The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 268: Clovis Points and Man’s Best Friend

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with David J. Meltzer, Ryan Callaghan, Spencer Neuharth, Corinne Schneider, and Phil Taylor.Topics discussed: Making sure that your local humane society is not The Humane Society of the United States; Jim H. encouraging hunters to be true to the message of conservation and favor wolf recovery even if it costs them a few extra elk tags; Covid vaccines for mink and great apes; Spencer saves bird lives; spotting an arrowhead by the side of the road as a bus driver holding the door open for a kid; delving deeper into the Folsom Site; a beautiful theory killed by a horrible fact; what to make of 34,000 bone scraps smaller than the size of your fingernail; how it’d be cool if you bought a book that came with an attached Folsom point; tribal vs. human and culture vs. genetics; the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; ancient peoples being successful at moving far distances; dogs as the first animal that humans ever domesticated; how there's dog DNA in wolves but no wolf DNA in dogs; anthropology classes as a resume builder; where you can find all of David's fascinating books; 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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Go farther, stay longer. Joined today by my favorite ever podcast guest. Now, I say I throw that around, not liberally, but I throw it around, but this is true. Professor David Meltzer, who just... Were you in this studio when you just did your online class? I did. I did. He just taught an online class in this studio prior to the recording about Clovis. Perfect timing, wasn't it?

God, I wish I would have been here early. Well, you know, when you show up late for class, Steve, this is the price you pay. You miss the good stuff. You miss the good stuff. In fact, it was the best lecture I ever gave. Really? You were feeling it this morning?

Oh, no. I was rolling. And where the hell were you? I'm looking out the window thinking, where's Steve? Damn it. He's supposed to be here. You were bringing it. We have a guy, an engineer accepted our challenge.

We wanted to get a light. Let me back up. A buddy of mine years ago was getting paid to go watch commercials, beer commercials in particular. They would pay him to watch beer commercials, and he had a dial. The more he liked a beer commercial, he'd turn his dial up. Whole bunch of guys watching beer commercials. And they dial what parts they, you know, whether they're into it or not.

And I wanted to get one of those for this room. And an electrical engineer is making us one that has five dials. Mechanical engineer has five dials. And as someone's talking, you don't need, you don't know where it's coming from, but I could like turn mine down and the light in the middle would dim. And that person would know that, that there's fading interest. Right.

I would right now, if I had that here right now, I would turn mine on full blast and I wouldn't touch it. Thank you. It'd already be on full blast. Thank you. When I re-listened to the last episode you were on, David, Steve introduced you the same way. Said you're his favorite guest.

So he means it. I think he means it. I told him earlier that he was, he used to be, we thought that his britches were too big for us. And so we would go after, we would target his students. And then got the man himself. And what was the analogy you made? That it's like if we were trying to get John Lennon on the show and got stuck with Ringo. We're not going to name names of the students.

No. Which coincidentally is how I get some of my speaking gigs. So that was good. The next time you bump into Steve, tell him we say hi. Not good at returning emails, that guy, but we still like him. Being Ringo's not so bad, though.

Is he the one? There's still a beat. Are any of them left? Paul and Ringo are left. You sure? Yeah. Also joined by, of course, Phil the Engineer. are any of them left? Paul and Ringo are left. Paul and Ringo. You sure? Oh yeah. Yeah. Huh. Uh,

also joined by of course, Phil the engineer, Corinne's here, Spencer's here, Cal's here. Um, so that, that's for Yanni's dad.

The High Life Man series of beer commercials will go down in history as the best beer commercials. We'll just say that before we move on. You might be a High Life Man. Is that an old one? Oh, they're not that old, but they're just like nostalgic and hilarious and well-written. But, but, but, but was the beer any good?

I mean, isn't that the issue? It doesn't matter at that point. Yeah, but that's when it comes to beer commercials, it's not, they're not tying it to the taste of the beer. I used to drink, well, I don't want to explain what beer I used to drink and why. They want you to associate with the product. Yeah it be representative of you right and if the first taste is no good

and you spit it out they've lost the war well mgd for a long time you would look in your bottle so if you looked through your bottle to the label on the other side it'd be people partying there's like pictures of people partying yeah so i'd like to drink that because i could look in there and i feel like i was partying then weirdly one day looking people partying. So I like to drink that because I can look in there and I feel like I was partying. Then weirdly one day I look in there and it's... You're the great American consumer. Then one day I look in there and it's a basketball hoop. Yeah, never ordered that stuff again.

We got a quick clarification. So I'm going to call them our good friends at Murdoch's. If you don't have Murdoch's around, Murdoch's is like a farm and ranch. I think it's pretty regional, right? It's a farm and ranch supply place. I was observing how I was in at Murdoch's buying some stuff. I'll tell you what I was buying. I was

buying a syringe from the livestock, the cattle syringe stuff. And noticed that you could round up your donation. And I noticed it was for the, it said the humane society on it. And I thought that was weird because the humane society, as we all know, is kind of like the leading, one of the leading anti-hunting organizations out there. And they're always filing, you know, every time there's a suit filed that you always see that they're like a signatory to the suit. But what I was screwed up about, we were kind of each a little bit wrong because I was, there's, there's an organization called the Humane Society of the United States.

And they're the ones that's always, they're always suing everybody. Like they're suing to stop that. You know, they don't want you to be able to fish in the local pond or whatever. It'll be them suing. Um, not to be confused with like humane societies more generally around animal shelters. So anyways, we talked about this and then Corinne has some back and forth with Murdoch's, the store. And they're changing their thing around and apparently we weren't the first people to bring that up. No affiliation.

It's local animal shelters. Yeah, exactly. They're raising up money. So as Corinne brought an example, I don't know why she brought this example. If your purchase was $10.62, just whatever. Yeah, I don't know. Corinne pointed out that you would be donating 38 cents if you rounded up. It's great.

It's a great example. Because I think a lot of people can't picture it, right? And then you put it in those concrete terms and then you're like, oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, you put your, I don't know, licorice and. Because they always got those weird huge bags of candy. Like some, you know, dog bones or something.

And your purchase is $10.62. And when you're about to make your purchase on the pin pad, it'll say, would you like to round to the nearest dollar? And this is the charity. This is the organization we donate to. It's now going to say animal shelters. Yeah. I feel like that. Think about it like this.

A long time ago, if your name was Richard, what would be your nickname? Dick. Okay. Over the years, though, the name Dick parallel pathed with another use of the word. Now, Richards go by Rick. Oh, right.

I feel like humane, like, I feel like this has happened with the Humane Society question. It's going to be a while until girls start being named Karen again, I feel like. Oh, yeah. That name has been sullied. In talking about wolves, our good friend Jim Heffelfinger wrote in. Of course, Jim is a wildlife expert and policy guy and biology guy down in Arizona.

What the hell is his official title? Geez. He's an academic. Yes, indeed. He's got many titles. I was pointing out, this is a correction. I was saying that the Mexican gray wolf had no geographical separation from other wolves, and they all just bled into each other that was my understanding right there's no it'd be like the only

let me put in terms of turkeys real quick so we have these five varieties subspecies of turkeys and um the like we talk about the osceola which the osceola turkey sits kind of like south of lake okachobee in florida and then the eastern turkey is north of lake okachobee in florida there's no fence between osceolas and easterns they just just we arbitrarily drew a line and i was under the impression with wolves that there was this sort of like arbitrary line drawn where the Mexican wolf, you know, we just drew a line and said, okay, if it's south of that, it's a Mexican wolf. If it's north of that, it's not. And Heffelfinger pointed out that's in fact not the case. prey scarce areas, um, areas around between Colorado and Utah. Um,

that did cause some genetic barriers, historic genetic barriers between different groups of wolves. And he goes on to say that the Mexican gray wolf is the most genetically distinct wolf subspecies in North America. And that would not be true if they had historically blended in with other types of wolves. Heffelfinger also has this to say, this you'll appreciate this Cal for hunters in Colorado to be griping about

funding wolf recovery, which we talked about. And I kind of griped about it myself. He thinks it does a disservice to hunters. And how can we run around so proudly talking about recovering wild turkeys, recovering deer, right? Recovering all these species. But then it comes to recovering wolves,

we want to be like, I want nothing to do with that. He said, what a PR triumph. Do that too. And if it costs you a couple elk tags because of wolves eating some elk here and there, who cares? It's like, if hunters want to claim, you're in the business of recovery,

you're in the business of wildlife, you're in the business of wildlife, um, be true to your message. I agree with that. He says, he goes, he goes on to say anti hunters would be besides themselves in conflicted confusion.

If you could pull that off. So there's a, uh, the theory of biological selection based on like game, uh, conditions is something, do you know this with, with a ladder? And I can't come up with a term right now, but that, that's what it is. It's like, you know, you're defined by your environment. And so there is no like state line or, you know, fence that there's going to be one species on one side of and the other. It's just like this developed thing over millennia of certain body types are selected for certain environments.

Yeah. Where that body type is going to be way better at surviving based on the game, the rainfall, uh, you know, places to hide, hide of the shrubs, stuff like that. Uh, Dr. Meltzer here will probably give us the right terminology, but I hear it described as morphological distinctions rather than genetic distinctions. Is that okay? Yeah, I suspect these are all subspecies and that what you've got are different subspecies that have adapted better to those particular niches, those particular kind of ecosystems. And so really what you're seeing is populations that are settling into a range and they're staying in that range.

And there will be intergression. There'll be gene flow between these populations because they are part of the same species. There's no reason why they couldn't interbreed and probably did out on the boundaries of each of their ranges, right, where the two of them would occasionally intersect one another. So, yeah, you're going to have that kind of movement. But you're right. taxa or particular populations that natural selection, you know, by the luck of the draw and over time and adaptation over time, they will be better adapted to a particular environment, a more desert environment or a more wooded environment, whatever, right? I mean, that's just how natural selection works over time. Now you give it a long enough time and you make those, um, those, those ecological areas

distinct enough and you, you know, reduce any kind of gene flow or introgression ultimately, and you got to give it tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Which we have no patience for, by the way. Not in this room. Um, you could end up with different species. Species creation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just evolution. It, you know, Darwin had all this figured out in 1859. Yeah.

And so like I went down the rabbit hole on this thing, speaking with Jim and then, uh, speaking with a bunch of the pro Colorado wolf reintroduction folks, you know, and there is a serious division on, well, who cares if this larger gray wolf intermingles with the mexican wolves because that's like a natural thing and uh they'll figure it out right and then you get into this genetic swamping uh type of discussion where um they're now we're dealing with such a small population of Mexican wolves that there, there is a real possibility of genetic swamping and how this larger wolf,

all the traits of the larger wolf are going to, uh, overrun the traits of this, this smaller genetic pool of Mexican wolves. And we just don't have the luxury of a big gene pool down here and a big gene pool up here and tens of thousands of years for them to do their thing. And they've spent umpteen million dollars getting that very small group of Mexican

wolves going. Yes. So to then have a bunch of yahoos in colorado vote for this and which is funny because it's citizens vote for this and then undo that there's probably a lot of people that are dedicated to that that great that mexican wolf recovery who are kind of like and it's also an endangered species act thing right so you could argue that the reintroduction of these wolves is like actually anti-endangered Species Act because it threatens this listed

wolf that we are dedicated to recovering. Yeah. You can make one of those documentaries that no one watches about all this. Yes. Uh, okay. Cal, um, did you see how Corinne even wrote a transition for you? I did.

That's good, man. That's full service right there, dude. She's like, with Cal, she's so worried about Cal's performance, she had to write a transition for him. She's like, he'll never... He's got nothing. I need more moms

segue mom wrote his transition for him so i got my first covid vaccine uh i was i was also hand delivered a joke the other day because I selected a Bugs Bunny, you know, what do you call it? Band-Aid. You can use them on your little kids, but Band-Aid. Band-Aid. And I was supposed to take that picture of that Band-Aid on my shoulder and say, that's all folks. Posted on Instagram. That was funny.

Yeah. Do it? No, I had, the Band-Aid came off too fast for my brain to react. I just had a guy in New Zealand send me, this is a really nice idea.

This is right up your alley, Cal. Sent me, he's making Band-Aids, no plastics. Love it. Band-Aids out of merino wool. New Zealand wool. Which is naturally antimicrobial

because the fibers are so fine, reduces the amount of surface area that bacteria grows on. Huh. Everybody knows that. I'm just saying. Didn't need a mama for that. Okay.

Hit a couch. Now I'm getting nervous. Sorry. Okay. COVID vaccine was recently used on great apes. Isn't a gorilla part of COVID vaccine was recently used on great apes. Isn't a gorilla part of the great ape family? Not just apes.

