The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 196: A Sea of Bones

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Lawrence C. Todd and Janis Putelis.Topics discussed: kill sites; the meaning of an artifact; taphonomy: the study of death; possum that took up residence inside of a dead buck; big-assed tongues; Larry's "it's not my problem, I'm retired" ethos; humans as the most invasive species; catch and release archaeology; high elevation corridors; the argument against Steve’s argument that people should leave wilderness alone; a child-like curiosity; 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. All right. Super special guest, Larry Todd. Larry, tell everybody what you do. Well, I'm trained as an anthropologist, archaeologist, but actually what I do more than that is something called taphonomy, which is the study of what happens to dead things. So my real passion when I started archaeology was looking at bison kill sites. And to study a bison kill site, you can't just look at the patterns you see when you excavate it and say, well, people did this and people did that and people did the other. You've got to look at what the carnivores did after the people left the

site and what the decay of the bones did to dispersal of things and what the rate of deposition does to what bones are preserved. And looking at all those sorts of things that happen after the death of an animal until it enters the laboratory is the field of taphonomy. When you say kill sites, you mean places where ancient people killed? Large groups of animals. I specialized mostly in big bison kill sites, but I also did a couple mammoth sites and did sites where people suspected that horses had been killed and a variety of sorts of things. I was sort of a taphonomist for hire. Can you break down the word taphonomy?

It's from the Greek, and taph is death, and onomy is study of. So a word that's similar that you may have heard is epitaph, the words that are on a tombstone. Yeah. So it's – the original definition was the study of death and burial. Do you got your epitaph figured out yet? No, I don't. Yeah. Do you?

No, man, I don't have one yet. I've never even thought about it. No, but McGuane – I don't have one yet. I've never even thought about it. No, but McGuane, I didn't think of it either, but McGuane said he already knows what he wants written on his thing. Well, it'd make a good t-shirt too, once you got it figured out. You just wear it on your shirt and then have them put it on your tombstone. So taphonomy. Am I saying it right? Yeah, taphonomy.

Yeah. So what's a large kill site? At what point do you get interested? Oh, I get interested with a single animal, but the ones that you focus on the most because there's the highest information potential are ones that have anywhere from 10 to I've worked on sites where there's close to 800 to 1,000 animals. Oh, like cliff jumps? Cliff jump. Well, one of the sites that I spent about 11 years on is a site on the Nebraska National Forest called the Hudson Mang site.

Okay. And there's probably 800 bison there from the little bit we saw of it. And one of the interesting questions there, and on many of the early sites, the payload And they got killed when? About 10,000 years ago. Okay. And one of the interesting questions is how they died and whether it was a kill. And there's a whole series of things like that that go into the taphonomy.

Step one is you find a bunch of bones and is it a natural death or is it a kill site? But one of the interesting things about, you know, your question about jumping over a cliff is many of the early sites, the earliest sites in North America, the ones from about 13,000 till about 8,000, aren't associated with jumps. But they hadn't started that strategy maybe. They hadn't started it or maybe they didn't need it. I think that probably the early peoples in the America were such specialists in bison behavior that they probably made our PhDs in zoology and ecology seem like kindergartners of knowing what bison are going to do given any given situation,

the cloud cover, the bugs, the wind direction, when it's last rained. They could probably use the bison behavior to help get them into a place where they could kill them regardless of whether there was a jump there. So some of them are in big open areas with no cliffs, no arroyo, no obvious sort of containment. And they probably, at that time, they're probably encountering groups that haven't had a lot of human pressure, perhaps. Yeah, very definitely. They probably, the animals that they were preying upon would have been used to the way wolves would hunt them or other social predators were. And all of a sudden you have this different sort of social predator shows up on the scene. we might talk about a little further on is one of the things I'm really worrying about now is

thinking about how that animal memory of kill events feeds into how you can hunt in a region and how often you can work through in mountain areas where I'm working now, how often you can effectively run a mountain sheep trap. Do you have to wait till the next generation of mountain sheep shows up or is there going to be somebody there in the herd that's going to, you know, don't go up that ridge, you know, if these sort of conditions. Got you. Yeah. Like you had to wait till their memory faded before you came back. Which is, as an anthropologist, it's both sort of interesting and almost heretical to talk about that. Because if you're talking about memory and information being passed down from and stored in the group from one generation to the next you're talking about what

we usually classify as culture yeah and and we usually when we talk culture um we usually say that's ours you know humans are defined by culture and everybody else na na na na doesn't have it and so i'm trying to really think about, in terms of hunting and landscapes, of multiple cultures colliding, human cultures versus the game animal cultures. Yeah. Have you spent much time talking to Kaufman, the migration researcher? A little bit. In Wyoming?

I'm working more with Arthur Middleton, who did the elk migration stuff from Cody into the Yellowstone. What level of exposure, like a newborn has, when you have a fawn or a calf hit the ground and it is taken somewhere by its mother, its ability to retain that information after the death of the mother. Right. Like how well it can retrace routes. It's pretty stunning, man. As a matter of fact, I'm spending next week in Berkeley with Middleton to talk about how we can better integrate my archaeological data from the high elevations. I'm working in some of the same areas that he has the elk GPS color data on. In terms of answering questions that he's interested in, like, what's the long-term fidelity of these migration corridors? How long do they go back in time?

And I'm interested in whether the corridors that the elk are using today, my expectation is they're using sort of the least cost path across the landscape that may have been used by elk. We know it's used by elk, but it may have been used by bison that are going into high country in the past, mountain sheep, and humans. So the elk migration corridors may be giving us a clue to what the past archaeology or the past human landscape of the high elevations was. And the archaeology can also help the wildlife people potentially see how long those corridors have been there. Let me do this for a minute just to help people get up to speed. You started talking about the Meng site. Uh-huh. You can talk about that one or pick sort of your favorite site that you can think of,

like a big kill site from a very old big kill site and lay out what the body of evidence is that you wind up working with to ascertain what happened there. Okay. Because I would just, I would automatically think like, wouldn't it just be that you look for spear points and if there's spear points, then it must've been people killing them. That's.

Explain how it gets more complicated. That was sort of the assumption. I probably will stick with Hudson Mang. Okay. Yeah. Great. Great. Some recent sites in the news, I probably will stick with Hudson-Mang. Okay, yeah, great, great. Some recent sites in the news, like there's a big mammoth site down in Mexico. It's on my list of things I got to ask you about that. Okay. So the up till about 1970 or late 1960s, when people approached the big kill sites, starting with Folsom right on up through the others, the sites themselves were pretty much thought of as being quarries.

You'd extract the bones from for exhibit, and then you'd also extract the points from. But they didn't really do a lot of work to kind of try and tie the two together. Yeah, like they just come in and sift all the dirt out and look for bit. Or in Folsom, they wash it away with water, right? Well, around 19, in the late 1960s, a researcher down in Colorado named Joe Ben Wheat excavated a site called the Olson Chubbuck site. I've heard of that one. And what he did there that was sort of remarkable is he started mapping and recording every bone in the site, sort of like you'd have a jigsaw puzzle.

And he came up with the idea, and he tried to do the analysis, that the site itself, the bone bed itself, is a key artifact. That in looking at the distribution of where the cows are and the calves are and how the carcasses are cut up and dispersed and that sort of stuff can give you a tremendous amount of information. So, and then several years after that, George Frizen from Wyoming followed up with a site called the Casper site, where he kind of took that perspective into account as well, that the site is an artifact, and then tried to plug in bison paleoecology of how they lived on the landscape and what had happened after it explain uh your term whether the site is an artifact uh okay um we all when we think of you you talked about you find the points with the

bones we all know that a nice piece of stone that's been no i mean just the definition of an artifact oh an artifact humanly produced humanly produced, humanly created. Like if you could pick up, like if you pick up a bone and it has cut marks, you pick up an ancient bone, which is a bone, the minute it has cut marks on it, it's an artifact. And the idea of the bone bed is artifact is that just like the individual flake scars on a flake piece of stone

have to be looked at all together to understand it. You don't just have that individual bone with a cut mark on it, but you need to know how it's positioned next to this one and that one and where it is within the bone bed. And that you need to look at the whole picture rather than the individual pieces. So the site, the bone bed, that pile of dead animals could be conceived of as an artifact. Yeah. You know, a thing we talked about, we talked with David Meltzer once. Uh-huh.

And we were talking about the Folsom site. An interesting thing like you're getting at with the Folsom site is I think the rib slabs are not there. Uh-huh. Which suggests that when they butchered those things, whatever, 12,000 years ago, when they butchered them, they hauled out the ribs on the bone. Uh-huh.

Because it's not in the bone bed. So that's. It's like the absence of something is, the absence of something becomes interesting. Uh-huh. Well, that's where you start looking at both what's there and what's missing. So we're up to the 1960s, and that was sort of the—

and 70s, that was a perspective of these bone beds are artifacts. And then this taphonomy stuff sort of reared its ugly head. And one of the things that taphonomy does is it's sort of the, wait a minute, let's take another look at this science. It sort of often points out what you don't know and why you don't know it rather than as the way we normally think of science as accumulating information. Taphonomic analysis, more often than not, leaves you with, well, we're not sure about that. We don't know that or the

other. So go back to that bone bed as an artifact. Everything in it is telling you something about human behavior. And so if a bone's missing, people took it away. If your carcasses are completely disarticulated, people cut them into little butchering units and deposited them there. Like quartering it out. Yeah. Yeah. And if bones were broken, humans broke them to get out the marrow.

So from the bone bed as artifact perspective, everything there was telling you about human behavior to give you a really rich picture of what was going on there. And where the taphonomy comes in is going, now wait a minute. We start looking at some of these bones and they've got wolf tooth marks on them. Don't you suppose the wolves were taking away some of the bones as well when they were coming in after the humans were there? You start looking at other bones and yeah, they're broken, but they're broken with the center part pushed down into the ground as if something had stepped on it later.

So you can't just look at the frequency of bone breakage and say humans broke every bone. Just because a carcass is not completely all together in a skeleton doesn't mean that humans had taken a part into those individual parts. We've all walked across a landscape and seen dead things. And more often than not, they're not all completely together. They get scattered. Yeah, you're like, oh, there's a shin bone. Yeah.

There's a femur. And over there's something else. I wonder where the skull is. Yeah, you never find it. You never find it. But for a while when we were doing archaeology, we sort of forgot about that. We'd look at a site as if any of those processes stopped happening just as soon as humans left away and it was frozen in time. And so the taphonomic study tries to bring all those other factors into account of how many of the bones do have the carnivore tooth marks, what percentage of them have cut marks relative to tooth marks?

