The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 931: Eating Rotten Mammoths

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with Drs. David Meltzer and Metin Eren on: huge Clovis points; human mammoth scavenging; the overkill question; and more! Find their paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X26003317?via%3Dihub 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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All right, man, we're here to talk about my all-time favorite subject. The subject that has enthralled me since I'd learned that it was a subject. Ice Age hunters, Clovis, Folsom, the First Americans, this subject, and, My two favorite guys to talk about this subject are here. Dr. David Meltzer, who's the Henderson-Morrison professor of prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He's been on the show before a couple times. And Dr. Meton-Aren, professor of anthropology at Kent State University, who has also joined us on the show before.

And before we get into the main thing, well, let me say this. One would think that when talking about stuff from 15,000, 14,000, 13,000, 13,000, 12,000 years ago, it wouldn't change that the understanding would be static at this point. But this remains, and what's so enthralling about it,

is it remains a kind of like dynamic subject. New ideas, new findings. It changes. It's crazy to something that's that old, that our understanding of something that old could evolve. But it's like a great intellectual exercise. Before we get into what

your latest theories, your latest understandings of who these people were, what they did, how they lived, what they killed or didn't kill. Help me get, help me understand what I'm holding up right here. I'm holding up a, like what I would what, I'm holding up a Clovis point that's what, nine and a half inches long? Yeah. Easily, yeah. And I saw it and I thought it was a novelty item, like when you're a little kid and you buy those giant chocolate bars or giant erasers. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Tourist shops. But this is a mold. This is a mold. This This is a cast of a real thing.

Yeah. Well, it's a real thing, but how do we know it wasn't 12,000 years ago, somebody wanted to make a giant chocolate bar as a novel thing? That's what I'm wondering about. We don't know. We don't know. And unfortunately, the context of that find is not sufficient for us to really be able to tell. What an incredible specimen.

Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, it's a clobest point on steroids. I have a, you know, the people that do the archaeological drawings. He drew me a real life size one, but he drew me the real life size one, but he drew me the wrong point because this would have been a much bigger this would have been a much bigger look at the other ones that met and brought well that that's what yeah so you this would be for for i got to be uh not everybody's watching this on video could can one of you guys tell what we're looking at met and go yeah i'm looking at a clovis point but what am what do i what do i mean when i'm looking

at clovis point it's a a giant lance weapon tip and we don't know what weapons they were using but the one you're holding like you said about nine 10 It's got a concave base. It's got straight parallel sides. And the Clovis Point has these channels on both faces, and those are called flutes. And think about those, to visualize it, think about World War I bayonets, right? A groove.

There you go. Up each face. The old blood groove on a bayonet. The old blood groove, yes. And that was a hypothesis, actually, for the function of flutes for a long time, was that you stick your animal and blood shoots out those grooves. The issue, though, is if you're attaching that to some sort of spear, right, you're going to have lashings maybe or some sort of adhesive.

And so, like... It's not a good drink. It's not a good... Yeah, exactly. Not a good group for bloodletting. So there's been other hypotheses for why people fluted. But I don't think it's... I know why they do.

No one has a... Oh, why? Because the way they hafted it on there. Definitely. Well, yeah. No, that... I don't know that. I don't know.

It's just one of the things that gets thrown out there. In the sense that that is a function. but was that the purpose, was that the intended purpose of it? We don't know. Yeah, understood. Because a lot of people have made arguments about, well, you know, you're just showing off because putting a flute in, and Metton knows this more than anybody, really, because he's a master flintnapper.

That's the point at which it's most vulnerable to breakage, right, when you're making one of those points. When you're driving one of those flute flakes off because, what, Metton, they're two millimeters? Well, I'll point out under Metton's instruction. I fluted one. I'm gonna show the video, people. I mean, he kind of like, he pretty much set it up for me, you know, but I fluted one. You know what? And that's not easy. But he had done all the prepping and set me up and what's practice shots and everything.

So, yes. The flute, one more, I want to get back to these different sizes and stuff, but when you pressure test these for strength, that's a detriment, right? The flutes, no. Like the signature flute is not a structural detriment? No, in fact, it's an advantage. And we published a paper 10 years ago on this where what we showed was that fluted points actually can, they act like a shock absorber. So in the same way that a car, when it crashes into something, the front end crumples, protecting the people inside. The base of a Clovis point, because it's thinner, because of the flutes, upon impact, it reduced.

the compression stress on the point and actually reduces the amount of breakage. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Now, that's a structural property of that shape with the flutes. With the flutes. Now, we don't know if that's why they made the flutes,

but when you have flutes on a point, you get that property. You don't have to understand the sort of mechanics of it and the engineering properties of it, but you understand that, well, you know what, if you flute that thing and it's thinner at the base, the points will be less, less damaged during use. Got it.

Yeah. Right? Just like a baseball player, you know, in center field, you know, there's a high fly ball coming toward them. They're not calculating parabolas, right? And how it's going to come down at them. They're just running for the ball because they sort of intuitively understand that. Yeah.

Got it. You also brought the other end of the continuum. Yes. Which is, so here I'm holding a Clovis point that's engine eight. Yeah, maybe. Maybe, yeah. And they come even smaller. Yes.

And this brings up, this, I guess, adds to the mystery, is you're so that these, these people, and can you tell people and can you remind folks in whatever way it makes sense in terms of BC or blank years ago, when were these things being manufactured in what is now the United States? About 13,000. 13,000. 13,000 years ago. Okay. That you could have one of these that's nine inches, nine and a half inches.

You could have one of these that's an inch. Both polluted. But they're exactly, right? They're so married to the style. Well, that's... Like the shape and the fluting that you would think, do you know what I'm saying? It's just that they're like, no, I don't care about how long it is. I just need it to look like this.

Yeah, but I think this is an interesting point you bring up because roughly they're, the same shape, right? They're both lancelot. They have concave bases, parallel sides. But that's a very general way to look at the shape. Okay. And so I think you could say in the same way that there's a lot of variation in the human species, right? And Danny DeVito and Shaquille O'Neal, but they're all human. There's a lot of variation in Clovis. I see. And so, yeah, they have the general anatomical similarities, but there's still a lot of variation within that. Got it. Which is not, unexpected of course because these groups are out on a landscape they're they're moving they're out on that landscape for the better part of what 700 years yeah and they're in all

corners of north america and you're going to have what we've called sort of cultural drift right is that somebody's making something and they're not making it quite like dad made it or mom made it right no reason why mom couldn't have made those and so you've got variants that will just accrue over time. Yeah. And so while you can generally argue, okay, we've got Clovis points in the Pacific Northwest, which kind of look like Clovis points in the Northeast. So, yeah, in a general sense, they're all very, very similar, like Metton's metaphor.

But there's enough variation that we're seeing in all likelihood sort of time and space slipping by. And with that changes in the styles in which people are making things simply because they're not making clones, right? Yep, got it. There are human artisans who are producing these kinds of things, and there's inevitably going to be variation. And I think another contribution to that variation, right?

There's stylistic drift. But we just completed a 10-year project funded by the National Science Foundation where we looked at, we basically did a Clovis Point Olympics. Okay. And we tested small ones and big ones and thin ones and wide ones to see whether or not they all functioned the same way. And they don't. And so another reason.

reason why we may be getting lots of variation in Clovis is because this particular Clovis point is for butchery. This one is for hunting. This one is maybe even for digging. Well, not necessarily for those things, but better at. Better at. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You mean, from your, when you're looking at it now, yes, without understanding, you know, what it was originally crafted for, but when you look at now, like, well, let's just try to take a guess. Like, what would it be good for? Yes, that's good. Exactly. What they're experiencing? what Metton and his team's experiments showed was that some of them had really great penetrating power.

Okay. And it wasn't necessarily that big hunker that you've got right there. It was the smaller ones. Right? You know, we always sort of think about big mammoth, you need a big point. Yeah, for sure.

No, not necessarily. On the subject and what we want to talk about today, add to this, but I'll just say this and you can add to it if you feel that it's wrong. Like the primary questions that animate conversation animate conversations around Clovis. The primary questions would be, there's this big long-running, burning one,

which is, did humans manage to drive woolly mammoths and Macedons to extinction? Were they really able to come in and kill these things off? Or if it wasn't that, was it some degree of, they contributed to the die off of mammoths and masadons. Right. And other big megafauna, right?

And the reason that has, the reason that argument has teeth is it kind of opens up this idea of, it becomes a debate about, well, how destructive is the human species and how long has the human species been destructive? Right. Right. A lot of, there's this kind of, there's almost a moral element to it. If you could look and be like, man, 13,000 years ago, humans were driving animals to extinction. through hunting.

And it, I don't know, that can be weaponized in some way or can you be used to rationalize certain behaviors or it's just interesting, right? So that debate animates discussion of Clovis. It's kind of like part of why we talk about Clovis today. Another, I would say the other major thing from my view that animates the discussion of Clovis is who were the first Americans. Right. Right.

Did, did, is this, was this a. group of people that showed up in what is now the lower 48 or Alaska in the lower 48, that they show up where they had this common culture, a common language. They knew who each other, they knew each other. And they showed up and then they sort of proliferated as a people. And then eventually this people through distance and time kind of form these other unique cultures or

conversely disparate people showed up here and they coalesced into this this unified culture and for 700 years kind of became like Americans you know in some way

do you agree with that or is there any I'm missing? Where do we start? I mean on terms of like the big animated the reason that keeps it relevant. Okay. Absolutely agree. Okay. And I can say that certainly the weaponization aspect, when you look at when overkill, the notion that people came in and wiped out all of these different

animals, and the current tally is 38 different genera. Okay? So everything from mammoth and mastodon, giant ground sloth, various, you know, peckeries, tapers, horses, camels, etc. That really that really hits its stride in the 1960s. And it's tied to the environmental movement. You've got Rachel Carson, Silent Spring gets published. Everybody's reading Aldo Leopold, all of these things, people are getting concerned about the environment. And this was a good homily.

