Ep. 693: Did Clovis Hunters Kill All the Mammoths?

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Spencer Pelton https://wyoarchaeo.wyo.gov/index.php/about/bios/wyoming-state-archaeologist-spencer-pelton and Todd Surovell https://sites.google.com/view/todd-surovell from the University of Wyoming https://www.uwyo.edu/anthropology/index.html, Randall Williams https://www.themeateater.com/games/turtle, Spencer Neuharth https://www.themeateater.com/games/turtle, and Brody Henderson https://www.themeateater.com/people/brody-henderson. Topics discussed: Testing a Clovis point on an elephant; the book Thunder Without Rain https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510738348/thunder-without-rain/ by the late Thomas McIntyre https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-077-african-hunting; breaking down all of the Slams; the prestigious caribou tag; Clay's Bear Grease podcast with Metin Eren https://www.themeateater.com/listen/bear-grease/ep-298-the-mystery-of-clovis; thrusting spears; the Clovis overkill hypothesis; hunting mammoths; the Mesa site; and more. 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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:41Steven Rinella?

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• 2:24Speaker 03

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten and in my case underwearless.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  The Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:34Steven Rinella?

  You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. All right, everybody. Today, we're going to dive in, once again, on my favorite subject of all subjects on the planet, which is First Americans. Who got here first? What were they doing? When they come? How'd they get here? Did they kill everything? Did they kill all the mammoths? All this question. And we have found, I'm going to explain this all in greater detail.

• 3:17Steven Rinella?

  We have found some fresh perspectives coming out of, fresh to me at least, because I'll explain the whole controversy. This is a very, this is a controversial subject, the First Americans. And we have had on in the past, a number of times, David Meltzer, to talk about the peopling of the Americas. And today, we're going to hear from, is it fair to call you guys all colleagues? Because you talk about the same stuff?

• 3:40Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:42Steven Rinella?

  Enemies? Enemies and I'm trying to soup it up.

• 3:44Speaker 06

  We have disagreements, but we work well together.

• 3:50Steven Rinella?

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

• 4:19Speaker 05

  Experiment, dug some, some of the most major sites. He's just kind of like, we call him the Godfather of Wyoming archaeology.

• 4:27Steven Rinella?

  And, and, and he went to Africa to test out stone tools on elephants, correct?

• 4:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, he did. In Zimbabwe, they were, they had a overpopulation problem of elephants and they were calling them... So he took advantage of that opportunity to to test Clovis weapons on actual African elephants.

• 4:43Steven Rinella?

  Alive?

• 4:44Speaker 06

  Uh, ostensibly dead and dying, is my understanding.

• 4:48Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Finished him off.

• 4:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:50Steven Rinella?

  But he just wanted to see how it would perform.

• 4:52Speaker 06

  Yeah. Was it a functional weapon for for killing an elephant? Yeah.

• 4:56Steven Rinella?

  And what did he determine?

• 4:57Speaker 06

  Absolutely. He had no doubt. He he's the only guy in recent time who's hit a an elephant with a Clovis weaponry.

• 5:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 06

  A a lot of people have done it actually with with deceased elephants, but George did it with living elephants.

• 5:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, nowadays you guys are constrained by the um, the ethics folks. That's a hard one to get across. Review boards. Real pesky matter. Here's what I'd like to do. I'm gonna stab some elephants. Uh, and Spencer Pelton from the, he's the Wyoming State Archaeologist and an adjunct at the University of Wyoming's Archaeology and Anthropology Department.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  That's correct. We should also clarify Todd was my major advisor. This is like, this is kind of like your Met and Melter relationship.

• 5:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  A little bit of a, you know, he brainwashed me into thinking like, like he did, so.

• 5:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:52Steven Rinella?

  So now you have strength in numbers.

• 5:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 5:56Steven Rinella?

  Man, I'm I'm reading a book right now. Um, we're trying, we, there's a guy we had on the show. Do you remember, remember the gun rider?

• 6:03Steven Rinella?

  And he's a big safari dude. I'm trying to get him to come back on. Thomas McIntyre. But his name doesn't look quite like McIntyre, Thomas McIntyre. You know him? He's like a gun, like a, like a gun rider. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? I remember listening to that.

• 6:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like what's super interesting about him is, I mean, a bunch of things, but he he went, he got super into Africa and spent his whole life hunting in Africa. And a lot of the places he hunted in Africa has now been taken over by Islamic radicals, Islamic fundamentalists. So like, like he used to hunt and there's a country no one's ever heard of in Africa called, um, see?

• 6:41Speaker 06

  Eritrea.

• 6:42Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  Djibouti.

• 6:43Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 6:45Steven Rinella?

  West, not on the coast, but it's like, uh, ah.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  Damn it. Democratic Republic of Congo.

• 6:52Speaker 06

  Cameroon.

• 6:52Steven Rinella?

  This is humiliating. No.

• 6:55Speaker 06

  Cote d'Ivoire.

• 6:56Steven Rinella?

  Come on, come on. Get out of my map here? You can't do that. Yeah, you can't bring it up. It's like, it's like, uh.

• 7:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay, Africa countries map. Fa- uh, I know right where it is.

• 7:11Speaker 06

  This should go quick.

• 7:12Steven Rinella?

  It's a...

• 7:15Steven Rinella?

  No, it has got some coast. Bursee-

• 7:18Speaker 06

  Burkina Faso.

• 7:19Steven Rinella?

  Yes!

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, see? No one's ever heard of it?

• 7:23Steven Rinella?

  You can't hunt there anymore.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 7:25Steven Rinella?

  Um, and those same dudes that those Green Berets were mixing it up with, like in Chad, are in that area.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 7:32Steven Rinella?

  Um, anyhow, in his book, he has a long thing. The book is called Rain Without Thunder, or Thunder Without Rain. Thunder Without Rain. It's about, it's like a history of the Cape Buffalo. But in there, he's got a lot of stuff about human history, and he's in this big section right now about poisons.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  Like poisoning spear points?

• 7:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh my, well, you, you might think that till you read the book. It was very important to poison the shaft.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 8:01Steven Rinella?

  Not the point.

• 8:03Steven Rinella?

  Anyhow, the stuff they could take down

• 8:07Steven Rinella?

  with plant poisons, plant toxins, and quick.

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 8:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a, there's a classic anthropological video of the Kung San or the Jeoponce, the Bushmen in the Kalahari.

• 8:18Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 8:18Speaker 06

  Hunting giraffe with these tiny little arrows. They just gotta get a couple arrows in it and then track it till it dies. I, I, I thought their poison was, um, insect based, though.

• 8:28Steven Rinella?

  He gets into the, no, there's three, he gets into the three plant genuses. This is a big thick book. He gets into the, like, the dead, the big, sort of the big three, the big three of plant poisons.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  And any, and he kind of juxtaposes those to the toxins that they use, the South American toxins, which are more of like a paralyzing toxin. And then these different plant toxins they use, but it just gave him like tremendous efficacy on huge shit. Killing huge shit. And some of the stuff just tips right over.

• 9:02Speaker 06

  You're trying to interview him again?

• 9:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 06

  I don't think it'll happen.

• 9:07Speaker 06

  He's dead.

• 9:07Steven Rinella?

  No!

• 9:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 9:08Steven Rinella?

  When?

• 9:09Speaker 06

  Uh, 2022.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  His book, he can't be dead in 2022. His book came out in 23.

• 9:13Speaker 06

  No more canvas safaris. Noted outdoor writer Thomas McIntyre dies at 70.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  That is November 7, 2022.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  We're gonna need to do a say on.

• 9:26Steven Rinella?

  Well, how does book come out 23?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  I don't know. We talked about.

• 9:29Speaker 07

  Hostess.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Chris Hardley's last movie came out six months after he was dead.

• 9:36Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. No shit, really?

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't think it's that uncommon. What? Heath Ledger's Joker came out. How long?

• 9:41Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no. I'm just talking about the, the, that he died. I feel like we should in the studio, we should have a picture of people who passed on.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 9:48Steven Rinella?

  They're on the show.

• 9:51Steven Rinella?

  I don't know.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 9:52Steven Rinella?

  You shouldn't be.

• 9:53Speaker 07

  We'll all be there someday, Spencer.

• 9:55Steven Rinella?

  It's good little bit of research right there.

• 9:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Damn.

• 10:02Speaker 07

  When I was doing my, uh, my research in graduate school, I came across articles from like the 60s and 70s where they were saying the next big thing in, in archery hunting was gonna be poison.

• 10:15Steven Rinella?

  Well, they use it in Mississippi, you know?

• 10:17Speaker 07

  Yeah. And that, but there were like a spade of law after this became like a, a thing. There was a spade of laws passed to prevent you from using.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, a lot of states explicitly say.

• 10:28Speaker 06

  He's that blood clotting poison, didn't they?

• 10:32Steven Rinella?

  Who does?

• 10:33Speaker 06

  I think that's what you're talking about.

• 10:34Steven Rinella?

  They do, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can still use that poison. It's real, it's common there. Like, I got a buddy, I got a buddy, you look at him, you just think he's a normal guy walking down the street. Um.

• 10:44Speaker 06

  But he's.

• 10:45Steven Rinella?

  He shoots poison arrows at deer.

• 10:49Steven Rinella?

  What, what, what? The late Tom, the late Thomas McIntyre gets into. That's really heartbreaking. I like that guy. What he gets into is that there's this other book. See, I'm, I'm gonna be going to Africa this summer, so I'm kinda gonna move in. I've been reading a lot about the World War II Pacific Theater, but I'm gonna start moving into Africa stuff. There's a book called White Hunter, Black Poacher that I wanna read next, and it kinda gets into this with like.

• 11:19Steven Rinella?

  As whites were coming in and safari culture was taken off, there was this effort to sort of like demonize indigenous hunting methods. And so, because they were pushing this like the only humane way is shooting these large bore rifles and poisons are, that all these methods they use are inhumane and this is more humane and like, and then this effort too to declare these big game ranges. And if you're like a white dude hunting the game ranges, you're like on safari. If you're a black dude hunting the game ranges, you're not doing conservation. You're a poacher. You're this, you're that. And this sort of ethical battle over who has access to the resources, which I'm just now digging into.

• 12:03Steven Rinella?

  But I was, I wanted to have Monty talk about Kate Buffalo.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm looking at his Goodreads page. His last published work, according to them, was 2012. And they're pretty thorough.

• 12:11Steven Rinella?

  That's a bald faced lie, buddy. Cause did you type in?

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Second editions?

• 12:16Steven Rinella?

  Did you type in thunder without rain?

• 12:18Speaker 04

  No, but I.

• 12:19Steven Rinella?

  You're lying bald facedly. Spencer's not lying that. That's what I meant. Well, no, because I feel like if you read lies and put them out. You're a liar too. You're a liar too. All right, moving on, we're gonna get, we're gonna die. We gotta have plenty of time to talk about Clovis, Clovis hunters. But real quick, someone wrote in mad because I have this, there's a few problems I always have. That like, it would take like electroshock treatment to have you quit having the problems. One problem is um, the, the whole Roosevelt Roosevelt thing, which like Franklin ruse, Theodore Rose? Did you know there's a split in the family?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  No, I didn't.

• 13:01Steven Rinella?

  That screws me up. And the other thing is what else screws me up is one of my, the one of the, the proper name for my highest honor.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 13:09Steven Rinella?

  Not referring to my honorary PhD, but referring to me being a National Wild Turkey Federat- or like to me being a royal slam holder, which I often refer to as a super slam holder. A guy wrote in very mad that I routinely get wrong what it is and insult the good folks at National Wild Turkey Federation.

• 13:40Steven Rinella?

  It's a royal slam.

• 13:42Speaker 06

  And you're saying what? A super slam?

• 13:44Steven Rinella?

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

• 13:48Speaker 06

  No, it's not.

• 13:51Steven Rinella?

  This guy's wrong.

• 13:52Speaker 06

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

• 13:58Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  Dude, it's right here.

• 14:01Steven Rinella?

  The royal slam, according to this joker.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Phil Geton Goodreads.

• 14:05Steven Rinella?

  What's his name? According to Brett.

• 14:10Steven Rinella?

  Brett says, just, it seems like this is the kind of thing you don't need to argue about since the internet came out, but like, it's like.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  I can read you what N W T F defines.

• 14:20Steven Rinella?

  Please, let's go with them.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  N W T F, grand slam is all four US subspecies.

• 14:25Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Royal slam is the grand slam plus the goulds.

• 14:30Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  World slam is royal slam plus the oscillated wild turkey.

• 14:35Steven Rinella?

  That's where I'm, that's where I, that's where I'm, that's where I'm not hip.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  And then what Brody was talking about, the US super slam harvests one wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  So you're, you.

• 14:47Steven Rinella?

  So Brett is right. Brett's right.

• 14:50Speaker 06

  You say that you're a super slam holder or a.

• 14:53Steven Rinella?

  Well, I, but I say it wrong.

• 14:55Speaker 06

  That's what I'm saying.

• 14:55Steven Rinella?

  I am a royal slam holder.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  Which is all four US subspecies plus the goulds.

• 15:02Speaker 07

  So does that change how it matches up against your honorary doctorate?

• 15:08Speaker 06

  His royal doctor.

• 15:11Steven Rinella?

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

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Oh, where do you put it?

• 15:22Steven Rinella?

  Honors.

• 15:24Speaker 06

  Awards.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  And that's a problem? It's a tell. It's a real tell.

• 15:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because then people look and they're like, oh, yeah, I don't like that. But if I had an honors thing in my resume, it would be like royal slam holder and then.

• 15:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay, we're not going to talk about these artifacts that just came out of, just not even going to talk about it. The artifact, the 6,000 year old hunting kit, which is in like, pretty nice shape, coming out of a cave in Big Ben National Park in Texas, because on Radio Live Spencer's going to be talking about the guy that did the work.

• 16:01Speaker 04

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

• 16:04Steven Rinella?

  Can't talk about it. Now, okay, hold on, hold that thought for a minute.

• 16:10Steven Rinella?

  There's one last thing I want to talk about. Cause this is going to seg, forget I said that, because I want to segue that into these boys.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 16:18Steven Rinella?

  But you know what's really funny that I've been laughing about is a word choice thing.

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  Alaska Fishing Game Department, you know, they're doing like, they're doing like a tag lottery? And they, they refer to a tag, I can't get enough of this. They referred to a big game tag as prestigious.

• 16:40Steven Rinella?

  As though, holding it, like if you look up, like, look up the word prestigious, just read it real quick. What does prestigious mean? It'd be like, holding the tag. You'd, you'd put it in the honors section of your resume.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Inspiring respect and admiration, having high status.

• 16:56Steven Rinella?

  Yes. So you're like, yeah, you'd be like, um, that would be like a, like a thing you, like you'd bring, if you're on a date.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's good marketing.

• 17:06Steven Rinella?

  With someone that's a little bit out of your league.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  I'm a prestigious tag.

• 17:08Steven Rinella?

  You'd be like, you know, you might be curious to know that I own a, that I hold a Kenai Caribou Tag in Alaska, you know, and she'd be like, ooh.

• 17:18Steven Rinella?

