Ep. 427: The OG of Archaeology

You could probably tell me the exact date we met Mike from your little h Yeah, June twenty eighth, two thousand and six. There you have it. I'll never forget it. Archaeologist and paleontologists when we had If you go back to an episode episode three h six, um one of many affiliations of Mike Couns, University of Alaska and the BLM, and I knew the Bureau Land Management. I knew him in his Bureau of Land Management capacity when he was

directing a bunch of archaeological work. And also like all aircraft in the Arctic in the National Patrol and Reserve Alaska, which if you read the news a lot, you're probably reading a little bit about that place lately. An episode three or six of this podcast. We had an episode called an Alder scholt Hellhole in which we interviewed some of Mike's colleagues. You know they're not here. I'm gonna say this because we couldn't get Mike. Does that make

you feel better? It was like getting the V. It was like having the VP. Like you're like the news and the President. K You're like, oh, I guess we'll take the VP. Like when you see the VP on the news. They couldn't get the president. So we had we had Mike. We had Dan and Pam doctor Pamela Groves and Daniel Mann. Dan Man. Yeah, we had him on and on that episode. Why couldn't you get Mike?

That episode? Because Mike when the beginning, when when the COVID began, he said he's not gonna go anywhere until COVID ends, which turned into like a year's long thing. And then he's got all these other reasons why he doesn't want to go anywhere. He's kind of like he's kind of I don't know that. I mean, I don't know. I'm getting the hermit. I get a hermit vibe off him. Yes, he likes to be in the Arctic. Um. So we

had him on. I don't remember this, but apparently we called Mike cons the It's good We called him the Forrest Gump of archaeology, to which he took to which we have to do some clarifications. He had wrote it after that episode and said, yes, I did know this is a correspondent between him and Krinn. He said, yes, I did know that Pam and Dan had done an episode with Steve, and yes, I have listened to that episode.

Comments about me by Dan, Pam and Steve made me sound like some benevolent, benabulous creature that wandered the north slope dolling out helicopters to researchers. I also found out that my old buddy David Meltzer has been on twice. I haven't yet listened to the Meltzer episodes. I don't suppose he told you that I started my archaeological career at Blackwater Draw, the Clovis Type site, while he was

still in grade school. So uh so, Krin suggested that rather than calling him the Forrest Gump of archaeology, is the Godfather of archaeology or the og of archaeology, You're just like archaeology comma og people, people, people know you. Do you want to know what I was called when the last twenty years I was ad blm up in the patrol em Reserve. No, I do want to know, Okay, Meltzer I think coined this the MASSI a group of

native group in in Africa. They're prestoral and the social standing and a wealth of any individual family is measured by the number of cattle they have, all right, So I think it was Meltzer decided that I had control of more helicopters on the north Slope than anybody else, and therefore I was the most important man on the north slope. And as I recall, I think it might have been somebody else christened to me the Emperor of the North and the King of the West. You know,

I got it. As a first question, this is I'm bringing this one up first because then we're going to touch on a couple things that we're going very quickly get back. But I'm bringing this one up first because this one just as a free standing question. You told me a story. Well, first of I'll let you set the scene. I spent time and we'll get to this.

I spent time with Mike cons and some other researchers in on the north slope of the Brooks Range, and we were surveying the ground for projectile points, and there was a bit of interest then in um looking for evidence remains interest with interest at the time of looking for evidence of you know who, possibly the first Americans right who had crossed the baring Land Bridge. You had once said to me, this is not the question. You had said to me something like ony, on June twenty fourth,

the mosquitoes will be here. If that was a date on June twenty third. On June twenty second, there are no mosquitos. June twenty third, I go like, oh wow, mosquito on my arm and smack it. On June twenty four. Holy shit, it would we would have. We would eat in a wall tent at night, and the first thing you would do is going and bomb it, like bug

bomb the wall tent. And I'm not joking. These guys would go in with a broom and a dust pan to sweep, and they would sweep up with legit dust pan of mosquitos and throw them out the door, and then you'd sit down and eat. It sounds like a beautiful place. You've never seen anything it's like maddening. It's daylight all the time. The sun just goes around over your head. They don't go by the activities are not governed by time of day. They're governed by wind speed.

So three in the morning wind dies down. All right, it's you don't know what way is up, Mike? Did you? Did you have people that would get kind of squirrely up there because of those the biggest, the biggest problem. Most of our crews were composed of undergraduate or graduate archaeology students from various universities, and the thing that seemed to bother them the most was the eternal daylight. Oh yeah, and I and they said, well, how do you sleep? I don't know. I just close my eyes and go

to sleep. But most of them would like tie a T shirt around their eyes or something like that. Yeah, and that was the bigger The other thing is, and I'll interject this here. When I was talking with a prospective crew member on the phone, you know, like they lived in Maryland or you know, texar Cana or someplace, and I would one of the things I always told them was that you could have something happen to you where you are now. And because you have access to

an ambulance in a hospital, it doesn't matter. It's something they could take care of. And fifteen minutes. If something happens to you out here, I'd be lucky to be able to get you out of here in twenty four hours. Even if I had the helicopter sitting on the ground and the weather was was, you know, on its ass, you couldn't go in. So just keep in mind that something as simple as almost a hangnail that can't do

any damage to you. In civilization, you could die from up here, So consider that before you tell me if you really want to come up here. So let me ask you my freestanding question. Now, I've tried to tell this story dozens of times, but I don't know the details, so I don't know how to end the story. You told me something to the effect of that you were flying along in a helicopter with a pilot and you saw an Arctic fox run into the carcass of a

beached whale. You advised your pilot to tap the whale with the landing gear of the helicopter, and how many foxes came out of the whale. Well, it wasn't quite

like that. Okay, help me out. My colleague Dale Slaughter, who was with me when we found the MASA site in nineteen seventy eight, I was working on his site for his PhD dissertation at a place called the Sharrock up on the Arctic coast between Windwright and Piered Bay, and the California gray whale had washed up on the beach and so the Arctic foxes had drilled into it.

How big is a California gray whale? Approximately, it's not one of the bigger whales, but it's it's probably, and it depends on the age, but let's say this, and was probably It was a matur one, all right, that's all. That's the best they can do, maybe twenty five feet long, something like that. So anyway, we had seen foxes go into it, and I just said, hey, let's go over and just bounce on this thing once and you know,

let see what happened. And we did, and a whole bunch of foxes came running out of these out of the whale. You didn't count them, no, but there were there are a lot of probably at least a dozen. So I think when I tell it, I'd like to say that thirteen came out that you can you can tell that you can tell that story anyway you wont I have. I have no particular feeling of priority on it. Okay,

I got one more. I got one more free standing question, and then we're gonna get back into longer answer things. You told me one time, sitting there in our pile of mesquite dead mosquitos. You're telling me about going to some lake and how many casts in a row you caught Lake Trout m Yeah, every cast. That was when

we were working on trans Alaska pipeline. It was in nineteen seventy four or fiveborn really yeah, Okay, So anyway, we um the surveyors and the archaeologists were out ahead of everybody on that project, on any project like that, because we had to clear the right away for the actual construction work. And if the surveyors had lay laid out, and then we'd be right behind them looking for archaeological

sites because the regulation said you can't. You can't, you know, on federal property or on any project that has federal money in it. You can't destroy cultural history, all right, So we were right behind them and that and we're weight out in front of everything and that's one of the reasons that just the archaeologists and the surveyors, we were the only working group that could carry firearms because we're out there totally by ourselves, and you do run

into grizzly bears pretty frequently. So it was one of these things we'll let the archaeologists and the surveyors. Well, basically we said we aren't going out there if we can't take our shotguns with it. So what was your question? You took You took some number of casts. Yeah, okay, so rough didn't catch a lake tripe? Well that was

it at Kellic Lake? Okay? Where where where I started digresses that almost everybody that ran the camp, like the kitchen help and a guy running the sewer treatment plan, and the guys in the small engine shop and etcetera, etcetera, never got out of camp ever, all right, And I mean, well, you're having all these adventures and they come up to us, you know, and dinner at dinner time, and they say, hey, could you take my camera when you go out tomorrow

morning and just circle camp once and take a couple of you know, aerial photos of camp, you know, so I can you know, take them home home with me, you know, when I go back on R and R and we and we'd say yeah, sure, you know, but

we didn't always get exactly what they wanted. So we had a helicopter, and what the pipeline guys were doing with the big wheels in order to make sure that they had enough helicopters, they would offer contracts to the helicopter companies that said, we'll pay you for eighty hours a month, regardless of how much we fly. If we fly your ship ten hours, we'll still pay you for eighty and so everybody, yeah, man, I want to get

one of those contracts. So I talked with the cap manager one night and I said, hey, can we do something about this. You know, these guys are stuck here all the time. I said, how about if our pilot says okay, he's okay with it, you know, because he's on his free time, and after dinner at night, two people can go with the pilot. He'll take them and they take their own pictures and get what they want. One of the things that we were also doing at the same time was taking people over to Akillic Lake.

All right, we weren't supposed to do this, but we did to fishing a lot of good lake trout over there. I don't think I can go to jail now because

that was, you know, forty five years ago. But at any rate, there was one time and I had a small crew over it at Killock Lake, which was about fifteen miles over the mountains from Galbreath Lake, which was where our headquarters with we had I think I had five guys in that crew, and then I brought about three more over and they were all fishing, and they all I mean, this didn't just happen every time, but at one moment everybody, they're nine people had a lake

trout on. They're standing about maybe ten yards apart, and one of them thirty eight inches long and thirty three pounds. Wow. Yeah, that's a true story. Yep. I can't even name everybody that was there, but so there was no consecutive cast. He might have forgotten. Oh no, no, they were not everybody that what I just related. Only thing happened once.

