00:00:05 Speaker 1: There were so many questions about the site that were unanswered. That's why I went back seventy years later. On this episode of the Bargaris podcast, we're going to the site of an ancient bison kill, the one found by George mcjuncan on Part one of the series. After George's death, it would become known as the Fulsome Site. It was here that stone tools made by humans were found with a relic form of Pleistocene bison and forever planted an indisputable data point into the debate of human antiquity in North America. We're gonna talk with Old Steve ronnella of Meat Eater and the nation's leading expert on the Fulsome site, Dr David Meltzer. He literally wrote the book on Fulsome after he went back there seventy years after its initial excavation and excavator in it again to find more answers. So on this podcast, we're going back to Fulsome. I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. But first, I have an overarching question I'd like to present to you, and it's this, What is the relevance of this knowledge about these ancient people in their lives? Why do we care? Is it merely entertainment to try to understand them or is there more? I'm in search of the answer. These things were herded, driven into a box canyon and then just raindown spears. I don't even kill them. You can't make them go anywhere they don't want to go. We don't have to drive them in there. Oh we gotta do is wait until they go up in their own their own So I think it was an accident. My name is Clay Nukelem, and this is the Air Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Yeah, that's see, that's the only way that I need to get in here. I'm walking through a grassy meadow headed towards a small drainage. The clicking you're hearing is Kyle Bell's Spurs the wild Worth Royo. That's it. We're eleven miles west of Folsom, New Mexico, on the Crowfoot Ranch. The place we're headed to is where a Pleistocene hunters killed a cow calf herd of thirty two bison some ten thousand, three hundred years ago. Here they found the bison bone piles buried beneath ten feet of earth and astonishingly roughly twenty stone points of a design that had never been documented before. They called this place the fulsome sight. You'd walk right past it if you didn't know what you were looking for. It looks like every other place on this ranch, but something special happened here. This is the voice of the current manager of the Crowfoot Ranch, Seth. They had all those archaeologists come out, you know, from this different schools, and they did a dig twenty years ago, twenty plus, so all this disturbed dirt they they dug right in here. What I thought was ironic that they found was they said that they were being selective of meat. Have you heard that? Because they didn't have any of their lower jaw bones to them, so they thought they were eating the tongues out of him. Yeah, really, and they were. They thought that was a delicacy. Here you're at the site. So when George found it, would it have been like it had been like a fresh cut bank after a big floor. Yeah, I mean you look, you can come up here and look at the erosion from it. Uh. And I assumed that this this has probably eroded more since. But you see how steep it was in in that flood. You know, it probably took another two or three foot off the sides. And that's when he set found the bone. In part one of this series, we learned that the site was discovered a nineteen o eight by freed slave named George mcjunkin. He was a self educated, self made man who became a renowned cowboy and the manager of the Crowfoot Ranch. The site wasn't excavated by professional archaeologists until after George's death, so he never knew the significance of his discovery. In this podcast series, we're en route to get a layman's pa h D on the fulsome site. You've heard Steve Ronella on Fair Greece before. He's a George Junkin junkie and has been forever fascinated by ice age hunters. In fact, he loved the bison hunters of the American planes so much he wrote a book called American Buffalo and he's been to the Fulsome site. Here's Steve of all the different really cool archaeological sites in America. I think one of the best things about the Fulsome site is that the finding of it, like the circumstances of who found it and how with the flash flood and you know, everybody dying in this freed slave trying to convince people to come. Look, right, the finding of it's as cool as what happened. So it's like a double whammy. Finding it is way cooler than just some I mean no disrespect, but if some anthropologists had just found it whatever doing aerial mapping right, it wouldn't be half as cool as it is. The way that it was the sky, yeah, and the fact you go down there and the guy's buried not too far from the site, like McJunkins, it just drips of history. You know. Mcjonkans got a nice tombstone now, but he used to just have this crudi old tombstones and people pitched together and made him a nice tombstone. I was standing there in the at Mcjonkins's grave with an archaeologist. Let's see these little bones laying on the ground, said what are all these bones. I picked one up. He said, that's a human finger bone because it had been ground squirrels and pray dogs whatever it Badgers over your cemetery, Yeah, every every you know, presidents make monuments all the time. If I was president, I would I would make it the George mcjunkin, not the Foalsome, the George mcjunkin National Monument, which would include the Falsome Site. Now, that would be something if Steve Ronella was president. To understand the significance of the Falsome Site. We've got to understand the quandary about human antiquity in North America that had been brewing for decades. Up to this point. Most people believe humans have only been here for about three thousand years. I had mentioned how the Folsome site is doubly cool. It's cool because how was found and who founded the McJunkins story. It was cool because of what happened there, meaning some dudes during the Ice Age killed thirty some bison and a big pile with stone tools and hand thrown weaponry. That's cool. It's tripally cool because of what it did to up end conventional thinking about what had gone on in the Western hemisphere. There's been a handful of occasions where human tools, like indisputably human creations in the form of projectile points were found mixed up with near in loose association with animals that we knew to be, like extinct Ice age animals. But the Ice Age was a long time ago. Here with the Folsome site, you got it stuck together. You got a projectile point in the rib, laying what they call in C. Two, laying in the rib of the thing. No rational