00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening un podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X David J. Meltzer. You know it's the writer named David Meltzer. That's gonna be disappointing. There's a poem named David Meltzer. There's a medical doctor named David Meltzers. If someone goes to if you go into Google and you write David Meltzer a auto phills David Meltzer anthropologist. Okay, so not David Meltzer, the wrestling writer. No, a victory from me. Uh, this is gonna this is gonna break some people's some dear friends of mine's hearts. But you're the favorite. Yeah, we haven't even started yet. You're the favorite guests that I've ever had on this show. We can stop right now. I'm good you haven't started. I uh um, I'm gonna flatter you a little bit. You know how people will have in a in a home. You'll have a coffee table right in your sign up your living room, and people will position books there which are a combination of what the person likes and how the person likes to be perceived. I keep I rotate. Well, there's there's a couple that aren't yours. I'm a little sorry to hear that. We go ahead. Well it's the photographer Um Hoffman. So I rotate Hoffman's book of photography with I sage people in a New World with your fulsome book. I rotate them and I and I put them there, and it's meant to be like this is my my this is like mikes. You know. My expression of myself is that that I value David J. Melzer's books. All I can say is, you've just earned yourself the next two books. Really, sure you get them on the house now, if they're gonna be, if they're gonna be on the table, you got them. I almost brought them to have you sign them. But they're but they're big sons of bitching books. Yeah, I do tend to, right, don't I know? Just they're they're they're they're full of maps and color, imagery, everything you could want from everything. I know when I finished with a book, I know nothing. It's all just poured out onto the page, nothing left. No, they're yeah, they're amazing, and you do. Um, we'll get into what you're working. We haven't. We're telling people all this, all them knowing what you do. But UM, a wonderful job of of explaining really complicated things in a way that don't They don't feel remotely dumbed down, but they're still accessible and you still feel like you have like you're getting a very scholarly understanding of something that would be easy to trivialize. All of us in the business have an obligation to speak to the public that both pays for people like me and is interested in the kinds of things that I'm lucky enough to do, and so I really feel that obligation strongly. Uh to write in good American that people can understand, which actually is a hell of a lot harder than writing for my colleagues. It's a whole lot easier just to use jargon because I know everybody knows what that is. And then when I have to explain something, especially in regard to some of the high tech stuff that we're involved in now, it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. I hope you keep at it. Um not. I want to tell people. Let's say you're at You're at a one of your faculty parties. We're here at Southern Methodist Universe. You're at a faculty party. You meet like an English professor, and you you meet an English professor's husband, and he says, so, what do you do? You say, so, I work on ice age hunter gatherers. That's the sort of boring tagline. Dude, that's that's titillating to me. Okay, So what follows is I work on the people who are the first to come into the America's Imagine what it must have been like to look around one day and see no smoke on the horizon, no freshly killed animals, no sign of any other human being, and realize, oh, we're all alone here, and this place is kind of looking different than where we came from. And what's over the next hill, and what's over the hill next to that. Imagine what it must have been like to be that person, to be in that group, to see a landscape teeming with animals that some of which you've never seen before. And you don't know which ones are going to feed you, which ones are going to cure you. The plants I think you raised in one of your books which ones are going to hurt you? When which ones are going to try and kill you? Exactly. You have a hypothetical scenario and one of your books where you point out something that's interesting is that people are coming from the north and had been were thousands of years, perhaps separated from tropical climates. And you're coming from the north and there there's a guy, we don't know, a woman, a man, whoever it was, that was like the first one to encounter a rattlesnake. No awareness, no even ancestral awareness of what that was. You kind of wonder though, Um, I mean, you guys surely have encountered rattlesnakes in your travels. And there is something that that that hits your reptilian brain that says, oh, it's kind of an interesting noise, but oh dear, that looks like that could be that could be trouble. Um. But yeah, imagine that and imagine all these these trees, these plants that you know you kind of recognize them. I mean, you know what a tree looks like for grind out loud, But what can that do for you? And that's one of the really amazing things about the peopling processes that after getting onto the continent and being here for ten thousand years, there's virtually not a single plant that Native Americans hadn't figured out. It's medicinal properties, it's food properties, its use as tools. I mean, it's really quite remarkable how folks learned about this new land. And I suspect they had to learn on the go, and they had to learn fairly quickly because they were moving with remarkable speed, archaeologically breathtaking speed across the continent. Uh, and they were able to figure things out. Can you can you explain that? Well? You know, let me ask you this, what's the best way if we're gonna get in, if we want to do a good fly over of the peopling of the New World, where's the best way to begin? Because I have in thinking about talking to you, there's all these things I wanted you to explain. I wanted he was playing like Clovis pre Clovis, sort of the moving like our best guests of Well, here's nothing I want to explain. How for a while the oldest accepted site in the New World, correct me if I'm wrong. For a while, the oldest one we knew about rock solid was down monta Verde right in Chili. Still is, so what happened between that? If they're coming from Siberia, what happened between Bryngia in Chili? Where's all their stuff? Fair question? Absolutely, these are all questions I want to ask you, So you tell me, like, what's the best place to begin what we used to think was the beginning or what we now think is the beginning. Well, so it used to be tough because with archaeological material, you're getting what's preserved, and it's a crapshoot because we are talking about a relatively small population on a vast continent. They're going to be flying below archaeological radar for centuries, if not millennia. There's simply not enough of them producing enough sites that the odds are that you'll find them. Right, So we always knew that the archaeological record, the oldest site you find is never going to be the oldest site in America. I mean, the odds are simply infinitestainally small. But now we've got genetics and genomics, And what genetics and genomics can tell us is the point at which ancestral Native Americans separated from Northeast Asian populations and started to make their way here. Now, the moment they split from their Asian cousins is not necessarily the moment they headed to the Americas, but it gives us a maximum age. And we now know based on ancient danna and genomics. And this is work that's been done by quite a number of but most especially my colleague Eski Willerslev at the GeoGenetics Center in Copenhagen, and our work has shown that around twenty three thousand years ago twenty three you know, plus or minus a thousand were archaeologists, right, Plus and minus a thousand years is nothing does around twenty three thousand years ago, we have that initial split. So we know that at some point after that they're coming this way and there was no longer exchange. Correct. We also know that, as you just said, we've got Monte verd A and the dates they're around fourteen thousand, seven hundred calibrated years. So we now have a window within which we can real quick explain for people what that means. Ah, okay, So radiocarbon years radiocarbon dating. Basically, you're looking at the amount of C four team that still resides in a sample after a certain period of time. And we know the half life, we know how long it takes to disintegrate in a sample. Yeah, I'm gonna annoy you here. Okay, go even deeper the sun. Like notice, tell peop real quick, because people get this is stuff you here their whole lives. They never know like what it means. So the sun comes down, it hits our atmosphere. Yeah right, okay. So basically, nitrogen gets blasted, turns into a stabile isotope of carbon, normal garden variety carbon is carbon twelve, right, and then you've got this isotope carbon four team. Carbon four team behaves just like carbon twelve in that it joins up with oxygen forms. CEO two gets absorbed into living matter. When it's no longer being absorbed, when that organism dies, the amount of CEO two begins to decay back to basically it's zeros out, okay, and it decays at a known rate. It's called a half life, and a half life of radio carbon is about five thousand seven hundred and thirty years. So if you've got half of the amount, not even looking at notes, No, I'm just making it up. Um. If you've got half, um, half the radio carbon is gone. Five thousand, seven thirty years has elapsed, right, okay, So and it just halves halves, halves, halves halves. Okay. Here's the problem. The very mechanism that creates the C fourteen in the atmosphere in the first place, which is the sun bombarding the upper atmosphere and and creating all the C fourteen, It's varying. So at certain points in the past more C fourteen is being produced. At other points in the past, less C fourteen is being produced. What that means is that when you get a radio carbon date, you've got to say to yourself, Okay, if this was a period when excess carbon was being produced in the atmosphere, it's going to give me a funky date. I've got to calibrate it. And how do you calibrate it? Tree rings? Tree rings. When a tree grows and you guys cut down trees, right, Um, you see all the growth rings. Those growth rings come on one year at a time. Okay. If you date an individual growth ring on a tree that you've counted back, and we now have a tree ring sequence that goes back thirteen thousand years in change. I don't know the exact number. If I were to look it up, I could tell you. Uh, you date those individual rings, you know that that ring should be eleven thousand, three and forty eight years old, But your radio carbon date tells you something else. That's how you know how much it's off, right, And so we have these really elaborate calibration curves. There's a there's a difference. So a radio carbon date of ten thousand years is actually equivalent to a real year date about eleven thousand seven d okay. And when you and today we're speaking in count well let's speaking and basically like we're you're arranging it into years as we understand that exactly right, I'm gonna give you real years. And the reason I'm doing that is a bit because the estimates that we get from genetics and genomics are in essentially real years, right, Okay, So we've got the genetic estimates at twenty three, Monte Verde has a date of four teen seven, fourteen thou seven hundred real years. It's radio carbon years. Just to kind of finish up with the example is twelve five, Okay, so you can see what the discrepancy is between a radio carbon in a real year. Okay. So in that window between twenty three and fourteen seven, we know people showed up. Now there's an issue there because that window is downtown. Last glacial maximum, right, the coldest period of the last hundred thousand years was between about twenty three thousand and nineteen thousand years ago. That's when we had these massive ice sheets covering basically Canada. Okay, two big ice sheets. One that goes from Newfoundland and lapse up against the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains Lauren Tied ice sheet. It goes as far south as Ohio, Central Ohio and Pennsylvania. It goes as far north as well. It actually connects up with an ice eat that makes it over to Greenland. Is there a point when a glacier turns into an