It's all the dudes with no tails, I think, isn't it? Oh. A bonobo. Bonobo. Yeah. Orangutans. Orangutans, chimps, orangs, and gorillas. Yeah.

So there is a COVID vaccine trialed on mink and the mink part of the story is pretty interesting because if you go over to Europe, big mink farms were, uh, cold. Like we're talking. To the tune of hundreds of thousands of mink, right? Yes.

In Denmark. In Denmark. Sorry, Denmark. Yeah. Yep. Oh, that must've been just the, I bet they didn't have a lot of press show up on that day. Oh boy.

Just, what are they? I guess they're probably like gas and gas chambers and stuff. Yeah. I don't know. Take a lot of water to, anyway. And, but we, so we also had COVID show up in farmed mink populations in, in Utah here in the States, but they were not cold.

There's a trial vaccine that was used on mink. And then they're using this vaccine on the grade eight population in the San Diego Zoo. And I thought they did this in New York as well. But and the, you know, it's a little interesting. It's a little controversial, like brings to, brings to mind a bunch of like sci-fi books and stuff I've read over the years.

I could, I could identify a couple areas of controversy is on one hand, you probably have the crowd who would say, well, how could they be vaccinating mink and gorillas and whatnot? And I haven't got mine yet. Like that's like, as though, like, as though it would have gone to them, like as though they would have gotten it. Give me that mink vaccine. Yeah.

I'm sure that there's that. There's probably all manner of things, but I was surprised to see in this story that an asymptomatic zookeeper, um, spread the virus to eight gorillas that tested positive. Yeah. Do you know Maggie here in our office is convinced that her dog died of COVID? No way. She's got a very compelling, very compelling

timeline, symptomology. Interesting. We should have her on. But that's the origin of many of our diseases. They're zoonotic and they get something that's relatively benign in one species when it gets into another can become very deadly and virulent and most of the major epidemic diseases that humans have suffered from over the last 10 000 years have come from animals originally

and why can't they go back in the other direction exactly yeah i don't know why it's so surprising to me yeah that is the argument here right it's like we need, especially maybe not so much the great, you know, the limited great ape population in the San Diego Zoo of eight individuals. something could transform in like a mink farm with thousands of individuals, or let's say like a chicken farm or a hog farm where you have thousands of individuals in close contact in one space, you could see how, um, a virus could evolve very quickly. Right. Just, yeah.

So, uh, yeah, I mean, super, super interesting. Uh, I'll tell you a take on this, this farm, this, this mink farm thing is, um, uh, wild fur prices are often tied very directly to ranch output. So remember that guy, I can't remember what he said, 95% of the, it's like globally or something, 95% of the fur coats that are

produced are farm furs. Not trapped in the wild. Yep. And people use, you know, there used to be like all over fox farms and mink farms and everything when people went back when people wore a lot of fur. Um, I wonder if these die-offs and kill-offs

at these ranch facilities will in a year or two's time result in like an explosion in value of wild fur as the ranch facsimile as their production falters and no doubt it probably takes to get to get going and retooled i'd be curious to watch how that plays out i think michigan is our number one farmed fur state no i believe so no man that makes me think they don't do much of it really just well i don't think there's like big signs around that say hey we're farming fur bring the kids all right spencer, Corinne didn't give you a transition. What? You guys have heard. See, look, he's stuttering over there.

I know. Look. See? You help this guy out. This guy looks slick. This guy looks slick, and Spencer's over here. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You guys have heard many times.

Dude, she's really trying to set you up for failure. I know. You guys have gotten many emails about that episode with Dr. Alan Lazara, like saving lives, specifically talking about the tourniquet. Three lives. Three lives. That's many. Got our first email about meat eater saving a bird's life. Spencer's in particular.

Right. This is all Spencer by example. Yeah. Back in November, I told a story about how I found an owl in a barbed wire fence that I tried to save. Cute little story. Yeah, yeah. It didn't work out, but it led me to a different part of the state. That's horrible.

Horrible. Yeah, real plot twist. It's a told that story back in November. It was like when you're watching The Departed and all um the guy the main guy gets shot in the elevator yeah and you're like oh that's not where i saw this going like quite abruptly all of the main characters are killed in that movie in the last like 10 minutes yeah and i was like that's not what i didn't picture this the spencer story has a lot is very similar to the departed. So, we got an email from Robbie

from the Montana FWP Region 5 HQ in Billings. He said that he got a phone call from a motorist that was traveling east of Billings on the interstate. This motorist pulled over to check on a hawk that was in

the ditch that looked injured. Excuse me, not a hawk, an owl. A great horned owl. Great horned owl. Big owl. To check on its condition. Is it proper to say horn or horned? Horned.

It is horned. Great horned owl. Yeah. So we stopped to check on this owl that was very much alive, but in very rough condition. So this motorist, who it says was driving a produce truck, which leaves me with some

questions. I don't know what sort of produce he'd be hauling. Yeah. Good question. He's driving a produce truck. If he was driving an auto parts truck, would you wonder what auto parts he was hauling?

No, I wouldn't. He's like alternators. In college, I, uh, I worked at Walmart for about six months in the produce section. So I, I love't. It's like alternators. In college, I worked at Walmart for about six months in the produce section. So I love produce. I got you. You're a produce man. Yeah. To make up for the minimum wage I got paid, I would just like graze on apples and oranges all day.

So I'm very particular about produce. We know the guys from Idaho, so maybe there's some potato. There we go. Oh. Maybe there are seed potatoes or something. Hauling taters. We'll say he was hauling potatoes. I'm on the edge of my seat.

About the owl. He stops to check on this owl, calls the FWP. Um, and he's talking to the guy at the FWP who's named Robbie. And he says, uh, yeah, I stopped to check on this owl because I heard on the meat eater podcast that there was a place in Montana that will rehabilitate injured birds. And he said, what kind of truck did it get hit by? When you say produce. That's right. Now, hold on before we talk about this owl.

So Robbie confirms that the place that he sort of heard about in the Meteor podcast is the Montana Raptor Conservation Center in Bozeman. It turns out that the guy is on his way through Bozeman on his way back to Idaho. So they coordinate a drop off at the Raptor Center and the guy puts the owl in his produce truck and he meets him at the exit at Bozeman. So Robbie writes in to tell us that I think it's safe to say the Meat Eater podcast saved the life of an owl today. If we ended the, if only the story ended there. That's right. Like my story.

If only the story ended there, but then Corinne had to go and. I got a fact check. Corinne had to go and see how. Yeah. That doesn't fit with the news cycle. That's right. So Corinne, what did you hear?

Okay. Not good. Yeah. Oh, so sad. So sadly, and they named this owl Great Horn Owl number 20. This owl did not make it. Explain their naming system. That's interesting so what i deduced is they will uh

name the animal based upon like its species so great horn owl and apparently this is case number 20 so this is raptor of the year number 20 so great horn owl number 20 um when they when they when they named mine i think it was gho and then i don't remember the number it was oh okay like oh 500 something but that was in right okay so of last year right so this is this year the injuries to the owl uh were there was a compound fracture uh uh around its or on its left humerus shoulder and they didn't put the owl through kind of the trauma of surgery because the problem with the compound fracture for something like a bird is what they would normally do is put a pin through the bone to kind of stabilize it. But you can't, with the shoulder, you can't really do that. It would cause tissue damage.

And even if surgery was performed on the bird, he wouldn't be able to fly, you know, even after he'd healed up. So he would have one working wing and another non-working wing. It would be a ground-based owl. Yes, it would be a hopping around owl. He's like, I'm going to walk over and get that rabbit. Yeah. So they discovered this in an x-ray and found also many, the bone had shattered.

So instead of put the owl through the trauma of surgery, they knew he wasn't going to make it anyway. And they euthanized him. The phone call that I received from the Montana Raptor Center when this happened back in November was unlike any I had before. They handled me very, very gently as though they were delivering the news that I lost my mother or something like that. They like had a buildup to it, explained what happened, and then they delivered the news, and they were real apologetic and explained why this had to happen the way it did and stuff like that. So they are a great crew.

There's an old joke about that. I'll tell you the punchline. The punchline is, how's mom? She's up on the roof. It's a great joke. I don't get it. You don't't i didn't tell you the joke i just told you the punchline you have to look it up okay i'll tell you wow this guy this guy goes okay this guy loves his cat he's got to go overseas for a work trip

he leaves his cat with his brother right away he lands calls his brother brother's like cat's dead and then later he's like man you could have you know kind of delivered it more slowly like maybe like the cat's on the roof and then you know the cats we got the cat off the roof but he's not looking too good you know so he goes anyways how's mom and he's like ah she's up on the roof so um So, oh, last thing. You were drawing parallels between saving lives with tourniquets and birds, but people write us in about saving lives with tourniquets. Right. It'd be great if you could find us a happy ending Raptor story. From what I gather, talking to them, that there's not a whole lot of them.

Really? When an owl gets hit by a vehicle. Vehicle collisions are hard on them. Yeah. Winds up in a fence. not a whole lot of them. Really? When an owl gets hit by a vehicle. Vehicle collisions are hard on them. Yeah, winds up in a fence. Not a whole lot of them make it. Okay. So we'll be searching for a while. Yeah, I wonder what the percentage of, you know, over the course of a year, how many birds they accept and what percentage, you know.

Actually make it. The fact that they entertain it must mean that it's not impossible. Oh, sure. Yeah. Mom thumped a owl in her school bus the other day. Had what happen? You know, mom drives school bus and she, she thumped an owl in the school bus. With the kids on board?

Well, that's what I asked. And she said, no, but that was like, so obviously good, you know, no trauma for the kids. And, and, uh, apparently mom stopped the school bus on the road and searched for the owl for a while and couldn't find it. You'll appreciate this, David. No, not that, but this, I have a friend named Ray, the rock man Baker, who's a big arrowhead hunter. And he was a professional agate. He collected agate, but walking around looking at the ground, inevitably turn up stuff he was so good at finding arrowheads he told me a story he showed me where it happened he was a bus driver

he one time swung his door you know they got that hand crank swung the door open to let a kid on looked and saw and found an arrowhead off on the side of a dirt road, picking a kid up out the school bus door. That's how good that guy was. Um, okay. Last time we spoke, you were, I can't remember to what degree did you tease your new, your, your new, do you call it a book? Mountaineer?

No, that was the first people's book. That was, I was finishing up. Well, I was finishing both of them. No, no, no. Either we got done recording and you brought it up or you teased what would become your forthcoming book. Yeah, yeah. I can't remember, but you didn't go into any kind of great detail. No, we didn't.

So for our discussion today, do you want to start out on Mountaineer? Yeah, let's start on top of the mountain in the Rockies. Because this is a crazy story. Yeah. So this is a site that was discovered by a colleague of mine, Mark Steiger, at what's now called Western Colorado University in Gunnison. And I had just finished up a few years earlier my excavations at the Folsom type site. Did we talk about Folsom last time?

No, but man, we could put this Mountaineer thing on hold. You could talk about Folsom. Okay, let's but man, we could put this Mountaineer thing on a hold. You could talk about Folsom. Okay. Let's, let's start with Folsom. Okay. What the hell? We did talk about Folsom, but we're just giving a review.

Okay. Okay. For the kids that weren't listening the first time we did this, Folsom is an extraordinarily important site and it's not because I excavated there for three years. It's because of what happened there in the 1920s.

And what happened there in the 1920s. And what happened there in the 1920s was that after 50 years of bitter, longstanding dispute and controversy over how long people had been in the Americas, Folsom was the site that provided the best, most secure and convincing evidence that indeed people had been here since the Ice Age in the Americas. And that evidence was, and this is for all you hunters out there, it was a stone spear point in between the ribs of a now extinct bison, bison antiquus. There was no question that that artifact was stabbed into that animal when that animal was alive.

And so if that animal was alive at the end of the Pleistocene, that meant people were there too. In the years after Folsom, lots more sites were found, which confirmed that in fact people had been here since the Ice Age, that they'd been hunting big game like giant bison, mammoths, maybe even some mastodons. But nobody ever went back to the Folsom site. And the reason was, is that when they finished up there in the 1920s, they said, well, there's nothing left. So I went back there in the 1990s and I excavated there and we learned a whole bunch of things about Folsom. And one of the things that was really the sort of key message that came out of that was that these are highly mobile people. They are tracking great distances across the landscape. And we know that by looking at the stone that they picked up because they tended to,

I mean, when you're out hunting, you want the best weaponry that you can get. You don't want something to fail when you're about to take a shot, right? These folks were using really high quality stone and the high quality stone that they were using is very distinctive in terms of its color, in terms of the fossils that might be within the rock as well. And so we knew from where they picked up the stone, how far they traveled across the landscape. And in the case of Folsom, it was literally hundreds of kilometers. They had been down to quarries in the panhandle of Texas, a place called Alabates National Monument, just outside of Amarillo. Is Alabates National Monument because it was a quarry?