What breakage appears to have happened paramortem, soon after death, as opposed to long after death? So you can maybe separate out the human breakage from the trampling breakage from the dry bone breakage later. Scattering. One of the studies I did my doctoral dissertation work on is I spent a lot of time looking at how recently dead cows would get dispersed across the landscape and measuring the distance from, for example, a hip to where the femur went and how that changed and starting to look at- Because you can do it over a known time span. And you can do it with a known individual. And then when you go to an archaeological site,

you can start measuring the bones and start, begin recognizing the bones of individual animals and see how they get dispersed and see if the dispersal patterns you see within the bone beds differs from what you see naturally. So a part of what taphonomy does is tries to establish some of those natural patterns without assuming that every – again, one of the strange things that archaeologists do is we tend to have this idea that humans create patterns in the world. And everything else creates chaos and randomness. And we all know by looking at, for example, the way streams move cobbles around. They sort them by sizes. They sort them by shapes. We're just one of many pattern-creating creatures. Yeah, that's a good point. So you can't use as your standard basic methodology of if you see a pattern, we did it.

Yeah. And so taphonomy tries to understand all those other sorts of patterns that could go into it. And as I mentioned before, that sort of gets you into that, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. So you asked me to talk about a specific site and the site that I said I spent 11 years on, the Hudson Mang bison kill site. It was called the Hudson Mang bison kill site when we got there. And there's close to 800 animals. You're not going to tell me this buzz kill story, right? Did it want to be not a kill site? Yeah. Well, we don't know. My bottom line now is after you do the taphonomic analysis, you get to the, well, it could be a kill site, but there's a lot of

things that don't necessarily mean there's some points there. Does that mean that the people killed the animals? There's 23 points in 800 animals. So sort of as a, and that's doesn't fit the pattern we see if. Okay.

These 800 animals are stretched out of what size patch of ground? They're, oh, in a size of this room, you know, 30 by 20 feet, there's probably. Oh. No, no, they're over a huge area, but in the size of this room, there could be the remains of 15 to 20 animals. It's just a solid sea of bone, bone on bone. So they cover, oh, maybe 70 meters by 50 meters. So a little less than the size of a square football field. And the deaths were spread out over how much time? Looks like almost instantaneously.

You can look at, you can assess time of death by looking at tooth eruption and wear patterns. And so if there's a mass kill, a mass death, there's going to be a snapshot of the age structure of the population. And since bison are a birth pulse species, they have most of their calves within about a two-week period in the spring. And the biological schedule of when the teeth erupt and when they start wearing from chewing on grass is predictable. You can look at the jaws of the calves in a site like that and tell how old they were at the time they died. I got you.

And you get all these calves that all have the same tooth eruption. Hudson-Mang looks like they were like four months old. So sort of middle of the summer, late summer. And then, you know, in the age structure, then you'll have a gap in the age structure, and then you'll have animals that are a year and four months old and two years and four months old. And when you get that nice, discreet sets of age structures, that tells you you've got a catastrophic, a mass death of all those animals dying at once. In the 26 points, how- 20-some, I forget the exact-

How directly affiliated are they with the bones? Stuck into them? No. Some are associated in the same stratigraphic level as the bone. Some are slightly above it. Some are slightly below it. There's one point that was reported to have been stuck into a bone. But when we went back through the collections, the point and the bone that it's associated with have different catalog numbers and say they're from different parts of the site.

Like someone pulled it out? Well, or that somewhere in the recording process, it wasn't recorded in a way that we can today go back to it and say, yeah, we're 100% sure that bone was stuck in that. So when we record a bone on a site like that, and like I said, there's 200 and some bones in the skeleton of a bison and 800 bison. Again, you can sort of do the work and imagine how many bones might be there. When we record its site today with this taphonomic perspective in mind,

before we remove it from the ground, we record about 29 separate observations on each individual bone that goes into a massive data set. So you don't have that problem down the line of which bone was where. It's like digging a site like a bone bed is like taking apart a hugely complex jigsaw puzzle that you're wanting to be able to tell somebody in the future how to put it back together exactly like it was. So you don't just say there's blue pieces over here and red pieces over there. Every piece of that puzzle has an inventory number and its exact location is pinpointed. So that, and that's the way you think of excavating a site. So at Hudson Mang, we went in,

I was thrilled to go into being able to dig the largest known paleo-Indian bison kill site in North America. And one of the things that the original known paleo-Indian bison kill site in North America. And one of the things that the original researchers noted were that there were no skulls there, that they'd been taken somewhere else. 800 skulls gone. 800 skulls gone, which led to an interpretation of there must have been some sort of ceremonial thing. We got to add this to the list i want to talk about because we laugh about this all the time everything they can't understand becomes ceremonial exactly that's that's in there with um only humans create patterns and if we don't see a pattern that we recognize it must be a ceremony there it's a corollary to that it's

like everything like you know there's three skulls lined up uh-huh must have been ceremonial it's like sometimes sometimes we'll get to two yeah i line all kinds of. It must have been ceremonial. It's like, I don't know. I line all – Sometimes we'll get to two. Yeah. I line all kinds of shit up that isn't ceremonial. You see my kids do stuff. They line everything up. They're Halloween candy. Is it ceremonial?

I don't know. It's just lining shit up. So that was one of the interpretations of, you know, the skulls were missing. As a matter of fact, when I first started working there with the Forest Service, they had this idea to kind of attract funding and attract attention to call it the Lost Skull Learning Center. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Keep going.

I keep like interjecting. No, no, that's fine. Here's the problem in talking to me. The problem with you talking to me is I know like i've heard of all this stuff but don't really know what goes on the behind the scenes story no but yeah like i know the version that it was like that they slaughtered 800 of them in a giant pile yep i didn't know that then later that story maybe became more complicated so so we got um we got missing skulls the other argument that was used early on was that um all the animals were completely disarticulated,

cut into bits and pieces. The other argument is even though there wasn't one there now, there'd been a cliff there in the past that's been filled with sediment. Oh, the sinkhole. Well, it's an actual cliff. There's other sites that are in sinkholes. So you've got a cliff on one side and then about 70 meters away, or a potential cliff area, about 70 meters away you've got this pile of bones. And so they're saying, well, the animals went over a cliff, they cut them apart, they drugged these bones over here for the secondary processing. So that's what I thought was going on there when we started recording the site.

And one of the first things we noted is when we got down into the bone bed, there weren't complete skulls, sure enough. But there were lots of maxillary tooth rows, upper tooth rows. There were lots of the petrous portion, the big hard portion in the inside of the head. There was the occipitals, the base of the skull. There's lots of portions of skulls, but no complete skulls. And then you start thinking about it. Can'll tell you a quick story yeah uh one time we killed a my brother killed an elk and we quartered it out and uh it was a cow and left the headliner a week later we went back to see what the grizzlies did to it guess what was left not they start right at the nose and work their way back it was that

yeah ball of like that ball of bone yeah that's funny but go on because you're now you're peaking my interest so um one of the things we record is if you imagine a bone laying on the ground and it's not laying completely flat well let's say we've got a bone laying on the ground and it's flat i talked about those 29 attributes we record on each bone, and one of them we record is the degree of weathering. You know, when you first expose a bone after an animal dies, it's nice and clean and solid surface and all that sort of stuff. You go back and look at that bone two years later,

and it's starting to crack, and the pieces of it are starting to chip off. And there's— It becomes porous. Yeah, and linear fractures to crack and the pieces of it are starting to chip off. And there's- Becomes porous. And linear fractures through it and all that. We've developed coding systems to describe that weathering. And so we record the weathering- Like degrees of weathering. Yeah, degrees of weathering.

One of the sets of attributes we record are the weathering on the top surface of the bone and the weathering on the bottom surface of the bone. Got you. With the idea being if the bone's laying there on the ground surface of the bone and the weathering on the bottom surface of the bone. Got you. With the idea being if the bone's laying there on the ground surface and not being moved, there's a good chance that it's going to be weathered more intensively on the top and the bottom. Like a year old drop antler. Yeah. You'll be like, oh, it's bleached.

And then you flip it and you're like, oh, it's brown. Exactly. Yeah. And then you know it's like it's been there, but it hasn't been there like that long. So imagine that going on in this pile of 800 bison. And you're starting to get some sand and sediments blowing in. Yeah. It's going to start covering up the bases of some of those bones. And they're going to start kept in place.

They're sort of not glued down, but they're held in place by the sediments. And it's not blowing in in one huge 1930s dust storm. You know, it's accumulating little bit by a little bit by a little bit by a little bit that it may take 15, 20 years for a foot of sediment to build up. Think of how big a bison skull is. It'll stand, you know, a foot and a half from the teeth up to the top of it above the ground surface. So while many bones of the skeleton can be completely buried within a few years,

there's still going to be the tops of those skulls sticking up above the ground, continuing to weather, continuing to be trampled on, continuing to be broken into bits and pieces. So unless you have very rapid sedimentation across a site, you're not going to find the skulls. Yeah, I got you. So that came into play. Yeah, the stuff coming by and gnawing on them.

Yeah, or the next herd of bison that runs across that area trampling on it. All those sorts of things can reduce the skulls to lots of not the sort of hang-on-your-wall quality skulls, but they're still there. Yeah. They're bits and pieces. So that sort of took the lost skull learning center out of the category of being not just silly, but wrong. Maybe the eroded skull learning center, right?

Yeah. We got that one wrong learning center, which is what learning's all about, isn't it? Then we started looking at things like, as I said, we record each individual bone and start doing measurements of the articular surfaces and you can match those to the other bones they go to. And so rather than saying these animals have all been brought from point A to point B as little discrete groups, it looks like each carcass is kind of scattered within a couple meter area. You know, it's what happens if you kind of be there and fall apart and get scattered. It's not everything is randomly dispersed and here and there.

The carcasses are in the point where, unless people were dragging complete bison carcasses across the landscape for 70 meters, they're in the position where they died. Well, I got to pause you for a minute now that you're deconstructing like the initial hypothesis what like i don't understand like how did someone think like what size group of individuals would they postulate would have even been capable of butchering 800 bison 800 bison in the mid to late summer. I mean, isn't that sort of the operating idea that we're talking about groups of individuals that might have been 10 to 30 individuals roaming around? Yeah, the labor force to butcher that many animals as completely as they were argued to be butchered would be, boy, you know, we could call out half the town of Bozeman for a weekend and maybe get it done.

Yeah, six to ten people per animal. Yeah. Right? And then we're talking about in the summertime, right? They're not just stripping the meat off. The argument was they were then cutting them into segments. They were moving them across the landscape. If they had just brought a hunter or a butcher over, that would have been like bullshit, man.

Yeah. And it was summertime, right? Well, that's, yeah. What's the tooth eruption and where? So stuff rocks. So they were going to be going bad quick. Bad. I mean.

Yeah. It's not like you're going to be like, oh, take a couple months and butcher these. You talked about looking at the grizzly gnawing on the skull. Imagine what's going to happen to the grizzlies and the wolves and everybody else there when you've got 800 dead animals. It's going to be, whoa. It'd be like when a whale washes up on the beach in Alaska, you know, and they realize they got like 13 polar bears on it, right? So it's going to be a dangerous place to be. If you're,

you're a hunter and gatherer family, you're not going to wait around there. So there are all sorts of things. And then eventually, uh, we got in the big equipment, the heavy equipment and excavated some big trenches back to where the cliff was supposedly. Because if, you know, again, you're always trying to evaluate the models of, okay, it's not looking like a jump over a cliff, but let's go to the base of the cliff and see what's going on there. And what we found is, yeah, there's a bedrock cliff there, but you can follow the buried soils from where the bone bed is back towards the cliff. And as they approach the cliff, they form a gentle surface.

