00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything, alright. First off, if you're listening to this before you go, do whatever you're gonna do while you listen, like drive your car or cooked dinner or something. Um, go to on iTunes or on Stitcher what have you, and give this here podcast a super good review, because that's helpful, real helpful, And it's like testimony to the stinginess and cruelty of society that less than one percent of the people who listen to this show have gone and given it a review on iTunes. In other news, we get a lot of people always ask about hats and shirts and stuff the merch stores like back up and running at the meat eater dot com. And another thing that comes up is people are always after they listen to shows, um, wondering about books, music ideas that were discussed on the show. 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And some of those books are written by our guest, Dan Flores, whose house we're in right now. Can I see the road you live on? Uh? You almost see? Well, you can? I mean, so we're seventeen miles southwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, not in Madrid. Now, we're not in uh Madrid, We're not in Syria's uh but kind of in the vicinity and within looking distance of what might be the oldest mine a turquoise mine, the oldest mine in North America. Yeah, very possibly the oldest mine and what is now the United States. I mean, we're sitting here on the couch looking out the screen door, and that mine is in view about four miles away. It's called Chalcey wheedle, which is an Aztec word. Um. Not that the the Aztec Indians lived here, this was Pueblo country, but the Pueblos traded turquoise all the way down into Central America, and uh, that turquoise made a really big splash among the Aztecs, who have a glyph for this little mountain where the mine is in the Temple of the Sun in Mexico City or or did have it. And so, yeah, this is a pretty major site for ancient North American archaeology. What did the what did the people here call it? Well, is that not known? Yeah, I don't think they don't. I'm not sure what the word was that the Pueblo Indians had for. But there was a pueblo here about five or six miles away that was basically a pueblo of miners responsible for mining the turquoise in the Surreos Hills. That pueblo was called sam Marcus Pueblo and it was part of the Chaco Canyon complex a thousand years ago, and this part of the world there was a major civilization that was basically orchestrated by a place we now called Choco, which is a National Historical Park in northwestern New Mexico. And it had far flung communities all over this part of the world, all the way over into Arizona present day Colorado, Utah, New Mexico. And this was a mining town that was part of that complex. Is it uh? Is it true to that Chocko ca. I think he told me this before, that it Chaco Canyon in present day. We didn't really understand it until you get up above it and aircraft and look down on it to understand how it's configured. Yeah, I think uh, I mean I might have said something like that and some of our conversations from years ago when we were in Missoula. And the reason that's the case is because what archaeologists have learned about Choco fairly recently in the last twenty five or so years, is that a lot of the buildings Pueblo Benito, for example, which was kind of the Indian version of the Vatican really uh in North America thousand years ago. It was laid out according to solstices and equinoxes. The sun rises over the Chaco Valley at solstice and equinox, and so the lines of the buildings were laid out in that way. And what archaeologists realized when I mean, I think they knew this for quite a while, but looking down on it from aerial views, they realized that this is a civilization that built an elaborate road network across the Southwest. And um, I mean, you can kind of see those roads when you're on the ground, when you're over there hiking around the cliffs, but you can really see them, I think, a lot better from the air. And what people realize looking down on the Chaco and Complex from the air was that these roads were built, probably for religious reasons, just straight as an arrow across the landscape. And so unlike modern road engineers who will take roads around mountains and follow streams up canyons and things, these guys just for whatever the reason, they shot these roads straight through the countryside, and if a butte got in the way, they just went right over the top of it and maintain that straight line. And these were roads that were used. I mean people were hauling the vegas, the beams that they used to build all these giant constructions in Chaco from the Chusca Mountains fifty miles away over these roads. And these guys who were basically pissing these logs from the mountains, great big Ponderosa pines, who are having to go up and down the topography because the roads just went straight, and there was probably a reason for it. I mean, it wasn't just done because that's like the practical way to build a road, because it's not practical. No, it's not really practical. I mean what you would you know, what animals do and what most road engineers to do is you see a beaute in front of you, you go around. But so that's what Steve, you might have a little of that blood in you, because that's kind of the way you hike. YEA. Most of us tend to go around and with the flow of the landscape, and when you see a beaut you're like, oh, just go right up and over it. Yeah, that's why they call me the inconsiderate mountain Go higher and considerate mountain go hiker. And and Dan, you were saying that some of that, so some of the turquoise taken out of here. You you're saying that, uh, there was awareness of this mind all the way down in the Aztec Empire, and that it seems as though, just based on faunnel remains, that these guys were getting maccaws and things from the jungles and they had those materials up here and in turn their rocks their turn turquoise was down there. Yeah, it was. It was a luxury good trade. I mean, we don't think, you know, of native people so much in the context of luxury goods, but I mean they were, you know, they were just like us. They were motivated by the same human nature impulses that we are to express status. And so turquoise, both turquoise and the things that the Pueblo people in the American Southwest traded farther south for turquoise were all luxury goods. And the mccause I mean, and this is a kind of a phenomenon of this part of the world because you can go into Santa Fe. I mean, I've got some scattered around here. There's a pot with McCaw feathers in it right there, and most of the shops in Santa fe still today you can go in and buy mccaugh feathers, because this is a bird we've known for the last thousand years around here, that was a sacred bird to the native people. They doesn't range here, obviously, this is a desert. They haul these things live up from the jungles of Central America, and the priests kept them in cages and treated them as kind of sacred beings. I think because of the brilliant plumage, the coloration of them. Yeah, and so yeah, it's a for their beautiful song. Oh my god, this is out the inconsistency between a macaw his appearance in his song where it sounds like like he's the most beautiful bird and he sounds like like a dying what I had imagined a disease dying tero dactyle to sound like. But we're just down in South America with some mkushi guys and they still hunt mccaus with the feathers. Yeah, I don't doubt it. And now you're like, we're in the world where's like we have dies and all these fabrics and you can buy like blaze pink ship on the internet, right, But they're like still, like, yeah, those feathers are amazing looking. And they were saying that macaus are difficult to hunt the hum of the bow. They're difficult to hunt. But there's a particular type of of date tree or I'm sorry, a particular type of palm that has like a date like fruit on it, and they said that the macaws like those so much that you need to watch for one of those trees the fruit, and that's the only time that a macaw will let down his guard. And if you wait under the tree, you might get a macaw with your bow. And the rig they use, it's just a little barbed point that they try to hit the macaw with it and then the tip falls away from the arrow, but it's connected to the arrow shaft with a piece of string. And then McCaw get tangled up and they were able to climb up, able to climb up and get it and get their feathers. And they still produced. They still out of the cause and two cans and stuff. They produced ceremonial head dresses. Yeah, well that was you know, even a thousand years ago, and quite likely farther back than that, because there are macaus on the rock art all around us. I mean there's a rock art site UM about twelve miles away from here, uh that has a hole kind of base relief of Macau's painted on it, and it Petroglyph National Monument, which is out west of Albuquerque on the Mesa on the west side of the Real Grand River. UM. I mean, I've seen Macau's painted there too, And some of this rock art is older than the Chaco and civilization, so that indicates to me that there's been a fascination with Macau's and obviously a trade going down all the way into Central America from the southwest for longer than the Chaco and civilization existed in this part of the world. Another interesting connection between New Mexico and and maybe further south is that the first time a European described buffalo or bison, it was Cortez or one of his chroniclers ran into it in Montezuma's personal collection and his zoo, maybe five six hundred miles south of maybe more than that, south of the furthest southern point that the animal could have range. That's right, because they didn't. They clearly didn't cross the Chihuahuan Desert, which is hundreds of miles of pure desert now, and we think that bison did uh range sporadically down in the northern Chihuahua state into some of the grasslands there. So definitely in Sonora, Sonora, Chihuahua, but not as far south as so that would have had. That would have been an animal that courtez some that probably was taken as a calf down to the courts of the Estet capital and became part of the officials was gifted to him or traded to him some probably. Yeah, that's always been my thought about it. You know, there's nothing I want to I want to talk more about that stuff, but they want to ask you about you mention this one time and you haven't explained to me yet. You were saying that you're gonna tell me or could tell me. We're open to discussing why uh why people's houses are seventy two degrees. The thing I often tease my wife about is, I'm like, I've identified my wife's like general comfort range. I'm like, there's a four degree window on which you don't you that you don't take steps to like change your clothes to accommodate, And she like from sixty eight to seventy two. When it falls outside of that four degree thing, I always find she's doing something to like, she's like losing layers or gaining laryerous to keep up with it. Yeah, well, I used to pose this question to classes at the University of Montana, and I would often do it at the end of the first class meeting, sort of for further cogitation after they left the class. So I want you to think about this question. Why is it that, no matter whether you live in Tucson, Arizona, or in Fairbanks, Alaska, you set the thermostat of your house when it's when it can be controlled at seventy two degrees And we do this all around the world. So why do we do this? And I will say that I don't know that anybody ever came back on the second day of class and said I know the answer to that. But if you think about it, it's a fairly obvious one. We are native as a species to only one part of the world, and we've colonized every where else. And so in order for us, in fact, to colonize out of equatorial Africa, I mean, we had to invent sown clothing we basically had to harness fire in order to keep ourselves warm. We had to build structures to keep ourselves either warm or cool. And once we had those things, once, once we had clothing and structures, we were in fire. We were able then to spread around the world, to go into northern Europe, to go into Scandinavia, to spread into Polynesia, to end up crossing Siberia into North America. But everywhere we went, that migration hasn't been long enough. It's only taken place in the last forty five thousand years. We haven't gone anywhere long enough to actually change who we originally are as a species. And so what we've had to do is to take our original habit hat with us everywhere we've gone. And of course what it's meant is that if you live in Canada, are you live in Scandinavia, we have to consume an enormous amount of energy in order to keep ourselves warm to live in places like that, or if you live in Phoenix, Arizona, we have to consume an enormous amount of energy to cool ourselves. Because what we're doing everywhere we go, and we're gonna have to do this when we go to Mars too in another couple of decades. We've got to set the thermostat at seventies because that's the ambient temperature under which we evolved as a species, and that's why we are only comfortable in your wife's four degree