Ep. 380: Chopping Up A Buffalo With Clovis Points

woman from Hawaii. I love her to death. We're doing a series with her spear Chef, so Jimmy's own Spearfish and show. I'm on one in the Bahamas and holy ship that we have a good time. I got some just really cool just everything about it, and I was like it was a dream, amazing footage. My kids were mesmerized by when I watched it with him, just all the beautiful underwater stuff. So episode one came out a few days ago. Check that out. Also, our hate to call our former co host, but it used to be

Yanni was on like on this show. Yanni was on every episode. This is back when Yanni produced Uh, Yanni needs to produce our TV show. We were always together, like we always say, nuts on a dog. Uh, Yanni was on every episode. Yanni like missed one episode in years of recording. But he's going on. He's gone. He's got his own stuff. He does his own show, runs

his own program um. He is launching a new podcast which is called which is our gear Talk Podcast, which is Yanni a collaborative project between our very own Yanni would tell us and Jordan's bud what we're gonna do on our gear Talk podcast where they just talk about all things gear, arguments about gear, what's coming out, what they like, how they packed everything from gear World, deep dives on certain gear items, history on gear and how

it came to be the way it is. You can go on over and pick that show up and subscribe to it and it will be served to you on its own feed. Gear Talk Podcast. All right, you know what's annoying. It's yesterday. My wife comes in the house. First thing out of her mouth, I heard you heard you don't have a very good grip strength. First thing that that was the So she ran into a couple of guys before she saw me. That was her number one takeaway from our day. It's just something you can

work on. Maybe you know I'm holding it's a Jamaar plus by Samson's Preston and tell us about this thing, tell us why you have this, and then we'll get into greater detail. Yeah. So that's a device that allows us to measure the strength of your grip. And we have another one in the box there for pinch strength.

And what we want to do when we do tests involving cutting, we're really interested in understanding the tools and not so much the butcher using the tools, and so we measure the strength of butchers and their grip strength and their pin strength, so we can control for that in our tests. So if we're looking at two different tools, we want to make sure that the difference we see is not due to different butchers, but because of the two different tools. And what's the highest score you've ever

seen throwing on this? It might have been yesterday really with John I think you got into the sixties. He just edged Clay and I out. Everybody introduced themselves Real Quick Spencer, Spencer new are Thy host media Trivia. I was part of the experiment yesterday. I'm met in air and I'm an archaeologist at Kent State University. Yeah, Clay nwcom here. Yeah, I was a part of the big fiasco we had yesterday too. I guess we're gonna tell about that. I wasn't sure if we were. Oh, we'll

get into that, okay, But I want to settled. I want to explain something about my low score. Ye. Dave Meltzer, archaeologist SMBU in Dallas, John Hayes from Hayes Tax from the studio, and I also took part in the experiment yesterday. Why do you got? Why do why are you sometimes an anthropologist and sometimes an archaeologist. Well, so archaeology is within anthropology, and so yeah, my degrees are Actually there's a flow chart. Yeah. Well, there's four subdisciplines, is what

there is. Archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics, and socio cultural anthropology all live under I'll live under the umbrella of anthropology. We're all studying humans in one form or another. Is it agreed upon that those are like the four subdisciplines of anthropology traditionally? Yeah? Absolutely. Could you go through those again? Our theology, which is what Mett and I do. We

study people in the past. Biological anthropology which looks at human variation human evolution from a physical biological point of view. Linguistics study language, and socio cultural is looking at culture societies around the world. M I had no idea. Archaeology is the cool one though. All archaeologists are anthropologists, but not all anthropologists are archaeologist. That's exactly right, Okay, So anyhow,

here's the important part of this whole thing. We had to measure grip strength yesterday because we we'll get into greater details. We butchered an entire buffalo yesterday, fresh dead, using stone tools, one of which is laying in front of us right now in my hands are full. I didn't know how bad it was, so I took a shower, m battered, yes, full of cuts. Yeah, and I'm gonna get ahead of ourselves for second. To address this one issue.

Archaeological sites, really old Clovis sites, you guys, find what one might deduce would be a knife made from a flake that is sharp all the way around it. Yeah, all the time. But the Neanderthals are smart and they knew to make a dull side for your finger. Well in the Middle Paleolithic sort of the time of the Neanderthals. Yeah, they would do what's called backing, and they would chip away one side to to make it dull such that

they could rest their hand on it. We don't really see that in on Clovis flakes, um, but they might have been using some sort of leather to protect their hands or something. M hmm. It's gonna eventually emerge that the Neanderthals had phones and stuff. One because every day there's a thing we've talked. Every day there's a thing like, oh, it turns out they were gentle artists, you know, And

it turns out they right, they just get like smarter smarter. Well, I mean, we were able to interbreed with them, so they're still alive and in some sense, I think in about two to of human DNA human genomes, because ste doesn't have too much. I came in low, which couldn't

explain my little grips, right, I came in sub. I came in like subpar on Neanderthal Uh okay, So we had to do grip strength and I had to go first, so I didn't have a technique, and then I was kind of going for like a long right, a long sustained grip and then John got though. Mr high score here just got up and did just like an explosive scrash explow some spam them strength. You've used his technique and we'll test it again. A lift that up? Okay,

got you got into the sixties. Now what number would you be satisfied at? Like forties? What number would you be satisfied with? This time? The strongest grip in the room. So you want to you want to hit seventy. So you're gonna have to hit test before you do it. And you were doing it on the third notch, third notch, So I was pretty low yesterday, the lowest. How did

you throw up sixty nine on this? Okay, ready, now you're gonna hear you see some things you might not want to test again because if you wait too long. Yeah zero, that's not the sound of redemption. Okay, ready, yeah damnit zo set and my hands all caught up from the flint plates. All right, here we go, So try reset and then really hit test and then it'll it'll go cool. Wait, you're testing your right hand, which is not your dominant hand. Well, that's part of the problem.

I didn't want to get I don't know how much people want to hear about it. But I'm I'm I used to be ambidexterous as a kid, so I settled in on some things I do, laugh some things I do right, So you'd really want to, in all fairness, you'd really want to measure both my hands and make an average well know, because I make it lower. Do reset and test real quick, really pushing test all right? So ah huh six now you hit spencer. Man, we're doing it in the place you did you good yesterday?

Didn't see That's the thing, man, if that machine was any good, you'd enter your age in and it'd like palibrate like handicaps. Bison doesn't care how you prolonged. All right, I'm gonna stand up. Is it ready to go? So you guys, you guys didn't stand up to hit it, just hit tests reset and and then tests reset and then test okay, reset and then test okay fifty nine point six. I'm gonna make you guys feel real good right now. Hold on, you felt you came in hotter yesterday?

Sixty two two? Who dialing the chords in and stuff? Training my whole life apparently, Yeah, just squeeze it and you make a girl you got a growl. Well, if you hit him with two fists, it'll count sixty. I'm gonna pass this on to my John. Here comes the one. Oh yeah, yeah, sixty one. So you didn't you didn't do as good as you did yesterday. You're come on, John seven, strongest man in the room. See, I don't trust this machine. Now, how could my group have gotten

so much stronger overnight? It's hey, I think it's a lot about technique, I really do. I'll hand that back to you. And what other industries use that, because, no doubt they don't make that for archaeologists. So physical therapy, uh in doctors and stuff they'll use to see how people's hands are improving if they were injured. Ergonomics as well, so just designing knife handles or steering wheels or all that sort of stuff that you need to grip. That's

what this kind of machine is for. And you guys have a pinch tester too. We have a pinch tester and everyone hates the pinch tester because it's awkward. Yeah, it's real awkward. What other kind of when you're doing studies? What other kind of do you ever have? Anything we need to like bite strength or anything like that, or

we've never done bite strength it. Um. That would actually be interesting because Neanderthal teeth are worn down because they used their mouths as almost a third hand to grip stuff. And so we can when we look at the indertal teeth and skeletons. Uh, all of their front teeth are just completely gone because they're holding you know, leather or meat in their teeth, holding the other part of it in their hand, and then they've got a knife in

their free hand to cut. So bite strength with the indertals, are you deducing that all based upon toothwaar? Yeah, toothwar already all have some video. Oh no, no video. The thing about me is I'm a Neanderthal and this is my uh, here's no very interesting. Here's a no thing we talked about yesterday that I wanted to get your feedback on, and you'd heard of it, but I want

to hear more of how you guys have heard of it. Um. We recently had a Coronado expedition expert on and she had found a number of she'd found a number of Coronado sites in the US that in preparation for that interview I was reading, Um, I can't remember a guy's name. He's kind of he's frustrating to read. But he wrote Coronado, Night of the Pueblos and plane Planes. Yeah, classic volume. Yeah,

irritating author. It was, yeah, yeah, it's just like he really uh went he went out of his way to be like, well, you see, it wasn't that unusual to come into a village and cut everybody's hand off. You know, this is you gotta remember the times, right, You're like, that seems a little excessive even accounting for the times. However, um, and there were many chroniclers of the expedition who later,

you know, it's hard to keep track of who. You know, some guy twenty years later he's like, oh and I remember this, and anyhow you can put together a pretty good idea of what went on. But um, of of little interest to Coronado experts, but of interest to me. As they encounter some bison hunters in the if I remember right, they were on the Yano Esticado the Texas Payhandle, and they encounter some bison hunters and they are they have dogs. It's pre horse. They have dogs. Um. They

had had no personal contact with Europeans. They remarked. The Coronado people remarked on how un blown away they were. They asked them, what are you? And then they had described how they would when they're skinning bison. They would sharpen stone tools with their teeth. I had never heard that, But you've seen and heard of that. Yeah, I mean I've there's all sorts of interesting and unique ways to re sharpened tools or to make tools, and yeah, you

can do it, especially on really thin edges. Um does that that's got to show up in the on the dental ware of someone. I suppose it just depends on how often you do it. Um. But what do they even mean by sharpened tools of your teeth? Well, I mean, we got a flake right here I can demonstrate now.

