# Ep. 931: Eating Rotten Mammoths

An episode of [The MeatEater Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/960902903), 14 Sep 2026, 1 h 49 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/63aba8bc-2dc8-4f89-807a-ae280065a7cd/a4c18f0a-f02d-48b6-b276-b4c500219d33/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=3892b9a1-a960-4f9e-bee7-ae280065a7db

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 YouTube See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:08] Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten,
[0:14] Speaker 1: and in my case, underwear-less.
[0:15] Speaker 2: We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can't predict anything.
[0:20] Speaker 1: Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I
[0:23] Speaker 1: need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no-compromise gear
[0:28] Speaker 1: that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just
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[0:38] Speaker 3: L I T E.com.
[0:43] Speaker 1: All right, man, we're here to talk about my all
[0:44] Speaker 1: time favorite subject. The subject that has enthralled me since
[0:48] Speaker 1: I learned that it was a subject ice age hunters,
[0:52] Speaker 1: Clovis Folsom, the, the, the, the first Americans, this subject,
[0:56] Speaker 1: and my two favorite guys to talk about this subject
[0:58] Speaker 1: are here.
[1:00] Speaker 3: Dr.
[1:00] Speaker 1: David Meltzer, who's the Henderson Morrison professor of prehistory. at
[1:05] Speaker 1: Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He's been on the
[1:07] Speaker 1: show before a couple times.
[1:09] Speaker 3: And Dr.
[1:09] Speaker 1: Matton Aaron, professor of anthropology at Kent State University, who
[1:13] Speaker 1: has also joined us on the show before. And before
[1:17] Speaker 1: we get into the main thing, well, let me say this.
[1:21] Speaker 1: One would think that when talking about stuff from 15,000, 14,000, 13,000,
[1:23] Speaker 1: 12,000 years ago, it wouldn't change, that the understanding would
[1:25] Speaker 1: be static at this point. but this is remains. And what,
[1:35] Speaker 1: what's so enthralling about it is it remains a kind
[1:38] Speaker 1: of like dynamic subject, new ideas, new findings.
[1:43] Speaker 3: It, it changes.
[1:45] Speaker 1: It's crazy to something that's that old that our understanding
[1:47] Speaker 1: of something that old could evolve, but it's like a,
[1:50] Speaker 1: it's a great intellectual exercise before we get into what your,
[1:54] Speaker 1: your latest theories, your latest understandings of who these people were,
[1:59] Speaker 1: what they did, how they lived, what they killed or
[2:01] Speaker 1: didn't kill. Um, Help me understand what I'm holding up
[2:05] Speaker 1: right here. I'm holding up a Clovis point that's, what,
[2:10] Speaker 1: nine and a half inches long?
[2:12] Speaker 3: Yeah. Easily, yeah. And I saw it, and I thought
[2:15] Speaker 3: it was a novelty item.
[2:16] Speaker 1: Like, when you're a little kid and you buy those
[2:18] Speaker 1: giant chocolate bars or giant erasers.
[2:21] Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean?
[2:22] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[2:22] Speaker 3: At, like, tourist shops. But this is a mold. This
[2:25] Speaker 3: is a... A cast of a real thing. Yeah.
[2:28] Speaker 2: Well, it's a real thing, but how do we know
[2:30] Speaker 2: it wasn't 12,000 years ago? Somebody wanted to make a
[2:33] Speaker 2: giant chocolate bar.
[2:34] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[2:34] Speaker 2: As a novelty.
[2:35] Speaker 3: That's what I'm wondering about.
[2:36] Speaker 2: We don't know. We don't know. And unfortunately, the context
[2:40] Speaker 2: of that find is not sufficient for us to really
[2:43] Speaker 2: be able to tell.
[2:43] Speaker 3: What an incredible specimen.
[2:45] Speaker 2: Oh, it's amazing.
[2:46] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[2:46] Speaker 2: It's a Clovis point on steroids.
[2:49] Speaker 1: I have a, you know, the people that do the
[2:52] Speaker 1: archeological drawings, he drew me a real life size one,
[2:55] Speaker 1: but he drew me the wrong point.
[2:57] Speaker 3: Because this would have been a much bigger... This would
[2:58] Speaker 3: have been a much bigger.
[2:59] Speaker 2: Look at the other ones that Meton brought.
[3:01] Speaker 3: Well, that's what... Yeah. So, this would be... I got
[3:04] Speaker 3: to be....
[3:09] Speaker 1: Not everybody's watching this on video. Can one of you
[3:12] Speaker 1: guys tell what we're looking at?
[3:13] Speaker 3: Meton, go. Yeah.
[3:14] Speaker 1: I'm looking at a Clovis point, but what do I
[3:16] Speaker 1: mean when I say I'm looking at Clovis point?
[3:18] Speaker 4: It's a giant lance weapon tip. And we don't know
[3:22] Speaker 4: what weapons they were using, but... The one you're holding,
[3:25] Speaker 4: like you said, is about nine, ten inches. Um, it's
[3:28] Speaker 4: got a concave base, it's got straight parallel sides, and
[3:33] Speaker 4: the Clovis Point has these channels on both faces, and
[3:37] Speaker 4: those are called flutes.
[3:39] Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
[3:40] Speaker 2: And think about those, to visualize it, think about World
[3:43] Speaker 2: War I bayonets.
[3:44] Speaker 3: Right? A groove. There you go.
[3:46] Speaker 2: Up each face.
[3:47] Speaker 3: The old blood groove on a bayonet.
[3:48] Speaker 2: The old blood groove.
[3:49] Speaker 3: Groove, yes.
[3:50] Speaker 4: And that was a hypothesis, actually, for the function of
[3:52] Speaker 4: flutes for a long time, was that you stick your
[3:54] Speaker 4: animal and blood shoots out those grooves. The issue, though,
[3:57] Speaker 4: is if you're attaching that to some sort of spear, right,
[4:00] Speaker 4: you're going to have lashings, maybe, or some sort of adhesive.
[4:02] Speaker 4: And so, like.
[4:04] Speaker 2: It's not a good drink.
[4:04] Speaker 4: It's not a good... Yeah, exactly. Not a good groove
[4:06] Speaker 4: for bloodletting. So there's been other hypotheses for why people
[4:11] Speaker 4: fluted But I don't think it's known as a... Oh, why?
[4:16] Speaker 1: Because the way they hafted it on there.
[4:18] Speaker 3: Definitely.
[4:19] Speaker 2: Well, yeah.
[4:20] Speaker 3: I don't know that. I don't know. It's just one
[4:22] Speaker 3: of the things that gets thrown out there.
[4:23] Speaker 2: In the sense that that is a function, but was
[4:27] Speaker 2: that the purpose? Was that the intended purpose of it?
[4:30] Speaker 2: We don't know.
[4:31] Speaker 3: Yeah, understood.
[4:32] Speaker 2: Because a lot of people have made arguments about, well,
[4:35] Speaker 2: you're just showing off because... putting a flute in, and
[4:39] Speaker 2: Metten knows this more than anybody, really, because he's a
[4:41] Speaker 2: master flintknapper, that's the point at which it's most vulnerable
[4:46] Speaker 2: to breakage, right? When you're making one of those points,
[4:48] Speaker 2: when you're driving one of those flute flakes off, because what, Metten,
[4:51] Speaker 2: they're two millimeters?
[4:53] Speaker 3: Well, I'll point out, under Metten's instruction, I fluted one.
[4:57] Speaker 2: Show the video, people.
[4:58] Speaker 1: I mean, he kind of like, he pretty much set
[5:01] Speaker 1: it up for me, you know, but I fluted one.
[5:04] Speaker 3: You know what?
[5:05] Speaker 2: And That's not easy.
[5:07] Speaker 1: But he had done all the prepping and set me
[5:11] Speaker 1: up with practice shots and everything.
[5:13] Speaker 3: So, yes. The flute, one more.
[5:17] Speaker 1: I want to get back to these different sizes and stuff,
[5:19] Speaker 1: but when you pressure test these for strength.
[5:24] Speaker 3: That's a detriment, right?
[5:26] Speaker 4: The flute, no.
[5:27] Speaker 3: Like the signature flute is not a structural detriment?
[5:29] Speaker 4: No, in fact, it's an advantage. And we published a
[5:32] Speaker 4: paper 10 years ago on this where... What we showed
[5:37] Speaker 4: was that fluted points actually can, they act like a
[5:41] Speaker 4: shock absorber. So in the same way that a car,
[5:44] Speaker 4: when it crashes into something, the front end crumples, protecting
[5:48] Speaker 4: the people inside, the base of a Clovis point, because
[5:51] Speaker 4: it's thinner because of the flutes, Upon impact, it reduces
[5:56] Speaker 4: the compression stress on the point and actually reduces the
[5:59] Speaker 4: amount of breakage.
[6:00] Speaker 3: Oh, is that right?
[6:00] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[6:01] Speaker 4: Now that's a structural property of that shape with the flutes.
[6:05] Speaker 3: With the flutes.
[6:05] Speaker 4: Now, we don't know if that's why they made the flutes,
[6:09] Speaker 4: but when you have flutes on a point, you get
[6:12] Speaker 4: that property.
[6:13] Speaker 2: You don't have to understand the sort of mechanics of
[6:15] Speaker 2: it and the engineering properties of it, but you understand that, well,
[6:19] Speaker 2: you know what? If you flute that thing and it's
[6:21] Speaker 2: thinner at the base, um, the points will be less
[6:25] Speaker 2: damaged during use.
[6:27] Speaker 3: Got it. Yeah. Right.
[6:28] Speaker 2: Just like a baseball player, you know, in center field,
[6:31] Speaker 2: you know, there's a high fly ball coming toward them.
[6:33] Speaker 2: They're not calculating parabolas, right. And, and how it's going
[6:37] Speaker 2: to come down at them. They're just running for the
[6:39] Speaker 2: ball because they sort of intuitively understand that.
[6:41] Speaker 3: Yeah. Got it. Uh, you also brought The other end
[6:47] Speaker 3: of the continuum. The other end. Yes. Which is, so
[6:50] Speaker 3: here I'm holding a Clovis point that's inch and an
[6:54] Speaker 3: eighth long. Yeah, maybe.
[6:56] Speaker 4: Maybe, yeah.
[6:57] Speaker 3: And they come even smaller. Yes.
[6:59] Speaker 1: And this brings up, this, I guess, adds to the mystery,
[7:04] Speaker 1: is you're so, that these people, and can you tell people,
[7:08] Speaker 1: and can you remind folks in whatever way makes sense
[7:13] Speaker 1: in terms of B.C. or blank years ago, When were
[7:17] Speaker 1: these things being manufactured in what is now the United States?
[7:20] Speaker 4: About 13,000.
[7:22] Speaker 3: 13,000 years ago.
[7:24] Speaker 1: That you could have one of these that's nine inches,
[7:27] Speaker 1: nine and a half inches. You could have one of
[7:31] Speaker 1: these that's an inch.
[7:32] Speaker 2: Both polluted.
[7:33] Speaker 1: But they're exactly, right? They're so married to the styles. Well,
[7:41] Speaker 1: that's like the shape and the fluting that, that you
[7:44] Speaker 1: would think, do you know.
[7:44] Speaker 3: What I'm saying? It's just that they're like, no, I
[7:46] Speaker 3: don't care about how long it is. I just need
[7:48] Speaker 3: it to look like this.
[7:49] Speaker 4: Yeah. But I think this is an interesting point you
[7:52] Speaker 4: bring up because roughly they're the same shape, right? They're
[7:56] Speaker 4: both Lancelet. They have concave bases, parallel sides, but that's
[8:01] Speaker 4: a very general way to look at the shape. Right. And,
[8:05] Speaker 4: and so I think, You could say in the same
[8:07] Speaker 4: way that there's a lot of variation in the human species, right?
[8:10] Speaker 4: And Danny DeVito and Shaquille O'Neal, but they're all human.
[8:13] Speaker 4: There's a lot of variation in Clovis.
[8:15] Speaker 3: I see.
[8:17] Speaker 4: And so, yeah, they have the general anatomical similarities, but
[8:20] Speaker 4: there's still a lot of variation within that.
[8:23] Speaker 3: Got it.
[8:23] Speaker 2: Which is not unexpected, of course, because these groups are
[8:27] Speaker 2: out on a landscape. They're moving. They're out on that
[8:32] Speaker 2: landscape for the better part of, what, 700 years? Yeah.
[8:35] Speaker 2: and they're in all corners of North America, and you're
[8:37] Speaker 2: going to have what we've called sort of cultural drift, right?
[8:42] Speaker 2: Is that somebody's making something and they're not making it
[8:46] Speaker 2: quite like dad made it or mom made it, right?
[8:48] Speaker 2: No reason why mom couldn't have made those. And so
[8:51] Speaker 2: you've got variants that will just accrue over time. And
[8:55] Speaker 2: so while you can generally argue, okay, we've got Clovis
[8:59] Speaker 2: points in the Pacific Northwest, which kind of look like
[9:01] Speaker 2: Clovis points in the Northeast. So, yeah, in a general sense,
[9:05] Speaker 2: they're all very, very similar, like Metin's metaphor. But there's
[9:09] Speaker 2: enough variation that we're seeing, in all likelihood, sort of
[9:15] Speaker 2: time and space slipping by. And with that, changes in
[9:18] Speaker 2: the styles in which people are making things, simply because
[9:21] Speaker 2: they're not making clones, right? They're human artisans who are
[9:26] Speaker 2: producing these kinds of things, and there's inevitably going to
[9:29] Speaker 2: be variation.
[9:30] Speaker 4: And I think another contribution to that variation, right, there's
[9:33] Speaker 4: stylistic drift. But we just completed a 10-year project funded
[9:38] Speaker 4: by the National Science Foundation where we looked at, we
[9:41] Speaker 4: basically did a Clovis Point Olympics. And we tested small
[9:45] Speaker 4: ones and big ones and thin ones and wide ones
[9:48] Speaker 4: to see whether or not they all functioned the same way.
[9:51] Speaker 4: And they don't. And so another reason why we may
[9:55] Speaker 4: be getting lots of variation in Clovis is because this
[9:58] Speaker 4: particular Clovis Point is for butchery. This one is for hunting.
[10:02] Speaker 4: This one is maybe even for digging.
[10:04] Speaker 2: Well, not necessarily for those things, but better at.
[10:06] Speaker 4: Better at, yes, that's exactly right, yeah.
[10:08] Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, you mean when you're looking at it now
[10:11] Speaker 1: without understanding what it was originally crafted for, But when
[10:18] Speaker 1: you look at now, like, well, let's just try to
[10:20] Speaker 1: take a guess.
[10:20] Speaker 3: Like, what would it be good for?
[10:22] Speaker 2: Yes, that's exactly what their experiments, what Mettner's team's experiments
[10:25] Speaker 2: showed was that some of them had really great penetrating power.
[10:29] Speaker 3: Okay.
[10:29] Speaker 4: Right.
[10:29] Speaker 2: And it wasn't necessarily that big hunker. No, it was
[10:31] Speaker 2: the smaller ones. It was the smaller ones.
[10:34] Speaker 3: Right.
[10:34] Speaker 2: You know, we always sort of think about big mammoth.
[10:37] Speaker 2: You need a big point.
[10:38] Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.
[10:39] Speaker 2: No, not necessarily.
[10:41] Speaker 1: On the subject and what we want to talk about today.
[10:49] Speaker 1: Add to this, but I'll say this and you can
[10:52] Speaker 1: add to it if you feel that it's wrong. The
[10:55] Speaker 1: primary questions that animate conversations around Clovis, the primary questions
[11:01] Speaker 1: would be, there's this big, long-running, burning one, which is,
[11:05] Speaker 1: did humans.
[11:09] Speaker 3: Manage to drive....
[11:13] Speaker 1: Woolly mammoths and macedons to extinction did like were they
[11:17] Speaker 1: were they really able to come in like and kill
[11:19] Speaker 1: these things off or if it wasn't that was it
[11:21] Speaker 1: some degree of um they contributed to the die-off of
[11:28] Speaker 1: mammoths and macedons right and other big megafauna right and
[11:32] Speaker 1: the reason that has the reason that argument has teeth
[11:35] Speaker 1: is it kind of opens up this idea of It
[11:38] Speaker 1: becomes a debate about, well, how destructive is the human
[11:41] Speaker 1: species and how long has the human species been destructive?
[11:45] Speaker 4: Right.
[11:45] Speaker 3: Right. A lot of there's this.
[11:48] Speaker 1: Kind of, there's almost a moral element to it. If
[11:51] Speaker 1: you could look and be like, man, 13,000 years ago,
[11:55] Speaker 1: humans were driving animals to extinction through hunting.
[11:58] Speaker 3: And it, I don't know.
[12:01] Speaker 1: That can be weaponized in some way, or it can
[12:03] Speaker 1: be used to rationalize certain behaviors or it's just interesting.
[12:07] Speaker 3: Right.
[12:07] Speaker 1: So that debate animates discussion of, of Clovis is like,
[12:11] Speaker 1: it's kind of like part of why we talk about
[12:13] Speaker 1: Clovis today. Another, I would say the other major thing
[12:16] Speaker 1: from my view, the animates, the discussion of Clovis is.
[12:21] Speaker 3: Who were the first Americans, right? Right.
[12:25] Speaker 1: Did, did, is this, was this a group of people that,
[12:30] Speaker 1: that showed up in what is now the lower 48
[12:34] Speaker 1: or Alaska in the lower 48, that they show up
[12:37] Speaker 1: where they had this common culture, a common language. They
[12:41] Speaker 1: knew who each other, they knew each other and they
[12:45] Speaker 1: showed up and then they sort of proliferated as a people.
[12:49] Speaker 1: And then eventually this people through distance and time kind
[12:55] Speaker 1: of form these other unique cultures. or the or conversely
[13:04] Speaker 1: disparate peoples showed up here and they coalesced into this
[13:09] Speaker 1: this unified culture um and for 700 years kind of
[13:13] Speaker 1: became like americans you know in some way.
