The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 427: The OG of Archaeology

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Mike Kunz, Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics include: When we called Mike Kunz the "Forest Gump of Archaeology"; the emperor of the north and the king of the west; dustpans of mosquitos; foxes running out of a gray whale carcass; the Alaska pipeline project; igneous intrusions; when you find Paleoindian projectile points in Alaska; the poor odds that you were the first person to find a thing that someone else dropped; how the Mesa site was discovered; the property of conchoidal fracture; direct tattoo evidence and direwolves; how everyone knew how to make projectile points; polar bears and climate change; the arctic small tool tradition; two iron pendants, two copper rings, and three blue glass beads; Occam's razor; going with the evidence you have; The Mesa Site: Paleoindians above the Arctic Circle; 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. Holy cow, Mike huns is here archaeologist and paleontologist who i knew uh you could probably tell me the exact date we met mike from your little uh yeah june 28th uh 2006 there you have it i'll never forget it archaeologist and pale. When we had, if you go back to an episode, episode 306, one of many affiliations of Mike Kunz's University of Alaska and the BLM, and I knew Bureau of Land Management. capacity when he was directing a bunch of archeological work and also like all aircraft in the Arctic, in the. National Patrolling Reserve, Alaska. Which if you read the news a lot, you probably been reading a little bit about that place lately.

In episode 306 of this podcast, we had an episode called An Alder Shoked Hell Hole, in which we interviewed some of Mike's colleagues you know they're not here i'm gonna say this because we couldn't get mike does that make you feel better it was like getting the v it was like having the v like you're like the news and they the president k you're like well shit i guess we'll take the vp like when you see the v on the news, they couldn't get the president. So we had Mike, we had Dan and Pam. Dr. Pamela Groves and

Daniel Mann. Dan Mann. We had him on. And on that episode, why couldn't you get Mike that episode? Because Mike, when the COVID began, he said he's not going to go anywhere until COVID ends, which turned into like a years-long thing. And then he's got all these other reasons why he doesn't want to go anywhere.

He's kind of like a, he's kind of, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'm getting a hermit. I get a hermit vibe off him. Yes. He likes to be in the Arctic. So we had a mind. I don't remember this, but apparently we called Mike Cunz the, it's good.

We called him the Forrest Gump of archaeology. To which he took, to which we have to do some clarifications. He had wrote in after that episode and said, yes, I did know. This is the correspondence between him and Corinne. He said, yes, I did know that pam and dan had done an episode with steve and yes i have listened to that episode comments about me by dan pam and steve made me sound like some benevolent but nebulous creature that wandered the north slope doling out helicopters to researchers i also found out that my old buddy david melzer has been on twice i haven't yet

listened to the melzer episodes i don't suppose he told you that I started my archeological career at Blackwater Draw, the Clovis type site while he was still in grade school. True story. So, uh, so Corinne suggested that rather than calling him the Forrest Gump of archeology, he is the godfather of archeology or the OG of archaeology.

Just like archaeology, comma, OG. People know what you're talking about. Do you want to know what I was called the last 20 years I was a BLM up in the Petroleum Reserve? No. I do want to know. Okay.

Meltzer, I think, coined this. The Maasai, a group of, a native group in Africa, they're pastoralists. And the social standing and the wealth of any individual family is measured by the number of cattle they have. Okay. All right? So I think it was Meltzer decided that I had control of more helicopters on the North Slope than anybody else. And therefore, I was the most important man

on the North Slope. And as I recall, I think it might have been somebody else, christened me the Emperor of the North and the King of the West. You know, I got it as a first question. This is, I'm bringing this one up first because, uh, then we're going to touch on a couple of things that we're going to very quickly get back. But I'm bringing this one up first because this one just is a freestanding question.

You told me a story. Well, first off, let me set the scene. I spent time, um um we'll get to this i spent time with mike huns and some other researchers in on the north slope of the brooks range and we were surveying the ground for projectile points and there was a bit of interest then in um looking for evidence remains interest but interest at the time of looking for evidence of you know who uh possibly the first americans right yeah who had crossed the bering land bridge yep um you had once said to me this is not the question you had said to me something like on

febru on june 24th the mosquitoes will be here. That was the date. On June 23rd, on June 22nd, there are no mosquitoes. June 23rd, I go like, oh wow, a mosquito on my arm and smack it. On June 24, holy shit. We would eat in a wall tent at night. And the first thing you would do is go in and bomb it. Like bug bomb the wall tent. And. And the first thing you would do is go in and bomb it, like bug bomb the wall tent. And I'm not joking.

These guys would go in with a broom and a dust pan to sweep and they would sweep up a legit dust pan of mosquitoes and throw them out the door and then you'd sit down and eat. Sounds like a beautiful place. You've never seen anything. It's like maddening. It's daylight all the time the sun

just goes around over your head they don't go by activities are not governed by time of day they're governed by wind speed so three in the morning wind dies down all right it's you don't know what way is up mike did you did you have people that would get kind of squirrely up there because of those? The biggest problem, most of our crews were composed of undergraduate or graduate archaeology students from various universities.

And the thing that seemed to bother them the most was the eternal daylight. Oh, yeah. And they said, well, how do you sleep i don't know i just close my eyes and go to sleep but um most of them would like tie a t-shirt around their eyes or something like that yeah uh and that was the bigger the other thing is and i i'll interject this here when i was talking with a prospective crew member on the phone, you know, like they lived in Maryland or, you know, Texarkana or someplace, and I would, one of the things I always told them was that you could have something happen to you where you are now, and because you have access to an ambulance and a hospital, it doesn't matter. It's something they could take care of in 15 minutes. If something happens to you out here,

I'd be lucky to be able to get you out of here in 24 hours. Even if I had a helicopter sitting on the ground and the weather was on its ass, you couldn't go anywhere. So just keep in mind that something as simple as almost a hangnail that can't do any damage to you in civilization, you could die from up here. So consider that before you tell me if you really want to come up here. Let me ask you my freestanding question now. I've tried to tell this story dozens of times, but I don't know the details.

So I don't know how to end the story. You told me something to the effect of that you were flying along in a helicopter with a pilot and you saw an Arctic fox run into the carcass of a beached whale you advised your pilot to tap the whale with the landing gear of the helicopter and how many foxes came out of the whale well it wasn't quite like that okay help me out my my colleague dale slaughter who was with me when we found the Mesa site in 1978, was working on his site for his PhD dissertation at a place called Sashara up on the Arctic coast

between Wainwright and Peard Bay. And a California gray whale had washed up on a beach. And so the Arctic foxes had drilled into it. How big is a California gray whale approximately? It's not one of the bigger whales, but it's probably, and it depends on the age, but let's say this one was probably, it was a mature one. All right.

That's the best they can do. Maybe 25 feet long. Okay. Something like that. So, at any rate, we had seen foxes go into it. And I just said, hey, let's go over and just bounce on this thing once and, you know, see what happens. And we did, and a whole bunch of foxes came running out of these, out of the whale.

But you didn't count them. No, but there were, there are a lot of them, probably at least a dozen. Oh, so I think when I tell it, I like to say that 13 came out. That you can, you can tell that, you can tell that story any way you want. I have, I have no particular feeling of

priority on it. Okay. I got one more, I got one more freestanding question and then we're gonna get back into longer answer things. You told me one time sitting there in our pile of dead mosquitoes, you were telling me about going to some lake and how many casts in a row

you caught lake trout. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Every cast. That was when we were working on Trans-Alaska Pipeline. It was in 1974 or 5. That's the year I was born. Really?

Yeah. Okay. So, anyway, we, the surveyors and the archaeologists were out ahead of everybody on any project that has federal money in it, you can't destroy cultural history. All right. So we were right behind him and that, and we're way out in front of everything. And that's one of the reasons that just the archaeologists and the surveyors, we were the only working group that could carry firearms because we're out there totally by ourselves. And you do run into grizzly bears pretty frequently.

So it was one of these things. We'll let the archaeologists and the surveyors. Well, basically, we said we aren't going out there if we can't take our shotguns with us. So what was your question? You took some number of casts. Yeah. Okay.

Uninterrupted and catching lake trout. Yeah. Well, that was at Killick Lake. Okay. Where I started to digress is that almost everybody that ran the camp, like the kitchen help and the guy running the sewer treatment plant and the guys in the small engine shop and et cetera, et cetera, never got out of camp ever. All right. And meanwhile, you're having all these adventures. at dinner time, and they'd say, hey, could you take my camera when you go out tomorrow morning and just circle camp once and take a couple aerial photos of camp so I can

take them home with me when I go back on R&R. And we'd say, yeah, sure. But we didn't always get exactly what they wanted. So we had a helicopter, and what the pipeline guys were doing was the big wheels. In order to make sure that they had enough helicopters, they would offer contracts to the helicopter companies that said, we'll pay you for 80 hours a month,

regardless of how much we fly. If we fly your ship 10 hours, we'll still pay you for 80. And so everybody went, yeah, man, I want to get one of those contracts. So I talked with the cap manager one night and I said, hey, can we do something about this? You know, these guys are stuck here all the time. I said, how about if our pilot says okay, he's okay with it, you know, because he's on his free time. And after dinner at night, two people can go with the pilot.

He'll take them up and they can take their own pictures and get what they want. One of the things that we were also doing at the same time was taking people over to Ickillick Lake. We weren't supposed to do this, but we did, to go fishing. A lot of good lake trout over there. I don't think I can go to jail now because that was 45 years ago. But at any rate, there was one time, and I had a small crew over at Ickillock Lake, which was about 15 miles over the mountains from Galbraith Lake, which was where our headquarters was. We had, I think I had five guys in that crew, and then I brought about three more over. And they were all fishing, and they all, I i mean this didn't just happen every time but on

at one moment everybody there nine people had a lake trout on they're standing about maybe 10 yards apart and one of them was 38 inches long and 33 pounds. Wow. Yeah. That's a true story. Yep. I can even name everybody that was there. But so there was no consecutive cast caught. Oh, yeah, there was. He told me that.