But uh, you know, when you've got an edge that's fairly thin, if you just can basically just push off a couple of flakes with your teeth, just pushing off those tiny little chips will resharpen that edge and your mouth like you but then you're imagine you're using your eye teeth, but then your mouth is full of well I think in the past people would have been used to having stuff in their food, and we don't see like teeth getting worn down. Well, a couple of thoughts.

One is that you ought to see probably micro cracks and the enamel if somebody is doing that on a regular basis. The other thing is is that when you

have groups that are in areas well. For one thing, farmers who are grinding corn and and matats, all sorts of mineral matter gets in their food, in their corn, and it does tend to wear down the molars in the back hunter gatherers um that lived on the planes during the Middle Holo scene, when you had just a whole lot of dust blowing, heavily worn teeth as well for the same reason, right, you just got a lot

of grit in the diet. We were talking yesterday a little bit about um this is also sort of on the edge of our primary activity yesterday, but we were talking, we were making jokes about that, like me at forty eight, I probably wouldn't have been there. And I know you said, like as like the Clovis people's and you said, I guess rightfully. So he said, we don't know because there's

not enough. You know, you don't have a bunch of skeletons laying around to determine, to accurately determine like where the holes are in sort of the age demographics. But what are what are some thoughts on hunter gatherer life expectancies. Probably in the forties would be my guess, what is happening to them? Just a lifetime of um being out all the time, having to uh hunt for your meals, track down those bison. Those bison that way a hell of a lot more than the one that we were

butchering yesterday, even though we were butchering a fairly large animal. Right, so you think it was it would have been like a no medical care, Yeah, right, good point. Things that would be like appendicitis, appendicitis, tooth infection, abscess too abscessed tooth. There you go. Um, so any number of things. Which is not to say that they were unaware of or

lack knowledge of medicinal plants. I mean, one of the things that's really striking is that a lot of the medicinal plants that we are discovering today we're already known ethnographically uh and could have been known for a very very long time. So while they were quite capable, um, there were probably things medical emergencies that would have been

simply beyond their ability. I guess it would have been almost a statistical issue too, that by the time you were in your mid forties or whenever, it's just time for something bad to happen, you know what I mean. It's just the amount of exposure to physical risk of hunting these big animals, crossing rivers, falling off cliffs. Right, Disease just just random things, random things, um that you just came on suddenly and you just couldn't cope for

any number of reasons, right. I mean, we live very cushioned lives and we've got lots of fail safe and backup systems. There were no backup systems. Is there any way to guess with with ice age hunters? Is there any way to guess when, like what what was a peak reproductive age for females? Uh? I do not know the answer to that. But actually, let me add one thing to what I was just saying about how tough

life was. One of the things that's come out of the recent genomic evidence, the DNA evidence, is that between about sixteen thousand and about thirteen thousand years ago, there was a sixtyfold increase in population of people in the Americas. So what that's telling you is that when they got into this new continent, actually things were pretty darn good. Now. I don't know what the start value was, you know, was it a hundred people and you know multiply that

or was it a thousand people? But the fact that that population increased so rapidly in such a relatively short period of time tells you that they were actually quite successful at moving into this new environment. Obviously, things are going to plateau, and again you still have those sort of random events that will come after a lifetime of hard living, but overall, the population was really quite successful.

The there's a new book uh coming out by a historian named Dan Flores, and he has a chapter um called Clovincia the Beautiful, and he has a chapter about a little bit about what's known about Clovis and then

speculations about Clovis and the mysteries of Clovis. And in there he has a observation that that, you know, a theory that I had considered, um, when looking at how quickly the Clovis hunters seem to have been able to colonize new country, you could you bring up this idea of why and then I've read what people would say. You know, you can't rule out that there was an

element of curiosity. Um. Oftentimes you'll see huge migrations of people that are propelled by hunger, propelled by warfare and um, and you know, and there's not correct me if I'm wrong, there's not like evidence of it being warfare propelling the thing. And he brings up he he talks about these various cases of of known times in the more recent historic record where people have stumbled upon islands say that had

never had humans on them. And and so like the whalers in from the eight hundreds who would land on these islands and there's no human record on the islands, and they would talk about literally walking up in and lifting birds, plucking birds like fruit from trees, or just being able to walk up, you know, with tortoises, you walk up and simply load them onto the boat. Um.

Animals that couldn't even comprehend what they were. And then you look at a place where you go to Yellowstone Park, where it hasn't been there that you've had a hundred year a hundred plus year absence of human hunting on that landscape. So only that's only one years of an absence human honey, because not very long. But you can get remarkably close to wildlife there that is not used

to human predation. And he throws out this idea that perhaps what propelled you along really quickly is the minute something got hard and you went a few miles yonder there were animals that had never seen a human predator before. Just keep chasing the dumb ones, and so yeah, like why is you do? You hunt for your while in a place for a while, and ship gets kind of like, I don't about these guys walking up to me anymore. Bump along, and then you're back into a place where

you can just have it pretty easy. And that might explain like why you sped through the continent so quick thoughts, Well, a couple of things. I mean, one is is that these are animals. You're coming into a continent where animals have been dealing with some pretty substantial predators for a very long time. Right, Mamiths and mastodons have dealt with giant short faced bear, saber tooth cats and the like.

They're not completely asleep at the evolutionary switch, right, Um, they know how to deal with predators and they learned really quickly. Okay, Uh, would that have work for people? Yeah? I mean I suppose the first person in UM is going to have that advantage. Is that going to pull people from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego? Probably not. Is that going to have some sort of local payoff? Well? Yeah? Possibly. Resource depression always sets in right as soon as you

start hunting. The first day of hunting season. The first gun that goes off, where are all the elk? Right? They're gone? Um? And in the bugle in the bugling of the bulls seems to wrap up in a real herd. Yeah. Yeah, so animals respond pretty quickly. Um. But back to what you said at the outset about curiosity. I mean, one of the things about curiosity is that it's actually an

adaptive strategy. And I probably he said this on this show before, but basically, for hunter gatherers is your insurance is not knowing what's going on and available where you are. It's knowing where you go next when things get bad, right, And so by continually kind of looking over the next hill and just seeing what's out there and knowing where

you can go gives you that advantage. So that curiosity actually has a built in adaptive function that works really well for people on a on a completely unknown new landscape. So instead of saying he was curious about what was over there, he was scouting. Absolutely absolutely. And you know, you got a band, you've got a bunch of teenage boys or girls, just say why don't you going to walk about? Go look over that hill, see what's in

that next valley, and come back. You know. The other thing is these people weren't looking for a place to settle down. I mean, these were these were They weren't sedentary agricultural people trying to find the most beautiful valley in North America to raise their family, to build a

log cabin. Now that's it's absolutely right, Clay and and but at the same time, they're not like sort of fur trappers, you know, going into the Rockies in the nineteenth century, where they're just you know, coming in grabbing resources and going back out again. They do have to make a living, they do have to raise families. Um, but these are as, you say, you know, highly mobile people.

So we're not seeing evidence that they're spending you know, more than a few days at a particular camp site or maybe in the winter a few months, but then they're moving on. Do anthropologists ever consider that there was like any sort of strategic reproduction with ancient humans when a time that like every calorie mattered, that they would do some method like we can't be having babies in December because it's just too hard on the mother's uh and and the other folks in camp, So we gotta

have our babies in April, May, June. Um. There's a huge complicated literature on that very issue. So you know, the answer to your question is, yes, anthropolo is just considered it. UM. The other part of the answer is can I give you a detailed, easily digestible UM response? Uh? No, No, I really can't. Um. We You know, we look at modern day hunter gatherer groups and their demographics, and we can see certain things, UM, like, for example, the critical

role of grandparents, right uh. Individuals who are beyond reproductive agent, what role do they play in helping families taking some of the um the weight as it were, off of mom and dad, especially mom in terms of childcare and that sort of thing, and contributing beyond their own reproductive years. So we do see those kinds of things. What does

that look like in a pleistocene situation. Really hard to tell now, didn't the more modern Native Americans, it's documented some of their strategy for for when to have kids. I was reading about the Shawnees and pretty much they didn't do much pro creating in the early part of the year because they didn't want to have babies in the winter, and there were they were like times when you were permitted to do that, and it also coincided with war and hunting, like you didn't want to be

doing that when you were going hunting either. But yeah, but the purpose it was was to have babies during optimal times of the year, but that may have been a much later, much later thing, right, Yeah, we just really don't have any idea about what's going on in

in ice age times. Have you ever heard the idea that uh monogamy was born of the fact that uh human females are instead of having like an annual like a once a year breeding time, that it's sort of like ever present and there's no outward display of of when someone's fertile, and so it would cause a male to need to stay near his partner year round, year round, And it couldn't be that you could just be like a bull elk and go hang out with other elk for eleven months out of the year and then sort

of like, yeah, but come September, you'll be back at the cabin. But it was yeah, I think I read that. I think it was the physiologist Jared Diamond. Its probably might be a widely held bleep. I think it was the physiologist Jared Diamond had written about what might have made um, what might have brought about this, This idea of a of a breeding pair human breeding pair that stay together in the same place all the time, you know, and that we don't split apart and come back for

like breeding season. That actually speaks to the what's called the provisioning hypothesis, which is actually proposed by one of my Kent State colleagues, oh and love Joy. And the other half of that hypothesis is that it's not that males are always staying by females. It's that we potentially evolved to be bipedal such that males would have free arms to go get resources for the females and bring them back um, and that way the female can keep

track of the kids and take care of them. So monogamy not only is for sort of the mom and the dad, but it allows the male to go and get food such that his offspring will have a better chance of surviving. Earlier, you mentioned, uh can somehow it came out I thought would be a great spring off point. You'd mentioned like teenage female teenage females that you mentioned that I mentioned just teenagers, right, they got a lot of time on their hands. They're always looking to cause trouble.

