The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 385: A Wild New World

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Dan Flores, Janis Putelis, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Jani negging Steve; the giant moose paddle that Steve's gonna make into a chair for his kid; how to get stuff from Alaska to the Lower 48; Dan Flores' brilliant new book, "Wild New World," is available; starting a story 66 million years ago; wiping the slate clean with a big asteroid; striking at a shallow angle; when extinctions stopped for 10,000 years; flightless birds as the first things to go; a haunting chicken memory from your childhood; where religious theology meets theories of extinction; cooking penguin eggs for breakfast; "too wild" for civilization; the fur desert; killing animals as a geopolitical idea; market capitalism wiping out the buffalo; the east coast prairie chicken; the ivory bill's toy trumpet cry; how Dan makes quick work of the mountain men; how our Neanderthal ancestors were more carnivorous than wolves; wishing to know an entire heaven and earth; 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. Oh, hey, real quick before we get started. I have sitting next to me a what I thought to be an extremely impressive moose shed and Giannis kind of negged it.

You know what negging is? I don't know the exact definition. Like how do you explain it phil when you neg something it's a it's a strategy to make them feel smaller on purpose it's a it was it was popularized as a strategy it was popularized as a strategy to pick up how do you spell it like let's say here i'm gonna i'm gonna be, me and Corinne are going to role play. No, no, I don't want to do it that way. Me and Corinne are going to role play. You neg me how you use it as a pickup strategy, as a hit on strategy.

Like I would say to Corinne, instead of being like, oh, let's say we're young single people. Okay. Okay. And I would approach Corinne and I would say, I could approach Corinne and say like, my goodness, you look beautiful today. Right. And that has one, that's one approach.

Or I could come up and go like, your shoes look kind of funny. And that was popularized for a time as a way to, as a subversive way to hit on someone oh if you don't come in with a compliment you come in with a with a like you know you should get you should change your hair i don't like your haircut doesn't look great on you and then you leverage then that's leveraged this is there's a whole book about how to do it people get all interested in kind of responding to that yeah there's a whole book about how to do it. Like, Steve, I'm not sure your glasses

match your outfit today. And instead of the expected thing would be like, holy cow, you look amazing. Would you like to have dinner? You come in and you're like, man, you should think about updating your wardrobe. Right? And you've set this whole,

you've set in play this dynamic, right? The tension starts from the first word. And every woman in the world just can't help but live the rest of her life to impress that man. Got it. And try to work hard. Yeah, it's very subversive. It's very manipulative. Yeah, that sounds like manipulating.

Let's get back to negging. Oh, well, I showed you my moose antler. I showed you my moose antler, and it's N-E-G. Okay, well. I showed you on my sweep. Merriam-Webster doesn't have this definition i would check the urban dictionary yeah urban dictionaries oh it's like a slang term point being i walked in like uh you know how do you have something impressive you just kind of walk in with it

he was so happy about it it just came in this big old box sorry i didn't i didn't yeah i didn't mean to pull your attention away. Did you notice this? This giant moose antler I'm holding? I mean, it's pretty huge. It's like as big as like a baby's cradle. Yeah. A baby's cradle.

I was pointing out to our guest who I'm about to introduce. I was pointing out that I have a plan in which I'm going to turn it into a chair for my kids. It's that big. Well, I brought it in and Yanni's like, why are you showing me that? I don't know. Is it big? Just right now. What's interesting about that shed?

It's just nagging the shit out of me. Are you going to make it into a chair after you saw the pictures of the moose antler chairs that I showed you from Latvia? No, no, no. It is a chair. No, it doesn't need to be. It is a chair. It already is a chair. Look at it. Fucking huge. But is that where you got the idea, Steve, from Yanni? Is that why

Yanni is nagging you? We're going to do a whole episode about Yanni's Latvian trip. We just decided. So we'll save that. No. Point being, the only reason i'm bringing this thing up is uh we there's been a long thing like how to bring this this is this is applicable to a very small subset of of our audience is how to get stuff from alaska down to the lower 48 so this year we were up hunting and Clay got a moose and he had the moose rack.

I had my moose shed. We all the moose meat and we used a service called Alaska Trophy Express. It's a great job, dude. We had like just frozen moose meat, the skull. I had my shed antler. It's cheaper than trying to get it all packaged and shipping it home on a plane now with baggage fees. And lo and behold, not too much long later,

there it all is. It was cheaper? Yeah. I don't know the exact details on it, but we ran the numbers and it was cheaper. Especially like, you know, especially if you wind up with these, like people got a couple moose and just showed up safe and sound. Clay's stuff got delivered down to, he had a

drive, you know how he lives on the border, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He drove over to Oklahoma and picked it up. My, my antler's sitting right here in the damn office. Alaska Trophy Express. Yeah. Big thanks to those guys.

With some attention to it as well. Look at the duct tape to make sure that that lower prong doesn't get broken off or anything. No, they did a wonderful job. Yeah. And I was holding off on Sanex. I wanted to see how it went, but they did a wonderful job. Our esteemed guest, Dan Flores, who we did an event with at the bookstore last night, who's out

promoting his new book wild new world i'm gonna have you explain the book real quick dan but first i want to point out there's something you might not know you when we were first starting the show out you were in one not first starting the show out but in the infancy of the show. I can't remember what episode number it was. The episode we did with you was our first episode that ever like really got traction. That was shared, you know, that had a life that lived, that had a life at the time that kind of lived beyond the normal subscriber base. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

It was kind of one of our first real serious shows that really just became a thing for us. This was the one we did in Seattle? That's correct. Yeah. It looks like that might be episode 33. Was it that early? It may have been that early, but it looks like Dan's been on episode 33, 69, and 86.

So we went back to the well, didn't we? Mm-hmm. Tell folks about your new book, Dan. Okay. I want to set it up for you though yes okay i read the entirety of that book probably within about 70 yards of that moose antler without knowing it was there without knowing that antler was there no yeah well i finished the book and then realized it was there and realized there was an antler sitting right beside you in the grass it was kind of

tucked into some willows but yeah read the whole the whole damn book, not knowing it was there, but it was there the whole time. Well, I suppose that says something about either your power of concentration or the ability of the book to hold you. Well, first of all, Steve, thanks for having me on again. It's great to be back with you guys and hang out with you as well. This new book, Wild New World, is the title and the subtitle is an epic story of animals and people in America, is an attempt to try to write in a single volume of a little short of 400 pages, the whole story, or at least a whole story, of the North American human wildlife, wild animal experience. And it's what is known in the trade as a big history. It was kind of inspired when

I began working on it by Yuval Harari's Sapiens, which I know almost all of us have read, which of course was a big history book about the origin of humans. But I wanted to focus specifically on North America. It's where I live. It's the country that the United States is the place that I know best and where I know the animals best and the history best. But I wanted to do justice to it. And so I started the story 66 million years ago. This is a book that in 398 pages goes from 66 million years ago down basically to advance earlier in 2022. So in other words, up to yesterday. And I wanted to start it that early because the only way to really explain how North America acquired its bestiary of animals is to look at what happened on the continent in the wake of the great asteroid

impact that wiped out the dinosaurs and created the age of mammals. Of course, we owe that asteroid, which is called, by the way, the Chicxulub impactor. I didn't know. Yeah, I never heard that word. You point out that it's a great word. It's a great word. It's a great word. And it's coming into more common use and recognition, I think. It's named after a little Mayan town on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, which is where this asteroid hit. And as I said, the purpose of talking about it to begin with and describing the effect of the impact on the continent and on Earth was really to set up the age that follows,

which is called the Paleocene, which is when North America began to acquire its animals. And that acquisition took place as a result of evolution of species that emerged in the wake of the demise of the dinosaurs, and also as a result of the migration of animals from other parts of the world, the most spectacular and charismatic of which animals like mammoths and mastodons, for example, and bison came out of Asia. Hey, I want to pause for from it to ask you a couple questions about that strike had there if that strike happened right now uh there's no way

humans would survive or is that not true well it would be so that strike wiped out 75 percent of of life on Earth. It didn't take out everything. It took out most terrestrial life, though. I mean, we ended up in terms of vertebrates in North America with only a couple of percent of creatures surviving it. I mean, alligators survived it. Crocodiles did. Mostly reptiles and amphibians. And what enabled things to survive was that they tended to be hidden back behind the mountain ranges on the opposite side of where the impact took place. And so it was possible for a few creatures that were isolated to survive. And I suppose that's probably what would happen with people if we had an impact like this one. I mean, this was a solar system-wide impact. It was a gigantic asteroid, more than seven miles in diameter,

and it was traveling at 27,000 miles an 000 miles an hour so yeah it was a huge impact yeah we did that we did this conversation last night at the local bookstore i was talking about i never and two things never occurred to me until i read dan's book is that it wasn't the first time that thing passed by no right so you'd be humans would be like oh there it is again yeah right and it got a little closer and the other thing is that hit at a shallow angle yeah like almost maximized for just blasting stuff right instead of just going straight down out of the sky yeah it did not hit from straight down it it hit at an angle and it hit at an angle, and it hit at an angle that was really severe on North America because it hit basically in what would today be the Gulf of Mexico. So North America, a lot of it got fried.