That cliff was already buried at the time the animals died. Got you. Just by looking at the – you follow like the sediment, whatever, the sediment lines. You're reconstructing what the old land surface looked like. So then for a while, the crew would joke about things of, well, maybe it isn't a bison jump. Maybe it's a bison stumble. They were running down the hill. Or what about, they got burned up.

That's, we don't see, and that's, and we talk about taphonomy and the things taphonomists get excited about is research opportunities like, boy, a grass fire has killed a cow. Let's go look at it to see what happens, what parts of the skeleton, how badly they get burned. We don't see any of that kind of burning in the bone bed itself. And remind me to talk about burning in the bone bed in a minute. And they couldn't have got stuck in the mud. No, there's not. You know, if you get stuck in the mud, we've got some sites like that.

And you find things like the feet and the toes and the limbs down in the mud. Because they were so damn stuck, they couldn't get out. Yeah, and there can be a foot and a half difference between the elevations of the feet and the rest of the body where it finally comes to life. These are smeared across one land surface. Lightning strike couldn't do that. Could. Maybe if they're all – that's one of our suggestions is potentially if they're herded there together, the one lightning strike could do it. What about when tornadoes hit them? You're not in tornado country.

Well, yeah, in Nebraska. We're in northwestern Nebraska. Okay. So tornadoes could be possible. And I don't know – there again, again what things you wish for. Wouldn't it be fun to find a herd of cows that have been killed by a tornado? It can't be that hard.

Well, I don't know whether I'm sure they get killed, but in that sort of number, they probably get killed one, two, three at a time. Does it aggregate them in the tornado or does it scatter them across the landscape? Don't know. You ask about fire and we don't see evidence of direct burning on the animals,

but they're down below where this cliff was in sort of a swale next to a damp area where you might aggregate if a prairie fire is burning. And one of the things that happens in fires when they burn over areas like that is they'll often suck the oxygen out of low-lying areas, so they may have asphyxiated. So by the time we got done at Hudson-Mang, the original excavator was really sort of irritated at us. And we never said that it wasn't a kill site. Did he double down?

Yep. You know, I'm reading a book by an entomologist that's going to come on the show named Justin Schmidt. And he studies insect toxins. But early in his book, he has a thing he's pointing out like, this is no offense to you. He says the reason all the great discoveries are made by young scientists is because they don't give a shit about what everybody thinks. And then you come up with something and then most of them then spend the rest of their life trying to defend their initial idea and encircle their initial idea because they're really reluctant to be that they were wrong.

And he's like, that's like the job of a scientist to not fall in love with the idea in the first place. And to continually be trying to figure out how you could be wrong. And again, that's why I like the field of taphonomy because that's sort of its goal. You're always asking that, well, we don't understand all the things that create. In every site I've dug, you've got sort of your textbook, what you go about taphonomy on. But then you realize that it's in a slightly different situation where it is on the land surface.

You know, is it in shade? Is it in where a snowdrift forms? Is it in an area where we haven't studied those taphonomies? And you realize you need to go back to the modern world or come to the modern world and study those processes again to make sure that you understand them. So you're continually in that cycle of saying, this is what we think we know, but then, yeah, but what about this? I think one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me was I was giving this sort of presentation

years ago, soon after I got married, and I had my wife, my arm around my new wife, and I said something to the crowd like, yeah, and I embrace ignorance. That didn't go over very well. Because the point is, you know, if you really want to learn something, step one is to say, yeah, I don't know that, or what are the alternatives? So in the Hudson Mang case, we came away from it saying, yeah, these animals died, and there's indications that humans were in the area, maybe soon after, maybe a little after. But whether it's a functional association, we can't say for sure, because there's all these unexplained patterns that may not have anything to do with a kill event. So we took a perfectly good story and turned it into, who knows, Shrug.

So let's say you had- Which means it opens the door for new research. Yeah. I always- Well, yeah, like it's just as interesting. I always root for everything to be a kill site, like a human kill site. Well, I do, because that's really, that's fun. That's cool.

But it is, it does bring up like, if not that, then how does 800 – how does like eight – like if you ever seen 800 or something in a field, that's a lot of big animals. But you look at – go to the Museum of Rockies here. There's big piles of dead dinosaurs in single bone beds. They don't always occur as one, two. There are sites where there's in the tens to 20s to 30 animals in the same place. And they make another good control to study if you can't, in that case, say, well, it's a human kill site. Something, there are processes that kill large groups of animals over and over again without

having humans on the scene. So what's your best guess? Like, let's, I know you guys don't like to do this in your business, but what's your, like, why are there 26, 27, whatever? Like, why are those, is it projectile points or scrapers or knives? They're projectile points. There's some scrapers. What are they there for?

They could have, if the animals died, humans could have, you know, we're great scavengers as well as good hunters. They also, it's by a spring. There's, and I said, there were points both in the bones, below the bones, above the bones. Hell, they could have come there 20 years later and camp next to that spring where most of the bison were completely buried. There's lots of ways you can get close associations and, and sediments across landscapes without being a. It could have just been a good hunting spot. Could have been a good hunting spot. Those weren't the only 800 animals that ever walked through there.

Yeah. If I saw 800 or something, I'd probably come back and check it a year later. Or a lot of the planes, any place where there's a water source and there's a spring right there is going to be one of your hunting locations over and over and over again. Yeah. I got you. Yeah. You know, uh, I'm sure you've been to the La Brea Tar Pits in LA.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like there you have, I don't know how, I mean, I don't know how many mammoths, I mean like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things. Dire wolves and that whole wall of dire wolves.

Yeah. There's like, yeah, there's a wall of like 40 some dire wolf skulls that came out of that thing, but it was active. It was like collecting carcasses. Uh-huh. Over time.

Yeah. Over so much time that I remember seeing that, I remember like someone was postulating like there's, there's so many bones, like what was going on here? How could there be so many bones? And then someone said like, one event in that vicinity, one event per decade would account for all of these bones. Uh-huh. Meaning a mammoth calf gets stuck in the tar. Yep.

A saber tooth or some scavenger goes out to eat it, gets stuck in the tar. A few birds come down to scavenge, they get stuck in the tar. If that happens every decade over the whatever, 20,000 years that that thing is collecting things, when it's all said and done, you open it up and it looks like. It looks like, oh my God. Noah's Ark got dumped out inside there, you know, but it's just like a gradual. But the 801 pile is so like intriguing. Yeah, it is. Especially when you see like eight, like if you were to look at 800 cattle out in a pasture, it's just a chunk of meat. Yeah, that's going to be, you know, like I say, almost a football field full of dead animals. Oh, man.

The stench. Oh, yeah. The stench. But again, one of the things that I don't like to call bone piles like that kill sites because even if we can demonstrate unambiguously that people kill them, if you really want to take full research advantage of them, you can also study them as other predator and scavenger food sources. And how does those kill sites produced by humans feed into the ecology of the other scavengers in the environment? So you can really start trying to reconstruct an ecology of the area if you approach the site, not just by trying to learn about people. Yeah, you know, that's the thing. When I was talking about La Brea, I forgot what the point I was going to get at.

When you look through the Hudson Meng, were there all kinds of like wolf bones and bear bones mixed in, like stuff that had gotten killed while they were in there scavenging? No, but there are bones that have the tooth marks of the scavengers. Gotcha. So unlike La Brea, where if you're a scavenger that's trying to get that tasty, dead, smelly, rotting thing, and you fall into the tar and you get trapped yourself, here there wasn't that

natural trap. Nothing to catch them. You could come and eat your fill or, unless a grizzly came and you were a coyote and it killed you too. Yeah, and potentially within a few months, all the meat was gone. Yeah, yeah.

So we studied, you know, we talked about taphonomy and all the meat's gone. We study things like what happens through time as maggots consume carcasses and what parts could get, and you see things, well, one of the really fun patterns at Hudson Mang that we see. The kneecaps, the patellas are often in place at the lower end of the femur and the

proximal, you know, they're right there where they belong in the skeleton. How does that happen? Even though they're laying loose once everything rots away. Yeah. But think of if you've watched an animal rot, and I've spent more time doing that than it's probably healthy, the lower legs up through at least the knee, when the meat rots away, the hide often contracts and holds it down around it. So seeing things like a kneecap in place on a carcass that you found in an archaeological site is probably a pretty good indicator that that animal wasn't skinned.

Oh. So if it wasn't skinned, it's real hard to get to the meat. Because it could have been encased. It could have been settled into the dirt by the time it. Yeah, by the time that the, because if you're burying incrementally, that dried hide around, it's almost like armor. You know, it's rawhide. It's tougher than hell. And it's going to hold that in place through a long period of time on some of those.

Did you see that thing recently came out? This is over in Europe. I can't remember what country it was in, where they found where guys had been stashing, not even like shank, like the meat you use to make forearms. Yeah, the lower legs, the metapodials. Stashing those in a cave. Yeah.

Or what they found was bones in a cave, and they were wondering why they had to scrape the hide off of them because instead of just stripping it off and someone postulated that they dried and contracted just they were throwing them in the cave that they always threw the from the hoof to the knee yeah in a cave just a storage in there and later they'd go and scrape it off and you've got that narrow dry hide off to get the marrow out. Cause they're like, why else would they need to have scraped knife that away when on a fresh animal, you just peel it back.

Yeah. Like a, like a banana. And that's, if you'd read that study, it's kind of, that's sort of taking taphonomy, taphonomy to an extreme. I don't think I'd do this in that they were saying, boy, after a week or so, it starts to taste a little rank.

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One of the things that I had a student who was a biochemist a few years ago, and I had another student that was an archaeologist, and we were watching carcasses rot. And he started questioning whether if you've seen a big carcass rot during the middle of the summer and the maggots infest it, they start piling out. You could collect quarts of maggots. And he's saying, boy, I wonder if people would eat those maggots. You know, they're probably little fatty sort of. Oh, I'm sure they're good for you. Well, what the student who was the biochemist did, we started collecting tissue samples from carcasses that died during the winter. Yeah.

And found out that once the maggots infested, throughout the winter that it would be okay to eat. When the maggots infested, they start bringing in a bunch of other toxins. So the toxicity of the meat, once it's maggot infested, goes up tremendously. Oh, really? So probably the maggot harvesters of the high plains wouldn't be a very, very good subsistence strategy. You know what's a good taphonomy story for you? Okay. One time my old man,

when we were kids, my dad hit a buck with his bow, and he killed it quick, but we never found it. We didn't realize. It ran into a cornfield, and we later realized we must have stumbled it

over 10 times without finding it. But he hit it like the arrow came down high, straight below. Punctured the lung, but didn't make an exit hole. So it runs off, and we don't know how, but we missed it. I mean, we were like probably had to have walked over it in a cornfield. But we would go check on it later.

And one time we're out there rabbit hunting and we go to check on, you know, dad's dead deer. Because by the time he found it, it was rotten. And there's a hole in its ribs. There's a hole in its side. And I peer down in that hole and there's a possum living in there. Oh, uh-huh. And I actually hauled him out by the tail.

