Ep. 03: Raven’s and Coyote’s America | The American West

For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their concrete reasons for why, and how, Native America achieved this kind of environmental success? Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. 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, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans, develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritized schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  You ever get that feeling the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own. Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage, you can search by location. You can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com, it is where the adventure begins. You guys are always hearing me talk about Montana Knife Company. I love these guys, hands down favorite knives. The blades are incredibly solid. These are high-quality tools that put in the work. Well, you asked for it, and I've been asking for it, and MKC finally did it.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It'll be dropping soon. Go to MKC.com right now and sign up for email and text alerts so you don't miss the drop. MKC.com, Montana Knife Company. Working knives for working people. Again, MKC.com.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Native America existed for 10,000 years in a West marked by many prior extinctions, but somehow found it possible to preserve almost all the biological richness of the continent until the arrival of Europeans. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Ravens and coyotes, America.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  I am walking the edge of a sharp-rimmed cliff in outback Montana before sunrise, moving through a twilight of grays and blacks and outlines. Large, graceful birds, sandhill cranes, are fluting their strange, pleistocene cries in the pastel sky overhead.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  But I’m focused on the lines of the topography in front of me, especially the way the mesa I’m walking narrows up ahead. Seeing that, my walking pace quickens.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  This is a historic piece of ground. Starting some 2,000 years in the past and continuing down to 200 years ago, it was the scene of frenzied, albeit sporadic, human activity. Like most historic places, there is something maddeningly mute about the spot now. It’s why we often stand and gawk numbly in such places, unable to connect to the events we’re supposed to marvel over. But this morning, I’m not going to be stymied by lack of imagination. I’m here with a purpose, my intent to experience at least some part of what a buffalo jump drive was all about. It was fully dark when I arrived here an hour earlier, parked my car at an interpretive

• 3:54Speaker 02

  sign, finished a cup of coffee, then slowly worked through the boulders to the top of this mesa. While I walked eastward to the luxuriant grassland of a high meadow, the sky had gradually lightened. Now, turning back towards the car and the cliff I’d climbed in the dark, I’m becoming caught up in what I tell myself are echoes of the place. Pointing myself down the narrowing mesa towards the far rim rock, I start to jog.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  I'm running a track that men and other animals have run many times in the past. But in contrast to my lope beneath the fluting cranes, then there would have been the pounding thunder of sharp, black hooves cutting through the grass and the alarmed grunting of animals, their huge forms wrapped in billowing clouds of dust that must have made for a ghostly stampede.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Now I hear only my footfalls and my breathing, but in the real thing, the air would have been rent by the exultant shouts of the drivers, urging on runners wearing the skins of wolves and red-coated bison calves, leading the herd to its destiny. Their costuming a ruse to fool buffalo cows into thinking that wolves were selecting out defenseless young ones. Listening to the rhythm of my feet, I wonder if the herd's noise wouldn't have been so overwhelming, it would have morphed into silence, adding a surreal quality to the ghostliness. The whole affair would have commenced days earlier with a religious ceremony

• 5:36Speaker 02

  and careful maneuvering of a bison herd in that high meadow into position for a stampede. Then if all went well, and it went well enough times in the past to accumulate a bone layer five feet deep at the base of the cliff I'd climbed, the runners who led the herd to the cliff edge would escape, if they could, by darting aside at the last moment, dodging the relentless brown river of animals hurdling into space in a dream of wild, frozen action.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Where I've begun my run is a half-mile back from the cliff, and soon enough, I cross to descending benches and realize I am on the point of no return in this bison jump. Get the animals here and have them running, and the downhill pitch steepens so quickly, there would be no way for the herd leaders either to stop or turn aside. I'm running harder now, pulled faster by the angling slope, and I register that out in the valley dawn color has arrived. Chrome-yellow light cast by the rising sun is lighting the white cliffs on the far side of the river, a scene of great beauty.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  One last soothing sight of earth, perhaps, as the lip of the plunge is scarcely a hundred twenty feet away now. Beyond that is windmilling motion and the silence of forty feet of free space, then the jarring stop amongst the boulders. I slide to a stop a few feet from the cliff edge and stand panning for a few minutes, looking down on the slope below. By modern standards, the scene would not have been pretty. In 1797, the British trader Peter Fiddler described such a concluding set piece. "The young men killed the crippled animals with arrows, bayonets tied upon the end of a pole and etc.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  The hatchet is frequently used, and it is shocking to see the poor animals thus pin up without any way of escaping." However pod-like their behavior as classic herd animals, all these bison were individuals, of course, and that is the way they died. Slanting sunlight, throwing morning shadows hundreds of feet long, across the Madison Valley of Montana, lights my face. Over the mountains, I see a jet glinting silver, a mobile diamond slicing through the blue, its motion fetching me back to my climb down to the car, back to my commitments. But before I start, I stand for a moment, thinking of the bison that died among the