range from six eight and seventy two. So we've got to recreate that everywhere we go. I read somewhere there's something about the human migrations around the world, and it was like to come at least the current on standing to come into what's now the Western Hemisphere, to come into the New World. The scholar the scholarly consensus is still that the first Americans passed across the Bearing Land Bridge, and to get to that point you needed to be able to live in the Arctic. Okay, so you're you're passing through the Arctic. People didn't get here until and the number could change through time, but it's sort of generally it's considered to be that people's first step foot here fourteen fifteen thousand years ago. That could change by a handful of years um as more sites emerge, but that the limiting factor what kept us out of here was that our our movement up into Siberia, which allowed us to come across into Alaska, was sort of stalled out until the invention of the eyed needle. Yeah, at which point, yeah, son clothing, Like once the archaeological record in Eurasia starts to turn up son close thing with the eye needle, and then people are ready to shoot up and crossover, and that that very likely was a female invention. I mean, you know, we pride ourselves as men on Okay, we invented at adols and things to be able to hunt more effectively, but the the eyde needle was probably an invention of women sitting there working hides and figuring out how to attach them one to the other and make an effect fitted clothing. Because what you need is clothing that's going to fit tightly enough around you that it maintains your body heat. And so we had to create sown clothing before we could ever basically not not even just live in these northern latitudes are extremely for southerly latitudes in the Southern hemisphere, but even to travel through them, because we suffered from frostbite so easily. I mean, we're basically semi equatorial apes and we have a hard time functioning in these really cold situations. I was just reading. I'm reading a book about d extinctions and it's written by a geneticist. It's about the possibility of like de extinction bringing back through people. Hear the word cloning is just like not at all like what they would do to to to recreate a passenger pigeon or recreate a mammoth is not at all has nothing to do with ship you saw on Jurassic Park. It's it's way more nuanced than complex. But Um, in it, she was explaining that the authors explaining that the wooly mammoth is about as far removed from the Asian elephant as we are from Chimp's meaning about we're about like genetically about nine eight percent the same, but there's still two percent pretty major man, Yeah, t percent at you Mozart and Einstein. Yeah, so you know an everything, And this is gonna lead to a question I want to ask you about. But Um, when I read about the people in the New World, like I've read the books that the anthropologist, the paleo anthropologist David Meltzer and and David Meltzer talks about that passageway that humans when humans went through the Arctic and passed through Siberian into Alaska first, Like important to realize that they weren't like thinking like, hey, let's go to America. There was no there was no like end the goal. They weren't like you, weren't like you were kind of you were going somewhere on a maybe a daily basis, but there was no like, hey, let's go colonize, like on the burying what's not the bearing what we think of when we look at like Burringia or what's not the burying land bridge, It's reasonable to think that generations might have been born and died on that land chunk with no concept of them being coming from somewhere and going somewhere. I mean, for one thing, it's six hundred miles wide. I mean we call it a bridge, and so that makes you think of it as this this narrow passageway from one continent to another. But at the time when h the the oceans were at their lowest, ebb Beringia was six d miles wide. So I mean it was you know, as wide as present day Texas. You wouldn't be crossing through Austin and San Antonio and think that Texarkana and El Paso were the edges of a bridge. I mean, I think probably you're exactly right. There would have been whole generations of people who would have just thought of that as a homeland. But I think what would have motivated them to go in the direction that carried them into North America is that I mean, I think this is one of the reasons we left Africa and began moving around the world, is that we were endlessly looking for places that other people hadn't been yet, because that meant the resources were rich, the animals were stupid, they hadn't been hunted yet, and so what you're looking for is a place where, wow, I haven't seen any other human camps for the last several days I have, I don't see smoke from campfires up ahead, And so you go in the direction where there appears to be an absence of prior human activity, and that's what naturally led them finally into North America. That that's kind of what I wanted to get out to ask you about is so of your feelings on that, because you just can't discount the idea that some point there was like some element of curiosity because population levels like like, for instance, there's this there's this idea that the reason that Native Americans were so susceptible to European diseases when when when Europeans arrived much later, it was because they had passed through this like big disease free corridor where you didn't have like in the Arctic, it was cold enough and it wasn't densely populated, so communicable diseases. Like people lost contact with communicable diseases and and lost their ability to tolerate them. So you can't be like, oh, like the Arctic was so filled up with people that there was warfare, right, It probably wasn't like that. It's probably just people moving. I think it was people moving. I mean, you know around like bacall And and uh, Russia there did seem to be where we think some of the Siberian populations that ended up in North America and became the ancestors of Native people. That I mean, there is some evidence of uh, you know, possible conflict that might have sent some groups on the move, but like like like over resources, probably over resources. I mean, I think that's probably the ultimate motivation for these migrations that carried us around the world, is that, as I said, a few minutes ago. I think human populations were sort of endlessly looking for places where the resources were going to be available solely to them and they weren't going to have to compete with other people for them, and so that would have that would have drawn people in these grand migrations northward, for example, out of Africa, through Turkey, around the Black Sea, all the way up into northern Europe. Originally because I mean anatomically modern humans us Holmo sapiens, we realized when we got there, the first people who arrived there found only Neanderthals. There, only these you know, I mean related hominins, but at least not us. And I think that's what fueled the migration into North America too. I will say, though, I mean, I'm I'm completely with you on this impulse that we have to see what's down the river and around the next mountain range. And I mean, I think that's why, you know, we're that kind of species. We've been doing this kind of spread out of our homeland and around the planet for so long. I mean, and not just our species, but prior hominant species like Neanderthals have done it, that it's part of our genetic legacy to to go and see what's there. I think that's why we we're gonna end up going to Mars uh and probably in other places in the Solar System as well. But I think that's why everybody is so excited about Mars at the moment. Is I mean, this is just one of those genetic pulls that we've had as a species, and I think it's been It's a tribute to us in a lot of ways. It's one of them, maybe the most noble things that we have about us. It's that we are curious enough that we want to go see what it's like somewhere else, even though we know, in the case of Mars, we're gonna have to wear helmets and suits and we've got to live inside polyurethane structures and you know, but I think people crossing uh Siberia and the the Baryngia and into North America said, Okay, we're gonna have to bundle up like you've never worn clothing before, and we've got to invent tight fitted clothing with you know, with eyed needles. Um. But if we need the technology to enable us to go there, damn it, we're gonna invent it because this is who we are. To me. It's one of our great tributes, our attributes as a species. The guy that I'm interested in his story get is the guy that's coming down the coastline. Like people used to be big on this idea that there was the ice free corridor that would have dumped the like the first the first Americans to hit what is now the Lower forty eight. There used to be this idea and made you can speak to other this idea is dead dead or kind of dead? Is uh? That they would have hit that they would have emerged on the Great Plains south of Edmonton, Alberta through what this idea that there's this ice free corridor where everything to the east was glaciated and the coastline was glaciated and the Rockies were glaciated, but you had this this dry chunk of land that would have just eventually funneled human traffic down with this little belt and spilled them out onto the primo hunting grounds of the Lower forty eight and from their reeked havoc on willie mammoths and mask dons. And now it seems that there's a lot more thinking or or that this a more fashionable idea. The people were coming down the coasts and probably had basic boat technology. But I'm interested in the feller and there was a first like like if you had a time machine you could go see if you're standing in any place, any place, and you're standing in California on the beach, there's a time you could have gone back in time and seeing the first dude or more likely a family group coming down the shore right and would have happened what happened. And I'm interesting the guy coming down the shore that hits like a calving glacier. So here he is never been here before. He's on this coastline and all he can see ahead of him is here's an ice field, alright, which still they still exist to day around you know, southeast Alaska, and there's a calving glacier. And he's like, kids, um, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna trust that this ends, and we're gonna battle out and around and see what's on the other side. Because that was a leap and ship like that had to been happening. I think that's probably in a way, it's that's the you know, and and and Christian and Jewish theology. That's the Adam myth. I mean, that's it's the first man, the first woman to see the world. And you know, in that myth, Adam gets to name all the animals even and so you can extrapolate, you know, from the Bible and the Book of Genesis to your you know, captain of his boat with his family going around this calving glacier and hoping there's something on the other side, and landing on the other side and finding some land and seeing animals that they've never seen before, and getting to name the animals and so like be like hunting Yellowstone Park. That's right, that's with no park rangers, with no park rangers, and and all these new beasts. Because I mean that's one of the things that as we went went around the world we confronted not everything was the same. I mean, we were seeing this this grand diversity of life on a planet that was billions of years old, where life had evolved as a result of shifting uh and continents breaking apart, so that we ended up with everywhere you went there were there was there were different life forms. You saw birds that you had never seen before, you saw animals you had never seen before, And I think that's probably one of the things, Especially people who were as closely tuned to nature and observing nature as these folks would have been because they lived off the natural world, I think that would have been an ultimate fascination to land on the other side of a Calvin glacier and see a whole host of creatures you had never seen before. Yeah, like with the first guy idea, after people had after people had passed through the Arctic and started coming south, they were probably hundreds of generations removed from snakes. Alaska has no snakes, so you can imagine that there was there. Again, there was like a guy. That's the thing I always returned to, is you get like you get when you think about history, you always think of it becomes faceless, right, But there was like a person who had no idea that a rattlesnake, right was like bad ship. And he would have had to have have been like the guy who made it and to the point where there is one and saw that first one. Yeah, that's like what you're and and there was no thing. There's no cultural No, they did have cultural awareness, but their cultural awareness is probably more confined to like a stead of experiences by just a handful of past generations like you weren't like always reading about wildlife on other continents now in some like real time way. Yeah, and I think that would have been tremendously exciting. I mean, it excites me to think about it too. Step into a brand new world. I