Like that's the monument status? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It is basically. So it's not coincidental. That's what they're celebrating with the monument. Absolutely. This is the Home Depot to beat all Home Depots at the end of the Pleistocene.

And for that matter, for the next 10,000 years, right? People have been going to that place to collect stone. And so we knew they'd been there. We knew they'd been up in Sterling, Colorado. They'd been making this big, long loop. So what were they doing? They were probably, we know they were bison hunters, big time bison hunters. So we've got highly mobile bison hunters.

They're there at the Folsom site. We were able to ascertain when they were there. We know they were there in the fall. And the reason we know they were there in the fall is that you look at the eruption patterns of their molars. You look at the wear patterns on their teeth. You make certain assumptions about when bison calves will pop out, generally, you know, mid-April to mid-May. And so by looking at that, you can infer that they were there in, say, September or October. They didn't stay long. We looked for a camp. We looked all over for a camp. We found

absolutely no evidence that they'd spent more than the three or four days that they would have needed to butcher the animals. They killed 32 of them. We know that too. And a little kind of trapped them in a little box canyon. Exactly right. Exactly right. They moved them into an arroyo, an arroyo that they couldn't necessarily get out of. And I suspect the hunters were positioned on the uplands right above where all these animals were thrashing around and trying to escape. Killed them, butchered them. And what they did, and we see this a lot in the archaeological record, they were gourmet butchers. They took all the good bits, right? So they got rib racks, they got shoulder hump meat, they took some of the long bones,

your basic bison drumsticks. They hauled all that away. What did they leave behind? They left behind heads, butts, and feet, because there's just not a lot of meat on heads, butts, and feet. Now, you can do some things with brains, you know, tanning hides, that kind of thing. But they weren't lingering. They weren't sticking around. Folsom's at about 7,000 feet elevation. And so my conclusion was it's September. You're at 7,000 feet. Winter's coming.

This is an area that gets a lot of snow. And I figured they're just going to bug out. They're going to go find someplace warmer. They're going to go lower elevation. They're going to get off into a more protected area. You know, case closed. So a few years after that, Mark Steiger invites me up to work in Gunnison with him on a site that he has on top of a mountain. The mountain is at an elevation.

It's a mesa in the Gunnison Basin. So picture it's not quite a mountain. The mountain is at an elevation. It's a mesa in the Gunnison Basin. So picture, it's not quite a park like South Park or North Park or Middle Park in Colorado, but it's the same kind of principle where you've got high, you're basically on just the west side of the continental divide. From there, you see all these 14,000 foot peaks. The lowest pass into that area is at 10,000 feet. You get down onto the basin floor. Basin floor is at about 7,700 feet. And just as a side note, the airport there in Gunnison, because you're at such high elevation, has a really extra long runway. And so when we were working there, we're literally working right above the airport and the Air Force is sending all these gigantic,

you know, those galaxy planes, the ones that they put tanks into. Yeah. They come there and they do touch and goes to sort of practice landing at high elevation. Got it, got it. Anyway, so he says, why don't you come up and work on this site, join the effort.

So I said, sure. This site was hiding in plain sight. You literally see it from town. You just look up and say, oh, okay, well, there's a Folsom site right on top of that. Of course, if you knew that. Yeah. Right? But people have been walking their dogs up there for.

Well, exactly. And Mark discovered the site because they were putting in some radio towers. Okay. So you've got this mesa, this isolated mesa in the midst of this basin, a thousand feet above the basin floor. And we're looking at a surface that is just flat as can be. And it's very rocky. It's a rock-strewn surface. And we noticed, Mark noticed first, and I noticed when we started to work in a different area of the site, that, you know, there's some patterns to these rocks. And the more we excavated, the more the patterns became clear. What we were seeing were sort of large circular areas with very large rocks forming the circle and then kind of a cleared area in the middle.

And in our case, what appeared to be a doorway leading into one of these sort of circular structures, it was facing east. And I think, okay, well, you got a circular structure, you got a doorway, it's facing east. That's maybe a house. So over a number of years, we were- Explain the east thing. Rising sun a house. So over a number of years, we were- Explain the east thing. Rising sun.

Okay. Rising sun. A lot, you know, you sort of look worldwide. There are certain kind of universal patterns, not truly universal, but it's common enough that it's clearly something meaningful that, you know, you have the sun coming in first thing in the morning. Yeah. So we're excavating these these what look to be structures.

We're finding very distinctive patterns. So right outside the front door, it's been cleared of rock and there's a bunch of scrapers there. Okay, well, if you're going to stretch out a bison hide and clean it, you want to kind of smooth out the surface that you're working on. We're, you know, we're spending a lot of time up there and we're thinking about it and we're thinking, why the hell are you building stonewalled structures, which in fact we know had wooden superstructures. That is to say, put it in just plain English, they had aspen poles that had been anchored by these large rocks. We know they were aspen poles because one of these structures burned.

And what had happened was the structure had been built. The aspen poles had been put up. Mud had been packed in and around all the poles to insulate the structure. And then when it burned, it basically turned the mud into ceramic, which preserved the bark of the imprint of the Aspen pole bark. Right? So, okay, we're a thousand feet above the valley floor. There's no water up there.

Now, you know how much water weighs, right? Seven pounds a gallon, right? About eight. Eight. That's good though. Maybe that was gas. Yeah. Something weighs that.

Something, yeah. If the nearest water is a thousand feet below you, and you know how much humans have to drink, right? We have water-cooled engines. You don't want to spend a good part of your day going up and down a thousand feet hauling water. Do you also want to build a stone structure with insulated walls in the summer on top of a mountain where there's no water? Yeah. It didn't make a lot of sense. And it finally dawned on us, well realized was this is likely a winter hamlet. There are what appear to be at least four of these large structures on top of this mesa.

Can you tell me the circumference of one of these structures? It's about five meters, So make it about 15 feet in diameter. Um, and yeah, generally plus or minus that. Um, and they're kind of in a big arc up on top of the, the hill there. And so what we also realized, so this is a closed basin in the winter. And mind you, this is Gunnison, Colorado. Gunnison, Colorado is one of the coldest places in the lower 48 of the United States. This was a site that was occupied in fulsome times. And the radiocarbon dates we have come in around 10,400 radiocarbon years, which is about 12.4 in real years.

And so this was the end of the Pleistocene. So you can be sure it wasn't any warmer then than it is today, right? So one of the things that we realized was that in a cold, closed basin like that, cold air sinks. So if you're 1,000 feet above the valley floor, it's actually warmer there than if you were down on the valley floor itself. And the other thing is, is you're on top of this mesa, there's no mountains that are shading you. So you're getting maximum daylight during those winter months and it's going to be more comfortable up there. And if you're there in the winter, you don't have to worry about water

because the snow is going to collect on the sides of the houses. It's going to collect in the cornices on the edge of the mesa. This is a really good place to spend the winter as it turns out, because not only do you have, well, let me back up. You have from the top of that mesa, if you walk around the perimeter of it, it's a couple of miles, just all around the edge of this Mesa. I don't know if the viewers at home can see me circling my finger to sort of. No, he's circling his finger. Wait, this isn't on TV. Um, you see, uh, you see forever, you see forever. You see forever. So if you're a hunter and you're sitting up on the edge of this mesa and the valley floor is dusted with snow, if there's a herd of bison down there, you're going to see them. And you got time to figure out, okay, how do we get down? How do we circle? What's the hunt strategy here? How are we going to do this? And think about this. If you're in a closed basin and the lowest elevation mountain pass out of that basin is at 10,000 feet.

Yeah, but what's the outlet? Is it a canyon, like a gorge? The Gunnison River. The Gunnison River out west. Yeah. But that gorge is incredibly narrow and incredibly deep. Gotcha. And it's a very treacherous outlet.

And in fact, one of the things that's really distinctive about the ecology, we were talking about the ecology of different regions earlier, right? The Gunnison Basin has a number of endemic species, which basically means these are animals and plants that have been isolated for thousands and thousands of years and hence have developed new species. Got it. Right? So that tells you that it's not easy getting in and out of that basin over the long geological time. But if you're a hunter-gatherer and you're in this basin and it's in the dead of winter,

they're getting just tons of snow up on these passes. You're essentially stuck there. But here's the good news. The animals are stuck there too, right? So if you've got elk and bison that are spending the summer up at 12 or 13,000 feet, you know, they can do okay in snow, but you know, they're going to come down and so are all the other animals. And so you've basically got a walking refrigerator on the valley floor below you that you can see from miles away. You've got ample stone. You've got water.

Why not just park yourself here at 8,000 feet in the Rockies? So my thinking, you know, coming. Yeah. Try not to freeze your butt. Well, yeah. But these folks knew what they were in for because they clearly, this wasn't a case where they kind of came in in the summer, they were hunting and uh-oh, the first snowfall, we're stuck here. They knew exactly what they were doing. They found one of the most ideal spots in that entire basin to set up their winter camp and stayed there through the

winter. Have you guys found any faunal remains at all? Ah, there's the, you know, there's a beautiful theory killed by a horrible fact. The fact is, is that we haven't found anything to empirically demonstrate, and this is the frustrating part of that whole project, to find anything that would clearly and securely confirm that this was a winter occupation. It's just not there. We found 34,000 bone scraps. What?

99% of which are no bigger than your thumbnail because this is a very cold environment. It's a very harsh environment. You got a lot of freeze-thaw and cracking and, you know, bone just doesn't preserve. And that's the problem. That's an interesting shed hunting observation in areas like that. High elevation, serious exposure, find a lot of cracked antler.

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What critters besides elk and bison are you finding bones of up there? Well, mostly it's just elk and bison because the larger mammals, you know, you're going to get more option or opportunity or likelihood of getting their bones preserved. The largest chunk that we got was a distal tibia of a bison. And it was just a chunk of the distal tibia.

So, you know, the lower leg bone, larger of the two. And that was, you know, that piece was maybe just a couple of inches in length. So we did find some fetal bone, which we thought, okay, so maybe we had, they killed an elk. March or whatever. Exactly. Um, but when we radiocarbon dated it, it wasn't fulsome in age. Um, have you been able to radiocarbon date any of the bone? Oh yeah, no, the bison bone that was large enough. Yeah, absolutely. No, we have, uh, we have really good solid, uh, radiocarbon ages on that site. Uh, and as I said, it's about 12, four and it's, there's Folsom points all over the place. We have over a hundred of them.

Any nice ones? Oh yeah. Are they in your book? Um, well, yeah. Like pictures of them? Sure. My kid just got a shark book for like, it's their like reading month at school. He got a book about sharks that came with two shark teeth.

Oh, well. In a little plastic container set in foam built into the cover of the book. Nice. Now, if you sold that book. With a Folsom point? With a Folsom point. Well, I'd only be able to sell. You'd sell the shit out of those books.

Yeah, I know, but I'd only have a hundred books to sell and I'd have to charge $10,000 for each. I feel like you'd get it. Your name, your reputation, your name and reputation would be destroyed. Well, I do have coauthors, so I just point to them. Why did you guys think of that? So, yeah, no, it's, but this getting back to the Folsom story, right? I was convinced, I was convinced that these guys. I want to get back to the points for a minute.

Okay. Are the points in the houses, like out front of the doors, just kind of everywhere? Well, one of the houses has a lot of them. And I think that that's, you know, we had a bunch of folks kind of sitting around. This is winter. What are you going to do? You're going to gear up. You're going to get ready for the hunt. and so they were making a lot of points and the really

interesting thing that we found one of the really interesting things that we found was a point that had been made at the site and we know it was made at the site because we found the channel flake the channel flake is the flake that is from the flute that you remove from the face of a Folsom Point. Which makes you a hell of a flint knapper, right? That's like the skill part. 40% of the time, it's going to fail. So if you make one of those- Like you get to that pinnacle moment and they break. Well, you invest 45 minutes in something and then what's the next to last thing that you do?

You flute it where you have a 40% failure risk. What were they thinking? Anyway, so we find a point and then find a point base from a clearly it was a point that had snapped in half and had been brought back to the site. It refit to that channel flake, which meant that they. You lost me. Okay. You make a point. You leave a certain amount of debris behind, including channel flakes.

