The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 694: Did Clovis Hunters Kill All the Mammoths?

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Spencer Pelton and Todd Surovell from the University of Wyoming, Randall Williams, Spencer Neuharth, and Brody Henderson. Topics discussed: Testing a Clovis point on an elephant; the book Thunder Without Rain by the late Thomas McIntyre; breaking down all of the Slams; the prestigious caribou tag;  Clay's Bear Grease podcast with Metin Eren; thrusting spears; the Clovis overkill hypothesis; hunting mammoths; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, everybody. Today we're going to dive in once again on my favorite subject of all subjects on the planet, which is uh First Americans who got here first. What were they doing when they come? How'd they get here? Did they kill everything? Did they kill all the mammoths all this question and We have found I'm gonna explain this all in greater detail we have found some fresh perspectives coming out of, fresh to me at least, because I'll explain the whole controversy. This is a very, this is a controversial subject,

the first Americans. And we have had on in the past a number of times, David Meltzer to talk about the peopling of the Americas. And today we're going to hear from, is it fair to call you guys all colleagues? Cause you talk about the same stuff. Oh yeah. Yeah. Enemies, enemies and I'm trying to soup it up. We have professional, we have disagreements, but we work well together. Yeah. No, he respects you guys and he says he does do good work. So, uh, who I'm talking about here today in the, in the studio with this is Todd Suravelle, who is the director of the George C. Frisdon Institute

of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. If you're interested in the peopling of the Americas and Clovis Hunters and stuff, you might go in and check out the late George C. Frisdon, because he did a lot of, I guess you call it experimental archaeology, right? Like, he went to Africa and... Experiments, dug some of the most major sites. He's just kind of like, we call him the godfather of Wyoming archaeology. And he went to Africa to test out stone tools on elephants, correct? Yeah, he did. In Zimbabwe, they had an overpopulation problem of elephants and they were

calling them. So he took advantage of that opportunity to test Clovis weapons on actual African elephants alive, uh, a sensibly dead and dying. My understanding. Got it. Finished them off. Yeah. He just wanted to see how it would perform. Yeah. Was it a functional weapon for, for killing an elephant? Yeah. And what did he determine? Absolutely. He had no doubt. He's the only guy in recent time who's hit a, an elephant with a Clovis weaponry. Yeah. A lot of people have done it actually with, with deceased elephants, but George did it with living elephants. Yeah. Nowadays you guys are constrained by the, um, the ethics folks. That's a hard one to get across. Review boards. Here's what I'd like to do. I'm going to stab some elephants. And Spencer Pelton from the, he's the Wyoming state archeologist and an adjunct at the university

of Wyoming's archeology and anthropology department. That's correct. We should also clarify Todd was my major advisor. This is like, this is at the University of Wyoming's Archaeology and Anthropology Department. That's correct. We should also clarify Todd was my major advisor. This is kind of like your Matt and Melter relationship. Oh, a little bit of a, you know, he brainwashed me into thinking like he did. So.

Yeah. So now you have strength in numbers. Yeah. Man, I'm reading the book right now. We're trying, as a guy we had on the show, do you remember the gun writer? And he's a big safari dude. I'm trying to get him to come back on Thomas

McIntyre, but his name doesn't look quite like McIntyre. Thomas McIntyre, you know him? He's like a gun, like a gun writer. No. You don't know what I'm talking about? I remember listening to that. Yeah, like what's super interesting about him is, I mean a bunch of things, but he went, he got super into Africa and spent his whole life hunting in Africa. And a lot of the places he hunted in Africa has now been taken over by Islamic radicals, Islamic fundamentalists. So like, like he used to hunt, and there's a country no one's ever heard of in Africa called um see Eritrea no no west not on the coast

but it's like uh damn it democratic republic of conga cameroon this is humiliating no cote d'ovoire come on come on get out of my map. You can't do that. Yeah, you can't bring it up. It's like, it's like... Okay. Africa countries map. Fah. I know right where it is. This should go quick.

It's uh... No, it has got some coast. Burkina Faso. Yes! Yeah, see? No one's ever heard of it. got some coast. Bursee. Burkina Faso. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. See, no one's ever heard of it. You can't hunt there anymore. Hmm. Um, and those same dudes that those green braes were mixing it up with like in Chad are in that area. Hmm. Um, anyhow, in his book, he has a long thing. The book is called rain without

thunder, or thunder without rain, thunder without rain. It's about it's like a history of the Cape Buffalo, but in there he's got a lot of stuff about human history, and he's in this big section right now about poisons. Like poisoning spear points? Well, you might think that till you read the book. It was very important to poison the shaft. Huh. Not the book. It was very important to poison the shaft. Hmm. Not the point.

Anyhow, the stuff they could take down with plant poisons, plant toxins, and quick. Hmm. Yeah, there's a, there's a classic anthropological video of the Kung San or the Jokwansi, the Bushmen in the Kalahari, you know, hunting giraffe with these tiny little arrows. They just got to get a couple of arrows in it and then track it till it dies. I thought their poison was insect based though. He gets into the three plant genuses. This is a big thick book. He gets into the like the debt, the big sort of the big three, the big three of plant poisons. Hmm. And any, any kind of juxtaposes those to the toxins that they use, the South American toxins, which more of like a paralyzing toxin.

And then these different plant toxins they use, but it just gave him like tremendous efficacy on huge shit, killing huge shit. And some of this stuff just tips right over. You're trying to interview him again. Yeah, I don't think it'll happen. He's dead. No. Yeah.

When? 2022. His book, he can't be dead in 2022. His book came out in 23. No more canvas safaris noted outdoor writer Thomas McIntyre dies at 70. That is November 7 2022 We're gonna need to do How does book come out 23? I don't know we talked about

Postmas yeah, Chris Hart Farley's last movie came out six months after he was dead Hmm no shit really yeah, I don't think it said I'm common what he fledgers Joker came out how long Phil I know I'm just talking about the did he died I feel like we should in the studio We should have a picture of people who passed on Okay, the round show there I Don't know hmm you shouldn't me. Well. I'll be there someday Spencer. It's good little bit of research right there Yeah, damn. What I was doing my research in graduate school,

I came across articles from like the 60s and 70s where they were saying the next big thing in archery hunting was gonna be poison. Well, they use it in Mississippi, you know. Yeah, but there were like a spade of law, after this became like a thing, were like a spade of law after this became like a, a thing there was spade of laws passed to prevent you from using. Yeah. A lot of stories explicitly say, yeah,

blood clotting, what poison didn't they? Who does? I think that's what they do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can still use that poison. It's real. It's common there. Like I got a buddy, I got a buddy. You look at him. You just think he's a normal guy walking down the street. He's poison arrows at deer. What the late Thomas McIntyre gets into. That's really heartbreaking. I like that guy. What he gets into is that there's this other book, see I'm gonna be going to Africa this summer so I'm kind of gonna move in. I've been reading a lot about the World War II Pacific theater but I'm gonna

start moving into Africa stuff. There's a book called White Hunter Black Poacher that I want to read next and it kind of gets into this with like as whites were coming in and safari culture was taken off, there was this effort to sort of like demonize indigenous hunting methods. And so, cause they were pushing this, like the only humane way is shooting these large bore rifles

and poisons are that all these methods they use are inhumane and this is more humane and like, and then this effort too to declare these big game ranges. And if you're like a white dude hunting the game ranges, you're like on safari. If you're a black dude hunting the game ranges, you're not doing conservation, you're a poacher, you're this, you're that,

and this sort of ethical battle over who has access to the resources, which I'm just now digging into. But I wanted to have Monnet talk about Kate Buffalo. I'm looking at his Goodreads page, his last published work, according to them, was 2012. And they're pretty thorough. That's a bald-faced lie, buddy. Because did you type in-

Second editions. Did you type in thunder without rain? No, but I- You're lying, bald-facedly. Well, Spencer's not lying. That's what I meant. Well, no, because I feel like if you read lies and put them out, you're a liar too. You're a liar too. All right, moving on. We're going to get, we're going to die. We got to have plenty of time to talk about Clovis, Clovis hunters, but real quick, someone wrote in mad because I have, there's a few problems I always have

that like, it would take like electroshock treatment to have you quit having the problems. One problem is the whole Roosevelt Roosevelt thing, which like Franklin Ruse, Theodore Rose, did you know there's a split in the family? No, I didn't. That screws me up. And the other thing is what else screws me up

is one of the proper name for my highest honor. Not referring to my honorary PhD, but referring to me being a National Wild Turkey Federator, like to me being a royal slam holder, which I often refer to as a super slam holder. Guy wrote in very mad that I routinely get wrong what it is and insult the good folks

at National Wild Turkey Federation. It's a royal slam. And you're saying what a super slam? I always say super slam, which is like less than what I have. No, it's not. This guy's wild. It's harvesting one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska. No, no, no, no, no. Dude, it's right here. The Royal Slam, according to this joker. Phil, get on Goodreads. What's his name? According to Brett. Brett says, just, it seems like that this is the kind of thing you don't

need to argue about since the internet came out, but like, it's like... I can read you what NWTF defines each plant. Please, let's go with them. NWTF. Grand Slam is all four US subspecies. Royal Slam is the Grand Slam plus the Goulds. Got it. World Slam is Royal Slam plus the Oscillated Wild Turkey. That's where I'm not hip.

And then what Brody was talking about, the US super slam harvest one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska. So Brett is right? Brett's right. You say that you're a super slam holder or a? But I say it wrong. That's what I'm saying. I am a royal slam holder.

Which is all four US subspecies plus the ghoul. So does that change how it matches up against your honorary doctorate? You know the problem with having an honorary doctorate as opposed to a regular one? You're like, if you do your, I don't have a resume, but we're at a maker resume. You're not allowed to put it under education. Oh, where do you put it? Honors. Awards.

And that's a problem. It's a tell. It's a real tell. Yeah. Because then people look and they're like, yeah, I don't like that. But if I had an honors thing in my resume, it would be like Royal slam holder. And then, okay, we're not going to talk about these artifacts. It just came out of just not even going to talk about it. The artifact, the 6,000 year old hunting kit, which is in like pretty

nice shape coming out of a cave in Big Ben National Park in Texas, because on radio live, Spencer's going to be talking about the guy that did the work. In a few weeks, we're gonna interview the guy who found it. Can't talk about it. Now, okay, hold on, hold that thought for a minute. There's one last thing I wanna talk about. Cause this is gonna seg, forget I said that, cause I wanna segue that into these boys.

Yep. But you know what's really funny that I've been laughing about is a word choice thing. Um, Alaska fish and game department, you know, they're doing like, they're doing like a tag lottery and they, they refer to a tag. I can't get enough of this. They referred to a big game tag as prestigious as though holding it. Like if if you look up like look up the word prestigious just read it real quick what does prestigious mean? If you're like holding the tag you put it in the honors section of your resume. Inspiring respect and admiration having high status. Yes so you're like yeah you'd be

like um that would be like a like a thing you like you'd bring so you're like, yeah, you'd be like, um, that would be like a, like a thing you had, like you'd bring, if you're on a date. Yeah. It's good marketing. Someone is a little bit out of your league. I'm a prestigious tag. You might be curious to know that I own a, that I hold a Keen Eye Caribou Tag in Alaska, you know, and she'd be like, Prestige. I thought that was a great word choice. Prestigious. It's a prestigious caribou tag. Oh, so back to this Adelado kit. I want to hear what you guys think about this. This will be our, this will be how we get into it. You guys know Matt and Aaron, who's been on the show.

Okay. Recently, one of our, one of our esteemed colleagues, one of our esteemed colleagues, Clay Newcomb, did a Bear Gries podcast about some of the ins and outs of the Clovis first idea and, you know, the peopling of the Americas. He did a little thing on that. A lot of the guys we work with are all equally fascinated by this subject. And in there, equally fascinated by this subject. And in there, Clay is at, with Metin. And Clay is observing that, what I always tell him, which is during the Ice Age period we're talking about, whether you go back, let's just, for, just for convenient memory sake, we go back like, like 10,000 years ago, they weren't shooting bows. And he's like,

well, how do you know they weren't? And he's, he corrects, so he cracks Clayton like, Oh, tell me more. Like, how do you know that there were no bows? And he said, well, cause I told him that. So when this 6,000 year old hunting kit comes out of this cave in Texas and lo and behold, it's not a damn bow. I sent it to clay to say, no notice, no bow. It's an at a level and B and are you guys at a ladle or at ladle guys? At a ladle all the way. I say at Lettle. Oh wow. Get heated. Interview over. Next thing controversy. So am I, who's right? Is it just impossible to say what Pete, like if someone, when humans and what is now the United States of America interacted with mammoths, is it impossible to say that they were,

is it impossible to say they weren't shooting bows at them? I don't think it's impossible. I mean, those projectiles are just so big. I just don't think they would work very well on a bow. And I think that's the assumption, right? Also, like the oldest direct evidence for bows in the world is probably the Mesolithic in Europe. The Apipaelithic, 20,000 in Israel, probably.