Send them off on a walk about. Okay. That brings up with a thing we need to talk about. We covered and we we've discussed multiple times. The footprints found in White Sands National Park. Okay, and I wanna feel free to roam on this one. I mentioned you, Hey, what are your thoughts about the footprints, the ancient footprints that they found. You'll have to describe what they're in or whatever. But but a sort of it's not fossilized, but whatever the hell the word is for it a

very old barefoot footprint. Um. Apparently, uh, this was found relatively recently by a park ranger in White Sands National Park. It seems to be that there is a what they determined to be a young female. She seems that she was carrying a child on her hip would periodically set the kid down and pick the kid back up. She'd gone on the lake shore. A mammoth I believe, or masadon crossed her track. Yeah, a ground a giant ground sloth crossed her track. She came back minus the child.

This is you'll have to go with this, like what Okay? Are people getting carried away or not carried away? But that's the story. That is the story. And I mentioned it to you. Story. Yeah, I mentioned it to you. And I don't want to say that you rolled your eyes, but you you seem to have. You had the sort of a yeah, but look on your face. Okay, So here's the butt. Okay. So the site is in the

White Sands National Park. That much is correct, Mexico, which is in New Mexico, surrounding the White Sands Missile Range. Actually it's within, it's sort of embedded within. And I can preface this by saying, we've actually been doing some work on the missile range h and at one point we were literally just a hundred meters or so north of the footprint site. So we wandered over to take a look, and really interesting, Oh yeah, Oh yeah, I've

not seen the footprints, find you. And we've actually been excavating in sediments that are the same age as the sediments that had produced the footprints. And I think I need to preface all this by saying, Look, the people that are working on that site, UM, these are pros. They know what the hell they were doing. Um, they know how to identify footprints. I got no question about whether these are footprints. Um. The issue issues really come

down to the age of the site. So the site is dated by the investigators between twenty three thousand and twenty one years ago, which, if feel remember from our previous conversations, is substantially older than the secure evidence that we have for people in the Americas. Give us around, give a quick review of that, which is around fifteen and a half fifteen sixteen thousand years ago. Is the okay, use the word secure evidence secure because there's always insecure

evidence out there that people are claiming. You know, we've got folks here a hundred and thirty thousand years ago. Just it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. What about Monteverde, I'm sorry you buy that one. Oh yeah, that's regarded as assailable. Yeah, well that's the that's the latest, that's the oldest one, because that new thing on Columbia right

around the snake or Salmon, I can't remember where it is. Yeah, well we've got some other sites that are sort of around that fifteen fifteen and a half plus or minus age and cold is how old? Like about thirteen exactly? Alright, sow one the site big. It's a big People might be like, yeah, what's the difference, but yeah, no, it's substantial. The site is sitting on the floor of an old lake bed okay, old place to seen Lake otaro Um.

And there's a couple of issues with UM, with the dating, and they're I'm going to get to sort of the larger questions around the site. When we look at it and when we're looking at at radio carbon dates, we're looking both at their reliability. If you date something again, are you're gonna get the same answer, and we're looking at their validity. Is the answer correct? Okay? What they're dating is um. The common name is ditch grass. The

scientific name is rupia. Now rupia photosynthesizes uh dissolved inorganic carbon, which is a really fancy way of saying dead carbon. If you ingest dead carbon into the system, the dates that you're going to get in return are going to

be older than they should be. Okay, So in terms of the issue of reliability, there was a paper that literally just came out yesterday in the journal Geoarchaeology, wherein they took some Rupia seeds from um and the scientific term is not literally seeds, but we're just gonna go with seeds because that makes the most sense in terms of the conversation. They dated um a bunch of rupea

seeds from what's known as a lake ball. What happens in these old lakes is that rupea grows in relatively deep water upwards of two meters, and during um these windstorms that will blow the water of the lake um, pile it up on one end, drop it down in the other. The rupea gets dislodged and gets piled up on the beaches right and and sometimes it forms balls where you just literally have a whole massive rupea seeds.

They took one of these balls, they divvied it up into portions, and they dated the different portions, and there was a span of fift hundred years Ostensibly, if you're going to date a single event, you ought to get the exact same number, right, So what that's telling you is that lots of different rupea seeds from lots of different ages are tending to get lumped together. So if

you're but they're not lasting fift hundred years. But wait, then, there was a paper that came out three weeks ago in the journal Paternary Research where they actually dated some rupia that had been collected in nineteen forty seven in the same drainage region. And these were modern rupia samples collected in nineteen forty seven radio carbon dated six months ago. The radio carbon dates on things that we're growing in nineteen forty seven came back seventy four hundred years old.

Why because they were ingesting dead carbon Rupia. Rupia is basically sucking up ancient carbon. So the dates that we have of twenty three thousand subtract seventy four hundred, what do you get around fifteen and a half thousand years ago? So in other words, the dating that they're doing, they're dating ancient things that may well be the same age as the footprints, but that doesn't mean they're that old.

Explain how are they associating their rupia with the footprint? Okay, you can't date a footprint, right, It's just what's the words it's not? I mean, what what do you call like a because it's not like it's a feature, it's not an artifact. Um But why is it? Why is it still there? I mean, let's say it's a thousand years old, Like, what makes it that the footprint is still there? Because normally you walk along the beach and

later in the day your footprint is not there. Okay, this is actually another one of the problems and issues that I have with this thing is um So footprints are said to have been found over a two thousand year period between twenty three thousand and twenty one years ago. Okay, they are found in sediment. And I know this because we were digging in a trench a hundred fifty away in the same deposit. That is rock hard. And when you read the original paper on the footprints, they talk

about excavating the footprints with a dirt rated chainsaw. I've done a lot of excavating. I've never excavated with a chainsaw. This the stuff is so rock hard to cut it out So my question is not so much how do the footprints get preserved, but how do you find them when you're chainsawing through a block of sediment? Well, how did the first person that found him find him? Anyways, but yeah, it must have found him on this roading on the surface. But then they excavated down with their

chainsaws and got several layers of these things. It's puzzling as hell to me, and I'd really love to see if footprints are are are preserved in some ways. We have dinosaur tracks, We have all kind of tracks in rock, something would have happened, but these are in rock. No, these are in sediment. Because the dinosaur tracks usually it's walking in some kind of I don't know mud. Did have did eventually that mud fossilizes? Yeah, yeah, no, it's

a puzzle. And these tracks. If you if you went to one of these tracks and you poked it, you'd indent it. I would think so, well, actually, if if you could, because again it's when we were taking sediment samples out of those same deposits, I was literally wailing away with a rock hammer to chip out the dirt. So I'm just not sure how they found multiple layers

couldn't be different that far away. I mean no, because schiologist that was working on the footprints was working with me on the other side of the fence on the missile range and said, this is the deposit in which the footprints are found. M But leaving that aside, that you have footprints stacked on top of each other, have different layers, and then I can't quite figure out how they were excavated. And I'd really like to see, you know,

how these that'll eventually become one would hope. Yeah, apparently there were videos made, so I'm not doubting that they found these things. I just don't understand and how they managed to excavate them in the condition that they're excavated. And the rupec the rupia does something different than other plants. Well. In fact, in that same paper where they dated the rupia from seven they dated another plant that had been collected that same year by the same botanists, and it

dated to only three hundred years ago. But other things would be more stable. So there's something about that. There's something about there's something about rupia that differentially is taking up this dead carbon that's giving it inflated ages. And I interrupted you or didn't give you time to do it. Why why do they feel that the footprint and the

plant our bodies? Oh, well they do, but um, others are skeptical because if you've got, um, let's say, the an edge of a lake and you've got people walking on it, or you have one of these big storm events and it washes up a bunch of rupea on a surface and then people walk across that surface, it was deposited. They were both deposited at the same moment, but they were both not necessarily well, they were the same age, except that rupia is dating older than it should.

