The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 306: An Alder Choked Hellhole

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Pamela Groves, Daniel Mann, Janis Putelis, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.Topics discussed: running rivers full of bones in the name of science; Mike Kunz, the Forest Gump of Archaeology; the Mesa Site; when you find a 50,000+ year old polar bear skull just sitting on the beach; the hybridization of brown and polar bears; horses as the most numerous large animal during the Ice Age; how you can't just collect paleontological artifacts from Federal Land to create your own collection; the conical ice cream cone growth of mammoth tusks; Bison Bob; interred in sediment; the most exciting find: a hand sticking out of the ground; environmental DNA; the megafaunal extinction event when 70% of large mammals went extinct globally; loess; throwing out the overkill hypothesis; genetic engineering, re-wilding and pet mammoths; Steve's future retirement pursuit of becoming a large pumpkin enthusiast; the last big flock of passenger pigeons killed near where Steve grew up; trying to cultivate that purple alder; how to donate to Pam and Dan's research at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (donors should note "other" as designation and enter Daniel H Mann and [e-mail] in the comments section); 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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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Alright everybody, man, we're going to get into something where this is my favorite topic of all time. And these are two, we have two guests today that I've been wanting to get on. I'm going to, when I get into why you're here, you're going to be extremely embarrassed.

Okay. No, flattered and embarrassed be extremely embarrassed. Okay. No, flattered and embarrassed. That's good. How jealous I am. Good. Of you two. Yeah, good. But first, Giannis is here. Brody.

How many times have you won meat eater trivia now, Brody? Two. Two out of how many? Four? Brody got a perfect score. Brody got a perfect score Brody got a perfect score But we realized I realized something That there's a correlation Between age and winning

See I thought it was just Reading articles And winning Everybody Very small sample size Steve You could live with the head With your head in a hole And be old

And win that thing That's true No it's Over I realize over the years you accumulate answers to things and it's just a race to. If we had Durkin on and Durkin smoked everybody,

then we'd know it was being old. Yeah. My wife thinks it has to do with memory too. You got a bad memory. Good memory. No, I'm having a good one. No, I mean bad because it's not always good to remember everything.

Right. You want a quick funny Pat Durkin story from last week? Oh, yeah. You want a quick, funny Pat Durkin story from last week? Oh, yeah. You know how those Wisconsin boys that Doug Duren, who's a huge man, rolls around with are all large individuals? Have you noticed that? Yeah, and they keep getting bigger as the night goes on.

And Pat Durkin. By the time Kiefer shows up, you think there can't be a bigger man in Richland County. The largest man in Richland County is now here. And then his Labrador gets out of the truck and it's the only lab on the planet where the truck really raises six inches when the dog gets up you're like what is going on here can you imagine getting punched by keifer oh my god or punched by doug no no uh i think your bones would come out the other side of your skin if Doug punched you. And you realize why they walk around like a little hunched over.

It's like nothing is built for them. Anyway, Pat Durkin walks out into the middle of this group of gentlemen. And Pat, comparatively. He's not from Richland County. He's not from Richland County. Comparatively, he is quite small. One could say pint-sized. And, you know, I asked Pat,

I was like, Pat, what have you not been eating? And he said, I used to march in a company of 80 men, and I'll tell you right now, I'm average-sized. Uh... in a company of 80 men. And I'll tell you right now, I'm average sized. Who else? Phil, Corinne.

But then I want you guys now to introduce yourselves and then I'm going to embarrass you, our two guests. Like talk about where you work. Whatever, however you want to do it. Just a quick intro. Okay.

My name's Dan Mann. I work at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. But the Arctic biology deal. Well, that's changed recently. Oh, really? Yeah. I used to be in the geography department, which was in geosciences. And then last year I quit and I went to the, now I'm back in the institute of arctic biology yeah senior senior research scientist in the institute of arctic biology

pamela uh pam groves and i'm also at the university of alaska fairbanks and i've been in the institute of arctic biology since 1987 okay now comes the part where I tell you how, uh, I met you guys. You probably don't remember this. Do you know an individual named Mike Kunz? Very well. Okay. Many years ago, many years ago, I was in Mike Kunz field camp. I think it wasn't like by the Ivatuck.

Ivatuck. Yeah. I was in his field camp doing, uh, doing some, I was working on, uh, I was working on my own research project, which involved tagging along on his, one of his research projects. And we were up hunting arrowheads out of helicopters on the North slope, which is prime pickings for arrowhead hunting. You two happened to come through while I was there. You happened to pass through. Okay.

And Dan, you said a sentence that I stole from you and I have used a thousand times since then. You're the one that introduced to me the term alder choked hell hole. I think it was alder haunted hello because there's also a bear haunted hellhole and it can be a moose haunted hellhole too no i it might have been but i swear it was a alder you had described going through an alder choked hellhole and you

guys were coming from doing what i thought would be the greatest job of any job on the planet you were just coming off of a river trip where you floated out like umpteen dozen miles of arctic river for the sole purpose of finding old ass bones eroding out of the riverbanks. And you had found a horse skull. A Pleistocene horse skull that you were feeling good about. I just overheard this all. So what, how old were you? Well, I'm 47 now.

So I must've been, this has been in like 2004. So you, you were working for outside magazine that's correct and did you do a story on mike and his i did oh i was with tony baker remember him yeah he was a yeah he passed away but he was an enthusiast right yeah he was incredible he was like the world's expert on making certain tool types. Yeah, that guy was amazing. I'm curious to know how you two passed through if you got there by a helicopter. Well, here's the deal. You'll have to explain that, but this place was so out there. I think if you look mathematically like what's the remotest place

In North America I think it's and you factor in I don't know what the hell you'd factor in but like Proximity to To any road populations and roads It's kind of like there yeah it's the pole Of inaccessibility and They had to take a I can't remember what aircraft they used

But I was in it They'd put fuel drums in the back of an aircraft. Yeah. On parachutes. It was the CASA from the BLM fire service. Okay. And they'd kick the fuel drums out here and there. Yeah.

So that the helicopter couldn't get there on a tank of gas. And so you'd be flying along in the helicopter and you'd have to land on some little knob and go down into an alder choked hell hole. Right. land on some little knob and go down into an alder choked hell hole right and roll the barrel back up because it would have rolled off of where off the landing zone and they roll the barrel back up uncork the barrel hand pump gas into a helicopter and you passed through i guess because you were just coming or going it was kind of a hub it's like a i don't know what do you call it well there's a landing strip at ivatuck so so you could fly small single-engine planes in there from Fairbanks. And then from Ivatuck, in the BLM days, then there'd be helicopters that would ferry us out to wherever we were going to work.

And then a week or two later, whatever the timeframe was, pick us up. We'd usually go back to Ivatuck, pick up more food and go out again. And you were hiking when you were doing these excursions in this particular place? Most of the time canoeing. We did some hiking, but we have inflatable canoes that you could roll up and stick in the helicopter. And then that was my, I was trying to envision a helicopter camp in which you were passing through. Like, are you showing your horse head out the window or are you coming through on a canoe?

I didn't get to see the horse head. Oh, okay. So it was a landing strip with a camp. And then we'd, see, this is, we do like an aviation version of spike camping so they got the way this this mike kunz worked i'll just explain the whole damn thing now this is in the npra the national petroleum reserve alaska which currently is is like relative to everything else like relative to everything else on the continent is like like unexploited wilderness but it is the petroleum reserve and so they have

you know the the powers that be um have the right to exploit the the oil resources the mineral oil resources there should there be need for this? And there's how many, like there's like four patrolling reserves in the country. A couple of them are in California. It's basically like oil in the bank for an emergency, but they can tap it for whatever reason. And I don't know what it takes to be able to tap the oil,

but it generally just sits there and it's kind of like, it's safe in the ground. Um, should we ever have, you know, world war three, we have this oil to exploit. They were looking to do some leases on it, but they hadn't mapped. They hadn't done a cultural survey of the landscape.

So that was sort of why this big giant arrowhead hunt was going on is they were out mapping cultural sites they didn't call it a giant arrowhead hunt they were out matching they were out mapping cultural sites which might in the future um make areas that would be hands off to oil exit to oil drilling, stuff you'd have to work around, okay? Because there's like significant cultural findings there. It would basically come down to,

they'd get helicopters, or in our case, we had two, like our group had two helicopters that operated out of this big landing strip where you could also land fixed wing aircraft. But then we would spike camp using the helicopters to land in places where you couldn't land fixed wing aircraft. So you'd go into a new area, like you might go a hundred miles over yonder and set up a camp and then arrowhead hunt out of a helicopter from the spike camp. Were you looking for known cultural sites or looking for cultural sites?

You'd look for places where if you were camping, that's where you'd camp. And you'd land there. Like, let's say you got two rivers coming together and you got a big V of land and it benches out. So like a finger ridge coming land and it benches out so like a somewhere coming down it benches out you're 20 feet above the confluence of two streams you can see every direction you got water there's a big flat spot you'd land uphill from it or whatever on whatever place you could land you'd walk down there and a lot of times you go down and be like oh there's a big tent ring all mossed over but you can see the rocks and you look at exposed ground and everywhere on the exposed ground be flint chips

projectile points because no one had ever picked it over no one had ever picked it over everything here's you know i mean there's still stuff laying around here but it's been people been picking it over since, I mean, they knew as soon as it got done making stone points, they started picking them up.

And then in the dirty 30s, like in the dust bowl, it became like a real thing to hunt arrowheads. But there it's like, if some dude dropped something 10,000 years ago,

it'd just still be laying there. And kind of what prompted this area is Kunz had found this site called the Mesa site. We're going to get back to you guys real quick here.

This Mesa site is this prominent Mesa that sits out. Can you guys describe the Mesa site? Yeah. So what happened was back in the seventies, they were doing some exploratory well drilling. You got to get Mike down here to tell you about this. Dude, we've been trying. Oh, he'd love this. You got to do it.

Listen, he is somehow waiting. He's waiting for the pandemic to end. You may have to take this. You may not live that long. Corinne is going to need to call him and be like, Mike, the pandemic isn't ending. You got to take your studio to Fairbanks. But anyway, so they were doing this exploratory well-dwelling drilling, and they had Mike along as the archaeologist. And they were like, we need some shot rock, some fill to make roadbeds.