Oh, really? They haven't that long ago. Well, it depends. I mean, the way we infer bows is usually based on the size of the stone point, because we very rarely find the bows themselves. I actually found one once in Denmark that was 6,000 years old. That's incredibly rare, right? What was that boat made out of?

I don't know. I was a kid at the time. I was maybe 22. It was my first archaeological field experience. It was about a 10-inch piece of a bow that had broken and it was recycled as part of a fish trap. What? Yeah, we were digging in this, they call it goodchets,

like this really muddy sediment. And they would make these fish traps that were like V-shaped fences that went to a woven fish trap. And the tide would come in, then it would go out and the fish would get funneled into that trap. So we were coming across all these little round pieces of wood standing vertically that

were the posts for that fence. And I came down on one that was D-shaped. And the old guy who had been doing archaeology over there forever took one look at it and he's like, that's a bow. He dug it out and sure enough, it was nice shaped end piece of a bow. Are you serious? Yeah, it was wild. But that's really rare.

Normally we're inferring the technology from the hard parts that are preserved, right? So finding bows themselves is really, really uncommon. We do have atlatls. We do have bows. But the basic argument that's usually made in distinguishing between bow and arrow and atlatl is the size of the point.

Once they get really small, we say, well, arrows are there. We have bow and arrow. Yeah. But that's testable, right? I mean, like I'm sure people could mess around and see, can you shoot a clovus point? I think people have done, done like experiments. David did that for his thesis. Yeah. David how one of our master's students has a

great, he's a great public science communicator in his own, right? But he did some ballistic experiments with like a crossbow and it was basically made own right, but he did some ballistic experiments with like a crossbow and just basically made points of, you know, from that big, like, you know, say a centimeter long up to the size of like a Clovis point and tested the accuracy of those things the further, like according to size. And I don't remember his conclusions. He concluded that you get to a certain size and the accuracy declines

dramatically with bow. Yeah. And if you look, so if you're looking like a stratified archeological site, like a rock shelter, that's just got layers and layers of stuff in it. You map out the widths of those projectiles through time. There's usually this dramatic decrease in width in Wyoming. For instance, it's like 1500 years ago or so. And that's generally assumed to be demarcating the transition to bow and arrow.

Where you've been using spear throwers, spear throwers, spear throwers, and all of a sudden you get a bow and your projectiles just decrease in size really rapidly. Got it. You know that dude I was talking about Clay Newcomb? Yeah. He killed, he put a, he put a fulsome point on an arrow

and killed a bear with it and the bear piled up in 20 yards. I think I was there. Was that on YouTube? Yeah. I think I saw that. I mean, he shot it. What'd he shoot?

He shot it from like three yards or something like that. He dug an underground pit and then had a bait pile. Cause he knew he wanted to like, he wanted to almost be shooting up into the bear So he was underground Because he wanted a good angle on it That's some next-level shit, man. Yeah, you know Folsom points are interesting because they're really really fine like a nice really well-made

Folsom points really light. I think it would work just fine as an arrow point. Let me hit, I want to do something real quick. I'm sure I do it quick. I want to lay out the current, I want to lay out the, what is the debate? Which debate? There's many debates, the big debate. Yeah, the big debate. I want to lay out the, or maybe you guys,

one of you guys want to do it? Lay out to me, but I want you to give the other side a fair shake. No, I want to do it. I don't want, I don't want to make you argue someone else's argument. Okay. Yeah. I don't mind making that argument. Oh, okay. Lay out the debate. Unless you want me to do it. Well, you did just get this honorary PhD. Maybe this is your oral exam. That's true. Well, I wasn't in this, but I'll just go with it. All right. For most of my life, the, for

most of my life, the dominant narrative about the first peoples to come into what is now the United States of America was that sometime, you know, 13,000 years ago, some big game hunters came over the Bering land bridge, not thinking they were probably not thinking they were going somewhere like the Bering land bridge. It was not a narrow, it's not like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was like a body of land the size of Texas. Generations probably lived and died on it

without knowing they were going anywhere. Came into Alaska, were prevented from going south because there was just massive ice sheets. This is like the ice age, big glacial ice sheets. Eventually this thing opened up. It's been described like an ice age, big glacial ice sheets. Eventually this thing opened up. It's been described like an ice free corridor opened up and it's been described as if you imagine the long coat that has a zip around the bottom and a zip around the top,

the glaciers melted, created this thing called the ice free corridor. And these hunters kind of spilled down onto the American Great Plains around the site of Edmonton, Alberta, and then raised hell on mammoths, killed, managed to wipe out mammoths and a bunch of other megafauna. And it was this like distinct culture. They had a distinct projectile point they made, and with stunning speed colonized the United States. Down in the Mexico, they were everywhere.

They were in Florida. South America too. Yeah, they were in Florida. They're in Washington state. Their points are up in Michigan. They were just everywhere. And then out of that group, eventually like came all these different cultures.

And then you start seeing these distinctive cultural markings. And the last, I don't know, a handful of years, it's become these new archeological sites have thrown this into question. Putting forward the idea that people were here much longer, that the people that were here earlier weren't Clovis and that Clovis kind of came, Clovis evolved here from other peoples that showed up here. The ice-free corridor thing isn't

true and these new people seem, these new people instead came earlier, they came in boats down the coast and then they somehow morphed into these mammoth hunting Clovis people. How's that? It's pretty good. Really? That's a good synopsis. Well yeah I mean there's a number of different issues there right like there's the the date of arrival to Alaska, there's the date of getting south of the ice sheets, there's the issue of how did they make a living, did they drive this extinction event, there's a number of separate issues there. Did they take the coastal route versus the inland route and You're right that we've sort of tied up Clovis with ice-free corridor pre Clovis with coastal

We don't necessarily have to tie these things together or like Clovis with Overkill or pre Clovis with not overkill right all these things we can sort of view independently kill or pre-clovis with not overkill, right? All these things we can sort of view independently. Hey, Spencer Neuhearth here to tell you about an exciting new project. I am thrilled to introduce me, Dieter Wirtl. It's a word game where you- Wait, wait, wait. You can't call it that.

Why? Well, because of copyright stuff. That name is probably property of the New York Times or something. Oh, well, what should we call it? I don't know. What is it exactly? Well, it's a lot like Wordle. Players get six tries to solve a five-letter word from categories like hunting, fishing,

animals, nature. Then, you get to compare your score to the scores from the MeatEater crew, and new games will drop every Monday morning on our website. I think the perfect name would kinda sound like Wordle. You know, have two syllables and end with L-E. Oh, and it has to be an outdoorsy word. Hmm. Introducing Mead Eater Turtle. It's like Wirtle, but better.

You can play it right now at TheMeadeater.com slash games. Let's start with this. When I say, like, tell people, like, what is Clovis? When we say Clovis, what are we talking about? The stone tool technology at the most basic level, but I think it's also come to be associated with a life way,

highly mobile, use of really high quality raw materials, seemingly a preference toward hunting large bodied animals. Widespread across North America, and, you know, just some extent in South America, if you're looking at like fluted, fells cave points. Fish tail points. Yeah. And, and another really clear attribute of

Clovis is wherever you find it, it dates within a very, very narrow time range, depending on who you ask. The Clovis period is 300 to 500 years. Hmm. And, and that was it. Yeah. range, depending on who you ask the Clovis period is 300 to 500 years. And, and that was it. Yeah. Yeah. That like the, the really consistent dates

across the country. Um, what Spencer mentioned that it's sort of a pan continental phenomenon. I think that's a really important part of the story because that's not really a thing after Clovis, you do get this regional differentiation and never again, do you see it right? So it suggests that there's really something special

about Clovis and right, the traditional explanation was, is that this was the technology made by the first people and they're spreading this technology across the continent and that's why it's everywhere. It's interesting because it's a really unique kind of spear point, it wasn't used as fluted points, right? Where they take these flakes from the base, were used for a very brief period of time and never again.

So it's like this really, really good cultural marker of this particular time period. And it is a pan continental phenomenon. So how does that happen if people are already here? Well, the argument, I suppose, is this is like a really popular stylistic idea of how to make a point that spreads among existing populations. Can you describe what you mean by a flute and a point? Like if someone's never, if they picture a stone point, they have one image in their

mind, maybe a couple images, but like what is a flute? What is a Clovis point look like if you're going to draw it? Yeah. So the, I would say when most people think of an arrowhead or spear point, right. They're thinking sort of the notched variety. We've got sort of a triangular, bifacially flaked piece of stone that had notches coming in from

the corners or the sides. That's a later invention that comes, uh, few thousand years after Clovis with Clovis. We're talking about what we call a lancelet point. That's a later invention that comes a few thousand years after Clovis with Clovis. We're talking about what we call a lancelet point. So it's long, it's narrow, it comes to a tapered end and the base is basely indented. It's concave. Can you hold that thought?

Brody, would you be a mega favor? Sure. Can you run into my office and grab my Clovis thrusting spear in the corner? And then I got on my desk, I got some Clovis and Folsom points. Yep. And then and then the flute, the word comes from like the flutes in a column right it's like it's a groove so the really special thing about Clovis points and similar points that follow like Folsom points and other regional varieties Spencer's got something. Dude that's badass. You met this dude when you were in Miami. This is a good visual aid. Tyson Arnold drew that, wanted me to hand it off to

you as a gift for your studio. That is so cool. Beautiful. Where do I hold this, Phil? That's right there. It's great. The line drawing of one of the points from a site called the East Wenatchee site in Washington. What's nuts is this is like the size. Yeah, that's actually the size. Yeah, that's like a giant. That's a really big one. Usually they're like a big Clovis point is usually half that long. That's that's exceptionally large. But when we're talking about for folks watching on YouTube, this is the the the flute flute.

So you take that's a real bitch. If you're a flint knap, it's really hard to do that. Like a high failure rate. Yeah It's almost like if you picture a blade If you were to be able to pinch it Sort of on the back end that's sort of the the shape right? Yeah Yeah, you know the When they were first found the archaeologists sort of made analogies to blood grooves on bayonets

And if I remember reading that yeah, that was like one of the original ideas as to why they were doing that. That three to 500 year period, can I, I want to take a stab at like a little bit just trying to describe what you're saying about, did that mean that everybody caught on? Or did that mean like everybody caught on or did that mean, like, does it make more sense that the reason everybody was, I can't say everybody, well let me ask

this question. During this three to five hundred year period, if you find a Clovis point and you date it, it's this three to five hundred year period, can, do you go anywhere else? Can you go anywhere in the U S and find other technologies that sit right inside that too? Like that there was different or is everything from that window Clovis? It's a really good question. Um, generally speaking, everything from that window is Clovis except for the site we just dug. Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of evidence that Great Basin has some different stuff going on. That's true. Some stem point components. By stem points, we mean they're not fluted. They're kind of, there's more of a stem. So the bottom, the base of the point kind of constricts more.

As a shoulder. Some of those components seem to overlap with Clovis a little bit from the Great Basin. Very different technology. And you look in some of those rock shelters there and the lowest most components there seem to overlap with Clovis slightly. Although Clovis still seems to have some slightly older dates and that stuff. Got it. And then we talked about this, Spencer, we talked about this where, what's kind of upset this idea that Clovis, the Clovis first idea was that they keep, they find these older sites.

And I don't know if you're gonna regret your word choice, but you said a problem with these really old archeological sites is they're not normal sites. Yeah. Like, like there's been tons of stuff in the media, you know, or was that time like the footprints in white sands. Okay. You got that. You got the dude out in Chesapeake Bay who's, who's finding, claiming to find really old stuff eroding out of banks in Chesapeake Bay. I know you're only, oh here's the points. See we want to have this picture show up Brody.

Oh, gotcha. This is like an actual size. Would you guys say that's a more normal? Yeah. That's a replica, I can't remember what one, that's a replica, that's a replica. No, no, no, this is a handmade one. And then here's one

hafted to a knife. These metten pieces, metten pieces. And here's one hafted to a dangle that spear right in front of this. So it's a Bill Phil's picture. Here's a quote. Here's a Clovis point hafted and it's like gripping it like imagine there's that that the wood is grabbing it like this and it's like gripping it. Like imagine there's that that the wood is grabbing it like this and it's bound. Got it. Hell of a flip napper man. Nominees grabbing like this.

Yeah. Split shaft. We call it. Yeah. Uh, tell me about these really old sites and, and, and, well, let's, I mean, if we're going to talk about them not being normal, let's talk about what is normal. Yeah.