reasonable person could come and make any argument that here's an Ice age relic, an animal that's not here now, that was killed and butchered by human beings, And that proved once and for all that human antiquity in the New World went back a long way. I want to clarify that by quote in the rib, Steve means the point was laying in between two ribs. It wasn't stuck in a rib, but it was just as conclusive. We heard briefly from Dr David Meltzer on Part one. He's the national authority on the Falsome site. And how would one know that, Well, he literally wrote a giant book called Falsome. It's basically a textbook on everything known about the place. Dr Meltzer isn't just a falsome expert, though. He's dedicated his academic career to the people of the Pleistocene era, which is a block of time that began a couple million years ago and ended ten thousand years ago. The time period from then until now it is called the Holocene. We live in the Holocene. If you know these two words, Pleistocene and Holocene, you'll pretty much be in the loop for talking about the recent history of planet Earth. Dr Meltzer is the author of multiple books on the Pleistocene, including First People's in a New World, The Great Paleolithic War, and Search for the First Americans. I went to the campus of s m U in Dallas, Texas, where he works. We'd hardly greeted each other when he asked me to follow him into his lab. It was full of bones and stone tools, ancient stuff. Skull that's been turned upside down because when we got it in the ground, it was top of the head facing up right. So we plastered it and then we cut underneath it, lifted it out, and so now what you see is the plaster. It's resting on its plaster cast and you can see the teeth in here. Wow. Right, And there's the back of the skull. So that is a bison antiquist skull from the full side, Yes, and it's a big It's pretty wild being in the same room with the skull of a bison antiquous. If you want to see a cell phone video the skull, you can check out my instagram at clay Underscore Newcomb. Dr Meltzer is a unique guy when it comes to fulsome The site was originally excavated between nineteen and nineteen, but seventy years later there were unanswered questions that he knew our modern techniques and technology could now answer, primarily carbon dating, which we'll talk about more in Part three of this series. Like a dramatic movie sequel and night Team, Dr Meltzer and his team went back to Falsome. They dug up the place again with new questions about the site's geology, it's antiquity which is the site's age, the paleo topography which is its former geography, and its depositional history, which basically means the layers that covered the site. Here's Dr Meltzer talking about the uniqueness of the Falsome site for fifty years there had been this very heated debate over how long people had been in the Americas, and all manner of contenders were put forward. This is evidence that people have been here since the place to see. This is evidence that people have been here for three hundred thousand years. Here's evidence that people have been here for three d fifty thousand years. But in each and every instance, those sites failed to prove what they were claimed to prove, and they failed because of various reasons. Uh, the artifacts weren't actually artif tacks, the artifacts were not in the geological deposits that were said to be that old. Uh, the artifacts had rolled downhill and ended up next to ancient animal remains, but they were not necessarily in what we call primary context. That is to say, they didn't enter the deposit at the same time as those ancient animals that are the deposit. And so you had, you know, literally decades of people arguing back and forth over how long people have been in the America's. When Folsom came along, it was just as advertised. What you had was a spot on the landscape where hunters had confronted and killed a herd of bison, we now know there were about thirty two animals that were dispatched that day and in the process left behind their artifacts in ways that made it absolutely clear that those animals and those people had been on that very landscape at the same moment in time. Because we had spear points what we know as falsome fluted points in direct association with the bones. And what I mean by that is we had a projectile point in between ribs. Right, it had sat there since that animal was killed. Right, There was no question that that that that was some sort of adventitious association, that somehow a projectile point had worked its way down into the dirt, into the earth ten feet below the surface and ended up in between two bison ribs. No. No, that animal was stabbed by a human. And because that animal was a now extinct form of bison, which when extinct at the end of the Palistocene, that was the first absolutely definitive proof that people had been in the Americas at the end of the Palistocene. The only question remaining after that was how much earlier might they have been? Right, But that's that's what made fulsome different. It was just as advertised. When you look back at the history of archaeology itself as a study. There was an incredible amount of drama and ego involved in the discussion of human antiquity. It was highly competitive regarding who discovered what and where. So it's hard to overstate how important to find was because it was so indisputable. Here's another component of understanding Falsome and archaeology that will help us. This is Steve describing to us what is called a type site. A lot of bygone cultures will have a thing called the type site, and the type site is where they were identified. When we talk about Fulsome hunters, the Fulsome culture was identified at wild Horse or Royal. You're Fulsome, New Mexico was when it was first identified the identifying feature of the Foalsome culture. I was calling Folsome homes and they took the name Falsome simply because that was the English name of the town. Sure, that was probably a brand new town. Has nothing to do as a descriptor of these people, not at all, and just to to keeping in the same state, just at the same point, in the same state. When we talk about a Clovis hunter, it just so happens that the projectile points which stand for the hunters that made them were first identified near Clovis, New Mexico. They were there over ten thousand years before anyone even thought to name to make it, we happen to right now be doing our conversation about Fulsome near Shadrin, Nebraska. Were you and I to walk out and find Holy Cow look at this insane projectile point, diagnostic unfound point, and then we realized it was this whole culture of people. And they