Ep. 268: Clovis Points and Man’s Best Friend

in the studio prior to the recording about Clovis. Perfect timing, wasn't it. I wish I would have been here early. Well, you know when you show up late for class D. This is the this is the price you miss. You miss, you missed the good stuff. In fact, it was the best lecture I ever gave you. I was rolling and were you. I'm looking out the window thinking where Steve. He's supposed to be here. You were bringing it. Um,

we have a guy, uh engineer accepted our challenge. We wanted to get a a light Let me back up. A body mine years ago was getting paid to go watch commercials, and beer commercials in particular, and they would pay him to watch beer commercials, and he had a dial, and the more he liked the beer commercial, he turned his dial up. A whole bunch of guys watching beer commercials and they dial what parts they have, you know, whether they're into it or not. And I wanted to

get one of those for this room. And an electrical engineer is making this one that has five dials. Mechanical engineer has five dials. And as someone's talking what you don't need, you don't know where it's coming from. But I could like turn mine down and the light in the middle with dim and that would know that that there's fading interest. I would right now if I had that here, right now, I would turn mine on full blast and I wouldn't catch it. Could already be on

full blast. When I re listened to the last episode you were on, David Steve introduced you the same way, said you're his favorite guest. So what he means it, I think he means it. I told him earlier that he was he used to be. Uh. We thought that he his his bridges were too big for us, and so we would go after. We would target his students and then got the man himself. And what was the analogy he made that. Um, it's like if we were trying to get John Lennon on the show and got

stuck with a ringo. We're not going to name names of the students, who, incidentally, is how I get some of my speaking gigs. So that was good. The next time you bump into Steve, say hi, it doesn't return to emails that I have, but we still like them being ringos. That still bad though? Uh? Is he the one? There's still a beat? Are any of them left? And ringo? Sure? Yeah huh? Also joined by, of course, filled the engineer, crns here, Spencer's here, Cal's here. Um, so that that's

for Yanni's dad. The High Life Man series of beer commercials will go down in history has the best beer commercials. We'll just say that before we move on. You might be a Highlife Man? Is that old one? Oh? They're not that old. But they're just like nostalgic and hilarious and well written. But but but but was the beer any good? I mean, isn't That doesn't matter when it comes to beer commercials. It's not They're not tying it

to the taste of the beer I used to drink. Well, I don't want to explain what beer I used to drink and why they want you to associate with the product. Yeah, haven't be representative of you, right, And if the first taste is no good and you spit it out, they've lost the war. Well, mg D for a long time, you would look in your bottle. So if you look through your bottle to the label on the other side, it would be people partying. There's like pictures of people partying.

So I'd like to drink that because I could look in there and I feel like I was partying that. Yeah that one day look in there and it's a basketball hoop. Yeah, never ordered that stuff. We got a quick clarification. So, uh, I'm gonna call them are good friends. At Murdocks If you don't have murdocks around, Murdocks is like a farming ranch. I think it's pretty regional, right, It's a farm and ranch supply place. I was observing how I was in at Murdocks buying some stuff. I'll

say what I was buying. I was buying a syringe from the livestock, the cattle syringe stuff, and uh, and noticed that you could round up your donation and I noticed it was for the it said the Humane Society on it, and I thought that was weird because the Humane Society, as we all know, it's kind of like the leading one of the leading anti hunting organizations out there, and they're always filing, you know, every time there's a suit file that you always see that they're like a

signator to the suit. But when I was screwed up about we're kind of each a little bit wrong because I was there's there's an organization called the Humane Society of the United States, and they're the ones that's always they're always sueing everybody, like they're suing to stop that, you know, they don't want you to be able to fish in the local pond or whatever to be them suing um. Not to be confused like Humane Society is

more generally around animal shelters. So anyways, we talked about this and then Kran has some back and forth with Murdoch's the store and they're they're changing their thing around and apparently we're the first people to bring that up. No affiliation, it's local animal shelters, Yeah, exactly, they're raising

up money. So as Krann brought in an exam don't know why she brought this example if your purchase was ten dollars and sixty two cents just what I don't know, Like Curran pointed out that you would be donating thirty eight cents if you round it up. That's great. It's a great example because I think a lot of people

can't picture it right. And then you put it in those concrete terms, and then you're like, oh, yeah, right, yeah, I mean you you you put your I don't know, liquorice, and because you've always got those weird huge like some you know, dog dog bones or something, and your purchases ten sixty two and when you're about to make your purchase on the pin pad, it'll say, would you like to round to the nearest dollar? And this is the charity, this is the organization we donate to. It's not going

to say animal shelters. I feel like that that think about it like this a long time ago. If your name was Richard, what would be your nickname Dick? Over the years though, uh the name Dick parallel path with another use of the word. Now Richards go by Rick. Oh. I feel like humane, like like I feel like this has happened with the Humane society question it's gonna be a while until girls start being named Karen again. I

feel like, oh that that name has been sullied. Uh and talking about wolves are good friend, Jim Halflfinger wrote in Um, of course, Jim is a wildlife expert and policy guy and biology guy down in Arizona. The hell's this official title? He's an academic. I was pointing out, this is a correction. I was saying that the Mexican gray wolf had no geographical separation from other wolves, and

they all just bled into each other. That's my understanding, right, there's no it would be like the only we to put in terms of turkeys real quick. So we have these five varieties of subspecies of turkeys, and um, we talked about the Osceola, which the osceolil turkey is sits kind of like south of Lake okachobe in Florida, and then the eastern turkey is north of Lake Okachobee in Florida. There's no fence between Osceolas and Easterns. They just just

we arbitrarily drew a line. And I was done the impression with wolves that there was this sort of like arbitrary line drawn where um, the Mexican wolf. You know, we just drew a line and said, Okay, if it's south of that, it's a Mexican wolf, it's north of that, it's not. And heffel Finger pointed out that's in fact not the case. And there were these very arid prey scarce areas um areas around between Colorado and Utah Um that did cause some genetic bear years historic genetic barriers

between different groups of wolves. And he goes on to say that the Mexican gray wolf is the most genetically distinct wolf subspecies in North America, and that would not be true if they had historically blended in with other types of wolves. Half a Finger also has this to say, this, you'll appreciate this cow for hunters in Colorado to be griping about funding wolf recovery, which we talked about, and I kind of graped about it myself. Um, he thinks

it's a it's a it does a disservice to hunters. Um. And how can we run around so proudly talking about recovering wild turkeys, recovering deer, right, recovering all these species, but then it comes to recovering wolves. Will will be like I want nothing to do with that. He said, what a pr triumph? Do that too, And if it costs you a couple of elk tags because of wolves eaten some elk here and there, who cares. It's like you're if if hunters want to claim you're in the

business of recovery, you're in the business of wildlife. Um, be true to your message. I agree with that, he goes He goes on to say anti hunters would be besides themselves in conflicted confusion if you could pull out. So there's a the theory of biological selection based on like game uh conditions is something do you know this with a with a ladder? And I can't come up with a term right now, but that that's what it is.

It's like, you know, you're defined by your environment and so there is no like state line or you know fans that there's gonna be one species on one side of and the other. It's just like this developed thing over millennia of certain body types are selected for certain environments where that body type is going to be way better at surviving based on the game the rainfall uh, you know, places to hide one way dubs, stuff like that.

Dr Meltzer. He will probably give us the right terminology by here described as morphological distinctions rather than genetic distinctions. Is that okay, Yeah, I suspect these are all subspecies and that um, what you've got are different subspecies that have adapted better to those particular niches um, those particular kind of ecosystems. And so really what you're seeing is um populations that are settling into a range, and they're

staying in that range. Uh, And there will be introgression, They'll be gene flow between these populations because they are part of the same species. There's no reason why they couldn't interbreede and probably did out on the boundaries of each of those their ranges, right where the two of them would occasionally uh intersect one another. So, yeah, you're going to have that kind of movement. But you're right.

I mean, if you've got particular taxa or particular populations that natural selection you know, by the luck of the draw uh and over time and adaptation, over time, they will be better adapted to a particular environment, a more desert environment or a more wooded environment, whatever. Right, that's

just down. Natural selection works over time. Now you give it a long enough time and you make those um, those those ecological areas distinct enough, and you know, reduce any kind of gene flow or introgression ultimately, and you've got to give it tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, which we have no patience for, by the way, not in this room. Um, you could end up with different species species. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just evolution. You know. Darwin had all this figured out

in eighteen fifty nine. Yeah, And so like I went down the rabbit hole on this thing, speaking a gam and then speaking with a bunch of the pro Colorado wolf reintroduction at folks, you know, and there is a serious division on well, who cares if this larger gray wolf intermingles with the Mexican wolves because that's like a natural thing and they'll figure it out right, And then you get into this genetic swamping uh type of discussion, where um, there now we're dealing with such a small

population of Mexican wolves that there there is a real possibility of genetic swamping and how this larger wolf, all the trades of the larger wolf are going to overrun the traits of this this smaller genetic pool of Mexican wolves and we just don't have the luxury of a big gene pool down here and a big gene pool up here and tens of thousands of years for them to and if million dollars getting that very small group of Mexican wolves going, yes, so of then have a

bunch of ye who's in Colorado vote for this and which is funny because it's citizens vote for this, and then undo that there's probably a lot of people that are dedicated to that that great that Mexican wolf recovery who are kind of like and it's also an Endangered Species Act thing, right, so you can argue that the reintroduction of these wolves is like actually anti Endangered Species Act because it threatens this listed wolf that we are dedicated to recovery. Yeah, you can make one of those

documentaries that no one watches about all this. Uh okay, cal Um, did you see how Creant even wrote a transition for you? I did. It's good. That's full that's full service right there. Dude. She's like with Cal, she's still worried about Cal's performance. She had to write a transition for him. She's like, he'll never he'll never, he's got nothing. I need more. Moms wrote his transition for him, so I got I was. I was also a hand delivered a joke the other day because I selected a

bugs bunny. Um uh, you know what do you call it? He's on your little kids? But band aids? Uh and uh. I was supposed to take that picture of that band aid on my shoulder and say, that's all folks posted on Instagram. Yeah, um, let's do it. No, I had the band aid came off too fast for my brain to react. I just had a guy in New Zealand send me this is a the nice idea. This is

right up your alley. Cow sent me. He's making band aids, no plastics, band aids out of marino wool, which is naturally anti microbial because the fibers are so fine reduces the amount of surface area that bacteria grows on. Everybody knows that I didn't need a MoMA for that. Okay, he accounts, and I'm getting nervous. Sorry, okay. COVID vaccine was recently used on great apes. Isn't a gorilla part of the great ape family? Not just eight it's all

the dudes with no tails. I think isn't it Bobo, Yeah, chips, the ranks and gorillas. Yeah. Um, so there is a COVID vaccine trialed on mink. And the mink part of the story is pretty interesting because if you go over to Europe, big mink farms were cold. Like we're talking to the tune of hundreds of thousands of mink right, yes, in Denmark, sorry Denmark. Yeah, I bet they didn't have a lot of press show up on that day. Oh what are they? I guess they're probably like gas and

gas chambers and stuff. Yeah, I don't know, take a lot of water to anyway. Um and but we so we also had COVID show up in farmed mink populations in in Utah here in the States, but they were not cold. Um, there's a trial vaccine that was used on mink. And then they're using this vaccine on the Grade eight population in the San Diego Zoo. And I thought they did this in New York as well. But um, and the you know, it's a little interesting, it's a