So they said, look, there's a mesa over there. Why don't you guys go check it out and tell us there's no arrowheads, and then we'll go blow it up, and then then we'll make a road and we'll use it all for the fill to make highways or to the drill pad. So Mike went up there and he went, holy cow, there's like projectile points everywhere. So he said, you can't blast this place. So he collected a little bag that had some charcoal in it, brought it back to town and it sat on his shelf for like a decade. And then another colleague of ours, Rick Rainier said one day, he goes, you know, those stone projectile points you found from that mesa, they're really strange. Why don't you let me radiocarbon date that little bag of charcoal

you brought back? So they did, they sent it in and it was like 11,500 years old. It's like super old. And the projectile points, you've talked to Meltzer already. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they're very close in style to Folsom points, which are like early Paleo-Indian or the kind of late Paleo-Indian. Anyway, they're old from down here, this area. And so suddenly they had this really significant site on the Mesa. And so Rick and Mike published this paper in Science Magazine and Ted Stevens

saw it, you know, our old senator. And he said, he called him up and he invited him to Washington, D.C. and he said, how much money do you guys need to continue this research? And Mike was so- What was his interest in it? It was Alaska. Oh, okay. So he was just a tireless promoter of Alaska. Exactly. Didn't care if it was- So he called him Uncle Ted. Didn't promoter of Alaska. Exactly. Didn't care if it was oil. So he called him Uncle Ted.

Didn't care if it was oil or arrowheads. Well, he was interested in native people and stuff. Yeah. And so Mike, you got to ask Mike this, but the way he's told me- He won't come on the show. Well, he will eventually. So Mike said, I was just so surprised that I should have said $500,000 a year, but I just said $120,000. and that's what he got.

And so for the next 10 years or something, Uncle Ted made a line item in the federal budget that Mike Kunz at BLM in Alaska would get $120,000 a year to do whatever he wanted with. Dude, that's classic pork barrel right there. And that's what – I love it. He brought Pam and I in then because it was like, oh, we need somebody to go collect bones. Oh, so you guys were rolled into the Mesa site deal? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we worked around the Mesa site for— So I wasn't told.

What a good introduction you just stumbled upon, Steve. So you worked up—talk about the Mesa, what it looks like. It's not miles long. You've been there, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. So it's a – Mike, again, you got to talk to him. But it's a place where the native people came 11,800 to about 10,000 years ago.

And it was a hunting lookout. So you went there to kind of check out the caribou and probably the bison and to repair your stone points. Okay, because they were always breaking. Whenever you missed something or whenever you hit a bone, you'd break the point. So you picture these guys sitting up there like telling tall tales and repairing their little projectile points, right? And they'd have little hares. So there are all these hares. There's probably 50 different little hares.

What's that? Just a pile of charcoal. Where they had little campfires. Like a little fire. What's the word you're using? Hearth. Hearth. Yeah. Yeah, sorry. It's a Tennessee pronunciation of hearth.

Yeah. Well, I was just dragging it out. Okay. Dragging the word out. But there are all these, like Steve was saying, all this debitage, all these flakes. And then occasionally they'd have a broken point they couldn't repair and they'd just toss it. So it's an amazing— But hundreds of them.

Yeah. It turned out it was a gold mine for these things. But it has a very peculiar geology. And this is kind of interesting if you're into the geology. A lot of those other sites you visited out towards Utica, they're on sedimentary rock. And as a result, the frost action breaks up the rock and it all kind of slushes downhill with frost action. The Mesa site's peculiar because it's on this dolerite

and it's deeply fractured bedrock. And so the water, it doesn't frost heave, basically. So that anything that was there 10,000 years ago is still there. But if you go to another kind of outcrop, like a lot of those you visited at Bayutukok, it's long gone. It's down in the drainage somewhere. So it's just this amazing kind of coincidence of a place where ancient people used a lot because it's an amazing lookout site and the geology was perfect for preservation. And this was the oldest site that had been found in Alaska at that point, in the northern part of Alaska. Yeah, in the northern part of Alaska, yeah.

Because when humans first came into North America, they crossed the Bering Land Bridge and had to move through northern Alaska before they could get anywhere else on the continent. So these were the early people. has been found of like a village or an actual settlement where the women and the kids would have been because that's down in the lower landscape that gets washed away as the rivers meander and whatnot. So that's what's—the Mesa is so special because it's such a stable spot geologically. And how many yards long is that? I mean, it's a couple hundred yards on top? It's probably 200 yards. And it's—three sides are steep cliffs. And so there's only one.

Remember, there's kind of a ramp that goes up on the south side. So it's kind of the other thing. You got to ask Mike about this. But my theory always was that, you know, you kill a caribou, you drag them back there, and then you're probably going to dry the meat because I don't think they're living there during the winter. So it would be a perfect place to prepare smoke, meat, and hides that are safe from the predators and the scavengers because you're up on this kind of fortress, right? So it'd be easy to keep the, you know, the bears and so forth away. Did you guys find on the mesa, did any bones come off that? Yeah.

Why did you look at each other? Well, there was one bone fragment they discovered really late in the excavation and nobody knew what it was. It was just like this little piece of burnt long bone. And I'm looking at Pam because Mike was hoping she could figure out from the DNA

what the species was. But you couldn't get DNA out of it. No. Maybe now somebody would have the technology. This was in the 90s when the ancient DNA technology wasn't so good. And DNA sits in a dead piece of tissue like bone. It degrades over time. And especially if it's been burned, the high temperatures cause further degradation.

So it's really hard to get DNA out of old samples like that. Where does that bone sit now? I don't know. But now that you brought this up, I think we should send it to Beth and see if she can get some DNA out of it now. She's been on the show, Beth Shapiro. Really? She talked about bison? We talked mostly about mammoths.

No, we talked a bit about bison. I want to get into bison with you guys too. How to clone a mammoth. Yeah. We talked about that book a hell of a lot. We're trying to get her back on. And apparently, her husband's a Neanderthal researcher. Yeah.

Which I think has gone back to Neanderthal. Has it? I think it's okay. I think it's back to being okay to say Neanderthal. I like so many of these new discoveries are new technology discovering something that's been on somebody's shelf or in somebody's drawer that was actually taken from the ground in the 70s of the 60s the 50s and it's just like it's the ultimate hoarder's sport right i was like oh don't throw that away so here's the perfect example of pam tell them about your polar bear skull from lonely

but pam before you do that i just need you to put a button on the bone. So you don't have a theory about what the bone is? My guess is probably caribou. Okay. Just because caribou are by far the most common and easy to hunt. Okay, because you guys gave each other a knowing glance. So I thought maybe you felt that it was like a human bone, but you didn't want to bring it up. No, and we've looked for human bones and never found any.

I mean, when we've collected bits and pieces of bones, could that be human? And I've brought some back and, oh, this could be. And then it usually ends up being a caribou something because it's the size is such okay so the pole so do the polar bear and i want to return later to in your wanderings um what would be uh like i want to get back to the human bone the human bone question so so the the polar bear story of course starts with mike khan so we were and rick renear the other guy from the mesa so the um four of us were up actually right on the north coast of alaska uh near an old uh it was a dewline site

lonely what's thatance early warning site. Oh. Or early radar site from the Cold War. What was the word? Dewline? Dewline. Distance early warning. There are these old big radar screens.

To prevent red dawn. Right. So anyways, we'd land, the helicopter dropped the four of us off, and Dan and Rick went one way with their little handgun, and Mike and I went the other way, and Mike had a shotgun. And right before we left, we asked Mike, because normally we work further inland than the coast, and do you ever see polar bears along this stretch? No, never this time of year. So Dan and Rick are walking along with just their little handgun and they look on the beach and there are these really fresh polar bear tracks, which are really distinctive because in polar bears, you can see the hair.

They have all that hair on their feet. And so... Oh, the hair shows up in the track in the mud. They were so fresh because the tide had just gone out. So it was really obvious. And it was kind of foggy. So they're looking around. And the helicopter disappeared in the fog.

So there was no way you could have waved a warning. So they're going one way and Mike and I are going the other way. And then I said to Mike, so do you ever find bones up here along the coast? And he goes, nah. And so we're just walking along and I look down and there's this bear skull and I pick it up and it's a polar bear skull. And it's like in perfect condition. And so we go, oh, well, it must have been a polar bear that just died. And so we collected it and then we brought it back and had it stored in our bone collection. And then it was a couple of years later, we had some extra or Mike had extra money for radiocarbon dating, which is how you can tell how old a bone is. And we decided that we wanted to put some...

You guys were like, everybody round up the neatest thing you can find. Well, and we decided... You got like a punch card? We'd already dated, and I'm sure we'll get into this, we dated all these different herbivores, caribou, mammoth, bison, horse, muskox. And so let's do a bunch of carnivores, caribou, mammoth, bison, horse, muskox. And so let's do a bunch of carnivores. And you don't find nearly as many carnivore bones as you do herbivores because you go up the trophic levels, there's fewer and fewer animals. So I said, oh, I got this polar bear

skull. It's modern, but maybe it's 100 years old or something. So we sent in a date, and it came back, and it was greater than 43,500 years, which is about the limit of radiocarbon dating. So you say it's infinite, and we said, wow, that's amazing. I wonder if that's right. So we sent off two more dates to a different lab, two more samples to a different lab to get it dated as well. And both of those came back at greater than 50,000 years. So it's like, wow, this is a really old polar bear just sitting just above the high tide line on the beach. And so then I started looking and no ancient polar bear skulls have ever been found. There's one old polar bear bone from Svalbard, part of a jawbone, and a couple polar bear bone fragments from Norway

that are maybe around 100,000 years. And then there's our polar bear skull. Of course, it wasn't in any kind of stratigraphic context. So all we could say is it's older than radiocarbon age. Do you think it had been moved a lot over the time? No, because it was in such good condition, it couldn't have been reworked. And so we actually ended up, we've collaborated with Beth Shapiro on a bunch of ancient DNA. And so we said to Beth, hey, we got this old polar bear skull. Are you interested? And she said, of course.

And so we sent her a sample. And actually last night we were just reviewing this manuscript that's in review to be published on the DNA of this polar bear. What all can you tell about it? Are we allowed to say anything? Oh, come on. Well, first off, it's a female. Okay. And it's in the skulls.

We named her Bruno. Yeah. It should be Brunella, but it's Bruno. But it's in incredibly good shape. So it hasn't been battered. So we think it was probably safely stored in permafrost for 90,000 plus years. I got it. Yeah.