I mean when you had everybody. But there was never a time with everybody standing on shore where at least one or two or maybe three people had a fish on. I mean always, always, if all nine people cast out. At least two of them would get a fish on every time. So because nobody ever really fished there before. I got a question about something you said earlier in your story. How often would you be forced to reroute that pipeline because you found something like was it common

or never? Did it never? And I'll tell you what. The regulations are bad in the sense that they never work the way they're supposed to work, and in or what we were supposed to do was protect any site that was eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. It takes about two years after the nomination of a site to be included, to go through all the paperwork and everything else before it can be put

on the register. Two years. We're out there building a pipeline, right, we can't wait two years for every time we find a site. So what the senior archaeologist, the guy that we worked for at the university decided was any site that we find within the CZW, which was construction zone with not the right of way, but the construction zone with which is wider than the right way because you have to have activities and sillary to the right away

all the time. If it was in the CZW. And we found a site, we excavated it no differently than we'd excavate any site, but we'd excavate it totally. We'd have all the notes there, all the maps, everything else in a museum, so that if there was to be designation for inclusion on the annual Register, all the stuff was there and we didn't have to wait two years for it to happen and then say, Okay, you guys can now move another quarter mile because we found another site.

That how many sites did you excavate? Two dozens? Dale and Dale Slaughter and I were in charge of the northernmost section of the pipeline that ran from a place called Linda Creek on the south side of the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range all the way to Prudo Bay, all right to the end of the It's about probably close to two hundred and fifty three hundred miles. I don't remember as long time ago, but I know that we excavated in that area. Let me put it this way.

I know that we discovered more than two hundred archaeological sites within the cz W of the pipeline in that distance. Yeah, we didn't. We didn't excavate them all, all right, Well you couldn't have. But that's about what we've found. What was that light being out ahead of that out ahead of that pipeline construction and you feel like he got like this, uh I forget like the geopolitics of it in the oil security, but you got like just this

monster coming behind you. Just rotal till on the ground, man, and that thing's gonna be there and you canna be able to see it from outer space and it ain't ever going away. We were usually far enough ahead so that we didn't we didn't encounter we weren't working near a lot of the equipment. But I do have one picture where the engineers had decided they wanted to use one material site that was different than the one they

had originally told us they were going to use. So we went and looked at that and we found a site there, and but it turned out that was the only material site that was located so it could be used on this one stretch of the road, and we literally I've got a picture I took from the helicopter of us on this stock of dirt and rocks sticking up in the air like this, and about six scrapers and five pushcats working all around us, and we're on this little stock sticking up in the air about fifteen

twenty feet and these guys were mining all the stuff all on us. So that's the only time that something like that happened. Yeah, yeah, And what were you guys working on there? Well, there was an archaeological site that we had to excavate because they were gonna they were gonna take everything that was in that in that Okay, I gotta step back. And then most of the material, all of the material came from the local surroundings, from the you know, the countryside. Most of it came out

of glacial deposits, ancient glacial glacial deposits. Because when the ice bladed, when it melted, when the glacier receded, all the junkeet had scooped up all along its course for thousands of years just stops right along with the ice. The ice melts out, and here's this big blob of rock and soil and everything else that just gets set down there. And it's big enough so it's actually a hill. You know, you can you can hike those. Sometimes you

hike in on them. It's like you're on an elevated sidewalk. Well those are those are cames, okay, all right, which which is what I was describing, but their linear cames, and sometimes they're small lateral moraines or eskers. But the whole point of this thing is that all that stuff was mined to make the road on that project, which most people don't realize. There's actually it was almost like

two separate projects. There was the road that had to be built north of the Yukon River, all right, and then that road because the road had to be built before you could even begin to build the pipeline. So it was like two separate projects the project when we built the road, and once the road was all built, then we could start the project to build the pipeline. And the project that does the most environmental damage by far is the road, because you're mine and all this stuff,

you're tearing up the country side, etc. Etc. So that's where the bulk of the of the concern is is on the road. Secondarily, after the project's done, still the road provides most of the impact to the surrounding ecology because that's where everybody's going up and down. Dust is

going all over the place. The main concern on the pipeline at the time was that it would disrupt caribou migrations because caribou would never seen a pipe line, and so they're gonna you got this eight hundred mile pipe. Well I shouldn't say the pipeline is eight hundred miles long. But the part they were worried about was the first three hundred miles, okay, with the artic Cariboo heard, Western

artic heard, and the porcupine heard. Like a lot of talk about would they go under it, would they cross it? Because they don't go understuff. Well, I got lots of pictures of caribou all nestled down in the shade of the pipeline taking a break. Okay, now, because that is is that like how people will tell you that the developments are great for muldier because sometimes there's a mulder in their yard. Well, we're laying next to us. Yeah, go ahead, Yeah, Well there used to be a thousand there,

now there's two. And yes, they're in your yard. Yeah, Now that's there by mean that you're subdivisions a good mulderer. That's a little different, all right. What the concern was legitimate at first because this had never been done before, all right, and you got oh sure, yeah. I'm not trying to downplay the concern. The western caribou heard at that time was probably about two hundred and fifty thousand animals.

Porcupine heard was probably even a little bigger. But if they couldn't migrate to their various seasonal locations, then I was going to have a tremendous impact on caribou. And at that time, more so than now, a lot of the native communities still relied very, very heavily on the environment to provide them with their food and so forth. And what it turned out to be was like anything else. I mean, wildlife biologists no knew this, but it had

never been demonstrated with caribou. If if you give the animals enough time, they'll acclimate to almost anything, all right, as long as they don't associate any bad, harmful occurrence with whatever it is that's there, all right. So if the pipelines there and nobody's shooting at them and killing them and doing this or that to disturb them, sooner or later, they're gonna get used to it. And you know, one of them is gonna say, hey, Fred, you see

that shade? There were two hundred miles from a tree. We got shade. Now, oh yeah, let's go wide down under it. And so is that why they initially not initially? Is that why they had the five mile buffer on either side for hunting. Yes, that's a simple answer. Yes, to make it not to not instill paranoia around that, not to not instill paranoia, but not to that road would provide access to hunt. In other words, it eliminates fair chase to a degree. All right, That's that's the

basic thing. In other words, not eliminates, well, enforces a definition of it. Well yeah, yeah, but what I mean it eliminates the concept of fair chase. If you have these guys all lined up, you know, taking it easy someplace, and you get out of your veiling and go and blow away three of them, all right, that's not fair chase, all right? And almost all phishing game regulations anywhere are

based on fair chase. In other words, you can't you can't have an edge that's unfair and will ecologically threaten the the herd or you know, the population and put it into some kind of danger or something. What's in your career, what's the most care but you ever saw at anyone given time. Well, you were out at Udicoc Udicot camp. Um, it was probably in It was fairly I'd say it's like two thousand nine or ten. We

had a heard come through Udicoc heading east. They were about a quarter of a mile wide and about two and a half miles long. Mm, so there, I mean I never figured it out, but there had to be somewhere on the order of somewhere between thirty and forty thousand and Yeah. That's unbelievable. What time of year it was in the fall? No, I to take it back, It wasn't well, no, I was into fall for up there. Okay, late summer for here. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Uh. That's

not far from the MASA site. Yeah, that place was, I mean that was a Uticac Uticoc. What's your guys camp? That was by that MAZA site Ivachech Okay, Yeah. The maze is six miles south of Ivotech. Udicoc is one hundred and forty miles west of Ivotech. Got it, So it's a long ways away. What were you doing? Explain when you were doing the day you found the MAZA

site and what it was that you found. Um, well, Dale and I had gotten dropped off by the helicopter because what we were doing at the time, almost without exception, all of the wells we drilled on that project. And you got to remember, the Trolling Reserve is about the size of the state of Indiana. Okay. It's the single largest chunk of land managed by a single federal agency

in the country. Okay. It's also, like, by various mathematical parameters, is the remotest place in America in terms of distance from road, distance from city, distance from this you're there's a sign at Ivotech, okay, and it says welcome to Ivotech. When you're here, you're still nowhere, all right, And it says like who however many people are there? You hang up little things? Population eight or three or whatever. Yeah, you walk. If you walked east from there, you would

go hundreds of miles until you hit the pipeline. Right, Okay, I'll center it for you. Here's Ivotech. It's four hundred miles from the near yest city, Fairbanks, Okay. All right. It's two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest town, Barrow now known as a Yavic, And it is one hundred and sixty miles sixty five miles from the nearest highway road, which is the Dalton Highway going to Pruda Bay, and it is ninety miles from the nearest Eskimo village,

anactoic pass. So that gives you an idea of exactly what you're talking about. I mean, it's the middle of nowhere, but any rate to get back to me and Dale find in the Mesa. So we get dropped off. And the reason is we were digging a site near the proposed well site of Lisburne, and so they the guys come by and say, we want you to go out and look at this stuff because Lisburne, along with two other well sites, we're going to be what they called

deep strat wells. They were going to be not excuse me, drive to find oil at all. They wanted to know what the subsurface strateigraphy was for a long way down that well at Lisburne with seventeen thousand feet, Damn, you're putting china on it. The well at Innigoc was nineteen thousand feet and the will At well at Tune the Lick was twenty one thousand feet. That drill it's got to come out hot, right, well, it's hot down there.