I mean, creatures just really got wiped out. the aftermath of it. It goes for several weeks producing tsunamis that are a mile tall that bounce off of land all over the globe and have still left these big piled up remnants of mud and debris five and six stories high on the ocean floor. I mean, those things still exist. And also- can you hold do they have chunks of that thing oh yeah yeah that the asteroid itself basically was obliterated but what we have are the remnants of the shocked uh geology from where it where it hit but you can't there's no there's no known piece of the thing. I'm not aware of there being any known pieces of the thing still there,

although I may be wrong about that because we do know that it was, we do know what the substance of the asteroid was. It was a chondrite, which is one of the most common forms of meteorites today that fly through the sky and produce those beautiful night sky comet-like appearances. So we know that it was a chondrite. That may imply that there was some residue of it that enabled people to identify what it was but i was uh really intrigued

when i was doing the research on this and there's a lot of new work on it which i tried to i tried to incorporate in the book uh by the fact that it it was such a blast that the ejectaa from the impact exited Earth's gravity and essentially spread across the entire solar system. And there are paleobiologists out there who argue that there is a good chance with an impact on a planet like Earth that was filled with life, that although it nearly destroyed life on Earth, it very likely spread microbial life across the solar system to places like Mars, to Jupiter's moons, to Saturn's moons. We're not going to know any of this until we definitively find out whether or not there is life on places like Enceladus or Europa or some of the moons of the outer solar system. But this impact was large enough that it may have done that very thing. It may have been a kind of a genesis effect for life in the solar system. Did you research at all,

when you're looking at the impact of such a great thing that has such mass and speed could it or did it affect at all like the earth's rotation its orbit its path and if not if it was still super so small like what would it take did you like look into what would it take to actually move the earth out of its orbit or to pause its rotation for a second yeah i uh well you know as a as a writer who is not a you know a scholar of this um i was able to use only the the articles that i found and i haven't found anyone yet who has actually investigated whether or not this nudged the Earth in its orbit or slowed its rotation or anything like that. I mean, you know, we think that the impact that created the Moon, I mean, very early in Earth's formation, there was a gigantic impact that probably produced the Moon, blew the Moon off the earth to create the moon that orbits around our planet

today, that that one probably did affect the orbit and probably the rotation. But that would have been one many times larger than even this Chicxulub impactor. And the Chicxulub impactor seems, you know, that seems plenty big enough that it can produce a mass extinction. It's hard to imagine one that would be even larger. But I mean, you know, you look at the moon through a telescope or look at Mars, sometimes photographs of Mars. I mean, and it's fairly clear that planets are constantly being bombarded, particularly by asteroids that formed from the planet that wasn't created between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That's the asteroid belt. And that was a place where a planet was trying to form and never quite did so. And so it's the spot that shoots all these projectiles out

through the solar system, especially to the inner planets of the system. So, I mean, I include a photograph in the book of this gigantic, to me, gigantic meteor crater in Arizona, because when I was writing about this- Oh, yeah, that's a good image. Yeah, I want- There's no looking at that one and what happened. No, you don't look at it and wonder. I mean, when I was writing about this, I thought, well, you know, hell, I've got, I mean, I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I've got, there's a meteor crater I know that's only about a five-hour drive from here. So I hopped in my

Jeep and drove over there to look at this thing. And I mean, it is worth, it's not very far off Interstate 40 east of Flagstaff, just a little south on a dirt road. I mean, it's well worth going out and having a look at. But I wanted to shoot a photograph of it in order to sort of give readers of the book some sense of. Oh, it does a great job of it. Yeah. I don't want to dwell too long on this whole, like, we got to get from there to yesterday. Yeah. But two things. Have you, you saw on the news that NASA just was toying around with how to nudge, nudging an asteroid to alter its trajectory.

Yeah. As like a sort of, you know, a potential future defense mechanism from such thing happening in the future. And have you seen the movie Melancholia? I have not seen melancholia no it's a dark one through most of the movie you can't everybody it's just a movie about people going about their lives and you can't tell it's just everything's off everything's frantic and off and it takes you a long time to realize that it's it's counting down to a strike and everyone's known for a long time that it's coming.

Yeah. And just everything's going to end. And so it's a, it's a, it's not on society is unraveling like in a way that, you know, the people who traffic in zombie movies would have it on role. It's just unraveling socially in strange ways.

And eventually you put together what the issue is this is what's looming over and you're you're experiencing uh you're experiencing life um toward its end but it's been known for quite some time well i think that's that's precisely what would happen because we do have the ability now to uh figure out when an asteroid is coming close enough to hit or to pass very, very near us. So, yeah, I mean, NASA obviously takes all of this seriously enough that it's developed and is working on a technology to try to deflect asteroids that could possibly strike Earth. And, you know, as you just said, we had about 10 days ago an example of what appeared to be certainly a successful hit and working out the movements of that body through space. It looks like it was nudged out of the direction it was it was going previously uh and that moment as you as you explain

sets up where you've basically wiped the slate clean yeah and it gives you a great starting point to explain how things came to be here when humans discovered the place. Yes, that's what I try to do with this opening chapter. And so after the Chicxulub impact, I mean, I'm able to cover millions of years in pretty rapid fashion by, in effect, describing the evolution of the North American species that come to be kind of the icons of continental evolution. And they're not quite the animals that most people assume because two of the most iconic creatures that emerge from North American evolution, we don't, many of us don't even think of as being American animals. And one of those is

the camel, which evolved some 45 million years ago in North America, eventually spread to other parts of the world where it survived. But by about 10,000 years ago, camels, the most recent camel that we had in North America was called Yesterday's Camel. It was a single-humped camel that would look very familiar to those of us who had the image of a camel in our heads. And it became extinct about 10,000 years ago. And the other animal, which of course has produced a modern-day dilemma, is the horse, which is a distinctively evolved North American group of animals that emerged 56 million years ago, fairly quickly after the Chicxulub impact. And they also were here down to about 8,000 years ago, we think, when once again they became extinct in North and South America and somehow survived in the rest of the world.

But in addition to those, I mean, we evolved wolves and coyotes. Those are the family of canids, are North American creatures from about five and a half million years ago. So they've been around singing what I call in another book of mine, the original national anthem in America for a very long time. Jaguars are a North American evolved cat. We have a whole host of species that wildlife departments still kind of think of as the classic North American animals are actually migrants from other parts of the world, from places like Asia. Newbies, too.

Yeah, newbies. I mean, as I was saying last night at the bookstore, I mean, one of the ones that we have now realized here just in the last few years. Can I tell them why I had you talk about you talk about that yeah yeah is uh the buffalo yeah so we were we were discussing i was discussing one place where i think where i was challenging dan i think i said you're out of your mind is um i was putting to dan how considering the debate around wild horses, feral horses, or wild, depending on your sentiments, the debate around areas where you have conflict between feral horses and native, what people would call native wildlife like desert bighorns and mule deer, how could you be a wild horse advocate considering that they're in some ways detrimental to native wildlife and and i was teeing dan up to explain his viewpoint which

which i know from reading the book about you know the need to be precise and careful around throwing around like native wildlife when you look at it from a deep history perspective. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so, I mean, the horse is probably our classic example of that very thing that you teed up for me because it's an animal that has been around for 56 million years in North America with the single exception of the 8, 9,000 years prior to 1500 or so when Europeans reintroduced these animals to North America. So they were just gone for a very small amount of time, which is one of the reasons as a result of their adaptation in North America and

their evolution here, they've done so well when we brought them back. I mean, they were completely pre-adapted, having evolved here, to conditions in North America. But the point of that chapter to describe what happened in North America after the impact is to set up the bestiary that was here when humans arrived. And the last about eight or nine pages of chapter one is actually about the, I turned to Africa then and described the evolution of humans there. and eventually their spread, humanity's spread out of Africa around the rest of the world. And so what I'm trying to create, obviously, is the possibility of humans ultimately finding these sort of lost continents, North and South America, which are the farthest away from Africa on the planet. They're the last continents that humans migrating out of Africa find. And what they find

there is this unique bestiary that's composed of all these animals that evolved in America and a whole host of others that ended up over time traveling the land bridges between Eurasia and America and becoming part of our native bestiary. Animals like mastodons and mammoths and saber-toothed cats and all the bears that we have, all the deer, all the sheep, the mountain goats, and of course, the bison, which is I was about to say a minute ago is one of the last ones to arrive. We think bison only arrived in North America about 250,000 years ago. Passenger pigeons, for example, had come or the progenitors of passenger pigeons, we think 15 million years ago. Passenger pigeons, for example, had come, or the progenitors of passenger pigeons, we think 15 million years ago, and mammoths 17 million years ago. So we had animals that had come to North America and become part of the native bestiary far, far longer ago in the past than bison did. And yet we think of bison i you know i'm not arguing