mean, and I I've read enough. For example, you know, just from in a sort of a minor key version of this, people passing in the nineteenth century from the woodlands of the east onto the Great Plains and encountering for the first time pronghorn antelope, for example, or coyotes, or huge herds of bison. They may have seen bison in small numbers in the woodlands in eighteen hundred, but getting two hundred miles farther west out of the grasslands and seeing herds that spread to the limits of the horizon. I mean. And and those people, of course left us a written account, and so you can read how exciting they found that. I mean, you know, John James Ottobon, who spent his entire life studying nature, hunting animals, shooting birds, painting birds, gets to a new setting on the Missouri River on the Great Plains in eighteen forty three, and I mean, I've always loved this passage. He wrote his wife that summer about all these animals he was seeing that he had never seen before, and finally close one of his letters with the line, I've got to stop right. I'm too excited to write anymore. I can't say anything else, I mean, And so there was that excitement is palpable through the written word of what people left us, you know, in the last hundred and fifty or two hundred years. So it must have been the same thing when someone emerged into North America and saw, you know, giant herds of camels for the first time, or I mean, they would have seen wild horses, no doubt plies the seen horses in Baryngia, and they would have seen mammoths and mastodons in in Baryngia, but they probably wouldn't have seen giant ground sloughs or hyenas or camels. And so they emerged into settings where they they saw creatures like that must have been exciting as hell. Some people have I think a hard time with the camel thing like that. We have like camelids on the great plants, but it's really like you kind of take for game like the in the Andies that you have llamas, alpacas, Yeah, and then something and then those are like domestic versions of some wild things. But yeah, so when you think about that, it's like not as surprising that we did have a number of camel species on the Great Plants and du hunting for him and dudes were hunting them. Yeah, we had one humped camels and not the double humped camels of of Africa. But the camels from South America had migrated u up the the Andes chain, crossed into North America and basically spread across the plains as far probably as the Canadian border, at least Montana. I mean, they were animals that could exist at fairly high latitudes in the Andes and so they could take fairly cold weather. So coming out of I mean, if these early UH inhabitants, these early arrivals in North America either came from the coast in land or emerged from an ice free corridor. And I don't think the ice free quarter is totally dead. I think they're dead now. I don't think it's dead. I think there are plenty of people who still believe that's the case, but I think they would have encountered as soon as they emerged from that quarter a suite of animals that they had never seen before. And I love the description I read fairly recently about um who these people might have been. I mean, we don't know, for example, if if the dates go back to fifteen sixteen thousand years, I mean we we haven't really assigned a name to maybe the first three or four thousand years of arrivals, because they didn't seem to leave a technology like the later Clovis people lad. But the Closed people left us thirteen thousand years ago and down to about eleven thousand years ago. I mean, they left us a technology that seems to make it apparent that uh. In the words of a recent scholar who described them, he described them as nor Are in hemisphere wild people, kind of like Vikings, but coming out of Siberia. And these were people who would who it was probably a very male dominated society, maybe dominated by warriors or hunters, and they were people who would have thrown themselves, uh into this new setting. And you know, if Paul Martin is right with his plies to scene the Bloods Creek hypothesis, Craig hypothesis. I mean, it would have only taken them three or four hundred years to go all the way from the vicinity of Edmonton down to the tip of South America to Tyral del Fuego and wipe out millions of animals along the way. That's the thing that's so puzzling about. There's two that you just brought up that that maybe you can speak to a little bit. Is uh One the way Clovis, the Clovis culture, they have this like diagnostic spear point. Okay, so when you when you excavate an old site and you find this spear point, the spear point is so peculiar. It's called a fluted spear point, where they would knock a channel out of each face of the projectile point. Um, it's it's so peculiar that it's regarded as diagnostic. And there are many projectile points there this way where people made it for a long time. They made it the same way every time, and then they moved on and started making different points that they're probably using in different ways and stopped making them that way. So when you find a clothe what what how you know a Clovis site, it's kind of like what did their spear point technology look like? Whoever arrived from There's nothing like trying to think out how to put this. There's nothing like the Clovis technology in Asia. So people think that it either is an American invention, that the people that first came down and colonized the New World, colonize what we now think of as a Lower forty eight and elsewhere, that they sort of coalesced into or developed into the Clovis culture and developed this projectile point suitable to the type of hunting they found here, or like an anthropological conspiracy theory is that the paleolithic people of Europe who quinn who Some whould argue it's coincidence, someone would argue it's not coincidence, who had a point kind of like the Clovis point much earlier, thirty forty years ago. They were making a point and hunting the same suite of mega fauna in Europe with a projectile point that's kind of similar. So there's this idea that these fellers uh hopped in some skin boats and came over. It's called I think it's called the salutary and hypothesis or the salute connection came over, showed the people here, what's up. The Europeans came, showed the people here, what's up? How to do this deal? They died out, and then what we regard as Native Americans came down afterward or had picked up their tricks of the trade from these European seafarers. What do you is that? What do you think of that? I mean, like, based on your career long exposure to this stuff, well, I mean it is in a way. I mean, it's a it's kind of a conspiracy theory, but it's a conspiracy theory that actually got a national geographic and so you've got to have some bona fides, some credentials to to make it into a magazine of that ilk um you know. I I some people call it racist. Well, I mean if you make the argument that, you know, it's the Europeans who kind of invent everything important and the Native people just glom onto the critical technological elements, then it does have sort of overtones of uh at least a kind of an ethnocentrism um word. Yeah, you know, so I I realized that we've not yet found a kind of a precursor to Clovish technology in Siberia, and frankly, I wonder if that's just because you know, there hasn't been great archaeology done yet in Siberia and that we're gonna find it. Um. I tend to think myself that this is somewhat coincidental in part because of the difference in time frames. The salutary In point, as you mentioned, is like a thirty thousand year old point. Uh. It's one of the points that you know, anatomically modern humans had in Europe within ten thousand years or fifteen thousand years of coming out of Africa. Uh. And the Clovis point, of course, occurs in time almost twenty thousand years later. So it's the kind of thing that that the time frame connections make me think it would be hard to to come up with the linkage, although you know you could. I suppose it's in the ram of possibility to argue that some Clovis, that maybe these Europeans got into North America left some sites, and people who became Clovis found those sites and attempted to emulate this kind of technology and did so very successfully. I don't know right now what the explanation for this particular gular mystery is. But one of the things I really love about science in all its forms is that we endlessly have mysteries. And you know the mysteries. I mean, in my career, Uh, quite a number of mysteries have been solved, but there are plenty of them out there that and all the time I've been doing this, we never have figured out what the answer is. And so that's kind of the great thing about all this is that there are things still to be resolved in the future. Uh, that other generations, uh maybe can come up with a really fine explanation for this is one that I have to say, you know, I can't come up with a plausible explanation for why the Salutary and culture and Point, which is a big game hunting culture, resembles the Clovis culture of twenty thousand years later in terms of some not just superficial but fairly close similarities of the technology. Uh. The one thing I will say about the two groups is that even though they're separated in time by almost twenty thousand years, they kind of seem to have the same effect on the fauna of the places they inhabit. I mean, it looks to me as if we finally invented agriculture in Europe because essentially people ultimately killed off all the major animals. And I think at a chronology that occurs at a later point in time in North America, because we entered we humans entered North America later in time. The same pattern follows. The big animals once our presence is fully established, uh in a location are going to go away. They disappear. And we began, in what's called the archaic phase, to sort of spread into too smaller micro habitats and hunt smaller animals like deer and elk and so forth. But eventually everywhere we go we're kind of forced in the direction ultimately of adopting agriculture. Because we tend to over hunt animals, we tend to ultimately take them out, so it's simply not as easy to live as a hunter anymore. And uh, we end up becoming farmers. You know. I want to get back that and and press you on a part of that, but uh, before I don't want to bring out like you're talking about, the mysteries is kind of the greatest mystery to me about the peopling of the New World, probably the greatest mystery to everyone is that we have we've most people have settled on this idea of the Bearing Land Bridge as the entry point. But the oldest rock solid site we have, Okay, the oldest site that like archaeologists and anthropologists just universe really agree on as being the oldest human settlement site in the New World is in Patagonia. Yeah, it is. And how much ship is missing between right, like it really, you know, And if you talk to anthro apologies about making more fines, they're not always like super optimistic about that we're gonna make more fines because there's been so much just like we've done so much road building and so much excavating and stuff that like that like the stuff that's gonna get found has maybe kind of been found, you know, you don't you don't feel like people are like in the Arctic, like in Siberia right now, there's a lot of enthusiasm about what's the next thing that's gonna thaw out of the perma frost, you know, like we don't even know, like mysteries are going to continue to like we're gonna be excited about what's to come, but most people are like not real excited about the prospect of finding really good intact iron ad paleo sites, but the oldest one we have is thousands and thousands of miles from the point of entry. So between Baryngia in Chili, it's like, where were those people hanging out? Well, I think that that site in Patagonia, which you know, the latest dates I've read for it, uh, you know, seemed to place it between fourteen and sixteen thousand years ago, that it very likely is good evidence that people were working their way down the coastlines. And I think the reason we don't have intervening sites along the coastlines is that as a result of the end of the Wisconsin ice Age and the rise of the oceans, many of those camp sites have ended up off shore and buried probably under two hundred feet of water. And so what we get then is an inland site in Chile. But they're probably were campsites, fairly regular campsites along the coast leading down to that that particular point, and we've just we've lost them as a result of the rise of the seas. A detail I like about that site, as they seem to have had tent steaks, tethering, some sort of tent structure with a strip of mastodon hyde, which is a nice detail. No, it's wonderful in it um but so so again what you jump in? What you gotta do? Why is it? Like you mentioned that we could have hunter gatherer cultures that went ten thousand years without over hunting, Like, what is it to happen? Like if we accept that some species were driven to extinction with the arrival of humans, right, and we like and as debatable, but let's just say that that was like it almost certainly was a contributing cause, right that that a lot of these big