Tell me what, yeah. What's a normal site. So, you know, a lot of Clovis sites, many of the early ones were large mammal kill sites. The first excavated Clovis site was actually the Dent site in Colorado. It's mammoth kill. A few years later, Clovis points, flakes, tools, bone rod is found with mammoth bones at Blackwater draw, the Clovis site that gives the Clovis complex its name. That pattern has been repeated over and over and over again at, depending on who you ask, 15 to 20 sites

where we have Clovis artifacts associated with mammoths, mastodons and gonfathirs. You know what gonfathirs are? No. Oh yeah. It's that, it kinda, they got those big armored plates on them? No. Oh that's not it? Cliftonont. Okay. No, I don't know. Gonfathir is related to a mastodon there in Central America and South America. Okay. So in northern Sonora, Mexico, last

twenty years or so, a Clovis gonf of the or kill site was found. So this pattern appears. Phil, can you put one of those on the screen? They have a shorter trunk. I am not an expert in, I think they oftentimes have two tusks to write it. I can't, there's some different, that's what I was for whatever reason. That's what I was picturing in my head. That the early ones definitely, uh, have strange cranial morphology things going on.

You want to spell that for me if you can? A G O M P H O T H E R E. So that's one aspect of Clovis. We also have Clovis bison kills, at least two of those, one in Oklahoma, one in Arizona. And then we have Clovis campsites. And these are basically, um, you have hearth features, fire pits, people working around them, and you have butchered remains of usually large mammals. The site we recently dug a lot of bison. Um,

and this is sort of typical hunter gatherer archeology, right? You have the things that hunter gathers do you have? Oh yeah. Yeah. They have the downward facing tusks and the upward ones. Oh yeah, man. I'd get after one of those, man. That'd be a sweet school. Look at that at that thing. What's that called again? Gonfathir. Oh it's right there. Yeah the genus. It's like a Star Wars looking thing. That's a good way to describe it. So that was like an elephant species down in South America. Yeah and in Central America they probably made it in the

southern US. Because this one clove is gonfathir killed, it's called El Fin del Mundo. It's, it's not far from the Arizona border, maybe a hundred miles south in, in Sonora. Hmm. Wow. This says they were on all continents except Australia and Antarctic tongue. Yeah. So, so Clovis archeology is pretty typical for hunter gatherer archeology. I mean, you have these domestic sites where people are camping, sitting around fires,

making and repairing tools, cooking, scraping hides. Then we have bone beds. And we also, of course, have the Anzac burial not far from here. Right. We have human remains. Is it true that no one's ever found a Clovis plant actually stuck into mammoth bone? That is true. Yeah.

Now, there was a case from Brazil somewhere where there was some kind of lithic stuck in, I want to say, gonfothier skull, but I saw that a long time ago. I need to check that. Do you know that there was a rumor, um, at the Clovis type site for a long time, people were just hauling that stuff away. And I went there once and did a lot of reading about it. And there was like a rumor that some bus driver that like they took kids out to see it and some bus driver allegedly took home a mammoth skull that had a point embedded in its eye

socket. But it's just like, it's just, it's just rumor. I've never heard that. You never heard that rumor. I've heard that rumor twice because I listened to you, your conversations, both times it came from you. I'm going to find where I'm going to find. Like, I couldn't have made that up. No. Bus driver. Like, did a bus driver took some kids to see it and hauled the thing home with him? I wouldn't have made that up.

It's too, like, much detail. I got to find where I read that. Wherever I read it, I think is on my bookshelf. If you find it, let me know. I want to see that. Yeah, I think when I made that comment to you about Clovis sites looking normal and everything before it not, this is what exactly what I'm meaning. Like you can dig a site that's 2000 years old, 5,000 years old, 6,000 years old.

It all has roughly the same characteristics as like a buried Clovis campsite. Because hunter gatherer campsites look a certain way. There's like concentrations of artifacts where people footnap and there's heart features that people congregated around to talk and eat and work hide and things like that. The pre-Clovis record to this point has nothing like that. It's all weird stuff. I think in a more general sense, the burden to prove for this stuff for over a hundred years now has simply been

find obvious human-made artifacts in a sealed geologic context. It's a good stratigraphic context. And I think in our view, you can point to any number of these sites that date before Clovis and you can say either the artifacts look a little weird or there was some weird with the geology. I gotta stop you. When you say weird, what do you mean?

Not obviously human made. There's a lot of natural processes that can produce things that look like artifacts and rocks falling off a cliff and striking something, getting entrained in a water course and breaking up that way. This is one of the brilliant projects that Medan actually initiated, looking at rocks in Antarctica, where we know there wasn't people,

and seeing the range of variation and how rock is just naturally modified by the environment, really great idea That's why he's doing that is because there's a lot of natural Processes that can break up rock to make them look like maybe they were broken by people when they actually weren't So these old old sites Well, what is okay at what date has it become in your mind? is okay. At what date has it become in your mind? When does it, when does it like tail off? Like you got really good sites up to what date and then, and then you got your weird sites.

13,000. And that's all the calibration stuff. Is that like, as we understand calendar years? And what we're talking about south of the ice sheets, north of the ice sheets, it's a different story, but south of the ice sheets, 13,000 and onward, beautiful, normal, typical hunter gatherer archaeology. To give you an example of the kind of thing Spencer was talking about, he and I, um, in Cerro Lan excavated a mammoth two, two, three years ago. That mammoth was 13,200 years old. We were really excited to, to excavate it because it's right on the cusp of Clovis. We thought, yeah, maybe this is a mammoth killed by people. Right above the mammoth, the mammoth was strangely near the top of the hill on this slope. On

the top of that hill, there was a bunch of chert or flint, like really good material for making stone tools. That mammoth was buried down on these old gravels, kind of like in a base of a little draw. And we kept finding little flakes. But all of this local raw material, and they're all tiny, like, you know, two millimeters. And this is this is like a perfect scenario for producing things that you could interpret as human-made artifacts that clearly aren't. So all of the local material, most of it has cortex, meaning it's just like a little chip taken off of a natural cobble.

But nothing like a typical lithic assemblage. And there are pre-Clovis sites like that where you have these things that look sort of like artifacts, but they're probably not, but they're interpreted to be artifacts. And there's also a lot of really strange things that show up in pre-Clovis sites that are argued to be evidence of humans that aren't the typical things like chipstone artifacts. And I made a list of those kinds of things,

if you're curious. Hit me with the list, yeah. All right, so, footprints, drag marks, fingerprints, copper lights, copper lights are fossilized crap. Crap. Seawheed, balls of seaweed, underwater meat caches. Spencer pointed that one out to me.

There's three cases of underwater. Dude, I'm big into those, man. You want me to tell you about those? Yeah, I do. I will note, there are no underwater. That's three cases of under water. Dude, I'm big into those, man. Do you want me to tell you about those? Yeah, I do. I will know. There are no underwater meat caches after Clovis to my knowledge. They're only a pre-Clovis thing. Oh, really? Yeah.

Man, I'm going to stop telling people about underwater meat caches. Cut marks. So like marks on bone, right? You guys know about those. Can we back up to the underwater meat cache? Yeah. What was the site that was interpreted to be this? There was a site somewhere where someone had piled up mammoth meat under a pond, filled the intestines full of gravel, and then use these gravel filled intestines to weight it down under that pond. That's bad ass. That site is in the Midwest. Is it, I think it's the burning tree mastodon. It's one that Dan Fisher

at the university of Michigan published. Okay. Yeah. I think that's the one I'm not sure. Not certain. And obviously the intestine rotted away. So it's just gravel. In a line. You're not buying it.

I mean, weird stuff, right? This is, this is, this is our point. I don't keep going now. Okay. But bone embedded in bone. What's that mean? Like you have a mastodon bone and there's like another piece of bone, like stuck into the rib that was healed around it, that they argued was a spear point and not to not to them duking it out That's what other people have said. Yeah Other bone modifications like the ways that bones have been fractured like you have no artifacts But bones are fractured in weird ways that seem like only humans could do it And the last one on the list is a pit full of grasshoppers

Okay, so this is, I just told you about probably 20 pre-Clovis claims, right? All this weird stuff. As opposed to like, what we like to see is like, let's just say some flakes from, from Nappingstone around a hearth feature in a really good stratigraphic context. It's well dated. There are millions of those on this continent. There is zero of those in pre-clovis. That's it. When you're talking about stratigraphic context, like we're talking about eroding banks, you're talking about digging out a hillside. Like what are, what are you, when you're thinking about where to look for a site, sort of what are the considerations in mind? What, what is like a normal site versus what makes things unusual?

I can speak to Wyoming, at least the best, the best places to find buried archeology in Wyoming, or like rock shelters and flood plains. In Wyoming and Montana, you walk around the landscape, which you guys do a lot, hunting, fishing, whatever. Most of the landscape that you're walking across has basically zero potential to preserve an archeological site.

If you're on the side of a hill, if you're on a really high surface that gets wind scoured, all those areas you can drop artifacts there. But if they aren't buried immediately with like datable material or whatever, you can't really preserve that archaeological site, right? You have no idea how old it is. But if you drop that stuff in a floodplain that receives annual flood events, it's going

to get buried slowly over time and get sealed within that stratigraphy and allows us to go back later and actually have with some degree of certainty an idea of how old that stuff is and that it's not say mixed with something that's like 10,000 years younger or 10,000 years older. It was just laid down in a really specific location, conducive to preservation. It's actually kind of rare, right? Like, if you think about just the range of human behaviors that you do every day,

even if you're out hunting or whatever, most of the stuff you do is not gonna be preserved in the archaeological record. It has to be this confluence of behavior and geologic contexts coming together to really preserve that activity. When Clovis was happening in the Americas, what did the technology look like on the rest of the

planet? Like during that three to five hundred year window. Well that's a lot of planet. What about where they just came from? The last place they were before the Americas. Yeah that slana River site where they had that bad ass, uh, wooly rhinoceros. Yana RHS way up and yeah. Tell them about that. That that's those guys are bad. That's like 20,000. That's 20,000 years before Clovis in the high Arctic and as an alarm period in the middle of the last glaciation where they've got,

I think spear shafts made out of rhinoceros horn, bow needles, beads, amazing things. But what about during that same era as Clovis? So if we go north to Alaska, just prior to Clovis, there's plenty of good archeology starting at about 14,000. It looks similar to Clovis. I mean, people are making bifacial projectile points. The one big difference is they're making a lot of microblades,

these really tiny, really long, skinny, sharp flakes that then they'll halve in a long piece of bone to make a really deadly spear point. You have end scrapers, pretty typical hunter-gatherer stuff. Really, maybe the biggest difference at that time is if you were to go, say to Israel, Middle East, you're right on the cusp of the origins of agriculture around Clovis times. And within a thousand years, people are growing crops, I think.

What, what is your take on, um, the overkill hypothesis. I think there's a lot of really strong evidence for it. I love it. Um, and I, you know, I love it. There's none I like more than the overkill hypothesis. You're talking about the blitzkrieg, right? Yeah. The idea, well, the idea that there's a, there's again, there's an ongoing debate about what role did

humans have in wiping out everything that was bigger than a modern American buffalo like when it was over like not that during this period of time like let's say from 20,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, I think nine genuses, so nine genera of animals went extinct. 35 genera. 35 genera in North America and 40 some genera in South America. So let me, let me, but can I hate you? Can I, I want to add the little wrinkle before you start.

Yeah. Folks will say we have 13, 14, 15 mammoth kill sites. We have zero giant ground sloth kill sites. We have zero. Um, what was that? Big ass, a hundred pound beaver cast? Yeah. Where are all the kill sites of those? Like where are all the short face bear kill sites? If they were killing all this, where is it all? Yeah, that's the right question. You know, I,

I was telling Spencer this, this morning that I started out incredibly skeptical of overkill for exactly that reason, right? Like as archaeologists, we work in a material world and we look at material evidence and when there's no material evidence, it's like, how do you believe something actually happened if there's no evidence for it? So yeah, it's a sticky problem. When we talk about mammoths is actually a huge number of mammoth kill sites. When you say only 14, it's actually a huge number, given the amount of time and space we're talking about. Like you feel that that is a lot. It's a gigantic number. We did a study comparing the density of mammoth kill sites in Clovis times to all other elephant kill sites from the rest of the world.