against this but we do think of them as being our classic north american iconic animal yeah distinctly american distinctly american yeah you there's something that's surprised when you're describing the how things shook out with our bestiary is that and i might be getting this a little bit wrong is you talk about imagining the western half of the country as being asiatic yeah in the eastern half of the country i can't remember is it is it more of a a european am i messing this up no no you're not. No, I do make that point in several places in the book. And I sort of start from the Mississippi Valley eastward to today's Atlantic coast. And, of course today's Greenland and Iceland and down through the British Isles into Europe. great inland sea. And the western piece, which is known as Laramidia, is basically a piece that would be from the Rocky Mountains, which didn't exist yet at the time of the impact, westward to the Pacific coast. And its connections, land bridge connections, were to Eurasia on the Western side, primarily to Asia itself. And so the exchanges of animals to those two different parts of America

tended to come from two different directions. I mean, even some of the European naturalists who got to North America in the 1700s, for example, Mark Catesby, a famous British naturalist who works in the American South, was far more interested in America's birds and reptiles because he thought the mammals in the eastern part of North America that he was himself studying were too much like the mammals of Western Europe for him to spend much time on them. So he sort of ignored the mammals because they were familiar and focused on these other groups. Whereas when people like Lewis and Clark, for example, crossed the Mississippi River and began to approach the Great Plains,

the Rockies, the Pacific Coast, I mean, their journals are full of these very distinct impressions of being in a whole new world with animals that having grown up in places like Virginia and Tennessee, none of them had ever seen before. They had never been exposed to. They were all brand new to Western science. I mean, from pronghorns to prairie dogs to mule deer to grizzlies, it was a completely different world. And it's a world that was much more influenced by Asia and migration out of Asia than the eastern side of the continent

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you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I'd love to cover it again again but we've covered so many times with um archaeologists and different paleontologists the the blitzkrieg hypothesis and the in the in the correlations between um the arrival of humans in the new world and the extinctions of the mammoth, the Macedon, and all the debates about who is to blame. So I'd love to, but I don't want to rehash it.

But you get into a thing I haven't thought of for a long time. So you cover the Clovis period, and the chapter is... Clovisia the Beautiful. Clovisia the Beautiful. And I learned a bunch of stuff about Clovis that I had never known. I had never known an accounting of how many Clovis points

archaeologists have recovered in the continent and where they came from, which was fascinating. And I learned all kinds of stuff about Clovis and anyone that reads the book is going to, I guarantee you, I don't care how checked out you are on Ice Age Hunters. You're going to learn more about Ice Age Hunters. And you cover the extinctions and the mysteries

and different explanations for the extinctions and some of the smoking guns that, that attribute human cause to those extinctions and other stuff beautifully well. Then you, then you get into a period in the book, which I think you call the native period. Yeah. And we go through all these extinctions

when humans arrive. But then you focus in on what doesn't happen for 10,000 years. Yeah. Extinctions stop for 10,000 years. You have people here, extinctions stop for ten thousand years you have people here extinctions stop yeah and then holy shit do they start back up again when europeans arrive but but can you talk a little bit about why they stopped what went on that where you had some semblance of stasis with North American wildlife? Yeah, it's a fascinating period because it speaks to this almost romantic hope we have that at some point in time, humans were a benevolent force in nature, and that somehow we were able to

go in the past, we hope, looking back on it as a kind of a lesson for us now, we were able to go for many thousands of years, in the case of North America, 10,000 years after the Pleistocene extinctions with almost no extinctions. You know, you talk about, yeah, there's one, right? There's one. It's not quite a complete success story. There is one. There is a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast of North America, basically from the Channel Islands in California along the California coast up into Oregon,

that was present when this period, which I refer to as Native America. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I call the chapter Ravens and Coyotes America after these deity figures. But it's basically 10,000 years of native North America after the end of the Pleistocene. And we know that those sea ducks were hunted as soon as this period begins. And they do finally become extinct, but it takes 7,500 years for this to happen.

They don't become extinct according to the archaeological sites of about eight or ten different kills of these sea ducks until about 2,400 years ago. So even with hunting, the sea ducks themselves last a long time. I will also say that flightless birds all over the world, as humans spread out of Africa and settle other parts of the world, flightless birds are usually the first things to go. They're the low-hanging fruit. That's what people can get at easily. When we have dogs, the dogs can get at them too. And so flightless birds of all kinds all over the world are going to go pretty quickly after humans arrive.

Was the dodo flightless? It was, yeah. Okay. And then the moas and— The moas, the great auk, which was our northern hemisphere penguin, which became extinct during the 1840s. It was one of those that became extinct as a result of the sort of mayhem you mentioned after Europeans arrived. But this 10,000 year period is really fascinating for the relative lack of extinctions. And we've also made it into this kind of baseline model because Europeans preserved when they arrived 500 years ago, this image of this fecund, wonderful kind of virgin continent that was just brimming with wildlife of all kinds. And so at the very end of that 10,000 years, you have this European journaling that describes a continent that was really rich in life. So the question,

obviously, is how did this happen? How was it possible for people to live here for 10,000 years and inflict almost no extinctions in contrast to the earlier period and the later period. And so it was something of a puzzle to figure out because frankly, hardly anybody has tried to work on this. And in Europe during that 10,000 years, they never slowed down they never i mean they continued to like they continued to extirpate you know from great britain and just on and on and on like species maybe it hit a crescendo with the pleistocene extinctions but they continued to whittle away at the place they whittled away at it to the point where the only reason in Western Europe in particular that we still had horses

and we still had wild cattle, aurochs, and we still had sheep and goats were numerous enough that they were more difficult, but cattle and horses in particular survived only because we domesticated them. Had we not domesticated them, we would have simply, in Western Europe, followed the trajectory of the earlier period where, I mean, there's a site in France where the remains of 20,000 horses have been excavated from being corralled and slaughtered by these late hunters. So, yes. That was over a period of time. That was over a period of time.

Yeah, it wasn't a single event. One big hoorah. Would have been quite a rodeo. But, no, and horses obviously were, you know, they were really hard to kill. I mean, you know, I have information in the earlier parts of the book about the Neanderthal hunters who very clearly were hunting horses. And I mean, these guys ended up being beaten to death by close in encounters with these really powerful, aggressive animals. I mean, broken thigh bones and fractured faces and gouged out eyes. And so it was not easy to do that, but Europeans managed to get horses to the point where we had to domesticate them,

essentially, to save them. In North America, though, here's this 10,000-year period where hardly anything like that really happens. And what I came to, and I start that chapter out, by the way, by climbing up on the cliff at the Madison Buffalo Jump one morning and walking back to the spot where I had read that the herds were off and started running towards the edge of the cliff, and running it myself down to the point where the animals were falling off the cliff into this huge bone bed, five, six, seven feet deep at the bottom of the cliff, and sort of speculating with that sort of strategy, which happened all over wherever

buffalo were found. I mean, the buffalo jump at one point down in West Texas, a place called Bonfire Shelter, so many animals were driven off that cliff that the reason it has that name today is because they spontaneously combusted, a huge mass of animals at the foot of the cliff spontaneously combusted and burned this cliff for hundreds of feet up towards its rim how then with those kind of techniques were people able to do this 10 000 year thing i gotta interrupt you i was my boy was mowing the lawn i was trying to save up leaf clippings you know for the garden and stuff and he left so he like parks the lawnmower over a can of gas leaving all the leaf clippings in the leaf bag oh boy i'm trying to explain it when he like does not believe me i'm like listen man you can't like that stuff you know can spontaneously combust

how could that be true i'm like i can't explain't explain it, dude. I'll look it up, but I'm telling you, man, you can't leave big bags of leaf clippings like that. No kidding. Yeah, well, he could have created his own bonfire shelter then. Yeah, so this is sort of how I set this up to start the chapter with accounts like this. And so here's what I think. Here's what the various explanations are. There is a map in that chapter that provides readers with the regional populations of native people at just before the arrival of Europeans. And that map goes from the Northeast to the Southeast to the Midwest to the Southwest to California, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, the Arctic. And all together, north of Mexico, and this includes Canada, we're convinced that 500 years ago, the total population of

North America, north of the Rio Grande River and north of Mexico, was a little less than 5 million people. In order to keep your population at that level, you have to actively try to control population. And so one of the arguments in this chapter is that because native people understood the relationship between their population size and their use of nature and the ability of nature as hunters and gatherers to sustain them, they deliberately kept their populations small, small enough that they didn't stress the animals that they depended on. Now, there were some animals like buffalo. After the Pleistocene extinctions removed all the grazing competition, buffalo become the only major grazers left on the Great Plains.

The horses are gone. The mammoths are gone. The camels are gone. There's almost nothing left out there. And so buffalo, like passenger pigeons, are going to multiply to such numbers that they basically are adapted better to the continent than humans are. Humans acting as predators on the populations of both of those animals, buffalo and passenger pigeons, are not sufficiently large to ever really lower their numbers.