made this point, they might wind up and call them the shattern Hunters. I think they'd call it Ronella newcom Okay, But if they were consistent with the days of yore, that's what they would wind up naming them. Fulsome Hunters were identified near Fulsom, New Mexico, and so they just the name, the nearby town name was applied to the culture. We talk about a culture. We're talking about like what you imagine a culture of people. We know them when we see them based on the point with our understanding right now, it's the point. The point has to be present, The projectile point that they like to make has to be present, meaning if we know that the Fulsome culture was active eleven thousand, seven hundred years ago. If you went down to South Florida and found a human camp site from eleven thousand, seven hundred years ago that had a different projectile point, you wouldn't call it a fulsome site. Okay, So it's not to when, Yeah, it's not when it's who and when it describes a culture, just like the culture of us to drive Chevrolet pickups and there's another culture in France that drives some other kind of pickup. The fulsome culture is identified by the type of technology they used when making stone points. But this culture was also associated with something else, much bigger. They were highly associated with a relics form of bison called bison antiquis, not something that went extinct, probably a relic form of the animal that lives here now. It was bigger, different sort of horn configuration was a bigger they call it like bison antiquis. They had a lot of fidelity to a certain style of points. They had a lot seems to have a lot of fidelity to bison. And they lived on what is now the American Great Plains. That's where they're found. So you can find them in the Panhandle of Texas, you can find them in New Mexico. You can find them in Montana, you can find fulsome points in southern Saskatchewan, you can find them all the way in western Nebraska. But they stayed to the Great Plains where the most of the plains Buffalo were. Yeah, and at the time it was probably cooler and wetter, but it was an open grassland, and it was just going by how few fulsome sites there are and how widely dispersed they are, and kind of the sort of the imprint of those people, it was probably insanely low population densities. I can't tell no one, no one can say this for real, but I've run this by professional anthropologists. It's not unreasonable to think that a band of these hunters, which would be an extended family group, that these bands of people, it makes sense that they were maybe you know, they maybe didn't exceed ten or twenty individuals. It's not unreasonable to imagine that they could go a generation without encountering individuals that you're not immediately related to. It seems very few people occupying that landscape at that time. Take a minute and imagine the North American continent ten thousand, three hundred years ago with human populations that scarce. By the time Europeans arrived here roughly ten thousand years after the Falsome Bison kill, which would be about six hundred plus years from the present. Backwards from the present, the place was basically like an urban center crawling with people. The civilization of the American Indians was in full swing and highly developed compared to when the Falsome Hunters were here. Some American Indians are undoubtedly the descendants of the Folsome Hunters wildly, though, of all the things these fulsome hunters used in life, there is one thing that has outlasted the rigor of time that we infer an incredible amount of data from. One of the things I like about the projectile point sin It's made of stone and it lasts long time, so it winds up being Some people that aren't into what we'd call Indian arrowheads sometimes don't get the fascination with it. But wait to think about it. It's not so much that it's the arrowhead. It's just a It's it's a a piece of something that survived, sometimes in a perfect state, from the time they handled it. Their bones are gone to large measure, their homes and structures, the things they wore the wood that they employed. I'd be as excited to find a spear shaft, but they're not laying around. It's like, but here's this thing that like that. A guy can drop that thing and it's gonna sit there for twelve years. What other thing can you drop on the ground. We talked about how long our stuff lasts, right, like how long plastic last? You said, a plastic bottle on the ground for twelve thousand years. To come back and look at there might be something, but they look like a volsible. Imagine archaeologists ten thousand years from now, Well, I doubt this place will be around. But them taking just one of your material possessions and making vast inferences about your entire life from it, I wonder what they'd say. I had some questions about how an archaeological site is verified, so it's legitimacy is known. I think it's important for us to understand the bigger picture of what's happening here beyond some dudes digging up bones and finding stone points que the Randy Travis song. It's a pretty complex world, and there were many missteps in early archaeology and in the original excavation of the fulsome site that almost disqualified it. So from an archaeological process, there's a prescribed way that a site should be excavated and understood. As I understand that there were other sites in Texas and Nebraska and maybe even in Kansas that potentially had similar type evidence of humans and these older animals that are now extinct, but they were mishandled and so they have to be It's it's like evidence coming into a courtroom that was acquired the wrong way and the judge goes, I can't use this. That's exactly how it played out. But we also need to put a little bit of historical context here. This is the eighteen nineties, early nineteen hundreds, the teens. There weren't clear cut methods for field excavation. A lot of these excavations were not conducted by you know, what we would now recognize as sort of professional scientists, professional archaeologist, professional geologists, and they didn't know what they were doing is really what it came down to. So, you know, we had this site out in Frederick, Oklahoma, where it was a growl quarry, and you know, the folks who were working the gravel quarry said, oh yeah, we've got artifacts associated with mammoth bones. Well, you know, it requires a certain amount of expertise to sort of really be able to in an excavation. No, okay, these are deposits of a certain age. These are things that are associated with those deposits. We know that they belong in those deposits. And so because there were not