Ep. 694: Did Clovis Hunters Kill All the Mammoths?

If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, you can't predict anything.

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. All Right, everybody, Today we're gonna dive in once again on my favorite subject of all subjects on the planet, which is First Americans. Who got here first? What were they doing when they come? How'd they get here?

We have enemies, we have disagreements, but we work well together.

Yeah.

No, he respects you guys, and he says he does do good work. So who I'm talking about here today in the in the studio with this is Todd Serravell, who is the director of the George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. If you're interested in the peopling of the Americas and Clovis hunters and stuff, you might go in and check out the late George C. Frison because he did a lot of I guess you call experimental archaeology, right, Like, he went to Africa.

And experiments stuck some some of the most major sites. He's just kind of like what we call him the godfather of Wyoming archaeology.

And and and he went to Africa to test out stone tools on elephants.

Correct, Yeah, he did. In Zimbabwe, they were they had an overpopulation problem of elephants and they were calling them so he took advantage of that opportunity to test Clovis weapons on actual African elephants alive, sensibly dead, and dying. Is my understanding, got finish them off.

Yeah, he just wanted to see how it would perform.

Yeah, was it a functional weapon for killing an elephant?

And what did he determined?

Absolutely, he had no doubt. He's the only guy in recent time who's hit an elephant with a Clovis weaponry. Yeah, a lot of people have done it, actually with deceased elephants, but George did it with living elephants.

Yeah. Nowadays, you guys are constrained by the the ethics folks. That's a hard one to get across.

Here's what I'd like to do.

I'm gonna stab some elephants. Uh. And Spencer Pelton from the he's the Wyoming State archaeologist and an adjunct at the University of Wyoming's Archaeology and Anthropology department.

That's correct. We should also clarify Todd was my major advisor. This is like, this is kind of like your Matt and Meltzer relationship. Oh, a little bit of uh, you know, he brainwashed me into thinking like like he did.

Yeah, so now you have strengthen numbers.

Man, I'm reading a book right now. We're trying it was a guy we had on the show. Do you remember, remember the gun writer And he's a big Safari dude. I'm trying to get him to come back on Thomas uh McIntyre. But his name doesn't look quite like McIntire. Thomas McIntyre, you know him. He's like a gun like a like a gun writer. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. I remember listening to that. Yeah, Like what's super interesting about him is I mean a bunch of things.

Eritre no no.

West, not on the coast. But it's like, uh damn.

Democratic Republic of Condo.

Cameras, humiliating, come.

On, come on.

Here, you can't do that, Hey, you can't bring it up. It's like it's like, okay, Africa countries map uh right where it is.

This should go quick.

It's uh no, it is got some coasts.

Yes, yeah, yeah, see, no one's ever heard of it.

You can't hunt there anymore. And those same dudes that those green brays were mixing it up with, like in Chad, are in that area. Anyhow. In his book, he has a long thing. The book is called Rain without Thunder or Thunder without Rain, Thunder without rain. It's about it's like a history of the Cape Buffalo. But in there he's got a lot of stuff about human history. And he's in this big section right now about poisons, like poisoning spear points. Oh well, you you might think that

Hum hmm.

Not the point anyhow, The stuff they could take down with plant poisons, plant toxins and quick hmm. Yeah.

There's a there's a classic anthropological video of the conkson of the jo Uonci the bushmen in the Kalahari no hunting giraffe with these tiny little arrows. They just got to get a couple of arrows in it and then track it till it dies. I thought their poison was insect based, though.

He gets into the No, there's three. He gets into the three plant genuses. This is a big, thick book. He gets into the like the dead, the big sort of the Big three, the Big three of plant poisons, and he kind of juxtaposes those to the toxins that they use, the South American toxins, which are more of like a paralyzing toxin, and then these different plant toxins they use. But it just gave him like tremendous efficacy on huge ship killing, huge shit, and some of his stuff just tips right over.

You're trying to interview him again. Yeah, I don't think it'll happen. He's dead. No, yeah, when twenty twenty.

Two, his book, he came dead in twenty twenty two. His book came out in twenty three.

No More Canvas Safari's No Outdoor writer Thomas McIntyre dies at seventy That is November seven, twenty two. We're gonna need to do it.

This book come out in twenty three.

I don't know.

We talked about Yeah, Chris hart Fardley's last movie came out six months after he was dead. No shit, really, Yeah, I don't think it's that uncommon. Well, he Fledger's joker came out how long philed?

I'm just talking about did he die? I feel like we should in the studio. We should have a picture of people be passed on.

Okay, show there.

I don't know, you shouldn't be We'll all be there someday, Spencer. It's good little bit of research right there.

Yeah. Damn.

When I was doing my uh my research in graduate school, I came across articles from like the sixties and seventies where they were saying the next big thing in archery hunting was going to be poison.

Well they use it in Mississippi, you know, yeah.

And that.

But they were like a spade of law after this became like a thing, there's a spade of laws passed to prevent you from using.

Yeah, a lot of stories explicitly.

Say blood clotting, what poison?

Didn't they Who does?

I think that's what?

Yeah?

They do?

Yeah, yeah, you can still use that poison. It's real. It's common there. Like I got a buddy, I got a buddy. You look at him, you just think he's a normal guy walking down the street, but he's poison arrows that deer. What what? What? The late Tom the late Thomas McIntire gets into that's really heartbreaking me.

I like that guy.

Well he gets into is that there's this other book. See, I'm going to be going to Africa this summer, so I'm kind of going to move in. I've been reading a lot about the World War two Pacific theater, but

I'm looking at his Goodreads page. His last published work, according to them as twenty twelve. They're pretty thorough.

That's a bald faced live buddy. Because did you type in second edition? Did you type in thunder without rain?

No?

But you're lying bald facedly. Well, Spencer's not lying, then, that's what I meant. Well, no, because I feel like if you read lies and put them out, you're a liar too. You're a liar too. All Right, moving on, we're gonna get We're gonna die. We gotta have plenty of time to talk about Clovis Clovis hunters. But real quick, someone wrote in mad because I have there's a few problems. I always have that like it would take like electroshock

And you're saying, what a super Slam?

I always say super Slam, which is like less than what I have.

No, it's not.

This guy's wild.

It's harvesting one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.

No, no, no, no, no, dude, it's right here. The Royal Slam. According to this joker, if you'll get on Goodreads, what's his name? According to Brett, Brett says just it just seems like that this is the kind of thing you don't need to argue about since the internet came out. But like, mmmm, it's like, I.

Will read you what nd n w TF. Let's go with n WTF. Grand Slam is all for us subspecies. Royal Slam is the Grand Slam. Plus the Goulds got it World Slam, Royal Slam plus the oscillated wild turkey.

That's where I'm That's where I that's where i'm. That's where I'm not Hill.

And then what Brody was talking about, the US Super Slam harvest one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.

So you're you so Brett is right, you say that you're a super Slam holder or well, I but I say it wrong.

That's what I'm saying.

I am a Royal.

Slam holder, which is all four U s subspecies plus the goul.

So does that change hot matches up against your honorary doctorate roy royal?

You know the problem with having an honorary doctor as opposed to regular one. You're like, if you do your I don't have a resume. But we're at to make a resume. You're not allowed to put it under education.

Oh where do you put it?

Honors award? And that's a problem. It's a tell.

It's a real tell. Yeah, because then people look and they're like, uhh yeah, I don't like that. But if I had an honors thing in my resume, it would be like Royal Slam holder, And then okay, we're not going to talk about these artifacts. It just came out

In a few weeks, we're going to interview the guy who found it.

Can't talk about it now, Okay, hold on, hold that thought for a minute. There's one nice thing I wanted to talk about because this is gonna segue forget. I said that because I want to segue that into these boys. But you know what's really funny they've been laughing about is uh a word choice thing. Alaska Fish and Game Department. You know, they're doing like they're doing like a tag lottery, and they referred to a tag. I can't get enough of this. They referred to a big game tag as prestigious.

Inspiring respect and admiration, having high status.

Yes, so you're like, yeah, you'd be like that would be like a like a thing you had, like you'd bring if you're on a date. Yeah, it's good marketing if someone is a little bit out of your league, prestigious, like you know, you might be curious to know that I own a that I hold a keen eye caribou tag in Alaska, you know, And she'd be like, prestige. I thought that was a great word choice, prestigious. It's

Okay.

Recently, one of our one of our esteemed colleagues, one of our esteemed colleagues, Clay Nukeombe, did a Bear Grease podcast about some of the ins and outs of the Clovis first uh idea and you know, the peopling of the Americas. He did a little thing on that. A lot of the guys we work with are all equally fascinated by this subject. And in there, uh, Clay is at with Metton, and Clay is observing that what I always tell him, which is during the ice age period,

Man.