  Prestige. I thought that was a great word choice. Prestigious. It's a prestigious caribou tag. Um, oh, so back to this Adalatto kit. The other, I want to hear what you guys think about this. This will be our, this will be how we get into it. You guys know Matt and Aaron, who's been on the show.

• 17:37Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 17:37Steven Rinella?

  Recently, one of our, one of our esteemed colleagues, one of our esteemed colleagues, Clay Newcomb, did a Bear Grease podcast about some of the ins and outs of the Clovis first idea, and you know, the peopling of the Americas. He did a little thing on that. A lot of the guys we work with are all equally fascinated by this subject. And in there, Clay is at with Matt and Clay is observing that, um, what I always tell him, which is during the Ice Age period we're talking about, whether you go back, let's just for, just for convenient memory sake, we go back like, like 10,000 years ago, they weren't shooting

• 18:20Steven Rinella?

  bows. And he's like, well, how do you know they weren't? And he's, he corrected. So he corrects Clay like, oh, tell me more. Like, how do you know that there were no bows? And he said, well, because I told him that.

• 18:34Steven Rinella?

  So when this 6,000 year old hunting kit comes out of this cave in Texas, and lo and behold, it's not a damn bow, I sent it to Clay to say, no, notice, no bow. It's an addle addle.

• 18:49Speaker 06

  And B.

• 18:51Steven Rinella?

  And are you guys addle addle or at laddle guys?

• 18:54Speaker 05

  Addle addle, all the way.

• 18:56Speaker 06

  I say at laddle.

• 18:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh. Wow. Getting heated.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  Interview over.

• 19:05Steven Rinella?

  So am I, uh, who's right? Is it just impossible to say what, what Pete, like if, if someone, when, when, when humans and what is now the United States of America interacted with, with mammoths, is it impossible to say that they were, is it impossible to say they weren't shooting bows at them?

• 19:31Speaker 05

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

• 19:45Speaker 06

  That'd be Paleolithic, 20,000 in Israel, probably.

• 19:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really? They had them that long ago?

• 19:51Speaker 06

  Well, it depends. I mean, the way we infer bows is usually based on the size of the stone point, because we very rarely find the bows themselves.

• 20:00Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 20:01Speaker 06

  I actually found one once in Denmark that was 6,000 years old. That's incredibly rare, right?

• 20:06Steven Rinella?

  What was that bow made out of?

• 20:08Speaker 06

  I don't know. I was a kid at the time. I was maybe 22. It was my first archaeological field experience.

• 20:13Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:14Speaker 06

  And it was about a 10-inch piece of a bow that had broken, and it was recycled as part of a fish trap.

• 20:21Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 20:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, we were digging in this, like, they call it gutcha. It's like this really muddy sediment. And they would make these fish traps that were like V-shaped fences that went to a woven fish trap. And the tide would come in, then would go out, and the fish would get funneled into that trap. So we were coming across all these little round pieces of wood standing vertically that were the posts for that fence. And I came down on one that was D-shaped. And the old guy who had been doing archaeology over there forever took one look at it, and he's like, that's a bow. And he dug it out, and sure enough, it was a nice shaped end piece of a bow.

• 20:57Steven Rinella?

  Are you serious?

• 20:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was wild. But that's really rare. Like, normally, we're inferring the technology from the hard parts that are preserved, right? So finding bows themselves is really, really uncommon. We do have atlatls. We do have bows. But the basic argument that's usually made in distinguishing between bow and arrow and atlatl is the size of the point. Once they get really small, we say, well, arrows are there. We have bow and arrow.

• 21:22Steven Rinella?

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

• 21:28Speaker 05

  I think people have done ballistic experiments.

• 21:31Speaker 06

  David did that for his thesis.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, David Howe, one of our master's students, has a great, he's a great public science communicator in his own right. But he did some ballistic experiments with like a crossbow. And he just basically made points of, you know, from that big, like, you know, say a centimeter long, up to the size of like a Clovis point.

• 21:48Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:49Speaker 05

  And tested the accuracy of those things, the further, like, according to size.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  And I don't remember his conclusions, but.

• 21:57Speaker 06

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

• 22:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, and if you look, so if you're looking like a stratified archaeological site, like a rock shelter that's just got layers and layers of stuff in it. You map out the widths of those projectiles through time, there's usually this dramatic decrease in width. In Wyoming, for instance, it's like 1500 years ago or so. And that's generally assumed to be demarcating the transition to bow and arrow. Where you've been using spear throwers, spear throwers, spear throwers, and all of a sudden you get a bow and your projectiles just decrease in size really rapidly.

• 22:32Steven Rinella?

  Got it. You know that dude I was talking about, Clay Newcomb?

• 22:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:35Steven Rinella?

  He killed, he put a, he put a Folsom point on an arrow and killed a bear with it and the bear piled up in 20 yards.

• 22:43Speaker 06

  I think, was that on YouTube?

• 22:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 06

  I think I saw that.

• 22:46Steven Rinella?

  I mean, he shot, what did he shoot? He shot it from like three yards or something like that. He dug an underground, he dug an underground pit. And then had a bait pile. Cause he knew he wanted to like, he wanted to almost be shooting up into the bear. So he was underground. Cause he wanted a good angle on it.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  That's some next level shit, man.

• 23:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  You know, Folsom points are interesting because they're really, really fine, like a nice, really well-made. Folsom points, really light. I think it would work just fine as an arrow point.

• 23:18Steven Rinella?

  Let me hit, um.

• 23:22Steven Rinella?

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

• 23:31Speaker 06

  Which debate? There's many debates. The big debate.

• 23:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the big debate. I want to lay out the, or maybe you guys, what do you guys want to do it? Lay out to me, but I want you to give the other side a fair shake. No, I want to do it.

• 23:44Steven Rinella?

  Cause I don't want to make you. I don't, I don't want to make you argue someone else's argument.

• 23:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't mind making that argument.

• 23:52Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay. Lay out the debate. Unless you want me to do it.

• 23:58Speaker 05

  Well, you did just get this honorary PhD. Maybe this is your oral exam.

• 24:01Steven Rinella?

  Well, I wasn't in this, but I'll.

• 24:06Speaker 05

  Alright.

• 24:10Steven Rinella?

  For most of my life,

• 24:14Steven Rinella?

  the, the, for most of my life, the, the dominant narrative about the first peoples to come into what is now the United States of America was that sometime, you know, 13,000 years ago, some big game hunters

• 24:31Steven Rinella?

  came over the Bering Land Bridge, not thinking, they were probably not thinking they were going somewhere. Like the Bering Land Bridge was not a narrow, it's not like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was like a body of land the size of Texas. Generations probably lived and died on it without knowing they were going anywhere. Came into Alaska, um, were prevented from going south because there was just massive ice sheets. This is like the Ice Age, big glacial ice sheets. Eventually this thing opened up. Um, it's been described like an ice free corridor opened up and it's been described as if you imagine a long coat that has a zipper on the bottom and

• 25:09Steven Rinella?

  a zipper on the top. Uh, the glaciers melted, created this thing called the Ice Free Corridor. And these hunters kind of spilled down onto the American Great Plains around the site of Edmonton, Alberta, and then raised hell on mammoths, killed ma- uh, wipe, managed to wipe out mammoths and a bunch of other megafauna. And it was this like distinct culture. They had a distinct projectile point they made and with stunning speed colonized

• 25:42Steven Rinella?

  the United States, down into Mexico. They were everywhere. They were in Florida.

• 25:46Speaker 06

  South America too.

• 25:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they were in Florida. They're in Washington State. Their, their points are up in Michigan. They were just poof everywhere. And then out of that group, eventually like came all these different cultures and, and then you start seeing these distinctive cultural markings. In the last, I don't know, handful of years, it's become these, these new archaeological sites, I have thrown this into question, putting forward the idea that people were here much longer, that the people that were here earlier weren't Clovis and that Clovis kind of came, Clovis evolved here from other peoples that showed up here.

• 26:29Steven Rinella?

  Uh, the ice free corridor thing isn't true. And these new people seem, these new people instead came earlier. They came in boats down the coast. And then they somehow morphed into these mammoth hunting Clovis people. How's that?

• 26:46Speaker 06

  It's pretty good.

• 26:47Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 26:47Speaker 05

  That's a good synopsis.

• 26:48Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 26:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a number of different issues there, right? Like there's the, the date of arrival to Alaska. There's the date of getting south of the ice sheets. There's the issue of how did they make a living? Did they drive the extinction event? Um, there's a number of separate issues there. Did they take the coastal route versus the inland route? And you're right that we've sort of tied up Clovis with ice free corridor, pre Clovis with coastal. We don't necessarily have to tie these things together or like Clovis with overkill or pre Clovis with not overkill, right? All these things we can sort of view independently.

• 27:22Steven Rinella?

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• 28:06Steven Rinella?

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• 28:50Steven Rinella?

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• 29:01Speaker 02

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• 29:16Steven Rinella?

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• 30:41Speaker 07

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

• 30:51Speaker 05

  The stone tool technology at the most basic level, but I think it's also come to be associated with a life way, highly mobile, use of really high quality raw materials, seemingly a preference toward hunting large bodied animals, widespread across North America and, you know, to some extent to South America, if you're looking at like fluted bell's cave points.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  Fishtail points, yeah. And another really clear attribute of Clovis is wherever you find it, it dates within a very, very narrow time range. Depending on who you ask, the Clovis period is 300 to 500 years.

• 31:29Speaker 07

  And that was it?

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, they're like, they're really consistent dates across the country. What Spencer mentioned, that it's sort of a pan continental phenomenon, and I think that's a really important part of the story, because that's not really a thing. After Clovis, you do get this regional differentiation, and never again do you see it, right? So it suggests that there's really something special about Clovis. And right, the traditional explanation was, is that this was the technology made by the first people, and they're spreading this technology across the continent, and that's why it's everywhere. It's interesting, because it's a really unique kind of spear point. It wasn't used as fluted points, right, where they take these flakes from the base, were used for a very brief period of time, and never again. So it's like this really, really good cultural

• 32:15Speaker 06

  marker of this particular time period, and it is a pan continental phenomenon. So how does that happen if people are already here? Well, the argument, I suppose, is it's like a really popular stylistic idea of how to make a point that spreads among existing populations.

• 32:31Speaker 07

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

• 32:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the, I would say what most people think of an arrowhead or spear point, right, they're thinking sort of the notched variety. We've got sort of a triangular, bifacially flake piece of stone that had notches coming in from the corners or the sides. That's a later invention that comes a few thousand years after Clovis. With Clovis, we're talking about

• 33:11Speaker 06

  What we call a Lancelot point. So it's, it's, it's long, it's narrow, it comes to a tapered end and the base is basely indented, it's concave.

• 33:18Steven Rinella?

  Can you hold that thought? Brody, would you be a mega favor?

• 33:20Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 33:21Steven Rinella?

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

• 33:28Speaker 06

  Yep. And then, and then the flute, um, the word comes from like the flutes in a column, right? It's like, it's a groove. So the really special thing about Clovis points and similar points that follow like Folsom points and other regional varieties of Spencer's got something here for you.

• 33:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, dude, that's badass.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  You met this dude when you were in Laramie. This is a good visual aid. Uh, Tyson Arnold drew that, wanted me to hand it off to you as a gift for your studio or whatever.

• 33:55Steven Rinella?

  That is so cool.

• 33:55Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  Right on.

• 33:56Steven Rinella?

  Where do I hold this, Phil?

• 33:58Speaker 05

  That's put right there. It's great. The line drawing of a, one of the points from a site called the East Wenatchee site in Washington.

• 34:03Steven Rinella?

  What's nuts is this is, this is like the size.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, that's.

• 34:06Speaker 06

  That's a big one.

• 34:07Steven Rinella?

  Actually the size. Yeah, that's like a giant.

• 34:09Speaker 06

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

• 34:15Steven Rinella?

  But when we're talking about, for, for folks, uh, watching on YouTube, um, this is the, the, the flute.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  That's the flute. So you take.

• 34:24Steven Rinella?

  And that's a real bitch if you're a Flint nav.

• 34:26Speaker 06

  It's really hard.

• 34:27Steven Rinella?

  To do that, like a high failure rate.

• 34:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 07

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

• 34:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, they're, when they were first found, the archaeologists sort of made analogies to blood grooves on bayonets.

• 34:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I remember reading that.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was like one of the original ideas as to why they were doing that.

• 34:52Steven Rinella?

  Uh,

• 34:56Steven Rinella?

  that three to 500 year period, can, can I, uh, I want to take a stab at like a little bit, just trying to describe what you're saying about. Did that mean that everybody caught on? Or did that mean, like, does it make more sense that the reason everybody was, I can't say everybody. Well, let me ask this question. During this three to 500 year period.

• 35:21Steven Rinella?

  If you find a Clovis point, you date it. It's this three to 500 year period. Can, do you go anywhere else? Can you go anywhere in the US and find other technologies? That sit right inside that too? Like that there was different? Or is everything from that window Clovis?

• 35:39Speaker 06

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

• 35:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean,

• 35:49Speaker 05

  there's a little bit of evidence that Great Basin has some different stuff going on.

• 35:53Speaker 06

  Ah, that's true.

• 35:54Speaker 05

  Some stem point components. By stem points, we mean they're not fluted. They're kind of, there's more of a stem. So the bottom, the base of the point kind of constricts more.

• 36:05Speaker 06

  As a shoulder.

• 36:06Speaker 05

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

• 36:24Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And then we talked about this, Spencer, we talked about this where

• 36:32Steven Rinella?

  what's kind of upset this idea that Clovis, the Clovis first idea was that they keep, they, they find these older sites. And I don't, I don't know if you're going to regret your word choice.

• 36:43Steven Rinella?

  But you said a problem with these really old archaeological sites is they're not normal sites.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:48Steven Rinella?

  Like, like there's, there's been tons of stuff in the media, you know, or was that a time like the, the footprints in white sands?

• 36:57Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:58Steven Rinella?

  You got that. You got the dude out in Chesapeake Bay who's, who's finding, claiming to find really old stuff eroding out of banks in Chesapeake Bay.

• 37:08Steven Rinella?

  I know you're only, oh, here, oh, here's the points. See, we wound up having this picture show up, Brody. Oh, gotcha. Well, this is like an actual size. Would you guys say that's a more normal?

• 37:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:21Steven Rinella?

  That's a replica. I can't remember what one that's a replica. That's a replica. No, no, no. This is a handmade one. And then here's one hafted to a knife.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  These metin pieces?

• 37:34Steven Rinella?

  Metin pieces. And here's one hafted to a dangle that spear right in front of this. So it's in Phil's picture. Here's a Clovis point hafted and it's like gripping it like imagine there's that that the wood is grabbing it like this and it's bound.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a hell of a flip knapper, man.

• 37:54Steven Rinella?

  It's grabbing like this.

• 37:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, split shaft, we call it.

• 37:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh. Tell me about these really old sites.

• 38:05Steven Rinella?

  And, and, and.

• 38:05Speaker 06

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

• 38:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, tell me what, yeah, what's a normal site?

• 38:12Speaker 06

  So, you know, a lot of Clovis sites, many of the early ones were large mammal kill sites. The first excavated Clovis site was actually the Dent site in Colorado. It's mammoth kill. A few years later, Clovis points, flakes, tools, bone rod. It's found with mammoth bones at Blackwater Draw, the Clovis site that gives the Clovis complex its name. That pattern has been repeated over and over and over again at depending on who you ask, fifteen to twenty sites where we have Clovis artifacts associated with mammoths, mastodons and gonophytes. You know what gonophytes are?