little controversial. Brings to brings to mind a bunch of like sci fi books and stuff I've read over the years. I could I could identify a couple areas of controversy is on one hand, you probably have the crowd who would say, well, how could they be vaccinating mink and grillis and whatnot? And I haven't got mine yet, Like that's that, like as though it would have gone to them, like as though they would have gotten it. Yeah, I'm

sure that there's that. There's probably man things, But I was surprised to see in this story that an asymptomatic zoo keeper um spread the virus to eight gorillas that tested positive. Yeah, do you know what, Maggie here in our office is convinced that her dog died of COVID. She's got a very compelling, very compelling timeline symptomology. But

that's the origin of many of our diseases. They're zoonotic, and they get something that's relatively benign in one species, when it gets into another can become very deadly and virulent. And most of the major epidemic disease us is that humans have suffered from over the last ten thousand years have come from animals originally, And why can't they go

back in the other direction? Exactly to me? And that that is the argument here, right, It's like uh, we need especially maybe not so much the great you know, the limited Great eight population the San Diego Zoo of eight individuals. But if you look at how uh something could transform in like a mink farm with thousands of individuals, or let's say like a chicken farm or a hog farm where you have thousands of individuals in close contact in one space, you could see how um a virus

could evolve very quickly. Right, So yes, I mean super super interesting. I'll tell you a take on this this farm, this this mink farm thing is um. Wild fur prices are often tied very directly to ranch output. So I remember that guy I can't remember said it's like globally or something, the not trapped in the wild ye and people used you know, they used to be like all over fox farms and mink farms and everything when people

back when people wore a lot of fur. UM. I wonder if these die offs and killoffs at these ranch facilities will in a year or two is time result in like an explosion and value of wild fur as the ranch facsimile as their production falters, and and no doubt it probably takes to get to get going and retooled I'd be curious to watch how that plays out. I think Michigan is our number one farmed first aig.

I believe so. No, man, that makes me think they don't do much of it really just well, I don't think there's like big signs around and say hey we're firing third bring me kids, all right, Spencer Krin didn't give you a transition. What you guys see you help this guy out. This guy looks slick. This guy looks slick, and Spencer over here, you guys trying to set you up for failure. I know you guys have gotten many emails about that episode of Dr Alan Lazara, like saving lives,

specifically talking about the tourniquet. Three lives, three lives. That's many. We got our first email about meat eater saving a bird's life, Spencer's in particular, right, this is all Spencer by example. Yeah, back in November. Back in November, I told a story about how I found a an owl in a barbedwire fence that I tried to save. Um cute little story. Yeah, yeah, it didn't work out, but it led me to a different part of the horrible,

got real plot twist. That story it was like when you're watching The Departed and all of a sudden, the guy, the main guy, got shot in the elevator. Yeah, and you're like, oh, that's not where I saw this going quite all of the character in that minute. And I was like, that's what I didn't picture that. The Spencer story has a lot it's very similar to The Departed. So we got an email from Robbie from the Montana

f WP Region five h Q and Billings. He said that he got a phone call from motorists that was traveling east of Billings on the interstate. This motorist pulled over to check on a hawk that was in the ditch that looked injured. Excuse me, not a hawk and owl, a great horned owl, great horned owl to check on it? Is it proper to say horn or horned horned owl? Yeah, So we stopped to check on this owl. Uh, that

was very much alive, but in very rough condition. So this motorist, who it says was driving a produced truck, which leaves me with some questions. And I don't know what sort of produce he'd be hauling. Yeah, good question. He was driving an autoparts truck. Would you wonder what auto parts he was on, wouldn't It's like all tators in college. I worked at Walmart for about six months

in the produce section, so I I love produce. Your produce man, Yeah, to make up for the minimum wage you got paid, I would just like graze on apples and oranges all day. So I very particular about produce. We know, we know the guys from Idahou, So maybe some potato. Maybe there were seed potatoes or something potatoes

on the edge of my seat. He stopped to check on this owl, calls the f w P UM and he's talking to the guy at the f w P who's named Robbie, and he says, yeah, I stopped to check on this owl because I heard on the Meat Eater podcast that there was a place in Montana that will rehabilitate injured birds. And he said, what kind of truck did he get hit by? When do you say produce?

Hold on before we're talking about this ol. So Robbie confirms that the place that he uh sort of heard about in the Mediator podcast is the Montana Raptor Conservation Center in Bozeman. It turns out that the guy is on his way through Bozeman on his way back to Idaho. So they coordinated drop off at the Raptor Center and the guy puts the owl in his produced truck and

he meets him at the exit at Bozeman. So Robbie writes in to tell us that I think it's safe to say the Meat Eater podcast saved the life of an owl today if we ended the if only the story end there, that's right, like my story. We have a story. But then Karan had to go and check had to go and see how Yeah that doesn't fit with the news cycle, right, So Karan, what did you hear? Okay? Yeah, oh so sad so sadly. And they named this owl great horn owl, number twenty. This owl did not make

it explain they're not their naming system. That's interesting. So what I deduced is they will uh name the animal based upon like its species, so great horn owl. And apparently this is case number twenty, so this is Raptor of the year number twenty, so great horn owl number twenty. Um. When when they when they named mine, I think it was g h O and then I don't remember the number. It was like something but that was in right, Okay, So of last year, right, so this is this year.

The injuries to the owl were there was a compound fracture around its or on its left humorous shoulder, and they didn't put the owl through kind of the trauma of surgery UM because the problem with the compound fracture for something like a bird is what they would normally do UM is put a pin through the bone to kind of stabilize it. But you can't with the shoulder. You can't really do that. It would cause tissue damage.

And even if surgery was performed on the bird, he wouldn't be able to fly, you know, even after he had healed up, So he would have one working wing and another non working wing, so be ground based owl. Yes, it would be hopping around. Al I'm gonna walk over and get that right, um. Yeah. So they discovered this in an X ray and found also many the bone had shattered, So instead of put the owl through the trauma of surgery, they knew he wasn't going to make

it anyway, and they euthanized him. The phone call that I received from the Montana Raptor Center when they happened back in November, it was unlike any I had before. They handled me very very gently, as though they were delivering the news that I lost my mother or something like that. Um, they like had to build up to it, explained what happened, and then they delivered the news and they were like real apologetic and explained why this had to happen, uh the way it did and stuff like that.

So they are a great crew. There's an old joke about that. I'll tell you the punch line. The punch line is how's mom? Uh, she's up on the roof. It's a great joke. Um, I don't get it. You don't. I didn't tell you the joke. I still the punch line. You have to look it up. This guy, this guy goes this Okay, this guy loves his cat. He's got to go overseas for a work trip. He leaves his cat with his brother right away, lands calls his brother

and brothers like cats dead. And later he's like, man, you could you know, kind of delivered it more slowly, like maybe like the cats on the roof and then you know the cats, We got the cat off the roof. He's not looking too good, you know. So he goes anyways, Hell's Mom? And he's like, ah, she's up on the roof. So um. Oh, last thing, you were drawing parallels between

saving lives with tourniquets and birds. But people write us in about saving lives with tourniquets, right, it'd be great if you can find us a happy ending rafter story. From what I get, they're talking to them that there's not a whole lot of them when it all gets hit by vehicle. Vehicle collisions are hard on him. Yeah, winds it up in a fence. Not a whole lot

of them make it. You'll be searching for a while. Yeah, I wonder what the percentage of you know, over the course of a year, how many birds they accept and what percentage? Uh you know, actually the fact that they entertained it must mean that it's not impossible. Oh sure, Yeah, mom thump day owl and her school bus the other day had what happened. You know, a mom drives school bus and she she thumped an owl in the school

bus with kids on board. Well, that's what I asked, and she said no. But that was like so obviously good, you know, no trauma for the kids. And and apparently mom stopped the school bus on the road and searched for the owl for a while and I couldn't find it. You'll appreciate this, David, No, not that, but this. I have a friend named Ray the Rockman Baker, who's a big arrowheadhunter. And he was a professional ego. He collected ego, but walking around looking at the ground, you inevitably turn

up stuff. He was so good at finding arrowheads. He told me a story and he showed me where it happened. He was a bus driver. He one time swung his door, you know they got that hand crank, swung the door open to let a kid on, looked and saw and found the arrowhead off on the side of a dirt road, picking a kid up out the school bus door. That's how good that guy was. Um. Okay, last time we spoke, you were I can't remember to what degree did you

tease you're you're you're new. Do you call a book mountaineer? No? That was the first people's book that was I was finishing up well. No, no, no, you like either we got done recording and you brought it up, or you teased what would become your new, your forthcoming book. Yeah, I can't remember, but you didn't go into any kind of great detail. So for our discussion day, you want to start out in the mountaineer. Yeah, let's start on top of the mountain in the Rockies, because this is

a crazy story. Yeah. So this is a site that was discovered by a colleague of mine, Mark Steiger, at what's called Western Colorado University in Gunnison, and I had just finished up a few years earlier, my excavations at the Folsome type site. Did we talk about Folsome last time? No? Man, we could put this mountaineer thing on the hold. You could talk about Okay, let's let's start with Falsome. What the hell we did talk about Falsom? But we'll just give it a review, Okay, okay for the kids that

weren't listening the first time we did this. Uh, Falsome is an extraordinarily important site. And it's not because I excavated there for three years. It's because of what happened

there in the nineteen twenties. And what happened there in the nineteen twenties was that after fifty years of bitter, long standing dispute and controversy over how long people have been in the America's Fulsome was the site that provided the the best, most secure and convincing evidence that indeed people had been here since the Ice Age in the Americas.

And that evidence was, and this is for all you hunters out there, it was a stone spear point in between the ribs of a now ext inked bison bison antiquis. There was no question that that artifact was stabbed into that animal when that animal was alive. And so if that animal was alive at the end of the place

to scene, that meant people were there too. In the years after Fulsome, lots more sites were found which confirmed that in fact, people had been here since the Ice Age, that they've been hunting big game like giant bison, mammoths, maybe even some mastodons. But nobody ever went back to the Fulsome site, and the reason was that when they finished up there in the nineteen twenties, they said, well,

there's nothing left. So I went back there in the nineteen nineties and I excavated there, and we learned a whole bunch of things about Fulsome, and one of the things that was really the sort of key message that came out of that was that these are highly mobile people. They are tracking great distances across the landscape, and we know that by looking at the stone that they picked up because they tended to I mean, when you're out hunting,

you want the best weaponry that you can get. You don't want something to fail when you're about to take a shot. Right, these folks were using really high quality stone. And the high quality stone that they were using is very distinctive in terms of its color, in terms of the fossils that might be within the rock as well. And so we knew from where they picked up the stone how far they traveled across the landscape, and in the case of fulsome it was literally hundreds of kilometers.

They had been down to quarries in the Panhandle of Texas place called Alibate's National Monument, just outside of m Alibates National Monument, because it was a quarry, like that's the monuments. Absolutely, yeah, it is. It is based not

coincidental like that, that's what they're celebrating with the monument. Absolutely, this is the home depot to beat all home depots at the end of the place to see and for that matter, for the next ten thousand years, right, people have been going to that place to collect stone, and so we knew they'd been there. We knew they'd been up in Sterling, Colorado. They've been making this big, long loop. So what were they doing. They were probably we know

they were bison hunters, big time bison hunters. So we've got highly mobile bison hunters. They're there at the fulsome site. We were able to ascertain when they were there. We know they were there in the fall. And the reason we know they were there in the fall is that you look at the eruption patterns of their molders, you

look at the wear patterns on their teeth. You make certain assumptions about when bison cabs will pop out generally, you know, mid April to mid May, and so by looking at that, you can infer that they were there and say September or October. They didn't stay long. We looked for a camp. We looked all over for a camp. We found absolutely no evidence that they spent more than the three or four days that they would have needed to butcher the animals. They killed thirty two of them,

we know that too. And a little kind of trapped them in a little box. Came exactly right, exactly right. They moved him into an arroyo and arroyal that they couldn't necessarily get out of. And I suspect the hunters were positioned on the uplands right a above where all these animals were thrashing around and trying to escape, killed them, butchered them. And what they did, and we see this a lot in the archaeological record. They they were gourmet butcher's.