• 8:16Speaker 02

  boulders below. Humans drove buffalo off cliffs in America for 12,000 years, and despite knowing something about it, I find it a shock to be in this space where it happened, this close to how it worked. I've visited Head Smashed In Jump in Alberta and absorbed archaeologist friends' accounts of Bonfire Shelter Jump in the gray limestone canyons of the Pecos River in Texas. Hearing at the visitor's center in Canada that Indians carefully utilized every part of the animals, yet knowing that in Texas, the cliff at Bonfire Shelter is scorched hundreds

• 8:56Speaker 02

  of feet high from the spontaneous combustion of an enormous mangled heap of unutilized bison, native hunters drove off the rim above. Those two sites beg a big question: putting aside whatever fantasies of the past we have, what kind of relationship did humans and animals fashion over the hundred centuries of Native America that followed the Pleistocene? And if it was different, more ecologically benign or balanced than what came before and what came after, then why?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Clovisia the Beautiful ended with the demise of elephants and the majority of America's big animals. People were here, but most of the original animals were not. The haunting stories of losses must have lasted, because having so many charismatic creatures disappear seems to have shifted human behavior. The 10,000 years that followed wasn't entirely extinction-free, but thousands of years later, arriving old-worlders described the wild new world that greeted them as "a paradise of animals." The image of America as an animal Eden out of prehistory has shaped the country's sense of itself ever since. But was that actually the reality of Native America?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  When 19th-century ethnographers began to assemble a linguistic map of Native America, the conclusion anyone would draw is that over 10,000 years, there had been a tremendous movement of peoples around the continent. Athabaskan speakers lived in interior Alaska and also way down in the southwest. There were pools of Algonquin speakers in New England, in the Ohio Valley, and in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. All this was in contrast to Australia, for example, where Aboriginal populations have stayed in place for 50,000 years. The American story implies significant experimentation with different locales and ways of life.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Some of those human migrations may have been related to the reshuffling of American nature that took place in the echoes of the Pleistocene extinctions. The biology of the continent was reinventing itself. The vegetation was changing. Without ground sloths to disperse their seeds, the range of Joshua trees now began to contract, and without mammoths to curb them, honey mosquito began to spread. There were so many missing animals that a remarkable number of ecological niches either were vacant or newly filling. The ecological rebirth was most dramatic in the western half of America.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  The loss of mammoths, giant bison, horses, camels, ground sloths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, scavenging birds, and a range of cat predators opened niches at every level. In cases like wolves and bears, there were ready replacement species. With dire wolves now extinct, gray wolves and ancient American wolves emerged as the primary canid predators. But with 70% of America's grazers gone, niches for replacements were wide open. With almost no competition, a new, smaller bison supplanted horses, mammoths, and its huge bison ancestors.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Within a few centuries, this new dwarf bison grew into a biomass of animals that had almost no analog anywhere else on Earth. Biologists now believe modern bison are a classic example of anthropogenic selection, their size and rapid reproduction shaped by human predation. Seals, sea otters, and sea lions accepted, along with the one-pronghorn species that survived to browse the forbs that camels once ate, most of the large animals west of the Mississippi were Asian immigrants. In some parts of the planet, the warmer climate that marked the end of the Ice Ages

• 13:20Speaker 02

  allowed hard-pressed humans to try out some new things. But since humans had extensively settled America only 13,000 years ago, rather than 45,000, North America didn't yet call for an agricultural revolution the way the Old World did. America's human cultures segued to a stage where animals were still of primary importance, but plants were taking on a more significant role. "Archaic" is the term anthropologists and archaeologists have long used for humans living this way, by which they mean people existing as hunter-gatherers.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  So while the Old World experimented with agriculture and domestication, in North America, the hunting-gathering lifestyle continued over vast spans of time and diverse geographies all the way into modern history. Clearly, we ancient hunters of animals surrendered our oldest life way with reluctance.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  America wasn't just in the throes of biological recreation. Around 8,500 years ago, there was another potent change. The warming cycle that ended the last Ice Age didn't relent, and America's climate swung into a hot, dry phase that stayed in place for a mind-blowing 3,700 years.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  This was the depths of the last interglacial, the long slide out of the frozen Wisconsin Ice Age. Now the Earth's rotational wobble had the northern hemisphere slightly closer to the Sun, and for almost forty centuries, some parts of America cooked. The altothermal, as it's called, came close to turning large parts of the continent into a true desert and a vacant one. Many species of animals left for wetter settings, so did many human groups, like other animals shifting eastward and westward out of the interior west. The country where Clovis and Folsom people thrived nearly emptied of humans during the altothermal.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  But once the altothermal subsided, generations of hunter-gatherer peoples returned to occupy the same landscapes for centuries. That kind of close familiarity gave them bodies of handed-down ecological insights about how to live in particular places. The feedbacks they read from place-based living enabled humans to come up with a striking epiphany, one allowing them to live well without using up their world. The breakthrough, a key to success in Native America, sprang from the realization that there was no longer a wild new world, empty of other people out there.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Clovis-like expansion across a virtually uninhabited continent was over. Humans now had to learn to deliberately, carefully manage their own numbers to avoid overshooting local resources when times turn bad. In a variable world, good times inevitably give way to bad times. That was an ancient lesson. Basing your numbers on the good times could set you up for disaster. How did these ancient Americans manage to pull off controlling their populations so they could live well on local resources? Birth spacing was one common strategy. Breastfeeding suppresses ovulation during a mother's fertile years, preventing a rapid