animals, mammoth masodonds, like their demise is contemporary at least contemporaneous with the arrival of people, suspiciously so suspiciously. So but then what why did how did we then go ten thousand years about losing a continuous stream of creatures? Well, I think you know, so again, this is kind of the plasto stine extinctions are are one of our big mysteries. And there are a big mystery in part because this is our most profound ecological disturbance since humans arrived in North America. I mean, we talk all the time these days about the effect that modern society has on wildlife on the habitat destruction. But I mean we lost thirty two genera of large animals in the plies to sine. I mean charismatic big species, Africa type analog animals, and hundreds of smaller ones. And so it was a kind of a sea change for North America. And suspiciously we arrived at just the time that this was happening, we humans did. But the other thing that happened, of course, is that this was the end of the Wisconsin ice Age, and so the climate was changing. And that's one of the great debates is whether or not climate was the primary cause, whether or not humans entering a landscape that had humans had not evolved in, had not been in before, where the animals had not evolved any kind of ability to resist us as hunters. I mean, that kind of thing is a debate that has been going on now for more than a century, and it's very likely that nobody is ever going to definitively resolve it. Some people argue that, okay, it's partly climate, and it's partly the human fluence. The best example we've got for the human influence is probably with the mammoths um Paul Martin and his his great book the you know, really the last book he wrote, and and the book that if people want to read about this, I think I would encourage them to read, is called The Twilight of the Mammoths. And Martin was the major advocate of Plistocene overkill, but he did concede that the best evidence we have is for this single species. For some species, we don't have very much evidence of human overkill at all because it doesn't turn up. It doesn't turn up in campsites, it doesn't turn up at camp sites. We don't find archaeological sites where people were processing horses, for example, and horses during the Plistocene seemed to have comprised in some places, like twenty of the biomass of large animals. They became extinct, and yet we've barely found any kind of archaeological sites at all that indicate that, in contrast to the Solutrean people in Europe who were run them over cliffs, we were running over cliffs and corralling them. Mostly what they were doing was corralling them and killing them, and they nearly wiped out Europe's horses. In fact, some people believed that it was only the domestication of the last few horses that enabled Europe's horses to survive extinction. But unlike those solutary and hunters in Europe, I mean, we, the North American hunters, don't seem to have produced the kind of archaeological sites that show, at least so far, a large scale destruction of horses. And yet horses became extinct here. So I mean, we're still puzzling this out as to exactly what happened. But we somehow lost all these animals. Probably humans were involved in some significant way for at least some of them, and once they were gone, what we essentially had to do was to reinvent ourselves. Two, to make the step from being Paleolithic big game hunters to the step of beginning to hunt smaller animals, beginning to rely more on gathering fruits and food stuffs from the plant world, and sort of instead of doing probably what the Clovis and fulsome people did was, which was to migrate widely across the landscape in search of animal herds, we had to start settling down into local habitats and I think and learning probably learning plant life too. That's exactly. The reason I think, to answer the question you pose to sort of launch this, why we don't just keep causing extinctions is because once we settle down and start living locally, we start learning landscapes at a more intimate level. And what we begin to learn is the the classic law of a bology, Lee Bigg's law, which argues that you have to to base your population for sheer survival on the worst years that you experience in your landscape rather than the best years. If you calibrate your population based on the best years, then when the worst years come along, you're going to be devastated. And so these archaic people who survive for seven or eight thousand years without wiping animals out and with with a very effective functioning kind of economy seem to do it because they become consciously aware of what a local habitat is capable of providing. Not that they don't trade with people from other settings, but they understand what it's like to live locally, and that gives them these kind of packets of cultural information about what the local habitat is capable of producing and what the limits are in both directions, the best years and the good years and what they seem to have done, frankly, was to have deliberately control their populations, mostly by engaging and infanticide, by killing excess babies when they were born, a kind of a form of abortion really kind of a draconian form of abortion that enabled them to keep their populations small enough that they weren't wiped out whenever bad years or a sequence of bad years came along. But starvation was still like certainly a factor in these societies. Oh, I think people certainly suffered from starvation. I mean, I think we've gotten genetic evidence today of people with you know, some of the groups in the Southwest. Native people in the Southwest have what's called starvation gene, where basically, uh, in contemporary times eating modern foods, they tend to become quite a beast because they had been in their past. Their populations selected for a type, a kind of a genetic type that was capable of storing food to enable them to get past these starving and lane times. And today, when they've got abundant food, they tend to if they're not careful, they become pretty OBEs. You know, this brings us something We touched on this a little bit before, But I'd like you to to to explain it more because that balance you arguing one of your and one of your papers, and the paper has been cited many, many, many times. You are like that that balance the people achieved, that that ten thousand year balance the people achieved between um humans and animals that they were hunting, was disturbed or interrupted by the introduction of the horse. Yeah, maybe unsustainably. So can you sketch that out for people? Yeah? I think, Uh, And this is what I argue in this long dure a story of of Native people in North America. I think the coming of Europeans bringing with them I mean, and I think it's a suite of things. I think it's it's not just the horse. I think it's the arrival of the market economy, which, as the Europeans introduce it, it essentially compels people who had been who had sort of lived off a diversity of resources in a landscape to specialize in the resources Let's say bison robes that the market economy wanted. The market economy might not have been interested in all the things they produced. It was interested in one or two things. And the market economy, as Europeans introduced it into North America five years ago, was very interested in the skins of animals, and so it tended to as European traders approached native people, they brought with them not only a desire to have these native people specialized in a particular product out of their resource base, but the Europeans also brought with them the goods of the industrial revolution, because Europe had gone through this progression of reaching a point where you couldn't live by hunting animals alone, and therefore having to become hunter gatherers and then eventually farmers. Europe, having been occupied by humans out of Africa forty five thousand years ago, had reached that sequence earlier in time than people in the America's had, having been occupied by a migration out of Africa only fifteen thousand year yars ago, And so the whole chronology of Europeans had carried their pattern through these various kinds of economies farther along to the point where they had begun to produce an industrial revolution metal goods. They produced iron, for example, and native people's all over the world who had not yet reached the iron age when they were first exposed to iron implements, knives, hatchets, axes, metal, arrow points, spear points. They were absolutely captivated by those goods. I mean. One of those stories I've often told is how when Captain Cook appeared off the coast of the island of Kawaii in the Hawaiian Islands in the seventeen eighties, the Natives who had been ex supposed to nails as a result of driftwood coming ashore. When they went out to meet cooked ships, they clamored aboard, and Cook's men reported that the Polynesians immediately started pulling the nails out of every plank on the ships, and they finally had to had to push them overboard and make them go back ashore because they were afraid they were gonna dismantle the damn vessels they were so eager to get metal. Another story I told I think I told this to Joe Rogan when I did the podcast with him, is about uh. I was once a an editor for a journal called ethno History, and we received a manuscript that was basically the editor journal of an early trader who was in the Amazonian basin. And this fellow had said he that he had replaced a trader who had been working among the native people for two or three decades, and when he asked the question of his predecessor, how do I get people who have never been exposed to the European trade to trade with us? This guy said, it's as simple as anything. You just go into an area where Europeans haven't been before and tie an axe to a tree, and a month later go back. And he wrote in his journal that he did this several times, and when he would go back, there would be throngs of people gathered around, hoping for another example of this kind of miraculous metal that they had found hanging from a tree. It's in some way, it's it's still happening right now though, because if you read about groups first contact groups coming out of the jungle in Peru, in Brazil, it's like oftentimes they're they're they're coming out to the rivers machetes and pots. Yes, that's it, it's metalware, it's metal. Well, I agree that stuff is nice. It's nice, and so I mean here in in the southwest, among these pueblo and people who made these gorgeous pots, I mean, and they made them hundreds of years before the Spaniards ever arrived here, and of course now sell them. I mean, I've got pots from the various pueblos all over the house here. They sell them in Santa fe Uh to people who want um to take home some beautiful object from the cultures of the Southwest. But when the Spaniards arrived with metal, these Pueblo people almost completely lost the art, and some of them at least of making pots, because hell, here's a metal pan. I don't really need a pot anymore. Here is an object made of metal that these Europeans will trade to me, and I don't have to engage in the painstaking work of making a ceramic pot. I mean, I was just telling the story to a group of people a few days ago about how uh Adolph Bandalier, the archaeologists who came out to what is now a Bandalia National Monument in the eighteen eighties, hired Indians to help him dig up some of the sites, and they were unearthing pot shards there, and those people took them back to pueblos like Sanduel Defonso Pueblo and showed these pot sharks to people like Maria Martinez, who became the first of the great modern celebrated pottery makers again in Pueblo and New Mexico. So it's like fixing up an old car. It's like fixing up an old car and learning how to do it again, basically reacquiring the skill to be able to do it, but having the availability of metal they had they had lost it. So when Native people confronted these kinds of things, this market impulse to specialize in particular resources, plus the availability of goods that were made of metal I mean, and those included things, of course, like the implements of war, like firearms. So if you trade someone a firearm, I mean, in the first few firearms that are traded a Native people are usually status goods, kind of like the turquoise we were talking about a minute ago. Only the head men end up with guns. But once you get them a gun, I mean, think of it. They can't produce powder, they can't produce flints or percussion caps. Later on, they don't have molds to make lead bullets, and they don't have gunsmiths to work on the gun if it breaks, And so suddenly they're snagged by the market economy. They've become dependent on it. From the point at which they start using guns they now have to have someone supply them with gunpowder, with cap percussion caps, with lead balls, and from that point on basically tell us what you want us to harvest for the market economy, and we'll do it. I mean in the way. Another factor had to have have been, like when you talk about that reliance to what it would have meant to neighboring groups that you were in warfare with, well, I mean, I was just gonna say that would add your that would like add to your incentive to acquire this stuff. It