agreed upon field techniques and clear cut field techniques at the time, and because some of these discoveries were made by folks who really didn't understand what they were seeing an exactly, well, yeah, they weren't even archaeologists, you know. They're the guys that work at the quarry. Yeah. Uh, and they're just you know, their job is just to shovel that stuff out of the way. Okay. So you find an artifact in the in the spoil pile over here, and you find some bones in the spoiled pile over there, that doesn't mean that you know, that artifact and that bone were associated back you know, twenty thousand years ago, fifteen thousand years ago. In retrospect, a couple of those sites, not the one in Frederick, but one out in Colorado City, Texas. Um in retrospect, we looked at the artifacts and we said, well, you know what, there is a possibility those artifacts could have been associated with that bison. But the problem was in and this is a few years before folsome the bison was being excavated by a fella who was just a local guy. Uh. He had discovered this bison in this creek bed and he wrote to the museum and said, you guys wanted so the folks folks in Denver said yeah, we'd really like to have that bison skeleton. And they gave him instructions on how to get it out of the ground, plaster it and put it into crates and ship it up to Denver. He excavates the bison, he plasters it up, he puts it into a crate. And the crate had been you know the folks in Denver and said, make a crate. You know this big by this big, by this big. And so he had this giant plastered bison, couldn't fit it into a crate. Instead of building a bigger crate, he simply knocked off chunks of the bone shoved it in there. So this was not done well right, And even though they found artifacts with the bison, they didn't realize that that was of interest or significance, and so they just ignored them. And it was only after the fact somebody was visiting Denver and said, hey, you know, I'd watched your guys excavate this thing down in Texas, and did you know they had, you know, points that came out with the bison. And the folks in Denver said, we had no clue. So, you know, you can't base a case for people having been here a very long time ago or hunting bison a very long time ago when you had that kind of excavation, And so that very well could have been a totally legitimate site, and I think it is actually the Fulsome site was originally excavated by an amateur archaeologist named Carl Schwaheim. He was a friend of George's. He was hired by the Denver Museum of Natural History to get them a bison and tick with skeleton. But while he was digging, he found a stone point. He made some sketches and notified the museum and this really perked their ears up, and they told him if you find another one, Carl, don't dig it up, leave it in place. Luckily, he did find another one, and they were able to send down a bona fide archaeologists to verify it in C two or in place. This then attracted the attention of the world. But I've got more questions, you know, and that brings me to kind of my biggest overarching question inside of archaeology, that is just it's so it's intriguing to think about this, is that how much of planet Earth have we excavated to understand what is here? I mean, it feels like we're just going off these very like if you took the volume of the Earth and said how much how much of that volume had as a professional archaeologist and modern times actually excavated, it would be a number so small it would be unbelievable. And so we're basing so much what we know off these little bit spots. But who's to say there's not another incredible spot fifty feet from the Falsome site that's gonna redirect history again, you know. But you're absolutely right. A lot of these sites are deeply buried. A lot of these sites will never see the surface again. A lot of these sites disappeared over time. You've got erosion. If you were around on the high Plains in the nineteen thirties during the dust Bowl. It would have been the worst time to live there, but it would have been the best time to do archaeology there because what was happening was that basically the surface is blowing away, and what it did was is exposed a lot of these old Ice Age Pleistocene Age lake beds, and they're all manner of bones and artifacts that came out of these sites. But of course, once all that stopped blowing, a lot of the archaeological discovery is necessarily based on chance encounters where you've got ranchers that are putting in a stock tank, you've got farmers that are plowing, you've got a road that's getting cut, and you just get lucky or a guh George mcjunkin exactly Occult of wild Horse Rodeo. You know, that's George mcjunkan is such an interesting character to me. You know, this is a guy who is clearly really intrigued and interested and fascinated wants to learn about what's around him. So he was the right guy at the right moment, in the right spot, and it changed American archaeology. We just can't get away from old George now Canley, I kind of get obsessed with these characters that I learned about them, and I'm considering them a junking tattoo. Bad That's not true. I don't do tats, but I do need some more info on the actual site. From this, I think will begin to understand how archaeologists think. Let's talk in specifics about the Falsome site and what was found there. So this flood in nineteen o eight unearthed these bones that George mcjunkin found, so we know how they were found in kind of the series, but what did they find there? So the initial excavations at Fulsome took place in ninety seven in night as well. Unfortunately, the site was excavated by paleontologists. The site was excavated by folks that were interested in bones, and while they did a decent job, they well, the term is telling. They referred to the Fulsome site as the Fulsome bone quarry. Right, they're coreying bone out of this thing, So they're not they're not viewing it as an archaeological site. Where an archaeological site meaning it has huge evidence of humans. Well, I mean they saw it as a bone quarry that had evidence of humans. But what they weren't doing was paying really close attention to things that we as archaeologists pay attention to. Where exactly were those artifacts found, how were the bones distributed. This is one of the things that really challenged us when we started excavating there, was that there's basically where no maps of their excavations. Now, we're archaeologists, were fairly compulsive about things. We're fairly compulsive about a lot of things because when you're excavating an archaeological site, you're destroying it. So you've got to make