But you can imagine if like that possum would have died. Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. And then it gets a case. It'd look like it was like a fetus. Uh-huh. Or it was a carnivorous deer. This was the deer's last meal.

Yeah. Like no one would ever be like, oh, you know, it probably happens. A possum crawled in there and died. Uh-huh. You know, this would be what came to mind. Yeah. You know, there's a site in Colorado. I don't, hopefully I can explain it enough for you to know what I'm talking about.

There's a site in Colorado where there's a lot of debate about whether it was a mammoth kill site or whether it was a spot that a few mammoths got washed up in a gravel bar. Uh-huh. You know what I'm talking about? North, I think it's like between Denver and Fort Collins in there or somewhere. Would it be the dent site, the one out by Greeley? Maybe. What's the dent site? It's one of the-

It's like one where people can't tell if they died or got killed. It was the site where it was first excavated with mammoths and points that were eventually called clovosite points before the clovosite was. And the association wasn't really established, and it was – so that might be the one. It was like the idea was – here, let me tell you the one last detail I remember. It was the people that were arguing there was a kill site were arguing that somehow they were crossing a river. Uh-huh. And then going in, you know how you get like a little cut, you'll have a high bluff or a high cut bank, but now you need to find like a little gap, like a little washout. Uh-huh. And animals will use that to get through the thing.

It was the idea that they had somehow ambushed these mammoths coming up through that thing, and it was a good spot to get through the thing it was the idea that they had somehow ambushed these mammoths coming up through that thing and it was a good spot to get them and so over time maybe they'd killed a couple there but then someone later was like how how do we know it's just not a place where carcasses would wash up on the beach or whatever i'm not i wish i could do a better job i'm not familiar with that one but i am familiar with a site where that was a question. There's a site in Wyoming near Worland, Wyoming called the Colby Mammoth Site. I've heard of that. Where there's seven mammoths and a lot of the bones occur in two piles. And when George Frizen originally excavated and reported on the site in Science Magazine, he hypothesized that those piles were areas where people killed mammoths or scavenged mammoths

and then taken some of the bones and piled it over the meat that was left there, packed snow and stuff in to put it into sort of freezing storage to where you come back later. So he saw the bone piles as being meat caches. Okay. And he published that in Science Magazine, you know, one of the top scientific journals in the world, as being this- Yeah, Science and Nature being two top. One and two, yeah.

Published it in Science as being a Paleo-Indian meat cache. And one of the responses to it was, and they were in the bottom of an arroyo. Okay. Where the piles were. One of the responses to it by a fairly well-respected researcher was sort of, well, George, how do you know that those piles aren't just like what you're talking about, sort of the mammoth bone pile equivalent of driftwood? If you've got water moving down a winding arroyo, aren't bones going to accumulate in some areas in big piles? And one of the things that I really respect people like George Frizen about is rather than taking that defensive position that you were talking about before, his response to say, well, yeah, it could be. How do we figure that out? So he and I, the university, that was at the University of Wyoming, and I was working on my PhD on collections there. They had a mammoth skeleton or the elephant bones in the bottom of the

stream, record their positions, release the water, record the current velocity, dam up the stream again, come back and measure which bones had moved and how far they moved. And we did that a number of times so that for each bone in the elephant skeleton, we could develop what we called a fluvial transport index. The same way a stream will deposit rocks. You get up toward the headwaters, big rocks. You get down toward the mouth and it's sand.

Some bones, light bones will float on other roll. So we developed this index of which bones would be most likely to be transported by flowing water. And then we went back to the Colby bone piles to see if they matched that sort of transport profile, and they didn't. Did not. Did not. So you can take things like that of, are these bones transported by water or not? And then your next step is, how do we develop the methods to assess that? So what do they think happened? What's the leading theory about what happened at that site?

I think we're still into the Fri prison's original interpretation of meat cash is probably most likely. It looks like one of them may have been where they did that, piled the stuff on and came back later and opened it up and got the meat back. Second one doesn't look like they ever did that. But again, if you're highly mobile people across a landscape, you're probably going to cash food wherever you can as a backup strategy. If things go wrong, and even the bone piles at sites during the winter where they don't necessarily put them in cash piles, you're going to know that next spring, if you're hungry, you can go back to that site where you killed the 50 bison in December. And it might not be the tastiest stuff in the world, but there's a food source there. Yeah, like if you read, I always talk about Stephenson, the Arctic explorer.

Yeah. When he was traveling in the Canadian high Arctic, and he was usually traveling with Inuit hunters, they'd kill everything they ran across. Yeah. And put it in a pile. Because it's going to be there. Yeah, they'd put it in a pile and keep going

because then they had in their head just where all this stuff was. And then I was just, we just interviewed another guest who just finished a book about the Greeley Polar Expedition. Uh-huh. And yeah, every point. You just would go because you're in your boat, you just go and drop stuff every point. Because then if your boat sank, you'd create a sort of like travel line that you knew you could rely on. Your breadcrumbs of safety. And you'd leave caches and they'd always leave a note in there in a container saying like,

there's this at this point, this at this point. So the other people could find it and go about sort of recovering these surplus food sources that you didn't want to have with you because it was too vulnerable to have it with you. One of my professors, Lewis Binford, spent a lot of time with the Nunimute Eskimo up by in the Brooks Range. And they talked, he talked about how you could talk to the old Nunimute and they could tell you where things were cached pretty much all over Alaska. They may never have been there themselves, but you'd been there and you left something

in this little dry spot. And when you came back to camp, you tell these things that like to us would seem like really boring stories. Like there's three sticks of wood in this cave down by that river. And so the greatest quote from that was he said one of his informants said, you know, Lou, every dead Eskimo remembers something he didn't pick up and put in a cache when he should have. That's interesting. Yeah. I mentioned to you before, I think it was before we started recording, I mentioned to you Mike Kunz. Yeah. He found a, when he was doing his work up in the North Slope of the Brooks Range, they were looking for, like the goal would be that you'd find evidence of the very first

Americans that would have been in Western Alaska after crossing from Siberia. But one of the very first Americans that would, you know, would have been in Western Alaska after crossing from Siberia. But one of the things he found was an old cache of trapping equipment and Russian made, a Russian made shotgun. Uh-huh. Very old. Uh-huh. You know, that someone had whatever, put it there and figured it'd come back and never got back to it. Yeah.

You know, that's, today we think of our lifestyles of, we cache stuff in our closets. You know, when we put our winter clothes up and get our summer clothes out. But if you're mobile across the landscape, there's a lot of stuff that you don't need all year long. You're going to be cashing stuff for emergencies, but you're also going to be cashing your summer gear when you're going into your winter range, and you don't pack everything. So a lot of the archeological record is not only stuff people lost intentionally,

but stuff you put up and may not get back to. And so those are really spectacular if you can find them. Have you ever found a mountain man cache like they used to make? No. I think there's been a few of those been recovered over the years. Beaver hides. Yeah. And you, you read accounts of like, uh, where they dug their cache bits and put the stuff in it and then they couldn't get back because they got killed or this, that'd be really fun to dig. Yeah. Yeah.

Like they, they'd had a way they could sort of make a, like a safe storage place for, for, uh, traps and dry beaver hides. Oh, that'd be cool to find one of those. Can I get a, I want to squeeze one in before we leave the Hudson Mang. Didn't you say in the beginning that one of the reasons they thought that it was a kill

site was because of the, the way that the animals were cut up and quartered? And so now that you think that that wasn't the case, what's the explanation of that? Well, dead things fall apart. And if you were to look down on the bone bed, it looks like just this jumble of scattered bones. But then if you start, like I mentioned before, recording dimensions of articular surfaces and stuff like this, the things that look like they're totally random

are carcasses that have dispersed within a fairly small area. Yeah, the bones aren't completely articulated, but if you were sitting on that side of the table— I see, so there wasn't a very, like, organized— No. Like, butchering. Shoulders over here, hams over there. If all four of us were to die in this room and be left to decay.

Just natural dispersion. Yeah. My femur might be over next to your cranium. That didn't mean a damn thing about it. Someone be like, someone cut them all up. Yeah. And they must, or you got whacked in the head with my femur would be sort of that. Yeah.

All right. Hey, tell us about what's going on with the, I don't think it's been fully published yet, but a lot of people have been sending me the articles and I've been reading everything I can find about the, uh, what might be, so you're, you're probably gonna go down there and buzzkill the whole thing, but what might be mammoth traps north of Mexico City? Tultipec 2 mammoth site. This is a new thing, right? Yeah, they've been

working there for about 10 months. It's the second mammoth that was discovered there in December of 2015, they were putting a water pipeline about two kilometers north of where this recent find was, and they found a nearly complete mammoth skeleton. No, no, no. I'm talking about – No. There's one they're digging up. Yeah. This is –

Oh, okay. Okay. I got you. I got you. I got you. So that got their antennas up for mammoths might be in this area. And they reconstructed that one. They built a hall of mammoths museum to display that one.

Yeah. Okay, I didn't know about that. What happened to that one? At the time, their story was it got bogged in the swampy ground next to a lake. Okay. And so they were putting in a new landfill recently, digging the big pit for the landfill. And they started noticing mammoth bones coming out. And they were intentionally looking for them because of this previous find.

So they were cutting into the lake sediments. And they thought, well, we found mammoths here before. We should look at that. And sure enough, they started seeing mammoth bones. And— Is this a woolly mammoth? It's a Colombian mammoth. Colombian mammoth.

Yeah, so... Was that bigger than woolly? Bigger. Okay. Pretty impressive critter. So they're more of a southerly, warmer climate mammoth. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So they were fortunate that they had people on site to look for the mammoth bones. After they were exposed in the cut bank there, they could go in and do some excavations. And they uncovered remarkable sets of mammoth bones. I think that, well, as I've been reading through the press release that they put out last week, the things that I can say about the site that are observations, that are facts, are that their salvage excavations uncovered 824 bones. Most of them were mammoths, but there was also a couple camel bones. There was a horse tooth.

And they're deposited in finely bedded deposits. Some of them are clay layers and some of them are volcanic ash layers. And those finely bedded deposits are inset into older lake deposits. That's what we know about it. That's what, from my reading of it, I always take away as observations. From that, the whole set of interpretations that roll out in the press release are that there were 14 mammoths there, that they were found in two large excavated pits, that there were systematic regular hunting of them, that it was intensive use of the mammoths

that were there. For example, they say the mandibles, the jawbones are turned upside down. So obviously they were cutting the tongues out if the mandibles are upside down. Is that obvious? No. Oh, that's what I was curious about. No bones. Because the press was even being like, and their tongues would have weighed 26 pounds.

Yeah. 12 kilo tongues and they would have been, yeah. Just because, and again, what's the likelihood that if you're laying on the ground, your jawbone is going to turn this way as opposed, you know, it's fun, fun. So that was because it was upside down. Right.