ice sheet or absolutely um. It all starts with snow, and it all starts with summer temperatures. And this was figured out actually by a guy sitting in a prisoner of war camp in World War One. He was a he was a mathematician, and he understood that if you play around with the amount of sunlight and heat hitting the Earth, you can either grow a glacier or make one go away. And the reason this happens is that UM, and it has to do with a whole bunch of sort of astronomical physics UM, where basically all the planets are constantly getting jostled. We like to sort of think of our Earth is is orbiting in a particular way, and it's always been that way and it's never going to change. And that's just not right right because we've got all these other planets out there, so we've got the gravitational effects of the Sun. But then there's Jupiter parked a few orbits out there, and it's also affecting us. So at times in the past, the northern hemisphere has been closer or further away from the Sun, which meant there's been more or less solar radiation hitting the surface. When you reduce the amount of solar radiation hitting the surface in um the summer, last year's winter snow doesn't melt, The next year snow piles up, and if it doesn't melt again, well you pile that up to a certain depths or so, it compresses, it packs, it turns to ice, and it starts to flow. Okay, it used to be that there was about a three week window in the far North between the last of the spring um freezing temperatures and the first of the fall freeze. If you close that two to three week window, you could start another ice age. I mean you have to close it sort of consistently for many, many years, right, um. But that's how it works. And so we had this period between twenty three thousand, nineteen thousand years ago where you had these massive ice sheets that had built up starting probably around twenty nine thirty thousand years ago and reached their maximum extent between that twenty three and nineteen thousand, covering up ground upon which now lives millions and millions of Americans. There's a reason Minnesota's the land of ten thousand lakes. Those are all glacial puddles, right. Uh. Seattle had um an ice sheet basically in downtown Seattle. That's why it's a great port. Right. The ice basically created these fiords Chesapeake Bay wise, Chesapeake Bay a bay. Well, the Susquehanna River had to because and you grow that much ice on land, and we are talking about an ice sheet that again east coast to the Rocky Mountains, and then from the Rocky Mountains to the coast range there was a second major ice sheet, the Quardier and Ice sheet. You put that much ice on land, where's all the water coming from the ocean, right, So all of that precipitation, like oceans evaporate, precipitation clouds move over land, falls its snow, and then it freezes. It doesn't get back to the ocean. So when that happens, you're basically locking up about five percent of the world's water. When that happens, sea levels drop, and we know that sea levels dropped, and this becomes part of the people in America story. Right, sea levels drop about a hundred and thirty meters, so you know, put it in defeat, uh several hundred feet in depth. So you could walk from Asia to America and you would have no idea that you were walking from one hemisphere to another. And the reason you would have no idea is that don't think of the bearing Land bridge. Is this sort of skinny rope bridge over the Amazon River somewhere. No, it's a thousand miles and you know, you look around and it's just a continent to you. That's that was one of the things that really started to interest me in this world a little bit, was when I started to get that because in every every like American school child's imagination, the Bearing Land Bridge is this thing where you like, it's like Moses going through right the part of red seat, Like you pack your ship up and it's this narrow little thing. Everybody's like, okay, ready, and then you run across it. You know, it's like you're you're sort of impression of it. And then to go up at what's now the would be the foot of it now and just you're your Northwest Alaska and you stand there and be like, you don't have any you don't understand where the oceans sit. You're just out on this massive thing. And that's what life on the Bearing the Bearing Land Bridge wasn't any more than when you're in Michigan. You're very aware of that you're on a peninsula. You're just somewhere exactly look at the map, and you also put it together. Right. No, that's a great analogy because it's a scale issue. You know, humans are small and the bearing land Bridge was really large, and you would have had no idea. And in fact, you know, there's no reason to think that people were only coming in one direction either. You know, they could go east, they could go west, And we're starting to see some of that evidence genetically that these populations are moving back and forth across the land Bridge. It was trafficking in humans, plants, animals for thousands of years. Yeah, but you're right. But there's a point you bring up in one of your I think it's I say, people in the New World. You bring up a thing and I mentioned I quote you on this a lot, and I hope but I'm not over emphasizing it. But you bring up a thing where you said the movement of people. As people are moving around, they're moving quickly. And I can't remember if you say this that I added it to it. But they're not like running from warfare necessarily, like they're they're they're leaving there, They're leaving places they're sparsely populated, four places that are sparsely or not populated at all. And and you I do know this part. You to the point where like you can't rule out some amount of curiosity, absolutely, like someone like they're Maybe they weren't like saying, hey we're headed America. We're headed of what will become America. But they are saying they're thinking something or else. You can't account for that they would have gone as far as they went. Well, let's put it this way, when when Europeans started sailing around the globe, did they find a single habitable landmask that wasn't already inhabited. No, everywhere they got to there was already somebody living there. Humans have been moving for millions of years, but humans, modern humans, anatomically modern humans, they've been moving all over the globe for the last fifty thousand years. Um. Do we know the exact motives? Not really, But I think curiosity had to have something to do with it, right. I mean, in any group, somebody's gonna say, hey, let's go over there. Uh, but let's go over there also has a good um My, My now deceased colleague lue Binford always used to say, for hunter gatherers, insurance is not knowing what you have right in front of you, it's knowing where you go next. When things go bad right in front of you, there's an incentive to look over that next hill, because especially when things are okay, because that's when you have the time and the resources and the teenage sons who are just driving you insane, and you say, why don't you go do a walk about and come back in a month and tell us what you've found. I mean, one of the really interesting things about where we do have oral history records, like in the colonization of the Pacific on these remote islands, and the civic inevitably it's younger brother. It's like, get him out of the house. He's not going to inherit anything anyway. Let's let him get into boat and go someplace and and find new things. Uh. And so you know there's an advantage to that. Humans are also very good at surviving, and that was part of that buying that insurance policy. Did you bring up like do you address this or here to somewhere else that there's that there's yet the idea of expansion and you could say that you know, every hill I come over, there's more game and right, and the wood sources are down by the rivers and no one's burned it yet, and it's just good living. But when you look at the landscape in the ice sheets, you're talking about there had people had to have come up with up against what would be perceived as like a hostile environment perhaps and then jumped it without question. And in fact, one of the things that's really striking about the earliest archaeological record that we have is that we've got stuff all over the place in a very short period of time. So we know people are moving in their tracking great distances, but their distribution was broad, it was not deep. We are not seeing every single spot being filled in. What we're seeing is that these people were probably leap frogging right because they are paying attention to what's over the next hill. Um, and if it looks bad that way, we'll go someplace else, go in another direction. So in fact, they are moving, um, not necessarily in a nice wave, expanding out, washing out across the continent. Um. They're looking for sweet spots. They're looking for the places that the hunting is good, the gathering is good. Um, it's a decent place to spend the winter, those kinds of places. I mean, they're all like us. They want to have comfort, they want to have food, they want to have security. If you're knowing what you now know, um, I don't know why I would ask you two any other way, but no, you now, now, if you imagine a colonizing group wherever, whether it's in northwest Alaska, whether it's you know, here in Texas, fur the South, a colonizing group, a group that's not likely to be bumping up against people who are already inhabiting lands ahead of them. How big are the groups? So um, This is one of the things that we've actually been spending a lot of time trying to get a better handle on. We actually now have again because of the genetics record, we're getting a sense of how large these populations are. And uh, well, let me answer it in a couple of ways. First off, the direct answer to your question, you're probably going to disperse. If a hundred of you come into the New World, you're not going to stay together as a group of a hundred and move all around. Why Why Why do you assume that? Because it's well, a couple of things. One, if disaster strikes, that's it, end of story. But to one of them, it's important things for hunter gatherers is information by dispersing your group, by sending out I don't want to say pods, right, but by sending out smaller units of say, kind of an extended family group. Why don't you folks go that way, You go that way, We'll go this way and never see each other again. No, no, no, that's one of the really important things. It's not just um when you're coming into a new world. Is one of my colleagues that says, it's not just what to eat, it's who to meet. At a certain point, your kids are going to be a marriageable age and you're gonna need to find mates for them. Okay. So one of the things that we've been looking for for a very long time, which um must be out there, but we really haven't found a lot of them, are rendezvous sites where folks, you know, half a dozen years down the road, ten years down the road, they get together to exchange information, to exchange mates, to talk to one another. I mean, we're fundamentally social beings, right are you? Are you going to weave into talking about the lynden Meyer site, Well, we could get there. Lyndenmeyer is one of the very don't need to I just know the idea of that that when you say goodbye, you're not always just saying goodbye for forever. Oh never, never, never never. But then again this gets back to you're on a landscape that nobody else's is around. And one of the things that UM and again I keep harping on the genomics because it's been so amazing in terms of telling us about population history. At the end of their string, Neanderthals were becoming fairly incestuous and in breeding a lot, and they were doing that because their populations were shrinking and they were scattered over a wide area. We now have this latest genome that Eski's group published, that we published UM just a few weeks back. One of the sites is in remote northern Siberia, literally right on the Arctic Ocean. Uh. These guys are out in literally it's the end of the world. These are early modern humans. These are not neander Tolls, and yet we see absolutely no sign of inbreeding or anything like that. They are going long distance to find mates. They are ensuring that they're keeping a healthy gene pool. So yeah, that's very important for humans on on an empty landscape, is that you maintain these connections. So there's no understanding of a gene pool. Absolutely not. But but humans but humans have but humans have a tendency to they get that, they get that, um and you