Elephants are interesting, right? Because as you mentioned, they used to occupy every part of the world except places they couldn't swim to, right? So you have them in Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America. It's really their absence. That's the unusual thing. Yeah. Even like Wrangel Island, the Greek islands,

dwarf mammoths in the Mediterranean islands, channel islands. Yeah. And, and if you look at it in terms of the density of mammoth kills in time, especially in a 400 year time period, I mean, it's a huge number of sites. It's really surprising to me that we're questioning whether Clovis people were hunting mammoths and whether they affected their populations

given the absolute incredible abundance of evidence that we have for it. Yeah, 14 is not a very big number, but given the total number of Clovis sites that actually speak to what Clovis people were doing, what they were hunting, it's a huge number. Is there any guesses, like during that Clovis period, is there any guesses how many of them were like say in North America in that time? How many Clovis people? Yeah. Sure, we can we can sort of estimate that by looking at modern hunter-gatherer population densities. It's a really complicated problem because you know first if they're first they start at basically a population

of zero and then they grow to some presumably some carrying capacity or some environmental limit. Right. And the number of people is going to vary across the continent. But when I tried to estimate it once, I got numbers in the neighborhood of 30,000 to a hundred thousand people. What about mammoth populations? We can estimate that too. I'm not going to make up numbers, but I don't know. I don't know off the top of my head, but it's a lot. It's a lot. Is it fair? When you talk about that 14 is a lot of sites, as you're saying that I'm kind of thinking in my head of, um, you know, I've done a lot of hunting throughout my life. I'm trying to think about ever made, if I ever made a archeological site. Well, you absolutely have. I'm saying like that. I made a discernible site. Well, you absolutely have.

No, I'm saying like that I made a discernible that was preserved. Like we're like, Oh, a guy killed a deer and then left his like, like bullet fragments, a knife blade, and it's all sealed up in some river bottom somewhere. I think it'd be, I think it's probably pretty rare. I mean, you probably pretty rare. I mean, you probably haven't made it all. That's what I'm thinking. Most of the animals you've butchered out, right?

You've left some stuff there, the coyotes have dispersed it. So what was an archeological site in the moment now becomes just kind of a scatter of chewed up deer bone or whatever. It's no longer really discernible as an archeological site. Yeah, I mean, just like the preservation of archaeological sites period is kind of a miraculous thing. And to have, that's what I thought saying, 14 mammoth kills, given all the ravages of

time and the unlikelihood for these things to be preserved and the very small number of sites from that time period in general, it's a lot. Like a substantial percentage of the Clovis sites that have ever been excavated are mammoth kills. It's the most common animal in Clovis faunal assemblage is mammoth, which is shocking, right? Because if you just go out there hunting and you sort of, if you take the attitude, I'm going to kill whatever I come across, you're not going to encounter mammoths a lot, right?

You're going to have funnel assemblages dominated by rabbits, squirrels. It's going to be way more deer kills than mammoth kills. The bigger the animal is, the less common they are in the landscape, right? So when you see this, this real focus on these large animals, it tells you they're going after those things and they're ignoring opportunities to go after these smaller animals. Not to say they didn't occasionally take them, but they're really specializing in the predation of these large animals. Why? Because you get the most bang

for your buck. I mean, you bring down a mammoth, let's say it takes you two days, you get enough food to feed 30 people for a month. It's sort of like, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask, is there any evidence like average size of like a Clovis group? Like how many people would be, huh? This guy just tried to answer that question. How many we've been working on this L'Prel Clovis site in Wyoming for how we worked on it for a decade, opened up the site in 2014. A few years ago, we decided we'd try to actually chase out how big this site is. The site's buried 10 to 15 feet deep, so it's not like you can just walk over and chase out the artifacts and say, like, OK, the site's right here.

So we ended up sinking all these really deep augers in this systematic grid over the site, screening all the dirt out of it and finding these little tiny artifacts. We ended up finding a site that was a couple of acres big. If you compare that to the size of ethnographically documented campsites where we have known numbers of people, it's somewhere between

30 and 50 people. Um, so in that site in particular too, it looks like there's these kind of these clusters of houses's these clusters of houses around this mammoth kill. You've got at least three of these pretty big clusters, each of which might contain two to four houses. So it all adds up to about that number. We might not have found the edge of the site, I think we did our best, but it seemed like, uh, it seemed like we about chased the edge of it out So if you compare just the amount of space that hunter gatherers use in the campsite To the space of that site if we land on this number of about 35 people or so

Hmm, and that they could feed him for a month Yeah, but it but that mammoth. I don't think they ate much of it. That's that's my interpretation Was that this mammoth, it was largely an anatomical order when it was excavated, meaning the bones are still sort of laid out in anatomical order. So it wasn't heavily butchered. Um, if they, if they did butcher it, they did not

move any bones. So it's possible like in all these. It's called gutless method. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, they certainly could have, they certainly could have filleted a lot of meat off of this mammoth, but in all these house areas that we dug, we dug four of them. The only mammoth we got was ivory and they were working the ivory, but we have no, no rib fragments, no foot bones.

Um, and we also have a lot of evidence for use of other big animals, mostly bison, around these, in these houses. So they're sitting next to this big dead elephant. It's a subadult, it's probably in its 20s, it's probably, I don't know, five ton animal. It seems barely butchered, they're not really moving the bones around

except for the ivory. And they're eating bison. So what do you make of that? I guess you don't, who knows? There's a lot of animals and I mean like when you all butcher animals right like you can kind of stop whenever. You can always get a little bit more marrow out of the animal or do or you can like maybe you want to take the liver or whatever. A lot of times you don't do that, right? Cause you don't need to same thing here. If you have animals at your disposal and you don't need to go to all that crazy effort to get every last calorie out of that animal, then

you're just going to take what you want and move on. Do the gourmet butchery. Yeah. You know, you hear people talk about, and when I say people, I mean, like people in the discipline that you're in, like right now I'm holding in my hand, if you're watching, I'm holding my hand a Clovis point that's hafted onto a knife blade. So I'm doing some devil's advocacy here. So what we know, if you look at the archaeological record, this is hafted onto a wooden handle with sinews. Okay, the sinews rot away, the wood rots away, and all you have is the stone left and some bone. Earlier I mentioned that they've

never found one of these points embedded into mammoth bone, and I don't even know how possible that is. I'm sure you could study it, whether it's like if you took a mammoth femur and jabbed it with this, do you ever get it to actually stick and dry in there or not? I don't know. So you have bones and you have stone. We assume, cause the stone's there, we're like, oh, they stabbed it.

They stabbed it and these are stuck in there because that's how they killed it, right? Someone else who's pushing a narrative that they weren't mammoth hunters says, well, they found it laying dead. And then they not the stone, the point didn't get there on the end of a spear shaft. It was there because it was on their little knife, which they cut this dead one up with. As a like, as an outdoorsman, what I I always laugh about that explanation. And you guys can back me up on this.

When you're out wandering around in the mountains or out wandering around the woods, you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff. I can almost go out and say, like it doesn't happen. On a two lane highway. Yes. Yeah. But I'm saying out, right out. Yeah. Encountering all this fresh dead stuff.

If you wanted me to produce a dead thing, it'd be much more like I would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wandering around until I found it. Do you know what I'm saying? So I've always laughed at that, but that's like an idea is that, is that they were just finding them laying around everywhere. And if you did find one, would you go, shoot? That's good. I don't think so. So yeah, I mean, I've had this argument with colleagues, right? They're like this, this

site we're digging, L'Prel, there's this dead mammoth there. There's not a Clovis point in it. There's a Clovis point about 40 feet away from it. And people say, yeah. Who found that? You know, somebody we paid to dig. Seriously? Yeah. In an excavation unit, yeah.

40 feet away. It's a big site. There's this camp, there's this dead mammoth in this really cool camp around it, right? And the Clovis point is in the camp area. But people will say to me- But not in with it. Not in the mammoth. Got it.

People will say to me, how do you know that mammoth wasn't scavenged? And the argument I make is exactly what you just made, which is there are a hell of a lot more opportunities to exploit alive mammoths than dead ones. Also, you know, this sort of this divide in the discipline about whether we see Clovis hunters as sort of living in this land of abundance, as Spencer sort of just described, why eat this really lean mammoth if I can access bison anytime I want? Sort of the idea I'm the first person in this land and these animals are naive to me and like it's easy living. Versus these are the first people in the land, these animals are naive to me. And like, it's easy living versus these are the first people

in the land. They're kind of lost. They're scared of these big animals. They don't know the animal behavior. It's dangerous to hunt them. So they're being really cautious, right? Mammoths are too dangerous to hunt. But that, yeah, but they've been dealing with them for, they've been dealing with them for generations

and thousands of miles. I'm on your side, man. I mean, I think these people, They were like, but think about it, and they're, You're right. They have like a hundred year generation. Because they were there, there's Mammoths in Siberia. Absolutely. They'd know no, like they would know no reality. They would know no reality in which even their most distant ancestor wasn't dealing with them. I would say even if they came into the Americas and had never seen a mammoth, they would really quickly learn how to expertly prey on that animal. And they would enjoy the

hell out of it. In part because of the danger, in part because you bring down all this meat, you can make your life for all your friends better. You can use that for social capital. You get a lot of prestige bringing down the animal like that, right? So yeah, I very much think this was a good time to be a human when you're the first person in a place. You guys understand that as hunters, right? You wanna hunt where nobody else hunts.

Yeah. So the big animals are. So we have the best opportunities. So we have the most animals. Right. We see this, this is all I've explained at various times of people's like, you can find isolated instances of what it might've been like for them. Because when you look at one whalers or like as soon as transoceanic shipping and whalers started hitting these islands that no one had ever been on.

Like no one found the Seychelles until trans-oceanic shipping. Like no one found it. There's one mammal, a fruit bat. Only one, it's so far out there, like no mammal had found it except for a flying mammal. When dudes get on these islands, they're just picking shit up. They're walking around just grabbing birds by the neck.

Birds are trying to land on them. They're like literally carrying, just like picking up and carrying turtles and stacking them in their boats upside down. Yeah. This the survival of giant tortoises on the Seychelles, the survival of giant tortoises in the Galapagos, both thing and both, both, the same thing in both cases, right? No humans know this story period. Yeah. And otherwise those things are goneers. just filled our boat with live ones. So we, about the knife question, you know, we, I did a study with Dave

Kilby and Bruce Huckle and others looking at this question of Clovis's knives and the idea of whether Clovis points could actually kill a mammoth or not. And, and one thing we looked at was, um, where you find complete points versus broken points, complete points, people generally don't discard functional tools, right? And we know from like later bison kills that you really commonly find complete points and

bison kills because you kill this big mass animals, you lose the points, you lose them in the mess and you don't get them back. It's like a really common place to find complete points. In camps you find the broken points. When they do retrieve the weapons, they're broken and they retooled. You find the broken ones in camps and the complete ones in kills. So we looked at this for Clovis and we find absolutely in these mammoth kills, you have a lot of complete points. If these are knives, you have to ask yourself, why are these people discarding six inch beautifully functional?

Well, it takes you forever to make. That's been in their hand the whole time, presumably if they're cutting it. Right. Like the Tanako mammoth, you've got eight of these inside the animal. And by the way, you keep asking about like artifacts embedded in the bone and mammoth

bone that has been found twice, I think in the upper Paleolithic of Europe at the Lain laner site which is a mammoth kill in Arizona there are two Clovis points right between the ribs of a mammoth right we'd expect them to find them you know so yeah not embedded in the bone but pretty much in a place where you shouldn't be questioning what this association between a weapon and a dead animal is right that is a good point if you got that big old pile all them guts and shit, you know, that you, if you had stabbed them in there, you might not retrieve them out. I mean, I've cut my hand on broadheads. I couldn't find inside

deer. Yeah. And especially if they have a foreshaft, right? Cause the foreshaft detaches in its way in the body cavity. And if, you know, one thing interesting about butchering mammoths, if they fall on one side, forget about that. They really only butcher like one side of the animal. Cause you can't turn it over. Right. So if, so if you shot it from that side, you might lose every weapon that went in from that side.

What are the tools, uh, did Clovis people have? Like, was there anything that would be redundant if you were to use that as a knife, did like, do we already know? Oh, they had a knife sort of thing yeah I mean Oh Brody can you can you run me another heron dude yeah you didn't grab did you bring my bone my bone shafts down the little white ones you grab those Brody's getting a workout we've got why a- That's why I don't sit in that chair. It's a pretty great sample of Clovis tools from this L'Prel site we keep talking about. Stone Age toolkits don't actually change a ton between

Clovis and the recent pass on the plains. You need the same stuff. You need stuff to cut things with, you need stuff to poke holes with, you need stuff to scrape with. It's like basically the three things that stone tools do. So stone knives and Clovis assemblages in my experience are just really large flakes. Sometimes they're retouched on one edge. In my experience just messing with hides. I find quartzite to be the best medium to use. I think it's because it got a little grit to it and it kind of cuts into the meat a little better. There's also at the L'Prel site a big chopper. I watched you guys' bison butchery experiment. One thing you were missing,

it met and tried to make you as a big chopper to get those ribs off. Got it. But at L'Prel we have this cobble. We have two of them. Two choppers, yeah. Cobble that fits just perfectly in your hand with like three flakes taken off of the edge of it.

Something you can just bash with. Really common tool type, like in any large mammal butchering. Like a hand axe. Basically. Yeah. In fact, you find them in the old one, like 1.8 million years old with the oldest choppers. And you find them in Clovis too.

