The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 380: Chopping Up A Buffalo With Clovis Points

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Metin Eren, David J. Meltzer, John Hayes, Clay Newcomb, Spencer Neuharth, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: How Steve feels insecure about his grip strength; archaeology living under the umbrella of anthropology; getting your hands all cut up by Clovis points; using your teeth to sharpen edges; curiosity as an adaptive strategy; the average age of early man; planned births; very, very old footprints in the sand; ruppia, or ditch grass; DNA in sediment; anonymous peer reviews and how you ought to have the right to know your critics; David's book, The Mountaineer Site: A Folsom Winter Camp in the Rockies; MeatEater does science: our bison butchery experiment using Clovis points; when you really want the rock you find to be an ancient tool; using human bodies for cut mark experiments; measuring microware on bones; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Real quick, a couple things we want to announce here so if you've watched me eater and followed our stuff you've obviously seen my friend kimmy werner around uh spearfisher woman from hawaii uh i love her to death we're doing a series with her spear chef so kimmy's own spearfishing show i'm on one the bahamas and holy shit we have a good time got some just really cool just everything about it man i was like it was a dream trip amazing footage my kids were mesmerized by it when i watched it with them just all the beautiful underwater stuff so episode one came out a few days ago check that out also our uh i hate to call him our former co-host but it used to be

yanni was on like on this show yanni was on every episode this is back when yanni produced uh yanni used to produce our tv show we were always together like we always say nuts on a dog uh yanni was on every episode yanni like missed one episode in years of recording, but he's going on. He's got his own stuff. He does his own show, runs his own program. He is launching a new podcast, which is our Gear Talk podcast, which is Yanni, a collaborative project between our very own Yanni Putellis and Jordan Budd. What we're going to do on our Gear Talk podcast where they just talk about all things gear, arguments about gear, what's coming out, what they

like, how they pack, just everything from the gear world, deep dives on certain gear items, history on gear and how it came to be the way it is. You can go on over and pick that, show up and subscribe, do it, and it'll be served to you on its own feed, Gear Talk Podcast. show up and subscribe do it and it'll be served to you on its own feed gear talk podcast all right you know what's annoying is yesterday my wife comes in the house

first thing out of her mouth i heard you i heard you don't have a very good grip strength first thing that that was the so she ran into a couple of you guys before she saw me. That was her number one takeaway from our day. Well, it's just something you could work on maybe, you know. I'm holding a, it's a Jamar Plus by Samson's Preston. Matt, tell us about this thing. Tell us why you have this, and then we'll get into greater detail. Yeah, so that's a device that allows us to measure the strength of your grip.

And we have another one in the box there for pinch strength. And what we want to do when we do tests involving cutting, we're really interested in understanding the tools and not so much the butcher using the tools. And so we measure the strength of butchers and their grip strength and their pin strength. Uh, so we can control for that in our tests. So if we're looking at two different tools, we want to make sure that the difference we see is not due to different butchers, but because of the two different tools. And what's the highest score you ever seen

thrown on this? Oh, it might've been yesterday. Really? With John. I think you got into the sixties. Wow. John? I think it was Cal.

Let's go with Cal. Cal got 69. He just edged Clay and I out. All right. Everybody introduce themselves real quick. Spencer, go ahead. Spencer Newhart, I host Meat Eater Trivia. I was part of the experiment yesterday.

I'm Matt Taner, and I'm an archaeologist at Kent State University. Yeah. Clay Newcomb here. Yeah, I was a part of the big fiasco we had yesterday, too. I guess we're going to tell about that. I wasn't sure if we were. Oh, we'll get into that. Okay.

But I want to explain something about my low score. Yeahave melzer archaeologist smu in dallas uh john hayes from hayes taxidermy studio and i also took part in the experiment yesterday oh why do you got why do i why are you sometimes an anthropologist and sometimes an archaeologist well so archaeology is within anthropology and so yeah my degrees are actually, there's a flow chart. Yeah. Well, there's four sub-disciplines is what there is. Okay. Archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. So all live under, all live under the umbrella of anthropology. We're all studying humans in one form or another. Is it agreed upon that those are like the four sub-disciplines of anthropology?

Traditionally, yeah. Absolutely. Could you go through those again? Archaeology, which is what Metna and I do. We study people in the past. Biological anthropology, which looks at human variation, human evolution from a physical, biological point of view. Linguistics, study of language. And sociocultural is looking at cultures, societies around the world. Hmm.

Had no idea. Hmm. Archaeology is the cool one, though. So all archaeologists are anthropologists, but not all anthropologists are archaeologists. That's exactly right. Okay, so anyhow, here's the important part of this whole thing. anthropologists but not all anthropologists are archaeologists that's exactly right okay so anyhow here's the important part of this whole thing we had to measure grip strength yesterday

because we we'll get into greater details we butchered an entire buffalo yesterday fresh dead using stone tools one of which is laying in front of us right now. And my hands are full. I didn't know how bad it was until I took a shower. Battered. Yes. Full of cuts. Yeah. And I'm going to get ahead of ourselves for a second

just to address this one issue. At archaeological sites, really old Clovis sites, you guys find what one might deduce would be a knife made from a flake that is sharp all the way around it. Yeah, all the time. But the Neanderthals were smart and they knew to make a dull side

for your finger. Well, in the middle Paleolithic, sort of the time of the Neanderthals, yeah, they would do what's called backing. And they would chip away one side to make it dull such that they could rest their hand on it. We don't really see that on Clovis flakes. But they might have been using some sort of leather to protect their hands or something. It's going to eventually emerge that the Neanderthals had phones and stuff. One day. Because every day there's a thing.

We've talked about this before. Every day there's a thing like, oh, it turns out they were gentle artists, you know. And it turns out they, right, they just get like smarter and smarter. Well, I mean, we were able to interbreed with them, so they're still alive in some sense, I think. At about two to 4% of human DNA, human genomes. Rub it in because Steve doesn't have too much Neanderthal DNA. No, I came in low, which could explain my low grip strength. I came in sub, I came in like subpar on neanderthal okay so we had to do grip strength and i had to go first so i didn't have a technique and then i was kind of going for like a long right a long sustained grip.

And then John got up, Mr. Highscore here, got up and did just like an explosive spasm. Explosive spasm of strength. Steve, use his technique and we'll test it again. Were you saying that? No, stand up. Here, I'll lift that up. You got into the 60s?

Now, what number would you be satisfied with? I was at like 40s. What number would you be satisfied with this time? The strongest grip in the room. So you want to hit 70. You're going to have to hit test before you do it. And you were doing it on the third notch. Yeah, third notch.

So I was pretty low yesterday. The lowest. Oh, he feels real good. How did you throw a 69 on this thing? Okay, ready? Now you're going to hear and see some things you might not want to hear and see. You might have to hit test again because if you wait too long. Oh, okay.

Hit test. Zero. That's not the sound of redemption. Okay, ready? Damn it. Zero. Get that thing set.

It's going to have an ass just next to the data. That was huge, man. You need a reset. And my hand's all cut up from the flip plates. All right, here we go. So try reset and then really hit test, and then it'll go. Cool.

Wait, you're testing your right hand, which is not your dominant hand. Well, that's part of the problem. I don't know how much people want to hear about it, but I used to be ambidextrous as a kid. So I settled in on some things I do left, some things I do right. So you'd really want to, in all fairness,

you'd really want to measure both my hands and make an average. Yeah, you can do that. Well, no, because I'd make it lower. Never mind. Don't do that. Is it ready? Do reset and test real quick. Really push it. Reset, test. All mind. Is it ready? Do reset and test real quick.

Really push it. Reset. Test. Alright. Go. Aha. 60. 60. I'll live with that. Now you hit it, Spencer. Oh, man. We're doing it. Alright, let's go. Last place.

You did good yesterday, didn't you? See, that's the thing, man. Spencer's got to have a lot of nandruff on him. If that machine was any good, so weak. If that machine was any good, you'd enter your age in and it'd like calibrate. You'd like handicap. A bison doesn't care how old you are.

See, he's doing the pro long. 53 now. Alright, I'm going to stand up. Is it ready to go? You guys didn't stand up to hit it. Just hit test. Reset and then test? Reset and then test.

Okay, reset and then test. Okay. Oh, 59.6. I pulled in a little hotter yesterday I'm going to make you guys feel real good right now Hold on You felt like you came in hotter yesterday I did, I had a 62

62 Whoa Winner All that knob turning and dialing he's always doing Oh Chords in and stuff train him a whole life apparently Yeah, just squeeze it you make a growl. Yeah, you gotta growl. Jiu-Jitsu! 31. That's good. Well, if you hit him

with two fists, it'll count 60. Bam, bam. I'm gonna pass this on to my proxy, John. Here comes the winner. I have a feeling

John's gonna knock it out. Sign it up. Oh, you got it. 61. So you didn't do as good as you did yesterday. He got better, though. Come on, John. Lower yet?

Phil. Strongest man in the room, Phil. See, I don't trust this machine now, man. I'll be waiting for my side coasters. How can my grip have gotten so much stronger overnight? I think it's a lot about technique. I really do. I'll hand that back to you.

And what other industries use that? Because no doubt they don't make that for archaeologists. No. So physical therapy in doctors and stuff, they'll use to see how people's hands are improving if they were injured Ergonomics as well. So just designing knife handles or steering wheels or all that sort of stuff that you need to grip That's what this kind of machine is for and you guys have a pinch tester, too We have a pinch tester and everyone hates the pinch tester because it's awkward. Yeah, it's real awkward

What other kind of but when you're doing studies what other kind of do you ever have anything we need to do like bite strength or anything like that or oh we've never done bite strength but um that would actually be interesting because neanderthal teeth are worn down because they used their mouths as almost a third hand to grip stuff and so we can when we look at Neanderthal teeth and skeletons, all of their front teeth are just completely gone because they're holding leather or meat in their teeth, holding the other part of it in their hand,

and then they've got a knife in their free hand to cut. So bite strength with Neanderthals would be cool. Now, are you deducing that all based upon tooth wear? Yeah, tooth wear. Or do you all have some video oh no no video the thing about me is i'm a neanderthal and this is my uh here's another very interesting here's another thing we talked about yesterday that i wanted to get your feedback on you'd heard of, but I want to hear more of how you guys have heard of it. We recently had a Coronado expedition expert on and she'd found a number of Coronado sites in the US.