He might have forgot. Oh, no, no. There were not everybody that, what I just related only happened once. Yeah. I mean, you had everybody. But there was never a time with everybody standing on shore where at least one or two or maybe three people had a fish on. I mean, always, always. If all nine people cast out, at least two of them would get a fish on every time.

Mm-hmm. Right. So, because nobody ever really fished there before. I got a question about something you said earlier in your story. How often would you be forced to reroute that pipeline because you found something? Like, was it common or? Never did it. Never.

And I'll tell you why. The regulations are bad in the sense that they never work the way they're supposed to work. And what we were supposed to do was protect any site that was eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. It takes about two years after the nomination of a site to be included to go through all the paperwork and everything else before it can be put on the register. Two years. We're out there building a pipeline, right? We can't wait two years for every time we find a site. So what the senior archaeologist, the guy that we worked for at the university, decided was any site that we find within the CZW, which was construction zone width, not the right-of-way,

but the construction zone width, which is wider than the right-of-way, because you have to have activities ancillary to the right-of-way all the time. If it was in the CZW and we found a site, we excavated it no differently than we'd excavate any site, but we'd excavate it totally. We'd have all the notes there, all the maps, everything else in a museum so that if there was to be designation for inclusion on the annual register, all the stuff was there and we didn't have to wait two years for it to happen and then say,

okay, you guys can now move another quarter mile because we found another site. How many sites did you excavate? Two? Dozens? Dale Slaughter and I were in charge of the northernmost section

of the pipeline. That ran from a place called Linda Creek on the south side of the continental divide in the Brooks Range all the way to Prudhoe Bay, all right, to the end of the project. It's about probably close to 250, 300 miles. I don't remember. It was a long time ago.

But I know that we excavated in that area. Let me put it this way. I know that we discovered more than 200 archaeological sites within the CZW of the pipeline in that distance. We didn't excavate them all. Yeah. All right. Well, you couldn't have. But that's about what we found.

What was that like being out ahead of that pipeline construction? And you feel like you got this, I forget the geopolitics of it and the oil security, but you got just this monster coming behind you, just rototilling the ground, man. And that thing's going to be there, and you're going to be able to see it from outer space, and it ain't ever going away we were usually far enough ahead so that we didn't we didn't encounter we weren't working near a lot of the equipment yeah yeah but i do have one picture where the engineers had decided they wanted to use one material site that was different than the one they had originally told us they were going to use.

So we went and looked at that, and we found a site there. But it turned out that was the only material site that was located so it could be used on this one stretch of the road. Yep. And we literally, I've got a picture I took from the helicopter, Located so it could be used on this one stretch of the road. Yeah. And we literally, I've got a picture I took from the helicopter of us on this stalk of dirt and rock sticking up in the air like this. And about six scrapers and five push cats working all around us. And we're on this little stalk sticking up in the air about 15 20 feet and these guys are mining all the stuff all around us so that's the only

time that something like that happened yeah yeah and what were you guys working on there well there was an archaeological site that we had to excavate because they were going to take everything that was in that. Okay, I got to step back a minute. Most of the material, all of the material came from the local surroundings, from the countryside. Most of it came out of glacial deposits, ancient glacial deposits. Because when the ice ablated, when it melted, when the glacier receded, all the junk it had scooped up all along its course for thousands of years just stops right along with the ice. The ice melts out, and here's this big blob of rock and soil and everything else that just gets set down there.

And it's big enough so it's actually a hill, you know. Yeah, you can hike those. Sometimes you're hiking on them. It's like you're on an elevated sidewalk. Well, those are cames. Okay. All right, which is what I was describing. But they're linear cames, and sometimes they're small lateral moraines or eskers.

But the whole point of this thing is that all that stuff was mined to make the road. On that project, which most people don't realize, there's actually, it was almost like two separate projects. There was the road that had to be built north of the Yukon River, all right? And then that road, because the road had to be built before you could even begin to build the pipeline. So it was like two separate projects.

The project when we built the road, and once the road was all built, then we could start the project to build the pipeline. And the project that does the most environmental damage by far is the road because you're mining all this stuff, you're tearing up the countryside, etc., etc. So that's where the bulk of the concern is, is on the road. Secondarily, after the project's done, still the road provides most of the impact to the surrounding ecology because that's where everybody's going up and down. Dust is going all over the place.

The main concern on the pipeline at the time was that it would disrupt caribou migrations because caribou had never seen a pipeline. And so they're going to – you got this 800-mile pipe. Well, I shouldn't say. The pipeline's 800 miles long, but the part they were worried about was the first 300 miles, okay, with the Arctic caribou herd, Western Arctic herd, and the porcupine herd. Like a lot of talk about would they go under it. Would they cross it. Because they don't go under stuff.

Yeah. Well, I got lots of pictures of caribou all nestled down in the shade of the pipeline taking a break okay now the whole helmet because that is is that like how people will tell you that that developments are great for mule deer because sometimes there's a mule deer in their yard well they're laying next to a wellhead yeah well, you'd be like, well, there used to be a thousand there. Now there's two, and yes, they're in your yard. Yeah. Does that thereby mean that your subdivision is good for mule deer?

That's a little different, all right? The concern was legitimate at first because this had never been done before, all right? And you got- Oh, sure, yeah. I'm not trying to downplay the concern. The Western Caribou herd at that time was probably about 250,000 animals. Porcupine herd was probably even a little bigger. But. If they couldn't migrate to their various seasonal locations, then it was going to have a tremendous impact on caribou. And at that time, more so than now, a lot of the native communities still relied very, very heavily

on the environment to provide them with their food and so forth. And what it turned out to be was like anything else. I mean, wildlife biologists knew this, but it had never been demonstrated with caribou. If you give the animals enough time, they'll acclimate to almost anything, all right? As long as they don't associate any bad, harmful occurrence with whatever it is that's there. All right. So if the pipeline's there and nobody's shooting at them and killing them and doing this or that to disturb them, sooner or later, they're going to get used to it.

And, you know, one of them's going to say, hey, Fred, you see that shade there? We're 200 miles from a tree. We got shade now. Oh, yeah. Let's go lie down under it. And so. Is that why they initially, not initially, is that why they had the five mile buffer on either side for hunting? Yes. That's a simple

answer. Yes. To make it not, to not instill paranoia around the pipeline. Not to not instill paranoia, but not to, that road would provide access to hunt in other words it eliminates fair chase to a degree alright that's the basic thing in other words not eliminates well enforce like enforces a definition of it well yeah but what I mean it eliminates

the concept of fair chase if you have these guys all lined up you know taking it easy someplace and you get out of your veal and go and blow away three of them all right that's not fair chase and almost all fish and game regulations anywhere are based on fair chase in other words you can't you can't have an edge that's unfair and will ecologically threaten the herd or, you know, the population and put it in some kind of danger or something.

In your career, what's the most terrible you ever saw at any one given time? Well, you were out at Utica. Yeah. Uticaq. Yeah. Uticaq Camp. It was probably in, it was fairly, I'd say it was like 2009 or 10. We had a herd come through Uticaq heading east. They were about a quarter of a mile wide and about two and a half miles long. Hmm. So there,

I mean, I never figured it out, but there had to be somewhere on the order of somewhere between 30 and 40,000 in that group. Yeah. That's unbelievable. What time of year was it? What time of year? It was in the fall. No, I take it back. It was it huh what time of year it was in the fall

no i take it back it was well no i was in the fall for up there okay late summer for here yeah yeah yeah uh that's not far from the mesa site yeah that place was i mean that was a Utica. Utica. Oh, what's the, what's your guy's camp that was by that Mesa site? I have a talk. I have a talk. Okay. Yeah. I have a check. The Mesa is six miles South.

I have a tech. You to cock is 140 miles West. I have a tech. Got it. So it's a long ways away. What were you doing? Explain what you were doing the day you found the Mesa site and what it was that you found. Well, Dale and I had gotten dropped off by the helicopter because what we were doing at the time,

almost without exception, all of the wells we drilled on that project. And you got to remember the petroleum reserve is about the size of the state of Indiana. Okay. It's the single largest chunk of land managed by a single federal agency in the country. Okay. It's also like by various mathematical parameters, it's the remotest place in America. In terms of distance from road, distance from city, distance from this, that, and everything. Yeah. There's a sign at Ivatuck, okay? And it says, welcome to Ivatuck.

When you're here, you're still nowhere. All right. And it says like, however many people are there, you hang up little things, population eight or three or whatever. Yeah. You walk, if you walked east from there, you would go hundreds of miles till you hit the pipeline, right? Okay, I'll center it for you. Here's Ivatuck. It's 400 miles from the nearest city, Fairbanks.

Okay. All right. It's 250 miles from the nearest town, Barrow, now known as Zygiavik. And it is 165 miles from the nearest highway, road, which is the Dalton Highway going to Prudhoe Bay. And it is 90 miles from the nearest Eskimo village, Antutu Pass. So that gives you an idea of exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, it's the middle of nowhere. But anyway, to get back to me and Dale finding the mesa.

So we get dropped off, and the reason is we were digging a site near the proposed well site of Lisburn. And so the guys come by and say, we want you to go out and look at this stuff because Lisburn, along with two other well sites, were going to be what they called deep strat wells. They were going to be not drilled to find oil at all. They wanted to know what the subsurface stratigraphy was. Okay. For a long way down. That well at Lisburn was 17,000 feet. Man, that damn near puts you in China, don't it?

The well at Inagak was 19,000 feet, and the well at Tunelik was 21,000 feet. That drill bit's got to come out hot, right? It's hot down there. We're only a little way into the story here. So all the other wells that we drilled up there over a three-year period, we were looking for hydrocarbon resources. They were all done in the winter because in the winter you can make your airstrip you can make your camp pad

you can make the drill pad everything out of ice and snow you go in there you're only drilling between five and seven thousand feet on those things you know you rig up spud the well drill for six weeks rig down and you're gone. Everything melts. Nothing left. No one ever touched the ground. Well, I mean, that's not true literally. But yeah, it would look like that. But you build every single thing out of ice and snow.