I'd say one underappreciated aspect of these hunter-gatherer toolkits is stuff to make clothes with. This is what I studied primarily from my dissertation and that's scrapers. So just a stone scraper, retouched on one end, stick it into a handle to get some leverage and it's what you use to scrape dry hide to make it more pliable. Also perforating tools that you'd use to prepare seams to sew clothing with. Because you're using- Yeah, those are cool. Using these bone needles, right? And bone needles don't have really

the tensile strength to perforate leather all the time. So you prepare a seam with little perforators and stitch it up. It's really kind of the bread and butter of a stone age tool gets these things where you scrape things, scrape hide, perforate hide and cut up animals with. I would say there is one knife form possibly, which is the ultra thin by face, which is a really, really beautifully made super thin bifacial knife that we've found a few of the Prel they're more commonly associated with Folsom, which follows Clovis in the West, but there are known Clovis examples, probably knives. Oh yeah. Um,

Oh, yeah. I have a confession to make. In all my like casual Joe below reading about Clovis hunters and Folsom hunters, I had never heard of what I'm holding in my hand until I was looking at that chart hanging at your office. Like then met and sends me some of these. These are out of these are replicas of some pieces that came out of Ohio, I believe. Sheridan cave. Yeah. I'd never even heard of this. When I opened the package up, I thought it was some kind of little point, but this is like a piece. This is a piece of a Clovis toolkit that is people debate what the hell this was, right? Yeah. Talk about that. Can you get a good on that? Phil, you getting it looks great. Just to give a quick little more analysis. It's, um, there's this bevel cut into it and it's striated. Like it's caught, like you wanted to just go not on a limb here.

Like you want to make it a little more grippy. So these are bone rods are commonly called bone rods. They've been founded a lot of clove, including the clover's type site has a really beautiful example of one of these. I've only found one in my career was that the powers two hematite quarry. What kind of bone? I'm guessing it was a piece of cortical bone, like a long bone from a bison. Not exactly sure. I don't know what these are, but my assumption is that it has something to do with the weaponry system. Uh, powers to this, this ochre mine is for whatever reason, just completely filled with paleo Indian

weaponry. We found like 170 points at this site. At an ochre mine. At an ochre mine in Southeast Wyoming. And we found one of these associated with the Clovis fulsome layer at powers two, which is also filled with projectile points and flakes and stuff.

So my assumption is that it has something to do with the weaponry system. What that is, I don't think anybody has really ever satisfactorily explained that. When you say weaponry system, you mean it was linked to the Clovis point somehow? Perhaps using the hafting system or something like that. Yeah, you could see this is a four shaft somehow. point somehow or perhaps using the half thing system or something like that yeah you could see this is a four shaft somehow right the Clovis point there and some other kind of wedge on the other side yeah guy online figured it out I was green that guy figured out a lot of different dudes debate that right and there's a dude saying

that like, if you wedge that thing in when you're trying to, I couldn't, he didn't have any visuals, but basically saying like, he wedged it in on the halfing process, and then as you lash that piece, it like tightens, that was his take on it. It like tightens the spear point, but he didn't have any pictures to explain

what the hell he was talking about. But it's like I had never heard of that thing. They're not common. You know, there's in 1936 in the Clovis site when they found the first mammoth remains in Clovis points, they had one of these in the mammoth bone bed, but it's not common to find them in mammoth bone beds. That might be the only case. Because it's like also imagine because it's organic and shit hauls it away or it rots if you have bone preserved these will be preserved if they were there okay left there but again like nice functional implements which these appear to be right they don't appear to be broken people tend not to leave these things behind pretty sure there were some of these in the

Anzic burial to yeah that used to an actually site there's some of these in the Anzac burial too. Yeah, the East Wenatchee site. There's several of these associated with like, I don't know how many points are from there, a couple dozen Clovis points. It seems to be consistently associated with weaponry though. The only other theory I've heard about these is dog sleds or something. Well, that's that was Grammy's argument about East Wenatchee. And I think those were were were by beveled Oh, yeah, so say they didn't have a point on one end They had a bevel this way and a bevel an alternate bevel on the other side and

Grammly argued that they were lashed together to make it the runner on That's really silly idea come on Do you ever find evidence of Clovis points being picked up by ancient humans like five thousand years later and they find a use for them and all of a sudden There's a Clovis point in with like a woodland. Yes site somewhere. Yes. I Know one example off the top of my head I'm pretty sure everybody cites this one example I've actually never tracked down the citation to it But I've heard over and over again my entire career that somebody found a fulsome point

to Pueblo. Yeah. That's what I heard. Me too. That's the one example of that happening. Like an Anastasi, the so-called Anastasi or ancient Puebloans that some Pueblo had one where some dudes like, look at that, brought it home. I think everyone's everyone's into old stuff, right? That's why I'm into archeology. I think we have to assume people had a fascination for the past. Yeah. I bring home old shell casings. I wouldn't bring home a new shell casing.

Probably collect some phones. If I find a straight wall shell casing, it's got some holes rod through it. I'm going to bring that sucker home. 100% man. You got to find one of my buddies. I'm going to bring that sucker home. Man. You got, if I found one of my buddies, I'm not bringing it home. Got a spot in your garage where you just stacked all your old treasures.

Look at this, a 27 Nosler case. It's gotta be, you know, it could be up to 15 years old. Yeah. Bringing that home. Steve, like, like 20 minutes ago, you asked about the absence of evidence for like hunting all

these megafauna. Yeah. Can I say something about that? Say everything you want to say about that. So when you talk about like the giant beaver, right? Those guys, my understanding is they're living in the Northeast in the Midwest. In terms of what our evidence for Clovis subsistence in that part of the world, we have about two bones that happen to preserve in a fire and they're both caribou. Bottom line is there's this huge

blank spot in what Clovis people were doing in that part of the country where that animal lives. We basically have no evidence for anything, any subsistence at all. Because it's not suitable to preserve. Right, right. So is the absence of evidence of hunting a giant beaver meaningful? Probably not, right? We can't really interpret it one way or another. And a lot about the Clovis record of faunal use is that way. Like if you say, well, there's no evidence for Clovis use of sloth, well, would you expect to see it in a mammoth kill site?

Probably not, right? And that's what most of our sites are. So is the absence of sloth in mammoth kill sites interesting? Probably not. Now, if we go to the Aubrey site in Texas, this big Clovis campsite, they do have sloth dermal ossicles, which are these little, like, pieces of bone embedded in the skin that armored these giant ground sloths.

Mm-hmm. Is that evidence for Clovis hunting of ground sloth? A couple dermal ossicles in a Clovis campsite? It's pretty ambiguous, right? Um, so the record is really hard to interpret. I will say there is recently published a sloth kill from Argentina called Campo Laborte. It's late Pleistocene, big, I think, megatherium.

I'm not sure which sloth. So there is some evidence for sloth use in South America. But just maybe to end this big train of thought, the most damning evidence for human causation of the megafaunal extinctions to me is you didn't have to do archeology. If you just did paleontology around the world, everywhere that people went to. And you just looked for a big extinction event in the last 80,000 years, and you find one. In every case, in every landmass, that marks human arrival.

100%. Yeah. And it's not just the North American thing, right? It's not just the South American thing. It's an Australian thing. It's a New Zealand thing. It's a Europe thing. It's an Asia thing.

It's all the islands. It's Hawaii. It's Polynesia thing. It's the Caribbean.. It's an Asia thing. It's all the islands. It's Hawaii. It's Polynesia thing. It's the Caribbean. There were giant ground sloths in Caribbean that survived the Pleistocene Holocene transition until 6,000 years ago. That, that one, that's one of the biggest smoking guns in my view on the overkill hypothesis. Absolutely. You get the rank, the Wrangle Island off Siberia. No one found it. Mammoth stayed there till 4,000 years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember reading, uh, Paul Martin's book, Twilight of the Mammoth. And I don't, I forget where it is in the book. It's either at the beginning or the end, but he tracks the spread of humans around the globe and lists all the stuff that went missing at the exact same time. And he get through to the end of it. I just remember reading that segment and just being like, God, it's almost too perfect.

Like how did that? Yeah. I mean, like I put that book down and it was like, you just watched a, a video on YouTube that's meant to convince you of something. You know, it was just like, nothing else makes sense to me now. You know what else is great about it? Is you say,

what about Africa? Doesn't happen in Africa. And it's cause you get like co-evolution. That was Paul's argument. Yeah, there was no sudden arrival. Yeah. The animals there had been like, hey, that little thing, you see something walking around two feet,

watch your ass. Like word got out. So what would you guys say then if you're leaning towards human cause, what would you say to the people that are like, well, it was like the climate was changing, the environment was changing, like these animals just couldn't adapt.

The climate environment had been changing for millions of years prior to that. That'd be my response. You know, the North American and South American cases are especially tricky because it happens at this really wild time when we're coming out of the glaciation, right? These massive when we're coming out of the glaciation, right? These massive mile thick sheets of ice are melting back, sea levels rising, all these ecological communities are reorganizing. You can imagine that could wreak havoc

on animal populations, right? And at the same time, you bring in this highly effective cultural predator that these animals have no experience with. And it's the coincidence of all this stuff in time that has made it such a difficult problem to to answer and it's why we're still debating about it. But I would say tell me tell me a climatic or ecological explanation

that can drive an extinction event over two continents from the Arctic to the tropics and back to the subarctic in South America, from the arid west to the humid east. What climate change can do that? What is the actual mechanism that could drive an extinction event so severe? And I don't know of one. And there's the other thing is that as dramatic as that seemed, these species had survived other cycles like that.

Dozens of them. I mean, there were interglacial periods where sea levels were high. Like right now you hear a lot about rising sea levels. There were periods between glaciations during the ice age when like the pedestal, when the Statue of Liberty would be standing in water, like the pedestal would be underwater during some of these periods. And the shit didn't go extinct then? Yep. underwater during some of these periods. And the shit didn't go extinct then. Nope.

Yeah. That was, that was the most recent interglacial we call stage five, 120,000 years ago. It was warmer than today. There were hippos living in England, for example. Yeah. Um, yeah.

And that, that was one of many previous interglacial that happened over and over and over and over again. The ice sheets oscillated back and forth and back and forth and there were ecological transitions with all of these These animals made it through that's right until people show up and if we look at the last dates and these animals At least the ones that we have good samples for they all go extinct within 300 years of Clovis arrival separate caribou caribou make it through bison, make it

through moose, make it through elk, make it through. We can talk about why, if you want to talk about that. Why. So I think there's a single unifying explanation for all large mammals survival that even applies to sub Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, which

is that large animals survive in places where people can't reach sufficient population densities to drive them to extinction. Okay. So if we, let's just take the case of bison, right? Bison survived, but actually bison went extinct over most of their range at the end of the

Pleistocene. They live coast to coast. You find bison in the rivers in Florida. You find them on the Olympic peninsula of Washington. You find them in Mexico, Rancho La Brea. Yep. Full of bison in the rivers in Florida. You find them on the Olympic peninsula of Washington, you find them in Mexico, Rocha, La Brea, full of bison, right? Today, bison pretty much limited to the mid

continent, or at least historically they were. Why is that? Well, when people don't have other foods to fall back on, basically the only way a predator can drive a prey to extinction is if they have another food to fall back on. This is why a lynx can't drive snowshoe hair to extinction, right? Because as soon as that hair population goes down, the lynx population goes down with them, and the hair rebounds, the lynx rebounds.

That's a good point, man. Right. So it's hard for a predator to drive its prey to extinction. It can only do that if it can switch to something else, right? So what I would argue, if we're talking about bison, is that in the Great Plains, there really weren't good switching options for people who lived in this part of the world that could really sustain. Like, you couldn't drive bison to extinction

and then switch and basically make your entire economy based on pronghorn or something else. And that's also, I think, the general story that explains the survival of animals in the high Arctic, let's say in Muscox and Caribou. There's no real switching options there, right? So if you really slam those populations, your population gets slammed right behind them. If we're going to talk about Southeast Asia, we're talking about dense tropical forests that there are very few people in until very recently.

If we're talking about Sub-Saharan Africa, we're talking about a massive, absolutely massive semi-arid desert that people have been living in in very, very low population densities for a long time. You didn't really have pastoralist people herding until the last 2,000 years, and that's really when those animals started getting slammed in Africa. So in general, I would say, you know, you have these large mammals, cases of large mammal survival in environments where people simply couldn't reach sufficient densities to drive them to extinction.

You know what comes out of contemporary biology that what you're talking about makes me think of is if you look at the southern caribou herds So we used to have caribou. I mean when I say used to I mean even in the 1900s, right? Yeah in 1920 1930 you had Like I don't want to say decent numbers, but you had caribou in Washington You had caribou and the Idaho Panhandle you had caribou in the Idaho Panhandle, you had caribou in Montana. Minnesota and Maine. And I've heard biologists when talking about like, well what was different is it be as human landscape development and landscape changes

happened, it allowed white-tailed deer and moose from logging practices and road building, it allowed white-tailed deer and moose to move into these areas, and it made it that wolves could sustain themselves because in these areas, they had like very limited number of caribou and there wasn't like a wolf predation problem and it was what you're talking about.