It must have been someone getting the tongue. Easy access to the tongue from the bottom. You know, when you cut into a bison to get its tongue out, if it's fresh, you can open it up and get the tongue out. Yeah, but even when I cut tongues out of stuff, I can't tell you what way I leave the head. No. And the way you leave it's not. so let's leave the tongues for a minute. The bones weren't fully articulated in these new areas. Again, they were scattered like we talked about at Hudson, Maine.

So that's obvious butchering. They said that they found – well, in one area, they found six right scapulas, no left scapulas, shoulder blades. So obviously people must have taken the left scapula away. That's a good one. Well, that's pretty good. Let me- That's a tasty one.

Let me give you one bad taphonomic joke and then we'll get back to the real world. I would say it's anomalous to find all right scapulas because we usually find the scapulas from the other side yeah because if they weren't left ta-da you wouldn't find them i got you that's good that's a good taphonomy joke um so the whole series of things there let's go back to sort of down the list for okay yeah because there's a there's one that they felt was laid out ceremonially because it had been injured in the past. Well, its tusk had been broken in the past. And they honored it by laying it out ceremonially.

They moved its scapulas or its pelvis up by its head. There was another tusk from another animal that was placed around it. It's sort of one of those classic examples of there's patterns in the piles of these bones. And the only explanation that's grasped at is humans must have done it. So I think it's a fabulous site. Every one of their sort of things that they've interpreted I see as research questions rather than answers. Yeah. It's a –

And the press probably runs away with this stuff too, right? Well, the press do. But I think in this case, and I don't want to sound derogatory about this, the excavators may have as well. Because think if you're faced with this amazing quantity of mammoth bones in an area where people are digging a landfill, and you know it's an important research thing, and you go to the press, you're going to want to make it sound as important as possible to be sure it doesn't get destroyed.

I would do that myself. Here's this fabulous site, and you're talking, you've got to make it a site that is worthy of preservation and further research so that next time something's found. So I'm not saying they necessarily did that, but in the back of – if I were faced with a pile of mammoth bones that impressing, I'd be really worried about the preservation of them and future areas of the site and trying to get everything I could for preservation and protection and funding. Trevor Burrus And start running the coolest version. Peter Robinson Start running the coolest version. Trevor Burrus That could maybe be true. So I don't think at present, and on this site, there's no scientific publication associated with it.

There's one. Peter Robinson Well, there's going to be one, right? Trevor Burrus Sometime. But right now, it's one like four-page press release that every one of the newspaper articles have been taking this one press release and spinning it a little different. Would you welcome an opportunity to go down there and have a look? I'm retired. Yeah.

And I would love to, but to do a site like that effectively needs somebody with a lot of energy and a lot of time. It'd be, oh, I'd love to look at it. I would be on a plane in a minute just to go drool on a site like that. Just because of, as they sort of mentioned in some of the press releases, and this is where I get to like on Hudson Mang and a lot of others, in terms of really understanding the past of these landscapes we live on, at one level, it doesn't matter whether it's a human kill site or not. Understanding the past ecology and life ways of the mammoths in that environment that we know that in some instances in what, 14, 15 sites, humans were preying on mammoths directly. Understanding the biology and ecology of those mammoths is key. So regardless of whether the site has human involvement, it's a key site. Are they finding human – are they finding artifacts?

They report no stone tools from it, which again is sort of surprising. If you've got 14 mammoths and you never once resharpen a stone tool. You're using essentially a disposable tool. And you never lose one. You know, think about all the huge piles of guts and gore and just bloody stuff that you're going to be dropping tools and losing. How could you not lose something? Yeah. So.

Buzz killing. I'm skeptical about the site. Another thing that I'm skeptical about is that they're excavated pits. Oh, is that right? They talk about the site. Six-foot deep holes. Oh. I just told my kid this morning about this.

He was telling me how they actually do it. He says they put sharp sticks in the bottom. I don't know where he got that, but he knew that. The geology, well, they don't talk about the geology of the site. I know it's radio, so I brought in some good pictures. This is what the site looks like. There's a pile of bones. You can see there's sediments here. And then right over here, this is the sort of drop-off. There are indeed steep drop-offs adjacent to the bones. They think that's the natural fate, the whole edge.

They think this is the cut that was there. Yeah, that's what he's looking at. It just looks like, I don't know, man, like a ledge, like imagine a six-foot-high cut bank. Well, they talk, yeah, cut bank, real high potential. They talk about in the article that at the time the site was forming, the lake that it was forming around was, its level was dropping. It was drying up. So as the lake that it was forming around was, its level was dropping. It was drying up. Okay.

So as the lake level is dropping, any water that's running into it is gonna cut in channels into it. So first they're gonna have to tell me that these aren't erosional channels cutting into that lowered lake level. Jumping to the conclusion that you've got more recent sediments in older sediments, and the only way that can happen is humans digging a hole, that's quite a leap. A lot of the bison kill sites we find that are in Arroyos have the same sort of sedimentation. Old drainage, bison killed in the bottom of it, sediment builds up over it. People didn't dig the drainage.

I got you. I don't know. The pits is a stretch for me. Just to get, you were talking earlier about how many people it would take to butcher 800 bison. How many people is it going to take to dig a, what is it, 80 meter long by 25 meter wide hole, two meters deep. You know, that's half the size of a football field.

That's like some Egyptian grade business right there. I was going to say, pyramids. Yeah. And why are you going to invest that much labor where you're not out hunting in an environment that's supposedly fairly rich in mammoths? Yeah, you're going to be sure you're going to get them if they're right there. But we talked about one of the things that I've been worrying about recently a lot. Let me ask, stop for a minute. Why did you not, like, okay, when this comes out, why do you not write,

so it was reported in the New York Times, why do you not write a letter, do you just not waste your time like why did you not write a letter to the editor saying like whoa here a minute and kind of like lay out why do you let why did why do you guys let the whole thing run and catch on fire and guys like me telling their kids all about it good questionervation, like you said. Well, laziness, you know, it's not my problem. I'm retired. We've heard these stories. I don't, good question. It doesn't burn you up? At this stage, it sort of runs off the back. We've heard that over and over and over and over and over again. You often get this buzz of press, and then you start looking at the story a little deeper, and you find out, well, it's not that simple.

I find, that's the thing, is, because I like to follow anthropology, it is, like, I do find that the stories generally get less interesting. Uh-huh, yeah. With the exception of the woman's skull they found down in the Yucatan. Underwater. Oh, I'm not familiar with that. That was a good story. That got better.

Okay. I thought that one got better. Yeah. It's old. I mean, I think it was one of the oldest pieces of human remains in the New World. Uh-huh. And how'd it get better?

Oh, because they found all the stuff that it was with. Okay. Yeah. All the other bones that were down in there and, you know, they were able to determine it was like a young woman and like injuries and all the stuff that was in there. Oh, had a whole life history. Yeah, and stuff that was in there. Just wanted it to be good.

And then that dude, that 7,000-year-old dude they found in Europe. Otzi, the Iceman. Yeah, that story got good. You know, here's something that's really interesting about Otzi that's not related to Otzi at all. But he's about, what, 3,000 years old, 4,000 years old. Killed by an arrow. Well, died by, yeah, he has. Was carrying an arrow in him.

And they can reconstruct his diet based on what's in his stomach. They were looking at the lichens that were growing. Just amazing pictures. He had tricked out boots that had three different kinds of hides on them and stuff. Yeah. That dude was badass. The fun thing right here in this area of the world to know about is the oldest artifact from an ice patch anywhere in the world comes from the Beartooth Mountains here. Yeah.

That's 10,000 years old. So about three times the age of Otzi is something that... Really? What was it? Adeladl, a dart shaft. A researcher here in Bozeman, Craig Lee, founded a few years ago radiocarbon data. He's been working

on these high elevation ice patches that are melting out and exposing the stuff that's been trapped in. So right here. It's come across our radar. Yeah. Right. But this, I remember the guy, there was a dude, I remember two things like this in Canada,

but I know someone found an Adel Adel shaft. The oldest ice patch. What was it made out of? A birch, I believe, but don't quote me on that. Was it still armed? No, it's just got the shaft and the point isn't on it and it's kind of warped from being it, but it's got the marks on it and it's got the notch where the point would have went in it. Was it decorative at all?

Well, it has a couple of marks on it that he thinks may be ownership marks. If you know, if you've got a dart and several darts end up in an animal and you want to say, well, my dart got it. No, that's my dart. So you do occasionally put marks on it. Yeah, like everybody uses different fletching on their arrows, man. Yeah, yeah. No shit. I don't know that.

So just, I like to bring that up just because we start talking about all the fabulous stuff and i do a lot of work with kids um and i grew up in a small town called matizzi wyoming where you think you're in the back of nowhere and there's nothing neat going on there so when i work with kids in this area i try and bring up things like that did you know the oldest one of those in the world comes from right here in our own backyard? I find people, I was just telling someone this morning about how, you know where Willsall is. Uh-huh. I mean, drive there, you know, be there in time

for lunch. Uh-huh. For a long time, that was the oldest human remains and new roles of little boy. The Anzick, yeah. Yeah, a little boy named Anzick One. Uh-huh. Yeah.

So just like right down the road, it's hard to picture. Let me lay out like a bigger road, it's hard to picture. Uh, let me lay out like a, a bigger idea, a bigger notion on you. Do you feel that, um, do you feel that for a while,

we really had this idea that early humans, that the, the earliest Americans, the first Americans were these hard-hitting very successful big game hunters and they're going around slaying mammoths left and right killing all kinds of big stuff wiping animals off the you know wiping all the megafauna off the face of the earth um and then my like like my my casual observational following of anthropology is that that narrative has become disrupted and that it's like they were eating lots of other stuff um places that we

thought they'd killed them they weren't actually killing them they ate a lot of clams they ate a lot of turtles they ate a lot of seeds and nuts and yeah maybe now and then they got lucky and found a crippled up mammoth and killed it and ate it like like where do you sit on that on the extremes and i know that this stuff bounces in extremes right it'd be like all they ate was mammoths and someone's going to probably counter that with they never they never ate a mammoth vegan yeah they're all And then somewhere, right? How do you feel about, do you think that that's true, that that flow of that perception is going through a change? And what version is right? Okay, you prefaced that with saying you wanted to look at a little bigger sort of broader question.

And I agree with that sort of perspective entirely. And for years, I was fascinated with the peopling of Americas. That was one of those things that just, that's why I looked at these early kill sites

and mammoth sites and bison sites to try and understand. Well, you know why? Because it is the most fascinating thing in the universe. Oh, and it's like playing this. It's not even debatable.

It's not even a debatable point. And excavating them is, those sites, it's like playing this wonderful game of pick up sticks. It's just the most fun you can have doing. So I was fascinated by it. And in the last 20 years, I've become much less fascinated with the peopling of the Americas question. Why?

Because that isn't the question. The question is, why did we leave Africa? The peopling of the Americas is is we ended up everywhere in the globe. We peopled the planet. Yeah. We're the biggest invasive species. So what happened? Yeah, we peopled America because we peopled everywhere.