But there are plenty of other animals like elk, for example, that could have been hunted down to very low populations. And in some areas, there's archaeological evidence, they probably were hunted down. I mean, I try to, in the following chapter, when I get Europeans to North America, I try to start out with the story of a Spaniard who's shipwrecked

on the Gulf Coast in the 1520s. And this is before the effect of the great disease die-offs for native people can have any kind of effect. And this guy describes a North America that's not brimming with wild animals. He describes a North America where the animal populations are fairly low. I mean, at one point he says it was almost an accident if anybody had a deerskin in their village. But mostly what people do over that 10,000-year period is to keep their populations low. There's also the effect of a delayed movement to the so-called Neolithic Revolution, which

is the spread of agriculture. That had happened in Europe and Asia and even in Africa much earlier because of population pressures on wildlife. People turned to domesticating plants and moved to domesticating animals and agriculture. That happened about 5,000 or 6,000 years later in North America because the population pressures weren't so severe here. So we have a much later movement to an agricultural revolution that can produce larger populations of people. And then the last thing I talk about in that chapter is this ideological difference. And I tend to argue, I think that this is accurate, that Native people in America preserved a very old way of thinking about the relationship between themselves and other animals. And that old way

was that humans are simply another part of the animal world. Tell the story of your chicken. Yeah, okay. I'll tell the story of the chicken for sure. You remembered that one, huh? Oh, no, it was great. Because to get into what you're going to get into, you need to tell the chicken story. Yeah, okay, I'll tell the chicken story for sure. But let me say, in order to set the chicken story up properly, native people tended to think of other species as kin to humans. And, I mean, their stories are full of examples of people being able to pass from human societies to animal societies,

to joining buffalo herds and intermarrying with other animals. It's an old idea. The reason I think it's old and it got preserved is because much of our early art, for example, of Chauvet Cave in France includes what archaeologists call therianthropes, where you have a figure painted on the walls that's half human and half animal, half human and half buffalo, for example. And so this kind of lingering sense of humans as part of a connection, a kinship with other creatures, informs the way native people think about wild animals. I mean, I mentioned at the bookstore last night, you know, these wonderful accounts of the ceremonies that they created to do whenever animals were difficult to find. The purpose of the ceremonies was to convince the animals that, no, we're not engaging in any hubris. We don't think we're exceptional. We think that you and

we are just the same, and we want you to return, and we'll engage in these marriages, these faux marriages, so people will dress up in the skins of animals, and they'll do these kind of simulated coital things in the ceremony. And one of the wonderful descriptions of this is that when these ceremonies were successful, the animals came dancing. They came dancing out of the buttes where they were hiding, out of the ground where they were hiding, out of the waterfalls where they were hiding, and returned to humanity. Yeah, this idea that when you weren't finding animals, it was on people, like the way you'd approach a friend that you offended, you had to come and make it right.

Yes, you had to make it right. What's the problem? Yeah. Something got askew, we'd like to make it right. Exactly. Can you please come back? That's exactly it. And I'm not prepared to say whether the ceremonies themselves produced new herds of bison, but what I am prepared to say

about that is that the ceremonies inculcated a belief in the people who did them that we've renewed our relationship, our kinship with these other creatures. We're not separate. We humans are not exceptional. We're the same as you are. And we broke your trust, and so we're coming to you to try to make things right. That became a very different kind of ideology than the one that Europeans brought. As evidenced by your chicken. As evidenced by my chicken.

And I tell, I'm glad you like that story because this is my oldest memory. This is from when I'm four years old. And I went to dinner last night with a woman who is, she's a psychologist, and she was confirming my idea that one's oldest memories usually are from about four years. And the ones you remember, those four-year-old memories, I obviously don't remember everything that happened at four years old, but you remember the ones that imprint as a result of an emotional response. And this was a very emotional one. And it probably set me in motion to ultimately writing a book like this because I was haunted by this my entire life. And what it involved was being four years old and having a pet chicken. I had a little yellow chicken that my parents had bought for me, and

it was only a few weeks old. And it lived in the house with me, and I fed it, and I gave it water. And we also engaged in these games of chase through the house. And so we would chase through the kitchen, underneath the furniture, around the sofa in the living room, around my mom's sewing machine. For some reason, I still remember the legs of the sewing machine as my chicken would run through. It was a way the chicken could get away from me. But one day, I'm chasing the chicken, and I chicken would run through. It was a way the chicken could get away from me. But one day I'm chasing the chicken and I miscalculate. I'm four years old, probably pretty clumsy, and I step on my chicken and kill it.

And so my mom and I go out in the backyard and we have a little box and we dig a hole and we bury my chicken. And so the question that I asked her and more specifically her response to the question is the thing that haunted me my whole life and probably led me towards ultimately writing a book like this. I said to my mother, so mom, I'm going to get to have Chicky again in heaven, right? And what my mom said in response sort of encapsulated the whole European perspective on the relationship between human beings and other animals. I mean, she essentially went right to the heart of what Europeans brought to North America with their religion, their market economy, and their ideology about how animals were in a completely subservient position with respect to human beings.

And at four years old, somehow, that didn't seem right. That didn't seem right to me. And through most of my life, it hasn't seem right. That didn't seem right to me. And through most of my life, it hasn't seemed right. And so I go to some lengths in this book to explain the origins, particularly the religious origins of this idea, where humans are the only creatures made in the image of God, the only creatures that have an immortal soul, everything else, all other living beings are not made in the image of a deity. Of course, native people would have completely insisted that that was wrong because they had all sorts of animal deities. But Europeans had the

idea that there was a God in the sky, that humans were the only ones made in that image. We were the only ones with souls. And so everything else was completely subservient to us and was there, as the Bible says, for our use. Unto your hand I will deliver them is the line in Genesis. And so that sort of thinking led to what I argue in the book is 400 years from 1500 to 1900 of the most widespread and complete destruction of populations of wildlife of millions of years of evolved ecological diversity on the continent, wiped out much of it over a mere 400-year period. And it's not comparable to anything else you can find anywhere else in modern history. I mean, I looked around for other examples, and there are certainly places where people will take out a particular species.

They'll focus on a particular region that they want to convert to farming and try to wipe out all the predators or something, but nothing that looks like what we did between 1500 and 1900 in North America, where one species after another, we either push to complete oblivion or reduced to the point that we have to go to these heroic Herculean efforts to save the last few of them so that those of us who are alive now still have a few animals to look at. I mean, and it's a, you know, it's a kind of a, it's a bummer of a story. I try to interleave in that story accounts of naturalists who were studying all these animals that Europeans thought, you know, the Bible doesn't say anything about America. So Europeans think, hell, how can this place even exist?

And how can these animals even exist? Who ever heard of a pronghorn antelope or a grizzly bear? That's not in the great chain of being that Aristotle put together uh so it becomes this uh the prelude to this kind of enormous destruction that in the 20th century we have to kind of move heaven and earth to recover from but of that 400 year period for 300 years of it there was i was surprised learn it's for 300 years of it there was an honest debate a debate i don't even really understand it it was debated whether extinction could even be possible whether extinction that's right was was is it theoretically possible yeah i was very surprised to hear that was the thing that people used to argue about yeah they did indeed. And the explanation for that is part of this religious ideology. And I mentioned something called the great chain of being a few minutes ago. It comes from Aristotle, but it was wholly adopted by Europeans who came to the Americas 500 years ago. And it was an idea that goes back 2,000 years in Western civilization

that everything, every living thing on earth was created at a moment of creation by a deity. And so everything that was created was perfect, everlasting, immutable, which means that no animal ever changed. Everything stayed exactly the same. And there was no possibility, because it was part of a divine creation, there was no possibility for what we today call extinction, for something to ultimately go away because the world was perfect as created by a divine being.

And so Europeans bring that without even questioning this great chain of being idea to America. And it's only in the late 18th century when workmen digging for rock and gravel in Europe and then people investigating these old hot spring sites and salt licks in North America began discovering the bones of creatures that nobody can identify as being living creatures, that anyone begins to wonder, well, so if there are these gigantic bones, why is there not an animal out there with bones like this? If there is a creature here with what appears in North America to be elephant tusks, we don't have any elephants in North America to be elephant tusks? We don't have any elephants

in North America. How could that be a possibility? And so it's the discovery of all these extinct animals out of the Pleistocene that sets this debate in motion. And only in the very beginning years of the 1800s, does Western science begin to say, well, wow, it looks like things don't last forever. It looks like there have been animals that were once on the earth and are now gone. And, of course, that ultimately begins to raise the question of, so why are they gone? And the next thought that occurs to you in a logical chain from that one is, what would cause an animal to go extinct? What factors out there in the world would produce something like the complete loss of an animal. This is a whole new area, as I think you gathered when you read this, of thinking about how the world works. And it's what finally began by

about the 1820s and 1830s to have people wondering what in the world caused the extinction of mammoths and mastodons and a whole host of other creatures. And can we somehow, can something somehow do this to existing animals? And meanwhile, they were busily doing it. They were busily doing it. And they didn't have to wait very long to find out whether it was possible because by the 1840s, this northern hemisphere penguin, these giant heavy-beaked birds called great auks, which nested. They nested all over the North Atlantic, but from Newfoundland all the way down to Florida, all along the Atlantic coast, These great auks were a feature of coastal life. Like we had a penguin. We had a penguin in the Northern Hemisphere, and we completely wiped it out by the 1840s.