• 38:47Steven Rinella?

  No. Oh, yeah. It's that it kind of, they got those big armored plates on them?

• 38:52Speaker 06

  No.

• 38:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's not it?

• 38:54Speaker 06

  Clipped it on.

• 38:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay. No, I don't know.

• 38:56Speaker 06

  Gonophyte is related to a mastodon there in Central America and South America.

• 39:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:01Speaker 06

  So in northern Sonora, Mexico, um, last twenty years or so, um, a Clovis gonophyte kill site was found. So this pattern appears.

• 39:12Steven Rinella?

  Phil, can you put one of those on the screen?

• 39:13Speaker 06

  Do they have a shorter trunk? Uh, I, I am not an expert in. I, I think I know what you're talking about.

• 39:18Speaker 05

  They oftentimes have two tusks too, right? I can't, there's some differences.

• 39:22Steven Rinella?

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

• 39:26Speaker 06

  The, the, the early ones definitely, uh, have strange cranial morphology things going on.

• 39:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  You want to spell that for me if you can?

• 39:35Speaker 06

  G O M P H O T H E R E.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  So that's one aspect of Clovis. We also have Clovis bison kills, at least two of those, one in Oklahoma, one in Arizona. And then we have Clovis campsites. And these are basically, you have hearth features, fire pits, people working around them. And you have butchered remains of usually large mammals. The site we recently dug, a lot of bison. And this is sort of typical hunter-gather archaeology, right? You have the things that hunter-gatherers do. You have hearth features.

• 40:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, they have the downward-facing tusks and the upward ones.

• 40:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, man. I'd get after one of those, man.

• 40:21Speaker 06

  [laughing]

• 40:24Steven Rinella?

  That'd be a sweet school to have. Look at that thing. What's that called again?

• 40:28Speaker 06

  Gomphothyr.

• 40:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it's right there.

• 40:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, the genus.

• 40:32Speaker 07

  It's like a Star Wars-looking tree.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  That's a good way to describe it.

• 40:36Steven Rinella?

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

• 40:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, and in Central America. They probably made it in the Southern US. Because this one Clovis Gomphothyr kill is called El Fin del Mundo. It's not far from the Arizona border, maybe 100 miles south in Sonora.

• 40:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Wow.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  This says they were on all continents except Australia and Antarctica.

• 41:02Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 41:03Speaker 06

  So Clovis archaeology is pretty typical for hunter-gather archaeology. I mean, you have these domestic sites where people are camping, sitting around fires, making and repairing tools, cooking.

• 41:14Steven Rinella?

  Bone beds.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  Scraping hides. Then we have bone beds. And we also, of course, have the Anzac burial not far from here, right? We have human remains.

• 41:23Steven Rinella?

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

• 41:32Speaker 06

  That is true.

• 41:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 06

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

• 41:46Steven Rinella?

  Do you know that there is a rumor at the Clovis type site?

• 41:52Steven Rinella?

  For a long time, people were just hauling that stuff away. And I went there once and did a lot of reading about it. And there was like a rumor that some bus driver, that like they took kids out to see it. And some bus driver allegedly took home a mammoth skull that had a point embedded in its eye socket. But it's just like, it's just, it's just rumor.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  I've never heard that.

• 42:14Steven Rinella?

  You never heard that rumor?

• 42:16Speaker 06

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

• 42:23Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I'm gonna find, I'm gonna find where I'm gonna find, like, I couldn't have made that up. No, bus driver, that like, that a bus driver took some kids to see it and then hauled the thing home with them. I wouldn't have made that up. It's too like much detail. Um, I gotta find where I read that. Wherever I read it, I think is on my bookshelf.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  Well, if you find it, let me know. I want to see that.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think when I made that comment to you about Clovis sites looking normal and everything before it, not. This is what exactly what I'm meaning. Like, you can dig a site that's 2,000 years old, 5,000 years old, 6,000 years old. It all has roughly the same characteristics as like a buried Clovis campsite. Cause hunter gatherer campsites look a certain way. There's like concentrations of artifacts where people footnapped. And there's hard features that people congregated around to, to talk and eat and work hide and things like that. Uh, the, the pre Clovis record to this point has nothing like that. Uh, it's all weird stuff.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  And I, I think in a more general sense, like the, the burden of proof for this stuff for like over a hundred years now has simply been find obvious human made artifacts in a sealed geologic context. It's a good stratigraphic context. And I think in our view, you can point to any number of these sites that date before Clovis and you can, and you can say either the artifacts look a little weird or there was some, something weird with the geology.

• 43:56Steven Rinella?

  I gotta stop you. When you say weird.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  What do you mean? I mean, not obviously human made. There's a lot of natural processes that can produce things that look like artifacts and rocks falling off a cliff and striking something. Uh, getting entrained in a, in a water course and breaking up that way. Uh, this is one of the brilliant projects that Madden actually initiated, looking at rocks in Antarctica. Where we know there wasn't people and seeing the range of variation and how rock is just naturally modified by the, by the environment. Really great idea. Um, that, that's why he's doing that is because there's a lot of natural processes that can break up rock to make them look like. Maybe they were broken by people when they actually weren't.

• 44:39Steven Rinella?

  So these old, old sites.

• 44:43Steven Rinella?

  Well, what is, okay. At what date does it become in your mind? When does it, when does it like tail off? Like you got really good sites up to what date and then, and then you got your weird sites.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  Thirteen thousand.

• 44:58Steven Rinella?

  And that's, all the calibration stuff, is that like as we understand years to be here?

• 45:02Speaker 06

  And we're, we're talking about south of the ice sheets, north of the ice sheets is a different story. But south of the ice sheets, thirteen thousand and onward. Beautiful, normal, typical hunter gatherer archaeology. To give you an example of the kind of thing Spencer was talking about, he and I, um. In Sarah and Lon excavated a mammoth. Uh, two, two, three years ago. That mammoth was thirteen thousand, two hundred years old. We were really excited to. To excavate it because you know, it's right on the cusp of Clovis and we thought, yeah, maybe this is a mammoth killed by people.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  Now, right above the mammoth, the mammoth was strangely kind of near the top of a hill on this, on this slope. And the top of that hill, there was a bunch of chert or flint, like really good material for making stone tools. And that mammoth was buried down on these old gravels, kind of like in a base of a little draw. And we kept finding little flakes. But all of this local raw material, and they're all tiny, like, you know, two millimeters. And this is, this is like a perfect scenario for producing things that you could interpret as human made artifacts that clearly aren't. Cause all of the local material, most of it is, has cortex, meaning it's just like. A little chip taken off of a natural cobble. Looked nothing like a typical lithic assemblage.

• 46:17Speaker 06

  And that there are pre Clovis sites like that, where you have these things that look sort of like artifacts, but they're probably not, but they're interpreted to be artifacts. And there's also a lot of really strange things that show up in pre Clovis sites that are argued to be evidence of humans that aren't the typical things like chipstone artifacts. And I made a list of those kinds of things, if you're curious.

• 46:40Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with the list, yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  All right, so footprints,

• 46:49Speaker 06

  drag marks, fingerprints, copper lights, you know what copper lights are?

• 46:54Steven Rinella?

  Fossilized, fossilized poops.

• 46:56Speaker 06

  Seaweed, balls of seaweed,

• 47:00Speaker 06

  underwater meat caches. Spencer pointed that one out to me. There's three cases of underwater.

• 47:05Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I'm big into those, man. You want me to tell you about those?

• 47:09Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, I do. I will know. There are no underwater, no underwater meat caches after Clovis, to my knowledge. They're only a pre Clovis thing.

• 47:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 47:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:21Steven Rinella?

  Man, I'm gonna stop telling people about underwater meat caches.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  Cut marks, so like marks on bone, right? You guys know about those?

• 47:28Steven Rinella?

  Can we back up to the underwater meat cache?

• 47:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:30Steven Rinella?

  What was the site that was interpreted to be this? There was a site somewhere where someone had piled up mammoth meat under a pond, filled the intestines full of gravel, and then used these gravel-filled intestines to weight it down under that pond. That's badass.

• 47:49Speaker 06

  That site is in the Midwest. I think it's the Burning Tree Mastodon. It's one that Dan Fisher at the University of Michigan published.

• 47:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's the one. I'm not sure, not certain.

• 48:01Steven Rinella?

  And obviously, the intestine rotted away, so it's just gravel.

• 48:05Speaker 07

  In a line.

• 48:06Steven Rinella?

  You're not buying it?

• 48:07Speaker 06

  I mean, weird stuff, right? This is, this is our point. I don't keep going now, okay? Bone embedded in bone.

• 48:16Steven Rinella?

  What's that mean?

• 48:17Speaker 06

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

• 48:22Steven Rinella?

  That was healed around it?

• 48:24Speaker 06

  That they argued was a spear point.

• 48:27Steven Rinella?

  And not two, not two of them duking it out?

• 48:30Speaker 06

  Well, that's what other people have said. Yeah. Other bone modifications, like the ways that bones have been fractured, like you have no artifacts, but bones are fractured in weird ways. It seemed like only humans could do it.

• 48:44Speaker 06

  And the last one on the list is a pit full of grasshoppers.

• 48:50Speaker 06

  Okay, so this is, I just told you about probably 20 pre-Clovis claims, right? All this weird stuff. As opposed to like, what we like to see is like, let's just say some flakes from Napping Stone, around a hearth feature, in a really good stratigraphic context, that's well dated. There are millions of those on this continent. There is zero of those in pre-Clovis.

• 49:19Speaker 05

  That's it?

• 49:20Speaker 07

  When you're talking about stratigraphic, stratigraphic context, like we're talking about eroding banks, you're talking about digging out a hillside. Like, what are, what are you, when you're thinking about where to look for a site? Sort of what are the considerations in mind? What, what is like a normal site? Versus what makes things unusual?

• 49:42Speaker 05

  I can speak to Wyoming at least. The best, the best places to find buried archaeology in Wyoming are like, rock shelters and floodplains.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  In Wyoming and Montana, you walk around the landscape, which you guys do a lot, hunting, fishing, whatever. Most of the landscape that you're walking across has basically zero potential to preserve an archaeological site. If you're on the side of a hill, if you're on a really high surface that gets wind scoured, all those areas, you can drop artifacts there. But if they aren't buried immediately with like, dateable material or whatever, you can't really preserve that archaeological site, right? You have no idea how old it is. But if you drop that stuff in a floodplain that receives like, annual flood events, it's gonna get buried slowly over time and get sealed within that, that stratigraphy. And allows us to go back later and actually have, with some degree of certainty,

• 50:35Speaker 05

  an idea of how old that stuff is and that it's not, say, mixed with something that's like 10,000 years younger or 10,000 years older. It was, it was just laid down in a really specific location conducive to preservation. It's actually kind of rare, right? Like, if you think about just the range of human behaviors that you do every day, even if you're out hunting or whatever. Most of the stuff you do is not gonna be preserved in the archaeological record. It has to be this confluence of like, behavior and geologic context coming together to really preserve that activity.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  When Clovis was happening in the Americas, what did the technology look like on the rest of the planet, like during that three to 500 year window?

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Well, that's a lot of planet.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  What about where they just came from then? Like the last place they were before the Americas?

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

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

• 51:29Speaker 05

  Yana, R H.

• 51:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, Yana, R H S, way up in, yeah.

• 51:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, tell them about that.

• 51:34Speaker 06

  That, that's.

• 51:35Steven Rinella?

  Those guys were badass.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  That's like 20,000, that's 20,000 years before Clovis in the high Arctic and a warm period in the Middle West glaciation where they've got, I think spear shafts made out of rhinoceros horn.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 51:49Speaker 06

  Bow needles, beads, amazing things.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  But what about during that same era as Clovis?

• 51:54Speaker 06

  So if we go north to Alaska, um, just prior to Clovis, there's plenty of good archaeology starting at about 14,000, it looks similar to Clovis. I mean, people are making bifacial projectile points. The one big difference is they're making a lot of micro blades, it's really tiny, really long, skinny, sharp flakes that then they, you know, they'll have in a, in a long piece of bone to make a really deadly spear point. Um, you have end scrapers, pretty typical hunter gatherer stuff. The, the really, maybe the biggest difference at that time is if you were to go, say to Israel, Middle East, you're right on the cusp of the origins of agriculture around Clovis times. And within a thousand years, people are growing crops, I think.

• 52:39Steven Rinella?

  What, what is your take on, um, the overkill hypothesis?

• 52:49Speaker 06

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

• 52:52Steven Rinella?

  I, I love it. Um, and I, you know, I love it. There's nothing I like more than the overkill hypothesis.

• 53:00Speaker 06

  You're talking about the blitzkrieg, right?

• 53:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the idea, well, the idea that.

• 53:06Steven Rinella?

  There's a, there's again, there's an ongoing debate about what role did humans have in wiping out everything that was bigger than a modern American buffalo? Like when it was over, like not only that, during this period of time, like let's say from 20,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, I think nine genuses, so nine genera of animals went extinct.

• 53:34Speaker 06

  Thirty-five genera.

• 53:36Steven Rinella?

  Thirty-five genera.

• 53:37Speaker 06

  In North America and forty-some genera in South America. So let me, let me.

• 53:43Steven Rinella?

  But can I, I want to add the little wrinkle before you start.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:47Steven Rinella?

  Um, folks will say, we have 13, 14, 15 mammoth kill sites. We have zero giant ground sloth kill sites. We have zero, um, what was that big ass 100 pound beaver?

• 54:08Speaker 06

  Castoroides.

• 54:09Steven Rinella?

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

• 54:20Speaker 06

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

• 54:42Speaker 06

  So yeah, it's a sticky problem. When we talk about mammoths, there's actually a huge number of mammoth kill sites. When you say only 14, it's actually a huge number, given the amount of time and space we're talking about.

• 54:53Steven Rinella?

  Like you feel that that is a lot?

• 54:55Speaker 06

  It's a gigantic number. We, we did a study comparing the, the density of mammoth kill sites in Clovis times to all other elephant kill sites from the rest of the world. Elephants are interesting, right? Cause as you mentioned, they used to occupy every part of the world except places they couldn't swim to, right? So you have them in Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America. It's really their absence that's the unusual thing.

• 55:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, even like Wrangell Island.

• 55:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:21Steven Rinella?

  The Greek Islands.

• 55:22Speaker 06

  Privilof islands, dwarf mammoths in the Mediterranean islands, Channel Islands. Yeah.

• 55:28Speaker 06

  And if you look at it in terms of the density of mammoth kills in time, especially in a 400-year time period, I mean, it's a huge number of sites.

• 55:40Speaker 06

  It's really surprising to me that we're questioning whether Clovis people were hunting mammoths and whether they affected their populations, given the absolute incredible abundance of evidence that we have for it. Yeah, 14 is not a very big number, but given the total number of Clovis sites that actually speak to what Clovis people were doing, what they were hunting, it's a huge number.

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• 59:05Speaker 04

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

• 59:15Speaker 06

  How many Clovis people?

• 59:16Speaker 04

  How many people, yeah?