And, you know, you put a, if you got a lake, the idea was to have, you start off with a small crew going out of Lonely. Lonely was the headquarters. It's an old dewline station about 90 miles east of Barrow. Dewline, that was the thing to make sure the Ruskies weren't coming? Yeah, the distant early warning line. So what you do is you have this little overland crew. You're walking a D7 cat, probably a 799 loader, a couple of Tucker snow cats,

maybe another dozer pulling a trailer full of stuff. You get these guys over there to where you're going to drill your well. And hopefully there's a lake close enough, but if there isn't, there almost always is, then you have to build one on the tundra. You build it out of ice. So this first ground crew gets over there and they'll build a little twin otter strip on a lake.

Then you can start bringing more people in. You get enough people over there, then you can build a big 5,000-foot herk strip on the ice or on a lake or else build one on the tundra. All right? Then you start hirking a rig in. In the meantime, there's a whole crew over there building the ice pad for the well, building the pad for the camp. And the guys start hirking in the rig.

They rig up and they start drilling. So you have to have C-130 Hercules is making about, I can't remember how many trips, something like 18 trips to get a TBA rig in there, which stands for transportable by anything, all right? Just depends on how many chunks you want to break it down into. And that's how the whole thing worked. But with the wells at Inagok, Lisburn, and Tunelik, you can't drill that deep in that amount of time. I mean, it took two years to drill those things. So everything has to be built just like it would be built if you were doing it in Wyoming. And that petroleum reserve down there has to all be built out of rocks and, you know, sand and gravel and all this kind of stuff.

Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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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. So, now we get back to Dale and me finding the Mesa site, right? You're surprised I can keep track of this. No, it's phenomenal, man.

All right. So, anyway, Dale and I are out there because the engineers— What's Dale's name? Slaughter. Dale Slaughter. He was up there when you were up there, when you were up at Utica. I was mixing him up with Dale. Was it Dale Guthrie that found that?

Dale Guthrie. He found a lot of shit coming out of the permafrost, right? Yeah. Like bison and mammoths. Yeah. Mammoths, yeah. So at any rate, the engineer said, we need something to cap that runway at Lisburn because we have to have that 5,000-foot herk strip there to be able to put the well in. And we need some kind of really resistant rock. Well, all that rock in that whole general area, the rock that underlays a huge area is referred to as country rock. Okay, in other words,

that's the rock that's there and da-da-da-da-da. That covers everything. It's still subsurface, but it's a uniform formation. But right around Lisburn, there were some igneous intrusions through that country rock.

In other words, magma had to come up. Not volcanic, but hard rock. And they'd surfaced up through the limestone country rock. And that stuff was hard. This has got to be Perkins Spencer right up. You digging all this, Spencer? I'm interested.

He don't even have a headset on. He's still interested. And so what the engineers wanted to do was find a good location for that stuff and drill it and shoot it, run it through a crusher, and then the final lift on the airstrip would be that hard

resistant rock. Well, so Dale and I are out there doing it because all of these things are up thrusts. They're like mesas or ridges or something like this. They're perfect for an archeological encment, for a use by the prehistoric people. Because you're up high, you've got a great view, you can look around the area for a game. You're up high

in the breeze, bugs aren't going to be too bad. It's well-drained. You're not going to have to be slopping around in gush all the time when it rains. And so, almost always, and it was the same with those littler things like Cames and Came Terraces and Eskers I was talking about a little while ago. That's where all the sites were.

And those are the things that all the engineers wanted to use. So you can see there's a problem. At any rate, so Dale and I had been out there all day, and it was one of those days where it was just lousy. It wasn't really raining. But, you know, this was in, I think, early August. And it was probably 28 degrees, about 10 knots of wind, mist. And, I mean, everything was wet.

It was cold. You know, there was enough wind so the chill factor was down probably about 10 degrees from the actual ambient temperature. Just, you know, and we'd been out all day and we were cold. And so what we had done is we'd flown out all the way to right to the front edge of the Brooks Range where all these igneous intrusives were. And we were working our way back towards where the well site was going to be. And so we'd been out there and you work 12 hours a day. So we'd been out there for, by that time, about 10 hours. We climbed up and down stuff. We probably walked seven, eight miles. And we came to this one spot, and there was this beautiful ridge that was right between us and the rain.

And we said, screw it, man. Let's just sit out here and get out of the weather. And we're just going to take it easy until we hear the helicopter coming. And so we were quitting like 45 minutes earlier or something. So we're sitting there and I look in front of us and I see what is just absolutely perfect. You can look on it. You can look on the cover of that thing. All right.

That's the mesa. That's what I see out there. All right. Except I'm looking at it from the backside. I see that thing sticking out.. That's the Mesa. That's what I see out there. All right. Except I'm looking at it from the backside. I see that thing sticking out. Sticks down your mic, Mike. Oh, I see that, you know, we're looking at it from the backside because we were on the Brooks Range side of it. And anyway. It's like if you're watching a John Wayne Western and they always shoot them in that

same spot where there's those sweet mesas in the background. It's like that, but in the Arctic. So at any rate, I said, man, that really looks good. I said, we've never looked at that. So I said, hey, I'm going to walk across this little draw here and climb up there and see what's there. And Dale says, go ahead. I'm staying here. I'm staying out of the wind. So I did, and I climbed up there.

And I came up on the windward side, which, you know, was a prevailing wind. And it was fairly well desiccated. There had been a lot of aeolian damage up there, erosion. There had blown off a lot of the vegetation, and so the mineral soil and the organic soil under the vegetation, there's lots of exposures. So I'm walking along and I'm looking down and I'm seeing flakes, you know, chert flakes, the byproducts of making stone tools. And I'm looking around and I say, well, I was right, you know, I figured there'd be something up here.

And I'm walking and all of a sudden I see a projectile point lying there. It's broken. And I look, man, that looks, I could be walking around in New Mexico or Colorado and see this thing, and I'd think it was a Paleoengine projectile point. In other words, you know, terminal pleistocene. And I thought, huh. Well, you occasionally find those kinds of things, you know, just oddness like that. I took about another 10 steps and I saw another one. And then I saw another one. They were all broken,

but I could, but they were the basal portions of them, which gives you a whole lot of information. And I said, geez. So I started looking at them. And they were dead ringers for paleo-Indian projectile points from the high plains of continental U.S. I mean, I could have got a basket full of them and walked out and started casting them around in New Mexico and Texas and Oklahoma and Nebraska and Iowa and nobody would have batted an eye when they found them. Oh, here's another Paleo-Indian

projectile point. So, in the meantime, Dale's been watching me and he sees me all of a sudden start bending down, you know, getting up and bending down again and he sees me all of a sudden start bending down, getting up and walking, bending down again, and he knew I'd found something big, and anyway, he's pissed off

because he didn't go up there with me. So he comes running across the thing, and he gets up there and he says, you probably found all the good stuff already. I said, no, you've been up there. There's a lot of area up on top there. And then we hear, this. I mean, you've been up there. There's a lot of area up on top there. So in that small, and then we hear, here comes our helicopter to pick us up.

So at any rate, I grabbed a few. I marked where I'd picked them up, probably five or six of them, and stuck them in my pack, and I took them back to camp with me. And nobody there, for those of you who don't know, when I first started out in

how to be an archaeologist school, I was at Eastern New Mexico University, which is about a five-minute drive from Blackwater Draw, which is the Clovis-type site. And that's where I cut my teeth in archaeology. So I knew Paleo-Indian projectile poor. And just to be clear for people who might not understand, those things weren't supposed to be there. Is that... Well, stylistically, occasionally in the Arctic and in the interior of Alaska, a point like that might be found in an isolated occurrence.

But no conglomeration and nobody, a lot of the, somebody who might be up here working might publish a little article that said, and we found two projectile points that look very reminiscent of projectile points from New Mexico at Terminal Place. Do you mind me laying out the great mystery real quick? What? I want to lay out this, kind of what Brody's getting at. I'm going to lay out the great mystery as quickly as possible. Do it. Okay. mystery as quickly as possible do it okay um there's a long-running debate about how long

humans have been in the western hemisphere yeah and there are changing fashions to explain how they arrived and how they came to be um for a while there was an idea that they entered in through Alaska, were held up in Alaska for a long time. And then an ice free corridor opened up sort of between the Eastern and Western ice sheets and humans emerged down to the great Plains around Edmonton, Alberta. That sounds good. That idea was replaced by an idea that they came along the coasts.

That's a good idea too. There has long been, for a long time, people thought that Clovis were, the Clovis people were the first Americans. Yeah. now it's better understood that Clovis was a sort of creation of some preexisting population of Americans. I'll say maybe to that. Maybe. I'm not saying, I agreed with you on everything so far, but that. Because when you have a couple sites from 13,000, 14,000 years ago,

what are the odds that you found the first place someone dropped something? They're very bad. So a lot of mystery about where did these cultures develop. And where they came from. And because it was first found in the high plains, this idea emerged. And you'll agree with this or not. This idea emerged that these cultures, um,

developed there. So to see these. Rather than traveled there. Yeah. So to see these diagnostic points of what might've been the first Americans to enter the new world, maybe you're looking at the shit they dropped thousands of years before anybody made their way down. For a long time, the oldest site in the New World was in Chile.

Chile. Monte Verde, but there's some. Now the Snake River has beat it. Some of those sites over there in Idaho are a little old. No, the salmon. Is it the salmon or the snake? Salmon, I think. Okay. Let me just make, I think. Okay.

There have. Let me, let me, you take it away. I just want one more sentence. Give me one more sentence. Yeah. If, if, if linguistically, genetically. Okay. Yeah.