This was a good lesson. Look what we did before. Let's not do it again. Now, the problem is, I don't think people did that before, right? There's lots of reasons to protect the environment. What people did 13,000 years ago or not isn't one of them. Got it. So I agree.

It's sort of been part of the discussion. And in fact, it's been part of the discussion since the 1850s, when people first noticed the bones of these giant animals and said, what happened to them? And one of the very early hypotheses was where they killed off by Indian arrows. Oh. So it's been talking about it. Someone floated that in the 1800s? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Charles Lylel, on his visit to the United States, his second visit to the United States, published in 1849, talks about it.

Because people were wondering, where are they now? Because they knew enough about the geology to know that these animals had been around relatively recently, at least in geological time, right? I mean, they were found in near surface deposits, and the bones seemed in pretty good condition. They weren't fossilized, mineralized. So yeah, no, it's been a longstanding question. I had no idea that someone threw that out there at that time. Oh, yeah, but they dismissed it. Okay. Because it made no sense to them because they knew that, you know, the ability, because at that point, I think it's fair to say people hadn't killed off all the passenger pigeons.

People hadn't actually caused the extinction of animals prior to that. So they probably had a hard time perceiving the ability, as we do now, given the technologies that we have, how easy it would be to drive an animal to extinction. Yeah. Someone should visit that dude in his grave and be like, listen, I know that you got dismissed outright in 1850, but had you waited a century, your idea would have gotten more traction. Absolutely, yeah. You'd have tapped into the zeitgeist if you waited 120 years. Yeah. And it is an interesting thing because it does tie into the notion that this sort of romantic notion of these big game hunters.

You know, they've come across the land bridge. They blasted down into North America and they look out across a landscape with these aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom. And mind you, some of the animals that went extinct to only weigh 20 pounds. They're lumped in there with Megafon. I've never gotten that. I've never understood that. But, okay, so bunnies are megafauna. Yeah, no, I got it.

I'm guilty of being like, yeah, all the big animals, all the big animals went away. Yeah, except for moose and caribou and bison and are the other big animals that didn't go away. Yeah, no, I understand. I understand. And we are trying to understand that as a package, right? These people come across, presumably they're related. they must have been successful at colonizing landscapes like the Bering Land Bridge, and then they spread out.

But one of the things that we've learned from the genetic record is that this is a fairly, mind you, we have limited ancient DNA from this time period, right? So we have limited information about who these people are specifically. But one of the things that we do know is that we have, early on, very, very different cultural patterns among very closely related biological populations. So the cultures will change and they will change fairly rapidly. So we've got people who are very closely related to Clovis living in the Great Basin who have a fundamentally different material culture, who we haven't found any evidence that they're out

killing big game because, well, if you're in the Great Basin, Western North America, there's not a whole lot of mammoth or mastodon wandering around out there. Okay. Right? Yeah. So the cultural patterns are not necessarily in sync

with what we understand, at least at the moment, to be the biological patterns. Got it. Yeah. Regarding the second question you brought up, right, did they, were they here and coalesced or

and became the first Americans? The Clovis point has never been found outside of the Americas, North America, right? And so, so by definition, it is, it's an American, it's an American invention, which means there had to be people, has not, has not been found in South America. No, and it's not been found in Europe or in Asia, right? So if the Clovis point was invented in North America, just to just for, just to help people a little bit on geography, you mean,

if I'm over in Nome, Alaska, and I go, whatever the hell it is, 70, 80 miles, and I hit, um, then I hit Asia. Yeah. Right. And I look up and down the beach. I'm not going to find a Clovis point. We have not found any Clovis points in, in Northeast Asia. Okay.

Which means it was invented in North America, which means there had to be people here to invent it. Yeah. Right. So by logic alone, right, there had to have been groups pre-Clovis. on the landscape somewhere to have come up with that first American invention. Are there good, rock-solid,

indisputable Clovis points in Alaska? I know what my answer is. I'm waiting to hear her. There are fluted points in Alaska. But they are later in time. And they come from when Clovis folks and related Clovis groups went from south to north

through the ice-free corridor back into Alaska. But there's never been a Clovis point of Clovis age found in Alaska. The dates, and you can actually quite literally track them in a time-transgressive manner going up the ice-free corridor.

Is that right? Absolutely. No, because you've got... Because stuff like the Mesa site and stuff is fluted, but that's much younger than clothes. No, Mesa is not fluted. Oh, it's not. Okay, I'm sorry. Um, there's, um, there's other sites,

Putu site, Bedwell site, um, what's the Ted Gables? Uh, Nanana, um, or, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, there's, yeah, there's fluid points up there. Uh, and they date, um, let me think about this, probably 500 years later. Yeah, in the 12s. Okay. And, yeah, they're in the 12s. Uh, and in fact, there's fluted points in that corridor region that are also dating

in the 12s rather than at 13. And so it almost looks like the corridor, let's just back up for a second, right? You've got these two massive ice sheets that during the Pleistocene are bumping into each other, basically down the spine of the Rockies. Okay. At the end of the Ice Age, they pull back, they retreat,

and they do this around 14,000, 14 and a half thousand. Initially, it's just this vast mud flat, right? Meltwater everywhere, there's not a whole lot of things growing there, living there. I've been in places like that in Alaska. There you go, right? But this place is 1,500 kilometers long and there's nothing growing. You're not going to go down that corridor, right?

You're going to have to wait for the plants to colonize, the animals to then follow, right? that doesn't happen until around 13, maybe slightly later, maybe slightly earlier, but not early enough. Clovis is already down here by then, okay? But then later, as these groups are expanding in North America, some of them make their way back up. Sure. Because by then, you've got bison, it's grassland. Now, what happens around 10,000 years ago, maybe 11, is that. you've got boreal forest moving in and once the boreal forest move in that corridor is shut down right you're not going to be going up and down that thing anymore so it really looks as though people came in just because it's not like super productive grassland I mean what are you going to get in a boreal forest it's just less draw yeah I understand absolutely but when you have bison up and down that corridor and in fact you brought up Mesa that's a really good case to bring up because it looks like these groups are following

tracking bison up and down this corridor and what you see at mesa looks an awful lot like what you've got on the northern high plains at 10,000 10 and a half thousand 11,000 years ago okay so we can make the connections but the connections are not from the north down to the south they're from the south back up to the north it's the craziest thing yeah i was first introduced to that idea and i think was the word was the word backdrift or something was that a word Absolutely. Backwash. Yeah. Yeah. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations.

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So don't wait. Go to themeatater.com slash tour to get your presale tickets now. So who where right now if you, I don't know. What's the fashionable idea right now of like, and I don't mean, I don't mean to make it trivializing. Yeah, yeah.

But like the, the idea right now. If you had to make a guess and no one's only to this. But you had to make guess. Like, I'm holding to. Who,

who, who, who, like, who and when and how, who first step foot in, in what is today, however you want to put it,

like, Washington State, Idaho Panhandle, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, like, where,

of the first human step in what is now the lower 48? Who, who, who, who, what was his name? What was he doing? Name rank serial number. Yeah. Like when. Right. If you had to guess.

And I'm setting this up. I know you're like a, you have to take this seriously. You spent your life publishing on this. You have a reputation at stake, but just casually. It's going to be, it's going to die right here in your studio. Just just casually. Like. Yeah, no.

Tell me a thing that wouldn't surprise you. I know you guys hate conversations like this, but tell me the thing that wouldn't surprise you. It's fine. It's fine. Look, I think that there is compelling evidence. Okay. We're going to do this evidence-based, not faith-based.

Okay, yeah. Okay. I think there's compelling evidence that people were here 15,000 years ago, plus or minus. Okay. Okay. I wouldn't be surprised if they were here earlier. Getting them here earlier is complicated. just because of the geology and because of the routes that would have been available.

Okay. We just mentioned that this interior corridor was not going to be available until around 13. So if people were here at 15, they had to come some other route. Okay. The coast was open. Ice had pulled back from the Pacific margin by 17, 16 and a half. So that's a route that you can take into the Americas and be here by 15. Okay.

We know from the genetic record that we have that ancestral Native Americans split off from Northeast Asian populations sometime around 25. I would not be surprised if people were here at 25,000, right? Like that wouldn't shock you. No, no. I mean, it would just make us have to think, well, how did they get here? Who were they? and how do they relate to everybody that we have after 15? Got it.

Right? And look, if people were here at 30, we'd have to give that a rethink as well. Okay, does that mean that the genetic evidence we have is just insufficient to tell us when these ancestral Native American populations first emerged? Does that mean that these groups that were here earlier were not related to ancestral Native Americans

as we know them that were here at 20? 12. Yeah. Right. You always have to follow the evidence. And, you know, you can sort of set up parameters of the problem and say, but you always have to sort of add the caveat as we understand it today, based on the evidence that we have today, this is the thing that has greater prior probability. This is the thing that has less. Yeah. Some years ago, about 10, actually, there was a paper published that suggested people were here 130,000 years ago. That one is really hard to sort of make sense. That gets even more complicated.

Well, yeah, because then you're not really talking about, you know, modern homo sapiens. Yeah. And so we just don't see any evidence archaeologically or genetically to suggest that those folks were here. Yeah. Because we don't even see them in parts of Asia by then. Got it. Yeah, how seriously can you take, this is some stuff we've discussed in the past, but how seriously can you take any idea that it wasn't Siberians?