know, the tendency to not unless cultures tend to not want to be incestuous, unless they're the Royal family of England. We'll strike that from the record keeping it in. So the group size or the rendezvous site where you want to get to. Okay, so you want a rendezvous site, um that these are These are mobile hunter gatherers. They can only carry so much, right, so this is not like a potluck dinner where everybody brings a roast or something. So you want to have a site that is easily located. You want to have a site that's on an ecotone where you've got several different ecological units that are sort of coming together eco tone, and it's basically where ecological um bioms ecotone ecological zones overlap. And when you have overlapping zones, you've got greater richness because you've got all the animals and plants from this area and all the animals and plants from that area, and they're all in the same spot in our in our vernack. There we would say like we're a bunch of good ship comes together something like that. You said so um, because that way you've got because everybody's gonna be showing up and they're gonna hang out there for what three weeks a month? Who knows, right, Um, but that way there's a food source. You want to have springs nearby, you want to have water stone handy thing to have nearby as well, because when you get together, you know, you're sitting around your man stone tools. You're teaching the young. Oh hey, you know, we've learned this new technique of manufacturing these particular tools. Here's how you do it. And you brought up the Lindenmeyer site. It's a really important site because it might be one of the few instances that we have of a genuine bona fide um rendezvous site. Aggregation site is the fancy jargon term that we use rendezvous a lot better, and with linden Meyer, it's fantastic because it's sitting in a spot, a geological spot where you've got this very nice exposure of a wall that has um white rock, it's got red rock. It looks like a barber pole and you can see it from twenty miles away. We should point out that this site sits between Denver and Fort Collins actually just north of for Collins, nor Collin, about sixteen miles north of four Collins. And it's now a what's the Colorado Program of Parks umlife, Yeah, um, or it's not. It's not a private ranch anymore. No, no, no, no, you can visit it. I visited it. I visited as a private ranch. No you can. You can now visit it. There's a little guest area there that you're kind of stand and look out over the site. It's very cool. Yeah, but you can see this thing if you just you know, if you're if you're there ten thousand years ago, you just tell your buddies, we'll meet you at that giant rock barber pole. They didn't know what a barber pole was, but we'll go with it, um, and we'll be there in two years. Right. And it's at that katone where there's a whole bunch of springs, there's a lot of animals, there's good stone sources and the archaeology there. This is fulsome age. So we're not going to go back to our radio carbon dates. The radio carbon dates are about ten thousand four. The calibrated ages are about twelve four twelve three twelve four h twelve three thousand, twelve thousand, three hundred. Um. We've got projectile points made out of raw material that are coming from different points on the map. So clearly it looks like the way is the Texas Panhandle, right. It looks as though people are converging on that spot from great distances, absolutely carrying with them toolstone. Yeah, because one of the things that you're gonna do when you meet up with people that you haven't seen in six years. UM. One of the currencies, and I don't want to use that term in any literal sense, but you say, hey, you know I made I made these really lovely points out of this really nice material that I have access to down in you know, a hundred miles away. I'd like you to have it, right, Um, it's it's a bond, it's a gift. Now. Obviously, all sorts of other things are being exchanged that we're never going to pick up archaeologically, um, but certainly stone because the amount of effort that these folks put in to making their stone was well beyond the necessities of the weapon reef for the hunt we're So here's another problem. I'm still stacked u with things I wanted to tell people about we haven't got to I want to get to that. You can write it now. We haven't got to what the world looked like then the critters running around? What was happening to those critters? Extinction? Yeah okay? Um, and the diagnostic qualities of their spear points projectile points. All right, got it? Got it? Okay. Quick question about the Lindenmeyer site. Does it does it fit the bill of the perfect like katone? Oh? Absolutely, yeah. You go there and you're like, man year round this place to be bitch and I could give them see your back planes to your front Oh yeah, no, you you just it's a great place, with the exception of the rattlesnakes, and they were they were they used they eight turtles and rattlesnakes and stuff at the site. Then the camel does there are camel bones? There's camel bones there, but they're they're archaeological association is questionable. It was there was a bison kill there, that were at least bison that were killed there. Um, and turtles. I would I would be surprised if they didn't remember. Yeah, I think that this is what I'm that you have whatever is happening in the years that they're not camping there. I mean that a rabbit dies whatever. You turn up with bones and it's probably hard to unless you see knife marks, it's hard to know that. That's. Actually one of the challenges when you're excavating a site is that um all sorts of extraneous things end up in a site, and sometimes those extraneous things are rodents um. And you've got to decide, Okay, I've got a bunch of dead bison here. So when we excavated the Fulsome site, we had a bunch of dead bison, but we also had small mammal remains. And the question is where they also eating the small mammals. Well, you look to see is there evidence that they've been butchered? You know, can you see cut marks on the bone? Uh? Is there evidence that they were burned? Well, if the bones were burned, where they burned because the rodent got too close to the fire um? Or or was it actually cooked um. So sometimes it's difficult to decide whether species in an archaeological site were prey or just background noise. UM. And in the case of Falsome, it was pretty obvious that those bison were prey because well, we've got the cut marks on the inside of the jaws where the tongues were cut out, probably right at the moment to kill tongue being a delicacy, not to me. What are the what are the cut mark What are the cut marks? Oh? From the stone tools that sliced the attachment of the tongue and you can actually see on the inside of the mandible. Uh, slices. We can go off to my lab after this and I'll show them to you. I've got them in the lab. Really, I've seen the photos of them. Oh. Yeah, no, I got the real thing. Um, did they do it the same way every time? Like they were good at it? Oh? I assume. So, I mean people when you look at um, planes, bison hunters. Uh. Certainly in the in the more recent groups, tongue is a delicacy and that was one of the first things that went at a at a bison kill eat it tongue. Yeah, like I say, not for me, I understand. I don't know. I don't like lungs, I don't like brains. Tongues. Okay, so what did it look like? Alright, imagine this, You've you've made your way over from Siberia into Alaska. You don't actually know that, but you're there and you're looking, and what you notice is there's all these birds and they're flying off in a different They're flying off in a direction, and you're thinking to yourself, well, all I see is ice, and maybe there's a little bit of margin along that Pacific coast. Those birds are heading in that direction. That tells me that there must be something down there. And this gets to the question you were asking about earlier. Are there places that people don't want to go? Well, getting from Alaska down to the lower forty eight in those days would have been a challenge, right, because you've got two options. One is that you come down the Pacific coast and there you're dealing with ice that is calving off into the sea. Um, it's going to have outlet channels coming off of these ice fields that are gonna be choked with sediment. You've got to cross these things. You've got to work your way around these ice sheets. Um. And there may not be a whole lot of food resources. But that that route south actually opens pretty early. That route south is opened by around sixteen thousand years ago. So you remember now let's go back to we've got that window between twenty three thousand and fourteen seven. If that route south from Alaska opens at sixteen that's pretty good timing free relatively ice free. You're gonna have to wait another probably several thousand years before that interior. So there's another route south in that route south opens when the ice sheets that basically met at the crest of the Rockies start to melt back, they start to retreat, So the one that sort of spread out from around Hudson Bay heads back east. The other one starts to work its way down the west slope of the Rockies. And now you've got what's called the ice free corridor opening between them. We now know, however, that that ice free corridor and this was environmental ancient DNA. This is DNA pulled out of sediment in a lake, in a lake that was at a pinch point right in the dead center of this ice free corridor. And let me see if I can create a mental picture for everybody. You've got a you've got two massive ice sheets butting one another. As they start to pull back, they open at the northern end and at the southern end like a coat that has a zipper that goes both ways, okay, and so if you you you raise your lower zipper and you lower your upper zipper, they're going to meet in the middle. And that's gonna be the last place that opens up where approximately like was that that pinch point on the continent. So we're in um at about fifty six degrees north in Alberta. It's in the Peace River drainage for those of the folks that have Google Maps want to kind of check it out, and those lakes. We cord the sediment at the base of the lake and you can recover DNA from all the animals and plants that were around that area and right it about twelve in a in a dust like sediment form. It's mud. Yeah, you're not finding you're not tapping into bones and stuff. No, no, no, it's amazing you can find out um. And actually this is really going to revolutionize our our understanding of these extinct fauna, which I'm gonna get to in a moment, because you can see them even if their bones aren't there. It's just wild. And what we found in this particular core was right around twelve thousand, six hundred boom. You've got mammoth, you've got bison, you've got moose, you've got some species of fish. There's a seahawk that ends up it's DNA ends up in this lake. Now, well that's happening right at about twelve six. So what that tells you if you prior to that, not not much is going on exactly, so that that corridor actually physically opens probably several thousand years earlier. But because you've still got two ice sheets parked nearby, nothing's growing there and it takes a while for it to get you know, you've got to get the grass there, you've got to get the plants growing, and the animals are going to follow. And that was a study that we did. But a study that Beth Shapiro's group did, she's fantastic and and her studies showed that bison that were separated by these ice sheets during the ice Age, so you had a northern herd in a southern herd, they get together around thirteen thousand years ago. So her dates are thirteen thousand, ours are about twelve six. So that's pretty consistent. That's pretty consistently telling you that that passageway opens around thousand plus or minus I mean, while you already have people down in South America exactly exactly, so that tells you people might have been using that corridor, but they weren't the first ones there. And in fact, the really interesting story is is that that corridor was used, but it wasn't by groups going southbound. It was by groups going northbound. They were heading back up to Alaska. We have archaeological evidence that and it's based on these kind of distinctive kinds of projectile points that that we see and that's it's indeed on that list. Uh that is telling us that, you know, the movement in that corridor is principally on the north bound lane, perhaps not perhaps not intent like not like, man, let's