That in preparation for that interview, I was reading, I can't remember a guy's name. He's kind of, he's frustrating to read, but he wrote Coronado, Night of the Pueblos and Plains. Pueblos and Plains, yeah, classic volume. Yeah. Irritating author. Well, it was the 1930s. Yeah, just like he really went out of his way to be like, well, you see, it wasn't that unusual to come into a village

and cut everybody's hand off you know this is you got to remember the times right you're like that seems a little excessive even accounting for the times uh however um and there were many chroniclers of the expedition who later you know it's hard to keep track of who, you know, some guy 20 years later is like, oh, and I remember this. And anyhow, you can put together a pretty good idea of what went on. But of little interest to Coronado experts, but of interest to me is they encounter some bison hunters in the, if I remember right, they were on the Llano Estacado, the Texas panhandle. And they encounter some bison hunters and they are, they have dogs. It's pre-horse.

They have dogs. They had no personal contact with Europeans. They, the Coronado people remarked on how unblown away they were. They asked them, what are you? And then they described how they would, when they're skinning bison, they would sharpen stone tools with their teeth. I had never heard that, but you'd seen

and heard of that. Yeah. I mean, I've, there's all sorts of interesting and unique ways to resharpen tools or to make tools. And yeah, you can do it, especially on really thin edges. That's got to show up on the dental wear of someone. I suppose it just depends on how often you do it. What do they even mean by sharpened tools of your teeth? Well, I mean, we've got a flake right here.

I can demonstrate now. But, you know, when you've got an edge that's fairly thin, if you just can basically just push off a couple flakes with your teeth, just pushing off those tiny little chips will resharpen that edge. You don't need to do a lot. But then your mouth has like your, but then you're, imagine you're using your eye teeth, but then your mouth is full of. Well, I think in the past people would have been used to having stuff in their

food and we don't, we see like teeth getting worn down. Well, a couple of thoughts. One is that you ought to see probably micro cracks in the enamel. If somebody is doing that on a regular basis. The other thing is, is that when you have groups that are in areas, well, for one thing, farmers who are grinding corn and matates, all sorts of mineral matter gets in their food, gets in their corn, and it does tend to wear down the molars in the back. Hunter-gatherers that lived on the plains

during the Middle Holocene when you had just a whole lot of dust blowing uh heavily worn teeth as well for the same reason right you just got a lot of grit in the diet we were talking yesterday a little bit about um this is also sort of on the edge of our primary activity yesterday but we were talking we were making jokes about that like me at 48 that i probably wouldn't have been there and i know you like as a like the clovis peoples and and you'd said i guess rightfully so you said we don't know because there's not enough you know you don't have a bunch of skeletons laying around to determine to accurately determine like where the holes are in sort of the age demographics but what are what are some thoughts on hunter-gatherer life

expectancies uh probably in the 40s would be my guess what is happening to them just a lifetime of um being out all the time having to uh hunt for your meals track down those bison those bison that weigh a hell of a lot more than the one that we were butchering yesterday even though we were butchering a fairly large animal right so you think it was it would have been like a no medical care okay yeah right it's hard that's a pretty hard yeah that's a good point things that would be like uh appendicitis right appendicitis uh tooth infection abscessed tooth abscessed tooth there you go um so any number of things which is not to say that they were unaware of uh or lack knowledge of medicinal plants i mean one of

the things that's really striking is that a lot of the medicinal plants that we are discovering today were already known ethnographically uh and have been known for a very, very long time. So while they were quite capable, there were probably things, medical emergencies that would have been simply beyond their ability. I guess it would have been almost a statistical issue too, that by the time you were in your mid forties or whenever, it's just time for something bad to happen yeah you know what i mean it just the the amount of exposure to physical risk of hunting these big animals crossing rivers falling off cliffs right disease just just random things random things um that you just came on suddenly and you just couldn't cope for any number of reasons, right?

I mean, we live very cushioned lives and we've got lots of fail safe and backup systems. There were no backup systems. Is there any way to guess with ice age hunters, is there any way to guess when, like what was a peak reproductive age for females? I do not know the answer to that. But actually, let me add one thing to what I was just saying about how tough life was. One of the things that's come out of the recent genomic evidence, the DNA evidence, is that between about 16,000 and about 13,000 years ago, there was a 60-fold increase in population of people in the Americas.

So what that's telling you is that when they got into this new continent, actually things were pretty darn good. Now, I don't know what the start value was. Was it 100 people and multiply that, or was it 1,000 people? But the fact that that population increased so rapidly in such a relatively short period of time tells you that they were actually quite successful at moving into this new environment. Obviously, things are going to plateau. And again, you still have those sort of random events that will come after a lifetime of

hard living. But overall, the population was really quite successful. There's a new book coming out by a historian named Dan Flores. And he has a chapter called Clovincia the Beautiful. And he has a chapter about a little bit about what's known about Clovis and then speculations about Clovis and the mysteries of Clovis and in there he has a observation that that you know a theory that I had it considered um when looking at how quickly the Clovis hunters seem to have been able to colonize new country, you,

you could, you bring up this idea of why. And then I've, I've even read where people would say, you know, you can't rule out that there was an element of curiosity. Oftentimes you'll see huge migrations of people that are propelled by hunger, propelled by warfare.

And, and, you know, and there's not, correct me if I'm wrong. There's not like evidence of it being warfare propelling the thing and he brings up he talks about these various cases of known times in the more recent historic record where people have stumbled upon islands say that had never had humans on them and and so like the the whalers

in from the 1800s who would land on these islands and there's no human record on the islands and they would talk about literally walking up and and lifting birds plucking birds like fruit from trees or just being able to walk up you know with tortoises you walk up and simply load them onto the boat um animals that couldn't even comprehend what they were and then you look at a place where you go to yellowstone park where it hasn't been the that you've had a hundred year a hundred plus year absence of human hunting on that landscape so only that's only 100 years of an absence of human hunting because not very long but you can get remarkably close to wildlife there that is not used to human

predation and he throws out this idea that perhaps what propelled you along really quickly is the minute something got hard and you went a few miles yonder, there were animals that had never seen a human predator before. Just keep chasing the dumb ones. And so, yeah, like why you hunt in a place for a while and shit gets kind of like, I don't know about these guys walking up to me anymore. Bump along.

And then you're back into a place where you can just have it pretty easy. And that might explain like why you sped through the continent so quick. Thoughts? Well, a couple of things. I mean, one is, is that these are animals, you're coming into a continent where animals have been dealing with some pretty substantial predators for a very long time, right? Mammoths and mastodons have dealt with giant short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, and the like. They're not completely asleep at the evolutionary switch, right? They know how to deal with predators, and they learn really quickly, okay? Would that have worked

for people? Yeah. I mean, I suppose the first person in is going to have that advantage. Is that going to pull people from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego? Probably not. Is that going to have some sort of local payoff? Well, yeah, possibly. Resource depression always sets in, right? As soon as you start hunting, the first day of hunting season, the first gun that goes off, where are all the elk? Right? They're gone. And the bugling of the bull seems to wrap up in a real hurry. Yeah. Yeah. So animals respond pretty quickly. But back to what you said at the outset about curiosity. I mean, one of the things

about curiosity is that it's actually an adaptive strategy. And I've probably said this on this show before, but basically for hunter gatherers, insurance is not knowing what's going on and available where you are. It's knowing where you go next when things get bad, right? And so by continually kind of looking over the next hill and just seeing what's out there and knowing where you can go gives you that advantage. So that curiosity actually has a built-in adaptive function that works really well for people on a completely unknown new landscape. So instead of saying he was curious about what was over there, he was scouting. Absolutely. Absolutely. absolutely and you know you got a band you

got a bunch of teenage boys or girls just say why don't you go on a walkabout go look over that hill see what's in that next valley and and come back you know the other thing is these people weren't looking for a place to settle down i mean these these were they weren't sedentary agricultural people trying to find the most beautiful valley in North America to raise their family. To build a log cabin and till some land. No, that's absolutely right, Clay. But at the same time, they're not like sort of fur trappers going into the Rockies in the 19th century where they're just coming in, grabbing resources and going back out again. They do have to make a living. They do have to raise families.

But these are, as you say, highly mobile people. So we're not seeing evidence that they're spending more than a few days at a particular campsite, or maybe in the winter a few months, but then they're moving on. Do anthropologists ever consider that there was like any sort of strategic reproduction with ancient humans when a time that like every calorie mattered that they would do some math like we can't be having babies in december because it's just too hard on the mothers uh and the other folks in camp so we got to have our babies in april may june right um there's a huge complicated literature on that very issue. So, you know, the answer to your

question is yes, anthropologists have considered it. The other part of the answer is, can I give you a detailed, easily digestible response? No, no, I really can't. We, you know, we look at modern day hunter gatherer groups and their demographics and we can see certain things like, for were, off of mom and dad, especially mom in terms of childcare and that sort of thing, and contributing beyond their own reproductive years. So we do see those kinds of things. What does that look like in a Pleistocene situation? Really hard to tell. Now, didn't the more modern Native Americans,

it's documented some of their strategy for for when to have kids like i was reading about the shawnees and pretty much they didn't do much procreating in the early part of the year because they didn't want to have babies in the winter and there were like times when you were permitted to do that and it also coincided with war and hunting sure like you didn't want to be doing that when you were going hunting either but yeah but the purpose was was to have babies during optimal times of the year but that may have been a much later much later thing right yeah we just really don't have any idea about what's going on in in ice age. Have you ever heard the idea that monogamy was

born of the fact that human females are, instead of having like a annual, like a once a year breeding time, that it's sort of like ever present and there's no outward display of, of when someone's fertile. And so it would cause a male to need to stay near his partner.