None. There's no, they came from Asia. For the viewers at home that are not watching on TV, I'm shaking my head, no. Yeah, yeah. So when people bring up that, you know, this idea that, like, that Europeans came or, Pacific Islanders out of the South came or whatever. It's just that you feel the evidence is still strong or overwhelming that these are like, these are Siberians. Oh, there's no feel about it. The idea that Stone Age people cross the Atlantic, I think is one of the most falsified

hypotheses in paleoan archaeology. I mean, it isn't supported genetically, archaeologically, chronologically, oceanaut like the oceanographers didn't show it didn't work. I've published several papers and so have you on that idea that maybe the first Stone Age Americans came from Europe and it no matter how you slice it, it doesn't work. And so. Yeah, no, I mean, if they came here, they suffered complete and total genetic amnesia, cultural amnesia. I mean, they forgot everything that they were doing in Europe and they forgot to

to bring their DNA with them. Yeah. Because all of the DNA that we have, both ancient and modern in the Americas, is Native American. When you look at this question globally of pioneering populations of humans, do you ever see, you know, New Zealand or Australia or wherever, do you ever see where a population gets somewhere, but it doesn't work out? and they don't thrive, they blink out for whatever reason. Yeah.

And then thousands of years go by and it gets re-hit or does humans usually have a way of when they get somewhere, it works. See, that's a really tough question because in the old world, Europe, Asia, Africa, it can be difficult if you don't have bones to know whether you're dealing with homo sapiens or homorectus or Heidelberg. or Neanderthalensis, there's all these other hominins, Denisovans that are running around. And so, and they're oftentimes using the same stone tool technology, right?

So you don't know if you're dealing with a Homo sapiens site who's making some sort of discoid core or a Neanderthal. Okay. This is one reason why to understand the mechanics of prehistoric colonization, North America is so valuable, right? And I think there's some regions in particular, like the Great Lakes in New England, that are really great, because you had glaciers covering the Great Lakes.

Oh. And so when the glaciers recede and we get... Gave you a nice clean slate. It's a demographic blank slate. I got you. And so that's why it's really great to study colonization processes there. That's an interesting point, man. Like, it doesn't have what makes Africa so complicated.

Yeah. Yes. Got it. But failed migrations is what you're asking about. And back... Like, like not just failed migrate, but failed piety. pioneering events. Oh, no, that's, yeah.

No, I actually argued that many years ago in a paper, just on sort of first principles, the idea that absolutely every movement into a landscape was successful, which is not to say that a movement was successful, but groups within that could have disappeared for want of an ability to cope with an environmental disaster. Yeah. Right.

One can only assume, even though it would be extremely difficult to test, one can only assume that groups that are moving out of Africa 100,000 years ago and moving out across the globe, some of them must have not made it. Now, one of the things that's been most interesting coming out of the genetic record is that we have what are referred to as ghost populations showing up in ancient genomes. these are signatures of DNA that are unrelated to any modern population. So clearly there were other groups with whom ancestral Native Americans interacted with what became of them, right? And were they possibly, and we don't know this, but here's one possible case, where they here when Native Americans showed up and there was interaction between them and for all intents and purposes,

they disappeared as a population. Yeah. Right? This gets back to your question earlier. This is why this question about the peopling is so dynamic and is constantly, you know, right there on the front burners of us trying to figure out because the more we learn,

the more complicated the story is. You know, when I started, which was a while ago, it was very simple, right? Mammoth hunters. They come into Alaska, they go down the ice freak border, or they start killing everybody. Total bad. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was a nice story, but there was no nuance to it. And what we've been learning over the years, and this is actually one of the reasons why, you know, we just published this piece on scavenging, was that we wanted to sort of critique the stereotypes. We wanted to sort of explore variation and nuance and are there alternative explanations for data that we've just kind of in a very common sense way interpreted over the years. Yeah. Let's get into your, let's get into your new paper. Segway. Yeah.

Tell me whichever one you wants to do it. Like, tell me the gimme the gist of the new paper you have about scavenging. So pretend you're a scientist. Okay. Got it. And I do that all time. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's great.

I play a scientist on TV, but I'm not one. And you have a very simple question. Okay. How many baseball hats of the home team are in the stadium on game day? Okay. And you have a hypothesis, right? There's going to be more green hats because that's the color of the home team than red hats, which is the away team. Okay.

And I think that because it's the home team. It's home team, right? And their fans live around here. Exactly. Right. So you've got your hypothesis. and you now want to test it. So you hire some dude to...

Has to be a dude, I'll bet. Well, only dudes are dumb enough to go count, right? So you hire some dude to go to the stadium on game day, and he counts all of the hats, okay? Comes back to you. And he's like, all right, scientist Steve, Dr. Steve, there were 15,000 green hats. Okay.

There was 10,000 red hats, right? You've got your data, you're like, supports my hypothesis, great. Yeah. Right? A couple years go by, and then you learn that the guy you hired to count all the hats is red, green, colorblind. You hired me for the job. It was a bad move, Steve. Bad move. So how do you know what the answer is? You don't. And so what our paper shows is that archaeologists are currently...

I don't know where you're going, but I love the analogy so far. What our paper shows is that archaeologists are colorblind to hunting versus scavenging and the interpretation of those two things in the sites we dig up. We can't tell the difference. The term is equilfinality. Okay. And that multiple processes can result in the same product. They can result in artifacts being found with bones.

They can result in artifacts that got snacks. tapped found with bones and we were talking this morning on the way over to the studio the experiment that we did with you guys in what four years ago now yeah which was just to refresh people we yeah these guys were conducting experiment where we were using stone tools to butcher a freshly killed bison carcass and then they took great interest in how did the tools break How did the tools dull? Where do the tools wind up? When you lost them or broke, I'm like, what did it look like? Meaning, so then you have not a collection of tools from having killed the animal, you had a collection of tools from having butchered the animal. I'm also just thinking of the famous efficiency part of that experiment. And Dr. Michelle Bebber's meat per minute measure. Okay. Which is published in the scientific literature. Yeah. So what we found in that,

one of the things people have said, and I'm guilty, right? I'm not going to paint anybody else with this brush. I'm included here. You know, you look at these busted points and you say, oh, well, that must be N-shock as a consequence of impact. Well, what we discovered was in the points that you guys were using, some of them snapped just like things that I've interpreted as N-shock from use and impact. Yeah.

Right? Like hit a shoulder blade and broke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those are the kinds of things that make you pause. And you realize you can't automatically assume that just because you have these things with a mammoth, that therefore these were the items that we used to kill it. Okay. That's the red, green color blindness that met in this talking about that we have. And it's important to stress this fact. We're not saying every site with a mammoth was a result of scavenging.

We've never said that. We've never said that. What we're trying to do is think harder about how we can discern what the process was that caused that product, right? And this is a problem in which, because there are multiple processes, you run into that issue of equifinality, because you can just as easily explain these things as a consequence of scavenging as you could. hunting. And we would love to know, is there an unequivocal, demonstrable, diagnostic test for one or the other? There isn't even a diagnostic test for scavenging. I went into this paper thinking, oh, well, we can tell scavenging because we have some instances

of Clovis points that were used, or actually, I'm sorry, ivory shafts that were used to pry apart mammoth feet. And I'm thinking, well, that has to be scavenging because rigor mortis had set in, right? The animal was already dead. But then in the course of doing this research, you know, one of the things that we learned was that rigor mortis under certain circumstances can kick in pretty quickly. Okay. So that animal might actually have been very recently killed by that hunter who then wanted to pry apart the feet. What do you mean by pry apart the feet? Get into the joints there to break apart the portions of the foot to get it footpad me. Okay, I thought, I was picturing that you meant, like, move his legs apart.

But you mean, like, literally, like, break the feet apart. Exactly. I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, every time you sort of think, okay, well, this is clearly a signature of hunting or clearly a signature of scavenging, then you think a little harder about it.

You realize, well, geez, the only instance that we sort of came up with in this paper is that if you see a beached whale from 200,000 years ago, long before people had marine technology, long before they went out in boats and could harpoon things, and it's been butchered on the beach, that's scavenging because they're not going to get in a whale. Sure. Right.

But, see, when I said that I had a thing that was going to trip you guys up. Okay. And it was going to blow your minds and make a question your career. I'm still waiting for it. It has to do with whales. Oh. But I'll, I'm gonna. You're wait.

No, I'm gonna wait a minute to bring it up. No, I'll bring it up now. Go ahead. Don't leave it, Steve. I was with some whale hunters and none of it. Oh, very cool. Okay. Okay.

And we were talking a lot about, I mean, they use contemporary weaponry now, but we were talking a lot about what their ancestors, how their ancestors hunter whales. And I was thinking about you guys. Because I feel, and maybe you can correct me on this, I feel that somewhere in your head, it's a little bit like you feel that it's a little bit outlandish or a little bit you're skeptical that humans could have killed these things oh no mechanically or maybe you have no skepticism about this but i was like but how would how would someone view i mean but like so if it's not in your head i think it's in some people's heads like really you're going to take a spear and kill a mammoth but then i was thinking like

Bahamah we know like as a matter of fact that humans were using stone tip bone tipped stuff and killing huge whales but I think that and I don't mean to put words in your mouth

and you're shaking your head like you don't have a problem with them killing it but I think that there is a sense from some people like how could they have walked up with a spear and killed a mammoth? I'm like I don't know how they do how they kill whales So I've given talks over the years where I've had hunters in the audience. And I've talked about killing mammoths where you've got a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it. And I've seen a lot of shaken heads where people are saying, no way am I doing that to a six-time animal. Thank you very much.