You attach that point to a spear. You go down, down slope, down a thousand feet. You go out onto the basin floor. You kill an animal. You bring back your busted spear. You unwrap it from its haft, the thing that mounts it to the spear. And you just, you know, sort of discard the base of the point right there. And then 10,000 radiocarbon years later, we come along and we refit that channel flake to the point.

There's the story. The story is that they made it here, used it on the valley floor, brought it back, right? So we know they were basically just hanging around the basin. The tip was absent. The tip was probably sticking in an animal somewhere and got lost forever. You know what I would do if I was an anthropologist? I would find, I'd go down to the Folsom site and I'd find some, a channel flake that matches one at your new site. Yeah.

And I would tell everybody how that was those guys and that's where they went. You know what? I was so tempted. I was so tempted to connect the two dots except they're different ages. How far apart are they? Less than a century, but- Less than a century? Yeah.

They might very well have known people. Well, that's entirely possible because there were few enough of those folks out there on the landscape. How few do you think i know you can't say but like give me a plausible idea of how few like if you were in new mexico colorado wyoming montana there's only one source of stone at just to clear this up there's only one source of stone at the uh gunnison site right um yeah okay So no outside. Well, now that that's, there's an interesting story and then I'm going to try and ignore Steve's question because I don't know the answer. So help, help me not come back.

But there has to be like, there has to be a framework. Actually, I'll give you, okay. Give me the framework to consider. I'm going to answer Steve's question and then I'll get back. He'll be like 1,200. Right. Cause there's stone moving around. Right.

Yeah. That could be independent of the people. of overlapping groups and trade and stuff like that. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Sorry. Okay. Stephen? Here's the answer to your question.

We actually know a lot more about population than we did the last time I talked to you. And the reason is, is that continued work on ancient DNA and genetics is giving us a much better picture of population history and demography. And one of the things that's come out in just the last couple of years is that populations, as soon as they got into the Americas, boomed. A 60-fold increase over about a 3,000-year period. Now, that doesn't give you absolute numbers. How many did they start with? Did they start with 100? Did they start start with a thousand? We have no idea. What we do know is that the rate of population increase was spectacularly high. This might've been sort of one of the biggest population booms ever in human prehistory, which basically means that when people got here, this was a rich environment in which they were highly successful.

It was the honey hole. There you go. You know, you, you crossed all of Eurasia. Yeah, you're, you're, it's like you're getting an opportunity to come in and, um, pick over things that have never been picked over. Well, not only that. Even like oysters, like here's an oyster bed. Yeah. It's never been picked over.

Well, let's, let's talk about large mammals. They've never seen a two-legged predator. Yeah. Now, they're not stupid. They're going to pretty quickly figure it out that you're bad news. Okay? But those first couple of times when you rock right up to them and whack them on the head. Sure.

You know, this is. Yeah, but like those stories. I mean, we have examples of this because in more, we have like very elaborate descriptions of people arriving on remote islands. There you go. That had never been inhabited and they literally walk around. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oftentimes to the point where it's all gone pretty soon.

Oh, very much so. Walk around clubbing everything to death. Yeah. Well, your oyster example too, right? There's descriptions of like every oyster is the size of your hand, like an outstretched, you know, big hand. Yeah. And the Chesapeake Bay, there's historical studies that show there's this massive shrinkage of oysters because of over-harvesting over the years. But to your question, Cal, about the stone, they did in fact bring in outside stone. To the Gunnison site. Yeah.

So presumably when they first showed up, they had material that they'd collected elsewhere. But then once you're sort of in that basin over the course of the winter, your stone's going to get used up. But fortunately, they had access to really high quality quartzite. Now, I should explain quartzite is not, you know, sort of your favored Folsom stone making or tool making material. What's the best stuff? Chirt, chalcedony, jaspers. And, you know, these folks went for the good stuff. And they certainly did at the Folsom site.

But here in Gunnison, they were making points out of quartzite, which was high quality quartzite. And so they were very adept at it. But they had an unlimited supply. So again, this gets to, if you're going to hunker down for a long period of time, you want food, you want water, you want stone.

They had all three. And it just so happens that they're on top of this mountain in the Rockies, where it's one of the coldest places in North America now, and probably was one of the coldest places in North America then,

but they did just fine. Do you mind walking through a, this is on Cal Stone question. Do you mind walking through a plausible explanation of how, in what form stone was transported? Because I've seen these references to, um, cores and bifaces and things. That's a good, yeah like that's good yeah so uh you're a pedestrian hunter gatherer you don't really have a lot of beasts of burden um the best you got is a dog and you can load a bunch of stuff on dogs you could load just tons of stuff on corinne's newfoundland out there uh but these dogs were probably not that large

um just in case youik needs a day job. This is a beautiful segue, by the way. Yeah. Beautiful segue. Well, I knew where we were going. I didn't need Corinne's script. David, David, you need to. You talked to Corinne.

You need to write my transitions. Corinne sold you a segue. So you're a hunter-gatherer, right? You go to these outcrops, and there's just a big, massive blocks of stuff. You're not going to schlep one of those things across the landscape. A, because. You held your arms up, but an outcrop is, I mean, it could be like a car sized outcrop. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Of good stone. I've been to, I've been to alabates and actually on the other side of the river from the national monument on, on a private ranch where I literally saw a block of alabas the size of a pickup truck. Okay. Just pure like. Oh, yeah. You could take the whole thing and make arrowheads out of it.

It was gorgeous. Well, you can make tens of thousands and then sell them with that book. Gotcha. That you want to publish. Yeah. Yeah. So what you're going to do and not just the weight and the size, you also want to get the quality. So you're going to spend a little bit of time at the outcrop.

You're going to spend a little bit of time at the quarry. And you're going to fashion, you're going to reduce the stone into manageable packages for carrying. And oftentimes what you're producing is kind of a large platter-like thing, which is easily transported. You put it in a bag, a leather bag or whatever. And we know this because oftentimes if we occasionally find these things, oftentimes we'll see that the flake scars have been rubbed and they're polished

and it's because they were in a bag with something else abrading them in essence. You can take that large platter of stone and you can turn it into anything you want. Right? So it's an easily transportable form. It's reduced the weight. You know, it's good stone and it can be morphed into whatever particular tool that you need. So you don't necessarily want to go to the quarry and make really highly specific.

Okay. I'm going to need three end scrapers. So I'm going to make them now. I'm going to need four. Yeah, because you're just stuck there and that's all really highly specific. Okay. Uh, I'm going to need three end scrapers. So I'm going to make them now. I'm going to need four. Yeah. Cause you're just stuck there and that's all you're doing. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So why not just take something that you can turn in into a number of other different things. And that's probably how they were transporting stuff. And that's called a core. Yeah.

So the core is basically the, the stone from which you are making other tools. And you guys will find cores now and then. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Um, and in fact, um, in the case of Mountaineer, uh, we do find quartzite cores. What we don't find is cortex and don't sort of associate core with cortex. Cortex is simply the outer rind, uh, of a block of stone.

So when it's been weathered, um, it'll get that. Oh yeah. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a word for that though, right? Cortex is the word C-O-R-T-E-X. Okay.

Another like, uh, when it gets that kind of, man, there's a, it'll come to you. It'll come to you. Um, we don't find any cortex, which means that they, you know, they went to the source. They, they got a cobble. They busted open the cobble. they could see the good stuff inside. So they removed all the junk and then they just carried it back to the site. And then they use that to make blades or scrapers or whatever. And you're not finding the outer nasty. Correct.

Correct. Because why transport it? Yeah, they were coming into that place with stuff that was ready to work with. Again, this gets back to you're a thousand feet above the valley floor. The stone sources are on the valley floor. Why carry extra weight? Yeah. I mean, I can tell you when we were working there, we would occasionally hike up to the top or run down from the top to the bottom just to see.

That was back when my knees worked. And I could go from, you know, hiking to the top would take, you know, you're at 7,700, 800, 8,000 feet or so. It would take about a half an hour, uh, to sort of make your way up the mountain. Uh, I could get down in 15 minutes running. So, uh, you can, you can make that trip pretty quickly. Now, of course, if there's snow on the ground, it's going to be longer and everything like that, but they probably had snowshoes. They probably had something that they could get around in the snow. But we also know that in another area of that mesa top, there was a summer occupation or what we interpret up projectile points. I think we had hunters

sitting on the edge, watching the valley floor below and retooling their weaponry and just, you know, kind of watching to see who's walking by. You know, there's cows, you know, the runway for the Gunnison Crested Butte Airport is right below you. But just off to the side there, somebody's got a bunch of cows on the field. And so, you know, I could sit up there from a thousand feet away and, yeah, sure, I can count the number of animals that are down there on the ground. It was a perfect vantage point. And it turns out a great place to spend the winter because you had everything you needed. Did you guys find any kind of thing that represents weapon types besides stone?

Any kind of other wood besides the remnants of the tent poles? No, no. It's just too harsh. It's just too harsh and the thing is where you do have sites um in in northern mexico they're they're dry where the climate's been very very dry for a long time you've got good preservation and when you have sites like that and there was a study done in one of these sites there's something like for every single item made out of stone there's 20 different things made out of wood or bone.

And that's just giving you the ratio of how much you're not seeing in these sites because the only thing that's preserving is stone and the occasional bits of bone. Sure. What's like the most interesting source material you've come across that they grabbed some sort of rock and made tools out of it? Like when I look at a baculite, I found a few of them. I'm like, man, that would be perfect for. What's a baculite? It's like an extinct squid species that leaves behind what looks like a femur. Yeah, I've seen that.

You have those at home, right? Yeah. Yeah. Or like a, like a piece of petrified wood. Yeah. So they have, there's a, there's a material up there that we haven't quite figured out. It's called opal CT. It's called opal CT.

It's an opalite. And it occurs in little tiny bits. Presumably it occurred in much larger blocks. And it's in and around these houses. It has no obvious functional purpose that we've been able to discern. We don't know where it comes from. It's not native to the top of that mesa, but clearly somebody hauled it up on top of there and we have no idea why or what its purpose was.

You know, at first I thought it was maybe some sort of pigment type thing, but that's not necessarily the case. So I don't know. It's a, it's a puzzle to us. Um, we know it's there, but we don't know why. In your dealings with, uh, anthropology and antiquities in the American Southwest, you ever crossed paths with Forrest Fenn? We did a whole podcast on him once. So there's some interest in this room about him. Yeah, I know Forrest, uh, of course, just recently passed away. Um, yeah. Um Yeah. Yeah, Forrest was indeed a character, a very interesting character, and was very supportive of archaeology, but also arguably crossed some lines, if you will uh yeah yeah forest basically i think purchased a pueblo and then you know had it excavated yeah um but he had um professional archaeologists excavating it so it's it's kind of a it's there's a lot of ambiguity around forest i liked forest he was a very

interesting character um so yeah that that's a great question though like where like how do you in in current times like decide on when to excavate something like what what are the factors now because it used to be like oh here's a site we're gonna dig it up yeah and find out everything there is to know. But now there's a mindset of like, great. We know there's a site here. Um, we know of other sites in the general area. We can draw a lot of conclusions. The most preserved we can make this site is to

not dig it up. Well, that's right. And the reality is, of course, is that nobody's making 10,000 year old sites anymore. Right. They're gone. They're finite. Are there more out there? Yeah, probably. Do we need to continue to dig them? Well, it really all depends. If you know about that time period, you know about that region, what's the point of digging yet another Folsom site, for example? Because you might find a body and there's not many bodies. Well, that gets us into a very different set of ethical questions, right? Yeah. You're going to.

Yeah. Sorry, Steve. Look, I'm, well, okay, we'll get to that in a sec. Well, it's just, it's a great question. Yeah, right. No. So there are sites that I have excavated that I haven't fully excavated. Save a chunk.

Save a chunk. Well, Folsom is the best example, right? There's a certain point when you're doing excavation and analysis that you sort of hit the point of redundancy. You've learned a whole bunch, but the further and more you dig, you're not really learning that much more. At that point, you should stop because at that point, all you're doing is adding to the collection that you don't really need because it's not telling you anything new. On the other hand, somebody could come along to Folsom 70 years after me as I came along 70 years after the first excavation. And I learned a hell of a lot that they didn't learn because, well, they were just paleontologists hauling bison bones out of the ground. Right. So if I leave a chunk of that there and I did, somebody coming along 70 years later can figure out all the things that I did wrong. Yeah. Because they know the right questions and they might have better, they might, different questions and different tools. Absolutely. Just as I did after the first one. Neanderthal, right? It's like we can't, like, it seems like it's monthly at this point. There's some new thing about Neanderthal. It's all the genetics. literally just the last seven years.