It's well established that the first Americans came from Siberia and Asia. And your oldest site is in far South america there is a lot of shit between siberia and south america in which people drop shit yeah and a number of ways they could have gotten there but no one's found it so to find something really old in alaska you could for a moment hold out hope that maybe these were the first people's stuff who ever stepped foot. And theoretically that stuff would be older.

The oldest stuff, the oldest stuff in the new world, by definition, has to be in Alaska. Correct? Yes, that's totally correct. That was a lot of sense. Unless you believe in UFOs. Or you believe in UFOs. Unless you believe in UFOs.

Or you believe in the salutary and hypothesis. Don't start talking Dennis Stanford stuff to me, all right? Jeez, I couldn't believe when Dennis got wrapped around the axle on that one. Anyway, you're sort of yes and no, all right? Yeah, I'm no expert. Um, you're sort of yes and no. All right. Yeah. I'm no expert. There. Well, it doesn't matter.

There's a lot of experts that are yes and no. So anyway, let me finish my Mesa story and I don't go back to this. Okay. Well, no, but yeah, because he's, he's the one that interrupted you. Yeah. He said, well, why does that matter? All right. So what I'm going to say is that I still, even though I had all this experience with Clovis and Paleo-Indians stuff because there wasn't any Paleo-Indian stuff in Alaska.

All right? And all the folks we had working for us at the time were from Alaska. Or there's probably a couple that weren't but had never had any Paleo-Indian experience. Except for one girl, Susan Well, was from North Dakota. And when she was a junior, I think, wherever she was going to school,

North Dakota State or something like this, she worked on a survey crew and that's in Paleo-Indian country down there. I mean, if you find old stuff, that's what you're going to find. And so I asked Susan, I said, hey, what do you think? And she said, that looks just like

Paleo-Indian stuff. I didn't prime her or anything. I just said, what do you think of this? And that's the first words out of her mouth. And then I said, hallelujah. all right, because that confirmed for me that I was absolutely right. So at any rate, we then, well, immediately said to the engineers, uh-uh, not doing this. And then the site we were already excavating, we had found some other stuff that was really important, and we said, uh-uh, you're not doing this. So they ended up getting a special permit from the Cora engineers to actually mine gravel out of Otuk Creek near the airstrip there to use as the overlayment, the final lift on the runway. Because all the preferred materials were burdened by archaeological sites.

Yeah, yeah. And so that's how the mesa was found and how it survived. Give a couple, because there's so many other things I want to touch on. Give a couple, give a recap of the significance of it. Like what wound up being the dates, the the abundance what were they doing up there most except for fairly recent prehistoric sites and these would be residential sites all right you like villages you don't get a lot of hearths, fires, remnants of fires. And that's what you want to date most. That's what you, if you have your druthers, that's what you want to date,

are those remnants of those fires, the charcoal and those fires. You have to have an organic substance. You can't date a rock. But if you're dating these campfires, or cooking fires, you know you're dating something that people did.

This isn't a wildfire remnant or a lightning strike or something. This is people fires. So you're dating what they did and what the date you get back is going to be related pretty directly to them, to their occupation of that spot at that time. But the Mesa was not a habitation site. It was a game hunting lookout. And what was taking place

there was the guys, mostly guys, were up there on top, sitting around these little fires, warming fires, keeping an eye out there. You can see from miles from up there, as you know. Keeping a lookout for game, and they're working on

their hunting equipment. They're taking the busted projectile points out of the half and putting new ones in. What they did was even the ones that they could resharpen when they broke on a hunting expedition, if enough of it was sticking out of the half, they just resharpen it real quickly in the half. So you find a lot of these stubby things that were thrown away. You can see the point is made exactly right up until just about here. And then all of a sudden it goes like that. And you say, wait a minute, it's been resharpened. All right. But once they got to a place like the

Mesa where they could do work on their stuff, they threw them away. All right. And made new ones and put them in. So at any rate, that place was used so much, and I'm grasping at a number here, but it'll be close. It'll say right in that book I left you. We found pretty damn near 50 camp fires up there. I don't know if you took most, if you took all of the

Paleo-Indian campfires that have been found in all the Paleo-Indian sites in New Mexico and Colorado, it wouldn't total 50. So, I mean, this was like, holy God, I can't believe this. Now, we didn't know this right away. We didn't know it until we started excavating there. 50 haras that

we can date. Every one of these haras has, you know, chips thrown into it, you know, from when they were working on things. Some of the times they just pulled an old busted point out of the end of the thing and just tossed it into the fire. And so a lot of these X projectile points, broken projectile points, have pot lid fractures on them. And a pot lid fracture occurs when you heat chert to a certain point, all right? It'll fracture like this. Because chert and flint, it's the same way, has a physical property called conchoidal fracture, that's what allows you to flake them. Because you know that you whack it and that flake is going to come over off of there. You'll know how it comes off.

You ever remember when you were a kid and you shot the window with your BB gun? Sure. You made a little hole in front and this cone-shaped thing behind it? Not when I shot Joe Suki's windshield with a Daisy Red Rider. All right, but you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah, I do. All right? That you know what I'm talking about, right? Yeah, I do. All right? That cone-shaped thing. Well, that glass is cryptocrystalline, just like chert or flit or obsidian,

and has the property of conchoidal fracture. It's controllable. It depends on the angle you hit it at, how hard you hit it, what you hit it with, whether it's soft hammer or hard hammer. And once you get to know how to do this, you can make any damn thing you want out of stone. I mean, you can make any shape you want, all right? That's how it works. And so when you heat these things up to a certain point, it'll pop a flake off,

and that conchoidal fracture principle works the same way. So you'll get these rounded, pit-shaped holes, maybe the size of your thumbnail or something, depending on how big the piece of shirt was, in the surface of the thing. The only way they can get there like that is by heat. It's a heat fracture. And so even if, for example, that hearth over the years,

it all blew away, all the charcoal blew away, everything blew away, but the heat fracture projectile point didn't blow away because it was too heavy. And so you excavate it 10,000 years later and scooping it up there and you pick it up and you see that concoidal fracture right in the middle of it there, you know that it had to be heat fractured. And that means it had to be definitely associated with some kind of heat. And if there's no evidence for wildfire or grass fire or anything else in the subsoil of the site you're digging, there's only one answer.

It got done that way because it ended up in the campfire. So there's all these interpretive things that have to go along with all of this. And you've got to do archaeology for quite a while before you pick up on all this stuff. And archaeologists are the first forensic scientists, all right? But instead of their clues being six hours old, they're 6,000 years old. And so back in the old days, for example, in fact, at the beginning of my career, it was still happening. Forensic police work hadn't been developed. And when the local police department had run into something that was sort of inexplicable with some kind of a clue they knew, but they didn't know what, they'd call up the local university and have an archaeologist go down to look

at it to see what they could tell them. And after archaeologists were doing that for him for a while, somebody came up with the idea, hey, why don't we just train our own guys to think that way and do that stuff? So we don't get to do that anymore. But beginning of my career, I got asked to do a couple things like that. And it was really neat. It was interesting, you know, to kind of get out of the context of archaeology and use those same skills to, you know, answer a different question. Is it possible that those folks up there were watching for mammoths? Or does it not line up time-wise?

The oldest date from the Mesa calendar year date is 13,660 years ago. There's another one that's 11,200 years ago. In terms of all the paleontological work that we did up there, Pam, Dan, and I, I wasn't directly, well, I was directly involved in it because I was funding it. But we did not find any mammoth remains that were that recent.

I think the most recent mammoth we found was about maybe 15 or 16. Got it. Yeah. What game do you think that they were looking at then? Caribou, dire wolves, deer, bison? Well, it wouldn't be after dire wolves, but no dire wolves ever existed in the North America,

in the Western Hemisphere. There were no dire wolves over here. That's like a trivia question, right? Now he knows how it feels. That's embarrassing. Now he knows that's embarrassing um caribou have been around forever all right uh bison bison priscus uh there was never any modern bison up here at least not as far as there's a real there's there's sort of this developmental transition with bison. Bison priscus was the Pleistocene bison, the root stock.

There was never any evolution of bison in the Arctic like there was down in North America. All right. There are bison priscus down there, but there's also bison latifrons, bison occidentalis, and bison antiquus. All of those evolved out of bison priscus down there, but up in Alaska, in the Arctic, that progression of evolution never happened.

It was always bison priscus. And were they still on the ground at that point? Yes. Okay. There were. Our most recent bison was 10,000 years. Got it. Yeah.

Can I? Horse. There was probably, there were probably still some horses around. And that was a big game animal. You think they were hunting bears, polar bears? No. We don't have any evidence of them. There are two kinds of bears.

There were short-faced bears and there were grizzly bears, same grizzly bear we have today. There were lions, the European cave lion, Pantera. That was over here. Spilea, Pantera spilea. Thank you whoever sent that to me. And they were, predators are in such small numbers compared to herbivores. The other thing is, nobody's going to go out after a lion with a piece of flint on the end of a stick that's this long. The same for the bears all right so we don't have any evidence of those kinds of place to see megafauna from archaeological sites in alaska what was your question spencer can i argue with you for a second i googled it while

we were sitting here it says in north america dire wolves have been found as far north as alaska and down into southern mexico national park service i also how far does alaska go down and how far is that from where he's talking about the arctic no i sure i didn't say that i was just asking if they'd ever been found there we've never found dire wolves in the part of Alaska that I've worked in, and I still would take issue with the Park Service on dire wolves being in Alaska.

Now, so this tattoo right here. Now he's referring to his tattoos. I'm going to source that. I have direct tattoo evidence. That's right. Hold on. This tattoo is 13,000 years old. It'll come around. That is the cattle brand for the original owners of the La Brea Tar Pit. And when I was there, it was one of the things that moved me so much was seeing, it was like a hundred dire wolf skulls that they have extracted from the La Brea Tar Pits.

