Ep. 931: Eating Rotten Mammoths

Steven Rinella talks with Drs. David Meltzer and Metin Eren on: huge Clovis points; human mammoth scavenging; the overkill question; and more! Find their paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X26003317?via%3Dihub Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:07Steven Rinella?

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• 1:55Steven Rinella?

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• 2:20Steven Rinella?

  All right, man, we're here to talk about my all-time favorite subject. The subject that has enthralled me since I'd learned that it was a subject. Ice Age hunters, Clovis, Folsom, the first Americans, this subject. And my two favorite guys to talk about this subject are here. Dr. David Meltzer, who's the Henderson Morrison Professor of Pre-History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He's been on the show before a couple of times. And Dr. Metten Aaron, Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University, who has also joined us on the show before. And before we get into the main thing, well, let me say this. One would think that when talking about stuff from 15,000, 14,000, 13,000, 12,000 years ago,

• 3:04Steven Rinella?

  that it wouldn't change, that the understanding would be static at this point. But this is remains, and what's so enthralling about it is it remains a kind of like dynamic subject. New ideas, new findings. It changes. It's crazy to something that's that old, that our understanding of something that old could evolve. But it's like, it's a great intellectual exercise. Before we get into what your latest theories, your latest understandings of who these people were, what they did, how they lived, what they killed or didn't kill.

• 3:40Steven Rinella?

  Help me get, help me understand what I'm holding up right here. I'm holding up a, like what I would, what I'm holding up a Clovis point that's what, nine and a half inches long?

• 3:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, easily, yeah.

• 3:50Steven Rinella?

  And I saw it and I thought it was a novelty item, like when you're a little kid and you buy those giant chocolate bars or giant erasers. Do you know what I mean?

• 3:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:59Steven Rinella?

  Like tourist shops. But this is a mold, this is a

• 4:03Speaker 05

  A cast of

• 4:04Steven Rinella?

  Of a real thing.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 06

  Well, it's a real thing, but how do we know it wasn't 12,000 years ago, somebody wanted to make a giant chocolate bar?

• 4:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 06

  As a novelty.

• 4:12Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm wondering about.

• 4:13Speaker 06

  We don't know. We don't know. And unfortunately, the context of that find is not sufficient for us to really be able to tell.

• 4:20Steven Rinella?

  What an incredible specimen.

• 4:22Speaker 06

  Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, it's a Clovis point on steroids.

• 4:26Steven Rinella?

  I have a, you know, the people that do the archaeological drawings, he drew me a real life size one, but he drew me the wrong point. Because this would have been a much bigger, this would have been a much bigger.

• 4:36Speaker 06

  Look at the other ones that Metten brought.

• 4:38Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's right, yeah. So you, this would be for, I gotta be, uh,

• 4:46Steven Rinella?

  not everybody's watching this on video. Could, can one of you guys tell what we're looking at?

• 4:50Speaker 06

  Metten, go.

• 4:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm looking at a Clovis point, but what am I, what do I, what do I mean when I say I'm looking at Clovis point?

• 4:55Speaker 05

  It's a giant lance weapon tip. And we don't know what weapons they were using. But the one you're holding, like you said, is about nine, 10 inches. It's got a concave base, it's got straight, parallel sides. And the Clovis point has these channels on both faces, and those are called flutes.

• 5:15Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:16Speaker 06

  And think about those, to visualize it, think about World War I bayonets, right? A groove.

• 5:22Steven Rinella?

  There you go.

• 5:23Speaker 06

  Up each face.

• 5:24Steven Rinella?

  The old blood groove on a bayonet.

• 5:25Speaker 06

  Blood groove, groove, yes.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  And that was a hypothesis, actually, for the function of flutes for a long time, was that you stick your animal and blood shoots out those grooves. And the issue, though, is if you're attaching that to some sort of spear, right? You're gonna have lashings maybe, or some sort of adhesive, and so like

• 5:40Speaker 06

  It's not a good drink.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  It's not a good, yeah, exactly. Not a good groove for, for bloodletting. So there's been other hypotheses for why people fluted. But I don't think it's

• 5:50Steven Rinella?

  I know why they do it.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  No one has a, oh, why?

• 5:53Steven Rinella?

  Because, because the way they hafed it on there.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 5:56Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, no, that

• 5:57Steven Rinella?

  I don't know that. I don't know. It's just one of the things that get thrown out there.

• 6:00Speaker 06

  In the sense that that is a function, but was that the purpose? Was that the intended purpose of it? We don't know.

• 6:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, understood.

• 6:09Speaker 06

  Because a lot of people have made arguments about, well, you know, you're just showing off. Because putting a flute in, and Metten knows this more than anybody, really, because he's a master flint knapper.

• 6:21Speaker 06

  That's, that's the point at which it's most vulnerable to breakage, right? When you're making one of those points, when you're driving one of those flute flakes off, because what, Metten, they're 2 millimeters?

• 6:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'll point out, under Metten's instruction, I fluted one.

• 6:34Speaker 06

  Show the video, people.

• 6:35Steven Rinella?

  I mean, he kind of like, he pretty much set it up for me, you know, like, but I fluted one.

• 6:41Speaker 06

  You, you know what? And that's not easy.

• 6:44Steven Rinella?

  But he had, he had, he'd done all the prepping and set me up and went to practice shots and everything, so yes.

• 6:52Steven Rinella?

  The flute, one more, I want to get back to these different sizes and stuff. But when you pressure test these for strength, that's a detriment, right?

• 7:03Speaker 05

  The flutes, no, actually.

• 7:04Steven Rinella?

  The signature flute is not a structural detriment?

• 7:06Speaker 05

  No, in fact, it's an advantage. And then we published a paper 10 years ago on this, where what we showed was that fluted points

• 7:17Speaker 05

  actually can, they act like a shock absorber. So in the same way that a car, when it crashes into something, the front end crumples, protecting the people inside.

• 7:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  The base of a Clovis point, because it's thinner, because of the flutes, upon impact, it reduces the compression stress on the point and actually reduces the amount of breakage.

• 7:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 7:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. Now, that's a structural property of that shape with the flutes.

• 7:42Speaker 06

  With the flutes.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  Now, we don't know if that's why they made the flutes.

• 7:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  But when you have flutes on a point, you get that property.

• 7:50Speaker 06

  You don't have to understand the sort of mechanics of it and the engineering properties of it. But you understand that, well, you know what, if you flute that thing and it's thinner at the base, the points will be less damaged during use.

• 8:04Steven Rinella?

  Got it, yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  Right? Just like a baseball player, you know, in center field, you know, there's a high fly ball coming toward them. They're not calculating parabolas, right? And, and how it's going to come down at them, they're just running for the ball because they sort of intuitively understand that.

• 8:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, got it.

• 8:21Steven Rinella?

  You also brought

• 8:23Speaker 06

  The other end of the continuum, yes.

• 8:26Steven Rinella?

  Which is, so here I'm holding a Clovis point that's inch and an eighth

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe.

• 8:33Steven Rinella?

  Long.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Maybe, yeah.

• 8:34Steven Rinella?

  And they come even smaller.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:36Steven Rinella?

  And this brings up, this, this, I guess, adds to the mystery. Is you're so, that these, these people, and can you tell people, and can you remind folks in whatever way it makes sense, in terms of B.C. or blank years ago, when were these things being manufactured in, in what is now the United States?

• 8:57Speaker 05

  About 13,000.

• 8:58Speaker 06

  13,000.

• 8:59Steven Rinella?

  13,000 years ago. That you could have one of these that's nine inches, nine and a half inches. You could have one of these that's an inch.

• 9:09Speaker 06

  Both polluted.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  But they're exactly, right? They're so married to the style.

• 9:17Speaker 05

  Well, that's

• 9:18Steven Rinella?

  Like the shape and the fluting that that you would think, do you know what I'm saying? It's just that they're like, no, I don't care about how long it is. I just need it to look like this.

• 9:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I, I think this is an interesting point you bring up because roughly they're the same shape. Right? They're both lancelet. They have concave bases, parallel sides. But that's a very general way to look at the shape.

• 9:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  Right? And, and so I think you could say in the same way that there's a lot of variation in the human species. Right? And Danny DeVito and Shaquille O'Neal, but they're all human.

• 9:50Steven Rinella?

  Yo.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  There's a lot of variation in Clovis.

• 9:52Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 9:53Speaker 05

  Um, and so, yeah, they have the general anatomical similarities, but there's still a lot of variation within that.

• 10:00Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 10:00Speaker 06

  Which is not unexpected, of course, because these groups are out on a landscape. They're, they're moving. They're out on that landscape for the better part of what 700 years.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 06

  And they're in all corners of North America and you're going to have what we've called sort of cultural drift. Right? Is that somebody's making something and they're not making it quite like dad made it or mom made it. Right? No reason why mom couldn't have made those. And so you've got variants that will just accrue over time.

• 10:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 06

  And so while you can generally argue, okay, we've got Clovis points in the Pacific Northwest, which kind of look like Clovis points in the Northeast. So yeah, in a general sense, they're all very, very similar, like Metten's metaphor. Um, but there's enough variation that we're seeing in all likelihood, uh, sort of, uh, time and space slipping by. And with that changes in the styles in which people are making things, simply because they're not making clones. Right?

• 11:00Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 11:00Speaker 06

  They're, they're human artisans who are producing these kinds of things and there's inevitably going to be variation.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  And I think another contribution to that variation, right? There's stylistic drift. But we just completed a, a 10 year project funded by the National Science Foundation, where we looked at, we basically did a Clovis point Olympics.

• 11:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  And we tested small ones and big ones and thin ones and wide ones to see whether or not they all functioned the same way. And they don't. And so another reason why we may be getting lots of variation in Clovis is because this particular Clovis point is for butchery. This one is for hunting. This one is maybe even for digging.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  Well, not necessarily for those things, but better at.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Better at. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah.

• 11:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh yeah. You mean from, from your, when you're looking at it now.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 11:48Steven Rinella?

  Without understanding, yup.

• 11:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:51Steven Rinella?

  What it was originally crafted for. But when you look at now, like, well, let's just try to take a guess. Like what would it be good for?

• 11:59Speaker 05

  Yes, that's

• 11:59Speaker 06

  Exactly. What their experiments, what Metten and his team's experiments showed was that some of them had really great penetrating power.

• 12:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:06Speaker 06

  Right? And it wasn't necessarily that big honker.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  No, it was the smaller ones.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  It was the smaller ones, right? You know, we always sort of think about big mammoth, you need a big point.

• 12:14Steven Rinella?

  Yep, for sure.

• 12:15Speaker 06

  No, not necessarily.

• 12:18Steven Rinella?

  Um, on, on the subject and what, what we want to talk about today.

• 12:26Steven Rinella?

  Add to this, but, but I'll just, I'll, I'll say this and you can add to it if, if you feel that it's wrong. Like the, the primary questions that animate conversations around Clovis. Um, the primary questions would be, there's this, there's this big, long running, burning one, which is did humans

• 12:45Steven Rinella?

  manage to drive woolly mammoths and mastodons to extinction? Did like, were they, were they really able to come in like and kill these things off?

• 12:56Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 12:57Steven Rinella?

  Or if it wasn't that, was it some degree of, um, they contributed to the die off of mammoths and mastodons?

• 13:07Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:07Steven Rinella?

  And, and other big megafauna, right? And, and the reason that has, the reason that argument has teeth is it kind of opens up this idea of, it becomes a debate about, well, how destructive is the human species? And how long has the human species been destructive?

• 13:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:22Steven Rinella?

  Right? A lot of, there, there's this kind of, there's almost a moral element to it. If you could look and be like, man, 13,000 years ago, humans were driving animals to extinction through hunting. And it, I don't know, that can be weaponized in some way, or can you be used to rationalize certain behaviors? Or it's just interesting, right? So that debate animates the discussion of, of Clovis. It's like, it's kind of like part of why we talk about Clovis today. Another, I would say the other major thing from my view, that animates the, the discussion of Clovis is, who were the first Americans?

• 14:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 14:01Steven Rinella?

  Right? Did, did, is this, was this a group of people

• 14:07Steven Rinella?

  that showed up in what is now the, the lower 48 or Alaska in the lower 48? Did they show up where they had this common culture, a common language? They knew who each other, they, they knew each other.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 14:21Steven Rinella?

  And they showed up and then they sort of proliferated as a people. And then eventually this people

• 14:30Steven Rinella?

  through distance and time kind of formed these other unique cultures. Or the, or conversely,

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  disparate peoples showed up here and they coalesced into this, this unified culture. Um, and for 700 years kind of became like Americans, you know, in some way.

• 14:55Steven Rinella?

  Do you agree with that? Or is there any I'm missing?

• 14:58Speaker 06

  Where do we start?

• 14:59Steven Rinella?

  Um, I mean, in terms of like the big, like the big animating, the, the reason that keeps it relevant.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  Okay. Um, absolutely agree.