It would seem like it would seem insane. It would seem insane. No, but people did. Yeah. I don't think there's any question that people were hunting. animals of all sizes, right? And the question is, how often? What was the frequency?

To what degree was it a critical element of their diet? Was that the only thing they were doing on the landscape? Yeah. I mean, this is the thing that we're sort of trying to get around is the sort of singular model. The stereotype. The stereotype. You know, we want to understand the complexity

of people's lives, their hunting strategies, their foraging strategies, which facultative scavenging, and this is what this paper is all about, the idea that if there's a four-ton animal dead on the landscape, why would you not take advantage of it?

Yeah, sure. Right? Were you able to look? Because when I was looking at the work, that you did, you address this, best want to tee it up to be, in my head, just as a guy today that wanders around out in the woods a fair bit and in a lot of places.

It's just like there aren't, it would be exceptionally rare, exceptionally rare to stumble across a salvageable, untouched, fresh carcass. It happens. It happened twice. Like when the lake I grew up, on. I can think of two cases. A deer swam up went through Bob Starritt's yard

and snapped its neck on Bob Starritt's fence. Don't for Bob Starritt. Why did he have a fence? Well, another one came through and got hung up and one came through and got hung up on Chet Utt Singer's fence. Oh, Bob and Chet, man. So, sure. And we scavenged those carcasses. But it's just not, it's so exceptional that I can tell you about these things that happen

when I was, I'm now 52, I can tell you about these things that happened when I was a teenager as being outliers. And they involve fences, human-made fences. But it's just like you can't, it's not reliable, from my view. It's not reliable to wake up in the morning and be like, kids, me and mom are going to walk until we find a fresh, dead thing, and then we're going to butcher it and bring it on home. Okay. I'll let Metton respond to that, but then I want to talk to you about reliability. Okay. Go Metton. So I have have an admission to make and it's that you are actually the inspiration for this paper oh great and it's because i because of my view on on april 21st 2025 episode 693 you said when you're out wandering around

the mountains oh god you actually have the entire quote or out wandering around the woods you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff if you wanted me to produce a dead thing i would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wandering around. I stand by that. So I've always laughed at the idea that they were just finding carcasses lying around, right? And I heard that quote, and it just got me thinking, right? It got me thinking about scavenging. It got me thinking about scavenging during the late Pleistocene when it was a very different

environment. A lot more animals. A lot more animals. Yeah, sure. Very different animals. And it got me thinking about our modern experience versus how and why we interpret the things the way we do over the centuries of the Clovis Archaeological record. Okay. Right. Where you had thousands and thousands of people who were spending every day of their lives outside. I mean, how often are you out in the field? Not like that. Exactly. Where am I at right now?

And you're out there for a week at a time, two weeks at a time, in a circumscribed area. But if you're spending your entire life out there, and let's just say a life expectancy of 45 plus or minus. Okay. We don't know, but that's generally the sort of estimation. That's thousands and thousands and thousands of person hours out on that landscape, on a landscape. on a landscape that has a hell a lot more game on it than the landscape does today.

And it's got elephants out there. And elephants on that landscape are going to last for a long time, right? It's not like a mouse dies and you've got to get there and scabbage it really quickly. Yeah. Even if stuff's working on it,

they're going to be working on it a long time. Absolutely. And sometimes they can't work on it because in winter months, and this is, we learned so much about carrion ecology and scavenging in the broader biological world in the winter months,

some carcasses just are not accessible because they freeze, which is something humans don't have to worry about because we've got stone tools and fire. I think the other thing to keep in mind, too, right? Hang on, you found that example in Dale Guthrie's book. Yes, it was.

There's a, the case of Blue Babe, the sort of freeze-dried bison, there's a carnassial tooth. from, is it a lion? A panthera? In the hide. And Guthrie's interpretation, I think it's a reasonable one,

is that that cat was basically trying to get into the carcass, and it was frozen. It snapped the tooth off. Oh, I pictured him breaking it. I don't know. I didn't know that theory. I know about this,

but I always thought that it was suspected or that he broke it off and fighting with the thing. Oh, that's entirely possible, too. But broke it off, trying to get a frozen thing ripped apart. Yeah. It would be more likely that it would break

if this thing was frozen. Yeah, exactly. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say, you had two examples where you found carcasses, right? I got a lot. Well, okay, so a lot.

But I'm saying they're unique enough that I remember them. Yeah, fair enough. Okay. But imagine you, 10,000 use, right? You're the Clovis population. I want to clarify my point. But I want you to go,

but I want to clarify for my point. Yes, but not reliable. Okay, let me let's talk about it. But not take it away. I'm not going to interrupt you get, but I just want to clarify what I'm getting at. It happens, but I would never plan on it. No, no, no. That's the whole point of facultative scavenging. You can't plan on it. You don't plan on it. Just like you don't plan on hunting, right? You go out looking. You're out there looking for animals. Are you going to see them? All the time. All the time. Okay. Look, nobody is saying that folks depended on scavenging. Depended on scavenging. What we're saying, you're saying. You're saying. You're saying. You're is like all other animals, all other predators in the animal kingdom, they all scavenge. Herbivore scavenge. Oh, God. Deer, hippos, giraffes, chimps will scavenge. Okay?

Yeah. So why would we assume that humans are any different, right? We're not arguing that don't make the assumption that humans were solely scavengers, in which case it would be an unreliable strategy without question. If they're facultative scavengers, if they come across something, then the question is, what's the cost benefit? Is it worth tracking where you haven't seen any big animals for quite a while? I mean, goodness knows, you've been on unsuccessful hunts before. Have you not? Yeah, plenty.

Yeah. So if you're on an unsuccessful hunt, and it's been quite a while since you killed anything, and there's a dead elephant laying there, are you going to pass it up? No. Exactly. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Hello. My gosh. Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish, right inside the free I-HER radio app.

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Cheers. Open the free IHR Radio app. Search video podcasts and tap watch. Hey, everyone, big huge announcement. Meat Eater Live, the Christmas tour, is kicking off again this year for the Christmas season of 2026. This time we're hitting the Midwest. Meat Eater Live, the Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities. We've got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and Fargo.

Join myself, Janus, Putellis, Claynew, Brent Reeves and Randall Williams for a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news, and opinions from across the worlds of hunting, fishing, wildlife conservation, and wild foods. Also, we're already stacking up some great special guests. I got my buddy Bubbly Doug making the appearance in Madison. Go to the meat eater.com slash tour and sign up to get early access to pre-sale tickets right now and secure your spot. tickets will be available to the public on Friday, so don't wait. Go to themeatater.com slash tour to get your presale tickets now. And when you look at the 15 sites where we have good association between Clovis artifacts and proboscitians.

Can you dig in on this for a minute? Yeah. This number. Yeah. This is where we've got Clovis points and maybe flakes or scrapers in a, secure context with elephant bones such that there's reason it's reasonable to assume that those artifacts were involved in the dismemberment in some way of that animal you know we're the killing of that animal or the killing of that animal right but there's but yeah it's just it i never knew that i never

knew this number until fairly recently there's like a number yeah it's like there's 15 well there's there's there's actually almost a hundred sites in what people have claimed but of those the the most secure ones where the artifacts and the bones entered the geological record at the same instant, we put it that way, that we feel that, yeah, okay, these things interacted in some manner. And the question is, what was the nature? Did they kill the animal, then dismember it? Did they come upon a carcass and then dismember it? Did they shoot at it and the animal wandered off and died? There's lots of different possibilities. And so what we're trying to do is disentangle all of these possibilities so you've got these 15 sites and they're likely spread across the 700 years of

clovis okay right when you think about that like per decade or per century that's not a lot of sites per year right so let's say hypothetically seven of those sites are scavenging right that's not a lot of scavenging that's going on in terms of the sites that we found and that's not a lot of hunting of mammoths that's going on either, right? Yeah. So I think the issue is that we can't take our personal experiences in the modern day of not finding carcasses or anything and try to impose that on the past because there's a different time scale, right?

Pass is a foreign country. Yes. One of my third favorite quote. Yeah. Yeah. And when you look at scavenging, even today, and it's very limited. in modern-day hunter groups, hunter-gatherer groups, our co-author Jim O'Connell, working with the HADSA.

Oh, okay. Yeah, this is what I wanted you to talk about this from, because you guys discussed this. Yeah, no, in fact, the best thing about this paper that certainly I enjoyed the most was working with O'Connell, who has spent a lot of time with hunter-gatherers, working with John Speth, who knows more about sort of the ethno-historic record, you know, the records from the 1500s and 1600s before all the changes

that take place and what was going on then and with Brianna Pobinar, who has spent a lot of time looking at the earliest archaeological records. You know, we sort of brought together this group of people with very, very different perspectives. What O'Connell brought to the table was, yeah, the Hazzah, if they're given the opportunity to scavenge, they will. He said they, if they see vultures, circling in the distance, they'll go check it out. They've gotten very good at confronting lions. And we've got

instances of Hadesa, small groups of Hotsa, even just a couple people, driving off prides of lion. Got it. Just with a couple shots. Yeah. And what he said was about 14% of the meat that they got during the time that he was tracking with them

came from scavenged animals. Is that right? Yeah. So we're not saying it was the major component of the Nobody would, right? Because to your point, it's not reliable. It's part of the groove. It's like it's part of what happens. You know, there is, and Metton did a huge amount of work

on sort of tracking the biological side of this. But one of the things that comes out of that discussion is that it's really a continuum between hunting and scavenging. And sort of where you are in that continuum depends on availability and opportunity and so on and so forth. There's even some suggestion that T-Rexes were scavengers. I don't know how, Heck, you would prove that.