Year round. Year round. And it couldn't be that you could just be like a bull elk and go hang out with other elk for 11 months out of the year. And then sort of like yeah but come september you'll be i know where i need to be back at the cabin but and it was yeah i think i read that i think it was the physiologist jared diamond it's probably

might be a widely held bleep i think it was the physiologist jared diamond had written about what might have made um what might have brought about this idea of a breeding pair, human breeding pair that stay together in the same place all the time, you know, and that we don't split apart and come back for like breeding season. That actually speaks to what's called the provisioning hypothesis, which is actually proposed by one of my Kent State colleagues, Owen Lovejoy. And the other half of that hypothesis is that it's not that males are always staying by females. It's that we potentially evolved to be bipedal such that males would have free arms to go get resources for the females and bring them back. Um, and that way the female can keep track of the kids and take care of them. So monogamy not only is for sort of the, the mom and the dad, but it allows the, the male to go and get food such that his offspring will have a better chance of surviving. Earlier you'd mentioned, somehow it came up, I thought it'd be a great spring off point.

You'd mentioned like teenage females. Did you mention that? Oh, I mentioned just teenagers, right? They got a lot of time on their hands. They're always looking to cause trouble, send them off on a walkabout. Okay, that brings up a thing we need on their hands. They're always looking to cause trouble. Send them off on a walkabout. Okay, that brings up a thing we need to talk about. We covered and we've discussed

multiple times the footprints found in White Sands National Park. Okay. And I want to feel free to roam on this one.

I mentioned to you, Hey, what are your thoughts about the footprints, the ancient footprints that they found? You'll have to describe what they're in or whatever, but, but a sort of, it's not fossilized,

but whatever the hell the word is for it, a very old barefoot footprint. Apparently this was found relatively recently by a park ranger in White Sands National Park. It seems to be that there is a, what they determined to be a young female. She seems that she was carrying a child on her hip. Would periodically set the kid down and pick the kid back up. She'd gone down a lake shore. A mammoth, I believe, or a mastodon crossed her track. Mammoth, yeah.

A giant ground sloth crossed her track she came back minus the child this is all you'll have to go with this like what okay are people getting carried away or not carried away but that's the story that is the story and i mentioned it to you story yeah i mentioned it to you and i don't want to say that you rolled your eyes, but you... Please tell us it's all true. You seem to have a... You had a sort of a yeah, but look on your face. Okay. So here's the but. Okay.

So the site is in the White Sands National Park. That much is correct. Which is New Mexico. Is that right? Which is in New Mexico. Surrounding the white sands missile range or actually just it's within it's within it's sort of embedded within and uh i can preface this by saying we've actually been doing some work on the missile range okay uh and at one point we were

literally just a hundred meters or so north of the footprint site so we wandered over to take a look oh and it's really pretty interesting oh yeah yeah. I've not seen the footprints behind you. And we've actually been excavating in sediments that are, um, the same age as the sediments that had produced the footprints. And I think I need to preface all this by saying, look, the people that are working on that site, um, these are pros. They know what the hell they were doing. They know how to identify footprints. I got no question about whether these are footprints. The issue, issues really come down to the age of the site. So the site is dated by the investigators at between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago, which if you'll remember from our previous conversations, is substantially older than the secure evidence that we have for people in the Americas.

Yeah, give a quick review of that. Which is around 15 and a half, 15, 16,000 years ago. Okay, you use the word secure evidence. Secure, because there's always insecure evidence out there that people are claiming, you know, we've got folks here 130,000 years ago. It just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Now, what about Monteverde? I'm sorry. Monteverde is 14 plus. Oh, it is? Okay. I was thinking- And you buy that one. Oh, yeah. Oh, that one's real. That's regarded as unassailable. Yeah. Well, that's the oldest one. No, because that new thing on the Columbia. Right. Right. Or on the snake or salmon. I

can't remember where it is. Yeah. Well, we've got some other sites that are sort of around that 15, 15 and a half plus or minus age. And Clovis is how old? Like 13? About 13. Exactly. All right.

So 23 to 21. The site is. It's a big jump. It's a big jump. People might be like, yeah, what's the difference? But. Yeah. No, it's substantial.

The site is sitting on the floor of an old lake bed. Okay. It's a big jump. People might be like, yeah, what's the difference? Yeah, no, it's substantial. The site is sitting on the floor of an old lake bed, okay? Old Pleistocene Lake Otero. And there's a couple of issues with the dating. And then I'm going to get to sort of the larger questions around the site. When we're looking at radiocarbon dates, we're looking both at their reliability, if you date something again, are you going to get the same answer? And we're looking at their validity. Is the answer correct? Okay. What they're dating is, the common name is ditch grass. The scientific name is rupia. Now rupia photosynthesizes dissolved inorganic carbon, which is a really fancy way of

saying dead carbon. If you ingest dead carbon into the system, the dates that you're going to get in return are going to be older than they should be. So in terms of the issue of reliability, there was a paper that literally just came out yesterday in the journal Geoarchaeology, wherein they took some rupia seeds from, and the scientific term is not literally seeds, but we're just going to go with seeds because that makes the most sense in terms of the conversation. They dated a bunch of rupia seeds from what's known as a lake ball. What happens in these old lakes is that rupiah grows in relatively deep water, upwards of two meters. And during these wind storms that will blow the water of the lake, pile it up on one end, drop it down

in the other, the rupiah gets dislodged and gets piled up on the beaches, right? And sometimes it forms balls where you just literally have a whole mass of rupiah seeds. They took one of these balls, they divvied it up into portions and they dated the different portions. And there was a span of 1500 years. Ostensibly, if you're going to date a single event, you ought to get the exact same number, right? So what that's telling you is that lots of different rupiah seeds from lots of different ages are tending to get lumped together. Yeah, but they're not lasting 1,500 years in a ball. But wait, but wait, but wait. Then there was a paper that came out three weeks ago in the journal Quaternary Research where they actually dated some rupia that had been collected in 1947 in radiocarbon dated six months ago. The radiocarbon dates on things that were growing in 1947 came back 7,400 years old. Why?

Because they were ingesting dead carbon. Rupiah is basically sucking up ancient carbon. So the dates that we have of 23,000 subtract 7,400, what do you get? Around 15,500 years ago. So in other words, the dating that they're doing, they're dating ancient things that may well be the same age as the footprints,

but that doesn't mean they're't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it,

be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more as a special offer you can get a free three months to try on x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all explain how are they associating their rupiah with the footprint ah okay you can't date a footprint right it's just what's the word for those it's not i mean what do you call like a because it's

not like a it's a feature it's not an artifact um no but why is it why is it still there i mean let's say it's a thousand years old like What makes it that the footprint is still there? Because normally you walk along a beach, and later in the day, your footprint's not there anymore. Okay, this is actually another one of the problems and issues that I have with this thing is, so footprints are said to have been found over a 2,000-year period between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. Okay? They are found in sediment, and I know this because we were digging in a trench 150 meters away in the same deposit,

that is rock hard. And when you read the original paper on the footprints, they talk about excavating the footprints with a dirt-rated chainsaw. I've done a lot of excavating. I've never excavated with a chainsaw. The stuff is so rock hard to cut it out. So my question is not so much how do the footprints get preserved, but how do you find them when you're chainsawing through a block of sediment?

Well, how did the first person that found them find them anyways? Yeah, he must have found them on the surface. Eroding on the surface. But then they excavated down with their chainsaws and got several layers of these things. Puzzling as hell to me, and I'd really love to see a video. But I mean, footprints are preserved in some ways. We have dinosaur tracks. We have all kinds of tracks.

In rock. Something would have happened. But these aren't in rock. No, these are in sediment. Because the dinosaur tracks, usually it's walking in some kind of, I don't know. Mud. that eventually that mud fossilizes yeah yeah no it's a puzzle so these tracks if you if you went to one of these tracks and you poked it you'd indent it i would think so well actually if you could because again it's

when we were taking sediment samples out of those same deposits, I was literally wailing away with a rock hammer to chip out the dirt. So I'm just not sure how they found multiple layers of footprints. Couldn't it be different that far away? 150 meters? No, because the geologist that was working on the footprints was working with me on the other side of the fence on the missile range and said, this is the deposit in which the footprints are found. But leaving that aside. That you have footprints stacked on top of each other in different layers. Yeah, and then I can't quite figure out how they were excavated, and I'd really like to

see how these things went. Well, that'll eventually become. One would hope, yeah. Apparently, there were videos made. So I'm not doubting that they found these things. I just don't understand how they managed to excavate them in the condition that they're excavating. And the rupia seed, the rupia does something different than other plants. Well, in fact, in that same paper where they dated the rupia from 1947, they dated another plant that had been collected that same year by the same botanist and it dated to only

300 years ago so but other things would be more stable so there's something about the there's something about rupiah there's something about rupiah that differentially is taking up this dead carbon that's giving it inflated ages and i and i interrupted you or didn't give you time to do it why why do they feel that the footprint and the plant are bodies oh well they do but um others are skeptical because if you've got um let's say the an edge of a lake and you've got people walking on it or you have one of these big storm events and it washes up a bunch of rupiah on a surface and then people walk across that surface. It was deposited. They were both deposited at the same moment, but they were both not necessarily, well,

they were the same age, except that rupiah is dating older than it should. But why? Okay. You find a track. What is it about the vegetation that you're like i'll date this vegetation oh oh it's the only thing that you can date well it's just on the same layer it's on the same layer yeah yeah yeah so it's not like it was has a footprint over it or something that i mean is there is it pretty good that that that yeah that the foot was on the plant? On the plant or, well, these are just literally layers of these seeds.