• 15:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:07Speaker 06

  Okay. Um, and I can say that, uh, certainly the weaponization aspect. When you look at when overkill, the notion that people came in and wiped out all of these different animals.

• 15:20Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:20Speaker 06

  And the current tally is 38 different genera. Okay?

• 15:24Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:24Speaker 06

  So everything from mammoth and mastodon, giant ground sloth, various, you know, peccaries, tapirs, horses, camels, et cetera. That really, that really hits its stride in the 1960s.

• 15:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:38Speaker 06

  And it's tied to the environmental movement. Uh, you've got, um, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring gets published. Uh, everybody's reading Aldo Leopold. Um, all of these things and people are getting concerned about the environment. And this was a good, this was a good homily. This was a good lesson. Look what we did before. Let's not do it again.

• 16:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:00Speaker 06

  Now, the problem is, I don't think people did that before, right? There's lots of reasons to protect the environment. What people did 13,000 years ago or not, isn't one of them.

• 16:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  So I agree. It's, it's sort of been a part of the discussion. And in fact, it's been part of the discussion since the 1850s, when people first noticed the bones of these giant animals and said, what happened to them? And, and one of the very early hypotheses was, were they killed off by Indian arrows?

• 16:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 16:31Speaker 06

  So it's been talked about.

• 16:32Steven Rinella?

  That in the 1800s?

• 16:33Speaker 06

  Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. Charles Lyell, on his visit to the United States, his second visit to the United States, published in 1849, talks about it. Because people were wondering, where are they now? Because they knew enough about the geology to know that these animals had been around relatively recently, at least in geological time.

• 16:53Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:54Speaker 06

  Right? I mean, they were found in near surface deposits. Um, and the bones seemed in pretty good condition. They weren't fossilized, mineralized. So yeah, no, it's been a, it's been a longstanding, uh, question.

• 17:06Steven Rinella?

  I had no idea that someone threw that out there at that time.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, but they dismissed it.

• 17:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  Because it made no sense to them.

• 17:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 06

  Because they knew that, um, you know, the ability, because at that point, I think it's fair to say, people hadn't killed off all the passenger pigeons. People hadn't actually caused the extinction of animals prior to that. Uh, so they probably had a hard time perceiving the ability as we do now, given the technologies that we have.

• 17:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  How easy it would be to drive an animal to extinction.

• 17:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  Um,

• 17:42Steven Rinella?

  Someone should visit that dude in his grave. And be like, listen, I know that you got dismissed outright in 1850, but had you waited a century, you, you, your idea would have gotten more traction.

• 17:52Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:54Steven Rinella?

  You would have tapped into the zeitgeist if you waited 120 years.

• 17:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Uh, and it is, um, it is an interesting thing because it does tie into the notion that,

• 18:09Speaker 06

  this sort of romantic notion of these big game hunters, you know, they've come across the land bridge. They blasted down into North America and they look out across a landscape with these an aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom.

• 18:23Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:24Speaker 06

  And mind you, some of the animals that went extinct only weighed 20 pounds. They're lumped in there with megafauna and I've never gotten that. I've never understood that. But, okay, so bunnies are megafauna.

• 18:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I got it. I'm guilty of that. Uh, I'm guilty of being like, yeah, all the big animals, all, all the big animals went away.

• 18:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, except for moose and caribou and bison and all the other big animals that didn't go away.

• 18:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I understand. I understand.

• 18:50Speaker 06

  Um, and we are trying to understand that as a package, right? These people come across, presumably they're related. They must have been successful at colonizing landscapes like the Bering land bridge. Uh, and then they spread out. But one of the things that we've learned from the genetic record is that, um, this is a fairly

• 19:15Speaker 06

  Mind you, we have limited ancient DNA from this time period, right? So we have limited information about who these people are specifically. But one of the things that we do know is that we have early on very, very different cultural patterns among very closely related biological populations. So the cultures will change and they will change fairly rapidly. So we've got people who are very closely related to Clovis, living in the Great Basin, who have a fundamentally different material culture, who we haven't found any evidence that they're out killing big game. Because, well, if you're in the Great Basin, Western North America, there's not a whole lot of mammoth or mastodon wandering around out there.

• 19:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:57Speaker 06

  Right?

• 19:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 06

  Uh, so the cultural patterns are not necessarily in sync with the, what we understand, at least at the moment, uh, to be the biological patterns.

• 20:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yep.

• 20:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Regarding the second question you brought up, right? Did they, were they here and coalesced or, and became the first Americans? The Clovis point has never been found outside of the Americas, North America, right? And so, so by definition, it is.

• 20:29Speaker 06

  It's an American invention.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  It's an American invention, which means there had to be people.

• 20:32Steven Rinella?

  It has not.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  Has not.

• 20:34Steven Rinella?

  Been found in South America.

• 20:36Speaker 05

  No, and it's not been found in Europe or, or in Asia.

• 20:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 05

  Right? So if the Clovis point was invented in North America.

• 20:44Steven Rinella?

  So just to, just to, just for, just to help people a little bit on geography, you mean, if I'm over in Nome, Alaska, and I go, whatever the hell it is, 70, 80 miles, and I hit, um, and I hit Asia.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  Right?

• 21:01Steven Rinella?

  And I look up and down the beach, I'm not gonna find a Clovis point.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  We have not found any Clovis points in, in Northeast Asia.

• 21:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Which means it was invented in North America, which means there had to be people here to invent it.

• 21:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 05

  Right?

• 21:16Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  So by logic alone, right, there had to have been groups pre-Clovis on the landscape somewhere, uh, to have come up with that first American invention.

• 21:28Steven Rinella?

  Are there good, rock solid, like indisputable Clovis points in, in Alaska?

• 21:37Speaker 05

  They, there are.

• 21:38Speaker 06

  I know what my answer is, I'm waiting to hear hers.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  There are, there are fluted points.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 21:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 05

  In Alaska.

• 21:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  But they are later in time.

• 21:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  And they come from when Clovis folks and, and related Clovis groups went from south to north through the ice free corridor, back into Alaska.

• 21:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  Um, but there's never been a, a Clovis point of Clovis age found in Alaska.

• 22:03Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 22:03Speaker 06

  The, the dates, um, and you can actually quite literally track them in a time transgressive manner, going up the ice free corridor.

• 22:12Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 22:12Speaker 06

  Absolutely. No, because you've got.

• 22:14Steven Rinella?

  Cause stuff like the Mesa site and stuff is fluted, but that's much younger than Clovis.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  Um, no Mesa is not fluted.

• 22:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it's not?

• 22:20Speaker 06

  No.

• 22:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I'm sorry.

• 22:21Speaker 06

  Um, there's, um, there's other sites, Hootu site, Bedwell site, um, what's the Ted Gables?

• 22:30Speaker 05

  Uh, Nanana, um, or.

• 22:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's fluted points up there, uh, and they date, um, let me think about this, probably 500 years later?

• 22:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, in the 12s.

• 22:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 22:44Speaker 06

  And they're, they're in the 12s. Uh, and in fact, there's fluted points in that corridor region that are also dating in the 12s rather than at 13. And so it, it almost looks like the corridor, um, let's just, to back up for a second, right? Uh, you've got these two massive ice sheets that during the Pleistocene are bumping into each other, basically down the spine of the Rockies.

• 23:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 23:13Speaker 06

  Okay? At the end of the Ice Age, they pull back, they retreat, uh, and they do this around 14,000, uh, 14 and a half thousand. Uh, initially, it's just this vast mud flat, right? Meltwater everywhere, there's not a whole lot of things growing there, living there.

• 23:33Steven Rinella?

  I've been in places like that in Alaska.

• 23:35Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 23:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:36Speaker 06

  Right? Um, but this place is 1,500 kilometers long and there's nothing growing, you're not gonna go down that corridor.

• 23:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 23:44Speaker 06

  Right? You're gonna have to wait for the plants to colonize, the animals to then follow, right? That doesn't happen until around 13, maybe slightly later, maybe slightly earlier, but not early enough. Clovis is already down here by then, okay? But then later, as these groups are expanding in North America, some of them make their way back up that corridor, because by then, you've got bison, it's grassland. Now, what happens around 10,000 years ago, maybe 11, is that you've got boreal forests moving in. And once the boreal forests move in, that corridor is shut down, right? You're not gonna be going up and down that thing anymore.

• 24:28Speaker 06

  Uh, so it really looks as though people came in.

• 24:30Steven Rinella?

  Just because it's not like super productive grassland.

• 24:33Speaker 06

  I mean, what are you gonna get in a boreal forest?

• 24:36Steven Rinella?

  It's just less draw, yeah. I understand.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, but when you have bison up and down that corridor, and in fact, you brought up Mesa, that's a really good case to bring up, because it looks like these groups are following, tracking bison up and down this cor, well, up this corridor. And what you see at Mesa looks an awful lot like what you've got on the Northern High Plains at, at 10,000, 10 and a half thousand, 11,000 years ago.

• 25:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  Uh, so we can make the connections, but the connections are not from the north down to the south, they're from the south back up to the north.

• 25:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 06

  It's the craziest thing.

• 25:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I, I was first introduced to that idea, and I think, was the word, was the word backdrift or something? Was that a word?

• 25:19Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 25:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 06

  Backwash. Uh, yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 06

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• 25:55Steven Rinella?

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• 26:57Steven Rinella?

  So who, where, right now, if you, I don't know, what's the fashionable idea right now? Of like, and I don't mean, I don't mean to make it trivializing. But the, like, the, the, the, the idea right now? If you had to make a guess, and no one's holding you to this, but you had to make a guess, like.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  I'm holding to it.

• 27:17Steven Rinella?

  Who, who, who first, like, who and when and how? Who first stepped foot in what is today, however you wanna put it, like, Washington State, Idaho Panhandle, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota? Like, where did the first human step in what is now the Lower 48? Who, who, who?

• 27:52Speaker 06

  His name was Fred.

• 27:53Steven Rinella?

  What was he doing?

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Name, rank, serial number.

• 27:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, like, when?

• 27:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 27:59Steven Rinella?

  If you had to guess? And, and I'm setting this up, I know, you're like, you have to take this seriously, you, you spent your life publishing on this, you have a reputation at stake, but just casually.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  It's gonna be, it's gonna die right here in your studio.

• 28:13Steven Rinella?

  Just casually, like.

• 28:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, no.

• 28:15Steven Rinella?

  Tell me a thing that wouldn't surprise you. I know you guys hate conversations like this, but tell me a thing that wouldn't surprise you.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  It's fine, it's fine. Look, um, I think, um, that there is compelling, uh, evidence.

• 28:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:28Speaker 06

  Right? We're gonna do this evidence based, not faith based.

• 28:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah.

• 28:31Speaker 06

  Okay. I think there's compelling evidence that people were here 15,000 years ago, plus or minus.

• 28:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:37Speaker 06

  Okay? Um, I wouldn't be surprised if they were here earlier. Getting them here earlier is complicated, just because of the geology and because of the routes that would have been available.

• 28:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:49Speaker 06

  Okay? We just mentioned that the, this interior corridor was not gonna be available until around 13.

• 28:55Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:56Speaker 06

  So if people were here at 15, they had to come some other route. Okay? Um, the coast was open, ice had pulled back from the Pacific margin by 17, 16 and a half. So that's a route that you can take into the Americas and be here by 15.

• 29:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 29:15Speaker 06

  We know from the genetic record that we have, that ancestral Native Americans split off from Northeast Asian populations sometime around 25? I would not be surprised if people were here at 25,000, right?

• 29:35Steven Rinella?

  Like, that wouldn't shock you?

• 29:37Speaker 06

  No, no, I mean, it would just make us have to think, well, how did they get here? Uh, who were they? And how do they relate to everybody that we have after 15?

• 29:46Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  Right? Um, and, and look, if people, if people were here at 30.

• 29:54Speaker 06

  We'd have to give that a rethink as well. Okay, does that mean that the genetic evidence we have is just insufficient to tell us when these ancestral Native American populations first emerged? Does that mean that these groups that were here earlier were not related to ancestral Native Americans as we know them that were here at 12?

• 30:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Speaker 06

  Right? You always have to follow the evidence. And, you know, you can sort of set up parameters of the problem and say, but you always have to sort of add the caveat. As we understand it today, based on the evidence that we have today, this is the thing that has greater prior probability. This is the thing that has less.

• 30:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 06

  Some years ago, about 10, actually, there was a paper published that suggested people were here 130,000 years ago.

• 30:44Speaker 06

  That one is really hard to sort of make sense.

• 30:47Steven Rinella?

  Like, that gets even more complicated.

• 30:49Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, because then you're not really talking about, you know, modern Homo sapiens.

• 30:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  And so we just don't see any evidence archaeologically or genetically to suggest that those folks were here.

• 31:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 06

  Uh, because we don't even see them in parts of Asia by then.

• 31:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah, how seriously can you take? This is some stuff we've discussed in the past, but how seriously can you take?

• 31:17Steven Rinella?

  Any idea that it wasn't Siberians?