So when this six thousand year old hunting kit comes out of this cave in Texas and lo and behold, it's not a damn bow. I sent it to Clay to say, no notice, no bow, it's an ad a laddle n B. And are you guys at a laddle or at laddle?

Guys add a laddle all the way, I.

Say a little oh wow.

Getting heated interview?

So am I?

Uh?

Who's right?

Is it just impossible to say what? What?

Like?

If someone when when when humans and what is now the United States of America interacted with with mammoths, is it impossible to say that they were Is it impossible to say they weren't shooting bows at them.

I don't think it's impossible. I mean, those those projectiles are just so big. I just don't think they would work very well on a boat. And I think that's the assumption, right. Also, like what the oldest direct evidence for bos in the world is probably the Mesolithic.

In europeith twenty thousand. That's real.

Probably, Oh really, they haven't that long ago.

Well, it depends. I mean the way we infer bows is usually based on the size of the stone point because we very rarely find the bows themselves. Actually found one once in Denmark that was six thousand years old. That's incredibly rare.

Right, So what was that boat made out of?

I don't know. I was a kid at the time. I was maybe twenty two. Is my first archaeological field experience. It was a It was a about a ten inch piece of a bow that had broken and it was recycled as part of a fish trap. But yeah, we were digging in this like they call it Gutcha. It's like this really muddy sediment and they would make these fish traps that were like V shaped fences that went to a woven fish trap and the tide would come in, then would go out, and the fish would get funneled

But that's testable, right, I mean, like, I'm sure people could mess around and see can you shoot a Clovis point.

I think people have done like polatics experiments.

David did that for his thesis.

Yeah, David Howe, one of our master students, has a great he's a great public science communicator in his own right. But he did some holistic experiments with like a crossbow and it's basically made points of you know, from that big like you know, say a centimeter long, up to the size of like a Clovis point mm hmm, and tested the accuracy of those things the further like according to size. And I don't remember his conclusions, but.

He concluded that you get to a certain size and the accuracy declines dramatically with bow.

Yeah. And if you look, so, if you look in like a stratified archaeological site, like a rock shelter that's just got layers and layers of stuff in it. If you map out the wits of those projectiles through time, there's usually this dramatic decrease in width. In Wyoming, for instance, it's like fifteen hundred years ago or so, and that's generally assumed to be demarketing the transition to bow and arrow.

Got it?

You know that, dude, I was talking about Clay nukembe Yeah, he killed it. He put a he put a fullsome point on an arrow and killed a bear with it, and the bear piled up in twenty yards.

I think was there was that on YouTube? Yeah, I think I saw that.

I mean he shot what he shot it from my three yards or something like that. He dug a underground he dug an underground pit and then had a bait pile because he knew he wanted to, like he wanted to almost be shooting up into the bear, so he was underground because he wanted a good angle on it.

That's the next level shit man.

Yeah, you know full some points are interesting because it's really really fine, like a nice, really well made fallso points really light. I think it would work just fine as an arrow point.

Let me hit.

I want I want to do something real quick. I'm trying to do it quick. I want I want to lay out the current. I want to lay out the what is the debate?

Which debate? There's many debates, the big debate.

Yeah, the big debate. I want to lay out the or let maybe you guys, what do you guys want to do? It lay out to me? But I want you to give the other side a fair shake. No, I want to do it because I don't want to make I don't want I don't want to make you argue someone else's argument.

Yeah, yeah, I don't mind making that argument.

Okay, layout the debate unless you want me to do.

Well. You did just get this on a a PhD. Maybe this is your oral examples.

It was.

All right.

For most of my life. The for most of my life that the dominant narrative about the first peoples to come into what is now the United States of America was that sometime, you know, thirteen thousand years ago, some big game hunters came over the Bearing Land Bridge, not thinking they were probably not thinking they were going somewhere like the Bearing Land Bridge was not a narrow It's not like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was like

They were to Florida, South America too.

Yeah, they were in Florida, They're in Washington State, their points are up in Michigan. They were just everywhere. And then out of that group eventually like came all these different cultures and then you start seeing these distinctive cultural markings.

How is that?

It's pretty good?

Really, that's a good synopsis.

Well, yeah, I mean there's a number of different issues there, right, Like there's the date of arrival to Alaska. There's the date of getting south of the ice sheets. There's the issue of how did they make a living? Did they drive this extinction event? There's a number of separate issues there. Did they take the coastal route versus the inland route?

Let's start with this. When I say, like what is tell people like what is Clovis? When we say Clovis, what are we talking about?

The stone tool technology at the most basic level. But I think it's also come to be associated with a LifeWay, highly mobile, use of really high quality raw materials, seemingly a preference towards hunting large bodied animals, widespread across North America, and you know something sitting in South America if you're looking at like fluted sales, cave points.

Fishtail points.

Yeah.

And another really clear attribute of Clovis is wherever you find it, it dates within a very very narrow time range. Depending on who you ask. The Clovis period is three hundred to five hundred years m and that was it. Yeah, Yeah, that like that the really consistent day across the country. What Spencer mentioned that it's sort of a pan continental phenomenon. I think that's a really important part of the story because that's not really a thing. After Clovis, you do

Can you describe what you mean by a flute and a point? Like if someone's never if they picture a stone point, they have one image in their mind, maybe a couple images, but like, what is a flute? What's what does a Clovis point look like if you're going to draw it?

Yeah, So the I would say when most people think of an arrowhead or spear point, right, they're thinking sort of a notched variety. We've got sort of a triangular, bifacially flaked piece of stone that have not just coming in from the corners or the sides. That's a later invention that comes a few thousand years after Clovis. With Clovis, we're talking about what we call a lanceolate point. So it's it's it's long, it's narrow, it comes to a

I thought, Brodie, would you mean mega favor?

Sure?

Can you run in my office and grab my Clovis thrusting spear in the corner. And then I got on my desk. I got some clover, some poles and points.

Yep, and then and then the flute. The word comes from like the flute. It's in a column, right, It's like it's a groove. So the really special thing about Clovis points and similar points that follow like folsome points and other regional varieties of Spencer's got something.

That's badass. You met this dude when this is a good visual aid? Tyson Arnold drew that wanted me to hand it off to you as a gift for your studio.

So where do I hold this film?

That's right? There is great the line drawing of one of the points from a psych called the East win At.

What's nuts is this is? This is like the size that's yeah, that's like a giant.

That's a really big one. Usually they're like a big Clovis point is usually half that long. That's that's exceptionally large.

But when we're talking about for for folks watch it on YouTube, this is the that's a real if you're a flint nap, it's really hard to do that, like a high failure rate.

Yeah, it's almost like if you picture a blade, if you were to be able to pin sort of on the back end, that's sort of the shape, right.

Yeah, yeah, you know they when they were first found that archaeologists sort of made analogies to blood grooves some banets, and I've never read that. Yeah, that was like one of the original ideas as to why they were doing that.

Uh, that three to five hundred to your period, can I U I want to take a stab at like a little bit, just trying to describe what you're saying about. Did that mean that everybody caught on or did that mean like, does it make more sense that the reason everybody was I can't say everybody. Well, let me ask this question. During this three to five hundred to year period, if you find a Clovis point, you date it, it's this three to five hundred of your period. Can do

It's a really good question. Generally speaking, everything from that window is Clovis except for the site we just dug.

Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of evidence that Great Basin has some different stuff going on. Some stem point components, but by standpoints, I mean they're not fluted, they're kind there's more of a stem so at the bottom the base of the point kind.

Of constricts more as a shoulder.

Some of those components seem to overlap with Clovis a little bit from the Great Basin, very different technology, and you look in some of those rock shelters there and the lowest most components there seem to overlap with Clovis slightly, although Clovis still seems to have some some slightly older dates in that stuff.

Got it, And then we talked about this spence. We talked about this work. What's kind of upset this idea that clobus the Clovis first idea was it they keep they find these older sites. And I don't know if you're gonna regret your word choice, but you said a problem with these really old archaeological sites is they're not normal sites.

Yeah.

Like there's been tons of stuff in the media, you know, or it was at a time, like the footprints in White Sands. Okay, you got that. You got the dude out in Chesapeake Bay. Who's who's finding claiming to find really old stuff? Or roading out of banks in Chesapeake Bay. I know you're only here. Oh, here's the points. See we wound up having this picture show up. Brody, Oh well, this is like an actual size. Would you guys say that's a more normal Yeah, that's a I can't remember

Got the hell flapper.