• 59:18Speaker 06

  Sure, we can, we can sort of estimate that by looking at modern hunter-gatherer population densities. It's a, it's a really complicated problem, because, you know, first, if they're first, they start at basically a population of zero, and then they grow to some, presumably some carrying capacity or some environmental limit, right? And the number of people is going to vary across the continent. But when I tried to estimate it once, I got numbers in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 100,000 people.

• 59:43Speaker 04

  What about mammoth populations?

• 59:45Speaker 06

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

• 59:53Steven Rinella?

  Is it fair? When you talk about that 14 is a lot of sites, as you're saying that, I'm kind of thinking in my head of, um, you know, I've done a lot of hunting throughout my life. I'm trying to think if I ever made, if I ever made a archaeological site.

• 1:00:10Speaker 06

  Well, you absolutely have.

• 1:00:11Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'm saying like that I made a discernible that was preserved.

• 1:00:17Steven Rinella?

  Like where they're like, oh, a guy killed a deer and then left his like, like bullet fragments, a knife blade, and it's all sealed up in some river bottom somewhere.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  I think it'd be, I think it's probably pretty rare. I mean, you probably haven't.

• 1:00:32Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm thinking is like.

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  Most of the animals you've butchered out, right? You've, you've left some stuff there. The coyotes have dispersed it. So what was an archaeological site in the moment, uh, now becomes just kind of a scatter of chewed up deer bone or whatever. And it's no longer really discernible as a, as an archaeological site. But yeah, I mean, just, just like the preservation of archaeological sites, period, is kind of a miraculous thing. And to have S Y Todd saying 14 mammoth kills, given all the ravages of time and the unlikelihood for these things to be preserved and the very small number of sites from that time period in general, it's a lot. Like a substantial percentage of the, the Clovis sites that have ever been excavated are mammoth kills.

• 1:01:15Speaker 06

  It's the most common animal in Clovis funnel assemblage is mammoth.

• 1:01:22Speaker 06

  Which is, which is shocking, right? Because if you just go out there hunting and you, and you sort of, if you take the attitude, I'm going to kill whatever I come across, you're not going to encounter mammoths a lot, right? You're going to have funnel assemblages dominated by rabbits, squirrels. It's going to be way more deer kills than mammoth kills. The bigger the animal is, the less common they are in the landscape, right? So when you see this, this real focus on these large animals, it tells you, they're going after those things and they're ignoring opportunities to go after these smaller animals. Not to say they didn't occasionally take them, but they're really specializing in the predation of these large animals.

• 1:01:56Steven Rinella?

  Why?

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  Cause you get the most bang for your buck.

• 1:02:01Speaker 06

  I mean, you bring down a mammoth, let's say it takes you two days, you get enough food to feed 30 people for a month. It's sort of like.

• 1:02:07Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:02:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask, is there any evidence like average size?

• 1:02:13Steven Rinella?

  Of like a Clovis group, like how many people would be?

• 1:02:18Speaker 06

  Eh, this guy just tried to answer that question.

• 1:02:21Steven Rinella?

  How many?

• 1:02:23Speaker 05

  We've been working on this LaPrell Clovis site in Wyoming for, we worked on it for a decade. Opened up the site in 2014. A few years ago, we decided we'd try to actually chase out how big the site is. The site's buried 10 to 15 feet deep, so it's not like you can just walk over and chase out the artifacts and say like, okay, the site's right here. So we ended up sinking all these really deep augers in this systematic grid over the site, screening all the dirt out of it and finding these little tiny artifacts. We ended up finding a site that was a couple acres big. If you compare that to the size of ethnographically documented campsites where we have known numbers of people, it's somewhere between 30 and 50 people.

• 1:03:06Speaker 05

  So in that site in particular too, it looks like there's these kind of these clusters of houses kind of around this mammoth kill. You got at least three of these pretty big clusters, each of which might contain, say, two, two to four houses. So it all kind of adds up to about that number. We might not have found the edge of the site. I think we did our best, but it seemed like, it seemed like we about chased the edge of it out. So if you, if you compare just the, the amount of space that hunter gatherers use in a campsite to the space of that site, we land on this number of about 35 people or so.

• 1:03:43Steven Rinella?

  And that thing could feed them for a month.

• 1:03:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it, but that mammoth, I don't think they ate much of it. That's, that's my interpretation.

• 1:03:51Steven Rinella?

  Why's that?

• 1:03:54Speaker 06

  This mammoth, it was largely in anatomical order when it was excavated, meaning the bones are still sort of laid out in anatomical order. So it wasn't heavily butchered.

• 1:04:06Speaker 06

  If they, if they did butcher it, they did not move any bones. So it's possible like in all these.

• 1:04:12Speaker 05

  It's called gutless method.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. No, no, they certainly could have, they certainly could have filleted a lot of meat off of this mammoth. But in all these house areas that we dug, we dug four of them. The only mammoth we got was ivory and they were working ivory, but we have no, no rib fragments, no foot bones.

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  And we also have a lot of evidence for use of other big animals, mostly bison around these, in these houses. So they're sitting next to this big dead elephant. It's a subadult, it's probably in its twenties. It's probably, I don't know, five ton animal. It seems barely butchered. They're not really moving the bones around except for the ivory. And they're, and they're eating bison.

• 1:04:53Steven Rinella?

  So what do you make of that? I guess you don't, who knows?

• 1:04:57Speaker 05

  There's a lot of animals and I mean, like when you all butcher animals, right? Like you can kind of stop whenever you can, you can always get a little bit more marrow out of the animal or do, or you can like, maybe you want to take the liver or whatever. But a lot of times you don't do that, right? Cause you don't need to. Same thing here. If you have animals at your disposal and you don't need to go to all that crazy effort to get every last calorie out of that animal, then you're just going to take what you want and move on.

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  Deal with gourmet butchery.

• 1:05:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, you hear people talk about, and when I say people, I mean like people in the discipline that you're in. Like right now I'm holding in my hand, if you're watching, I'm holding my hand a Clovis point that's half to Dandu, a knife blade. So I'm doing some devil's advocacy here. So what we know, uh, if you look at the archaeological record, this is half the Dandu wooden handle was sinews. Okay. The sinews rot away, the wood rots away and all you have is the stone left and some bone.

• 1:05:58Steven Rinella?

  Earlier, I mentioned that they've never found one of these points embedded into mammoth bone, and I don't even know how possible that is. I'm sure you could study it, whether it's like if you took a mammoth femur and jabbed it with this, do you ever get it to actually stick and dry in there or not? I don't know. So you have bones and you have stone. We assume, because the stone's there, we're like, oh, they stabbed it. They stabbed it, and these are stuck in there because that's how they killed it. All right. Someone else who's pushing a narrative that they weren't mammoth hunters says, well, they found it laying dead. And then they not the stone, the point didn't get there on the end of a spear shaft. It was there because it was on their little knife, which they

• 1:06:43Steven Rinella?

  cut this dead one up with. As a like, as an outdoorsman, what I always laugh about about that explanation is, um, and you guys could back me up on this. When you're out wandering around in the mountains or out wandering around the woods, you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff. It like it like I can almost go out and say like, it doesn't happen.

• 1:07:13Speaker 07

  On a two lane highway, yes.

• 1:07:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but I'm saying outright out.

• 1:07:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Steven Rinella?

  Encountering all this fresh dead stuff. If you wanted me to produce a dead thing, it'd be much more like I would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wandering around until I found it. Do you know what I'm saying? So I've always laughed that. But that's like an idea is that is that they were just finding them laying around everywhere.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

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

• 1:07:43Speaker 06

  So, yeah, I mean, I've had this argument with colleagues, right? They're like, this, this, this site we're digging, La Prel, there's this dead mammoth there. There's not a Clovis point in it. There's a Clovis point about 40 feet away from it.

• 1:07:54Steven Rinella?

  Oh, there is?

• 1:07:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Steven Rinella?

  Who found that?

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  You know, somebody we paid to dig.

• 1:07:59Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 1:08:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 05

  And an excavation unit, yeah?

• 1:08:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:04Steven Rinella?

  Forty feet away.

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  It's a big site. There's this camp, there's this dead mammoth in this really cool camp around it, right? And that the Clovis point is in the camp area. But, but people will say to me-

• 1:08:16Steven Rinella?

  But not in it, not in with it.

• 1:08:18Speaker 06

  Not in the mammoth.

• 1:08:19Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:08:19Speaker 06

  People will say to me, how do you know that mammoth wasn't scavenged? And the argument I make is exactly what you just made, which is there are a hell of a lot more opportunities to exploit alive mammoths than dead ones. Also, you know, this, this, there's sort of this divide in the discipline about whether we see Clovis hunters as sort of living in this land of abundance, as Spencer sort of just described. Why eat this really lean mammoth if I can access bison any time I want? Sort of the idea, I'm the first person in this land and these animals are naive to me and like, it's easy living. Versus, these are the first people in the land, they're kind of lost, they're scared of these big animals. They don't know the animal behavior, it's dangerous to hunt them, so they're being really cautious, right? Mammoths are too dangerous to hunt.

• 1:09:04Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:09:11Speaker 06

  I, I'm on your side, man. I mean, I think these people-

• 1:09:14Steven Rinella?

  They were, like, they, but, but, and they're-

• 1:09:17Speaker 06

  You're right, they, they have like a hundred year generation-

• 1:09:20Steven Rinella?

  Beyond that, because they were, there's mammoths in Siberia.

• 1:09:22Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:23Steven Rinella?

  They'd know, know, like, they would know no reality. They would know no reality in which even their most distant ancestor wasn't dealing with them.

• 1:09:34Speaker 06

  I would say even if they came into the Americas and had never seen a mammoth, they would really quickly learn how, learn how to expertly prey on that animal.

• 1:09:42Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:43Speaker 06

  And they would enjoy the hell out of it. In part because of the danger, in part because you bring down all this meat, you can make your life for all your friends better, you can use that for social capital. You get a lot of prestige bringing down an animal like that, right? So, yeah, I, I, I very much think this was a good time to be a human when, when you're the first, first person in a place. You guys understand that as hunters, right? You want to hunt where nobody else hunts.

• 1:10:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Speaker 06

  So the big animals are, it's where you have the best opportunities, it's where you have the most animals, right?

• 1:10:12Steven Rinella?

  We, we see this, this is, I've explained at, at various times to people, it's like, you can find isolated instances of what it might have been like for them, because when you look at one whalers, or like, as soon as transoceanic shipping and whalers started hitting these islands that no one had ever been on, like, no one found the same shells until transoceanic shipping, like, no one found it. There's one mammal, a fruit bat, like one that's so far out there, like no mammal had found it, except for a flying mammal. When dudes get on these islands, they're just picking shit up. They're walking around just grabbing birds by the neck. Birds are trying to land on them. They're like, literally carrying, just like picking up and carrying turtles and stacking

• 1:10:57Steven Rinella?

  them in their boats upside down.

• 1:10:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, the survival of giant tortoises on the seashells, the survival of giant tortoises in the Galapagos, both thing and both, both, the same thing in both cases, right? No humans know this story, period.

• 1:11:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And the people that get there are like, we just filled our boat.

• 1:11:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Steven Rinella?

  Like with live ones.

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  So we, about the knife question, you know, we, I did a study with Dave Kilby and Bruce Huckle and others, looking at this question of Clovis as knives, and the idea of whether, you know, Clovis points could actually kill a mammoth or not. And, and one thing we looked at was, um, where you find complete points versus broken points. Complete points, people generally don't discard functional tools, right?

• 1:11:39Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  And we know from like, later bison kills, that you really commonly find complete points in bison kills. Because you kill this big mass of animals, you lose the points, you lose them in the mess, and you don't get them back. It's like a really common place to find complete points. In camps, you find the broken points. When they do retrieve the weapons, they're broken and they retool, you find the broken ones in camps and the complete ones in kills. So we looked at this for Clovis, and we find absolutely in these mammoth kills, you have a lot of complete points. If these are knives, you have to ask yourself, why are these people discarding six inch, beautifully functional?

• 1:12:15Steven Rinella?

  Well, it takes you forever to make.

• 1:12:17Speaker 07

  That's been in their hand the whole time, presumably if they're cutting it.

• 1:12:20Speaker 06

  As a butchery, right? Like the Tanaco mammoth, you've got eight of these inside the animal. And by the way, you keep asking about like, artifacts embedded in the bone? And mammoth bone, that has been found twice, I think, in the Upper Palatonic of Europe. At the Lainer site, which is a mammoth kill in Arizona, there are two Clovis points right between the ribs of a mammoth. Right? We'd expect them, to find them, you know? So, yeah, not embedded in the bone, but pretty much in a place where you shouldn't be questioning what this association between a weapon and a dead animal is, right?

• 1:12:48Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:13:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, and especially if they have a four shaft, right? Because the four shaft detaches and it's way in the body cavity. And if, you know, one thing interesting about butchering mammoths, if they fall on one side, forget about that side. They really only butcher like one side of the animal because you can't turn it over. Right? So if you shot it from that side, you might lose every weapon that went in from that side.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  What other tools did Clovis people have? Like, was there anything that would be redundant if you were to use that as a knife? Like, do we already know they had a knife sort of thing?

• 1:13:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd say, I mean.

• 1:13:34Steven Rinella?

  Brody, can you run me another hearing, dude?

• 1:13:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:13:42Speaker 06

  The little white ones.

• 1:13:44Steven Rinella?

  Can you grab those?

• 1:13:45Speaker 06

  See you guys in a minute.

• 1:13:48Steven Rinella?

  Brody's getting a workout.

• 1:13:50Speaker 05

  We've got a.

• 1:13:50Speaker 07

  That's why I don't sit in that chair.

• 1:13:52Speaker 05

  It's a pretty great sample of Clovis tools from this La Proul site we keep talking about. You know, Stone Age toolkits don't actually change a ton between Clovis and like the recent pass on the planes. You need the same stuff. You need stuff to cut things with, you need stuff to poke holes with, you need stuff to scrape with. It's like basically the three things that stone tools do. So, stone knives and Clovis assemblies, in my experience, are just really large flakes. Sometimes they're retouched on one edge. In my experience, just messing with hides, I find quartzite to be the best medium to use. I think it's because it's got a little grit to it and it kind of cuts into the meat a little better. There's also at the La Proul site a big chopper. I watched you guys' bison butchery experiment.

• 1:14:38Speaker 05

  One thing you were missing, Metten tried to make you, is a big chopper to get those ribs off.

• 1:14:42Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:14:42Speaker 05

  But at La Proul, we have this cobble.

• 1:14:44Speaker 06

  We have two of them.

• 1:14:45Speaker 05

  Two choppers, yeah. Cobble that fits just perfectly in your hand with like three flakes taken off of the edge of it, something you can just bash with. Really common tool type, like in any. Large mammal butchering.

• 1:14:56Steven Rinella?

  Like a hand axe.

• 1:14:57Speaker 05

  Basically.

• 1:14:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, in fact, you find them in the old one, like 1.8 million years old, the oldest choppers. And you find them in Clovis, too.