[13:18] Speaker 3: Do you agree with that or is there any i'm missing.
[13:21] Speaker 2: Where do we start?
[13:22] Speaker 1: I mean, in terms of the big animating, the reason
[13:27] Speaker 1: that keeps it relevant.
[13:28] Speaker 3: Okay.
[13:29] Speaker 2: Absolutely agree.
[13:30] Speaker 3: Okay.
[13:30] Speaker 2: Okay. And I can say that certainly the weaponization aspect,
[13:37] Speaker 2: when you look at when Overkill, the notion that people
[13:41] Speaker 2: came in and wiped out all of these different animals,
[13:44] Speaker 2: and the current tally is 38 different genera. Okay? So
[13:48] Speaker 2: everything from mammoth and mastodon, giant ground sloths, various, you know, peccaries, tapirs, horses, camels,
[13:54] Speaker 2: et cetera. That really hits its stride in the 1960s.
[14:01] Speaker 2: And it's tied to the environmental movement. You've got Rachel Carson,
[14:07] Speaker 2: Silent Spring gets published. Everybody's reading Aldo Leopold. All of
[14:13] Speaker 2: these things, people are getting concerned about the environment. And
[14:16] Speaker 2: this was a good, This was a good homily. This
[14:18] Speaker 2: was a good lesson. Look what we did before. Let's
[14:21] Speaker 2: not do it again. Now, the problem is, I don't
[14:24] Speaker 2: think people did that before, right? There's lots of reasons
[14:27] Speaker 2: to protect the environment. What people did 13,000 years ago
[14:31] Speaker 2: or not isn't one of them.
[14:33] Speaker 3: Got it, yeah.
[14:34] Speaker 2: So I agree. It's sort of been part of the discussion.
[14:38] Speaker 2: And in fact, it's been part of the discussion since
[14:40] Speaker 2: the 1850s when people first noticed the bones of these
[14:45] Speaker 2: giant animals and said, what happened to them. And one
[14:48] Speaker 2: of the very early hypotheses was were they killed off
[14:52] Speaker 2: by Indian arrows? So it's been talked about.
[14:55] Speaker 3: Someone floated that in the 1800s? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.
[14:58] Speaker 2: Charles Lyell, on his visit to the United States, his
[15:00] Speaker 2: second visit to the United States, published in 1849, talks
[15:03] Speaker 2: about it. Because people were wondering, where are they now?
[15:08] Speaker 2: Because they knew enough about the geology to know that
[15:12] Speaker 2: these animals had been around relatively recently, at least in
[15:15] Speaker 2: geological time.
[15:17] Speaker 3: Right.
[15:17] Speaker 2: I mean, they were found in near surface deposits and
[15:20] Speaker 2: the bones seemed in pretty good condition. They weren't fossilized, mineralized. So, yeah, no,
[15:25] Speaker 2: it's been a it's been a long standing question.
[15:29] Speaker 3: I had no idea that someone threw that out there
[15:31] Speaker 3: at that time.
[15:32] Speaker 2: Well, yeah, but they dismissed it because it made no
[15:35] Speaker 2: sense to them because they knew that, you know, the
[15:40] Speaker 2: ability because at that point, I think it's fair to
[15:43] Speaker 2: say people hadn't killed off all the passenger pigeons. People
[15:47] Speaker 2: hadn't actually caused the extinction of animals prior to that.
[15:53] Speaker 2: So they probably had a hard time perceiving the ability
[15:57] Speaker 2: as we do now, given the technologies that we have,
[16:01] Speaker 2: how easy it would be to drive an animal to extinction.
[16:04] Speaker 3: Yeah. Someone should visit that dude in his grave.
[16:08] Speaker 1: And be like, listen, I know that you got dismissed
[16:10] Speaker 1: outright in 1850, but had you waited a century, your
[16:14] Speaker 1: idea would have gotten more traction.
[16:15] Speaker 2: Absolutely.
[16:16] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
[16:17] Speaker 1: You would have tapped into the zeitgeist if you waited
[16:19] Speaker 1: 120 years.
[16:20] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[16:22] Speaker 2: Uh, and it is, um, it is an interesting thing
[16:25] Speaker 2: because it does tie into the notion that, um, this
[16:32] Speaker 2: sort of romantic notion of these big game hunters. You know,
[16:36] Speaker 2: they've come across the land bridge. They've blasted down into
[16:39] Speaker 2: North America and they look out across a landscape with
[16:43] Speaker 2: these aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom. And mind you,
[16:48] Speaker 2: some of the animals that went extinct only weighed 20 pounds.
[16:51] Speaker 2: They're lumped in there with megafauna and I've never gotten that.
[16:53] Speaker 2: I've never understood that. But okay, so bunnies are megafauna.
[16:58] Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I got it. I'm guilty of that. I'm
[17:01] Speaker 3: guilty of being like, yeah, all the big animals, all
[17:03] Speaker 3: the big animals went away.
[17:05] Speaker 2: Yeah, except for moose and caribou and bison and all
[17:09] Speaker 2: the other big animals that didn't go away.
[17:11] Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I understand.
[17:12] Speaker 4: I understand.
[17:13] Speaker 2: And we are trying to understand that as a package, right?
[17:17] Speaker 2: These people come across, presumably they're related. They must have
[17:22] Speaker 2: been successful at colonizing landscapes like the Bering Land Bridge.
[17:28] Speaker 2: and then they spread out. But one of the things
[17:30] Speaker 2: that we've learned from the genetic record is that this
[17:35] Speaker 2: is a fairly, mind you, we have limited ancient DNA
[17:41] Speaker 2: from this time period, right? So we have limited information
[17:43] Speaker 2: about who these people are specifically. But one of the
[17:47] Speaker 2: things that we do know is that we have early
[17:50] Speaker 2: on very, very different cultural patterns among very closely related
[17:56] Speaker 2: biological populations. So the cultures will change and they will
[18:00] Speaker 2: change fairly rapidly. So we've got people who are very
[18:03] Speaker 2: closely related to Clovis living in the Great Basin who
[18:06] Speaker 2: have a fundamentally different material culture, who we haven't found
[18:11] Speaker 2: any evidence that they're out killing big game because, well,
[18:14] Speaker 2: if you're in the Great Basin, Western North America, there's
[18:17] Speaker 2: not a whole lot of mammoth or mastodon wandering around
[18:19] Speaker 2: out there.
[18:20] Speaker 3: Right?
[18:21] Speaker 2: Uh, so the cultural patterns are not necessarily in sync
[18:25] Speaker 2: with the, what we understand, at least at the moment, uh,
[18:29] Speaker 2: to be the biological patterns.
[18:30] Speaker 3: Got it. Yep.
[18:33] Speaker 4: Yeah, uh, regarding the second question you brought up, right,
[18:35] Speaker 4: did they, were they here and coalesced or, and became
[18:40] Speaker 4: the first Americans? The Clovis Point has never been found
[18:45] Speaker 4: outside of the Americas, North America, right?
[18:49] Speaker 3: And so.
[18:50] Speaker 4: So by definition, it is.
[18:52] Speaker 2: It's an American invention.
[18:53] Speaker 4: It's an American invention, which means.
[18:55] Speaker 2: There had to be people.
[18:55] Speaker 3: That point has not.
[18:56] Speaker 2: Has not.
[18:57] Speaker 3: Been found in South America. No.
[18:59] Speaker 4: And it's not been found in Europe or in Asia.
[19:02] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[19:03] Speaker 4: Right? So if the Clovis Point was invented.
[19:05] Speaker 3: In North America... So just.
[19:08] Speaker 1: To help people a little bit on geography, you mean
[19:11] Speaker 1: if I'm over in Nome, Alaska, and I go whatever
[19:15] Speaker 1: the hell it is, 70, 80 miles, and I hit.
[19:20] Speaker 1: And I hit Asia, and I look up and down
[19:25] Speaker 1: the beach, I'm not gonna find a Clovis point.
[19:28] Speaker 4: We have not found any Clovis points in Northeast Asia,
[19:31] Speaker 4: which means it was invented in North America, which means
[19:34] Speaker 4: there had to be people here to invent it. So
[19:40] Speaker 4: by logic alone, there had to have been groups pre-Clovis
[19:47] Speaker 4: on the landscape somewhere to have come up with that first.
[19:50] Speaker 4: American invention.
[19:51] Speaker 1: Are there good, rock-solid, indisputable Clovis points in Alaska?
[19:56] Speaker 2: I know what my answer is. I'm waiting to hear hers.
[20:03] Speaker 4: There are fluted points in Alaska. But they are later
[20:08] Speaker 4: in time. And they come from when Clovis folks and
[20:12] Speaker 4: related Clovis groups went from south to north through the
[20:17] Speaker 4: ice-free corridor back into Alaska. But there's never been a
[20:22] Speaker 4: Clovis point of Clovis age found in Alaska.
[20:27] Speaker 2: The dates, and you can actually quite literally track them
[20:30] Speaker 2: in a time-transgressive manner going up the ice-free corridor.
[20:34] Speaker 3: Is that right?
[20:35] Speaker 2: Absolutely.
[20:36] Speaker 1: No, because you've got- Because stuff like the Mesa site
[20:38] Speaker 1: and stuff is fluted, but that's much younger than Clovis.
[20:42] Speaker 2: No, Mesa is not fluted.
[20:43] Speaker 3: Oh, it's not?
[20:44] Speaker 2: Okay, I'm sorry. There's other sites, Hutu site, Bedwell site.
[20:51] Speaker 2: What's the Ted Gables? Yeah, there's fluted points up there.
[20:59] Speaker 2: And they date, let me think about this, probably 500
[21:04] Speaker 2: years later?
[21:06] Speaker 4: Yeah, in the 12s.
[21:07] Speaker 3: Okay.
[21:08] Speaker 2: They're in the 12s. And in fact, there's fluted points
[21:11] Speaker 2: in that corridor region that are also dating in the
[21:15] Speaker 2: 12s rather than at 13. And so it almost looks
[21:18] Speaker 2: like the corridor, let's just back up for a second, right?
[21:26] Speaker 2: You've got these two massive ice sheets that during the
[21:29] Speaker 2: Pleistocene are bumping into each other, basically down the spine
[21:35] Speaker 2: of the Rockies.
[21:35] Speaker 3: Okay. Okay?
[21:37] Speaker 2: At the end of the ice age, they pull back,
[21:39] Speaker 2: they retreat, and they do this around 14,000, 14 and
[21:45] Speaker 2: a half thousand. Initially, it's just this vast mud flat, right?
[21:52] Speaker 2: Melt water everywhere. There's not a whole lot of things
[21:54] Speaker 2: growing there, living there.
[21:56] Speaker 3: I've been in places like that in Alaska.
[21:58] Speaker 2: There you go, right? But this place is 1500 kilometers long.
[22:03] Speaker 2: and there's nothing growing, you're not gonna go down that corridor, right?
[22:07] Speaker 2: You're gonna have to wait for the plants to colonize,
[22:11] Speaker 2: the animals to then follow, right? That doesn't happen until
[22:15] Speaker 2: around 13, maybe slightly later, maybe slightly earlier, but not
[22:20] Speaker 2: early enough. Clovis is already down here by then, okay?
[22:26] Speaker 2: But then later, as these groups are expanding in North America,
[22:30] Speaker 2: some of them make their way back up that corridor,
[22:34] Speaker 2: because by then, you've got bison, it's grassland. Now what
[22:38] Speaker 2: happens around 10,000 years ago, maybe 11, is that you've
[22:43] Speaker 2: got boreal forest moving in. And once the boreal forest
[22:46] Speaker 2: move in, that corridor is shut down, right? You're not
[22:48] Speaker 2: gonna be going up and down that thing anymore. So
[22:51] Speaker 2: it really looks as though people came in.
[22:53] Speaker 3: Just because it's not like super productive grassland.
[22:56] Speaker 2: I mean, what are you gonna get in a boreal forest?
[22:59] Speaker 3: It's just less draw, yeah, I understand.
[23:01] Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely.
[23:03] Speaker 2: But when you have bison up and down that corridor,
[23:05] Speaker 2: and in fact, you brought up Mesa, that's a really
[23:07] Speaker 2: good case to bring up because it looks like these
[23:11] Speaker 2: groups are following, tracking bison up and down this corridor, well,
[23:16] Speaker 2: up this corridor. And what you see at Mesa looks
[23:19] Speaker 2: an awful lot like what you've got on the Northern
[23:21] Speaker 2: High Plains at 10,000, 10 and a half thousand, 11,000
[23:26] Speaker 2: years ago. So we can make the connections, but the
[23:30] Speaker 2: connections are not from the North down to the South.
[23:32] Speaker 2: They're from the South back up to the North. It's
[23:33] Speaker 2: the craziest thing.
[23:35] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[23:35] Speaker 1: I was first introduced to that idea. And I think
[23:38] Speaker 1: that it was the word was the word back drift
[23:41] Speaker 1: or something.
[23:42] Speaker 3: Was that a word?
[23:43] Speaker 2: Absolutely. Backwash.
[23:46] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[23:49] Speaker 1: So who, where right now, if you, I don't know,
[23:53] Speaker 1: what's the fashionable idea right now of like, And I
[23:58] Speaker 1: don't mean to make it trivializing, but the idea right now,
[24:05] Speaker 1: if you had to make a guess, and no one's
[24:07] Speaker 1: holding you to this, but.
[24:09] Speaker 5: If you had to make a guess, who and when
[24:16] Speaker 5: and how, who first stepped foot in.
[24:22] Speaker 1: What is today, however you want to put it, like,
[24:27] Speaker 1: washington state idaho panhandle montana north dakota minnesota like the
[24:37] Speaker 1: where did the first human step in what is now
[24:42] Speaker 1: the lower 48. what was he doing name rank serial
[24:48] Speaker 1: number yeah uh like when right if you had to
[24:52] Speaker 1: guess And I'm setting this up. You have to take
[24:57] Speaker 1: this seriously. You spent your life publishing on this. You
[25:00] Speaker 1: have a reputation at stake. But just casually.
[25:03] Speaker 2: It's going to die right here in your studio.
[25:05] Speaker 3: Just casually.
[25:07] Speaker 1: Tell me a thing that wouldn't surprise you. I know
[25:10] Speaker 1: you guys hate conversations like this, but tell me a thing.
[25:12] Speaker 3: That wouldn't surprise you. It's fine.
[25:14] Speaker 2: It's fine. Look, I think that there is compelling evidence.
[25:20] Speaker 2: We're going to do this evidence-based, not faith-based.
[25:22] Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah.
[25:23] Speaker 4: Okay.
[25:24] Speaker 2: I think there's compelling evidence that people were here 15,000
[25:27] Speaker 2: years ago, plus or minus. I wouldn't be surprised if
[25:32] Speaker 2: they were here earlier. Getting them here earlier is complicated
[25:37] Speaker 2: just because of the geology and because of the routes
[25:40] Speaker 2: that would have been available. We just mentioned that this
[25:44] Speaker 2: interior corridor was not going to be available until around 13.
[25:47] Speaker 2: So if people were here at 15, they had to
[25:50] Speaker 2: come some other route. The coast... was open. ICE had
[25:56] Speaker 2: pulled back from the Pacific margin by 17, 16 and
[26:01] Speaker 2: a half. So that's a route that you can take
[26:05] Speaker 2: into the Americas and be here by 15. We know
[26:08] Speaker 2: from the genetic record that we have that ancestral Native
[26:14] Speaker 2: Americans split off from Northeast Asian populations sometime around 25,
[26:23] Speaker 2: I would not be surprised if people were here at 25,000, right?
[26:27] Speaker 3: Like that wouldn't shock you?
[26:29] Speaker 2: No, no. I mean, it would just make us have
[26:31] Speaker 2: to think, well, how did they get here? Who were they?
[26:35] Speaker 2: And how do they relate to everybody that we have
[26:37] Speaker 2: after 15?
[26:38] Speaker 3: Got it.
[26:39] Speaker 2: Right? And look, if people were here at 30, we'd
[26:47] Speaker 2: have to give that a rethink as well. Okay, does
[26:49] Speaker 2: that mean that the genetic evidence we have is just insufficient?
[26:52] Speaker 2: to tell us when these ancestral Native American populations first emerged?
[26:56] Speaker 2: Does that mean that these groups that were here earlier
[26:58] Speaker 2: were not related to ancestral Native Americans as we know
[27:03] Speaker 2: them that were here at 12? You always have to
[27:08] Speaker 2: follow the evidence and you can sort of set up
[27:13] Speaker 2: parameters of the problem and say, but you always have
[27:16] Speaker 2: to sort of add the caveat As we understand it today,
[27:20] Speaker 2: based on the evidence that we have today, this is
[27:22] Speaker 2: the thing that has greater prior probability. This is the
[27:25] Speaker 2: thing that has less. Some years ago, about 10 actually,
[27:30] Speaker 2: there was a paper published that suggested people were here
[27:34] Speaker 2: 130,000 years ago. That one is really hard to sort
[27:38] Speaker 2: of make sense of.
[27:40] Speaker 3: That gets even more complicated.
[27:41] Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because then you're not really talking about modern
[27:44] Speaker 2: Homo sapiens. And so we just don't see any evidence.
[27:48] Speaker 2: archaeologically or genetically to suggest that those folks were here.
[27:53] Speaker 2: Because we don't even see them in parts of Asia
[27:58] Speaker 2: by then.
[27:59] Speaker 3: Got it.
[28:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, how seriously can you take, this is some stuff
[28:03] Speaker 1: we've discussed in the past, but how seriously can you
[28:07] Speaker 1: take any idea that it wasn't Siberians?
[28:16] Speaker 3: None.
[28:17] Speaker 4: There's no, they came from Asia.
[28:19] Speaker 2: For the viewers at home that are not watching on TV,
[28:21] Speaker 2: I'm shaking my head no.