We're only a little way under the story here. So all the other wells that we drilled up there over a three year period, we were looking for hydrocarbon resources. They were all done in the winter because in the winter you can make your airstrip, you can make your camp pad, you can make the drill pad, everything out of ice and snow. You go in there. You're only drilling between five and seven thousand feet on those things. You know, your rig up, spud the well, drill for

six weeks, rig down, and you're gone. Everything melts, nothing left. No one ever touched the ground. Well, I mean not, that's not true. Literally, yea, it would look like that. But you build every single thing out of ice and snow, and you know, you put a if you got a lake. The idea was to have you start off with a small crew going out of Lonely. Lonely was the headquarters. It's an old new line station about ninety miles east

of Barrow Dow line. That is the thing to make sure the Rooskies weren't coming, yeah, the distant early warning line. So what you do is you have this little overland crew go. You're walking a D seven cat, probably a seven ninety nine loader, um, a couple of tucker snow cats, maybe another dozer pulling a trailer full of stuff. You get these guys over there to where you're gonna build drill your well, all right, and hopefully there's a lake close enough. But if there isn't there almost always is,

then you have to build one on the tundra. You build it out of ice. So this first ground crew gets over there and they'll build a little twin otter strip on a lake. Then you can start bringing more people in. You get enough people over there, then you can build a big five thousand foot herk strip on the ice or on a lake, or else building one on a tunder all right, then you start herking a

rig in. In the meantime, there's a whole crew over there building the ice pad for the well, building the pad for the camp, and the guys start hrking in a rig. They rig up and they start drilling. So you have to have c one thirty hercules is making about. I can't remember how many trips, something like eighteen trips to get a TBA rig in there, which stands for transportable by anything, all right, just depends on how many chunks you want to break it down into. And that's

how the whole thing worked. But with the wells at Innigac, Lisbon and Tuna Lake, you can't drill that deep in that amount of time. I can't. I mean, it took two years to drill those things. So everything has to be built just like it would be built if you were doing it in Wyoming, you know, in that petroleum reserve down there, as to all be built out of rocks and you know, sand and gravel and all that kind of stuff. So now we get back to Dale

and me finding the MASA site. Right, you're you're you're surprised that I can keep track of this. It's just phenomenal man, all right. So anyway, Dale and I are out there because the engineers what's Dale's name, Slaughter? Dale Slaughter, Uh, he was up there when you were up there, when you were up at Utica. I was mixing him up with Dale. Was a Dale Guthrie that found Dale Guthrie. He found a lot of ship coming out of the perma frost, right like yeah, bison and yeah, yeah, mammoth.

So any rate, the end engineer said, we need something to cap that runway at Lisburne because we have to have that five thousand foot herk strip there to be able to you know, put the well in, and we need some kind of really resistant rock. Well, all that rock in that whole general area. The rock that underlay is a huge area is referred to his country rock, okay. In other words, that's that's the rocks that's there, and da da da da da. That covers everything. It's still subsurface,

but it's a uniform formation. But right around uh Lisburne, Uh, there were some igneous intrusions through that country rock. In other words, magma had come up, not volcanic, but hard rock, all right, and they'd surfaced up through the limestone country rock. And that stuff was hard. This gotta be Perkin Spencer right up Spencer and the don't you have a headset on?

He's still interested and um so that what the engineers wanted to do was find a good location for that stuff and drill it and shoot it, run it through a crusher, and then the final lift on the airstrip would be that hard resistant rock. Well. So Dale and I are out there doing it because all of these things are upthrusts, you know, they're like maces or ridges

or something like this. Um they're perfect for an archaeological encampment, for a for use by the you know, prehistoric people, because you're up high, you've got a great view, you can look around the area for a game. You're up high on the breeze. Bugs aren't going to be too bad. It's well drained. You're not gonna have to be slopping around and goosh all the time when it rains. And so almost always, and it was the same of those littler things like cames and came terraces and escers I

was talking about a little while ago. That's where all the sites were, and those are the things that all the engineers wanted to you. So you can see there's you know, there's a problem at any rate. So Dale and I had been out there all day and it was one of those days where it was just lousy. It wasn't really raining. But you know, this was in I think early August, and it was probably twenty eight degrees, about ten knots of wind missed and I mean everything

was wet. It was cold, you know, there was enough wind, so the chill factor was down probably about ten degrees from the actual ambient temperature just you know, and we've been out all day and we were cold. And so what we had done is we'd flown out all the way to right to the front edge of the Brooks Range where all these igneous in truces were, and we were working our way back towards where the well site was going to be. And so we'd been out there, and you work twelve hours a day, so we've been

out there for by that time, about ten hours. We climbed up and down stuff. We'd probably watch eight seven eight miles and we came to this one spot and there was this beautiful ridge that was right between us and the rain, and we said, screw it, man, let's just sit out here and get out of the weather. And we're just gonna take it easy to well, you're

the helicopter coming. And so we were quitting like forty five minutes earlier or some So we're sitting there and I looked in front of us, and I see what it's just absolutely per You can look on it. You could look on the cover of that thing, all right. That's the mason. That's what I see out there, all right, except I'm looking at it from the back side. I

see that. I think sticks, Oh, I see that. You know, we're looking at it from the back side, because we were on the bricks range side of it, and anyway, looks like if you're watching a John Wayne Western and they always shoot him in that same spot where there's little sweet maces in the background. It's like that, but in the Arctic. So any rate, I said, man, that really looks good. I said, We've never looked at that.

So I said, hey, I'm gonna walk across this little draw here and climb up there and see what's there. And Dale says, go ahead, I'm I'm staying here. I'm staying out of the wind. So I didn't. I climbed up there, and I came up on the on the windward side, which you know, was a prevailing wind, and it was fairly well desiccated. There's been a lot of alien damage up there, erosion. They're blown off a lot of the vegetation, and so the mineral soil and the

organic soil under the DA there's lots of exposures. So I'm walking along, I look looking down, I'm seeing flakes, you know, chirt flakes, the byproducts of making stone tools, and I'm looking. I say, well, I was right, you know, I figured there'd be something up here. And I'm walking. All of a sudden, I said, projectile point lying there, it's broken. I look, man, geez, that looks I could be walking around in New Mexico or Colorado and see

this thing. And I think it was a paleo and projectile point in other words, you know, terminal place to scene. And I thought, huh, well, you occasionally find those kinds of things, you know, they're just oddness like that. I took about another ten steps and I saw another one, and then I saw another one. They were all broken, but I could but they were the basal portions of them, which gives you a whole lot of information. And I

found I said, so let's start looking at him. And they were dead ringers for Paleo Indian projectile plant points from the high plains of continental US. I mean, I could have got a basketfull of them and walked out and started casting them around in New Mexico and Texas and Oklahoma and Nebraska and Iowa, and nobody would have batted an eye when they found him. All right, Oh,

there's another paleo Indian projectile point. So in the meantime, Dale's been watching me and he sees me all of a sudden start bending down, you know, getting up and walking on, bending down again, and he knew I'd found something big, and anybody's pissed off because he didn't go up there with me, so he can run across the thing. And he gets up there and he says, you probably found all the good stuff already, you know, And I said, now this, I mean there's you've been up there. There's

a lot of area on top there. So in that small and then we hear blappappappap where here comes to our helicopter to pick us up. So any rate, I grabbed a few I marked marked where they where I'd picked him up, probably five or six of them, and stuck him in my back and I took him back

to camp with me and nobody there there. For those of you who don't know when I first started out and how to be an archaeologist school, I was at Eastern New Mexico University, which is about a five minute drive from Blackwater Draw which is the Clovis type site.

And that's where I cut my teeth in excuse me, an archaeology, so I knew Paleo Indian project And just to be clear for people who might not like understand, those things weren't supposed to be there, is that this stylistically occasionally in the Arctic and in the interior of Alaska, a point like that might be found in an isolated occurrence, all right, but no conglomeration, and nobody a lot of the somebody who might be up here working might publish

a little article that said, and we found two projectial points that look very reminiscent of projectile points from New Mexico at terminal places. Do you mimmy laying out the great mystery? Real quick? What I want to lay out? This? What kind of what Brody's getting? Now? I'm gonna lay out the great mystery as quickly as possible. Do it? Okay.

There's a long running debate about how long humans have been in the Western hemisphere, and there are changing fashions to explain how they arrived and how they came to be. For a while, there was an idea that they entered in through Alaska, were held up in Alaska for a long time, and then an ice free corridor opened up sort of between the eastern and western ice sheets, and humans emerged down to the Great Plains around Edmonton, Alberta. That sounds good. That idea was replaced by an idea

that they came along the coasts. That's a good idea too. There is long ben For a long time people thought that Clovis were the Clovis people were the first Americans. Yeah, now it's better understood that that Clovis was a sort of creation of some pre existing population of Americans. I'll say maybe to that. Maybe I'm not saying I agreed with you on everything so far, but that because you're you.

When you have a couple sites from thirteen four thousand years ago, what are the odds that you found the first place someone dropped something? Right, they're very bad. So a lot of mystery about where did these cultures develop and where they came And because it was first found in the high plains, this idea emerged. And they agree with this or not, this idea emerged that these cultures

developed there. So to see these traveled there, yeah, so to see these diagnostic points of what might have been the first Americans to enter the New World. Maybe you're looking at the ship they dropped thousands of years before anybody made their way down. For a long time, the oldest site in the New World was in Chile monte Verde. But there's some now now. The snake rivers beat it. Some of those sites over there in Idaho are a little no the salmon. Is it? The salmon or the snake?