There was nothing for them to fall back on. So as caribou numbers would dwindle, wolf pressure would just go away. But now wolves don't move out because they're like, they're still picking away on white-tailed deer, they're still picking away on moose. And any caribou that turns up, they're going to hammer it because they're always present. Yeah. That's super interesting. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have something to fall back on. It's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have something to fall back on.

Yup. Right. Otherwise you get stuck in that predator prey cycle. Yeah. And I really think you can explain large mammal survival across the globe with that one principle.

I mean, you guys live in a place, we live in a place where large mammal, we're famous for large mammals, right? We've got, we've got bison and elk and moose, pronghorn, deer. Why are these spaces famous for large animals? Well, because hardly anybody lives here, right? That's really always been the case in this part of the world, the Rocky Mountains, because it's high, it's dry. It's a hard place for people to make a living. And it's those places that these large animals

can really thrive because the predation pressure from humans is really low. Yeah, that's an interesting point because you look at like, Appalachia or whatever, they had bison, they had elk, they had wolves, they had cougars, and for a long time they didn't. And then you have these like spots like, you know, the Northern Rockies, which was able to hang on to like a relatively intact ecosystem. And you go up to Alaska, and they were able to hang on to, like, their, like, suite of megafauna, survive the initial human pulse.

It's a good theory, I like that. What percentage of people in your field believe in the Blitzkrieg hypothesis, and how has that changed during, like, your career? So, um... I'd like to, I wish we could answer this independently because I'd love to hear what he has to say. Yeah, I seem to get both right down a number.

First thing I'll say is that when I was in graduate school, Paul Martin, who's the real champion of that was a friend of mine. He was retired. He was really nice to me. And I'd go up and I'd go up to his office and I'd argue with him all the time about this. I didn't believe in it at all until I left and

did some science and I ultimately decided Paul was right. It wasn't because he was nice to you. No, when I, when I wrote a review on that Twilight of the Mammoth for Dan's class, I remember, you know, you'd write the book reviews and he'd write a couple of sentences at the bottom and the first, I'll always remember this.

The first thing he wrote on there was Paul Martin was a delightful dinner companion. And I've enjoyed many evenings with him. He was a great guy. Uh, I'm going to answer the, I'm going to say, uh, somewhere between one and 2% believe this. Oh, wow. What would you say, Spencer? No. Yeah. I mean, you're, that's it. You're talking to an endangered species here, Steve, right in the studio.

So the numbers going down. You know, the, the point you raised of where's the evidence. Like if people drove horse to extinction, why do you have two horse kill sites is, is a, is a argument that really resonates with a lot of people. They don't really I would say a lot of people haven't thought about the nature of the sample and the sample size that we have yeah and that maybe that's actually quite a bit of evidence for horse hunting. Yeah I'll say like I mean to start with like very a very low percentage of archaeologists actually study this stuff right like paleo-

Indians there's a very small segment of archeologists actually study this stuff, right? Like paleoindians, there's a very small segment of archeology alongside all the complex of people and just the people that do everything else. So like, for instance, in my experience, I didn't really think about this stuff at all until I went to Colorado State University for my masters and my advisor there, Jason LaBelle was invested in paleoindian stuff and kind of trained me up on that. But even then I was like, you know, it sounds good. Like, Marni Verde looks solid, all these pre-Clovis, we need to be going out there and digging deeper, I guess. And it really wasn't until Todd brainwashed me at Wyoming.

But it is true that when you actually buckle down and start thinking critically about this stuff and really invest your intellectual energy and understanding it, it just kind of comes into focus. I mean, it's really obvious to me that Clovis was basically the first people and they drove the Megafon to extinction. But I don't think that that's a very popular view for a number of reasons. I mean, one, it's just a small percentage of archaeologists that are invested in this stuff. And then among those that do, I just got to say like, And then among those that do, I just got to say like, archaeology prioritizes discovery and newness, right? And we can't really escape that. I do. I love discovering stuff. And so everyone's constantly wanting to push it back.

And I think there's a little bit of wishful thinking there. Like, did we really find the oldest? It's kind of a bummer, right? It's like an existential crisis for people that have invested a lot of their time and energy into finding the oldest thing to be like, well, we did it. Now, what is a bit of a bit of a bummer to folks? I think now if the number is one or two percent. Of that 98, 99 percent.

How divided is that block of thinking like are they in terms of the cause? Yeah. Like, like are there, could you subdivide that quickly into a couple of different camps or what's the, I'm just curious about the, I don't think so. I mean, I think Spencer's right that like most people aren't invested in this. Like if you're, if you're a Maya archeologist studying, you know, pyramids and things in the Guatemalan jungle, your experience with overkill is, you know, what you learned as a graduate student and what you're teaching in your intro

to archeology class, right? I would guess that most of those people believe there's some sort of climatic and ecological explanation. The other contenders, by the way, is something called hyperdisease. Have you heard about this? Yeah, the idea. What about, what about that?

It was just like a combination of factors that all hit at the same time. It's a really good point, right? Like these are not what we call mutually exclusive. They're all, they all could be operating simultaneously. And there's a fourth contender that is- Yeah, who's that dude that's really into those little micro blasts or whatever?

He's micro glass. Richard Firestone was the original guy. You know what's funny? I did a tour of the Lindenmire site. Yeah. And the day I was at Lindenmire, Lindenmire's big, fulsome site, I'm just telling the audience here. It's kind of cool because it's right on the, it's north,

it's between Denver and Fort Collins. North of Fort Collins. Is it north of Fort Collins? Um, and it's a huge, they argue a huge Folsom winter campsite. And some people argue that it's, this sounds a little out there, that because of the rock faces on the mountains, it's easy to explain where it is. And that you could have had, that this might have been a place where

fulsome hunters from all across the Great Plains, you could say, no, no, no, just follow, you'll know. Look for the big white slash on the peak. And if you've never been there, that's where we'll be. Sounds fanciful. So the guy that came up with that idea, I think, is what was my master's advisor, Jason LaBelle. Oh, okay. I believe him. It's a big exposure, a white river group out there. It's visible for miles in every direction. And yeah, it's right at

the margin of the, you know, the high plains and the Colorado Piedmont. It's kind of at this eco tone. It makes, it all makes sense to me. It's like, it's the biggest, it's the biggest Folsom site that exists. It's the capital of the Folsom world. When I was there, there was a dude, cause they've done all the stratigraphy there. So they've done a lot of dating on stuff and there was a guy there collecting those little things he's looking for to prove that it was like a, that the, that the place to see an extinctions were some kind of bombardment of, uh, comets, comets killed them all. You didn't even put that on your list. What, uh, I did a study of that.

Okay. Tell me, tell people about that. Oh, go ahead. Well, uh, where, yeah, comets. Okay. Then we can get into the Brody's idea about a bunch of shit was happening all at once. I think it was the, I think it was 2007. This paper was published in what we call PNAS proceedings. the Brody's idea about a bunch of shit was happening all at once. I think it was the, I think it was 2007.

This paper was published in what we call PNAS proceedings. Sounds like a rap. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, uh, where they, they had, they had taken these, collected sediments from a bunch of terminal places, end of the Ice Age sites. And they would take these sediment columns. So they just collect sediments, you know, in very fine intervals through sort of the Pleistocene

Holocene transition. What year was this going on? It was published in 2007. See, that's when I was there. 2006, I was working on, I was there around 2005, 2006. So they found consistently at a certain time point, I want to say 12,700 years before present approximately, they claimed to find high concentrations of weird things. Those things included little tiny metallic spheres.

They call them titanomagnetites. It's like iron oxides with titanium. Little tiny spheres like the diameter of your hair. They said they had high concentrations of magnetic particles. So they would literally put this sediment in water and then run a super strong magnet through it, collect the magnetic particles, and count them up through these sediment columns.

They said they'd peak right at this horizon. They did the same thing for what are called platinum group elements like iridium that's used to identify the extinction of the dinosaurs when that meteorite hit and there's this high iridium concentration. All this weird stuff. And all of us, a lot of us who have been digging sites like this and digging through sediments of this age were like, oh my God, it's all this weird extraterrestrial stuff that we

had never seen before. We've been digging through it our whole life. I just wanted to see it myself. And I was working on a site at the time and I had friends who were working on sites where we could collect these samples and just replicate, do what they did and replicate their analysis. And we failed to replicate any of them. We didn't find high concentrations of microspherules, magnetic particles, or platinum group elements. Completely failed for what that's worth. Where does that idea stand right now? Is it fashionable in your community? No, it's complete.

It's, it's funny. You know, we thought that the early kind of pushback against it would make it go away. It doesn't, it didn't, it's, they're still publishing papers in support of it. And I would say the vast majority of people in, in geology and archaeology don't, it didn't, they're still publishing papers in support of it. And I would say the vast majority of people in geology and archeology don't take it seriously. I mean, a massive extraterrestrial impact that drives an extinction over two continents doesn't leave like a whisper of dust.

There ought to be like massive geologic evidence for craters and tsunamis and fires, and it's just not there. If it's 2% right now believe in Blitzkrieg, what was it 20 years ago? What do you think it'll be 20 years from now? I really good question. When I break down these, these arguments and you kind of look at the timing, I would say that we're like in a post, a post Clovis first world longer than we were ever in a Clovis first world at this point. The Clovis first paradigm was basically like

let's say 1973 with Paul Martin's paper. That was the height. Up to like pinnacle. Up to basically like 1997 when Monte Verde became accepted as a pre Clovis site. That was kind of like the Clovis first era. Ever since Monte Verde came out it's basically just been gaining more acceptance that there was stuff a pre Clovis site. That was kind of like the Clovis first era. Ever since Monte Verde came out, it's basically just been gaining more acceptance that there was stuff before Clovis. So you guys are an endangered species. You're like the guys at the record store saying there's no good music anymore. Where our habitats fragmented. There's like a relic population in Kansas, some in Alaska. I have this sort of maybe schizophrenic perspective about it. Like sometimes I look at the record and I kind of feel like Neo in The Matrix.

Like I can see something that nobody else can see. Like, oh my God, it's so obvious that Clovis is first. And then half the time I feel like a guy with a tinfoil hat, like believing in crazy conspiracies. Like why the hell can I see what everybody else sees? What would need to happen to convince everyone else to agree with you? Oh, no, that'll never happen. I mean, archaeology, the record is too crappy.

We all look at the same evidence and interpret it completely differently. It's pretty amazing that way. We're never going to get consensus. In your line- But there's a thing that could happen that would work the other way. For sure. Oh yeah. A thing that could happen that would work the other way is someone finds a bulletproof

17,000 year old site. Yeah. Bulletproof. Yeah, yeah. For sure. Oh, okay. Absolutely. I would love for that to happen, honestly.

It'd be great to open up this whole other world that we knew nothing about, a whole other record to study. I just, I don't think that's happened yet. You know, if I had to crystal ball it, and I always put it like this, just to make a graphic, like God has a gun to your head. And he says, what happened to the megafauna?

And he knows, he's omniscient. And you have to guess right or else you die. So the screws are to you. There's no room for playing games. I would say in that moment, my life's on the line, right? I would say something was going on where there was turmoil. Numbers were depressed. There was some upheaval.

And into this upheaval came humans and, and, and tipped it, tipped it to extinction, but something was going on where it wasn't like peak. Yeah. But maybe it would be like, wrong, Steve. It was my creation that forsake me. Sure. You know what I'm saying? if I had to make a life or death test. So Vance Haynes made that argument and he had good, like he worked on these sites in the San Pedro River Valley in

Arizona, these beautiful Clovis sites, really well-preserved surfaces and he thought there's really clear evidence that when people were there at Murray Springs and Lainer and Blackwater Draw, that there was a drought and that these mammoth populations were depressed. They're kind of stuck to these water holes and people were just basically the coup de grace. And it's a, it's a, it's a really good argument for the Southwest. But we're talking about the Southwest in two massive continents, right? So again, if we're going to have some kind of ecological upheaval that spans

two continents from the Amazon to the East Coast No What is it? I also feel like we should we haven't talked about Alaska yet Oh, I knew some Alaska stuff man. So like there there are pre-clovis sites in the Western Hemisphere There in Alaska. That's There's clear evidence of human occupations clear campsites There's clear evidence of human occupations, clear campsites, about 14,200 years old. They contain mammoth remains. They contain these little microblades, seemingly among the first technologies that people brought

here from Northeast Asia. You see the same technology in Northeast Asia. Yeah. It's exactly what you'd expect for the first people in the Western Hemisphere. They're carrying Asian technology and living in Alaska. And exactly when you'd expect to see them too. And that's a good point, man. And it coincides with what we did a study back in 2015, looking at when megafaunal populations

decline between Alaska, United States, South of the ice sheets in South America. Basically, slightly before we find archaeological evidence for human occupation in Alaska, megafauna starts to decline, to extinction. And that's important because when you look at the archaeological survey in Alaska that's been done, compared to that that's been done south of the ice sheets, it's very slim.