That was the inspiration for my skull wall. It hit me like a diamond bullet. Oh, really? That's where I went. It's beautiful. My first date with my wife was at La Brea Tar Pits. That was the inspiration for my skull wall. It hit me like a diamond bullet. Oh, really? That's where I went. It's beautiful. My first date with my wife was at La Brea Tar Pits. So anyway, what are they extracting then if they're not dire wolves?

I should actually backstep. There are none in Alaska. Okay. And to my knowledge- National Park Service says there are. All right. I have to say, since I didn't work in that area, I don't know. But I was of the opinion, since I had never read anything about that, that there were dire wolves in the Western Hemisphere. So that's my answer.

But I don't know everything everything as you're finding out uh i want to move on to polar bears yeah no this is a great line of questions ask him a question about the points yeah man is there any way to infer this is yanni papa yanni this is yanni Thank you. What percentage of these people that were there hunting, making these points, what percentage of them had the skills to make the point? Or is that just unknown? Every single one of them. Unknown. Every single one of them.

In fact, I'm going to jump way forward thousands of years to Eskimo Zooka. If you're living out in the middle of Arctic Alaska, and we'll say especially in the wintertime, but it could be where it's dark all the time, you can't see anything or very little. I mean, when I say it's dark all the time, it gets to be twilight, but that's about the best it gets for a long time, especially if you're north of 70 degrees latitude. The winter encampments were small because there weren't enough resources for a family. And the families were small as well. To be able to survive through the winter, if you had more than two or three families living in the same place,

I mean, you'd use up a big willow patch for your firewood fast. Okay. So if the men have to leave to go out hunting, you try and always camp someplace where there's a reliable food resource. That's why most of these winter encampments occur on the shores of a big lake that has a reliable fish resource in it. So you can at least get fish through the ice. Also, hopefully, caribou migrate through there in the fall by this lake. So you also have a caribou resource.

But if the caribou don't show up, you've always got that lake with a fish resource that you can get through. So dad goes off to do something with, say, two or three of the other men, and that may be all that it were in that encampment. Go off, do a little hunting. That leaves the women there all by themselves. Now, commonly what they would do would be set little snares for ptarmigan and other smaller critters like that. But there's no guarantee you're going to get them. What if the guys don't come back? Or don't come back for a long while? Or vice versa, what if the guys go out and they rip their parka

and there isn't any woman there to sew it up? Every single adult Eskimo could do every single thing there was to do to be able to live. The men may not have been the greatest seamstresses in the world, but I guarantee they could fix anything that ripped or tore or anything else. They could do anything that women could do, except have a baby, of course. But in the women, they could make a projectile point. They could make a, you know, a Leister point.

They had to be able to because there's no way they're going to survive if you didn't. So in my opinion, that evidence is transferable as far back as you want to go in the Arctic. If you want to go about 5,000 years, 10,000 years, 15,000 years. Adults, every adult could do everything you needed to do to be able to stay alive. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Was the chert that they were using really abundant up there? Did they have to source it from some faraway place? Everybody that I ever had up there, like Tony Baker was one of the first ones to make. He hadn't been up there. The first time he came up to work with me, he hadn't been up there the first time he came up to work with me he hadn't been up there 10 minutes and he didn't before he said i can't believe this shirt up here it's everywhere he said if if this was done in new mexico they wouldn't have thrown that stuff away

you know the big waist flakes and stuff like that and i said i, I know, Tony, that's where I went to school in New Mexico. The reason is, is because chert in the Arctic, especially within the petroleum reserve, because it's a sedimentary rock, it forms that way. It is totally ubiquitous. It is everywhere. You can find it in every gravel source. You can find it in every stream bed. You can find it everywhere. Anybody that I ever brought up that was already an archaeologist from, you know, down south would say, I can't believe this. God, this stuff is laying there. You know, I mean, they'd pick up five big pieces and say, you'd never find this on an archaeological site down there. They'd use this stuff.

Because it's chunks this big, you know, you could have made three projectile points out of it. But the stuff is like growing on every tree up there. So people just took the best, just used what they wanted, didn't worry about it. The only time you might have an issue would be in the wintertime when you can't really access it too well. But people were probably making a supply, all right? They, during the summer, you know, the good months, they'd make what we call preforms. They'd make a, you know, biface preform about like this. Like the size of your palm.

Yeah. Well, not even that big, just, you know, like about like this. And you could use, then use that to make almost anything. And anything, anything big and anything small, all right, the waist flakes, you could make them out of, on the waste flakes. So that would be the only instance where you just literally could not find. Now, there are spots where there isn't any, but by and large, it's just everywhere. You keep saying make anything. The only thing I've seen or heard of is that there's points for projectiles. What else did they make? Scrapersers hide scrapers

knives alls uh not usually those were made out of bone whatever anything to do with sewing was pretty much made out of out of bone or got it got it antler well no what's that spoke what you guys are talking about a spoke shave or a spoke shave well that's different i know but i was just trying to save myself just wanted to contribute you didn't do a real good job but i'll let it go uh at any rate so um there's things called burns uh i mean i'd have to go into a description of gravers. Graver was like a Marlin spike. When guys are working on their equipment and they have to undo knots that they made to half, you know, you're wrapping stuff in a haft, a knife or a projectile point, they have these

little things called gravers, which have these little prongs sticking out of them. And they're used just like sailors use a Marlin spike. They're used to undo a knot, all right? So you can, whatever that knot is holding in place, you can get it out or get it away. So there's all kinds of different things that projectile points were not the primary thing that were made. These sort of semi-formal tools that you just needed for everyday use,

things to slice hide with or slice meat or make holes for sewing or, you know, all of this kind of stuff. So there's a- Like an awl. Mike's eyes went in the back of his head for a second. Okay, go ahead. One more. One more.

It'll be quick. It's a yes or no. Did they make any big stuff like hatchet heads or large spear points? It depends on where they were. At a time, there were warmer periods up there. I mean, we find buried spruce stumps up there, but they're 150,000 years old when it was warmer up there. We find beaver-chewed sticks, all right? But if you dated one, it's going to be over 45,000 years old.

So mostly when humans were there, there just wasn't anything that was big enough to require an axe or an adze. And they didn't hollow out logs to make boats. They were all skin boats made on a silver field. So what were they burning in the fires you guys were found? Willow. Okay.

Willow. Shrub willow. Okay. Willow. You know what... Shrub willow. Yeah. Probably something that would need a big point would be a... Is that what you were going to say? I was going to tell Brody something interesting. I'm talking about the trees, how you'll find trees, but then they're super old. Because things constantly change.

When you're looking, like when you get up around the northern tree line, like you're going up in the Brooks Range. Yeah. And you see what looks like, you'll see bands of trees, you know. At a point, you'd be like, well, there's the last tree we're going to look at. And then there's going to be no more trees to the north. In your head, you're like, that tree is advancing.

No. You think like a point, like, oh, look, he's growing out. Like, he's heading north. He's a pioneer. Yeah, he's a survivor. Right. You know, he's like hanging on, man. Like, his bodies are all dead.

Okay, you ready to talk about polar bears? I recently, we've been, we were wanting to talk about this a long time ago there was recently an article where a some kind of population ecologist or someone was discussing that his information about polar bear population dynamics was being labeled misinformation online oh i know because he was saying that polar bear numbers are strong and growing and a lot of the they have become an emblematic megafauna for climate change yeah and a lot of they become a poster boy for climate change. Yep. And the narrative is, is that as climate change continues, we will lose the polar bear. The polar bear will be this emblematic loss of a charismatic species because of climate change. And many, it annoys many climate change activists that they're not vanishing.

And they get embarrassed by the fact that polar bear numbers are strong. And so by pointing out that polar bears are doing fine, you become accused of misinformation, not because it's misinformation, but it's not helpful propaganda. Okay. You're talking about Lombard. And we sent this to you to say, what do you think about all this? Yeah.

Okay. I can tell you. And I was given a very biased telling. Okay. I can tell you. Okay. Lombard said, essentially, if polar bears are on the way out, how come the population is four or five times as great as it was in the 1960s or 1970s? That's what he said. That was a, and I know he knows this, but he's on the other side of the coin, okay, in terms of climate change.

Like he has an ax to grind. Well, he's grinding an ax because that is deliberately a disingenuous comment. Okay. And I'm going to tell you why. Please. Back in the 60s and into the very, very early 70s, there were basically no controls on recreational hunting of polar bears. The reason that the worldwide population was down to around 4,000 or 5,000 was because of uncontrolled hunting,

all right, trophy hunting. All the countries that had polar bears, in other words, had Arctic sea ice parts, you know, exposures on their countries, got together and they said, we need to do something about this. This is in, like I say, the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s. And they did. In our country, two, I guess you could call them landmark regulations were passed. The Marine Mammals Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act. And that those banned any commercial hunting of polar bears in the United States. It stopped as of 1972

when that legislation... 73 first. 73, 72, when that legislation was passed. Natives, Alaska Natives can do it for special, specific cultural reasons. All right. But there has to be, I mean, it has to be a good reason. All right. I mean, it has to be a good reason, all right? So as a result of that, polar bear populations started growing. So why are polar bears on the Threatened and Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammals

Protection Act if the population's growing, because it is. There's somewhere between probably 10,000 and 14,000 polar bears now in that, what, 30, 40-year span of time. The reason that they are considered threatened or endangered has nothing to do with their population at all. It has to do with habitat loss. And as the temperatures warm, both in the atmosphere and in the seawater, sea ice diminishes.

They're threatened and endangered because they aren't going to have any place to live. I can give you a personal example of that. When we were, remember we talked about Tunalik earlier, one of the deepest well

on the North Slope, 21,000 feet? Well, we found a couple of archaeological sites where the engineers wanted to put the hirk strip for the Tunalik Well site. And we're right out near the coast. And so we were excavating those to get them out of the way so they could go ahead and build the hirk strip.