• 31:24Speaker 06

  None. There's no, they came from Asia. For the viewers at home that are not watching on TV, I'm shaking my head, no.

• 31:32Steven Rinella?

  So, so when people bring up that, you know, this idea that like, that Europeans came or Pacific Islanders out of the South came or whatever, it's just that you like, you feel the evidence is still strong or overwhelming that these are like, these are Siberians.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  Oh, there's no feel about it. The, the idea that Stone Age people crossed the Atlantic.

• 31:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 31:59Speaker 05

  I think is one of the most falsified hypotheses in paleo and in archaeology. I mean, it, it isn't supported genetically, archaeologically, chronologically. Ocean, like the ocean, oceanographers didn't show it, didn't work. I've published several papers, and so have you, on that idea that maybe the first Stone Age Americans came from Europe. And it, no matter how you slice it, it doesn't work.

• 32:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 32:27Speaker 05

  And so.

• 32:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I mean, if they came here, they suffered complete and total genetic amnesia, cultural amnesia. I mean, they, they forgot everything that they were doing in Europe and they forgot to bring their DNA with them.

• 32:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Speaker 06

  Because all of the DNA that we have, both ancient and modern in the Americas, is Native American.

• 32:50Steven Rinella?

  When you look at this question globally of pioneering populations and humans.

• 32:57Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you ever see? You know, New Zealand or Australia or wherever, do you ever see where a, where a population gets somewhere, but it doesn't work out? And they, and they, they don't thrive, they blink out for whatever reason.

• 33:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:13Steven Rinella?

  And then, and then thousands of years go by and it gets re-hit. Or does, or do humans usually have a way of when they get somewhere, it works?

• 33:22Speaker 05

  See, that's a really tough question because in the old world, Europe, Asia, Africa, you're, it can be difficult if you don't have bones to know whether you're dealing with Homo sapiens or Homo erectus or Heidelbergensis or Neanderthalensis. There's all these other hominins, Denisovans that are running around.

• 33:44Speaker 05

  And so, and they're oftentimes using the same stone tool technology, right? So you don't know if you're dealing with a Homo sapien site who's making some sort of discord core or a Neanderthal.

• 33:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  This is one reason why to understand the mechanics of prehistoric colonization. North America is so valuable, right? And I think there's some regions in particular, like the Great Lakes and New England, that are really great because you had glaciers covering the Great Lakes.

• 34:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 34:10Speaker 05

  And so when the glaciers recede and we get.

• 34:13Steven Rinella?

  Gave you a nice clean slate.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  It's a demographic blank slate.

• 34:16Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 34:17Speaker 05

  And so that's why it's really great to study colonization processes there.

• 34:22Steven Rinella?

  That's an interesting point, man. Like, it doesn't have what makes Africa so complicated.

• 34:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 34:27Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 34:28Speaker 06

  But failed migrations is what you're asking about. And back.

• 34:34Steven Rinella?

  Like, like not just failed migrate, but failed pioneering events.

• 34:38Speaker 06

  Oh, no, that's, that's, yeah. No, I, I actually argued that many years ago in a paper, just on sort of first principles. The idea that absolutely every movement into a landscape was successful. Um, which is not to say that a movement wasn't successful, but groups within that could have disappeared for want of an ability to cope with an environmental disaster.

• 35:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 06

  Right? One can only assume, even though it'd be extremely difficult to test. One can only assume that groups that are moving out of Africa 100,000 years ago and moving out across the globe. Some of them must have not made it.

• 35:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 06

  Now, one of the things that's been most interesting coming out of the genetic record is that we have what are referred to as ghost populations showing up in ancient genomes. These are signatures of DNA that are unrelated to any modern population. So clearly there were other groups with whom ancestral Native Americans interacted with. What became of them, right? And were they possibly, and you know, we don't know this, but here's, you know, one possible case. Were they here when Native Americans showed up? And there was interaction between them and for all intents and purposes, they disappeared as a population.

• 36:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  Right? This gets back to your, your question earlier. This is why this question about the peopling is so dynamic and is constantly, you know, right there on the front burners of us trying to figure out. Because the more we learn, the more complicated the story is. You know, when I started, which was a while ago, uh, it was very simple, right? Mammoth hunters. They come into Alaska, they go down the ice free corridor, they start killing everybody.

• 36:35Steven Rinella?

  Total badass.

• 36:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and it was a nice story, but there was no nuance to it. And what we've been learning over the years, and this is actually one of the reasons why, you know, we just published this piece on scavenging, was that we wanted to sort of critique the, the stereotypes. We wanted to sort of explore variation and nuance and are there alternative explanations for data that we've just kind of in a very common sense way interpreted over the years.

• 37:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Let's get into your, let's get into your new paper.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  Segue.

• 37:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Tell, tell me whichever one you want us to do it like, like tell me, give me the gist of the new paper you have about, about scavenging.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  So pretend you're a scientist, okay?

• 37:30Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  And.

• 37:31Steven Rinella?

  I do that all the time.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, that's great.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  I play a scientist on TV, but I'm not one.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  And you have a very simple question, right? How many baseball hats of the home team are in the stadium on game day? Okay? And you have a hypothesis, right? There's going to be more green hats because that's the color of the home team than red hats, which is the away team.

• 37:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Okay?

• 37:55Steven Rinella?

  And I think that because it's the home team.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  It's the home team, right?

• 37:57Steven Rinella?

  And their fans live around here.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  Exactly, right? So you've got your hypothesis and you now want to test it. So you hire some dude to.

• 38:04Speaker 06

  Has to be a dude, I'll bet.

• 38:05Speaker 05

  Well, it's got, well, only dudes are dumb enough to go count, right? So you hire some dude to go to the stadium on game day and he counts all of the hats.

• 38:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  Okay? Comes back to you and he's like, all right, scientist Steve, Dr. Steve, there were 15,000 green hats.

• 38:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:23Speaker 05

  There was 10,000 red hats, right? You've got your data, you're like, supports my hypothesis? Great, right? Couple of years go by and then you learn that the guy you hired to count all of the hats is red, green, colorblind.

• 38:39Speaker 06

  You hired me for the job. It was a bad move, Steve.

• 38:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:43Speaker 06

  Bad move.

• 38:45Speaker 05

  How do you know what the answer is? You don't. And so what our paper shows is that archaeologists are currently.

• 38:52Steven Rinella?

  I don't know where you're going, but I love the analogy so far.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  What our paper shows is that archaeologists are colorblind to hunting versus scavenging and the interpretation of those two things in the sites we dig up. We can't tell the difference.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  It's, it's, the term is equa finality.

• 39:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:12Speaker 06

  In that multiple processes can result in the same product. They can result in artifacts being found with bones. They can result in artifacts that got snapped, found with bones. And we were talking this morning on the way over to the studio, um, the experiment that we did with you guys.

• 39:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 06

  In, what, four years ago now?

• 39:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 06

  Which was just.

• 39:38Steven Rinella?

  Just refresh people, we, uh, these guys were conducting experiment where we were using stone tools to butcher a freshly killed bison carcass. And then they took great interest in how did the tools break? How did the tools dull? Where did the tools wind up? When you lost them or broke them, like, what did it look like? Meaning, um, so then you have not a collection of tools from having killed the animal, you had a collection of tools from having butchered the animal.

• 40:07Speaker 05

  I'm also just thinking of the famous efficiency part of that experiment and Dr. Michelle Bevers' meat per minute.

• 40:14Speaker 06

  No meat per minute.

• 40:15Speaker 05

  Measure.

• 40:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Which is published in the scientific literature.

• 40:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  So.

• 40:21Speaker 06

  So what, what we found in that, one of the things people have said, and I'm guilty, right? I'm, I'm not going to paint anybody else with this brush. I'm included here. You know, you look at these, uh, these busted points and you say, oh, well, that must be end shock as a consequence of impact.

• 40:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 06

  Well, what we discovered was in the points that you guys were using, some of them snapped, just like things that I've interpreted as end shock from use and impact.

• 40:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  Right?

• 40:52Steven Rinella?

  Like it hit a shoulder blade and broke.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, so those are the kinds of things that make you pause. And you realize you can't automatically assume that just because you have these things with a mammoth, that therefore these were the items that were used to kill it. Okay? That's the red, green color blindness that, that Metin is talking about that we have.

• 41:17Speaker 06

  And it's important to stress this fact. We're not saying every site with a mammoth was a result of scavenging.

• 41:24Speaker 05

  We've never said that.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  We've never said that. What we're trying to do is think harder about how we can discern what the process was that caused that product, right? And, and this is, this is a problem in which, because there are multiple processes, you run into that issue of equa finality because you can just as easily explain these things as a consequence of scavenging as you could hunting.

• 41:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  And we would love to know, is there an unequivocal demonstrable diagnostic test for one or the other? There isn't even a diagnostic test for scavenging. We, I went into this paper thinking, oh, well, we can tell scavenging because we have some instances of Clovis points that were used, or actually, I'm sorry, ivory shafts that were used to pry apart mammoth feet. And I'm thinking, well, that has to be scavenging because rigor mortis had set in, right? The animal was already dead. But then, in the course of doing this research, you know, well, one of the things that we learned was that rigor mortis, under certain circumstances, can kick in pretty quickly.

• 42:37Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  Okay? So that animal might actually have been very recently killed by that hunter who then wanted to pry apart the feet.

• 42:45Steven Rinella?

  What do you, what do you mean by pry apart the feet?

• 42:46Speaker 06

  Get in, into the joints there to break apart the portions of the foot to get it foot pad meat.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I, I thought, I was picturing that you meant like, move his legs apart. But you mean like, literally like, break the feet apart?

• 43:00Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 43:00Steven Rinella?

  I got you. Yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, every time you sort of think, okay, well, this is clearly a signature of hunting, or clearly a signature of scavenging, then you think a little harder about it. You realize, well, geez. The only instance that we sort of came up with in this paper, uh, is that if you see a beached whale from 200,000 years ago,

• 43:24Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:24Speaker 06

  long before people had marine technology, long before they went out in boats and could harpoon things, and it's been butchered on the beach, that's scavenging.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  Cause they're not going to get in a whale.

• 43:35Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  Right?

• 43:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 05

  Um, but.

• 43:39Steven Rinella?

  See, when, you know, when I said that I had a thing that was gonna, that was gonna trip you guys up?

• 43:43Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 43:43Steven Rinella?

  And it was gonna blow your minds and make you question your.

• 43:45Speaker 06

  I'm still waiting for it.

• 43:46Steven Rinella?

  It has to do with whales.

• 43:48Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 43:49Steven Rinella?

  But I, I'm gonna.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  You're wait.

• 43:50Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm gonna wait a minute to bring it up. No, I'll bring it up now.

• 43:53Speaker 06

  Go ahead. Don't leave us hanging, Steve.

• 43:56Steven Rinella?

  I was with some whale hunters and none of it.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  Oh, very cool.

• 43:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 43:59Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 44:00Steven Rinella?

  And we were talking a lot about, I mean, they use contemporary weaponry now, but we're, we were talking a lot about what their ancestors, how their ancestors hunted whales. And I was thinking about you guys, because I feel, and maybe you can correct me on this. I feel that somewhere in your head, it's a little bit like, you feel that it's a little bit outlandish, or a little, you're skeptical that humans could have killed these things.

• 44:27Speaker 06

  Oh, no.

• 44:28Steven Rinella?

  Mechanically. Or maybe you have no skepticism about this.

• 44:31Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 44:32Steven Rinella?

  But I was like, but how would, how would someone view, I mean, but like, so if it's not in your head, I think it's in some people's heads. Like, really? You're gonna take a spear and kill a mammoth? But then I was thinking like, Bahamut, we know, like, as a matter of fact, that humans were using stone tipped, bone tipped stuff in, in, in killing huge whales.

• 44:58Speaker 06

  Well, absolutely.

• 44:58Steven Rinella?

  And so, but I think that, and, and I don't mean to put words in your mouth, and you're already, you're shaking your head like you don't have a problem with them killing it. But I think that there is a sense from some people like, how could they have walked up with a spear and killed a mammoth? I'm like, I don't know. How'd they do, how'd they kill whales?

• 45:13Speaker 06

  So I've given talks over the years where I've had hunters in the audience.

• 45:19Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 45:20Speaker 06

  And I've talked about killing mammoths, where you've got a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it. And I've seen a lot of shaking heads where people are saying, no way am I doing that to a six ton animal. Thank you very much.

• 45:34Steven Rinella?

  It would seem like, it would seem insane. It would seem insane.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  No, but people did.

• 45:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 06

  I don't think there's any question that people were hunting animals of all sizes, right? Um, and the question is, how often?

• 45:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  What was the frequency? Uh, to what degree was it a critical element of their diet?

• 45:56Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:57Speaker 06

  Was that the only thing they were doing on the landscape?

• 46:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 06

  I mean, this is the thing that we're sort of trying to get around is the, the sort of singular model.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  The stereotype.