Because it was just seven years ago that Eske Willerslev's group, of which I'm a part of, provided the first sequence of a Clovis individual. So we have a genome of a Clovis person from the Anzic site. Which is right here. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. have a genome of a Clovis person from the Anzick site. In that seven years. Which is right here. Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. Because that boy's name is Anzick one, right? Yeah.

It's near Wilsall. How far is Wilsall from here? Not far. Yeah. So in that seven years, we've sequenced and other labs have as well, a number of ancient genomes. And these are things that, I mean, look, there's a lot I can learn as an archaeologist. I can learn about what people hunted.

I can learn about how far they traveled across the landscape. I can learn about how they responded to different environments, how they were impacted by different environments, what their impacts were on different environments. The one thing I can't do as an archaeologist is population history. If you've got an artifact over, you know, in this site over here, and I've got an artifact in that site over here, and they kind of look alike, we might want to say, oh, well, they're part of the same population, but we would have no idea, right? Because artifacts can look alike for a variety of reasons, not necessarily just because

they're historically related. If you've got a genome and I've got a genome, I can tell you precisely how closely they're related. I can look at patterns of admixture. We know when different groups got together because we see gene flow, just as all of us have a bit of Neanderthal DNA in us, right? So we know there was, well, sex between early modern humans and Neanderthals. So yeah, there's a tremendous amount to be learned from ancient skeletons. The flip side is there's some ethical issues and concerns when you're doing genetic research with populations, regardless of, you know, sort of where they are and who they are. You know, there's a certain amount of protocols that, you know, one goes through to get permission to do genetic research because you can learn a lot, not all of it good about a population.

It's a particularly challenging issue here in the Americas because the relationship between the indigenous Native American communities and the scientific communities have not always been good because, you know, on the scientific side, we have a lot of sins to atone for, you know, for the first 100 or 250 years of anthropology, we have anthropologists, you know, having skulls sent to them from Native American battle sites, right? Where the U.S. Army would go in and just sort of gather up a bunch of the heads and ship them back to Washington. So there's a long and kind of sordid and unfortunate history in the relationship between Native Americans and, you know, the scientific community. And getting into genes, getting into DNA is a particularly, invasive's the wrong word, but it can be viewed in that way.

It can be viewed as contradictory, right? Well, I mean, what it is, is it's, you know, it's taking your essence, it's taking your DNA. And I know a lot of, a lot of people are concerned about, well, how much do people know about me from my genes? How much do they know about me from my DNA? And so you attach that to this sort of difficult history between the scientific community and the native american community and their feelings about their dna being part of somebody else's study you know we understand our history we don't necessarily need you telling us stories about who we are and where we come from i think you'd be

able to speak to this better me but there's also an issue of, of defending a narrative against people who want to like unseat a narrative. Like if you remember with Kennewick man, some guy took a look at the 9,000 year old skull that comes out of the Columbia, right? He's like, ha, that looks like a European to me. Yeah. I got a white guy with a spear point in him. That's exactly what he said.

And then you're like, guess the first Americans weren't who we thought. Exactly. Well, in fact. Good old Europeans. It was, it was Esky's group. It was our group that, in fact, sequenced the Kennewick genome. And we showed that, in fact, he's Native American through and through. Okay.

So it's a, and, you know, we always ask permission to get a genetic sample from the living. But how do you deal with the dead? I would imagine if you're talking about something that's 12 000 years old i don't know that someone has a real legitimate claim on that well now see there's a really interesting it'd be interesting for me to go and and argue that uh for me to for me to take offense about excavations of italians in in Italy that were from even a thousand years ago would be a stretch for me to act like I had input on that. But my ancestors are, you know, some of my ancestors are from Sicily. So is that my business? If you're looking at something that's 12,000 years old and you're looking at groups that no doubt went through radical migrations, influxes of new people because someone's in colorado now

or if someone's standing in colorado 12 000 years ago i think it'd be a pretty dubious assumption to say that that became the the northern cheyenne or the ute like who knows well so um somebody 12 000 years ago could have no answer descendants at all, or they could have thousands. And we won't know unless we basically do the sort of before and after genetic sequences. Or their descendants wound up in Florida. Exactly right. And so the question also becomes at what point when you go back into the past, does something stop being tribal and just become human? Right?

That this is in a sense telling us about the- I don't know where, but I feel like that happened at 12,000 years ago. I don't, I wouldn't want to be the guy that picks the number, but to me that is a long time ago. Look at the Aboriginal oral histories, right? Like Aboriginal oral histories, Australia, they, you know, they have this case of being

able to talk about their history for thousands and thousands of years, right? Without question, without question, oral history is remarkably strong back to a certain point, you know, where you're, you know, at that point, you're just sort of getting the distant echoes and, you know, how valid is it or how reliable is it? All of this is now sort of part and parcel of NAGPRA, which is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which was intended to right a lot of those wrongs by saying that human skeletal material, which is simply sitting in boxes in museums and universities needs to be returned to the descendant communities. And how do you determine lineal descent over thousands of years? Is it just based on geography? Well, it's based on about 10 different criteria of which geography is one of them. And that's what made Kennewick so problematic was that here you've got an ancient individual

who's- Talk about, tell people what Kennewick man is. Okay. So Kennewick was a, uh, a human skeleton found in 1996 on the banks of the Columbia river. Fourth of July or something, right? Yeah. It was the, um, the speedboat races that they have, um, on the Columbia and a couple of guys, uh, a couple of 20 somethings were trying to sneak in to watch the boat races. So they were walking along the river bank and they were going to climb the fence and get into the area to watch the races. And one of them stepped on some of the bones.

So they call in the coroner. Because right away you're thinking it's a murder victim. Well, exactly. So they call the coroner and the coroner comes out there with a local archaeologist, forensic anthropologist named James. Oh, so he was already thinking this could be not a recently this could not be a recent murder i think i think what they what they would often do is turn the bones over to him and say you know tell us a story about how this person died uh and so that's when he discovered the uh the stone point and then they radiocarbon dated it

that's when he gave the quote to the new york times that said i've got a white guy with a stone point in them uh because based on his look at the skull, it looked like a European. Isn't that called cranial morphology or something? Yes, it did. What's that discipline called? Cranial. And the next step is calling the New York Times. It's undisciplined is what it is.

That whole school thought about measuring – these relative measurements on your skull will tell you where the person came from. Very problematic. Very problematic. Very problematic. Because, you know, the skull is incredibly plastic in an anatomical sense. It just, it morphs over time and in very complex ways. Anyway, so they get a radiocarbon date back on it and suddenly, you know, you've got a European on the banks of the Columbia. Excuse me.

It's hard not to get coughed up about the banks of the Columbia, excuse me, it's hard not to get coughed up about the banks of the Columbia. Um, they've got somebody here, um, who's not native American. Well, uh, that, that triggered a long running lawsuit, several million dollars of, you know, us tax dollars because the banks of the Columbia were controlled by Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Interior, sort of picked up a portion of the lawsuit, bringing in their archaeologists. The long and short of it is that it went into court and then into appeals court, and they said that, well, this isn't an Native American because it doesn't look like one and because it's that old. Well, so they did this analysis of the skeletal material.

I know we're into a weird semantics thing, but this doesn't – let's say that had been true. It would draw into question what What is a native American? Yeah. Well, what they, what they decided was that, you know, it wasn't.

And therefore NAGPRA, he wasn't. And therefore NAGPRA did not apply. So just based on, just based on the appearance of the skull. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Problem. Yeah.

Problematic science. And so Kennewick hit NAGPRA right where it's weakest for just the reasons that you brought up a few moments ago. At that antiquity, how can you tell if in what way he's related? out in the last, uh, years since then is that NAGPRA now pays more attention to, um, if you can't sort of determine lineal descent, then who are the tribes that live in the region? Right. Got it. Uh, and so it's, but we were able, we, uh, obtained a piece of a finger bone of Kennewick, and this is Esky's team. I'm just the archaeologist with them. So I kind of provide the context, and they do all the really heavy lifting in terms of the genetic work. And we were able, fortunately, to obtain DNA samples from a number of the Colville tribe, the confederated tribe of Colville, and they provided

DNA samples that made it possible to sort of look at Kennewick relative to one of the tribes in the Pacific Northwest. There were five tribes that had claimed Kennewick as a potential ancestor of theirs. So we did our sequencing. We produced our results. And it was a really interesting event because we published the paper in Nature in 2015, a major scientific journal. And they wanted to do a press conference because Kennewick had been so controversial. Yeah. They said, you know, we should really do a big announcement. And Esky called me and he said, we're going to do a press conference in London. And I said, nobody in London cares. Let's do it in Seattle. And so we did. And so that

summer I was in the field somewhere and I just got on a plane, went to Seattle, met up with Esky and Morton Rasmussen, who'd done a lot of the work. And a number of the representatives of each of the five tribes showed up. We gave our results. And one of the reporters at the time in the room said, well, what do the tribes think? And Esky said, well, you've got representatives of them here. Why don't you just ask? And one after another, a representative of each of the five tribes got up and talked about what it meant to have Kennewick shown to be a Native American. And it was really profound. I mean, we just gave the results. They gave the results meaning.

They were able to say, look, you know, we felt very strongly about this from the get-go, that Kennewick was a Native American. We've been deeply unhappy and in fact resentful of all of the stuff that's been surrounding Kennewick, the lawsuit and everything like that. They didn't appreciate, well, that's harsh. They wished it hadn't had to come to, you know, all of the science and the genetics and everything like that because they felt they understood what the answer was all along, but they were at least glad for that. So our results were obviously published. The results were then checked by a group at the University of Chicago, and things just snowballed right after that. I think the senator from Washington put in a piece of legislation that said, okay, it's done. Kennewick's been out of the ground long enough. It's reporter, when the tribe said, we've agreed as even though we have our differences among the five of us, we've agreed that we're going to jointly rebury Kennewick. And one of the reporters said, where are you going to rebury it? And I thought, do you really think they're going to tell you after all of this?

They're going to tell you so that you can go look? No, they said, no, this will be a private ceremony. So was there – what was learned from the genetic sequencing of Kennewick? Well – And the comparison with indigenous groups that provided samples. Okay. So what we learned was Kennewick is or was a part of a population that was ancestral to these populations. Could we draw a direct ancestry line?

No, we could not. We would need a hell of a lot more modern day samples to sort of figure out. So that didn't preclude other groups being related to Kennewick. Sure. But it showed that at least the tribe that provided the samples was in some fashion related to Kennewick. More related than someone in coastal Alaska. We don't know. Don't know.

We don't have a genome from coastal Alaska. I got you. Yeah. But the key thing was unequivocally Native American, despite what his head shape was. So get into Anzick. Hmm. Like talk about who, like the specimen Anzick won.

So Anzick was a really important study because what it showed us for the first time was that the Native American population, the ancestral Native American population that came into the Americas, got south of the big continental ice sheets. Soon thereafter split into two major lineages. One of the lineages stayed up north, and the other made it all the way to Tierra del Fuego. We call those Northern Native Americans and Southern Native Americans, and Anzick is actually a Southern Native American, even though, of course, he's here in Montana, right?

But descendants of Anzick make it all the way down through the hemisphere and rapidly. We have now genomes from other places in North America and a key one in Southeastern Brazil, which indicate a very close relationship to the population of which Anzick was a part. So, again, this gets back to the issue of populations Anzick was a part. So again, this gets back to the issue of populations exploding, people doing really well. Turns out they're just hoofing it. They're moving really great distances and are being very successful at it. Was that, that boy was buried with ochre and Clovis points and things? Who holds those Clovis points now? I do not know the answer to that.

But the individual himself has been reburied. After the study, Sarah Anzick, whose father I understand was the one who discovered it, actually was one of the key persons who sort of triggered the re, uh, analysis of Anzick and said, you know, she, she felt that, you know, we shouldn't just have these bones just sitting around. Let's, let's, let's be done with this. Let's learn what we can and then let's rebury. Uh, you have the first book I had years and for me, it sat on my coffee table for many years

was your Folsom book. I think you did Folsom first, right? I did. In terms of your big, like popular coffee table books. I wouldn't have thought of that as a coffee table book, but I'm glad you found room for it on yours. Well, by that, I mean large format color photography. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I don't know what the hell that's that. That is a coffee table book. It was all black and white pictures. Yeah, okay. Okay. Okay. I don't know. What the hell? That is a coffee table book. It was all black and white pictures. Really? Yeah, sorry. It's got a color photo on the cover.