Yeah, split shaft we call it.

Yeah. Uh, tell me about these really old sites.

And and and well let's I mean, if we're going to talk about them not being normal, let's talk about what is normal.

Tell me what what's a normal site?

So, you know a lot of Clovis sites. Many of the early ones were large mammal kill sites. The first excavated Clovis site was actually the Dent site in Colorado. It's mammoth kill. A few years later Clovis points flakes, tools, bone rod. It's found with mammoth bones at Blackwater Draw, the Clovi site that gives the Clovis Complex its name.

No, oh, yeah, it's that kind of They got those big armored plates on them. No oh, that's not it. Okay, No, I don't know.

Gomfatheer is related to a masdon. They're in Central America and South America. So in northern Sonora, Mexico. The last twenty years or so a Clovis Gomfithear kill site was found. So this pattern people, phil, you put one of those on the screen, they have a shorter trunk.

I am not an expert in They oftentimes have two tusks too. Write I can't, there's some difference.

That's what I was for whatever reason, That's what I was picturing in my head.

That the early ones definitely have strange cranium morphology things going on.

You want to spell that for me if you can't, A G O M P H.

O T H E R E. So that's one aspect of Clovis. We also have Clovis bison kills, at least two of those, one in Oklahoma, one in Arizona. And then we have Clovis campsites, and these are basically you have heart features, fire pits, people working around them, and you have butchered remains of usually large mammals. The site we recently dug a lot of bison. And this is sort of typical hunter gathering archaeology. Right. You have the

Man, I'd get after one of those, man that'd be a sweet school to have. Look at that thing.

Was that called again gomfa there? Yeah, the genus star wars looking.

That's a good way to describe it.

So that was like an elephant species down in South America.

Yeah, and in Central America. They probably made it in the southern US because because this this one clove is Gonfitthier killed. It's called Elphine del Mundo. It's it's not far from the Arizona border, maybe one hundred miles south in Sonora.

Hm.

Wow.

It says they were on all continents except Australia and Antarctic.

Yeah.

So so clove is archaeology is pretty typical for hunter gathered archaeology. I mean, you have these domestic sites where people are camping, sitting around fires, making and repairing tools, cooking, scrape, scraping hides. Then we have bone beds, and we also, of course have the Anzac Burial not far from here, right, we have human remains. Uh.

Is it is it true that no? Is it true that no one's ever found a cloves point actually stuck into mammoth bone?

That is true?

Yeah.

Now, there was a case from Brazil somewhere where there was a some kind of lithic stuck and I want to say gonfity or skull. But I saw that a long time ago. I need to check that.

Are you do you know that?

There was a rumor at the close type site for a long time peop were just hauling that stuff away. And I went there once and did a lot of reading about it. And there was like a rumor that some bus driver that like they took kids out to see it, and some bus driver allegedly took home a mama's school that had a point embedded in his eye socket. But it's just like, it's just it's just rumor.

I've never heard that.

You never heard that rumor.

I've heard that rumor twice because I listened to your conversations. I think both times it came from you, dude.

Everybody find I'm going to find where I'm gonna find, Like, I couldn't have made that up. A bus driver like did a bus driver took some kids to see in the hall of thing home with them. I wouldn't have made that up. It's too like much detail. I gotta find where I read that. Wherever I read it, I think is on my bookshelf.

I know if you find let me know, I don't want to see that.

Yeah, I mean, I think when I made that comment to you about Clovis sites looking normal and everything before it not, this is exactly what I'm meaning. Like, you can dig a site that's two thousand years old, five thousand years old, six thousand years old, it all has roughly the same characteristics as like a Barry Clovis campsite,

When you say weird, what do you mean, I.

Mean not obviously human made. There's a lot of natural processes that can produce things that look like artifacts and rocks falling off a cliff and striking something, getting entrained in a watercourse and breaking up that way. This is one of the brilliant projects that met and actually initiated, looking at rocks and Antarctica where we know there wasn't people and seeing the range of variation and how rock

So these old old sites, well what is okay? At what date does it become in your mind? When does it when does it like tail off? Like you got really good sights up to what date and then and then you got your weird sites thirteen thousand and that's all the calibration stuff is that, like as we understand you.

Calendar yeares, and we're talking about south of the ice sheets. North of the ice sheets, it's a different story. But south of the ice sheets thirteen thousand and onward, beautiful normal typical hunter gather archaeology. To give you an example of the kind of thing Spencer was talking about, he and I and Sarah Lawn excavated a mammoth two three years ago. That mammoth was thirteen thousand, two hundred years old.

Yeah, all right, so.

Footprints, drag marks, fingerprints, copper lights, copper lights are cross poops, seaweed, balls of seaweed. Uh, underwater meat caches, Spencer pointed. That went out to me, there's three cases. Yeah I do. There are no no underwater meat caches after Clovis to my mind, they're only a pre Clovis thing.

Oh really, Yeah, I'm gonna stop telling people about underwater.

Meat cut marks. So, like Mark's on bone, right, you guys know about that.

Can we back up to the underwater meat cash? What was the site that was interpreted to be this. There's a site somewhere where someone had piled up mammoth meat under a pond filled the intestines full of gravel and then use these gravel filled intestines to weigh it down under that pond. That's badass.

That site is in the Midwest. I think it's the Burning Tree mas it On. It's one that Dan Fisher at the University of Michigan published. Okay, yeah, I think that's the one. I'm not sure that certain.

And obviously the intestine rotted away, so it's just gravel in a line. You're not buying it.

I mean weird stuff, right, this is this is our point. I don't even keep going now, Okay, bone embedded and bone.

What does that mean?

Like you have a mass it on bone and there's like another piece of bone like stuck into the rib.

That was healed around it that they argued was a spear.

Point and not to not two of them duking it out.

That's what other people have said. Yeah, their bone modifications, like the ways that bones have been fractured, Like you have no artifacts, but bones are fractured in weird ways. It seemed like only humans could do it. And the last one on the list is a pit full of grasshoppers. Okay, so this is I just told you about probably twenty pre Clovis claims, right, all this weird stuff as opposed to like, what I'd like to see is like, let's just say some flakes from from napping Stone around a

That's it.

When you're talking about stratigraphic stratigraphic context, like we're talking about eroading banks, you're talking about digging out a hillside, like what are what are you when you're thinking about where to look.

For a site?

Sort of what are the considerations in mind? What is like a normal site versus what makes things unusual?

I can speak to Wyoming at least the best place is define buried archaeology in Wyoming or like rock shelters and floodplains in Wyoming and Montana. You walk around the landscape, which you guys do a lot, hunting, fishing, whatever, most of the landscape that you're walking across has basically zero potential to preserve an archaeological site. If you're on the side of a hill, if you're on a really high

When Clovis was happening in the America, is what did the technology look like on the rest of the planet, like during that three to five hundred year window.

Well, that's a lot of planet.

What about where they just came from, like the last place they were before the America.

Yeah, that Slana River site where they had that badass wooly rhinoceros.

Yanayana rights way up and yeah on bought that those guys. That's that's twenty thousand years before Clovis in the High Arctic and in a warm period in the Middle Last Glaciation where they've got I think spear shafts made out of rhinoceros, horn bow needles, beads, amazing things.

But what about during that same era as Clovis.

So if we go north to Alaska, just prior to Clovis, there's plenty of good archaeology starting with about fourteen thousand, it looks similar to Clovis. I mean, people are making bifacial projectile points. The one big difference is they're making a lot of microblades. It's really tiny, really long, skinny, sharp flakes that then they you know, they'll have in a long piece of bone to make a really deadly spear point. You have end scrapers, pretty typical hunter gatherer stuff. Really.

I think, what's your take on the overkill hypothesis.

I think there's a lot of really strong evidence for it.

I love it, and you know I love it. It's not not light more than the overkill hypothes you're talking

And forty some genera in South America. So let me let me be caun.

I hate you. What can I want to add? The little wrinkle before you start. Yeah, folks will say, we have thirteen, fourteen, fifteen mammoth kill sites. We have zero giant groundsloft kill sites, we have zero. What was that big ass one hundred pound beaver catch?

Yeah?

Where are all the kill sites of those? Like, where are all the short faced bear kill sites? If they were killing all this, where.

Is it all?

Yeah, that's the right question, you know that. I I was telling Spencer this this morning that I started out incredibly skeptical of overkill for exactly that reason, right, Like, as archaeologists, we work at a material world and we look at material evidence, and when there's no material evidence, it's like, how do you believe something actually happened if there's no evidence for it? So, yeah, it's a sticky problem when we talk about mammoths. Is actually a huge

Is there any guesses, like during that Clovis period, Is there any guesses how many of them were, like, say, in North America in that time.