• 16:59Speaker 02

  succession of pregnancies. Child mortality was high among ancient humans anyway, but most hunter-gatherers practiced forms of abortion to control their populations, and the evidence is that as an ecological strategy, it worked well. But for the women who carried babies to term, or close to it, infanticide in particular was a psychological burden. Ultimately, many hunter-gatherers sought to escape it. But the larger equation was relentless. The hunting-gathering economy was still the predator's economy, and predators of whatever kind were always few compared to prey.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Hunting and gathering required space to roam, habitats for birds and mammals. Living the good life meant you could not overburden the world with people. There was one possibility to increase human numbers, but it meant giving up much of humanity's ancient life and investing in an entirely new economy. Around 5,000 years ago, an agricultural revolution similar to the one that swept the Old World began to spread into North America from the South. The selection and domestication of wild plants emerged where human populations were densest and animal populations lowest, namely crowded Mesoamerica.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Unknown traders and travelers first carried ideas about domestication northward about 4,000 years ago, and later the actual seed stocks of Mexican agriculture.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  So over the ensuing millennia, crop fields and farming towns began to dot Native America from the South to Southern New England, then along the river valleys of the Midwest, and even in scattered locations in the desert southwest. Once the agricultural transformation took root, populations began to grow and sometimes centralized governing bodies, usually religious ones, organized towns into regional empires we know as Cahokia, Spiro Mounds, Ho Ho Kam, and the Chacoan Empire, which I talked about in our first podcast.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  All of these were very late experiments in the last thousand years of Native America. But in vast regions of America, agriculture never replaced hunting and gathering. So wedded were Native people to the hunt that even as agricultural towns emerged, many of the farmers continued to hunt, at least seasonally. Some returned exclusively to hunting when circumstances allowed. What sort of human existence could be better?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance, durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. You ever get that feeling you're stuck inside staring at screens and a primal urge kicks in, you crave wide open spaces, fresh air, the chance to connect with the land? Well, maybe it's time to find your own piece of the wild. But searching for property can be a maze. That's where land.com comes in. They've got millions of listings across the country, from mountain ranches to hidden fishing holes.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Their search tools are like a seasoned guide, helping you narrow down what you want. Land.com isn't just about buying and selling. It's about finding a place to hunt, fish, explore, or simply sit by a campfire and listen to the crickets. So head over to land.com today to turn one day into today. Because trust me, there's nothing quite like the feeling of standing on your own piece of earth.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  All the evidence indicates that America's native people lived immersed in art, stories, and observations designed around the grand theme of understanding themselves in a sometimes impenetrable world. A fundamental way to probe those kinds of understandings is through stories of gods. The oldest named characters in North American history, in fact, are the deities who created the continent and its life and set in motion human life with all of its victories and tragedies. Stories of these deities make up the continent's oldest literature. With few exceptions, ancient American gods were animals, although the stories describe

• 22:31Speaker 02

  some as anthropomorphic animals. In Western America, for example, the deity who acquired the universal epithet coyote stood upright on its legs and brandished human hands, but had the fur, sharp nose, erect ears, and the tail of a coyote. The deities who made it into modern English as Coyote, Raven, Spiderman, Skeletonman, Master Rabbit, all shared a basic human nature with their followers. Our vices, our lusts and our jealousies, our selfishness and our narcissism resided in America's ancient gods, there to witness and there for good reason.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  More about this in a later episode, but the deities not only explained to listeners why North America was the kind of world it was, they taught lessons, often uncomfortable or funny ones, about human behavior and motives. They were gods, creators, also thieves, liars and lechers, classic professors of human nature. Coyote, who emerges from the stories as a kind of whirlwind biophysical force with an enormous appetite for pleasure and sensuality, was one of the most widely known gods out of ancient America, an avatar for humans in the world, and we'll devote much of an episode to him and his stories.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Like Raven, he is the on-the-scene conductor of a master plan set in motion by an aloof first cause. This more knowable, approachable god was common in Native America. And if there are mysteries in the world you've wondered about, let Raven's adventures explain them. Raven was yet another merged animal-human deity who told the Clinchets, "I was born before this world was known." Uttering his monosyllabic "Ga," Raven proceeds to shape each animal in a slightly different

• 24:36Speaker 02

  way and to name them all: whale, seal, eagle, bear, caribou, beaver, salmon, sea otter, land otter, wolf. The birds he paints in bright colors because he wants them to be pretty. There is one worrisome thread that runs through Raven and Coyote stories, though. "In early times," the Inuit explained, "Raven becomes concerned that humans are becoming too numerous. Human villages are growing too large, and subsequently their residents are killing too many animals." The Inuit first man agrees and tells Raven, "If the people do not stop killing so many animals, they will kill everything you've made."