They took all the good bits, right, so they got rib racks, they got shoulder humped meat, they took some of the long bones, you're basic bitson drumsticks. They hauled all that away. What did they leave behind? They left behind heads, butts and feet, because there's just not a lot of meat on heads, butts and feet. Now, you can do some things with brains, you know, tanning hides, that kind of thing. But they weren't lingering, they weren't

sticking around. Folsome is it about seven thousand feet elevation, and so my conclusion was, it's September. You're at seven thousand feet. Winter's coming. This is an area that gets a lot of snow. And I figured they're just gonna bug out. They're gonna go find someplace warmer. They're gonna go lower elevation, they're gonna get off into a more protected area, you know, case closed. So a few years after that, Mark Steiger invites me up to work in Gunnison with him on a site that he has on

top of a mountain. The mountain is at an elevation, it's a mesa in the Gunnison basin. So picture it's not quite a park like South Park or North Park or Middle Park in Colorado, but it's the same kind of principle where you've got high uh. You're basically on just the west side of the Continental Divide. From there you see all these fourteen thousand foot peaks. The lowest pass into that area is a ten thousand feet You get down onto the basin floor basin floors at about

seventy feet. And just as a side note, the airport there in Gunnison, because you're at such high elevation as a really extra long runway and so when we were working there, were literally working right above the airport and the air Force is sending all these gigantic uh you know, those Galaxy planes, the ones that they put tanks into. They come there and they do touch and goes to sort of practice landing at high elevation anyway, So he says, why don't you come up and work on this site?

Joined the efforts, I said, sure. So this site was hiding in plain sight. You literally see it from town. You just look up and say, okay, well, there's a fulesome site right on top of that, of course if you knew that, right, But their dogs up there for well exactly, and and Mark discovered the site because they

were putting in some radio towers. Okay, so you've got this mesa, this isolated mason in the midst of this basin thousand feet above the basin floor, and we're looking at a surface that is just flattest can be, and it's very rocky. It's a rock strewn surface. And we noticed Mark noticed first, uh, and I noticed when we started to work in a different area of the site that you know, there's some patterns to these rocks. And the more we excavated, the more the patterns became clear.

What we were seeing were sort of large circular areas with very large rocks forming the circle, and then kind of a cleared area in the middle, and in our case, what appeared to be a doorway leading into one of these sort of circular structures. Um, it was facing east, and I think, okay, well you've got a circular structure, you've got a doorway, it's facing east. That's maybe a house. So over a number of years we were explained the east rising sun rising sun a lot. You know, you

sort of look worldwide. There are certain kind of universal patterns, not not truly universal, but it's common enough that it's clearly something meaningful that you know, you have the sun coming in first thing in the morning. So, um, we're excavating these these uh, what looked to be structures, we're finding very distinctive patterns. So right outside the front door, it's been clear of rock and there's a bunch of

scrapers there. Okay, well, if you're going to stretch out of bison hide and clean it, you want to kind of smooth out the surface that you're working on. Um, we're you know, we're spending a lot of time up there, and we're thinking about it, and we're thinking, why the hell are you building stone walled structures which in fact we know had wooden superstructures. That is to say, put it in just plain English, they had aspen poles that had been anchored by these large rocks. We know they

were aspen poles because one of these structures burned. And what had happened was the structure had been built, the aspen poles had been put up, mud had been packed in and around all the poles to insulate the structure, and then when it burned, it basically turned the mud into ceramic, which preserved the bark of the imprint of the aspen pole park. Right. So, okay, we're a thousand feet above the valley floor. There no water up there. Now,

you know how much water ways? Right? Seven ponds of gallon? Right about eight? That's good though, maybe that was gas something. Um. If the nearest water is a thousand feet below you, and you know how much humans have to drink, right, we have water cooled engines. You don't want to spend a good part of your day going up and down a thousand feet hauling water. Do you also want to build a stone structure with insulated walls in the summer

on top of a mountain where there's no water. It didn't make a lot of sense, and it finally had dawned on us. Well, maybe this wasn't occupied in the summer as we thought about it and thought about it some more, what we realized was this is likely a winter hamlet. There are are what appeared to be at least four of these large structures on top of this. Can you can you tell me the circumference of one

of these structures. It's about five meters to make it about fifteen feet in diameter UM and yeah, generally plus or minus that um And they're kind of in a big arc up on top of the hill there. And so what we also realized, so this is a closed basin in the winter. And mind you, this is Gunnison, Colorado. Gunnison, Colorado was one of the coldest places in the lower forty eight of the United States. This was a site

that was occupied in fulsome times. And the radio carbon dates we have come in around ten thousand, four hundred radio carbon years, which is about twelve four in in real years. And so this was the end of the Palisto scene. So you can be sure it wasn't any warmer than than it is today. Right. So one of the things that we realized was that in a cold closed basin like that, cold air sinks. So if you're

a thousand feet above the valley floor. It's actually warmer there then if you were down on the valley floor itself. And the other thing is is you're on top of this mesa. There's no mountains that are shading you, so you're getting maximum daylight during those winter months, and it's going to be more comfortable up there. And if you're there in the winter, you don't have to worry about water because the snow is going to collect on the side of the houses, it's going to collect in the

cornices on the edge of the mesa. This is a really good place to spend the winter, as it turns out, because not only do you have um, well, let me back up, you have from the top of that mesa, if you walk around the perimeter of it, it's a couple of miles just all around the edge of this mesa. I don't know if the viewers at home can see me circling my finger, just sort of circling. Wait, this isn't on TV. Um you see uh, you see forever,

you see forever. So if you're a hunter and you're sitting up on the edge of this mesa and the valley floor is dusted with snow, if there's a herd of bison down there, you're gonna see him, and you've got time to figure out. Okay, how do we get down, how do we circle? What's the what's the hunt strategy here? How are we going to do this? And think about this. If you're in a closed basin and the lowest elevation mountain pass out of that basin, is it ten tho feet? Yeah?

But what what's the outlet? What? What is it? Is a canyon like a gorge the Gunnison River out of the west. Yeah, but that gorge is incredibly narrow and incredibly deep, and it's a very treacherous outlet. And in fact, one of the things that's really distinctive about the ecology.

We were talking about the ecology of different regions earlier, Right, the Gunnison Basin has a number of endemic species, which basically means these are animals and plants that have been isolated for thousands and thousands of years and hence have developed new species. Right. So that tells you that it's not easy getting in and out of that basin over

the long geological time. But if you're a hunter gatherer and you're in this basin and it's in the dead of winter, they're getting just tons of snow up on these passes. You're essentially stuck there. But here's the good news. The animals are stuck there too, right. So if you've got elk and bison that are spending the summer up at twelve or thirteen thousand feet, you know they can do okay in snow, but you know they're going to

come down, and so are all the other animals. And so you've basically got a walking refrigerator on the valley floor below you that you can see from miles away. You've got ample stone, you've water. Why not just park yourself here at eight thousand feet in the rockies. So my thinking, you know, coming trying to freeze your butt. Well yeah, but um, these folks knew what they were in for, because they clearly this wasn't a case where they kind of came in the summer they were hunting

and oh the first snowfall, we're stuck here. They knew exactly what they were doing. They found one of the most ideal spots in that entire basin to set up their winter camp and stayed there through the winter. Have you guys found any funnel remains at all. There's the you know, there's a beautiful theory killed by a horrible fact. The fact is is that we we haven't found anything

to empirically demonstrate. And this is the frustrating part of that whole project to found to find anything that would clearly and securely confirmed that this was a winter occupation. It's just not there. We found thirty four thousand bones, scraps of which are no bigger than your thumbnail. Because this is a very cold environment. It's a very harsh environment. You've got a lot of freeze, thraw and cracking, and

you know, bone just doesn't preserve. And that's the problem as an interesting shed hunting observation in areas like that high elevation, serious exposure, find a lot of cracked antler yep, goes quick. Yeah, like the the that freeze thaw and and how hot the sun gets on those south facing slopes.

The brown antlier once it falls off cracks. What critters besides elk and bison or you finding bones of up there, Well, mostly it's just elk and bison because the larger mammals, you know, you're gonna get more option or opportunity or likelihood of getting their bones preserved. We the largest chunk that we got was a distal tibia of a bison. Uh. And it was just a chunk of the distal tibia, so you know, the lower leg bone larger of the two. Uh. And that was you know, that piece was maybe just

a couple of inches uh in length. So we did find some fetal bone, which we thought, okay, so maybe we had they killed an arch or whatever exactly. Um, but when we radiocarbon dated it, it wasn't fulsome in age. Uh. Have you been able to radio carbon date any of the bone? Oh? Yeah, no, the bison bone that was large enough. Yeah. Absolutely. Now we have we have really good solid radio carbon ages on that site. Uh. And as I said, it's about twelve four and it's there's

fulsome points all over the place. We have over a hundred of them. Any nice ones? Oh yeah, are they in your book? Um? Well, yeah, like pictures of them. My kid just got a shark book or like if they're like reading want that school. He got a book about sharks that came with two shark teeth. Well in a little plastic container setting foam built into the cover of the book. Now, if you sold that book with

the point the falsome point, well I don't. Yeah, I know, but I don't have a hundred books to sell and i'd have to charge for each. I feel like, you get it, your reputation destroyed. Well, I do have co authors, so I just point to them. So why why did you guys think of that? Um? So, yeah, no, it's uh, but this getting back to the fulsome story, right. I was convinced. I was convinced that these guys, I want

to get back to the points for a minute. Okay, are the points um in the houses, like out front of the doors, just kind of everywhere? Well, one of the houses has a lot of them, and I think that that's you know, we had a bunch of folks kind of sitting around, this is winner. What are you gonna do. You're gonna gear up, You're gonna get ready for the hunt. And so they were making a lot

of points. And the really interesting thing that we found were one of the really interesting things that we found was a point that had been made at the site. And we know it was made at the site because we found the channel flake. The channel flake is the flake that is from the flute that you remove from the face of a falsome point, which makes you a hell of a flint napper. Right, that's still of the

time it's going to fail. So if you get that pinnacle moment and yeah they break, well, you know, you invest forty five minutes and something, and then what's the next to last thing that you do. You flute it where you have a failure risk. What were they thinking? Anyway? So we find um a point, and then find a point base from a clearly at a point that it's snapped in half and had been brought back to the site.

It refit to that channel flake, which meant that they Okay, you make a point, you leave a certain amount of

debris behind, including channel flakes. You attach that point to a spear, You go down down slope down a thousand feet, you go out onto the basin floor, you kill an animal, You bring back your busted spear, you unwrap it from its half, the thing that mounts it to the spear, and you just you know, sort of discard the base of the point right there, and then ten thousand radio carbon years later we come along and we refit that

channel flake to the point. There's the story. The story is is that they made it here, used it on the floor, brought it back right. So you know, they were basically just hanging around the basic the tip was probably sticking in an animal somewhere and got lost forever.