I think, would you say the assumption is that if there was a footprint and on the same layer? Yeah, exactly. Because that's like a capsule of time. Exactly. So if there was a rupiah growing on that same level. Yeah, I'd want more, man. I thought it was that, I assume they were taking it where they could see the the foot well i mean that would be so random though you know no it wouldn't well okay let me we did that all of human history would just be a big no no i'm saying that you have

a track let's say you have a let's say imagine there's a piece of seaweed yeah and you stepped on it and you stepped on it and then you stepped on it, and then that preserved. And you could see where like, absolutely, this footprint crushed this plant. And you actually had- And then you'd be like, those are friends. Steve Brunel's perfect world. And Steve Brunel's perfect world actually exists on the coast of British Columbia. There is a site that has 13,000-year-old somebody stepped onto vegetation. Huh. How do you know those are

accurately dated? They're not absorbing a dissolved inorganic carbon. That plant? That plant. Yeah. This is, no, this is a tricky plant. A couple other pieces of information. So I've worked out there. You're on the floor of an old lake bed. You stand out there. You look around you think What the hell would have attracted people to this spot? Repeatedly over 2,000 years now. There's nothing out there today now. That's not to say that there wasn't it was something It was the marsh or something. Yeah. Yeah, there's nothing to say that there wasn't anything there, you know 15,000 plus years ago or 23 if you believe the dates which I'm skeptical about but the other piece is is that people apparently or allegedly or 15,000 plus years ago or 23 if you believe the dates, which I'm skeptical about. But the other piece is that people apparently or allegedly or purportedly came here over a 2,000-year period repeatedly.

There's not a single artifact, no features, no other evidence of a human presence except their footprints. What were you digging at? We were north of there and we were testing that same deposit, and we were actually taking DNA samples. DNA of what? The sediment. Does sediment have DNA? Oh, yeah.

Clay, you're into the whole new world now. I'm sorry, man. Someday, these boys are going to be able to, you'll be able to go, you'll be able to dig down, get to a certain get a scoop and you'll be like oh yeah there was a 13 year old male here okay steve's going a little bit a little bit farther than i would go um but um so this is work that's actually been done uh the last 20 years, in fact. You're looking for human DNA in the soil?

Anything. It's like a living animal or plant. So, you know, we've talked about the ice-free corridor. And one of the things that we were able to do with ancient DNA out of lake cores is we were able to detect basically the moment that animals and plants start occupying this region. Because when you take a lake core out at the very bottom, it's just gravel and grit and whatnot. And at a certain point, suddenly, boom, you've got mammoth DNA, you've got bison DNA. And we use, it's called shotgun sequencing, where you basically take sediment and you just look to see what is alive

in here or what was once living in here that contributed its DNA. We just had a piece last year with a whole series of sites around the Arctic, and we were able to trace mammoth DNA over time and watch the mammoth populations basically shrinking into a small area of the timer peninsula of northern siberia uh up to around 4 000 years ago and we were able to do this not by their bones because bones don't survive long enough but that's because a mammoth only is going to leave one skeleton behind but over the course of its lifetime it's shedding dna constantly we could go out to the site where we were butchering that animal yesterday. And we could go and take, I mean, all you guys were bleeding out there, right? We could take some of that sediment. We could get DNA out of that sediment and we'd find bison DNA. We'd find Rinella DNA.

So that DNA, that John Hayes DNA. DNA was like, this must have been an extraordinary grip strength. Well, that's it. That wouldn't degrade over time? Well, it does. No, Clay's absolutely right. DNA, you know, in your genome, 3.2 billion base pairs, right? By the time it gets into the archaeological record or the geological record and mind you dna has been recovered from upwards from sites upwards of two million years old no

really seriously i would not steve i would not lie to you but just not like horribly degraded oh it's terribly degraded recognizable but. That actually makes it identifiable as ancient DNA because ancient DNA in general is no more than about 100 letters long. If you see a string of DNA letters that are thousands and thousands of letters long, you know that somebody in the lab sneezed and contaminated your sample. Okay? But if it's anywhere, you know, 50 plus or minus, that's ancient DNA. And what you have to do, and this is a very analytically challenging thing, is you've got to take all those little fragments of DNA and figure out what is the sequence here. And then map that sequence to a reference genome, which will tell you it's mammoth, it's bison, it's something else. And so a lot of the work that's done in ancient DNA, ancient environmental DNA is actually the term,

involves compiling reference sequences so that when you're doing the shotgun work, where you're looking at all the DNA fragments within a sample of sediment, you can match it up with whatever might have been out on that landscape wow one thing i appreciate though about the work you guys do is that uh i mean just i guess just this is part of the scientific process in general is you have you you engage in work often that isn't going to yield the answer but you're developing a tool. You know what I mean?

Like you're almost starting laying the groundwork for, you're sort of building a toolkit or laying the groundwork for probably maybe the next generation to really enjoy the benefits of. Well, that's exactly right. But that's how you push things forward as well. This is research um pure research uh what we do i mean let's be honest we're archaeologists uh what we do is

useless um but it's not necessarily meaningless um we learn things and in the process of learning things we also learn what we don't know and then we push forward again to try and figure out, okay, how do we remove that piece of ignorance? What is the greatest defense of like your job? If someone's like, yeah, what you do is useless. Well, I think people are fundamentally interested in who we are and how we got here. And I well recognize that, you know, my son is a doctor. He's a real doctor. He's an MD.

I'm just a PhD. And so I'm not going to cure cancer. I'm not the guy that you're going to call on the airplane when somebody gets sick. You know, you're going to have to wait modern world, I think people do appreciate where we've been, um, the history of the human species, um, because it's a fascinating history and it tells us a hell of a lot about who we are today. Yeah. It's you'd wind up in the same landscape is if you said, why do this might seem like a stretch but bear with me you might be why do musicians matter why do visual artists matter be like uh the information inspires people

why the podcast is you to yeah causes you to ask questions yeah why do podcasts matter i mean why are people listening to meat eater why why am i getting all these emails, and thank you, by the way, from your listeners? Do people send a lot of pictures of things they found in their yard? Well, yes, there's a lot of that. A fundamental question that everyone has, whether they realize it and have consciously articulated before it, is who are we and where do we come from? Because that gives us reason, justification. I mean, there is so much philosophical fodder that influences whether we make electric cars

or whether we go to war or whether we try to cure cancer or whether we try to say that human life has value based upon deep history of who we were and where we came from. Spencer Newhart. That's why this is important. Here's where the rubber meets the road for me personally is

I wish I had been an Ice Age hunter. And when they invent time travel, I want to have a very educated guess about where I want to land and when. That's the whole reason. Yeah, so for him it's a practical issue. I don't want to make a horrible mistake see i could have said like oh sweet white sands missile range 25 000 years ago can i ask him a question that has to do with the broader study of archaeology? Yeah, please.

So you, in your status in the anthropology, archaeology world, like you questioning the validity of this work, is that okay? How would you feel if someone said that about your work is this just part of the the is you know what does steve say cynicism is the chastity of the intellect oh no no no skepticism skepticism is the chastity of the intellect yeah did you invent that no some spanish no it's it's just a genuine question. No, it's an absolutely fair question, and Metten and I can speak to that

because we just had to respond to a criticism of a paper we published. Oh. Look, in academia, the currency... Did you tell him to come say that to your face? Yeah. The guy we read about yesterday. I'm sorry,

inside joke. Inside joke. Ideas are the currency, right? This is not the business world where, you know, who makes the most money and who dies with the most toys

or anything. This is all about ideas and ideas are open season. My ideas, your ideas, everybody's ideas. And so, Metten and I

were just, just published a paper in which we responded to a critique of a work that ideas. And so Metten and I were just, uh, just published a paper in which we responded to, uh, a critique of the work that we had published. Metten, you want to give a quick. Yeah, we actually talked about this in January when I was here. It was the idea that Clovis points are kind of like these automatic mammoth killers. Um, and that they were designed to just, that's what they were for, to kill big proboscideans. And our research questioned that and doesn't seem to hold up.

But some colleagues of ours wanted to sort of roll the ideas around and question that. And we responded with evidence. And that's it. I mean, everything we do. Do they call you and give you a heads up? Not in this case. Yeah.

And is there a little animosity in there now, man? There's got to be. Well, no, because we won. It's like somebody got in your taxidermy work. So it's not like if a journalist is going to do a hit piece on you, they might call you at the last minute to give you a chance to respond. He doesn't say like, hey, man, you're chance to respond. There's not, he doesn't say like, Hey man, you know, you're going to open your email tomorrow and I'm going to kind of attack your,

your last, you know, the last two years of your life. Well, I think the point though, is everything we're doing is in some way wrong. And I think you've got to go in, you've got to go into science with that attitude because someone's going to do something better 10 years from now, 50 years from now. If you're going into it thinking that you're going to build a legacy that's going to be untarnished and held, no, that's just not the case. Well, hang on a second there.

Just kidding. Something I learned yesterday, I asked Menden what will be the greatest criticism of the study that we did. He gave his answer. But then I learned this, that the feedback during the peer review portion is anonymous, which is like kind of freeing. And that sounds like very beneficial to your community, right? Or no? It's mostly anonymous. I'll tell you what I do. When I get a paper that I really like to review, I'll just, I'll say glowing things about it. I'll say publish this immediately. This is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I'll just send it back. sign my review because people are entitled to know who their critics are in part so that they

can just say, oh, it's that guy. So positive feedback, positive feedback, you go anonymous. Yeah. Nobody needs to know who their fans are, but people need to know who their critics are. And I don't want to hide behind anonymity if, if I'm really unhappy about a paper. Have you ever had to criticize someone who was a legitimate close friend well you know the footprint stuff oh yeah no one of my longtime professional friends and colleagues is part of that team and he and i have you know talked about this and and you know he's quite open uh i'm open to criticism you know we we go back and forth. That makes us smarter. Or at least I'd like to hope so.

Have you ever seen it go, have you ever seen it where people couldn't just, they couldn't hack it though and got personal? If you don't say yes, I'll know you're lying. I mean, in your Folsom book, I mean, there was a whole clash. I mean, it was like a drama. Yeah, no, I'm actually trying to think of specific examples that I can give you. And part of it is I'm running through several. No, it can absolutely ruin relationships if you can't handle it, right? But if you accept the fact that your ideas will be criticized, you know, well, just put on your big boy pants and deal with it.

I mean, we criticize each other too. I mean, when we're writing a paper. Have you guys ever fist fought? Not yet. No. But like if we're writing a paper together. Oh yeah. You know, he'll, I'll say something sort of.