Where that? Okay, let you take it away. I want one more sense, Give one more sense. Yeah if if if linguistically genetically okay, it's well established that the first Americans came from Siberia in Asia, and your oldest site is in far South America. There is a lot of shit between Siberia and South America in which people drop shit. Yeah, in a number of ways they could have gotten there, but no one's found it. So we can find something

really old Alaska. You could for a moment hold out hope that maybe these were the first people's stuff who ever stepped foot, and theoretically that stuff would be older Oka, the oldest stuff, the oldest stuff in the New World, by definition, has to be in Alaska. Correct, Yes, that's totally correct. Believe in UFOs or you believe in the salutary and hypothesis. Let's don't start talking Dennis Stafford stuff to me, all right. Jeez, I couldn't believe when when

Dennis got wrapped around the axle on that one. Anyway, Um, you're sort of yes and no, all right, Yeah, I'm little expert there. Well it doesn't matter. There's a lot of experts suit or yes and no. Okay, So anyway, let me finish my Masis story, and I don't go back to this. Okay, Well no, but yeah, because he's he's the one interrupted you. Yeah, he said, well, why

does that matter? All right? So what I'm gonna say is that I still, even though I had all this experience with Clovis and Paleo Indians and the High Plains and the Lano Esticado, I still wish wanted somebody to corroborate this agree with me when I brought this stuff into camp. But nobody up in Alaska had ever worked with any Paleo Indian stuff because there wasn't any Paleo

Indian stuff in Alaska, all right. And all the folks we had working for us at the time, we're from Alaska, or there's probably a couple that weren't, but had never had any Paleoindian experience except from one girl citizen Well was from North Dakota and when she was a junior, I think it wherever she was going to school in North Dakota State or something like this. She worked under Surrey crew and that's in Paleo Indian country down there. I mean, if you find old stuff, that's what you're

going to find. And so I asked Susan, I said, hey, hey, what do you think? And she said that looks just like Paleo Indian stuff. I didn't I didn't prime her or anything. I just said what do you think of this? And that's the first words out of her mouth. And then I said, hallelujah, all right because that confirmed for me that I was absolutely right. So any rate, we then well immediately said to the engineers, not doing this.

And then the site we were already excavating, we had found some other stuff that was really important, and we said, uh, you're not doing this. So they ended up getting a special permit from the core engineers to actually mine gravel out of oh Tuck Creek near the airstrip there to use as the overlayment the final lift on the runway. Because all the preferred materials were burdened by archaeological sites and um, so that's that's how the mason was found

and how it survived. Give a couple, because there's so many other things I want to touch on. Give a couple. UM, give a recap with a significant stuff like what want to be in the dates, the abundance, what were they doing up there? Most except for fairly recent prehistoric sites, and these would be residential sites, all right, You like villages, Um, you don't get a lot of horse fires remnants of fires,

and that's what you want to date most. That's what you if you have your druthers, that's what you want to date. Are those remnants of those fires, the charcoal and those fires. You have to have an organic substance. Well, yeah, you can't date you can't date a rock. But if you're dating these these these camp fires, right or cooking fires, you're you know, you're dating something that people did. This isn't you know, a wildfire remnant or you know, a

lightning strike or something. This is people fires, all right, So you're dating what they did and what the date you get back is going to be related pretty directly to them, to their occupation of that spot at that time. But the Mason was not a habitation site. It was a game hunting lookout. And well, what was taking place there was the guys, mostly guys, were up there on top, sitting around these little fires, warming fires, you know, keeping

an eye out there. You can see for miles from up there, as you know, keeping a lookout for game. And they're working on their hunting equipment, their work, you know, taking to busted projectile points out of the out of the half and putting new ones in. They what they did was even the ones that they could resharpen when they broke on a hunting expedition, if enough of it was sticking out of the half, they just resharpen it real quickly and a half. So you find a lot

of these stubby things that were thrown away. You can see the point is made exactly right up until just about here, and then all of a sudden it goes like that, and you say, wait a minute, it's been very sharpened, all right. But once they got to a place like the Mesa where they could do work on their stuff, they threw them away all right and made new ones and put them in. So at any rate,

that place was used so much. And I'm grasping at a number here, but it'll be close, or it'll say right in that the book I left you, we found pretty damn near fifty camps fires up there. I don't know if you took most, if you took all of the Paleo Indian camp fires that have been found in all the Paleo Indian sites in New Mexico and Colorado, it wouldn't total fifty. So I mean, this was like, Holy God, I can't believe that. Now. We didn't know

this right away. We didn't know until we started excavating. There fifty horrors that we can date. Every one of these horrors has flint, you know, chips thrown into it, you know, from when they were working on things. Some of the times they just pulled an old, busted point out at the end of the thing and just tossed it into the fire. And so a lot of these these projectile points, broken projectile points have potland fractures on them.

And a potland fracture occurs when you heat chirt to a certain point, all right, it'll fracture like this because chirt and flint's the same way. Has a physical property called conchoidal fracture. That's what allows you to make to flake them because you you know that that you whack it, and that flake is going to come over off of there. You'll know how it comes all you. Ever remember when you're a kid and you shot the window with your BB gun, Sure made a little hole in front and

this cone shaped thing behind it. Now, when I shot Joe Suki's windshield with the Daisy red Rider. All right, but you know what I'm talking You know what I'm talking about, right, all right? That cone shaped thing, Well, that glass is cryptocrystalline, just like shirt or flint or obsidian, and has the property of conchoidal fracture. It's controllable. It depends on the angle you hit it at, how hard you hit it, what you hit it with, whether it's

soft hammer or hard hammer. And once you get to know how to do this, you can make any damn thing you want out of stone. I mean, you can make any shape you want, all right, That's how it works. And so when you heat these things up to a certain point, it'll pop a flake off and it'll pot and that conchoidal fracture principle works the same way so you'll get these rounded pitch shape, you know, holes, you know, maybe the size of your thumbnail or some depending on

how big the piece of shirt was. In the surface of the thing. The only way they can get there like that is by heat. It's a heat fracture. And so even if, for example, that hearth over the years, it all blew away, all the charcoal blew away, everything blew away, but the heat fracture projectile point didn't blow away because it was too heavy. And so you've excavated ten thousand years later and scooping it up there, and you pick it up and you see that conchoidal fracture

right in the middle of it there. You know that it had to be heat fractured, and that means it had to be definitely associated with some kind of heat. And if there's no evidence for wildfire or grass fire or anything else in the sub soil of the site you're digging, there's only one answer. It got done that

way because it ended up in the campfire. So there's all these interpretive things that have to go along with all of this, and you got to do archaeology for quite a while before you pick up on all this stuff and archaeologists are the first forensic scientists, all right, but instead of their clues being six hours old, they're six thousand years old. And so back in the old days for example, in fact, at the beginning of my career,

it was still happening. Forensic police worker never hadn't been developed. And when the police, the local police department, and run into something that we're talking that was sort of inexplicable, is some kind of a clue they knew, but they didn't know what, they call up the local university and have archaeologists go down to look at it to see

what they could tell them. After archaeologists were doing that for him for a while, somebody came up to the idea, Hey, why didn't we just train our own guys to think that way and do that stuff, so we don't get to do that anymore. But the beginning of my career I got asked to do a couple of things like that, and it was really neat. It was interesting, you know, to kind of get out of the contexts of archaeology and use those same skills too, you know, answer a

different question. Is it possible that those uh folks up there we're watching for mammoth's or does it not line up time wise? The old estate from the MESA calendar year date is thirteen thousand and six hundred and sixty years ago. There's another one that's eleven thousand, two hundred years ago. In terms of our all the paleontological work that we did up there that Pam Dan and I didn't, I wasn't directly well, I was directly involved in it because I was funding it. But we did not find

any mammoth remains that were that recent. I think the most recent mammoths we found was about maybe fifteen or sixteen. Yeah, what game do you think that they were looking at? Then? Caribou, dire wolves, deer, bison. But I wouldn't be after dire wolves. But no dire wolves ever existed in uh, you know, the North America, in the western hemisphere. There were no dire wolves over here. That's like a tribute question. Wrong, that's embarrassing. Fields um Cariboo had been around forever, all right,

Uh Bison, bison priscus. Uh, there was never any modern bison up here, at least not as far as there's a real there's there's sort of this developmental transition with bison. Bison priscus was the was the place to see bison, the rootstock, all right. There was never any evolution of bison in the Arctic like there was down in the in North America. All right, there are bison priscus down there, but there's also bison ladder frons, bison oxenden talas, and

bison antiquis. All of those evolved out of bison priscus down there. But up in Alaska in the Arctic, that that progression of evolution never happened. It was always bison priscus. And when were they still on the ground at that point, Yes, okay, there were Our most recent bison was ten thousand years horse. There was probably there were probably still some horses around and that was a big game game at well, you think they are hunting bears. No, they we don't have

any evidence of them. There are two kinds of bears. There are short faced bears and there are grizzly bears. Same grizzly bear we have today. There were lions, the European cave lion pantera. That was over here, all right, Um spilea, pan spilea, Thank you whoever sent that to me. And they were predators are in such small numbers and compared to herbivores. The other thing is anybody nobody's going to go out after a lion with a piece of flint on the end of a stick that's this long,

all right? Um, the same for the bears. So we don't have any evidence of those kinds of place to see megafauna from archaeological sites in Alaska. What was your question, Spencer? Can I argue with you for a second. I googled it while we were sitting here, says in North America, dire wolves have been found as far north as Alaska and down into southern Mexico National Park Services. Then how far does Alaska go down? And how far is that more?