And we were looking right out at Icy Cape, all right? And Icy Cape is kind of, you come up through the Bering Strait, all right, going north. Then you want to turn to go to Barrow, all right, to go to Alaska and Arctic Canada. So you turn east, turn right up there, you go around Icy Cape, and then you go right up the coast to Barrow and Barter Island, and, you know, you get into the Canadian Arctic. But Icy Cape was named for a reason. It was icy. What happened very

frequently there was that the sea ice never cleared out. It lasted all summer long. And so, there was no way to get around the corner to get into the rest of the Arctic

to the east. You couldn't get through there. The sea ice stayed there all summer. It was there all winter and it was there all summer. That didn't happen every single summer, but it happened relatively frequently. When they were trying to develop Prudhoe Bay, there were summers where all this stuff's coming up from Seattle on these huge barges,

these huge module camp units and everything. They sat off icy cape all summer long until the winter sea ice started to grow and went back to barrel. They couldn't get through. know that that happened was when we were digging Tunelik in 1977 because we were there from, I think we were there through most of August. Before the end of August, you're starting to have ice grow again anyway. That ice never went out. Everybody turned around and went back down to Seattle. So that happened. And I could be wrong, right? The reason I remember it so graphically is because I was there watching it. I wasn't there for that purpose, but we just, you know, just remember it.

I mean, we could look out every day. It wasn't foggy and you could see it. So what happens to these polar rivers when that stops happening? I mean, that's just an example. That's just a place where you could see it. It was easy to see. Well, if they don't have that sea ice to exploit, it's going to get to a point sooner or later where their numbers are going to start dropping. There's just no way around it. As early as 2009, a couple of my USGS colleagues had some weather cams set up in Drew Point,

which is about maybe 15 miles west of Lonely. And when Frank went out to check the cameras in the summer, there's this polar bear sow and two cubs on land. And so this camera, the camera's right on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, right? And in the background, you can see the entire Arctic Ocean, as far as you can see, not a speck of ice anywhere. And one of the cubs, in fact, I got a picture right here I could show you. One of the cubs, if you look at it, is all dirty brownish kind of because he's been down in the crevices of the front where the land is breaking off because of storm surges, because of climate change, because of the melting ice lenses, because of climate change.

He's down there groveling around looking for stuff to eat. And those polar bears are stuck there until the winter sea ice comes. I mean, they're there from the time the sea ice seasonally disappears if they're not on the ice. All right? If they're on the inside limit of the pressure ridges that form and they don't get out of there fast, just like that mom and her two kids, they're on land until winter comes again. And in most cases, they're going to have a really hard time surviving because they're not terrestrially adapted in terms of hunting. I mean, the things they eat are seals, basically. And that's why that statement by Lombard is so disingenuous because it has nothing to do with the population numbers.

It has the fact to do with we already know that these guys are on the downhill slide because pretty soon they aren't going to have what they need to survive. And that's it. What's your take on, what are your feelings about the Ambler Road? There's two things about the Ambler Road.

Yeah, tell people what it is too. there's, there's two, there's two things about the Ambler Road. Yeah. Tell people what it is too. Uh, the state of Alaska wants to build the road. They want to build the road so that they can open the Ambler area for exploration and possible mining. We have mining companies. Yeah. Huge amounts of precious metals.

Yeah. Well, the point is- I don't know if you ever looked at it. It's like absurd amounts of precious metals. The point is that the oil companies, after they discovered the biggest oil deposit in North America in Prudhoe Bay, they built their own damn road. All right.

The state didn't go into up to their ears in debt or beyond building a road to entice them. The oil companies knew that stuff was up there. They footed the bill. I don't know. They footed the bill for the road. Hell yeah. Yeah. Now, the government, the federal government, which most of that road goes through, at least north of the Yukon River, all right, they gave them, they were selling them material from the material sites, you know, from these glacial things I was talking about. They were selling that stuff to them for about 50 cents a yard. If anybody here has ever bought gravel, you know it sells for a hell of a lot more than 50 cents a yard.

And so the federal government was giving them a break on it. But, I mean, they were still getting something out of it. The state of Alaska wants to do that. The oil companies didn't need any enticement. They knew there was enough resource up there that they could build that... As I recall, they built that road predicated on the fact that oil at $20 a barrel would pay for it in X number of years.

Trevor Burrus Could have made that road in diamonds. Peter Van Doren No. would pay for it in X number of years. Could have made that road in diamonds. And, no, I mean, there's other economics involved, but, I mean, that was a general, you know. Yeah. Okay, so. Like it would have been worth it at 20, but they're still pulling oil,

and they were pulling oil when it was $100 a barrel. All right, they figured the lifetime of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline would be 20 years. It's into its 40th year now. All right? Now, granted, they do decent maintenance on it, but they figured it would be a goner after about 20 years, and it isn't. All right?

They're still good. ConocoPhillips is just in the process of developing their willow prospect up in the petroleum reserve. They're going to drill 200 wells off of five locations. Yeah, and they even got the approval of the Biden administration. Yeah, and it's all going to go down the pipeline. So the point is that the state of Alaska wants to build this road so that the mineral companies will go in there and develop that area. Well, if the prospects are so great, how come the mineral companies aren't going in there to do it themselves, just like the oil companies did on the pipeline?

That's the question all right but you have to have an attitude about it that goes beyond what makes economic sense as a person who spent their life in the arctic well what i'm saying is i'm not a lot of people aren't necessarily strong environmentalists, but they wonder why that same formula doesn't work for the mining companies that work for the oil company. It's why should my state go to the trouble of building this road and the expense of building this road?

It's like betting on the come, all right? And it probably would pay off. I would say that. But why should you give the guys a free ride? Use your damn money. That's what you got it for. If you think it's so great, build a road. We'll give you permits. Federal government will give you, probably. Park Service is still PO'd about it. But BLM would probably issue all of the necessary permits. But if you want that and there's so much money to be made, you shouldn't be afraid or reluctant to build the road yourself. I think that's what a lot of people think.

So you got that. You got that. You got that aspect of it, which wasn't an aspect of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Road. The other aspect is that a road, as I mentioned earlier, is about – that has the greatest potential to create harm to the environment than any other thing that would be associated with that prospect. Was that even on your radar when they were building the road up to Prudhoe Bay? Like, was that even a concern at that time? That the road would be...

Environmentally, like, damaging. I don't want to say it was a huge concern, but it was a concern that was addressed by both the state and the federal government. Peter Robinson, Jr.: But it's a huge concern for the Ambler Road now. Peter Robinson, Jr.: Yeah, well, because first of all, you've got to cross Park Service land. That's one thing. Gates of the Arctic.

And that's pretty much a big no-no nationwide. It's just like trying to drill for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. And so there's that aspect of it that people don't like as well. And I think that in the Native community, I don't want to go into that too far, but I'm sure there is a lot of, most of the local residential Native community that would be along that road is very probably not in favor of it. I don't know. I didn't go to any of the meetings because I'm an old ex-BLM guy and I've got all this experience and everything else. And I didn't want to go to any of those meetings and stand up and make some kind of a statement because I felt like it would be somewhat unfair and biased of me to do something like that

because i don't think any there was anybody there that could argue me off my stance whatever it was because i got too much experience you ready to change topics again i want to change topics again okay can we back up real quick when you introduced the polar bear idea you said that you have a bias what was the bias i was putting my stance in a biased form expressing the as though you were the author who wrote that it but i've heard that i've heard that viewpoint expressed by many people who don't want to be bothered by the inconveniences of climate issues and others. And I was, I was laying out an expression of how it's, how that is spun. Got it. Uh, when I met you long, long ago, last time I saw you 20, before I even came close to having kids. You were all excited.

You were all worked up about some beads you had found. Oh, well, we didn't, yes and no, all right? We didn't find the original beads, okay? Okay. All right. This is a site called Punyuk Point. It's at Ativlik Lake. Probably, since we can use Ivor Tuck as a reference, we have been.

If you were at Ivatuck and you flew southwest in a helicopter, you could be at Ativlik Lake and Punyuk Point in 20 minutes. Okay. Okay. In the 1950s, there was an archaeologist by the name of Bill Irving who was getting his PhD at the University of Wisconsin. And his dad was a biologist and had been associated with the University of Alaska for a number of years and was doing some biologic surveys in that general area

with his Eskimo assistant, Simon Paniak. And around Ativlik Lake, they found, in the process of their biological investigations. They found, I think, something like 13 or 14 archaeological sites. One of them was huge. It covered about, from let's say the east end to the west end, 300 meters. 300 yards. 50 semi-subterranean pit house,

semi-subterranean house remains. And, I mean, it was obviously an area that had been used a lot. So he decided, after his dad told him about it, he decided that he wanted to excavate that site for his PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. So he went up there in 1957 with an Eskimo crew, and they did a bunch of work, and they found a bunch of stuff. And then I think he went back the next year, found a little more.

And I'm not going, I'm not, if I start going down this rabbit trail of how come and why, we'll be here forever. So all I'm going to say is 57 was essentially the last year he did anything. All right. He went back in 61 or 60. Yeah, 61. And did some more work. idea that he translated into

a hypothesis of a pan-Arctic culture called the Arctic small tool tradition. It stretched all the way from Alaska to Greenland.

And predated? No. No, it didn't predate Eskimos. Well, yeah, it predated Eskimos because the aspect, today we call that culture the Denbigh-Flint complex. The dates on that complex or that group of people existed between 4,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago. But the importance of it was that that cultural group originated in Alaska and in a time span of less than probably 250 years had spread all the way to Greenland. I mean, that was big news. Very successful.