There's like two highways and a few little patches of archaeological research. And lo and behold, everywhere people look in Alaska, they find pre-Clovis sites, especially in this place called the Tonono Valley and outside of Fairbanks. Just a lot of pre-Clovis evidence there. And we haven't really looked that hard in Alaska. It's a super difficult place to do archaeology, but we found pre-Clovis sites immediately. Despite the 150 years of research we've done south of the ice sheets very little and they're normal Yeah, and they're normal It's not weird shit. It's like chip stone around hearth features butchered animal bones

It's normal stuff and what we call discrete discrete stratigraphic levels meaning they're just like really clear Occupations if you're to look through them. Yeah. Yeah, so those do you think those people? through them. Yeah. Yeah. So those, do you think those people hit Alaska and just stayed or did they like some states get absorbed into Clovis or that? I would say they, the ancestors of Clovis, some stayed and some of South. Yeah. Have you ever been to or looked at the stuff from the Mesa site? I have the book. I've never seen the stuff. That's cool. That's not as old though. No. It's cool. I went to that Mesa. It's badass, man.

Yeah, I listen to you talk about it. You can just picture people wanting to get up on that thing and look around. I didn't go on top of it, but I sat and looked at it, you know. But that's not old, right? It's Pleistocene's it's like maybe 12 Seven sticks matter I sound of something yeah, maybe two thousand years after people arrive in Alaska and it's probably you know the argument is those are planes bison hunters coming back back north this and the Artifact form that's what that's what they had introduced me to is this idea of backfill

Yeah, like that you get the initial waves of people coming through, but then at some point in time, people move back the other direction. Yeah. Back migrations kind of ubiquitous. Clouds up the record. What part of the Americas moved on from Clovis the quickest and which ones held out the longest? Probably the Great Basin was the quickest. Spencer mentioned there's some really old stemmed projectile points that some Great Basin archaeologists argue are as old,

if not older, than Clovis. You also have Clovis points in the Great Basin, but there's some very old old dates on these stemmed projectile points in the Great Basin, but there's some very old, old dates on, on these stemmed projectile points in the Great Basin. Um, I don't know that we have really good age control on post Clovis, um, projectile point types, except in the Rocky Mountains. And we, you know, at L'Prel, another really cool thing we found was a Folsom point. And we have, we, we appear to have a single occupation where people killed, killed mammoths,

killed bison, was buried by a flood probably 10 years after they killed that mammoth. And on the same surface, we've got one Clovis Point and one Folsom Point. This would be the oldest case of Folsom ever found. So. And that would probably be, you know, that's pretty early. We know Clovis persists after that too. So there's like this long period of overlap where both are being made. So there was this major extinction event with large animals. Like what happened to the Clovis culture? Like when that extinction event happened, did they just, what happened to them? Did they evolve into other cultures?

Did they? I think it's pretty clear. I mean, it's Folsom and the Rocky Mountains at least. And then other regions of the United States have these other post Clovis fluted point traditions. Because when you talk, when you give them these different names, like Clovis, Folsom, it's like there was this people,

and then there was this, you know what I mean? Yeah, we should be clear to make that distinction. I mean, Clovis wasn't a a people it was a stone tool technology. Yeah where did cell phone people come from? Yeah the way I look at it and like this is like getting into the realm of hand waving but Folsom points are a lot smaller than Clovis points. If you put them side by side you oftentimes don't get that when you're just looking at books and illustrations of this stuff but also points are generally at least half the size of Clovis points I'm not gonna make you go you can imagine something smaller than that Clovis points have a distinct

function from Folsom points maybe they're a thrusting spear, not an atlatl dart. You introduce another weaponry system into your toolkit and they're used at the same time. And that also affect the culture, right? So I mean Clovis points basically disappear when the mammoth disappears, seemingly. So they're probably a pretty closely linked thing, that Clovis points were used to hunt mammoths, and then once mammoths were gone, didn't have much need for them anymore, and people started making these little fulsome points a lot more often.

You don't need to hold that, I was just showing you. I wanna look at it. Oh, you wanna look. You very quickly start seeing regional diversification in the way people are making a living. Right. And one thing, I visited this site, Feendel Mundo in Mexico,

and I visited another site where they found some Clovis points on the surface. One thing that really struck me there was here you're looking at this Mexican Clovis point, right? You drop that in Wyoming, you wouldn't know it was from Mexico. You drop it in South Carolina, you wouldn't know it was from Mexico.

And they find him, right, with these gonfides, with these elephants. But in this same site, which is this really highly eroded surface site, I'm seeing marine shells brought in from the Gulf of Cote, the Sea of Cortez, and ceramics, right? You start to see this super regional specialization. But in Clovis, everybody's doing the same damn thing.

Everywhere. It's really, really striking. You go to Missouri at the Kimswick site, you've got a dead mastodon full of big Clovis points, Mexico, Wyoming. Dudes had it figured out. That was the way to make a living apparently. What was going on on the West Coast?

You know, you had the kelp highway theory, like what archaeology is there at the same time as Clovis? Yeah, that's a really good question. So the first thing I should note is, you know, the coastal migration thing has been around for a long time. The idea has been around since at least the 1940s that this was another way to get around the glaciers. It really became in vogue in 1997 when Monteverde was accepted to be pre-Clovis and real because the argument was in order to get them down there that early,

the ice free corridor simply wasn't an option. So the coast had to be the case. Right? So ever since then, like everybody has assumed it's the coast. I should say that these again aren't mutually exclusive. You could take both routes, right? But there's been a huge amount of work now on the West Coast because of that, because everybody's kind of assumed that's the entry point. And my understanding is that there is very little archaeological evidence from the place to see it at all. You're not seeing different technologies at the same time as Clovis was going on?

We don't really have anything Clovis age over there. The closest thing is maybe on the Channel Islands in California, humans are getting out there pretty early. I don't think there's any weaponry associated with it. No, there's some really funky points out there, but that stuff's kind of hard to date because you're dating off in marine shells, and there's a lot of old carbon in the

ocean. So those dates tend to be too old. There's a, there's a very famous human remains from, um, Prince of Wales. Well, not you're talking about Alaska. No, I'm talking about on the channel islands. Oh yeah. And I've, I've, I've, I've Arlington Springs

woman, but she had a lot of, uh, marine resources in her diet, which means the dates are too old. But it was kind of like, it was basically a Clovis age date before you did the correction for that. But we really don't have a good, a good sample of dated stuff from the Pacific coast. I will say there are Clovis points that have been found basically on the beach. There's one from an island off the coast of Mexico, a Clovis point. But you're also looking for sites in coastal rainforest.

Yeah, it's a really challenging environment. You know what makes me optimistic though, is I was with the geologist up there who works in Alaska. And you know, you always heard when people talk about the kelp highway theory or the coastal migration theory, everybody's like, yeah, but all that stuff's underwater. But he has these shoreline maps, tons of it's not,

because of the isostatic rebound. That's right. So when you had all that ice on top of the, I'm not telling you, I'm telling folks at home, when all that ice was laying on the earth, it's so heavy that it pushed the crust down and sank it. And there's still like seismic activity in Southeast Alaska from, as the ice melted off,

the land pops back up. So when you look at these shorelines, it's this like, it's this wave like undulating thing where some of that ice age shoreline is a hundred feet up the hill. Yep. So it's like, there could be stuff there. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, like, what I'm saying is you can't just say, well, it's all underwater.

Yeah. I have no doubt that there's some archeology underwater. I think it's been proven. Well, they found some underwater, but I'm saying it's not uniformly all at the same depth. It's like a real hodgepodge of like, you know, the geological history is a real hodgepodge of stuff that's way up in the forest or down under water. So I, what I'm saying is I might find me an old ass site. Well there's that notion, right? That some of the isostatic rebounds kind of kept some of these coastal areas above water, but also, how, why would you expect that people would never maybe go in inland for a night and form a campsite? Right. I mean, basically the assumption is that people follow a river. People are just living on the beach.

Yeah, dude, have you been there? The beach is nice. Sometimes like, it's not that it's nice, it's an overwhelming abundance of food. It's not easy to get. Not easy to get? It's in the water. It's shi- no. Alright, but- Dude, listen, I'm telling you, you get into the shellfish and the salmon, go talk to anybody that lives there now.

All right. But picture yourself at the end of the ice age and you come down into Seattle and it's like, oh, we could live off shellfish and ignore these mastodons and bison. Or, we live after these big animals. Yeah, but shellfish don't hurt you. But they've had coastal, no, but they, but they've had coastal cultures there. They've had coastal cultures there continuously. I get that's the argument. Who were always more abundant, who were always more abundant than interior peoples. And even many of the interior peoples in, if we go to Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, many of the interior

peoples are still reliant on anadromous fish, like marine resources. You can't ignore it. And that part of the world is a good reason why you do that now. Yeah. I'm saying in the place of scene, that's probably not your best option. Also, if we're talking about that, let's look at this first real argument. Let's look at this idea. People are, are, have thousands of years of coastal adaptation. Where's that in the archeological record? That's an assumption. Two, people are living at high population densities.

Where are they? Why can't we find them? Three, we don't really see intensive use of marine resources until let's say four or 5,000 years after Clovis in that part of the world. Yeah. Part of that is sea level rise. Still, you know, I think part of the success

of the Kelp Highway hypothesis is that it's a good marketing campaign and I wanna rebrand the ice-free corridor to the meat highway. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Meat highway, man, yeah. I was pretty enamored by the Kelp Highway thing too. I mean, it's a really elegant theory.

I, and I'm not, I'm really not shitting on it at all. It's, it's a cool, cool idea. It makes a ton of sense when you think about, I mean, plus here's the thing. You can like the life in kelp beds and then you can eat the kelp. I mean, it makes sense until you look at the, until you look at the evidence. But also, you mentioned meat versus shellfish, but what's saying that they weren't killing large marine mammals? Yeah, in fact, if there's a coastal thing, that's what I think they would be doing,

is focusing their effort on large marine mammals, mostly seals, maybe some whales. I'm being reminded of Ben Potter's study, that obsidian sourcing study. You probably know more details about it than I do, but basically, uh, an archeologist in Alaska, a great archeologist out of, out of, uh, Fairbanks named Ben Potter did a big obsidian sourcing study of all the oldest sites that they know about in Alaska.

The hypothesis was basically like, if people were tied to coastal regions, then we should have coastal obsidian in these sites, because there are obsidian sources kind of right on where that corridor would be. Okay. Lo and behold, every single piece of obsidian used in these oldest sites in Alaska, the people that are the ancestors of the first Americans, they're from interior sources, from mountain sources in the interior of Alaska, and really no evidence that people were utilizing the coastal regions of Alaska.

Well, I'll settle on this. If I took your ass and dropped you off somewhere on like wherever, okay. Some remote area in Southeast Alaska. I've been there. Well, and you know what? You know where I wouldn't wind up finding you? Up in the mountains. That is absolutely true. I would find you down on the beach getting fat off kelp greenling and clams. Until I got enough expertise to effectively hunt bear

and caribou. Dude, that's a great point. Yeah, no, I got you. No, what you're saying is good, but it is an enticing idea. And then, I don't want to go too deep in this, but then, I don't know if you know, like, Melter's whole deal with going up and all that, trying to put the, trying to figure out is there any kind of like plant pollen evidence of an ice-free corridor. And so they go up to these places on the, you know, where the ice-free corridor supposedly existed. And they go into these ponds and pull up sediments and try to go find sediments

that would be at the right time. So you go 13,000 years ago and he'd be like, okay, show me evidence at 13,000 years ago that there were mammoths and vegetation. And he's like, it's a rock garden, right? It was water and rock. Yeah. But I don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying how he explained it. I never read anything in terms of the availability of both migration routes. Yeah. Like was there a green, verdant ice free corridor? It's a real, there is now, right? So at some point there had to be, and the question is when does that go from being a barrier to something that

humans can actually traverse? That's, that's a question for both migration corridors. It's a really challenging thing to answer because, you know, if we're thinking about a 10 mile space, we can study that by drilling a core in a lake and studying the DNA or the pollen out of it. We're talking about something that's 1200 miles long. Is that what we decided?