You know what I would do if I was an anthropologists, I would find I'd go down to the folsome site m hm, and I'd find some channel flake that matches one at your news site, and I would tell everybody how that was those guys and that's where they went. You know what. I was so tempted. I was so tempted to connect the two dots um, except they're um, they're different ages. How far a part of it? Um? Less than a century? But less than a century? Yeah,

they might very well have known people. Well, you know that's entirely possible, because you know, there were a few enough of those folks out there on the landscape. How many, like how few do you think? I know you can't say, but like, let's give me a plausible idea of how few, Like if you were in New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and there's only one source of stone. Just to clear this up, there's only one source of stone at the Gunnison site. Um, okay, so no outside that, that's there's

an interesting story. And then I'm gonna try and ignore Steve's question because I don't know the answer, so help me not come back. But there has to be there has to be a framework. I'll give you, give me the framework to answer Steve's question, and then I'll get back because there's stone moving around that could be independent of the people because of overlapping groups. And absolutely here's

your question. Here's the answer to your question. We actually know a lot more about population than we did the last time I talked to you. And the reason is is that UH continue to work on ancient DNA and genetics is giving us a much better picture of population history and demography. And one of the things that's come out in just the last couple of years is that populations as soon as they got into the America's boomed a sixtyfold increase over about a three thousand year period.

Now that doesn't give you absolute numbers. You know, how many did they start with? Did they start with a hundred, did they start with a thousand? We have no idea. What we do know is that the rate of population increase was spectacularly high. This might have been sort of one of the biggest population booms ever in human prehistory, which basically means that when people got here, this was a rich environment in which they were highly suc It

was the honeyhole. There you go. You know, you you crossed all of your you're, you're It's like you're getting an opportunity to come in and, um pick over things that have never been picked over. Well, not only it was like oysters, Like here's an oyster bed, it's never been picked over. Well, let's let's talk about large mammals. They've never seen a two legged predator. Now, they're not stupid, they're going to pretty quickly figure it out that you're

bad news. Okay, But those first couple of times when you rock ride up to him and whack them on the head. You know, this is like those stories. I mean, we have examples of this because in more we have like very um elaborate descriptions of people arriving on remote islands they had never been inhabited, and they literally walk around, um oftentimes to the point where it's all gone pretty soon,

walk around clubbing everything to death. Well your oyster example too, right, there's descriptions of like and re oyster is the size of your hand like an outstretched you know, absolutely yeah, and the chest peak Bay. There's historical studies that show there's this massive shrinkage of oysters because of overharvesting over the years. But to your question, cal about the stone, Um, they did in fact bring in outside stone to the gun of Some site. Yeah. So presumably when they first

showed up they had material that they'd collected elsewhere. But then once you're sort of in that basin, over the course of the winter, your stone is gonna get used up. But fortunately they had access to really high quality court site. Now I should explain court site is not you know, sort of your favored fulsome stone making or tool making materials Church cal Sdney Jaspers, and you know, these folks went for the good stuff. Uh. And they certainly did

at the Fulsome site. But here in Gunnison they were making points out of court site, um, which was high quality court site, and so they were very adept at it. But they had an unlimited supply. So again this gets too. If you're gonna hunker down for a long period of time,

you want food, you want water, you want stone. They had all three, and it just so happens that they're on top of this mountain in the Rockies where it's one of the coldest places in North America now and probably was one of the coldest places in North America then. But they did just fine. Do you might walking through a uh, this is on Cow's stone question, do you might walking through a plausible explanation of how in what form stone was transported? Because I've seen these references to

um cores and by faces and things. That's a good Yeah, I like that, that's good. Yeah. So uh, euro pedestrian hunter gather you don't really have a lot of beasts of burden. Um, the best you've got is a dog, and you can load a bunch of stuff on dogs. You could load just tons of stuff on Karn's Newfoundland out there, but these dogs were probably not that large. Um. Just in case you big needs. This is a beautiful seg by the way, beautiful segue. Well I knew where

we were going. I didn't need Korean's script. David. So, Um, you're a hunter gatherer, right, you go to the you go to these outcrops and there's just a big, massive blocks of stuff you're not going to slip one of those things across the landscape a because well you held your arms out. But an outcrop is I mean it could be like a car sized out crop. Oh yeah,

oh yeah, I have good stone. I've been to I've been to Alibates and actually on the other side of the river from the National Monument on on a private ranch where I literally saw a block of Alibates the size of the pickup truck just peer like could take the whole thing and make it. You can make tens of thousands and then sell them with that book that you know you want to publish. Yeah. Um, so what you're gonna do and and not just the weight and

the size, you also want to get the quality. So you're gonna spend a little bit of time at the outcrop, You're gonna spend a little bit of time at the quarry, and you're gonna fashion. Um, you're gonna reduce the stone into manageable packages for carrying. And oftentimes what you're producing is kind of a large platter like thing which um is easily transported. You put it in a bag, a leather bag or whatever. And we know this because oftentimes

if we occasionally find these things. Oftentimes we'll see that the flake scars have been rubbed and they're polished, and it's because they were in a bag with something else a braiding them. In essence, you can take that large platter of stone and you can turn it into anything you want, right, So it's an easily transportable form. It's reduced the weight. You know, it's good stone, and it can be morphed into whatever particular tool that you need.

So you don't necessarily want to go to the quarry and make really highly specific Okay, a gonna need three end scrapers, so I'm gonna make them now, I'm gonna need for that's all you're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So why not just take something that you can turn in into a number of other different things. And that's probably how they were transporting stuff. And that's called a core. Yeah. So the core is basically the stone from which you

are making other tools. And you guys will find cores now and then oh yeah um and in fact um, in the case of Mountaineer, we do find court site cores. What we don't find is cortex, and and don't sort of associate core with cortex. Cortex is simply the outer rind of a block of stone, so when it's been weathered, Um, it'll get that. Yeah, okay, well there's a word for that though, right. Cortex is the word c O R T E X another like I want to get that kind of man, there's a it'll come to you. It'll

come to you. Um, we don't find any cortex, which means that they you know, they went to the source, they got a cobble, They busted open the cobble. They could see the good stuff inside, so they removed all the junk and then they just carried it back to the site and then they used that to make blades or scrapers or whatever. And you're not finding the outer nasty correct Correctly, they were coming. Yeah, they were coming into that place with with stuff that was ready to

ready to work with. Again, this gets back to your thousand feet above the valley floor. The stone sources are on the valley floor. Why carry extra weight? I mean, I can tell you when we were working there, we would occasionally hike up to the top or run down

from the top to the bottom just to see. That was back when my knees worked and I could go from you know, hiking to the top would take you know, you're at eight hundred eight thousand feet or so, it would take about half an hour, uh to sort of make your way up the mountain. I could get down in fifteen minutes running, so, uh, you can, you can make that trip pretty quickly. Now, of course, if there's snow on the ground, it's going to be longer and

everything like that. But they probably had snowshoes, they probably had something that they could get around in the snow. But we also know that in another area of that Mesa top there was a summer occupation, or what we interpret as a summer occupation. It's very close to the edge of the Mesa and we have um a bunch of um busted up, used up projectile points. I think we had hunters sitting on the edge, watching the valley floor below and retooling their weaponry and just you know,

kind of watching to see who's walking by. You know, there's cows, you know, they the runway for the Gunnison Crest Debut Airport is right below you, but just off to the side there, Uh, somebody's got a bunch of cows on the field, and so you know, I could sit up there from a thousand feet away and yeah, sure, I can count the number of animals that are down there on the ground. It was a perfect vantage point and it turns out a great place to spend the

wind or because you had everything you needed. Did you guys find any kind of thing that represents UM weapon types besides stone? Any kind of uh other would besides the remnants of the tent poles? No? No, And it's too harsh. It's just too harsh. And the thing is, where you do have sites UM in in northern Mexico, they're they're dry where the climate has been very, very

dry for a long time, you've got good preservation. And when you have sites like that, and there was a study done in one of these sites, there's something like for every single item made out of stone, there's twenty different things made out of wood or bone. And that's just giving you the ratio of how much you're not seeing in these sites because the only thing that's preserving

is stone and the occasional bits of bone. What's what's like the most interesting source material you've come across that they grabbed some sort of rock and made tools out of it, Like when I look at it back light, I found a few of I'm like, man, that would be perfect. It's um like an extinct squid species leaves behind what looks like a female right. Yeah, we're like a like a piece of petrified would Um. Yeah, so they have there's a there's a material up there that

we haven't quite figured out. It's called opal c t. It's an opal light and it occurs in little tiny bits. Presumably it occurred in much larger blocks, and it's in and around these houses. It has no obvious functional purpose that we've been able to discern. Um. We don't know where it comes from. It's not native to the top of that mesa, but clearly somebody hauled it up on top of there, and we have no idea why or

what its purpose was. You know, at first I thought it was maybe some sort of pigment type thing, but that's not necessarily the case. So I don't know. It's a it's a puzzle to us. Um. We know it's there, but we don't know why. In your dealings with anthropology and antiquities in the American Southwest, do you ever crossed paths with forest fend We did a whole podcast on him once there's some interest in this room about him. Yeah, I know. Forest, of of course, just recently passed away.

Um yeah, um Forest. Forest was indeed a character, a very interesting character, and um was very supportive of archaeology, but also arguably um across some lines if you will. Uh. Yeah, yeah, Forest basically I think purchased a pueblo and then you know, had it excavated. Um, but he had um professional archaeologists excavating it. So it's it's kind of a it's there's a lot of ambiguity around Forest. I liked Forest. He

was a very interesting character. UM. So yeah, that's that's a great question, like where like how do you in in current times like decide on when to excavate something like what what are the factors now? Because it used to be like, oh, here's a site, We're gonna dig it up and find out everything there is to know. But now there's a mindset of like, great, we know there's a site here, Um, we know of other sites in the general area. We can draw a lot of conclusions.

The most preserved we can make this site is to not dig it up. Well, that's right, and the reality is, of course is that nobody's making ten thousand year old sits anymore. Right, they're gone their finite Um, are there more out there? Yeah? Probably? Uh do we need to continue to dig them? Well, it really all depends if you know about that time period, you know about that region. What's the point of digging yet an other fulsome site, for example, because you might find a body and there's

not many bodies. Well, that gets us into a very different set of ethical questions, right Na, Yeah, sorry, Steve Um, Look, I'm well, okay, let's we'll get to that in a sect. Well, it's just it's a great question. Yeah right, No, so um, there are sites that I have excavated that I haven't fully excavated save a chunk, save a chunk. Well, Fulsome is the best example. Right. There's a certain point when you're doing excavation and analysis that you sort of hit

the point of redundancy. You've learned a whole bunch, but the further and more you dig, you're not really learning that much more. At that point you should stop because at that point, all you're doing is adding to the collection that you don't really need because it's not telling

you anything new. On the other hand, somebody could come along to fulsome seventy years after me, as I came along seventy years after the first excavation, and I learned a hell of a lot that they didn't learn because well,

they were just paleontologists hauling bison bones out of the ground. Right, So if I leave a chunk of that there and I did, somebody coming along seventy years later can figure out all the things that I did wrong because the questions and they might have better, they might different questions, just as I did after the first one. Um Neanderthal A Right, it's like we can't like it seems like it's monthly at this point, there's some new thing about Neandertal.