But why, Okay, you find a track, what is it about the vegetation that you're like, I'll date this vegetation. Oh, it's the only thing that you can date. Well, it's just on the same lighter, it's on the same layer. Yeah. Yeah, So it's not like it was has a footprint over it or something that I mean, is there is it pretty good that that that that their foot was on the plant on the plant or well, these are these

are just literally layers of these seeds. I think would you say the assumption is that if there was a footprint and on the same layer, because that that's like a capsule of time exactly if there was a rupea growing add one more. Man, I I thought it was that. I assumed they were taking it where they could see the foot so random though, you know, no, wouldn't well, okay, let me let me do that. All of human history would just be a big I'm saying that you have

a track. Let's say you have a Let's say imagine there's a piece of seaweed. Yeah, and you stepped on and you stepped on it, and then that preserved and you could see where like absolutely this footprint crushed this plant, and you actually many be like those are friends. Steve Ronnell is perfect World and Steve Bronelle's Perfect World actually exists on the coast of British Columbia. There is a site that has thirteen thousand year old footprints where somebody

stepped onto vegetation. How do you know those are accurately dated? Uh, they're not absorbing dissolved inorganic carbon that plant. That plant. Yeah, this is no, this is a tricky plant. A couple other pieces of information, so I've worked out there you're on the floor of an old lake bed. You stand out there. You look around, you think, what the hell would have attracted people to this spot repeatedly over two

thousand years? Now, there's nothing out there today. Now that's not to say that there wasn't It was something, It was the marsh or something. Right, Yeah, there's nothing to say that there wasn't anything there, you know, fifteen thousand plus years ago or twenty three if you believe the dates, which I'm skeptical about. But the other pieces is that people apparently or allegedly or purportedly came here over a

two thousand year period repeatedly. There's not a single artifact, no features, no other evidence of a human presence except their footprints. What were you digging at? We were north of there, and we were testing that same deposit, and we were actually taking DNA samples DNA of what the sediment? Does sediment have DNA? Oh yeah, but the clay. You're

You're into the whole new world. Now, someday these boys are gonna be able to you be able to You'll you'll be able to dig down, get to a certain spot, get a scoop, and you'll be like, oh, yeah, there was a thirteen year old male here Okay, well, Steve's going a little bit bit, a little bit farther than I would go. But um, so this is work that's actually been done over the last twenty years. In fact, you're looking for human DNA and anything anything. It's like

anything animals. So um. You know, we've talked about the ice Free Corridor and one of the things that we were able to do with ancient DNA out of lake cores is we were able to detect basically the moment that um animals and plants start occupying this region. Because when you take a lake corp out at the very bottom is just gravel and grit and whatnot, and at a certain point suddenly, boom, you've got you've got mammoth DNA,

you've got bison DNA. And we use it's called shotgun sequencing, where you basically take sediment and you just look to see what is alive in here or what was once living in here that contributed its DNA. We just had a piece last year um UH with a whole series of sites around the Arctic, and we were able to trace mammoth DNA over time and watch the mammoth populations basically shrinking into a small area of the Timer Peninsula of northern Siberia up to around four thousand years ago.

And we were able to do this not by their bones, because bones don't survive long enough. But that's because a mammoth only is going to leave one skeleton behind, but over the course of its lifetime at shedding DNA constantly. We could go out to the site where we were butchering that animal yesterday and we could go and take um, I mean, all you guys were bleeding out there right, Um, we could take some of that sediment. We could get DNA out of that sediment, and we'd find bison DNA,

we'd find nala DNA. That John in his DNA an extraordinary grip strength. Well, let's it that wouldn't degrade over time. No, Clay is absolutely right. Um d NA uh, you know in your genome three point two billion base pairs right by the time it gets into the archaeological record or the geological record. And mind you, DNA has been recovered from upwards from sites upwards of two million years old. No, really, seriously, I would not Steve, I would not lie to you,

but just not like horribly degraded. It's terribly degrade recognizable. That that actually makes it identifiable as ancient DNA, because ancient DNA in general is no more than about a hundred letters long. If you see a string of DNA letters that are thousands and thousands of letters long, you know that somebody in the lab sneezed and your sample okay. But if it's anywhere you know, fifty plus or minus uh,

that's ancient DNA. And what you have to do, and this is a this is a very analytically challenging thing, as you've got to take all those little fragments of DNA and figure out what is the sequence here, and then map that sequence to a reference genome which will

tell you it's mammoth, it's bison, it's something else. Uh. And so a lot of the work that's done in ancient DNA, ancient environmental DNA is is actually the term UH involves compiling reference sequences so that when you're doing the shotgun work where you're looking at all the DNA fragments within a sample of sediment, you can match it up with whatever might have been out on that landscape. One thing I appreciate the about the work you guys do is that. Uh, I mean, just I guess this

is part of the scientific process in general. Is you have you you engage in work. Often this isn't gonna yield the answer, But you're developing a tool m you know what I mean, Like you're almost started laying the groundwork for you're sort of building a tool kit or laying the groundwork for probably maybe the next generation to really enjoy the benefits of Well, that's exactly right. Um, but that's how you push things forward as well. Um, this is research, um, pure research. What we do. I mean,

let's be honest, we're archaeologists. What we do is useless, um, but it's not necessarily meaningless. Um. We learned things, and in the process of learning things, we also learned what we don't know. And then we push forward again to try and figure out, Okay, how do we remove that piece of ignorance? What is the greatest defense of like your job. If someone's like, oh, what you do is useless, well, I think people are fundamentally interested in who we are

and how we got here. Um, and I well recognize that. You know, my son is a doct he's a real doctor. He's an empty I'm just a PhD. And so I'm not gonna cure cancer. I'm not the guy that you're going to call on the airplane when somebody gets sick. You know, you're gonna have to wait twelve thousand years

and then I can help you. Um. But I do think that, um, you know, in in our modern world, I think people do appreciate where we've been, um, the history of the human species, um, because it's a fascinating history and it tells us a hell of a lot about who we are today. Yeah, it's you'd wind up in the same landscape. Is if you said, why do This might seem like a stretch, but bear with me. You might be why do musicians matter? Why do visual

artists matter? Be like, uh, the information inspires people who yeah, causes you to ask questions? Yeah, why the podcast matter? I mean, why are people listening to meat Eater? Why why am I getting all these emails and thank you by the way from your listeners pictures of things they found in their yard. Well, yes, there's a lot of that fundamental, fundamental question that everyone has, whether they realize it and have consciously articulated before it is who are

we and where do we come? From because that that gives us reason justification. I mean, there's so much philosophical fodder that influences whether we make electric cars, or whether we go to war, or whether we try to cure cancer, or whether we try to say that human life has value based upon deep history of who we word, where we came from. Spencer new Well, that's why, um, I

wish I had been an ice age hunter. And when they invent time travel, I want to have a very educated guess about where I want to land and win. That's the whole reason. Yeah, So for him, it's a practical issue. I don't want to make a horrible mistake. See I could have said like, oh sweet White Sands missile range years ago, there I am and should have listened to melt Hey can I can I ask him a question that has to do with the broader study

of archaeology. So, so you, in your status in the anthropology archaeology archaeology world, like you questioning the validity of this work? Is that? Is that? Okay? How would you feel if someone said that about your work? Is this just part of the is you know? What does Steve say? Cynicism is the chastity of the intellect. Cynicism, skepticism is the chastity of the intellectual. Did you invent that some Spanish? I'm not just aenuine question. No, it's it's an absolutely

fair question. And met and and I can speak to that because we just had to respond to a criticism of a paper we published. Look and in academia the currency uh to say that to your face, the guy who read about I'm sorry inside inside um, ideas are the currency, right. This is not the business world where you know who makes the most money and who dies with the most toys or anything. This is all about ideas, and ideas are open season. My ideas, your ideas, everybody's ideas.

And so Mett and I were just just published a paper in which we responded to a critique of the work that we had published. Me and you want to give a quick Yeah, we actually talked about this in January when I was here. Who was the idea that Clovis points are kind of like these automatic mammoth killers, um, and that they were designed that's what they were for

to kill big Proboscidians. And our research question that and doesn't seem to hold up um, But some colleagues of ours wanted to sort of roll the ideas around and question that, and we responded and with evidence. And that's it. I mean everything we do, do they call you give your heads up? Not in this case. Yeah. And is there a little animosity in there? No, Man, Um, someone's gonna like, if a journalist is gonna do a hit piece on you, they might call you at the last

minute to give you a chance to respond. There's not that he doesn't say, like, hey, man, you know you're gonna open your email tomorrow. I'm gonna kind of attack your your last you know, the last two years of your life. Well. I think the point though, is everything we're doing is in some way wrong. Um. And I think you've got to go in You've got to go into science with that attitude because someone's going to do

something better ten years from now, fifty years from now. Um. If you're going into it thinking that you're gonna build a legacy that's going to be untarnished and held it, No, it's just not the case. We'll hang on a second there, Just kidding. Something I learned yesterday I asked men, what will be the greatest criticism of the study that we did? Um,

he gave his answer. But then I I learned this that the feedback during the peer review portion is anonymous, which is like kind of freeing, and that sounds like very beneficial to your community, right or No, Um, it's mostly anonymous. I'll tell you what I do. When I get a paper that I really like to review, I'll just I'll say glowing things about it. I'll say, published this immediately, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread,

and I'll just send it back. If I get a paper that I really don't like, I will review it in detail and I will sign my review. Because people are entitled to know who their critics are, in part so that they can just say, oh, it's that guy, positive positive feedback you're going on amous. Nobody needs to know who their fans are, but people need to know who their critics are. And I don't want to hide behind anonymity if if I'm really unhappy about a paper.