[28:25] Speaker 1: So when people bring up this idea that Europeans came
[28:32] Speaker 1: or Pacific Islanders out of the South came or whatever,
[28:36] Speaker 1: it's just that you feel the evidence is still strong.
[28:42] Speaker 1: or overwhelming that these are Siberians?
[28:45] Speaker 4: Oh, there's no feel about it. The idea that Stone
[28:48] Speaker 4: Age people crossed the Atlantic, I think is one of
[28:52] Speaker 4: the most falsified hypotheses in paleo and archaeology. I mean,
[28:59] Speaker 4: it isn't supported genetically, archaeologically, chronologically, the oceanographers didn't show it,
[29:08] Speaker 4: it didn't work. I've published several papers and so have you.
[29:11] Speaker 4: on that idea that maybe the first Stone Age Americans
[29:14] Speaker 4: came from Europe, and no matter how you slice it,
[29:16] Speaker 4: it doesn't work. And so.
[29:20] Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean, if they came here, they suffered
[29:23] Speaker 2: complete and total genetic amnesia, cultural amnesia. I mean, they
[29:30] Speaker 2: forgot everything that they were doing in Europe, and they
[29:32] Speaker 2: forgot to bring their DNA with them. you know because
[29:35] Speaker 2: uh all of the dna that we have both ancient
[29:38] Speaker 2: and modern in the americas is native american.
[29:42] Speaker 1: When you look at this question globally of pioneering populations
[29:47] Speaker 1: of humans do you do you ever see you know
[29:53] Speaker 1: new zealand or australia or wherever do you ever see
[29:55] Speaker 1: where a where a population gets somewhere but it doesn't
[29:59] Speaker 1: work out and they and they they don't they don't
[30:02] Speaker 1: thrive they blink out yeah for whatever reason yeah and
[30:05] Speaker 1: then and then thousands of years go by and it
[30:08] Speaker 1: gets re-hit or does or do humans usually have a
[30:11] Speaker 1: way of when they get somewhere it.
[30:14] Speaker 4: Works see that's a really tough question because in the
[30:17] Speaker 4: old world europe asia africa you're it can be difficult
[30:22] Speaker 4: if you don't have bones to know whether you're dealing
[30:26] Speaker 4: with Homo sapiens, or Homo erectus, or Heidelbergensis, or Neanderthalensis.
[30:32] Speaker 4: There's all these other hominins, Denisovans, that are running around.
[30:36] Speaker 4: And so, and they're oftentimes using the same stone tool technology, right? So,
[30:41] Speaker 4: you don't know if you're dealing with a Homo sapiens
[30:43] Speaker 4: site who's making some sort of discoid core or a Neanderthal.
[30:47] Speaker 3: Okay.
[30:48] Speaker 4: This is one reason why to understand the mechanics of
[30:51] Speaker 4: prehistoric colonization, North America is so valuable. And I think
[30:55] Speaker 4: there's some regions in particular, like the Great Lakes in
[30:58] Speaker 4: New England, that are really great because you had glaciers
[31:00] Speaker 4: covering the Great Lakes. And so when the glaciers recede
[31:05] Speaker 4: and we get- Gave you a nice clean slate. It's
[31:07] Speaker 4: a demographic blank slate. I got you. And so that's
[31:09] Speaker 4: why it's really great to study colonization processes there.
[31:14] Speaker 1: That's an interesting point, man. It doesn't have what makes
[31:18] Speaker 1: Africa so complicated.
[31:19] Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes.
[31:20] Speaker 3: Got it.
[31:21] Speaker 2: But failed migrations is what you're asking about. And back.
[31:27] Speaker 1: Like, not just failed migration, but failed pioneering events.
[31:31] Speaker 3: Oh, no, that's... Yeah.
[31:32] Speaker 2: No, I actually argued that many years ago in a paper,
[31:37] Speaker 2: just on sort of first principles. The idea that absolutely
[31:41] Speaker 2: every movement into a landscape was successful. Which is not
[31:46] Speaker 2: to say that a movement wasn't successful, but groups within
[31:49] Speaker 2: that could have disappeared for want of an ability to
[31:52] Speaker 2: cope with an environmental disaster, right? One can only assume,
[32:00] Speaker 2: even though it would be extremely difficult to test, one
[32:03] Speaker 2: can only assume that groups that are moving out of
[32:06] Speaker 2: Africa 100,000 years ago and moving out across the globe,
[32:10] Speaker 2: some of them must have not made it. Now, one
[32:13] Speaker 2: of the things that's been most interesting coming out of
[32:16] Speaker 2: the genetic record is that we have what are referred
[32:19] Speaker 2: to as ghost populations showing up in ancient genomes. These
[32:25] Speaker 2: are signatures of DNA that are unrelated to any modern population.
[32:31] Speaker 2: So clearly there were other groups with whom ancestral Native
[32:34] Speaker 2: Americans interacted with. What became of them, right? And were
[32:41] Speaker 2: they possibly, and we don't know this, but here's one
[32:46] Speaker 2: possible case, were they here when Native Americans showed up?
[32:51] Speaker 2: and there was interaction between them and for all intents
[32:53] Speaker 2: and purposes, they disappeared as a population. This gets back
[32:59] Speaker 2: to your question earlier. This is why this question about
[33:03] Speaker 2: the peopling is so dynamic and is constantly right there
[33:08] Speaker 2: on the front burners of us trying to figure out
[33:10] Speaker 2: because the more we learn, the more complicated the story is.
[33:17] Speaker 2: When I started, which was a while ago, It was
[33:21] Speaker 2: very simple, right? Mammoth hunters. They come into Alaska, they
[33:25] Speaker 2: go down the ice-free corridor, they start killing.
[33:27] Speaker 3: Everybody, they spread it over.
[33:29] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was a nice story, but
[33:34] Speaker 2: there was no nuance to it. And what we've been
[33:37] Speaker 2: learning over the years, and this is actually one of
[33:40] Speaker 2: the reasons why we just published this piece on scavenging,
[33:44] Speaker 2: was that we wanted to sort of critique the... the
[33:49] Speaker 2: stereotypes we wanted to sort of explore variation and nuance
[33:53] Speaker 2: and are there alternative explanations for data that we've just
[33:57] Speaker 2: kind of in a very common sense way interpreted over
[34:00] Speaker 2: the years.
[34:01] Speaker 3: Yeah. Let's get into your, let's get into your new paper. Segway. Yeah.
[34:08] Speaker 1: Tell me whichever one you want us to do it. Like,
[34:11] Speaker 1: like tell me the, give me the gist of the.
[34:13] Speaker 3: New paper you have about, about scavenging.
[34:19] Speaker 4: So pretend you're a scientist.
[34:21] Speaker 3: Okay. Got it. And I do that all the time.
[34:24] Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
[34:24] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[34:25] Speaker 4: That's great.
[34:26] Speaker 2: I play a scientist on TV, but I'm not one.
[34:29] Speaker 4: And you have a very simple question.
[34:31] Speaker 3: Okay.
[34:32] Speaker 4: How many baseball hats of the home team are in
[34:37] Speaker 4: the stadium on game day?
[34:38] Speaker 3: Okay.
[34:39] Speaker 4: And you have a hypothesis, right? There's going to be
[34:41] Speaker 4: more green hats. Cause that's the color of the home
[34:44] Speaker 4: team than red hat, which is the away team. Okay. Okay.
[34:47] Speaker 3: And I think that because it's the home team.
[34:49] Speaker 4: It's the home team, right?
[34:49] Speaker 3: And their fans live around here.
[34:50] Speaker 4: Exactly, right? So you've got your hypothesis and you now
[34:53] Speaker 4: want to test it. So you hire some dude to.
[34:57] Speaker 2: Has to be a dude, I'll bet.
[34:57] Speaker 4: Well, only dudes are dumb enough to go count, right?
[35:02] Speaker 4: So you hire some dude to go to the stadium
[35:04] Speaker 4: on game day and he counts all of the hats, okay?
[35:08] Speaker 4: Comes back to you and he's like, all right, scientist Steve, Dr. Steve,
[35:13] Speaker 4: there were 15,000 green hats. Okay. There was 10,000 red hats.
[35:18] Speaker 4: You've got your data. You're like, supports my hypothesis.
[35:21] Speaker 3: Great.
[35:22] Speaker 4: A couple years go by, and then you learn that
[35:25] Speaker 4: the guy you hired to count all the hats is red, green, colorblind.
[35:32] Speaker 2: You hired me for the job. It was a bad move, Steve.
[35:35] Speaker 3: Bad move.
[35:36] Speaker 4: So how do you know what the answer is? You don't.
[35:40] Speaker 4: And so what our paper shows is that archaeologists are currently.
[35:45] Speaker 3: I don't know where you're going, but I love the
[35:46] Speaker 3: analogy so far.
[35:47] Speaker 4: What our paper shows is that archaeologists are colorblind to
[35:52] Speaker 4: hunting versus scavenging and the interpretation of those two things
[35:57] Speaker 4: in the sites we dig up. We can't tell the difference.
[36:01] Speaker 2: The term is equifinality.
[36:03] Speaker 4: Okay.
[36:05] Speaker 2: In that multiple processes can result in the same product.
[36:09] Speaker 2: They can result in artifacts being found with bones. They
[36:14] Speaker 2: can result in artifacts that got snapped, found with bones.
[36:20] Speaker 2: And we were talking this morning on the way over
[36:22] Speaker 2: to the studio, um, the experiment that we did with
[36:26] Speaker 2: you guys in what, four years ago now, which was.
[36:30] Speaker 3: Just refresh people.
[36:31] Speaker 1: We, uh, These guys were conducting an experiment where we
[36:36] Speaker 1: were using stone tools to butcher a freshly killed bison carcass.
[36:43] Speaker 1: And then they took great interest in how did the
[36:46] Speaker 1: tools break? How did the tools dull? Where did the
[36:49] Speaker 1: tools wind up? When you lost them or broke them,
[36:52] Speaker 1: what did it look like? Meaning, so then you have
[36:56] Speaker 1: not a collection of tools from having killed the animal,
[36:58] Speaker 1: you had a collection of tools from having butchered the animal.
[37:00] Speaker 4: I'm also just thinking of the famous efficiency part of
[37:03] Speaker 4: that experiment. and Dr. Michelle Bevers' meat per minute.
[37:07] Speaker 2: No, meat per minute.
[37:07] Speaker 3: Measure. Okay.
[37:10] Speaker 4: Which is published in the scientific literature.
[37:11] Speaker 2: Yeah. So what we found in that, one of the
[37:18] Speaker 2: things people have said, and I'm guilty, right? I'm not
[37:22] Speaker 2: going to paint anybody else with this brush.
[37:24] Speaker 4: I'm included here.
[37:26] Speaker 2: You know, you look at these busted points and you say, oh, well,
[37:29] Speaker 2: that must be end shock as a consequence of impact. Well,
[37:33] Speaker 2: what we discovered- was in the points that you guys
[37:35] Speaker 2: were using some of them snapped just like things that
[37:39] Speaker 2: i've interpreted as end shock from use and impact.
[37:43] Speaker 3: Yeah right like hit a shoulder blade and broke yeah.
[37:46] Speaker 2: Yeah yeah uh so those are the kinds of things
[37:51] Speaker 2: that make you pause and you realize you can't automatically
[37:55] Speaker 2: assume that just because you have these things with a
[37:58] Speaker 2: mammoth that therefore these were the items that were used
[38:02] Speaker 2: to kill it okay that's the red green colorblindness that
[38:06] Speaker 2: Metin is talking about that we have. And it's important
[38:10] Speaker 2: to stress this fact. We're not saying every site with
[38:14] Speaker 2: a mammoth was a result of scavenging.
[38:17] Speaker 4: We've never said that.
[38:18] Speaker 2: We've never said that. What we're trying to do is
[38:22] Speaker 2: think harder about how we can discern what the process
[38:29] Speaker 2: was that caused that product.
[38:32] Speaker 3: Right?
[38:33] Speaker 2: And this is a problem in which, because there are
[38:38] Speaker 2: multiple processes, you run into that issue of equifinality because
[38:43] Speaker 2: you can just as easily explain these things as a
[38:45] Speaker 2: consequence of scavenging as you could hunting. And we would
[38:48] Speaker 2: love to know, is there an unequivocal, demonstrable diagnostic test
[38:55] Speaker 2: for one or the other? There isn't even a diagnostic
[38:58] Speaker 2: test for scavenging. I went into this paper thinking, oh, Well,
[39:01] Speaker 2: we can tell scavenging because we have some instances of
[39:06] Speaker 2: Clovis points that were used, or actually, I'm sorry, ivory
[39:11] Speaker 2: shafts that were used to pry apart mammoth feet. And
[39:15] Speaker 2: I'm thinking, well, that has to be scavenging because rigor
[39:18] Speaker 2: mortis had set in, right? The animal was already dead.
[39:21] Speaker 2: But then in the course of doing this research, you know,
[39:24] Speaker 2: one of the things that we learned was that rigor
[39:26] Speaker 2: mortis under certain circumstances can kick in pretty quickly.
[39:29] Speaker 4: Okay.
[39:30] Speaker 2: So that animal might actually have been very recently killed
[39:34] Speaker 2: by that hunter who then wanted to pry apart the feet.
[39:37] Speaker 3: What do you mean by pry apart the feet?
[39:39] Speaker 2: Get into the joints there to break apart the portions
[39:44] Speaker 2: of the foot to get it foot pad me.
[39:46] Speaker 3: Okay.
[39:47] Speaker 1: I thought I was picturing that you meant like move
[39:49] Speaker 1: his legs apart. But you mean like literally like break
[39:52] Speaker 1: the feet apart.
[39:52] Speaker 3: Exactly.
[39:53] Speaker 4: I got you.
[39:53] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
[39:54] Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you know, every time you sort of think, okay, well,
[39:57] Speaker 2: this is clearly a signature of hunting or clearly a
[40:00] Speaker 2: signature of scavenging. Then you think a little harder about it.
[40:03] Speaker 2: You realize, well, geez, the only instance that we sort
[40:07] Speaker 2: of came up with in this paper, uh, is that
[40:11] Speaker 2: if you see a beached whale from 200,000 years ago,
[40:17] Speaker 2: long before people had marine technology, long before they went
[40:20] Speaker 2: out in boats and could harpoon things, and it's been
[40:23] Speaker 2: butchered on the beach, that's scavenging.
[40:26] Speaker 4: Because they're not going to get in a whale.
[40:27] Speaker 3: Sure. Right? Yeah. But.
[40:29] Speaker 1: See, you know when I said that I had a
[40:33] Speaker 1: thing that was going to trip you guys up?
[40:35] Speaker 2: Okay.
[40:35] Speaker 3: And it was going to blow your minds and make
[40:37] Speaker 3: you question your career?
[40:38] Speaker 2: I'm still waiting for it.
[40:39] Speaker 3: It has to do with whales.
[40:40] Speaker 4: Oh.
[40:41] Speaker 3: But I'm going to.
[40:42] Speaker 2: You're going to wait?
[40:43] Speaker 3: No, I'm going to wait a minute to bring it up. No,
[40:45] Speaker 3: I'll bring it up now.
[40:45] Speaker 2: Go ahead. Don't leave us hanging, Steve.
[40:48] Speaker 3: I was with some whale hunters and none of it.
[40:51] Speaker 2: Oh, very cool.
[40:51] Speaker 3: Okay.
[40:52] Speaker 2: Okay.
[40:52] Speaker 1: And we were talking a lot about, I mean, they
[40:54] Speaker 1: use contemporary weaponry now, but we were talking a lot
[40:56] Speaker 1: about what.
[40:57] Speaker 3: Their ancestors, how their ancestors hunted whales.
[41:01] Speaker 1: And I was thinking about you guys, because I feel,
[41:05] Speaker 1: and maybe you can correct me on this. I feel
[41:07] Speaker 1: that somewhere in your head, it's a little bit like
[41:11] Speaker 1: you feel that it's a little bit outlandish. Or a
[41:14] Speaker 1: little bit, you're skeptical that humans could have killed these things.
[41:20] Speaker 3: Oh, no. Mechanically.
[41:22] Speaker 1: Or maybe you have no skepticism about this. But I
[41:24] Speaker 1: was like, but how would someone view, I mean, but like,
[41:28] Speaker 1: so if it's not in your head, I think it's
[41:30] Speaker 1: in some people's heads.
[41:31] Speaker 3: Like, really?
[41:32] Speaker 1: You're going to take a spear and kill a mammoth?
[41:36] Speaker 1: But then I was thinking, like, Bahamut, we know, like,
[41:40] Speaker 1: as a matter of fact... that humans were using stone-tipped,
[41:45] Speaker 1: bone-tipped stuff and killing huge whales. Well, absolutely. But I
[41:51] Speaker 1: think that, and I don't mean to put words in
[41:53] Speaker 1: your mouth, and you're shaking your head like you don't
[41:55] Speaker 1: have a problem with them killing it, but I think
[41:56] Speaker 1: that there is a sense from some people, like, how
[41:59] Speaker 1: could they have walked up with a spear and killed
[42:01] Speaker 1: a mammoth?
[42:02] Speaker 3: I'm like, I don't know. How'd they kill whales?
[42:05] Speaker 2: So I've given talks over the years where I've had
[42:10] Speaker 2: hunters in the audience.
[42:12] Speaker 3: Uh-huh.
[42:13] Speaker 2: And I've talked about killing mammoths, where you've got a
[42:17] Speaker 2: stick with a sharp rock at the end of it.
[42:20] Speaker 2: And I've seen a lot of shaking heads where people
[42:22] Speaker 2: are saying, no way am I doing that to a
[42:24] Speaker 2: six-ton animal.
[42:25] Speaker 3: Thank you very much. It would seem insane. It would
[42:28] Speaker 3: seem insane.
[42:29] Speaker 2: No, but people did.
[42:31] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[42:32] Speaker 2: I don't think there's any question that people were hunting
[42:36] Speaker 2: animals of all sizes, right? And the question is, how often?