• 46:07Speaker 06

  The stereotype. You know, we want to understand the complexity of people's lives, their hunting strategies, their foraging strategies, which facultative scavenging, and this is what this paper is all about. The idea that if there's a, a four ton animal dead on the landscape.

• 46:30Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:30Speaker 06

  Why would you not take advantage of it?

• 46:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, sure.

• 46:35Speaker 06

  Right?

• 46:35Steven Rinella?

  And were you able to look, cause when I, when I was looking at the work that you did, you, you address this, but I just want to tee it up, to be, in my head, just as a guy today that wanders around out in the woods a fair bit, and in a lot of places, I, it, it's just like, there aren't, it would be exceptionally rare, exceptionally rare to stumble across a salvageable, untouched, fresh carcass. It happens.

• 47:09Speaker 06

  Steve.

• 47:09Steven Rinella?

  It happened twice, like when the lake I grew up on, I can think of two cases. A deer swam up, went through Bob Starett's yard, and snapped its neck on Bob Starett's fence.

• 47:19Speaker 06

  Darn for Bob Starett. Why did he have a fence?

• 47:21Steven Rinella?

  Came through and got hung up, and a one that came through and got hung up on Chet Utzinger's fence.

• 47:26Speaker 06

  Oh, Bob and Chet, man.

• 47:28Steven Rinella?

  So, sure. And we scavenged those carcasses. But it's just not, it's, it's, it's so exceptional that I can tell you about these things that happened when I was, I'm now 52. I can tell you about these things that happened when I was a teenager as being outliers. And they involve fences, human made fences. But it's just like, you can't, it's not reliable.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 47:54Steven Rinella?

  From my view, it's not reliable to wake up in the morning and be like, kids, me and mom are gonna walk until we find a fresh dead thing, and then we're gonna butcher it and bring it on home.

• 48:06Speaker 06

  Okay. I'll let Metten respond to that, but then I want to talk to you about reliability.

• 48:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 48:10Speaker 06

  Go, Metten.

• 48:11Speaker 05

  So, I have an admission to make, and it's that you are actually the inspiration for this paper.

• 48:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, great.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  And it's because.

• 48:20Steven Rinella?

  Cause I, cause of my view on.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  On April 21st, 2025, episode 693.

• 48:27Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:28Speaker 05

  You said, when you're out wandering around the mountains.

• 48:32Speaker 06

  Oh, God, you actually have the entire quote.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Or out wandering around the woods, you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff. If you wanted me to produce a dead thing, I would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wandering around.

• 48:48Steven Rinella?

  I stand by that.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  So I've always laughed at the idea that they were just finding carcasses lying around.

• 48:56Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:57Speaker 05

  Right? And I heard that quote, and it just got me thinking, right? It got me thinking about scavenging. It got me thinking about scavenging during the Lake Pleistocene, when it was a very different environment.

• 49:12Speaker 06

  A lot more animals.

• 49:13Speaker 05

  A lot more animals.

• 49:14Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 49:15Speaker 05

  Very different animals.

• 49:17Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  Um, and it got me thinking about our modern experience versus how and why we interpret the things we, the way we do over the centuries of the Clovis archaeological record.

• 49:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  Right?

• 49:33Speaker 06

  Where you had thousands and thousands of people who were spending every day of their lives outside. I mean, how often are you out in the field?

• 49:44Steven Rinella?

  Not like that.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 49:45Steven Rinella?

  Where am I at right now?

• 49:47Speaker 06

  And, and you're out there for a week at a time, two weeks at a time, in a circumscribed area.

• 49:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 06

  But if you're spending your entire life out there, and let's just say a life expectancy of 45 plus or minus.

• 49:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 49:59Speaker 06

  We don't know, but that's generally the sort of estimation. That's thousands and thousands and thousands of person hours out on that landscape, on a landscape that has a hell of a lot more game on it than the landscape does today.

• 50:14Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  And it's got elephants out there, and elephants on that landscape are gonna last for a long time.

• 50:21Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:21Speaker 06

  Right? It's not like a mouse dies.

• 50:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  And you've got to get there and scavenge it really quickly.

• 50:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 06

  Okay?

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  Even if stuff's working on it, they're gonna be working on it a long time.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 50:31Speaker 05

  And sometimes they can't work on it. Because in winter months, and this is, we learned so much about carrion ecology and scavenging in the broader biological world. In the winter months, um, some carcasses just are not accessible because they freeze.

• 50:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  Which is something humans don't have to worry about because we've got stone tools and fire. Um, I, I think the other thing to keep in mind too, right?

• 50:55Speaker 06

  But, oh, hang on.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:56Speaker 06

  You found that example in Dale Guthrie's book.

• 50:58Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 50:59Speaker 06

  Uh, there's a, a, a, the case of Blue Babe.

• 51:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Speaker 06

  Sort of freeze dried bison.

• 51:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 06

  There's a carnassial tooth from, is it a lion?

• 51:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:09Speaker 06

  A panthera in the hide. And, and Guthrie's interpretation, and I think it's a reasonable one, is that that, that cat was basically trying to get into the carcass and it was frozen. It snapped the tooth off.

• 51:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I pictured him breaking it. I don't know. I didn't know that theory. I, I know about this, but I always thought that he's, that it was suspected, or that he broke it off and fighting with the thing.

• 51:33Speaker 06

  Oh, that's entirely possible too.

• 51:35Steven Rinella?

  But broke it off, trying to get a frozen thing ripped apart. Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 06

  It would be more likely that it would break.

• 51:40Steven Rinella?

  Which would almost make more sense.

• 51:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Go ahead.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  And, well, I was gonna say, you, you had two examples where you found carcasses, right?

• 51:47Steven Rinella?

  No, no, I got a lot.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  Well, okay, so a lot.

• 51:49Steven Rinella?

  But I'm saying they're unique enough that I remember them.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, fair enough.

• 51:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:53Speaker 05

  But imagine you, 10,000 yous, right? You're the Clovis population.

• 51:59Steven Rinella?

  I, I want to clarify my point. But I want you to go, but I want to clarify my point. Yes, but not reliably.

• 52:07Speaker 06

  Okay, then let me, let's talk about.

• 52:08Steven Rinella?

  But not, take it away. I'm not gonna interrupt you again, but I just want to clarify what I'm getting at.

• 52:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I, I know.

• 52:13Steven Rinella?

  It happens, but I would never plan on it.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  No, no, no. That's the whole point of facultative scavenging.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  You can't plan.

• 52:18Speaker 06

  You don't, you don't plan on it.

• 52:19Speaker 05

  No.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  Just like you don't plan on hunting, right? You go out looking.

• 52:23Steven Rinella?

  Plan on hunting?

• 52:24Speaker 06

  You're out there looking for animals. Are you gonna see them?

• 52:27Speaker 05

  All the time.

• 52:28Speaker 06

  All the time.

• 52:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:30Speaker 06

  Look, nobody is saying that folks-

• 52:33Speaker 05

  Depended on scavenging.

• 52:34Speaker 06

  Depended on scavenging. What we're saying is like all other animals, all other predators in the animal kingdom, they all scavenge.

• 52:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Speaker 06

  Herbivores scavenge.

• 52:44Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 52:45Speaker 06

  Deer, hippos, giraffes, chimps will scavenge. Okay?

• 52:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 06

  So, why would we assume that humans are any different? Right? We're not arguing that, don't make the assumption that humans were solely scavengers, in which case it would be an unreliable strategy, without question.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:06Speaker 06

  If they're facultative scavengers, if they come across something, then the question is, what's the cost benefit? Is it worth tracking where you haven't seen any big animals for quite a while?

• 53:17Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 53:17Speaker 06

  I mean, goodness knows you've been on unsuccessful hunts before, have you not?

• 53:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, plenty.

• 53:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, so if you're on an unsuccessful hunt and it's been quite a while since you killed anything, and there's a dead elephant laying there, are you gonna pass it up?

• 53:32Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 53:33Speaker 06

  Exactly.

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• 55:05Speaker 05

  And when you look at the 15 sites where we have good association between Clovis artifacts and, and Probesidians.

• 55:13Steven Rinella?

  Keep, keep digging on this for a minute, this, this number.

• 55:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. This is where we've got Clovis points and maybe flakes or scrapers in a secure context with elephant bones, such that there's reas, it's reasonable to assume that those artifacts were involved in the dismemberment in some way of that animal.

• 55:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 06

  Or the killing of that animal.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  Or the killing of that animal, right?

• 55:37Steven Rinella?

  But there's, but I, yeah, it's just it,

• 55:41Steven Rinella?

  I never knew that, I never knew this number until fairly recently. There's like a number.

• 55:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:45Steven Rinella?

  It's like, there's 15.

• 55:47Speaker 06

  Well, there's, there's actually almost 100 sites in which people have claimed. But of those, the, the most secure ones, where the artifacts and the bones entered the geological record at the same instant, put it that way.

• 55:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  Uh, that we feel that, yeah, okay, these things interacted in some manner. And the question is,

• 56:06Speaker 05

  How?

• 56:06Speaker 06

  What was the nature? Did they, did they kill the animal, then dismember it? Did they come upon a carcass and then dismember it? Uh, did they shoot at it and the animal wandered off and died? Right? There's lots of different possibilities. And so what we're trying to do is un- disentangle all of these possibilities.

• 56:24Speaker 05

  So you've got these 15 sites and they're likely spread across the 700 years of Clovis.

• 56:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 56:31Speaker 05

  Right? When you think about that, like per decade or per century, that's not a lot of sites per year.

• 56:39Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 56:39Speaker 05

  Right? So let's say hypothetically, seven of those sites are scavenging, right? That's not a lot of scavenging that's going on in terms of the sites that we found. And there's not a lot of hunting of mammoths that's going on either, right?

• 56:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 05

  So I, I think the issue is that we can't take our personal experiences in the modern day of, of not finding carcasses or anything, and try to impose that on, on the past, because it's a different time scale, right?

• 57:12Speaker 06

  Past is a foreign country.

• 57:14Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 57:14Steven Rinella?

  It's one of my, my third favorite quote.

• 57:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Um, and, and when you look at scavenging, even today, and it's, it's very limited in, uh, modern day hunter groups, hunter gatherer groups. Uh, our co-author Jim O'Connell, uh, working with the Hadza.

• 57:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. Uh, Yeah, that, this is why I wanted you to talk about this from, because you guys discussed this, so.

• 57:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, in fact, the, the best thing about this paper that, um, that certainly I enjoyed the most was working with O'Connell, who has spent a lot of time with hunter-gatherers, uh, working with, uh, John Speth, who, uh, knows more about sort of the ethnohistoric record, you know, the records from the 1500s and 1600s before all the changes that take place. Um, and what was going on then, and with, uh, Brianna Pobenar, who, uh, has spent a lot of time looking at the earliest archaeological records. You know, we sort of brought together this group of people with very, very different perspectives. What O'Connell brought to the table was, yeah, the Hadza, if they're given the opportunity to scavenge, they will.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  He said, they, if they see vultures circling in the distance, they'll go check it out.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  They've gotten very good at confronting lions. And we've got instances of Hadza, small groups of Hadza, even just a couple people, driving off prides of lion.

• 58:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  Just with a couple shots.

• 58:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. And what he said was

• 58:41Speaker 06

  about 14% of the meat that they got during the time that he was tracking with them, uh, came from scavenged animals.

• 58:48Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 58:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we're not saying it was the major component of the diet. Nobody would, right? Because to your point, it's not reliable.

• 58:55Steven Rinella?

  It's part of the groove. It's like, it's part of what happens. Yeah.

• 58:58Speaker 06

  You know, there, there, there is, and Metten did a huge amount of work on sort of tracking the biological side of this. Um, but one of the things that comes out of that discussion is that it's really a continuum between hunting and scavenging, and sort of where you are in that continuum depends on availability and opportunity and so on and so forth. There's even some suggestion that T. rexes were scavengers.

• 59:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 06

  I don't know how heck you would prove that, but, you know.

• 59:24Steven Rinella?

  Can I?

• 59:25Speaker 06

  Go ahead.

• 59:25Steven Rinella?

  I have, do you remember the writer, if you ever hear the writer Jack Hitt?

• 59:30Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, absolutely. He's hilarious.

• 59:31Steven Rinella?

  Jack Hitt wrote a piece about, Jack Hitt wrote this big piece about, uh, who's the big dinosaur guy in town?

• 59:37Speaker 06

  Jack Horner.

• 59:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Horner. He was on the show one time.

• 59:40Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 59:41Steven Rinella?

  Jack Hitt was writing about that stuff.

• 59:44Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 59:44Steven Rinella?

  And he was expressing like skepticism of anyone that would go into a field where the experts are mostly 13-year-olds. So, I have, I have kids, young enough where, you know, they all go through the dinosaur phase. And that's, so

• 1:00:02Steven Rinella?

  having had kids that went through a dinosaur, their dinosaur phase in recent years, where that came from was someone started looking at

• 1:00:11Steven Rinella?

  by the skull structure of a T. rex.

• 1:00:13Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:00:15Steven Rinella?