But, can I? Go ahead. I have, do you remember the writer, if you ever hear the writer, Jack Hit? Yeah. Well, absolutely. He's hilarious. Jack Hit wrote a piece about, Jack Hit wrote this big piece about, who's a big dinosaur guy in town?

Jack Horner. Yeah, Horner. He was on the show one time. Okay. Jack Hit was writing about that stuff. Okay. And he was expressing, like, skepticism of anyone that would go into a field where the experts are mostly 13-year-old.

old. So I have kids young enough where, you know, they all go through the dinosaur phase. And that's, so having had kids that went through a dinosaur, their dinosaur phase in recent years, where that came from was someone started looking at by the skull structure of a T-Rex. What must have been like an incredible olfactory capability. And so, what? Why would they need to smell so good was the idea? Like they have all these chambers and whatnot for smell. So being like, they weren't a site predator, perhaps. They were wandering around being like, you know, 10 miles away, there's some rotten thing. That's kind of what pushed that idea, was that they seem to have like an incredible olfactory structure.

Yeah. I would be skeptical that T-Rex was only. scavengers because what we learned from the biological yeah yeah no oh no um but that's but that's what everyone got all hip to that and it's like it's it's a thing that happens you got to realize this is a thing that happens is it winds up being yeah and and with all due respect like some of your work is like this way too it winds up being it upsets a narrative yeah that like terex must have just wandered around ripping shit to shreds and killing everything in its path And then someone's like, why do you think, why do we think that?

Yeah. And then everybody's got to go, yeah, I don't know why I thought that. I just like, because the cartoons and stuff. I don't know. I don't know why I thought that. And they're like, well, he was really good at smelling. Maybe he's really good at smelling rot and stuff. And that was his group.

And it like, and it starts the conversation. So the same way we talked about is like this image and I always held it of these big dudes wandering the landscape, whack and mammoths left it, right? I don't know. It's just why do I think that? I don't know why. It's conventional wisdom. It's seductive.

Yeah, it is. It is. It's appealing. It's romantic. It's, you know, hey, these guys made it all the way over here from Siberia. You know, they must have been tough dudes. Killing ma'am is left and right. One for breakfast.

One for lunch. Yeah. We can't tell the difference, though, with any one archaeological site. Yeah. I mean, we went through every single potential criteria, broken Clovis points, impact scars on the Clovis points. These things called emlets, which are microscopic linear impact traces,

which are thought to occur when a projectile enters an animal, right? And you get these little microscopic lines on the point. You get those same lines from hitting a bush. We've done experiments, right? Or hitting grass. If you just throw and miss, you get those things.

Same thing, right? So of our 15 sites, both of us suspect, at least some of those, were hunted, right? Some of those mammoths at those 15 sites were hunted. Yeah. Some of them, I think, were probably scavenged, right?

We don't know, but we can't tell. So we don't know if it's all 15 were hunted and zero were scavenged. All 15 were scavenged, zero were hunted. And you had to have contemplated the middle ground, which is what you come across when it's all messed up. Yeah. For whatever reason, and then you go over there and kill it real quick. Well, one of the things that came out of the animal literature was that,

wildlife biologists can sometimes have a hard time telling whether something was was hunted or scavenged and who scavenged it right and that's just a couple days later yeah you know if it's out there in the rain uh in the snow if it's really high heat um you know you just you just can't tell unless you got a wildlife camera that caught it in the act and we don't have wildlife cameras that caught people in the act going after a mammoth can you can you help tie this work tie this discussion about where they like were they they're perhaps killing it perhaps killing some perhaps scavenging some your curiosity about this has to be fed by this bigger question right your curiosity about this is is spawned from your interest you're motivated by this big a

discussion of how probable is it that humans killed all this stuff? Can you connect these? Do you view this discussion is totally outside of that or do you think it informs the discussion? That the plasticine extinctions were driven by humans?

I think for me, what this research shows is that we cannot use archaeology to test that question of overkill. Got it. So a couple of things for me. One of the things is I'm really interested in how people adapt to landscapes.

And I want to know about how they respond to the environmental and ecological challenges of surviving on that landscape. How are they successful on that landscape? What is the impact of the environment and the climate of that landscape on their adaptations? What is the impact of their adaptive strategies on the resources on that landscape? landscape. So for me, it's not so much the specific question of extinctions, though I'll get to that in a moment. It's really the larger question, what was it like to come into what was either an empty continent or a continent that was at the very best lightly populated, where there hadn't been much of a human footprint or human impact up to that point. What are folks doing on that landscape and how do they do it and how did they figure it all out? right? Because one of the things that's really clear is that by around 11,000 years ago, you've got people in very different parts of North America developing adaptive strategies, incorporating lots of different resources in their diet. I think that's happening earlier as well,

but that's a sidebar. So they clearly had figured stuff out. So I want to know about that process and I want to know how it unfolded and what the impacts in both directions of the environment on the people and people on the environment. Extinctions is one piece of that, obviously, right? And the problem that I have with overkill in addition to what mentioned,

met and just mentioned, is that it's also the end of the Pleistocene. So all sorts of things are happening at the end of the Pleistocene. And so the question becomes an even larger equilinality issue. Right? If the Pleistocene is coming to an end, how can you say it was just humans until you've factored out and precluded the possibility of all the changes that are taking place at the end of the Ice Age as the Earth emerges from the grip of 20,000 years of cold, right? that that can't not have had an impact on all of these different animals.

But the thing that makes it a really interesting and challenging question, and which is why I think I don't want to just stop at saying, oh, it was humans or not humans. I want to find out how do you kill off mammoth and horses and camels on the great grasslands of North America, mastodons in the forest, giant beavers in swamps, gliptodonts in Florida, animals with very different ecological tolerances,

ecological thresholds, very different adaptations. It's too easy an answer to say that humans killed them all because we don't have any evidence that humans killed, you know, 36 of the 38 or, you know, okay. Yeah. So that becomes, for me, the more interesting. intellectual challenge that we have to address. And so, yeah, if humans were responsible for killing the last mammoth standing, fine. Does that mean there are cause of the extinctions?

I don't think so, because everything that we're seeing in the environmental record and in the ancient DNA record is that they've already started to swirl around the drain long before humans showed up. So if you want to cause, it's not going to be the last, mammoth that was killed by a hunter, it's going to be processes that were set in place thousands of years earlier. And that becomes a question of how do we understand that in terms of what's happening at the end of the Pleistocene, at the end of the Ice Age, climatically and environmentally and ecologically? This question is a little out of order.

I should have asked earlier, all those animals you just named. So go through that list again, the big stuff that vanished. or hit me with four or five big things that vanished mammoth, mastodon, gompathyr, camel, horse, arimatherium, nothrotheriops, myelodon, glossetarium. How many do you want it on? That's plenty, because it demonstrates this point that I want to dig in on for a minute. Okay. We have 15 sites. We have 15 sites where we have proboscisidians. Human tools with mammoth and mastodon. Mixed in with proboscitians, mixed in with elephants. Yeah. But we don't have those with giant beavers. We don't have those with giant ground sloths. We don't have them with Astanalegas, the extinct bunny.

We don't have them with, you know, the little tiny antelope that disappeared. Okay, so hear me out. Wait, wait, wait, Steve. One more thing. Please, yeah, go on. We don't have them with the spruce tree that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. Okay. I don't know about that spruce tree.

Yeah. Really? Yeah, absolutely. And Paul Martin, bless his heart, wonderful guy. He was the guy that was really behind the overkill stuff. He was a terrific guy. He tried to explain why humans might have caused the extinction of the spruce tree. Really?

Yes, he did. It's in his 2005 book. Kids run around machete. He's whacking away at him all the time. No, it was setting fires out of season. Okay, got it. Yeah. All right.

I'll let you finish. Sorry. No, no, I don't have a point. It's kind of a question. be like if let me ask a sub i got a sub question is there do we have any mammoths or masadons that have a projectile point jammed into it and does that even happen when you test it we do in the old world yeah so in europe and in asia we actually have stone points embedded in bone okay um we do not have a single clovis point embedded

in any proboscadian bone in north america and because all the stuff you do i'm sure you have gone around with fresh bone jabbing points and do it oh it happens i mean is it hard to do is it hard to pull off uh i mean i've never stabbed an animal with clovis points um no i mean just like cattle bones or something oh uh yeah i don't know maybe you should i don't know yeah shoot some shoot some like well george frisand did yeah he got uh clovus point in embedded in bone. Yeah. He did.

Yeah, he did. Okay. That's what I was curious. Yeah. Oh, it's happened. It's happened. It's not like a one and a thousand chance. Oh, no.

No. In the old world, there's several archaeological examples of that occurring, which is very strong evidence that that particular animal was hunting. Which I think is where you were going with that. And that's a fair point. I just, that was like a sub question because it kind of informs this. It'd be the, I don't, I don't even have this formed in my head yet. But we have these sites where they've killed elephants.

And I'm just trying to make a word that lumps man. and Colombian mammoths and all that kind of stuff. Macedon's. They've killed elephants. So, but we don't have sites where they killed giant ground sloths. We don't have sites where they've killed saber-toothed cats. So I would look and I'd say, well, they had, if I'm assuming that humans killed all this big stuff off, I would be like, well, man, it sure seems like they had a preference. Mammoths were the ones to get.

Yeah. Because when we, like, we don't have this other stuff. So they're going out and they've been like, no, I'm going to look for a mammoth and get it. If it's scavenging, why don't we have scavenged? If it's just opportunistic scavenging, where are all the scavenged giant groundsloss? Where are the scavenged giant beavers? Yeah. Go ahead.