very very careful records all the way through the process. Maps, photographs, detailed measurements, all this stuff. And the folks who were basically coreying this for bone, we're doing none of that. And so when we started they had identified on their maps, you know, here's a skeleton here, here's a skeleton here, here's a skeleton over here. They weren't nice, discrete skeletons of animals. These were bone piles, and they hadn't quite recognized that these were discard piles. They were not you know, here's an animals stretched out on the ground. And of course, you know, they weren't paying attention to a lot of the things that we only subsequently started paying attention to, like what's the surface condition of the bone, because that tells you something about how long it was sitting out posed before it got covered by the sediment. They weren't really paying much attention to the sediment itself. What's the nature of the sediment, how did it originate? Why is the site in this particular spot, Where did the kill take place? There were so many unanswered questions. The thing that they that they did in the nineteen twenties was they clearly showed people have been here since the Pleistocene. They did that just fine, But there were so many questions about the site that were unanswered. That's why I went back seventy years later because I said, you know, it's the most famous site in North America, one of the most famous sites in North America, and we know almost nothing about it in terms of what we what we hope and expect to know nowadays about an archaeological site. It's funny in when they finished up the excavations, barn and Brown, who had been in charge, said, there's nothing left. Don't bother to come here. We've excavated the whole thing what I realized. And this was actually before we went out there. I was talking to a verder of paleontologists here at the university and he said, oh, Barne Brown said that about all his sites. And the reason he said that about all his sites is he didn't want anybody coming in after him to go to dig the sites. So he said, you can probably ignore that, And wow, I bet that was encouraging. How many more bison did you discover when you did excavations in the late nineties, Well, because we know there were thirty there was a bison kill of thirty two animals. We know that now, and so how many did they find and how many did you find? Well, so this gets back to the issue of you know, they were just counting a pile of bones as as an animal, right, they didn't really have a clear sense of how many animals they were. They had a clear sense of how many animal piles, how many bones piles that there were, but they did estimate that they were probably at least a couple of dozen. Okay, okay, what we did, and this is sort of the the typical way in which you estimate the number of animals that were once present in a kill, is that you take bones that well, in this case, we were taking basically bison ankles. So bison have two ankles left and right. And so what you do if you count up how many right ankles you have or how many left ankles you have, and you say, okay, I got thirty two right ankles, or I got thirty right ankles and thirty two left ankles. Well, there wasn't an animal walking around on three legs. You probably had thirty two animals. Where did they teach you this kind of reasoning? This is brilliant. No, well it's not me um no. But see, this is the kind of thing that you didn't do in the nine twenties. This is why we had to go back and in fact by literally counting up all of the elements that gave us insight into what the hunters were eating and what they took off site. Because you know, okay, so there's two hundred plus or minus change of bones and a bison skeleton, there is you know, X number of ribs, there's X number of thoracic vertebrae, and so you've got thirty two animals. So if you've got thirty two animals, and you know X number of ribs thirty two times X gives you the total number of ribs, and then you double it because you got a left side and the right side. So then when you go to the site and you say, well, I've only got three ribs here, you know what you're missing. They took those ribs with them. And we have pretty clear evidence that these folks were literally taking rib racks off of these animals because we have an under account of what we ought to have in terms of ribs, in terms of thoracic vertebrae. Those are the big sort of structural high spinus process ribs on a buffalo hump. That's what makes the hump right really good meat there. So we're missing a bunch of upper leg bones and that's where the bulk of the meat would be in the hams of those big bison. Think of them as bison drumsticks. So when we go to the site, we do all these detailed counts of all the bones. How many should there be? How many are we missing? And are we missing them because of erosion or the bones you know, fell apart, or are we missing them because the hunters when they did all of them took them with them exactly right. So Dr Meltzer never fully got to the answer my question about how many more bison he found when he redug fulsome we need some answers. How many bison did your team find that we're not found in the original excavations, because just an estimate, I mean, did did you find five more? Or well, whole skeletons are numbers of bones. Well, let me how many? How many bison skulls did you find that they had not found? Oh, let me think about that. You know, usually the people that I deal with, Dr Meltzer kind of can say offhand how many bison and tick with skulls they've found in their life. You're the only one I've talked to you that it's like, well, I don't know. You know. I talked to a guy on one of my previous Burgaris podcasts and I asked him how many times he been bit by venomous snakes and he said, uh, he said, I don't know, I've lost count, and he had been bit by twenty venomous snakes in his twenty plus You're kind of like that guy. Well, you know, I'm talking about Mr Fred episode twelve. Um. Actually I have the total numbers. So the Colorado Museum collected sixteen hundred elements, the American Museum two thousand, we collected about seven hundred. Uh So there's a total of about forty three hundred bison elements. So you probably found more. Yeah, mind you, we're not finding you know, whole bison and complete parts. Uh So, we found about seventeen cranial parts. We found at least three. Yeah, we have at least three intact crania and many more. That's exciting to dig up a bison skull. Were you there when they I mean, were you the one digging when this happened? Um? Actually no, I got out of the way. So did your team find any points? No, it was that surprising