And the Arctic small tool tradition, he formulated it, demonstrated that it existed, and it has withstood the test of time. I mean, Alaska all the way to Greenland. I mean, that's a long road. So, at any rate, Punyuk Point is in the petroleum reserve. One of the things that Irving found, now, when he was doing this, it was just, radiocarbon

dating was just starting to be accepted by archaeologists. It had been being used for maybe 10 years and not used too widely. For one reason, it required a tremendously large sample to do it, all right, back in the early days. A large sample of datable material. So at any rate, he got I think only one or two radiocarbon dates. But what I'm going to say here, one of the things that he found when he was excavating there were some blue glass beads. And he found those blue glass beads in occupations that were much more recent than the Arctic small tool tradition. But this site had been used for 4,000 or or five thousand years by different people. He thought that those beads were historic.

So he thought that it was a historic occupation, that those Eskimos probably got those beads from the whalers. You know, the whalers, they were trade beads. And they showed up. Camped on this old-ass site and left the stuff laying there. Yeah, but they showed up all in eastern North America during the 1500s and 1600s in sites occupied by

native peoples. And so I mean, he just said, okay, there must have been a historic occupation here, period of historic occupation, or those bees wouldn't be here. He also found some cold-hammered native copper.

And there's a lot of raw native copper in Alaska. And, you know, the native people have used it for years. You know, you find nuggets in streams and stuff. I mean, you just pound it into whatever you want, all right? I mean, that's nothing new. So, at any rate, Irving just said, yeah, in his dissertation, yeah, there's some glass beads there, so there must be a historic occupation. Well, at any rate, that site is in the Petroleum Reserve, and because I was a Petroleum Reserve archaeologist, there was money available to go back of the winter, the prevailing winds blow these huge chunks of ice right up into that site.

I mean, it just bulldozes that thing. It hits the bank right at the edge of the lake, and it just peels the tundra back. You know, you're talking about chunks of ice that weigh 500, 600 pounds. Prevailing wind just blowing them right off into the... And as a result, the site's being severely impacted, you know, but by natural forces. So I said, okay, give me some money. I'll go up there and, you know, with Irving's dissertation in hand and see how much damage is actually occurring there and, you know, what the loss is and how concerned we have to be

about this very, very famous and important archaeological site, you know, the instigation of the Arctic small tool tradition. See if we need to consider doing something about this, if there is something, or first of all, seeing if there is something we can do about it. 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.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So we go up there, and I was, you know, another archaeologist in our office. I asked him to come on up and help me with it, Robin Mills. And so we're running this thing. I got an excavation crew. I got some of my old buddies there.

Dale Slaughter was there again. And Rick Renier was there again. And so at any rate, because Irving had found the copper, all right, I said, the first thing let's do, let's do a metal detector survey of this area. You know, I mean this big site area. And see what we can find, all right? Because what we want to do is as much unin-invasive exploration as possible. We didn't want to go around digging holes everywhere.

Mm-hmm. So when we got this one hit on the metal detector, we dig this thing and, you know, just a hole this big, all right? And down underneath the vegetation, in other words, underneath the sod level into the soil about five centimeters deep, all right, which is deeper than any historic stuff would be, we find this little tumble of two iron pendants, two copper rings, and three blue glass beads in this little pile. And one of the copper bangles, circular thing,

there's no way the natives could weld anything. So what they did when they made bangles out of raw copper, cold hammered it, they'd bang on it and they'd make this crescent and keep banging it and banging it and banging

it until it was circular. Then they bang it some more so those two ends overlapped. Yeah, just to weld it. Not to weld it, but join it. And then they wrapped it with willow twine. Keep it shut. Then you could string it on something like a necklace or a bracelet, right?

One of those bangles had, first of all, we interpreted this thing as an object of personal adornment. Three beads, two bangles, you know, two of the iron things, pendants. And obviously it was personal adornment. But we could date this thing because it had this organic twine wrapped around it. We could see 14 dated. And when we dated it, it said it dated to about 60 years earlier than Columbus's original landing at Hispaniola.

So it's how do we get glass beads made in Europe? Made in Venice? Well, now, we said Venice. All right. Made in Venice? Well, now, we said Venice. All right. But by this certain method that wasn't even really maybe not supposed to exist at that time, in an archaeological site in Alaska, in the lower 48, none of this type of beads, there's a whole hierarchy, you know, thing of beads with all these numbers associated with them. These are 2A40 beads, and there are none of those beads found west of the Rocky Mountains. All of them are found in the east

and they date 1500s and 1600s. Okay? No more recently than that. All post-Columbus. No, I mean, Columbus is 1492. The stuff in the east is the people from Europe colonizing the United States. Yeah. Okay. But

none of it is in the West where colonization took place later. All right. So it's like, the first thing is, how come these beads are in Alaska? Well, and then it's like, how come

there's no historic occupation at Punyuk Point, but we've got these beads that everywhere they exist in the new world, they're in a historic context. You know, I mean, how do we resolve this? So neither Robin nor I were bead people, you know, I mean, I dug a few sites, you know, historic sites where their beads occurred and everything, but I mean, we never researched beads at all, I mean, we just didn't, all right, so we had to, we had to learn, so we found a couple of real bead researchers, and we said, hey, we've got these beads. What can you tell? I mean, we hired them to look at these beads and write us a report,

which they did. And the report said that these are 2A40 glass beads. They're made by a process called Aspieo that was developed in Europe. And they're amongst the earliest beads made by that process. And we think they came, there are a lot of little teeny tiny bubbles in the glass. And we think they, we're pretty sure they were made in like the Netherlands and France and maybe a few other European places. And they were made specifically as trade beads to trade with native populations in Africa and the New World and so on and so forth. But they were always made during a historic period. Well, historic period in the old world goes way further.

But what I'm saying is they were made in a period that was not historic over here. These cultures were still prehistoric in Alaska, all right? And so it's, how did they get there? So Robin and I knew that, first of all, this methodology was developed in Venice, all right? And that Venice was the primary trader of the Eastern Mediterranean.

All right? They traded with a lot of the cultures in the Near East. All right? The Turks and Arabs and stuff like this that are on that far eastern coast of the Mediterranean. And there was no Italy then. There were just these city-states,

and Venice was one of the most powerful city-states in that area. They had a big navy. Well, at any rate, so we figured, okay, if the Venetians developed this method of making beads, I'm not going to go into it, but it's very distinctive. If you see that, you know, all right, at least originally that had to come from Venetians. And we said, so if they're trading, they have these caravans going on the Silk Road, okay? And that's a very generic term.

There are a whole bunch of roads, and you just call all those roads together going to the east, the Silk Road, all right? Well, a lot of those are going through aboriginal territory in the old world. And these traders aren't going to miss a beat. So they're taking a bunch of these trade beads with them, and it's getting into the native community and gets into the, you know, drizzles down into the Russian Far East, and these guys into the Eskimo habitations there, and these guys are trading with Alaska Eskimos

in the Bering Strait. And so back and forth. And that's how we figured those beads got to Alaska. In the meantime— Came in the back door. Well, you could call it the back door, but it's not really— It was the front door. It's really—yeah, it's really not—

because the aboriginal cultures have been trading each other back and forth across the Bering Strait for thousands of years. All right. Isn't that wild, man? So, but, so this, and they're still doing it at this time. And you get these beads into their, you know, they're getting them from the, from the traders just like they're supposed to, and then they're bringing some of them across the Bering Strait to the Alaskan Eskimo trade fairs on our side of the Bering Strait. That's how they got there, all right? But we still had to demonstrate the age of these things, because in our article, if you

look at it, we say a pre-Columbian presence of Venetian glass trade beads in Arctic Alaska. So how do we demonstrate this? One of the things we did was we had the beads analyzed through a process called neutron activation, instrumental neutron activation. And what that does is it gives you a fingerprint of the elements that are present in the glass.

And our beads up in Alaska matched the same elemental pattern as the beads in Northeastern America did, the same kind of bead, okay? So, the genesis of these beads is the same. That doesn't mean that they were made in Venice, but it means that they had to be made in the same place these other beads were made. Okay? So, you know, we start getting interested now. These beads

that we've got in Arctic Alaska are 100% 2A40 glass beads. That's their, you know, name in the archaeological register. And they have a date on them that's pre-Columbian.

So, but we've only got one date, right? And you can always have, one date is nice, but if you really want to have your theory hold water, you better have a couple other corroborating. So anyway, one of the things we also wanted to do at Punyuk Point was excavate one of these semi-subterranean house remains that Irving had never touched, okay? And to see exactly what was going on in it, all right? Because all our evidence said there's no historic occupation. There's no period of historic occupation here. Irving, who didn't really do much dating,

all right, and was working in more of mixed context, just assumed because there were glass beads that there was a historic occupation of the site. So anyway, we were excavating House 11. Well, we called House 11. We excavated down onto the floor near the hearth, and guess what we found?

We found a half of a glass bead. All right. The house had only had one episode of use because there was only one floor layer

in the house. Because you live in one of those things during the winter and it's a wintertime occupation, all right? Everything gets from the house,

from the hearth in the house, gets tromped down into the floor and, I mean, gets tromped down into the floor. I mean, you can see that the floor layer may only be this thick, but you can see that floor layer, because all the junk. What will happen subsequent to that is, the reason there's an occupation there is because there's a willow patch next to that lake that has sufficient wood in it for two

or three families to get through the winter on. But after that winter, there isn't enough there anymore. So you got to wait about 10 years before that willows renew themselves and somebody else will use it again. In the meantime, all this stuff drifts into this abandoned house. And so the next time somebody inhabits it, they create another floor layer. But if I go in there and excavate it, I hit this floor layer and I say, oh, here's the floor.

And oh, geez, I went right through it. And then I hit this layer of no occupation at all when it wasn't used. And then the next thing I know, I hit the next layer. So I know if I only get one layer, all right, that that's the only occupation of that house. And I know that the charcoal in that hearth directly relates to that floor. And whatever that date is, that's how old that occupation was. That bead is smushed down into the floor.