Well, there's two issues there, right? The first is tephanomy and how well certain animals survive on the land. landscape after they, you know, die. And mammoth bones are thick. They just have a great, they often also are found near watering holes. Okay. They can be gently buried. So you'll have a greater chance of finding mammoth bones and any other of those things.

Okay. And just for bison, which we'll talk about. Yeah. Yeah. Also, too, like, they were probably hunting bunnies and all those other things. Sure. Just because we don't have the sites, right? So I think the other thing.

Yeah, I can see like, like rabbit bone. Yeah. It just gets crunched up by stuff and eat. Yeah, and so it's really important to separate out the question of hunting and what they hunted versus did they cause the extinction of these animals, right? I wouldn't be surprised that they hunted bunnies, right? But there's no evidence that they cause the extinction of those things. And I would add to, you raise an interesting question, right? if they were scavenging, why aren't we seeing scavenged arrema theorems, giant sloths?

Right? We're not entirely sure that all of these animals were even around when these folks. Gotcha. Okay. That's a great point, man. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you probably can't make a perfect timeline. Well, no, we can't.

And in fact, when you actually look at the last, they're called last appearance dates, which is the last radiocarbon date that we have. have on an animal. Of the 38 different genera, about 20 of them, 20 or 18, don't hold me to the specific number, are gone by 20,000 years ago. Oh. Right. So, yeah. I mean, it's a fair point to say, why weren't they scavenging the other things? Why were they scavenging mammoth? Well, mammoth and mastodon actually survive up until around 10,000 years ago. And in fact, mastodons were living in the Great Lakes area when Folsom people were killing bison out on the high plains okay so is that right oh yeah oh absolutely um and so what that is telling us is that you know if you are going to scavenge

that's the big hunk of meat that's laying on the landscape for you we know that they were there we don't know about the other three dozen general okay but also they're going after bison they're hunting bison at this time. So we know that they are, in fact, hunting. And it's really interesting in a number of clovis sites, the targets are not necessarily mammoth. There are bison in some of these clovis sites. Got it. The other thing we learned in this research is that elephants last much longer on the landscape after they die than lots of other animals. So just the pure chance of humans coming across an elephant carcass would be higher than a bunny or a caribou.

Just because of how huge it is. How huge it is. And there are documented cases of elephants lasting seven months on the landscape. And then they get scavenged, right, after that point. So... Yeah. And you know what?

Your question makes me think, too. I don't think we've systematically gone through all of these sort of early kills of deer or bison and sort of did the same kind of vetting of those as we've done mammoth kills and it were mammoth scavenging events and yeah that'd be interesting when you look at other stuff do you see more definitive kill kind of stuff going i mean that's what i would think but you know what we haven't sort of turned our sort of critical eye on that although the more we do comparisons between Clovis and post-Clovis hunter-gatherer groups,

archaeologically, the more similarities we tend to find. You know, we used to think that fluting was a paleo-Indian behavior. And then we excavated Goodson Rock Shelter in Oklahoma, where we dug two meters down, we found fluted by faces. We thought, oh, my goodness, this is one of the first Clovis rock shelters ever found. We were so excited. We get radio carbon dates. Well, it ticks.

We get radiocarbon dates from two meters down where we're finding the fluted by faces, right? The radiocarbon dates come back 4,500 BP. And we're like, oh, those must be wrong. You know, charcoal can move between layers and rock shelters. So we do optimal stimulated luminescence or OSL dating, right, of that same layer. The dates come back, 4,500 BP. Oh, those must be wrong. Sand grains can move, right?

It was the third field season we've been sweating and getting bit by ticks and all this sort of stuff. Very unpleasant. We find notched archaic projectile points that we know from other sites date to 4,500 BP made on the same exact stone raw material as our fluted by faces. And we had to succumb to the evidence at that point. So these folks were making like two kinds? No, what they were doing was they were, it's convergent evolution. they were basically, they had independently come up with this fluting technique, and on the way to making their notched points,

they were fluting their by-faces, and then the fluting was erased in the final stage. Got it. We didn't know fluting occurred. I didn't know fluting occurred in post-Clovis periods. Got it. But there's very little sort of back-and-forth, I think, or not as much, between Paleo-Indian and post-Pal Indian archaeological sites.

Which is largely because of what you were talking about earlier, Steve, which is that this has been so much of the attention has been focused on Clovis. And look, we're just as guilty as everybody else. It's awesome. Right? Clos is awesome. It is really pretty awesome. And it's what gets all the archaeological attention. But we haven't sort of systematically evaluated all the other things that came later in the same way.

And that partially has to do with the fact that we find so little Clovis that we pour over every flake scar and every. every small chip and everything. In later time periods where you've got sites that are acres and millions of artifacts, they just don't sort of analyze things as closely, as often as I think. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. Yeah, and because, and getting back

to the whole extinction issue, right? There's more riding on it 13,000 years ago in terms of the possible role of humans in the demise of all these animals. Yeah. there's there's it's a greater question to answer and so that's why the focus you've heard the chaos now you can see it hello my gosh watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish right inside the free iher radio app gets the blood going up catch every laugh and iroll on shows like the tom green

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So don't wait. Go to themeatater.com slash tour to get your pre-sale tickets now. You know, on the question of big stuff is easier to scavenge. I mean, just, it's big. Yeah. So it takes a long time to go away. Are you familiar with Viljolm or Stephenson? He's an Arctic Explorer.

He spent a lot of time cutting across like early 1900s. He was up in on the Arctic coast of Alaska and he went into the high the high Arctic Victoria Island and stuff. He made a lot of first contacts with people. They knew about white people but hadn't encountered them. He's got a couple of books about his wanderings. At one point, they're hurting for food and they find a whale. This is in northern Alaska.

They find a whale and he talks about they had to. to boil it and boil it the tongue they had to boil it and boil it and boil it to desalinate it enough to be able to eat it and he later they later run into in his time he's like one of his books is my life with the askemo he used the word askimo they run into some ascomo who said i can't remember how many they's it's it's multiple that's been there for years well so then it was still like here's this guy scavenging a whale that people like oh no it's i can't It was two years, whatever. They're like, oh, that thing's been there for forever.

And they're still eating on it. Well, and this is where, I think, working with and learning from John Speth was incredible because for years, he has systematically searched and read through the ethno-historic literature on hunter-gatherers, not the post-World War II literature, but everything basically pre-World War II. And while scavenging is incredibly rare post-World War II, pre-World War II, he finds it everywhere.

Hunter-gather groups around the world from Argentina to Alaska to Asia, all over. They're scavenging everything. And in fact, oftentimes they prefer the putrid meat to fresh meat. Got it, yeah. He gives the example of,

just to sort of put this in some sort of local context, he talks about Mandan and Hadatsa group. in the early sort of 1600s, 1700s, Bison that would wander out onto the ice. Sure. Break up, they'd fall in ground. They'd float downstream. And, you know, Mandan and Hadatsa groups would just pull them out.

They'd be pretty bloated at that point. I've written about this. It was part of this, the seasonal plan, part of the seasonal plan was that shit washes downriver. Yeah. And you were wondering about reliability of scavenging. No, there you go. Well, I just, yeah, yeah, you're right.

That, that contradicts it. Yeah. No, and it didn't, somebody was asked, well, what about the smell? And John has this great quote in the paper, a Native American, said, we don't eat the smell. But when I was just hanging out, though, I was just hanging out with Inuit folks. And they still eat a lot of what they call fermented walrus. Right. Right.

And other things. And talking to him about it, it's, it wasn't that someone once upon a time, I'm guessing here, but it wasn't that someone once upon a time said, I could really go for something fermented. What it probably was, you kill a bunch of walrus because there's walrus around. You can use some of it. You can't use all of it. And you dig down and get into the permafrost. and bury some and covered up with rocks so polar bears don't get it yeah and then when you're

really hard up you go and it's like it's a little rank but i'm not going to starve to death over this well and so you eat it your children eat it their children eat it and eventually becomes it's just a thing that is acceptable and it's like but it's birth like the birth of the idea was trying to store stuff over right and so you can imagine that that people's tolerances for these things, stank or fermentation or rot or whatever, probably grow into taste. Probably grow into a thing that you don't mind,

that it's normal and you like it, right? It's custom and culture. Yeah. Especially when it's been done for two million years. I mean, like, when you've got little homo habilis, they're not going out and hunting rhinos and hippo, right? That's a three-foot-tall hominin that barely can,

makes stone flakes. So they are scavenging. No one questions whether Homo Hables was scavenging, right? So I think, and you had a quote this morning, that scavenging, when hunting gets added with Homo erectus, scavenging doesn't go away. And I think the ethno-historic literature shows that to be the case. Yeah, no, credit to Mary Steiner, who's worked a lot on Neanderthal sites. And Mary pointed out, because Neanderthals, there's no question. these guys were hunting. They were serious dudes. And what she said is, you know,

it's unfortunate that we haven't really thought about Neanderthal scavenging, because that is, in a sense, a form of gathering. You've got hunting and you've got gathering. And if you think about scavenged meat, it's low cost, it's low risk, it's nutritious. And if you don't know where you're going

or what you might find up ahead of you, it's right there in front. And why would you pass it up? Because again, you're not going to have those sort of food taboos. I mean, when we think about scavenge stuff, right? You're not going to buy a package of ground beef in the grocery store that's kind of turned brown. Yeah. Right?

You won't touch that. Well, I do have one story, but... And how'd you go after you ate it? Yeah. So, you know, for them, it, it, yeah, these folks are subsistence hunters and gathers. And subsistence, I think, has a pretty wide bandwidth. Sure. Much wider than our experiences, certainly.