Well, that, in your memory, memories are always in color, right, Steve? No, but I have, yeah. But I have the damn book. Okay, whatever you call it. You describe the book to me. It's a big ass, tall, wide book. It's a large study of the Folsom site. Yeah. Not a coffee a coffee oh you're

taking insult that i called that uh okay his magnum opus his first magnum his first magnum sure uh i'm not insulted and then you did i'm glad you bought the book first peoples in a new world that's true which which is now that has color yeah now that book that book lays out the whole damn deal that's the whole damn deal i mean it's just the the this the the title says it all first people's in a new world if you're interested in ice age hunters and clovis and all that good stuff killing mammoths or not or not that's the important uh always add this is your book and then a decade went by and you had to update it. So you got a new one coming out.

Well, listen, I had to update it. I want to get a full signed collection of your books. Well, okay. Okay. Do you want the Folsom points with them? Yes. Okay. So that book was actually almost obsolete as soon as it came out.

First Peoples in 2009. And the reason was in 2009, I could see ancient genomes on the horizon. I knew, because in those days, the genetic information that we were getting was extraordinarily limited. We hadn't quite broken through the barrier of getting genome-wide data. All we were getting were mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA. And just to give the really brief version of it, it's only telling you about a single ancestor on your mother's side and your father's side. A genome tells you about all the people. Well, there's a whole lot of complications to that statement, but it tells you about thousands of ancestors that you have. Whereas mitochondrial

and Y chromosome DNA, only a single ancestor ofiece. I knew that genome-wide studies were coming when I was writing First Peoples. Got it. I knew that we would get ancient DNA, but it was still, I mean, I didn't know how far off it was in the future, but I published the book. And literally, you know, the book comes out in 2009. In 2010, it's the first ancient genome published. Yeah, but was anything in the book down? I mean, I haven't read it in a long time. I mean, I read the whole damn book.

But was anything in there flat out contradicted or was it just missing explanation that you would have liked to have included? Do you really want me to air the dirty laundry and why I had to write a new edition and sort of quietly disguise all the things that went on? I guess that question. Was anything in there, was it just that you, let's say you were going to, you were trying to, you were trying to publish the alphabet, right? Right. A to Z, and you did A to X perfectly.

And then they add Y and Z, and you're like, Darn, yeah, yeah. I'm going to do a new one that has Y and Z. Yeah. Or was it that you had the whole alphabet wrong? Well, I'd like to think I had most of the alphabet, right? Um, there were things that, um, I have changed and changed significantly in the new edition, but the real, uh, the real novel parts are the last 10 years of the genetic work. There's been just, um, a huge amount of information that's

come out about population history. But there's been a lot of changes in other sections about sea level change. There's a bunch more sites that have come out there as being especially old, sort of so-called pre-Clovis sites. So, yeah, there's a lot that's new, but the real push, the real impetus for me to do the new edition was the genetics, because I've been heavily involved in that pretty much almost since the book came out, working with Willerslev, S.Q. Willerslev and his group. So I've been basically, I've had a seat at the table watching all this stuff unfold. And so when I looked at the book, um, I thought, you know, geez, this is really dated. Uh, and people are getting, you know, circa 2008 when I wrote it, uh, the view then, and it's just an

terribly incomplete. We were definitely missing Y and Z in the alphabet. When's that book coming out? Both of them. So both of them were supposed to be out a year or so ago, but as we all know, uh, 2020 was the year time stood still and nothing happened, um, because of the pandemic. And so everything just ground to a halt. Uh, but both of them will be out one in June. This is the Mount both of them will be out, one in June. This is the Mountaineer book. Yeah. Will be out in June, and the new First Peoples book will be out in July. Now, why did you not roll the Mountaineer information into—

Oh, there's some of it in the First Peoples book. Okay. Oh, absolutely. So one can get a good sense of that site in the First Peoples book. Yeah. hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love

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

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. 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. Did you cover the Cooper's Ferry

Idaho? I do. You do? That's Ferry, Idaho? I do. I do. You do? That's a sweet. That's in the new one? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No.

Well, because of the pandemic, I didn't go out in the field in 2020. I spent a lot of time writing and I spent a lot of time riding, right? Because you can only write for 10, 14 hours a day and you just got to get on your bicycle and burn 30 or 40 miles just to sort of do something. So, yeah, I was actually updating the book because nothing was happening with it. So I just kept adding material to it. I'm not sure the publisher was all that thrilled because, oh, can I can I squeeze this in? Can I ask you about what you think of the stone samples, like the possible origin points of the stone samples found at Cooper's Ferry? One of you better explain what you're talking about. Okay.

So do you mind if I let the doctor explain? The doctor will see you now. So, Cal, I think what you're referring to are the projectile points that they argue have affinities to ones from northern Japan. Yes. Is that the argument that you're making? Yeah. They never quit, do they? Well, okay. Let me first start by saying, and then the other shoe will drop in a minute.

Okay. The site is exquisitely excavated. Lauren Davis is a terrific archaeologist. And the dates on the site, you know, there's been some pushback on it. But I think that site falls in the range of a whole bunch of other sites that we have in the Americas that sort of date around 15 and a half thousand or so years ago. Um, it's an old site that, that part I get. Old site. Yeah.

Well. And, and, and controversial to some people because for, for the location, right? It's like, oh, it could be so old that it should be completely under ice. No, no, no. Not at that point, no. But the, well, so you've got this site at 15.5. You've got other sites around that sort of same the Americas around 15,500 or 16,000. So we're starting to get actually a really nice consistent story about the peopling process.

The part where I sort of depart from the argument that Lauren Davis and colleagues have made is tying it to northern Japan and the sort of Paleolithic occupation in that part of the world. And they're basing it on similarities in the projectile points in the spear points. And the problematic aspect is what they've got are some fragmentary points there in Idaho, which they say, oh, well, these look like, you know, these full-blown points, these complete points over here in Japan. And they sort of make the match by just taking a little tiny fragment and kind of putting it on top of one of these Japanese points and saying, look, it's the same form. Well, you can't do that, right? Because that's also the same form as a bunch of projectile points in other parts of

the world at other times as well. If you're going to draw a direct link, it's going to be, and this gets back to what I was saying earlier, population history and identifying who's related to who is not something we can do readily with the archaeological record. And especially with little fragments of points that you say, oh, okay, well, this one matches that. No, it's just a little tiny fragment. You know, you can't say that if this thing was full blown and complete, that it would in fact resemble this one over here in Japan, thousands of miles away. Right.

And how would you. Maybe it's the base of a little doll. Well, that's it. Right. I mean, it's just a point base or a point tip and point bases and point tips can be pretty damn generic that that being said do you what do you think about because also this because of the water access right there were some conclusions that were kind of drawn as far as like people could have gotten here through a coastal migration right right and so like early boat use and and and traveling some open water in early early boats yeah like do you do you hold with any of that

okay i love it okay which is why i like it okay well i'm gonna make you a happy guy because he loves it it's just it's fun to think about. Okay. Which is why I like it. Yeah. So another thing that's come out of ancient DNA, it's the gift that keeps on giving, is that you can extract DNA out of sediment. And one of the projects. Really?

Steve is looking skeptical here. Well, no, I'm just not skeptical, surprised. What's in there? Muck? Oh, you wouldn't believe. I mean, muck's kind of. Yeah, muck a'm just not skeptical. Surprised. What's in there? Muck? Oh, you wouldn't believe. I mean, muck's kind of a DNA type of term. Yeah, well, that's the sort of accepted scientific term. Sorry.

Yeah. Yeah, what's hiding in there? Okay, so what's hiding in there is basically anything that shed any DNA over that particular piece. Aquatic vegetation. You name it. You name it. I like that, Cal, aquatic vegetation. Yeah. Muck has a lot of that in piece. Aquatic vegetation. You name it. You name it. I like that, Cal. Aquatic vegetation. Yeah.

Yeah. That's big. Muck has a lot of that in it. Yeah. So another of the projects that I was involved with, Esky's group, was, so the ice-free corridor. We must have talked about it the last time I was here. Oh, yeah. I used to be a big fan of that thing.

Yeah, but we're not anymore. No, I know. No, there you go. I know. I still like it. Well, you can't. I can tell you why. I like the thought of people like, you know, like when Moses parted the Red Sea?

Well, yeah, that's exactly. I like the thought of this like, this wall of ice, right? Sure. And these like badass hunters. Right. This little gap cracks through the ice. Squeezed through the ice. And they come out and there's just the American Great Plains, man.

And they just set to kill it. It's a wonderful story. It's just not true. Yeah. Sad, isn't it? So one of the projects that we did was Mikkel Pedersen, one of Esky's guys, cored a couple of lakes right in the dead

center of that corridor. And the corridor opened like a zipper jacket that opens from the top and the bottom. So the top and the bottom opened earliest, but the middle part of the zipper, you know, stayed closed. So he got a couple of cores from lakes right in that sort of unzippered part,

right, right after it opened. And what we found was nothing was living there until around 12,600 years ago. So even if you round up, we were talking about rounding up earlier, right? Yeah. Even if you round up to 13,000, that's still

too late to get people south of the ice. They were already down there. They were already down there. Fishing, fishing in Cal's little spot. Exactly right. Cooper's Landing. So Cal. They've been fishing Cal's spot for 3,000 years.

Exactly. At least, at least. How much salmon then? They, well, in fact, one of the arguments that's been made is that people were sort of coming down the coast following these salmon runs. And then when they got south of the ice sheet, they headed up the major river systems. Head up the Columbia. Get onto the snake.

Move yourself interior. Doesn't that change? Because it was supposed to be mammoth hunters. Now it's salmon fishermen. Yeah. Does that offend you? No. It's just.

As an old river rat myself. I have no problem with it. I have no problem with it. I just. It's not the romantic vision that we always had held to. Yeah. But then it never made much sense. Are you going to go after a three and a half, four ton animal that doesn't like you with a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it?

When you're just tripping over seafood or whatever. Right. Or turtles. Yeah. Turtles. Kelp forest. Kelp forest. I'm not sure I'm going to go with kelp forest

with you, Kelp, just because we, we don't really know what the Pleistocene sort of seascape. Yeah. But that's another theory, right? It's like the kelp forest. Oh yeah. Don't they call it the kelp highway? Kelp highway's right love it cruising down the kelp highway yeah we talked

about this it just breaks the seas magically and you can travel from japan yeah follow your big stone point and get it all the way to cooper's fair and then break it into like 20 pieces yeah eventually like man i've been carrying around this big stone point for yeah generations and no one's used it yet. My daddy handed it down to me. But we don't necessarily think they had boats either because we now, and this is again, you know, it's in the new book. Like boats or? Any kind of watercraft.

They didn't have to have it because by the time we think people were moving down the coast, the coast was clear by around 16 and a half to 17. Yeah, but how are they going to cross like the Stikine? Well, now that is, you know, that's a question, right? So if you're coming down in winter, are these things going to be frozen? Oh. I don't know. But how hard would it have been to make a... I am getting into the game.

I was not going to become an anthropologist, but I am now. Are you going to approach it from, I've drawn some conclusions. Now I need to go out and find the facts. What do you call the kind of, in your biz, Dr. Meltzer, what do you call the kind of paper where you just throw out an idea? Oh, a speculative paper. Yeah. I'm going to publish a speculative paper saying that they had.

You're not a doctor, but you play one on the radio. Saying that they had to have had some type of small skin craft that they could use to scoot across the river. I think that's about the extent of my paper. Okay. And that's actually a fine paper. The problem is, are you going to get in that skin craft in, you know, somewhere on the Aleutian islands and paddle all the way down? No. Cause you're gonna have to constantly haul it out.

I mean, now and then you're like, ah, we got to make another boat. Oh, absolutely. Well, look, people cross the Mississippi. They had to have something to get across these kind of major children in your gear across yeah yeah yeah no so they had watercraft what i was that you mean like watercraft water well yeah i'm i mean i'm talking about the idea that they actually made boats and sort of travel down the coast without once setting foot on land which is one of the theories that's that's been out i'll write a paper about that with you. Well, sure. Yeah.

I'll let you go first. No, you can be the senior author. I've already got, I've already got a PhD. You can, you can be senior author. I want to,

oh, sorry, Spencer, go ahead. Last month, my wife and I went to Utah and we were camping. We spent a whole day hiking to different petroglyphs in the area. And there was this one site that you hike to and there's these petroglyphs. Amazing. And then there was this one site that you hiked to, and there's these petroglyphs.