  What must have been like an incredible olfactory capability. And so, why would they need to smell so good, was the idea? Like, they have all these chambers and whatnot for smell. So, um, being like, they weren't, they, they weren't a sight predator, perhaps. They were wandering around being like,

• 1:00:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Steven Rinella?

  You know? I mean, 10 miles away, there's some rotten thing. That's kind of what pushed that idea. Was that they seemed to have like an incredible olfactory structure.

• 1:00:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 05

  I, I would be skeptical that T. rex was only scavengers, because what we learned from the biological, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Um.

• 1:00:56Steven Rinella?

  But that's when everyone got all hip to that.

• 1:00:58Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 1:00:59Steven Rinella?

  And it's like, it's, it's a thing that happens. You gotta realize this is a thing that happens, is it winds up being.

• 1:01:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Steven Rinella?

  And, and with all due respect, like, uh, some of your work is like this way too. It winds up being, it upsets a narrative.

• 1:01:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Steven Rinella?

  That, that like, T. rex must have just wandered around ripping shit to shreds and killing everything in its path. And then someone's like, I, why do you think, why did we think that?

• 1:01:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Steven Rinella?

  And then everybody's gotta go, yeah, I don't know why I thought that. I just, like, because the cartoons and stuff, I don't know. I don't know why I thought that. And they're like, well, he was really good at smelling. Maybe he's really good at smelling rotten stuff, and that was his groove. And it, it like, and it starts the conversation. So the same way we talked about is like this image, and I always held it, of these big dudes wandering the landscape, whacking mammoths left and right. I don't know, it's just, why do I think that? I don't know why.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  It's conventional wisdom.

• 1:01:53Steven Rinella?

  It's seductive.

• 1:01:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is. It is. It's appealing. It's romantic. It's, you know, hey, these guys made it all the way over here from Siberia. You know, they must have been tough dudes.

• 1:02:02Steven Rinella?

  Killing mammoths left and right, one for breakfast, one for lunch.

• 1:02:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, we can't tell the difference, though, with any one archaeological site.

• 1:02:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 05

  I mean, we went through every single potential criteria.

• 1:02:19Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  Broken Clovis points, impact scars on the Clovis points.

• 1:02:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  These things called emlets, which are microscopic linear impact traces.

• 1:02:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  Which are thought to occur when projectile enters a, an animal, right? And you get these little microscopic lines on the point. You get those same lines from hitting a bush. We've done experiments, right? Or hitting grass.

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  You just throw and miss.

• 1:02:43Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  Same thing, right? So of our 15 sites, both of us suspect at least some of those were hunted, right? Some of those mammoths at those 15 sites were hunted.

• 1:02:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  Some of them, I think were probably scavenged, right? We don't know, but we can't tell. So we don't know if it's all 15 were hunted and zero were scavenged. All 15 were scavenged, zero were hunted.

• 1:03:07Steven Rinella?

  You're, and you had to have contemplated the middle ground. Which is what you come across when it's all messed up.

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Steven Rinella?

  For whatever reason, and then you go over there and kill it real quick.

• 1:03:17Speaker 06

  Well, one of the things that came out of the animal literature was that, um, wildlife biologists can sometimes have a hard time telling whether something was, was hunted or scavenged, and who scavenged it, right?

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  And that's just a couple days later.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:03:31Speaker 06

  You know, if it's out there in the rain, uh, in the snow, if it's really high heat, um, you know, you just, you just can't tell unless you got a wildlife camera that caught it in the act. And we don't have wildlife cameras that caught people in the act going after a mammoth.

• 1:03:49Steven Rinella?

  Can you, can you help tie this work?

• 1:03:56Steven Rinella?

  Tie this discussion about where they like,

• 1:04:00Steven Rinella?

  were they perhaps killing it, perhaps killing some, perhaps scavenging some.

• 1:04:07Steven Rinella?

  Your curiosity about this has to be fed by this bigger question, right? Your curiosity about this is spawned from your interest. You're motivated by this big discussion of how probable is it that humans killed all this stuff? Like, can you connect these? Like, do you view this discussion as totally outside of that? Or do you think it informs the discussion?

• 1:04:34Steven Rinella?

  That the Pleistocene extinctions were driven by humans?

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  I think for me, what this research shows is that we cannot use archaeology to test that question of overkill.

• 1:04:48Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:04:50Speaker 06

  So a couple of things for me. Uh, one of the things is I'm really interested in how people adapt to landscapes.

• 1:04:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:04:59Speaker 06

  And I want to know about how they respond to the environmental and ecological challenges of surviving on that landscape. How are they successful on that landscape? What is the impact of the environment and the climate of that landscape on their adaptations? What is the impact of their adaptive strategies on the resources on that landscape? So for me, it's not so much the, the specific question of extinctions, though I'll get to that in a moment. It's really the larger question. What was it like to come into what was either an empty continent? Or a continent that was at the very best lightly populated? Where there hadn't been much of a human footprint or a human impact up to that point?

• 1:05:45Speaker 06

  What are folks doing on that landscape? And how do they do it? And how did they figure it all out?

• 1:05:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 06

  Right? Cause one of the things that's really clear is that by around 11,000 years ago, you've got people in very different parts of North America developing adaptive strategies, uh, incorporating lots of different resources in their diet. I think that's happening earlier as well, but that's a sidebar. So they clearly had figured stuff out. So I want to know about that process and I want to know how it unfolded. And what the, the impacts, uh, in, in both directions of the environment on the people and the people on the environment. Extinctions is one piece of that, obviously, right?

• 1:06:31Speaker 06

  Um, and the problem that I have with overkill, in addition to what mentioned, met and just mentioned, uh, is that it's also the end of the Pleistocene. So all sorts of things are happening at the end of the Pleistocene. And so the question becomes an even larger equa finality issue. Right? If the Pleistocene is coming to an end, how can you say it was just humans? Until you've factored out and precluded the possibility of all the changes that are taking place at the end of the ice age, as the earth emerges from the grip of 20,000 years of cold. Right?

• 1:07:12Speaker 06

  That, that can't not have had an impact on all of these different animals. But the thing that makes it a really interesting and challenging question. And which is why I think, um, I don't want to just stop at saying, oh, it was humans or not humans. I want to find out, how do you kill off mammoth and horses and camels on the great grasslands of North America? Mastodons in the forests, giant beavers in swamps, glyptodonts in Florida? Animals with very different ecological tolerances, uh, ecological thresholds, very different adaptations.

• 1:07:54Speaker 06

  It was, it's too easy an answer to say that humans killed them all. Because we don't have any evidence that humans killed, you know, 36 of the 38 or, you know?

• 1:08:03Steven Rinella?

  No, yeah.

• 1:08:04Speaker 06

  Right?

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  So that becomes for me, the more interesting intellectual challenge that we have to address. And so, yeah, if humans were responsible for killing the last mammoth standing, fine. Does that mean they're a cause of the extinctions? I don't think so. Because everything that we're seeing in the environmental record, uh, and in the ancient DNA record, is that they've already started to swirl around the drain.

• 1:08:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  Long before humans showed up. So if you want a cause, it's not going to be the last mammoth that was killed by a hunter. It's going to be processes that were set in place thousands of years earlier. And that becomes a question of how do we understand that? Uh, in terms of what's happening at the end of the Pleistocene, at the end of the ice age, climatically and environmentally and ecologically.

• 1:08:58Steven Rinella?

  This question is a little out of order. I should have asked earlier.

• 1:09:04Steven Rinella?

  All those animals you just named. So, so go through that list again, the big stuff that vanished. Or hit me with, hit me with four or five big things that vanished.

• 1:09:13Speaker 06

  Mammoth, mastodon, gompother, camel, horse, areumotherium, nothortheriops, myladon, uh, glossotherium. How many do you want?

• 1:09:22Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's plenty because it demonstrates this, this point that I want to dig in on for a minute.

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:09:28Steven Rinella?

  We have 15 sites. We have 15 sites where we have.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  Probasidians.

• 1:09:33Steven Rinella?

  Human tools.

• 1:09:35Speaker 06

  With mammoth and mastodon.

• 1:09:36Steven Rinella?

  Mixed in with probasidians, mixed in with elephants.

• 1:09:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Steven Rinella?

  Um,

• 1:09:43Steven Rinella?

  but we don't have those with giant beavers. We don't have those with giant ground sloths.

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  We don't have them with, uh, ashtalina legas, the extinct bunny. Uh, we don't have them with, um, you know, the little tiny antelope that disappeared.

• 1:09:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so hear me out.

• 1:09:58Speaker 06

  Wait, wait, wait, Steve, one more thing.

• 1:10:00Steven Rinella?

  Please, yeah, go ahead.

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  We don't have them with the spruce tree that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene.

• 1:10:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay. I didn't know about that spruce tree.

• 1:10:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:10:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. And Paul Martin, bless his heart, wonderful guy. He was the guy that was really behind the overkill stuff. He was a terrific guy. He tried to explain why humans might have caused the extinction of the spruce tree.

• 1:10:22Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  Yes, he did. It's in his 2005 book.

• 1:10:26Steven Rinella?

  Kids running around machetes, whacking away at them all the time.

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

  No, it was, uh, setting fires out of season.

• 1:10:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:10:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 1:10:33Speaker 06

  I'll let you finish, sorry.

• 1:10:34Steven Rinella?

  No, no, I don't, I, I don't have, I don't have a point. It's just, it's kind of a question, be like,

• 1:10:40Steven Rinella?

  if, let me ask a sub, I got a sub question.

• 1:10:45Steven Rinella?

  Is there?

• 1:10:48Steven Rinella?

  Do we have any mammoths or mastodons that have a projectile point jammed into it? And does that even happen when you test it?

• 1:10:56Speaker 05

  We do in the old world.

• 1:10:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  So in Europe and in Asia, we actually have stone points embedded in bone.

• 1:11:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:06Speaker 05

  We do not have a single Clovis point embedded in any probosidian bone in North America.

• 1:11:13Steven Rinella?

  And, cause all the stuff you do, I'm sure you have gone around with fresh bone, jabbing points into it.

• 1:11:20Speaker 05

  Oh, it happens.

• 1:11:20Steven Rinella?

  Is it, is it, is it hard to do? Is it hard to pull off?

• 1:11:24Speaker 05

  Uh, I mean, I've never stabbed an animal with Clovis points.

• 1:11:30Steven Rinella?

  No, I mean, just like cattle bones or something.

• 1:11:31Speaker 05

  Oh, uh, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:11:34Steven Rinella?

  Maybe you should, I don't know.

• 1:11:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Steven Rinella?

  Shoot some, shoot some, like.

• 1:11:37Speaker 05

  Well, George Frisand did. And he got, he got, uh, Clovis point embedded in bone.

• 1:11:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:11:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so okay, okay. That's what I was curious.

• 1:11:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh, it's happened, it's happened.

• 1:11:44Steven Rinella?

  It's not like a one in a thousand chance.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  Oh, no. And in the old world, there's several archaeological examples of that occurring, which is very strong evidence that that particular animal was hunted.

• 1:11:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, which I think is where you were going with that. And that's a fair point.

• 1:11:57Steven Rinella?

  I just, that was like a sub question because it kind of informs this. It'd be the, I don't, I don't even have this formed in my head yet, but

• 1:12:05Steven Rinella?

  we have these sites where they've killed elephants. And, and I'm, I'm just trying to make a word that lumps mammoths and Colombian mammoths and all that kind of stuff. Mastodons, they've, they've killed elephants. So, but we don't have sites where they killed giant ground sloths. We don't have sites where they've killed saber tooth cats. So I would look and I'd say, well, they had, if I'm assuming that, that humans killed all this big stuff off, I would be like, well, man, it sure seems like they had a preference. Mammoths were the ones to get. Because the, when we, like, we don't have this other stuff. So they're going out and they've been like, no, I'm gonna look for a mammoth and get it.

• 1:12:45Steven Rinella?

  If it's scavenging, why don't we have scavenged, if it's just opportunistic scavenging, where are all the, where are all the scavenged giant ground sloths? Where are the scavenged giant beavers?

• 1:12:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, go ahead.

• 1:13:00Speaker 05

  Well, there's, there's two issues there, right? The, the first is taphonomy. And, and how well certain animals survive on the landscape after they, you know, die. And mammoth bones are thick. Uh, they just have a great, they often also are found near watering holes. They can be gently buried. So you'll have a greater chance of finding mammoth bones and any other of those things. And

• 1:13:25Speaker 06

  including bison, which we'll talk about.

• 1:13:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Also too, like, they were probably hunting bunnies and all those other things, right? Just because we don't have the sites, right? So I think the other thing-

• 1:13:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I could see like, like rabbit bone.

• 1:13:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Steven Rinella?

  It just gets crunched up by stuff and eaten.

• 1:13:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so it's really important to separate out the, the question of hunting and what they hunted. Versus, did they cause the extinction of these animals? Right? Um, I wouldn't be surprised if they hunted bunnies, right? But there's no evidence that they caused the extinction of those things.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  And I would add to, I mean, you raise an interesting question, right? If they were scavenging, why aren't we seeing scavenged, um, areamotheriums, giant sloths, right? Um, we're not entirely sure that all of these animals were even around when these folks were here.