And much more opportunities than our experiences as well. You guys both know of, at least, Mike Kahn's. I've worked in the Arctic with them one season. I again serious person follow the facts do your research and then like I'm doing with you at times I'm like but but you know if you had to guess anyways I was up with him in the Arctic and I'm and I'm pressuring him about what would be the coolest thing to find right what do you hope you find what would be the coolest thing you'd find and he indulged me and he said I sometimes imagine he's explained me I sometimes imagine that I'm flying along in my helicopter and they're out of the ground is a fucking hand and he's like and it's just it a landslide like a landslide like an encampment and then it freezes right and he goes and under that landslide melting out of this ice is just everything yeah it's everything it's everything it's the dogs the clothes.

Yeah. It's like, you know, it's Pompeii. Right. Right. It's like Pompey and Mount Vesuvius where there's a dude like, or, you know, there's a person literally doing a thing and they're like, right. They're in their fetal position. So he said, yeah, that would be cool.

Well, what, like, what, it doesn't need to be that fanciful. But like, what could we find? And I put this question to another anthropologist. one time and I'm like but god there's got be so much stuff out there he's like I don't know look at how many roads we've already built how many foundations we've already dug

um this individual is saying I'm not optimistic that we're going to find all kinds of new amazing stuff yeah well like but what what would be an exciting thing

that's that's somewhat probable that would stir the conversation around the first Americans up? First, let me talk about Mike's dream. Okay. Mike's fantasy.

Again, I pushed him on this. No, no, that's fine. Regrettably, it's coming true because of climate change. Oh, yeah. Ice fields are melting, and there's a whole sort of sub-discipline that's emerging now, where people are going to these areas where glacial ice is disappearing, and they're finding stuff. So far, no hands sticking out of the crowd, which actually would pretty hard to see from

a helicopter. But, you know, Mike needs to stick around a little while longer. It's a dream like it. It's true. Yeah, because who also is hiding under all that ice. Yeah. Look, my sense would be what I would like to see, right? And this is actually something that we're working on now.

is getting far more ancient environmental DNA on landscapes and on animals. Because leaving aside, I'm an archaeologist, but let's just leave aside all the archaeological stuff, partly for reasons that met and said, we're not going to be able to answer this question with the archaeological data. What we really need to find, what we really need to develop, is a knowledge base and data.

Let me pause for a moment and give a bit of an explanation. If you go to a lake and you get a sediment core out of that lake. And you thin slice it like a salami. And you take just a little square centimeter of dirt out of that. You can recover all of the plants and animals that were on that. landscape at that moment in time. Okay. If they were, if the animals were taken a leak, if they were dropping a turd, if they were shedding,

I mean, you moving across, you could find your DNA all over this room, Steve, okay? What that does for us, if we really want to understand environmental change, species changes over time, we can't just look at what is a mammoth doing? We've got to look at what the environment around that mammoth is doing and how that's changing. And so for me, and again, this is something that we're working on, is we need to develop, you know, it's kind of mundane. It's not as exciting to seeing a hand sticking out. You can't beat the hand, man.

No, no. I'm conceding ground. I defer to Mike on all of this and other questions. But what we need to do is develop that knowledge. because then we'll be able to say, look, these animals are starting to swirl down the drain at this point in time, and here's the reason why. We're seeing their vegetation changing. We're seeing that biological community evolving over time because of this ultimate driver,

which is the climate that's changing at the end of the Pleistocene. So that's what I want to find, is find those sites, and we've got several of them going right now, working with it. my colleagues at the Center for Geogenetics in Copenhagen, where we're actually looking at a number of these localities that are terminal Pleistocene, where we're looking at the presence of the plants and the animals that are out on that landscape, just trying to get so that we can answer that question. So much as I would love to be able to say, if I found this one thing, it could solve all of the questions that we've been asking, there isn't going to be one thing. This is not like, what's that movie with Billy

Crystal, one thing. I don't know. Where they go off to a dude ranch? Oh. City slickers. City slickers, right? And Jackillands. Yeah, Jack.

Yeah, yeah. There's not going to be one thing. Yeah. Okay. It's going to be a lot of work on a lot of different things. Yeah. Do you have one thing? I do.

Oh, thank goodness. Okay. And I think it's because for several years now, we've done all these experiments. And we'll do one experiment. We get a result. We'll do a very different experiment. We get the same result. Like, again, we're finding the more experiments we do, the more equifinality there is. So what we're learning is how much we can't know about the Stone Age. And that sucks. Right? I didn't go into archaeology and the Stone Age to learn about all the things I can't actually know about, right? Yeah, that's a bummer.

It's a bummer, right? No one does that. I found out you can't find anything out. Yeah. And really, we're in a lot of ways, I think, looking at maybe the extent of some archaeological interpretation. You think so? So for me, I would take the single Clovis Point embedded in a mammoth bone.

That would be awesome, right? But I'll tell you what's going to happen, right? If someone finds a Clovis Point embedded in a mammoth bone, they're going to say, they're going to say overkill, we killed all the mammoths done, right? That proves all these other 15 sites were definitely kills. And I'll tear my hair out because I'm like, no, like, we suspected they hunted. This is confirmation, right? Strong evidence. And that's really all I'm looking for is some strong evidence. Because I think they hunted these things, but it would be, yeah, that's true. It would be nice to have an unequivable case. It would be great. But I'll tell you, the reaction is. I see what

you're saying because if you had it if you find the one where the shoulder blade has the thing sticking into it then all the other pieces laying around all the other broken points laying around and stuff it would kind of inform your understanding of what you're seeing elsewhere well see and this is where override it but it would like you'd inform it in some way now but see this is where you you can't take a single case and then justify all the equivocal cases that's just it it's It's illogical. And it's not good science. It would show that, yeah, it would be great confirmation of this thing that we suspect is happening.

Do you know that when I was first introduced, the historian Dan Flores, many, many years ago, took me to the Blackwater Draw site, the Clovis type site. Clovis, New Mexico. It was closed. We always laughed about this. It was closed and we jumped the fence and went and looked around. I've done that. Long time ago. I then started reading about it.

And in my head, I'm sure I've told you this story. In my head, I've read somewhere how it sits in my head that I read how at one point in time, a school bus driver that had taken local school kids to see the Blackwater draw site found a mammoth skull with a projectile point and, bedded in the eye socket and took it. I then later had people go, find that for me. I cannot find it, but how would I have made that up? Like, I can't find where I read it.

Was it a dream? Yes. But like, by all, I've looked. I've looked. Was it a pamphlet? I don't know. It's not. findable, it's not findable digitally.

Like, I don't know, but I swear. Then I went and told people that. I'm like, hey, you know that a bus driver one time took some kids out here and found a mammoth skull, the projectile point stuck in and dragged it home. And I would tell people this. In some point, someone called me out and I'm like, can you point this out to me? What are you talking about? And I'm like, yeah, I'll go find it. I can't find it.

Well, I dreamed it. You dreamed it because, well, think about it. You know how big a mammoth skull is. I don't know. But how would I have made it? that up. I don't. Memory plays... Like the bus driver? Yeah. Yeah.

Were the kids on the bus? Yeah. Did they help carry the skull? This is a call to listeners. This is a call to listeners. This is a call to listeners. If you can help me out and find whatever the hell. Or you are that bus driver. Yeah. In another life, I was the bus driver. No, not you. Maybe the bus driver's listening right now. Listen, if your grandpa was a bus driver and every time you walk into like his old barn,

there's a skull in there, the piece of stone sticking out of the eye socket. Can you please send me a photo? You know, I... Because I don't know. It was Mike Cunz's hand, but I read it somewhere and I... It's embarrassing. I was like, embarrassed. I can't remember who challenged me on it, but I was embarrassed to be like, I don't know.

I don't know. Yeah, one gets these things in one's memory, and then over the years, the memory gets embellished in ways subconscious. But a bus driver? Yeah. Well, that's just a nice... detail. Yeah. I will tell you, I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time in and around that locality over here. You ever heard this story? No, I've heard other rumors, but that's not one of them.

I think it's an apocryphal. At this point, it's an apocryphal story. It probably is. It traces back to me. Yeah, right? You're actually patient zero on that particular epidemic. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So what, tell me what you guys are working on now. like what's next in this world in this world in the ice age world so i've been working the last few years on a site that's at 10 000 feet oh oh you've talked about this in the rockies yeah tell people about this site so this is a site that was originally excavated by the smithsonian in the 1990s and you know really interesting work that they did there and just out of curiosity um i know when i've been on on the show before, we've talked about our work at the Mountaineer site in the Gunnson area.

Oh, that's what I thought you were getting into is the Gunnison. Oh, yeah, no, this is a different one. Okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, sorry. So just to, for those who didn't hear the previous podcast, and I can't quote a chapter and verse of which podcast it was, as Metteneuxe of your quote. Yeah, the Mountaineer site. The Mountaineer site in Gunnison, right? We had a winter village, a Folsom Age winter village. So this other site was up and over the continental divide from Mountaineer about, oh, I think 80 kilometers or so. Okay. And there's a couple of substantial mountain passes between this other site and Mountaineer,

one at about 11,000 feet and the other at about 115. And like highways cutting through them or? Well, there are now. Okay. Yeah. Slum Gullion Pass and Spring Creek Pass. Okay. For those of you that have a Colorado Atlas in front of you.