Yeah. So why is it that we started expanding out of Africa in the first place? Why did you move away from home? Curious? Curious. But there's also, I think, getting back to the specifics of your question. We're working on a site in northwestern Ethiopia at about 70,000 years of age, trying

to answer that question of what was going on with humans in terms of our ecology right before we left Africa and expanded into the rest of the world. Peter Robinson The diaspora, the human diaspora. Richard Wagner And traditionally, when people have looked at human evolution and human movement into Europe, just like in the peopling of Americas, they focused on that big game hunter. You know, that we can expand because we're the apex predator into every environment we go into. One of the things we're seeing on our 70,000-year-old Middle Stone Age site on the tributaries of the Blue Nile is that— Where's that? It's northwestern Ethiopia.

Okay. So right around the time when we think that, like, anatomically— Yeah, anatomically modern humans were there right before we started that diaspora. And what we're seeing is, yeah, there's a few big game animals there, but there's also every other damn thing that crawled, swam, wiggled, walked. I think one of the things that makes us effective is not the big game hunting per se, but that we are just so plastic in our diet. We are the classic omnivores, which means that you can move into any environment out there and you're going to find something to eat. Do you know that I just heard the other day that 80, I think it's

like 80 some percent of the animals on the planet are carnivorous. It's the dominant form. Uh-huh. Because you got to go in like all the fish and stuff, right? Yeah. It's the dominant, the dominant way to be.

So if you. Omnivores are a small minority. Which, which gives you, uh, that opens up all those other niches. Yeah. So I think the peopling of the Americas, the answer to the peopling of the Americas, the timing we still don't have down, but it's that

we're just flexible in what we can eat and what we can do. And when you plug that into. Like we left because we could? We left because we could. And we had, if you can eat anything, you can go any damn where you want. Yeah. You know, as you said, you can go any damn where you want. Yeah.

You know, as you said, you plug in curiosity to that. You plug in even marginal population growth to where if oldest kid, you know, why don't you go over in that next valley? Like not propelled by the need to go kill thousand pound. Because you're constantly running out of thousand pound mammals. That might sometimes pull you. But at other times, one of the things we're seeing along the Blue Nile is that the tributary we're on is a seasonal river. It has, you know, 100 meters wide, 20 meters deep during the rainy season, but then during

the dry season, it ends up into these little puddles. And those little puddles are where the game's attracted to. You can walk out into those puddles and you pick up meter-long catfish. You know, that's just, so the dry seasons, and this runs counter to the ways. That's a big cat, man. It's, yeah. But in the past. Do you fish there?

No, we, well, we've, we fish to collect the fish, to bury them in the ground, to collect their bones, to put into our comparative collection. I got it. The locals give, yeah, give us that sort of look of you're doing what with that fish? to bury them in the ground, to collect their bones, to put into our comparative collection. The locals give us that sort of look of, you're doing what with that? Like, this guy's got it all wrong. But anyway, it's looking like, in terms of resource predictability,

in the past models of when people left Africa suggested we did it during the wetter phases, of where you can make it through the Sahara and down along the Nile Valley, that obviously you're going to do it when it's wetter. But what we're seeing on this side is when it's during the rainy seasons and during the high moisture season is a really tough time to get away because the game's dispersed. It's tough to fish in the rivers. You can't get the mollusk, you can't get the fish.

But the dry seasons are where the resources become predictable because they're around those few remaining water holes. And so you could move from water hole to water hole to water hole around these small resources rather than the big, you know, following the big game. You're following the catfish and the mollusk from one water hole like pearls on a string down the river. It's just going to suck you down the river drain. Yeah.

During the time of year when, you know, again, we've thought of it in the past, if you're not going to be out there in the middle of the desert during the dry season, it might make it the most predictable, the most likely, not only the small stuff, but if there's game animals in the area, they're going to be coming there to water. So you're going to know that several times a day, there's going to be game animals

there as well. You know, we've been fortunate enough to travel a little bit on some rivers down in South America with Amerindians. Uh-huh. And they really like the dry season. Oh, yeah. Because the fishing's phenomenal.

And dry. They always talk about when the dry season, dry season, dry season. They like the dry season to travel because everything gets concentrated in the deep holes. Wet season, it's muddy and it's awful and it's terrible. And you sit around and you get rained on and it's miserable. Yeah, the only thing they like about the wet season is if it gets so wet that you have small little hills that become like refugia. Oh, and everything gets – And you can go there and get a lot of – you can go there and animals will have to get up on those.

And you can just pull up and kill them. That's fun. That's the flip side of our dry season. You know, there's those two times a year when you've got these sort of landscape scale grocery stores because everything's there. Your big Costco. Yeah, they talk about it. You go out. If it gets like that, they would go out in their boats and just clean the house. And they know exactly where those places are.

Where everybody likes to hang out. But yeah, they always talk about the dry season being when you want to fish. Yeah. So what's your theory on the i mean like where do you stand on the blitz the blitzkrieg hypothesis idea in north america that humans that that that humans came in i mean just ideas popular in 79 80 and maintain remain popular for a while humans came in and killed everything and that's why the mammoths are gone because people killed them and ate them all.

Do you sort of go against the grain on that? I don't know. Well, what is the grain on that now? No, I think the grain on it now is this bullshit. I think- I would say the scholarly consensus. Let's go back to, you know, we've been talking about Hudson Mang. We left that story with killing might be one potential of it. When you look at Pleistocene extinctions, I'm sure that having a new novel predator

on the scene had something to do with it. But if you've got a climate change, if you've got vegetation change, if you've got water source change, if you've got maybe new diseases on the scene, it's hard to say which one of them is the killing stroke. I don't think you can say that humans had nothing to do with it. You can't put wolves back into Yellowstone and novel predator and say they don't have something to do with game population numbers. So humans had something to do with it, but I don't think the Blitzkrieg model, I think

it's too simplistic. I think it goes back to where we started it falls back to that if there's a pattern all these animals dying within a couple hundred year period we must have done it because nothing else creates patterns yeah uh here's another one for you i was saying i was saying to someone the other day the other day yanni was there we were out doing a little arrowhead hunting on a buddy's ranch because there was a spot where there's like a hill. He's got a barn. Up above his barn, there's a little benchy hill right above a creek.

And there's sort of this little erosion line that kind of marches its way up the hill and so one of the guys out there that works on the ranch was saying you know a cool place to look is every year i'll go up and look at that little erosion line you'll find a lot of flakes stone flakes um and we went up there and had to look around and found a bunch of stone flakes and found one little small little um i mean like a little point the tip was missing but a little point size, your thumbnail. Uh, I was explaining to everybody, I don't know if you, if he was an ear shot, but I was, cause he was off looking around too. I was explaining, we're like, man, all the low hanging fruits gone. And I was saying like, you read about arrowhead hunting in like the thirties.

Cause for a long time, no one gave it. No, no one cared. Like he's, no one picked it up. Then all of a sudden it became interesting. And then you got all these guys like sheep herders from the thirties and forties that Because for a long time, no one gave it. No one cared. No one picked it up. Then all of a sudden, it became interesting. And then you got all these guys like sheep herders from the 30s and 40s that would fill five-gallon buckets full of arrowheads. And now saying there's nothing left. But before we started our recorded conversation here, you were talking about the kind of like stunning amount of sites you're still able to identify when you go out looking um touch on that like i guess like different avenues of approach that i would like you to take would be one how like how much

stuff is out there do you agree that all the that everything's been picked over and it's all gone now have we not even scratched the surface on old human sites? You just opened up a whole warren of rabbit holes. Sure. I'm trying to decide which one to go down. Okay, let me ask you. A lot of areas have been very heavily picked over. Okay, so that's true.

Which from an archaeological perspective is just devastating. Really? Which means you can find an archaeological perspective is just devastating. Which means you can find an archaeological site, there'll be a few flakes there. And all you can say about it is people were here sometime in the last 13,000 years. Yeah. Which we knew before that. One was just like little chips. Yeah. If the points are there, those are like we talked about, well, like a GPS puts a timestamp on every time you're in a spot.

If you've got a point there, you've got a timestamp of when people were there. So unfortunately for years, I grew up hunting arrowheads. My grandpa took me out. That's sort of what got me fascinated with it. People have been collecting arrowheads in particular, which means they've been sort of erasing time from the surface archaeological record. Because unless you know, like we talked about, an individual bone in a site, knowing where it comes from as a puzzle piece, unless you know where each one of those points come from, it just is turned into a nice little piece of rock rather than being a piece of the puzzle. So yeah, things have been picked over real severely.

And it means it makes our job even harder as an archaeologist to try and understand human use of landscapes. I was talking to you a little bit about the things that we find in remote areas away from where people get in the high elevations of wilderness areas. And we do find points there. Most of what we find are the small flakes. I think I mentioned in the last 20 years we found close to a little over 200,000 artifacts. Most of them are the small flakes.

And even in the remote areas, you know, 20 miles from a trailhead back in the wilderness areas, we've been picking up, folks have been picking up the points for the last 100 to 150 years. So even back there, they're sparse and the record is terribly degraded. Trevor Burrus I got a friend that's got quite a collection of points. Uh-huh. And his strategy, I almost hesitate to say what his strategy is.

His strategy is high mountain passes. Uh-huh. It's, remind me to get back to that here in a minute. And I need to make this point. High mountain passes means they're on

Forest Service property. You're not supposed to touch them. Which means he's probably got enough points to make it a real easy felony offense at this point. Yeah, we were talking the other day, man. It's like,

you're asking a lot of somebody. Which means, oh, no. Let me go down that rabbit hole. We do catch and release archaeology up there. We found these 200,000 things and damn near all of them are there. Okay, let me ask you this, though. I, we do catch and release archeology up there. We found these 200,000 things and damn near all of them are there. Okay. Let me ask you this though.

We make. Did you talk them in or did you leave them on the surface? We leave them on the surface. I'm not going to damage the archeological record by changing it. Yeah, but then some other chump's going to find them. I, I often get that down in the bar. If you don't pick it up, some other SOB will. And I say, ah, my aspiration has never to been one of those SOBs.

It's. When we were on the Arctic slope, we tucked them all into the moss. You jabbed it as close as where you found it. You just tucked it into the moss. We use high-precision GNSS receivers. We have its location down to within 10 centimeters. So if we tucked it in, we could come back and find it. But when I work with students, I see the archaeological record. One of my jobs is to leave it as much unchanged by me as possible

so that they can come back later and demonstrate why that old SOB Todd was wrong in his interpretations. If I start pushing things down into the sod that far. Watch him push it into a bone on accident. Or if they come back and start excavating that site and the elevation of that point is five centimeters different than everything else on it, they're going to say, well, these are two different occupations. Todd was wrong. That point isn't associated. So I see archaeology as sort of like medicine. The first rule is do no harm.

Leave it as intact as possible. Yeah, when you see an old lady drop her purse, drop her driver's license. Yeah. Or credit card, right? Whatever. She drops five bucks. Would you be like, yeah, I'm going to take that five bucks because I wouldn't, but someone else would. Yeah, exactly. And one of the things that I, as I get older, I now have grandchildren and I'm waiting for the day, the oldest one is three now, where I can start taking them back onto the landscape and showing them where these points are in their natural habitat.