It's all. It's all the genetics, it's all the ancient DNA. But to Steve's question about a body, so um, we've learned a tremendous amount about human population history of the America's in literally just the last seven years, because it was just seven years ago that ESK. Wheeler Slives group of which I'm a part of, UH provided the first

sequence of a Clovis individual. So we have a genome of a Clovis person from the antics in that oh yeah, Oh absolutely, because that boy's name is zik One, right, yeah, it's it's near will Sall, how far as will saw from here far? So in that seven years, we've sequenced and other labs have as well a number of ancient genomes. And these are things that I mean, look, there's a lot I can learn as an archaeologist. I can learn about what people hunted. I can learn about how far

they traveled across the landscape. I can learn about how they responded to different environments, how they were impacted by different environments, what their impacts were on different environments. The one thing I can't do as an archaeologist is population history.

If you've got an artifact over you know, in this site over here, and I've got an artifact in that side over here, and they kind of look alike, we might want to say, oh, well, they're part of the same population, But we would have no idea, right because artifacts can look alike for a variety of reasons, not necessarily just because they're historically related. If you've got a genome and I've got a genome, I can tell you precisely how closely they're related. I can look at I

can look at patterns of admixture. You know, we know when different groups got together because we see gene flow, just as all of us have a bit of neandertal DNA and US, right, so we know there was well sex between early modern humans and neandertals. So yeah, there's a tremendous amount to be learned from ancient skeletons. The flip side is there's some ethical issues and concerns when you're doing genetic research with populations, regardless of you know,

sort of where they are and who they are. Um. You know, there's a certain amount of protocols that you know, one goes through to get permission to do genetic research because you can learn a lot, not all of it good,

about a population. It's a particularly challenging issue here in the Americas because the relationship between the indigenous Native American communities and the scientific communities have not always been good because you know, on the scientific side, we have a lot of sins to atone for you know, for the first hundred or two hundred fifty years of anthropology, we have anthropologists, you know, having skulls sent to them from Native American um battle sites right where the U. S.

Army would go in and just sort of gather up a bunch of the heads and shipping back to Washington. Uh So there's a long and kind of sorted and unfortunate history in the relationship between Native Americans and you know, the scientific community and getting into genes, getting into d n A is a particularly invasives the wrong word, but it can be viewed in that way. It can be

you as a contradictory, right. Well, I mean what it is is it's you know, it's taking your essence, it's taking your d n A. And I know a lot of a lot of people are concerned about, well, how much do people know about me from my genes? How much do they know about me from my d n A? And so you a hatch that to this sort of difficult history between the scientific community in the Native American community and their feelings about their DNA being part of

somebody else's study. You know, we understand our history. We don't necessarily need you telling us stories about who we are and where we come from. I think you'd be able to speak to this better me. But there's also an issue of of defending a narrative against people who want to like un see a narrative like if you remember with kennewick Man, some guy took a look at the nine thousand year old school that comes out of the Columbia, right, He's like, Hi, that looks like a

European to me. Yeah, I got a white guy with a spear point in him. That's exactly what. And then you're like, guess the first Americans weren't who we thought exactly well, in fact, good old Europeans it was. It was Esky's group. It was our group that in fact sequence the kind of wig genome, and we showed that in fact, he's native American through and through. Okay, so it's a and you know, we always ask permission to get a genetic example from the living, But how do

you how do you deal with the dead? Would imagine if you're talking about something that's twelve thousand years old, I don't know that someone has a real legitimate claim on that. Well, now see, there's a really interesting would be interesting for me to go and and and argue that. Uh, for me to for me to take offense about excavations of Italians in Italy that were from even a thousand years ago would be a stretch for me to act

like I had input on that. But my ancestors are you know, some of my ancestors are from Sicily, So is that my business? If you're looking at something that's twelve tho years old, you're looking at groups that no

doubt went through radical migrations, influxes of new people. Because someone's in Colorado now, or if someone's standing in Colorado twelve years ago, I think it'd be a pretty dubious assumption to say that that became the Northern Cheyenne or the you like, who knows, well, so, um, somebody twelve thousand years ago could have no answer, no ascendants at all, or they could have thousands, and we won't know unless we basically do the sort of before and after Florida

exactly right. And and so the question also becomes, at what point, when you go back into the past, does something stop being tribal and just become human? Right? You know that this is in a sense, I don't know where, but I feel like that happened at twelve tho years ago. I don't I wouldn't want to be the guy that picks the number, but to me that look at the

histories right, like Aboriginal oral histories Australia. They you know, they have this case of being able to talk about their history for thousands and thousands of years right, without question, without question. Oral history is remarkably uh strong, back to a certain point you know where you're you know, at that point you're just sort of getting the distant echoes and you know, how how valid is that are how

reliable is it? The all of this is now sort of part and parcel of um NAGPRA, which is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which was intended to write a lot of those wrongs by saying that human skeletal material, which is simply sitting in boxes in museums and universities, needs to be returned to the descendant communities. And how do you determine lineal descent, you know, over

thousands just based on geography. Well, it's based on about ten different criteria, of which geography is one of them. And that's what made Kennewick so problematic was that here you've got an ancient individual who's talk about tell people

what is okay. So kenna Wick was a human skeleton found in nine six on the banks of the Columbia River fourth of July or something, right, Yeah, it was the speedboat races that they have um on the Columbia and a couple of guys, a couple of twenties some things. We're trying to sneak in to watch the boat races. So they were walking along the river bank and they were going to climb the fence and get into the area to watch the races, and you know, one of

them stepped on some of the bones. So they call in the corners. Right away, You're thinking it's a murder victim. Well exactly, So they called the coroner, and the coroner comes out there with um, a local archaeologist forensic anthropologist named Well. So he was already thinking this could be not but recently, this could not be a recent murderer. I think. I think what they what they would often do is turn the bones over to him and say,

you know, tell us a story about how this person died. Uh. And so that's when he discovered the stone point, and then they radiocarbon dated it. That's when he gave the quote to the New York Times that said, I've got a white guy with a stone point in them because based on his look at the skull. It looked like a European. Isn't that called cranial morphology or something that's not even in the next step New York Times. It's undisciplined,

is what it is? That that that whole that whole school thought about measuring relative These relative measurements on your skull very problematic, very problematic, because you know, the skull is incredibly plastic in an anatomical sense. It just it morphs over time and in very complex ways. Anyway, so they get a radio carbon date back on it, and suddenly you know, you've got a European on the banks of the Columbia. Excuse me, it's hard not to get

cocked up about the banks of the Columbia. UM. They've got somebody here, UM who's not Native American. Well, uh, that that triggered a long running lawsuit several million dollars of you know, US tax dollars because the banks of the Columbia were controlled by UM Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Interior, you know, sort of picked up a portion of the U. The lawsuit bringing in their archaeologists.

The long and short of it is is that the UM it went into the court and then into appeals court, and they said that, well, this isn't an end of American because it doesn't look one, and because it's that old. Well, um, so they did this analysis um of the skeletal material. I know, I know, we're into a weird um semantics thing, but this doesn't Let's let's say that had been true, they would draw into question what is a Native American?

M Yeah, well what they what they decided was that you know, it wasn't and therefore NAG he wasn't and therefore NAG did not apply. So just based on just based on the appearance of the skull mhm, yeah, yeah, problematic science. And so Kennewick hit nagper right where it's weakest for just the reasons that you brought up a few moments ago. At that antiquity, how can you tell

if in in in what way he's related. So one of the things that's come about in the last years since then is that NAGPRA now pays more attention to um. If you can't sort of determine lineal descent, then who were the tribes that live in the region, right? Uh? And so it's but we were able. We obtained a piece of a fingerbone of Kennewick. And this is Eski's team. I'm just the archaeologist with him, so I kind of provide the context and they do all the really heavy

lifting in terms of the genetic work. And we were able, fortunately to obtain DNA samples from a number of the Callville tribe, the Confederated Tribe Callville, and they provided DNA samples that made it possible to sort of look at Kennewick relative to one of the tribes. In the Pacific Northwest. There were five tribes that had claimed Kennewick as a

potential ancestor of theirs. So we did our sequencing, we produced our results, UM and it was a really interesting UM, a really interesting event because we published the paper in Nature in two thousand fifteen, major scientific journal, and they wanted to do a press conference because kind of Wei had been so controversial. They said, you know, we should really do a big announcement. And Eski called me and he said, We're going to do a press conference in London,

and I said, nobody in London cares. Let's do it in Seattle. And so we did. Uh. And so that summer. I was I was in the field somewhere and I just got on a plane, went to Seattle, met up with Sky and Morton Rasmussen, who had done a lot of the work, and a number of the representatives of each of the five tribes showed up. We um, we gave our results, and one of the reporters at the time in the room said, well, what are the what

are the tribes think? And Eski said, well, you've got representatives of them here, why don't you just ask and and after another representative each of the five tribes got up and talked about what it meant to have Kennewick shown to be a Native American. And it was really profound. I mean, we just gave the results. They gave the results, meaning they were able to say, look, you know, we felt very strongly about this from the get go that

Kennewick was a Native American. We've been deeply unhappy and in fact resentful of all of the stuff that's been surrounding Kennewick, the lawsuit and everything like that. Um, they didn't appreciate, well, that's harsh. They wished it hadn't had to come to you know, all of the science and the genetics and everything like that, because they felt they understood what the answer was all along, but they were at least glad for that. So our results were obviously published.

Um the uh the results were then checked by a group at the University of Chicago, and things just snowballed right after that. UM, I think the Senator from Washington put in a piece of legislation that said, Okay, it's done. Kennewick has been out of the ground long enough. It's time for him to be returned to the tribes and reburied. And uh. President Obama signed the legislation and literally Kennewick.

A funny side note at the at the news conference, the reporter when the tribe said, we've agreed, as even though we we have our differences among the five of us, we've agreed that we're going to jointly rebury Kennewick, and one of the reporters said, where are you going to rebury it? I thought, do you really think they're gonna tell you after all of this, they're gonna tell you so that you can go look. Uh No, they said, no,

well we're gonna this will be a private ceremony. So was there um, what was what was learned from the from the genetic sequencing of Kennewick, Well, in the comparison with with with indigenous groups that know what, the indigenous groups that provided samples. Okay, so what we learned was Kennewick is or was a part of a population that was ancestral to these populations. Could we draw a direct ancestry line. No, we could not. We would need a hell a lot more modern day samples to sort of

figure out. So that didn't preclude other groups being related to Kennewick, but it showed that at least the tribe that provided the samples was in some fashion related to Kennewick, more related than someone in Coastal Alaska. We don't know. We don't have a we don't have a genome from coastal Alaska. Uh yeah, But the key thing was was unequivocally Native American, despite what his head shape was. Uh So get into anzik mhm, like talking about who like

the specimen anzick one. So an zick Um was a really important study because what it showed us for the first time was that the Native American population, the ancestral Native American population that came into the America's got south of the big continental ice sheets, soon thereafter split into two major lineages. One of the lineages stayed up north and the other made it all the way to Tierra del Fuego. We call those Northern Native Americans and Southern