[42:43] Speaker 2: What was the frequency? To what degree was it a
[42:46] Speaker 2: critical element of their diet? Was that the only thing
[42:50] Speaker 2: they were doing on the landscape? I mean, this is
[42:53] Speaker 2: the thing that we're sort of trying to get around
[42:55] Speaker 2: is the sort of singular model.
[42:58] Speaker 4: The stereotype.
[42:59] Speaker 2: The stereotype. You know, we want to understand the complexity
[43:04] Speaker 2: of people's lives, their hunting strategies, their foraging strategies, Which
[43:12] Speaker 2: facultative scavenging, and this is what this paper is all about,
[43:16] Speaker 2: the idea that if there's a four-ton animal dead on
[43:21] Speaker 2: the landscape, why would you not take advantage of it?
[43:26] Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. Right?
[43:28] Speaker 1: Were you able to look, because when I was looking
[43:32] Speaker 1: at the work that you did, you addressed this, but
[43:36] Speaker 1: I just want to tee it up, to be, In
[43:39] Speaker 1: my head, just as a guy today that wanders around
[43:42] Speaker 1: out in the woods a fair bit, and in a
[43:43] Speaker 1: lot of places, it's just like, there aren't, it would
[43:48] Speaker 1: be exceptionally rare, exceptionally rare to stumble across a salvageable, untouched,
[43:58] Speaker 1: fresh carcass.
[44:00] Speaker 2: It happens.
[44:02] Speaker 3: It happened twice.
[44:04] Speaker 1: The lake I grew up on, I can think of
[44:05] Speaker 1: two cases. A deer swam up, went through Bob Starrett's yard,
[44:09] Speaker 1: and snapped its neck on Bob Starrett's fence.
[44:11] Speaker 2: Darn for Bob Starrett. Why did he have a fence?
[44:13] Speaker 1: Well, another one came through and got hung up. And
[44:16] Speaker 1: one came through and got hung up on Chet Utzinger's fence.
[44:19] Speaker 2: Oh, Bob and Chet, man.
[44:20] Speaker 3: So, sure.
[44:22] Speaker 1: And we scavenged those carcasses. But it's just not. It's
[44:29] Speaker 1: so exceptional that I can tell you about these things
[44:32] Speaker 1: that happened when I was, I'm now 52. I can
[44:34] Speaker 1: tell you about these things that happened when I was
[44:36] Speaker 1: a teenager as being outliers. And they involve fences, human-made fences.
[44:42] Speaker 1: But it's just like, you can't, it's not reliable from
[44:47] Speaker 1: my view. It's not reliable to wake up in the
[44:49] Speaker 1: morning and be like, kids, me and mom are going
[44:53] Speaker 1: to walk until we find a fresh dead thing.
[44:56] Speaker 3: And then we're going to butcher it and bring it
[44:58] Speaker 3: on home. Okay.
[44:59] Speaker 2: I'll let Metten respond to that, but then I want
[45:01] Speaker 2: to talk to you about reliability.
[45:02] Speaker 3: Okay. Go, Metten.
[45:03] Speaker 4: So, I have an admission to make, and it's that
[45:07] Speaker 4: you are actually the inspiration for this paper.
[45:11] Speaker 3: Oh, great.
[45:11] Speaker 4: And it's because.
[45:13] Speaker 1: Because of my view on the improv.
[45:15] Speaker 4: On April 21st, 2025, episode 693, you said, when you're
[45:23] Speaker 4: out wandering around the mountains... Oh, God, you actually have
[45:25] Speaker 4: the entire quote. or out wandering around the woods... you
[45:28] Speaker 4: do not often encounter fresh dead stuff. If you wanted
[45:32] Speaker 4: me to produce a dead thing, I would be much
[45:35] Speaker 4: quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than
[45:38] Speaker 4: I would wandering around.
[45:40] Speaker 3: I stand by that.
[45:42] Speaker 4: So, I've always laughed at the idea that they were
[45:46] Speaker 4: just finding carcasses lying around, right? And I heard that
[45:52] Speaker 4: quote and it just got me thinking, right? It got
[45:56] Speaker 4: me thinking about scavenging, it got me thinking about scavenging
[46:01] Speaker 4: during the Lake Pleistocene when it was a very different environment.
[46:04] Speaker 2: A lot more animals.
[46:06] Speaker 3: A lot more animals. Yeah, sure.
[46:08] Speaker 4: Very different animals. And it got me thinking about our
[46:13] Speaker 4: modern experience versus how and why we interpret the things
[46:19] Speaker 4: the way we do over the centuries of the Clovis
[46:23] Speaker 4: archaeological record.
[46:24] Speaker 3: Okay.
[46:25] Speaker 4: Right?
[46:25] Speaker 2: Where you had thousands and thousands of people who are
[46:29] Speaker 2: spending every day of their lives outside. I mean, how
[46:33] Speaker 2: often are you out in the field?
[46:36] Speaker 3: Not like that. Exactly. Where am I at right now?
[46:39] Speaker 2: And you're out there for a week at a time,
[46:41] Speaker 2: two weeks at a time in a circumscribed area.
[46:44] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[46:45] Speaker 2: But if you're spending your entire life out there and
[46:47] Speaker 2: let's just say a life expectancy of 45 plus or minus.
[46:51] Speaker 3: Okay.
[46:51] Speaker 2: We don't know, but that's generally the sort of estimation that's,
[46:56] Speaker 2: Thousands and thousands and thousands of person hours out on
[47:00] Speaker 2: that landscape, on a landscape that has a hell of
[47:02] Speaker 2: a lot more game on it than the landscape does today.
[47:06] Speaker 2: And it's got elephants out there. And elephants on that
[47:10] Speaker 2: landscape are going to last for a long time, right?
[47:14] Speaker 2: It's not like a mouse dies and you've got to
[47:17] Speaker 2: get there and scavenge it really quickly.
[47:19] Speaker 1: Even if stuff's working on it, they're going to be working.
[47:22] Speaker 3: On it a long time.
[47:23] Speaker 2: Absolutely.
[47:24] Speaker 4: And sometimes they can't work on it. Because in winter months,
[47:27] Speaker 4: and this is, we learned so much about carrion ecology
[47:31] Speaker 4: and scavenging in the broader biological world. In the winter months,
[47:36] Speaker 4: some carcasses just are not accessible because they freeze, which
[47:40] Speaker 4: is something humans don't have to worry about because we've
[47:42] Speaker 4: got stone tools and fire. I think the other thing
[47:46] Speaker 4: to keep in mind too, right?
[47:48] Speaker 2: Hang on. You found that example in Dale Guthrie's book.
[47:50] Speaker 4: Yes, it was.
[47:52] Speaker 2: There's a... The case of Blue Babe, the sort of
[47:56] Speaker 2: freeze-dried bison, there's a carnassial tooth from, is it a lion?
[48:00] Speaker 3: A panthera?
[48:03] Speaker 2: In the hide. And Guthrie's interpretation, and I think it's
[48:06] Speaker 2: a reasonable one, is that that cat was basically trying
[48:11] Speaker 2: to get into the carcass and it was frozen. It
[48:13] Speaker 2: snapped the tooth off.
[48:14] Speaker 3: Oh, I pictured him breaking it. I don't know. I
[48:15] Speaker 3: didn't know that theory.
[48:16] Speaker 1: I know about this, but I always thought that it
[48:20] Speaker 1: was suspected or that he broke it off and fighting
[48:24] Speaker 1: with the thing.
[48:25] Speaker 2: Oh, that's entirely possible too.
[48:27] Speaker 3: But broke it off, trying to get a frozen thing
[48:29] Speaker 3: ripped apart.
[48:31] Speaker 2: It would be more likely that it would break if
[48:32] Speaker 2: the thing was frozen.
[48:34] Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Go ahead.
[48:35] Speaker 4: Well, I was going to say, you had two examples
[48:37] Speaker 4: where you found carcasses, right?
[48:40] Speaker 3: I got a lot.
[48:40] Speaker 4: Well, okay, so a lot.
[48:41] Speaker 3: But I'm saying they're unique enough that I remember them.
[48:44] Speaker 4: Yeah, fair enough.
[48:45] Speaker 3: Okay.
[48:46] Speaker 4: But imagine you, 10,000 ewes, right? You're the Clovis population.
[48:52] Speaker 1: I want to clarify my point, but I want you
[48:54] Speaker 1: to go, but I want to clarify my point. Yes,
[48:57] Speaker 1: but not reliably.
[48:59] Speaker 4: Okay.
[48:59] Speaker 3: Let me, let's talk about it. Take it away. I'm
[49:02] Speaker 3: not going to interrupt you again, but I just want
[49:03] Speaker 3: to clarify what I'm getting at. It happens, but I
[49:06] Speaker 3: would never plan on it. No, no, no, no.
[49:08] Speaker 2: That's the whole point of facultative scavenging.
[49:10] Speaker 4: You can't plan.
[49:10] Speaker 2: You don't, you don't plan on it.
[49:11] Speaker 4: No.
[49:12] Speaker 2: Just like you don't plan on hunting, right? What do
[49:15] Speaker 2: you mean you don't plan on hunting? You're out there
[49:17] Speaker 2: looking for animals. Are you going to see them?
[49:19] Speaker 4: All the time.
[49:20] Speaker 2: All the time.
[49:21] Speaker 3: Okay.
[49:22] Speaker 2: Look, nobody is saying that folks.
[49:25] Speaker 4: Depended on scavenging.
[49:26] Speaker 2: Depended on scavenging. What we're saying is like all other animals,
[49:32] Speaker 2: all other predators in the animal kingdom, they all scavenge.
[49:35] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[49:35] Speaker 2: Herbivores scavenge.
[49:37] Speaker 3: Oh, God. Deer scavenge.
[49:39] Speaker 2: Hippos, giraffes, chimps will scavenge, okay? So why would we
[49:45] Speaker 2: assume that humans are any different, right? We're not arguing that,
[49:50] Speaker 2: don't make the assumption that humans were solely scavengers, in
[49:55] Speaker 2: which case it would be an unreliable strategy, without question.
[49:59] Speaker 2: If they're facultative scavengers, if they come across something, then
[50:02] Speaker 2: the question is, what's the cost-benefit Is it worth tracking
[50:06] Speaker 2: where you haven't seen any big animals for quite a while?
[50:09] Speaker 2: I mean, goodness knows you've been on unsuccessful hunts before.
[50:13] Speaker 2: Have you not?
[50:14] Speaker 3: Yeah, plenty. Yeah.
[50:16] Speaker 2: So if you're on an unsuccessful hunt and it's been
[50:18] Speaker 2: quite a while since you killed anything and there's a
[50:21] Speaker 2: dead elephant laying there, are you going to pass it up?
[50:24] Speaker 3: No.
[50:25] Speaker 2: Exactly.
[50:29] Speaker 4: And when you look at the 15 sites where we have,
[50:33] Speaker 4: good association between Clovis artifacts and proboscideans.
[50:37] Speaker 3: Can you dig in on this for a minute?
[50:39] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[50:39] Speaker 3: This number.
[50:40] Speaker 4: Yeah. This is where we've got Clovis points and maybe
[50:45] Speaker 4: flakes or scrapers in a secure context with elephant bones
[50:51] Speaker 4: such that there's reason it's reasonable to assume that those
[50:55] Speaker 4: artifacts were involved in the dismemberment in some way of
[50:58] Speaker 4: that animal.
[50:59] Speaker 2: Or the killing of that animal.
[51:00] Speaker 4: Or the killing of that animal, right?
[51:02] Speaker 1: But yeah, I never knew this number until fairly recently.
[51:08] Speaker 3: There's like a number.
[51:09] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[51:09] Speaker 3: It's like, there's 15.
[51:11] Speaker 2: Well, there's actually almost 100 sites in which people have claimed.
[51:15] Speaker 2: But of those, the most secure ones where the artifacts
[51:20] Speaker 2: and the bones entered the geological record at the same instant,
[51:23] Speaker 2: put it that way, that we feel that, yeah, okay,
[51:26] Speaker 2: these things interacted in some manner. And the question is,
[51:30] Speaker 2: what was the nature? Did they kill the animal, then
[51:33] Speaker 2: dismember it? Did they come upon a carcass and then
[51:35] Speaker 2: dismember it? Did they shoot at it and the animal
[51:39] Speaker 2: wandered off and died? There's lots of different possibilities. And
[51:42] Speaker 2: so what we're trying to do is disentangle all of
[51:46] Speaker 2: these possibilities.
[51:48] Speaker 4: So you've got these 15 sites and they're likely spread
[51:52] Speaker 4: across the 700 years of Clovis, right? When you think
[51:56] Speaker 4: about that, like per decade or per century, that's not
[52:00] Speaker 4: a lot of sites per year, right? So let's say hypothetically,
[52:06] Speaker 4: seven of those sites are scavenging, right? That's not a
[52:12] Speaker 4: lot of scavenging that's going on in terms of the
[52:14] Speaker 4: sites that we found. And there's not a lot of
[52:16] Speaker 4: hunting of mammoths that's going on either, right? So I
[52:20] Speaker 4: think the issue is that we can't take our personal
[52:24] Speaker 4: experiences in the modern day of not finding carcasses or
[52:28] Speaker 4: anything and try to impose that on the past because
[52:33] Speaker 4: there's a different timescale, right?
[52:35] Speaker 2: The past is a foreign country.
[52:38] Speaker 4: Yes.
[52:39] Speaker 3: That's my third favorite quote.
[52:40] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And when you look at scavenging... Even today,
[52:45] Speaker 2: it's very limited in modern day hunter groups, hunter gatherer groups.
[52:51] Speaker 2: Our co-author, Jim O'Connell, working with the Hadza.
[52:55] Speaker 3: Oh, okay.
[52:56] Speaker 1: Yeah, this is why I wanted you to talk about
[52:58] Speaker 1: this because you guys discussed this.
[53:00] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[53:00] Speaker 2: No, in fact, the best thing about this paper that
[53:05] Speaker 2: certainly I enjoyed the most was working with O'Connell, who
[53:08] Speaker 2: has spent a lot of time with hunter gatherers, working
[53:11] Speaker 2: with John Speth, who... knows more about sort of the
[53:16] Speaker 2: ethno-historic record, you know, the records from the 1500s and
[53:19] Speaker 2: 1600s before all the changes that take place and what
[53:25] Speaker 2: was going on then. And with Brianna Pobinar, who has
[53:29] Speaker 2: spent a lot of time looking at the earliest archeological records,
[53:32] Speaker 2: you know, we sort of brought together this group of
[53:34] Speaker 2: people with very, very different perspectives. What O'Connell brought to
[53:37] Speaker 2: the table was, yeah, the Hadza, if they're given the
[53:41] Speaker 2: opportunity to scavenge, they will. He said, they, If they
[53:45] Speaker 2: see vultures circling in the distance, they'll go check it out.
[53:50] Speaker 4: They've gotten very good at confronting lions. And we've got
[53:53] Speaker 4: instances of Hadza, small groups of Hadza, even just a
[53:56] Speaker 4: couple people, driving off prides of lion.
[53:59] Speaker 3: Got it.
[54:00] Speaker 4: Just with a couple shots.
[54:01] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[54:02] Speaker 2: And what he said was about 14% of the meat
[54:07] Speaker 2: that they got during the time that he was tracking
[54:09] Speaker 2: with them came from scavenged animals.
[54:12] Speaker 3: Is that right? Yeah.
[54:13] Speaker 2: So we're not saying it was the major component of
[54:15] Speaker 2: the diet. Nobody would, right? Because to your point, it's
[54:18] Speaker 2: not reliable.
[54:18] Speaker 3: But it's part of the groove. It's like it's part
[54:20] Speaker 3: of what happens.
[54:22] Speaker 2: You know, there is, and Metten did a huge amount
[54:25] Speaker 2: of work on sort of tracking the biological side of this.
[54:29] Speaker 2: But one of the things that comes out of that
[54:31] Speaker 2: discussion is that it's really a continuum between hunting and scavenging.
[54:35] Speaker 2: And sort of where you are in that continuum depends
[54:38] Speaker 2: on availability and opportunity and so on and so forth.
[54:41] Speaker 2: There's even some suggestion that T-Rexes were scavengers. I don't
[54:45] Speaker 2: know how the heck you would prove that.
[54:48] Speaker 3: Go ahead. Do you remember the writer, if you ever
[54:52] Speaker 3: hear the writer Jack Hitt? Yeah.
[54:54] Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.
[54:55] Speaker 3: He's hilarious. Jack Hitt wrote a.
[54:56] Speaker 1: Piece about, Jack Hitt wrote this big piece about, he
[55:00] Speaker 1: was a big dinosaur guy in town.
[55:01] Speaker 3: Jack Horner. Yeah, Horner. He was on the show one time.
[55:04] Speaker 2: Okay.
[55:05] Speaker 3: Jack Hitt was writing about that stuff.
[55:08] Speaker 2: Okay.
[55:08] Speaker 1: And he was expressing skepticism of anyone that would go
[55:12] Speaker 1: into a field where the experts are mostly 13-year-olds. So
[55:19] Speaker 1: I have kids young enough where they all go through
[55:23] Speaker 1: the dinosaur phase. So having had kids that went through
[55:28] Speaker 1: their dinosaur phase in recent years, where that came from
[55:31] Speaker 1: was someone started looking at, by the skull structure of
[55:36] Speaker 1: a T-Rex, what must have been like an incredible olfactory capability.
[55:44] Speaker 3: And so why would they need to smell so good
[55:47] Speaker 3: was the idea.
[55:48] Speaker 1: Like they have all these chambers and whatnot for smell. So, um,
[55:55] Speaker 1: being like, they weren't, they weren't a site predator, perhaps
[55:59] Speaker 1: they were wandering around being like, yeah, you know, I mean,
[56:03] Speaker 1: 10 miles away, there's some rotten thing. That's kind of
[56:06] Speaker 1: what pushed that idea was that they seem to have
[56:09] Speaker 1: like an incredible olfactory structure.