How many clothes people? Yeah, sure, we can we can sort of estimate that by looking at modern hunter gatherer population densities, it's a it's a really complicated problem because you know, first, if they're first they started basically a population of zero, and then they grow to some presumably some caring capacity or some environmental limit, right, and the number of people is going to very across the continent.

What about mammoth's populations.

We can estimate that too. I'm not going to make up numbers, but I don't know. I don't know off the top of my head. But it's a lot. It's a lot.

Is it fair when you talk about that? Fourteen is a lot of sights. As you're saying that, I'm kind of thinking in my head of you know, I've done a lot of hunting throughout my life. I'm trying to think about ever made if I ever made a archaeological site, Well, you absolutely have know what I'm saying, Like that I

I think it'd be. I think it's probably pretty rare.

I mean, you've probably had so that's what I'm thinking.

It is like most of the animals you've butchered out right, You've you've left some stuff. The coyotes have dispersed it. So what was an archaeological site in the moment now becomes just kind of a scatter of chewed up deer bone or whatever, and it's no longer really discernible as

It's the most common animal in Clovis funnel assemblage is mammoth, which is which is shocking right, because if you just go out there hunting, you and you sort of if you take the attitude I'm gonna kill whatever I come across, You're not gonna encounter mammoths a lot, right, You're gonna have funnel asemblages dominated by rabbits, squirrels. It's gonna be way more dear kills than mammoth kills. The bigger the

Yeah, I was gonna ask, is there any evidence like average size of like a Clovis group, Like how many people would be.

Eh, this guy just tried to answer that question.

How many.

We've been working on this laprel Clovis site in Wyoming for how we worked on it for a decade, opened up the site in twenty fourteen. A few years ago we decided we try to actually chase out how big this is. The site's very ten to fifteen feet deep, so it's not like you can just walk over and chase out the artifacts and say like, okay, the site's

Hm and nothing could feed them for a month.

Yeah, but that mammoth, I don't think they ate much of it. That's that's my interpretation was that this mammoth, it was largely an anatomical order when it was excavated, meeting the bones, it's still sort of laid out in anatomical order, So it wasn't heavily butchered if they if they did butcher it, they did not move any bones. So it's possible like and all these.

Called gauntless methods.

Yeah, yeah, no, they certainly the certainly could have filated a lot of meat off of this mammoth. But in all these house areas that we dug, we dug four of them, the only mammoth we got was ivory, and they were working the ivory. But we have no no rib fragments, no footbones. And we also have a lot of evidence for use of other big animals, mostly bison around these in these houses. So they're sitting next to this big dead elephant. It's a subadult's probably in its twenties.

So what do you big of that? I guess you don't. Who knows.

There's a lot of animals, And I mean, like when you all butcher animals, right, like, you can kind of stop whenever you can. You can always get a little bit more marrow out of the animal or do or you can like maybe you want to take the liver or whatever. Well, a lot of times you don't do that right because you don't need to same thing here.

You want and move on do the gourmet butchery.

Yeah, you know, you hear people talk about and when I say people, I mean like people in the discipline that you're in. Right now, I'm holding in my hand. If you're watching, I'm holding my hand a Clovis point that's half to don d a knife blade. So I'm doing some devil's advocacy here. So what we know if you look at the archaeological record, this is half the DOWNTO wouldn't handle with sinews. Okay, the sinews ride away, the wood rots away, and all you have is the

Like it.

It vert like I can almost go out and say, like, it doesn't happen the ju lane highway. Yes, yeah, but I'm saying out right out yeah, encountering all this fresh dead stuff, if you wanted me to produce a dead thing, it'd be much more like I would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wander around. So I found it, you know what I'm saying. So I've always laughed at but that's like an idea, is that is that they were just finding them laying around.

Everyone And if you did find one, would you go shoe that's a good eating I don't think so.

Yeah. I mean I've had this argument with colleagues, right they're like this this this site we're digging laprell, there's this dead mammoth there. There's not a clovise point in it. There's a Clovis Point about forty feet away from it. You're yeah, people said, yeah, somebody we paid to dig.

Seriously, yeah, in an excavation, know, yeah, forty ft away.

It's a big sight. Is this camp. There's this dead mammoth in this really cool camp around it, right, and that the the Clovise point is in the camp area. But people were not in with it, not in the mammoth. People will say to me, how do you know that mammoth wasn't scavenge? And the argument I make is exactly what you just made, which is there a hell of a lot more opportunities to exploit a live mammoths than

But that Yeah, but they've been dealing with them for They've been dealing with them for generations and thousands of miles.

I'm on your side, man, I mean, I think people they were they but their right, they have like one hundred year generation.

Because they were there's mamoson Siberia. Absolutely, they'd know no like, they would know no reality. They would know no reality in which even their most distant ancestor wasn't dealing with them.

I would say even if they came into the America's and had never seen a mammoth, they would really quickly learn learn how to expertly prey on that animal, and they would enjoy the hell out of it, in part because of the danger, in part because you bring down all this meat. You can make your life for all your friends better. You can use that for social capital. You get a lot of prestige you bring down an animal like that. Right, So yeah, I very much think

Right, we see this. This is how I've explained at various times of people is like you can find isolated instances of what it might have been like for them. Because when you look at when whaler's or like as soon as trans oceanic shipping and whalers started hitting these islands that no one had ever been on, like, no one found the say shells until transoceanic shipping, Like no one found it. There's one mammal of fruit bat like one. It's so far out there, like no mammal had found

Yeah.

This the survival of giant tortoises on the Seychelles, the survival of giant tortoises and the Galapagos, both things and both both the same thing in both cases. Right, no humans, no historic period.

We just filled our boat like with live ones.

So we about the knife question. You know, I did a study with Dave Kilby and Bruce Huckle and others looking at this question of Clovis's knives and the idea of whether you know, Clovis points could actually kill a mammoth or not. And and one thing we looked at

Well, it takes in their hand the whole time, presuming right, like.

At the Knocko mammoth, you've got eight of these inside the animal. And by the way, you keep asking about like artifacts embedded in the bone, and mammoth bone that has been found twice I think in the Upper Paralytic of Europe. At the layer site, which is a mammoth kill in Arizona, there are two Clovis points right between the ribs of them, right, we'd expect them to find them,

Right. That is a good point that if you got that big old pile on them, guts and shit, you know that if you had stabbed them in there, you might not retrieve them out. I mean, I've cut my hand on broad heads I couldn't find inside deer.

Yeah, and especially if they have a foreshaft, right, because the fore shaft detaches in its way in the body cavity. And if you know one thing interesting about butchering mamot's, if they fall on one side. Forget about that stiff. Yeah, it really only but like one side of the animal, because if you can't turn it over right, so if you shot it from that side, you might lose every weapon that went in from that side.

What are their tools did Clovis people have? Like was there anything that would be redundant if you were to use that as a knife? Like do we already know?

Oh?

They had a knife sort of thing.

Yeah, it's it.

I mean, oh, Brodie, can you can you run me another hair and do?

Yeah?

You didn't grab did you bring my bone? My bone shafts down?

The little white ones?

Keep grabbing those, see you guys in a minute. Brody's getting the workout. We've got a why don't sit in that chair.

It's a pretty great sample of Clovis tools from this Laprell site we keep talking about, Uh, you know, stone age toolkits don't actually change a ton between Clovis and like the recent pass on the planes. You need the same stuff. You need stuff to cut things with, you need stuff to poke holes with, you need stuff to scrape with. It's like basically the three things that stone tools do. So stone knives and Clovis as sandwiches and

In fact, you find them in an old one like one point eight million years old, the oldest choppers, and you find them in Clovis too.

I'd say one underappreciated aspect of these hunter gathered toolkits, the stuff to they close with. This is what I studied primarily for my dissertation and that's scrapers, so you just a stone scraper retouched it on one end. You stick it into a handle to get some leverage, and it's what used to scrape dry high to make it

I would say there is one knife form possibly which is the ultra thin Byface, which is a really really beautifully made, super thin bifacial knife that we've found a few of, the prowl. They're more commonly associated with Folsom, which follows Clovis in the West, but there are non Clovis examples, probably knives.

Oh yeah, I have a confession to make in all my casual Joe below reading about Clovis hunters and fulsome hunters I had never heard of what I'm holding in my hand until I was looking at that chart hanging at your office. Like then Meton sends me some of these these are out of Uh, these are replicas of some pieces that came out.

Of Ohio, I believe Sheridan Cave.