to you know. And the reason is is that they literally ad excavated back in the nies most of the site. So if you if you imagine to kill site with that many animals, I guess there would be kind of a central area and then kind of fringe animals out to the side of it, and you guys kind of we're finding well leftovers, we were finding the leftovers of the excavation rather than the leftovers of the kill because I think we were in an area of the kill where a lot of the processing and butchering was taking place. But because we were where the area of processing and butchering was taking place, there weren't necessarily points there. Okay, so let's think about this is in terms of a bison kill. Okay, So we've got a conundrum. We have no way of knowing really what happened that day in the fall some ten thousand years ago. I wanted to get some clarity from Dr Meltzer about what we one hundred no. So we're trying to make sense of how the heck that these ancient humans could have killed that many big animals in one spot. How how certain are you your hypothesis? I mean, when you really think about the amount of evidence that we have and the kind of conclusions that we're coming to, it's kind of mind boggling to me. Because we have bones, and we have points, we have the topography, and now you have in depth researched what the land would have looked like at that time from the from the excavations that you've done. How certain are you? I mean, you being the chief authority on this, are you just guessing question. Well, no, you asked two questions there, Clay, Okay, how it went down, that's inference, right, How they made the kill, um, the time of the year they made the kill. Uh. Did they maneuver the animals and kill them in the in the arroyo or did they kill them in the tributary? I have to infer that right, Okay, So that part you're making absolutely and in fact, you know, when we wrote all this up in the Folsome book, you know I made it clear. Here's one alternative explanation, here's another. Now, the first part of your question was, am I sure this is a kill of thirty two animals? Yes? Absolutely, yes, yeah, because there's no other way to account for it. Right. So one of the things that we do is archaeologists, um is Okay, You've always got to make sure that things are not there naturally before you can conclude that they're there culturally, that is to say, before you can conclude that they're there is a consequence of human action. You've got to illuminate the possibility that nature could have done it. Precisely, how they did it and how the thing played out that that day in the fall ten thousand four, ninety plus or minus twenty years ago. Those are educated inferences based on all of the evidence that we've accumulated in terms of what the landscape look like, where we find bones, where we find bone parts, that kind of thing. It's time to get into the meat of this story. Let's talk about the day of the kill. Here's Steve and I talking about it. Talk to me about what you think happened on that day. We have one isolated bison kill site, thirty two animals, roughly twenty points that were found in this kill site. We have radio carbon dates that take us back to that time. We know how far it was below the surface. It's like you only have so many data points to begin to make conclusions. What do you think happened that day? These animals wait over a thousand pounds. You didn't drag them around and pile them up, but they're in a big pile. The understanding based on every way you look at it, including like the proximity of the animals where they were killed, the fact that they were in a high box canyon, is that someone didn't come up and surprise them. Thirty some animals in a tight little bundle at the head of a box canyon. They weren't in there sleeping. It just goes against everything we understand about how bison act. These are an open country animal. They're not in there like, oh, they're all in there asleep, We're gonna sneak in. It's just not what they were doing. They got driven up in there. That's like the understanding of everyone looks at the landscape is these things were herded, driven into a box canyon where there was no escape. They got him up to the head of the box canyon, big high walls. I'll tell you I've I've managed to do that on two occasions, almost accidentally, and caught dear at the head of box canyons where they had to come back out through me to get out, heard him into a box canyon, and then this rain down spears on him and killed him. Very interesting, Steve Ronnella. But our old buddy Kyle Bell disagrees with you. Kyle was the cowboy on part one that I said was the guardian of George McJunkins character and legacy. We're standing in the wild horse arroyo at the sight of the kill as he's telling me what he thinks happened, and This is strictly my theory on this, and everybody does. When the first time I ever came down here and looked around, I saw some things that didn't fit some of the stories that I had heard. But I have been a guide for the last thirty years and probably been in on at least two hundred buffalo kills, and my theories are based on if bison antiquous acted like the bison that we deal with today, and that's what I'm basing my theories on. There was a reason that the bison almost got wiped out in North America. They're not hard to kill and you can't make them go anywhere they don't want to go. If there was a migration path through and bison came through here in the fall, then the people that followed the bison that lived off of them would know that they're gonna be in this valley this time of year. In this particular drag cameras probably had a couple of drones, you know. And I believe in this drainage that there's a mineral in here that the buffalo knew about and that we're after. And selenium is a mineral. It doesn't get in the grass no matter how much grass they eat, they don't get the selenium that they need. So they need to know where there's a lick, a salt lick of some sword. Then the people would know it too, and they said, we don't have to drive them in there. Oh we gotta do is wait until they go up in there on their own, and then we'll put hunters in a circle around them. The men back then were proficient with an addle addle. That's what was used here to kill the buffalo with very interesting kyle, the old salt lick, bush whack, the oldest trick, and the paleolithic hunter's bag of tricks. They were probably hanging in tree saddles and using commercial scent control products too. But let's see what the doctor Meltzer has to say about it. So I think it was an accident. I think these folks were hid in someplace else. I think they were heading for a