• 1:14:19Steven Rinella?

  Got you.

• 1:14:20Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:14:21Steven Rinella?

  That's a great point, man.

• 1:14:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I mean,

• 1:14:24Steven Rinella?

  Cause you can't, you probably can't make a perfect timeline.

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  Well, no, we can't. Um, and in fact, when you actually look at the, um, the last, they're called last appearance dates, which is the last radiocarbon date that we have on an animal.

• 1:14:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:14:38Speaker 06

  Um, of the 38 different genera, about 20 of them, 20 or 18, I, I don't, don't hold me to the specific number, are gone by 20,000 years ago.

• 1:14:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:14:51Speaker 06

  Right? So, yeah. I mean, it's a fair point to say, why weren't they scavenging the other things? Why were they scavenging mammoth? Well, mammoth and mastodon actually survived up until around 10,000 years ago. And in fact, mastodons were living in the Great Lakes area when Folsom people were killing bison. Out on the high plains. Okay, so.

• 1:15:12Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:15:13Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Um, and so what that is telling us is that, you know, if you are gonna scavenge, that's the big hunk of meat that's laying on the landscape for you. We know that they were there. We don't know about the other three dozen genera, okay? But also, they're going after bison. They're hunting bison at this time. So we know that they are in fact hunting. And it's really interesting, in a number of Clovis sites, the targets are not necessarily mammoth. There are bison in some of these Clovis sites.

• 1:15:49Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:15:50Speaker 05

  The other thing we learned in this research is that elephants last much longer on the landscape after they die than lots of other animals.

• 1:16:00Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  So just the pure chance of humans coming across an elephant carcass would be higher than a bunny or a caribou.

• 1:16:09Steven Rinella?

  I mean, just because of how huge it is.

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  How huge it is. And, and there are documented cases of elephants lasting seven months on the landscape. Um, and then they get scavenged, right? After that point, so.

• 1:16:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. And you know what? Your, your question makes me think too. I don't think we've systematically gone through all of these sort of early kills of deer or bison, and sort of did the same kind of vetting of those as we've done mammoth kills. And it were mammoth scavenging events.

• 1:16:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that'd be interesting. When you look at all this stuff, do you see more definitive kill, hunt kind of stuff going on?

• 1:16:50Speaker 06

  I mean, that's what I would think, but you know what? We haven't sort of turned our sort of critical eye on that.

• 1:16:57Speaker 05

  Although the more we do comparisons between Clovis and post Clovis hunter gatherer groups archaeologically, the more similarities we tend to find. Um, you know, we used to think that fluting was a, a paleo-Indian behavior.

• 1:17:14Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:15Speaker 05

  And then we excavated Goodson Rock Shelter in Oklahoma, where we dug two meters down. We found fluted bifaces. We thought, oh my goodness, this is one of the first Clovis rock shelters ever found.

• 1:17:27Speaker 06

  We were so excited.

• 1:17:28Speaker 05

  We were so excited. We

• 1:17:30Speaker 06

  Terrible site.

• 1:17:31Speaker 05

  Get radiocarbon dates.

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  Bullet ticks.

• 1:17:33Speaker 05

  We get radiocarbon dates from two meters down where we're finding the fluted bifaces, right? The radiocarbon dates come back 4,500 BP. And we're like, oh, those must be wrong. You know, charcoal can move between layers in rock shelters. So we do optimal stimulated luminescence or OSL dating, right, of that same layer.

• 1:17:53Steven Rinella?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:17:54Speaker 05

  The dates come back 4,500 BP. Oh, those must be wrong. Sand grains can move, right? It was the third field season, we've been sweating and getting bit by ticks and all this sort of stuff.

• 1:18:05Speaker 06

  Very unpleasant.

• 1:18:06Speaker 05

  We find notched, archaic projectile points that we know from other sites date to 4,500 BP, made on the same exact stone raw material as our fluted bifaces. And we had to succumb to the evidence at that point.

• 1:18:23Steven Rinella?

  So these folks were making like two kinds?

• 1:18:25Speaker 05

  No, what they were doing was they were, it's convergent evolution. They were basically, they had independently come up with this fluting technique. And on the way to making their notched points, they were fluting their bifaces. And then the, the fluting was erased in the final stage.

• 1:18:43Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:18:44Speaker 05

  We didn't know fluting occurred. I didn't know fluting occurred in, in post Clovis periods.

• 1:18:48Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:18:49Speaker 05

  But there's very little sort of back and forth, I think, or not as much, between paleo-Indian and post paleo-Indian archaeological sites.

• 1:18:58Speaker 06

  Which is largely because of what you were talking about earlier, Steve, which is that this has been, so much of the attention has been focused on Clovis. And look, we're just as guilty as everybody else, right?

• 1:19:10Speaker 05

  It's awesome.

• 1:19:11Speaker 06

  It is really pretty awesome. Um, and it's what gets all the archaeological attention. But we haven't sort of systematically evaluated all the other things that came later in the same way.

• 1:19:21Speaker 05

  And that partially has to do with the fact that we find so little Clovis that we pore over every flake scar and every small chip and everything. In later time periods, where you've got sites that are acres and millions of artifacts, they just don't sort of analyze things as closely as often as I think.

• 1:19:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's fair to say.

• 1:19:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, and because, um, and getting back to the whole extinction issue, right? There's more writing on it 13,000 years ago in terms of the possible role of humans in the demise of all these animals.

• 1:19:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Speaker 06

  Right? So the, um, there's, there's, it's a greater question to answer. And so that's why the focus.

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• 1:21:34Steven Rinella?

  You know, uh, on, on the question of, um, big stuff is, is easier to scavenge. I mean, just, just, it's big.

• 1:21:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Steven Rinella?

  So it takes a long time to go away. Are, are you familiar with, uh, Viljam or Stephenson? He was an Arctic explorer. He spent a lot of time cutting across like early 1900s. He was up in, uh, on the Arctic coast of Alaska. He went into the high, the, the high Arctic, Victoria Island and stuff. He made a lot of first contacts with people. They, they knew about white people but hadn't encountered them. He's got a couple of books about his, his wanderings. At one point, they're hurting for food and they find a whale. This is in northern Alaska. They find a whale and he talks about they had to boil it and boil it, the tongue. They had to boil it, boil it, and boil it to desalinate it enough to be able to eat it.

• 1:22:26Steven Rinella?

  And he later, they later run into, in, in, in his time, he's, like, his, one of his books is My Life with the Eskimo. He used the word Eskimo. They run into some Eskimo who said, I can't remember how many, they, it's, it's multiple. That's been there for years.

• 1:22:43Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:22:44Steven Rinella?

  So then it was still like, here's this guy scavenging a whale that people are like, oh no, I can't remember, it was two years, whatever. They're like, oh, that thing's been there for forever. And they're still eating on it.

• 1:22:53Speaker 05

  Well, and this is where I think working with and learning from John Speck was incredible. Because for years, he has systematically searched and read through the ethnohistoric literature on hunter-gatherers, not the post-World War II literature, but everything basically pre-World War II. And while scavenging is incredibly rare, post-World War II, pre-World War II, he finds it everywhere. Hunter-gather groups around the world, from Argentina to Alaska to Asia, all over. They're scavenging everything.

• 1:23:30Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  And in fact, oftentimes, they prefer the putrid meat to fresh meat.

• 1:23:38Steven Rinella?

  Got it, yeah.

• 1:23:39Speaker 06

  He gives the example of, just to sort of put this in some sort of local context, he talks about Mandan and Hadatsa groups in the early, sort of 1600s, 1700s, bison that would wander out onto the ice.

• 1:23:56Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:23:58Speaker 06

  Break up, they'd fall in, drown, they'd float downstream. And, you know, Mandan and Hadatsa groups would just pull them out, they'd be pretty bloated at that point.

• 1:24:09Steven Rinella?

  I've written about this. It was part of this, it was the seasonal plan, part of the seasonal plan was that shit washes down river.

• 1:24:16Speaker 06

  And you were wondering about reliability of scavenging.

• 1:24:19Steven Rinella?

  There you go. Well, I just, yeah, yeah, you're right. That contradicts it.

• 1:24:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, and, and it didn't, somebody was asked, well, what about the smell? And John has this great quote in the paper, a Native American said, "We don't eat the smell."

• 1:24:41Steven Rinella?

  But when I was just hanging out, though, I was just hanging out with Inuit folks, and they still, they still eat a lot of what they call fermented walrus.

• 1:24:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:24:53Steven Rinella?

  Right? And other things. And talking to him about it, it's, it's, it wasn't that someone once upon a time, I'm guessing here, but it wasn't that someone once upon a time said, "I could really go for something fermented." What it probably was, you kill a bunch of walrus, because there's walrus around. You can use some of it, you can't use all of it. And you, you dig down and get into the permafrost and bury some, and cover it up with rocks so polar bears don't get it.

• 1:25:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Steven Rinella?

  And then when you're really hard up, you go, and it's like, it's a little rank. But I'm not going to starve to death over this.

• 1:25:32Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:25:32Steven Rinella?

  And so you eat it, your children eat it, their children eat it, and eventually becomes, it's just a thing that is acceptable. And it's like, but it's birth, like, the birth of the idea was trying to store stuff over, right? And so you can imagine that people's tolerances for these things stank, or fermentation, or rot, or whatever, probably grow into taste, probably grow into a thing that you don't mind, that it's normal and you like it, right?

• 1:26:04Speaker 06

  It's custom and culture.

• 1:26:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  Especially when it's been done for two million years.

• 1:26:08Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:26:09Speaker 05

  I mean, like, when you've got little Homo habilis, they're not going out and hunting rhinos and hippo, right? That's a three-foot-tall hominid that barely can, makes stone flakes. So they are scavenging. And they've, no one questions whether Homo habilis was scavenging, right? So I think, and you had a quote this morning, that scavenging, when hunting gets added with Homo erectus, scavenging doesn't go away.

• 1:26:35Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:36Speaker 05

  And I think the ethnohistoric literature shows that to be the case.

• 1:26:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, credit to Mary Steiner, who's worked a lot on Neanderthal sites. And Mary pointed out, because Neanderthals, there's no question, these guys were hunting. They were serious dudes. And what she said is, you know, it's unfortunate that we haven't really thought about Neanderthal scavenging, because that is, in a sense, a form of gathering. You've got hunting, and you've got gathering. And if you, if you think about scavenged meat, it's low cost, it's low risk, it's nutritious. And if you don't know where you're going, or what you might find up ahead of you, it's right there in front.

• 1:27:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Speaker 06

  And why would you pass it up? Because again, you're not going to have those sort of food taboos. I mean, when we think about scavenged stuff, right? You're not going to buy a package of ground beef in the grocery store that's kind of turned brown.

• 1:27:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Speaker 06

  Right? You won't touch that.

• 1:27:40Steven Rinella?

  Well, I do have one story, but.

• 1:27:44Speaker 06

  And how'd you feel after you ate it?

• 1:27:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, you know, for them, it, it, yeah, these folks are subsistence hunters and gatherers.

• 1:27:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:55Speaker 06

  And subsistence, I think, has a pretty wide bandwidth.

• 1:27:59Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:27:59Speaker 06

  Much wider than our experiences, certainly, and much more opportunities than our experiences as well.

• 1:28:09Steven Rinella?

  Uh, you guys both know of, at least, Mike Kuns.

• 1:28:13Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:28:13Steven Rinella?

  The.

• 1:28:14Speaker 06

  I've, I've worked in the Arctic with him one season.

• 1:28:17Steven Rinella?

  I, again, serious person, follow the facts, do your research, and then, like I'm doing with you at times, I'm like, but, but, you know, if you had to guess. Anyways, I was up with him in the Arctic, and I'm, and I'm pressuring him about what would be the coolest thing to find.

• 1:28:36Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:28:36Steven Rinella?

  What do you hope you find? What would be the coolest thing you'd find? And he indulged me, and he said, "I sometimes imagine," he's explaining to me, "I sometimes imagine that I'm flying along in my helicopter, and there, out of the ground is a fucking hand."

• 1:28:53Steven Rinella?

  And he's like, and it's just a landslide, like a landslide, like an encampment. And then it freezes. Right? And he goes, "And under that landslide, melting out of this ice, is just everything."

• 1:29:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:11Steven Rinella?

  It's everything. It's the dogs, the clothes.

• 1:29:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Steven Rinella?

  That, it's, it's like, you know, it's Pompeii.

• 1:29:19Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:19Steven Rinella?

  Right? It's like Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius, where there's a dude like, or, you know, there's a person literally doing a thing, and they're like, right?

• 1:29:27Speaker 06

  They're in their fetal position.

• 1:29:28Steven Rinella?

  So he's, yeah, he said, "Yeah, that would be cool."

• 1:29:33Steven Rinella?

  Well. What, like, what?