go back up north, because there are probably people who have been that had been for hundreds of years to the south exactly. But this gets back to those bison. Right at the end of the ice age, you've got a H. Dale Guthrie, well known, remarkable University of Alaska scientist paleocologist. Dale called it the Great Bison Belt. At the end of the ice Age, you could walk from Texas to well Mike, Kansas site on the north slope of Alaska, and you'd be on grass the entire time. If you're living in Montana eleven thousand years ago. I'm sorry, I'm in radio carbon um old school. Do you think in radio carbon? I think in radio carbon, I always have to pause and get it into calibrated. You're like someone like you're like someone from Europe who's talking to Americans, and they're like they do They're like, let me think, uh yeah, x feet ten ft. Well, and here's the issue for me on that, and that is that calibrations have changed over the years. So the first calibration, okay, it gave us one answer, and then when the next calibration set came out five years later, thou wasn't eleven seven anymore. It was eleven five. And so I'm thinking, Okay, when you guys get that settled, I'll start using calibrated all the time. But until then, radio carbon doesn't change over the years, these dates, don't. Do you talk to your colleagues and radio carbon. It depends what I'm talking to. If I'm talking to a geneticist, I've got to go calibrated. If I'm talking to a geologist, depends what kind of geologist. I'll go calibrated if I have. Do you guys identify each other? Oh, it's a signal? Yeah, No, you tuck on your ear so you don't ask. Yeah, yeah, you know. You don't want to embarrass somebody by asking on that. That's right, Yeah, I see fourteen radar goes off. Um what were we talking about? Oh? Right, So what does the world look like? Okay, so you get into northern North America and um, it looks a whole lot different than it does today. You've got this vast landscape opening up before you. You've got aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom wandering past. Right, You've seen mammoth before, but these mammoths don't quite look like the ones that you've been seeing in Alaska. They're slightly different. You've got large predators on the landscape. Um, you've got a smile it on Faytalis, which is the best scientific name ever devised. It's the deadly claw, It's the saber tooth cat. You've got Arctotis Simus, the giant short faced bear. And I had a TV role once where I started with an animated Arctotis Simus. My kids, I lost all credibility with them. Even with them. Look that's on TV with a cartoon bear. Not my best moment. Um and thirty eight genera altogether that are on their way to extinction. Now, some of them were keep keep going with the list, because like multiple species of camel ITTs, camels, horses, tapers, peckery's um of hunter pound beaver. Oh yeah, kind of kind of like a beaver, kind of like a beaver. Yeah. Um. And then you had my favorite was the um the glyptodont, which was basically I think submersible um Volkswagen with an armored tail. And you've got a cliptod on it's about that big h You've got um giant ground slots, four genera of them that way three four tons uh. And of course you've got multiple species of elephant. Uh. It's a spectacular thing. And the thing that had always struck people was it looked as though they all went extinct at the same moment in time. Now, if you're going to have thirty eight different genera of animals going extinct, explain genera people. Ah. So that goes back to the Lenaean hierarchy that you may have remembered from high school biology. Um, species, genus, family all that. Uh and genus uh yeah, um, it's it's a word. There's a word that you use as an there's a pnemonic. Yeah, but King Philip sits on yeah. Uh. And so genera is simply the plural of genus. Okay, So you've got thirty eight genera. They all appear to have gone extinct simultaneously. And you think as many people did define simultaneously, I mean on Tuesday, right, I mean, well, no, that's the issue is that people thought that they all just died at the same geological moment. Now, a geological moment, you know, plus or minus a hundred years. Okay, but that's really fast. Oh they thought it was plus or minus a hundred years. Um, well, actually three hundred years. I was exaggerating. But still that's still oh no question, No, yeah, that's that's that's a that's a lot of narrow, mighty narrow chunk of time. Well, and especially if you're talking anywhere from a hundred to two hundred million animals. Yeah, okay, So can climate do that? Can climate wipe out an entire well literally a hemisphere? Because you had thirty eight genera in North America and fifty two in South America so extinct. Could climate have done all that simultaneously, given that you were dealing with animals that live in arid and semi art environments, animals that live in the forest, animals that live as hurt animals, animals that have basically live isolated lives in the woods. Umfer absolutely very different physiology, adaptation habitats. Can climate a single climate change wipe them all out? And the answer is, well, it's kind of hard to aim. But here's the thing. This is like a this is a where the logic a little bit falls apartners It didn't wipe them all out. Chipmunks were here. There's chipmunks. You know, it's like an annoyance of me when people say an ice age relic, So like we're ice age relics, raccoons or ice age relics, mice or ice age relics. And and actually a number of those small rodents are still responding to recent climate changes from the last ice age. No, but see, this is this is where this needs to go. Everything died down to the size of a bison. Yeah, no, except for the spruce tree that also went extinct, and the snakes that went extinct, and Oh yeah, No, I shouldn't say down to like and then then the end of there. But I mean there were many animals that were bigger than that. We'll see this is this is where we're going. Because all of these animals thought to have gone extinct simultaneously, it couldn't have been climate. Therefore it had to be people. It had to be fast moving hunters blasting out across the contin Blitz Creek, the overkill hypothesis, all that nutting this right, you've got a bunch of people are gonna call that? Not now, a bunch of people with sharp sticks and pointy rocks at the end are going to wipe out a hundred million animals in the space of several hundred years. Um well, what we've what we've the end of a Rambo movie. Yeah, Adrian, sorry, wrong movie. Um At, what we've now realized is that those thirty eight genera didn't all go extinct simultaneously. So immediately that takes the pressure off of finding a single cause. Okay, so now we can say, well, what's happening at the end of the Ice Age? See, there's always been this confluence of potential causes. The end of the Ice Age brings people into the Americas and animals go extinct, and so the assumption always was, well, Okay, people come in, animals go extinct. They had to be related. Well, no, maybe they're both related to that larger trigger, which is the end of the ice age. That's an interesting point. Rather than one being a symptom of the other, there are symptoms of the same thing. And what we now know is that some of these animals were probably gone twenty thousand years ago, long before people show up, and in fact, the majority of those thirty eight genera we don't have any evidence that they were around when people got here, so they've all disappeared, so there's no association. So we do have evidence that people hunted some of these animals. There are a grand total of fifteen fifteen sites in which we have reasonably secure evidence that people prayed on mammoth. There's about a dozen of those sites. Masted on. It's someone that's pretty iron clad, like projectile points stuck in its skull. Still no question mammoth mastered on horse and camel. Mammoth masthed on horse, camel and gampath here, so we've got it's it's another l pant it's a it's a sort of um more southern um elephant that is related to mammoth mastodon. They're all in the Proposidian family. Okay, so so tell me the ones again. Mammoth mastodon, gampathyre, horse, camel five Now, no kill site of a saber tooth. No, no hemia, kenya kills, No camel kills, no horse kills, ground cloth no, yeah, no ecliptodont kills. Yeah. But that's the thing, is that stuff none. I I never read about him. I never thought about it. I never thought about the omissions. If you're gonna yeah that. And that's the key thing is that people always point to mammoth kills. Well, yeah, okay, so somebody killed an elephant, but you've still got another hundred million animals you gotta get rid of, and you've got another thirty seven genera that you've got to kill off. But here's the other thing. When you look at the extinctions process in isolation, you've got thirty eight large animals that go extinct. Well, there's nine large animals that are still around today, moose, cariboo, must cox. You know, things that you guys have probably hunted over the years, those are megafauna in that definition. But more importantly, not only do we have these nine genera that survive, we've also got other genera that go extinct that are not megafauna. And in fact, even one of the megafauna is the astaland rabbit. The astland rabbit was the size of a bunny. There's no way that's a megafauna. But it went extinct, right, So how do you explain that they absolutely how do you explain why bison didn't go extinct? So here we have thirty eight genera, Oh, no question, right, And we've got thirty eight genera for which we have virtually no evidence of human hunting and predations. Oh yeah, And and bison get hunted for eleven twelve thirteen thousand years and in mass kills, right, I mean there are single kills of two hundred animals and bison. I mean you can still order it ted Turner's Montana Restaurant, Montana Grill, Montana Grill, and it's it's really good stuff. Right. Uh. So here we have intensive hunting of an animal for eleven twelve thousand years, and they don't go extinct, virtually no evidence of any hunting of any of these thirty eight genera and they do go extinct. Why do we think humans were responsible for that? Okay, but when you were a younger man, not that your old man. Now, when you were a younger man, were you and uh, what's what I'm trying to look for an apostle. Were you a believer in were you a blitz Creek hypothesis? Man, your history isn't tarnished by blitz Creak hupp I liked it because of how tidy it was. Oh well, that's why a lot of people liked it. And in fact, we're like, okay, cool, Now let's move on to the next question. Because no, I mean, I do archaeology, and I know how many sites killed sites there are. I just I never bought it because the evidence wasn't there. And people love people love the idea, and nothing they liked about the idea, and this is gonna take us way astray, and don't you don't need even pursue this thought. I think one of the reasons people liked about it is because when you look at other when you look at examples of human cause environmental destruction, it's nice to get It's nice you look at all these horrible things are going on. Now, it's nice to be like, this is nothing. Those those people, but the ancestors of the the Native Americans, they were horrible. They killed everything off. Therefore, we should really give ourselves a pat on the back for not being so destructive. Um, I think there's a little bit of that at play. There's a lot of that. And know that this is probably way outside of your no, no, no. In two thousand three, Don Grayson and I wrote a paper in which we said one of the things that made the overkill hypothesis attractive was in the nineteen sixties. It came out really in a big way in the nineteen sixties when everybody was all about Earth Day and important things like that, and they used it as a as a homily, as a lesson of look at all the horrible things humans have done. Well, wait a minute, this is one thing humans didn't do. Right. They are not guilty of murdering the place to see, right, So you're absolutely right. I mean, this is something that people were using for and that the evidence didn't warrant being used in that way. In the tidiness, and because it's so baffling, it's nice, like, you know, when you're trying to comprehend infinity, like in space. It's comforting if someone was say like, oh, no, it does end, that ends there's a wall. Yeah yeah, and then you'd be like, well, what's past the wall? It would be nice to just have to be able to stop thinking about it. Yeah. No, I've seen