• 1:15:04Speaker 05

  I'd say one, one underappreciated aspect of these hunter gatherer toolkits is stuff to make clothes with. This is what I studied primarily for my dissertation, and that's scrapers. So you, just a stone scraper, retouched on one end, you stick it into a handle to get some leverage. And it's what you use to scrape dry hide to make it more pliable. Uh, also perforating tools that you'd use to prepare seams to sew clothing with. Cause you're using.

• 1:15:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, those are cool.

• 1:15:28Speaker 05

  Using these bone needles, right? And with bone needles don't have really the tensile strength to perforate leather all the time. So you prepare a seam with little perforators and stitch it up. Uh, it's really kind of the, the bread and butter of a stone age toolkits, these things where you scrape, things scrape hide, perforate hide and, and cut up animals with.

• 1:15:47Speaker 06

  I would say there is one knife form possibly, which is the ultra thin biface.

• 1:15:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Speaker 06

  Which is a, a really, really beautifully made, super thin, bifacial knife. Um, that we've found a few at La Prel. They're more commonly associated with Folsom, which follows Clovis in the West, but there are known Clovis examples. Probably knives.

• 1:16:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Um.

• 1:16:12Steven Rinella?

  I have a confession to make. In all my like casual, uh, Joe Blow reading about Clovis hunters and Folsom hunters. I had never heard of what I'm holding in my hand until I was looking at that chart hanging at your office.

• 1:16:29Steven Rinella?

  Like, then Metten sends me some of these.

• 1:16:33Steven Rinella?

  Um. These are out of, uh. These are replicas of some pieces that came out of Ohio, I believe.

• 1:16:42Speaker 06

  Sheridan Cave, yeah.

• 1:16:45Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:16:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:59Steven Rinella?

  Uh, talk about that. Can you get a good on that, Phil? You getting it? Looks great. Uh, just to give a quick little more analysis, it's um, there's this bevel cut into it. And it's striated. Like it's cut like you wanted, uh, just going out on a limb here. Like you wanted to make it a little more grippy.

• 1:17:20Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 1:17:21Steven Rinella?

  What the hell is that?

• 1:17:22Speaker 05

  So these are bone rods, uh, commonly called bone rods. They've been found at a lot of Clovis, including the Clovis type site has a really beautiful example of one of these. I've only found one in my career. It was at the Powers II, uh, hematite quarry.

• 1:17:36Steven Rinella?

  What kind of bone was it?

• 1:17:38Speaker 05

  Uh, I'm guessing it was a piece of cortical bone, like a long bone from a bison. Not, not exactly sure. I don't know what these are, but my assumption is, uh, that it has something to do with the weaponry system. Uh, Powers II, this, this Oker mine is for whatever reason, just completely filled with paleo Indian weaponry. We found like a hundred and seventy points at this site.

• 1:18:01Steven Rinella?

  At an Oker mine?

• 1:18:02Speaker 05

  At an Oker mine in southeast Wyoming. And we found one of these associated with the Clovis Folsom layer at Powers II, which is also filled with projectile points and flakes and stuff. So my assumption is that it has something to do with the weaponry system. What that is? I don't think anybody has really ever satisfactorily explained that. When you say weaponry system, you mean it was linked to the Clovis point somehow? Perhaps using the halting system or something like that.

• 1:18:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, you could see this as a four shaft somehow.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:18:33Speaker 06

  The Clovis point there and some other kind of wedge on the other side.

• 1:18:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, a guy online figured it out. I was reading.

• 1:18:41Speaker 07

  That guy figures out a lot of stuff.

• 1:18:45Steven Rinella?

  So I got to reading about different dudes debating it, right? And there's a dude saying that like,

• 1:18:52Steven Rinella?

  if, if, if you wedge that thing in when you're trying to, I don't, I couldn't, he didn't have any visuals, but basically saying like he wedged it in on the halting process. And then as you lash that piece, it like tightens. That was his take on it. It like tightens the, the, the spear point, but he didn't have any pictures to explain what the hell he was talking about.

• 1:19:12Speaker 05

  But it's like I had never heard of that thing.

• 1:19:15Speaker 06

  They're not common. You know, there's in 1936 in the Clovis site, when they found the first mammoth remains in Clovis points, they had one of these in the mammoth bone bed. But it's not common to find them in mammoth bone beds. That that might be the only case.

• 1:19:27Speaker 05

  Because it's like, also, I imagine, because it's organic and shitholes it away, or it rots.

• 1:19:34Speaker 06

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

• 1:19:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, the East Wenatchee site, there's several of these associated with like, I don't how many points are from there. A couple dozen Clovis points. Seems to be consistently associated with weaponry, though. The only other theory I've heard about these is dog sleds or something.

• 1:20:06Speaker 06

  That's that was Gramley's argument about East Wenatchee. And I think those were by beveled.

• 1:20:12Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 06

  So so they didn't have a point on one end. They had a bevel this way and a bevel, an alternate bevel on the other side. And Gramley argued that they were lashed together to make it the runner on sleds. Yeah, that's really silly idea.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  Come on.

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  Do you ever find evidence of Clovis points being picked up by ancient humans like 5,000 years later, and they find a use for them? And all of a sudden, there's a Clovis point in with like a woodland.

• 1:20:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:20:40Speaker 04

  Site somewhere.

• 1:20:40Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:20:43Speaker 05

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

• 1:20:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's what I heard.

• 1:20:55Speaker 04

  Me, too. That's the one example of that, like, happening.

• 1:20:59Steven Rinella?

  Like an Anasazi, what so the so-called Anasazi or ancient puebloans that some pueblo had one where some dudes like, look at that, brought it home.

• 1:21:10Speaker 05

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

• 1:21:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I bring home old shell casings. I wouldn't bring home a new shell casing.

• 1:21:23Speaker 05

  Probably collect some bones.

• 1:21:25Steven Rinella?

  If I find a straight wall shell casing that's got some holes rot through it, I'm gonna bring that sucker home. Hundred percent, man.

• 1:21:31Speaker 05

  You got.

• 1:21:32Steven Rinella?

  What if I found one of my buddies, I'm not bringing it home.

• 1:21:34Speaker 05

  Got a spot in your garage where you just stack all your old, all your treasures.

• 1:21:38Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Look at this, a 27 Nosler case. It's gotta be, you know, it could be up to 15 years old.

• 1:21:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm bringing that home.

• 1:21:46Speaker 06

  Steve, like, like 20 minutes ago, you asked about the absence of evidence for, like, hunting all these megafauna.

• 1:21:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Speaker 06

  Can I say something about that?

• 1:21:55Speaker 05

  Say everything you want to say about that.

• 1:21:58Speaker 06

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

• 1:22:24Speaker 05

  Because it's not suitable to preserve?

• 1:22:25Speaker 06

  Right, right. So is the absence of evidence of hunting of giant beaver meaningful? Probably not, right? We can't really interpret it one way or another. And, and, and a lot about the Clovis record of faunal use is that way. Like, if you say, well, there's no evidence for Clovis use of sloth. Well, would you expect to see it in a mammoth kill site? Probably not, right? And that's what most of our sites are. So is the absence of sloth in mammoth kill sites interesting? Probably not. Now, if we go to the Aubrey site in Texas, this big Clovis campsite, they do have sloth dermal ossicles, which are these little, like, pieces of bone embedded in the skin that armored these giant ground sloths. Is that evidence for Clovis hunting of ground sloth? A couple dermosicles in a Clovis campsite? It's pretty ambiguous, right?

• 1:23:12Speaker 06

  So the record is really hard to interpret. I will say, there is recently published a sloth kill from Argentina called Campo La Borte. La Borte, it's late Pleistocene, big, I think, megatherium, I'm not sure which sloth. So there is some evidence for sloth use in South America. But just maybe to end this, this big chain of thought. The most damning evidence for human causation of the megafaunal extinctions, to me, is you didn't even have to do archaeology. If you just did paleontology around the world, everywhere that people went to, and you, you just looked for a big extinction event in the last 80,000 years,

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  and you find one, in every case, in every landmass, that marks human arrival.

• 1:24:00Steven Rinella?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:24:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. And it's not just the North American thing, right? It's not just a South American thing. It's an Australian thing. It's a New Zealand thing. It's a Europe thing. It's an Asia thing. It's all the islands. It's Hawaii, it's Polynesia thing. It's the Caribbean. There were giant ground sloths in the Caribbean that survived the Pleistocene-Halocene transition until 6,000 years ago.

• 1:24:20Steven Rinella?

  That, that one, that's one of the biggest smoking guns, in my view, on the overkill hypothesis.

• 1:24:24Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:25Steven Rinella?

  You get the Wrangle, Wrangle Island off Siberia. No one found it.

• 1:24:30Speaker 06

  Mammoths survived.

• 1:24:31Steven Rinella?

  And mammoths stayed there till 4,000 years ago.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Speaker 07

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

• 1:25:02Speaker 06

  That's remarkable.

• 1:25:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, like, I, I put that book down and it was like you just watched a, a video on YouTube that's meant to convince you of something. You know, it was just like, I don't, nothing else makes sense to me now.

• 1:25:15Steven Rinella?

  You know what else is great about it? As you say, um. What about Africa? Doesn't happen in Africa. It's because you get like co-evolution.

• 1:25:24Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. That was Paul's.

• 1:25:25Steven Rinella?

  There was no, yeah, there was no, there was no sudden arrival.

• 1:25:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Steven Rinella?

  The animals there had been like, hey, that little thing, you see something walking around two feet? Watch your ass. Like word got out. So what, what would you guys say then, if you're leaning towards human cause, what would you say to the people that are like, well, it was like the climate was changing? The environment was changing, like these animals just couldn't adapt. The climate environment had been changing for millions of years prior to that. That'd be my response.

• 1:25:58Steven Rinella?

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• 1:26:42Steven Rinella?

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• 1:28:51Speaker 06

  You know, the North American and South American cases are especially tricky, because it happens at this really wild time when we're coming out of the glaciation, right? These massive, mile-thick sheets of ice are melting back. Sea level's rising. All these ecological communities are reorganizing. You can imagine that could wreak havoc on animal populations, right? And at the same time, you bring in this highly effective cultural predator that these animals have no experience with. And it's the coincidence of all this stuff and time that has made it such a difficult problem to answer, and it's why we're still debating about it. But I would say, tell me, tell me a climatic or ecological explanation that can

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  drive an extinction event over two continents, from the Arctic to the tropics and back to the subarctic and South America, from the arid west to the humid east. What climate change can do that? What is the actual mechanism that could drive an extinction event so severe? And I don't know of one.

• 1:29:52Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:30:00Speaker 06

  Dozens of them.

• 1:30:02Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:30:21Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:30:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that, that was, that was the most recent interglacial, we call it Stage 5E, 120,000 years ago. It was warmer than today. There were hippos living in England, for example. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that was one of many previous interglacials. It happened over and over and over and over again. The ice sheets oscillated back and forth and back and forth. And there were ecological transitions with all of these. These animals made it through. That's right. Until, people show up, and if we look at the last dates in these animals, at least the ones that we have good samples for, they all go extinct within 300 years of Clovis arrival. Except for caribou. Caribou make it through. Bison make it through. Moose make it through. Elk make it through.

• 1:31:07Speaker 06

  We can talk about why, if you want to talk about that.

• 1:31:10Steven Rinella?

  Why?

• 1:31:11Speaker 06

  So I, I think there's a single unifying explanation for all large mammal survival that even applies to Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, which is that large animals survive in places where people can't reach sufficient populations in cities to drive them to extinction. Okay, so if we, let's just take the case of bison, right? Bison survive, but actually bison went extinct over most of their range at the end of the Pleistocene. They lived coast to coast. You find bison in the rivers in Florida. You find them on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. You find them in Mexico, Rancho La Brea.

• 1:31:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:31:46Speaker 06

  Full of bison, right? Today, the bison are pretty much limited to the mid-continent, or at least historically they were.

• 1:31:53Speaker 06

  Why is that? Well, when people don't have other foods to fall back on, basically, the only way a predator can drive a prey to extinction is if they have another food to fall back on. This is why a lynx can't drive snowshoe hare to extinction, right? Because as soon as that hare population goes down, the lynx population goes down with them, and the hare rebounds, then lynx rebounds.

• 1:32:14Steven Rinella?

  That's a good point, man, yeah.

• 1:32:15Speaker 06

  Right. So it's hard for a predator to drive its prey to extinction. It can only do that if it can switch to something else, right? So what I would argue, if we're talking about bison, is that in the Great Plains, there really weren't good switching options for people who lived in this part of the world that could really sustain. Like, you couldn't drive bison to extinction and then switch and basically make your entire economy based on pronghorn or something else. And that's also, I think, the general story that explains, like, the survival of animals in the high Arctic. Let's say in, you know, musk ox and caribou. There's no real switching options there, right? So if you really slam those populations, your population gets slammed right behind them. If we're going to talk

• 1:32:58Speaker 06

  about Southeast Asia, we're talking about dense tropical forests that there were very few people in until very recently. If we're talking about Sub-Saharan Africa, we're talking about a massive, absolutely massive, semi-arid desert that people have been living in in very, very low population densities for a long time. You didn't really have pastoralists, people herding, until the last 2,000 years, and that's really when those animals started getting slammed in Africa. So in general, I would say, you know, you have these large mammals, cases of large mammal survival in environments where people simply couldn't reach sufficient densities to drive them to extinction.

• 1:33:33Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. You know what comes out of, like, contemporary biology that what you're talking about makes me think of is, if you look at the southern caribou herds, so we used to have caribou, I mean, when I say used to, I mean, even in the 1900s, right?

• 1:33:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Steven Rinella?

  You know, in 1920, 1930, you had, I don't want to say decent numbers, but you had caribou in Washington, you had caribou in the Idaho Panhandle, you had caribou in Montana.

• 1:34:03Speaker 06

  Minnesota.

• 1:34:03Steven Rinella?

  And Maine. Um, and I've heard biologists when talking about like, well, what was different is to be, uh,

• 1:34:13Steven Rinella?

  as human landscape development and landscape changes happened, it allowed whitetail deer and moose from logging practices and road building, it allowed whitetail deer and moose to move into these areas. And it made it that wolves could sustain themselves because in these areas, they had like very limited number of caribou and there wasn't like a wolf predation problem and it was what you're talking about. It, there was nothing for them to fall back on. So as caribou numbers would dwindle, wolf pressure would just go away. But now wolves don't move out because they're like, they're still picking away on whitetail deer. They're still picking away on moose and any caribou that turns up, they're going to hammer it because they're always present.

• 1:34:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. That's super interesting. It's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have something to fall back on.

• 1:35:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 06

  Right. Otherwise you get stuck in that predator prey cycle. Yeah. And I, I really think you can explain large mammal survival across the globe with that one principle. I mean, you guys live in a place, we live in a place where large mammal, we're famous for large mammals, right? We've got, we've got bison and elk and moose, pronghorn deer. Why, why are these spaces famous for large animals? Well, because hardly anybody lives here, right? That's, that's really always been the case in this part of the world, the Rocky Mountains, because it's high, it's dry. It's a hard place for people to make a living. And it's, and it's those places that these large animals can really thrive because the, the predation pressure from humans is really, is really low.

• 1:35:42Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:36:14Speaker 04

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

• 1:36:21Speaker 06

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

• 1:36:30Speaker 04

  You can both write down a number.

• 1:36:33Speaker 06

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

• 1:36:51Speaker 04

  It wasn't because he was nice to you.