What's an example? Too far. Well, so with this Clovis hunting paper, I thought that we might think about how it dealt with extinctions. And he said, no, that's too far. That's beyond the data. And so we talked about that for a while and I kept pushing it and he's no.

And then we settled on what the data actually meant. And so I think that's good to have criticism within a team as well. We started arguing last night about what was that thing? Oh, the, the. Oh yeah, I heard a criticism this morning at their break room table. I'm seeing a reality TV show. Metin and Meltzer. Both of them with their fists up.

Yeah, I know. But this is what we do. This is what you should be doing. Yeah, this is what you should be doing. That's useful to get a lot of the stuff out of the way just amongst your own team. Well, exactly right. Wouldn't you rather be embarrassed in front of your friends than publicly in front of everybody that doesn't like you?

Yeah, for sure. You just shoot a bunch of holes before you even got started. It's the only way to go. It's the only way to go. I mean, look, we all want our papers to be well received. And the only way to ensure that is to, you know, give it that harshest criticism you can, find out all the holes before somebody else exposes them. I want to move on to what we were doing yesterday and where those questions were born of and what exactly happened. But first, I want to get into another mystery that I found out yesterday.

John Hayes from Hayes Taxidermy. You don't do birds and fish? Nope, I no longer mount birds and fish. I remember talking to him. He just like flat out turned business down yesterday. Max is like, hey. Hey, when you meet a taxidermist that doesn't do birds and fish, you're talking to a man that knows what he's doing.

Well, that's like, Max, I've never seen someone so defeated in my life max goes up to his truck window to bring up like some ducks and he just dude walked away like right like just like deflated what's up with that real quick um take as long as you want trying to like just uh figure out where the passion for me really is. My experience on birds and ducks was very early on. All the fish, you know, we did mostly skin mounts back then. I did a little bit of reproductions and it's

just not my strong suit. And for me to take something in and know that at best it's going to be okay. I just can't do that. But what if you have to do a diorama? I would hire it out by somebody that was really good. John, is it not partly financial? No, it's financially, you know, you can profit off it.

Yeah, you just have to be good at it. And I don't feel that I'm at that level to charge somebody that amount. Is it connected to your personal passion inside the outdoors too? Like you don't care about or you're not as interested? He hates birds and fish. You hate birds and fish? He wishes they were gone. No, I think it just didn't hold the same fascination for me that the other stuff did.

There's also like if you went to a restaurant that was fine dining, their menu is significantly smaller than if you were like Applebee's where you can get tacos and spaghetti and hamburgers. Sushi. That'd be a good sign. The fine dining of tax. Hayes Taxidermy Studio. The fine dining of taxidermy. Limited menu. Clay had a little, Clay really broke John Hayes' heart yesterday where Clay said something like, talking to someone else, said,

not a friend, you know, but a taxidermy friend. A taxidermy friend. That's not somebody I'd hang out with. I said, I'm really close to this one taxidermist. Well, I mean, you know, like you would be to a taxidermist. You got to know how close to people, right? He had to go, so all my friends, that must make all my friends taxidermist friends. No, he looked at me and he said, Clay, what are we?

He's like, what am I to you? All right. So I don't care what you guys does it. Mettener, David. Let's say you ran into someone and you had like three seconds to say what we did yesterday. What did we do yesterday? We tested the effectiveness of different Clovis tools for butchering a bison. Oh, that was great.

I've been looking for a way to describe it. I went a little too deep. My wife kind of lost her. I think you looking for a way to describe it. I went a little too deep with my wife, kind of lost her. I think you lost her on grip strength. Well, she was also, we were also trying to do our daughter's school open house, and I was also trying to explain all this. I wish I had just had that in my back pocket

that I could have gotten over it more quickly. Okay, in greater detail now, what happened, and just lay the whole thing out. What sort of deep questions are there that this could be a little window into answering? So we're always interested in better interpreting the stuff we dig up in the archeological record and experiments, uh, and sort of replicating different tools can give us windows into what we are digging up because, you know, obviously the

stuff we dig up, it doesn't, people aren't around anymore. They can't tell us how this stuff was used. Um, but we know the past was a very dynamic place. by making tools and using those tools we can kind of get a better sense of that dynamism or how do you say that word dynamism dynamics past dynamics past dynamic that's much better um and so what we did yesterday was we made some clovis fluted points and and he met and made them oh Oh, yeah. He's a Flint now. Very skilled Flint now. Yeah, this is ringing a bell. Both Dr. Meltzer and Metten have been on the show before,

and we talked about... How come he doesn't get to be a doctor, too? Dr. Metten? Dr. Aaron? That's a good point. Yeah, Metten's his first name. I mean, I worked really hard to get him a PhD. He did.

I don't know why. I think because maybe... He's professor. Oh. But you're not? Well, I'm tenured, but I'm not full professor yet. It totally has to do with age. I mean, I think it does.

That's what I was going to just say. Yeah. Yeah. Because compared to me, you're probably a young little whippersnapper. I'm 39. Yeah. You should be calling me Mr. Rinella. It's Dr. Aaron.

Dr. Meltzer has been on the show to discuss his books and things. Oh, I was going to ask you about this earlier. Where's the book about the high Colorado site? Mountaineer. It's out. I didn't send that to you. No, you sure talked about sending it to me. It's out.

Note to self. Send Steve a book. Where can people find that book? Ah, University of Colorado Press. And I presume it's on Amazon. Just like the- What's it called? Mountaineer, A Folsom Winter Camp in the Rockies.

It is on my list. Oh, man. And the new edition... I'm just going to buy it. Okay. And then there's the new edition of the First People's book, which both of them came out last year. I have the old one.

I guess after I was on the show. I was on the show last spring. So, yes, both books are now out. Thank you for asking. What changes from old edition to new edition? The most important change is the genetics. Here it is right here. 75 bucks.

Here it is. You got to pay to play. It's out of stock. It's out of stock. You sold out. Oh. The Mountaineer site. You got to release this after we get the book steve

now it's going to be sold out i'm gonna buy now before i'm gonna get in there now hold on it might be available okay well no no it's hold on one sec the mountaineer site a fulsome winter camp in the rockies david melter and brian andrew and Mark Steiger, three of us. Mettin and I did the chapter on the projectile points and the scrapers as well. Oh, 54 bucks for a paperback? I know you personally set the price, right? We could just pay him directly. So there's two in stock. I'm grabbing one of them for me.

Clay, you want the other one? Yes. All right, we're getting the both. Yes. All right. We just bought you out. Thank you. They're going to have to go back to the printer.

Hey, I can just hear a Bear Grease podcast now on the Mountaineer site. I had a lot of fun on the Folsom one, Clay. Let's do Mountaineer. People still talk about that one. I think it turned out really well. In our video, I think, well, yeah, we can talk about this. In my car is a Hello Baby video baby monitor with remote camera. What?

Well, you know what? You got some news to break, Steve? No, no. But my wife was just telling me about a baby shower. I'm going to put that in save for later. Save. And, okay, I'm in checkout. All right, suckers, if you try to buy his book mountaineer good luck

steve's gonna relist it now for 108 double the price yeah me and clay are gonna go do a little book business all right so go on oh one more thing i want to ask about before you really get into it in the same book i just read that had that clovincia the beautiful chapter i had no idea um it sort of goes in like well roughly how many clovis points of archaeologists found does about what would it wind up being ten thousand is what i had somewhere around ten thousand clovis sites clovis points points yeah around ten thousand clovis points. Clovis points. Yeah, not sites, sorry. Around 10,000 Clovis points are in existence, known to archaeologists, not counting coffee cans and people's windowsills. I think it's closer to 13. It was 13.5 now that you say that. Yeah.

It's funny when you see that number online. It says like only 10,000, so they're really rare. Not knowing like, you know, having a reference to that number, 10,000 is like, whoa, there's a lot of them. But apparently not. What's striking is how few sites we have. We've got a lot of isolated points that are found just all over, plowed fields, whatever, principally in the eastern U.S. And these folks, but think about it. So John broke two of them yesterday yesterday and that was actually just fine.

I really wanted to see what. It was the enormous grip strength. It was that grip strength. They just couldn't take it. Yeah. And so you can imagine that you're making these things constantly over the course of your lifetime. So 10,000 is actually a pretty low number and it's probably, or 13,000 is a low number. And you're sort of under counting all the ones that are in those coffee cans or mounted, you know, over somebody's fireplace. It has to be more, there has to be far more. No question.

That are on bolo ties and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And Clovis is kind of like a brief window, right? Like only a few centuries or something. Yeah well sort of it um it's kind of smeared across time and space so the earliest stuff that we see you know is 13.5 some of the later stuff depending on where you define Clovis would be what do you say met 12.6 12.5 yeah and sort of northeastern North America well and also too I was just doing some number crunching. I know that 10,000 sounds like a lot, but if you have, if you say Clovis is what, five, 700 years. Yeah. So 13,000.

Not necessarily all in one place. Sure. Right. You know, that's, that's 18 points per year, um, which is not a lot if you think about it. Right. How many did we bring out yesterday? 10.

And how many needed to be repaired because of grip strength here? A couple. 18 Clovis points per year, which is not a lot. And when you think about the fact that, you know, if you know what you're doing, you can make a Clovis point in 30 to 40 minutes. So there's a lot still out there. Well, and also too, just, that's not a lot of work. We think, you know, these Clovis points are the end all and be all, but for Clovis folks, they may not have been that important if you're not spending that much time per year to make them.