But the basic polar bear story, you got to get Beth to talk about this. But you'll be really interested because it has a lot to do with Southeast Alaska and the ABC bears. So Admiral T. Baranoff and Chichagoff. Uh-huh. So if you, you've,

did you hear all this stuff from her about the polar bear genes? I've heard it from other folks, but just remind us like, like, uh, polar bears seem to be closely related to brown bears from the ABCs. Yeah. And they're not, and, and are a younger species than brown bears.

The split went that way rather than the other way. I might be screwing this all up. Well, everybody else is confused about it too. Okay. But what seems to have happened was whenever there's a warm time in the Arctic, we start losing sea ice, like what's going on right now. So the polar bears are kind of shit out of luck. So they tend to come on shore. And when they come on shore, they encounter brown bears. And for some reason, female polar bears kind of like male brown bears. So there seems to

be brown bear genes go into the polar bear population via male brown bears. So there seems to be brown bear genes go into the polar bear population via male brown bears breeding with female polar bears. So then during cold times, so picture the height of a glaciation, it's super cold. The Arctic is frozen. There's no leads, okay? So if you're a hyper predator like a polar bear and you're hunting seals, you're kind of out of luck because you need a place for the seals to come up, right? So the polar bear population— When you're saying a lead, you mean like cracks in the ice, openings in the ice? Yeah. So the polar bear populations tend to move south.

So during the last glacial maximum, like 20,000 years ago, there were polar bears off the coast of Ireland, and they were all the way down in the southeast Alaska. Oh, huh. Yeah. So what we used to think happened then, this was like last year, this is what we thought happened was. Wait. It's amazing how quickly shit about a long time ago changes. Yeah.

So when the glaciers started to retreat about 18,000 years ago, polar bears got stranded in southeast Alaska. Okay. So you can picture the sea ice is retreating back across the Gulf and then up the Bering Strait. So you got these poor polar bears and they're like stranded on these islands. And then what we think happened, we thought last year would happen, brown bears invaded from like Yellowstone and down here, south of the ice sheet. And they came in and they met these beautiful female polar bears and they mated. And then we had polar bear mitochondrial DNA because that's inherited from the females. It's now in the DNA of these brown bears around, you know, on Prince of Wales Island and so forth.

Okay. So there's this interbreeding. But it turns out from the old Svalbard mandible that Pam mentioned and this – from Bruno, this new bear, it's much more complicated. And there's been multiple hybridizations between these two bear species. And that's continuing today, right? Yeah. Yeah, today it's kind of confusing because you read about like in Churchill where there's brown bears and polar bears are mating. But apparently there's only one female polar bear that's actually produced fertile offspring from those crosses. She's had like eight cubs.

She's had eight cross cubs? They were all sexually viable? Well, supposedly, yeah. But, I mean, who really knows because they're all wandering around everywhere. She's had eight cross cubs They were all sexually viable Well supposedly yeah But I mean who really knows Because they're all wandering around everywhere Which is where the name Groler bear comes from I didn't know that

But it's only Groler Male grizzly bear Oh yeah People screwing it up But the larger thing that's interesting though Is that we used to think that species were just like unique, right? Yeah. And they'd be like a black bear and a polar bear and a brown bear. But that's not true at all.

We're finding more and more species. And bears are not alone in this. Ravens are another group that's, this is becoming more and more apparent, is the species aren't like isolated little islands. There's often a lot of hybridization going on. And this has been really important in their evolution. And if you want to be hopeful about something in a time like this,

where the climate is changing really rapidly and we have all these ecosystems moving around. This is the perfect time for that. So in some ways, we see a lot of extinction, but we also see a lot of new things happening evolutionarily. Yeah, we were just talking about mule deer moving into Alaska. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. So maybe we'll get mule deer and caribou hybridizing. Whoa. Right. So maybe we'll get mule deer and caribou hybridizing. Phil, think of a good name for a mule deer caribou hybrid as you're sitting there. A mule-de-boo. Hey, before we move on, I have a question, one more question about the Mesa site. You were saying that they were often sitting up there repairing their points. How do you know that they were repairing and not just making new ones? Again, you got to talk to the archaeologist, but-

He won't come on the show. He will. You just got to go to him. Because around these little halves, okay, there are all these broken points, okay? So we know that they were once mounted. They have these little foreshafts. We're talking about not bows and arrows. We're talking about spear throwers here. So you had a little foreshaft that went on a longer thing, it had

feathers on the end, and then you're throwing it with an atlatl. So they often break. And so little hares, broken points, and then a lot of flakes from making new points or repairing the old ones. And it's really funny, if you look at some of the Mesa points or Folsom points, you'll see that they have a beautiful base and they go up and then they had the shoulder. And the shoulder is where the point broke. And then the guys were like, oh, hell, I can fix this. And they just sharpen it up again.

At the time that I was up at the Mesa site, I do want to move away from archaeology and get into you guys' specialty, which is paleontology, right? That's fair. But a last archaeology point here. When I was up there, the enthusiasm around the site was that there was a lot of people talking about in that community, people talking about like pre-clovis so at that time for for many decades i think it was held that like clovis was this initial human culture and then uh there was this theory that there had to have been like clovis had to have arisen from something right there had to have been a culture that created clovis so people were excited about that and if i remember right back then a possible explanation for the mesa site

was that these people that were occupying that site and hunting there had possibly hadn't come like their direct ancestors in a few generations hadn't arrived from siberia but had maybe backfilled they had been they were coming from the south and sort of recolonizing the north which their very distant ancestors might have passed through is that still a fashionable notion or don't you track the changing theories that much? Yeah, no. What did Meltzer say? I can't remember.

I asked him about it too. I don't know. Do you remember what Meltzer said about that? Do you know what he got to hold those Folsom skulls when we visited Meltzer? Yeah. Dan and Meltzer were in grad school together, so. You guys still friends or are you like rivals? I'm not an archaeologist yet.

I've worked with Dave at the Folsom site. Oh, you did the Folsom site? Well, I was doing the geomorph around the Folsom site. Oh, man. Yeah. That was a great place. More jealousy kicking in, Steve? Oh, yeah.

He's like the Forrest Gump archaeologist. That's a great place. More jealousy kicking in, Steve? Oh, yeah. He's like the, he's like Forrest Gump. Rock star. Forrest Gump archaeologist. He's just like. If you've never been to the Folsom site, you got to go there because it's an amazing, amazing place. But, yeah, so that's just the backwash hypothesis is what you're talking about. Oh, that was the name. I don't remember that name.

Mike doesn't like this. So that's why we're hesitating. Tony Baker was big into it. Was he? But he was an enthusiast. Yeah. A lot of people are big into it. Because it's looking now, and you guys know this from talking to Dave Meltzer, is that first dispersal of humans into the new world was probably along the northwest coast.

So probably down through southeast Alaska. And so then Clovis took off probably as people broke in from the coast into the interior kind of habitat. And bison by that time would have ranged all the way up through the ice-free corridor up into the Yukon and onto the north slope. And so it would have been probably good hunting. So they could well have spread back to the north. And that's why Mesa points look so much like Folsom points is because they originated from the lower 48, those people. But you're like on the edge of – there's still a lot of archaeological controversy about this.

Shouldn't listen to us. We're not archaeologists. I'm going to swing us into paleontology. Watch how smoothly I do it. Okay. Okay. Those fellers sitting on top of the Mesa site, what were they seeing? You put in a good four-day hunt on the Mesa site.

Like what walks past? And had they been there a thousand years earlier would it have looked way different in terms of what would have walked past um it could have the thing is you probably could have sat there for a couple days and not seen anything walk past that's one thing that i think people think Alaska is this wilderness just crawling with animals. And even back then, there were all these megafauna and the carrying capacity of the land probably wasn't all that huge. So that's why it was important to have a strategic lookout. And since there are no trees, you could see a long way. So especially if it happened to be a mammoth, you could probably spot it way off in the distance.

And so like these animals aren't like they're not living in a valley like they're constantly traveling as like for their food needs or reproduction or migration or it it's not clear how far they would have traveled. Basically, an animal wants to travel as little as possible because moving uses up energy, and it just depends on what food resources are available to you. But they probably had some seasonal movements between winter and summer feeding grounds, and just like most caribou populations in the north are migratory, and some of them travel a thousand kilometers, some of them travel 50 kilometers. So it really depends on their habitat. But that said, the herbivores that could have been seen from the Mesa site would have included caribou and muskoxen, which still exist on the North Slope today. bison and horses. And then if they had really sharp eyes,

they could have also seen bears, wolves, and there were lions running around up there. And not a lot of them, but they could have seen those animals as well. What was the lion like? Big. A little bit. Like a mountain lion? No.

Like an African lion. A little bit bigger than any living lion. Whoa. And they're thought because of the lack of a mane. And we know the lack of a mane from the cave paintings in Europe, that they were probably not living in prides. They were probably much smaller social groups because that's what the main is for is the boss around other big lions. So, but one of the interesting things we found with our bone collections on the North Slope is that the horses are the main large animal as the Ice Age.

Most numerous. Yeah, really. Like they would outnumber caribou. Back then. Probably, yeah. How many kinds of horses? Just one. Okay.

In the late part of the Ice Age. They were more earlier. What did it look like? It looked kind of like, have you ever seen pictures of the little ponies from Yakutsk? Yep. Okay. And they have this incredibly long hair. I know it only because my daughter has like an encyclopedia of horses.

Yeah. Okay. So picture kind of a large, fat Shetland pony with really, really long fur. Like real sturdy. Very sturdy. And these little tiny holes like this big, which immediately tells you something about the landscape, right? Because there wasn't all that tussocks and peat up there. Yeah, big feet you would think, you would associate larger feet would always be the preferable foot for anything to do with Alaska.

Yeah. We can talk about that when we talk about why they're not there anymore. But the thing about that Dan started to allude to is the horses and lions when we compiled this huge collection of all these bones, the

lion bones that we had dated track and number the horse bones. So our theory is that lions specialized in hunting horses. Oh, and as horses went down, lion numbers went down. Yeah. Yeah.

And that would make sense, especially if they were solitary or small groups, like a horse would be much easier prey than say a mammoth or even a bison with horns and it appears that there were lots of horses so it would have been easier to find a horse to munch on if you were a lion Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps,points and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can 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 membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Can you guys explain a little bit about, you allude to your bone collection. Explain a little bit about how you built up a bone collection. The first thing that we should say is collecting these bones, it was all on federal property.