And we were just, I don't know, on a busman's holiday visiting this site back in, I don't know, six, eight years ago. And it had been interpreted by the Smithsonian. And I think reasonably enough that it was kind of a way station because you're at 10,000 feet at the end of the ice age. It's a Folsomage site, I should add. You're at 10,000 feet at the end of the ice age. You're not going to be hanging around. mountaineer we had reasons to think they were hanging around in the winter well for one thing it's only at 8,000 feet so it's a lot lower it was probably a good place to spend the winter for a variety

of reasons that we've talked about before yeah yeah the hell it held game absolutely well in the winter and made it and animals would get in there and it hard for them to they're hard for them to get out and they would winter in there yep yep and people were sitting up on top of this mesa a thousand feet above the valley floor where actually it's warmer than on the valley floor and the basin floor because cold air sinks, right? So we had a good sort of case for that. Anyway, so the Smithsonian had done this work back in the 90s. And about four years ago, the collections came back to the Forest Service out in western Colorado.

And we got to looking at them at the collections. Again, just out of curiosity. And we were just dumbstruck to see some of the projectile points were made out of stone that came, we are convinced from the Gunnison Basin. Okay. And then it occurred to us, oh, well, maybe these folks were on their way over to Mountaineer. Okay. Because we know, when you look at the distribution of these Folsom sites in the Rockies and out on the plains, they tend to have circuits, right?

So we did a bunch of work at the original Folsom site, you know, back in the 1990s. And these folks are kind of tracking. up and down the edge of the Rockies. They're mostly out on the plains. They're going from the Panhandle of Texas up into eastern Colorado, stopping at the Folsom site, moving around. In the Rockies, they're sort of within the Rockies itself, right? The Rocky Mountains themselves.

So we got to wondering, is there a connection between the folks that we know were in the Gunnison Basin and the folks that were on the other side of these two high mountain passes? Yeah. So we spent three years excavating out there. It's called the Black Mountain site. And what we found was indeed, they were there, but only briefly. They may have been there on a couple of separate occasions.

So this really was kind of a waypoint. One of the local folks that put us up in the summers, they have a sort of a dude ranch out there. a shout out to Fremont's Ranch. It's a wonderful place to stay. And Greg Pearson, who's the kind of runs and guides out of Fremonts, said, oh, yeah, that's a spike camp. That's what he calls it. Oh, really?

Yeah. You must use the term as well. Yeah. So he said, yeah, that kind of looks what I would call a spike camp, where you're kind of there, you're checking your weaponry to making sure it's all good. They were making some points. they were discarding some other ones, but you don't see the kind of tools

that you find in a residential locality where people spend a long time. Yeah, sure. Right? So not a lot of scrapers. We had some engraving tools. I just spent most of last year doing the analysis of all the stone tools from the site,

and it's mostly just little tiny flakes because they were just making sure everything, all their gear was in good shape. Because if you think about it, you're there at the end of the place to scene, and you're at 10,000 feet, you're going to have to go up and over a mountain pass that's 11,

and then you have to go up and over another one at 11.5, and then you drop down into the drainage that will take you into the Gunnison Basin. Yeah. You don't want to start that trek at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, right? So you hunker down at this nice little way station. You get yourself ready, and then the next morning you do your thing.

Yeah. One of the really... Was your bone at that site? Not a darn thing. Really? Not a darn thing. And I'll tell you, I was out there a year ago last spring with my colleague, Eski Wilderslev, who basically invented environmental DNA.

Because we had taken some samples from there in 2023 to see if there was anything in the DNA that we could identify that would tell us what the plants and animals were because there is no bone preserve. Yeah. And didn't see a darn thing. And Eski, we were passing. through on our way to Santa Fe, kind of a circuitous route on the way to Santa Fe from Denver, because he wanted to see the site to try and figure out, well, there has to be, why isn't the DNA

preserved? This is an ideal setting. And it has to do with some technical stuff about single-stranded versus double-stranded DNA, which we won't go into. But we took a bunch more samples in 2025, and I was just in Copenhagen for a month working on some other projects, ancient DNA-related stuff. And I talked to the person who's doing the analysis of the environmental DNA from this site. And one of the things that struck me, and this is all very preliminary data, is that she's seeing a lot of plants in the DNA, but no woody plants, no trees. And one of the things that had always been sort of in the back of my mind was, okay, this is a great place for a way station because you would have been. been in the trees before you get up and over the tree line and have to cross these high elevation passes.

Yeah. Because then you'd have wood for fuel. But we weren't finding any trees in the DNA, just a lot of flowers. Right. I'm no kidding. Flowers are not going to keep you warm. So they were up in the alpine, yeah. Yes.

And so now this is all very, very, very preliminary. I'll tell you what they were doing. They're hunting sheep. Big horns. You're done. You have to do anything else. Thank goodness. I don't know what they do.

with the bones. You better look over to the right or the left, I guess. You know, I'd love it if we found some sheep DNA, but there's absolutely no animal DNA. Go, man, yeah. So what they're doing now, this was the initial run through doing what's called shotgun sequencing, where you're not necessarily looking for specific plants. And so I've asked them, can you go back and do what's called capture DNA, where you're using as bait, tree species, See if you can grab chunks of DNA out of the swirl, if you will, that are trees. Because that's the only way that you'll be able to be sure that there's either trees there or not trees there. Got it.

So hopefully we'll have that answer in a few months. So, yeah, that's what's been I've been working on on the archaeological side of things. Wouldn't it be great if that DNA stuff was so good that you could just be like the people that were here were there? I, you know what? Someday. I've thought about that, Steve. I've absolutely, that's my hand sticking out of the ground, right? Is the ability to say that would be, you know, in theory it's absolutely possible to a degree.

There's preservation limitations. You know, getting a full genome out of a sediment sample is a challenge. you could probably get whether they were, they shared, you know, uniparental, monocondrial DNA, Y chromosome markers, but that wouldn't necessarily tell you whether it's the same people. It just tells you whether at some point back in the past, they have a shared maternal ancestor.

Understood. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what I've been doing. And Matt, what can we expect next from you? Cool. A couple things. Actually, thanks to some of the meat eater listeners of this podcast. You know, a couple years ago, we published a Clovis Point and a Folsom Point that Matthew Wendell, who's a listener and a fan, sent to us.

And he said, hey, can you analyze these? We did. We found all sorts of stuff we learned. We published that in the scientific literature. That's happened again now. Ben Galt in New England found a Clovis point or a fluted point from Nantucket Island. And he said, hey, like, I'm interested. Can you learn about anything?

And so he sent it to us and we're doing all the analyses now. Oh, really? So, yeah, I mean, thanks to the meat eater podcast listeners, like, we're doing real research on Clovis and Fluted Points, and we're learning all sorts of stuff. So that's awesome. So if anyone out there wants to send us more artifacts, we won't keep them. We'll send them back to you. But we can do all sorts of awesome geometric morphometrics and microware analysis and learn every

Clovis point, we learn something, right? Yeah. So we do that sort of thing quite a bit. But the big thing next for me is I'm going to Kenya in January. January, I'm really interested in the origin of all technology over three million years ago. And we published a new hypothesis last year or about a year and a half ago on how that origin of technology with stone tools occurred. And it all has to do with butchering and cutting carcasses up with naturally sharp rocks. And there's a site that dates about 2.9, 2.8.

million years ago. Oh, that's early. Yeah. Where we think we may have some naturally sharp rocks in association with a carcass. Oh, really? Yeah. And so we're going to go and check those out. And we'll see.

So some one or something was like, hey, that's got a sharp edge on it. I'm going to beat snot out of the same. And why this is really important, right, is that the practice of cutting. came before stone tools. Yeah, right? But if you look at the scientific literature, everyone thinks that the origin of stone technology was some sort of eureka moment,

like in 2000-West Space Odyssey, where someone is like, you know what, I need to cut something, bam, I'm going to, you know, go ahead and do that, and I've got my knife, right? But there's no reason to suspect that's the trajectory that things took. And really, the only reason to make stone tools is if the behavior of cutting,

was already in place. Yeah. And so I think that the exploitation of carcasses and meat potentially goes back much farther than we currently have. Maybe even back to a creature called artopithecus. That's like 4.4 million years old. I could be wrong. I probably am, but we're going to investigate.

So how long we've spent over there? This first trip to Kenya, because I've been to Africa four other times, this one will be about 10 days, and then we'll go for longer stints in the near future. Got it. Yeah. So it should be good. Yeah.

Well, guys, thanks for coming on the show, man. Thanks for having us. Always enjoyable. Yeah. I got to tell people a quick thing. I was going to bring it up earlier. I'm bringing up now. And you guys are welcome to come.

We've been talking about how our Christmas tour tickets, I've been trying to explain the complexity of pre-sail and sale. It is officially pre-sale, which means they're on sale. I'll spare you the distinction between pre-sale. and sale. Tickets are on sale for the Christmas tour. Monday, December 14th, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tuesday, December 15th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Wednesday, December 16, Madison, Wisconsin. Thursday, December 17, Des Moines, Iowa. Friday, December 18, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Saturday, December 19th, Fargo, North Dakota. Get your tickets now. Nate, what's the ticket address, man? Just go to the meat eater.com, look up the Christmas tour. The Christmas tour is where you go to get your laughs at Christmas.

And if you got someone in your life who's a fan, a listener to the show or whatever, give them a couple of these bad boys as an early gift in a Christmas card. They are going to be grateful. All right, guys, thanks again for coming on. You have a stand. You can come on anytime you want, you know. Thank you. Listen, if we ever just walk in,

in here and you guys are sitting here, we're going to record. Anytime you want to come on, you come on, just keep us posted. For sure. And I think we always have ideas. So other collaborations in the future, all sorts of tests. Yeah, we're supposed to be cutting up some ostriches or something like that. Oh, don't worry. Thanks. Thanks again. Again, Dr. David Meltzer and Dr. Meton, Aaron. Thanks for coming.

Thanks, Dave. Thank you very much. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human