And we were working with Clovis tools yesterday, which is it accurate to say like that's the oldest tool we have from humans in North America. I think you'd say they are among the earliest or some of the earliest artifacts. They're certainly the most distinctive early form and the most widespread form that we know about. And they're like 13,000 years old, but humans had been here 15,000 years ago, maybe 25,000 years ago. What were they doing for those thousands of years if not using Clovis? Yeah, no, it's, it's earlier cultures. So cultures change over time. And as a consequence,

uh, the, the distinctive weaponry, hunting tools, butchering tools, knives, whatever, uh, changes as well. Now there are certain things that, you know, are pretty timeless. The scraper. Yeah. That met and made that proved to be kind of not very useful yesterday. You can see similar forms going back hundreds of thousands of years and coming all the way up to recent times. Spencer, are you asking like what were they

so if Clovis is 13 and we've been here for 15, what did they do for the 1500 years before Clovis? Yeah, and I guess I'm kind of asking like was Clovis Arrowhead 1.0 or was it, or was it maybe like 5.0, but we just don't have one through four. Well, I think the other thing to keep in mind is even though people might've been, or were in North America, that doesn't necessarily mean they were everywhere in North America. I think there are some areas where Clovis would have been first, you know, maybe New England, maybe the, the upper great lakes. Um, and, and so, you know, where we get.

Oh, they might've been the first people to. In, in some regions. Some regions. So when we say that people were here 15,000 years ago, that doesn't mean everywhere. That's a good point. That never occurred to me. Yeah. Yeah.

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I derailed us. Back to the bison experiment. Talk about what we did and how that might prove to be, like what we were up to. How it might prove to be useful or not so uh we made a bunch of replica clovis tools fluted points and and large what we call bifacial thinning flakes which are really sharp and uh we did all sorts of analyses uh before we did any butchery on these tools we made sure that the the clovis points matched in terms of their form actual clovis artifacts we did something called micro wear which is where you look at these tools with

a high powered microscope to look at polishes and striations and all that sort of stuff that the tools could be used for we did what else did we do we did so many pre-analyses. But anyway, the point is, you guys then took those tools, you butchered the bison, and now we can re-look at those tools to see what they look like. And now we can compare those things to the actual archaeological record. So what you guys did is a lot. So you get an idea of what they were doing with some of the tools that we have found. And so let's say we find an archaeologicalological site with Clovis point and some bison, and we see a bunch of Clovis points from that site, but there's no microware that matches the microware that you guys produced. Well, that's really interesting. Why is that? Why is that

microware different in the archeological record versus the ones you guys produced? Now, if it's the same, that's really interesting, too. And it shows that maybe similar activities were happening. But as we talked about yesterday, that whole issue of equifinality, lots of different processes can result in the same product. So what we're trying to understand is, OK, we got some signatures yesterday on the stone tools. So we'll at least know, okay, one of the possible pathways to that particular product would be the kinds of activities we saw you guys engaging in yesterday. Let me give it from, I want to give it from my angle for a sec.

So we long ago, we've all become acquaintances through this show. And Corinne, tell the history of this because you kind of understand a little bit better um yeah we've probably been talking about this for quite some time i know on metin's episode he talked about getting some of the crew together who you know have had a lot of experience butchering processing breaking down large game um getting them together to potentially participate in some kind of experiment if we were able to uh identify either a bison or an elephant uh that might need to be called uh oh that that's right now i remember him saying remember him saying it, but it's not always easy

in the circumstances. And then there's ethical concerns that play into it. Yep, yep. And, you know, with kind of our larger web of folks we're connected to. In the animal business.

In the animal business, finding a bison. So you're telling me there was an animal business in the animal business finding uh so you're telling me there was an elephant potentially on the table for us to be well we did fell real short we probably wouldn't have come we felt as though we would hit and we still might we felt as though we'd hit on some zookeeper somewhere who had to euthanize an elephant or there's an accident. I don't know. I don't know. And we thought that if that person knew that it could potentially,

and then you have an elephant that it gets euthanized, that it might be that there's some. Donate it to science. Yeah, that there'd be, that person's sensitivities and sensibilities might say, well, knowing that we're in this unfortunate, unavoidable circumstance, and perhaps, right, there would be – the body would be put to use by researchers. So we thought we would just be able to connect some dots that might otherwise not get connected just through audience reach. Right. And that led us down this thing of working on this project where we did the bison work.

And so we started out with a commercially, it was a commercially raised bison from a producer who does Norris Bridger bison. He does custom slaughter. So he raises animals and sells those animals and he sells them while they're still alive. People, he knows he's going to produce X number. You can come in and he sells shares. He even talked about that he had a bull that he was selling his ground and he had eight purchasers for one bull.

Or you could buy a half or a whole or whatever to help. That's his business. We started with a fresh dead two-year-old bull. We did the same exact sort of approach you do for ground butchering any large animal. And we had a bunch of people collect the five butchers who all have extensive field butchering experience. One of those included John Hayes,

who's done more skinning and fleshing than any of us. And we did the animal. We did it by doing the primary opening cut, basically running anus to chin. And then we worked on half of it using one collection of tools, skinned half of it using one collection of tools, Skinned half of it using one collection of tools.

Skinned the other half using a different collection of tools. And boned the thing down into all the primaries. And I went into it thinking that we were going to be working under. I have thought that we'd end up working in headlights of a car. I told my wife. I think we all did. I told my wife I'd be home at 9.30 last night. I was home at 5.

Yeah. I was like, we're probably going to wind up, we're going to have a bunch of trucks pointing headlights. That would have been pretty demoralizing if you'd have shared that with us when we were going there.

I'm glad you did. I feel like these things never are on schedule. It's just not going to be as easy as it seems. No, I thought it would be... I thought it'd be very hard to do with these tools but in fact it was like in all honesty man it's i felt like it took about as long as it would have taken it wasn't a major a major difference in time i mean it it it took more time but not a substantial amount more time i mean i think we skinned a whole adult bison in under two hours.

Broke it up into quarters. And then even had a guy, well, I mean, I guess that even counts deboning it. Now, there were five of us, and we were trying to work efficiently. And the parts of it, the opening, making opening cuts was a lot different. Anything that required a little finesse was different, but just in terms of someone holding the leg and someone pulling the hide and you're cutting the fascia, you know, you're cutting, no difference. said the the biggest limiting factor for what i was doing deboning a quarter was that it was a bison not that i had a stone tool in my hand it was just the sheer size of it and then i was one person trying to constantly rotate this thing so it wasn't even like that much less efficient in some ways what i pointed out uh what i pointed out i was texting my brother danny about what i'd been

up to. Um, and he was like, man, it takes us. Cause they, they actually hunt them a fair bit in Alaska. There's draws you can do to draw for these different herds. They have, he says,

man, it takes me a lot longer than that with a normal knife. And I said, well, there's five people. And I said, and also consider this. We had,

uh, stone tools expert. Who's there sharpening for us. So're all you know so we had it was different than if you start even with a normal knife if you don't if you're not a good sharpener you don't have sharpening equipment you hit a point where you're just pissing into the wind yeah but we were so we had like someone there doing giving us like razor-edged sharpened tools you know the way i thought about it and would describe it is that if i had one of dr aaron's points clovis points that's good in my pouch and went deer hunting back in arkansas tomorrow and killed a deer i wouldn't

worry about skinning it with that stone point i mean it wouldn't be a factor i wouldn't be like hey i'm gonna be three hours late coming home because i got a field dress to steer with a stone point it would have just been like okay do you want one of course all right yeah and another huge takeaway for me was that a clovis point makes a hell of a clovis knife yeah i. Mm-hmm. I mean, but that's probably the way they were using them though, right? Well, and what was cool too yesterday with that experiment. You can't ask them.

Was that the two different tools seemed to function better for certain tasks. Oh, yeah. So like the Clovis point worked good for some things, whereas those big bifacial thinning flakes worked better for other things. Should we clarify that right now? We've said it a couple of times. So we had like Clovis points that would have been napped that were connected with artificial sinew to a wooden handle that basically looked like knives. Yeah.

In multiple sizes. And we were told to pick a numbered Clovis knife, essentially, and you guys recorded which knives we were using. We butchered one whole side of the bison with these Clovis knives that you had made. The second side of the bison we butchered with big flint flakes. Is that silica? Yeah, kind of like discs almost. Yeah, you would pick it up on the ground and wouldn't realize.

where the handle is real sharp. But yeah, exactly. Yeah, minus the handle and sharpened all the way around. These flakes though, you'd pick them up on the ground and not recognize that they were made by man.

I mean, it's just a flake, a big like flake the size of the palm of your hand. And we butchered an entire side with those and i i was used i went with the leather used a piece of leather to protect your fingers yeah and it it worked pretty good oh hey you know how he just said mate you wouldn't recognize as being made by man can you there's a thing i wanted to talk about what we forgot to talk about can you talk about what you guys are doing in antarctica. We, uh, have a paper coming out in the journal

antiquity and, uh, we, uh, you know, there's lots of claims for archeological sites being real old in different places. And, and the claims are dependent on the rocks themselves. What people think are stone tools. Like a lot of the stuff I send you pictures of. Yeah.

Yeah. And this has to be a tool. Yeah. And you know, cause it fits so nicely in the hand or there's like even flakes taken off and things like that. So, uh, it occurred to, uh, sort of our group of researchers, um, that, you know, if we could find a place somewhere on earth where humans had never been, that'd be a great natural laboratory for looking at how flint and basalt

and obsidian fracture geologically, just in their sort of natural habitat without humans around. And so, uh, we went first to the polar rock repository in Columbus, Ohio. And then this past summer, we went to the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, and we just started going through all sorts of their rock collections, millions of rocks. And what we found really questioned for me, what exactly we know about stone, because we're finding stone tools with morphologies that are quite advanced. So things that look like hand axes, things that could have been made by Neanderthals, all sorts of simple stone flakes, like the one that's being held right here in the studio.

You could find stuff that would look like that. But you're saying it wasn't made by a human or a Neanderthal. But because these were Antarctic rocks, we know 100% that these were not made by people or hominins or monkeys, primates. So it's real scary. Yeah. The challenge is that a lot of artifacts don't have attributes that are obviously and distinctively and securely made evidence that they were made by humans. So you often have to look at the context.