I was surprised, egg picking. Yeah, egg picking. People, they're cooking them for breakfast. They went after eggs, yeah. And it was kind of a tragic thing because these were birds that only laid one egg. I mean, they had a nest with one egg in it. He was good for one egg a year. One egg a year.

And so you take away their eggs. I mean, this happened to, you know, we think that things like this happen to animals like mammoths because mammoths don't, these giant elephants, they weren't able to give birth until the cows were 10 years old or so. And they would only give birth, they had a really long gestation period, so you only give birth every two or three years. And with a low population turnover like that, just like the auk with its one egg, I mean, that makes certain creatures more susceptible to extinction than those like passenger pigeons, for example, or like bison, which exist in the millions of creatures.

Or rats. Or rats. I mean, there are a whole host of other animals that certainly multiply into large numbers. But yeah, these animals that humans were focused on, not that they weren't focused on rats, because they were bringing Norway rats into America, and obviously we had pack rats here already. But the animals that we were focused on as part of our market economy, and I want to make sure that I make this clear, it was the idea of wild animals essentially functioning like trees you could log, like coal you could dig up out of the ground, as natural resource commodities in a market economy that produced this wholesale slaughter of so many creatures. That's why the ox disappeared, is the birds became fair for sailors in the Atlantic who found that you could, I mean, and this was true of so many species in North America, they were naive of humans as predators.

And so they would let humans just walk up. I mean, there's a horrible account of people hunting great auks where they would say, we would just go up to an island where great auks were nesting, gather up their eggs, and then we would set up a board plank between the island and our boats and have a couple of guys get off and just herd the ox over the plank into the boats where we killed them as soon as they arrived. And the account goes on to say, you know, thanks to the deity for creating a creature so innocent that it becomes sustenance for hungry sailors on the seas. I mean, that happened over and over again with creatures that were innocent of human predation and essentially sort of allowed themselves to be wiped out by an economy

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Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. You covered so many extinctions, near extinctions. And in some cases, you can imagine that a lot of the players involved perhaps weren't entirely clear on what they were doing.

The human players involved perhaps couldn't picture the ultimate outcome of what they were up to. But there are cases where people damn sure knew. You talk about that with the sea otters i mean they knew and fur seals they knew we got them all we heard there's another spot let's go let's go look and see and when they leave they're gone and they were aware that they were they were the the the the masterminds behind it the people really making the money behind it had all awareness that it was a race for a vanishing resource. And there was no impetus to call it quits. No, and you're competing against people from other nations.

I mean, with the sea otters and the fur seals. I mean, it's the Americans, the Russians, the Spaniards, I mean, a whole host of nationals are out killing these animals. And, I mean, it actually reached a point between the Americans and the Russians where there were so few of these animals left that they began cooperating with one another to locate and exploit the last groups. And, yeah, that Pacific Coast hunt for fur, for fur seals and sea otters, I mean, that's an abysmal story. You know, it's a particularly sense, I mean, in the case of sea otters, I mean, these animals are critical to the ecologies of the Pacific coast because they keep the kelp beds in check. And once they're gone, I mean, the whole Pacific coast it's a story that you can I mean, it even features the deliberate conscription of native hunters kidnapping them to make them go out and hunt these animals for these European fur companies and American fur companies down to the last few colonies of them. And the only reason they're not gone, particularly in the case of sea otters, which were regarded as, you know, I mean, I think I said last night at the bookstore,

there's an account of one of these sea otter hunters where he says, why do we go after these animals? You don't understand. Except for a gorgeous woman and a newborn infant, the pelt of the sea otter is the most beautiful object in the entire world. And you could get big money for sea otter pelts in China. And so that's where most of them went. They were harvested off the Pacific coast of North America and then hauled by ship over to China where you could sometimes, I mean, there was an account that really set the sea otter hunt in motion where in China, people were willing to pay $120 per pelt. Most pelts didn't bring that. Eventually, they brought $20 or $25, though, and that was a lot of money back in those days. So yeah, they knew what they were doing. They

knew what they were doing with passenger pigeons, too. I mean, that's one of the bizarre ones, in fact, because the passenger pigeon story only happens like about 130, 135 years ago. My grandparents were still alive when there were passenger pigeons flying in the skies in louisiana i mean i actually chart in the book how many years it was that i missed passenger pigeons in my home state of louisiana and it was about 45 years isn't that incredible yeah it's incredible and there were of, of course, billions of them. I mean, in the last ones were, the reason I know that people understood what the hell they were doing is that they were slaughtering them on their nests, not giving them an opportunity

to raise the next generation of birds. You just went in and found out where they were nesting, and you killed them on the nests. So they understood that this was going to be the end of the most numerous bird in the world, the most numerous bird species in North America. And yet, I went ahead and pushed it, and nobody seemed to be worried. When that last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in 1914, hardly any newspapers ran an obituary about her death. And one of the newspapers I found that did, this is what it said. Well, you know, it's too bad about Martha, but we all ought to be happy that the passenger pigeon decided not to stick around with us the way grasshoppers have. I mean, so there was no remorse about it. There was a sense that animals like passenger pigeons, like bison, like wolves,

jaguars, grizzly bears, these were just too wild to stay in a country that was modeling itself on Europe. England didn't have grizzly bears. England didn't have jaguars. England hadn't had wolves since the 1400s. So, hell, we're just going to emulate England and wipe out all those things in North America. They're just too wild for civilization. Talk about when the British used extirpation or tried to use regional extinction as a weapon against America.

Yeah, that's a fascinating story. And it's the shorthand version of it is the creation of the fur desert in the 1820s, primarily, over a period of about eight or nine years, when the Hudson's Bay Company, when England and the United States were still America's claim to the country west of the divide all the way to the coast. But the Hudson's Bay Company and Great Britain were still claiming that they owned much of that country. And we don't resolve that debate, actually, until the 1840s when we finally draw the line between the United States and Canada. So the country in the Rockies, west of the divide, was a disputed territory. But the British traders realized that, and the Hudson's Bay Authority realizes that

we can't keep these damned Americans out. They're crossing the divide no matter who claims it, and they're trapping beavers and all kinds of animals on the west side of the divide. So here's the way to keep them out. We'll just, as the term they used was, we'll ruin the country. We'll kill everything that's over there. I mean, this is when bison disappear from west of the divide, too. But what they particularly focus on, because it was the target of the American trappers, were beavers.

And they worked out a strategy with these Hudson's Bay brigades, but led by people like Peter Skeen Ogden, for whom Ogden, Utah is named, that you send out these parties of trappers with their wives and girlfriends to sort of keep everything camp life going along well. And you go from stream to stream to stream. You do a bunch of trap sets one afternoon. You do another round of trap sets the next morning, and that's usually good enough to wipe out all the beavers on a particular stream in a place like the Bitterroot Mountains. So over about eight years, these guys trap west of the divide in what is mostly now Montana and Idaho and Utah. They trap 35,000 beavers, and they liberate or ruin 6,000 beaver ponds, which had stored water, of course, all over that country.

That water providing campsites for native people, water for wildlife, all those beaver dams now fall into disrepair and drain and the streams begin running through them and tear the dams up so that they've affected a kind of an ecological transformation of the entire country by removing the beaver and its dams both. So the story is, and I write about a couple of other instances where this is the case too, I even argue that the American Revolution, in part, was set in motion by the anger that American colonists had for the British government trying to stop them from hunting white-tailed deer, which they were wiping out in almost all the colonies, and also trying to prevent them from crossing the Appalachian-Allegheny Divide to hunt the animals in the Mississippi Valley

drainage. The British government had actually passed a law, the Proclamation of 1763, to stop that movement to preserve the wildlife of that region. So the idea of killing animals actually becomes a kind of a geopolitical idea as a contest among people's colonies and competing nations for territory you uh try your best in the book to put to rest the idea that killing off the buffalo was actually a deliberate articulated government play to subjugate the native americans yeah i do uh explain that a little bit well i think our uh what I can say to sort of initiate that is that one of the most common explanations for what happened to the Buffalo is what you just described, policy, a conspiracy actually, between particular players in government, in the federal government, and the American military in the post-Civil War years, to wipe out Buffalo in order to force Native people onto reservations in the Indian Wars and initiate the process of acculturation and assimilation for Native people.

I mean, and that's probably the most common explanation that people trot out. What I tried to do with this story was to figure out how did a story like that begin? And what I came to was a very interesting story. I didn't find really any references, an occasional one, to something like this being the explanation for the demise of Buffalo. It's certainly not, for example, in William Hornaday's great book, The Extermination of the American Bison, which was published in 1889. He doesn't say anything like that. But by the early decades of the 20th century, people were starting to talk about this as an explanation.