Amazing. And then 100 feet further, there's these dinosaur tracks that are fossilized. The petroglyphs, 5,000 years old. Dinosaur tracks were like 150 million years old. At least, yeah. And it like put me in a real brain pretzel. Uh-oh.

And it was like real hard to calibrate. Does that ever happen where you're like excavating some site that's like 3000 years old and you like collide with something that's a hundred million years old, that's significant? Well, sure. Because people are people and people pick up things. So, um, I don't know if this story is true or not, but I've heard it that in some of the excavations at one of the, uh, Pueblos, um, ancient Pueblos and maybe Chaco Canyon, uh, they found a Folsom Point. Now, obviously Folsom people weren't living in Chaco Canyon, uh, a thousand years ago, but somebody there saw Folsom Point on the ground and thought, oh, wow, this is pretty cool. Sure, man.

And brought it home. Right. So collectors, right. We were talking about people that like to go out and collect stuff. They collect crinoids. They collect fossils. So, yeah, it's actually not uncommon to, I mean, it's not common necessarily, but it's not uncommon to have that sort of asynchronous set of materials actually out on a site

where you've got something that's millions or many, many millions of years old next to something that's fairly recent. Have you been following, we're trying to get him on the show once he gets vaccinated, but Mike Kunz's crazy glass beads out of Genoa, Italy that wound up in Alaska? He sent me that paper. He was talking about that in 2008? Yeah. Well, it took a while to get that paper published. In fact, it may not even have appeared yet.

Are you buying it? Am I doing something bad by talking about it? No. No, no, no. It's in press. get that paper published. In fact, it may not even have appeared yet. Are you buying it? Am I doing something bad by talking about it? No. No, no, no. It's in press. It's in press. It's just, I don't think the issue has shown up in my. Anyways, glass beads.

Well, I'm not surprised. That were made in Italy. Of course. That would have had to have come. The hard way. The hard way. The long way. So out of like through Europe.

Across Eurasia. Across Asia. Across Asia. Headed east. The long way. So out of like through Europe. Across Eurasia. Across Asia. Headed east. Yeah, but think about it. Then crossed the Bering Strait. Then a straight. And landed in Alaska way before anybody would have ever thought about bringing them from the other, through the Americas. Oh yeah.

Those are some crazy ass beads. Well, but think about the Silk Road. I'm thinking how easy they are to transport. Well, and that's. You can forget about it in your pocket. You can but think about the Silk Road. I'm thinking how easy they are to transport. Well, and that's. You can forget about it in your pocket. You can chew on it the whole way. Well. We need to move on to dogs.

Go ahead, though. You think that the beads were carried by dogs? Very plausible. There's some fancy leashes and stuff in New Mexico I've seen. Turquoise. Yeah. All right, dogs. Yeah. All right, dogs. Yeah. What, do you, do you, I feel that because Americans have, I shouldn't just say Americans,

there's probably some global aspect to this, just an insatiable appetite for dog information. Dogs are cool. I mean, people eat it up, man. Hmm. And I feel that in the last, I don't know, I don't know how long it's been going on, decades, whatever, years, you see a hell of a lot of news, speculation, publications about, hey, where did these things come from anyway? It's like a hot question right now. It's genetics again, Steve. Yeah.

Because. Is that what's just opening up new windows of opportunity? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's now becoming clear that the dog history is incredibly complicated. It's incredibly interesting too, in the sense that that's the first species humans domesticated. We've been around. Like that feels ironclad.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, cause it's by like a huge amount of time, right? 10,000 plus years. Okay. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, cause it's by like a huge amount of time, right? 10,000 plus years. Okay. 10,000 plus. So, uh, yeah, I mean, dogs have been our pals for a long time and they've been not just

our pals, but they've been our sort of workhorses, work dogs. Uh, they've been part of our cultural repertoire as it were, uh, you know, for many groups, dogs were a tool. They were used for hunting. Uh, they were used for defense, guarding, uh, warning systems. I mean, dogs are great. And in fact, when I got together with these folks to, uh, produce this dog paper that we had just, uh, just published this past, well, just a couple of months ago, actually, um, I was really excited about it, but I told them that, you know, if this was a story about cats, they'd have to find somebody else to work with. I don't do cats no cat wow you talk big cat guy down there big time cat guy right there sorry spencer you can write the paper the next time you know cats come along yeah yeah all right so you want to talk about the paper i want to talk about the paper um I want to talk about the paper.

Oh, can I tell you my thing first or later? Like, I think I might've uncovered some good source material for you. Okay. You're the host. You go. I'm reading a book and I'm going to do a big, big, huge book report on this show coming soon. I'm reading a book with, don't judge. My brother sent it to me.

Listen, my brother sent it to me, said, don't look at the title. Just read the book. Okay. The title is Alaska's Wolfman. No, but it's interesting. What it's about, it's a guy that goes up to Alaska in 1915. He's a market hunter. So he, for road building crews and mining camps, he hunts doll sheep and caribou.

Right. But in the early days, like leading up to statehood he becomes a government wolfer and he winds up doing a bunch of like at the same time out in western alaska eskimo groups are trying to they're trying to help eskimo groups diversify their economy by reindeer with bringing in reindeer herds but wolf predation on these reindeer herds is horrible because reindeer just don't get it right they just you know they're coming in from somewhere else turn them loose and they're just picking sitting targets he winds up doing a bunch of uh he winds up doing a bunch of wolf work all around the state usually where there's like a faltering caribou herd

doll shoot numbers get really depressed and he would go in and do this heavy duty wolf work. But in the book, he's got some fascinating observations about he's doing much of his work, but dog teams. So he catches wolves now and then. And his findings about how, like what you can actually get done with a wolf. What happens when he breeds a wolf with whatever he breeds a wolf with a Malamute, what the attributes of that generation is, what the attributes of the next generation is, the difficulty that he encountered. He basically got, you cannot take a wolf. Like in his view, you cannot take a pure wolf.

There's nothing you will do that will ever make that a predictable pet. A wolf is a wild animal. Yeah. He's like, you can't do it. No, a dog's been a domesticated animal for over 20,000 years. And it's just a, it's night and day.

The interesting thing about wolves and dogs in terms of gene flow is that there's, there's dog DNA and wolves, but not the reverse in modern day. Hold on a minute. Let me, I gotta say that. I gotta do that real slow in my head. Say it again. So when dog, uh, in dog populations today, there's no wolf DNA, but in wolf populations, there is dog DNA. So the introgression. I get it, but I don't understand what the implications are. It's a one-way gene transfer it's not it's not going both ways walk me through it well i don't understand why it happened that way but my colleague gregor larson who was one of the

principles on this dog paper say the first part again i'm sorry i'm struggling okay so you've got you've got dogs and wolves mating. Okay. But they're not producing, the wolves are not producing, um, they're producing mates or, or descendants that have dog DNA in them, but the dogs are not producing viable offspring from the wolf mating. I'm with you now. Kind of. More.

Yeah. I'm with you more. Yeah. Um, well, I mean, it's not entirely clear why that is because oftentimes when you've got two species that are kind of on the edge of biological compatibility, they can produce viable offspring. So humans and Neanderthals produce viable offspring, but. We know that today only because we all have some amount. I have less than normal. Okay.

Think about that. We think about this genetically or behaviorally. I can't remember what it was, but like. I think Joe Rogan's is extraordinarily high. So I was thinking about the whole 23andMe during our earlier conversation, right? Because it's like, I want like the oral history versus what you draw the conclusions you come to from looking at like a 23andMe report versus the oral history that you've been subject to your entire life. I think is like an interesting headspace to be in and listen to this podcast. Yeah.

Right. It's like, well, I, my family's done this. And then it's like, oh, but. Yeah. But you know what happened when Yanni took it? No. Very Latvian. They were, they were lying.

Yeah. But I mean, genetics is genetics and identity is not. Sure. Right? And so whatever they told you about your people was probably the true story in a cultural sense, right? This is who we are. This is who we become. This is who we were.

These are your ancestors. What the genetics is telling you about is sort of the deeper past and the other populations that your relatives and ancestors have sort of interacted with. Yeah, the stories didn't get woven into the narrative. Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, the narrative is a cultural narrative. The narrative is not a genetic narrative. Yeah, I mean, if you're, yeah, I mean, picture, this is way off dogs, but if you're adopted into, say, oh, I'll say this. Let's say you're adopted into an Italian family, you know, and that's, you identify and.

Of course. And one day you'd be like, ha, I guess that was all wasted time. Turns out. Turns out. Turns out I'm Latvian. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So you want to go back to the dogs? Yeah, no, I think we should get back to the dogs. Dogs and wolves became two very different things 10,000 years ago. No, they were already 20,000. 20,000 years ago. 20,000, yeah.

And I suspect, okay, so let's think about the context in which this is happening. This is the glacial period. It's probably happening during what's known as the last glacial maximum. That's about a 3,000, 4,000 year window during this last glacial period when times were really tough. It was really cold. It was really cold. It was really harsh, very severe conditions. And you've got isolated human populations living somewhere in Northeast Asia. We know they're isolated because we can see it in the ancient DNA. We know we have new lineages that are emerging. Wolves are living in that same part of the world

and they're just as, um, they're in just as much trouble, right? It's cold, it's harsh, there's probably not a lot of game running around, right? And so they're, you know, sticking their noses up in the air, and they're smelling stuff, right? They're smelling food, and they're kind of creeping around these camps, and at some point, you know, somebody's throwing them meat or maybe they're just kind of moving in after the humans leave and kind of gnawing on the bones that are left behind on the camp. And over time they start to become commensals. Basically they're hanging around with one another. Um, and, and it is a process. It's not an event, right? You don't just sort of turn

a wolf into a dog in a day. Um, it's a long drawn out process and these, you know, and the sort of, they're finding themselves together, kind of isolated on this landscape. And in that long-term process, they're understanding that they're not necessarily, I mean, in principle, they're predators, they're competitors as predators, right? Because in principle, people are hunting meat, they're hunting meat too, but they found a way to get along, uh, and they found a way to sort of help one another. And so the dogs, you know, start to aid in the hunting as they become dogs, right? As they're kept by the people, they're fed by the people, they're raised by the people, they get a, they get habituated to the people they're raised by the people they get a they get habituated to the people there's a it might maybe you think it's fanciful but i've even read i i don't know like someone postulating

what might have been the the reciprocity that like a early warning system oh absolutely you know absolutely like how they just go ballistic when something strange is happening right yeah yeah yeah yeah no that's why i say they're part of the cultural repertoire. They're a tool. They were a tool for people, especially if you're on a vast unknown landscape, like say the Americas, right? You're making that left turn. You've gotten around the continental ice sheets. You're spreading out into the northern hemisphere.

You have no idea what's around the corner and you have no idea what's going to feed you, hurt you, try and kill you. Right. If you've got a dog with you, that's a pretty good thing. And that's what came out of this work that we just published was I was in Oxford a year or two ago. And I was talking to Gregor Larson, my colleague who works on ancient dogs, doing the genetics. And I said to him, you know, your dog— Over beers. Over beers, right?

No, no. That made a good story. But the beers actually came after we figured all this out. This was not some sort of— Wait, we should cut this out. Really? This was not some sort of drunken, oh, whoa. Oh, yeah.

You could do something with beers. Over beers doesn't mean drunk. Not just beer, grain belt beer. Yeah. Yeah, this is not an ad for it. Didn't we start out this conversation about beer ads? And then I cracked an MGB. And boy, it hit me.

I was envisioning you guys were real casual in this person's office. Well, no, we were. We were casual in the office. I was there. Talking shop. I was talking shop. I'd gone there to give a series of lectures at Oxford. And I said, you know, Gregor, your dog dates look a lot like our people dates.

And. Explain that. Okay. So we know from the ancient. Oh yeah. Okay. I got you. Do you want me to explain?

I know, but everybody else doesn't know. Because other people might be listening, Steve. I think it's. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Explain it for Cal. He'll never get it. Explain it to Spencer.

All right. Here's how it works, Spencer. So human lineages, we were just talking about this. They split over time. So groups become isolated. One group goes and stays in northeast Siberia. Another group goes into the Americas. And then in the Americas, some of them stay north.