What Metten is doing in Antarctica is showing, okay, we've got a completely geological context, and yet we have things that look like artifacts. Someone might elsewhere claim is evidence of humans. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, if the, if the context is a little ambiguous and it's, you know, if it's not, if you've got something that you're not quite sure it's an artifact, but it's sitting next to a hearth and you've got a bunch of smashed animal bones and you've got evidence of a structure, yeah, okay, the artifact might be ambiguous in terms of its attributes. But looking at the context, you say, okay, fine. The problem is, is that when you've got situations where geology and geological processes have the opportunity to

create mischief and make things that mimic artifacts and that's the only thing you have and you don't have a good archaeological context or other evidence that will confirm it that's where it becomes problematic and a lot of the claims for truly ancient sites are based on just these sort of ambiguous artifacts in ambiguous contexts like here's a hundred thousand year old mammoth and here's a sharp rock. Exactly right. And so what Metten is able to show, or will be able to show with this Antarctica stuff is that do not be fooled just because something

looks like it could be an artifact. That doesn't mean that it is an artifact. You should label that paper. Uh-huh. So would. Probably ain't Clovis. Would these naturally occurring, looking like tools when first peoples came into all these different areas and they found these rocks when they were like, I need something to cut something with.

Would that be like the original prototype? And then they decided we need to start replicating this? Yeah. So there's a few hypotheses for why people start to nap stone. And one of them is inspired by the site site called dakika which is in east africa and it dates to about 3.3 million and uh there they've got uh cut marks on uh ungulates and bovid type creatures and what they say how you say it i don't know which which part bovid bovid bovid bovid yeah i don't know't know. Sounds smart when he says it.

Yeah. I thought it was bovid. I don't know. It could be bovid. Yeah. Bovid. Yeah. My doctor recently said tinnitus.

And I said, I thought it was tinnitus. He goes, I don't know what it is. That's just how I say it. Sounds like a good doctor, but they think that basically Australopithecus was using naturally sharp rocks that they would just pick up, uh, to cut Mark bone. Now,

maybe at that point they were like, it's a lot easier to break this stuff ourselves and scour the landscape looking for naturally sharp rocks. We're like the rock Steve picked up works way better than my rock. How do I get one like Steve's? Well, number nine. Gotta make it. Yeah, number nine.

Hell, number nine. Well, another piece of that, though, was when Clay asked for an ax to smash those ribs, break them apart from the vertebral column. What he ended up doing, through no fault of his own, was the ax that he was using

was getting fractured and flaked. One of the hypotheses about where tools come from in the original, you know, two, three million years ago, is that humans come on to an animal kill. They haven't killed the animal because they're not capable of it, right? But some big predator did. And there's not a whole lot of meat left on the bones. So what do they do? They grab a rock and they start wailing away at the long bones to try and get to the marrow, right? Because that's something that the big cats or lions, whatever, aren't going to access. And in the process, they create sharp flakes. Yep.

And a light bulb goes off and you think, sharp flakes. I can scrape meat off. Right. Uh, so there's lots of ways in which the pathways could have ended up, you know, getting, you know, the, the possibility that John raised, uh, that Metton was talking about as well. Um, and we're just this sort of accident of you're smashing a rock, uh, against bone and it breaks and you end up with well cut fingers and lots of really sharp flakes that you realize, okay, I can use this. One of the things that, that I know you guys,

you're reluctant to draw these hard, you know, you're not reluctant, you can't draw all these hard conclusions. And, and, and like you pointed out, we're not ice age hunters. You know, we don't know what went on. You can't rule out weird stuff like we're kids messing around,

you know, and whatever they're doing, they're throwing rocks at stuff and playing and smashing things. You know, you don't know what happened. Right. Um, but I feel like you can take certain things like,

like fleshing that hide. I feel like someone, someone could arrive at this thing that, that I don't know how they did it. They didn't do it that way. Yeah. So in some ways, experimental archaeology is really useful for showing how something definitely could not have happened. Yeah.

So, you know, like that scraper, right? So that's a situation where given the form of that scraper, you know, it doesn't look like you were able to flesh that hide with it. So, and sort of go back to the drawing board and try a different form. I think like with the scraper deal at, during those times, what we were trying to get off the hide wouldn't have been like what I would deem as a waste product at my studio where like, I got

to get this off, dispose of it, then I can get to what I need to do. I think they would have still been trying to harvest that and then you'd have been left with just like when you skin out a beaver and it air dries and you're just a light, light film. You're not trying to roll three quarters of an inch of meat off the hide.

You know, that would have been something you were still trying to consume. That's interesting. Okay. That's how I felt yesterday with like the, the shanks of the quarters is that it took me as much time to get the meat off around like the shanks as it did the wholeanks of the quarters is that it took me as much time to get the meat off around like the shanks as it did the whole rest of the quarter. And so like, I could spend just as much

time removing 90% of the meat on a back ham as I could removing the 10% of the meat on a back ham that came from the shanks. And I told Michelle, I was like, this just like, isn't kind of, this isn't very reasonable to like get the lowest quality cut of meat and spend the same amount of time to get 10% of the yield. So maybe they ate this off the bone. Maybe they just didn't really need it that badly to get this piece of meat that was the size of a water bottle off compared to everything else. Here's a thought that I had while we were doing it yesterday, is that we're skinning this bison, and we have all this other context of our human life around us,

like Steve needed to go to his daughter's open house. Well, if I could make it. If you could make it. You know, we wanted to go have dinner at a restaurant. I mean, I'm just making stuff up. I'm making stuff up. Got to get to the processor. And the way we chose efficiency for every single decision that we made, we chose efficiency to skin the spicing.

And I was thinking if, and we kind of talked about this yesterday, if there had been one of the Paleolithic hunters there with us watching us he undoubtedly would have done it different oh go go read make go read uh make prayers to the raven by by the anthropologist richard k nelson when he talked when he's with the koyukak right what you do and don't do yeah they have skinning animals holy Holy cow. They had so many superstitions. You can't touch that. Spiritual reasons. You can't like so-and-so can't do that. You can't move it that way. Yeah. You know? Well, but here's my point is that they, what we did yesterday was literally like them walking onto a pile of $2,500 worth of American dollar bills.

I mean, like this was their life. This was their, the reason, there was no higher moment in their world other than just like family stuff. But it's like, man, we, this is what we, we're professional hunters. We are now capable to take this that we're processing and live in peace for the next

two months or whatever and so just that mind frame would have caused them i think to potentially have done things totally different maybe they took two hours to get the shank off or maybe they were running from short-faced bears and chunked them into the woods. But bear in mind, and Matt and Drew speak to this, because bear in mind, we were doing something just to help them interpret what was from around then. But let me get back to something you said yesterday, though, Clay. You said, imagine at the Folsom site you got 32 bison that you've got to process. I think they would have gone for efficiency and speed under those circumstances because those 32 bison aren't going to butcher themselves. And you had evidence of that by the way they gourmet butchered them.

Absolutely. Which they were taking choice cuts, leaving some stuff. Moving fast because, you know, 32 animals, unless you've got 100 butchers out there. And if you've got a small group, you better work fast because it's just not going to. And it's 85 degrees out. And it's 85 degrees, yeah. What's the closest an experiment has come to this before, like what we did yesterday? There's been a few butcher experiments on elephants and bison.

So, you know, I think replicability in science is always important, you know, and I think we've made certain improvements on past studies, uh, in terms of how we documented things and, and we've made certain modifications to how things were documented and, but undoubtedly, I think we were much more systematic about it. Yeah. Yeah. More, more systematic, but undoubtedly someone will use this study as a stepping stone to do it even better. And that's the key point. There's no ever final word in science. And I think once you start thinking in those terms, you're in trouble.

We touched on, I want to point out to people that in addition to you guys doing your work, we were able to document it. We had videographers there to document it in a way that was just, there was a round documenting the process. So you'll be able to see this whole thing play out eventually. Yeah. In addition to reading the paper that you generate from it. But we've spent a bunch of time talking about the stone. You're also interested in the bones. Can you explain?

Well, I think David would write so when you get to a kill site you will find sometimes not always cut marks on bone and those cut marks are presumably a consequence of the butchering process and so one of the things that we were also paying close attention to and and John will be helping us on this, is the activities that were done kind of around the bone. And when John is able to get everything sort of all cleaned up, we'll ship the bones to Andrew Boehm, who was out there with us yesterday. And he's an expert in this kind of thing. And so he will be examining the cut marks on the bones because we actually, once again, have a, have a link between the process and the product. So we know what was being done when you guys were hacking away at the ribs on both sides, right? Uh, so we'll be able to

see what that looked like and the difference between struggling with those flakes as you were, as opposed to using the Clovis points to really just pop them and go right along the rib rack. You know, I've read that the Neanderthals, there's evidence suggesting that they parted out their dead. Did they like quartered out their dead? There's a couple of sites where there might be evidence of cannibalism.

I don't know if they quartered them out though, but they will find cut marks on. But I'm saying is that, that's presumably that's because of cut mark on. Of cut marks. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So they do find cut marks on, on some children and, you know, if times get tough in ice age Europe, it's really cold. They'll find cup

like that yeah so we're gonna have to get a cadaver i've tried i do i do want man like i'm reluctant to say but i want in on that when you get that going well you know experiments you know if if nothing if comes up sooner, I might leave my body for a very specific I've thought about doing that. I've thought about leaving my body. You know,

I might have it drawn up in my will that I want to be used in a cut mark experiment. Wait a minute. Well, you got this whole thing about being dumped

for the grizzlies. I know, but I might change that. I was going to have it dumped for grizzlies. We were all kind of getting used to that idea. I'm always telling my kids, I'm like, you're going to have it dumped for grizzlies. We were all kind of getting used to that idea. I'm always telling my kids, I'm like, you're going to have to quarter me out and dump me here.

But I might do this instead and make my kids work on the project. Yeah. And then the grizzlies can have access to the bones after. Yeah, they won't be traumatized or anything. Dump the bones afterward. Yeah. So John will clean all the bones up in a way that doesn't add new marks to them, John. Yes, that is going to be the.

He's like, no, I scraped them all with a scraper. Yeah, I got a knife out, scratched it all off. Brillo pad. No, we'll put them in a big tank for a few days of warm water. Just start emulsifying all the flesh off of it. And then once we finally get it to where it softens up, then we'll power wash it off. So it'll be no tools introduced. And you'll be able to look and you'll be able to say, we know this is where it's cool.