• 25:21Speaker 02

  In Coyote's case, as both the Yanas of California and the Navajos of the Southwest told the story, humans have to die, because if they do not, human overpopulation will result in the destruction of all the animals and even of Earth itself.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  In the early 1930s, a historian of religion named Joseph Epps Brown became fascinated by native religions. He interviewed traditional Lakota elders, including the legendary black elk, and ultimately set down the ideas that made up part of hunter-gatherer knowledge about America's animals. Brown's informants perceived the essential nature of animal species as much through dreams and visions as through native science. Bears ruled the underground, as bison did the surface, and eagles the air. Certain animals illustrated particular traits useful to the human animal. Members of a wolf clan sought to invoke the wolf's cooperative skills in hunting and

• 26:31Speaker 02

  killing. If a young man on a vision quest heard a bull elk bugle for cows in the crisp air of autumn, he might then regard the elk as a totem whose potent sexuality he could internalize. These elders also recalled a connection involving energy flow between creatures. These were connections neither 18th-century Linnaean science or 21st-century genetic science would ever think to link together. What the Lakotas called "umi" or "yum" was whirlwind power, the unrestrained residue of the energy of the four winds. They remembered whirlwind power as much sought,

• 27:15Speaker 02

  in part because possessing it made one difficult to attack and battle. But only a small number of special animals, spiders, also moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk, and bison possessed the whirlwind secret. As for bison, seasonal winds coming from the north or south seemed part of their mystery, bringing them or taking them away. A south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon. But they could entirely disappear, which led to a widespread belief in Native America that bison had their origins underground, and sometimes they returned there. As had been true of our first hunting ancestors in Africa,

• 28:00Speaker 02

  true of the Neanderthals, true of the Clovis people, native ceremonial lives centered on an ancient human desire to control nature. But they did so primarily as part of a religious philosophy, not a scientific one. Managing animals based on population modeling, carrying capacity of landscapes, or selective sustainable harvest, as modern ecologists and biologists do, would have been incomprehensible because native cause-effect explanations for why things happened relied on completely different premises.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  The religions through which native people understood animals were, however, superb at apprehending the kinship between animals and humans. Crucial in Native America was knowledge about how to influence animals in a realm usually defined as supernatural, an essential part of religion. A friend from my years in Montana, Professor Rosalind Lapierre, has done the best insider account so far of the invisible reality that was central to this 10,000-year-old world. Rosalind's own Blackfeet people possessed what she calls "a powerful worldview" that suggests the Blackfeet desire to manipulate animals and nature

• 29:24Speaker 02

  is a deep-seated human impulse, available through the assistance of supernatural allies. The degree of power one possessed to call on those allies determined how much you could make happen. Human beings could become vectors of power from these supernatural realms if a sacred being sought them out, or through a vision quest, or other effort to find a sympathetic animal ally, or even by purchasing power from someone who already had it. Another intriguing look at native religious traditions with respect to animals comes from the work of an anthropologist who lived with the Athabaskan-speaking Koyukon peoples of Alaska. The Koyukons preserve an ideology

• 30:09Speaker 02

  with powerful echoes of how life in the 10 millennia span of Native America must have worked. Keen observational naturalists with a highly refined knowledge of animal behavior, the Koyukons traced their link with animals back to what they called "distant time", when animals were human and spoke human languages. The deity animal was ever-watching raven. Raven rarely missed anything and was always alert to violations of taboos about how to treat animals and respect them. Many raven stories were about the bad luck that befell people who transgressed against the animal world. Animals were critical to a major life force:

• 30:53Speaker 02

  luck, that could make or break a person's life. Luck was an award from ever-watching raven as a result of correct behavior towards animals. And the most correct behavior of all was treating them as kin.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  10,000 years ago, the entire human population of planet Earth numbered only about 4 million. Across all the Americas, humans then likely made up only a quarter of that number. North America probably had barely 500,000 people then, fewer than a single large city in our time. Agriculture changed that. But because big parts of the continent were unsuited to farming, and because farming was a new development, America wasn't entirely remade by agriculture the way Europe or Asia were.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  By 500 years ago, the best guess is that America north of Mexico had grown its population to just under 4 million people. 4 million people spread across a landscape that, in the 21st century, supports 400 million, seems explanation enough for why humans and wild animals coexisted well for so long in Native America. That might be an argument that for hunting and gathering and subsistence farming economies, 4 million people was just about the carrying capacity of the American landscape.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  The effects accumulated, though. Across the final 1,500 years of Native America before old worlders arrived, a cumulative total of 150 to 200 million people lived out their lives north of Mexico. America was no howling wilderness. It was a long inhabited, lived-in world. Humans are biological, after all, and no species gets a free ride in nature. In some American archaeological sites, animal remains show a significant decline over time. The massive Emeryville mound site on the shore of San Francisco Bay portrays a steady decline in the bones of sturgeon, salmon, deer, elk, and pronghorns,

• 33:14Speaker 02

  demonstrating a drawdown of local wildlife as human populations grew in native California. Elk remains in many continental archaeological sites are so scarce that some scientists suggest that elk numbers must have been suppressed, and the almost certain cause was human hunting. There was also at least one human-caused wildlife extinction in Native America. As humans spread around the world, flightless birds were always particularly vulnerable, and the Pacific coasts of California and Oregon, along with the Channel Islands, held one: a flightless sea duck in the genus Chyndites.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  In the past decade, researchers dating the remains of these goose-sized ducks from six coastal sites concluded that humans began killing them 10,000 years ago, just as the Pleistocene gave way to Native America. Wiping them out was hardly the three-century Blixcreeds that took out mammoths, or later, passenger pigeons or bison, but by 2,400 years ago, people had hunted Pacific flightless sea ducks to extinction.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Judging from the stories people preserved of their cultural heroes, the most common environmental overreach, though, was what the Inuit Raven story feared: overhunting brought on by growing human numbers.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Coyotes and ravens in America existed for 75 times longer than the United States has so far. So it shouldn't be a surprise that a history reaching beyond human memory would provoke a religious awe from its human inhabitants. Native America's cultural heroes taught that the key to the animal-human relationship was kinship. Animals were people. They had families and societies, opinions and cultural memories. Like people, they also possessed something essential to them: a breath or a spirit that survived death. Respect came from honoring that humans and animals were kin

• 35:27Speaker 02

  and acknowledging that we and they could move between one another's cultures because we sprang from the same source. This became the key when, because of some human hubris that violated the arrangement, the animals retaliated by withdrawing from humans' presence. Pleading with bison, elk, deer to return and rebalance the world thus became a focus of some of the grand ceremonies Native peoples developed in North America.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  When Old Worlders arrived in America 500 years ago, Central and South America held more than 50 million people. But in what is now the United States and Canada, hunting and gathering culture still prevailed across vast stretches, and here the human population had not yet reached 5 million. Even with human numbers seemingly so slight, 500 generations of humans had physically transformed North America. To the native peoples the continent was occupied, settled, its birds and reptiles and mammals all intimately known and considered kin. Even with fewer than 5 billion inhabitants, parts of America held large enough numbers of people

• 36:44Speaker 02

  that wild animals weren't always abundant. But save one, all the species that had survived the Pleistocene extinctions still existed. Beavers continued to engineer a watery landscape. Shorebirds and ducks filled the skies, and bears, wolves, and other predators still played their crucial roles in American ecologies. Even with thousands of years of human harvest, bison and passenger pigeons were still among the most numerous species on Earth. But the change that was coming was on a scale no one could possibly fathom. Since the Ice Age ebbed and northern seas flooded Beringia, America's animals and humans

• 37:27Speaker 02

  had lived in near-total isolation from the rest of Earth. No one on either side of the Atlantic had any inkling the other existed, or that such biological isolation sat ready to deliver one of the most profound tragedies in history. When the planet's human population finally rejoined after parting thousands of generations earlier, the America of Clovis and Folsom and Chaco, of bison and passenger pigeons, confronted a staggering transformation. Raven and coyote would never be able to turn things back to the way they had been.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  You guys have heard me talk all about Montana Knife Company for a few years now on the podcast. Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now. Make sure you

• 39:11Speaker 01

  sign up for their email and text message notifications. So you get the alert the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. You ever get that feeling you're stuck inside staring at screens and a primal urge kicks in? You crave wide open spaces, fresh air, the chance to connect with the land? Well, maybe it's time to find your own piece of the wild. But searching for property can be a maze. That's where Land.com comes in. They've got millions of listings across the country, from mountain ranches to hidden fishing holes. Their search tools are like a seasoned guide

• 39:55Speaker 01

  helping you narrow down what you want. Land.com isn't just about buying and selling. It's about finding a place to hunt, fish, explore, or simply sit by a campfire and listen to the crickets. So head over to Land.com today to turn one day into today. Because trust me, there's nothing quite like the feeling of standing on your own piece of earth.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Dan, la última vez que hablamos sobre,