He's talking about the Arctic? No, sure, I didn't say that. I was just asking if they've ever been found there. We've never found dire wolves and part of Alaska that I've worked in, and I still would take issue with the Park Service on dire wolves being Now, so this this tattoo right here, and now I was referring to

his tattoosdence hold on this tattoo thousand years old. We'll come around that that is the cattle brand for the original owners of the Librea tarpet and when I was there, I was it was one of the things that moved me so much was seeing it was like a hundred dire wolve skulls that they have extracted from the Librea tarpets. That's that was the inspiration from my skull wall hit me like a diamond. That's where I went with beautiful. My first day with my wife was a tarts. So anyway,

what are they extracting? Then? If they're not dire wolves, I should I should actually back step. There are none in Alaska. To my National Park Services, there are all right, I have to say. Since I didn't work in that area, I don't know. But I was of the opinion since I had never read anything about that, that there were dire wolves in the Western hemisphere. So that's my answer. But I don't know everything is you're finding out. I want to move on to polar bears. Yeah, ask him

a question about the points? Yeah, man, is there any way to infer This is Yanni, Papa Yanni, this is Yanni. Thank you, Ah. What percentage of these people that were there hunting making these points? What percentage of them had the skills to make the point or is that just every single one of them unknown, every single one of them.

In fact, I think you asked them. I'm gonna jump away forward thousands of years to escam Okay, if you're living out in the middle of Arctic Alaska, and we'll say especially in the wintertime, but it could be where it's dark all the time, you can't see anything or very little. I mean when I say it's dark all the time, it gets to be twilight, but that's about the best it gets for a long time, especially if

you're north of seventy degrees latitude. The winter encampments were small because there weren't enough resources for a family, and the families were small as well to be able to survive through the winter. If you had more than two or three families living in the same place, I mean, you'd use up a big wool patch for your firewood fast. Okay. So if the men have to leave to go out, honey, you try and always camp someplace where there's a reliable

food resource. That's why most of these winter encampments occur on the shores of a big lake that has a reliable fish resource in it. So you can at least get fished through the ice. Also, hopefully caribou migrate through there in the fall and by this lake, so you also have a cariboo resource. But if the cariboo don't show up, you've always got that lake with a fish

resource that you can get through. So Dad goes off to do something with say two or three of the other men, and that maybe all of it were in that encampment, go off, do a little honey. That leaves the women there all by themselves. Now commonly what they would do would be set little snares for ptarmigan and other smaller critters like that, But there's no guarantee you're

going to get them. What if the guys don't come back or don't come back for a long while, or vice verse of what if the guys go out, they ripped their parka and they're in any woman there to sew it up. Every single adult Eskimo could do every single thing there was to do to be able to live. The men may not have been the greatest seamstresses in the in the world, but I guarantee you they could

fix anything that ripped or tour or anything else. They could do anything that women could do except to have a baby, of course. But and the women, they could make a projectile point, they could make a you know, lester point. They had to be able to because there's no way they're going to survive if you didn't. So, in my opinion, that evidence is transferable as far back

as you want to go in the Arctic. If you want to go up five thousand years, ten thousand years, fifteen thousand years adults, every adult could do everything you needed to do to be able to stay alone. Was the chart that they were using really abundant up there? Did they have to source it from some far away place? Everybody that I ever had up there, like Tony Baker was one of the first ones to make that. He hadn't been up there the first time he came up

to work with me. He hadn't been up there ten minutes, and he didn't before. He said, I can't believe the chirt up there. It's everywhere. He said, if this was done in New Mexico, they wouldn't have thrown that stuff away, you know, the big waist flakes and stuff like that. And I said, I know, Tony, That's where I went to school in New Mexico. The reason is is because chert in the Arctic, especially within the petroleum reserve, because it's a sediment rock, it forms that way. It is

totally ubiquitous. It is everywhere. You can find it in every gravel source, you can find it in every stream bed, you can find it everywhere. Anybody that I ever brought up that was already an archaeologist from you know, down south, would say, I can't believe this. God, this stuff is laying it well, you know, I mean they'd pick up five big pieces and say, you'd never find this on an archaeological site down there. They use this stuff because there's chunks is big. You know, you could have made

three projectile points out of it. But the stuff is like growing on every tree up there. So people just took the best, just used what they wanted, didn't worry about. The only time you might have an issue would be in the wintertime when you can't really access it too well. But people were probably making a supply, all right. They during the summer, you know, the good months, they'd make

what we call preforms. They'd make a you know byface preform about like this, yeah, well not even that big, just you know, like about like this, and you could use then use that to make almost anything and anything, anything big and anything small. All right, the wate flakes, you could make them out on the waste flakes. So that would be the only the only instance where you just literally could not find. Now there are spots where there isn't any, but by and large, it's just everywhere.

So you keep saying, make anything. The only thing I've seen or heard of is that there's points for projectiles. What else did they make? Scrapers, hide scrapers, knives not Usually those were made out of bone. Whatever. Anything to do with selling was pretty much made out of out of bone or antler. Well, no, what's that spoke? What's you guys are talking about? A spokeshaver? So a spokeshave Well that's different, I know, but I'm just trying to save myself. You didn't do a real good job, but

I'll let it go any rate. So, um, there are things called burns. I mean, i'd have to go into a description gravers. Graver was like a Marlin spike. When guys are working on their equipment and they have to undo knots that they made to half your wrapping stuff in a half a knife or a projectable point. They have these little things called gravers which have these little pronks sticking out on them, and they're you're used just

like sailors use a marlin spike. They're used to undo a knot, all right, so you can whatever that knot is holding in place, you can get it out or get it away. So there's all kinds of different things that projectile points were not the primary thing that we're made. These sort of semi formal tools that you just needed for everyday. Use things to slice hide with it, or slice made or make holes for sewing, or you know, all of this kind of stuff. So there's an all

in the back of his head. Okay, go ahead, it'll be quick. It's a yes or no. Did they make any big stuff like hatchet heads or large spear points or it depends on where they were there at a time. There were warmer periods up there. I mean we find buried spruce stumps up there. Uh you know, but there are one hundred and fifty thousand years old when it

was warmer up there. We find beaver chewed sticks, all right, But if you dated when it's gonna be over one hundred and forty five or over forty five thousand years old. So um, you know what, mostly when humans were there, there just wasn't anything that was big enough to require an axe or ads or and they didn't they didn't hollow out logs to make boats. They were all skin boats made on us. So what were they burning and

the fires you guys were founding? Okay, will you know what? Yeah, probably something would need A big point would be a that what you're gonna say. I was gonna tell Brody's something interesting when I'm talking about the trees. How you'll find trees but then they're super old, you know, because like things constantly change when you're when you're looking, like when you get up around the northern tree line, like you're going up in the Brooks Range and you see, uh,

what looks like you'll you'll see bands of trees. You know, at a point you'd be like, well, there's the last tree you were going to look at, and then there's gonna be no more trees to the north. In your head, you're like that tree is advancing. No, you think like a point like, oh, look at he's growing out, like he's heading a peer. Yeah, he's a survivor, right, you know, he's like hanging on man, like his buddies are all dead. Yeah, okay,

you ready talking about polar bears. I recently, we've been we were wanting to talk about this long time ago. There was recently an article where a he's some kind of population ecologist or someone was discussing that his information about polar bear population dynamics was being labeled misinformation online. Oh, I know, because he was saying that polar bear numbers are strong and growing and a lot of the they

have become an emblematic megafauna for climate change. Yeah, and a lot of they've become a poster boy for climate change. And the narrative is is that as climate change continues,

we will lose the polar bear. The polar bear will be this emblematic loss of a charismatic species because of climate change, and many it annoys many climate change activists that they're not vanishing, and they get embarrassed by the fact that polar bear numbers are strong, and so by pointing out that polar bears are doing fine, you are you become accused of of misinformation. Not because it's misinformation,

but it's it's it's not helpful propaganda. Okay, you're talking about Lomberg, and we sent this to you to say, what do you think about all this? Yeah, okay, I can tell you. And I was given a very biased telling. Okay, I can tell you. Okay. Lomberg said, essentially, if polar bearers are on the way out, how come the population is four or five times as great as it was in the nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies. That's what he said.

That was a and I know he knows this, but he's on the other side of the coin, Okay, in terms of climate change, like he has an ax to grind, well, he's grinding an axe. Because that is deliberately a disingenuous comment, okay. And I'm gonna tell you why. Please. Back in the sixties and into the very very early seventies, there were

basically no controls on recreational hunting of polar bears. The reason that the worldwide population was down to around four or five thousand was because of uncontrolled hunting, all right, trophy hunting. All the countries that had polar bears, in other words, had Arctic sea ice parts, you know, exposures on their countries got together and they said, we need

to do something about this. This is in like I say, the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies, and our kin and they did, and our country too, I guess you could call them. Landmark regulations were passed, the Marine Mammals Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, and that those banned any commercial hunting polar bears in the United States. It's stopped as of nineteen seventy two, when those when that legislation seventy three seventy two, when that

legislation was passed. Natives Alaska natives can do it for special, specific cultural reasons, all right, but there has to be I mean, it has to be a good reason, all right. So as a result of that, polar bear populations started growing. So why are polar bears on the Threatened and Endangered Species Act and a Marine Mammals Protection Act if the population is growing, Because it is. There's somewhere between probably ten and fourteen thousand polar bears now in that what

thirty four year span of time. The reason that they are considered threatened or endangered has nothing to do with their population at all. It has to do with habitat loss, and as the temperatures warm, both in the atmosphere and in the seawater, sea ice diminishes, they're threatened and endangered because they aren't going to have any place to live.

I can give you a personal, a personal example of that when we were remember we talked about earlier one of the deepest well on the north slope twenty one thousand feet well, we found a couple of archaeological sites where the engineers wanted to put the herk strip for the Tna Lick Well site. And we're right out near the coast, and so we were excavating those to get them out of the way so they could go ahead and build a HIRK trip. And we were looking right

out at Icy Cape, all right. And Icy Cape is kind of you come up through the Bearing straight all right, going north. Then you want to turn to go to Barrow, all right, to go to Alaska and Art of Canada. So you turn east, turn right up there, you go around Icy Cape, and then you go right up the coast to Barrow and Barter Island, and you know, you get into the Canadian Arctic. But Icy Cape was named for a reason. It was icy what happened very frequently.