Native Americans. And Anzick is actually a Southern Native American, even though of course he's hair in Montana, right. But descendants of Anzec make it all the way down through the hemisphere and rapidly. We have now genomes from other places in North America and a key one in south eastern Brazil, which indicate a very close relationship to the population of which Anzick was a part. So again this gets back to the issue of populations exploding. People doing

really well. Turns out they're just hoofing it. They're moving really great distances and are being very successful at it. M HM. Was that that boy was buried with Ochre and Clovis points and things. Who holds those Clovis points Now? I do not know the answer to that, UM, but the individual himself has been reburied MHM. After the study Sarah and Zick, who's father I understand was the one

who discovered it. UM actually was was one of the key persons who sort of triggered the re analysis of Antick and said, you know, she she felt that, you know, we shouldn't just have these bones just sitting around. Let's let's let's be done with this. Let's learn what we can and then let's rebury. Uh. You have the first book I had of years and for men, it sat my coffee table for many years. Was your Folsome book. I think you did Foalsome first, right in terms of

your big like popular coffee table books. I wouldn't have thought of that as a coffee table book, but I'm glad you found room for it on yours. Well by that, I mean large format color photography. Yeah, okay, okay, okay, I don't know what the hell is that's that's that is a coffee table book. It was all black and white pictures. Really, yeah, sorry, it's got a color photo. Well that in your memory memories are always in color, right, Steven. But yeah, but I have the damn book. Okay, what

are you called? You described the book to me. It's a big gas it's it's a large study of the Falsome site. Yeah, not a coffee Oh you're taking insult that I called that okay his magnum opus. Sure, and then you did. I'm glad you bought the book First People in a New Worlds, which which is that its color? Now that book, that book lays out the whole damn deal. That's the whole damn deal. I mean, it's just the

title says it all. First People's in a New World If you're interested in ice age hunters and clovis and killing mammoth or not or not, that's the important This is your book. And then a decade went by and you had to update it, so you got a new one coming out. Well, listen, I had to update. I want to get a full signed collection of your well okay, okay, um, do you want the fulsome points with him? Yes, okay,

so um. That book was actually almost obsolete as soon as it came out First People's in two thousand nine. And the reason was in two thousand nine, I could see ancient genomes on the horizon. I knew, you know, because in those days, the genetic information that we were getting was extraordinarily limited. We hadn't quite broken through the

barrier of getting genome wide data. All we were getting were mitochondrial DNA and y chromosome DNA, and just to give the really version of it, it's only telling you about a single ancestor on your mother's side and your father's side. The genome tells you about all the people. Well, there's a there's a whole lot of complications to that statement, but it tells you about thousands of ancestors that you have, whereas mitochondrial and y chromosome DNA only a single ancestor

a piece. I knew that genome wide studies were coming when I was writing First People's I knew that we would get ancient DNA, but it was still I mean, I didn't know how far off it was in the future. Um, But I published the book and literally, you know, the book comes out in two thousand nine, in two thousand ten, is the first ancient genome published? Yeah? But was anything in the book down't? I mean, I haven't read it a long time. I mean I read, I read the

whole damn book. But was anything in there flat out contradicted or was it just missing explanation that you would have liked to have included? Do you really want me to air the dirty laundry and why I had to write a new edition And sort of quietly, I guess

that question was anything in there? Was it just that you, let's say you were gonna you were trying to um, you're trying to publish the alphabet R A to Z and you did A to X perfectly, and then they add y and Z and you're like, darn, yeah, I'm gonna do a new one has y and z. Or was it that you had the whole alphabet wrong? Well, I'd like to think I had most of the alphabet right. Um. There were things that um, I have changed and changed

significantly in the new edition. But the real, uh, the real novel parts are the last ten years of the genetic work. There's been just a huge amount of information that's come out about population history, but there's been a lot of changes in other sections about sea level change. There's a bunch more sites that have come out there as being especially old, sort of so called preclue of his sites. UM. So yeah, there's a lot that's new.

But the real, the real push, the real impetus for me to do the new addition was the genetics, because I've been heavily involved in that pretty much almost since the book came out working with Willerslevski Willerslev and his group. So I've been basically I've had a seat at the table watching all of this stuff unfold. And so when I looked at the book, um, I thought, you know, jeez,

this is really dated. Uh, and people are getting you know, circa two thousand eight when I wrote it the view then, and it's just an terribly incomplete We were definitely missing Y and Z in the alphabet. What's that book coming out? Both of them? So both of them were supposed to be out a year or so ago, but as we all know, uh, two thousand twenty was the year time stood still and nothing happened, um because of the pandemic and so everything just ground to a halt. But both

then will be out one in June. This is the Mountaineer Book will be out in June, and the new First People's Book will be out in July. Now, why did you not roll the Mountaineer information into Oh, there's some of it in the First People's Book, so one can get a good sense of that site. In the First People's Book, did you cover the Cooper's Ferry? Idaho? I do, I do? That's the new one. Yeah, oh yeah, no, I well, because of the pandemic, um I spent I

didn't go out in the field. In I spent a lot of time writing, and I spent a lot of time riding, right, you know, because you can only write for you know, ten fourteen hours a day, and you just got to get on your bicycle and burn thirty or forty miles just to sort of do something. So yeah, I was actually updating the book because nothing was happening with it, so I just kept heading material to it. I'm not sure the publisher was all that thrilled. Because

can I can I squeeze this in? Can I? Can I ask you about what what you think of the um the stone samples like the possible origin points of the stone samples found it at Cooper's Ferry? So one, do you want you better explain what you're talking about? Okay? So, um, do you mind if I let the doctor? The doctor will see you know, So cal Um, I think what you're referring to are the projectile points that they argue have affinities to ones from northern Japan that you're making. Yeah, ah,

they never quit do it? Well? Okay, let me let me. Let me first start by saying uh, and then the other shoe will drop in a minute. Um. The site is exquisitely excavated. Uh. Lauren Davis is a terrific archaeologist. UM. And the dates on the site, you know, there's been some put back on it, but UM, I think that site falls in in the range of a whole bunch of other sites that we have in the Americas that sort of date around fifteen and a half thousand or so years ago. Um. It's an old site that that

part I get old site. Yeah. Well, and and in controversial to some people because for for the location, right, it's like, oh, it could be so old that it should be completely under ice A. No, no, no, um,

not at that point. No. UM. But the UM, Well, so you've got this site at fifteen five, You've got other sites around that's sort of same chronological ballpark fifteen five to fifteen and and it actually matches up pretty nicely with the genetic evidence, because we've got genetic evidence that we've got these populations splitting out and coming into the America's around fifteen and a half or sixteen thousand. So we're starting to get actually a really nice consistent

story about the people in process. The the part where I sort of depart from the um. The argument that Lauren Davis and colleagues have made is tying it to northern Japan and the sort of paleolithic occupation in that part of the world. And they're basing it on similarities

in the projectile points in the spear points. And the problematic aspect is, uh, what they've got are some fragmentary points there in Idaho, which they say, oh, well, these look like, you know, these full blown points, uh, these complete points over here in Japan, and they sort of make the match by just taking a little tiny fragment and kind of putting it on top of one of

these Japanese points and saying, look, it's the same form. Well, you can't do that, right, because that's also the same form as a bunch of projectile points in other parts of the world at other times as well. If you're going to draw a direct link, it's going to be And this gets back to what I was saying earlier.

Population history and identifying whose related to who is not something we can do readily with the archaeological record, and especially with little fragments of points that you say, Okay, well this one matches that. No, it's just a little tiny fragment. You know, you can't say that if this thing was full blown and complete that it would in fact resemble this one over here in Japan thousands of miles away, right, And how would you? Maybe it's the

base of a little doll. Well, that's it, right, I mean, it's just a point base or a point tip, and point bases and point tips can be pretty damn generic. That that being said, do you what do you think about? Because also this because of the water access, right, there are some conclusions that were kind of drawn as far as like people could have gotten here through a coastal migration, right, right, and so like early boat use and and in traveling some open water in early early boats, like do you

do hold with any of that? Okay? Okay? Which is why I like it? Okay, Well, I'm gonna make you a happy guy that it's fun to think about, Okay, why I like it? So another another thing that's come out of ancient DNA, it's the gift that keeps on giving, is that you can extract DNA at a sediment. And one of the projects really Steve is looking skeptical here. Well, no, I'm just not skeptical surprised. What's in there? Mark? Oh, you wouldn't believe a DNA type of term? Yeah, well

that's that's the sort of accepted scientific term. Um. Sorry, yeah, okay, So what's hiding in there? It's basically anything that shed any DNA over that particular quadic vegetation. You name it, you name it vegetation. So. Another of the projects that I was involved with Eski's group was so the Ice Free Corridor. We must have talked about it the last time I was here. Oh yeah, I used to be a big fan of that thing. Yeah, well we're not

anymore neither. You go, and well you can't. I like a lot of people like, you know, like Whens is part of the Red Yeah, that's exactly like this wall of ice, right, and he's like badass hunters. This little gap cracks through and it come out, and there's just the American Great Plains story. It's just it's just not true. Sad,

isn't it. Um. So, one of the projects that we did was Michael Peterson, one of Eski's guys, cored a couple of lakes, right, in the dead center of that corridor, and the corridor opened like a zipper, a zipper jacket that opens from the top and the bottom, So the top and the bottom opened earliest, but the middle part of the zipper, you know, stay closed. So he got a couple of cores from lakes right in that sort

of un zippered part, right right after it opened. And what we found was nothing was living there until around twelve thousand, six years ago. So even if you round up we were talking about rounding up earlier, right, even if you round up to thirteen thousand, that's still too late to get people south of the ice They were already down there. They were already down there fishing, fishing and cows little spot exactly, fishing, at least at least

they well. In fact, one of the arguments that's been made is that people were sort of coming down the coast following these salmon runs, and then when they got south of the ice sheet, they headed up the major river systems, head up to Columbia, get onto the snake, move yourself interior. Doesn't that change because it was supposed to be mammoth hunters, not salmon fisherman. Yeah, does that offend you as an old river at myself. I have no problem with it. I have no problem with it.

I just it's not the romantic vision that we always had held to. Yeah, but then it never made much sense. Are you going to go after three and a half four ton animal that doesn't like you with a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it when you're just tripping over seafood or whatever? Right? Or turtles turtles Kelp for us Kelp Forest. I'm not sure I'm gonna go with Kelp Forest with the Kelp just because we we don't really know what the place to see

sort of seascape. But that's another theory, right, it's like the Kelp Forest Kelp Highway. That's right, cruising down the Kelp Highway. Yeah, it just breaks the seeds magically, and you can travel from Japan, yeah, big Stone Point and get it all the way to Cooper's and then break it into pieces. Yeah eventually. Like man, I've been carrying around this Big Stone Point for yeah, generations and no one's used it yet. My daddy hand down to me.

But we don't necessarily think they had boats either, because we now and this is again you know, it's in the new book. Any kind of water craft. They didn't have to have it because by the time we think people were moving down the coast, the coast was clear by around sixteen and a half to seven. How they going to cross like the Stikeen? And well, now that is you know, that's a question, right, So if you're coming down in winter, are these things going to be frozen? Oh?

I don't know how hard would it have been to make? Uh? I am getting into the game. I was not going to becoming an anthropologist, but I am. Now are you gonna approach it from? I've drawn some conclusions. How I need to go out and in your in your bizs Dr Melic, what do you call the kind of paper

where you just throw out an idea? Oh, a speculative paper, okay, a doctor, But you play one on the radio saying that they had to have had some type of small skin craft that they could use a scoot across the river. I think that's about the extent of my paper, okay, And that's actually a fine paper. The problem is that you're going to get in that skin craft and you know, somewhere on the Aleutian Islands and paddle all the way down. No, because you're gonna have to constantly haul it out now

and then you're like, we gotta make another boat. Oh absolutely, Well, look people cross the Mississippi. They had to have something to get across these kind of making your children and your gear craft. Yeah, yeah, no, so they had watercraft.