And I tracked it back to the publication by a former buffalo hunter of a memoir called On the Border and the Buffalo. And it was published in 1906. And this particular author essentially describes his comrades and himself as agents, sort of secret agents of this conspiratorial government program to wipe out the buffalo in order to force Indians to yield in the Indian Wars. And what he says is, we should be given, and there are people in government who know this, we should be given medals of distinction for what we did for North America. And then the thing that really set me in motion looking at this, because there was an easy way to check whether or not it was true. He says, and I even understand that when the state of Texas was considering a law to stop the hunting of buffalo in West Texas, General Philip Sheridan journeyed

to Austin and made an impassioned plea to the Texas legislature not to do this. And the guy even goes on to recreate a speech that Sheridan was supposed to have said. Now, you know, as a historian, it's fairly easy to go, okay, let's look back at the records of the Texas legislature at a bill that was designed to do this, because what sort of caught my attention was I had studied the attempts in the federal Congress in the 1870s to pass a couple of bills to protect Western animals, and the Texas delegation had always been resolutely opposed to those bills. The Texas delegation always referred to those bills as they would say to other members of Congress, you're just being sentimental. And of course, in the 1870s, calling another guy sentimental, that was casting aspersions on your manhood, because only women

were supposed to have sentiment. And so this whole story made me kind of really wonder. And so I had a graduate student who I sent to Austin who was very into the whole Buffalo story. And he spent his spring break there combing through the records of the Texas legislature and came back. And I said, because he had gone down with the idea, I'm going to write the full story of this. All the texts of the bill they were proposing, exactly what else Sheridan might have said. He came back and said, man, I got to tell you, Texas never proposed a bill to do what this story says. And not only that, I can't find any record anywhere that Philip Sheridan ever addressed the Texas legislature about any topic and certainly not about a Buffalo topic. And so I look back at this story and realize the entry entry to it was it is said so this guy in his book was

basically just providing a hearsay account anyway that that strategy is still used today oh a lot of people are saying yeah yeah a lot of people people say yeah yeah it's that great passive voice thing you know i i can't say exactly who it was. A lot of people are saying he's corrupt. Sheridan, you know, who has been the villain in this story for a century. I mean, that guy was actually a kind of a nationalist who spent his last years protecting wildlife in Yellowstone National Park. And so anyway, what is fairly clear is that this is a story sort of like the story we were telling ourselves in the early 20th century about the Civil War. That the Civil War wasn't really about slavery. The South wasn't trying to defend slavery. Civil War was actually about states' rights. Well, that makes everybody feel a little bit better about things. Okay, so Southerners

weren't actually fighting to defend slavery. They were fighting just to defend states' rights, and that's all there was to it. A Southern way of life. This wasn't about slavery at all. This story about Buffalo is one of those stories that kind of makes everybody feel better. Okay, it was the government that did it. It wasn't the fault of anybody else. The government, you know, the dastardly federal government, once again, had this plan to wipe out one of our great iconic animals. The truth is the federal government had never entered into the whole wildlife story at all and wouldn't do so until

the year 1900 when it finally started acting to stop the market hunt. But the federal government had just sort of stood back and been paralyzed and not been able to do anything. And so they just let market capitalism ship them back. And, I mean, it was an industrial. It was very much like the Industrial Revolution elsewhere in America. The whole thing was kind of an industrial process of wiping out these animals. Talk about the ivory-billed woodpecker, which is something we covered off on last night but yeah i'll i'll i'll tee it up right now the same way i teed it up last night is uh after reading the story about the ivory build woodpecker um which i wasn't i i knew i knew it roughly but i didn't really put together how intact and recognizable america was at the time recently yeah at the time we lost

ivory build woodpecker where americans were having a unified common experience we were in the a we were in the age of being able to immediately distribute news and ideas all around the country. We had suburbia, we had a middle class. Uh, it was like we were America. Yeah, we were America.

And we, and it wasn't a case of only realizing later what we'd done. It was a case of, um. It was a case of, um, it was a case of, we just watched it happen. Like, like,

like if someone said these two cars are going to collide, um, but we're just going to let them collide to see what happens. Yeah. There was no sort of mystery about who was to blame or what went on it was just we just i mean we culturally we we kind of signed off on it yeah i'm afraid that you you described that very very accurately i mean this this happened at a time when modern America existed. I mean, everybody was driving cars. They had phones.

The country had been electrified. People had electricity in their homes. They had washing machines. And, I mean, it's modern America. I mean, and the story kind of comes to its conclusion. It doesn't come to its conclusion, conclusion actually until last year when the Fish and Wildlife Service declared that the Averyville woodpecker is officially extinct. But this last hurrah of what's probably the second largest woodpecker in the world and

another one of our charismatic creatures from America from millions of years of American ecology, gets just—and I think the explanation for the way you did tee it up is that we were so used to just letting these things happen because people adopted the position of, well, this is just inevitable. This is the inevitable consequence of civilization. This is just collateral damage in creating a modern country. There's not anything you can do with it. Sure, we're going to wipe out 10 billion passenger pigeons. Sure, we're going to wipe out 30 million buffalo. Of course, we're going to wipe out, you know, our only native parrots, the Carolina parakeets, these beautiful tropical birds that existed all the way up in a New York state. Yeah, of course, we're going to do that. And so people acted as if this is just collateral damage. And what can you do, you know, and making our fortunes, this is what happens. So the story kind of unfolds this way.

It's the 1930s. We have just lost the eastern prairie chicken, the heath hen. I mean, and this is, you know, a kind of three years by himself, booming every spring to try to call a female and having no luck because there were none. So we've lost this bird. Did you know about that there was like a prairie chicken on the East Coast? No. You didn't know this? I'd maybe heard without thinking about what a

heath hen was yeah it was a prairie chicken yeah you've heard everybody's heard about a heath hen but no we didn't i didn't know the ins and outs of the species like a story like a cool little prairie chicken that people would go hunt for and yeah it sounded like they hooted just like the uh dusky on the coast yes Yes, very much like that. And so that bird was gone by 1931. We had discovered that the biological survey, which is the forerunner of the Fish and Wildlife Service, had discovered in the 1930s that we were down to the last 16 whooping cranes. That trumpeter swans were almost gone. That the bald eagle was in danger of extinction.

In fact, one of our sort of the first endangered species kind of act that we passed is the Bald Eagle Protection Act in 1940. And the only reason it gets passed is because, well, the ball eagle, after all, is our damn national symbol. So what do we do with all that money with him on there? That's right. So how are we not going to save this bird that's our national symbol? But in the midst of all this, of all four of these birds going, this is when the Carolina parakeets, the last, their two subspecies and the second subspecies, the Atlantic Coast version,

goes extinct in that same stretch in the 1930s. So it's kind of this comeuppance period. And right in the middle of it, the incredible, beautiful ivory bill woodpecker is pronounced by the biological survey to also be extinct, same year that the heath hen was announced to be extinct. And then three years later, a group of ornithologists from Cornell are in Louisiana in one of the last pieces of old growth forest left along the Mississippi River. And only, by the way, about 125 miles from where I grew up. Man, that place has been the center of cool bird shit for a long time. It has indeed.

Yeah. It's the Mississippi and all these great forests. Oh, shit for a long time. It has indeed. Yeah. It's the Mississippi and all these great forests. Oh, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. I was speaking of the Cornell, the ornithologist at Cornell. The ornithology lab.

They've been leading the charge on bird stuff for a long time. They have for sure. Yeah. And they were on top of this. And so a couple of their people, including a videographer, a guy with a video camera or a motion picture camera, is on the scene when they discover in this patch of old growth forest that they find along the Mississippi, seven pairs of ivory bill woodpeckers still alive in this patch of forest the forest is called the singer tract because it belongs to the singer sewing machine company and so when the cornell folks make this discovery and and i've got by by the way, a screen grab from the motion picture imagery they shot of the ivory bills there in the book. It's one of the few still photographs that anyone has of an ivory bill woodpecker.

You know what? I somehow didn't know that that existed. You didn't know it existed? I didn't know you could look at a picture of one. Yeah. Because usually all the shit, you got to look at paintings. You got to look at paintings. You have to look at Audubon and Wilson and people like that.

Let me interject for one sec. People need to pay attention to the fact here that they thought they were gone. Yeah. You know what someone has? We talked about this with a friend of ours last night. When someone has a sort of near-death experience, it readjusts their priorities. So at this point that you're getting at where they find these, it was assumed they were gone. That's right.