pass that's about eight eight or so kilometers north of there. I think they spotted a herd. And you know, with bison, the image that you have is lots of noise, lots of stampedes, animals flying over a cliff. I think a lot of of these hunts in These kills were based on very careful maneuvering of the herd Bison. You know, their eyesight is not so good. They smell good in the sense that they smell well, not that they bathe regularly, and so you can kind of get behind them and make them a little bit nervous. I mean, you don't want to make them too nervous, because you know, those animals can go at upwards of almost forty miles an hour. They can turn on a dime. They're dangerous. But if you can get them maneuvered, and if you can get moving, and if you can move them up in arroyo that has a nickpoint, a point beyond which they can't go, you got them trapped. The thing about fulsome it's a very interesting land form because you've got this arroyo what we now call a wild horse arroyo, and it had a tributary coming in. You think that the animals were moved up that arroyo, they hit that bottleneck, they hit that nick point, and they couldn't go anywhere, and I think the hunters had kind of gone around. So you had hunters maybe behind them, moving the herd small herd, and then you had your hunters who had flanked them gone around, and we're on the uplands above that bottleneck, above that nick point. Some of the bones that we found, or the bulk of the site was actually in the tributary that's leading down into what was then wild Horse Arroyo ten thousand plus years ago. Most of the bones that were found were found up in that tributary. Some of the bones were found down in the arroyo. So either the kill took place in the arroyo and some of the animals were trying to escape up that ramp of the tributary, or the kill took place in the tributary and they were fleeing down the tributary and trying to escape out the channel. Either way, it appears as though a number of the animals were sort of piled up against the walls of the arroyo, and the royal walls were, you know, four meters high plus or minus. A bison is not gonna be able to jump out of that thing, right, So they were trapped and and the bottleneck point is literally about a foot and a half wide, so they wouldn't been able to squeeze up and get past um that bottleneck, having dedicated much of his life to this kill. Dr Meltzer's opinion carries a lot of weight with me. Both he and Steve think the bison were herded into the Box Canyon. Dr Meltzer continues on with its story. So the kill takes place, and it's a it's a god awful, bloody, messy affair. You've got thirty two animals. It's it's the fall. You've got calves there, you've got cows. They're they're making a ruckus. You make the kill, you start to butcher the animals your field. You know, you're doing your field processing. Points will have broken off inside the carcass points will have broken off when you've shoved the spear into them and it's snapped and you pull out the spear and all you've got is a little butt end of the point that's still attached to the spear. You're doing the butchering. You know there's blood, there's gore, there's everything all over the place, and you're kind of in a hurry because we know they didn't stay there for very long, so you're just getting everything ready to transport. And so the main area where the kill took place is where you're going to find the busted up points that they couldn't retrieve, or that they found that they said, you know what, this thing is so busted up, there's no point trying. Those points would have been found at the point of the kill where the action took place, right, and then where they may have drugs. Some of them to butcher would have been right and so but when you're butchering, you got your hand on the stone knife, you've got your hand on the scrapers, so you're not gonna lose that, right understood. So um, but that's the stuff that you're going to very carefully curate and take with you onto the next place, right, because that's part of your tool kits. So that explains why your team wouldn't have found any points because you guys were I think where the main excavations that had taken place in the nineteen twenties pretty much removed the principal kill area we were excavating. And we know this partly by looking at the bones. What we were finding were discard piles where carcass parts that were not nobody's gonna transport a bison skull, It had no no use for it. It's too heavy, there's no use for it. And once you chop the tongue out, and we know they did that at the spot, you don't need the jaws either, So they're just throw that off to the side. So we were excavating where they were just pushing off the stuff to the side that they were not going to transport. I had some more questions about the kill. Here's Steve. How many people do you think would have been there to have done that. I think it's uh, No, one knows. No, I think it was. It was probably a major kill man. It's interesting that they were able to do that because one of the things think about return when we were talking about um, just the very low population density of people and the isolation of it, and the fact that they seemed to wander a lot. These guys and false in New Mexico are carrying toolstone from the Texas Panhandle. You can say like, oh, they had this trade route and traded it. They went there and got it, and they wandered around, and they kept on the move, and they hunted animals that experienced no hunting pressure that they were dispersed and moved, and they'd find animals where in that group of animals there's no experience with humans because that we know that means a lot in terms of the ability for a human to kill an animal. For them to not have figured out what was going on, it might have been just that these are just animals with very little exposure to humans and perhaps very easily manipulated by humans. You can get real close to them, you can kind of make a half surround and you know, nudge them along. They're not immediate like you see one of those things on two legs. I don't care what you're doing. You get there. Perhaps they're responding to the human predators no differently than they respond than how we see the same species respond to wolves, which is your bunch up. Maybe when approached by a bunch of bipedal predators, these bipedal predators could just mimic the activity of wolves, kind of get roughly around them, they sort of bunch up, and then you kind of like gently nudge them along and nudge them into this thing, and then nudge them up this canyon, and when they can't get away, you start killing them. May be like a walk in the park, but