Have you ever had to criticize someone who was a legitimate close friend, well you know the footprint stuff. Yeah. No. One of my long time professional friends and colleagues is part of that team, and he and I have you know, talked about this, and and you know he's quite open. I'm open to criticism. You know, we we go back and forth. That makes us smarter at least. I have you ever seen it go? Have you ever seen it

where people couldn't just they couldn't hack it? Don't got personal if you don't say yes, I'll know your life. I mean, in your Falsome book, I mean it was a whole clash. I mean it was like a drama. I'm just actually trying to think of specific examples that I can give you, and they're part of it as I'm running through several. So, No, it can absolutely ruin

relationships if you can't handle it right. But if you accept the fact that your ideas will be criticized, you know, we'll just but on your big boy pants and deal with it. I mean we criticize each other too. I mean, well when we're writing, not yet, but like if we're writing the paper together, yeah, you know, he'll I'll say something sort of an example far well, so with this Clovis hunting paper, Um, I thought that we might think about how it dealt with extinctions, and he said, no,

that's too far, that's beyond the data. And so we talked about that for a while and I kept pushing it in his's no, and then we settled on what the data actually meant. And so I think that's good to have criticism within a team as well. We started arguing last night about what was that thinking O the heard of criticism this morning at both their fists up. Yeah, no, um, but this is what we do you should be doing. Yeah,

this is what you should be doing. That's useful to get a lot of the stuff out of the way, just amongst your own team. Exactly right. Wouldn't you rather be embarrassed in front of your friends than publicly in front of everybody that doesn't like you? For sure? You just shoot a bunch of holes before you even got started. It's the only way to go. It's the only way

to go. I mean, look, we all want our papers to be well received, and the only way to ensure that is to, you know, give it that harshest criticism. You can find out all the holes before somebody else exposes them. I want to I wanna move I want to move on to what we were doing yesterday and where those questions were born of and what exactly happened. But first I want to get into another mystery that I found out yesterday. Uh John Hayes from from He's

tax to me, you don't you don't do birds and fish? No, by no longer mountain birds and fish. Like he just like flat out turned business down yesterday. Max. Hey, when you made a tax servist that doesn't do birds and fish, you're talking to a man that knows what he's doing. Max. I've never seen someone so defeated in my life up and just dude walked away like just like deflated. What's up with that? Real quick? Um, or take as long as you want, trying to like just figure out where

the passion for me really is. Um. My experience on birds and ducks was very early on. Uh all the fish, you know, we we did mostly skin mounts back then. I did a little bit of reproductions. And it's just not my strong suit. And for me to take something in and know that at best it's going to be okay, I just I can't do that. But what if you have to do a diorama? I would hire it out by somebody that was financial. No, it's it's it's financially you know you can you can prop it off, Yeah,

you just have to be good at it. And I don't feel that I'm at that level to charge somebody that is it connected to personal passion inside the outdoors too, like you don't care about or you're not as interested. He hates birds and fishing. He wishes he wishes they were gone. No, um, I think it. Uh, it just didn't hold the same fascination for me that the other

stuff did. There's also like if if you into a restaurant that was fine dining, their menu is significantly smaller than if you were like Applebee's where you can get tacos and spaghetti and hamburgers. Good signed the Fine Dining Hayes Tax the Studio, the Fine red Menu. Clay Clay had a little Clay really broke John Hayes's heart yesterday with Clay said something like, uh talking of someone else, said not a friend, you know, friend friend, I said,

I'm really close to this one tax service. Well, I mean, you know, like you would be to a tax You gotta know how close to you? So my friend No, he looked at me and he said, Clay, what are we like? What am I to you? Uh? All right, So I don't care what you guys, does it met David? How Let's say you ran into someone and you had like three seconds to say, what we did yesterday? What do we do yesterday? We tested the effectiveness of different

Clovis tools for butchering a bison. That's great. I've been looking for a way to describe it. I went a little too deep. My wife kind of lost her I think you lost her grip strength. Well, she was also we were also trying to do our daughters school open house, and I was also trying to explain all this. Always had just had that in my back pocket, I could

have gotten over it more quickly. Okay, Uh, in greater detail, now what happened and just lay the whole thing out, like what what sort of deep questions are there that this could be a little window into answering. So we're always interested in better interpreting the stuff we dig up in the archaeological record and experiments, uh, and sort of replicating different tools can give us windows into what we are digging up, because you know, obviously the stuff we

dig up, it doesn't people aren't around anymore. They can't tell us how this stuff was used. Um, but we know the past was a very dynamic place. So by making tools and using those tools, we can kind of get a better sense of that dyna dynanism or how do you say that word diamondism, dynamics past past dynamic.

That's much better. Um. And so what we did yesterday was we made some Clovis fluted points and he met and made him Yeah, this is this is about both Dr Meltzer and Metton have been on the show before, and we talked about how come he doesn't get to be a doctor to Dr Matton, Dr Eric, Well, that's a good point. I worked. I worked really hard to get him a PhD. He did. I don't know why. I think because maybe, um he's professor. Oh, well you're not.

I'm well, I'm tenured, but I'm not full professor yet. It totally has to do with age. I mean, could I think it does. That's what I was going to just say. Yeah, because you're compared to me, you're probably young Will little whipper snapper, Yeah, you should be calling me Mr Renell. Doctor Meltzer has been out of the show to discuss his books and things. Oh. I was going to ask about this earlier. Where's the book about the High Colorado site? I didn't send that to you know,

you sure talked about sending it to me. It's out. Note to self, send Steve a book or where can people find that book? A University of Colorado Press. And I presume it's on Amazon, just like what's it called, um Mountaineer A Fulsome Winter Camp in the Rockies. It is on my list. And and the new additions, okay, and then there's the new edition of the First People's Book, which both of them came out last year. I guess, I guess after I was on the show. I was

on the show last spring. So yes, both both books are now out. What changes from the addition did new edition? The most important change is the genetics because bucks the mountain here it is, you sold out the Mountaineer site. You got to release this after we get the book, Steve. Now, it's gonna be sold out by now before I'm gonna get in there. Now, Hamet, it might be available, okay, well no, no, it's on one second, the Mountaineer site,

A Fulsome Winter Camp in the Rockies. David Meltzer and Brian Andrews and Mark Stugger three of us Metton, Metton and I did the chapter on the projectile points and the scrapers. Fifty four bucks for a paperback. I know, I know, you personally set the price right, just pay him directly. There's so there's two in stock. I'm grabbing one him for me, call you out the other one. Yes, we're getting all right. We just bought you out. Thank you.

They're to go back. I can just hear a Burgrease podcast now on the on the mountaineer side, I had a lot of fun on the falsome one. Clay Let's let's mountain people. People still talk about that one. I think it's video. I think, well, look into my car is a hello baby video baby monitor with remote camera? What? Well, you know what, there's a news to break my wife. My wife was just telling me about a baby shower. I'm gonna put that and save it for later. And okay,

I'm and check out. Alright, Soccers, if you try to buy his book Mountaineer, good look, Steve's gonna be listed now for an do a little book business, all right, So go on. Oh, one more thing I want to ask about before you really get into it. In the same book I just read, they had that Clo Vincia A beautiful chapter. I had no idea. Um, it sort of goes in like, well, roughly how many Clovis points of archaeologists found? Does about what you want up be? In?

Ten thousand? Is what I had seen? Somewhere around ten thousand Clovis sites Clovis points points. Around ten thousand Clovis points are in existence known to archaeologists, not counting coffee cans and people's closer it's thirteen five now that you say that, Yeah, it's funny when you see that number online. Uh, it says like only ten thousands, so they're really rare, not knowing like uh, you know, having a reference to that number ten thousands, like, whoa, there's a lot of them,

but but apparently not. What's striking is how few sites we have. We've got a lot of isolated points that are found just all over plowed fields whatever, principally in the Eastern US and these folks. But think about it, you're so John broke two of them yesterday, and and that was actually just fine. I really wanted the enormous grip strength. It was that grip strength. They just couldn't

take it. Yeah. Um, and so you can imagine that you're making these things constantly over the course of your lifetime. So ten thousand is actually a pretty low number, and it's probably thirteen thousand is a low number, and you're sort of undercounting all the ones that are in those coffee cans or mounted you know, over somebody's fireplaces. There has to be far more, no question, that are on bolo ties and stuff. Yeah. Absolutely, And this is kind of like a brief window, right, like only a few

centuries or something. Yeah, well sort of it. Um, it's kind of smeared across time and space. So the earliest stuff that we see, you know, it's thirteen five. Some of the later stuff, depending on where you define Clovis would be what do you say, met twelve six twelve five sort of northeastern North America. Well, and also too,

I was just doing some number country. I know that ten thousand sounds like a lot, but if you have if you say Clovis is what five years, So thirteen thousand not necessarily all in one place, right, you know, that's that's eighteen points per year, um, which is not a lot if you think about it, right, how many did we bring out yesterday? Ten and how many needed to be repaired because of grip strength. Here eighteen closed

points per year, which is not a lot. And when you think about the fact that you know, if you know what you're doing, you can make a closed point in thirty to forty minutes, So there's a lot still out there a few well, and also to just that's not a lot of work. We think, you know, these closed points are the end all and b all, but for closed folks they may not have been that important if you're not spending that much time per year to make them. And we were working with Clovis tools yesterday,

which is it accuracy. That's the oldest tool we have from humans in North America. I think you'd say they are among the earliest or some of the earliest artifacts. They're they're certainly the most distinctive early form and the most widespread form that we know about. And and they're like thirteen thousand years old. But humans had been here fifteen thousand years ago, maybe twenty five thousand years ago. What were they doing for those thousands of years? Not

using Clovis? Yeah, No, it's it's earlier cultures. So cultures change over time, and as a consequence, uh, the distinctive weaponry, hunting tools, butchering tools, knives, whatever changes as well. And now there are certain things that you know are pretty timeless. The scraper, Yeah, and that met and made that proved to be kind of not very useful yesterday. Uh. You can see similar forms going back hundreds of thousands of years, uh and coming all the way up to recent times.