You'll say, we know that the marks on said femur were made by a hafted Clovis point, or we know that the marks on said femur were made by a flake of a person with extraordinary grip strength. Right? So made by a flake of a person with extraordinary grip strength. Right? So made by clay. And then later when you're digging around in some old bone bed

and you see some marks, you might make a more educated guess. If the marks are distinctive. If the marks are distinctive. And that will be something kind of interesting to find out. Now, I've got to bring this up. On the Folsom site, there's some famous, famous marks on the jawbone of one of the bison. Several, actually. Yeah.

Oh, it was on several of the bison. Up on the lower jaw where there were distinctive cut marks on the jaw where it's believed they were cutting the tongues out. So when we're looking at the jaws of this bison, we'll be able to see whether Clay Newcomb, in removing the tongue, left his mark. Clay was nervous about doing it because he knew about those marks. I'm glad they were watching me close. He knew about those marks and he didn't know if he was going to be able to. On the way there, he brought he brought up like what about bias because i've seen those marks and what if i can't resist going his name is in the

marks like yeah yeah clay if they're signed that's a giveaway yeah yeah no i was paying attention when i was cutting that tongue out because i cut the cut the tongue out and uh i was i did everything just as efficient as possible okay and uh i don't think i touched that bone well we we don't see them all the time so yeah it's entirely possible now it probably was slightly biased in the sense that you knew i would not have had him do it we should have had john do it i'm confident we left some tool marks on the ribs oh i, I'm very confident. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

That was when I was going to bring up like what obviously is the way to go and what obviously is not the way to go. Having a big, giant chunk of, what was that rock called? Oh, Georgetown Flint. Yeah. Beating on ribs with a giant chunk of Georgetown Flint is not the way to do that. Not the way to do that we decided in retrospect we should have given him a smaller hand axe because there was just too much opportunity for that thing to fall apart and the waves of force were having to travel too far through the thing before it got to the

bone oh really did clovis use a braided rocks like what you might see in like southwest hand axes like ground stone yeah ground stone no not really not ground stone, but we do see a braiding stone. Yes. That were used for perhaps in grinding the edges of Clovis points or in straightening the shaft of a spear. But not hand axes made by just grinding away a rock to get an edge on it. No. They didn't like that stuff. No, their toolkit in terms of production was very efficient.

And I think it's because they're moving around so much and they got a lot to do. They didn't have a six-pound rock. They liked to carry whoever they wanted. No, no. So they're trying to basically get this rock down in a portable form as quick as possible. When, you don't know where this is going to appear because you've got to do your whole submission process. Yeah. Do you know?

No, not yet. And we generally won't think too hard about the journal until we see the final paper and all the analyses and stuff because that can dictate where it goes. But do you know you'll get a paper? Yeah, we'll count on it. Yeah, definitely. You feel like you'll get a paper out? Oh, 100%. I mean, yeah.

And what's going to be a criticism of this study when that anonymous feedback rolls in? Well, I think, you know. Shouldn't have Clay there. I was about to say, not enough Neanderthal on Steve. There'll be information that people may have wanted that we didn't collect, right? That'll be a criticism. That'll be a criticism. They might have done it a different way. But I think the great thing about experiments is that they can be redone. if you excavate an archaeological site you can't re-excavate it

but with an experiment you can do it again and alter variables um and so i think that's a strength of experiments so and how long will it take you to do all the work and analyze and write the paper uh several months and um because once i get back i'm gonna sort of give it my entire focus but you gotta have the bones back before you can make well so we can work on other aspects there's so many pieces to this in terms of the microware and the morphology the clovis points and efficiency all that sort of stuff um we can work on the stone stuff until the the bone stuff is ready to be sent to Andrew. Yeah.

So, yeah. All right, boys, stay tuned. Yeah. But real quick, just, I think this would be a good time just to say how appreciative we are to collaborating with everyone and Meat Eater. And it's just been awesome. And I don't know if you remember, but in January when I was here, you asked me for something. Do you remember what you asked me for? Probably a whole bunch of Clovis points.

You asked me for a Folsom point. Oh, I did ask you for a Folsom point? Yeah, and so I got a little something for you. Oh, really? Yeah. Just open it real careful. Uh-oh. It's a big white box about this big.

It's a big birthday cake. And you have to do a little unwrapping, too. Steve is opening a white box childish grin on his face all right inside is another box oh inside is another box paper is crinkling holy smokes anticipation i thought this was right because i wanted a four chef yeah oh that is gorgeous man so just all of us, all the archaeologists, we're just so appreciative for all you guys, and so we thought that this would be something for you

that you could look at and everyone could see, and a couple of Clovis points hafted on the Port Warford four-shafts. That is gorgeous. So it's a box, or how do you describe it? Well, it's a picture box. A shadow box. A display, yeah, like a treasure box, a display box with two hafted Folsom points. Says to Steve Rinell and the Meat Eater team, Folsom points napped on Texas Georgetown

Chirt, Gray, and Fredericksburg Chirt, Tan, by M.I. Aaron, hafted on Port Oxford Cedar Four Shafts by M.I. Aaron, hafted on Port Oxford cedar foreshafts by M. Wilson. Man, thank you. Where's that going to go? The podcast studio? Yeah, it's right here, man. Steve, can you show it to us? That's amazing.

It's beautiful. It is. Wow, look at that. Thank you so much. Very well done. Oh, it's gorgeous. I, yeah. It is. Wow, look at that. Thank you so much. Very well done. Oh, that's gorgeous. I'm going to pass that around. While you're waiting for the paper to come out, you can go check out.

Right, Corinne? While you're waiting for the paper to come out, and while you're waiting for this eventual episode to drop where you get to see everyone getting their hands real dirty and cut up using Clovis points, you can watch Meteor Season 11.

For free. For free. On our own website. A window of time. It'll be available for free. On 10-26, October 26, you'll see an episode with me and Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee hunting the rainforest of

Southeast Alaska for black-tailed deer. Getting our buns kicked. Till the end. So check that out while we're waiting for the paper to come out. If you're waiting for the Mountaineer site, I don't know, the Mountaineer site book, me and Clay are taking bids.

I'm sure they'll come up with other copies to sell. No, it was said available soon. Hey, season 11, it's going to be rolled out. It just starts on October 26th. One a week.

One a week. Yep, on our old website. Okay. Before we get out of here, can we talk about the email you sent last night, Metten? Yeah. He didn't send me an email

last night. He sent me an email. This is in all caps. You guys got like a little side thing going on? No, no. Well, this is the criticism we talked about earlier. This is the disagreement from last night that spilled over into the break room this morning.

But I was real excited. Metten wrote me an email last night. He says... Well, okay. I was really enthusiastic. I'm just going to preface that. So, all right. This is all caps.

It says, Spencer, I think you solved a huge mystery about Clovis technology. I am so freaking excited. And then he talked to me. He just got real jealous. So let's hear about what you think we discovered. Well, honestly, I think we got to save that for the paper. Okay. Yeah.

But then David shot you down? No, it has to do with the intentionality of how these things were made. Got it. So, yeah, we'll get there. Major cliffhanger. Exciting. And Spencer did it. So yeah, we'll get there. Major cliffhanger. Exciting. And Spencer did it. Spencer, yeah.

It's just, it's a, what's cool is it's a, it's a new way of thinking about a feature of a Clovis point that is not in the literature. Wow. Good job, Spencer. Spencer. But it could all be wrong. It could be wrong. It could be wrong.

But it could be right. But it could be right. It could be right. That's right. If not, I still got a high last night from getting this email from Matt. My stomach turned when you sent it. I was like, Shelby, I don't know what's

going on. I may have just done something incredible. I think things might be looking up for us, Shelby. I told you this would all pay off. Yep. Alright guys, thanks so much. It was a Yeah. Yep. All right, guys. Well, thanks so much.

It was a lot of fun. I'm not joking. I will... I said yesterday, this is the highlight of my career. Really. I mean, like a real high point. And the other thing is,

I will talk about that in probably a very annoying way. I will talk about that for the rest of my life so we yeah and it left me wondering like why have I you know why have I never done it all the knowing about oh you can Flint knives and da da da da like that it took this many decades and someone else to lay the whole thing out for me to just do it,

like butcher an animal with a flint knife. I just, for two days. I don't understand why I never did it. Just, well, it worked out with the podcast and just everyone sort of getting to know each other. Yep. Just. But to be able to do it with stuff that looks like,

that's like, to be able to do it with stuff that resembles and is made from the materials left behind actual Clovis sites was was fantastic and I think for us to all of your observations using those things absolutely we were taking notes yeah what you guys were saying and when you were complaining when you were happy we were making notes of what was working and what wasn't that was really helpful because with your knowledge of how to process these animals like we will look at these tools in new ways and and so that's i think just the the benefit of this collaboration okay elephants next and then folks done and done same spot hey i i know we're closing down so i we can't get into this at all but it i just gotta say it

i mean i killed a bear with a stone point like five days ago it's interesting that all this happened it's the first time i've ever hunted with well i've hunted with a stone point before first time i've ever killed an animal with stone we're just like for another day with a fulsome point yeah i watched the video the little video clip of it last night. Yes. People will be able to see it. And Dr. Meltzer was our featured guest. Well, these guys aren't interested because you did it with a bow.

Right. That's another story. Well, how and when will you be able to see it, Clay? The release date is unknown at this time. I don't think I can go into the release date. But there will be a film put out through Meat Eater. Dr. David Meltzer is one of our feature guests. We went to New Mexico. We went to the Folsom site.

Yeah. And then we made some Folsom points and I killed a bear with a Folsom point. So yeah, it's going to come out. Run that. The good thing he doesn't have to run that by the old ethics committee. Yeah. Oh, I'm ready, man. I'm just saying these guys have a whole higher level of like,

do you know what I mean? Right. They got to put up, they don't just call a couple of guys and they're like, Oh yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. Go for it. Uh, thank you so much guys. Thank you. Thank you for this. We'll cherish this. I'm not going to hog it. I'm not going Thank you so much, guys. Thank you. Especially for this. We'll cherish this. I'm not going to hog it.

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