• 1:29:38Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't need to be that fanciful. But like, what could we find? And I, I put this question to another anthropologist one time, and I'm like, "But God, there's got to be so much stuff out there." He's like, "I don't know, look at how many roads we've already built. How many foundations we've already dug?" Um, this individual's saying, "I'm not optimistic that we're going to find all kinds of new amazing stuff."

• 1:30:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well.

• 1:30:05Steven Rinella?

  Like, but what, what would be an exciting thing that's, that's somewhat probable that would stir the conversation around the first Americans up?

• 1:30:20Speaker 06

  First, let me talk about Mike's dream.

• 1:30:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:30:23Speaker 06

  Mike's fantasy.

• 1:30:25Steven Rinella?

  Again, I pushed him on this.

• 1:30:27Speaker 06

  No, no, that's fine. Regrettably, it's coming true, because of climate change.

• 1:30:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:33Speaker 06

  Ice fields are melting, and there's a whole sort of sub-discipline that's emerging now, where people are going to these areas where glacial ice is disappearing, and they're finding stuff.

• 1:30:46Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:48Speaker 06

  So far, no hands sticking out of the ground, which actually would be pretty hard to see from a helicopter. But, you know, Mike needs to stick around a little more, a little while longer, and.

• 1:30:59Steven Rinella?

  His dream might come true. Yeah, because who knows, he's hiding under all that ice.

• 1:31:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, look, my, my sense would be what I would like to see, right? And this is actually something that we're working on now, is getting far more ancient environmental DNA.

• 1:31:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:22Speaker 06

  On landscapes and on animals. Because leaving aside, I'm an archaeologist, but let's just leave aside all the archaeological stuff, partly for reasons that met and said, we're not going to be able to answer this question with archaeological data. What we really need to find, what we really need to develop, is a knowledge base and data.

• 1:31:47Speaker 06

  Let me pause for a moment and give a bit of an explanation.

• 1:31:51Speaker 06

  If you go to a lake and you get a sediment core out of that lake.

• 1:31:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:57Speaker 06

  And you thin slice it like a salami.

• 1:32:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:32:01Speaker 06

  And you take just a little square centimeter of dirt out of that. You can recover all of the plants and animals that were on that landscape at that moment in time. Okay. Uh, if, if they were, if the animals were taking a leak, if they were dropping a turd, if they were shedding. I mean, you moving across, you could find your DNA all over this room, Steve.

• 1:32:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Speaker 06

  Okay. What that does for us, if we really want to understand environmental change, species changes over time. We can't just look at what is a mammoth doing? We've got to look at what the environment around that mammoth is doing and how that's changing.

• 1:32:47Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:48Speaker 06

  And so for me, and again, this is something that we're working on, is we need to develop. You know, it's kind of mundane. It's not as exciting as seeing a hand sticking out.

• 1:32:59Steven Rinella?

  You can't beat the hand, man.

• 1:33:00Speaker 06

  No, no, I'm conceding ground. Uh, I defer to Mike, uh, on all of this and other questions. Um, but what we need to do is develop that knowledge because then we'll be able to say, look.

• 1:33:15Speaker 06

  These animals are starting to swirl down the drain at this point in time. And here's the reason why we're seeing their vegetation changing.

• 1:33:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Speaker 06

  We're seeing that biological community evolving over time because of this ultimate driver, which is the climate that's changing at the end of the Pleistocene. So that's what I want to find is find those sites. And we've got several of them going right now. Um, working with my colleagues at the Center for Geogenetics in Copenhagen, where we're actually looking at a number of these localities that are terminal Pleistocene.

• 1:33:49Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:33:49Speaker 06

  Where we're looking at the presence of the plants and the animals that are out on that landscape, just trying to get so that we can answer that question. So much as I would love to be able to say, if I found this one thing, it could solve all of the questions that we've been asking.

• 1:34:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:07Speaker 06

  There isn't going to be one thing. This is not like, what's that movie with Billy Crystal? One thing?

• 1:34:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 1:34:14Speaker 06

  Where they go off to a dude ranch?

• 1:34:16Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:34:17Speaker 06

  Um.

• 1:34:18Steven Rinella?

  City slickers.

• 1:34:19Speaker 06

  City slickers, right? And Jack.

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  There's not going to be one thing.

• 1:34:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Speaker 06

  Okay. Um, it's going to be a lot of work on a lot of different things.

• 1:34:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  Do you have one thing?

• 1:34:32Speaker 05

  I do.

• 1:34:32Speaker 06

  Oh, thank goodness. Okay.

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  And I think it's because for several years now, we've done all these experiments.

• 1:34:42Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  And we'll do one experiment, we get a result, we'll do a very different experiment, we get the same result. Like, again, we're finding the more experiments we do, the more equa finality there is.

• 1:34:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:55Speaker 05

  So what we're learning is how much we can't know about the Stone Age. And that sucks.

• 1:35:03Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:04Speaker 05

  Right? I didn't go into archaeology and the Stone Age to learn about all the things I can't actually know about, right?

• 1:35:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a bummer.

• 1:35:11Speaker 05

  It's a bummer, right? No one does that.

• 1:35:13Steven Rinella?

  I've found out you can't find anything out.

• 1:35:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. And really, we're, we're in a lot of ways, I think, looking at maybe the extent of some archaeological interpretation.

• 1:35:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:35:24Speaker 05

  So for me, I would take the single Clovis point embedded in a mammoth bone. That'd be awesome, right? But I'll tell you what's going to happen, right? We've, if someone finds a Clovis point embedded in a mammoth bone, they're going to say, overkill. We killed all the mammoths, done, right? That proves all these other 15 sites were definitely kills. And I'll tear my hair out because I'm like, well, no, like, we suspected they hunted. This is confirmation, right? Strong evidence. And that, that's really all I'm looking for is some strong evidence. Cause I think they hunted these things, but.

• 1:35:59Speaker 06

  It would be, yeah, that's true. It would be nice to have an unequivocal case.

• 1:36:02Speaker 05

  It would be great. Um, but I'll tell you, the, the reaction is.

• 1:36:07Steven Rinella?

  But if you, I see what you're saying. Cause if you had, if you find the one where the shoulder blade has the thing sticking into it,

• 1:36:16Steven Rinella?

  then all the other pieces laying around, all the other broken points laying around and stuff, it would kind of inform your understanding of what you're seeing elsewhere.

• 1:36:25Speaker 05

  Well, see, and this is where.

• 1:36:26Steven Rinella?

  Override it, but it would like, you'd inform it in some way.

• 1:36:29Speaker 05

  Now, but see, this is where you, you can't take a single case and then justify all the equivocal cases. That's just, it, it's, it's illogical. Um, and it's, it's not good science. Um, it would, it would show that, yeah, it would be great confirmation of this thing that we suspect is happening.

• 1:36:49Steven Rinella?

  Do you know that when I was first introduced, uh, uh, the historian Dan Florries, many, many years ago, took me to the Blackwater Draw site, the Clovis type site, Clovis, New Mexico.

• 1:37:05Steven Rinella?

  It was closed. We always laugh about this. It was closed and we jumped fence and went and looked around. So.

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  I've done that.

• 1:37:11Steven Rinella?

  Long time ago. Uh, I then started reading about it and in my head, I'm sure I've told you this story. In my head, I've read somewhere how it sits in my head that I read how at one point in time, a school bus driver that had taken local school kids to see the Blackwater Draw site, found a mammoth skull with a projectile point embedded in the eye socket and took it. I then later had people go find that for me.

• 1:37:48Steven Rinella?

  I cannot find it, but how would I have made that up? Like, I can't find where I read it.

• 1:37:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:57Speaker 05

  Was it a dream?

• 1:37:59Steven Rinella?

  Yes. Yeah, but like, like by all, I've looked, I've, I've looked. Was it a pamphlet? I don't know. It's, it's not findable. It's not findable digitally.

• 1:38:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, I don't know, but I swear, then I went and told people that. I'm like, hey, did you know that a bus driver one time took some kids out here and found a mammoth skull? The projectile point stuck in and dragged it home? And I would tell people this. And some point someone called me out and I'm like, can you point this out to me? What are you talking about? And I'm like, yeah, I'll go find it. I can't find it.

• 1:38:32Speaker 06

  Well.

• 1:38:32Steven Rinella?

  I dreamed it.

• 1:38:33Speaker 06

  You dreamed it because, well, think about it. You know how big a mammoth skull is?

• 1:38:38Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, but how would I have made that up?

• 1:38:40Speaker 06

  I don't, um, memory plays.

• 1:38:42Steven Rinella?

  Bus driver?

• 1:38:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:44Speaker 05

  Were the kids on the bus?

• 1:38:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, did they help carry the skull?

• 1:38:47Steven Rinella?

  This is a call to, this is a call to listeners. This is a call to listeners.

• 1:38:52Speaker 06

  Ah.

• 1:38:52Steven Rinella?

  If you can help me out and find whatever the hell.

• 1:38:56Speaker 05

  Or you are that bus driver.

• 1:38:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. In another life, I was the bus driver.

• 1:39:00Speaker 05

  No, not you. Maybe the bus driver's listening right now.

• 1:39:04Steven Rinella?

  Listen, if your grandpa was a bus driver and when you, every time you walk into like his old barn, there's a skull laying there, the piece of stone sticking out of the eye socket, can you please send me a photo?

• 1:39:15Speaker 06

  You know, I.

• 1:39:16Steven Rinella?

  Because I don't know. It was Mike Kuns's hand. But, but I read it somewhere and I, it's embarrassing. I was like embarrassed. I can't remember who, who challenged me on it, but I was embarrassed to be like, I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:39:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, one gets these things in one's memory and then over the years, the memory gets embellished in ways subconscious.

• 1:39:37Steven Rinella?

  But a bus driver?

• 1:39:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, that's just a nice detail.

• 1:39:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:40Speaker 06

  Um, I will tell you, um, I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time in and around that locality over years.

• 1:39:46Steven Rinella?

  Story.

• 1:39:47Speaker 06

  No, I've heard other rumors, uh, but that's not one of them. And.

• 1:39:53Steven Rinella?

  I think it's an apocryphal, at this point, it's an apocryphal story.

• 1:39:57Speaker 06

  Probably.

• 1:39:57Steven Rinella?

  The trace is back to me.

• 1:40:00Speaker 06

  You're, you're actually patient zero on that particular epidemic.

• 1:40:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:40:07Steven Rinella?

  So what, uh, tell me what you guys are working on now? Like what's next? In this world?

• 1:40:12Speaker 06

  In this world.

• 1:40:13Steven Rinella?

  In the Ice Age world.

• 1:40:14Speaker 06

  So I've been working the last few years on a site that's at 10,000 feet.

• 1:40:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:40:20Speaker 06

  And.

• 1:40:20Steven Rinella?

  You talked about this.

• 1:40:21Speaker 06

  In the Rockies.

• 1:40:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, tell people about this site.

• 1:40:23Speaker 06

  So this is a site that was originally excavated by the Smithsonian in the 1990s. Uh, and, you know, really interesting work that they did there. And just out of curiosity, um, I know I've, when I've been on in the show before, we've talked about our work at the Mountaineer site in the.

• 1:40:42Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's what I thought you were getting into is the Gunnison.

• 1:40:45Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. No, this is a different one.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yep, sorry.

• 1:40:48Speaker 06

  So just to, for those who, uh, didn't hear the previous podcast, and I can't quote a chapter and verse of which podcast it was, it's met and put of your quote.

• 1:40:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the Mountaineer site.

• 1:40:59Speaker 06

  The Mountaineer site in Gunnison, right? We had a winter village, a Folsom Age winter village. So this other site was up and over the continental divide, uh, from Mountaineer about, oh, I think 80 kilometers or so.

• 1:41:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:14Speaker 06

  Okay. And there's a couple of substantial mountain passes between this other site and Mountaineer. One at about 11,000 feet and the other at about 11.5. And.

• 1:41:24Steven Rinella?

  Like, like highways? Cutting through them or?

• 1:41:27Speaker 06

  Well, there are now.

• 1:41:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:41:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, Slumgullian Pass and Spring Creek Pass.

• 1:41:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:32Speaker 06

  Uh, for those of you that have a Colorado Atlas in front of you. And we were just, I don't know, on a busman's holiday, uh, visiting this site, uh, back in, I don't know, six, eight years ago.

• 1:41:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:46Speaker 06

  And it had been interpreted by the Smithsonian, and I think reasonably enough that, uh, it was kind of a waystation. Cause here at 10,000 feet at the end of the Ice Age, it's a Folsom Age site, I should add. Here at 10,000 feet at the end of the Ice Age, you're not gonna be hanging around. Uh, Mountaineer, we had reasons to think they were hanging around in the winter. Well, for one thing, it's only at 8,000 feet, so it's a lot lower. It was probably a good place to spend the winter for a variety of reasons that we've talked about before.

• 1:42:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, the, the, it held, it, it held game.

• 1:42:19Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:42:19Steven Rinella?