We are you asking like what were they? So if Clovis is thirteen and we've been here for fifteen, what did they do for the fifteen hundred years before clothes? And I guess I'm kind of asking like, was Clovis arrowhead one point oh? Or was there it was? Was it maybe like five point oh? But we just don't have one through four. Well. I think the other thing to keep in mind is even though people might have been or we're in North America, that doesn't necessarily mean

they were everywhere in North America. I think there are some areas where Clovis would have been first, you know, maybe New England, maybe the the Upper Great Lakes, um and and so you know where we get they might have been the first people to in some regions some reasons. So when we say that people were here fifteen thousand years ago. That doesn't mean everywhere. That's a good point. Never that never occurred to me. Yeah, you could have had like that stuff along the Columbia River or whatever

people that were using salmon resources. But that doesn't mean they were hanging out because I mean, the Great Lakes covered with ice. I can't live on a glacier, so I derailed us. But back to the bison. Talk about what we did and how that might prove to be like what we were up to, how it might prove

to be useful or not so. Uh. We made a bunch of replica Clovis tools, fluted points and large what we call bifacial thinning flakes which are really sharp, and uh, we did all sorts of analyzes before we did any butchery on these tools. We made sure that the Clovis points matched in terms of their form actual Clovis artifacts. We did something called microware, which is where you look at these tools with a high powered microscope to look at polishes and striations and all that sort of stuff

that the tools could be used for. Um we did, Uh, what else did we do? We did so many pre analyzes. Um, But anyway, the point is you guys then took those tools you butchered the bison, and now we can relook at those tools to see what they look like, and we can compare those things to the actual archaeological records. So what you guys get an idea of what they were doing with some of the tools that we have found.

And so let's say we find an archaeological site with Clovis point and some bison, and we see a bunch of Clovis points from that site, but there's no microware that matches the microware that you guys produced. Well, that's really interesting. Why is that? Why is that microware different in the archaeological record versus the ones you guys produced. Now, if it's the same, that's really interesting too, and it

shows that maybe similar activities were happening. But as we talked about yesterday, um that whole issue of equifinality, Lots of different processes can result in the same product. So what we're trying to understand is, Okay, we got some signatures yesterday on the stone tools, so we'll at least know, Okay, one of the possible pathways to that particular product would be the kinds of activities we saw you guys engaging in yesterday. Uh, let me give it. I want to

give it from my angle for a secon. So we long ago, UM, we've all become acquaintances through this show and um crin tell the history of how tell the history of this because you kind of understand a little bit better. Yeah, we've probably been talking about this for

quite some time. I know on Metton's episode he had talked about getting some of the crew together, who you know, have had a lot of experience butchering, processing, breaking down large game UM, getting them together to potentially participate in some kind of experiment if we were able to identify either a bison or an elephant that might need to be called that's right. Yeah, it's not always easy to there's and then there's concerned. There's there's an ethical concerns.

Ye yep, and uh, you know with kind of our larger web of folks were connected to UM in the animal business. In the animal business, finding there was an elephant potentially on the table for us, we felt as though we would hit and we still might. We felt as though we'd hit on some zookeeper somewhere who had to euthanize an elephant, or there's an accident. I don't know,

I don't know. And we thought that if that person knew that there, that it could potentially and then you you have an elephant that it gets euthanized, that it might be that there's some donated to science. Yeah, that there'd be that that that person sent that that person's sensitivities and sensibilities might say, well, knowing that we're in this unfortunate, unavoidable circumstance, and perhaps right there would be

the body would be put to use by searchers. So we thought we would just be able to connect some dots that might otherwise not get connected, just through audience reach. And that led us down this thing of working on this project UM where we did the bison work. And so we started out with a um A commercially. It was a commercially raised bison from a producer who does uh North Bridger bison. He does custom slaughter, So he raises animals and sells those animals and he sells them

while they're still alive. People he knows, he knows he's going to produce X number. You can come in and he sells shares um. He even talked about that he had a bowl that he was selling his ground and he had eight purchasers for one bowl, or you could buy a half for a hole or whatever it help. That's his business. Uh. We started with a fresh dead two year old bull. We did the same, the same exact sort of approach you do for ground butchering any

large animal. And we had a bunch of people collected five butchers who all have extensive field butchering experience. When of those included John Hayes, who's done more skinning and fleshing than any of us. Uh. And we did the animal. We did it by doing the primary opening cut, basically running anus to chin, and then we um worked on half of it using one collection of tools, skinned half of it using one collection of tools, skin the other half using a different collection to tools, and bone the

thing down into all the primaries. And I went into it thinking that we were gonna be working under UH. I half thought that we'd end up working in the headlights of a car. I told my life that I would be I told my wife I'd be home at nine thirty. Last night. I was home at five. I was like, we're probably gonna wind up, we're gonna have a bunch of trucks point and head. That would have been pretty demoralizing if you had shared that with us when we were going. But I just I feel like

these things never are on schedule. It's just not gonna be as easy as it seems. I thought it would be. Uh, I thought it'd be very hard to do it with these tools, But in fact it was like an all honesty man, It's I felt like it took about as long as it would have taken. It wasn't a major a major difference in time. I mean it it took

more time, but not a substantial amount more time. I mean, I think we scanned a whole adult bison and under two hours in the quarters, and then even had a guy well, I mean, I guess that even counts debone in it. And now there were five of us and we were trying to work efficiently. And the parts of it, the opening making opening cuts was a lot different. Anything

that required a little finassal was different. But just in terms of someone holding the leg and someone pulling the hide and you're cutting the fast you know, you're caughting. No difference there was. There was one point where I said, the biggest limiting factor for what I was doing deboning a quarter was that it was a bison, not that I had a stone tool in my hand. It was just the sheer size of it. And then I was

one person trying to constantly rotate this thing. So it wasn't even like that much less effishing in some ways what I pointed out. What I pointed out, I was texting my brother Danny about what I've been up to um and he was like, man, it takes because they actually hunt them a fair bit in Alaska. There's draws you can do to draw for these different herds they have. He says, Man, it takes me a lot longer than

that with a normal knife. And I said, well, there's five people, and I said, and also consider this, we had uh stone tools expert, who's there sharpening for us? So we're all you know, so we had It was different than if you start even with a normal knife, if you don't, if you're not a good sharpening you don't have sharpening equipment, you hit a point where you're just pisting into the wind. But we were so we had like someone they're doing giving us like razor edged

sharpened tools. You know. The way I've thought about it and would describe it is that if I had one of Dr Aaron's points Clovis points in my pouch and went deer hunting back in Arkansas tomorrow and killed a deer, I wouldn't worry about skinning it with that stone point. I mean, it wouldn't be a factor. I wouldn't be like, hey, I'm gonna be three hours late coming home because I got a field dress to steer with a stone point. It would have just been like, okay, of course, a right. Yeah.

And another huge takeaway from me was that a Clovis point makes the hell of a Clovis knife. Yeah, I mean, but that's probably the way they were using them though, right. Well, And what was cool too yesterday with you ask them was that the two different tools seemed to pune auction better for certain tasks. So like the Clovis point worked good for some things, whereas those big bifacial thinning flakes worked better for other things. Should we clarify that right now?

We've said a couple of times, but so we had we had to like Clovis points that would have been napped that were connected with artificial sinew to a wooden handle that basically looked like knives in multiple sizes, and we were we were told to pick a pick a numbered Clovis knife essentially, and you guys recorded which knives we were using. We butchered one whole side of the

bison with these Clovis knives that you had made. The second side of the bison, we butchered with big, big, big flint flakes that silica kind of like discs almost yeah, that you would pick it up on the where the handle is real sharp. But but yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, minus the handle and sharp, so you would pick them up on the ground and not recognized that they were made by man. I mean, it's just a flake, a big like flake, the size of the palm of your hand.

And we butchered an entire side with those, and I was used. I went with the leather, used a piece of leather your fingers. Yeah, and it it works pretty good. Oh hey, you know how he just said, mate, you wouldn't recognize as being made by man. Can you there's a thing I want to talk about, what we forgot talk about. Can you talk about what you guys are

doing in Antarctica. Yeah, we have a paper coming out in the journal Antiquity, and uh we uh, you know, there's lots of claims for archaeological sites being real old in different places, and the claims are dependent on the rocks themselves. What people think are stone tools, like a lot of the stuff I send you pictures of yeah, yeah, and this, yeah, and you know, because it fits so nicely in the hand, or there's like even flakes taken

off and things like that. So uh, it occurred to uh, sort of our group of researchers um that you know, if we could find a place somewhere on Earth where humans had never been, that would be a great natural laboratory for looking at how flint and basalt and obsidian fracture geologically just in their sort of natural habitat without

humans around. And so we went first to the Polar Rock Repository in Columbus, Ohio, and then this past summer we went to the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, and we just started going through all sorts of their rock collections, millions of rocks, and what we found really questioned for me, uh, what exactly we know about stone because we're finding stone tools with morphologies that are quite advanced, So things that look like hand axes, things that look

like they could have been made by Neanderthals, all sorts of simple stone flakes like the one you know is being held right here in the studio. Like you you could find stuff the would look like that, but we're saying it wasn't made by But these were Antarctic rocks. We know that these were not made by people or hominence or monkeys primates, um. So it's real scary. Yeah. The challenge is that, um, a lot of artifacts don't have attributes that are that are obviously and distinctively and

securely made evidence that they were made by humans. So you often have to look at the context. What Menton is doing in Antarctica is showing, Okay, we've got a completely geological context, and yet we have things that look like artifacts someone might elsewhere claim is evidence of human absolutely absolutely, And you know, if the if the context is a little ambiguous and it's you know, if it's not.