here's your thing. Maybe that day, because we don't there's not tons of these sites. It's like it's hard to nothing last that long, or it's all it's twenty under sand and gravel, whatever. There's not a lot of these sights to compare it to. Or as far as we know, those people talked about that day for the rest of their lives, that's the weirdest day that ever happened. They're like, no, man, I'm telling you, dude, do you remember that one time they just were up in there. I don't know what they were doing. I never see anything like it. My dad never saw anything like it. Or it was just another day. You know, when you get this any kind of like some sort of like statistical thing, if you only find one thing, you have to assume that you were looking at like something happened. Well, no, no, I was gonna say the other point that let's say that at some point in time, someone was gonna like freeze an American household. Here's an American household frozen in place. What are the odds that of all the American households at at eleven PM that you would have frozen place a murder in progress, or would have more likely have been some people in their living room watching TV. It's like, it's just more likely that you would have catch just this randomized American household at eleven PM. You catch some sort of thing that seemed normal multiple rather than like, oh my god, this one spectacular always murdering each other at eleven at night, because you capture the spectacular event and isolation. So you look at like this one thing, we don't have many of them, This one thing, like you have to go like, I don't know, man, there's these people out there. They are killings of all time. Here's this pretty well preserved scenario where they killed stuff. I'm just gonna have to go on the assumption that this is like indicative of what these people did and not that it was a weird day. We've talked about these stone points, but we haven't talked about how they were used to kill the bison. At the time in North America, there were two options for throwing sticks with sharp rocks on the end, bows and addle addles. Here's what Dr Meltzer had to say, were these hand projected spears? Were these ad laddles? Well, now, so that's something I cannot answer, right. You need a lot of force. Think about a bison. The side of a bison is basically a picket fence of ribs, and they're fairly wide. You've got hair, you've got hied, you've got bone, you've got fat. All that stuff has to get penetrated. The thinking is, the suspicion is and this, you know, this gets to another one of those things that we just have to infer this because we don't really know that these were either thrust or thrown at high velocity. And we know that in fact, there was some velocity involved because we have what are known as impact fractures. Basically, when bone meat stone at high velocity the front end, you get some serious front end damage. So the points that they found, though were not diagnostic in terms of at lett or hand thrusted spear, No, because you know, whether it was thrust or throne, it's the same size point. You know, regardless of how it happened, it would have had to bend some pretty bad to the bone people to have killed thirty two bison. It was a cow calf herd and the kill took place in the fall. How do we know the dental eruption patterns? So bison tend to have between about mid April and mid May, and their teeth, their molars grow at a fairly regular rate. And these these molars or these pre molars have already you know, busted over and are on the surface. Now you can say, okay, well it's probably been about four months. So if you go, you know, mid April age of the calves, that then understand that they we been born in the spring. And and you've got a bunch of four month old calves, that tells you you've got a kill that took place, you know, September plus or minus. We're going to halt the conversation right here. It's so interesting to ponder our ancient history as humans. You have to wait for part three to hear the rest of the story. We live in such a weird concoction called time that binds us so tightly to the present, it's hard to imagine any other form of life beyond what we experience with their own life, that is, unless we strain our brains to think back. But maybe it's not a cognitive exercise as much as it is a spiritual one to try to understand ancient man. But a bigger question is why do we care or even want to understand them? And I cannot fully answer that, but I am convinced that the lives of these people that left these stone points are still relevant in regardless of the barrier of time that separates us. We're in the process as a culture of redefining modern humanity. Who we are, why we're here, Why are we so clearly different than the other beasts of this planet? And now the heck did we go from slinging stone tip spears advising to driving testlas? Why is there such turboil in the earth. These are just some of the questions that we have. The fulsome sight gives us an indisputable data point, a moment frozen time that shows us what men were doing during a couple of days stretch over ten thousand years ago. As rudimentary as this info may seem, this data point anchors part of our identity as humans. It reminds us of a more simple definition of humanity. This was a group of people connected together by a common cause. These hunters were undoubtedly a family group trying to make a living and survive in a hostile place. The complexity of modern life can be bewildering, but I don't think it has to be. There are a lot of mysterious questions about these people that I'm very interested in, like where the heck did they come from? And what was the construct of their spiritual belief system which they undoubtedly had. Atheism seems to be a pretty new phenomena in our species. These are questions that stone points and bones can't answer, but it's all we have to go off of. But isn't this the cool thing about being human? This rare cognition and this awareness that we possessed is a gift, and our curiosity about past humans on this planet is also a gift. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greece. On Part three of this podcast, will continue in our conversation with Steve Rinella and Dr Meltzer. We've got several interesting topics yet to explore, one of them being how the Fulsome Sight upended many people's understanding of the Bible's teaching on the Age of men and the Earth. I've got a few thoughts on that. Leave us a review on iTunes and tell some of your friends about this podcast and tune in next week when myself, along with a whole New Render crew discuss the Fulsome Sight Sorry Old Render regulars have a great week,