There was that the sea ice never cleared out, lasted all summer long, and so there was no way to get around the corner to get into the rest of the Arctic to the east. You couldn't get through there. The sea ice stayed there all summer, you know, it was there all winner and it was there all summer. That didn't happen every single summer, but it happened relatively frequently.

When they were trying to develop Prudeo Bay. There were summers where all this stuff's coming up from Seattle on these huge barges, these huge module camp units and everything. They sat off icy cape all summer long until the winter, see I started to grow and went back to Barrow. They couldn't get through. The last year that I know that that happened was when we were digging Tunelik in nineteen seventy seven, because we were there from I think we were there through most August. By the before the

end of August, you're starting to have ice grow again. Anyway, that ice never went out. It was everybody turned around and went back down to Seattle. So that happened, and I could be wrong, all right. The reason I remember it so graphically is because I was there watching it. I wasn't there for that purpose, but we just you know, just remember it. I mean we could see look out every day. It wouldn't foggy and you could see it. So what happens to these polar bears when that stops happening?

All right? I mean that's just an example. That's just a place where you could see it, all right. It was easy to see. Well, if they don't have that sea ice exploit, it's going to get to a point sooner or later where their numbers are going to start dropping. There's just no way around it. As early as two thousand and nine, a couple of my USTs colleagues had some weather cams set up and drew Point, which is

about maybe fifteen miles west of Lonely. And when Frank went out to check the cameras in the summer, there's this polar bearer sow and two cubs on land and so this camera the camera's right on the edge of the of the Arctic Ocean right and in the background you can see the entire Arctic Ocean as far as you can see, not a spec of ice anywhere. And one of the cubs. In fact, I got a picture right here. I could show you one of the cubs.

If you look at it is all dirty, brownish kind of because he's been down in the crevices of the front where the land is breaking off because of storm surges, because of climate change, because of the melting ice lenses, because of the climate change. He's down there groveling around looking for stuff to eat. And those polar bears are stuck there until the winter sea ice come. I mean, they're there from the time the sea ice seasonally disappears.

If they're not on the ice, all right, If they're on if they're on the inside limit of the pressure ridges, all right, they form and they don't get out of there fast, just like that mom and her two kids. They're on land untill it's till winter comes again. And in most cases they're going to have a really hard time surviving because they're not terrestrially adapted in terms of hunting, you know, I mean the things they eat your seals, basically.

And that's why that statement by Lomberg is so disingenuous because it has nothing to do with the population numbers. It has the fact to do with We already know that these guys are on the downhill slide because pretty soon they aren't going to have what they need to survive. And that's it. What's your take on, um, what are your feelings about the Ambler Road? Whereas there's there's two there's two things about the Ambler Road. Ye tell people what it is to the State of Alaska wants to

build the road. They want to build the road so that they can open the Ambler area for exploration and possible mining. Mining companies huge amounts precious metals. Yeah, well you looked at it's like absurd amounts of precis The point is that the oil companies, after they discovered the biggest oil deposit in North America in Prudeo Bay, they built their own damn road, all right. The state didn't go into up to their ears in debt or beyond building a road to entice them. The oil companies knew

that stuff was up there. I don't know they footed the bill for the road. Hell yeah, yeah. Now the government, the federal government, which most of that road goes through at least north of the Yukon River, all right, they gave them. They were selling them material from the material sites, you know, from these glacial things I was talking about. They were selling that stuff to him for I like about fifty cents a yard. If anybody here's ever bought gravel, you know, it sells for a hell a lot more

than fifty cents a yard. And so the federal government was given him a break on it. But I mean they were still getting something out of all right. The state of Alaska wants to do that too. In the oil companies didn't need any enticement. They knew there was enough resource up there that they could build that they built. As I recall, they built that road predicated on the fact that oil at twenty dollars a barrel would pay for it an X number of years could have made

that road in diamonds. And now, I mean there's other economics involved, but I mean, now, as a general you know, okay, so like it would have been worth it at twenty but they're still pulling oil. They were pulling the oil when it was one hundred dollars, all right. They figured the lifetime of the Trans Alaska Pipeline would be twenty years.

It's into its fortieth year or now, all right. Now, granted they do decent maintenance on it, but they figured it'd be a goner after about twenty years, and it isn't. All right, they're still good Conical Phillips is just in the process of developing developing their willow prospect up in the patrolling reserve. They're going to drill one hundred two hundred wells off of five five locations at their approval of the Biden administration. Yeah, and it's all gonna go

down the pipeline. So the point is that the state of Alaska wants to build this road so that the mineral companies will go in there and develop that area. Well, if the prospects are so great, how come to mineral companies aren't going in there to do it themselves, just like the oil companies did on the pipeline. That's the question, all right, But you have to have an attitude about it,

the goals beyond what makes economic sense. As a person who spent their life in the Arctic, well, what I'm saying is, I'm not a lot of people aren't necessarily strong environmentalists, but they wonder why that same formula doesn't work for the mining companies that work for the oil company it's why should my state go to the trouble

of building this road. In the expense of building this road, it's like betting on the come all right, and it probably would pay off, I would say that, But why should you give the guys a free reign, a free ride? Use your damn money. That's what you got it for. If you think it's so great, build a road, We'll give you permits, federal government will give you. Probably Park Service is still pout about it, but BLM would probably

issue all the necessary permits. But if you want that and there's so much money to be made, you shouldn't be afraid or reluctant to build the road yourself. I think that's what a lot of people think. So got you got that. You got that aspect of it, which which wasn't an aspect of the trans Alaska Pipeline road all right. The other aspect is that a road, as I mentioned earlier, is about it that has the greatest potential to create harm to the environment any other thing

that would be associated with that prospect? Was that even on your radar when they were building the road up to Prudeo Bay, Like, was that like even a concern at that time that that the road would environmentally like damaging. Yeah, I don't want to say it was a huge concern, but it was a concern that was addressed by both the state, and it's a huge concern for the Ambler Road now. Yeah, well, because first of all, you got

to cross Park Service land. That's one thing gates of the Arctic Um and that's pretty much a big no no nationwide. It's just like trying to drill for oil and the National art and the Artic Wildlife refuge Um. And uh so there's there's that aspect of it that people don't like as well. And I think that in

the native the native community. I don't want to go into that too far, but I'm sure there is a lot of most of the local residential Native community that would be along that road is very probably not in favor of I don't know. I didn't go to any of the meetings because I'm an old XBLM guy and I've got all this experience and everything else, and I didn't want to go to any of those meetings and

stand up and make some kind of a statement. And because I felt like it was somewhat it would be somewhat unfair and bias of me to do something like that, because I don't think any there was anybody there that could argue me off my stance, whatever it was, because I got too much experience. You're ready change topics again. I want to change topics again. Okay? Can we back up real quick? When you introduced the polar bear idea, you said that you have a bias. What was the bias?

I was putting my stance in a biased form, expressing the l You were the author who wrote that. But I've heard that, I've heard of that viewpoint expressed by many people who don't want to be bothered by the inconveniences of climate issues and others. And I was I was laying out an expression of how it's how that

is spun. Got it? Uh? When I met you long long ago, last time I saw you, twenty before I even came close to having kids, you were all excited, You're all worked up about some beads you had found. Oh well we didn't yes, and no, all right, we didn't find the original beads. Okay, okay, all right. This is a site called Punyak Point typically probably since we

can use Ivatuk as a reference we have been. If you were at Ivatuk and you flew southwest in a helicopter, you could be at Tivolik Lake and Punyak Point in twenty minutes. In the nineteen fifties, there was an archaeologist by the name of Bill Irving who is getting his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, and his dad was a biologist and had been associated with the University of Alaska for a number of years and was doing some biologic surveys in that general area with his Eskimo assistant,

Simon Penniak, and round a Tivolik Lake. They found in the process of their biological investigations, they found I think something like thirteen or fourteen archaeological sites. One of them

was huge. It covered about from let's say the east end to the west end three hundred meters okay, three hundred yards fifty semi subterranean pitouse, semi subterranean house remains, and I mean it was obviously an area that had been used a lot, so he decided he wanted after his dad told him about it, he decided that he wanted to excavate that site for his PhD dissertation at

the University of Wisconsin. So he went up there in nineteen fifty seven with an Eskimo crew and they did a bunch of work and they found a bunch of stuff, and then I think he went back the next year found a little more. And I'm not going I'm not if I if I start going down or this rabbit trail of how come and why, I will be here forever. So all I'm going to say is fifty seven was

essentially the last year he did anything. All right. He went back in sixty one or sixty yeah, sixty one and did some more work, and he came up with this um idea that he translated into a hypothesis of a pan Arctic culture called the the Arctic small Tool tradition. It stretched all the way from Alaska to Greenland and and predated, no, preday Eskimos. Not well, yeah, predated Eskimos because the aspect today we call that culture the Denby