If you've got something that you're not quite sure it's an artifact, but it's sitting next to a hearth and you've got a bunch of smashed animal bones and you've got evidence of a structure. Yeah, okay, the artifact might be ambiguous in terms of its attributes, but looking at

the contact you say, okay, fine. The problem is is that when you've got situations where geology and geological processes have the opportunity to create mischief and make things that mimic artifacts, and that's the only thing you have, and you don't have a good archaeological context or other evidence

that will confirm it, that's where it becomes problematic. And a lot of the claims for truly ancient sites are based on just these sort of ambiguous artifacts in ambiguous context, like here's a hundred thousand year old man and here's a sharp rock exactly right. And so what Menton is able to show, where we'll be able to show with this Antarctica stuff, is that do not be fooled. Just because something looks like it could be an artifact, that

doesn't mean it is an artifact. You should label that paper probably ain't Clovis with these naturally occurring looking like tools. When first people's came into all these different areas and they found these rocks when they were like I need something to cut something with. Would that be like the original prototype? And then they decided we need to start

replicating this. Yeah. So there's a few hypotheses for why people start to nap stone, and one of them is, uh inspired by the site called Takika, which is in East Africa at dates about three point three million, and uh there they've got cut marks on ungulates and bovid type creatures. And what they say, I don't know which which part? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, bo I always I thought was bovid. I don't, yeah, bovid. Yeah, but my doctor recently said tendis and I said, I thought it

was tenightus because I don't know what it is. It sounds like a good doctor. But they think that basically austral Epithecus was using naturally sharp rocks that they would just pick up to cut mark bone. Now, maybe at that point they were like, it's a lot easier to break this stuff ourselves and scour the landscape looking for naturally sharp rocks. Were like, the rock Steve picked up works way better than my rock. How do I get

one like Steve's. Well. Another piece of that, though, was when Clay asked for an axe to smash those ribs break him. Apart from the vertebral column. What he ended up doing, through no fault of his own, was the acts that he was using was getting fractured in flaked. One of the hypotheses about where tools come from in the in the original you know, to three million years ago, is that humans come on to a an animal kill.

They haven't killed the animal because they're not capable of it, right, but some big predator did, and there's not a whole lot of meat left on the bones. So what do they do. Um, they grab a rock and they start wailing away at the long bones to try and get to the marrow, right, because that's something that the big cats or lion whatever aren't going to access. And in the process they create sharp flakes and a light bulb goes off and you think, sharp flakes, I can scrape

meat off, right. So there's lots of ways in which the pathways could have ended up, you know, getting you know the possibility that John raised that Menton was talking about as well. Um, and we're just the sort of accident of your smashing a rock against bone and it breaks and you end up with well cut fingers and lots of really sharp flakes that you realize, Okay, I can use this one of the things that that I know you guys, you're reluctant to draw these hard you know,

you're not reluctant. You can't draw these hard conclusions. And and like you pointed out, we're not ice age hunters. You know, we don't know what went on. You can't rule out we yourself, like we're kids messing around, you know, whatever they're doing there, throwing rocks that stuff and playing and smashing things. You know, you don't know what happened, right, Um, but I feel like you can take certain things like

like flashing that hide. I feel like someone someone could arrive at this thing that that I don't know how they did it. They didn't do it that way. Yeah, So in in some ways experimental archaeology is really useful for showing how something definitely could not have happened. So, you know, like that scraper, right, So that's a situation where given the form of that scraper, you know, it doesn't look like you were able to flesh that hide with it. So and sort of go back to the

drawing board and try a different form. I think, like with the scraper deal at during those times, what we were trying to get off the hide wouldn't have been like what I would deem as a waste product at my studio, or like I gotta get this soft disposed of it that I can get to what I need

to do. I think they would have still been trying to harvest that and then need have been left with just like when you skin out of beaver and it air drives and you're just a light light film and trying to roll three quarters of an inch and meat off the hide. You know that would have been but you were still trying to consume. That's interesting. That's how I felt yesterday with like the shanks of the quarters, is that it took me as much time to get the meat off around like the shanks as it did

the whole rest of the quarter. And so like I I could spend just as much time removing of the meat on a backham as I could removing the ten percent of the meat on a backham that came from the shanks. And I told Michelle, I was like, this just like, isn't kind of this isn't very reasonable to like get the lowest quality cut of meat and spend the same amount of time to get you know, ten percent of the yield. So like maybe they ate this

off the bone. Maybe they just like didn't really need it that badly to get this this piece of meat um that was like the size of a I don't know, a water bottle off compared to everything else. You know. Here's the thought that I had while we're doing it yesterday, is that we're skinning this bison and we have all this other context of our human life around us. Like he needed to go to his daughter's open house. I couldn't make it. If you could make it, you know,

we wanted to go have dinner at a restaurant. I mean, I'm just making stuff up. I'm making stuff up. Got to get to the processor and the way we we chose efficiency for every single decision that we made. We chose efficiency to skin the spice. And and I was thinking if, and we kind of talked about this yesterday, if there had been one of the Paleolithic hunters there with us and watching us, he undoubtedly would have done

it different. Oh go and go read Make Go Read Make Prayers to the Raven by by the anthropologist Richard Kane Nelson when he talked when he's with the Koreya KRK what you do and don't do? Yeah, they skinning animals, they had so many. Yeah, superstition can't touch that. Spiritual can't like so can't do that. You can't move it that way, you know. Well, But here's my point is that that they eight what we did yesterday was literally like them walking onto a pile of worth of American

dollar bills. I mean like this was their life. This was there the reason. There was no higher moment in their world other than just like family stuff. But it's like, man, we we this is what we were, professional hunters. We are now capable to take this that we're processing and live in peace for the next two months or whatever. And so just that mind frame would have caused them,

I think, to potentially have done things totally different. Maybe they took two hours to get the shank off, or maybe they were running from short faced bears and chunked him into the woods. But bear in mind and managed to speak to this because bear in mind the we were doing something just to help them interpret what was from around them. But let let me get back to something you said yesterday though, Clay, you you said, imagine at the Fulsom site, you got thirty two bison that

you've got a process. I think they would have gone for efficiency and speed under those circumstances, because, uh, those thirty two bison aren't going to butcher themselves, and you had evidence of that by the way they gourmet butchered them absolutely, which they were taking choice cuts, leaving some stuff moving moving fast because you know, thirty two animals, unless you've got a hundred butchers out there, um, and if you've got a small group, you better work fast

because it's just not gonna it's eighty five degrees. Yeah, what's the closest and experiment has come to this before like what we did yesterday. There's been a few butchery experiments um on elephants and bison. Um. So you know, I think replicability and science is always important, you know, And I think we've made certain improvements on past studies, uh in terms of how we documented things, and we've

made certain modifications to how things were documented. And but undoubtedly I think we were much more systematic about it. Yea more more systematic. But undoubtedly someone will use this study as a stepping stone to do it even better. Um, And that's the key point. There's no ever final word in science, and I think once you start thinking in those terms, you're in trouble. We we touched on I want to point out to people that in addition to you guys doing your work, we had we were able

to document it. We had videographers there to document it in a way that was just there was around documenting the process. So you'll be able to see this whole thing play out eventually, in addition to reading the paper that you generate from it. But we spent a bunch of time talking about the stone. You're also interested in the bones. Can you explain? Well, I think David right. Um. So when you get to a kill site, you will find, uh, sometimes not always cut marks on bone. And those cut

marks are presumably a consequence of the butchering process. And so one of the things that we were also paying close attention to and and John will be helping us on this is the activities that were done kind of

around the bone. And when when John is able to get everything sort of all cleaned up, will ship the bones to Andrew Bone, who is out there with us yesterday and he's an expert in this kind of thing, and so he will be examining the cut marks on the bones because we actually once again have a have a link between the process and the product, so we know what was being done when you guys were hacking

away at the ribs on both sides, right. Uh, So we'll be able to see what that look like and the difference between struggling with those flakes as you were, as opposed to using the Clovis points to really just pop them, uh and go right along the river back. You know, I've read that the Neanderthal's uh, there's evidence suggesting that they parted out there dead, that they like quartered out there dead. There's a couple of sites where, um,

there might be evidence of cannibalism. I don't know if they quartered them out though, but they will find cut marks on is what I'm saying is that that's presumably that's because of cut mark cut marks. Yeah. Yeah, Um, so they do find cut marks on on some children. And you know, if times get tough and ice age Europe it's really cold, um, they'll find like that. Yeah. So we're gonna have to get a cadaver. I've tried

to say it, but I want in on that. When you get that going, you know, experiments, if nothing, if nothing comes up sooner, I might leave my body that I thought about leaving my body. Um, you know, I might have a drawn up in my will that I want to be used in a cut ark. Wait a minute, you got this whole thing about being dumped for the grizzlies. I might change that. I think was going to We were all kind of getting used to that out. I'm always telling my kids, like, you're gonna have to quarter

me out and dump me here. But I might do this as dead and make my kids work on the project, and then the Grizzlies can have access in the bones after dump the bones afterward. So so John will clean all the bones up in a way that doesn't add new marks to him. John, Yes, that is going to be. He's like, no, I scraped them all the scrape Yeah, scratched it all off. So we'll put him in a big tank for a few days of warm water to start.