And we did it either while we were working for the Bureau of Land Management or when we had a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to collect these bones. And all the bones are in the University of Alaska Museum Earth Sciences. Yeah, you're not hoarding for your own shadow box. No, we don't have our walls adorned with skulls and tusks. It's all federal property and it's all, there's a database you can access online and all the bones are listed in there. And you're probably, and I'm guessing very meticulous about where it came from. What was the context? Yeah.

I have all that information yeah on my computer but um yeah so so that's the first thing that we collected these bones and it's it's a federal crime to go onto federal property and collect archaeological or paleontological specimens uh you can end up in jail or with a big find. Well, that's if it's fossilized, right? Well, no, it doesn't have to be fossilized because many of these bones that we find, they've been stored in a deep freezer in the Arctic for thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, but how do they spell it out? They're not fossilized.

But you can pick up a shed antler from a caribou. Right, but if you found a mammoth bone, that would be regarded as paleontological, even if it just came out of tundra and looked like a fresh bone. Gotcha. Even if it had meat on it, it still, so. Yeah, the key thing

is the paleontological aspect. In other words, how old the thing is. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and there's been a couple of incidents where professional, like, river guides

have collected. Oh, I know this story. Yeah, okay, so we don't need to go into that. But if you could tell the story, I would love, I never knew enough detail to tell the story.

Can I tell you a version I've heard? Is that uncomfortable? Are you sure you want to put this on your podcast? Well, no, but kind of. Okay, yeah, sure. You know this lady, huh? No. Oh.

No. But let me tell you a version I heard. I heard that there was a gentleman in the lower 48 who had a living room display. Am I right? Had a living room display of a nice mammoth tusk. And someone got to wondering, how the hell did he get a mammoth tusk? And that led to an investigation. Yeah, the story I heard was somehow a photograph got on a website, and it was like, come on my river-guided tour,

and you might be able to find things like this. And then there was some photograph floating around of the guy's living room. So that was how the two were connected. But it's so ironic. I still remember going to this pilot's house in Kotzebue once. And I was like, hey, do you ever find any bones? And he goes, come on in. I'll show you. And the guy had this incredible collection of mainly bison, but also bear and mammoth.

And I was like, what are you going to do with this? And he goes, don't tell anybody I have it. Yeah. So there's a lot of this stuff floating around. It is legal if it is from your mining claim. Yeah. Isn't there also something where native Alaskans are allowed to take those things and keep them? Or am I wrong about that? I think if it's on their private property.

Oh, okay. So it's like their own allotment or their native corporation. Tribal lands. Yeah. And it is. But anyway, it's a sensitive thing. And, you know, you really got to be careful because there's – what shocked me about this River Guide incident was that Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Interior, actually has a task force whose job it is to investigate these things and go after people. And it was like, holy cow.

They have undercover agents. Yeah. It's like scarring online sales and stuff of yeah yeah i think it'd be important to talk about why we have these laws well yeah the most probably the the strongest uh emotions about this come from the archaeologists because they go do not pick up an arrowhead i've gotten i've gotten in huge trouble just picking up something go hey look at this thing where'd you get that? Put that down. Because you're taking it out of context.

And so, therefore, they go out and they're trying to figure out something about some archaeological site. You've been messing with the data. It'd be like if someone messed up a crime scene almost. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's a really good analogy. So, the same with these bones.

A bone that's out of context that you don't know somebody's uncle found it, you know, like who knows where. And it's pretty much useless scientifically. And it's just going to sit in somebody's, you know, coffee table and decay and then somebody will throw it away. So it's like gone. So best thing is if you ever run across one of these things, even like an arrowhead, just take a photograph of it. And then call up your friendly archaeologist and say, hey, I found this amazing point. It's going to change our history of the world. I just think it's pretty interesting that at some point in our recent past, we, you know, thought to think that far ahead that, hey, this stuff is so important that we should

make like federal rules and laws, you know, to protect it. Like, it seems like a lot of foresight for, I don't know, sometimes it doesn't seem like we have that. Yeah, because, you know, there are all those museums that have human archaeological remains and now they're busy repatriating remains

to the groups they came from. Oh yeah, just going and digging up people's graveyards and hauling away the remains of their ancestors. 150 years ago, people just ransacked archaeological sites. I was reading a thing recently about the, there was a thing in the Atlantic about people working on the coastal passage of early humans and they were talking about you remember when we went spearfishing with greg

and alex out the channel islands they're talking about in the the native peoples on the channel islands them remembering people digging their great the graveyards of their ancestors they remember archaeologists digging those graveyards complaining about the stench of rotting carcasses wow digging active yeah yeah and it what it got into was it got into a uh why there's a great reluctance on the part of some native peoples to participate in the archaeological process scar in their mind is like like like literally the bones of their grandfathers being hauled off yeah like literally the bones of their grandf being hauled off by. Yeah. Like literally the bones of their grandfather's being dug up by archaeologists and hauled away to a museum.

Yeah. Oh. So back to how you make a bone collection the right way. Okay. So yeah. So you covered your ass. So. It's a legit bone collection and it's not in your living room.

So we fly into a place like Ivatuck and then put all our stuff on a helicopter and get flown out. And we say, oh, that looks good. And the helicopter. And what is all your stuff? So if it's just the two of us, we have one inflatable canoe. We have a sleeping tent and a cook tent. Some years we carry it in an electric fence for bears and then just a little camp stove and food. Freeze dry food?

No. So you guys pack, not actual food, but you pack food. Yeah. Do a little fishing on the way when you're floating? Occasionally. Yeah, usually we don't because of the bears. It just complicates things having to deal with that. But we usually would eat until Dan couldn't eat couscous anymore, couscous, polenta, rice.

So we're usually out for three weeks or so. So three-week river trips. Yeah. I mean, it's actually kind of boring. You float along, and then she says, oh, well, there's a good gravel bar. So she gets off, and she walks the gravel bar, and I pedal the canoe upwind to the other end of the gravel bar and pick her up. And then she usually shows up with a bunch of bone fragments. We lay them down in the sand, and we look through them and go, well, that's interesting.

That's not interesting. That's well-preserved. That's not well-preserved. And if they're not collectible, we just throw them back in the river. So they never leave the place where they were. Yeah. So we rarely, I mean, we probably collect like 1% of the

bones that we actually encounter. On a good day, how many bones do you find doing a trip like that? Oh, on a really good day, it's interesting because there's a sort of a sorting process that the river does with bones. And so there are certain places and gravel bars that kind of accumulate bones. And so you could, on one gravel bar, find maybe five tibios or humerus or femurs from different species. But on a really good day, I would guess we might end up collecting 50 bones. And most commonly you'd find long bones like the leg and arm bones and foot bones.

And then, of course, a mammoth bone is a lot more significant than a little caribou bone. And then skulls are pretty exciting when you find skulls. We, you know, there's a lot of, mammoths are big animals, right? So their bones just blow up sort of. So there's a lot of mammoth material. And tusks are big and they're well preserved, but we never collect tusk anymore. You don't? No.

So if you find a tusk, you kind of go, that's cool. And then you put it back in the river. Just leave it laying. Just leave it laying. But we have collected. Hold on. Do you throw it out in a deep hole? Or do you just leave it laying where you found it? Usually we put it back in the water because it's easier on them and they'll get re-buried that way.

But what I was going to say was. Steve's just, I've told this story a hundred times, but when I was doing that stuff with cunts, and they'd find those sweet spear points, and then photograph them, draw them, they showed me how they draw them,

like they sketch them, photograph, and then just stick them right back in the moss, man. It was like, it took every, like all of my willpower, all of my willpower to walk away.

I was like, I'd be like, I'm going to sneak back here in the dark. But it never got dark. We have collected some big tusks. Yeah, one of the tusks we collected, I don't know if you saw this article that Matt Willer was the first author on that came out. Just recently. Yeah, this year. Oh, yeah. No, we were hot on that article.

The wandering mammoth thing. Oh, yeah, man. So this was a tusk that we found. You guys found that tusk? Yeah. So this is another Mike Cunn story. So Mike said, he said, well, you guys go out to the eastern part of the dune field, which is kind of the northern part of the NPRA. So we were flying around and we saw this gigantic mammoth tusk.

Hold on, back up. You're bone hunting from the air or you're flying to a river to float it. Well, we were kind of doing both. It's a land that's so packed full of good stuff that you can just fly over and pick it out with the naked eye. The tusk was so big that you could see it from

the helicopter at about 500 feet. So we'd land and it's like, what is it doing? It's just sitting on the side of the river. So we're like looking at this thing and go, no, this is not worth anything. It's a bull tusk. It's a huge diameter. It's probably eight feet along the arc, but it's all

just laying out. Just laying there. Why would you say it's not worth anything already? Was it like a beam of sunlight shining through on us? Do you gather that it's worth a lot to the folks in this room? Well, it seems like there is a lot of interest here, yeah. So we told Mike and he goes, well, what was your question, Johnny? You were being facetious or serious that you're seeing something like this and you go, eh. It wasn't well enough preserved.

It was really weathered. But wait, we're going to get to what happens when you find a really well preserved one. So we go back and Mike goes, well, I want to see this thing. So he comes out with a shovel and sure enough, he finds the pear. He finds the other one. So then we have this elaborate. Where was the other one? It was in the creek.

It was like right there. Because they're really big, so the creek's not able to move it very far. So we have these these ridiculous photographs of Mike posing with these two enormous mammoth tusks. I think he used it for his Christmas card

or some damn thing. How much would something like that weigh? Like I said Oh we weighed it. Yeah we brought this bathroom scale out there with us to weigh it.

They were like 140 pounds each. Holy shit. Oh. So can you imagine this bull mammoth is carrying this weight? Okay, so we're there and it's like, I'm like, this is a total waste of time, you know. So we start looking around and we find another tusk and it's sticking out of the gravel. So we start digging around and we come up with the skull.

Two beautiful tusks. They're exquisitely preserved. Also a bull. So, they're really big diameter at the base, but not so long. They must have died in a fight. Well, this was a little bit upstream. Oh, okay. So, we brought this back here.