Flint Complex. That the dates on that that complex or that group of people existed between four thousand years ago and three thousand years ago. But the importance of it was that that that cultural group originated in Alaska and in a time span of less than probably two hundred and fifty years, had spread all the way to Greenland. I mean that with big news, very successful, and this

the Arctic small tool tradition. He formulated it demonstrated it that it existed, and it has withstood the test of time. I mean Alaska all the way to Greenland. I mean that's a that's a long road. So any rate punic point is in the petroleum reserve. One of the things that Irving found, Now, when he was doing this, it was just radiocarbon dating was just starting to be accepted

by archaeologists. It had been being used for maybe ten years, and not used to widely for one reason, it required a tremendously large sample to do it all right back in the early days, a large sample of datable material. So any rate he got I think only one or two radiocarbon dates. But what I'm gonna say, one of the things that he found when he was excavating there were some blue glass beads, and he was he found those blue glass beads and occupations were much more recent

than the Arctic small tool tradition. Okay, but the site had been used for you know, five four or five thousand years by different people. He thought that those beads were historic. So he thought that it was a historic occupation, that those Eskimo's probably got those beads from the whalers, you know, the whalers. They were trade beads, and they showed up camped on his old ass site and left

the stuff. But they showed up all all in eastern North America during the fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds and in sights you know, occupied by um Native peoples. And so I mean, he just said, Okay, there must have been a historic occupation here, period of historic occupation, or those beads wouldn't be here. He also found some cold hammered native copper. And there's a lot of raw native copper in Alaska, and you know, the native people have used it for years. You know, you find nuggets and

streams instead. I mean you just pound it into whatever you want, all right, I mean, that's nothing new. So anyway, Irving just said, yeah, in his dissertation, Yeah, there's some glass beads there, so there must be a historic occupation. Well, any rate, that site is in the patrolling reserve, and because as a patrolling reserve, archaeologists, there was money available to go back and look at sites that had had

some environmental degradation just because of natural causes. At a typical like when the ice goes out at the end of the winter, the prevailing winds blow these huge chunks of ice right up into that site. I mean, it just bulldozes that HiT's the bank right at the edge of the of the of the lake, and it just peels the tunderback. You know, we're talking about chunks of

ice that weigh five six hundred pounds. Prevailing wind just blowing him right off into it, and as a result, the site's being severely impacted, you know, but by natural forces. So I said, okay, give me some money. I'll go up there and you know, with Irving's dissertation in hand, and see how much damage is actually occurring there, and you know what the loss is, and how concerned we have to be about this very very famous and important

archeological site. You know, the instigation of the article small tool tradition. See if we need to consider doing something about this, if there is something or first of all, seeing if there is something we can do. So we go up there and and I was you know, one of another archaeologist in our office. I asked him to come up and help me with it at Robin Mills. And so we're running this thing. I got an excavation crew,

I got some of my old buddies there. Dale Slaughter was there again, and Rick Ernier was there again, and so any rate, because Irving had found the copper, all right, I said, the first thing let's do, let's do a metal detector survey of this area, you know, I mean this big site area, and see what we can find, all right, Because what we wanted to do is as much uninvasive exploration is that we didn't want to go

around digging holes everywhere. So when we got this one hit on the on the metal detector, we go and we dig this thing and you know, just just a hole, this big, all right, and down underneath the vegetation, in other words, underneath the sod level into the soil about five centimeters deep, all right, which is deeper than any

historic stuff would be. We find this little tumble of two iron pendants, two silver or two copper rings, and three blue glass beads in this little pile, and one of the copper bangles circular thing there's no way the natives could weld anything. So what they did when they made bangles out of raw copper, cold hammered it. They bang on it and they make this crescent and keep banging it and banging it and banging it until it was circular. Then they bang it some more. So those

two ends overlapped. Yeah, wed not the weld of it, no, join it. And then they wrapped it with with willow twine. Keep it shut. Then you can string it on something like a necklace or a bracelet. Right, one of those bangles had. First of all, we interpreted this thing as a as an object of personal adornment. Three beads, two bangles, you know, two um the iron things pendance, And obviously it was personal adornment. But we could date this thing

because it had this organic twine wrapped around it. We could see fourteen dated and we when we dated it, it said it dated to about sixty years earlier than Columbus's original landing at Hispaniola. So it's how do we get glass beads made in Europe? Well, now we said, we said venice, all right, but by this certain method that wasn't even really maybe not supposed to exist at that time in an archaeological site in Alaska in the

lower forty eight. None of this type of beads. There's a whole hierarchy, you know, thing of beads with all these numbers associated with them. So archaeology, these are two a forty beads, and there are none of those beads found west of the Rocky Mountains. All of them are found in the East, and they date fifteen hundreds and sixteen hundreds. Okay, no, no more recently than that, all post Columbus. No that I mean Columbus is fourteen ninety two. The stuff in the East is the people from Europe

colonizing the Uniteds. Yeah, okay, but none of it is in the West, where colonization appeared took place later, all right. So it's like the first thing is how come these beads are in Alaska? Well, and then it's like, how come there's no historic occupation at Puny Point. But we've got these beads that everywhere they exist in the New World, they're in a historic context, you know, I mean, how do we resolve this? So neither Robin nor I were bead people, you know, I mean, I dug a few sites,

you know, historic sites where their beads occurred. And everybody, I mean, we never researched beads at all. I mean we just didn't, all right, So we had to we had to learn. So we found a couple of real bead researchers and we said, hey, we've got these beads. What can't you tell you know we I mean, we hired them, all right, say to look at these beads and write us a report, which they did, and the report said that these are two a forty glass beads.

They're made by a process called uspa ao that was developed in Europe, and there are amongst the earliest beads made by that process, and we think they came There are a lot of little teeny tiny bubbles in the glass, and we think they were pretty sure. They were made in like the Netherlands and France and maybe a few other European places, and they were made specifically as trade beads to trade with native populations in Africa and the

New World and so on and so forth. But they were always made during a historic period, all right, well, historic period and the Old World goes back way for But what what I'm saying is they were made in a period that was not historic over here. These cultures were still prehistoric in a last, all right, and so

it's how did they get there? So Robin and I knew that first of all, this this methodology was developed in Venice, all right, and that Venetian Venice was one of the was the primary trader of the eastern Mediterranean, all right. They traded with a lot of the cultures you know in the in the Near East, all right, the Turks and Arabs and stuff like this that are on that far eastern coast of the Mediterranean. And there

was no Italy then. There were just these city states, and Venice was one of the most powerful city states in that area. They had a big navy. Well anyway, so we figured, okay, if the Venetians developed up this method of making beads, I'm not going to go into it, but it's very distinctive if you see that, you know, all right, at least originally that had to come from Venom. And we said, so, if they're trading, they have these caravans going on the Silk Road, okay, And that's a

very generic term. There are a whole bunch of roads. And you just called all those roads together going to the east the Silk Road. All right. Well, if a lot of those are going through Aboriginal territory in the old world, and these traders aren't going to miss a beat.

So they're taking a bunch of these trade beads with them, and it's getting into the native community and gets into the Drizzles down into the Rush and far East, and these guys into the Eskimo habitations there, and these guys are trading with Alaska Eskimos and the Bearing Straight and so back and forth. And that's how we figured those beads got to Alaska and the main well you could call at the back door, but it's not really it's

really yeah, it's really not. Because the Aboriginal cultures have been trading each other back and forth across the Bearing Straight for thousands of years, all right, But so this and they're still doing it at this time. And you get these beads into their you know, they're getting them from the from the traders, just like they're supposed to. And then they're bringing some of them across the Bearing Straight to the Alaska and ask him a trade fairs

on our side of the Bearing strait. That's how they got there, all right. But we still had demonstrate the age of these things because in our article, if you look at it as say pre Columbian presence of Venetian glass trade beads in Arctic Alaska. So how do we demonstrate this. One of the things we did was we had the beads analyzed by through a process called neutron neutron activation instrumental neutron activation. And what that does is it gives you a fingerprint of the elements that are

present in the glass. And our beads up up in Alaska matched the same elemental pattern as the beads in Northeastern America did the same kind of bead. Okay, so the genesis of these beads is the same. That doesn't mean that they were made in Venice, but it means that they had to be made the same place these other beads were made. Okay, so you know that, you know, we start getting interested. Now. These beads that we've got

an article Alaska are two a forty glass beads. That's their you know, name in the archaeological register, and they have a date on them that's pre Columbian. So but we've only got one date, right, and you can always have one date is nice, but if you really want to have your theory old water, you better had a

couple other corroborating. So anyway, one of the things we also wanted to do up on your point was excavate one of these semi subterranean house remains that Irving had never touched, okay, and to see exactly what was going on in all right, because all our evidence said there's

no historic occupation, there's no period of historic occupation here. Irving, who didn't really do much dating, all right and was working in more of mixed context, just assumed because there were glass beads, that there was a historic occupation of the site. So anyway, we were excavating House eleven, well, our outwood we called House eleven. We excavated down onto the floor near the hearth, and guess what we found more, We found a half of a glass bead. All right.

The house had only had one episode of use because there was only one floor layer in the house. Because you live in one of those things during the winter and it's a wintertime occupation, all right. Everything gets from the house gets from the hearth, and the house gets chomped down into the floor. And I mean you can see that flip. The floor layer may only be this thick, but you can see that layer all right, because all

the jump. What will happen subsequent to that is the reason there's an occupation there is because there's a willow patch next to that lake that has sufficient wood in it for two or three families to get through the winter on it. But after that winter, they aren't enough there anymore. So you got to wait about ten years before that willows renew themselves and somebody else will yields

it again. In the meantime, all this stuff drifts into this abandoned house, and so the next time somebody inhabits it, they create another floor layer. But if I go in there and excavate it, I hit this floor layer, and I say, oh, here's here's the floor and these I went right through it, and then I hit this layer of no occupation at all, And then the next thing I knew, I hit the next layer. So I know if I only get one layer all right, that that's

the only occupation of that house. And I know that the charcoal and that hearth directly relates to that floor and whatever that date is, that's how old that occupation is. That bead got smushed down into the floor. That date was fourteen hundred something. I can't remember. That's how old that damn beads. Okay, So this is why I'm getting back to the forensic Yeah, all right, that's why we're responsible for forensic science archaeologists. All right. I just wanted

to let you know that at any rate. So then we've we've got this, We've corroborated our our date on the on the bangal bead thing, right, I mean it's not exactly the same, but they overlap. Okay. A couple of years later, we're working at a place called Kenyak Sugvic where there was a huge karigi this is a men's house, huge bowlers this big, you know, and a huge circle um and there were there was it's another

lake with Cariboo. The Cariboo came by their drive lines called the Nuxuk where the natives would you know, fill they'd be up build these stone lines every now and then set a stick up, tie a couple of feathers to it and a piece of skin so blow on the line and get all the cariboo coming down them, run them down into the lake, come out in their kayaks and lance the cariboo while they're in the lake. So there they and so there's sub semi subterranean houses there.