men in black I know, you know at the end where they and everything there's a wall in there. Yeah. No, absolutely. It was a tidy explanation, but a wrong one, and a badly wrong one. So how broad was for how many? Okay, is there is there sort of I know that species beginning to end all the time, Like, there's things right, we're creating them, not we. Evolution is happening, yeah, the earth is whatever. You're producing things and things are dying. If you were going to sort of put some brackets around this mass extinction, where do the brackets set? Well, it does, knowing that there's that it's not hard edged, right the edges are yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I mean the process was probably starting um as the last glacial maximum was beginning. Okay, so some of them are disappearing really early on, and some of them are in fact making it up until twelve thousand years ago, eleven thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago. It's smeared over time. It's smeared over time. Why wasn't it happening during the other cycles. Well, now that's that's the gotcha question that I always get. So I give a talk was trying to do, but I'm I'm glad you did. In fact, you can phrase it as I got your question. I give a talk about plisuscene extinctions, and I give all the evidence as to why humans weren't blamed. In Inevitably, somebody raises her hand at the end says, what about what about previous? Right? So I make the point that there's all sorts of climate changes that are happening at different levels that would have impacted different different animals in different ways at different times, and so on and so forth. So we really need to get a better understanding of how climate change affected individual species rather than treat everything is a block. It was alive when extinct. Let's try and figure out what was it about glyptodonts that they couldn't handle at the end of the Palistocene. So I do all this well, and then here's the gotcha. Come around. I know you, Yeah, what was it about those? Or take something else like a mammoth. I don't know. I don't know. They're extinct animals, and because we don't know their physiology, their adaptation, we know something about their habitats. But here's where we're going to get past the impast We're gonna get past the impast with ancient DNA because now we're sequencing their their genomes and we know now well, for some species, we know now that their genetic diversity was collapsing towards the end of the Palistocene. We know now that their populations were collapsing towards the end of the Palistocene. We're still not entirely sure why this is happening, but it has nothing to do with people, because it's happening pre people. Okay, so we are going to start to get those answers. This is a hundred and fifty year old question that people have been struggling with. I mean, Charles Lyell, the British geologist who was here in the eighteen forties, wrote about this saying, you know, why do all these big animals go extinct? We're going to have an answer in the next couple of decades, I would predict, man, I don't want to do this. It's not a gotcha. You ask me the gotcha question, but it's not. It's not meant to be like a bad gotcha? What about? What about? What about? Right? What about? This is? What about is m what about? I don't want to get two sidetracked here. But when when they were laying who was the guy that laid out the famous he published blitz Creek hypothesis. Wonderful guy, the terrific guy. When it was so you don't have animosity? Oh no, no, I liked Paul when it was laid out. There were examples like Rangle Island in this Okay, Rangle Island, the Bearing Sea held on to him until four thousand years ago. And it just so happens that mugs hadn't showed up. They still went extinct. They weren't extinct before people ever made it there. I thought it was like contemporary people eventually did. In fact, there's some really interesting research that um Well Best Shapiro and Russ Graham were just involved in on St. Paul's Island, um where basically they showed that, uh, these these mammoths were surviving past the end of the ice age. Um, they were shrinking because basically they had the shrinking, shrinking body size. Yeah, there simply wasn't enough to support them. Sea levels were coming up, the island was getting smaller, um, they were running out of fresh water. There were all sorts of things, and basically they ultimately vanished. And I think it's around well ahead of here's part two of the got you okay? Good? And then then leave it's rest. Then they point out that humans have always been in Africa and humans co evolved with what makes you think animals didn't go extinct in Africa as well? I'm just I'm talking. We're talking about we're talking about elephants. Okay, I am sure. That's a great point. That's a great point. That's but that's the thing people say, I'm about arguing this to you. Tell me, I'm relating to you like an argument you're very familiar with. It's always like, okay, so elephants vanished virtually everywhere, um that they exist except these elephant species in Alaska or I'm sorry, in Africa. Hang on, it must be because they were used to people and that people couldn't kill them all because they co evolved. That's the thing folks say. Yeah, Okay, I'm not quite sure that it really has much meaning. But in any case, you don't even like the Well, can you do a better job of saying what I'm trying to say? Um? Well, let me put it this way. My my colleague Jim O'Connell, who worked with the Hazza in Africa, the Hadza don't describe elephants as animals. They describe them as enemies. They don't mess with elephants. Go back and read Teddy Roosevelt's encounter with a bull elephant. When he got out of the White House, he went on a murderous spree in Africa collecting. That's a big word for sure. Go ahead. He didn't my favorite food. He was stuffing it and sending it to New York. But on display, Um and read his encounter with a bull elephant and he darn near died uh in the encounter. Okay, Uh, these are nasty animals, and whether people were hunting them or not, uh, it's pretty doubtful. Okay, But let's get to the sort of larger question about the climate. If you put the extinctions in context, what you see is that all sorts of things are happening at the end of the place to see in North America. But you almost started saying something he did. Did a bunch of stuff go extinct in Africa? Some did? Yeah? Yeah, not as not as massive and as constrained geologically in geological time as in the Americas. Okay, Um, what happened in Europe in parts of Europe and parts of Eurasia. Absolutely no, we lose mammoths in Eurasia. Yeah, Um, you have massive range changes. Caribou don't live in the southeast US anymore, Muskoks don't live in Tennessee anymore, and so you've got these ecological changes that are taking place. Um, Biota are dissolving, plants and animals are moving all. That's a really interesting point about muskox I've never thought about then. I mean, if you okay, if they found muskoks remains in Tennessee, you're saying, and you look at the fringe that they inhabited at the time of European contact, you were it's like you had ten fingers, they were down to a pinky, you know what I'm saying. It's interesting thing like they were probably close. Yeah, it could have been close to being gone or something, you know, uh well, or they just found their niche. Uh and it's a very good niche. And in fact, they would have been highly vulnerable human hunting. And they're still around. I mean, what's there. What's their defensive strategies? They all get heads out, heads out, butts in. Right, it's like a faculty. And and it works with wolves. But if a bunch of hunters show up and they want to kill off all the muscocks, they're they're just standing targets, right. Okay, But let's get back to the larger picture. Massive range changes, massive ecological changes, um, lots of extinctions. Birds go extinct, You've got snakes going extinct. You've got reptiles going extinct. You've got turtles going extinct. You've got a spruce tree going extinct. There's and Paul Martin actually tried to come up with an explanation as to why humans would have overkilled a spruce tree. No, Um, it has something to do with forest burning or something. It didn't work this tree, oh yeah, uh oh yeah, And and so all of these things are happening. So extinctions, if you rip it out of its context, it looks. Oh my god, this is horrible. Humans showed up. They must be the cause. Well, did humans also cause all these other kinds of things going on? No, it was the end of the Pleistocene. Now let's get to the gotcha question that I wanted you to ask me. Just going to ask, So, why is it that they didn't go extinct during the previous interglacial? Okay, we've been cycling through ice ages for the last two plus million years. Okay, So why is it that all these animals didn't go extinct and twenty five thousand years ago the last time we had a warming event. Why did they only wait until ten thou plus years ago to go extinct? And the answer is is that, well, some of them did disappear. A lot of those species weren't around during the previous interglacial. We actually don't know that much about the previous intergl acial. In terms of what we know about the last previous interglacial is from deep sea cores. We have no idea what's going on in the landscape. We don't have good records of changes in the vegetation, changes in the ecosystem, changes in the environment. It was all demolished by the ice sheets. Well, because we just don't have good we don't have good samples of it. I mean, this is stuff that's a hundred and twenty five years old. You can probably count on one hand the number of pollen cores vegetation records that we have from a hundred and years ago. There's just no data, right, So you can't say, well, they should have all gone extinct in the previous interglacial if it was climate. We don't know what that looked like, right, We still don't know what this interglacial, this transition from the ice Age to the not ice Age. We're still not fully aware of this, and we won't be aware of its effects on these animals until we do each of these animals individually, because we've got to figure out what is it about a glyptodont that it couldn't handle? What is it about the giant ever that it couldn't handle? What might be an example, like any example, okay, and then then we'll move on to our checklist. But what may be any example when you say that it couldn't handle it? So one of the things that happens at the end of the ice age is that obviously it gets warmer, and there's a change in the composition of the plains grassland, grasses grass right when you look at it, when it's on your lawn or whatever. But in fact, there's very distinctive kinds of grass species that occupy that that create that landscape of the Great Plains um and they're designated by particular carbon pathways. Their CE three grasses, Sea four grasses. These are grasses that grow predominantly in the summer, and then there's winter grasses. Well at the end of the plaista scene Sea four grasses. And this is a hypothesis that I've sort of kicked around for a few years and and I'm still not convinced it's correct and definitely needs testing. But you wanted a for instance, at the end of the place to see the plains grassland becomes dominantly C four Now Sea four grasses um have anti herbivory toxins. It taste terrible and um they are not easily digested unless well, one of the principal Sea four grasses is buffalo grass. Buffalo love the stuff mammoth. They don't have the same kind of gut systems that bison do, and so they're on a landscape where the resources to them, the food forage to them is shrinking, right, and it's becoming more toxic to them. Well, the expanding grasses are becoming more toxic to them. H And suddenly they're getting out competed by bison. Bison populations are expanding, mammoth, horse, camel. They can't cope. One other assibility that people have suggested, which um Again, it's gonna be hard to tell and test until we get that really high resolution data. But imagine this. You're in the middle of an ice age, and for a variety of reasons ice age um climates were more equable. And by that what we mean is that you had cooler summers, warmer winters. Nowadays, out on the central part of North America we have really hot summers and really cold winters. Okay, during the Pleistocene actually wasn't so bad for a variety of reasons, not least that you had this massive ice sheet parked over Canada, blocking cold Arctic air from coming south. Yeah. When you