does, and it means that the people who don't acquire it who and there were some groups, for example, who who sort of saw, okay, this is a this is kind of a zero sum game, because if we get caught in this, we're never gonna get out of it. We're always gonna have to have these these goods, and we're just gonna go further and further and further into this kind of economy, and we're going to forever be pulled out of our ancient traditions. And so occasionally you would have a band or a tribe led by someone who would sort of see the consequence inst is and say, okay, I'm not gonna do it. But the people in the next valley, if they did it, and they armed themselves with with guns, and they had the resources that the European traders gave them as opposed to the group that was resisting entering the trade. I mean it became an unequal struggle and the group that resisted ended up being overpowered and overcome by those who cooperated with the market economy. You know, things you're saying keep resonating me with With this article, I've been bringing up a lot, lady by the journalist John Lee Anderson who who wrote this piece in The New Yorker about this group, this Amerindian group who's in the process right now of coming into contact with the wider world. And um, you know they're they're living the borderlands Team Prue and Brazil and the young ones will come out and are interacting and and the young ones that even explain because through some through various translators, they're able to communicate, and the young ones explain, Um, when we get close, you know, when we go back, the old people burned the clothes. Like there's that resistance built in where they're they're they're talking about people, Um, other generations being like, don't get tangled up with these people. But it's irresistible. It's irresistible. They're coming out of the jungle naked. Yeah, it's irresistible. And you know, so there, I think we can identify with it if we just understand that everybody is motivated by the same human nature, regardless of the cultural overlays that we have. These people that that you've just described from South America and that I was describing basically sort of using North American and examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, these they're just like us. And so we can if we think about it, we can find ourselves in exactly that kind of situation. I mean, I think we probably do, you know, in our modern lives on almost a daily basis, it's hard to resist a damn cell phone. I mean, I know a handful of people who say, Okay, I'm not gonna have one of those things. But I mean, you're kind of disadvantaging yourself in a way if you resist the march of modern technology. Yeah, Like, if all your buddies are out drinking nowadays, you can't find them without a phone. You can't on a bar, and everyone went there and stayed there. But now you'd never catch up with them, That's right, you gotta text them and find them. And so you know what I mean, it's the same principle at work, and I think it's been at work among us for two hundred thousand years and maybe in I mean that that that's as far back as we know right now that our own species has existed. You know, if we knew more about the Neanderthals, it probably was at work among them as well, these same principles. So do you feel that, like like, and I know you focus a lot of your scholarly attention, um, not exclusively, but a lot of it on bison. Do you feel that, let's say, just the market had been introduced, would they have wound up at in the same place that we did eventually, where we had effectively ecologically speaking, we had exterminated the animal. Well, I think it would have been possible. Yeah. So, I mean Native people obviously they have an economy. They haven't exchanged economy before Europeans ever arrived. I mean, we know that there were trading networks just like I was describing. For this Turko is going from the mountain out the door here all the way down into Central America and the Caribbean. There were trade networks that stretched all over the America's so that people that were producing goods, sometimes utilitarians, sometimes status goods, were able to trade for things they their local area didn't produce, uh, and that they wanted, that they desired. And so that had been going on for for thousands and thousands of years in the Americans. And that's probably I mean, I'm not an economist, but I don't doubt that that may not be the first step toward what ultimately becomes kind of a global market economy where everybody specializes in something and you have trade networks that spanned the world. I think in some ways what native people in the Americans were engaging in was kind of a prototypical version of that. But uh, and of course they they also had what the market, you know, is characterized by in our own time, where some people accumulate lots of things for purposes of status, and so again to make these native people who were here for thousands of years kind of more humanly understandable to us now, I mean, over in Chocko Canyon, when they were doing excavations over there, they discovered that the difference between the elites and the peasant population in Chocko Canyon, and the elites were probably priests and their families, was so dramatic that in some instances the elites had such better food, such better nutrition, that they were living twice as long as peasants who were working the fields only of a few hundred yards away. And there are instances where well, there was there was one uh vault where evidently the wife or the wives of one particular priest in Chaco at one stage of the high development of that civilization. Uh, this room was found with sixty thousand pieces of turquoise jewelry. I mean, so this is a woman who was the Choco and version of Amelda Marcos with all of her hundreds of shoes. I mean, no individual needs sixty thou pieces of turquoise jewelry. But that was kind of a status statement on the part of native people. So in other words, I'm saying that they also had that. It's not that they were trying to make everybody somehow democratically equal. There were status divisions, but they hadn't reached the point that the capitalists market had, where so much of the natural world has been converted into kind of soulless commodities when Native people confronted the capitalists market economy. For the Europeans, the animals whose hides they were trading for had no real relevance in Christian religion. Those animals lacked souls, they didn't have a plan uh in guard God's larger scheme of things. The Native people, though, still accorded kind of sacred rights to a lot of those uh animal species that Europeans saw is just kind of a congress of resources. So one of the places where you have a kind of a jarring difference is there where the European point of view is that you know, these are just resources. These things are kind of inert matter of These animals are alive, but they're just dumb brutes and their lives don't really matter. And Native people, on the other hand, they sometimes struggle with this trade exchange because they still did regard these animals as being sacred, soul filled uh ken really to them. So it was that's part of the psychic kind of disaster that I think Native people go through in the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. And this happens all over the world and it'll be happening in among these groups that that New York or journalists would described was describing in South America too. It induces a kind of a a psychological crisis that undermines your worldview. And I think it's one of the reasons that Native people in the America's and I mean they had almost no choice but to participate in the market economy, but it really kind of rendered a catastrophic effect on them ultimately, from which I think some people have yet to recover. Are you through with the book Keepers of the Game? He he does a good job in there with the impacts of the beaver trade a native populations where here you have an ant like like like the bison or buffalo loose so large in the mythology of the tribes, I mean on the planes if you just look at like artwork and belief systems and oral traditions. But he talks about these groups in the Northeast that didn't really pay that much attention to the beaver. You know, it was it was like a reliable resource when you needed it, but it wasn't like this defining thing. And in Keepers of the Game he gets into some of their uh, some of the people's like just kind of puzzlement about why is it that they're so interested in the animal, and kind of the awakening to the idea that you could get a lot of money and get a lot of goods from this thing that we had really paid that much attention to before. Yeah, that's a like the guy who says, the guy who's like been stomping on Morrel's down in his cotton would grow up his whole life and never thought about them. One day some guy knocks on his door. He's like, you know, he's just like really ship man. Yeah, they're everywhere, They're everywhere, but people really want these things. Yeah, I think, uh you know, I mean, that's a very interesting book. Calvin Martin was the guy who wrote it, trying to that yeah, and uh you know, and his his argument was a really intriguing one because he kind of argued against some of the things. I was just explaining that the fur trade had an economic basis. He argued that it was based on it it was Indians participated in it for spiritual or religious reasons rather than economic reasons. And what he came up with was this very interesting idea that on the eve of the arrival of the Europeans, uh In the in the northeast, um Indians began contracting disease, and they were diseases they had never encountered before. And what Calvin Martin argued was that from uh itiner at European fishermen, they were being exposed, these native people being exposed for the first time to European diseases against which they had no immunity influenza, and they're dying of these diseases that their shamans can't cure, that they've never encountered before. And in their religious traditions they had uh Some of these Algonquin speaking people of that region had this tradition that they had a sacred pack with the animals, and the animals were supposed to keep humans healthy. And so Martin argued in that book that the circumstances of when these people were getting these diseases without ever having seen Europeans necessarily before, these are diseases that had worked inland with no explanation other than their own cultural beliefs, that they blamed the animals for those diseases and therefore engaged. And he found one Jesuit priest who said the Indians are engaging in a war against the animals and retaliation for making them sick, and they discover that these Europeans want the skins of those same animals. So it was kind of a blockbuster idea when it came out, which was in about nineteen eighty. But I have to say, was it was it Lampoon? Well, it wont a bunch of prizes when it came out as being this very imaginative and new inter rotation of why Indians participated in the fur trade. But what happened very interestingly is that another very famous anthropologist named Shepherd Craik came along three or four years later and called on a bunch of his anthropologist friends to see if they could find some evidence anywhere else in North America that something similar had happened. And they couldn't find any evidence anywhere that there had been another incident like this, And so Craik published a book consisting of all the studies of himself and his anthropos anthropologist friends trying to extrapolate Calvin Martin's argument elsewhere and finding no reason, uh that it seemed to work anywhere else. And he basically said, I think Calvin Martin took one document and he basically leveraged it into this argument hut without having additional supporting evidence for it. And it looks like he leveraged it too much. When you've put out your ideas, um and published them and previously in in journals and now in popular books, some of them are kind of controversial. Like what sort of negative feedback or or criticisms do you get when you call him to question something such as, you know, the relationship between Native Americans and buffalo when you call him the question that it was maybe a little more complex than we are taught in elementary school. Yeah, you must, you must get some you must get attacked. I will say it kind of worked like this, and yeah, I you know, not necessarily attacked. But I've had some interesting experien arians is um particularly I mean I first published, um, that bison ecology article in the journal American History, and so sort of in the aftermath that, uh, some big news outlets, uh you know, found out about it, and the New York Times did a story about my interpretation what had happened to the to the bison and so um. This was in the early nineties. I just got to the University of Montana UH to teach the history of the West there. And one day I was I was at home in my apartment. I hadn't moved out in the Bitter Root Valley and I was still living in Missooli in a little apartment. I was screwing around with something in the and the phone rang, just you know, And so I picked up the phone. And I mean, I would say it that way because the