Carbondated it and it was very young, relatively young. It was like 18 19 000 and that's the one it was so well preserved that we decided to section that one and do the um the annual growth ring yeah tell the whole damn story now about how they fit together like ice cream cones and all that stuff yeah well so hey he said it so that the tusks grow kind of in a conical, it's like a stack of ice cream cones. Okay. And so the hardest thing about this whole analysis was we have this machinist friend, and it was how are we going to cut this thing down the axis?

And it's cut this kind of slow helical bend to it. So that took us eight, it took eight people, eight hours with a bandsaw to cut the thing. And it was, yeah, it was incredibly complicated, but we ended up sectioning it in two and hopefully one half is going to show up in the museum at some point. And so then you could see the little growth rings.

You have to sand it way down. Yeah. So then it's polished and then it can be analyzed for these. And once it's polished, you can see the growth rings. Yeah. Yeah. So then from that, it was apparent the thing was about, what, 35 years old or so. He wasn't very old.

Yeah, a young man. And what was their lifespan? Assuming they, you know. How old are you, Corinne? 38. Oh. Yeah. Corinne's older than me. was their lifespan uh assuming they you know how old you kren oh yeah like if they reached old age it's it's not it's like elephants yeah so it's probably 60 to 80 years okay somewhere like that so he wasn't all that old he was kind of middle-aged crime yeah and he's middle-aged at 35. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Sorry.

So when Matt Wilder did the strontium isotopes and the nitrogen isotopes on this thing, he put together this scheme where he could track where- You got to explain that, about how he went around gathering up all those rodent teeth and stuff. Yeah. So it's actually more to it than that because there was a grad student before who started this thing working on salmon because you can trace where the salmon are coming from, from the strontium in the water from their streams. Strontium is what's It's a stable isotope, and it's the same as true of carbon, and that's what radiocarbon dating is based on, these stable isotopes that can break down over time. Yeah, so Alaska has this really diverse geology, and it varies in the amount of the strontium, this rare earth element. So by looking at the amount of strontium in different years of the mammoth's test, he was able to figure out, well, where did that mammoth probably live during that year of his life? And if you looked at like a mouse that has a very small home range,

it would just all be consistent. It would all be strontium value. Because he wasn't ranging across different zones with different strontium levels exactly yeah so from that um they were able to put together where this animal probably ranged and we think it probably was born somewhere down um kind of in the lower yukon and then wandered around up past fairbanks and then later in life came back, crossed up the Cuyahoga, went across the Brooks Range, ended up on the North Slope where we found it. And the interesting thing from the nitrogen isotopes, it looks like the thing probably starved to death because when you begin to starve to death, you begin to break down your

muscles and they have a characteristic nitrogen isotope ratio. So you're like eating yourself. And so we think the thing starved to death. And your question is, well, why would a 35-year-old middle-aged bull mammoth starve to death? I don't know. Why do animals die? But we never found any of his leg bones. We dug and dug and we never found any of his leg bones. We dug and dug

and we never found any, so we don't know. So we didn't find the rest of his skeleton to know, see if he had any injuries that were obvious or anything. Yeah, you could see why a legless mammoth wouldn't live to old age, for sure. I can jump

to that one. That might be a paper for you. Obviously. He had no legs. Do you guys ever find stuff that there's a concern for preservation? Like it's going to like somehow deteriorate if you don't get it like handled or treated in some way well we have um occasionally found pleistocene arrow bones still with soft tissue and bison bob the um skeleton we found had a lot of soft tissue and so obviously that has to be frozen or it would just rot away yeah Tell the story of Bison Bob.

But like what you were doing when you found it. So Bison Bob, we were paddling down the river. We'd actually just paddled through a hailstorm and we had a favorite campsite a little bit down river. So we were looking forward to getting to our campsite. So you've been on one river enough to, you'll do one river more than once. Oh, we've been doing them for 20 years.

So every bend has a name and we have our favorite. Why are you doing the same rivers over and over again? High water, right? There's a couple of things. First of all, there are not many rivers that have the right characteristics to preserve bone. It has to be a fairly slow river with fine sediments. If it's a bouldery river that's really fast, any bones that get incorporated in the river get broken up. And also, going to the same places over and over again for 20 years, you really get

to know and understand the system in a way that you can't if you just bop in a couple times over a space of a few years. And to me, that's one of the really important lessons of this research we've been doing is having these long-term data sets and really getting to know the area. To me, it's really helped us understand how the system functions and be able to better put together the information we put in papers about how the animals live. So anyways. What was the first time you go down a river?

Is it way better pickings than the second time? Or is new stuff constantly churning up there? Every year is different. And that's when people say, don't you get bored? And you never get bored because every year is different. And it might be related to how much of a spring flood there was or, you know, if some bank got cut away. And how high the river is, how clear the water is. One year, it seemed like we drug our canoe almost the whole way because the water was so low, but it was really clear. And so we were finding bones in the bottom of the river channel that we never would have seen.

Okay. And you'd floated over a bunch of times. Yeah. And so every year it's like a clean slate. Do you ever got to get into your swimsuit and go down there and swim down and grab something. Well, not a swimsuit, but I sent a picture somewhere of Dan in a dry suit with flippers and a mask. And my niece was with us and she had a wetsuit and they did try snorkeling to look in the bottom of the river, but my niece, when she came up with us, often would just walk in the river and find stuff or you feel stuff with your feet. So that snorkel trick didn't work good for you?

No, it didn't work well at all. Visibility? Let's just leave it at that. It's a great photo, though. Was it a personal comfort thing or a visibility thing? Both, actually. The river's really cold, so after about an hour of flopping around in there,

and then, you know, it's little things like, you know, when you have flippers on, you've got to walk backwards to get out, and then you fall over, and everybody's laughing at you. And you're just not finding much. And the dry suit has big bubbles of air in it. Yeah, so you kind of look like a hunchback in Notre Dame. And you can't dive down.

Yeah, it just goes on and on. So no, that's not recommended. Now, even though you've, and I understand going back to the same place 20 years in a row, and I feel like the same way about certain places I like to go hunting, you know, and just the intimacy that you gain after just. Just being there over and over and over. But at the same time, we all pore over maps all the time looking for like the next great spot. So do you do that also and kind of look at the gradients of certain rivers

and go, man, that one could be the honey hole? And that was the advantage of working with Mike and BLM is having the helicopter. And that's like when we found the wandering mammoth, we had the opportunity to fly around to different places. And so over the course of the decades, we did check out a lot of other places. But unless you have a helicopter, most of those places, you just can't get there. Yeah. Mike's annual budget for those helicopters,

when you were there, it was over a million dollars a year. There were some summers we had three aircraft. And so we could literally just look at a map like you were suggesting and just, hey, we want to go check out this river. And he said, sure, go. And it'd be like, I don't know, 20 grand. We'd blow in an afternoon flying around. And sometimes it panned out and sometimes it didn't. Now we're really hobbled because now it costs us, if we drive to Coldfoot, okay, the southern edge of the Brooks Range, it costs us $10,000 to charter a beaver

for a drop-off and a pickup. So that means we only get one river and we only have one reach of that river that we can float. Where in the old days, before Mike retired and he was the emperor of the Arctic, we could get like 10 times more done in a little field season. So Bob the bison. So. Hailstorm. So, Hailstorm, we're paddling, we're hoping to get to Cottonwood Bluff campsite. But as we paddle, we're always looking and there's something up there on the riverbank. And then we always try and guess ahead what it is.

It's a bison. No, it's a musk oxen. So, we got to it and it was a bison skull kind of partially buried right at the river level upside down. And we could see one horn and part of a mandible. And so we stopped. And for some reason, skulls are the most exciting bones to find. And so we dug it out carefully. Let me stop you real quick.

When you see a bison skull, you know, just based on what we understand about the timeline there, you know it's at least what years old? 12,000. 12,000. Okay. So just the fact that you laid eyes on it, and it turned out to be a complete skull with the mandible there and one horn sheath. The other side just had a horn core, but it was in immaculate condition. So we dug it out, and we put it in the water to kind of rinse it off and all this gunk came out of the eye orbit like it was the rotten eyeball oh really and so we were working kind of focused on the skull and then

as we were cleaning it up looked around and just a little bit up the bank, oh, there's a few more bones. And, oh, look, that's a bison metatarsal, like a kind of wrist or ankle bone. Was there an odor of, like, rotten eater? Not really with the skull. No? The skull also had a lot of the brain was still in there. So that all dribbled out into the river.

It was pretty disgusting, this kind of white, fatty stuff. Oh, yeah. I've dealt with that inside. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So we saw these bones close by, and then, you know, we started looking farther and farther up the bluff,

and there were more and more bones. And we go, wow, there's a lot here. But then it was getting late. So we put the skull in the canoe and went and camped. And the next day went back, it was just like a hundred yards back up river and went up the bluff about 30 feet and we could find bones sticking out of the bluff. It's very fine, sandy sediment. And so we started retrieving bones. But then a lot of the bluff was still frozen and the bones were frozen in. So we had this one little bucket and one of us would go down to the river and fill the bucket up and carry it up and pour it over.

It took three days, I think, to get all the bones out. And as we went farther into the bluff, that's when we started to find hair and tissue. And like the front legs, when we excavated them, the bones were still articulated, attached to each other. You know, the humerus and the radius ulna were attached. And we found, oh, a bunch of the vertebrae from the back were still all articulated. But the neatest thing were actually the hooves because it was a big bison. It was a bull, and Dale Guthrie thought it was probably 12 years old.

Mature bull. Very mature bull. And they're very tall. Tall and you know how buffalo are kind of narrow if you look at them from the front or from the back? So like that, but kind of on steroids, so even taller. But with these dainty little hooves. So the hooves were like, I don't know, something like that.

No. Like the size of a... Like little high heels. And it still had the sheaths, the hoof sheaths were still attached. I mean, just so our listeners get a better idea, you're showing me like four inches across? Yeah. Like a little lemon kind of. So like almost smaller than like a caribou's hoof.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So again, we're talking running on hard surfaces. They're not running on tundra. Like grassy plains kind of stuff. Yeah. They're not running on tundra. Like grassy plains kind of stuff. And so if you look on the bottom of the hoof sheath, it still had the little scratches where he'd run over rocks and stuff. Really?