What I was you mean like watercraft water? Well, yeah, I'm I mean I'm talking about the idea that they actually made boats and sort of traveled down the coast without one setting foot on land, which is one of the theories that's that's been out already paper about that. I'll let you I'm already got I've already got a PhD. You can you can be senior author. Want Oh sorry, Spencer, go ahead. Last month, my wife and I went to Utah and we were camping. We spent a whole day

hiking two different petrol glyphs in the area. And there was this one site that you hiked, you and there's these petrol glyphs amazing, and then a hundred feet further there's these dinosaur tracks that are fossil lives petrol glyphs five thousand years old. Dinosaur tracks were like hundred and fifty million years old at least, and it like put me in a real brain pretzel and it was like

real hard to calibrate. Does that ever happen where you're like excavating some site that's like three thousand and you'd like collide with something that's a hundred million years old? That's significant? Well, sure, because people are people and people pick up things. So um, I don't know if this story is true or not, but I've heard it that in some of the excavations at one of the pueblos um ancient pueblos and maybe Choco Canyon, they found a

falsome point. Now, obviously falsome people weren't living in Chaco Canyon a thousand years ago, but somebody there saw a falsome point on the ground and thought, oh wow, that's pretty cool, brought it home. Right, So collectors, right, we were talking about people that like to go out and collect stuff. They collect crnoids, they collect fossils. So yeah,

it's actually not uncommon uh too. I mean it's not common necessarily, but it's not uncommon to have that sort of asynchronous uh set of materials actually out on a site where you've got something that's millions or many many millions of years old next to something that's fairly recent. Have you been following We're gonna we're trying to get him on the show once he gets vaccinated. But we're Mike kuns is crazy glass beads out of Genera, Italy in Alaska. He sent me that paper he was talking

about that in two thousand eight. Yeah, well it took a while to get that paper published. In fact, it may not even have appeared yet. Are you buying it? Am I by doing something bad by talking about it? No? No, no, no, it's impressed. It's impressed. It's just I don't think the issue is shown up in my anyways. Glass beads, well,

I'm not made in Italy. That that would have had to have come the hard way, the hard way out of like through Europe, cross headed east, then crossed the Bearing straight and landed in Alaska, way before anybody you would have ever thought about bringing them from the other through the America's those some crazy ass beads. Well, but think about the Silk road. I think how easy they are to transport. Well, and you forget about in your pocket? Boy, Well, we need to move on to dogs. Go ahead. You

think that the beads were carried by dogs. That's very plausible. There's some fancy leashes and stuff in Mexico. I've seen turquoise Yeah, alright, dogs. Yeah, what do you do you? I feel that because Americans have I shouldn't just say it's probably's probably some global aspect to this, just an insatiable appetite for dog information. Dogs are cool. I mean,

people eat it up, man um. And I feel that in the last I don't know how long it's been going on decades whatever, years, you see a hell of a lot of news speculation, publications about hey, where do these things come from? Anyway, it's like a hot question right now. It's it's genetics again, Steve, because is that what's just opening up new just opening up new windows of opportunity? Absolutely? Absolutely, and and it's now becoming clear that, um,

the dog history is incredibly complicated. It's incredibly interesting too, in the sense that that's the first species humans domesticated. We've been around like that. That feels ironclad. Oh yeah, oh yeah, because it's by like a huge amount of time, right, ten thousand plus years, ten thousand plus so uh yeah, I mean dogs have been our pals for a long time. And they've been not just our pals, but they've been our sort of workhorses, work dogs. They've been part of

our cultural repertoire as it were. Uh, you know, for many groups, dogs were a tool. They were used for hunting, they were used for defense, guarding, warning systems. I mean, dogs are great. In fact, when I got together with these folks too, uh produce this dog paper that we had just just published this past well just a couple of months ago actually, Um, I was really excited about it, but I told him that, you know, if this was a story about cats, they'd have to find somebody else

to work with them. I don't do cats, big cat down, the big time cat guy right there. Sorry, Spencer, you can write the paper the next time, you know, cats come along. Yeah, yeah, all right, So you want to talk about the paper. I want to talk about the paper. Um Can I tell you my thing first or later? Like I think I might have uncovered some good source material for you. You're the host, you go, I'm reading a book and I'm gonna do a big, big, huge

book report on this show coming soon. I'm reading a book with don't judge my brother said to me. Listen. My brother said to me, said, don't look at the title. Just read the book. Okay, the title is Alaska's Wolf Man. No, but it's in red. What it's about the guy that goes up to Alaska. He's a market hunter, so he for road building crews and mining camps. He hunts dollsheep

and caribou. But in the early days, like leading up to statehood, he becomes a government wolfer and he winds up doing a bunch of like at the same time, out in western Alaska, Askimo groups are trying to they're trying to help Askimo groups diversify their economy by reindeer with bringing in reindeer herds. But wolf predation on these reindeer heers is horrible because reindeer just don't get it right. They just you know, they're coming in from somewhere else,

term loose, and they're just picking sitting targets. He winds up doing a bunch of He winds up doing a bunch of wolf work all around the state, usually where there's like a faltering caribou herd. Dollsheet numbers get really depressed, and he would go in and do this heavy duty wolfwork.

But in the book he's got some fascinating observations about um, he's doing much of his work but dog teams, so he catches wolves now then, and his findings about how, like, what you can actually get done with a wolf, what happens when he breeds a wolf with whatever he breeds a wolf of the Mala mute, what the attributes of that generation is, what the attributes of the next generation is.

The difficulty that he encountered. He basically got you cannot take a wolf, like, in his view, you cannot take a pure wolf. There's nothing you will do that will ever make that a predictable pet. A wolf is a wild animal. He's like, you can't do it. No, A dog has been a domesticated animal for over twenty years, and it's just a it's night and day. The interesting thing about wolves and dogs in terms of gene flow is that there's there's dog danna and wolves, but not

the reverse in modern days. I gotta say that, I gotta do that real slow in my head say it again. So when dog in dog populations today, there's no wolf DNA, but in wolf populations there is dog DNA. So the introgression. Understand what it's a one way it's a one way gene transfer. It's not it's not going both ways. So well, I don't understand why it happened that way. But my colleague Gregor Larson, who was one of the principles on

this dog paper part again, I'm sorry, I'm struggling. Okay, So you've got you've got dogs and wolves mating, but they're not producing. The wolves are not producing. Um, they're producing mates or descendants that have dog DNA in them, but the dogs are not producing viable offspring from the

wolf mating kind of more. Yeah, yeah, um, well, I mean it's not entirely clear why that is, because oftentimes, when you've got two species that are kind of on the edge of biological compatibility, they can produce viable offspring. So humans and neandertal has produced viable offspring. But we know that today only because we all have some amount

I have less than normal. Okay, about that we think about this genetically your behaviorally, I think Joe Rogan's is extraordinarily So I was thinking about the whole twenty three and me during our earlier conversation because it's like I want like the oral history versus what you draw the conclusions you come to from looking at like a twenty three and me report versus the oral history that you've been subject to your entire life. I think it is like an interesting headspace to be in and listen to

this podcast. Right, it's like, well, I my family has done this. And then it's like, oh, but we know what happened. One YI took it no very lavian they were. They were lying. Yeah, but I mean genetics is genetics and identity is not right. Uh, and so whatever they told you about your your people, it was probably the true story in a cultural sense. Right, this is who we are, this is who we become, this is who we were. Uh, these are your ancestors. Um, what the

genetics is telling you about is sort of the deeper past. Uh, and the other populations that your relatives and ancestors have sort of interacted with. The stories didn't get woven into the narrative. Yeah, yeah, because you know, the narrative is a cultural narrative. The narratives not a genetic area. I mean,

if you're picture this is way off dogs. But if you're adopted into say, I'll say this let's say you're adopted into an Italian family, you know, and that's you identify, and of course, and what one day you'd be like becausel was all wasted time. Yeah, um, all right, so you want to go back to the dogs. Yeah, I think we should get back. And dogs and wolves became two very different things ten thousand years ago. Yeah, and I suspect. Okay, So let's think about the context in

which this is happening. This is the glacial period. It's probably happening during what's known as the Last Glacial Maximum. That's about a three four thousand year window during this last glacial period when times were really tough. It was really cold, it was really harsh, very severe conditions. And you've got isolated human populations living somewhere in northeast Asia. We know they're isolated because we can see it in the ancient DNA. We know we have new lineages that

are emerging. Wolves are living in that same part of the world, and they're just as um, they weren't just

as much trouble. Right, it's cold, it's harsh, there's probably not a lot of game running around, right, and so they're you know, sticking their noses up in the air and they're smelling stuff, right, they're smelling food, and they're kind of creeping around these, um, these camps, and at some point, you know, somebody's throwing them meat or maybe they're just kind of moving in after the humans leave and kind of knowing on the bones that are left behind on the camp. And over time they start to

become commence als. Basically they're hanging around with one another, um. And and it is a process. It's not an event, right, you don't just sort of turn a wolf into a dog in a day. Um. It's a long drawn out process. And these you know, and they're sort of they're finding themselves together kind of isolated on this landscape, and in that long term process, they're understanding that they're not necessarily i mean, in principle their predator, their competitors as predators,

right because in principle people are hunting meat. They're hunting meat too. But they found a way to get along, uh, and they found a way to sort of help one another. And so the dogs, you know, start to aid in the hunting as they become dogs, right, as they're kept by the people, they're fed by the people, they're raised by the people. They get a they get habituated to the people. There's a it might maybe you think it's fanciful,

but I've even read I don't know. It's like it's someone postulating what might have been the reciprocity that like a early warning system. Oh absolutely, absolutely, like how they just go ballistic when something strange is happening, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No. That's why I say they're part of the cultural repertoire.

They were a tool. They were a tool for people, especially if you're on a vast unknown landscape, like say the America's right, you're making that left turn, you've gotten around the continental ice sheets, you're spreading out into the northern hemisphere. You have no idea what's around the corner, and you have no idea what's going to feed you, hurt you, try and kill you. Right, if you've got a dog with you, that's a pretty good thing. And that's that's what came out of this this work that

we just published. Was I was in Oxford a year or two ago, and I was talking to Gregor Larson, my colleague who works on ancient dogs doing the genetics, and I said to him, you know, you're beers over beers, right, No, No, that made a good story. But the beers actually came after we figured all this out. This was not some sort of drunken old whol over just beer, grainbelt beer. Yeah, this is not an ad for it. We didn't. We

start out this conversation about boy hit me. I was, you guys were real casual in this person's office, and we were. We were casually in the office. I was there talking shop. I was talking shop. I had gone there to give a series of lectures to Oxford, and I said, you know, Gregor, your dog dates look a lot like our people dates, and explain that. Okay, so we know from the age. Okay, do you want to because other people might be listening, Steve, I think it

cal al right. Here here's how it works, bense Um. So human lineages, Um, we were just talking about this. They split over time, so groups become isolated. They you know, one group goes and stays in the northeast Siberia, another group goes into the America's and then in the Americas, some of them stay north, others go south. And so we see this in the genetic record. We see different um lineages happle groups. You can call them different names,

but lineages works. And these are groups that are historically related to one another, but over time they've become separated. Okay, So we have a record of when those sort of lineages emerge. So we know that ancestral Native Americans split off from groups that would stay in Asia sometime around twenty three thousand years ago. We know that when they get into the America's sometime around sixteen thousand or so

years ago, they split off again. Some of them stay north, others go south um and then later on we see more splits as they move further and further south into the hemisphere. So we've got a record of all these kind of turnpoints along the way as people are moving into this hemisphere. And when Gregor showed me the results with the dogs, he said, well, you know, we've got a split here. We've got two lineages developing at this time. We've got a bunch of lineages developing at this time.