• 40:24Speaker 03

  ya sabes, en los años 70, había esta concepción muy popular de los pueblos nativos como seres inherentemente ambientalistas.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Y creo que, en muchos sentidos, hemos pasado a eso. Y creo que desde un punto de vista histórico, reconocemos que no todas las acciones humanas en el paisaje antes de la relación europea eran sostenibles ambientalmente. Pero luego, en esta conferencia, describes una larga franja de tiempo que parece estar relativamente estable o sostenible. Y me pregunto, no necesariamente preguntando si era sostenible, sino más sobre cómo empiezas a desenredar las contradicciones allí.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Bueno, tuve que buscar algunas explicaciones para lo que parecía ser una premissa bastante obvia, que es que cuando llegan las personas del antiguo mundo hace 500 años, encuentran un continente norteamericano que parece ser ecologicamente saludable, con una diversidad bastante amplia de animales, pájaros y peces. Y quiero decir, sabemos que, a cierta medida, esa descripción se basaba en una especie de liberación ecológica de animales, pájaros y otras especies

• 42:00Speaker 02

  que surgió como resultado de la supresión de la población indíaca a través de esta introducción inadvertida de la enfermedad antigua. Así que la población indíaca disminuye de casi 5 millones, que es lo que pensábamos que era en la época de la relación, a una cantidad de 900.000, en lo que ahora son Estados Unidos y Canadá, como resultado de esas epidemias de enfermedad. Así que muchas de las descripciones que recibimos de lo maravillosa que era la naturaleza de América del Norte están basadas en eso, en esta rápida liberación ecológica.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  But on the other hand, when you sort of try to survey the range of species that were present, we think were present, say, 10,000 years ago, and the ones that were still present 500 years ago, there's not really a substantial difference in the range. Now, there would have been, there's no question, there's evidence here and there, that there were reductions in numbers of particular species. But as we talked last time, I mean, when I was doing the research on this particular chapter, which is out of Wild New World, I can only find evidence of one entire and complete extinction during that 10,000-year

• 43:19Speaker 02

  period, which of course is very different from the Pleistocene that preceded it, and it's very different from the 500 years since then. So I was tasked with trying to figure out, so why? How did this happen? How is it possible to do this? And I came up with two or three explanations, really, that I relied on, and I think have some explanatory power. And one of them has to do with the fact that North America is colonized by people at a far later date than much of the rest of the world. And in a lot of the rest of the world, like in Eurasia, for example, the human population reaches a point where

• 44:03Speaker 02

  it becomes pretty difficult to live as hunters and gatherers because the numbers of huntable creatures are gradually being reduced. And so at the end of the Pleistocene, that sort of stimulates what we call the Neolithic Revolution in the Old World, the agricultural revolution, where you start relying a lot on growing crops, people start living in towns rather than hunting across the landscape, and they start domesticating a lot of the animals that they had hunted. So hogs and sheep and goats and cattle and horses and all get domesticated.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  But because North America was settled a lot later, although agriculture does get a start in North America about four or five thousand years ago, it never reaches the kind of epic level that it does in the Old World, so that a lot of America is still inhabited by, populated by hunter-gatherer groups. I mean, there's agriculture certainly in the South and as far north as southern New England. There's, of course, a big agricultural region in the Southwest, based on irrigated crops and Mexican cultivars. But a lot of, say, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Pacific Northwest, California,

• 45:19Speaker 02

  which has a very dense population of native people, they never become agricultural. And so what that ultimately translates to is that the population of North America, as far as we can tell, never grows beyond about five million people. And that relatively low population, obviously, doesn't put as much stress on wildlife populations as a larger population would. Then I also came to the conclusion that by not having domesticated animals and native people, I mean, they had, obviously, dogs, and a lot of groups domesticated wild turkeys,

• 46:02Speaker 02

  especially in the Southwest, because they were kind of starving for protein, and turkeys as domesticated birds provided a possibility for that. But it's kind of a strategy of living that allows a lot of ecological functions to continue. So there's no need to make war on predators, for example. You don't have to go after wolves and coyotes and lions and bears, because you don't have domesticated, herd animals to protect the way Old Worlders did. So that provides a kind of an ecological continuity, I think, that Europeans find.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Then the last thing that I dealt with was this distinction, and it really becomes a distinction after Europeans arrived.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  And how native people and native religions viewed their relationship with other animals. They continued to think of themselves, and I think this is a very old human idea. I think it goes back beyond Neanderthals, maybe far back in our history, where we considered ourselves to be kin, to coming, to come from the same sources, same origins as other creatures. And so that kinship idea, sort of with the idea that other creatures were, they had families, they were, they were just like us. In fact, you could even, some people could even go back and forth from being bears to people. And that sort of belief system about animals