We were excavating one of those because it was a little bit later than some of the others, all right, And we were water screening the stuff we were getting out of the houses because it was a little different than it was at Punic Point. It was a kind of mushy and so forth, and so we were putting the stuff in the screen and then pouring water over to print it out rather than shaking it, you know.

Found another bead, so we but the trouble was that we couldn't tell if that was from the house or from the trash midden that was associated with the house, and that house had been occupied more than once. But but we took a date on an organic some organic substance, I don't remember what it was, from the same date as the bead, and it came out where it barely overlapped in terms of age with what we found it

at Punyac Point. It was a little bit off, all right, but it was close, but we're still close in your terms. Before it was like fourteen hundred something, so it was, it was, it was more than that, maybe forty years off. All right, I should be able to say this right, but I can't so any rate. And it still wasn't what you would call a good date because there was a possibility it came out of the trash pit, and we couldn't absolutely say that. Even if the date was right,

we couldn't say it was absolutely associated with that object. Well, in the meantime, one of the guys up at the museum had been doing this research on a certain period of time amongst a number of sites uh in the in the area that were related by time. And I can't remember exactly what it was, but when he did this the excavation, and i'm i'm, it was at a

place called Lake Kayak. He found in a he found a two half beads, one half in one house, one half in the other house, and if you put them together, they made a single bead. Yeah, and the date on it overlap somewhat with the date that we had at Puny Point. And that was the only non native artifact found in either of those two houses. Every other artifact found him in. Those two houses were native made and

dated earlier than the historic period. So now, all right, we had, like the three beads we found, we had a couple that Irving had found, although we didn't have them, So we found out what museum they were in, and we got in touch with them and said, hey, could you And Irving had found a couple bengals too, and Irving and so we got them all right, and on one of those bangles that was with Irving beads with willow wrapped up around the bengal all right, just like

it had been we found. So we dated it and it came back about one hundred and fifty years too recent. But what happened when we unwrapped that stuff was that that bangle they never hammered it up far enough so that it overlapped when they wrapped it up, So they put a piece of willow across that gap to close the gap and then wrapped it up, and we dated that piece of willow and it matched our date. So now we've got a couple of little beads are blowing

up people's idea of it. So anyway, that's the whole background that thing, all right, So then beds. So then we said, okay, all right, we said we've got good enough radiocarbon data here on these beads that say they could well be pre Columbian. We also know that the glass that those glass beads, they were some of the earliest made by the Aspiao process, and there's a really good chance that they were made in Venice, all right. And and we also know that you know, you've heard

of Akham's razor. A razor is a It's like the simplest explanation of something is almost always the right one. That's my theory of automotive automotive mechanics, so any rate, what's it called. So what I'm saying is the the simplest way that those beads could have gotten there with overland from the old world. And so that was the general hypothesis, well supported hypothesis of our article, and it got public, all right, a lot of people disagreed with it.

There have been other developments since then that show that we were probably more right than we you know, we're giving credit for but we don't have time. That could come another day, and people that want to argue, like the perspective is that. I mean, what's groundbreaking about it is that the world, that the New world was connected with the old world in some like unexpected way, and that materials could somehow flow from like prior to Columbus,

materials were flowing from Italy into artic Alaska. Yeah, and there was a chain of like presumably discussion and exchange that would have led to that at a time when people thought that that was hundreds of years away. Yeah, and it said no, I got it from a dude.

He was white. Yeah, Like, let's uh, like, let's assume you're right, bees showed up whatever fourteen hundred, Um, I'm pretty sure we're really right, right, But but what would have been like after that point, what would have been the next point at which those people could have been exposed to someone who could have given those them beads that like, if they hadn't come from that direction to this to this day, there are the only two a forty beads that exist in Alaska. Okay, So that was it. Yeah,

I mean there an so they wouldn't run. Yeah, that the Russians brought in, But none of this, none of these things, you know, next time he's on he needs to tell you about the old crazy Roosky shotgun. We need to have them on like five more times. I feel like we could because they got a crazy Roosky shotgun. And I think you guys found some crazy old traps too, well they were they're not old. Well, there were a good a cash of about fifty or sixty steel traps.

We didn't get to all those. Now I've got them. We didn't get to We didn't get to all the good wildlife stuff, the moose stuff, and the dude. You just need to come for a week next time. You need to. Yeah, like your buddy Meltzer, he had to come on twice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Long there's no more pandemics that prevent you from going anywhere for three years. Yeah, yeah, No,

I would. I would be willing to come back. But I mean there's a lot there's you know, I kind of bumbled my way through this because I didn't really I could have made myself a little clearer on some of these things. There was no missing clarity. Yeah okay, but I'm just saying that, Um, I'd be happy to come back and talk some more about this stuff. Because on the bead thing, there's there's stuff that we have done since then, I gotta tell you, but yeah, you

guys tied it into Marco Polo. The biggest thing of this was that when the University of Alaska put this out, you know, as a press release, I mean the press pit up on this. I stumbled into it and it

was I was like, I already know about them beads. Though, the best part of this whole thing that I got the biggest kick out and we did numerous interviews and yeah, La Parisian and Paris did this fifteen minute video interview and they had an artist do all this stuff to make it all classy in her I mean, it was amazing. But the best thing I want to make two points here.

The best thing was that I love the most was that our beads, which were on the front cover of American Antiquity, the volume it was published in, appeared on the front page of the Venice newspaper. Yeah yeah, yeah. And the other thing was because it got so much

publicity in the press. Some guys that have been researching glass, some you know, scientists researching glass produced in Venice their Italian for at least the last thirty thirty five years got in touch with us and said, would you be willing to do laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry on the glass on those glass beads, which is a different thing than than than we had done than instrumental neuton activation analysis, because we think that there's a good

chance those beads were made in Venice. So we did, and we got a slightly different part using that other method and one of the researchers, and so we gave all our information to the Italian researchers and we're in the process of deciding how we're going to handle this. So this is a news flash. Sandro says that given the results of that, you know study, that the beads were probably made in Venice. Noah, So that's the next chapter. You need to find the ancestor of the man that

made him. That's impossible. But the point is, and I'll make this last point, Robin and I are breed spacelists. We didn't know anything to beat about beads anything else. What we did was we took the evidence we had and we went what it told us. Even though we were swimming upstream on this thing with the beads and everything else. We just said, Okay, this says this, So that's the simplest answer is probably it is this, this

is this, and we arrived at this. That looks like now with this new research, it's it's going to be sufficiently proven it's true just because we followed the lines of every and in your field of research, do you like do some do you know some folks who tend to get maybe distracted by what's not the simplest explanation, like they look they want to look for things that

are some crazy. I think what happens is if you don't, if you can't come up with a pretty reasonable answer, then you start casting about looking for something else and you can't find And so every time you do a new cast about you're moving a little further away from from the chances of it being react. That's a that's the path that leads to um that they're bigfoot beats exactly. UFOs dropped them. Hey you know bigfoot guy, the big foot guy. I don't know about the big foot Well

the guy at Washington State University. Oh yeah, Grover Krantz. Yeah, Well, I went to graduate school at Washington State University and my first year. My first year there was Grover Krantz's first year as a professor there, so and we all thought he was crazier. Oh man, it was good to have you on. Uh, get that book out, hold the book up. Oh you can get that online again. I was gonna yeah. Just just all you gotta do is say masa site, uh maza se Paleo Indians above the

Arctic Circle. Yeah, Michael cons and it'll take you right, It'll take you right to the BLM wood page and you can download that whole thing. But you can also just go goal m I K E K U n Z and mostly like University of Alaska, right, because you have published a ridiculous number of journal scientific journal articles on all things from ancient polar bear, brown bear hybridization too. I don't even know so exactly people of Arctic archaeology.

People can spend the rest of their lives reading Mike's words. Now. Yeah, I'm glad you made it down. I'm glad you're able to provide some context to what your your former colleagues had to say about proper normanclature. Yeah. Um, thanks man. Oh and everybody check I'll remember that email. Your chet k questions too. So you got etiquette questions, which we call chetick questions, email them too. Why don't we have our own like what we'll get it for email to

them eat or at them eater dot com. No, it's meat eat the meat eater at themmeater dot com as it should be subject line chattkit. We'll read the whole episode on addicott chatt ict. So we need your questions, yep. And if it's uh, if today is like April third or April fourth, then great. But if it's April after April fourth, don't bother. It's too late. I don't care what the hell date it is. Go and pre order

our new kids activity book, Catch a Crayfish Count the Stars. Um, if you want to have kids, that gotta you know, you know, tough kids to understand nature and have kind of a raw bloody edge to them. Get Catch Crayfish Count Stars four, said children. And raise him right all right, everybody, thank you, Oh seal Ram shine like silver in the sun, right on, all right, on alive on sweetheart. We're done, beat this damn horse to death, taking a new one

and ride. We're done beat this damn horse today. So take your new one and ride on.