That's when I said to him, you know, you're split times kind of look like our split times. And then there was that sort of oh why didn't I think of this before? It's called eureka moment. It wouldn't even I don't want to call it a Eureka moment because that implies it was a really deep and profound insight. No, this was, well, of course people can come into the America's without dogs, but dogs are not going to come

into the America because without people. So of course the dog, the dog history is gonna mimic and match and coincide with human history. Now, whether they came in with the very first people was, you know, kind of a different issue, but clearly they must have come with people, so at some point their histories aligned. And so when we so I then went to the white board, he said, okay,

well let's kind of try and figure this out. So I drew Siberia, com Chaca Peninsula, I drew Alaska, and I said, okay, here's where we have groups splitting off at different times. Here's where they are at this point, here's where they are at that point. And then they put the dog story on, and you had a beer in your hand while you were well. Then we went to the bar afterwards and congratulated ourselves having figured this out. So yeah, yeah, that's uh. And it was just so

obvious that well, of course it had to happen this. Okay, here's a couple of questions for did this happened again, Did the same thing that we're talking about happening in Siberia with dogs happened in other places completely unrelated? Or did that then? Like that, did the dog then sort of like backfill along the path that humans have been

taken since the African diaspora? Right? So, um, dogs go both directions, right, So they're going to be domesticated, and some of them are heading east, some of them are heading into the America's others presumably went west with people. We know that populations that are in this part of northeast Asia at the end of the ice age, after the last glacial maximum, they're moving all over the Eurasian But that was it's possible that there was a singular

domestication event. Well, now that's controversial, and you'll have to get a dog person on here to defend either the single origin point or the multiple origin point, because I don't do dogs. If it's multiple, how many how like what's like a fashionable multiple? Has that happened twice or ten times? Um? I think the argument is is that there might have been sort of three centers of domestication. But again, it's not my thing, and this dog group is my second question. Um, I know you're not a

dog guy, but you probably know this. This These dogs are they need they're adding like they're adding as people moving to new areas. No doubt there has to be some crossbreeding occurring where they're they're bumping into like all of a sudden, you come here and the Mexican gray wolf. Let's say, let's say the Mexican gray wolf was a thing, then maybe it wasn't um at some point their dogs pick that up a little bit, right, pick it up

to some degree. Maybe I don't. I don't know that we have enough resolution of the dog genetic record to say that. What I do know, and this is, you know, sort of an answer to a different part of the question that you were asking, is that this is not the first time it's happened. We know that when people move across the Far North around five thousand years ago,

they're taking dogs with him as well. And that's a completely separate event where people are tracking across the landscape bringing their dogs with them, but but possibly dogs that had been in a sort of rolling lineage with these early dogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and think about it, do you think of them as a technology? Was like a technology that's been transferred. Well, and and let's let's

kind of riff on that transfer notion. You know, when you've got a dog and you see other people with their dogs, your dog is gonna go running over there, unless it's on a leash, and it's gonna go hanging out with them for a while and may or may not come back. So I suspect when you know, sort of groups were um, you know, encountering one another after sort of long separations, I suspect the dogs were probably

moving back and forth between groups um as well. Um, but yeah, they were part of the They were part of the colonization process. They were part of the dispersal process into the Americas and probably served, you know, really important rolls because think about it, if you're coming into a completely unknown landscape, not a bad idea to have a dog with you. What's the oldest dog bone that's been found and what's now the lower forty eight it's around ten thousand years old from a couple of sites

in Illinois. And what can they tell about those? What they look like? How big were they? Oh? Gosh, you'd have to ask a dog person. But I don't think they were terribly large. Don't think big wolves. Yeah, the sites are called Coster KOs t e R. And Still Well are the sites that have produced these sort of ten thousand year old dogs. Had the dogs been butchered or just dead again, you'd have to ask a person who's a dog. You gotta tell us a good dog person.

I gave you a name, Gregor Larson and Angela Perry. Have you spoken this person? No, not yet, but they were on my list. They're on your list? Yeah? No, Um, dogs were food too. Look, times get tough, you know, Sorry, you've been a really good dog. But you know it's either you or me. Oh it's the Swiss Army knife of companions, you know. I mean there's a lot exactly what criticisms their objections have there been to your conclusion about this? Well, the um the argument. So there were

two pieces to that that piece we just published. One was the sort of um kind of coinciding histories, uh, and that part I think seems fairly robust and sound. The other thing was, though that we drew the conclusion that domestication took place in northeast Asia rather than sort of further west. And I know some of the dog genetic folks, um pushed back on that a bit because they think domestication Again, this gets to the issue of you know, was there a single center of dog domestication

or multiple Uh that's it's unresolved. But we offered that hypothesis in the paper that we think you know, they were domesticated in northeast Asian went both ways east and west. Good stuff, man, Oh, it's fantastic. The Spencer brought up, uh the college days, which a long long time ago now, and um, you know, you always you gotta mix of people who want to be in class and you gotta mix people who gotta be in class in order to

check that box on their requirement list. And you got some people that ran in both both crowds depending on the class. Yeah. Oh yeah for sure. Uh. I can't help but think. I'm like, what's your take, Dr Meltzer, Like, how many of your students are going? You know, I listen to the Mediator podcast to get away from Dr Meltzer. Damn he followed me here. Um he stole that from the lecture. Look, you know today's today's college students. Um, I think it's a tough time to be in college.

Just I mean, we have pemic, pandemic, the economic situation, you know what it, the likelihoods of jobs, all that good stuff, right, Um, And I know that what I do is not terribly useful. Just because it's not useful doesn't mean it's meaningless and so useful in the nuts and bolts kind of like, yeah, yeah, what are you gonna do? You're gonna make yourself a Clovis point and go out and survive. I don't think so. Um, maybe you could, Steve, but I couldn't. The line I got.

I was a history anthropology major, and the line I got was are you gonna open a history store? Yeah? There you go, and you could. So my my job is to say, Okay, I know you're not coming in here necessarily because you're interested in what I do, but I will do my best to make it interesting for you. I will do my best to help you think about things that you otherwise wouldn't think about, and think about them in critical ways, and try and sort of transport

yourself out of your business school environment. Right, let's take you back fifteen thousand years and think about what it's like to be on a landscape where you haven't seen any smoke on the horizon, you haven't seen any freshly killed animals, you haven't seen any other humans in a very long time, and you realize, wait a minute, I'm all alone here. But hey, the living looks pretty good here. How do I do that? How do I how do

I make a living on this landscape? Right? So I try and and give people the sense of what it would have been like to come into a completely new world, not a new world in the European sense of well, you know, we finished trashing the old world, now we're going to go to the new world. This this truly was a new world back then, and what would that

have been like? So yeah, I get it that they're not necessarily coming in because they really want to learn about archaeology, um, but I think they'll take something away from it, or at least I hope they do. I double minored in college. I got a minor and anthropology and a minor and health. And what I told people when I did this was that I got the minor and health because I also had a biology major, and so I could go into the midfield. If I wanted

that the health minor would help me. The reality was that I was interested in anthropology, but I was a C student there. So if I also minored in health, I was an A student there and so I could carry my g p A. The anthropology was to entertain me. The health was just to like help with my resume. So anthropology is resume building, like the health. That's why we picked him off. He tanked the interview that I got looking at him. Yeah, classes like yours, you got

to see an anthropologist. Classes like yours kept me wildly entertained. Favorite stuff. Yeah, I like it. I know they lean on you a little bit over there and in the Ivory Tower, but uh, I like it that you take the time to come explain your work to people. Well, I mean, look, the greater public um genuinely is interested in what we do. They're not necessarily, you know, going to be taking a lot of classes and everything like that. But you know, people can find interest in things from

the ancient past and do uh. And because a lot of archaeological research is supported by the greater public, it's it's only fair that we give back. Uh. So I don't like to just publish for my colleagues. I like to publish for a broader audience so that I can give back. So it's part of my responsibility as somebody who has spent his life in an Ivory tower, and

I gotta say, Evory towers are awfully nice. Um. But it's also nice to get out once in a while, um, and to be able to share what I've learned because fundamentally, you know, it's the thing that interests me and I just think, well, it's going to interest others as well. Be fantastic. Okay, So uh, okay, how do they find if you want to see Mountaineer? What form is it? Like? How do they find it? Well, it's just on the south edge of town of Gunnison and you can't get

the site the book starting on June. Okay, so this is my opportunity to Yeah, okay, if you were a big im I'm venturing you're not a big Instagram guy. Well you know. Okay, So I have to apologize to all the people who listened to the podcast the last time because you asked me at the very end, are you on Twitter? Are you on Instagram? And I admitted that I was on Instagram. What I didn't tell you was I only had six followers and they were my kids.

And the only reason I was on Instagram was to send them pictures of where I was in the world at any given time. And I got literally almost three requests to join me on Instagram. Deny them all. I I just again, I apologize to everybody can listen, but I don't. I don't publish anything of interest on Instagram, So speak to them. Uh, this is your It's an

elaborate Instagram post called a book. It's like if you could pack a whole lot of pictures and a whole lot of texts a single Instagram post, it would be called and bundle it as a book. It would be called The Mountaineer Site and it will be out in June from the University of Colorad. It's called the Mountaineer Site. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, I'm confirming with Karan. It's got a subtitle to um, what's the subtitle? I don't know. We're checking, but it's

like it's a book. Yeah, oh yeah, it's a book. It's a book. Um. And and then color photos No, sorry, but I'll tell you. The cover photo is gorgeous. The cover photo was taken by my colleague, uh, Steve Emsley of the Mountain in Winter. Oh here we go. Okay, so what's the subtitle? Hard to read on my website, it's something like a Fulesome Winter Camp in the Rockies or the Mountaineer site a Fulesome Winter Camp in the Rockies.

Or you could learn about the Mountaineer site, which is a new site in the revised update the tenuere revised update of First People's in a New World, which is it's a compending. I don't know how you describe it's it's just like I said earlier, it's the whole damn store. It's everything I know. There's nothing left, guys to someone. Yeah, you know, I remember the old days, like the Greeks or whoever. They were into this idea called the sum

of all knowledge. Like they had the idea that a person could um no everything that was known the last person. That's hard to pull off now, yeah, I know, I

think good. It was the last person in the or something, the last person who knew everything, like like all knowledge all you know, mathematics, astronomy, all, yeah, I know every I know a lot of things in a very small niche and that's about the best I can and it's captured beautifully, beautifully and first people in the New World, Dr David Meltzer, I'm gonna I remembered from last last time,

it was David J. Meltzer. Not to be confused with the beat poet, not to be confused with the guy that writes about wrestling, and not to be confused with the business person David Meltzer who I get all sorts of David J. Meltzer, Anthropologists, Southern Methods, Methodist Universe, Southern Methoist University SMU in Texas. That one for as great as uh your work is, and it's how smart you are. Um.

I fell into this trap after the last podcast. I typed in David Meltzer books and I found a book called Mushroom Cultivation Self Guide to Mushrooms from all over the World. When I was real like, I was like this, this guy just has all my interest and then and then I was like, he's got to have a cat book, the perfect guy. Thanks for having me, honest, I really appreciate your work on mushrooms. Oh and also North Thing Bear Grease podcast. Clay Newcombe. Newcombe who's been on this

show many times. Every time Clay's on the show, people are like, man, that guy ought to have his own podcast. Well he does. It's called bear Grease. It's like a it's a history podcast, history, history, folklore, culture, history done and Clay's unique style. It's investigative. Bear Grease Podcasts part of the Meat Eater podcast Network. Listen now, Thank you everybody,