• 1:36:53Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:36:54Speaker 07

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

• 1:37:14Speaker 06

  He was a great guy. Uh, I'm going to answer, I'm going to say, uh, somewhere between one and 2% believe this.

• 1:37:21Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:37:22Speaker 06

  What would you say Spencer?

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:37:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you're

• 1:37:26Speaker 04

  That's it?

• 1:37:26Speaker 05

  You're talking to an endangered species here, Steve, right in the studio.

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  So the number's going down, you think?

• 1:37:34Speaker 06

  You know, the, the point you raised of where's the evidence, like if people drove horse to extinction, why do you have two horse kill sites? Is, is a, is a argument that really resonates with a lot of people. They don't really, I would say, a lot of people haven't thought about the nature of the sample and the sample size that we have.

• 1:37:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Speaker 06

  And that maybe that's actually quite a bit of evidence for horse hunting, but.

• 1:37:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll say like, I mean, to start with, like very, a very low percentage of archaeologists actually study this stuff, right? Like paleo Indians. There's a very small segment of archaeology alongside all the complex Civ people and just the people that do everything else. So like for instance, in my experience, I didn't really think about this stuff at all until I went to Colorado State University for my masters and my, my advisor there, Jason LaBelle, was invested in paleo Indian stuff and kind of trained me up on that. But even then I was like, you know, it sounds good. Like, uh, Monteverde looks solid, all these pre-Clovis, we need to be going out there and digging deeper, I guess. And it really wasn't until Todd brainwashed me at Wyoming.

• 1:38:34Speaker 05

  But it is true that when you actually buckle down and start thinking critically about this stuff and really invest your intellectual energy into understanding it. It just kind of comes into focus. I mean, it's really obvious to me that Clovis was basically the first people and they drove the megafaunt to extinction. But I don't think that that's a very popular view for a number of reasons. I mean, one, it's just a small percentage of archaeologists that are invested in this stuff. And then among those that do,

• 1:39:01Speaker 05

  I just gotta say, like archaeology prioritizes discovery and newness, right? And we can't really escape that. I do. I love discovering stuff. And so everyone's constantly wanting to push it back. And I think there's a little bit of wishful thinking there. Like, did we really find the oldest? It's kind of a bummer, right? It's like an existential crisis for people that have invested a lot of their time and energy into finding the oldest thing. To be like, well, we did it. Now what? It's a bit of a, it's a bit of a bummer to some folks, I think.

• 1:39:30Speaker 07

  Now, if, if the number is one or 2% of that 98, 99%. How divided is that? Block of thinking? Like, are they?

• 1:39:43Speaker 06

  In terms of the cause?

• 1:39:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, like, are there, could you subdivide that? Quickly into a couple of different camps or? What's the, I'm just curious about the?

• 1:39:54Speaker 06

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

• 1:40:12Speaker 06

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

• 1:40:22Speaker 07

  What about?

• 1:40:24Speaker 03

  Um, what about that it was just like a combination of factors that all hit at the same time?

• 1:40:30Speaker 06

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

• 1:40:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, who's that dude that's real into those little micro blasts or whatever? Micro glass?

• 1:40:45Speaker 06

  Richard Firestone was the original guy.

• 1:40:47Steven Rinella?

  You know what's funny? I, I did a tour of the Lindenmeyer site.

• 1:40:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Steven Rinella?

  And the day I was at Lindenmeyer, Lindenmeyer's a big Folsom site, I'm just telling the audience here. Uh, it's kinda cool, cause it's right on the, it's, it's north, it's between Denver and Fort Collins.

• 1:41:01Speaker 06

  North of Fort Collins.

• 1:41:01Steven Rinella?

  Is it north of Fort Collins? Um, and it's a huge, they argue, a huge Folsom winter campsite. And some people argue that it's, this sounds a little out there, that because of the rock faces on the mountains, it's easy to explain where it is. And that you could have had, that this might have been a place where Folsom hunters from all across the Great Plains, you could say, no, no, no, just follow, you'll know. Look for the big white slash on the peak. And if you've never been there, that's where we'll be. Sounds fanciful.

• 1:41:41Speaker 05

  So, the guy that came up with that idea, I think, is, was my master's advisor, Jason LaBelle.

• 1:41:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:41:46Speaker 05

  I believe him. The big exposure of White River group up there, it's visible for miles in every direction. And, and yeah, you, it's right at the margin of the, you know, the high plains and the Colorado Piedmont, it's kind of at this eco-tone. It, it makes, it all makes sense to me. It's like, it is, it's the biggest, it's the biggest Folsom site that exists, for sure.

• 1:42:04Speaker 06

  It's the capital of the Folsom world, I would say.

• 1:42:06Steven Rinella?

  When I was there, there was a dude, cause they've done all this stratigraphy there. So, they've done a lot of dating on stuff. And there was a guy there collecting those little things he's looking for to prove that it was like, uh, that the, that the Pleistocene extinctions were some kind of bombardment of, uh-

• 1:42:22Speaker 06

  Comets.

• 1:42:22Steven Rinella?

  Comets. Killed them all.

• 1:42:24Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 1:42:25Steven Rinella?

  You didn't even put that on the list.

• 1:42:26Speaker 06

  What, uh, I, I did a study of that, actually.

• 1:42:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay, tell me, tell people about that idea.

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  Oh, go ahead.

• 1:42:33Speaker 06

  Well, uh, yeah, comets, okay.

• 1:42:37Steven Rinella?

  Then we could get into the Brody's idea about a bunch of shit was happening all at once.

• 1:42:41Speaker 06

  I, I think it was the, I think it was 2007, this paper was published in what we call PNAS, Proceedings-

• 1:42:47Steven Rinella?

  Sounds like a rapper.

• 1:42:49Speaker 06

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS.

• 1:42:54Speaker 06

  Where they had, they had taken these, collected sediments from a bunch of terminal Pleistocene, end of the Ice Age sites. And they would take these sediment columns, so they just collect sediments, you know, in very fine intervals through sort of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition.

• 1:43:10Steven Rinella?

  What year was this going on?

• 1:43:11Speaker 06

  It was published in 2007.

• 1:43:12Steven Rinella?

  See, that's when I was there. 2006, 2000, I was working on, I was there around 2005, 2006.

• 1:43:20Speaker 06

  So, so they found consistently at a certain time point, I want to say 12,700 years before present approximately, they claimed to find high concentrations of weird things. Those things included little tiny metallic spheres, they called them titano-magnetites, it's like iron oxides with titanium, little tiny spheres like the diameter of your hair. They said they had high concentrations of magnetic particles, so they would literally like, put this sediment in water and then run a super strong magnet through it, collect the magnetic particles and count them up through these sediment columns. They say they'd peak right at this, this horizon. They did the same thing for what are called platinum group elements like iridium, that's

• 1:44:04Speaker 06

  used to identify the extinction of the dinosaurs when that meteorite hit and there's this high iridium concentration. All this weird stuff.

• 1:44:13Speaker 06

  And all of us, a lot of us who had been digging sites like this and digging through sediments of this age were like, oh my god, it's all this weird extraterrestrial stuff that we had never seen before, we've been digging through it our whole life? I just wanted to, to see it myself. And I was working on a site at the time and I had friends who were working on sites where we could collect these samples and just replicate, do, do what they did and replicate their analyses. And we failed to replicate any of them. We didn't find high concentrations of microspherules, magnetic particles or platinum group elements. Completely failed, for what that's worth.

• 1:44:46Steven Rinella?

  Where does that idea stand right now? Is it fashionable in your community?

• 1:44:50Speaker 06

  No. It's completely, it's, it's funny, you know, we thought that the early kind of pushback against it would make it go away, it doesn't, it didn't, they're still publishing papers in support of it. And I would say the vast majority of people in, in geology and archaeology don't take it seriously. I mean, a, a massive extraterrestrial impact that drives an extinction over two continents doesn't leave like a whisper of dust. There ought to be like massive geologic evidence for craters and tsunamis and fires and it's just not there.

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  If it's 2% right now believe in Blitzkrieg, what was it 20 years ago? What do you think it'll be 20 years from now?

• 1:45:30Speaker 05

  That's a good point.

• 1:45:32Speaker 06

  That's a really good question.

• 1:45:34Speaker 05

  When I break down these, these arguments and you kind of look at the timing, I would say that we're like in a post, a post Clovis first world, longer than we were ever in a Clovis first world at this point. The Clovis first paradigm was basically like, let's say 1973 with Paul Martin's paper.

• 1:45:50Speaker 06

  That was the height.

• 1:45:51Speaker 05

  Up to like-

• 1:45:51Speaker 06

  That was the pinnacle.

• 1:45:52Speaker 05

  Up to basically like 1997, when Monteverde became accepted as, as a pre-Clovis site. That was kind of like the Clovis first era. Ever since Monteverde came out, it's basically just been gaining more acceptance that there was stuff before Clovis.

• 1:46:08Speaker 04

  You guys are an endangered species.

• 1:46:09Speaker 05

  You're like the guys at the record store saying there's so good music anymore. Where our habitat's fragmented. There's like a relic population in Kansas, some in Alaska.

• 1:46:20Speaker 06

  I have this sort of, maybe schizophrenic perspective about it, like sometimes I look at the record and I kind of feel like Neo in The Matrix, like I can see something that nobody else can see, like, oh my God, it's so obvious that Clovis is first. And then half the time, I feel like a guy with a tinfoil hat,

• 1:46:40Speaker 06

  like believing in crazy conspiracies, like why the hell can't I see what everybody else sees?

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

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

• 1:46:50Speaker 06

  Oh, that'll never happen. I mean, archaeology, the record is too crappy. We all look at the same evidence and interpret it like completely differently. It's pretty amazing that way. We're never gonna get consensus.

• 1:47:00Speaker 05

  But there's a thing that could happen that would work the other way. For sure.

• 1:47:04Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:47:04Speaker 05

  A thing that could happen to work that way is someone finds a bulletproof 17,000 year old site. Yeah. Bulletproof.

• 1:47:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:10Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 1:47:11Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:47:12Speaker 05

  I would love for that to happen, honestly. It'd be great to open up this whole other world that we knew nothing about. A whole other record to study. I just, I don't think that's happened yet. You know, if I had the crystal ball, and I always put it like this, just to make a graphic, like God has a gun to your head. And he says, what happened to the megafauna? And he knows, he's omniscient.

• 1:47:35Steven Rinella?

  And you have to guess right, or else you die. So the, so the screws are to you. There's no room for playing games. I would say in that moment, my life's on the line. Right? I would say something was going on where there was turmoil. Numbers were depressed. There was some upheaval. And into this upheaval came humans and, and, uh, and tipped it. Tipped it to extinction. But something was going on where it wasn't like peak.

• 1:48:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Steven Rinella?

  But maybe it would be like, wrong, Steve. It was my creation that forsaken me. Sure, you know, but I'm saying if I had to make a life or death.

• 1:48:25Speaker 06

  So, so Vance Haynes made that argument and he had good, like he, he worked on these sites in the San Pedro River Valley in Arizona. These beautiful Clovis sites, really well preserved surfaces. And he thought there's really clear evidence that when people were there at Murray Springs and Lainer and Blackwater Draw, that there was a drought. And that these, these mammoth populations were depressed. They're kind of stuck to these water holes and people were just basically the coup de grace. And it's a, it's a, it's a really good argument for the Southwest. But we're talking about the Southwest in two massive continents, right? So again, if we're going to have some kind of ecological upheaval that spans two continents from the Amazon to the East Coast.

• 1:49:04Steven Rinella?

  Now.

• 1:49:05Speaker 06

  What is it?

• 1:49:07Speaker 05

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

• 1:49:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, hit you some Alaska stuff, man.

• 1:49:11Speaker 05

  So like there, there are pre Clovis sites in the Western Hemisphere. They're in Alaska.

• 1:49:16Steven Rinella?

  That's what makes sense, right?

• 1:49:18Speaker 05

  There's clear evidence of human occupations, clear campsites. About 14,200 years old. They contain mammoth remains. They contain these little micro blades. It's seemingly among the first technologies that people brought here from Northeast Asia.

• 1:49:33Speaker 06

  You see the same technology in Northeast Asia. Yeah.

• 1:49:36Speaker 05

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

• 1:49:44Speaker 06

  And exactly when you'd expect to see them too.

• 1:49:46Steven Rinella?

  And. That's a good point, man.

• 1:49:48Speaker 05

  And it coincides with, we did a study back in 2015, looking at when megafaunal populations declined between Alaska.

• 1:49:57Speaker 05

  Uh, United States, south of the ice sheets in South America. Basically, slightly before we find archaeological evidence for human occupation in Alaska, megafauna starts to decline to extinction. Uh, and that's important because when you look at the archaeological survey in Alaska that's been done, compared to that that's been done south of the ice sheets, it's very slim. There's like two highways and a few little patches of archaeological research. And lo and behold, everywhere people look in Alaska, they find pre-Clovis sites, especially in this place called the Toninna Valley, and outside of Fairbanks. Just a lot of pre-Clovis evidence there. And we haven't really looked that hard in Alaska. It's a super difficult place to do archaeology, but we found pre-Clovis sites immediately.

• 1:50:39Speaker 05

  Despite the 150 years of research we've done south of the ice sheets, very little.

• 1:50:43Speaker 06

  And they're normal.

• 1:50:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they're normal.

• 1:50:46Speaker 06

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

• 1:50:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:50:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. So those, do you think those people hit Alaska and just stayed? Or did they like? Some stayed. Get absorbed into Clovis or?

• 1:51:10Speaker 06

  I would say they're the ancestors of Clovis. Some stayed and some moved south. Yeah.

• 1:51:16Speaker 05

  Have you ever been to or looked at the stuff from the Mesa site?

• 1:51:21Speaker 06

  Uh, I have the book. I've never seen the stuff.

• 1:51:24Speaker 05

  That's cool. But that's not, that's not as old, though.

• 1:51:27Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:51:27Speaker 05

  It's cool. I went to that Mesa, it's badass, man.

• 1:51:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:51:31Speaker 05

  You can just picture people wanting to get up on that thing and look around, you know? Actually, I didn't go on top of it, but I sat and looked at it, you know? Um, but that's not old, right?

• 1:51:39Speaker 06

  It's Pleistocene. It's, it's like, uh, maybe 12,000.

• 1:51:43Speaker 05

  12,000 years old.

• 1:51:45Speaker 06

  Something like that.

• 1:51:45Speaker 05

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

• 1:51:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe 2,000 years after people arrive in Alaska. And it's probably, you know, the argument is those are plains bison hunters coming back, back north, this and the, the artifact form.

• 1:51:57Steven Rinella?

  That's what, that's what they had introduced me to is this idea of backfill.

• 1:52:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:52:02Steven Rinella?

  Like, that, you know, you get the initial waves of people coming through, but then at some point in time, people move back their direction.

• 1:52:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, back migration's kind of a ubiquitous.

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• 1:55:26Speaker 04

  What part of the Americas moved on from Clovis the quickest? And which ones held out the longest?