[56:12] Speaker 4: Yeah. I would be skeptical that T-Rex was only scavengers.
[56:16] Speaker 4: Cause what we learned from the biological.
[56:18] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
[56:19] Speaker 1: No.
[56:19] Speaker 3: Oh no.
[56:20] Speaker 1: Um, but that's what everyone got all hip to that.
[56:23] Speaker 1: And it's like, it's, it's a thing that happens. You
[56:25] Speaker 1: got to realize this is a thing that happens is
[56:27] Speaker 1: it winds up being.
[56:28] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[56:30] Speaker 1: And, and, with all due respect, like some of your
[56:33] Speaker 1: work is like this way too. It winds up being,
[56:35] Speaker 1: it upsets a narrative that like T-Rex must've just wandered
[56:41] Speaker 1: around ripping shit to shreds and killing everything in its path.
[56:46] Speaker 3: And then someone's like, I don't, why do.
[56:48] Speaker 1: You think, why do we think that? And then everybody's
[56:51] Speaker 1: got to go, yeah, I don't know why I thought that.
[56:53] Speaker 1: I just think because the cartoons and stuff.
[56:54] Speaker 3: I don't know.
[56:56] Speaker 1: I don't know why I thought that. And they're like, well,
[56:58] Speaker 1: he was really good at smelling. Maybe he's really good
[56:59] Speaker 1: at smelling rot and stuff. And that was his group.
[57:02] Speaker 1: And it starts the conversation. So the same way we
[57:04] Speaker 1: talked about it. It was like this image, and I
[57:06] Speaker 1: always held it, of these big dudes wandering the landscape,
[57:11] Speaker 1: whacking mammoths.
[57:12] Speaker 3: Left and right. I don't know. It's just, why do
[57:14] Speaker 3: I think that? I don't know why. It's conventional wisdom.
[57:17] Speaker 3: It's seductive.
[57:18] Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.
[57:19] Speaker 3: It is.
[57:19] Speaker 2: It's appealing. It's romantic. It's, you know, hey, these guys
[57:22] Speaker 2: made it all the way over here from Siberia. You know,
[57:24] Speaker 2: they must have been tough dudes.
[57:25] Speaker 3: Killing mammoths left and right. One for breakfast, one for lunch.
[57:30] Speaker 4: Yeah. We can't tell the difference though with any one
[57:36] Speaker 4: archeological site. Yeah. I mean, we went through every single
[57:41] Speaker 4: potential criteria, broken Clovis points. impact scars on the Clovis points.
[57:48] Speaker 4: These things called emlets, which are microscopic linear impact traces,
[57:52] Speaker 4: which are thought to occur when a projectile enters an animal, right?
[57:57] Speaker 4: And you get these little microscopic lines on the point.
[58:00] Speaker 4: You get those same lines from hitting a bush. We've
[58:03] Speaker 4: done experiments, right? Or hitting grass.
[58:05] Speaker 2: If you just throw and miss, you don't get those things.
[58:08] Speaker 4: Same thing, right? So of our 15 sites... both of
[58:13] Speaker 4: us suspect at least some of those were hunted, right?
[58:16] Speaker 4: Some of those mammoths at those 15 sites were hunted.
[58:19] Speaker 4: Some of them, I think were probably scavenged, right? We
[58:22] Speaker 4: don't know, but we can't tell. So we don't know
[58:24] Speaker 4: if it's all 15 were hunted and zero were scavenged.
[58:28] Speaker 4: All 15 were scavenged, zero were hunted.
[58:31] Speaker 1: And you had to have contemplated the middle ground, which
[58:35] Speaker 1: is what you come across when it's all messed up
[58:38] Speaker 1: for whatever reason.
[58:39] Speaker 3: And then you go over there and kill it real quick.
[58:41] Speaker 2: Well, one of the things that came out of the
[58:42] Speaker 2: animal literature was that wildlife biologists can sometimes have a
[58:47] Speaker 2: hard time telling whether something was hunted or scavenged and
[58:51] Speaker 2: who scavenged it, right?
[58:53] Speaker 4: And that's just a couple days later.
[58:54] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[58:55] Speaker 2: You know, if it's out there in the rain, in
[58:58] Speaker 2: the snow, if it's really high heat, you know, you
[59:03] Speaker 2: just can't tell unless you've got a wildlife camera that
[59:06] Speaker 2: caught it in the act. And we don't have wildlife
[59:09] Speaker 2: cameras that caught people in the act going after a
[59:12] Speaker 2: mammoth can.
[59:13] Speaker 1: You can you help tie this work tie this discussion
[59:21] Speaker 1: about were they like were they they're perhaps killing it
[59:26] Speaker 1: perhaps killing some perhaps scavenging some your curiosity about this
[59:32] Speaker 1: has to be fed by this bigger question, right? Your,
[59:36] Speaker 1: your curiosity about this is, is, is spawned from your interest.
[59:43] Speaker 1: You're motivated by this big discussion of how probable is
[59:46] Speaker 1: it that humans killed all this stuff?
[59:50] Speaker 3: Like, can you connect these?
[59:51] Speaker 1: Like, do you, do you view this discussion as totally
[59:53] Speaker 1: outside of that? Or do you think it informs the discussion?
[59:58] Speaker 1: That the Pleistocene extinctions were driven by humans.
[1:00:01] Speaker 4: I think for me, what this research shows is that
[1:00:06] Speaker 4: we cannot use archaeology to test that question of overkill.
[1:00:12] Speaker 3: Got it.
[1:00:14] Speaker 2: So a couple of things for me. One of the
[1:00:17] Speaker 2: things is I'm really interested in how people adapt to landscapes.
[1:00:22] Speaker 3: Okay.
[1:00:23] Speaker 2: And I want to know about how they respond to
[1:00:26] Speaker 2: the environmental and ecological challenges of surviving on that landscape.
[1:00:31] Speaker 2: How are they successful on that landscape? What is the
[1:00:35] Speaker 2: impact of the environment and the climate of that landscape
[1:00:38] Speaker 2: on their adaptations? What is the impact of their adaptive
[1:00:42] Speaker 2: strategies on the resources on that landscape? So for me,
[1:00:46] Speaker 2: it's not so much the specific question of extinctions, though
[1:00:49] Speaker 2: I'll get to that in a moment, it's really the
[1:00:51] Speaker 2: larger question What was it like to come into what
[1:00:56] Speaker 2: was either an empty continent or a continent that was
[1:01:00] Speaker 2: at the very best lightly populated, where there hadn't been
[1:01:04] Speaker 2: much of a human footprint or human impact up to
[1:01:08] Speaker 2: that point? What are folks doing on that landscape and
[1:01:11] Speaker 2: how do they do it and how did they figure
[1:01:13] Speaker 2: it all out? Because one of the things that's really
[1:01:16] Speaker 2: clear is that by around 11,000 years ago, you've got
[1:01:21] Speaker 2: people in very different parts of North America developing adaptive strategies,
[1:01:28] Speaker 2: incorporating lots of different resources in their diet. I think
[1:01:31] Speaker 2: that's happening earlier as well, but that's a sidebar. So
[1:01:37] Speaker 2: they clearly had figured stuff out. So I want to
[1:01:39] Speaker 2: know about that process and I want to know how
[1:01:42] Speaker 2: it unfolded and what the impacts of in both directions
[1:01:48] Speaker 2: of the environment on the people and people on the environment.
[1:01:51] Speaker 2: Extinctions is one piece of that, obviously, right? And the
[1:01:56] Speaker 2: problem that I have with overkill in addition to what
[1:01:59] Speaker 2: Metin just mentioned is that it's also the end of
[1:02:04] Speaker 2: the Pleistocene. So all sorts of things are happening at
[1:02:08] Speaker 2: the end of the Pleistocene. And so the question becomes
[1:02:12] Speaker 2: an even larger equifinality issue. If the Pleistocene is coming
[1:02:17] Speaker 2: to an end, how can you say it was just
[1:02:20] Speaker 2: humans until you've factored out and precluded the possibility of
[1:02:26] Speaker 2: all the changes that are taking place at the end
[1:02:28] Speaker 2: of the Ice Age as the Earth emerges from the
[1:02:30] Speaker 2: grip of 20,000 years of cold, right? That can't not
[1:02:37] Speaker 2: have had an impact on all of these different animals.
[1:02:42] Speaker 2: But the thing that makes it a really interesting and
[1:02:44] Speaker 2: challenging question, and which is why I think I don't
[1:02:49] Speaker 2: want to just stop at saying, oh, it was humans
[1:02:52] Speaker 2: or not humans. I want to find out how do
[1:02:55] Speaker 2: you kill off mammoth and horses and camels on the
[1:03:00] Speaker 2: great grasslands of North America, mastodons in the forest, giant
[1:03:05] Speaker 2: beavers in swamps, glyptodonts in Florida, animals with very different
[1:03:11] Speaker 2: ecological tolerances, ecological thresholds, very different adaptations, it's too easy
[1:03:20] Speaker 2: an answer to say that humans killed them all. Because
[1:03:22] Speaker 2: we don't have any evidence that humans killed, you know,
[1:03:25] Speaker 2: 36 of the 38 or, you know, okay, right? So
[1:03:31] Speaker 2: that becomes, for me, the more interesting intellectual challenge that
[1:03:35] Speaker 2: we have to address. And so, yeah. If humans were
[1:03:39] Speaker 2: responsible for killing the last mammoth standing, fine. Does that
[1:03:43] Speaker 2: mean they're a cause of the extinctions? I don't think so.
[1:03:46] Speaker 2: Because everything that we're seeing in the environmental record and
[1:03:51] Speaker 2: in the ancient DNA record is that they've already started
[1:03:55] Speaker 2: to swirl around the drain long before humans showed up.
[1:03:59] Speaker 2: So if you want a cause, it's not gonna be
[1:04:01] Speaker 2: the last mammoth that was killed by a hunter. It's
[1:04:05] Speaker 2: gonna be processes that were set in place thousands of
[1:04:09] Speaker 2: years earlier. And that becomes a question of how do
[1:04:13] Speaker 2: we understand that in terms of what's happening at the
[1:04:17] Speaker 2: end of the Pleistocene, at the end of the Ice Age,
[1:04:19] Speaker 2: climatically and environmentally and ecologically.
[1:04:22] Speaker 1: This question is a little out of order. I should
[1:04:24] Speaker 1: have asked earlier. All those animals you just named. So
[1:04:31] Speaker 1: go through that list again. The big stuff that vanished.
[1:04:34] Speaker 1: Or hit me with four or five big things that vanished.
[1:04:37] Speaker 2: Mammoth, mastodon, gompother, camel, horse, iremotherium, nothrotheriops, mylodon, glossotherium. How
[1:04:45] Speaker 2: many do you want?
[1:04:46] Speaker 3: That's plenty. Because it demonstrates this point that I want
[1:04:49] Speaker 3: to dig in on for a minute. Okay. We have
[1:04:53] Speaker 3: 15 sites. We have 15 sites where we have.
[1:04:56] Speaker 2: Proboscideans.
[1:04:57] Speaker 3: Human tools.
[1:04:59] Speaker 2: With mammoth and mastodon.
[1:05:00] Speaker 3: Mixed in with proboscideans. Mixed in with elephants. Yeah.
[1:05:04] Speaker 4: Um.
[1:05:07] Speaker 1: But we don't have those with giant beavers. We don't
[1:05:10] Speaker 1: have those with giant ground sloths.
[1:05:12] Speaker 2: We don't have them with, uh, Aztlana legus, the extinct bunny. Uh,
[1:05:17] Speaker 2: we don't have them with, um, you know, the little
[1:05:19] Speaker 2: tiny antelope that disappeared.
[1:05:21] Speaker 4: Okay.
[1:05:21] Speaker 3: So hear me out. Wait, wait, wait, Steve. One more thing, please. Yeah,
[1:05:24] Speaker 3: go ahead.
[1:05:25] Speaker 2: We don't have them with the spruce tree that went
[1:05:27] Speaker 2: extinct at the end of the Pleistocene.
[1:05:29] Speaker 4: Okay.
[1:05:30] Speaker 3: I didn't know about that spruce tree. Yeah. Really? Yeah, absolutely.
[1:05:34] Speaker 2: And Paul Martin, bless his heart, wonderful guy. He was
[1:05:37] Speaker 2: the guy that was really behind the overkill stuff. He
[1:05:39] Speaker 2: was a terrific guy. He tried to explain why humans
[1:05:44] Speaker 2: might have caused the extinction of the spruce tree.
[1:05:46] Speaker 3: Really? Yes, he did.
[1:05:48] Speaker 2: It's in his 2005 book.
[1:05:49] Speaker 3: Kids run around machetes whacking away at.
[1:05:51] Speaker 2: Them all the time. No, it was setting fires out
[1:05:54] Speaker 2: of season.
[1:05:54] Speaker 3: Okay. Got it. Yeah. All right.
[1:05:57] Speaker 2: I'll let you finish, sorry.
[1:05:58] Speaker 1: No, no, I don't have a point. It's just, it's
[1:06:01] Speaker 1: kind of a question to be like, if, let me
[1:06:06] Speaker 1: ask a sub, I got a sub question. Is there,
[1:06:12] Speaker 1: do we have any mammoths or mastodons that have a
[1:06:14] Speaker 1: projectile point jammed into it?
[1:06:16] Speaker 3: And does that even happen when you test it?
[1:06:19] Speaker 4: We do in the old world. So in Europe and
[1:06:23] Speaker 4: in Asia, we actually have stone points embedded in bone.
[1:06:30] Speaker 4: We do not have a single Clovis point embedded in
[1:06:35] Speaker 4: any proboscidian bone in North America.
[1:06:37] Speaker 1: And because of all the stuff you do, I'm sure
[1:06:40] Speaker 1: you have gone around with fresh bone, jabbing points into it.
[1:06:44] Speaker 3: Oh, it happens. Is it hard to do? Is it
[1:06:46] Speaker 3: hard to pull off?
[1:06:49] Speaker 4: I mean, I've never stabbed... an animal with Clovis points.
[1:06:54] Speaker 3: Um, no, I mean just like cattle bones or something.
[1:06:56] Speaker 4: Oh, uh, yeah, I don't know.
[1:06:57] Speaker 3: Maybe you should, I don't know. Yeah. Shoot some, shoot some.
[1:07:00] Speaker 4: Like, well, George Frison did. He got, he got, uh,
[1:07:03] Speaker 4: Clovis Point embedded in bone.
[1:07:05] Speaker 3: Yeah. He did. Yeah, he did. Okay, that's what I
[1:07:06] Speaker 3: was curious.
[1:07:07] Speaker 4: Yeah, it's happened. It's happened.
[1:07:08] Speaker 3: It's not like a one in a thousand chance. Oh, no.
[1:07:11] Speaker 4: In the old world, there's several archaeological examples of that occurring,
[1:07:15] Speaker 4: which is very strong evidence that that particular animal was hunted.
[1:07:18] Speaker 2: Which I think is where you were going with that,
[1:07:20] Speaker 2: and that's a fair point.
[1:07:21] Speaker 1: I just, that was like a sub-question because it kind
[1:07:23] Speaker 1: of informs us. It'd be the, I don't even have
[1:07:26] Speaker 1: this formed in my head yet, but we have these
[1:07:29] Speaker 1: sites where they've killed elephants, and I'm... I'm just trying
[1:07:33] Speaker 1: to make a word that lumps mammoths and Colombian mammoths
[1:07:36] Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff.
[1:07:37] Speaker 3: Mastodons.
[1:07:38] Speaker 1: They've killed elephants. So, but we don't have sites where
[1:07:42] Speaker 1: they killed giant ground sloths. We don't have sites where
[1:07:44] Speaker 1: they've killed saber-toothed cats. So I would look and I'd say, well,
[1:07:48] Speaker 1: they had, if I'm assuming that humans killed all this
[1:07:52] Speaker 1: big stuff off, I would be like, well, man, it
[1:07:55] Speaker 1: sure seems like they had a preference. Mammoths were the
[1:08:00] Speaker 1: ones to get Because we don't have this other stuff.
[1:08:06] Speaker 1: So they're going out and they're being like, no, I'm
[1:08:07] Speaker 1: going to look for a mammoth and get it. If
[1:08:09] Speaker 1: it's scavenging, why don't we have scavenged? If it's just
[1:08:14] Speaker 1: opportunistic scavenging, where are all the scavenged giant ground sloths?
[1:08:20] Speaker 1: Where are the scavenged giant beavers?
[1:08:24] Speaker 2: Go ahead.
[1:08:25] Speaker 4: Well, there's two issues there, right? The first is taphonomy.
[1:08:30] Speaker 4: and how well certain animals survive on the landscape after
[1:08:33] Speaker 4: they die. And mammoth bones are thick. They often also
[1:08:39] Speaker 4: are found near watering holes. They can be gently buried.
[1:08:42] Speaker 4: So you'll have a greater chance of finding mammoth bones
[1:08:46] Speaker 4: than any other of those things. And just be- For bison,
[1:08:49] Speaker 4: which we'll talk about in a moment. Also too, they
[1:08:53] Speaker 4: were probably hunting bunnies and all those other things, Sure.
[1:08:56] Speaker 4: Just because we don't have the sites. Right. So I
[1:08:58] Speaker 4: think the other thing. Yeah.
[1:08:59] Speaker 3: I can see like, like rabbit bone. Yeah. It just
[1:09:04] Speaker 3: gets crunched up by stuff and eat.
[1:09:06] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:09:06] Speaker 4: And so it's really important to separate out the, the
[1:09:09] Speaker 4: question of hunting and what they hunted versus did they
[1:09:15] Speaker 4: cause the extinction of these animals? Right. Right. I wouldn't
[1:09:19] Speaker 4: be surprised if they hunted bunnies, right? But there's no
[1:09:23] Speaker 4: evidence that they caused the extinction of those things.
[1:09:26] Speaker 2: And I would add to, you raise an interesting question, right?