Yeah, I'd never even heard of this. When I opened the package up, I thought it was some kind of little point. But this is like a piece. This is a piece of a Clovis toolkit. That is, people debate what the hell this was?

Right?

Yeah, talk about that. Can you get a good on that? Phil You're getting it looks great? Uh, just to give it quick a little more analysis. It's there's this bevel cut into it and it's strided like it's caught like you wanted to just going out on a limb here, like you wanted to make it a little more grippy. All right, Michael.

So these are bone rods, commonly called bone rods. They've been found in a lot of clovi including the Clovis Typesite has a really beautiful example of one of these. I've only found one in my career, was that the powers to hematite.

Corey, what kind of bones.

I'm guessing it was a piece of cortical bone, like a long bone from a bison. Not exactly sure. I don't know what these are, but my assumption is that it has something to do with the weaponry system powers Too. This okre mine is, for whatever reason, just completely filled

When you say weaponry system, you mean it was linked to the Clovis point somehow, or.

Perhaps using the hafting system or something like that.

Yeah, you could see this as a four cheft somehow, right, the Clovis point there and then some other kind of wedge on the other side.

Yeah, a guy online figured it out. I was that guy figures out a lot I saying, So I got to about different dudes debating it, right, and there's a dude saying that, like if you wedge that thing and when you're trying to I couldn't. He didn't have any visuals, but basically saying like he wedged it on the hafting process and then as you lash that piece it like titans.

That was his take on it.

It like it tightens the spear point. But he didn't have any pictures to explain what the hell he was talking about. But it's like, I had never heard of that thing.

They're not common, you know. There's in nineteen thirty six in the Clovis site when they found the first mammoth remains in Clovis Points, they had one of these in the mammoth bone bed, but it's not common to find them in mammoth bum beds. That that might be the only.

Case because it's like also I imagine, because it's organic and ship hauls it away or it rots.

If you have bone preserved, these will be deserved if they were there and they were left there. But again, like nice functional implements, which these appear to be right, they don't appear to be broken. People tend not to leave these things behind. Pretty sure there were some of these in the Anziki.

Yeah, and then the East Winnachi site. There's several of these associated with, like, I don't know how many points are from there, a couple dozen Clovis points. It seems to be consistently associated with weaponry, though. The only other theory I've heard about these is dog sleds or something.

That's That was Gramley's argument about East and I think those were bi beveled, so they didn't have a point on one end. They had a bevel this way and a bevel an alternate bevel on the other side. And Gramley argued that they were lashed together to make it the runner on the heads. That's really silly idea.

Come on, do you ever find evidence of clodest points being picked up by ancient humans, like five thousand years later and they find a use for them in all of a sudden, there's a clothes point in with like a woodland site somewhere.

Yes, I know one example off the top of my head, and I'm pretty sure everybody cites this one example. I've actually never tracked down the citation to it, but I've heard over and over again my entire career that somebody found a fulsome point of Pueblo.

Yes, yeah, that's what I mean.

That's the one example of that like happening like.

An Sazi what what so the so called honestas your ancient puebloans that some pueblo had one where some dude's like, look at that, brought it home.

M I think everyone's everyone's into old stuff, right, That's why I'm into archaeology. I think we have to assume people had a fascination for the past.

Yeah, I bring home old shell casings. It wouldn't bring home a new shell casing from If I find a straight ball shellcasing that's got some holes rotten through it, I'm going to bring that sucker homered percent. Man, you got if I found one of my buddies, I'm not bringing it home.

I got a spot in your garage where you just stack your old or your treasures.

Look at there's a twenty seven nozzler case. It's got to be you know, we could be up to fifteen years old.

Yeah, I'm bringing that home.

Steve, Like, like twenty minutes ago, you asked about the absence of evidence for like hunting all these megafaunas. Yeah, can I say something about that?

Say everything you want to say about that.

So when you talk about like the giant beaver, right, those guys, my understanding is are living in the northeast, in the Midwest. In terms of what are evidence for Clovis subsistence in that part of the world, we have about two bones that happen to preservative fire and they're both caribou. Bottom line is there's this huge blank spot in what Clovist people were doing in that part of the country where that animal lives. We basically have no evidence for anything any subsistence.

At all because it's not suitable to preserve.

Right, right, So is the absence of evidence of hunting of giant beaver meaningful? Probably not right. We can't really interpret it one way or another. And a lot about the Clovis record of finnel uses that way. Like if you say, well, there's no evidence for Clovis use of sloth, well, would you expect to see it in a mammoth kill site? Probably not right, And that's what most of our sites are. So is the absence of sloth and mammoth kill sites interesting?

That that, that's one of the biggest smoke and guns in my view on the overkill hypothesis. We get Wrangle Island off Siberia. No one found it man and man stayed there till four thousand years ago. Yeah.

I remember reading uh, Paul Martin's book Twilight of the Mammoths, and I don't I forget where it is in the book. It's either at the beginning or the end. But he tracks the spread of humans around the globe and lists all the stuff that went missing at the exact same time, and he get through to the end of it. I just remember reading that segment and just being like, God, it's almost too.

Perfect, Like how did It's remarkable?

Yeah?

I mean like I put that book down and it was like you just watched a video on YouTube that's meant to convince you of something.

You know.

It was just like I don't nothing else makes sense to me. Now you know what else is great about it? As you say, what about Africa? Doesn't happen in Africa? And it's cause get like co evolution.

Was.

Yeah, there was no there was no sudden arrival. Yeah, the animals there had been like hey that little thing, you see something walking around two feet watch your ass? Like word got out.

So what would you guys say then, if you're leaning towards human cause, what would you say to the people that are like, well, it was like the climate was changing, the environment was changing, Like these animals just couldn't adapt.

The climate environment had been changing for millions of years prior to that. That'd be my response.

You know, the North American and South American cases, they're especially tricky because it happens at this really wild time when we're coming out of the glaciation. Right, these massive mile mile thick sheets of ice are melting, back sea

And there's the other thing is that as dramatic as that seemed, these species had survived other cycles.

Like that, dozens of them.

I mean, there were there were interglacial periods where sea levels were hot, like right now you hear a lot about rising sea levels. There were there were periods between glaciations during the Ice Age when like the Pedestal, when the Statue of Liberty would be standing in water, like the Pedestal would be underwater during some of these periods, and the ship didn't go extinct then yep, yeah, And that.

Was that was the most recent interglacial we call Stage five E one hundred and twenty thousand years ago was warmer than today. There are hippos living in England, for example. Yeah, yeah, and that was one of many previous interglacials. It happened

That's a good point, man, Yeah.

Right, So it's hard for a predator to drive its prey to extinction. It can only do that if it can switch to something else. Right. So, what I would argue if we're talking about bison is that in the Great Plains, there really weren't good switching options for people who lived in this part of the world that could really sustain, Like you couldn't drive bison to extinction and then switch and basically make your entire economy based on

Mhmm. You know what comes out of like contemporary biology that what you're talking about makes me think of is if you look at the Southern caribou herds. So we used to have cariboo. I mean when I say used to, I mean even in the nineteen hundreds, right, Yeah, you know in nineteen twenty, nineteen thirty, you had I don't want to say decent numbers, but you had caribou in Washington, you had caribou and the Idaho Panhandle. You had caribou in Montana.

Minnesota, and Maine.

And I've heard biologist when talking about like, well, what was different? Is it be as human landscape development and landscape changes happened, it allowed whitetail deer and moose from logging practices and road building. It allowed whitetail deer and moose to move into these areas. And it made it that wolves could sustain themselves because in these areas they had like very limited number of caribou and there wasn't

Yeah, that's super interesting.

It's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have something to fall back on, yep, right, otherwise you get stuck in that predator prey cycle.

Yeah.

And I really think you can explain large mammals survival across the globe with that one principle. I mean, you guys live in a place. When we live in a place where large mammal we're famous for large mammals, right, We've got bison and elk and moose, prong horn deer. Why are these spaces famous for large animals. Well, because

Yeah, that's an interesting points you look at like Appalachi or whatever. They had bison, they had elk, they had wolves, they had cougars, and for a long time they didn't. And then you have these like spots, like you know, the Northern Rockies, which was able to hang onto like a relatively intact ecosystem, and you go up to Alaska and they were able to hang on to like their their like suite of megafauna survive the initial human Pulse's good theory.

I like that.

What percentage of people in your field believe in the blitzkrieg hypothesis and how has that changed during your career?

So I'd like to I wish we could answer this independently, So I'd love to hear what has to say.

You can both write down a number.