say the extremes, I mean you could live in a northern tier state and you live in uh, you live in something that can very consistently swing hundred twenty degree temperature swings absolutely, like it's not unusual to get a negative twenty winter day, and it's not unusual to get over a hundred summer day. You've been in North Dakota. So now what that means is that if if you're an elephant and you've been producing calves and it takes you twenty two months to grow another elephant and and have that elephant child, Um, you've been used to having that elephant in, say March. Well, during the Pleistocene, March wasn't so bad. But what happens when that climate shifts from a more equable to a more continental, big swing and temperature suddenly March instead of being you know, it's kind of almost spread. Is the word you're saying when you say equable equable e q U a B equator Like exactly. I thought you were saying equitable meaning equal. Yeah, and then continental continental is really strong swings in temperature. So San Francisco versus North Dakota. Okay, so you've been you've been birthing baby mammoths all this time in March, and suddenly March damn cold freezing, there's nothing to eat and the baby dies, Well, it takes you another twenty two months to make another one. You can't respond that quickly. And then how many every years to bring it for to achieve sexual maturity? Right? Well, exactly right? And how many are you going to have over the course of a reproductive lifetime? Four five? You know you you sort of knocked them, knock the knees out from under them in terms of their reproductive cycle. And yeah, you can drive mixed in pretty quickly, but these are just you know, sort of arm wavy things. Well, no, I understand that. You're like, yeah, we don't know upon request, you're taking shots at what what sorts of things? Yeah? I know him the first to admit. You know, people say, well, you've got to have a climate alternative. If you're gonna say it's not overkill, well no, I don't because we don't have the evidence. We know the kinds of things that we need, but we don't have any of that evidences yet and we need to get it. So there's pressure to to cleanly replace the blitz creek or the overkill hypothesis. Someone would want to be like, okay, if not that, then prove oh no, I'd love to have an answer for him. But this is this is the thing I think in in ten years down the road, twenty years down the road, we are going to have those answers and it's going to come at the molecular level. It's going to come out of the DNA. Yeah, that's the cool thing, not hout narrowheads. No, No, we're still gonna be doing it. But that's not where the answer is gonna be. Can can we jump to projectile points? Okay? Lay it out the the obsession with them in the early years of your discipline, I was it was like this diagnostic tool, and talked about that a little bit to approach. You know, that's a really good way to describe it, to use the term diagnostic, because um, these are artifacts. I mean, these books had all sorts of tools, right, we have fixated on that class of projectile points their weaponry because they invested a lot of effort in it. They invested a lot of effort in the manufacturer, They invested a lot of effort in finding the right stone, uh in hafting it, attaching it to the end of a spear um and they were doing as as I mentioned earlier, they spent more effort on it than was warranted by the task at hand. Okay, you feel that's you feel that's true. You know, Um, it was fancier than it needed to be. You can't help but look at some of the stonework and some of the ways in which they flaked their artifacts too match up with you know, lines in the stone or bands or anything like that, and you can't help but think that's a human on the other side of that. Somebody was looking at that and had I mean, look, when you guys go out hunting, you have particular weapons, you take care of them. You might I don't know what do you do to sort of dress up your your guns or your bows. I mean you accessor rise, but nothing that well, I'm probably not looking at it right. Someone else might look at it and think that there are esthetic modifications, but off top of my head, I don't think of Yeah. Okay, but if you're if you're living on a landscape where you have relatively little material culture around you, right, and one of the things that's emblematic of your group is to make these protect these projectile points in a particular way. Um, you're going to invest in those things because you want people to see you remember the group. You're a good flint napper, You've been places, You've collected this really cool stone. And because you're investing in that you as an ancient hunter gatherer, we as archaeologists can use that because the style and the stylistic attributes that they are adding to their weaponry, the stuff that goes beyond what's necessary to kill that animal is diagnostic of time and of group. Enough space. Yeah, because someone's listening and you grab your phone and look, you know, type up folesome point, go to images and it's it's distinctive, it's it's Yeah, the minute you look, you'd be like, oh, I get it. Yep, there's nothing that looks like that, nothing at all, and so um, it's helpful to us. So the reason we have this fixation, and it's it's not always a healthy fixation, but the reason we have this fixation on their projectile points is that they tell us so much. Okay, and especially in the absence of radiocarbon dating, you know you've got a falsome side if you've got these points, unless you know, you were just darn unlucky and somebody happened to have found a falsome point and brought it into a pueblo, in which case you're gonna have to say, well, that probably doesn't belong there. Um. The downside of that is that we've been neglectful of all the other tools in the tool kit which you're doing most of the work. You know, the scrapers, the knives, the gravers, the drills, the alls. How many tools might someone have had, like like like an ice age family, what they what might they have had? Um? You know, the answer is probably in some of the burial caches that we have where uh, individuals had died and somebody basically left their tool kit with them. Uh. And there's a well known site, uh Crowfield in Ontario, and off the top of my head, I'm thinking several dozen um, and I could be quite mistaken about the number uh by faces and scrapers and points were found with the no no actual physical human remains were found, but there was a kind of a burned area, so it looked as though it was a a cremation burial and the only thing that survives is the stone. And of course the stone got put in the cremation, so it it popped and crazed and and broke. UM. But yeah, you could probably. I mean, stone may actually have been the least of the things that you had to deal with this year. As you're slepping across the landscape. Uh, you know, are you bringing material for building structures, are you carrying children? All that stuff? Yeah, cordage clothing as you bone bone products. And I'm glad you mentioned cordage because in fact, um we may be missing the vast majority of their tools. There are sites that where preservation is really really good, and the number of non stone artifacts would artifacts in particular by a factor of six six times more of that stuff than there is of stone tools. We get fixated on stone tools because that's all we got. One of the things you you get at, uh in your book Folsome is you talk about the Folsome type site and what the people who first dug it will looking for. They wanted big bones and big stone tools. Well, first they just everything else went into a pile right because it wasn't of interest. And then then later became like really like all the stuff that they weren't paying attention to that was so instructive. They this was the nine twenties, and what they really wanted first off was just a a bison to put on display. So these were museum folks out of Denver and they just wanted to find a bison that they could rearticulate and put on display. And up until about ten it doesn't look like the ones we have now, much bigger, much bigger, And up until about ten years ago you could see it at at what was then the Colorado Museum in Natural History which is now the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And then when they realized artifacts were there, uh, the site became especially important to a broader audience because those bison were extinct, and in those pre radio carpon days when you had no way of determining how old something was, if you found an artifact wedged between the ribs of a now extinct animal, you knew that somebody had been around at the time that animal was alive. And so fulsome became terribly important in n seven because it was the very first site where you could definitively say there was a hunter, there was an ice age animal, and that hunter killed that ice age animal, and then they just you know, that's it, We're done. Uh. And seventy years later when we went back to the site, there were so many fundamental questions that hadn't been answered in the nineteen twenties because well, they just wanted to find out how old it was. I wanted to find out what was the environment like, what was the site like, what were the activities that took place there? How many animals were killed? What was the season of the year. Uh, did they camp there? Did they spend a winter there? Uh? And ultimately uh, when we spent three years excavating there and got a lot out of the site. The site's very famous, not because of what we did there, but because of its role in the history of archaeology. But we were really pleased to be able to go back there and learn a lot more about it. We're off, we're way off rejectile points. But you tell the story. But in your book, you tell the story of George mcjunkin. Yes, the guy that that that found it. He was a am I right that he was. He was a freed slave or the son of a freed's. George mcjunkin was born a slave in pre Civil War Texas, and he took the name mcjunkin from his owner. And after the Civil War he made his way into northeastern New Mexico and George. George must have been a remarkable man because after the great flood of Fulsome which cut this arroyo in, sized it deeply and exposed the bones, George was doing what every good cowboy does after a storm. He went out and he was checking his fence lines, and he looked down in what was probably about a twelve ft deep cut and saw bones. Now, um, I think a lot of cowboys looking down seeing bones would have just said, oh, bones and kept going. George got off his horse and he went down into the arroyo and he looked at the bones and he said to himself, we assume these are not cowbones. These are buffalo bones, and they're really big. And we know he thought something about him because he told people about him. George was an amateur naturalist. When you see pictures of George, there's very few of them, but in one of them he's on his horse and in the um scabbard where you keep your rifle. He had a telescope. He wasn't interested in shooting coyotes. He was interested in seeing what he could see with his telescope. So he made frequent trips over to Ratone and there was a sort of a kindred spirit there. Fellow by name of Karl Schwaheim who was the blacksmith in the village of her Tone, and Carl had a wonderful fountain outside his house where two male bull elks had gotten into Mortal Kombat. Their antlers had locked and they died, and Carl thought that was pretty cool, so he made a fountain out of it out of the racks. And George would stop by and and talk to Carl, and he told Carl, he said, you know, on this ranch, on the crow Foot ranch where I've been working, where on the ranch, foreman, I've I found these old bones. And it took years, but Carl finally got up there. Uh sadly after um mcjunkin died. Yeah, I I uh went to this site and wrote a piece about mcjunkin And this kind of thing that happens is that he so desperately wanted someone to come look, and then he dies and they finally go look, and then like, holy ship, this guy found something really others well, so they took the bones up to Denver and they said, you know, hey, there's there's a bunch of bison bones. And so that's when Denver got interested them museum to say, oh, sure we could use one for display. Uh. And so that's they subsequently went down there but again a few years later uh and started excavating and then realized, oh, this isn't just a bunch of bones, there's actually stone tools down here. What's going on? That's when they started. In fact, Karl Schwaheim, our village blacksmith, was