• 47:38Speaker 02

  as being kin is strikingly different from the one that Europeans bring to bear because they arrived with the idea that humans are completely exceptional. We are above everything else and all the other creatures on earth were placed here by a deity for us to use. And so we stand in one spot and everything else stands in a lower position. And that distinction, I think, probably has some role to play in, in trying to explain this. But as I said, you have to operate from the premise that here's the evidence. When Europeans arrived, the place looks pretty damn healthy. It looks like it's got the pretty full complement

• 48:20Speaker 02

  for the previous 10,000 years of all the animals and, and birds and fishes that were there 10,000 years before.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  You, you just strayed into a question I had. You kind of inadvertently walked into a question I had, um, which was, I know that in North America, there were dozens, probably hundreds of religions of some sort, right?

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Belief systems.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Around a theme of animism, right? If you go to Western Europe.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  You kind of said that you think of this, but if you could expand on it. If you go to Western Europe back to some point, I don't know when. Was it that religions mirrored that there as well? Or was it a totally different belief system that made this sort of primed them for like the Abrahamic religions, meaning like Islam, Judaism, Christianity?

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  I mean, did they go from animism and thinking that they were related to bears? And that mountains had a spirit and a personality into like monotheism? Or do you think that the path was more gradual? And they just developed a sort of different worldview that made Christianity eventually appealing?

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think, I think it's more gradual and it is a, there is a progression from that. And there's no doubt that not long ago in Western Europe, 1,500 years maybe, certainly by, for, for areas like, say, Scotland, Ireland, outback regions of Germany and France. People are still, you know, the Druids are still considered to be, they're not only non-Christian, but they're considered to be nature worshippers.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  And so, I mean, and that's.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  1,500 years ago.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's still evident, you know, at a time when Christianity is attempting to convert all these outback pockets of Europe. But even by that point, 1,500 years ago, so the Vikings, for example, some of those Viking groups share this idea that they are related still to, to deities that are found in mountains and to various animals. But there's been a progression already, and you can see it from this, this kind of animistic religious tradition in the Greeks, because the Greeks began about 2,500 years ago.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Sort of steadily moving from the idea of polytheistic animal or animal deities and deities that are found in landscapes to human gods, but they don't have a single one. They will have, they will have Demeter, for example, who becomes the goddess of the crops. And they'll have Poseidon, and they'll have Artemis, who is the goddess of the wild creatures. And so, but Artemis and Poseidon and Demeter are all in human form. So there's been a progression from the idea that you have a creature like, say,

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Coyote, who is a Paleolithic deity in North America, who can stand on his, on his hind legs and may have opposable thumbs, but he also has coyote snout, erect ears, he has coyote tail. So Coyote is sort of in the process of doing the same thing in North America, sort of becoming human. So the Greeks do that so that their deities ultimately become human-like deities. And then ultimately, of course, in Judeo-Christianity, the idea is there is a single

• 52:20Speaker 03

  They narrow it way down.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  They narrow it down to a single deity who lives in the sky, rather than in a mountain or in a population of animals.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  I think when I was looking at this episode, it's, it's an episode about a, a long period of time from the Pleistocene extinctions up until first contact, essentially. And it treats it almost as a whole. And I think that has a lot of explanatory power. But also, there's moments in it where you can drill down and say, like, Cahokia. You know, there are these stories of these rise and fall of civilization, which on its own is sort of this epic

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Historical tale, right? Even if we don't have all the details.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  But I kind of wonder how you think about that, the, the big picture compared to the small picture and sort of what you gain by looking at the big picture and what you lose without zeroing in on these, like sort of epic human stories.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, that's obviously a great question. And what I will say is that the, the episode here that we're talking about is a highly distilled version of a chapter in one of my books, which is about four or five times longer than, than what we presented here in the podcast. And even that comes from a, a book that was in its entirety, 400 pages long. And I realized that I could have easily written a 2,000 page book while I was working on this.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  And so it, it becomes, you know, sort of a matter of, all right, in terms of the book and the chapter particularly, and to a certain extent, the podcast as well.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  How many people are interested in reading a 2,000 page book, you know? So I've got to make the book 400 pages and how many people are interested in listening to a three and a half hour podcast? I've got to make the podcast, it's got to be only 35 or 40 minutes or something, or an hour or whatever we're doing. So, yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  It's very humane that you keep your audience in mind.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, I started out as a writer for magazines and I had editors who drilled that into me when I was in my early twenties, that you had to think about the audience. And so I've always kind of, as a result of that, I think I've never kind of gotten over the notion of, I got to think about, you know, the readers. And I can't lay a, you know, an enormous kind of thing on top, especially today where people, you know, are not committed to the idea necessarily of, of reading.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. No, I didn't. And I didn't mean that to be a question of like, why didn't you do this or why, why'd you leave this out? But it's more like that story. Is comprehensible, read at a certain level.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Right? And then, and you gain a lot from the big, broad, sweeping history, but