The first thing I'll say is that when I was in graduate school, Paul Martin, who was the real champion of that, was a friend of mine. He was retired. He was really nice to me, and I go and I'd go up to his office and I'd argue with him all the time about this. I didn't believe in it at all until I left and did some science, and I ultimately decided Paul was right.

It wasn't because he was nice to you.

What I wrote a review on that Twilight of the Mammoth for Dan's class. I remember, you know, you'd write the book reviews and he'd write a couple of sentences at the bottom and the first I'll always remember this, The first thing he wrote on there was Paul Martin was a delightful dinner companion.

Enough, he was a great guy. I'm going to answer. I'm going to say somewhere between one and two percent and believe this. Oh wow, what would you say, Spencer?

No, yeah, I mean that's it.

You're talking to it in dangerous She's here, Steve right in the studio.

So the numbers going down.

I think.

You know. The point you raised of where's the evidence? Like if people drove horse to extinction, why do you have two horse kill sites? Is an argument that really resonates with a lot of people. Uh huh, they don't really. I would say a lot of people haven't thought about the nature of the sample and the sample size that we have. Yeah, and that maybe that's actually quite a bit of evidence for horse hunting.

But yeah, I'll say, like I mean to start with, like very a very low percentage of archaeologists actually study this stuff, right, like Paley Indians. There's a very small segment of archaeology alongside all the complex of people and

I do.

I love discovering stuff, and so everyone's constantly wanting to push it back. And I think there's a little bit of wishful thinking there, like did we really find the oldest? It's kind of a bummer, right, It's like an existential crisis for people that have invested a lot of their time and energy into finding the oldest thing to be like, well we did it. Now what it's a bit of a it's a bit of a bumber to some folks.

I think, now, if the number is one or two percent of that ninety eight ninety nine percent, how divided is that block of thinking?

Like are they in terms of the cause? Yeah?

Like like are there could you subdivide that quickly into a couple of different camps or well, I'm just curious about.

The I don't think so. I mean, I think Spencer's right that, like most people aren't invested in this. Like if you if you're a Maya archaeologist studying you know, pyramids and things in the Guatemalan jungle, your experience with overkills. You know what you learned as a graduate student, then what you're teaching your intro archaeology class.

Right, Yeah, I.

Would guess that most of those people believe there's some sort of climatic and ecological explanation. The other contenders, by the way, is something called hyper disease. Have you heard about this? Yeah?

What about what about that?

It was just like a combination of factors that Yeah, that's all the time.

It's a really good point, right, Like these are not what we call mutually exclusive. They're all they all could be operating simultaneously. And and there's a fourth.

Who's that dude that's real into those little micro blasts or whatever. He's micro glass.

Richard Firestone was the original guy.

You know, it's funny. I did a tour of the Lindenmeyer site, and the day I was at Lindenmeyer, linden Meyer's big, folesome site. I'm just telling the audience here

So the guy that came up with that idea, I think is what was my master's advisor, Jason LaBelle. I believe him. The big exposure of White River group there, it's visible for miles in every direction. And yeah, it's right at the margin of the you know the high planes in the Colorada Piedmont. It's kind of at this eco tone. It makes it all makes sense to me. It's like it's the biggest it's the biggest folsome site that exists.

Capital When I was there, there was a dude because they've done all this stratigraphy there, so they've done a lot of dating on stuff, and there was a guy there collecting those little things. He's looking forward to prove that it was like that the place to scene extinctions were some kind of bombardment of comets. Comets killed them all.

The list What god, I did a study of that.

Okay, tell me tell people about that idea.

Oh, go ahead, well where yeah comments?

Okay, then we can get into the Brody's idea about a bunch of shit was happening all at once.

I think it was the I think it was two thousand and seven. This paper was published in what we call pen ASS Proceedings sounds like proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences PNASS, where they they had they had taken these collected sediments from a bunch of terminal places, the end of the ice age sites, and they would take these sediment columns. So they just collect sediments, you know, in very fine intervals through sort of the place to see Holocene transition.

What year was this going on?

Was published in two thousand and seven.

See that's when I was there two thousand and six, two I was working on I was there around two thousand and five, two thousand and six.

So they found consistently at a certain time point I want to say, twelve thousand and seven hundred years before present approximately, they claim to find high concentrations of weird things. Those things included little tiny metallic spheres. They call them titano magnetites. It's like iron oxides with titanium, little tiny

For what that's worth, Where does that idea stand right now? Is it fashionable in your community?

No? No, it's complete. It's funny. You know. We thought that their early kind of pushback against it would make it go away. It it didn't. They're still publishing papers and support of it. And I would say the vast majority of people in geology and archaeology don't take it seriously. I mean, a massive extraterrestrial impact that drives an extinction over two continents doesn't leave like a whisper of dust.

If it's two percent right now, believe in Blitzkreek, what was it twenty years ago? What do you think it'll be twenty years from now.

That's a good.

It's a really good question.

When I break down these these arguments and you kind of look at the timing, I would say that we're like in a post a post Clovis first world longer than we were ever in a Clovis first world. At this point, the Clovis First paradigm was basically like let's say nineteen seventy three with Paul Martin's paper that was.

The height up to, like a pinnacle up to basically.

Like nineteen ninety seven when Monte Verde became accepted as a pre Clovis site, that was kind of like the Clovis First era. Ever since monte Verde came out, it's basically just been gaining more acceptance that there was stuff before Clovis.

So guys aren't a endangered species.

You're like the guys at the record store saying there's no good music anymore.

We're are habitat fragmented. There's like a relic population in Kansas, some in Alaska.

I have this of maybe schizophrenic perspective about it, Like sometimes I look at the record and I kind of feel like Neo in the matrix, like I can see something that nobody else can see, like, oh my god, it's so obvious that Clovis is first. And then half the time I feel like a guy with a tenfoil hat, like believing in crazy conspiracies, like why the hell can I see what everybody else sees?

What would need to happen you convince everyone else to agree with you.

Oh no, that'll never happen. I mean archaeology, the record is too crappy. We all look at the same evidence and interpret it like completely differently. It's pretty amazing. That way, we're never gonna get consensus.

There's a thing that could happen that would work the other way for sure.

Oh yeah.

The thing that could happen work that a way is someone finds a bulletproof seventeen thousand year old site. Yeah bulletproof, Yeah, yeah, they sure absolutely.

I would love for that to happen. Honestly, it would be great to open up this whole other world and we knew nothing about a whole other record to study. I just I don't think that's happened yet.

You know, if I had to crystal ball it now, I always put it like this, just to make a graphic, like God has a gun to your head and he says what happened to the megafauna? And he knows he's ominiscient, and you have to guess right or else you die. So the So the screws are to you, there's no

So vans Haynes made that argument, and he had good He worked on these sites in the San Patrio rebellion, Arizona, these beautiful Clovi sites, really well preserved surfaces, and he thought there's really clear evidence that when people were there at Murray Springs and Laner and Blackwater draw that there was a drought and that these these mammoth populations were depressed.

I also feel like we should We haven't talked about Alaska yet.

Oh him, use some Alaska stuff, man.

So like there are pre Clovia sites in the Western Hemisphere, they're in Alaska.

That's what it makes sense.

There's clear evidence of human occupations, clear camp sites about fourteen years old. They contained mammoth remains, they contained these little microblades, seemingly among the first technologies that people brought here from Northeast Asia.

You see the same technology in Northeast Asia.

Yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect for the first people in the Western Hemisphere. They're carrying Asian technology and living in Alaska.

And exactly when you'd expect to sam too.

And that's a good point, man, And it coincides with what we did a study back in twenty fifteen looking at when megafaunal populations decline between Alaska, United States south of the ice sheets in South America, basically slightly before we find archaeological evidence for human occupation in Alaska, megafauna starts to decline to extinction. And that's important because when you look at the archaeological survey in Alaska that's been done compared to that that's been done south of the

And they're normal.

Yeah, and they're normal.

It's not weird shit. It's like chipstone around hearth features, butchered animal bones. It's normal stuff. And what we call distreet discrete stratigraphic levels, meaning they're just like really clear occupations if you're to look through them.

Yeah.

Yeah, So those Do you think those people hit Alaska and just stayed or did they, like.

Some states, get absorbed into Clovis or.

I would say the ancestors of Clovis, Some stayed and some move south.

Yeah, have you ever been to or looked at the stuff from the MASA site?

I have the book. I've never seen this stuff. That's cool.

That's not as old though.

No cool.

I went to that masa. It's badass, man.

Yeah.

You can just picture people wanting to get up on that thing and look around.

You know.

I didn't go on top of my sat and looked at it, you know. But that's not old, right.