[1:09:31] Speaker 2: If they were scavenging, why aren't we seeing scavenged arimatheriums,
[1:09:35] Speaker 2: giant sloths, right? We're not entirely sure that all of
[1:09:40] Speaker 2: these animals were even around when these folks were here.
[1:09:43] Speaker 3: Gotcha.
[1:09:44] Speaker 4: Okay.
[1:09:45] Speaker 3: That's a great point, man.
[1:09:46] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
[1:09:48] Speaker 3: Because you probably can't make a perfect timeline.
[1:09:51] Speaker 2: Well, no, we can't. And in fact, when you actually
[1:09:54] Speaker 2: look at the last, they're called last appearance dates, which
[1:09:58] Speaker 2: is the last radiocarbon date that we have on an animal.
[1:10:01] Speaker 3: Okay.
[1:10:03] Speaker 2: Of the 38 different genera, about 20 of them, 20
[1:10:08] Speaker 2: or 18, don't hold me to the specific number, are
[1:10:13] Speaker 2: gone by 20,000 years ago.
[1:10:14] Speaker 4: Oh.
[1:10:14] Speaker 2: Right?
[1:10:15] Speaker 1: Right.
[1:10:16] Speaker 2: So, yeah. I mean, it's a fair point to say,
[1:10:20] Speaker 2: why weren't they scavenging the other things? Why were they
[1:10:22] Speaker 2: scavenging mammoth? Well, mammoth and mastodon actually survived up until
[1:10:25] Speaker 2: around 10,000 years ago. And in fact, mastodons were living
[1:10:30] Speaker 2: in the Great Lakes area when Folsom people were killing
[1:10:32] Speaker 2: bison out on the high plains. Is that right?
[1:10:37] Speaker 4: Oh, yeah.
[1:10:38] Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. And so what that is telling us is
[1:10:42] Speaker 2: that if you are going to scavenge... That's the big
[1:10:46] Speaker 2: hunk of meat that's laying on the landscape for you.
[1:10:49] Speaker 2: We know that they were there. We don't know about
[1:10:51] Speaker 2: the other three dozen generally. But also, they're going after bison.
[1:10:59] Speaker 2: They're hunting bison at this time. So we know that
[1:11:02] Speaker 2: they are, in fact, hunting. And it's really interesting. In
[1:11:05] Speaker 2: a number of Clovis sites, the targets are not necessarily mammoth.
[1:11:11] Speaker 2: There are bison in some of these Clovis sites.
[1:11:13] Speaker 3: Got it.
[1:11:14] Speaker 4: The other thing we learned in this research is that
[1:11:17] Speaker 4: elephants last much longer on the landscape after they die
[1:11:23] Speaker 4: than lots of other animals. So just the pure chance
[1:11:27] Speaker 4: of humans coming across an elephant carcass would be higher
[1:11:32] Speaker 4: than a bunny or a caribou.
[1:11:33] Speaker 3: I mean, just because of how huge it is.
[1:11:35] Speaker 4: How huge it is. And there are documented cases of
[1:11:38] Speaker 4: elephants lasting seven months on the landscape and then they
[1:11:43] Speaker 4: get scavenged. right after that point.
[1:11:45] Speaker 2: So.
[1:11:46] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:11:46] Speaker 2: And you know what? Your question makes me think too.
[1:11:49] Speaker 2: I don't think we've systematically gone through all of these
[1:11:54] Speaker 2: sort of early kills of deer or bison and sort
[1:12:00] Speaker 2: of did the same kind of vetting of those as
[1:12:02] Speaker 2: we've done mammoth kills or mammoth scavenging events.
[1:12:07] Speaker 3: Yeah, that'd be interesting.
[1:12:08] Speaker 1: When you look at other stuff, do you see more
[1:12:10] Speaker 1: definitive killed kind of stuff going on.
[1:12:14] Speaker 2: I mean, that's what I would think. But you know what?
[1:12:17] Speaker 2: We haven't sort of turned our sort of critical eye
[1:12:20] Speaker 2: on that.
[1:12:21] Speaker 4: Although the more we do comparisons between Clovis and post-Clovis
[1:12:27] Speaker 4: hunter-gatherer groups, archaeologically, the more similarities we tend to find.
[1:12:33] Speaker 4: You know, we used to think that fluting was a
[1:12:36] Speaker 4: Paleo-Indian behavior. And then we excavated Goodson Rock Shelter in Oklahoma, where...
[1:12:43] Speaker 4: We dug two meters down, we found fluted bifaces. We thought,
[1:12:47] Speaker 4: oh my goodness, this is one of the first Clovis
[1:12:49] Speaker 4: rock shelters ever found. We were so excited. We get
[1:12:56] Speaker 4: radiocarbon dates. We get radiocarbon dates from two meters down
[1:13:00] Speaker 4: where we're finding the fluted bifaces. The radiocarbon dates come
[1:13:04] Speaker 4: back 4,500 BP. And we're like, oh, those must be wrong.
[1:13:08] Speaker 4: Charcoal can move between layers in rock shelters. So we
[1:13:12] Speaker 4: do optimal stimulated luminescence or OSL dating of that same layer.
[1:13:18] Speaker 4: The dates come back, 4,500 BP. Oh, those must be wrong.
[1:13:22] Speaker 4: Sand grains can move, right? It was the third field
[1:13:25] Speaker 4: season we've been sweating and getting bit by ticks and
[1:13:28] Speaker 4: all this sort of stuff.
[1:13:29] Speaker 2: Very unpleasant.
[1:13:30] Speaker 4: We find notched, archaic projectile points that we know from
[1:13:36] Speaker 4: other sites date to 4,500 BP made on the same
[1:13:40] Speaker 4: exact stone raw material as our fluted bifaces. And we
[1:13:44] Speaker 4: had to succumb to the evidence at that point.
[1:13:47] Speaker 3: So these folks were making like two kinds.
[1:13:49] Speaker 4: No, what they were doing was they were, it's convergent evolution.
[1:13:53] Speaker 4: They were basically, they had independently come up with this
[1:13:57] Speaker 4: fluting technique. And on the way to making their notched points,
[1:14:01] Speaker 4: they were fluting their bifaces. And then the fluting was
[1:14:05] Speaker 4: erased in the final stage.
[1:14:07] Speaker 3: Got it.
[1:14:08] Speaker 4: We didn't know fluting occurred. I didn't know fluting occurred
[1:14:10] Speaker 4: in post-Clovis periods.
[1:14:12] Speaker 3: Got it.
[1:14:13] Speaker 4: But there's very little sort of back and forth, I think,
[1:14:17] Speaker 4: or not as much between Paleo-Indian and post-Paleo-Indian archaeological sites.
[1:14:22] Speaker 2: Which is largely because of what you were talking about earlier, Steve,
[1:14:26] Speaker 2: which is that this has been so much of the
[1:14:29] Speaker 2: attention has been focused on Clovis. And look, we're just
[1:14:32] Speaker 2: as guilty as everybody else.
[1:14:33] Speaker 4: Yeah, it's awesome.
[1:14:34] Speaker 2: Right?
[1:14:34] Speaker 4: Clovis is awesome.
[1:14:35] Speaker 2: It is really pretty awesome. And it's what gets all
[1:14:38] Speaker 2: the archeological attention, but we haven't sort of systematically evaluated
[1:14:42] Speaker 2: all the other things that came later in the same way.
[1:14:45] Speaker 4: And that partially has to do with the fact that
[1:14:47] Speaker 4: we find so little Clovis that we pour over every
[1:14:51] Speaker 4: flake scar and every small chip and everything. In later
[1:14:54] Speaker 4: time periods where you've got sites that are acres and
[1:14:59] Speaker 4: millions of artifacts, they just don't sort of analyze things
[1:15:03] Speaker 4: as closely as often as I think. Yeah.
[1:15:07] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:15:07] Speaker 2: And because, um, and getting back to the whole extinction issue, right.
[1:15:11] Speaker 2: There's more riding on it 13,000 years ago in terms
[1:15:15] Speaker 2: of the possible role of humans in the demise of
[1:15:18] Speaker 2: all these animals.
[1:15:19] Speaker 3: Right.
[1:15:19] Speaker 2: So the, um, there's, there's, it's a greater question to answer.
[1:15:25] Speaker 2: And so that's why the focus, you.
[1:15:30] Speaker 1: Know, uh, on the question of, um, Big stuff is
[1:15:35] Speaker 1: easier to scavenge. I mean, just, it's big.
[1:15:38] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:15:39] Speaker 1: So it takes a long time to go away. Are
[1:15:40] Speaker 1: you familiar with Viljom or Stephenson? He was an Arctic explorer.
[1:15:45] Speaker 1: He spent a lot of time cutting across, like, early 1900s.
[1:15:49] Speaker 1: He was up on the Arctic coast of Alaska. He
[1:15:53] Speaker 1: went into the high Arctic, Victoria Island and stuff. He
[1:15:58] Speaker 1: made a lot of first contacts with people. They knew
[1:16:01] Speaker 1: about white people but hadn't encountered them. He's got a
[1:16:04] Speaker 1: couple books about his wanderings. At one point, they're hurting
[1:16:08] Speaker 1: for food, and they find a whale. This is in
[1:16:12] Speaker 1: northern Alaska. They find a whale, and he talks about
[1:16:14] Speaker 1: they had to boil it and boil it, the tongue.
[1:16:17] Speaker 1: They had to boil it and boil it and boil
[1:16:19] Speaker 1: it to desalinate it enough to be able to eat it.
[1:16:22] Speaker 1: And they later run into, in his time, one of
[1:16:27] Speaker 1: his books is My Life with the Eskimo. He used
[1:16:29] Speaker 1: the word Eskimo. They run into some Eskimo who said,
[1:16:32] Speaker 1: I can't remember how many, it's multiple. That's been there
[1:16:36] Speaker 1: for years. So then it was still like, here's this
[1:16:41] Speaker 1: guy scavenging a whale that people are like, oh no,
[1:16:43] Speaker 1: I can't remember, it was two years, whatever.
[1:16:45] Speaker 3: They're like, oh, that thing's been there for forever. And
[1:16:47] Speaker 3: they're still eating on it.
[1:16:49] Speaker 4: Well, and this is where I think working with and
[1:16:52] Speaker 4: learning from John Speth was incredible. Because for years, he
[1:16:57] Speaker 4: has systematically searched and read through the ethno-historic literature on hunter-gatherers.
[1:17:03] Speaker 4: Not the post-World War II literature, but everything basically pre-World
[1:17:07] Speaker 4: War II. And while scavenging is incredibly rare post-World War II,
[1:17:14] Speaker 4: pre-World War II, he finds it everywhere. Hunter-gatherer groups around
[1:17:19] Speaker 4: the world, from Argentina to Alaska to Asia, all over,
[1:17:25] Speaker 4: they're scavenging everything. Mm-hmm. And in fact, oftentimes they prefer
[1:17:29] Speaker 4: the putrid meat to fresh meat.
[1:17:33] Speaker 3: Got it, yeah.
[1:17:35] Speaker 2: He gives the example of, just to sort of put
[1:17:38] Speaker 2: this in some sort of local context, he talks about
[1:17:41] Speaker 2: Mandan and Hadatsa groups in the early sort of 1600s, 1700s,
[1:17:49] Speaker 2: bison that would wander out onto the ice.
[1:17:52] Speaker 3: Sure.
[1:17:53] Speaker 2: Break up, they'd fall in ground. they'd float downstream. And
[1:17:59] Speaker 2: Mandan and Hadassah groups would just pull them out. They'd
[1:18:02] Speaker 2: be pretty bloated at that point.
[1:18:04] Speaker 3: I've written about this. It was part of the seasonal plan.
[1:18:09] Speaker 1: Part of the seasonal plan was that shit washes downriver.
[1:18:12] Speaker 2: And you were wondering about reliability of scavenging.
[1:18:15] Speaker 3: There you go. Yeah, you're right. That contradicts it. Yeah.
[1:18:21] Speaker 2: No, and it didn't. Somebody was asked, well, what about
[1:18:26] Speaker 2: the smell? And John has this great quote in the paper,
[1:18:29] Speaker 2: a Native American, said, we don't eat the smell.
[1:18:36] Speaker 1: But when I was just hanging out, though, I was
[1:18:38] Speaker 1: just hanging out with Inuit folks, and.
[1:18:45] Speaker 3: They still eat a lot of what they call fermented walrus.
[1:18:49] Speaker 4: Right. Right.
[1:18:50] Speaker 3: And other things.
[1:18:51] Speaker 1: And talking to them about it, it wasn't that someone
[1:18:55] Speaker 1: once upon a time, I'm guessing here, but it wasn't
[1:18:58] Speaker 1: that someone once upon a time said, I could really
[1:19:00] Speaker 1: go for something fermented. What it probably was, you kill
[1:19:04] Speaker 1: a bunch of walrus because there's walrus around.
[1:19:07] Speaker 3: You can use some of it. You can't use all
[1:19:08] Speaker 3: of it.
[1:19:09] Speaker 1: And you dig down and get into the permafrost and
[1:19:14] Speaker 1: bury some and cover it up with rocks so polar
[1:19:17] Speaker 1: bears don't get it. And then when you're really hard up,
[1:19:20] Speaker 1: you go, and it's like, it's a little rank. But
[1:19:25] Speaker 1: I'm not going to starve to death over this. And
[1:19:28] Speaker 1: so you eat it, your children eat it, their children
[1:19:31] Speaker 1: eat it, and eventually it becomes a thing that is acceptable.
[1:19:35] Speaker 1: But its birth, the birth of the idea was trying
[1:19:39] Speaker 1: to store stuff over, right? And so you can imagine
[1:19:44] Speaker 1: that people's tolerances for these things, stank or fermentation or
[1:19:51] Speaker 1: rot or whatever, probably grow into taste, probably grow into
[1:19:56] Speaker 1: a thing that you don't mind, that it's normal and
[1:19:58] Speaker 1: you like it, right?
[1:19:59] Speaker 2: It's custom and culture.
[1:20:01] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:20:01] Speaker 4: Especially when it's been done for two million years.
[1:20:04] Speaker 3: Sure.
[1:20:04] Speaker 4: I mean, like when you've got little homo habilis, they're
[1:20:07] Speaker 4: not going out and hunting rhinos and hippo, right? That's
[1:20:11] Speaker 4: a three foot tall hominin that barely can make stone flakes.
[1:20:16] Speaker 4: So they are scavenging. No one questioned whether Homo habilis
[1:20:20] Speaker 4: was scavenging, right? So I think, and you had a
[1:20:23] Speaker 4: quote this morning, that scavenging, when hunting gets added with
[1:20:28] Speaker 4: Homo erectus, scavenging doesn't go away. And I think the
[1:20:32] Speaker 4: ethno-historic literature shows that to be the case.
[1:20:36] Speaker 2: Yeah, no, credit to Mary Steiner, who's worked a lot
[1:20:39] Speaker 2: on Neanderthal sites. And Mary pointed out, because Neanderthals, there's
[1:20:43] Speaker 2: no question these guys were hunting. They were serious dudes.
[1:20:48] Speaker 2: And what she said is, you know, it's unfortunate that
[1:20:51] Speaker 2: we haven't really thought about Neanderthal scavenging, because that is,
[1:20:54] Speaker 2: in a sense, a form of gathering. You've got hunting
[1:20:57] Speaker 2: and you've got gathering. And if you think about scavenged meat,
[1:21:05] Speaker 2: It's low cost. It's low risk. It's nutritious. And if
[1:21:11] Speaker 2: you don't know where you're going or what you might
[1:21:14] Speaker 2: find up ahead of you, it's right there in front.
[1:21:18] Speaker 2: And why would you pass it up? Because again, you're
[1:21:22] Speaker 2: not going to have those sort of food taboos. I mean,
[1:21:25] Speaker 2: when we think about scavenge stuff, right? You're not going
[1:21:28] Speaker 2: to buy a package of ground beef in the grocery
[1:21:31] Speaker 2: store that's kind of turned brown, right? You won't touch that.
[1:21:36] Speaker 3: Well, I do have one story, but.
[1:21:39] Speaker 2: And how'd you feel after.
[1:21:40] Speaker 3: You ate it? Yeah.
[1:21:43] Speaker 2: So, you know, for them, it... Yeah, these folks are
[1:21:48] Speaker 2: subsistence hunters and gatherers. And subsistence, I think, has a
[1:21:53] Speaker 2: pretty wide bandwidth.
[1:21:54] Speaker 3: Sure.
[1:21:55] Speaker 2: Much wider than our experiences, certainly. And much more opportunities
[1:22:01] Speaker 2: than our experiences as well.
[1:22:05] Speaker 3: Uh, you guys both know of at least Mike cons the, and.
[1:22:09] Speaker 2: I've, I've worked in the Arctic with him one season. I, again,
[1:22:14] Speaker 2: serious person, follow the facts, do your research.
[1:22:17] Speaker 1: And then like I'm doing with you at times, I'm like, but,
[1:22:20] Speaker 1: but you know, if you had to guess anyways, I
[1:22:26] Speaker 1: was up with him in the Arctic and I'm, and
[1:22:28] Speaker 1: I'm pressuring him about what would be the coolest thing
[1:22:30] Speaker 1: to find.
[1:22:32] Speaker 3: What do you hope you find?
[1:22:33] Speaker 1: What would be the coolest thing you'd find? And he
[1:22:35] Speaker 1: indulged me and he said, I sometimes imagine, he's explaining
[1:22:39] Speaker 1: to me, I sometimes imagine that I'm flying along in
[1:22:42] Speaker 1: my helicopter and they're out of the ground as a
[1:22:46] Speaker 1: fucking hand. And he's like, and it's just a landslide,
[1:22:53] Speaker 1: like a landslide, like an encampment.
[1:22:58] Speaker 3: And then it freezes.
[1:23:00] Speaker 1: And he goes, and under that landslide, melting out of
[1:23:03] Speaker 1: this ice is just everything.