hired to do the excavations. So he was He spent the summer of working largely by himself. And I can tell you from having dug that site that it was hard work. He had to dig through about nine or ten ft of lake clay's which if you've ever tried to shovel that stuff, it's hard, hard work. But he got down to the bone bed. Uh. He exposed it. Unfortunately that first summer, Uh, the artifact that he found popped out of the ground before he had a chance to see where it came from. But everybody got all excited and they said next year go back excavate again, but be more careful. And and that was the year that he exposed something, realized it was in place, realized it was literally between two ribs and stopped the presses or stop all activity, alert the press, get everybody out here, and folks came and witnessed it in place. It was literally one of those things where you sort of you lay your hands on it and say, okay, this is real. Uh. And one of the people that came to see it was a fellow miham A vy Kidder, who was at the time a god in the discipline. He was one of the most famous archaeologists in North America. He came, he saw, he blessed it. And and it's a comment about the way science works when somebody of that status looks at that site and says, I'm a believer. What are you going to say? What you say is I'm with him. I agree. Uh. And so from that moment on, Fulsome became sort of the anchor point of the first people into the Americas with their very distinctive Falsome point. You know what, you still old it because I was gonna do I was gonna do a remarkable bit of hosting where I brought us back to projectile points, but point by by pointing out that that name, the town of Falsom, New Mexico, was then bestowed upon the projectile point that was found there, the very diagnostic falsome point exactly right well down on it as a host. Yeah, well I was gonna do that, and then you did it. Yeah sorry, um, so fulsome point in the projectile point conversation people used to there there was falsome point. Everyone agreed that fulsome came after Clovis. They didn't know that yet. They didn't know that, okay. So Clovis gets discovered about half a dozen years later, and at first they weren't sure what to do with it because they looked at Clovis points. Now, Falsome points are really nice and thin, they're very sharp, they're very well made. You look at Clovis points and they're kind of larger and clunkier and thicker, and you think to yourself, it's fe horse exactly. So you think, okay, well, the clunkier ones they must have maybe they came later. Everybody sort of forgot what they were doing. No, um, they didn't. They didn't know the relative age of these things. And it wasn't until about five years into the excavations at the Clovis site, which took place between nineteen thirty three and about nineteen thirty eight that they finally realized that Clovis points were being found below the levels in which Falsome points were being found, and so therefore where are they both found at the Clovis gravel pit? What were people doing there? Hanging out? Someone dropped a fulsome point and then thousands of years later a guy drops the Clovis point. Now, first they dropped the Clovis point, then several thousand years later, Yeah, yeah, um, okay, So you're out on the high plains. You've been out on the high plains, right. It's not a lot of water. The Clovis site is one of those wonderful spring fed o a c's in the middle of a vast, semi arid environment. Every animal, you know, within a certain radius is going to come out there for a drink. Hunters were using that spot for thousands and thousands of years, and so they were drawn to it, and the first folks that were drawn to it we're Clovis people. And then they killed some mammoths in there. Uh, they scavenged some mammoths and some of them they killed. One of the things that's really interesting. People make a big deal about folks hunting elephants, and you know, you get this romantic image in your head of a bunch of brave guys with sharp pointy sticks killing this trumpeting animal. Oh there you go. Burn Well, several of the mammoths at um at the Clovis site had already died. And we know this because they were literally prying apart their feet after the rigor mortis had set in. They were scavenging the carcasses. They weren't killing these things. Now, some of them were genuinely killed, right, we have we have absolutely unequivocal evidence that people did kill these l because there was there was a skull well the projectile point. But then that was questioned, right, like project like a thing stuck in its eye socket. But then later people thought that it was just someone just did it after the fact they came out of the black Water draw site. That doesn't I mean, you know better me? Yeah, I know, You're gonna have to home a few more bars before I get that one. I'm not sure. I okay. What I had heard there was like that there was somehow in the history of this site someone had produced skull that has a Clovis point stuck in the eye socket and then someone later felt, I think that that projectile point was added to that skull nowadays, Yeah, that would be a pretty stupid place. If you can get to reach the offense, I you're probably in bigger trouble than it was. Whatever the story I heard was, it was it was questionable. Yeah, there was no questionable in C. Two. Is that the word you guys use institution associated? Um? No, these guys were literally prying apart already did elephants, and and they're only partially butchered because they're in a pond. Right, if you're gonna drop a big animal, are you going to drop a big animal in the mud? And if you do, how are you getting it out of the mud? That's a problem. Oh, this kind of thing happens. But sure it's not ideal. It's definitely not ideal, and especially if the animal weighs four tons and you know, so, what are you gonna do? Well, parts of it are kind of sticking out above the mud. You slice off some steaks and you're done. Or you come onto a recently dead animal and you think, yeah, it doesn't smell that bad and you kind of get some meat out of it. Now again, I emphasize that there are a few sites where it's absolutely clear that that people were that we're praying on live animals. But then there's also sites where some of these animals got away, they got shot. There's a very famous mammoth site in southern Arizona, the Nacho site. It's got eight Clovis points stuck in it. It's like a pincushion. But it wasn't butchered. It must have escaped some carnage somewhere and went off to die at eight points in it. Who's got those points? Uh? The Arizona State Museum man pay it late night visits. Really, I never heard that story. But they never got it butcher, they never butchered it. Yeah, there's there's several others that are like that. So people were losing stuff too. Yeah, well, you know the animal I mean, these are highly mobile. These these animals can travel. These animals can book it and you know, if you're not. Uh well. One of the things that we think about the Nachos site is that it was an escape ee from another kill, so that they were busy chowing down on the animals that they had killed and saying, yeah, I forget him, got him eight times. Yeah, I realized now we're gonna have to have a part two. But I wanna, um, because one of the things I want to talk about was, and it's nothing you talk about your books, is the don't even answer because this is part two. Sometimes we can will bother you, wait a year, and then bother you again. Um. That the love affair with these guys being these like big hunters and missing and I was kind of alluding to it when I got to what what they were interested in at the fulsome site and your argument of that they probably had like an enormously very diet shellfish, plant matter, small mammals that just isn't we don't see it. And then when people would find sites, they weren't looking for it. Yeah, I mean they didn't know what to say, like, oh, yeah, they're like eating little turtles, they're cracking clams open, you know whatever. Um, I'll answer you now, but we'll save it for part two. That's fine, because I do have one more question I'm gonna ask about for part one for part one. It has to do with the projectile points. Fair enough, So the anticipation of the question in part two is that you know we've got so many of these mammoth kills. Well, those are really easy to find archaeologically. Um. I I spent quite a number of years working on the high plains of West Texas, and I can tell you how many times I climbed a windmill to look out across the landscape and I could see an old pluvial lake basin a quarter of a mile away, and I could see an elephant tusk eroding out on the surface. It just gleamed white. Does happened to you? Oh yeah, And so I would just get down off the windmill and I'd go hike over there through the dunes to look at the lake basin and sure enough, oh, there's an elephant here, and then I look around for artifacts. Well that's how most of these sites were found. There's a reason these guys were big game hunters. It's because archaeologists we're only looking for the big bones. But it's it's excusable because what the hell is here supposed to go? By George mcjunkin, You know, I mean, you're just explaining George mac junkin saw a bunch of big bones. Yeah. No, I'm not going to climb up that that windmill tower and see, Oh look there were a bunch of mice that were killed over there. Yeah, it's not gonna be visible to you. So it creates this little bit of it. When I was looking into this um and in writing about some of the stuff I encountered, I can't remember who it was. I do remember who it was, but I don't want to. I don't want to say who it was because she didn't say it in the nicest possible way. It was It was a It was a woman um who spoke somewhat negatively of the Bison boys, and she had it in her head as she explained to me, that it was like this these big, macho western guy cowboys who love the story of the big bison hunters, the mammoth hunters, and it that's and they all like to hunt and oh yeah. And then it was like they're there's sort of like their dream of these like hunters. And it caused just in this mindset, caused to miss all these other things that maybe weren't is romantic to think about, which people like traveling down the coast eating clams. Right. No, she's not wrong, she's not wrong at all. Um. There's a I mean we all bring our own particular baggage to our science, and you know, we try and subvert the subjectiveness in in our inquiries, right we want to go where the evidence will take us, um. In my case, so I started doing archaeology when I was fifteen, and I was working on a Clovis site in Virginia, and I remember how desperate we were to find mammoth bones, because well, if it's a legitimate Clovis site, there's gotta be a dead elephant here or something, because they are never more intent from elephants, right um. And it was a spectacular site because it was sitting literally right on a church source, and they were making all these fabulous stone tools, and we had detailed records of literally individuals sitting there cross legged, napping a stone tool, standing up and walking away, and you could still see the artifacts that had rained down on either side of their crossed legs, and they got covered up almost immediately, and it still preserved ten thousand plus years later, and I thought, well, this is really cool, but no elephants. And I remember this was nineteen so this was the second season of their nineteen seventy two Hurricane agnes Is bearing down on the East coast and we are down in a pit ten twelve feet below the surface and we found what that's how deep this stuff is? Oh yeah, well in that particular site, Yeah, we found what we thought was a mammoth vertebrae. And I remember how excited everybody was and how how anxious everybody was because you know the hurricanes coming. We're literally right on the edge of the Shanandoah River, rivers rising fast, um, and everybody works late into the night to get this thing out of the ground. We get it back to the lab and in the sort of smoky glow of these lanterns, it gets cleaned up and we discover it's a piece of court site doing a really good imitation of a mammoth vertebrae. And I remember how how just busted everybody was. Yeah, and all the older kids got to go off and get stoned and drink and you know, I'm just sixteen. What am I doing? Um? And it really it It was a memory for me that I thought to myself, why were we so disappointed? What was it about it? And what what was it that made this site somehow inadequate? That we didn't have a dead elephant