truth is, with a cell phone, I mean, I don't keep the ringer onto my phone, so a phone ringing is an unusual thing for me. This was back in the nineties before I had a cell phone, so I actually had a landline and still didn't ring very much. And I don't talk on the phone a whole lot. But the phone rang, and I picked up the phone, and this sonorous, deep voice says, is this Dan Flores? And I said, yes it is. And and the voice on the other hand said, well, this is Vine Deloria. I have just read your article on bison ecology. And what I thought he was going to say next is that, you know, you son of a bitch, How in the world could you ever argue, UH that Indians were involved in the destruction of the Bison because Vine Deloria, I mean for the members of your audience who don't know who Vine Gloria is. He was, I'm guilty this. I'm waiting to hear. Okay, so let me tell who he was. He's was one of the most outspoken Native writers in the period, from probably the nineteen seventies through vind Vine died about just a few years ago, so he was still alive into the twenty first century, but especially from about the nineteen seventies. He wrote books like God Has Read and Customer Died for Your Sins Yes. And he was teaching in the law school at the University of Colorado and Boulder when he called me, and what he said was, I would like for you to come to Boulder as my guest, because every year I have a gathering of people from the tribes and we discussed the relationship between Native people and animals, and I want you to come to the next one is my personal guest, the next one I'm having. It was just a couple of months away. But what I expected him to say was, I want you to speak to the assembled group. He said, I want to tell you, I don't want you to say a word when you come, I want you to come as my guest. You can sit right beside me. I'll introduce you to everybody there. But I don't want you to say a word. I want you to listen to what people say. And I said, I would be very happy to do that. And so I went to Boulder and UH set up beside Vindeloria. Out of the group of about thirty five people, there was one other white guy in the audience. Uh. And did you know his sorry interrupt his motive or what did you think his motive at that? Well? I I thought what his motive was and I and I was right about it. He he just wanted me to hear what Native people said about their relationship with animals. Um, but not in an adversarial way, not an anniversary show, you buddy, you know. And what he actually said to me when I was there is Uh. He said, that piece you did is the most interesting piece I've read that anybody has ever done on bison. He said interesting. He didn't say the most accurate, the best. He said he found it interesting. Now, Delia went on over the next few years as friends of mine in the profession began to adopt my argument about what happened to bison, And for the sake of your readers, I'll just say that the bison ecology article from was basically a recasting of what happened to bison in the West, and it argued that, in opposition to our simplistic view that we had had for a long time, that after the Civil War, white hide hunters had gone out and slaughtered these animals, slaughtered forty million of them are sixty million of them in the space of about twenty five years, and that was what had happened to them. I argued that in fact, the decline of bison had begun much earlier than that that it was caused by multiple reasons, in part a changing climate in the nineteenth century that produced the end of the Little Ice Age and therefore less conducive conditions to having large herds of bison on the grasslands of the Great Plains because the grasslands weren't as productive anymore. I argued that competition from horses for grass and water. As horse numbers had grown, wild horses and Indian horse herds had competed with bison, and that had drawn the numbers of bison down. That introduced European livestock diseases like anthrax, for example, and bovine tuberculosis had gotten among the herds as a result of UH, the overall on trails, taking oxen across the west and spreading these diseases, that that had reduced the numbers, and that there was in effect a whole host of reasons, but that one of the reasons was also that Native people had gotten involved in the market economy and had begun hunting bison not just for subsistence, but in order to produce bison robes for the market economy. And so among these various causes, the role of Indians in the hunt was one of them. And other scholars in the field of Western history, within the next five or six years, UH, people like Elliott West at the University of Arkansas and Drew Eisenberg, who at the time was at Princeton. Yeah, I read one of his books, Yeah, began writing books and articles basically using this same interpretation. And so during the nineteen nineties, I would say by probably two thousand and five, about fifteen years after I published that article, essentially just about everybody in the field had adopted that argument, and so it's become the standard argument for what happened to bison in the nineteenth century now has has replaced this earlier, more simplistic view that we had for a long time. And so as that's happened, one of the things I've noticed is that I haven't it's been a long time actually since anyone from the Native community has, you know, sort of stopped me in an elevator or at a conference or something and wanted to express some concern that I was dissing how Indians had interacted with bison. So I think the Native people, over time, and there have been some of them I've talked to who I mean, they were very perceptive about all this, and they understood that this very likely was absolutely what happened, because they had gotten enough evidence from their own traditions that people had hunted buffalo in fact for the market. Uh. So I think that even the Native people, I mean, there's no doubt if you you know, they're always as I've learned from writing Coyote America, I mean, there are people who are gonna troll you whenever they don't agree with your particular interpretation. So they're probably some trollers still out there on this this particular line of argument, but it's become the primary explanation for what happened to bison. But and it's not entirely isolated, because there's there's this idea it Europeans wiped out Muscos in Alaska without ever stepping foot on the land, just by saying, hey, if you get a minute, we'd like meat and hides. That's exactly Yeah, And that was all that it took. Yeah. Well, so, I mean, I'll give you another example that's directly related. I mean, it's a part of the bison story. I mean, we had argued that it was the hide hunt, wide hide hunters after the Civil War that had wiped out bison in the United States. There never was a white hide hunt in Canada. Canadian bison were hunted only by Native people and by the may Tee. And yet the same thing, explain explain. The Maytee are a group of Uh mixed blood Canadian people who were French from their European backgrounds Um and several different tribes of Sinnaboins and Uh Sue and speaking people's Uh from the Indian background. And they had become a kind of a third culture in Canada. And they had but they had an almost like industrial precision to their hunts they did, I mean, you know, and they had the same I mean, when you read their traditions from the Indian side of the mix, they had inherited many of the same explanations of the sacredness of the animal and the use of all the parts of it and everything that you find among the the Lakotas or the Cheyennes, or whichever group farther south you want to study. All of that was intact. But indeed they did have a kind of an industrial approach. They went out in carts, uh the famous Red River carts, out onto the plane and hunted bison and hauled the products back to places like Ottawa, for example, and sold them. But there was never a white hide hunt in Canada, and yet the exact same thing happened to bison there has happened in the States. Interesting about those guys that I read about was they would on the northern planes in the winter, when things started to freeze up, they would dig these giant pits and fill them full of quarters like bison quarters, wait till it all FROs good, and then bury that stuff. And they'd be eating frozen meat into July digging it out of those the ground. I mean if you think about it in the nineteenth century and earlier, I mean all the way back to the time of you know, head smashed in in Alberta, which where bison jumps go back ten thousand years. I mean. The great problem with killing large numbers of animals like bison is how do you preserve them? Because if you if you drive four hundred bison off a cliff and Alberta in August, I mean, you can only dry and salt a small percentage of the animals if you don't have a way to refrigerate those carcasses. And obviously ten thousand years ago or even two hundred years ago, they didn't, And so you had to be very circumspect about trying to drive enough and or small enough group of animals off a cliff that you didn't end up wasting an enormous quantity of that kill simply because you lack the ability to preserve enough of the meat. But there seems to be cases where it's spun out of control, like the Southernmost jump. I believe this is the Southernmost jump on fire Shelter used a couple of times, and one time, it worked real well, and it got its name because all those rotting carcasses combusted and a spontaneous combustion, hundreds of animals and some small number were as they say in the archaeological parlance, disarticulated, I think is the word they disarticulated for. But then, but even then it was like there was probably so few people and such strong resources that you did there was no need to even like consider finiteness now, and there were you know, they were even arguments some people who did Boston jumps set so you can't really let any of them get away because if one of them gets away, they're gonna go tell the other bison what your stratagem was. And so when you jump them, you've got to make sure that you kill every one of them that goes off the jump. Nobody sense because look at like the power of the lead cow and a herd of elk who carries institutional knowledge about where to go. And we know that there are damn sure a lot of cow elk running around that are twenty years old who have done big migrations that many times they put together where it's okay to be where it's not okay to be and how to respond to certain stimuli. And yeah, they are creatures that figure out what to do and what not to do. So I could totally see that you have a population in a valley that would get to be like, uh, yeah, we're not going on push this off that We're not We're not gonna do that, and you know, and I think that that harkens back to what is best called native science. I mean, it's an observation that native people made prop a blife from real life examples. We let that cow get away, and damn it, the next time we tried to drive, I heard off that cliff some cow looked like the same one, swerved him away and took him off in a different direction. And so I think it's it's kind of an observational uh kind of effect, which is a version of science where you observe and effect and you you related to a cause and you say, okay, that's why that happened. So kyote America. So that made the best seller that that was the New York Times bestseller. Yeah, the paperback is about to come out, and as one of my friends uh has put it, I cinema, the dust jacket of it and it's got New York Times best Seller across the top. And it also was a finalist for the E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Prize from Pan America. And so they put a big badge on the front and my my buddy wrote me back when I sent it to him. He said, Man, that coyote is wearing an awful lot of blaying this time around. Who told you on that? Like, who who didn't like the ideas in there? Like what sort of person was upset by the ideas of Well, it's been kind of and I'm basing this on the reviews on Amazon. Oh yeah, so right, but please yeah, but you've been reading those well, I mean I yeah, I do look at him because because I'm interested in that. Uh yeah, that just that could be just like okay, never mind, Yeah, it's right. It's somebody who's having a bad day. I mean, I had somebody write a review the other day that went something like, there was a review of American Serengetti and this guy says, or this person says, I think it was a guy says this is on Amazon says this book is flawlessly written. It's a quick read. It it's just It's marvelous from start to to end. Three stars out of five. Yeah. Yeah, well you know why. He was probably pissed because it took an extra day. Okay are you familiar are you for with Poco pads? Okay, so Poco pads. This guy with Jack's welding. Jack's plastic welding makes a like a sleeping pad. Okay, a very heavy duty sealed welding raft. Yeah, you can use it to as a bench cover. Um, the heaviest ship. Not a backpack raft, but indestructible sleeping pad that when you get away, you just dried off the top. So I was looking at it. I was not at the super there's the biggest one there, and I see it, like and you know, everybody knows these are great pads. But it's got a it's