But it looked like it was from an animal that had died like three weeks ago. It was so fresh. And we found three hoof sheaths. And then we also found sediments. We thawed out and came off. There was this little point sticking out. And eventually that became the other horn sheath. Oh, really? And so we eventually found the only really big bone we were missing was one scapula,

and then there were some of the little wrist and ankle bones. But we found all the little vertebrae from the tail that go down to these tiny little things, like half inch in diameter. So what does your canoe look like when you have a find like this? Well, we ferried. What does your canoe look like when you have a find like this? We made numerous trips back to camp, and we actually had a tarp that we spread them out on. But then this was the other lucky thing about Mike. We did have a satellite phone, so we called up and said, hey, Mike, we've got this bison skeleton, and it's actually starting to smell. And there's flies coming around and we're

worried that some bear's gonna come and so he sent the helicopter over and we uh flew it back to ivatuck and then flew it to fairbanks and stuck it in a freezer and what were you able to find out about that animal um and why do you think it was so well like how did it get so well preserved yeah that and if you can't avoid you're explaining that is also explain how an animal of that size could just die out there somewhere and not get scavenged well and then can i ask a follow-up no i'm still i'm still stuck on the on the eyeball socket and the brain in there is that if there's's any soft tissue from that creature that would be worth saving, that would give you information you couldn't find from hard tissue bone.

I guess from the hair you can do various isotopic analyses. We haven't done anything with any of the soft tissue. It's all frozen. But what was Yanis' question? Oh, just how an animal. Yeah, why didn't something eat it? Well, one theory that we came up with is along that stretch of river, there's a lot of quicksand.

Because sometimes you're walking along dragging the canoe or something, and all of a sudden you go and get sucked in. And so this is another thing about bison with small feet. They'd be really vulnerable to quicksand going in. And so one theory is because because he was a bull in his prime, that he got stuck in quicksand and couldn't get out. And so he might have died actually in the river, in which case he wouldn't have been heavily scavenged because come winter, he would have just gotten buried over by the river sediments, frozen in. And then we think because the sediments that we actually found his skeleton in were about 11,000 years old. So probably he died over 40,000 years ago and was just interred in these sediments. And then at some point, the river moved away from

where he was, and then it moved back, exposed him. He toppled down the bluff a little and got reburied. And then if we hadn't come along and found him, he would have toppled into the river again. But by then, the bones would have gotten dispersed more and more and because we went back to that section twice more that summer to see if we could find anything else and the whole face of the bluff had just collapsed so if we hadn't been there when we'd been there you never would have known he was totally serendipitous that we found him. Do you feel like the permafrost thawing out thing, is it a race against time, finding super well-preserved specimens like that?

Have you seen evidence of the permafrost thawing being a real thing? You know, like the lion cubs with hair on them and the wolf pups and all that. You mean is it increasing? Yeah, yeah. Like do you see? Yeah, so you think it would be, right?

I mean, there's global warming, mean annual temperature of Alaska is going up significantly. But what's happening is on the ground, there's so much insulation from the overlying vegetation that we're not seeing yet widespread thermocarcin, so melting and thawing. So I don't think thawing is accelerating. This is why we're working along these rivers because the river is doing the thawing for you. And it's done the same thing for, you know, 100,000 years. Just as it meanders across the.

Yeah, just goes back and forth. The meanders move back and forth over time. So it's not like the whole place is thawing and we're not in a race to save resources. Because you hear that. Well, why do you hear that all the time though? I feel like it's like a, like, it's like a Nat Geo. Well, I'm not going to get that funding. It's like a Nat Geo talking point that it's like everything's coming out.

It's a race against the clock. On the north coast of Alaska, the rate of coastal erosion is definitely increasing. And that also, I think, has to do with less sea ice and forming, which protects the coastline. So when there are storms, it's causing more erosion. Also, I think we're also hearing, you know, the Russians are really in the mammoth tusk hunting now. So you kind of get the impression that, oh, yeah, they're all coming out of the permafrost now. They're everywhere in Siberia, but they're not. I mean, they know exactly where to go,

and they're using, like, steam hoses, and, you know, they're mining for mammoth tusk. Oh, really? Yeah, so it's not like the whole Arctic is melting down now. It's happening in specific places, like Pam said, like the coastal zones. But a lot of the North Slope interior is not yet feeling the big thaw, but it'll happen. It's a bigger issue in places like interior Alaska where the permafrost is much warmer, like Fairbanks.

Oh, it's more borderline. Yeah, definitely more borderline. It doesn't take that much to melt the permafrost if the permafrost is only 31 degrees. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

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team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. When I was with Mike Cunz, I think I even put this in the thing I wrote.

I was saying to Mike, I said, what's the coolest thing you could find? And to quote him, he said, I'd be flying along in my helicopter and there'd be a fucking hand

sticking out of the ground yeah when you're drifting along um yeah we're always looking that you would find that you would find remains and it would be that here's uh here's some person from 25,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, whatever the hell. And it'd rewrite all understanding. Yeah, it'd be fully clothed, would have all the tools. That's what Mike pointed out too. It would be the whole. The map to Teodelfuego, right?

Yeah, exactly. That when Mike expounded on it. And he was, we were having, you know, I don't mean to make him seem uncouth but i mean he was we were just kind of musing around the table and it would be that there would be like a family group of people i mean because of the permafrost it'd be all the things you never find yeah the clothes the clothing yeah what was in their bag well that's one how their tent like how their shelters were constructed, whatever. Just be like that.

Like the bison bob, the bison bob of a nomadic, ice age hunting group. That's one reason Mike flew us up there was he figured if I got these poor people out there looking for bones and if they see a human bone, then they'll call me. So we were like, you know, looking for him. So that was part of our mission. Find something unusual, call him. He'll come fly in. He'll find that little hand sticking up.

And then he'll say, you guys go back to camp. I'll take care of this. I'll take it from here, boys. Go away. It's an issue of numbers. I said earlier that we find lots of the herbivores. There are a lot more herbivores. And then you find many fewer carnivore bones.

And then humans, there were probably even fewer humans than there were carnivores running around up there. So the chances of stumbling upon the family that got stuck in quicksand in the river is really slim. But man, like, it'll probably never, who knows? But it has to be there. But we, I mean, we were always looking. There has to be a group of, you know, Ice Age hunters that, whatever, a landslide. Or I kept looking just for, you know, the clumsy guy who dropped his toolkit somewhere. Yeah.

You can find the whole little assemblage or. So have you met this guy named Eski Willerslev? Nope. I remember that. He's Danish and he's a trip. But he's one of the DNA guys, and he's in Copenhagen. He's a colleague of Dave Meltzer's. Okay.

So archaeology is kind of moving on now, getting away from arrowheads and finding people buried in mud. And they're getting into like environmental DNA. So DNA of people that's preserved in sediment. And that's really the new horizon. And I think if Esky had his way, he would come up to Alaska and other parts of North America and take a bunch of lake cores and try to find a lake where people had camped on the beach.

And then they'd like, you know, peed in the water or, you know, just the refuge had drained into the water. And we'd pick up the ancient DNA preserved in these lake sediments. Which would be like final, like dead end resting places for it. Yeah. And that would be fairly conclusive. You know, then you could date the lake sediment and you could say, oh, well, look, there were people there 15,000 years ago or something. That's kind of the view.

What if he had his way? How can he not have his way? Money. It's all just, I mean, that'd be, it's, it would be a very expensive project, but we'll see what happens. I think for you. Because he'd want to do hundreds of sites. Yeah.

You'd have to do, it'd be like looking for a needle in a haystack because you'd have to find a lake where people camped and then there'd have to be enough human DNA excreted into the lake water to show up in the lake sediment. So it's not a sure thing at all. And if it's on a hillside, there's no way it's going to still be there. Right. That's the whole geologically stable site thing. Is that because they feel like there's no more surprises with physical artifacts or physical tissue? And you're looking for these little needles and haystacks. And the preservation thing, like 0.1 of 1% of the sites would ever be preserved. And then you'd have to find it. So it actually might be more efficient to go with. The lake study with the DNA.

Yeah. And also, if you were to find human remains, there are all these ethical and political questions about what kind of sampling you can do. Oh, you'd be wading into a nightmare, man. So getting the environmental DNA would be a lot more straightforward than an actual, although it would be really exciting to find old human remains. Has anyone ever pulled animal DNA off an ancient arrowhead? Yeah. It was first done with proteins from blood, you know, in the little kind of crevices of projectile points.

And a lot of people didn't really believe that. They were like, well, how do we know that that animal protein is actually that of a deer or bison or something? But more recently, people have been extracting ancient DNA from projectile points. But it's, like Pam was saying, there's a huge preservation problem because DNA is a very delicate compound and it breaks down. So the Arctic is the ideal place if you're going to find such a thing. And going back to the Mesa site, I really wish that all those old Mesa points had been kept in a freezer because maybe they still have DNA. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah.

But the trouble there is I don't think they were handled correctly when they were dug out of the ground. This is another thing about archaeologists today. They become enlightened and they always go, well, we're not going to dig the whole site we're going to leave that because in 10 years there'll be a whole bunch of new techniques which you know tell us a bunch of things yeah that's when i was when i was with those guys they would talk about um they were they were always discussing where they might go back like which of these campsites might warrant going back and like dig it right and you imagine just going there with a shovel and digging but it would be that they

might do a square meter right right just do one square meter and then and then in a hundred or whatever in three years when there's completely different innovations and technologies someone could go do another meter and apply their you know new academic rigor to that. That was one of the funny things at the Mesa site when Pam wasn't there, but I was up there one summer day with Mike up on top and they were digging these squares and there were like 10 of them and everybody had a square and they had a little trowel with a brush. And I was like, oh my God, how can you guys be doing this? This is really boring. Why don't you just give me the shovel and let me dig.

Find some stuff. Yeah. So Mike goes, oh, you can't do that, but here's one that we've dug and we've dug it all the way down to gravel

and there's nothing left. And I said, well, can I dig that? And he goes, yeah, but it's a waste of time. So I got the shovel.

I just started digging and they were just all aghast. Like, why are you letting him do this? And sure enough, about two feet down, we found a little projectile point that it somehow wiggled down through the gravel.

Oh, really? Yeah, but he was like kind of irritated. I know this is another thing that changes all the time. Like what happened to all the stuff? What happened to all the bison and short-faced bears and step lions and woolly mammoths? And I was real hot on, for a long time, I was hot on the Pleistocene, the Blitzkrieg hypothesis, because it was so tidy. It was like, dudes came and killed them all, right?

And just seemed just great. You could fold it up and put it in your pocket. It was just a perfect explanation. You could like fold it up and put it in your pocket. You know, it was just like a perfect explanation. Evil humans. Yeah. What's the latest? Like why that time did like nine genera, like nine genera of animals.