Others go south. And so we see this in the genetic record. We see different lineages, haplogroups. You can call them different names, but lineages works. And these are groups that are historically related to one another. But over time, they've become separated. So we have a record of when those sort of lineages emerge. So we know that ancestral Native Americans split off from groups that would stay in Asia sometime around 23,000 years ago. We know that when they get into the Americas,

sometime around 16,000 or so years ago, they split off again. Some of them stay north, others go south. And then later on, we see more splits as they move further and further south into the hemisphere. So we've got a record of all these kind of turn points along the way as people are moving into this hemisphere. And when Gregor showed me the results with the dogs, he said, well, you know, we've got a split here. We've got two lineages developing at this time. We've got a bunch of lineages developing at this time. That's when I said to him, you know, your split times kind of look like our split times. And then there was that sort of, oh, why didn't I think of this before? It's called a eureka moment.

It wasn't even, I don't want to call it a Eureka moment because that implies it was a really deep and profound insight. No, this was, well, of course, people can come into the Americas without dogs, but dogs are not going to come into the Americas without people. So of course the dog, the dog history is going to mimic and match and coincide with human history. Now, whether they came in with the very first people was, you know, kind of a different issue, but clearly they must have come with people. So at some point their histories aligned. And so when we, so I then went to the

whiteboard, he said, okay, well, let's kind of try and figure this out. So I drew Siberia, Kamchatka Peninsula, I drew Alaska. And I just said, okay, here's where we have groups splitting off at different times. Here's where they are at this point. Here's where they are at that point. And then they put the dog story on. And you had a beer in your hand while you were drawing. Well, then we went to the bar afterwards and congratulated ourselves for having figured this out. So yeah yeah that's uh and

it was just so obvious that well of course it had to happen this way are the dog okay here's a couple questions for you okay did this happen again did the same thing that we're talking about happening in siberia with dogs happen in other places completely unrelated or did that then like the debt did the dog then sort of like backfill along the path that humans have been taken since the african diaspora right so um dogs go both directions right so they're going to be domesticated and some of them are heading east some of them are heading east. Some of them are heading into the Americas. Others presumably went west with people. We know that populations that are in this part of Northeast Asia at the end of the Ice Age after the last glacial maximum, they're moving all over the Eurasian continent. But it's possible there was a singular domestication event.

Well, now that's controversial, and you'll have to get a dog person on here to defend either the single origin point or the multiple origin point because I don't do dogs. I like dogs. If it's multiple, how many – like a fashionable multiple, has it happened twice or ten times? I think the argument is that there might have been sort of three centers of domestication. But again, it's not my thing. And this dog group – here's my second question. I know you're not a dog guy, but you probably know this. These dogs are, they're adding, like, they're adding, as people move into new areas, no doubt there has to be some crossbreeding occurring where they're they're bumping into like all of a sudden

you come here and the mexican gray wolf let's say let's say the mexican gray wolf was a thing then maybe it was um at some point their dogs pick that up a little bit right pick it up to some degree maybe uh i don't i don't know that we have enough resolution of the dog genetic record to say that okay what i do know and this is you know sort of an answer to a different part of the dog genetic record to say that. What I do know, and this is sort of an answer to a different part of the question that you were asking, is that this is not the first time it's happened. We know that when people move across the far north around 5,000 years ago,

they're taking dogs with them as well. And that's a completely separate event where people are tracking across the landscape, bringing their dogs with them. But possibly dogs that had been in a sort of rolling lineage with these early dogs yeah yeah yeah well and think about it if you think of them as a technology it was like a technology that's been transferred well and and let's let's kind of riff on that transfer notion you know when you've got a dog and you see other people with their dogs

your dog's going to go running over there unless it's on a leash and it's going to go hanging out with them for a while and it may or may not come back. So I suspect when, you know, sort of groups were, you know, encountering one another after sort of long separations, I suspect the dogs were probably moving back and forth between groups as well. But yeah, they were part of the, they were part of the colonization process. They were part of the dispersal process into the Americas and probably served, you know, really important roles. Because think about it, if you're coming into a completely unknown landscape,

not a bad idea to have a dog with you. What's the oldest dog bone that's been found and what's now the lower 48? It's around 10,000 years old from a couple of sites in Illinois. And what can they tell about those? What'd they look like? How big were they?

Oh gosh, you'd have to ask a dog person, but I don't think they were terribly large. Don't think big wolves. Okay. Yeah. The sites are called Koster, K-O-S-T-E-R, and Stilwell are the sites that have produced these sort of 10,000 year old dogs.

Had the dogs been butchered or just dead? Again, you'd have to ask a person. Who's a dog? You got to tell us a good dog person. Oh, I gave you a name, Gregor Larson and Angela Perry. Got that correct? I, these were the-

Have you spoke to this person yet? No, not yet, but I, they were on my list. Yeah. They're on your list. Yeah. No. Dogs were food too. Look, times get tough.

You know, sorry, you've been a really good dog. Yeah. But, you know, it's either you or me. Oh, it's the Swiss army knife of companions, you know. I mean, there's a lot of good uses. I could even open a can with this dog. Exactly. What criticisms or objections have there been to your conclusion about this?

Well, the argument, so there were two pieces to that piece we just published. One was the sort of kind of coinciding histories. And that part I think seems fairly robust and sound. The other thing was though, that we drew the conclusion that domestication took place in Northeast Asia rather than sort of further West. And I know some of the dog genetic folks, um, push back on that a bit, uh, because they think domestication, again, this gets to the issue of, you know, was there a single center of dog domestication or multiple, uh, that it's unresolved, but we offered that hypothesis in the paper that we think, you know, they,

they were domesticated in Northeast Asia and they went both ways, East and West. Good stuff, man. Oh, it's fantastic. Uh, Spencer brought up brought up uh the college days which long long time ago now and um you know you always you got a mix of people who want to be in class and you got a mix of people who got to be in class in order to check that box on their requirement list yeah and you got some people that ran in both both crowds crowds. Yep. Depending on the class. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure.

And, uh, I can't help but think I'm like, uh, what, what's your take, uh, Dr.

Meltzer? Like how many of your students are going, you know, I listen to the mediator podcast to get away from Dr. Meltzer. Damn. He followed me here.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, he stole that from the lecture. Look, you know, today's college students, I think it's a tough time to be in college. Because of the pandemic. Pandemic, the economic situation, you know, what are the likelihoods of jobs, all that good stuff. Right. Um, and I know that what I do is not terribly useful just because it's not useful doesn't mean it's meaningless. And so I.

Useful in a nuts and bolts kind of like. Oh yeah. Yeah. What are you going to do? You're going to make yourself a Clovis point and go out and survive? I don't think so. Um, maybe you could Steve, but I couldn't. The line I got, I was a history anthropology major and, uh, the line I got was, are you

going to open a history store? Yeah, there you go. And you could. So my, my job is to say, okay, I know you're not coming in here necessarily because you're interested in, in what I do, but I will do my best to make it interesting for you. I will do my best to help you think about things that you otherwise wouldn't think about and think about them in critical ways and try and sort of transport yourself out of your business school environment, right? Let's take you back 15,000 years

and think about what it's like to be on a landscape where you haven't seen any smoke on the horizon, you haven't seen any freshly killed animals, you haven't seen any other humans in a very long time, and you realize, wait a minute, I'm all alone here, but hey, the living looks pretty good here. How do I do that? How do I make a living on this

landscape, right? So I try and give people the sense of what it would have been like to come into a completely new world, not a new world in the European sense of, well, you know, we finished trashing the old world. Now we're going to go to the new world. This, this truly was a new world back then. And what would that have been like? So yeah, I get it that they're not necessarily coming in because they really want to learn about archeology. Um, but I told people when I did this was that, uh, I got the minor in health because I also had a biology major. And so I could, uh,

go into the med field if I wanted the health minor would help me. The reality was that I was interested in anthropology, but I was a C student there. So if I also minored in health, I was an a student there. And so it could carry my GPA.

The anthropology was to entertain me the health was just to like help with uh my resume so your anthropology is resume building i like the health that's why we picked him up yeah he tanked the interview that i got to look at that i was like oh yeah he's got a B average. Classes like yours kept me. You got a C in anthropology? Let's have him in for a talk. Classes like yours kept me wildly entertained. Thank you.

Favorite stuff. Yeah, I like it. I know they lean on you a little bit over there in the ivory tower, but I like it that you take the time to come explain your work to people. Well, I mean, look, the greater public genuinely is interested in what we do. They're not necessarily, you know, going to be taking a lot of classes and everything like that. But, you know, people can find interest in things from the ancient past and do. And because a lot of archaeological research is supported by the greater public. It's, it's only fair that we give back. Uh, so I don't like to just publish for my colleagues. I like to publish for a broader

audience so that I can give back. So it's part of my responsibility as somebody who has spent his life in an ivory tower. And I got to say, ivory towers are awfully nice. Um, but it's also nice to get out once in a while, um, and to be able to share what I've learned because fundamentally, you know, it's the thing that interests me. And I just think, well, it's going to interest others as well. Fantastic.

Okay. So, uh, okay. How do they find, if you want to see Mountaineer, what form is it? Like, how do they find it? Well, it's just on the south edge of town of Gunnison, and you can't get over there. No, no, not the site, the book. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Well, I'll be offering tours starting on June 15th. Okay, so, oh, this is my opportunity to... Yeah. Yeah, okay. If you were a big... Venturing, you're not a big Instagram guy. Okay, so I have to apologize to all the people who listened to the podcast the last time.

Because you asked me at the very end, are you on Twitter? Are you on Instagram? And I admitted that I was on Instagram. What I didn't tell you was I only had six followers. And they were my kids. And the only reason I was on Instagram was to send them pictures of where I was in the world at any given time. And I got literally, uh, almost 300 requests to join me on Instagram.

Did you deny them all? I, I just, I, again, I apologize to everybody who listened, but I don't, I don't publish anything of interest on Instagram. I gotcha. So speak to them. Uh, this is your, it's an elaborate Instagram. I got you. So speak to them. This is your, it's an elaborate Instagram post called a book. It's like if you could pack a whole lot of

pictures and a whole lot of text into a single Instagram post. It would be called. And bundle it as a book. It would be called the Mountaineer site. And it will be out in June from the University of Colorado. Oh, it's called the Mountaineer site.

Yeah. Okay. Yep. Okay. Yeah. I'm confirming with of Colorado. It's called the Mountaineer site. Yeah. Okay. Is that? Yep. Okay. Yeah. I'm confirming with Corinne. It's got a subtitle too.

What's the subtitle? I don't know. We're checking. But it's like, it's a book. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's a book. It's a book.

Um, and, and then. Color photos? No, sorry. But I'll tell you, the cover photo is gorgeous. The cover photo was taken by my colleague, uh Emsley, of the mountain in winter. Oh, here we go. Okay, so what's the subtitle? Hard to read on my website.

It's something like a Folsom winter camp in the Rockies or. That's exactly what it is. Oh, phew. The Mountaineer site, a Folome winter camp in the rockies or you could learn about the mountaineer site which is a new site in the revised update the 10-year revised update of first peoples in a new world which is it's a compendium i don't know how you describe it it's it's just like like i said earlier it's the whole damn story it's's everything I know. There's nothing left, guys. Remember in the old days, like the Greeks or whoever,

they were into this idea called the sum of all knowledge. There you go. They had the idea that a person could know everything that was known. Right. That's hard to pull off nowadays. Yeah, I know. I think Goethe was the last person in the 1600s or something, the last person who knew everything.

Yeah, like all knowledge, all mathematics, astronomy. The guy knew it all. Yeah, I know a lot of things in a very small niche. Yeah. And that's about the best I can do. And it's captured beautifully, beautifully in First Peoples in a New World. All right, Dr. David Meltzer. I'm going to add one thing that I remember from last time.

It was David J. Meltzer. Not to be confused with the beat poet, not to be confused with the guy that writes about wrestling, and not to be confused with the business person, David Meltzer, who I get all sorts of... David J. Meltzer, anthropologist, Southern Methodist University, SMU in Texas. That one.

There you go. For as great as your work is and how smart you are, I fell into this trap after the last podcast. I typed in David Meltzer books. And I found a book called Mushroom Cultivation, Self-Guide to Mushrooms from All Over the World. And I was thrilled. I was like, this guy just has all my interests nailed.

And then I found out it wasn't. Then Spencer's like, he's got to have a cat book. That's going to be the perfect guy. Thanks for having me on again. I really appreciate your work on mushrooms. Oh, and also another thing. Bear Grease podcast. Clay Newcomb Newcomb, who's been on this show many times.

Every time Clay's on the show, people are like, man, that guy ought to have his own podcast. Well, he does. It's called Bear Grease. It's a history podcast. History, folklore. Folklore, culture, history. Done in Clay's unique style. It's investigative.

Bear Grease podcast, part of the Meat Eater Podcast Network. Listen now. Thank you, everybody. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great

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