got like a two and a half star review. Okay, so, um, that's weird how it had because it's only been reviewed a couple of times. And I read him in like five stars, five stars. And some guy who's mad at Amazon about some delivery problem that he had had in the past and had given Amazon a one star review. Um, but gave it to Jack's plastic Welding, who hasn't sold many of these pads and therefore gave the illusion of this being a shitty pet. That's an example. But I don't think that when you read the reviews, I don't think you're capturing the general conversation around something. Well, yeah, I would agree with you absolutely on that. I mean, the reviews are you know, they're a slice, but they do give you, I mean one of the things that you know, Amazon reviews I think do give you as a as a author. It's a little bit of an impression of how something is getting received. And so to me, for something like Coyote America, Uh, what I kind of say is that there are camps of takes on a book like that, and I relate that to the fact that coyotes themselves are extremely political. Political is being gluten intolerant. Yeah, And so the fact that this is an astonishingly political animal means that there are people who have picked that book up or ordered it from Amazon and didn't really look too closely at what was going to be in it and opened it up and said, well, and this is what some people have said. I was expecting a bunch of animal stories like Ernest Thompson Seaton used to ride a hundred years ago, and instead I had to read about how I mean and I had just I had. I was forced into reading this. This author forced me to read how kyotes have been poisoned relentlessly for decades, and I just I didn't want to read that, but he forced me to read it. One star out of five. So if listeners want to go, we Uh interviewed Dan Uh. I believe episode thirty four or thirty six. Yeah, you haven't wait, can you? I was gonna say thirty three, but yeah, when he scrolled through it will say Seattle, Washington, and they'll say Dann Flores. But it was thirties somewhere right now. I might come back and tell you what it wasn't a second here. And we talked at length about both the Dan's books that were calling at the time Coyote America, I call him kyotes. We talked about that. Dan tells me um during that interview why I call him coyotes, Why he calls him coyotes? And he said something that I have I have referred to quite a number of times since, which was that anybody who shoots one never calls it a coyote. Yeah, yeah, anyone who's killed one calls the kayo, which I'm sure there's some deviations, just like there are political conservatives who are gluten and tolerant, but generally it's a left wing disease, so there's some variation there. But uh so go listen to that. If you want to hear about the two books, you have two boks go at the same time. American Serengetti and and you're in America Cowardy America and Coardy America is now coming out in paperback, and American Serengetti is already in paperback. And they're both also in audio CD form too, So check those out, and check out the interview that we did. Did you find the number? You've been off a quiet yet? Just listening? Just listening, Go back and listen to episode thirty three, which was really was one of It was a very pop of the episode for us. People loved it. That was demanded and demanded more. Yeah, that was really Uh the first interview I did for either one of those books, um, because they hadn't come out now, they hadn't come out yet. I mean I I ended up getting an interview on Morning America or a good Morning, uh morning edition I'm sorry on NPR with David Green uh for the Coyote book. Uh, and quite a number of other things on various regional NPR stations and so forth, and another podcast or two. But that was the one that you did, was the first one. Do you mind real quick? Um, just sketching out with each of those books, just so people understand. Yeah, Cayote America is, um, a biography of the animal in effect, is what it is. It's an attempt to write a biography of the coyote from its evolution in North America, which goes back to the the beginnings of the canad family five point three million years ago, through it's long roller coaster like history in America, including about ten thousand years of time when it was revered as a principal deity by the native people of the American West everywhere that coyotes were found. UM. And I do a chapter called Old Man America in the book which takes on that story and and relates uh in my own prose four different what I think are sort of representative old Man coyote stories, which are, if if one stops to think about it, this is the oldest literature in North America. This is our our oldest body of literally stories. They were handed down orally and then finally set down UH in print at the beginning of the twentieth century. So the story can the Coyotes biography continues from that through its UH first encounters with Europeans in the nineteenth century, people like Lewis and Clark Uh Mark Twain didn't quite know what to call it. Yeah, they don't. In fact, the coyote has called for most of the nineteenth century the prairie wolf. That's the name that Lewis and Clark gave it, and so for most Americans through about the eighteen seventies or eighteen eighties, that's what the coyote was called. But by the middle of the century, as as American settlement had begun to get out to the Southwest to places like here Santa Fe, New Mexico, they encountered people who were using the old Aztec word for the animal that had been hispanicized into coyote. And so by the time Mark Twain and rights Roughing in in eighteen seventy three, coyote has become at least among people who read his books. UH kind of the accepted form of pronunciation, although a two syllable form had survived in much of the rural parts of the country as a result of the mountain men who were in the Southwest and who encountered that that same sort of transition from prairie wolf to a new form, and they called it. I think they thought coyote was a little bit too fancy. They called it a coyote. If you're from Arkansas, maybe coyote sounds a little fancy. So uh, anyway, we ended up with two different pronunciations, one sort of in the rural middle part of the country and then around the coast, uh coyote. And of course when the Wily Coyote cartoons come along, they began to convert a lot of people who uh hadn't thought about how they were going to pronounce the animal's name and the kai yote pronouncers. But anyway, the story goes on through our attempts in the twentieth century. I mean, this is an animal that we actually in the United States attempted to exterminate through a federal agency known as the Bureau of Biological Survey. It's still around now. It's called wildlife services, and this agency poisoned and invented poisons for the purpose millions and millions of coyotes in the twentieth century, only to have us discover and this is the rare environmental story that goes in this kind of direction, that no matter what we did, we not only couldn't get rid of coyotes, we not only couldn't exterminate them, but in fact, our efforts to do so ended up spreading them out of the West across all of the rest of the United States. And so they now ended up in every single state except for a white uh, and are in every large and small city in the United States. They've even moved into urban areas. So um, it's the story of I argue in the book kind of really America's other than us, probably the most interesting mammal in North American history. No other creature has a biography that even approaches uh, something like the coyote has. And I kind of ended with talking about uh wily coyote and what effect Wily has had on American culture more than you would think. And even Walt Disney, who helped sort of change attitudes towards coyotes in the sixties seventies and uh those decades by doing six different pro coyote Disney films in those years. So that's what that book is about. American Serengetti is a book that's about the region of the United States, the American Great Plains that once was the analog of East Africa, the Massaia Mara and the Serengetti with I mean, it was one of the ecological wonders of the world up until about nineteen hundred or so, with this marvelous aggregate of large grazing animals, the bison that we've been talking about a lot tonight, Uh, that you, of course have written about in a very successful book, and I've written about some too. And along with bison, wild horses that were reintroduced having evolved on the Great Plains, reintroduced by Europeans back to America thousands of years after they had become extinct, and that just spread in uh an instant across this old ecological homeland of theirs uh prong horn antelope, gray wolves, grizzly bears, which we think of them as mountain animals now, but they were originally were a Great Lanes animals. Yeah, didn't Custer kill one in South Dakota, Custer Kill one in South Dakota. And one of the stories I tell people when I talk about this book is everybody has seen The Revenant with Leonardo Dicac that oh my god, you're ruined my night. Well, I mean the story that story, Yeah, opened the dank gass BC forest instead of where it belongs rightfully on the Willow line by Perian Zones. The American West was just like people should be hung for that. Yeah, on the great planes. This story was a real story. It happened to you glass, but it happened out on the planes rather than in the glass. Had no child, Yeah, he had not not exact revenge. He had no Indian child's and did not take revenge. Confronted the people that left him, and was satisfied knowing that they had to live the rest of their lives that he was still alive and they had left him. Yeah, with the guilt of having left him. But it happened down on the plains because that's where the grizzly bears were. So anyway, this is a book about all these these creatures of the Great Plains uh in the primarily the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, and uh, I sort of take them one at a time. I do prong horns in a chapter, wild horses in a chapter, gray wolves in a chapter, uh, grizzly bears and a chapter, bison in a chapter, and I do a chapter on coyotes, which were the jackals of the planes too. And then the book finally ends up going to our possibilities in the twenty first century, primarily through what's known as the American Pray Reserve Project in Montana of trying to recreate and rewild on Americans serengetti that will ultimately have all those animals in place again in a wildlife park that will be we hope, something like twice the size of Yelso it's a long term project, but it's spent under wife for about fifteen years, not not without speaking of controversy. Now without controversy itself, plenty of controversy surrounding it, to be sure, weirdly seems to be like the main story that is picked up in the media is the controversy, at which imagine a lot of ideas probably go through that phase. I would like to remind people when I'm talking, when I when I do when I give public lectures and I'm talking about the conservation history of this country, I always like to remind people how pissed everyone was at Theodore Roosevelt for laying out the national forest system. Pissed and then a couple of years go by and they carve his face in a big giant mountain. But at the time, live it. Yeah, I live it, I mean, and live it for I mean, when he set aside the Grand Canyon as a national mon month, I mean, you know, so we've got a review of the national monuments going on now, all the way back to the Escalante Grand Staircase in years and three, reviewing George W. Bush's Monuments review and Clinton's monuments as well on Obama's monuments. Yeah. Well, when Teddy Roosevelt decided that the Grand Kenyon he was going to set aside as a national monument, I mean, there were people who were absolutely furious at the idea. And of course it's basically a world class site. Became a National Park fourteen years later and is a world class site. So I mean, what I really would love to see, I think it's this American Prayers Air Project is the great conservation project of the twenty one century. It's gonna take decades, but I would love to see it as our version of Yellowstone National Park. I mean, we're the first country ever creates a national park system, the United States is, but we passed over the Great Plains in doing it, and I think now is our opportunity to circle back and take this area that once was one of the great spectacles of the world in terms of wild animals, and do like Africa has done and acquire for ourselves. Uh, this marvelous historic Great Plains animal park. Yeah, I should touch. Actually I brought up the idea of it, of its controversial nature, and I should. Rather than leaving that hangout, I just want to explain a couple of points about it. Where you already have some large federally managed landscapes up there. So you have the Charles M. Russell Refuge along the Missouri Breaks, and you have some some monument, some some national monument, national monument that was designated on the Clinton administration, the Missouri Breaks National Monument. And what what the Prayer Reserve is doing is taking money. And critics of it always like to point out that it's generally