I'm also buying all the flesh off of it, and then once we finally get it to where it softens up, the will power wash it off. So'll be no tools introduced, and you'll be able to look and you'll be able to say, we know this is where it's cool. You'll say, we know that the marks on said femur we're made by a hafted Clovis point. Or we know that the marks on said feemur were made by a flake of a person with extraordinary grip strength. Right, so made by

Clay um. And then later when you're digging around in some old bone bed and you see some marks, you might make a more educated guess if the marks are distinctive, If the marks are distinctive, and that will be something kind of interesting to find. And now I've got to bring this up on the fulsome site. There's some famous famous marks on the jawbone of one of the bison.

Several actually, yeah, always on several of the bison up up on the on the lower jaw where they were distinctive cut marks on the jaw where it's believed they were cutting the tongues out. So when we're looking at the jaws of this bison, we'll be able to see whether Clay newcome in removing the tongue left his mark.

Clay was nervous about doing it because he knew about he knew about those marks, and he didn't know if he was gonna be holder he on the way there, he brought up, like, what about bias, because I've seen those marks, and what if I can't resisting His name is in the marks, they're signed. That's to giveaway. I was paying attention when I was cutting that tongue out, because I cut to cut the tongue out, and uh I was I did everything just as efficient as possible,

and uh, I don't think I touched that bone. Well, we don't see him all the time, so yeah, it's entirely possible. Now, it probably was slightly biased in the sense that you knew I would not have had him do it. We should have had John do it. I'm confident we left some tool marks on the ribs. Oh, I'm very confident. Yeah. Yeah, that was when I was going to bring up, like, what obviously is the way to go, and what obviously is not the way to go? Having a big giant chunk of what was that rock

called Georgetown flint? Yeah, beating nine riffs of the giant trunk Georgetown flint. It's not the way we decided in retrospect, we should have given him a smaller hand axe, because there was just too much opportunity for that thing to fall apart the waves of force. We're having to travel too far through the thing before it got to the bone. Did Clovis use a braided rocks like what you might

see in like Southwest hand axes like groundstone groundstone? No, not really, not really groundstone, but we do see a braiding stone that were used for um, perhaps in grinding the edges of Clovis points or in uh a straightening the shaft of a spear, but not hand axes made by just grinding away a rock to get an edge on it. No, they didn't like that stuff. No, they they're tool kid. Uh. In terms of production was very efficient, and I think it's because they're moving around so much

and they got a lot to do. They didn't have six pod rock they like to carry. Who are no? No, So they're they're trying to basically get this rockdown in a portable form as quick as possible when you don't know where this is going to appear, because you got to do your whole submission process, do you know? No, I'm not yet. And we generally won't think too hard about the journal until we see the final paper and all the analyzes and stuff, because that can dictate where

it goes. But but do you know you'll get a paper Yeah, we'll count out. Yeah, definitely, you feel like you'll get a paper out, I mean yeah. And when what's going to be a criticism of this study? When that anonymous feedback rolls in? Well, I think, uh, you know, I was about to say, not enough Neander. They'll be information that people may have wanted that we didn't collect, right, that will be criticism. That would be a criticism they

might have done it in a different way. And but I think the great thing about experiments is that they can be redone like, if you excavate an archaeological site, you can't re excavate it, um. But with an experiment, you can do it again in alter variables um. And so I think that's a strength of experiments. So and how long will it take you to do all the work and analyze and write the paper? Uh? Several months and um, because once I get back, I'm gonna sort

of give at my entire focus. But you gotta have the bones back before you can make it well, so we can work on other aspects. There's so many pieces to this in terms of the microware and the morphology at the Clovis points and efficiency all that sort of stuff. Um, we can work on the stone stuff until the bone

stuff is wrong could be sent to Andrew. So yeah, all our boy, but real quick, just I think this would be a good time just to say how appreciative we are to collaborating with everyone and and meat eater and it's just been awesome. And I don't know if you remember, but in January when I was here, you asked me for something. Do you remember what you asked me for? Probably a whole bunch of Clovis points. You asked me for a falsome point. I did ask for a false point, and so I got a little something

for you. Yeah, just open it real careful. Oh, a big white box about this big as a big birthday cake. And you have to do a little unwrapping too. Just Steve is opening a white box, childish grant on his face. All right, inside is another box. Oh, inside is another box, papers, crinkling, oh, smoking anticipation. I thought that's right. I wanted a Yeah,

all that is gorgeous. Man. So just all of us, all the archaeologists, were just so appreciative and for all you guys, and so we thought that this would be something for you that you could look at and everyone could see. And a couple of clobus points halfted onto Port Orford fork shafts is gorgeous. So so it's a it's a box and like, how do you describe display

like a treasure box? Display box with two halfted fulsome points, says to Stephen now and the meat Eater team fulsome points napped on Texas or Ridgetown, Church Gray and Fredericksburg churt Tan by m I Aaron hafted on Port Oxford Cedar four shafts by M. Wilson Man. Thank you the podcast studio worlds right here, man, Steve, can you show it to us? It's amazing, It's beautiful. It is wow, look at that. Thank you so much, very well done. Well it's gorgeous. Let pass it around while you're waiting

for the paper to come out. Um you can go check out right ran while you're waiting for the paper to come out, and while you're waiting for this eventual episode to drop where you get to see everyone getting their hands real dirty and cut up using Clovis points. You can watch Meat Eater season eleven for free on

our own website a window of time. It will be available for free um on ten October twenty six, you'll see an episode with me and Evan hay For from Black Rifle Coffee hunting the rainforests of Southeast Alaska for blacktail deer, getting our buns kicked untill the end. Um, So check that out while we're waiting for the paper to come out, and if you're waiting for the if you're waiting for the Mountaineer site, I don't know the Mountaineer site book. Me and Clai are taking bids. I'm

sure they'll come up with other coffees to sell. It was said available soon season eleven. It's gonna be rolled out. It just starts on October one a week, one a week on our old website. Before we get can we talk about the email you sent last night? Metton? Yeah, he sent me an email. This is in all caps. Guys, got like a little side thing going on. Well, this is the this is the criticism we talked about earlier, disagreement from last night that's spilled over into the break

room this morning. But I was really excited met and wrote me in the m LS night. Okay, I was, I was really enthusiastic. I'm just gonna preface that. So Zoll capt it says, Spencer, I think you so haved a huge mystery about Clovis technology. I am so freaking excited m M and then jealous. So let's let's let's let's hear about what what you think we discovered. Well, honestly, I think we got to save that for the paper. Yeah it's no, it's it's it has to do with

the intentionality of of how these things were made. And so yeah, well yeah we'll get their major and Spencer did it. Spencer, Yeah, it's just it's a what's cool is it's a it's a new way of thinking about a feature of a Clovis point that is not in the literature. Wow, good job, Spencer. But it could all be wrong. It could be wrong, it could be wrong, but right if not, I still got a high last night from getting this email from men like my stomach. Yeah,

it's like Shelby, I don't know what's going on. I may have just done something incredible. I think things might be looking up. I told you, all right, guys, thanks so much. It was a lot of fun. I'm not joking, I will I said yesterday like this is the highlight of my career. Um really, I mean like like a real high point. And another thing is I will talk about that in probably a very annoying way. I will talk about that for the rest of my life. So will we. And it makes me more like why have I,

you know, why have I never done it? All that knowing about oh you can flint knives and da da da da da like that it took this many decades and someone else to lay the whole thing out for me to just do it, like put you're an animal with a flint knife. I just for two I don't

understand why I never did it. Just well it worked out with the podcast and just everyone start of getting to know each other and just but to be able to do it with stuff that looks like it's like, to be able to do it with stuff that resembles and is made from the materials left behind actual Clovis sites,

um was was fantastic. And I think for us to all of your observations using those things, absolutely we were taking notes on what you guys were saying and when you were complaining, when you were happy, we were making notes, so what was working and well it wasn't. That was really helpful because with your knowledge of how to process these animals, like, we will look at these tools in new ways and and so that's I think just the benefit of this collaboration. Elephants next, and then folks the

same spot. Hey, I know we're closing down, so we can't get into this at all, but I just gotta say it. I mean, I killed a bear with a stone point like five days ago. It's interesting that all this happened. It's first time I've ever hunted with well I've hunted with a stone point before. First time I've ever killed that on the stone, just like for another day with a falsome point. I watched the video that

the little video clip of it last night. That's what people will be able to see it, And and Dr Meltzer was because, right, that's another story. How and when will it be be able to see it? Class The release date is unknown at this time. I don't think I can go into the release date, but but there will be a a film put out through Meat either. Dr David Meltzer is one of our feature guests. We go to we went to New Mexico. We went to

the Folsom site. Yeah, and and then we've made some falsome points and I killed a bear with a falsome point. So run out by the old run that good thing. He doesn't have to run that by the old ethics committee. Yeah. Oh I'm ready, man. I don't know what I'm just saying. These guys have a whole higher level of like, you know what I mean, they got put up. They don't just call a couple of guys and they're like, yeah, I don't know, yeah, go for it. Uh, thank you

so much, guys, thank you, thank you for this. I'm not gonna hog it. I'm not gonna put it in my bedroom. We're gonna keep in the studio here. Appreciate it, all righty body, thank you very much. On