It's place to see it. It's it's like maybe twelve.

Seven sticks in my head or I don't know something.

Yeah, maybe two thousand years after people arrive in Alaska and it's probably you know, the argument is those are planes bison hunters coming back back north fist in the fact form.

That's what That's what they had introduced me to, is this idea of backfill. Ye like that you get the initial waves of people coming through, but then at some point in time people move back to their direction.

Yeah, migrations kind of like quitous clouds up the record.

What part of the America has moved on from Clovis the quickest, in which ones held out the longest.

Probably the Great Basin was the quickest. It's Spencer. Spencer mentioned this some really old stemmed projectile points that that some Great Basin archaeologists argue are as old, if not older than Clovis. You also have Clovis points in the Great Basin, but there's some very old old dates on these stemmed projectile points in the Great Basin. I don't know that we have really good age control on post Clovis projectile point types except in the Rocky Mountains. And

So there was this you know, major extinction event with large animals like what happened to the Clovis culture, Like when that extinction event happened, did they just what happened to them? Did they evolve into other cultures?

Did they?

I think it's pretty clear now. I mean it's it's Fulsome in the Rocky Mountains at least, and then other regions the United States have these other post Clovis fluted point traditions.

Because when you talk, when you give them these different names, like Clovis Falsome, it's like there was this people and.

Then there was this Yeah, we should you know what I make that distinction? I mean they weren't Clovis wasn't a people. It was a stone tool technology.

Where did cell phone people come from?

Yeah? And the way I look at it and like this is like getting into the realm of handwaving. But fullso points are a lot smaller than Clovis points if you put them side by side. You oftentimes don't get that when you're just looking at books and illustrations of this stuff. But full some points are generally at least half the size of Clovis points.

I'm not gonna make it.

Demanded something smaller than.

Well, right here, Clovis points have a distinct function from Folsome points. Maybe they're a thrusting Spearit not an Atlatal dart. You introduce another weaponry system into your toolkit and they're used at the same time.

And that also effect the culture, right Like, so, I.

Mean Clovis points basically disappear when when the mamos disappeared, So they're probably a pretty closely linked thing that Clovis points were used to haunt mammas, and then once mammos were gone, didn't have much need for him anymore, and people started making these little falsome points a lot more often.

You don't need to hold I was just showing it.

I want to look at you.

You very quickly start seeing regional diversification and in the way people are making a living right. And one thing, I visited this site fiendal Mundo in Mexico, and I visited another site where they found some Clovis points in the surface. One thing that really struck me there was here, you're looking at this Mexican Clovis point. Right. You drop that in Wyoming, you wouldn't know it's in Mexico. You drop it in South Carolina, you wouldn't know it's from Mexico.

Right.

You start to see this super regional specialization. But in Clovis, everybody's doing the same damn thing everywhere, and it's it's really really striking. You go to Missouri at the Kimswick site, you've got a dead mast, it on full big Clovis points, Mexico, Wyoming.

Dudes had it figured out that.

Was the main way to make a living.

Apparently what was going on on the west coast, you know with the kel you had the Kelp Highway theory, Like what archaeology is there at the same time as closed.

Yeah, that's a really good question. So the first thing I should note is, you know, the coastal migration thing has been around for a long time. The idea has been around since least the nineteen forties that this was another way to get around the glaciers. It really became in vogue in nineteen ninety seven when mona verity was accepted to be pre Clovis and real because the argument was in order to get them down there that early. The ice ree corder simply wasn't an option to the

You're not seeing different technologies at the same time as Clovis was.

Going on, or we don't really have anything Clovis age over there. The closest thing is maybe on the Channel Island in California. There's very early humans are getting out there pretty early.

I don't think there's any weaponry associated. Now.

There's some really funky points out there, but but that stuff's kind of hard to date because you're dating off in marine shells and there's a lot of old carbon in the ocean, so these dates tend to be too old. There's there's a very famous human remains.

From Prince Wales.

Well not you're thinking about Alaska. No, I'm talking about on the Channel Islands. Oh yeah, Arlington Springs woman. But she had a lot of marine resources in her diet, which means the dates are too old. But it was kind of like it was basically a Clovis age date before you did the correction for that. But we really don't have a good a good sample of dated stuff from the Pacific coast. I will say there are Clovis

But you're also looking for sites and coastal rainforest.

Yeah, it's a really challenging environment.

You know, you know it makes me optimistic though. I was with the geologist up there who works in Alaska, and you know, you always heard when people talk about the Kelp Highway theory or the coastal migration theory, everybody's like, yeah, but all that stuff's underwater. But he was, he has these shoreline maps, tons of it's not because the ice a static rebound, that's right. So when you had all that ice on top of the I'm not telling you, I'm telling folks at home when all that ice was

Yep.

So it's like there could be stuff there. Well, I mean yeah, I mean, like, like what I'm saying is you can't just say, well, it's all underwater.

Yeah, I have no doubt that there's some archaeology underwater. I think it's true they've.

Found some underwater, but I'm saying it's not uniformly all at the same depth. It's like a real hodgepodge of of like you know, the the geological history is a real hodgepodge of stuff that's way up in the forest or down underwater. So what I'm saying is I might find me an old ass site.

Well, there's that notion, right that some of some of the isostatic rebounds kind of kept some of these coastal areas above water, but also why would you expect that people would never maybe go in inland for a night and form a campsite, right, I mean, basically the assumption is that people are just living on the beach because, yeah, dude, have you been there? The beach is nice. Sometimes Like it's not that it's nice, it's.

It's an overwhelming abundance of food.

It's not easy to get, not easy to it's in the water.

No.

All right, but but dude, listen, I'm telling you, get into the shellfish and the salmon. Go talk to anybody who lives there now.

All right, but but picture yourself at the end of the ice age, and you know, you come down into Seattle, and that's like, we could live on shellfish and ignore these mastodons and bison. Ye or after these big animals have a shellfish.

Don't hurt. But they've had coastal No. But but they've had coastal cultures there. They've had coastal cultures there continuously.

I get that's the argument.

Always more abundant, who were always more abundant than interior peoples, and even many of the interior peoples and were going to Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, many of the interior peoples are still reliant on anadromous fish like marine resources. You can't ignore it.

And that part of the world is a good reason why you do that. Now, Yeah, I'm saying in the place to see, that's probably not your best option. Also, if we're talking about that, look, let's let's look at this first argument. Let's look at this idea. People are have thousands of years of coastal adaptation. Where's that the archaeological record. That's an assumption. Two people are living in high population densities. Where are they? Why can't we find them? Three?

Still hm.

You know, I think part of the success of the Kelp Highway hypothesis is that it's a good marketing campaign. And I want to I want to I want to rebrand the Ice Free Corridor to the Meat Highway.

Oh. I was pretty enamored by the Kelp Highway thing too. I mean, it's a really elegant theory and I'm not I'm really not shitting on it at all. It's it's a cool it's cool.

Yeah, it makes a ton of sense when you think about I mean, plus, here's the thing. You can like the life in kelp beds, and then you can eat the kelt.

I mean it makes sense until you look at the until you look at the evidence.

But meat versus shellfish? But what what what's saying that they weren't killing large marine mammals.

Yeah, in fact that if there's a coastal thing, that's what I think they would be doing is focusing their effort on large marine mammals mostly you know, seals, maybe some whales.

And being reminded of like Ben Potter's study, that of city and sourcing study. You probably know more details about it than I do. But basically, an archaeologist in Alaska, great archaeologists out of out of Fairbanks named Ben Potter, did a big subsidian sourcing study of all the oldest

Oh, I'll settle on this. If I took your ass and dropped you off somewhere on like wherever, Okay, some remote area in southeast Alaska, I've been there well, and you know what, you know where, I wouldn't wind up finding you up in the mountains. I would reach down on the beach, getting fat off, kept green, laying and clams.

Until I got enough expertise to effectively hunt bear and caribou.

Dude, that's a great point. Yeah, No, I got you. No, what you're saying is good, but it is. It is an enticing idea. And then I don't want to go

Terms of the availability of both migration roots.

Yeah, like, was there a green verdant ice free corridor?

It's a really there is now, right, So at some point there had to be. And the question is when does that go from being a barrier something that humans can actually traverse. That's a question for both migration corridors. It's a really challenging thing to answer because you know, if we're thinking about a ten mile space, we can study that by drilling a core in a lake and studying the DNA or the pollen out of it. We're

Nine to twelve hundred is what we looked at.