  Well, in the winter and made, and animals would get in there and it'd be hard for them to.

• 1:42:23Speaker 06

  They're hard for them to get out.

• 1:42:24Steven Rinella?

  And they would winter in there.

• 1:42:25Speaker 06

  Yep, yep. And people were sitting up on top of this mesa, a thousand feet above the valley floor, where actually it's warmer than on the valley floor and the basin floor, cause cold air sinks, right?

• 1:42:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:34Speaker 06

  So we had a good sort of case for that. Anyway, uh, so the Smithsonian had done this work back in the nineties and about four years ago, uh, the collections came back to the Forest Service, uh, out in, uh, western, uh, Colorado. And we got to looking at them, at the collections, again, just, you know, out of curiosity and, and we were just dumbstruck to see some of the projectile points were made out of stone that came, we are convinced, from the Gunnison Basin.

• 1:43:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:43:06Speaker 06

  And then it occurred to us, oh, well, maybe these folks were on their way over to Mountaineer.

• 1:43:13Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:43:13Speaker 06

  Uh, because we know, when you look at the distribution of these Folsom sites in the Rockies and out on the plains, they tend to have circuits, right? So we did a bunch of work at the original Folsom site, you know, back in the 1990s. And these folks are kind of tracking up and down, um, the edge of the Rockies. They're mostly out on the plains. You know, they're going from the Panhandle of Texas up into, uh, eastern Colorado, stopping at the Folsom site, moving around. In the Rockies, they're sort of within the Rockies itself, right? The Rocky Mountains themselves. So we got to wondering, is there a connection between

• 1:43:55Speaker 06

  the folks that we know were in the Gunnison Basin and the folks that were on the other side of these two high mountain passes?

• 1:44:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:04Speaker 06

  So we spent, uh, three years excavating out there. Uh, it's called the Black Mountain Site. And, um, what we found was indeed, uh, they were there, but only briefly. Uh, they may have been there on a couple of separate occasions.

• 1:44:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:21Speaker 06

  So this really was kind of a waypoint. One of the local, uh, folks that, um, put us up in the summers, uh, they have a, sort of a dude ranch out there. Uh, a shout out to Fremont's Ranch. It's a wonderful place to stay. Uh, and, uh, Greg Pearson, who's the, uh, kind of runs, uh, and guides out of Fremont's, said, oh yeah, that's a spike camp. That's what he calls it.

• 1:44:47Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:44:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. Uh, you, you must use the term as well?

• 1:44:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. So he said, yeah, that kind of looks what I would call a spike camp, where you're kind of there, you're checking your weaponry to making sure it's all good. They were making some points. They were discarding some other ones. But you don't see the kind of tools that you find in a residential locality where people spend a long time.

• 1:45:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:45:09Speaker 06

  Right? So not a lot of scrapers. Uh, we had some engraving tools. Uh, I just spent most of last year doing the analysis of all the stone tools from the site. And it's mostly just little tiny flakes, cause they were just making sure everything, all their gear was in good shape. Because if you think about it, you're there at the end of the Pleistocene and you're at 10,000 feet, you're gonna have to go up and over a mountain pass that's 11. And then you have to go up and over another one at 11.5, and then you drop down into the drainage that will take you into the Gunnison Basin.

• 1:45:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Speaker 06

  You don't want to start that trek at five o'clock in the afternoon, right? So you hunker down at this nice little waystation. Uh, you get yourself ready and then the next morning, you do your thing.

• 1:45:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:56Speaker 06

  Um, one of the really.

• 1:45:58Steven Rinella?

  Was there bone at that site?

• 1:45:59Speaker 06

  Not a darn thing.

• 1:46:00Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:46:01Speaker 06

  Not a darn thing. And I'll tell you, um, I was out there a year ago last spring with my colleague, Eskie Wilderslev, who basically invented environmental DNA. Cause we had taken some samples from there in 2023 to see if there was anything in the DNA that we could identify that would tell us what the plants and animals were. Because there is no bone preserved.

• 1:46:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Speaker 06

  And didn't see a darn thing. And, and Eskie, we were passing through on our way to Santa Fe, kind of a circuitous route on the way to Santa Fe from Denver, uh, cause he wanted to see the site to try and figure out, well, there has to be, why isn't the DNA preserved? This is an ideal setting. And it has to do with some technical stuff about single stranded versus double stranded DNA, which we won't go into. But we took a bunch more samples in, in 2025. And I was just in Copenhagen for a month, uh, working on some other projects, uh, ancient DNA related stuff. Uh, and I talked to the person who's doing the analysis of the environmental DNA from this site.

• 1:47:06Speaker 06

  And one of the things that struck me, and this is all very preliminary, uh, data, uh, is that she's seeing, uh, a lot of plants in the DNA, but no woody plants, no trees.

• 1:47:22Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:22Speaker 06

  And one of the things that had always been sort of in the back of my mind was, okay, this is a great place for a waystation because you would have been in the trees before you get up and over, uh, the tree line and have to cross these high elevation passes.

• 1:47:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:36Speaker 06

  Because then you'd have wood for fuel. But we weren't finding any trees in the DNA, just a lot of flowers, right?

• 1:47:44Steven Rinella?

  No kidding, yeah.

• 1:47:44Speaker 06

  Flowers are not gonna keep you warm.

• 1:47:46Steven Rinella?

  So they were up in the Alpine, yeah.

• 1:47:47Speaker 06

  Yes. And so, uh, now this is all very, very, very preliminary.

• 1:47:52Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you what they were doing. They were hunting sheep.

• 1:47:55Steven Rinella?

  Big horns.

• 1:47:56Speaker 05

  You're done. You have to do anything else.

• 1:47:57Speaker 06

  Thank goodness.

• 1:47:58Steven Rinella?

  I don't know what they do with the bones. You better look over to the right or the left, I guess.

• 1:48:03Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, I, I'd love it if we found some sheep DNA, but there's absolutely no animal DNA.

• 1:48:08Steven Rinella?

  God, man, yeah.

• 1:48:09Speaker 06

  So what they're doing now, um, this was the initial run through doing what's called shotgun sequencing, um, where you're not necessarily looking for specific plants. And so I've asked them, can you go back and do what's called capture DNA? Where you're using as bait tree species to see if you can grab chunks of DNA out of the swirl, if you will, that are trees. Cause that's the only way that you'll be able to be sure that there's either trees there or not trees there.

• 1:48:41Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:48:42Speaker 06

  So hopefully we'll have that answer in a few months. Um, so yeah, that's what's been, um, I've been working on, on the archaeological side of things.

• 1:48:51Steven Rinella?

  Wouldn't it be great if that DNA stuff was so good? That you could just be like, the people that were here are, were there.

• 1:48:59Speaker 06

  Uh, you know what?

• 1:49:00Steven Rinella?

  Someday.

• 1:49:00Speaker 06

  I've thought about that, Steve. I've absolutely, that's, that's my hand sticking out of the ground, right? Is the ability to say.

• 1:49:07Steven Rinella?

  Sophisticated.

• 1:49:08Speaker 06

  That would be, you know, in theory, it's absolutely possible to a degree. Um, there's preservation limitations.

• 1:49:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:18Speaker 06

  Um, you know, getting a full genome out of a sediment sample is a challenge. Uh, you could probably get whether they were, they shared, you know, uniparental mitochondrial DNA Y chromosome markers. But that wouldn't necessarily tell you whether it's the same people. It just tells you whether at some point back in the past, they have a shared maternal ancestor.

• 1:49:42Steven Rinella?

  Understood, yeah.

• 1:49:44Speaker 06

  So yeah, that's what I've been doing.

• 1:49:45Steven Rinella?

  And men, what, what, uh, what can we expect next from you?

• 1:49:48Speaker 05

  Cool. Couple things. Uh, actually, thanks to some of the Meat Eater listeners of this podcast. You know, a couple of years ago, we published a Clovis point and a Folsom point that, uh, Matthew Wendell, who's a listener and a fan, sent to us. And he said, hey, can you analyze these? We did. We found all sorts of stuff. We learned. Um, we published that in the scientific literature. That's happened again now. Uh, Ben Galt in, in New England found a Clovis point or a fluted point from Nantucket Island. And he said, hey, like, I'm interested. Can you learn about anything? And so he sent it to us and we're doing all the analyses now and.

• 1:50:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:50:24Speaker 05

  So yeah, I mean, thanks to the Meat Eater, uh, podcast listeners, like, we're doing real research on Clovis and fluted points and we're learning all sorts of stuff. So that's awesome. So if anyone out there wants to send us more artifacts, we won't keep them. We'll send them back to you.

• 1:50:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39Speaker 05

  Um, but we can do all sorts of awesome geometric morphometrics and microware analysis and learn. Every Clovis point, we learn something, right?

• 1:50:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:47Speaker 05

  So we, we do that, that sort of thing quite a bit. But the big thing next for me is, uh, I'm going to Kenya in January. Um, I'm really interested in the origin of all technology.

• 1:50:59Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:00Speaker 05

  Um, over three million years ago. And we published a new hypothesis last year, uh, or about a year and a half ago, on, on how that origin of technology with stone tools occurred.

• 1:51:12Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:13Speaker 05

  And it all has to do with butchering and, and cutting carcasses up, um, with naturally sharp rocks.

• 1:51:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:51:20Speaker 05

  And there's a site, um, that dates about 2.9, 2.8 million years ago.

• 1:51:24Speaker 06

  Oh, that's early.

• 1:51:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, where we think we may have, uh, some naturally sharp rocks in association with a carcass.

• 1:51:33Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:51:34Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so we're gonna go and, and check those out and, and we'll see.

• 1:51:37Steven Rinella?

  So some one or something.

• 1:51:41Steven Rinella?

  Was like, hey, that's got a sharp edge on it. I'm gonna beat snot out of this.

• 1:51:46Speaker 05

  And why this is really important, right, is that the, the practice of cutting came before stone tools.

• 1:51:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:55Speaker 05

  Right. But if you look at the scientific literature, everyone thinks that the origin of, of stone technology was some sort of eureka moment, like in 2001 Space Odyssey, where someone like is like, you know what? I need to cut something. Bam. I'm gonna, you know, go ahead and do that. And I've got my knife, right? But there's no reason to suspect that's the trajectory that things took. And, and really, the only reason to make stone tools is if the behavior of cutting was already in place.

• 1:52:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:26Speaker 05

  And so I think that the exploitation of carcasses and meat potentially goes back much farther than we currently have. Maybe even back to a creature called Artapithecus. That's like 4.4 million years old.

• 1:52:39Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:40Speaker 05

  I could be wrong. I probably am, but we're, we're gonna investigate.

• 1:52:43Steven Rinella?

  So how long we spent over there?

• 1:52:45Speaker 05

  This first trip to Kenya, because I've been to Africa four other times. This one will be about 10 days and then we'll go for longer stints in, in the near future.

• 1:52:53Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:52:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it should be good.

• 1:52:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, guys, thanks for coming on the show, man.

• 1:52:58Speaker 05

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:52:59Speaker 06

  Always enjoyable.

• 1:53:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:00Steven Rinella?

  I gotta tell people a quick thing. Um, I was gonna bring it up earlier. I'm bringing it up now. The, uh, you guys are welcome to come. We've been talking about how our Christmas tour tickets, the, I've been trying to explain the complexity of pre-sale and sale. It is officially pre-sale, which means they're on sale.

• 1:53:21Steven Rinella?

  I'll spare you the distinction between pre-sale and sale. Tickets are on sale for the Christmas tour. Monday, December 14th, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

• 1:53:32Steven Rinella?

  Tuesday, December 15th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wednesday, December 16, Madison, Wisconsin. Thursday, December 17, Des Moines, Iowa. Friday, December 18, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Saturday, December 19, Fargo, North Dakota. Get your tickets now. Nate, where, what, what's the ticket address, man?

• 1:53:57Steven Rinella?

  Just go to the meat eater.com, look up the Christmas tour. The Christmas tour is where you go to get your laughs at Christmas. And if you've got someone in your life who's a fan,

• 1:54:06Steven Rinella?

  a listener of the show or whatever, give them a couple of these bad boys and, and, uh, as a early gift in a Christmas card. They are gonna be grateful. Um, all right, guys, thanks again for coming on. You have a stand. You can come on anytime you want, you know?

• 1:54:21Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:54:21Steven Rinella?

  Listen, if we ever just walk in here and you guys are sitting here, we're gonna record. Anytime you wanna come on, you come on. Just keep, keep, keep us, keep us posted.

• 1:54:29Speaker 05

  For sure. And I think we always have ideas. So other collaborations in the future, all sorts of tests.

• 1:54:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we're supposed to be cutting up some ostriches or something like that.

• 1:54:39Speaker 05

  Oh, don't worry.

• 1:54:42Steven Rinella?

  All right. Thanks. Thanks again. Again, uh, Dr. David Meltzer and Dr. Metten Aaron. Thanks for coming.

• 1:54:47Speaker 05

  Thanks. Thank you very much.

• 1:55:15Steven Rinella?

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