Imagine what, how is it not just national elation that that you'd be like oh my god we thought we had destroyed the species but look we've been given a second chance it's like in uh you know and uh what's the j the jimmy stewart movie everybody watches every christmas wonderful life yeah right you, he gives them a second chance. He's good. Everything's going to be better. Here we are. We're like, ah, we killed them all. Then some time goes by and it's like,

no, we're, you know, by the grace of God, we have a, we can start afresh. Exactly. One would think the one would think because yeah,

they had been pronounced extinct in 1931. Now we have found seven pairs of them. So the story proceeds like this. This Cornell sends a young graduate student, a guy named James Tanner, down to do what amounts to kind of salvage natural history on the ivory bill woodpecker. I mean, the only natural history we really had done on ivory bills was done by people like Audubon and Alexander Wilson. Nobody in the late 19th century had really studied them. And so Tanner, with all the modern expertise that an ornithologist can bring to the game, puts together and writes a book about it, this wonderful study of ivory bales, of their nesting habits, of their mating

habits, how their young react, what sort of predators they have, how they respond to people. He said, for one thing, they're not really shy around people. I mean, they don't really go duck and hide when I show up. They just kind of expose themselves out in the open. He describes, and we actually have recordings with that motion picture film that was shot of them, of their cries. They made several different sounds, including a sound that people way back in colonial history had referred to as the toy trumpet in the woods. The ivory bill sounds like it makes a cry like a toy trumpet, they said. And he described how ivory bills flew through this beautiful old growth forest. And as I say in my description of all this, John James Audubon had always said, whenever he saw an ivory bill fly through the forest,

it reminded him of a Van Dyke painting. It was just this gorgeous image. And so Tanner studies these birds for about four or five years. And Cornell sends him out, meanwhile, on this reconnaissance all over the South, everywhere there is remaining old growth to see if there are others. And everywhere he goes, he can't find them anywhere else. So they know by about 1938 or 1939, these are the only seven left.

These are the only ones. And sometimes they're getting a chick up. Occasionally a chick is getting snagged by an owl or something. Their population is growing a little bit. And at this point, the Singer Sewing Machine Company announces to the world that it has sold the logging rights to this piece of ground it owns to a Chicago logging company, which plans on commencing logging the area in 1940. And so there's a couple of more years as the logging is actually taking place of people dashing out, trying to get one last glimpse of the birds. Roger Torrey Peterson, for example, goes down in 1941, gets one glimpse of the birds. But the last

bird anybody ever sees is a female nesting in a tree that the loggers actually cut down. And as the tree is falling, she flies out of it and goes doing this sort of rollicking, sweeping flying motion that these woodpeckers made over the Mississippi River. And it's the last time anybody ever sees one in North America. If you put that in a movie i would roll my eyes yeah i know i'd be like oh brother yeah but it's unreal yeah it actually happened though yeah and so you can roll your eyes at the fact that we let this happen as we had done so many friggin times uh it just somehow that one

i don't know that one just feels different well it happens in the modern age as i think part of the the difference you know you know what one of the ways it feels different is if you look at look at what damning damning is in the Columbia basin or whatever, what damning is done to salmon, you know, you can point and be, you can point and look like, okay, but one way to understand world war two was that, um, we beat the Germans by out, out smelting them.

We produced more aluminum. Therefore, we produced more aircraft. Producing aluminum is extremely energy dependent, right? You know, we beat this global threat. We had a nation to feed. We produced all this agriculture. And so shipping, all this stuff. And so a casualty is salmon.

And one could come in, one could come in and present a trade we made. And you'd look and be like, yeah, when you put it that way, I guess that was a trade we made. But in this case, it's just like, it's what? It's a logging tract? It's a logging tract.

Yeah. A single logging tract. Like an amount of money that'll sort of wind up in a very, it's like a sort of, it's not a nation's history. It's a chunk of money that'll wind up in a very few people's bank accounts. You know, it's so, it's just very,

it becomes very personal. You could almost go and find, you could go and be like, Oh no, it was kind of like this guy and this guy. And those are the two people, right? That like,

that, that it came down to. Yeah. It's like, those are the two people that said, okay, I don't know who they were. Well. I don't know who they were. Well, I don't know who they were either.

And although I have not seen that the Singer Company ever made this argument, the timing of this is in 1940, right before the year before the United States enters the war. And, of course, there was the argument that the Olympic Peninsula got logged, Olympic National Park got logged because we needed the lumber for the war effort. So I think, as I said, I haven't seen that the senior government— They could now make it patriotic. They could make it as a patriotic act. We had to do this in order to win the war. So we had to sacrifice those last seven pairs of ivory bills. You know, and that's in historical terms.

You haven't seen that, though. I haven't seen it. In historical terms, though, one of the arguments. That's a hot tip for that family. Yeah, it is a hot tip for the family. I mean, Alan Nevins, the great American historian, one of his arguments about capitalism do was to win World War II, to defeat the Germans, to defeat the fascist menace

to the world in World War II. And so that kind of argument then, ultimately you could say, almost we've used it to trump everything else. Anything that got sacrificed, the collateral damage is too bad, but it enabled us to do this. Did you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? Oh yeah, sure. Kurt Vonnegut was talking about, he had two great observations about military uniforms. He said to the Nazis that it was almost like they knew when they chose their uniforms

it's almost like they knew that they'd always be bad guys in the movies that's a great line and he also talked about when they came out with desert camo he said that apparently they're preparing to fight the next war on top of a Denver omelet. Yeah, man. Yeah, those Nazi helmets in particular. I know. You look at it and it's like, we need to come up with something that looks... Because nobody else has a helmet like that. Yeah, no kidding.

Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a high-end 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 and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you

um you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Oh, man. Got any follow-ups,

Yanni? No, I got too much. Too many follow-ups? Yeah. It's such a good book i want to point out a little bit um to our readers who are uh heavily you know tend to be heavily involved in hunting and fishing it's um it will challenge a lot it'll challenge a lot of your notions about your heroes and icons and idols. I didn't get into all that today. We did last night somehow. Dan makes quick work of the mountain men. Well, if I can squeeze one in before we get to mountain because i can see he's like edging

towards it he doesn't want to let it go i'm not gonna do it no i'm not gonna do it i'm not gonna do it i'm just telling people that that be prepared for uh be prepared for some of your your hunting your iconic hunting heroes including some of the early players in the in the wildlife conservation movement be prepared for a perspective that will challenge some of your assumptions about their heroic deeds, which is good. It's good for your brain. Sure. Well, here's one that I've been tangling with lately, which is in my head. And so I'm glad we're here and I can pose this to you and just kind of get your thoughts on it after you've exhaustively been thinking about it. But I'm a proponent that we all think of ourselves as part of nature. And as hunters, I think that, you know, we, we play that out to a maximum

as much as we can. Right. But what is it to say that all this destruction that we've done and these changes over the last couple hundred years, 400 years, that that isn't natural. And that's not the way that it should be. And I want you to understand that I'm all for, like, I wish I could see the pileated woodpecker and had seen the great penguin of the East Coast, right? But when I really try to step back and look at it from a really big viewpoint, it's like, well, if we really are- Animals being animals. Part of it, we're being animals.

Yeah, there's been other animals that they don't show remorse if they wipe out a certain species that they used to feed on. They adapt and start feeding on another species. Yeah, like a pack of wolves gets a weird freeze and they can cross out to an island they've never been to before and they go out there and kill every damn thing on the island are they evil so i mean i can kind of keep going on that but you understand my sort of question and just sort of this idea that i grapple with right that even though it is terrible and it makes me sad to think that we as a human species are gonna what looks like just you, eat ourselves out of house and home.

But in the end, is it, is it just as natural as an ice age? So it's a great question, uh, Yanni. And I'll also say, and Steve can back me up on this, that the listeners who are convinced that hunting is a lifestyle that has characterized human beings from the beginning and all through time are not going to be disappointed in reading this because this story with in terms of humans starts at the point when we become upright predators in africa and develop a strategy for a whole new a whole new approach to living and it produces who we are. It enables us to grow big brains. It fosters a language that increases the connections, the neural network in our brains so that we are able to take culture, which I argue in the book, every single animal just about we now know is cultured and transmits culture down through time. But as a result of the hunting impress on us, we are able to put together a language that allows a very rich

culture for human beings. And I mean, I track that story through the point where, I mean, as I said last night in referring to the Neanderthals who are our ancestors, all of our ancestors, we all have Neanderthal genes in us. These people who were present down to 40,000 years ago had a lifestyle that was more carnivorous than wolf packs. And we know this from nitrogen isotopes in their bones. They ate more meat than wolves of the time. That'd be a great t-shirt. Yeah, it would. No kidding. I ate more meat than a wolf. And they also rested when humans finally got to North America and began hunting the wildlife they found here they represented 40 000 generations of previous hunters which is one of the reasons they were so good at it i mean i tell a story they didn't wake up and be like i think about getting into hunting no they didn't wake up and think about that man

they there was no adult onset hunting back then there was nothing that. I tell a story in the book about a mammoth hunt that took place in southern Arizona, present-day southern Arizona, near Tucson, where there was a herd of mammoths. This group of Clovis hunters approached. Thirteen of the fifteen animals were adolescents and calves. And when archaeologists did the excavation of the three sites associated with this particular kill episode, all 13 calves and adolescents were found in one spot, each of them with one Clovis point in them. 13 Clovis points for 13 adolescents and calves then they found the bull about eight miles away with two clovis points in it and five miles away they found the cow who had obviously fought to the end to try to protect those calves she had eight clovis points in I mean, this is a record of people who were damn good at this.