So like nine genuses of animals vanished from the Western Hemisphere. What was so special that all those dozens of animals went extinct? Well, there was significant climate change going on. And I think one thing is you can't give one reason for all extinctions. Like it can vary a lot regionally. And so obviously the area that we know best is northern Alaska. And I think one thing about northern Alaska is the human density was never that high, and it's this vast area where these animals were ranging.

So I don't think that human hunting had a huge impact on those animal populations. And our data from our bone collection shows that humans overlapped with horse and bison for probably a couple thousand years and possibly even with mammoths for a while. So it seems like they could coexist. And Dan's itching to say something. No, it's just – it's kind of the same old story in science. You know, the first thing we do is we latch on a simple explanation, like Blitzkrieg.

People overhunted, they killed all the animals. And then you realize, well, that doesn't kind of fit with some of the chronologies where people are rare, like on the North Slope or other places like on islands in the tropical Pacific, it's really well documented that all the endemic bird species went extinct after people showed up.

So it's pretty obvious people killed them all. Or Moa in New Zealand is a really good example of overkill. So it works in some places but not in others. So then the second stage is you go, okay, so it works in some places, but not in others. So then the second stage is you go, okay, so it's not the same everywhere. It's complex. And then it just kind of keeps getting more and more complex because you realize, I think it was, I think it's more like 70 genera globally of megafauna. So animals over a hundred pounds average weight when extinct. Globally.

Globally. And then, but when you start looking at the records globally, you see, well, in Australia, almost all those extinctions happened before 40,000 years ago. In Africa, only like 12% of the megafauna went extinct. Well, I can tell you why that's true. Why? Because Africa had always had humans. Yeah. That's one of the, that's probably part of the explanation.

They had evolved together and it wasn't like a surprise attack. Yeah. Yeah. But Africa is also different in other ways. It's a much more diverse set of habitats. Africa is a huge continent and it's right on the equator. And the combination of the evolution with humans plus this kind of diversity of semi-arid habitats that are changing all the time.

But anyway, but you see what I mean? The complexity grows on complexity. And I think everybody's kind of come around to this now where there's no one explanation that's going to fit all species. Some cases it is overkill.

Think MOA. Other cases it's climate change, which is probably what happened on the North Slope where we went from well-drained substrate where you could make it with your little dainty bison hooves to now, there's no way that animal could get around. It would starve in a week just because it's so boggy up there. Sinking through the tossics and into the tundra.

It's kind of counterintuitive that at the end of the last ice age, as the climate got warmer in northern Alaska, it became a less favorable environment for these large animals. You kind of think, oh, it warms up and everything, there's more plants growing. But the warmer temperatures allowed shrubs and peat to come in which created this really boggy environment then then insulated the permafrost so the water never drains away and it's just and these were plains grazing animals for the most part or they they were mostly grazing animals, so they needed large grasslands. And so grasslands, by their nature, are kind of well-drained areas, which suggests to us that the horses retreated to these last little sandy grasslands,

but then eventually that became too small to support them, and they died out. Do you have a sense of how long? Like, it wasn't like one century the animals were there and then the next like how do you have a sense of how long this extinction event that that that's interesting I just want to weigh

in on that a little bit so I asked Meltzer about that like I used to have it that that I don't know in my head I sort of pictured that like 13,000 years ago 13 000 in one day ago all that shit was there and then and then like you know 12 364 whatever the hell uh it was all gone and we talked melts about this he goes that that window of time keeps broadening, broadening.

And it wasn't like everybody all died on one day. It was, there was things that were, that were fading out over the course of 10,000 years. And I'm sure regionally it was also like you said. Yeah. Back to the DNA preserved in sediment. So when an animal dies in a permafrost area,

the DNA is often very well preserved, if you can find it. So there's two studies now, one from the Yukon, one from Siberia, who have looked at these LUS sections. So LUS is windblown silt. That's L-O-E-S-S, right? Yeah, you got it. And it's frozen. Frozen. So both of them are showing, are revealing that mammoth, bison, and even woolly rhinoceros in Siberia survived way into the Holocene. So well into the present interglacial. Thousands of years after we thought they did based on when the last, the most recent dated bone was. There was just an article that came out about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You saw it in that Nature. These guys are probably quoted in there. Probably. I don't know, but I was reviewing that paper. But yeah. Yeah, you saw it in that Nature. These guys are probably quoted in there. I don't know, but I was reviewing that paper.

But yeah, yeah. But so that's a really big deal because it suddenly is, that gets rid of the overkill hypothesis. Because people have been in Siberia for 30,000 years and yet woolly rhinoceros were stampeding around until 8,000 or 6,000. So it's really kind of this big wake up, like, hey, we got a new source of data. It's telling us something totally different. And a lot of these animals were hanging on much more recently than we thought they were before. It demonstrates a vulnerability

in getting your information from bones. Oh, yeah. Because a thing that I always return to when I'm thinking about antiquity, and it moves from paleontology to archaeology, is that for a period of time, the oldest site in the New World was in Chile. So how much shit is laying between there and the point of entry? Like the oldest site, and I know it's been surpassed since then, but the oldest sort of like academically agreed upon site was thousands of miles away from the point of entry. So you imagine how much junk was laying between there that you never found.

And I once put this to an anthropologist down in Colorado where I was sort of gauging his enthusiasm about finding more stuff. And he was, you know, like the bone thing. He just wasn't like optimistic that you'd find more Clovis sites or more Folsom sites. And I was like, well, someone will turn it up. He goes, but think of how much ground we've turned up. How many roads we've built, houses we've built, railroads we've built. Everything that's happened, we have a few. I don't feel that all of a sudden now it's going to be that we find tons more sites full of like bones and projectile points.

It's going to need to be, it's going to be something else. Right. Like it's just, we're not going to keep dragging this stuff up out of the you know this stuff up out of the ground it's not going to become at like an increased ratio and he was talking about the great plains but uh to be able to dig into the stuff you're talking about now with taking lakebed sediments and finding dna and stuff it's like that's a whole frontier man it makes you guys i don't know what the hell it means for you guys. Well, give us some. For your job security.

Give us some money and we'll have job security. We want to do that. We just don't have the money to get those cores. One of the interesting things about this, though, is that it's, I think it's pretty well accepted by most people now that if humans hadn't started producing greenhouse gases in like mid-Holocene, so let's say 5,000 or 6,000 years ago, a lot of this was coming out of rice agriculture in Asia. If we hadn't started doing that, we would be back in the Ice Age now, which meant that a lot of those big animals would probably have survived. So we would have had little refugia for a willy rhino, and mammoth would have been up on Wrangell Island and so forth,

and horses would have been running around in northern Alaska. And we would have gone back into the Ice Age quick enough that their ranges could have re-expanded, and we would still have them. Is there an idea that human impact on the environment goes back thousands of years? Yeah. It goes back probably five or 6,000 years through greenhouse gases. Burning and.

Yeah. So we're. Slash and burn agriculture. We're burning, we're clearing for us. So all that CO2 goes in the atmosphere. We're creating these rice patties, which are just hotbeds for methane production and methane's an incredible greenhouse gas.

So if, if we hadn't started messing around with agriculture. We might have stayed on that same cycle. Yeah, we could have stayed on the same cycle. Where during the intergalacticals, during the warm times, big animals would have become scarce. They were driven into like far northern refugia. And then when the ice age came on again, it was like, yeah, we're back in business. You know, the Arctic prairie is back.

Mammoth steppes back and they spread all over the place again. Here's my last question for you. They're not brooding you. I have a last one for you. How hip are you to the idea? Like, do you care about support these ideas where people are gonna do these sort of cockamamie rewilding yeah the cockamamie genetic things where you can through various crossbreeding processes or whatever create some approximation of a pleistocene horse create some approximation of a mammoth by like taking genetic information from mammoths and working it into contemporary

elephants and then turning them back out and bringing back the ice age are you hip on this i mean like are you like that's a good idea well the big problem with that is the environment that those animals inhabited is gone and uh so where are they gonna live well that this one feller in uh siberia doesn't he have the idea that just them being there will make the environment it'll be like them being there will turn it back into a grassland which came first the chicken or the egg and i i think that you have to have the environment before you can have the animal there. I don't think the animals. So you don't think that the grazing animals came and turned tundra into grassland? No.

Okay. Do you, Dan? No. You guys haven't talked about this? Yeah. Let's put it mildly. No, I don't think that's possible. And it's not just me.

That's Dale Guthrie. You know who that is? Oh, yeah. Yeah. He had that babe. He had that famous. Blue babe. He had that famous dinner party where they served a 30,000-year-old license.

I don't think anybody really ate it. Dude, I would have eaten the whole thing. But I think the whole rewilding thing is, it's kind of like, that's a huge amount of resources, huge amount of scientific input and money input. And why don't we just save the animals we still got rather than trying to recreate something with these weird ass like hybrids. What was that, that old book about the island of Dr. Moreau or something? Remember that where he lived on this island, he created all these weird animals and they all went wild and ate everybody.

So why are we messing with that? Why don't we just preserve like the African elephant and the white rhino and so forth and so on instead of screwing around, trying to reinvent something that is gone. I'm not, I don't get enthusiastic about that idea. I think that if a proponent of that idea were here, I think they have this kind of fatalistic attitude that you'll never pull that

off. You'll never pull saving, like, that you're not going to save those things. And the next best idea would be to create a protectable place. Like the grizzly bear thing out here on that road to Livingston.

Yeah. Yeah. Except when I want to see a grizzly, that's the first place I go. You can watch them roll barrels around inside of a log fortress. But Steve, it's better than that. You could genetically engineer those grizzlies

so they could be pettable. You know, they'd be nice grizzlies. And they'd be better grizzlies. Yeah'd be better grizzlies yeah no i think it's totally ridiculous and i would think you guys as the hunting community would be really against rewilding i mean it just seems like i haven't taken it seriously i think you better because it is mean, there's, there's a lot of people messing with it. Yeah. I haven't taken it seriously as a, um,

I, I, I only find it problematic when, when it, when people start talking about trying to like recreate approximations of things. Um, especially if you get into this,

we explored this with best shapiro one time you get this idea of like what is like so what exactly is a passenger pigeon right here's an animal that was in flocks of millions right if you just you know the last one like martha died in the cincinnati zoo right so let's say you made a thing and you're like, okay, here's three of them. And that's what they look like. That's them. Without flocks of millions, changing forests, like, have you really made anything? Do you know what I mean? And is there public appetite for flocks of birds that could destroy entire agricultural fields overnight?