That's a length. That's a length of it, right, So like, how do you know when that thing is open versus closed over a stretch that humans can actually migrate? It's incredibly challenging, and if you date different geologic deposits in different places, you get different answers, and there's a lot of disagreement. The dates that I generally see are anywhere from it was open from fourteen thousand, five hundred, or

Can I bolster your Can I bolster your argument?

I'd love that.

Think about this, man. This is the thing I think about when I think about the Kelp Highway too, is let's say, let's okay, let's say the Ice Free Corridor was real shitty and it wasn't great, but you were just you were making a moon shot, right. You're dying of curiosity, so you start picking into there, and why would someone do that? You'd like why would anyone take the risk. They wouldn't want to go into marginal habitat. But think about this, let's go back to the coastal theory.

Yeah, it's fart.

And they would have had calving, like calving glaciers, and it would have been like, let's go in the north, let's check it up. Yeah, So someone there has to be a thing where someone's like so dying of curiosity that they have and they have to have the faith to be like, I have a feeling I don't know why, I just have a feeling that if you go and in thirty miles, maybe we'll find a place where it's not a hundred wall foot wall of ice.

Yeah. Maybe the elephant in the room is also that it would have required a pretty sophisticated technology of maritime travel, right that we really don't have any evidence that existed at that time. We found Australia, though that's a much smaller task than circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean, the North Pacific.

Yeah, Australia. We're talking about maybe fifty kilometers of tropical yeah.

Chip Shaw swim that.

The other thing I think about with this with coastal versus inland is I've like, I've only watched one season of that show alone, but it was a season where this dude, it spent some time with some Siberian rangdeer herders.

If you could string up a net and catch a hundred salmon and.

One you thinking of salmon runs, you're not thinking of clam beds. Like it's two different arguments. What people did I don't know, but like you're not thinking of clam beds, you're not thinking of celt beds, and you're not thinking of salmon runs.

All these things live in the water and really cold.

What no, No, in that area and that area clam beds. Yeah, but there's a twenty foot tide swing.

You could walk across a mile of some of that stuff without hitting water.

You know, it's nothing but food. It is nothing but food on those clam beds.

I think that people are driven by package size.

Giant clan beds. I don't think it was. Yeah, there's a lot to it. There's a lot to it, like the date stuff, But the food abundance thing. I think that the food abundance thing, I think is overwhelming amounts of food. So I don't think that that was the problem.

You know what's interesting about this right is we're arguing about evidence that doesn't exist in both cases.

That's what makes it to stop.

Is there any explanation for what would have kept that ice free corridor open.

Just the end of the ice age, there was Lauren Tide and the cordieron sheets just kind of gradually received from each other, received completely until six thousand years ago or something because they grew out of Hudson Bay and eventually the last of it disappear on that time ago. But yeah, basically by the time it reached a certain point like winter temperatures wouldn't have pushed it together again, and then it was open.

Do we have any Clovis age skeletons of humans?

Yes, what he's talking about?

What are they like?

The Anzi boy from just West My apologies for asking two years old, the anti child and they just found out he was His mother had a diet that was very similar to what they find with large cats. Mm hmm, choosing big game.

So how many Clovis humans do we have?

One that's it?

There's there's one from Mexico that's roughly that age from a cave in Mexico, Is there, daw Steve? But it's not clearly it's not clearly Clovis and Antik is the one.

Yeah, it was found in the sixties or seventies and Will saw Montana and a bunch of ochre and a bunch of projectile points.

Yeah, so her mother the reconstruction was at least forty percent mammoth in her in his mother's diet, which is a huge amount.

And this pisses off met and Aaron and Meltzer because people are like, see, they killed all the mammoths, and they're like, well, no, I can see that they were eating mammoths, but how is this telling me they killed them all.

For the record, we liked both Meton and Meltzer a whole lot, And it's good to contextualize, like we're literally talking about like a couple thousand years and maybe a half dozen sites of disagreement, right, It's just that those, yeah, a couple thousand years and half dozen sites have really big implications for these two issues about how people got here and whether or not they killed off these animals.

Well, I already told you that this is the primary thing I think about was that quote. Was that Dan Flore's quote. It wasn't his quote, but he told us that quote. The reason the reason they're fighting so much is there's so.

Little yeah, exactly talking about academics. The reason that arguments are so impassionate because there's so little.

I've heard that attributed to.

But there is a lot. But here I want to like this should we should have said at the beginning, at the very end. But where this becomes political, and where it becomes social, and where it becomes cultural, well it's a lot of places. But one of the places it becomes this is is it innately human that we destroy our environment? Right? Is it sort of this lately human ancient practice that we drive things to extinction? Is it just who we are and we've always done it

Been just because something's human universally human, which I think that tendency is, doesn't make it. It doesn't addicate us from more responsibility to deal with it.

No, of course, not like slavery is inherently human.

It's a universal practice that because we live in a liberal democracy that decided it was a bad thing we got rid of. I should know, like, how many places in the world, for instance, have thriving large game populations outside of the American West Many. And the only reason we have him here right is because there's state sanctioned conservation laws that have allowed that to happen. Otherwise we'd

He with one more way, this where the rubber meets the road. If you turn around and look above your head, you're going to see a war club. That war club was given to us by a guest. It didn't sit where you're sitting, but he sat in that seat in our old studio named Taylor Keene. Okay, and Taylor Kean felt that part of this thing of like he would argue that human history in the New World goes back

It's an interesting debate. Let me contextualize it a little bit. So, until the Fulsome site was discovered, the widespread notion among people that studied this stuff was the Native Americans have only been here about three or four thousand years. Yeah, And when the Fulsome site came out and there's this revelatory thing that people have been here since the Ice Age, it was of enormous benefit to Native Americans because it

Six hundred and fifty human generations approximately.

So yeah, fast forward almost a century now, Now that thirteen thousand years old is no longer old enough, old enough, you have to keep pushing it back a little further. I just I think thirteen thousand years is a really long time, and it's certainly enough time to establish that you have some sort of patrimony over the land of this country. I don't quite understand the argument that it's not quite long enough to establish that. It's a really long time.

Yeah, the scientific study of the human past in North America has confirmed that the descendant communities today their ancestors were these people that they arrived six hundred and fifty human generations ago.

Anzik showed that.

Yeah, Anzick did show that another human remains. You know, if we look at if we go back to I assume you guys have ancestry in Europe, and we asked how long do we have ancestry in Europe? It's almost certainly less than that, because there have been multiple populations that have run over Europe repeatedly. So thirteen thousand years is longer than anybody in Europe. Most people in Europe could truly lay claim to some you know, places of homeland. It's a long damn time.

That's an interesting point. Do you know what two percent African?

I didn't know that? Who told me?

My wife tells me to keep that down because she's guy kind of oversell.

It's to get away with any linguistic turn the phrase.

She's like, I keep it under you keep it under your head. She doesn't wanted to impact my worldview.

You know.

Okay again, join today. I'm going to have you, guys tell people. I'm gonna remind everybody who you are. Then I'm going to have you tell people how to find your work and how to follow what you guys work on. So Todd Surrevel, the director of the Georgie C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, and Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archaeologist and an adjunct

I'm going to get so many photos off.

You know, I gotta tell people's story. So I walk into I walk into Spencer's office and the first thing that greets me, just laying on the floor is a giant the end of a giant dinosaur fever. So I said, what's that. He goes, that's a rock, and I said, I thought it was a big dinosaur bony. So that's what the guy that brought it to me thought was. And then he said, I gonna have it if I wanted. The guy that brought it just left it there. So it was not the dude that brought it.

But it was a very convincing dinosaur. Not a dinosaur, but it was very convincing.

Sitting there, sitting there on his floor. As it's not in the collections.

He didn't ask you to come out to his truck to look at it first.

I would have been so excited you would this thing. I would have been like, holy cow man, No, I got it. I'm rich. So how do people find your work? What should they check out? I have one of your books upstairs. The badger wa just got barker gulch. Yeah, I had to buy that sucker.

I brought one for you.

You did, Yeah, bought it on him.

I searched my name. You can find my website. Spell your name out, serve L s U r O v e LLL Okay, I do want to say that that my job is as director of the Prison Institute, is raising money to support archaeological research in our department, mostly other people, students, faculty, people like Spencer. So if you're interested in supporting the last breath of last dying breath of Clovis first archaeology, and people who believe in licensing extinctions,

Oh excellent, Yeah, you can just google me too. I've got some talks on YouTube. I got a research gate page where all my research goes. Also write a newsletter on substack called Social Stigma. It's about basically political issues and archaeology and anthropology. That's free. You want to subscribe to that.

That's interesting.

Good, Thanks guys, appreciate you coming on. Man, it's been fascinating.

Yeah, thank you, thank you,