Not only does that make me super grandpa, but it connects the people that, you know, get to find that point with that landscape in a different way. It's not just, you know, this open hillside. It's that hillside where I find that point with that landscape in a different way. It's not just this open hillside. It's that hillside where I found that point. So I think just that leaving them there has that opportunity to connect people with the landscape in a way they don't otherwise have. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes

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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. Let's step back from it further. One of the reasons we don't see or that we don't envision wilderness areas as having a lot of archaeology is by time the fur trappers came into the mountains, a lot of the Native Americans had been living there, had been killed by disease, or they'd been pulled out of the mountains

to the trading post down in the lower elevations. It was an underpopulated landscape. And so we've brought that notion into the present of high mountain areas, the passes, and they were depopulated. Oh, you don't think of them like that historically? You think that people were up there hunting? Oh, yeah. We see... I get that historically? You think that people were up there hunting? Oh, yeah.

We see, we see. I get that idea. We'll be way up in the mountains and I wonder if they ever would have left the river valleys and even gone up in there. We see, we've got teepee ring sites, habitation sites at over 11,000 feet. We've got sites in the high elevation where we find April to March mountain sheep fetuses, they were up there in late winter. We find sites where there's bison fetuses from near full term back to just beginning at high elevation. They were there year round.

And we see sites that are – let me get back to my – people were there much more than we think in the past. So getting back to the idea of wilderness depopulated, no people, we eradicated the people from there. And so if we're back into that same area, picking up the artifacts, the arrowheads that demonstrate their presence, we're taking that one step further by erasing their physical presence. And that just bothers me. I'm with you. That approaches to, yeah, we've already killed vast numbers of them, and now we're going to erase their presence by removing those artifacts from that landscape. You know, I'm constantly trying to do self-improvement.

Like I'm exploring this idea right now of if you're hunting on a tag uh-huh like i'm sorry like if i was a perfect person and i did this once this year if i was a perfect person you're hunting on a hunting tag and you wound something and you feel that you wounded it mortally but didn't recover so you've filled your tag you would not your tag right what i'm going to try to do is like, it would be very, very difficult for me, but to see a point or a half a point and leave it. Oh, that would be hard. One of the things we do is we take latex molding material in the back country with us.

We find that perfect point. We make a mold of it. A little catch and release. Catch and release. You put the point back, you come back, and you can make a cast of that mold. You've got that three-dimensional memory right there. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if outfitters caught on to that, that you could take people into backcountry, and rather than having that person collect that point once and take it back with them and give you a little tip, if every year when you went back and a new hunter, you could say, well, let's look around here

for some arrowheads. They find that arrowhead. You make a mold of it and the arrowhead goes back in its place and the hunter gets to go back home with his memory. It's another sort of, you know, catch and release, but of an economic value to the folks that do often encourage the picking them up. I don't want to, I don't want you to think that I'm like plying you for trade secrets so that I can go and ransack the federal lands

because I'm definitely not. But as much as you're comfortable, like when you're scouting, just rolling through the mountains, scouting around, have you developed a sense of like this would be a good place to look or do you have to treat everything equal because you didn't know what it used to be like?

Or are you looking for, you look like you see stone flakes, you kind of know your eye knows what to see for tent rings. Like, how do you sort of navigate, if you're trying to look through it through human eyes, right, from thousands of years ago, what are you imagining when you walk through the mountains? Let me give you, and I'm going to try and work through three answers to that. Okay. A couple of years ago, I was down talking to some elders on the Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming about this catch and release archeology, and they liked that idea. And then I asked them another question, which was, you know, every time I'm in the mountains and I put my tent down and I start looking around where my tent is, I start finding flakes.

Oh, no. And do you think or would you be more comfortable with my leaving my tent there or should I move it off your ancestral site? And the guy I was talking to thought about it for a minute and he said you know if I didn't see those flakes I'd move your damn tent because something's wrong with that place so um sort of answer one is good places to camp in the past or good places to camp today and so that's that's one second one is you sort of as you're spending more time like with with anything else, you start to get that innate feel for places that should have stuff. You know, it just has that ping to it, the right sort of stuff. And so rely on that a little. But again, since we always want to evaluate our ideas rather

than just saying, I know where stuff is, I've been working with several people who are sort of one of my former students, Paul Burnett, who's sort of a GIS modeling whiz. And we've developed probability models based on where we've looked in the past on where there's the greatest probability of finding things in present. We've got about 10 variables of landscape dimensions that go into this linear probability model and gives a probability model for every 10 by 10 meter area across the forest. Oh, is that right? From 0 to 100% if you're going to find something there. Is there something that's 100%? No, we're at 98, 99%.

And it's borne out. Well, to give you an example, and we've reworked this model a couple of times. One of the variables when we first hit the model of where we didn't find things was in heavily timbered areas. So heavily timbered areas, low probability of finding stuff. And then we started doing post-fire archaeology. And, you know, it's not a big gee whiz, Mr. Science. One of the reasons that you don't see things in areas where there's that much duff under the trees is you can't see the damn ground. So we started doing work after fires and we start seeing stuff there.

So you throw the tree cover out of your model and we keep revising the model and we go out every year and work with it. Yeah. When I was, when I was, uh, spent that 10 days hunting arrowheads with guys that were really good, like anthropologists on the North slope. Um, the first thing was open ground. Uh-huh. Yeah.

You gotta see the ground. If it's, if it's moss, don't waste your time. Yep. And the second thing was that they liked is like great places to camp. Uh-huh. And they found that in that country,

um, confluences of rivers and they make that sort of V, that V of land where they come together, and you'd find like flat benches on a nice little rise above those confluences, good visibility. You're camped on that bench. You can see the valleys around you, pretty flat ground, access to water, and they would love those spots. Well, yeah, you've let that cat out of the bag. So I'd say, yes, confluences is one of the 10 variables we look at. Okay. Yeah.

Still today though, man. Oh yeah. When you're floating down the river, it's a great place. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. You're retired, but you still work. So how, what, what makes being retired, like how define retired?

No one pays you? No, no pesky paycheck. So that's retirement? Yeah. I say, and it's sort of joking, but it's sort of true, is I no longer have that damn job getting in the way of my work. Yeah. So I spend.

Pencil pushing. Yeah. And being a university faculty member means administrative stuff and, you know, endless things that are draining your time. And what drains your, doesn't drain your time is university professors' interaction with students. I really miss that. Okay. But just all the other sort of things that build up. So since I've retired.

And what university did you retire from? Colorado State in Fort Collins. Okay. Since I've retired, I've spent two to three months, most winters, working on the projects in Ethiopia, like I'm talking about, talked about earlier. That's what you do in the winter? That's what we do in our winter. And that's their dry season. And in the summer, I've been focusing on, and again, this is, when I retired, I wanted to get away from the data intensive things like bison bone bed. I wanted to retire.

And I thought, what I'd really like to do in retirement is go backpacking in the mountains. And so I decided to start focusing on high elevation archaeology with this notion in the back of my head that I'm not going to find much. And therefore, I can still be doing archaeology, but I won't have those huge data sets to deal with. The first year I went up there with students, we were going to survey 20 miles along a Forest Service trail corridor in a 10-day period. And I thought, boy, we can do that easy. We made it a mile and a half and recorded 6,000 artifacts. What? that easy. We made it a mile and a half and recorded 6,000 artifacts. And I thought,

this isn't, this, we hit, we hit the hot spot. And that's gone on and on and on and on. And right now our cumulative data set is over 200,000 artifacts. So I'm again back in this huge data, big data, lots of attributes. Oh my God, did I get that wrong sort of thing. But it's exciting because the areas where we're working in the wilderness areas in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are one of those blank spots on the archaeological map of knowledge. So not only do I get to embrace that ignorance again of here's something we don't know about. And so every time we go out, we're finding new and interesting things. And one of the projects I'm working on now as sort of to dovetail with that is I've been working with some of the people that have been doing the migration studies of GPS coloring animals and following them and looking at how they move across the landscape. And we've been beginning to collaborate on whether those corridors that the game animals are using

may well have been corridors that people would have used. So not only have I failed in retirement in getting something that is a lot more complex than I thought, but you keep realizing that you can't just do the archaeology to understand it. You need to start worrying about the biology of all the other critters that are using those landscapes simultaneously. I like that you're filling in the map like that because I feel like that that would wind up being helpful when people want to develop pristine ecosystems that you could talk about how there's a lot of cultural sites there.

I know you probably can't say like, oh yeah, but like from my perspective, you could talk about how there's a lot of cultural sites there. I know you probably can't say like, oh, yeah, but like from my perspective, you could weaponize that stuff and use it to protect wilderness. Well, it has – that's a double-edged sword in that some people who are anti-wilderness will make the argument, well, if you're saying that people have been there forever, why should we keep people out today? So you've got to watch how you make that i'd say yeah just because yeah that's a great point yeah there's a real difference between doubly weaponized yeah between protecting oh so people were all over here all the time and you're saying they were

a major component of the environment they were the apex predator year round okay let's put the road in there and get the ski area. Yeah, let's get everybody back up in there. Yeah, it's like we were talking about mammoths and all the people that want to do the DNA and recreate mammoths. You could make that same argument. Folks might say, well, let's re-people the wilderness. Yeah. No, I'm not. I wish I would have brought it up.

Fill that in all this out. Well, you've got to – that's one of those arguments that it's going to be there. Anytime you start talking about finding archaeology in the wilderness, and I've had people say that to me seriously. Well, then why do we have wilderness? It's not that the concept – I got to think about it for a minute. I'll come up with something good. It's just – the law was poorly written when it says where a man is only a minute. I'll come up with something good. It's just, it's, the law was poorly written when it says

where a man is only a visitor. It might, you know, we might just reword the law to where contemporary use of it is only transient or something like that.

Yeah, I got you. Yeah, I know what you got. That's been great. It's a lot to take in. We should ask Phil

if he's got anything he wants to say too. Sure, we can do that. You can throw it to Phil after you he wants to say, too. Sure, we can do that. You can throw it to Phil after you do yours. Phil can go on then, you can do yours. I don't have a whole lot. You see a lot of arrowheads, Phil, off the federal land? Never found one.

Never looked? Never looked, though. You got some hot tips today. Are you going to use it to abuse the law? Not at all. At least I won't say I will in front of Larry. That would be really bad if you did. Yeah, no.

I find a lot of discomfort in uncertainty. And I guess that could – so that's a foolish way to live. I understand that. But I love talking or listening to people like you who seem to relish in it. I'm sort of one of those almost OCD organizing things. When we go into the back country, for example, I've got a spreadsheet that tells people their calorie output per day for the entire time for my food shopping list. I don't like uncertainty. But unfortunately, that's the way the world is.

And unless you want to live in a delusional world, you've sort of got to embrace it. So the things that you can, I can control how many calories I take into the mountains for 23 days. I can't control what happened in the past, and I'm comfortable with that. You deal with the things that you can put in its own little boxes. And archaeology, one of the reasons I really love it is because of that uncertainty. I would hate it to be in a field or a job when you retire. You say, well, I know everything I need to know about this. I can just go fishing for the rest. Not to say fishing is a bad thing, but you can just play golf.