[1:23:06] Speaker 3: Yeah. It's everything. It's the dogs, the clothes. Yeah. It's like,
[1:23:12] Speaker 3: you know, it's Pompeii.
[1:23:14] Speaker 4: Right.
[1:23:15] Speaker 3: Right.
[1:23:15] Speaker 1: It's like Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius where there's a dude like, or,
[1:23:19] Speaker 1: you know, there's a person literally doing a thing and.
[1:23:21] Speaker 2: They're like, right. They're in their fetal position.
[1:23:24] Speaker 3: Yeah. He said, yeah, that would be cool.
[1:23:28] Speaker 2: Well.
[1:23:29] Speaker 3: What, like.
[1:23:30] Speaker 1: What, it doesn't need to be that fanciful, but like,
[1:23:35] Speaker 1: what could we find? And, and I, I put this
[1:23:39] Speaker 1: question to another anthropologist one time and I'm like, but God,
[1:23:43] Speaker 1: there's gotta be so much stuff out there. He's like,
[1:23:44] Speaker 1: I don't know, look at how many roads we've already built,
[1:23:49] Speaker 1: how many foundations we've already dug. Um, I, this individual
[1:23:54] Speaker 1: is saying, I, I'm not optimistic that we're gonna find
[1:23:57] Speaker 1: all kinds of new, amazing stuff.
[1:23:59] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:24:00] Speaker 1: Well, like, but what, what would be an exciting thing?
[1:24:06] Speaker 1: That's that's somewhat probable that would stir the conversation around
[1:24:13] Speaker 1: the first Americans up.
[1:24:15] Speaker 2: First, let me talk about Mike's dream.
[1:24:17] Speaker 4: Okay.
[1:24:19] Speaker 2: Mike's fantasy.
[1:24:21] Speaker 3: Um, again, I pushed him on this.
[1:24:22] Speaker 2: No, no, that's fine. Um, regrettably it's coming true because
[1:24:27] Speaker 2: of climate change.
[1:24:27] Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
[1:24:28] Speaker 2: Ice fields are melting. And there's a whole sort of
[1:24:32] Speaker 2: subdiscipline that's emerging now where people are going to these
[1:24:36] Speaker 2: areas where glacial ice is disappearing and they're finding stuff.
[1:24:43] Speaker 2: So far, no hands sticking out of the ground, which
[1:24:47] Speaker 2: actually would be pretty hard to see from a helicopter. But,
[1:24:50] Speaker 2: you know, Mike needs to stick around a little while
[1:24:53] Speaker 2: longer and find those things.
[1:24:55] Speaker 3: His dream might come true. Yeah, because who knows what's
[1:24:57] Speaker 3: hiding under all that ice. Yeah.
[1:25:01] Speaker 2: Look, my sense would be what I would like to see, right?
[1:25:08] Speaker 2: And this is actually something that we're working on now,
[1:25:11] Speaker 2: is getting far more ancient environmental DNA on landscapes and
[1:25:20] Speaker 2: on animals. Because leaving aside, I'm an archaeologist, but let's
[1:25:26] Speaker 2: just leave aside all the archaeological stuff. Partly for reasons
[1:25:29] Speaker 2: that Metin said. We're not going to be able to
[1:25:30] Speaker 2: answer this question with archaeological data. What we really need
[1:25:34] Speaker 2: to find, what we really need to develop is a
[1:25:38] Speaker 2: knowledge base and data. Let me pause for a moment
[1:25:43] Speaker 2: and give a bit of an explanation. If you go
[1:25:47] Speaker 2: to a lake and you get a sediment core out
[1:25:51] Speaker 2: of that lake and you thin slice it like a
[1:25:54] Speaker 2: salami and you take just a little square centimeter of
[1:26:00] Speaker 2: dirt out of that, you can recover all of the
[1:26:05] Speaker 2: plants and animals that were on that landscape at that
[1:26:09] Speaker 2: moment in time, okay? If the animals were taking a leak,
[1:26:17] Speaker 2: if they were dropping a turd, if they were shedding,
[1:26:20] Speaker 2: I mean, you moving across, you could find your DNA
[1:26:23] Speaker 2: all over this room, Steve, okay? What that does for us,
[1:26:29] Speaker 2: if we really want to understand environmental change, species changes
[1:26:34] Speaker 2: over time, we can't just look at what is a
[1:26:38] Speaker 2: mammoth doing. We've got to look at what the environment
[1:26:40] Speaker 2: around that mammoth is doing and how that's changing. And
[1:26:43] Speaker 2: so for me, and again, this is something that we're
[1:26:47] Speaker 2: working on, is we need to develop It's kind of mundane.
[1:26:52] Speaker 2: It's not as exciting as seeing a hand sticking out.
[1:26:54] Speaker 3: No, you can't beat the hand, man.
[1:26:56] Speaker 2: No, no. I'm conceding ground. I defer to Mike on
[1:27:01] Speaker 2: all of this and other questions. But what we need
[1:27:05] Speaker 2: to do is develop that knowledge because then we'll be
[1:27:08] Speaker 2: able to say, look, these animals are starting to swirl
[1:27:13] Speaker 2: down the drain at this point in time, and here's
[1:27:16] Speaker 2: the reason why. we're seeing their vegetation changing. We're seeing
[1:27:20] Speaker 2: that biological community evolving over time because of this ultimate driver,
[1:27:25] Speaker 2: which is the climate that's changing at the end of
[1:27:27] Speaker 2: the Pleistocene. So that's what I want to find is
[1:27:31] Speaker 2: find those sites. And we've got several of them going
[1:27:34] Speaker 2: right now, working with my colleagues at the Center for
[1:27:38] Speaker 2: Geogenetics in Copenhagen, where we're actually looking at a number
[1:27:42] Speaker 2: of these localities that are terminal Pleistocene. where we're looking
[1:27:46] Speaker 2: at the presence of the plants and the animals that
[1:27:49] Speaker 2: are out on that landscape, just trying to get so
[1:27:52] Speaker 2: that we can answer that question. So much as I
[1:27:55] Speaker 2: would love to be able to say, if I found
[1:27:58] Speaker 2: this one thing, it could solve all of the questions
[1:28:01] Speaker 2: that we've been asking, there isn't gonna be one thing.
[1:28:04] Speaker 2: This is not like, what's that movie with Billy Crystal,
[1:28:08] Speaker 2: One Thing?
[1:28:08] Speaker 3: No, I don't know.
[1:28:10] Speaker 2: Where they go off to a dude ranch?
[1:28:12] Speaker 3: Oh. City slickers.
[1:28:15] Speaker 2: City slickers.
[1:28:15] Speaker 3: Right.
[1:28:16] Speaker 2: And Jack plants. There's not going to be one thing. Okay. Um,
[1:28:23] Speaker 2: it's going to be a lot of work on a
[1:28:24] Speaker 2: lot of different things.
[1:28:25] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:28:26] Speaker 2: Do you have one thing?
[1:28:27] Speaker 4: I do.
[1:28:28] Speaker 2: Oh, thank goodness.
[1:28:29] Speaker 4: Okay. And I think it's because for several years now
[1:28:36] Speaker 4: we've done all these experiments Mm-hmm. And we'll do one experiment,
[1:28:40] Speaker 4: we get a result. We'll do a very different experiment,
[1:28:43] Speaker 4: we get the same result. Like, again, we're finding the
[1:28:45] Speaker 4: more experiments we do, the more equifinality there is.
[1:28:50] Speaker 3: Okay.
[1:28:51] Speaker 4: So what we're learning is how much we can't know
[1:28:56] Speaker 4: about the Stone Age. And that sucks. Mm-hmm. I didn't
[1:29:00] Speaker 4: go into archaeology and the Stone Age to learn about
[1:29:03] Speaker 4: all the things I can't actually know about.
[1:29:05] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a bummer.
[1:29:06] Speaker 4: It's a bummer, right? No one does that.
[1:29:08] Speaker 3: I found out you can't find anything out.
[1:29:10] Speaker 4: Yeah. And really, we're in a lot of ways, I think,
[1:29:15] Speaker 4: looking at maybe the extent of some archaeological interpretation.
[1:29:19] Speaker 3: You think so?
[1:29:20] Speaker 4: So for me, I would take the single Clovis point
[1:29:24] Speaker 4: embedded in a mammoth bone. That would be awesome, right?
[1:29:27] Speaker 4: But I'll tell you what's going to happen. If someone
[1:29:30] Speaker 4: finds a Clovis point embedded in a mammoth bone, they're
[1:29:35] Speaker 4: gonna say, overkill, we killed all the mammoths, done. That
[1:29:39] Speaker 4: proves all these other 15 sites were definitely kills. And
[1:29:42] Speaker 4: I'll tear my hair out because I'm like, no, we
[1:29:45] Speaker 4: suspected they hunted. This is confirmation, strong evidence. And that's
[1:29:49] Speaker 4: really all I'm looking for is some strong evidence. Because
[1:29:53] Speaker 4: I think they hunted these things.
[1:29:54] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true. It would be nice to have an
[1:29:57] Speaker 2: unequivocal case.
[1:29:57] Speaker 4: It would be great. But I'll tell you, the reaction is.
[1:30:03] Speaker 3: I see what you're saying.
[1:30:04] Speaker 1: Because if you had it, if you find the one
[1:30:06] Speaker 1: where the shoulder blade has the thing sticking into it,
[1:30:11] Speaker 1: then all the other pieces laying around, all the other
[1:30:15] Speaker 1: broken points laying around and stuff, it would kind of
[1:30:17] Speaker 1: inform your understanding of what you're seeing elsewhere.
[1:30:20] Speaker 4: Well, see, and this is where.
[1:30:21] Speaker 3: It wouldn't override it, but it would inform it in
[1:30:24] Speaker 3: some way.
[1:30:24] Speaker 4: No, but see, this is where you can't take a
[1:30:27] Speaker 4: single case... and then justify all the equivocal cases. That's just,
[1:30:34] Speaker 4: it's illogical and it's not good science. It would show that, yeah,
[1:30:42] Speaker 4: it would be great confirmation of this thing that we
[1:30:44] Speaker 4: suspect is happening.
[1:30:45] Speaker 1: Do you know that when I was first introduced, the
[1:30:50] Speaker 1: historian Dan Flores, many, many years ago, took me to
[1:30:53] Speaker 1: the Blackwater Draw site, the Clovis type site.
[1:30:58] Speaker 3: Closed New Mexico.
[1:31:01] Speaker 1: It was closed. We always laugh about this. It was
[1:31:03] Speaker 1: closed and we jumped the fence and went and looked around.
[1:31:06] Speaker 4: I've done that.
[1:31:06] Speaker 3: Long time ago.
[1:31:09] Speaker 1: I then started reading about it and in my head,
[1:31:12] Speaker 1: I'm sure I've told you this story. In my head,
[1:31:15] Speaker 1: I read somewhere how it sits in my head that
[1:31:21] Speaker 1: I read how at one point in time, a school
[1:31:25] Speaker 1: bus driver that had taken local school kids to see
[1:31:28] Speaker 1: the Blackwater draw site, found a mammoth skull with a
[1:31:33] Speaker 1: projectile point embedded in the eye socket and took it.
[1:31:39] Speaker 1: I then later had people go, find that for me.
[1:31:43] Speaker 1: I cannot find it.
[1:31:44] Speaker 3: How would I have made that up? Like, I can't
[1:31:49] Speaker 3: find where I read it.
[1:31:52] Speaker 4: Was it a dream?
[1:31:54] Speaker 2: Yes.
[1:31:56] Speaker 3: But like, by all, I've looked. I've looked. Was it
[1:32:02] Speaker 3: a pamphlet? I don't know. It's not findable. It's not
[1:32:06] Speaker 3: findable digitally. Like, I don't know. But I swear. And
[1:32:10] Speaker 3: I went and told people that.
[1:32:11] Speaker 1: I'm like, hey, did you know that a bus driver
[1:32:13] Speaker 1: one time took some kids out here and found a
[1:32:15] Speaker 1: mammoth skull with a projectile point stuck in it and
[1:32:17] Speaker 1: dragged it home? And I would tell people this. At
[1:32:20] Speaker 1: some point, someone called me out and I'm like, can
[1:32:22] Speaker 1: you point this out to me? What are you talking about?
[1:32:25] Speaker 1: And I'm like, yeah, I'll go find it.
[1:32:26] Speaker 3: I can't find it. I dreamed it.
[1:32:29] Speaker 2: You dreamed it because, well, think about it. You know
[1:32:32] Speaker 2: how big a mammoth skull is.
[1:32:34] Speaker 3: I don't know, but how would I have made that up?
[1:32:35] Speaker 4: Like a bus driver?
[1:32:36] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
[1:32:40] Speaker 4: Were the kids on the bus? Yeah.
[1:32:42] Speaker 2: Did they help carry the skull?
[1:32:43] Speaker 3: This is a call to listeners. This is a call
[1:32:47] Speaker 3: to listeners. If you can help me out and find
[1:32:50] Speaker 3: whatever the hell.
[1:32:51] Speaker 4: Or you are that bus driver.
[1:32:53] Speaker 3: Yeah. In another life, I was the bus driver.
[1:32:55] Speaker 4: No, not you. Maybe the bus driver's listening right now.
[1:33:00] Speaker 1: If your grandpa was a bus driver and every time
[1:33:03] Speaker 1: you walk into his old barn, there's a skull laying there,
[1:33:06] Speaker 1: the piece of stone sticking out of the eye socket.
[1:33:08] Speaker 3: Can you please send me a photo of him?
[1:33:10] Speaker 1: You know i because i don't know it was mike
[1:33:13] Speaker 1: kunz's hand but but i read it somewhere and i
[1:33:17] Speaker 1: i it's embarrassing i was like embarrassed i can't remember
[1:33:20] Speaker 1: who who challenged me on it but i was embarrassed
[1:33:23] Speaker 1: to be like i don't know i don't know.
[1:33:26] Speaker 2: Yeah one gets these things in one's memory and then
[1:33:29] Speaker 2: over the years the memory gets embellished in ways subconscious
[1:33:32] Speaker 2: but a bus driver Yeah, well, that's just a nice detail.
[1:33:35] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[1:33:37] Speaker 2: I will tell you, I mean, I've spent a fair
[1:33:39] Speaker 2: amount of time in and around that locality over the years.
[1:33:42] Speaker 3: You haven't heard his story?
[1:33:43] Speaker 2: No. I've heard other rumors, but that's not one of them.
[1:33:47] Speaker 3: I think it's an apocryphal. At this point, it's an
[1:33:51] Speaker 3: apocryphal story.
[1:33:52] Speaker 2: It probably is.
[1:33:53] Speaker 3: It traces back to me. Yeah, right.
[1:33:56] Speaker 2: You're actually patient zero on that particular epidemic.
[1:33:59] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[1:33:59] Speaker 3: Yeah. So tell me what you guys are working on now. Like,
[1:34:05] Speaker 3: what's next? In this world.
[1:34:08] Speaker 2: In this world.
[1:34:09] Speaker 3: In the Ice Age world.
[1:34:10] Speaker 2: So I've been working the last few years on a
[1:34:13] Speaker 2: site that's at 10,000 feet. Oh, you've been.
[1:34:16] Speaker 4: Talking about this.
[1:34:17] Speaker 2: In the Rockies.
[1:34:18] Speaker 3: Yeah, tell people about this site.
[1:34:19] Speaker 2: So this is a site that was originally excavated by
[1:34:22] Speaker 2: the Smithsonian in the 1990s. And, you know, really interesting
[1:34:28] Speaker 2: work that they did there. And just... out of curiosity,
[1:34:33] Speaker 2: I know when I've been on the show before, we've
[1:34:36] Speaker 2: talked about our work at the Mountaineer site in the
[1:34:38] Speaker 2: Gunnison area.
[1:34:38] Speaker 3: Oh, that's what I thought you were getting into, is
[1:34:40] Speaker 3: the Gunnison. Oh, yeah.
[1:34:41] Speaker 2: No, this is a different one.
[1:34:42] Speaker 3: Okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yep, sorry.
[1:34:44] Speaker 2: So just to, for those who didn't hear the previous podcast,
[1:34:48] Speaker 2: and I can't quote a chapter and verse of which
[1:34:50] Speaker 2: podcast it was, it's met and put of your quote.
[1:34:54] Speaker 3: Yeah, the Mountaineer site.
[1:34:55] Speaker 2: The Mountaineer site in Gunnison, right? We had a winter village,
[1:34:58] Speaker 2: a Folsom Age winter village. So this other site, was
[1:35:03] Speaker 2: up and over the Continental Divide from Mountaineer about, oh,
[1:35:07] Speaker 2: I think 80 kilometers or so. And there's a couple
[1:35:11] Speaker 2: of substantial mountain passes between this other site and Mountaineer,
[1:35:15] Speaker 2: one at about 11,000 feet and the other at about 11,500.
[1:35:20] Speaker 3: Like highways cutting through them?
[1:35:23] Speaker 2: Well, there are now. Slum Gullion Pass and Spring Creek Pass,
[1:35:27] Speaker 2: for those of you that have a Colorado Atlas in
[1:35:29] Speaker 2: front of you. And We were just, I don't know,
[1:35:34] Speaker 2: on a busman's holiday visiting this site back in, I
[1:35:39] Speaker 2: don't know, six, eight years ago. And it had been
[1:35:43] Speaker 2: interpreted by the Smithsonian, and I think reasonably enough, that
[1:35:48] Speaker 2: it was kind of a way station because you're at
[1:35:50] Speaker 2: 10,000 feet at the end of the ice age. It's
[1:35:52] Speaker 2: a Folsom Age site, I should add. You're at 10,000
[1:35:55] Speaker 2: feet at the end of the ice age. You're not
[1:35:56] Speaker 2: going to be hanging around. Mountaineer, we had reasons to
[1:36:00] Speaker 2: think they were hanging around in the winter. Well, for
[1:36:03] Speaker 2: one thing, it's only at 8,000 feet, so it's a
[1:36:05] Speaker 2: lot lower. It was probably a good place to spend
[1:36:08] Speaker 2: the winter for a variety of reasons that we've talked
[1:36:10] Speaker 2: about before.