Do you know what I mean? So it's like to spend all this energy on something where you can sort of look at it and go like, yeah, it's hard to explain why, but that's roughly what you had sitting in that cage. I just don't care. What about a mammoth? But the way, if they could honestly go,

if they could, and it's been explained to me that this isn't going to happen. If you could honestly go and find some things in the permafrost and here's a viable egg and here's a viable sperm. All right. Yeah. And which is not how it's going to go. And you combine those and create one behaviorally.

They spent what they spent 13 years with their mom. Yeah. Learning how to do mammoth shit? So let's say you make one. What do you really have? Oh, I'd love to have a pet mammoth. But I don't think it's, I just think it's a crazy idea. And I just think we've messed up so many things on this planet ecologically by trying to intervene. And so why do that when, as Dan said,

we've got all these crises now that we should be trying to avert? I mean, we spend a lot of time in New Zealand, you know, and it's just an ecological disaster there. Sure. Introduce species and whatnot. And even in Alaska, they're reintroducing bison to places where they haven't been bison for thousands of years but they they managed to really muddy the waters on that question well exactly but i think um even based on dubious exactly which is right up your alley dubious bone finds right yeah yeah and and for

that matter a muskox which is my beloved species you know they were reintroduced to alaska um but that was after a much shorter time frame they disappeared from alaska in the late 1800s and they were reintroduced actually not to their native range in Alaska but to Alaska and Nunavak in what's the first place right 1930s well actually they were in Fairbanks and then they went to Nunavak and then they made it back to the north slope in the 1970s so it was about a a hundred years. Did they disappear for the same reasons, climate change, or was that a legit overhunting situation? I think that it was basically the climate change. Musk ox populations in our bone collections suggest this, that musk oxen persisted in Alaska for a really long time, but always at really low

numbers. And so as the climate changed, their populations were declining naturally. And they, both muskoxen and caribou populations fluctuate naturally in response to all kinds of different environmental conditions. And it is possible that humans may have killed the last one or two muskox in Alaska, but their population had declined on its own. And so that reintroduction I feel better about because it was such a short time frame. It's kind of like the elk reintroductions in eastern United States. Yeah, that there's still viable habitat for them. And you're putting the actual animal back. Right.

You're not being like, oh, this is close to that. You're not adding a new species that you're not sure how it's going to interact with the other existing species that are already there some of the original rewilding people um weren't doing it through like genet they weren't proposing through genetic wizardry they were proposing just take the closest shit you can find so take african animals and cheetahs and whatnot and just cut them loose on the Great Plains and call it good.

Which makes a lot more sense. Didn't you guys do a show on Nilgai in Texas? Yeah. So Texas has how many species of African and Asian antelope? It's got piles. Dozens. Some they have more.

There's more in Texas. Yeah. Scimitar horned orcs, they have more in Texas than exist on native range. Yeah. See, that's kind of different. That's not the genetic engineering rewilding. And I think that part of rewilding is a valid, acceptable thing. Yeah, and they've had some cases where those, well, the American, like, you know, our American bison, they've had cases where a species was saved because of private holders. Yeah.

Like, there's no, like, you can't argue the point that private collectors, Britain cowboys, who at the last minute went out and gathered up buffalo off the Great Plains, that if they hadn't done that. There wouldn't be any. And put them in a fence somewhere, they'd be gone. I mean, there's a couple of places where they held out, but you would have had a very, very small thing. And if you look at how they actually were re-spread, so much of it funneled through these private individuals.

It's easy to look down at Texas and be like, oh, they're messing with this and messing with that. But there are cases where those privately held animals wound up becoming impactful toward putting animals back on the landscape. We'll revisit the rewilding thing. But I think that, like you said, I would rather take the money and expertise

and stop the bleeding. Yeah. And not try to graft new. Stop the bleeding on the body and expertise and stop the bleeding. Yeah. And not try to graft new, stop the bleeding on the body and not try to like graft new limbs. New appendage. Especially if it's passenger pigeons. Pigeons are nice, but. Although it would have been remarkable to see those huge flocks flying over but sure they say the last big the last big flock was killed not far north of where i grew up really yeah do you

know that petoskey michigan i think was the last big like big bang is there a monument there i don't know maybe i should make one. A big pile. I keep fluctuating on what I want to do when I retire. I was going to, um, I was going to spend it devoted to a very arcane or very weird seeming pursuit of getting Hunter's Orange Laws standardized around the country. I thought you were going to become a large pumpkin enthusiast. Well, I was going to become a large, I was going to become a large pumpkin enthusiast. Well, I was going to become a large, I was going to become a large pumpkin enthusiast.

I was going to push to have it be that you had to wear an orange hat everywhere you went. That's it. Then I was going to push to have National, Yellowstone National Park turned into a wilderness area and have all the infrastructure removed.

Wow. Now I might find and make monuments to where I think the last thing, the last big, like the last thing went extinct. Like on this place in 1804, the last Buffalo in Kentucky was shot. That'd be really 1820. That would have redeeming social value. I can't decide. And artistic.

I do like them huge fricking pumpkins, man. The kind where you gotta get a fork truck. They actually raise them on pallets. Yep. You can do both, Steve. All right, guys. I'm glad you finally came down, man. I've been pestering the shit out of Corinne

to get you guys on the show. I want you to go back home, talk to your buddy Mike Cuns. Get him fired up. Tell him the pandemic will never end. It's a soft end. The end will look like this. The end will be that it's like a cold or the flu.

Tell him that we're almost to the end. But it wasn't the end he was looking for. They flew to New York this fall. He did not. Oh, you shouldn't have told them that. Dude, that really makes Corinne seem like not a strong producer. She didn't find

that. She hasn't been looking at flight manifests. She didn't hire a private investigator. She's like, well, Mike, that's awkward because my research indicates that you have left Fairbanks. I have receipts. I know we're trying to wrap this up, but so Cal had to leave halfway through. He could not stay away.

He asked me to ask a question. And it's sort of, you know, a good bow to put on it. And he said, in the hunt for hunting everything ancient. Hold on, if it's a good bow, let these guys do their questions. Okay. Because what if they don't have a tight bow? Cal's is good. I don't, but I'm going to save it for next time.

Speaking of, it's been a while since you've asked about concluders. That word hasn't been said on this podcast in probably over a year. I kind of gave up on it. I should get back to that. Yeah, you should. Here's Cal's concluder. Here's Cal's concluder. In the hunt for everything ancient, have you ever discovered something modern that has been equally as surprising or interesting oh

the red alders okay yeah no so along one of these rivers that we routinely go down one day we're paddling along and off in the alder choked hell hole was a purple alder. And so it was like, with purple leaves. So you got to imagine the sea of green alder thicket, really unpleasant, full of mosquitoes. In the middle is one purple alder. So of course we got off and went in there and stomped around and got bit by mosquitoes. It was like, well, maybe we can take one of these back and grow it and then become multimillionaires from, you know, like selling purple alders. So you load that in your canoe. So we load in this little root with a little sprout, a little tiny one, took it back and spent hours and hours and hundreds of dollars trying to cultivate this thing, and it died. So it's still out there, though, in the middle of the alder-choked hellhole.

Because, at least in Fairbanks, landscaping options are kind of limited, but alders grow like anything. So you could have purple alder bushes, hedges. So you could have been like, from the same mentality that brought us kudzu. Yeah. But there's already alders growing there, so. But you must have asked a botanist about it. Is it a subspecies or? Just a freak specimen.

It's a weird just genetic. It's quite common. And, you know, plants have variable chromosome numbers. Their genetics are really messy compared to mammalian genetics. And so apparently it's quite common to get these weird little anomalies like that. And if we ever go back there. Does it drop a waypoint on it? to get these weird little anomalies like that. If we ever go back there. Did you drop a waypoint on it?

Oh, yeah. It'd cost you a lot, though. All right, guys. Thanks for coming down. Yeah, well, thank you. Light a fire under Kunz's ass for us. Fun discussion. You guys didn't have any concluders, anything we missed that you felt that

you'd like to share with the world? Yeah, do like a how to find your work and how to support your research or something. Yeah, I was going to say, we should put out a call to if there's anybody out there that would like to help fund this lake sediment research

that you guys would like to do, how they could help that out. Yeah, University of Alaska has a very nice like to do, how they could help that out. Yeah. University of Alaska has a very nice way to do things like that. You can just Venmo them. You can send me an email, and then I'll get in touch with the foundation at University of Alaska. It's tax deductible. Your money, we've done this before, and money comes in.

They put it in a special account. It can't be abused or stolen or anything else. We use that money for our research, and we write a report to the donor, and the foundation people love it. And that's the Center for Arctic Biology. Institute of Arctic Biology. Institute of Arctic Biology. At University of Alaska at Fairbanks. So someone could earmark that money. Yeah. Yeah. And just lock it in to this is what it's going to be used for. It's not going to disappear into some overall, you know, like university lawn mowing fund

or something. But I think, I don't know, I hope the listeners, if you're out there somewhere, you realize that this isn't just some arcane field that we're pursuing. It actually has real implications for conservation in the future, because we really need to figure out what makes big animals go extinct, because there's a lot of big animals going extinct right now. And the more we can learn, the better. And so there's a lot of really basic research that remains to be done. And I think you kind of gather from our discussion today, it reaches into archaeology and also into genetics, like Beth Shapiro and Mike Kunz and Dave Meltzer,

the other archaeologist. So it's a really active field, this kind of interface between DNA evolution and conservation. I'm just glad they can't keep pointing their finger at hunters. Yeah, well, you guys should be relieved.

Overkill is dead, except on tropical islands. So you guys should feel relaxed about that. I got a challenge for listeners. Every time you're thumbing through, I don't know, going through and you're finding articles from Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Nat Geo, dealing with something to do with old ass bones in Siberia or Alaska or something to do with mammoths, I challenge you to read the article, then read all the citations, and not encounter the names Pamela Groves and Daniel Mann.

It's impossible. It's impossible. You're always in there. That's good. I didn't know that. That's good. All right, guys. Thanks for coming down.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. all right guys thanks for coming down yeah thank you thank you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. On-axe hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include

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