The ice-free corridor? Nine to 1200 is what we looked at. That was how wide it is? No, that's the length of it. That's the length of it, right? So like, how do you know when that thing is open versus closed over a stretch that humans can actually migrate? It's incredibly challenging if you date different geologic deposits in different places you get different answers and there's a lot of disagreement The dates that I generally see are anywhere from it was open from fourteen thousand five hundred or some people say it's open around

13,000 What is really clear to me is that it's open right around the time. Clovis explodes across North America. Can I bolster your, uh, can I bolster your argument for you? I'd love that. Think about this, man. This thing I think about when I think about the kelp highway too is let's say let's, okay, let's say the ice free corridor was real shitty and it wasn't great, but you were just, you were making a moon shot, right?

You're dying of curiosity. So you start picking into there. Why would someone do that? You'd be like, well, why would anyone take the risk? They wouldn't want to go into marginal habitat. But think about this. Let's go back to the coastal theory. You go to like glacier Bay or any number of areas in BC, any number of areas in Southeast Alaska, where still today, still today, that ocean land interface is a wall of ice. So people coming down in a boat had to have been okay with the idea that like, it's true, as far as they could see,

it was a wall of ice. Yeah, absolutely. It's far and they would have had calving, like calving glaciers and it would have been like, let's go. And then north paddling. Let's check it out. So someone, there has to be a thing where someone's like so dying of curiosity that they have, and they have to have the faith to be like, I have a feeling. I don't know why I have a feeling that if you go and again, 30 miles, maybe we'll find a place where it's not a hundred wall foot wall of ice. Yeah. On the beach.

The elephant in the room is also that it would have required a pretty sophisticated technology of maritime travel, right? That we really don't have any evidence that existed at that time. That we found Australia though. That's a much smaller task than circumnavigating the Pacific ocean. The North Pacific. Yeah. Australia, we're talking about maybe 50 kilometers of tropical water. Yeah. Chipshaw swim that. North Pacific. Yeah, Australia, we're talking about maybe 50 kilometers of tropical water. Oh, that was it? Yeah.

Chipshot swim that. The other thing I think about with this, with Coastal versus Inland is I've like, I've only watched one season of that show alone, but it was a season where this dude had spent some time with some Siberian ranger herders. He was an excellent outdoorsman. Ended up building like a drift fence and killing a moose on this show and subsisting off this moose. And all the while there's somebody else on the show that is just meekly checking a little fish trap every day and they're getting out these little graylings or something and just starving to death, eating these tiny fish while this dude's sitting high on this fatty moose meat. And that guy devoted his energy towards the correct endeavor,

I would say. And he want you won that season? Yeah, but you're not, if you could string up a net and catch a hundred salmon and one go. You're not thinking of salmon runs. You're not thinking of clam beds. Like it's two different arguments. What people did, I don't know, but like, you're not thinking of clam beds. You're not thinking of kelp beds and you're not thinking of salmon runs.

It's all these things live in the water and really cold one. No, you know in that area in that area You said low tide clam beds Yeah, but there's a 20 foot tide swing You can walk across a mile of some of that stuff without hitting water, you know, it's nothing but food It is nothing but food. It is nothing but food on those clam beds. I think that people are driven by package size. Giant clam beds.

I don't think it was, yeah. There's a lot to it. There's a lot to it. Like the date stuff, but the food abundance thing, I think that the food abundance thing, I think is overwhelming amounts of food. So I don't think that that was the problem. You know, what's interesting about this, right,

is we're arguing about evidence that doesn't exist in both cases. That's what makes it fun. Maybe that's how we know it's time to stop. You can never be wrong. Is there an explanation for what would have kept that ice free corridor open? Just the end of the ice age. Those Laurentide and the courtyard and sheets just kind of gradually

received that, you know, the lower part from each other recede completely until what, six thousand years ago or something, because they grew out of Hudson Bay and eventually the last of it disappeared around that time ago but yeah it basically by the time it reached a certain point like winter temperatures wouldn't have pushed it together again and then it was open. Do we have any Clovis age skeletons of humans? Yes what are you talking about? What are they like? The Anzac boy. We have an ancient from Montana. My apologies for asking. Two years old, the Anzic child, and they just found out he was, his mother

had a diet that was very similar to what they find with large cats. She was eating big game. So how many Clovis humans do we have? One. That's it. There's, there's one from Mexico. That's roughly that age from a cave in Mexico. Is there? Yeah. Duh Steve. But, but it's not clearly, it's not clearly Clovis and Anzic is the one. Yeah.

Well, it was found in the sixties or seventies in Willisaw, Montana and a bunch of ochre and a bunch of projectile points. Yeah. So, so her mother, the reconstruction was at least 40% mammoth in her, in his mother's diet, which is a huge amount of mammoth. And this pisses off Mettan Aron and Meltzer because people are like, see, they killed all the mammoths. And they're like, well, no, I can see that they were eating mammoths, but how is this telling me they killed them all?

I can see that they were eating mammoths, but how is this telling me they killed them all? For the record, we like both metton and melter a whole lot. So it's good to contextualize, like we're literally talking about like a couple thousand years and maybe a half dozen sites of disagreement, right? It's just that those couple thousand years and half dozen sites have really big implications for these two issues about how people got here and whether or not they killed off these animals. And so that's why we talk about it so much, right? Even though like it's like kind of a tempest in a teacup, if you know that phrase, a couple of people arguing about, oh yeah, half dozen sites in a couple thousand years, they do have pretty big implications for the peopling of the Americans.

Well, I already told you this is the primary thing I think about. What was that quote? What was that Dan Flory's quote? It wasn't his quote, but he told us that quote, the reason they're fighting so much is they're so little at stake. Yeah, exactly. Talking about academics,

the reason the arguments are so impassionate is because there's so little at stake. I've heard that attributed to Henry Kissinger. But there is a lot, but here I want to like this should, we should have said this in the beginning, so that the very end, but where this becomes political and where it becomes social and where it becomes cultural, it's a lot of places. But one of the places it becomes this is, is it innately human

that we destroy our environment? Right? Is it sort of this innately human ancient practice that we drive things to extinction? Is it just who we are and we've always done it that way, or did we like become evil later? And so people will look and like, Blitzkrieg hypothesis people can look at, let's say, extinctions we're driving now

with certain human activities. Isn't it nice to be able to go like, oh, we've always done that. What do you think happened to all the mammoths? There's nothing new. It's always how it's been. Just because something's human, universally human, which I think that tendency is, doesn't make it, it doesn't abdicate us from more responsibility to deal with it.

No, of course not. Like slavery is inherently human. It's a universal practice that because we live in a liberal democracy that decided it was a bad thing, we got rid of. I should know like how many places in the world, for instance, decided it was a bad thing we got rid of I should know like how many places in the world for instance Have thriving large game populations outside of the American West Not many and the only reason we have them here right is because there's state sanctioned conservation Laws that have allowed that to happen. Otherwise, we'd be in the same boat. We have no big animals left. Yeah so I think that argument that like

by acknowledging this we're kind of surrendering our moral obligation to do something about it, it's not a good argument to make. Just because something has happened forever doesn't mean we need to keep doing it. Okay, here's one more way where the rubber meets the road. If you turn around and look above your head, you're gonna see a war club. That war club was given to us by a guest who didn't sit where you're sitting, but he sat in

that seat in our old studio named Taylor Keene, okay? And Taylor Keene felt that part of this thing of, like he would argue that human history in the New World goes back 50,000 years. Okay, he thinks it's way older. And he thinks that this like 13,000 year Clovis story is a way of, is a way of, he thinks that help fuel manifest destiny to say, well, they haven't been here that long. Like the people we're displacing our new arrivals too. We're just another new arrival. I don't agree with him because I think that if you had gone to sort of like the architects of manifest destiny,

whether you go back to Jackson, you go back to Jefferson and you had said, hey, hey, hey, before you do this, bear in mind, Native Americans have been on the landscape 50,000 years, not 13,000 years. They wouldn't have been like, yeah, you're right. You're right. We better all leave and go back to Europe. And also they wouldn't have been able to comprehend the timeline anyways, because they weren't living on that timeline. So I think that his argument is false, but he feels that this 13,000 year arrival thing and I've encountered this perspective from a handful of friends of mine who are

indigenous friends of mine that it that it's meant to sort of it's meant to kind of de of it's meant to kind of deflate or call into question indigenous ownership of the landscape to be like, your people showed up, our people showed up, like no one's from here, people just showed up and they've always been fighting over it anyways.

And we're just the latest of another people to come here and fight for it. It's an interesting debate. Let me contextualize a little bit. So until the Folsom site was discovered, the widespread notion among people that studied this stuff was that Native Americans had only been here about three or four thousand years. Yeah. And when the Folsom site came out, there was this revelatory thing that people have been here since the ice age It was of enormous benefit to native americans because it established that they've been here a very long time 13 000 years is a really long time uh

650 human generations approximately So yeah fast forward Almost a century now now that 13 000 years old is no longer old enough, old enough, you have to keep pushing it back a little further. I just, I think 13,000 years is a really long time and it's certainly enough time to establish that you have some sort of patrimony over the land of this country. I don't quite understand the argument that it's not quite long enough to establish that.

It's a really long time. Yeah, it is. The scientific study of the human past in North America has confirmed that the descendant communities today, their ancestors were these people, that they arrived 650 human generations ago. Anzig showed that. Yeah, Anzig did show that,, and other, and other human remains.

Um, you know, if, if we look at, if, if we go back to, I assume you guys have ancestry in Europe and we ask how long do we have ancestry in Europe, it's almost certainly less than that, because there have been multiple populations that have run over Europe repeatedly. So 13,000 years is longer than anybody in Europe. Most people in Europe could truly lay claim to some place as a homeland. It's a long damn time. That's an interesting point.

Do you know I'm 2% African? I didn't know that. My wife always tells me to keep that down because she said I kind of oversell it. It's the best to understand. As long as you don't use that as an excuse to get away with any linguistic terms of phrase. She's like, I'd keep it under your hat.

She doesn't want it to impact my worldview, you know? Okay, again, join today. I'm going to have you guys tell people, I'm going to remind everybody who you are, then I'm going to have you tell people how to find your work and how to follow what you guys work on. So Todd Suravelle, the director of the George C. Frizen Institute of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, and Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archeologist

and an adjunct at University of Wyoming. So if you find cool stuff in Wyoming, if you're like, good Lord, it's a mammoth skull with a stone point stuck in its forehead. I'm gonna get so many photos of rocks off of this. Yeah. I gotta tell people's story. So I walk into Spencer's office,

and the first thing that greets me just laying on the floor is a giant, the end of a giant dinosaur femur So I said, what's that? He goes that's a rock. I Saw that was a big dinosaur bone. He said that's what the guy that brought it to me thought And he said I could have it if I wanted the guy that brought it just left it there But it was or was it not? It was not. It was not. No, the dude who brought it in, he's like, yeah, never mind. But it was a very convincing dinosaur bone. For not being a dinosaur bone, it was very convincing. It's an 80 pound paperweight. It's just sitting around his floor.

It's not in the collections. He didn't ask you to come out to his truck to look at it first. truck to look at it first. I would have been so excited. You would, this thing I'd have been like, holy cow, man. Now I got it. Now I'm rich. So how do people find your work? What should they check out? I have one of your books upstairs. You do. The Badger. Well, I just got it. Barger Gulch. Yeah. I had to buy that sucker. I brought one for you. Oh you did? Yeah. Bought it on Amazon. I searched my name. You can find my website. Spell your name out. Suravel, S-U-R-O-V-E-L-L. Okay. I do want to say that my job as director of the Frison Institute is raising money to support archaeological research in our department, mostly other people, money to support archaeological research in our department, mostly other people, students, faculty, people like Spencer.

So if you're interested in supporting the last dying breath of Clovis first archaeology and people who believe in Pleistocene extinctions, search the Frisian Institute. We're happy to take donations. Every dollar goes to research. Oh, excellent. Yeah, you can just Google me too. I've got some talks on YouTube. I got a research gate page where all my research goes.

Also write a newsletter on Substack called social stigma. It's about basically pop political issues and archeology and anthropology. That's free. You want to subscribe to that. That's interesting. Good. All right. Thanks guys.

Appreciate you coming on, man. It's been fascinating. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks guys appreciate you coming on man it's been fascinating. Yeah thank you. Yeah thank you. Hey, Spencer Neuhearth here to tell you about an exciting new project. I am thrilled to introduce me, Dieter Wörtel. It's a word game, where you- Wait, wait, wait. You can't call it that.

Why? Well, because of copyright stuff. That name is probably property of the New York Times or something. Oh, well, what should we call it? I don't know. What is it exactly? Well, it's a lot like Wordle. Players get six tries to solve a five-letter word from categories like hunting, fishing,

animals, nature. Then you get to compare your score to the scores from the Meat Eater crew, and new games will drop every Monday morning on our website. I think the perfect name would kinda sound like Wirtle. You know, have two syllables and end with L-E. Oh and it has to be an outdoorsy word. Hmm. Introducing Meat Eater Turtle.

It's like Wirtle, but better. You can play it right now at themeateater.com slash games.