• 1:55:32Speaker 06

  Probably the Great Basin was the quickest. Spencer mentioned there's some really old stemmed projectile points that some Great Basin archaeologists argue are as old, if not older than Clovis. You also have Clovis points in the Great Basin, but there's some very old dates on these stemmed projectile points in the Great Basin. I don't know that we have really good age control on post Clovis projectile point types, except in the Rocky Mountains. And we, you know, at La Pren, another really cool thing we found is a Folsom Point. And we have, we, we appear to have a single occupation.

• 1:56:17Speaker 06

  Where people killed mammoths, killed bison. It was buried by a flood, probably 10 years after they killed that mammoth. And on the same surface, we've got one Clovis point and one Folsom point. This would be the oldest case of Folsom ever found, so. And that would probably be, you know, that's pretty early. We know Clovis persists after that, too. So there's like this long period of overlap where both are being made.

• 1:56:39Speaker 04

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

• 1:56:55Speaker 05

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

• 1:57:02Speaker 04

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

• 1:57:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, we should be clear to make that distinction. I mean, they weren't. Clovis wasn't a people, it was a stone tool technology.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  Where did cellphone people come from?

• 1:57:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, the way I look at it, and like, this is like getting into the realm of hand-waving, but Folsom points are a lot smaller than Clovis points. If you put them side by side, you oftentimes don't get that when you're just looking at books and illustrations of this stuff. But Folsom points are generally at least half the size of Clovis points.

• 1:57:37Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna make you go. You didn't break down a Folsom point down.

• 1:57:40Speaker 04

  Just imagine something smaller than that.

• 1:57:42Speaker 05

  But you can imagine a scenario where like.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Well, right here.

• 1:57:45Speaker 05

  Clovis points have a distinct function from Folsom points. Maybe they're a thrusting spear, not an atalaltal dart. You introduce another weaponry system into your toolkit.

• 1:57:55Speaker 03

  You folks watch.

• 1:57:56Speaker 05

  And they're used at the same time.

• 1:57:58Speaker 04

  And that'll also affect the culture, right? Like.

• 1:58:02Speaker 05

  So, I mean, Clovis points basically disappear when the mammoths disappear, seemingly. So they're probably a pretty closely linked thing. That Clovis points were used to hunt mammoths. And then, once mammoths were gone, didn't have much need for them anymore. And people started making these little Folsom points a lot more often.

• 1:58:20Speaker 03

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

• 1:58:21Speaker 05

  I wanna look at it.

• 1:58:22Speaker 06

  But you very quickly start seeing regional diversification in the way people are making a living.

• 1:58:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:58:30Speaker 06

  And one thing, I visited this site, Fin del Mundo in Mexico. And I visited another site where they found some Clovis points on the surface. The one thing that really struck me there.

• 1:58:40Speaker 06

  It was here, you're looking at this Mexican Clovis point, right? You drop that in Wyoming, you wouldn't know it was from Mexico. You drop it in South Carolina, you wouldn't know it's from Mexico.

• 1:58:51Speaker 06

  And they find them, right? With these gomphides, with these elephants. But in this same site, which is this really highly eroded surface site, I'm seeing marine shells brought in from the Gulf of the Sea of Cortez and ceramics, right? You start to see this super-regional specialization. But in Clovis, everybody's doing the same damn thing. Everywhere. And it's really, really striking. You go to Missouri at the Kimswick site, you've got a dead mastodon full of big Clovis points. Mexico, Wyoming.

• 1:59:20Speaker 05

  Dudes had it figured out.

• 1:59:22Speaker 06

  That was the way to make a living, apparently.

• 1:59:25Speaker 04

  What was going on on the West Coast? You know, you had the Kelp Highway Theory, like what archaeology is there at the same time as Clovis?

• 1:59:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a really good question. So the first thing I should note is, you know, the coastal migration thing has been around for a long time. The idea's been around since at least the 1940s, that this was another way to get around the glaciers. It really became in vogue in 1997, when Monteverde was accepted to be pre-Clovis and real, because the argument was, in order to get them down there that early, the ice-free corridor simply wasn't an option, so the coast had to be the case, right? So ever since then, like, everybody has assumed it's the coast. I should say that these, again, aren't mutually exclusive. You could take both routes, right?

• 2:00:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:00:13Speaker 06

  But there's been a huge amount of work now on the West Coast because of that, because everybody's kind of assumed that's the entry point. And my understanding is that there is very little archaeological evidence from places seen at all.

• 2:00:26Speaker 04

  Like, you're not seeing different technologies at the same time as Clovis was going on, or?

• 2:00:32Speaker 06

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

• 2:00:41Speaker 05

  I don't think there's any weaponry associated with it.

• 2:00:42Speaker 06

  No, there's some really funky points out there, but that stuff's kind of hard to date, because you're dating often marine.

• 2:00:50Speaker 06

  Shells. And there's a lot of old carbon in the ocean, so those dates tend to be too old. There's a very famous human remains from.

• 2:01:00Steven Rinella?

  Prince of Wales.

• 2:01:01Speaker 06

  Well, not you're thinking about Alaska. No, I'm talking about on the Channel Islands.

• 2:01:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, no, I've heard.

• 2:01:06Speaker 06

  Arlington Springs woman, but she had a lot of marine resources in her diet, which means the dates are too old. But it was kind of like, it was basically a Clovis age date before you did the correction for that. But we really don't have a good, a good sample of dated stuff from the Pacific coast. I will say there are Clovis points that have been found basically on the beach. There's one from an island off the coast of Mexico, a Clovis point.

• 2:01:31Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:01:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a really challenging environment. That's right.

• 2:01:37Steven Rinella?

  You know, what makes me optimistic, though, is I was with a geologist up there who works in Alaska. And you know, you always heard when people talk about the Kelp Highway Theory or the Coastal Migration Theory. Everybody's like, yeah, but all that stuff's underwater. But he was, he has these shoreline maps, tons of it's not because of isostatic rebound.

• 2:02:00Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:02:00Steven Rinella?

  So when you had all that ice on, on top of the, I'm not telling you, I'm telling folks at home. When all that ice was on the, laying on the earth, it's so heavy that it pushed the crust down and sank it. And there's still like seismic activity in Southeast Alaska from, as the ice melted off, the land pops back up. So when you look at these shorelines, it's this like, it's this wave like undulating thing. Where some of that ice age shoreline is 100 feet up the hill.

• 2:02:31Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:02:32Steven Rinella?

  So it's like, there could be stuff there.

• 2:02:35Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, yeah.

• 2:02:37Steven Rinella?

  I mean, like, like what I'm saying is you can't just say, well, it's all underwater.

• 2:02:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I have no doubt that there's some archaeology underwater. I think it's been proven.

• 2:02:46Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:03:03Speaker 06

  Well, there's that notion, right, that some of, some of the isostatic rebounds kind of kept some of these coastal areas above water, but also.

• 2:03:11Speaker 05

  Why would you expect that people would never maybe go in inland for a night in former campsite, right? I mean, basically, the assumption is that people-

• 2:03:21Steven Rinella?

  Follow a river.

• 2:03:22Speaker 05

  When I'm at my-

• 2:03:23Steven Rinella?

  Follow a salmon.

• 2:03:24Speaker 05

  People are just living on the beach.

• 2:03:25Steven Rinella?

  Cause that's for all-

• 2:03:26Speaker 05

  Solely living on the beach.

• 2:03:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, dude, have you been there?

• 2:03:28Speaker 05

  The beach is nice sometimes.

• 2:03:30Steven Rinella?

  They're like, it's not that it's nice, it's, it's an overwhelming abundance of food.

• 2:03:38Speaker 06

  It's not easy to get.

• 2:03:40Steven Rinella?

  Not easy to get.

• 2:03:42Speaker 06

  It's in the water.

• 2:03:43Steven Rinella?

  It's shit, no.

• 2:03:44Speaker 06

  Alright, but, but-

• 2:03:45Steven Rinella?

  Dude, listen, I'm telling you, you get into the shellfish and the salmon, go, go talk to anybody that lives there now.

• 2:03:53Speaker 06

  Alright, but, but picture yourself at the end of the ice age and, you know, you're, you come down into Seattle and it's like, oh, we could live off shellfish and ignore these mastodons and bison.

• 2:04:03Steven Rinella?

  Yup.

• 2:04:04Speaker 06

  Or, we'd go after these big animals.

• 2:04:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but-

• 2:04:08Speaker 06

  What do you do?

• 2:04:09Steven Rinella?

  Shellfish don't hurt ya. But they've had coastal, no, but they, but they've had coastal cultures there, they've had coastal cultures there continuously.

• 2:04:17Speaker 06

  I, I, I get that's the argument.

• 2:04:18Steven Rinella?

  Who are always more abundant, who are always more abundant than interior peoples. And even many of the interior peoples in, if we go to Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, many of the interior peoples are still reliant on anadromous fish, like marine resources, you can't ignore it.

• 2:04:34Speaker 06

  And, and that part of the world is a good reason why you do that now. Yeah, I'm saying in the places, that's probably not your best option. Also, for top, like, look, let's, let's look at this-

• 2:04:44Speaker 05

  This is our first real argument.

• 2:04:45Speaker 06

  Let's look, let's, let's look at this idea. People are, are, have thousands of years of coastal adaptation, where's that in the archaeological record? That's an assumption. Two, people are living at high population densities, where are they? Why can't we find them?

• 2:05:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:01Speaker 06

  Three, we don't really see intensive use of marine resources until, let's say, four or five thousand years after Clovis in that part of the world. Yeah, part of that is sea level rise, still.

• 2:05:11Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:05:12Speaker 06

  You know, I think part of the success of the kelp highway hypothesis is that it's a good marketing campaign and I wanna, I wanna, I wanna rebrand the ice-free corridor to the meat highway.

• 2:05:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 2:05:24Speaker 05

  Meat highway, man, yeah.

• 2:05:28Speaker 05

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

• 2:05:37Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:05:45Speaker 05

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

• 2:05:49Speaker 04

  But also, like, you mentioned meat versus shellfish, but what, what, what's saying that they weren't killing large marine mammals?

• 2:05:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, in fact, that, if there's a coastal thing, that's what I think they would be doing.

• 2:06:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:06:04Speaker 06

  Is focusing their effort on large marine mammals, mostly, you know, seals, maybe some whales.

• 2:06:09Speaker 05

  I'm being reminded of like Ben Potter's study, that obsidian sourcing study. You probably know more details about it than I do, but basically, uh, an archaeologist in Alaska, a great archaeologist out of, out of Fairbanks, named Ben Potter, did a big obsidian sourcing study of all the oldest sites that they know about in Alaska. The hypothesis was basically like, if people were tied to coastal regions, then we should have coastal obsidian in these sites, because there are obsidian sources kind of right on where that corridor would be.

• 2:06:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:06:37Speaker 05

  Lo and behold, every single piece of obsidian used in these oldest sites in Alaska, the people that are the ancestors of the first Americans, they're from interior sources, from mountain sources in the interior of Alaska, and really no evidence that people were utilizing the coastal regions of, of Alaska.

• 2:06:54Steven Rinella?

  Son of a gun.

• 2:06:57Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'll settle on this. If I took your ass and dropped you off somewhere on like wherever, okay? Some remote area in southeast Alaska.

• 2:07:08Speaker 06

  I've been there.

• 2:07:09Steven Rinella?

  Well, and you know what, you know where I wouldn't wind up finding you? Up in the mountains.

• 2:07:14Speaker 06

  That is, that's absolutely true today.

• 2:07:16Steven Rinella?

  Down on the beach, getting fat off kelp, greenling and clams.

• 2:07:20Speaker 06

  Until I got enough expertise to effectively hunt bear

• 2:07:25Speaker 06

  and caribou.

• 2:07:27Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that's a great point. Yeah, no, I got you. No, what you're saying is good, but it is, it is an enticing idea. And then Mel, I don't want to go, I don't want to go too deep in this, but then, I don't know if you know, like Meltzer's whole deal with going up and, uh, all that, the whole, trying to put the, trying to-

• 2:07:47Steven Rinella?

  Figure out, is there any kind of like plant pollen evidence of an ice free corridor?

• 2:07:54Steven Rinella?

  And so they go up to these places on the out, you know, where the ice free corridor supposedly existed. And they go into these ponds and pull up sediments and try to go find sediments that would be at the right time. So you go 13,000 years ago and he'd be like, okay, show me evidence at 13,000 years ago that there were mammoths and vegetation. And he's like, it's a rock garden. Right? It was water and rock.

• 2:08:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:08:22Steven Rinella?

  But I don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying how he explained it. I never read anything.

• 2:08:27Speaker 06

  In terms of the availability of both migration routes.

• 2:08:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like was there a green verdant ice free corridor?

• 2:08:34Speaker 06

  It's a real, there is now, right? So at some point there had to be. And the question is, when does that go from being a barrier? Something that humans can actually traverse? That's, that's a question for both migration corridors. It's a really challenging thing to answer. Because, you know, if we're thinking about a 10 mile space, we can study that by drilling a core in a lake and studying the DNA or the pollen out of it. We're talking about something that's 1,200 miles long. Is that what we decided? The ice free corridor?

• 2:08:59Steven Rinella?

  Nine to 1,200 is what we looked.

• 2:09:01Speaker 05

  That was how wide it is?

• 2:09:02Speaker 06

  No, that's, that's a length of it. That's a length of it, right? So like, how do you know when that thing is open versus closed over a stretch that humans can actually migrate? It's incredibly challenging. And if you date different geologic deposits in different places, you get different answers. And there's a lot of disagreement. The dates that I generally see are anywhere from it was open from 14,500 or some people say it's open around 13,000. What is really clear to me is that it's open right around the time Clovis explodes across North America.

• 2:09:35Steven Rinella?

  Can I bolster your, uh, can I bolster your argument for you?

• 2:09:38Speaker 06

  Sure. I'd love that.

• 2:09:41Steven Rinella?

  Think about this, man. This is the thing I think about when I think about the Kelp Highway too. Is let's say, let's, okay, let's say the ice free corridor was real shitty. And it wasn't great, but you were just, you were making a moonshot, right? You're dying of curiosity. So you start picking into their, and why would someone do that? You'd be like, why would anyone take the risk? They wouldn't want to go into marginal habitat. But think about this, let's go back to the coastal theory. You go to like Glacier Bay.

• 2:10:11Steven Rinella?

  Or any number of areas in B C, any number of areas in Southeast Alaska. Were still today. Still today, that ocean land interface is a wall of ice. So people coming down in a boat had to have been okay with the idea that like. It's it's true. As far as they could see, it was a wall of ice.

• 2:10:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:10:38Steven Rinella?

  As far and they would have had calving, like calving glaciers and they would have been like. Let's go.

• 2:10:43Speaker 06

  In the north.

• 2:10:44Steven Rinella?

  Paddle.

• 2:10:45Speaker 06

  In the north.

• 2:10:45Steven Rinella?

  Let's check it out. So someone, there has to be a thing where someone's like so dying of curiosity. That they have and they had to have the faith to be like, I have a feeling. I don't know why. I just have a feeling that if you go and like in thirty miles. Maybe we'll find a place where it's not a hundred wall foot wall of ice.

• 2:11:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, the elephant in the room is also that it would have required a pretty sophisticated technology of maritime travel, right? That we really don't have any evidence that existed at that time.

• 2:11:18Steven Rinella?

  They found Australia, though.