in it. And so I mean you asked earlier, was I ever an over killer? Well, no, I mean that was part of my my growing up experience as an archaeologists was I thought to myself, you know, maybe we've been letting our expectations drive the way we do our field work, or the kinds of anticipations that we have for what we're going to mind at an archaeological site. Maybe we need to sort of clear all that clutter out of our heads and try and think, you know, what does the record actually tell us? And to what degree is that record biased by what we're looking for as opposed to seeing what's in front of us. Before I get to my last question, uh, the thing I'd like to think about is that our thinking is still riddled with them. And you know, in in in in your fifty years from now, people will be laughing. I don't mean this isn't any I don't mean it's as an insult. Five years now, if you will be laughing at some of your assumptions, I I will be disappointed. If they don't, I will be disappointed they got lazy. Yeah, It's like, come on, people work hard, There's there's mistakes in here. You just gotta find them. Yeah. No, I mean you want science to improve, you want our understanding of the past to get better, and the only way to do that is to question your assumptions. Historical inertia is a very powerful force. You think what your teachers told you to think. Um, you you go with what the conventional wisdom is, and you don't cross examine it enough. You've got to cross examine that conventional wisdom. The thing I found with the people who are remarkable in this space, and I'll put you and I feel Bath Shapiro. I mean, you guys probably don't think of yourself in the same space, but you know, interesting old stuff. That's a good space. Um, they're not, You're not. She's not that in love with their ideas. It can be the ideas of Like it's like a thing I'm holding, I'm checking it out, I'm curious about it, but I'm not cradling it close to my you know, chest, so no one can come near it. Well, that's that's probably a hard position to hold. Well. That was the thing that was so wonderful and frustrating about Paul Martin, who again wonderful character. He was so good at ropa dope that when you'd pin him down on pleistocene overkill, he very quickly move away and he'd give you another counter argument. Oh damn it. Okay, so wait a minute, can counter your counter And he was so great at defending his argument um that in some ways it was kind of a caricature because it wasn't dead. Yeah he passed away gosh a while ago, no um, but again a lovely man and and very clever, And he was so fixated on defending his theory that he didn't say, Okay, well what is the alternative. I'm right, you should never be in the position of defending your theory. You should always be in the position of trying to kill it. Yeah, that's good advice. See it kind of messes up the flow. But I can't resist asking the last question. You want? That be a great place to end, you know, I was talking about remarkable hosting a remarkable holes would just be like we just end. I'm not uh, because one lasting I want to I want you want to go back. I want to get a better understanding, and I want you to explain to people that, uh, we just we make some different things. We we have a shirt, we just came out with UM, and it's it's like a very rough it's it's a very rough, like history of North American projectile points all way have to like a modern mechanical modern LK crunting point is it's really rough, right, And I knew that when we put the shirt out, um that all the know it alls to be like, oh you you forgot this, and you're so stupid you forgot that. And so I in unveiling the design, um, which it did on on a platform I'm guessing you don't spend a ton of time on called Instagram, and unveiling the design, four followers, Oh I'm gonna blow you up. We're gonna blow you up. So in unveiling the design, uh, I headed the naysayers off by saying, um, this is an approximation. There were many there were many false starts. Oh go ahead, can you pull it up? Oh you want to see it? Yeah, you're easy to find. We're gonna find the wrestling writer. So I say, like the shirts an approximation. These some of these technologies, um, some of these technologies, uh even like modern ones, like they kind of started and didn't catch on. And so this shirt just kind of shows like a rough outline of how these things came about. And I said, for instance, you could make a week's worth of T shirts showing what happened from pre Clovis to like the Woodland or whatever point I made, And a lot of guys on they were like, so glad you are not acknowledged pre Clovis, which is funny because I'm sure you guys are way beyond that. But there was a debate when I was like, when I was getting curious about this, and I met a mutual a guy that you were friends with, and I became friends with him, Tony Baker. Um. When we met, I like it, he are you reviewing the shirt? Like, yeah, but it's it's not in stratigraphic order. You have to have the oldest at the bottom, youngest at the top. Yeah, when you dig into a site, you don't get the oldest stuff at the top. So you got your clothes point right there. I'm not going to complain about anything else about that shirt. It's your shirt. You do whatever you want anyone. So when when I was dabbling in this stuff, there was this sort of debate where there was like people who argued right Clovis. First that this idea that that Clovis hunters were the ones that found the closed arms, were the ones that the first were the first Americans. And then the counter argument, which I think one which one right, is that Clovis emerged as this distinctly American culture. That's absolutely true, from some other group or some some people who had we don't know, from some other technology. It's the part we don't know. So you're absolutely right. The Clovis point is the very first American invention. Right. There's nothing in Siberia like this. There's nothing in Asia like this. Okay, so that was made here, made in America. Who made it? Do you think they stamped it made in America? Well, um, we're not going to go political, but it was made by immigrants, dam it. Um. So you've got this, uh, this Clovis point. But you've also got pre Clovis people here making stuff. And the real question is in terms of populations, what's the relationship between the Clovis folks and the people who were here before Clovis. Are they ancestor descendant? Are they two different groups? Um? And here's where once again that's interesting, man, that there was that there were groups that coexisted, but we actually don't know that, um to be sure, because is you know, pre Clovis stuff. We've got back now to fourteen seven, let's just say, fifteen thousand, rounded on, and they didn't make that point, and Clovis folks are making this point. Was your point cooler or less cool? Um? It just vary depending on where you were it was. It was it as crafty? Um, well, the ones at Montaverti are pretty crafty. Yeah, you look at me like, wow, oh absolutely, no, that's serious stonework. Um. So yeah. So the question is we as archaeologists can look at the points at a place like monta Verde and say, okay, well that doesn't look at all like Clovis, but could they be historically related? We have no way of telling, right, just a couple of different kinds of rocks and they're separated by two thousand years and several thousand miles. If we could get a genome of a pre Clovis person, we would know for sure what the relationship was between pre Clovis and Clovis, because at the moment we have a Clovis genome, and we know we've got lots of genoe him out of Montana exactly right. And we've got lots of genomes that are younger than Clovis. And we know basically everybody in the America's at the genomic level is related. Now they can be more or less distantly related, but they're all related. So the real, you know, the sixty dollar question that's still lnkering out there is what about earlier than Clovis? Um? We actually tried Eskis group tried to get um d NA out of some of the material from Monte Verde and was unsuccessful. Ah, so we're still looking. Uh, I'm gonna ask you what the odds are that we'll find someone, and if we do, what are the odds that it's gonna melt out of the perma frost in Alaska? And I'll point out by another person we both know, Mike cons Sure. I was describing him like, what would be the coolest thing that you could find? And he says, I remember him painting a picture of I'm flying along, you know, and his helicopter absolutely, and they're sticking out of a glacier. Is a damn hand you know? That actually sounded like my um, yeah, that would actually be pretty cool. Um, do you think we'll find something? You know, you never say never in archaeology, but it's but we've got I guess the problem is right, there's one, you got one good Clovis one. Yeah. But here's the thing about d n A. When you're looking at a genome, you're actually looking at thousands of ancestors because each of those letters in that DNA alphabet, the gees, the seas, the tse, the as um, are getting inherited from an expanding network of ancestors. So with a single genome, you're actually seeing lots of different populations that have contributed to the DNA of that individual. So we actually now we just published last fall um a paper which had some genomes from South America which have a signal which we think is real of UM, a distant austral Asian ancestor. So we know that there are other folks that are out there that are contributing to the d n A of Native Americans. What we don't have at the moment is a full genome of somebody who is not on that direct um that is pre Clovis in age right, and that may or may not be on that same Native American chain of ancestry back to Asia. My my gut feeling, uh is my gut is I don't know. Actually, I'm not going to make any predictions. You know, the archaeology of pre Clovis versus Clovis is so different. Do you think to yourself, Oh, there's gotta be different people. But one of the things that we found out is that you can have very distinctive archaeological records and yet genomically these populations are closely related. So yeah, people do different things. Some people drive one car, some people drive another style of car, same thing. How much time has to go by before I email you come back on and you'd be like really receptive to do it? A year? Um, sure we can talk in a year. I can call you a year, to email a year in a year, when I in a year and whatever in a year, in three months, when I get young June and when you come out here. Something I'm gonna ask about. I want to ask you about, uh, some of the discredited theories that have come up about who the first Americans were. I want to ask you about the idea of successional waves, that it wasn't like one group that showed up and then all Native Americans. But there could have been groups have showed up in, they petered out, they got killed off, they starved to death, and then other groups came in and replaced them. The thing about that ancient people were interested in what they regarded as ancient people and moved their stuff around a little bit, meaning they're like, oh, that's a cool looking projectile point, and they bring it home and to their TV and lay it with their special ship that they like. Um, this is a handful things I want to talk about next time we have you. All right, here's here's the deal that we can cut. Um. I'm just now finished the new edition of First Peoples in the New World. So you told me mine's obsolete. Now, Oh it's horribly obsolete. Yeah, no, it's don't even read it. It's too late. Now sit out on my coffee table. Well, forget everything you knew about it. Block it out of your mind. Um, when it comes out, let's have a conversation. How's that. That's a good time. And I'll be prompted to because I'll see it and I'll be like, that's right, that guy, that's right, that's right. I got a coffee table that needs a book. Thank you seriously this uh and I'm still gonna stand by my earlier statement. My favorite guest we've ever had on Dr David J. Meltzer s M. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, everyone, thanks for listening. Again. And if I said it once, I staid a thousand times. Please go check out our feature length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars in the Sky. You can find it at Stars in the Sky film dot com. It is available for streaming and download. Again, do us yourself a good turn, do us a good turn Stars in the Sky. Find it at Stars in the Sky film dot com. You can stream it, you can download it, and you can watch it again and again. Thank you.