• 55:35Speaker 03

  yeah, there's also all of this drama that sort of lies beneath the surface of that.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, there, I mean, that's, you're exactly right. And there are, so the truth is, you know, with a, a story like that, I mean, that's an attempt to cover 10,000 years.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  And sort of, uh, one quick sweep. And I mean, it does give, I think,

• 55:58Speaker 02

  some narrative power.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  To it, doing it that way. But, uh, I would hope that for a lot of people who are fascinated, for example, by whatever one says about Cahokia or Chaco, that they would dig deeper because yeah, the stories are phenomenal and they are far richer than one can tell in an attempt to kind of do a broad coverage.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  I got one last one for you.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  With your book, Wild New World, where you do, you, you, you tell the story of wildlife in America, and you start, you know, with the Chicks Lube impact or like the destruction of the dinosaurs, which happened just off the coast of our, you know, kind of the coast of our current day country. And then you track all the way through to the present and then you kind of dabble in the future for a minute. Like, I'm not going to go read one of those for every continent right now, but I'm dying to read that for South America. Like, do, there's, there's the language barrier, but, but does that kind of work

• 57:13Speaker 01

  exist? Like, does what you do, are you aware of your, like a South American counterpart? An Asian counterpart, an African counterpart who are, who are saying like,

• 57:26Speaker 01

  who, who are doing that type of work in those places?

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Or is there something particular about the North American story that makes it?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Possible.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Possible in North America.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Possible to do it.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, does that book exist about South America?

• 57:40Speaker 02

  I am not aware of a book like that existing for South America. I mean, I think probably Australia may come the closest Yeah. to having work like that.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  But I do think North America lends itself, and probably South America would too. But the Americas lend themselves to a particularly powerful kind of story in this form because they're the last parts, except for some of the islands out in the oceans. They're the last parts of the earth that humans find Yeah. and come to. And so by the time we find the Americas, I mean, we're, we're pretty much who we are now. But we had also been living forty-five thousand generations as hunters. And so we're really, really good at that.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  And the other thing, of course, that I think makes it a powerful story is that it's fairly evident, at least I think it's evident, I argue that in Wild New World, that one of the things that propels our migration around the world is that we're doing something that, you know, all of us today still do. We all love getting out to a spot where, man, okay, there's not a single other car at the trailhead. I, I'm looking over this valley, I do not see a single other campfire. We're the only ones, my buddies and I are the only ones that are gonna be backpacking into this mountain valley this weekend. And what I think people were doing as they moved out of Africa into the Middle East, into Europe, into Asia, is they were propelled constantly by looking for places

• 59:25Speaker 02

  that other humans hadn't been because that implied to them that the resources were going to be just rich and available. The animals were going to be innocent of humans as hunters. I mean, and it propelled us around the world. And it's probably one of the reasons, you know, without us really being conscious of it, we still tend to be fascinated with exploration and with going to the moon, going to Mars, going to, you know, Titan, Saturn's moons, or Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. I mean, we're still fascinated by this idea of going into new places. And as

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  I said, you know, I certainly experience this all the time. And I know, I'm pretty sure probably you guys do as well. This is something we always feel good about is, man, I'm the, I'm looking out over this country and I don't see evidence of anybody else in it.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, Dan, thanks, man. I look forward to jumping into the next episode.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Thanks, Stephen. Randall, appreciate it.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  You ever get that feeling, the walls closing in, the concrete jungle suffocating you? You crave some wide open spaces, the chance to connect with nature, maybe in a spot all your own. Well, head over to land.com. They've got ranches, forests, mountains, streams, you name it. Search by acreage. You can search by location. You can search by the kind of hunting and fishing you're dreaming of. Land.com, it is where the adventure begins. When you're in the back country, don't forget your own back country. Keep it pristine and confidently clean by bringing along wet extra-large Dude Wipes. Just like your truck gets muddy out in the wild soaking your butt, you'd never clean your vehicle with dry paper

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  towels. So why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper? Wetter cleans better. So ditch the itch and switch from TP to wet extra-large Dude Wipes. Dude Wipes, it is the best clean pants down. They're available at Amazon, that's where I usually order mine from, but you can get them at Walmart nationwide. Fantastic product. Proud to be doing ads for these boys at Dude Wipes.

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Someone once said, "Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth." I did. Mike Tyson. Oh, well, Mike Tyson and Boost are here to tell you that your mobile plan is punching you in the mouth with prices that can knock you out. That's a low blow. Totally, but you can do something about it. You have to punch back. No, Mike. You gotta switch to Boost with a plan that's $25 a month forever. Oh, that's a great plan. Maybe you can do both. Boost Mobile, what's your plan?