[1:36:11] Speaker 1: Yeah, it held game well in the winter and animals
[1:36:17] Speaker 1: would get in there and it'd be hard for them
[1:36:18] Speaker 1: to leave and it would winter in there.
[1:36:21] Speaker 2: Yep, yep. And people were sitting up on top of
[1:36:23] Speaker 2: this mesa 1,000 feet above the valley floor where actually
[1:36:25] Speaker 2: it's warmer than on the valley floor and the basin
[1:36:28] Speaker 2: floor because cold air sinks, right? So we had a
[1:36:31] Speaker 2: good sort of case for that. Anyway, so the Smithsonian
[1:36:35] Speaker 2: had done this work back in the 90s. And about
[1:36:38] Speaker 2: four years ago, the collections came back to the Forest
[1:36:42] Speaker 2: Service out in Western Colorado. And we got to looking
[1:36:48] Speaker 2: at them, at the collections, again, just out of curiosity.
[1:36:51] Speaker 2: And we were just dumbstruck to see some of the
[1:36:55] Speaker 2: projectile points were made out of stone that came, we
[1:36:59] Speaker 2: are convinced, from the Gunnison Basin. And then it occurred
[1:37:03] Speaker 2: to us, oh, well, maybe these folks were on their
[1:37:06] Speaker 2: way over to Mountaineer. Because we know when you look
[1:37:12] Speaker 2: at the distribution of these Folsom sites in the Rockies
[1:37:15] Speaker 2: and out on the plains, they tend to have circuits, right?
[1:37:20] Speaker 2: So we did a bunch of work at the original
[1:37:23] Speaker 2: Folsom site, you know, back in the 1990s. And these
[1:37:26] Speaker 2: folks are kind of tracking up and down, the edge
[1:37:30] Speaker 2: of the Rockies. They're mostly out on the plains. They're
[1:37:32] Speaker 2: going from the panhandle of Texas up into Eastern Colorado,
[1:37:37] Speaker 2: stopping at the Folsom site, moving around. In the Rockies,
[1:37:41] Speaker 2: they're sort of within the Rockies itself, right? The Rocky
[1:37:44] Speaker 2: Mountains themselves. So we got to wondering, is there a
[1:37:48] Speaker 2: connection between the folks that we know were in the
[1:37:53] Speaker 2: Gunnison Basin and the folks that were on the other
[1:37:55] Speaker 2: side of these two high mountain passes? So we spent
[1:38:01] Speaker 2: three years excavating out there. It's called the Black Mountain Site.
[1:38:06] Speaker 2: And what we found was indeed they were there, but
[1:38:11] Speaker 2: only briefly. They may have been there on a couple
[1:38:14] Speaker 2: of separate occasions. So this really was kind of a waypoint.
[1:38:19] Speaker 2: One of the local folks that put us up in
[1:38:23] Speaker 2: the summers, they have a little sort of a dude
[1:38:25] Speaker 2: ranch out there. A shout out to Fremont's Ranch. It's
[1:38:30] Speaker 2: a wonderful place to stay. And Greg Pearson, who's the
[1:38:36] Speaker 2: kind of runs and guides out of Fremont's, said, oh, yeah,
[1:38:40] Speaker 2: that's a spike camp. That's what he calls it.
[1:38:42] Speaker 3: Oh, really? Yeah.
[1:38:44] Speaker 2: You must use the term as well.
[1:38:46] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:38:47] Speaker 2: So he said, yeah, that kind of looks what I
[1:38:49] Speaker 2: would call a spike camp, where you're kind of there.
[1:38:52] Speaker 2: You're checking your weaponry and making sure it's all good.
[1:38:55] Speaker 2: They were making some points. They were discarding some other ones.
[1:38:59] Speaker 2: But you don't see the kind of tools that you
[1:39:01] Speaker 2: find in a residential locality where people spend a long time.
[1:39:04] Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. Right?
[1:39:05] Speaker 2: So not a lot of scrapers. We had some engraving tools.
[1:39:11] Speaker 2: I just spent most of last year doing the analysis
[1:39:14] Speaker 2: of all the stone tools from the site. And it's
[1:39:16] Speaker 2: mostly just little tiny flakes because they were just making
[1:39:19] Speaker 2: sure everything, all their gear was in good shape. Because
[1:39:22] Speaker 2: if you think about it, you're there at the end
[1:39:24] Speaker 2: of the Pleistocene and you're at 10,000 feet. You're going
[1:39:28] Speaker 2: to have to go up and over a mountain pass
[1:39:30] Speaker 2: that's 11. And then you have to go up and
[1:39:32] Speaker 2: over another one at 11.5. And then you drop down
[1:39:35] Speaker 2: into the drainage that will take you into the Gunnison Basin.
[1:39:38] Speaker 2: You don't want to start that trek alone. at five
[1:39:41] Speaker 2: o'clock in the afternoon, right? So you hunker down at
[1:39:44] Speaker 2: this nice little weigh station, you get yourself ready, and
[1:39:49] Speaker 2: then the next morning you do your thing.
[1:39:53] Speaker 3: One of the really- Was there bone at that site?
[1:39:55] Speaker 2: Not a darn thing.
[1:39:56] Speaker 3: Really?
[1:39:57] Speaker 2: Not a darn thing. And I'll tell you, I was
[1:40:00] Speaker 2: out there a year ago last spring with my colleague,
[1:40:04] Speaker 2: Eski Wilderslev, who basically invented environmental DNA. because we had
[1:40:08] Speaker 2: taken some samples from there in 2023 to see if
[1:40:11] Speaker 2: there was anything in the DNA that we could identify
[1:40:15] Speaker 2: that would tell us what the plants and animals were
[1:40:18] Speaker 2: because there is no bone preserved and didn't see a
[1:40:21] Speaker 2: darn thing. And Esky, we were passing through on our
[1:40:25] Speaker 2: way to Santa Fe, kind of a circuitous route on
[1:40:28] Speaker 2: the way to Santa Fe from Denver because he wanted
[1:40:30] Speaker 2: to see the site to try and figure out, well,
[1:40:32] Speaker 2: there has to be, why isn't the DNA preserved? This
[1:40:35] Speaker 2: is an ideal setting. And it has to do with
[1:40:38] Speaker 2: some technical stuff about single-stranded versus double-stranded DNA, which we
[1:40:41] Speaker 2: won't go into. But we took a bunch more samples
[1:40:45] Speaker 2: in 2025. And I was just in Copenhagen for a
[1:40:49] Speaker 2: month working on some other projects, ancient DNA-related stuff. And
[1:40:55] Speaker 2: I talked to the person who's doing the analysis of
[1:40:58] Speaker 2: the environmental DNA from this site. And one of the
[1:41:02] Speaker 2: things that struck me, and this is all very preliminary data,
[1:41:09] Speaker 2: is that she's seeing a lot of plants in the DNA,
[1:41:15] Speaker 2: but no woody plants, no trees. And one of the
[1:41:18] Speaker 2: things that had always been sort of in the back
[1:41:20] Speaker 2: of my mind was, okay, this is a great place
[1:41:23] Speaker 2: for a way station because you would have been in
[1:41:25] Speaker 2: the trees before you get up and over the tree
[1:41:28] Speaker 2: line and have to cross these high elevation passes because
[1:41:32] Speaker 2: then you'd have wood for fuel. But we weren't finding
[1:41:35] Speaker 2: any trees in the DNA. just a lot of flowers, right?
[1:41:40] Speaker 2: Flowers are not going to keep you warm.
[1:41:41] Speaker 3: So they were up in the Alpine.
[1:41:43] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[1:41:43] Speaker 4: Yes.
[1:41:44] Speaker 2: And so, uh, now this is all very, very, very preliminary.
[1:41:47] Speaker 3: I'll tell you what they were doing. They're hunting sheep, bighorns.
[1:41:51] Speaker 3: You're done.
[1:41:52] Speaker 4: You don't have to do anything else.
[1:41:53] Speaker 2: Thank goodness.
[1:41:54] Speaker 3: I don't know what they do with the bones. You
[1:41:56] Speaker 3: better look over to the right or the left, I guess.
[1:42:00] Speaker 2: You know, I'd love it if we found some sheep DNA,
[1:42:02] Speaker 2: but there's absolutely no animal DNA.
[1:42:04] Speaker 3: Oh, man, yeah.
[1:42:05] Speaker 2: So what they're doing now, this was the initial run
[1:42:09] Speaker 2: through doing what's called shotgun sequencing, where you're not necessarily
[1:42:14] Speaker 2: looking for specific plants. And so I've asked them, can
[1:42:17] Speaker 2: you go back and do what's called capture DNA, where
[1:42:21] Speaker 2: you're using as bait, tree species to see if you
[1:42:25] Speaker 2: can grab chunks of DNA out of the swirl, if
[1:42:28] Speaker 2: you will, that are trees. Because that's the only way
[1:42:31] Speaker 2: that you'll be able to be sure that there's either
[1:42:35] Speaker 2: trees there or not trees there.
[1:42:37] Speaker 3: Got it.
[1:42:37] Speaker 2: So hopefully we'll have that answer in a few months.
[1:42:42] Speaker 2: So yeah, that's what I've been working on on the
[1:42:45] Speaker 2: archaeological side of things.
[1:42:47] Speaker 1: Wouldn't it be great if that DNA stuff was so
[1:42:49] Speaker 1: good that you could just be like, the people that
[1:42:53] Speaker 1: were here were there.
[1:42:54] Speaker 2: You know what?
[1:42:55] Speaker 3: Someday.
[1:42:56] Speaker 2: I've thought about that, Steve. I've absolutely... That's my hand
[1:43:00] Speaker 2: sticking out of the ground, right? Is the ability to say...
[1:43:03] Speaker 2: That's sophisticated. That would be... You know, in theory, it's
[1:43:06] Speaker 2: absolutely possible to a degree. There's preservation limitations. Getting a
[1:43:16] Speaker 2: full genome out of a sediment sample... is a challenge.
[1:43:22] Speaker 2: You could probably get whether they shared uniparental mitochondrial DNA
[1:43:29] Speaker 2: Y chromosome markers, but that wouldn't necessarily tell you whether
[1:43:33] Speaker 2: it's the same people. It just tells you whether at
[1:43:35] Speaker 2: some point back in the past, they have a shared
[1:43:37] Speaker 2: maternal ancestor. So yeah, that's what I've been doing.
[1:43:41] Speaker 3: And Matt, what can we expect next from you?
[1:43:43] Speaker 4: A couple of things. Actually, thanks to some of the
[1:43:47] Speaker 4: meat eater listeners of this podcast, you know, a couple
[1:43:51] Speaker 4: of years ago, we published a Clovis point and a
[1:43:53] Speaker 4: Folsom point that Matthew Wendell, who's a listener and a
[1:43:57] Speaker 4: fan sent to us. And he said, Hey, can you
[1:43:59] Speaker 4: analyze these?
[1:44:00] Speaker 3: We did.
[1:44:00] Speaker 4: We found all sorts of stuff. We learned, um, we
[1:44:03] Speaker 4: published that in the scientific literature that's happened again. Now, uh,
[1:44:07] Speaker 4: Ben Galt in, in new England found a Clovis point
[1:44:10] Speaker 4: or a fluted point from Nantucket Island. And he said, Hey, like,
[1:44:14] Speaker 4: I'm interested. Can you, learn about anything. And so he
[1:44:17] Speaker 4: sent it to us and we're doing all the analyses now.
[1:44:19] Speaker 4: And so, yeah, I mean, thanks to the meat eater, uh,
[1:44:22] Speaker 4: podcast listeners, like we're doing real research on Clovis and
[1:44:26] Speaker 4: fluted points and we're learning all sorts of stuff. So
[1:44:28] Speaker 4: that's awesome. So if anyone out there wants to send
[1:44:31] Speaker 4: us more artifacts, we won't keep them. We'll send them
[1:44:33] Speaker 4: back to you. Um, but we can do all sorts
[1:44:36] Speaker 4: of awesome geometric morphometrics and microwear analysis and learn every
[1:44:40] Speaker 4: Clovis point. We learned something, right?
[1:44:42] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[1:44:43] Speaker 4: So we do that sort of thing quite a bit.
[1:44:45] Speaker 4: But the big thing next for me is I'm going
[1:44:48] Speaker 4: to Kenya in January. I'm really interested in the origin
[1:44:53] Speaker 4: of all technology over 3 million years ago. And we
[1:44:59] Speaker 4: published a new hypothesis last year or about a year
[1:45:02] Speaker 4: and a half ago on how that origin of technology
[1:45:06] Speaker 4: with stone tools occurred. And it all has to do
[1:45:09] Speaker 4: with butchering and cutting carcasses up um, with naturally sharp rocks.
[1:45:15] Speaker 3: Okay.
[1:45:15] Speaker 4: And there's a site, um, that dates to about 2.9,
[1:45:18] Speaker 4: 2.8 million years ago.
[1:45:19] Speaker 3: That's early. Yeah.
[1:45:21] Speaker 4: Where we think we may have, uh, some naturally sharp
[1:45:26] Speaker 4: rocks in association with a carcass.
[1:45:29] Speaker 3: Oh, really? Yeah.
[1:45:30] Speaker 4: And so we're going to go in and check those
[1:45:32] Speaker 4: out and, and we'll see.
[1:45:33] Speaker 1: So someone or something was like, Hey, that's got a
[1:45:39] Speaker 1: sharp edge on it.
[1:45:40] Speaker 3: I'm going to, beat snot out of this.
[1:45:42] Speaker 4: And why this is really important, right, is that the
[1:45:47] Speaker 4: practice of cutting came before stone tools, right? But if
[1:45:52] Speaker 4: you look at the scientific literature, everyone thinks that the
[1:45:55] Speaker 4: origin of stone technology was some sort of Eureka moment,
[1:45:58] Speaker 4: like in 2001 Space Odyssey, where someone is like, you
[1:46:02] Speaker 4: know what, I need to cut something, bam, I'm gonna
[1:46:05] Speaker 4: go ahead and do that, and I've got my knife, right?
[1:46:08] Speaker 4: But there's no reason to suspect that's the trajectory that
[1:46:13] Speaker 4: things took. And really the only reason to make stone
[1:46:16] Speaker 4: tools is if the behavior of cutting was already in place.
[1:46:22] Speaker 4: And so I think that the exploitation of carcasses and
[1:46:25] Speaker 4: meat potentially goes back much farther than we currently have
[1:46:30] Speaker 4: maybe even back to a creature called artopithecus that's like
[1:46:33] Speaker 4: 4.4 million years old i could be wrong i probably
[1:46:36] Speaker 4: am but we're gonna investigate so how long we've spent
[1:46:39] Speaker 4: over there this first trip to kenya because i've been
[1:46:42] Speaker 4: to africa four other times this one will be about
[1:46:45] Speaker 4: 10 days and then we'll go for longer stints in
[1:46:48] Speaker 4: in the near future so yeah so it should be
[1:46:50] Speaker 4: good yeah.
[1:46:52] Speaker 3: Well guys thanks for coming on the show man Thanks
[1:46:54] Speaker 3: for having us.
[1:46:55] Speaker 2: Always enjoyable.
[1:46:55] Speaker 3: Yeah. I got to tell people a quick thing.
[1:46:57] Speaker 1: I was going to bring it up earlier. I'm bringing
[1:47:00] Speaker 1: it up now. You guys are welcome to come. We've
[1:47:05] Speaker 1: been talking about how our Christmas tour tickets, I've been
[1:47:08] Speaker 1: trying to explain the complexity of pre-sale and sale. It
[1:47:11] Speaker 1: is officially pre-sale, which means they're on sale. I'll spare
[1:47:17] Speaker 1: you the distinction between pre-sale and sale. Tickets are on
[1:47:21] Speaker 1: sale for the Christmas tour. Monday, December 14th, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tuesday,
[1:47:28] Speaker 1: December 15th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wednesday, December 16th, Madison, Wisconsin. Thursday,
[1:47:36] Speaker 1: December 17th, Des Moines, Iowa. Friday, December 18th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Saturday,
[1:47:44] Speaker 1: December 19th, Fargo, North Dakota. Get your tickets now. Nate,
[1:47:49] Speaker 1: what's the ticket address, man? just go to the meat eater.com.
[1:47:53] Speaker 1: Look up the Christmas tour. The Christmas tour is where
[1:47:56] Speaker 1: you go to get your laughs at Christmas. And if
[1:47:58] Speaker 1: you got someone in your life, who's a fan, a
[1:48:01] Speaker 1: listener of the show or whatever, give them a couple
[1:48:04] Speaker 1: of these bad boys. And, uh, as a early gift
[1:48:07] Speaker 1: in a Christmas card, they are going to be grateful. Um,
[1:48:12] Speaker 1: all right guys, thanks again for coming on.
[1:48:14] Speaker 3: You have a stand. You can come on anytime you want.
[1:48:16] Speaker 2: Thank you.
[1:48:17] Speaker 1: Listen, if we ever just walk in here and you
[1:48:18] Speaker 1: guys are sitting here, we're going to record. Anytime you
[1:48:22] Speaker 1: want to come on, you come on. Just keep us posted.
[1:48:25] Speaker 4: For sure. And I think we always have ideas. So
[1:48:28] Speaker 4: other collaborations in the future. All sorts of tests.
[1:48:31] Speaker 3: Yeah, we're supposed to be cutting up some ostriches or
[1:48:33] Speaker 3: something like that.
[1:48:34] Speaker 4: Oh, don't worry.
[1:48:38] Speaker 3: Thanks again. Again, Dr. David Meltzer and Dr. Metten Aaron,
[1:48:42] Speaker 3: thanks for coming.
[1:48:43] Speaker 2: Thanks, David.
[1:48:43] Speaker 4: Thank you very much.
[1:49:03] Speaker 1: Thank you.

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