• 2:11:20Speaker 05

  That's a much smaller task than circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean.

• 2:11:26Speaker 06

  The North Pacific. Yeah, Australia, we're talking about maybe fifty kilometers of tropical.

• 2:11:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that was it?

• 2:11:30Speaker 06

  Water. Yeah.

• 2:11:31Steven Rinella?

  Chip shot swim that.

• 2:11:35Speaker 05

  The other thing I think about with this with coastal versus inland is I've like, I've only watched one season of that show alone. But it was a season where this dude had spent some time with some Siberian Ranger herders. He was an excellent outdoorsman. Ended up building like a drift fence and killing a moose on this show. And subsisting off his moose. And all the while, there's somebody else on the show. That is just like meekly checking like a little fish trap every day and they're getting out these little graylings or something and just. Starving to death, eating these tiny fish while this dude's sitting high on like this fatty moose meat.

• 2:12:06Steven Rinella?

  Man.

• 2:12:06Speaker 05

  And that guy devoted his energy towards the correct endeavor, I would say. And he won, he won that season.

• 2:12:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you're not.

• 2:12:14Speaker 06

  If you could string up a net and catch. A hundred salmon in one go.

• 2:12:17Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:12:31Steven Rinella?

  It's.

• 2:12:32Speaker 06

  All these things live in the water, in really cold water.

• 2:12:35Steven Rinella?

  No, you got, no, in that area, in that area.

• 2:12:38Speaker 06

  You're saying low tide clam beds.

• 2:12:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but there's a 20 foot tide swing.

• 2:12:44Speaker 04

  You could walk across a mile of some of that stuff without hitting water, you know?

• 2:12:48Steven Rinella?

  It's nothing but food. It is nothing but food on those clam beds.

• 2:12:57Speaker 06

  I, I, I think that people are driven by package size.

• 2:13:00Steven Rinella?

  Giant clam beds.

• 2:13:06Steven Rinella?

  I don't think it was, yeah. There's a lot to it. There's a lot to it. Like the date stuff, but the food abundance thing, I, I think that, uh, the, the food abundance thing, I think is overwhelming amounts of food. So I don't think that that was the problem.

• 2:13:20Speaker 06

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

• 2:13:26Speaker 06

  That's what makes it fun.

• 2:13:27Steven Rinella?

  Maybe that's how we know it's time to stop.

• 2:13:29Speaker 06

  You can never be wrong.

• 2:13:32Speaker 04

  Uh, is there an explanation for what would have kept that ice free corridor open?

• 2:13:38Speaker 05

  Just the end of the ice age. Um, those laurentide and the cordyceps just kind of gradually receded that, you know, the laurentide didn't

• 2:13:45Speaker 04

  From each other.

• 2:13:46Speaker 05

  Recede completely until, what, 6,000 years ago or something? Cause they grew out of the Hudson Bay and eventually it, uh, the last of it disappeared around that time ago. But yeah. It basically, uh, by the time it reached a certain point, like winter temperatures wouldn't have pushed it together again, and then it was open.

• 2:14:03Speaker 06

  Do we have any Clovis age skeletons of humans?

• 2:14:05Steven Rinella?

  Yes. What are you talking about?

• 2:14:07Speaker 06

  What are they like?

• 2:14:08Steven Rinella?

  The Anzac boy.

• 2:14:09Speaker 06

  We have an ancient from Montana. My apologies for asking.

• 2:14:14Steven Rinella?

  Two years old, the Anzac child, and they just found out he was, uh, his mother, um, had a diet that was very similar to what they find with large cats. She was eating big game.

• 2:14:26Speaker 06

  So how many Clovis humans do we have?

• 2:14:28Steven Rinella?

  One.

• 2:14:28Speaker 06

  That's it. There's, there's one from Mexico that's roughly that age from a cave in Mexico.

• 2:14:34Steven Rinella?

  Is there?

• 2:14:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. Doh, Steve. But, but it's not clearly Clovis. It's not clearly Clovis. Anzac is the one.

• 2:14:42Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:14:49Speaker 06

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

• 2:14:57Steven Rinella?

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

• 2:15:13Speaker 05

  For the record, we like both metin and melts her a whole lot.

• 2:15:18Speaker 05

  So, and it's good to contextualize, like, we're literally talking about, like, a couple thousand years and maybe a half dozen sites of disagreement, right? It's just that those

• 2:15:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:27Speaker 05

  couple thousand years and half dozen sites have really big implications for these two issues about how people got here and whether or not they killed off these animals. And so that's why we talk about it so much, right? Even though like, it's like kind of a tempest in a teacup, if you know that phrase.

• 2:15:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:41Speaker 05

  Couple of people arguing about, yeah, half dozen sites in a couple thousand years. They, they do have pretty big implications for the peopling of the Americas.

• 2:15:49Steven Rinella?

  Well, I already told you, this is the primary thing I think about. What was that quote? What was that Dan Florrie's quote? It wasn't his quote, but he tells that quote, the reason the, the, the reason they're fighting so much is they're so little.

• 2:16:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Talking about academics, the reason that arguments are so impassioned is because there's so little.

• 2:16:09Speaker 06

  I've heard that attributed to Henry Kissinger.

• 2:16:13Steven Rinella?

  But there is a lot, but here, I, I want to like, this should, we should have said this in the beginning instead of at the very end, but where this becomes political and where it becomes social and where it becomes cultural. Well, it's a lot of places, but one of the places it becomes this is, is it innately human?

• 2:16:32Steven Rinella?

  That we destroy our environment. Right? Is it sort of this innately human ancient? Practice that we drive things to extinction? Is it just who we are and we've always done it that way? Or did we like?

• 2:16:48Steven Rinella?

  Become evil later? And so people will look and like? Blitzkrieg hypothesis people can look at? Let's say, uh, extinctions we're driving now with certain human activities. Isn't it nice to be able to go like, oh, we've always done that? What do you think happened to all the mamas? There's nothing new. It's always how it's been.

• 2:17:10Speaker 05

  Just because something's human, universally human, which I think? That tendency is doesn't make it. It doesn't abdicate us from moral responsibility to deal with it.

• 2:17:18Steven Rinella?

  No, of course not. Like slavery isn't inherently human.

• 2:17:22Speaker 05

  It's a universal practice that because we live in a liberal democracy that? Decided it was a bad thing we we got rid of. I should know like how many places in the world, for instance? Have thriving large game populations outside of the American West? Not many. And the only reason we have them here, right? Is because there's state sanctioned conservation laws that have allowed that to happen. Otherwise we'd be in the same boat. We have no big animals left.

• 2:17:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:46Speaker 05

  Uh, so I, I think that argument that like? You know, by acknowledging this, we're kind of, uh? Surrendering our moral obligation to do something about it? It's not a good argument to make. Just because something has happened forever, doesn't mean we need to keep doing it.

• 2:18:00Steven Rinella?

  Can I hit with one more? Way this where the rubber meets the road? If you turn around and look above your head, you're gonna see a war club?

• 2:18:08Steven Rinella?

  That war club was, uh, given to us by a guest? He didn't sit where you're sitting, but he sat in that seat in our old studio named Taylor Keen. Okay? And Taylor Keen felt that?

• 2:18:22Steven Rinella?

  Part of this thing of, of like, he, he would argue? That? Human history in the new world goes back 50,000 years. Okay, he thinks it's way older. And he thinks that this like 13,000 year Clovis story? Is a way of, um?

• 2:18:43Steven Rinella?

  Is a way of, he thinks it helped fuel manifest destiny. To say, well, they haven't been here that long. Like, the people were displacing our new arrivals too. We're just another new arrival. I don't agree with him. Because I think that if you had gone to the, sort of like the architects of manifest destiny, whether you go back to Jackson, you go back to Jefferson, and you had said, hey, hey, hey, before you do this, bear in mind, Native Americans have been on the landscape 50,000 years, not 13,000 years. Um, they wouldn't have been like, yeah, you're right. You're right. We better all leave and go back to Europe. And also, they wouldn't have been able to comprehend the timeline anyways.

• 2:19:28Steven Rinella?

  Because they weren't living on that timeline. So I think that his argument is false, but he feels that this 13,000 year arrival thing. And, and I, and I've encountered this perspective from a handful of friends of mine who are indigenous friends of mine. That it, that it's meant to sort of, it's meant to kind of de, it's meant to kind of deflate or call into question indigenous ownership of the landscape to be like, your people showed up, our people showed up, like, no one's from here. People just showed up and they've always been fighting over it anyways. And we're just the latest of another people to come here and fight for it.

• 2:20:10Speaker 05

  It's an interesting debate. Let me contextualize a little bit. So, until the Folsom site was discovered, the widespread notion among people that studied this stuff was that Native Americans had only been here about, say, 3,000 or 4,000 years.

• 2:20:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:25Speaker 05

  And when the Folsom site came out and there was this revelatory thing that people have been here since the Ice Age, it was of enormous benefit to Native Americans because it established that they've been here a very long time. 13,000 years is a really long time.

• 2:20:40Steven Rinella?

  650 human generations, approximately.

• 2:20:44Speaker 05

  So yeah, fast forward almost a century now. Now that 13,000 years old is no longer

• 2:20:52Steven Rinella?

  Old enough.

• 2:20:52Speaker 05

  Old enough. You have to keep pushing it back a little further. I just, I think 13,000 years is a really long time and, and it's certainly enough time to establish that you have some sort of patrimony over the land of this country.

• 2:21:05Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:06Speaker 05

  I don't, I don't quite understand the argument that it's not quite long enough to establish that. It's a really long time.

• 2:21:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:13Speaker 06

  The scientific study of the human past in North America has confirmed that the descendant communities today, their ancestors were these people, that they arrived 650 human generations ago.

• 2:21:27Speaker 05

  Anzac showed that.

• 2:21:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, Anzac did show that and, and other, and other human remains. You know, if, if we look at, if, if we go back, I assume you guys have ancestry in Europe and we ask, how long do we have ancestry in Europe? It's almost certainly less than that because there have been multiple populations that have run over Europe repeatedly. So 13,000 years is longer than

• 2:21:50Speaker 06

  anybody in Europe, most people in Europe could truly lay claim to some, you know, places of homeland. It's a long damn time.

• 2:21:56Steven Rinella?

  That's an interesting point. Do you know I'm 2% African?

• 2:22:00Speaker 06

  I didn't know that. Who told you?

• 2:22:01Steven Rinella?

  My wife always tells me to keep that down because she says I kind of oversell it.

• 2:22:07Speaker 05

  As long as you don't use it as an excuse to like get away with any linguistics terms of phrase.

• 2:22:12Steven Rinella?

  She's like, I'd keep that under your, I'd keep that under your hat.

• 2:22:17Steven Rinella?

  She doesn't want to impact my worldview, you know?

• 2:22:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay, again, join today. I'm going to have you guys tell people, I'm going to remind everybody who you are, then I'm going to have you tell people how to find your work and how to follow what you guys work on. So Todd Surovell, the director of the George C. Frisen Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, and Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archaeologist and an adjunct at University of Wyoming. So if you find cool stuff in Wyoming. If you're like, if you're like, good lord, it's a mammoth skull, the stone point stuck in its forehead.

• 2:22:58Speaker 05

  I'm gonna get so many photos of rocks off of this.

• 2:23:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, I gotta tell people's story. So I walk into, I walk into Spencer's office and the first thing that greets me just laying on the floor is a giant,

• 2:23:11Steven Rinella?

  the end of a giant dinosaur femur. So I said, what's that? He goes, that's a rock. And I said, oh, I thought it was a big dinosaur bone. He said, that's what the guy that brought it to me thought was.

• 2:23:23Steven Rinella?

  And then he said, I could have it if I wanted. The guy that brought it just left it there.

• 2:23:29Speaker 06

  So it was or was it not a dinosaur?

• 2:23:31Steven Rinella?

  It was not.

• 2:23:31Speaker 06

  It was not a dinosaur.

• 2:23:32Steven Rinella?

  No, the dude that brought it is like, yeah, nevermind.

• 2:23:34Speaker 07

  But it was a very convincing dinosaur bone. For not being a dinosaur bone, it was very convincing.

• 2:23:38Speaker 05

  It's an eighty pound paperweight.

• 2:23:40Steven Rinella?

  Just sitting there, it's sitting there on his floor. It has, it's not in the collections.

• 2:23:45Speaker 06

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

• 2:23:49Steven Rinella?

  Come on, bring it in.

• 2:23:50Speaker 05

  Wield it in.

• 2:23:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I would have been so excited. You would, this thing, I would have been like, holy cow, man. Now I got it. Now I'm rich.

• 2:24:01Steven Rinella?

  So how do people find your work? Like, what should they check out? I have one of your books upstairs.

• 2:24:05Speaker 06

  You do?

• 2:24:05Steven Rinella?

  The Badger, well, I just got it.

• 2:24:07Speaker 06

  Barker Gulch?

• 2:24:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I had to buy that sucker.

• 2:24:09Speaker 06

  I brought one for you.

• 2:24:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you did?

• 2:24:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:11Steven Rinella?

  Bought it on Amazon.

• 2:24:14Speaker 06

  I searched my name. You can find my website.

• 2:24:17Steven Rinella?

  Spell your name out.

• 2:24:18Speaker 06

  Surovell, S U R O V E L L.

• 2:24:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:24:22Speaker 06

  Um, I do want to say that, that my job is, as director of the Frisen Institute is raising money to support archaeological research in our department. Mostly of other people, students, faculty, people like Spencer. So if you're interested in supporting the last breath of, last dying breath of Clovis first archaeology and people who believe in lysocine extinctions. Search the Frisont Institute. We're happy to take donations. Every dollar goes to research.

• 2:24:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, excellent.

• 2:24:50Speaker 05

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

• 2:25:07Steven Rinella?

  That's interesting. Good. Thanks, guys. Appreciate you coming on, man. It's been fascinating.

• 2:25:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:25:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:25:40Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of

• 2:26:24Steven Rinella?

  a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. Time out in the field is not free. Okay, every time you go in the woods, there's a trade-off happening. Like, you leave work early, you miss your kid's game, whatever, you forego some family gathering. If that applies to you, what you got to do is you got to learn how to spend the right time out in the woods, the right time in the tree. An OnX Hunt's Deer Movement Forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet based on real conditions, so you're not missing the kid's game or burning paid time off on a day that's not going to produce. The Deer Movement Forecast means missing fewer of the moments that matter, whether in the stand or back at home. Try it today in OnX Hunt.

• 2:27:10Steven Rinella?

  You need credit to buy, well, pretty much any big thing. So how do you get started? Easy. The One Pay Builder Card. It's simple and smart. One Pay is the banking app trusted by millions of Americans. And the One Pay Builder Card is an easy way to build credit. Just use it to make everyday purchases, build your credit history, and then you can work up to the big milestones. Buying a new car or a new house. Or hell, maybe something I'm always thinking about, which is another boat. Those moments start with small, consistent steps with the One Pay Builder Card. Download the One Pay app or visit onepay.com for banking that gives you more for what matters.

• 2:27:53Speaker 02

  One Pay is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Coastal Community Bank or Lead Bank, members FDIC. Builder card results may vary and aren't guaranteed. Learn more about banking through One Pay at onepay.com/podcast.

• 2:28:07Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.