So you're not going to be, listeners out there, you're not going to be disappointed at this long-term story of the role of hunting in the human experience. You may be disappointed when you encounter humans who are motivated by an idea that they're exceptional from all other creatures and that they have an economy called the global market, who will go out and slaughter animals by the thousands in order to provide pelts or leather or some other part for a global market economy now can you give the can you quick give the this is this is helps to respond to yannis uh the quote by the buffalo hunter who's like well you could say we were whatever yeah or you could say we were

i can't remember what it was and he goes and i guess that's probably more true yeah frank and it's a sentence that when talking about how are we different than animals or whatever it's a sentence that an animal isn't going to say no it's a sentence that an animal isn't going to say uh that's true or an animal besides us isn't going to say. That's true. An animal besides us isn't going to conjure up this sentence. And it rests on hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated culture that enables Frank Mayer to say this. And it follows, by the way, I sort of look at about four or five of the buffalo hunters and how they react to what they've done. And some of them are completely defensive. I mean, there's a guy named Jay Wright Moore who basically says, you know, all this bullshit here with these conservationists about

what we did to the buffalo. There is not a buffalo out there between the Arkansas River and the Canadian border that was worth a grain of salt compared to any one of the settler families that got killed or died in the migration westward. These animals just weren't worth anything. And, of course, what he's expressing is the classic, we're creating civilization here, and these were all the collateral damage animals of doing that. But Frank Mayer was kind of more thoughtful about it. And he was a buffalo hunter in Kansas in the 1870s, and he wrote a memoir,

a really good memoir of doing all this. And he kind of reaches the end of his memoir, and he says, and I can't remember the exact quote, but it goes something like this. You know, some people say that we just did this for the country, and others say, hell, we just did it for the country and others say hell we just did it for ourselves and we didn't really give a crap about the buffaloes or what anybody else who comes later and is not going to get to see a buffalo ever thinks and he says when i reflect on, I think that's the way it was. We just didn't give a crap about either the animals or what anybody else who came later was going to think. So there's a range of opinions, as you would expect from all these guys. But, yeah, it goes like that. And what I said last night when Steve was sort of holding my feet to the fire on this particular one, that I was breaking his heart by talking the way I was about buffalo hunters and about beaver trappers.

I was saying that you denied them like that. Very thoughtful. But what I said sort of in defense is that actually throughout the book, and I do this at least four different times, including with Buffalo Hunter, including with Jay Wright Moore and his brother, including with a wolf bounty hunter in Colorado, including with a plume hunter, these guys who kill snowy egrets and roseate spoonbills and all for the plume trade to decorate women's hats. And a couple of other instances, what this market hunt for animals did do is it enabled people who were rural, who had really no access to an economy where you could make money. It allowed them to make money and it allowed them entry into the middle class. So Jay Wright Moore and his brother, after they stopped hunting buffalo, they're able to buy a ranch and stock it with cattle in Texas. The wolf bounty hunter in Colorado is able to do the same thing. He makes $7,000 on 140 wolves he bounties in one year, and he buys a ranch in Colorado and stocks it with Herefords.

One of the guys who is the plume hunter in Florida and who is almost wiping out snowy egrets in Florida and driving flamingos basically out of the country, this guy ends up making so much money doing it that he buys himself an island, a yacht, builds a house, and puts all this great furniture, brand new furniture in his house. So it's a way of getting into the American middle class. But for somebody like me, looking back on that, which happened in my home state in Louisiana, I mean, who I identify most with is somebody like Henry David Thoreau, who, looking back on what happened in Massachusetts before he ever came along, penned this incredible journal entry in 1856 where he says, you know, I just, I don't want to look up at the night sky and think that before I came along, some demigod came along and plucked all the best of the constellations out of the sky so I don't get to see them. He said, it's like listening to a symphony where, hell, the French horns are gone and the strings are gone and the drums are gone.

And he ends this with this classic line. and an entire earth not one that somebody has come along and defiled before i ever appear in my own life and so i mean that is a the other side of the the story you know john mcphee's phenomenal trilogy on american geology uh rising from the plains yeah it was collected all together as annals of the former world yeah at one point in the book he says if i had to sum up this book meaning his book in one sentence it would be that the top of mount everest is marine limestone uh dan does the same thing and he sums up this story in two words that he puts at the end of one of his chapters and those two words are fucking pathetic yeah

all that shit you're talking about yanni i think about all the time man like if i was to get into my own psychology, okay. Which I guess I am because I'm there. The story of the Clovis hunters killing everything off. It's seductive for a lot of reasons. Like it tickles the imagination, but there's a seduction there for this reason. And likewise, like, oh, wolves will go to an island and kill all the moose or kill all the deer on an island.

And, and, and you love them. You love them, those stories, because then you can sit back and go see. It just happens, man. Just happens. Nothing to get worked up about. But in the back here, in the deeper, deeper part of your brain, there's an inherited, carried guilt. And you can be like, I don't know, why don't wolves have it? I don't know.

They don't. I don't think they have it. But that ain't going to make yours go away. i don't i don't wish it to go away oh you wrote about that in your buffalo book i can't remember what specifically yeah when you when you kill that buffalo oh yeah you wrote you wrote about you know you couldn't help feeling some guilt about it yeah yeah especially something as beleaguered and as complicated as that one. But now I realize it's just a newbie fake,

it's a newbie fake American animal anyways. I should have called it, instead of American Buffalo, I should have called that book Asian Buffalo. Asian Buffalo. It should have been about horses. Late comer. Yeah, it should have been about horses.

That's right, Steve. Well, man, it's a um it's a it's a really challenging uh in-depth book i don't know what will happen i don't pay super i don't know how it all works but like for me, to see that book nominated for a national book award or to see that book nominated for a Pulitzer prize, wouldn't even kind of surprise me. I don't know how you're going to top it. Well, uh, I may not be able to top it. That's right. I mean, I'm no, I'll no doubt write more books, but, uh, yeah, this one is kind of a, it's the, it represents thinking about this since I was four years old. That's what, that's what I mean.

I mean, there's so much in it. The reading, I was like, how in the hell do you know all this? There's so much in it and so much note carding and, and taking like wildly disparate stories and sets of ideas and combining them all hunting everything down um it's uh if you had just been a historian and been an academic and in in the end you you laid that book out and fell over dead, people will be like, oh, you know, there it is. Right? What more is there to say? But I don't know what you'll do.

I don't know how you'll, I joked last night that your next one will have to be about the cosmos. Yeah, you did. Because I don't know where you go from here. Unless you narrow back in. Yeah, yeah well that's probably what one would do is narrow back in so this this is very likely the the the big story the big narrative like you might yeah there's another this last thing i'll point out about the book is um there's some incredible restraint in there because there are areas that I know, you know,

really well and that you spent years of work on and have written about widely and you don't do them. You know? And I was like, dude, man, that dude just, he just,

he could have gotten just 20 free pages right there with his other shit. But you just, the restraint. Well, part of the restraint was trying to hold this thing to under 400 pages, which I managed to do by only two pages. And so there were plenty of spots, I have to say. I mean, you know, it would be easy to write an 800-page book out of this story. Because I'd be like, he damn sure knows a lot to flesh that story out that he didn't include there. Yeah, well, there were times when I said, okay, I've already done something like this, so I'm not going to go there. I mean, the coyote story probably. Oh, yeah, for sure.

That's that. And then, I mean, just stuff about with when, when the horse is reintroduced or, you that you could sit out in three or four days and you could actually read it and not have to, you know. I mean, books that get too long to me, you know, you tend to after 200 pages, you put them away and you may not go back for a month. And I was trying to make sure that I was writing a book that somebody would start. And within about three or four days, you would go through it. Man, I almost sent you a couple of mean emails while I was reading it, but I didn't. Well, you should have. I'm always up for mean emails. Someday I'm going to take it and I'm going to do a footnoted version where, where like I was telling you last night, all my footnotes are going to begin with, well, yeah, but.

Steve's commentary. Well, yeah, but keep in mind. They were super badass. That might be a nice little addendum, a little essay. Yeah, Steve should just take notes all over the book, and then we can reprint a copy of Dan's book with Steve's notes. Or better, he reads the whole thing, and then I get to just pause and be like,

what Dan's leaving out here that I think people should really pay attention to, man, is like some of the... That can be a new audio yeah a great new audio version of the audio book like for instance on the aldo leopold stuff i would pause and be like i'd like to point out that aldo leopold was and remained throughout his entire life a very avid hunter play bow hunter too i I was like, somehow that got left out. I hate to do this to you, but we gotta get to some trivia. Dan's gonna

win trivia, I'm afraid. Okay, well it looks like last time the trivia guest won, so you can... That was my lovely wife, Adrian. No. I just wanted to say that. Congratulations to her. Wow. Everybody will be able to tune in. You're going to stay for trivia, right? Yeah. All right.

Yeah. All right. Stay tuned for trivia. Wild New World, the epic story of animals and people in America by Dan Flores. Check it out.

And it'll stretch your brain out in sometimes uncomfortable ways. But ultimately, your brain will just, and sometimes uncomfortable ways, but ultimately it'll, it'll, your brain will just be bigger and, uh, and better. So enjoy.

And for people listening now, it's actually available. Oh, it is available. Got it. Yeah. Wild new world. It's a wild old world.

Thanks Dan. Oh, you bet guys thank you Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. On-axe hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips. You Canadians, the great features that you love and on X are available for your hunts this

season. Now the hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.