Yeah. That date was 1400 something. I can't remember. That's how old that damn bead is. Okay? Hmm. So this is why I'm getting back to the forensic. Yeah, yeah. All right? Wow. That is why I'm getting back to the forensic. Yeah, yeah.

All right? Wow. That's why we're responsible for forensic science, archaeologists. All right? Just wanted to let you know that. At any rate, so then we've got this, we've corroborated our date on the Bengal bead thing, right? I mean, it's not exactly the same, but they overlap, okay? A couple of years later, we're working at a place called Kinyak-Sugvik,

where there was a huge karigi. This is a men's house. Huge bowlers this big, you know know in a huge circle and there were there was it's another lake with caribou the caribou came by there are drive lines called the

nooksuk where the natives would you know fill they'd be build these stone lines every now and then set a stick up tie a couple feathers to it and a piece of skin so it would blow in the line and get all the caribou coming down,

run them down into the lake, come out in their kayaks and lance the caribou while they're in the lake. So there's semi-subterranean houses there. We were excavating one of those because it was a little bit later than some of the others, all right?

And we were water screening the stuff we were getting out of the houses because it was a little different than it was at Punyuk Point. It was kind of mushy and so forth. And so we were putting the stuff in the screen and then pouring water over it to rinse it out rather than shaking it.

Found another bead. But the trouble was that we couldn't tell if that was from the house or from the trash midden that was associated with the house. And that house had been occupied more than once.

But we took a date on an organic, some organic substance, I don't remember what it was, from the same date as the bead, and it came out where it barely overlapped in terms of age with what we found at Punyuk Point. It was a little bit off, all right, but it was close. But it's close in your terms. Before it was like 1,400 something, so decades? Or are you talking more than that? Maybe 40 years off.

Okay. All right. I should be able to say this, right? But I can't. So at any rate, and it still wasn't what you would call a good date because there was a possibility it came out of the trash pit. And we couldn't absolutely say that. Even if the date was right, we couldn't say it was absolutely associated with that object. a certain period of time amongst a number of sites in the area that were related by time.

And I can't remember exactly what it was, but when he did this, the excavation and I'm it was at a place called Lake Kayak he found two half beads one half in one house one half in the other house and if you put them together they made a single bead

oh no kidding yeah and the date on it overlapped somewhat with the date that we had at Punyuk Point. Yeah. And that was the only non-native artifact

found in either of those two houses. Every other artifact found in those two houses were native- made and dated earlier than the historic period. So now, we had like the three beads we found, we had a couple that Irving had found, although we didn't have them. So we found out what museum they were in and we got in touch with them and said, hey, could you, and Irving had found a couple bangles too.

Okay. And Irving, and so we got them, all right? And on one of those bangles that was with Irving's beads was willow wrapped up around the bangle. All right? Just like it had been, we found. So we dated it,

and it came back about 150 years too recent. But what happened when we unwrapped that stuff was that that bangle, they never hammered it out far enough so that it overlapped when they wrapped it up. So they put a piece of willow across that gap

to close the gap and then wrapped it up. And we dated that piece of willow and it matched our date. So now we've got... A couple little beads are blowing up people's idea of history. So anyway, that's the whole background behind that thing. All right. So then we said, okay, all right. We said, we've got good enough radiocarbon

data here on these beads that say they could well be pre-Columbian. We also know that those glass beads, they were some of the earliest made by the Aspieo process, and there's a really good chance that they were made in Venice. All right. And we also know that, you know, you've heard of Occam's razor. A razor is a, it's like the simplest explanation of something is almost always the right one. Okay. That's my theory of automotive mechanics.

So, at any rate. What's it called? I'm out of gas. What's it called? Automatic. Razor. So, what I'm saying is the simplest way that those beads could have gotten there was overland from the old world.

And so that was the general hypothesis, well supported hypothesis of our article. And it got published. A lot of people disagreed with it. There have been other developments since then that show that we were probably more right than we were given credit for. But we don't have time. That could come another day. And people that want to argue, like the perspective is that, I mean, what's groundbreaking about it is that the world, that the new world was connected with the old world in some like unexpected way. And that materials could somehow flow from like prior to Columbus, materials were flowing from Italy into Arctic Alaska. Yeah.

And there was a chain of like, presumably discussion and exchange. Yep. That would have led to that at a time when people thought that that was hundreds of years away. Yeah. And they could have said, no, I got it from a dude. He was white. Yeah. Like, let's, uh, like scary.

Let's assume you're right. And those bees showed up, whatever, 1400. Um, I'm pretty sure we're really right but but what would have been like after that point what would have been the next point at which those people could have been exposed to someone who could have given those them beads that like if they hadn't come from that direction. To this, to this day, there are the only two A40 beads that exist in Alaska. Okay. So that was it. Yeah.

I mean, there aren't any others. So they wouldn't have run into any. There are later beads. Yeah. That the Russians brought in, but none of this, none of these things. Okay. You know, next time he's on, he needs to tell you

about the old crazy Ruski shotgun he found. We need to have him on like five more times. I feel like we could just go. Because they got a crazy Ruski shotgun, and I think you guys found some crazy old traps too. Well, they're not old. Well, there were a cache of about 50 or 60 steel traps. Where are those now? I've got them.

I'll have to go catch a little fur right now. We didn't get to all the good wildlife stuff The moose stuff You just need to come for a week next time Yeah like your buddy Meltzer he had to come on twice Yeah As long as there's no more pandemics That prevent you from going anywhere for three years

Yeah No I would be willing to come back But I mean there's You know I kind of No, I would be willing to come back. But, I mean, there's, you know, I kind of bumbled my way through this because I didn't really, I could have made myself a little clearer on some of these things. No, there's no missing clarity. Yeah. Okay. But I'm just saying that I'd be happy to come back and talk some more about this stuff.

Because on the bead thing, there's stuff that we have done since then. I got to tell you. But yeah, you guys tied it into Marco Polo. The biggest thing of this was that when the University of Alaska put this out as a press release. I mean the press picked up on this. I stumbled into it. And it was – I was like, I already know about them beads. The best part of this whole thing that I got the biggest kick out of, and we did numerous interviews.

Yeah, La Parisienne in Paris did this 15-minute video interview, and they had an artist do all this stuff to make it all classy. I mean, it was amazing. But the best thing—I want to make two points here. was that I loved the most was that our beads, which were on the front cover of American Antiquity, the volume it was published in, appeared on the front page of the Venice newspaper. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. That's great.

And the other thing was, because it got so much publicity in the press, some guys that have been researching glass, some, you know, scientists, researching glass produced in Venice, they're Italian, for at least the last 30, 35 years, got in touch with us and said, would you be willing to do laser ablation, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry on those glass beads, which is a different thing than we had done, than instrumental neutron activation analysis.

Because we think that there's a good chance those beads were made in Venice. So we did. And we got a slightly different report using that other method. And one of the researchers, and so we gave all our information to the Italian researchers. And we're in the process of deciding how we're going to handle this. So this is a newsflash. Sandro says that given the results of that, you know, study, that the beads were probably made in Venice.

Yeah. So that's the next chapter you define the ancestor of the man that made them that's impossible but the point is and I'll make this last point Robin and I are breed specialists

we didn't know anything about beads anything else, what we did was we took the evidence we had and we went with what it told us. Even though we were swimming upstream on this thing with the beads and everything else, we just said, okay, this says this. So that's the simplest answer is probably it. This is this, this is this. And we arrived at this that looks like now with this new research, it's going to be sufficiently proven as true just because we followed the lines of evidence. In your field of research, do you know some folks who tend to get maybe distracted by what's not the simplest explanation? Like they want to look for things that

are some crazy i think what happens is if you don't if you can't come up with a pretty reasonable answer then you start casting about looking for something else and you can't find and so every time you do a new cast about you're're moving a little further away from the chances of it being reality. That's the path that leads to that they're Bigfoot beads. Exactly. UFOs dropped them. Hey, you know Bigfoot guy? The Bigfoot guy?

I don't know about the Bigfoot guy. Well, the Bigfoot guy at Washington State University? Oh, yeah. Grover Krantz? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I went to graduate school at Washington State University? Oh, yeah. Grover Krantz? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I went to graduate school at Washington State University and my first year there

was Grover Krantz's first year as a professor there. And we all thought he was crazier than that. You don't say. Oh, man, it was good to have you on. Get that book out. Just hold the book up. Oh, you can it was good to have you on. Get that book out. Just hold the book up. Oh, you can get that online.

You can? I was going to. Just all you got to do is say Mesa site. Mesa site. Paleo Indians above the Arctic Circle. Yeah. Michael Kunz. And it'll take you right to the BLM webpage, and you can download that whole thing.

But you can also just Google M-I-K-E-K-U-N-Z, and mostly like University of Alaska, right? Because you have published a ridiculous number of scientific journal articles on all things from ancient polar bear, brown bear hybridization to I don't even know. OG. OG of AA. Arctic archaeology. People can spend the rest of their lives reading Mike's words. Yeah, I'm glad you made it down. I'm glad you were able to provide some context to what your former colleagues had to say about proper nomenclature yeah thanks

man oh and everybody check out remember that email your chetaket questions too so you got etiquette questions which we call chetaket questions email them to you why don't we have our own like website for now email to the me'll get it. It's just easier this way. It's just easier this way for now. Email to themeateater at themeateater.com. No, it's meeteater at themeateater.com. Meeteater at themeateater.com, as it should be. Subject line, Chattakit. We're going to do a whole episode on Atticut Chattakit.

So we need your questions. Yep. And if today is like April 3rd or April 4th, then great. But if it's after April 4th, don't bother. It's too late. And I don't care what the hell date it is. Go and pre- order our

new kids activity book, Catch a Crayfish, Count the Stars. If you want to have kids that got tough kids that understand nature and have kind of a raw, bloody edge to them, catch crayfish, count stars, four said children, and raise them right. All right, everybody, thank you. Oh, ride on, ride on, little card. Ride on. I want to see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun.

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