You want to talk about something you can never figure out, fishing. That's hard. It's the same thing. If you're an avid fisher person, you're going to be working for that forever. You just start figuring out all the shit you don't know. If you do it right, it's always slapping you in the face with what you don't know. Wake up and pay better attention and think about it this way. And so to me, it makes me feel more like a kid all the time because you're always sort of curious. You're asking why, why, why like kids always do rather than saying I've got the answers.

You know who didn't cope with that well? Not that you would know him. My father didn't cope with that well. My father didn't – he never, you know, he didn't finish high. He didn't like formally finish high school, right? But he never fell in love with the journey of knowledge and would be dismissive of entire fields of inquiry because they were always, as he put it, changing their story. He didn't like it. So it'd be that

instead of saying, oh, it'd be really interesting to understand why mammoths went extinct and a guy floats an idea and people are like, oh, that's a great idea. And then later someone pokes some holes in it. It wouldn't be that he remained interested. He would be just ruined it. They don't, you know, they don't know what they're talking about.

And he would get angry about it and condemn the whole question because they were changing their story again. So you can imagine how you'd feel about, I think, the African diaspora, right? That changes all the time. And he would just get where he didn't want to hear about it. It was all hogwash. It can't be right if there, if it isn't black and white. Yeah. Which is, he wanted to know the damn answer now. If not, they're all stupid. No one should even wonder about it. Sort of. Um, my dad was a lot the same way, you know, he never finished high school. He was a rancher. He, you know, uh, and he was real skeptical when I started talking about going into this archaeology stuff.

First of all, why don't you get a real job? And secondly, are you going to ever get paid to do it? And then I got the university jobs and I started getting paid and I started, you know, being in Africa and being in France and excavating these bison sites. And he put up with it because it brought the money in. And it wasn't until. Like that legitimized it. That legitimized it. But it wasn't till like that legitimized it that legitimized it but it wasn't till he was almost gone and i went in to talk to him

the night before he died and i was telling him about how he's going to shift careers and go into the mountains and try and understand what was going on there and trying to see how the people in the game animals interacted and get up there and start looking where nobody had ever looked. And he pulled off his oxygen mask and he said, it sounds like you're finally doing something worthwhile. Oh, really? So, you know, talk about another spur to get out of the academic and get into that, you know, that I finally got that, um, I got that stamp of approval. Yeah. It got his, it piqued his curiosity. Yeah. It didn't matter, you know, that I was

academic full professor at university. That was just – you're finally doing something that matters. Yanni? What have you learned that's been interesting in this post in retirement of like these mountain landscapes? I just think how complex and how intensively they've been used. And that we've, you know, we, for years, the archaeologists have specialized in the areas we can get to. It's like we've specialized on bone beds because they're easy to see. We've specialized in plains, areas where you can drive a four-wheel drive to.

And there's this whole other world that we know almost nothing about. So when I was a kid, I wanted to be either an archaeologist or an astronaut. So this is sort of combining both of those because I'm in a new world doing archaeology and everything we find there is, wow, you know, teepee rings, stone circles at 11,000 feet that have habitation debris. What are they doing up here? You need one of those thousand dollar Swedish tents, plopped it, told it in place, but they're up there in the high winds. They're doing things that... I think just that, oh my God, there's this world that I never knew existed, is probably the most exciting thing I've ever seen.

It's what keeps you going. I wish I'd retired 30 years ago to where I had better energy to be up there. Like I said earlier, we're up for 23 days this summer. And after about 10 days, I got this message on our in-reach from our outfitter that said, do you need anything? And I think he thought we'd ask for a bottle of whiskey or some beef steaks or something like that. And I said, yeah, we're about out of ibuprofen.

We're getting to the age where, you know, that becomes a real serious thing. I wish I could have started into these unknown landscapes earlier. You know, it's funny, man. My brother and I were up in the, kind of like in the sub-Alpine zone in some of the similar area to what you've been talking about and had this conversation this September where we found a very improbable

little beaver dam. Uh-huh. And I was like, man, like what the hell is that thing doing up here? And that led us to talking about during the mountain man era, we're like, where's those guys that ever like found this beaver right when they were just scouring this place out and then that got us talking about if you sat overlooking this meadow we were on

i was like how many years would you had to sit here before someone strolled through if you were here 2 000 years ago 3 000 years ago and we. And as we're talking about this, we're imagining, like, it must have been, you could have sat here 10 years and no one would have come by. I think actually. But then maybe it's like, maybe like you're saying, like you'd have been seeing someone every month come through there. I relish the isolation of being in the wilderness and not seeing people. And one of the reasons I've quit hunting as much is by the time hunting season rolls around, my empty wilderness starts to become repopulated. But I'll bet you that in the past, and what we're seeing from the archaeological record, is that the year-round number of people there was much

higher than today. So rather than thinking of it at 2,000 years ago, how long would you have had to sit here till somebody walked by? It probably should be flipped on its head and said, how long would I be setting here before some other SOB came by and spooked the game? Let me ask you a question. That's interesting, man. One of the things that I really get fascinated by or what attracts me to the mountains is I've always got to get over that next pass or look at that next drainage. You know, it just, I got that problem. Especially get older. I go, God, will I ever get over that pass into that drainage? And we talked about people moving into areas and that curiosity

has got to be part of it. You know, you want to tie the country together of what's over here and what's over there. And yeah, I got that problem real bad. There's a spot that's bugging the hell out of me up in alaska where we always get up and look and you and it's like we're in kind of this alpine area it's real beautiful uh-huh and there's this deep trough of like nasty looking timber but then you see this other side yeah there's another one popping up and it's like there's no way to get in there that's got to be the coolest place in the world you You know, and I'm always like, no one's probably been there for 300 years. I know exactly. Anything else?

Were you involved at all in that camp that was recently discovered above Gunnison? Oh, that's a cool spot. Oh, the one up on the Folsom sites up there? Yeah. No. I just read about it and they're doing some, you know, fun stuff there. 10,000 feet above sea level winter camps or even higher. Yeah. And pretty substantial structures. Again, that's when those things. Like badass houses paved with rocks and stuff. 10,000 feet above sea level winter camps or even higher. And pretty substantial structures.

Again, that's when those things – Building like badass houses paved with rocks and stuff. Yeah, we tend to think of – we've talked about biases like only humans create patterns and another bias that feeds into things like that is the older something is, the least sophisticated, the more poorly made it is. And we've got time and time again, when you look at the archaeological record of North America in many ways, the older stuff is often the most finely crafted,

the most sort of best product, and as you get more recent, it turns into the... So that notion that we have that old is crappy, modern is better, whether it's housing structures or stone tool projectile point technology, it just doesn't hold. And I love getting back to that uncertainty to take those things that we just assume we know and saying, now, wait a minute, let's look at that a little differently.

And so for me, the how do you know that? That again, it's like that young kids daddy why yeah is is sort of that's what drives my sort of curiosity is i've always got that sort of why and and what if i what if i picked that up and thought about it from a different way if i had one token to a time machine there's like three things well one would be that i'd go with Daniel Boone over the Cumberland Gap, whatever the hell, I can't remember what year it was, pre-Revolutionary War,

and do that little jaunt with him. One that I would go like, out with, you know, like to hang out with some Folsom hunters 12,000 years ago. And the other one

that I would go to like out to Miles City 20,000 years ago to see how long you got to sit there for a mammoth walks by. Uh-huh. Like, was there a bunch or not many? Where it was just like, you glass up shitloads of them or you like, you look and look and look

and can't find one. I would love to know that. Yeah. 40,000, 50,000, whatever. Uh-huh. But man, I would love to. Well, that's why we're talking about. Some time machine stuff.

Like people that would want to go back and watch them sign the Declaration of Independence. I mean, that's cool, but that's not as cool as a lot of machine stuff. Like people that would want to go back and watch them sign the Declaration of Independence. I mean that's cool, but that's not as cool as a lot of other stuff. We were talking about that site in Mexico earlier. That's one of those sites where with that many animals that well-preserved, you can start trying to answer for at least for that area. To where, as I mentioned, trying to answer those paleoecological questions is as interesting as trying to say how people interacted with them. So, you know, if I had my time machine, um, one of the things we've been finding in the mountains here that I hadn't seen ever in the mountains are glass trade beads and we think glass trade beads for trade period.

We've got one site where we've got glass trade beads and metal that they're cutting into arrow points and things like that, that I submitted a butchered bison bone for radiocarbon date and got a radiocarbon date back of 1650. And being an archaeologist, I say, that's wrong. We know that trade beads- Yeah, there shouldn't be any metal points or- Yeah. And so we've submitted a couple more and they're coming into that mid to late 1600s.

Coming all the way up from Mexico. Some are coming. By then, some of them are coming in from the English and French fur traders on the East Coast. Yeah. So I would love to be in the mountains of northwest Wyoming, late 1600s, you know, 150 years before. And ask them, where the hell did you get that? Yeah, and what's – because that doesn't fit our picture at all. You know, we think of Lewis and Clark as coming through this area and being the first sort of interactions with the Native Americans here.

150 years, they were plugged into these continental-wide trade networks. And again, coming from a small town like Matitsi, I like to highlight that of, kid, you're from – not from the back of nowhere. You're in a place that's been connected with the rest of the continent for ever yeah i've brought this up this would be my this would be my final thought but i brought us a bunch of times where the historian elliot west has a piece where he talks about when lewis and clark hit the great plains there were indians on the greatains who had gone to Europe, met the King of France, and come back again.

So in terms of like discovering, you know what I mean? Yeah. It's a much more complex picture. And a lot of us use that Lewis and Clark period as the baseline of whether it's how many grizzlies they saw or the bison populations and this and that and the other. And if you consider what I think was the Crow tribe in the late 1700s lost 60 to 80 percent of their population from disease, that's removing huge numbers of key predators from the environment. So by the time Lewis and Clark's comes through, the environment's reorganized in a way it may have never been.

Grossly manipulated. Yeah. It's not, well, or under-manipulated. You know, all of a sudden it's like- It's being manipulated, meaning like impact of, yeah, impact of man. A lot of our ideas of managing wilderness areas or managing game is to try and get back to that baseline that probably never existed. That baseline of when Lewis and Clark came through was probably artificial in

that it had been depopulated. The ecology had been reorganizing for the last 50 to a hundred years into something that may never have been. So it's, it's, and again, how do you deal with that? If you're a wildlife manager, I don't know. It's just sort of throws a lot of, but it's – and again, how do you deal with that if you're a wildlife manager? I don't know. It just sort of throws a lot of – but it's one of those we probably need to think about it. Yeah. My operating idea, instead of trying to pin it to a certain year, I just like to operate on I would like to see more wildlife tomorrow in more places than we have it today. Uh-huh. And in better conditions.

Yeah. It's like, I'm not going to attempt to tie it to what I'm trying to match. Uh-huh. I just want, I can tell you one thing, I'd like more of it in more places. Yeah. And we certainly don't want to see it decline. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for coming on, man.

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