outside money. It's money that's very important for people to express for whatever reason, that they're taking money from people donated around the country to buy land that just comes up for sale. So we're talking about willing seller willing buyer. This is not it's not no one's like getting land for free. It's not the government giving anyone land. It's just they're starting out with existing parcels of public land. And when properties come up for sale in the vicinity, they go and say what you're asking for the place, The person names the price they're asking and it goes to auction or Hawevard. Also happens in the American Prayer Reserve buys the land, so the seller got exactly what they're after. They got market value for the land. Oftentimes the land you'll you'll also attain grazing rights on joining pieces of land, and so they will take over grazing rights and an opt to not opt to not always exercise them through the grazing of cattle. So they do have a program out there that deals with grazing cattle on land. The criticism comes from people who look and they say that and the and it's understandable, and yeah, and I think you need to be sympathetic to it, where someone's like, so my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father invested very heavily in this idea and sacrifice a tremendous amount um of work and effort to make the desert bloom right that that we came in and raise cattle and help feed the nation and establish an economy that would allow either to be schools and towns. And we built this out of nothing. And to now have someone say thanks, but no thanks, it's insulting to people. Um, the American praiser at one time used to it has this long line of ideas that are kind of strung out. At one time. There's this idea the Buffalo Commons, which is similar. Remember the writer Bill Kittridge in his book Hole in the Sky, Um pointed out that going to Jordan, Montana and mentioning the Buffalo Commons was a sure fire way to get your ask it. So that when I said, that's the controversial part is it's controversial and spirit only. It's not that someone's like stealing someone's lands, just someone's saying, like, how can you come and act like what we've done here isn't the best thing for the country. How can you say that you want to tear up our roads, raise our buildings, rip out our fences because what was here before us is more precious to you than what we created. Like, that's the idea. And I don't even really need to articulate the other side, because the other side has to do with, you know, more n like some fairly unassailable notions of of wildlife, habitat and and in this case, free market economies. But that kind of sketches out for you why it pisses people off, is yeah, um yeah, I think that's that's a good expression of it, you know, And like you, I think we can all be sympathetic to that. Um you know. I mean I come from Louisiana, where my grandfather and my father and my brother were all in the oil business. But that is a business in Louisiana that uh doesn't It doesn't have a continuing application into the future. It's not. I mean, primarily the oil resources are depleted, and so in my generation, there's no possibility to continue to do that. I mean, it might be possible, I suppose at some point to go in and frack or horizontal drill and manage to extract those resources. But what I'm saying is I'm from a generation that can't do what my father, my grandfather ended up doing for their livelihood. I think in Montana, on these ranches, there is a sense that they can continue to do this, and so that's I think, as as you said, Steven, that's kind of why there's a a sort of a spiritual resistance among some people to it. Um I would say, you know, on the other hand, that it's a good thing to remember that this is not a federal project. This is not the federal government coming in and creating a new national park or a national monument. This is private enterprise doing what it's always done in America, taking private land and then doing what they want to do with it. So it can be in a way, the American Prayer Reserve can be defended as part of this traditional kind of private enterprise, capitalist approach. It's just that what they want to do with it is not what private uh developers have often attempted to do. So it seems fishy. Two people, Yeah, it seems quietly bought a ranch and then over time people realize that you didn't run cattle on it, and that you tore up the fences. Um, it might go unnoticed. But articulating a grand vision, yeah, makes people uneasy. Um and you But anyways, you probably explain a lot of this, But I do. I mean I and I try to place this whole story in the context of how in the twentieth century we tried on numerous occasions, realizing that the great planes had been passed over for a kind of an African or Yellowstone like wildlife park. We tried on several occasions to make it happen, and uh, and every instance up and down the plains from West Texas to Montana, we've failed so far. And so this attempt by the American Prayer Reserve is probably the most promising attempt that we've had in a long time, and it's taking the the possibility on in a whole new way by doing this kind of private enterprise buying up ranches when they come up for sale, with the idea of ultimately cooperating with the managers of the federal lands that are in the vicinity along the Missouri River and somehow managing this as a whole in order to reintroduce all these classic animals that we sort of thoughtlessly, heedlessly a century Ago obliterated from the landscape. I mean, we did it almost without a second thought a hundred years ago, and now we're rethinking what we did and hoping that we can somehow restore this. And so, as I said to me and those of us who are conservation thinking kind of people, this is one of the most exciting things that's happening in the West these days. You know, uh, when you talk about doing without thinking about it. I recently had occasion to speak with the with the conservation leader Jim Pozits, and he spells out that time of us realizing what we were doing through the story of Theodore Roosevelt, the first buffalo he killed and the second buffalo he killed, and sort of how he how he interpreted those two actions, one being near is it Medina Madora, Madora, North Dakota, and one around Henry's Lake. Um. The second time and sort of the first one he does award dance around, dance surrounded right, and the second one um, and by this time there are like none left. And the second trip he has a conservation epiphany. UM. And that's one of the many things that makes that guy's life interesting that ties into things we're talking about is being this trans like one of these guys who was alive at this like very transitional moment where he was in some ways engaged with the end or kind of aware of the end, and then was one of the people who said, like, whoa, at just the right moment, I mean, just the right moment. Yeah, And it became the seed when he became president for those National Bison Refuges that he set up, and the first one in southwestern Oklahoma, the Witch of Toam Mountain Ones, and then the next one in when they did that one, they were trucking animals from the Bronx Zoo. That's how bad things got. When they were trying to set up some buffalo parks in the West, they were they were getting animals from the Bronx Zoo and shipping them by rail back out west. Well, William T. Hornaday, who was the director of the Bronx Zoo, had had the foresight, I mean, he had written the first great book about what had happened to bison extermination oftermination of the American bison. Yeah, and he had had the foresight to start through people like Buffalo Jones and Kansas Charles. Buffalo Jones who had and a former buffalo hunter, and then was stricken by guilt and said, as a result of my wickedness and killing so many, now I'm going to try to do everything I can to save the last few that are there. Not roped him and fed him on cow's milk. He did and provided Hornaday with some of these animals that went to the Bronx Zoo. So one of the reasons, as you know well and have written about, they were trading them around, of course, is they were trying to make sure, I mean, the the animal population of bison had had gotten so small that they were afraid of genetic bottlenecking, and so they were trying to spread the few animals that they had left widely to get as dispersed a number of genes from the original population. In these particular little groups of animals they were trying to build herds up from. There was a there was a hunter during the big slaughter in the southern plains. There was a hunter that was who grew sickened to buy it like what buffalo Jones later clan grew sickened by it and swore to call it off. But then in the morning he explained how he was hearing all the gunfire. It was like, funk, man, they're doing it. They're gonna do it whether I'm there or not, and jump back in. Yeh. Not too many of those buffalo hunters ever seemed to express much remorse, you know, and some of them actually became pretty combative about what they had done, you know. That's the interesting thing is like when Hornaday was out trying to get someone, he was trying to collect specimens. So at first he was trying to collect dead ones. And he he took the Northern Pacific I just recently made its way to Miles City, Montana, and Hornday took it out and then struck off with a wagon and cart and a guide he was traveling with, and they went up into the Pumpkin Creek area to see if he could shoot a handful as zoo specimens. And he's riding through the bone fields trying to find one. And in his book he points out that there was still eyes, there were still hide hunters in Miles City convinced, and that was like, that was I should put out. That was the last of them, That was the last big congregation, and I think it was killed. They started killing it in the Winner. The summer of eighty two, I think a bunch were killed on one of the reservations. Some of the Sioux got there where they gave them some of their guns back and let him leave the reservation to go on one last hunt, and they killed a thousand and then that was it to the point where Horny was out scrounging around hoping to find a couple. He points out that many of the people in Miles City were hide hunters who just were waiting for the next big push to come down out of Canada. Yeah, well some of them. And they had seen I heard cross the medicine line into Canada, and they were convinced that that herd was coming back soon. And I think, as harned, he says, he already knew when they were telling him that what had happened to that hurt because the mate had wiped out, that had gotten onto it. Yeah, they were that herd was already gone. But these hunters, I mean, and he he met one guy sitting around a campfire one night, Doc something or other who wandered into his campfire and sat down, And this guy was firmly convinced that all he had to do was sit around and wait for a few weeks or a few months or maybe the next year, and there was a gigantic herd or bison that was gonna come down from Canada and it would all resume. And instead, as he explains, these guys kind of fell into shopkeepers ranchers and they had to retrain. Eventually they never did come back. Well, when they did come back, they came from the east by rail. That's right. Yeah, Yeah, all those guys had to retrain. And so this is yet another one of those says in American history where the resources finally gone and you just have you have to face it. You gotta retrain and do something else. Yeah, there's another one you might know about. To another little remnant herd is the story from the story of the guys Sam walking Kyo. Sam walking coyote perhaps had gone, had gotten in a fight with his wife or divorced from his wife, and gone out to the Milk River and hunted and somehow came back home with a couple calves. Calves that followed him, and that became the source animals for what is still the National Bison Refuge for National Bises at the reserve refuge. It's uh, I think it's properly a refuge, just they're they're supposed to be administered by the Fishing Wildlife Service as a National wildlife refuge. And that so that became sam walking coyotes, animals from the milk became that source herd. Then later that heard in the Flathead Valley became the source herd for the original Alaska introductions, not reintroductions, but introductions as those animals spun off and the Canadian herds too, right, I mean, I think the Canadian government ended up buying that for that wild herd, and that and that was the I can't remember the name of that what that what that herd when that sprang off with that herd became all right, So check out dance books. You learn about all kinds of stuff. Um and uh and and and dan was hugely influential and and um fostering my interest in these subjects. Uh. Yeah, you haven't said ship are you building? Are you like built up with like bent up thoughts? Had those nice thoughts when we took our teat break there earlier, But um, which were that dan us talking about the the trade goods? You know that the market brought across the Atlantic and we're just down in Guyana, and how the parallels were so similar, Like they're still using their native bows, arrows. They like making a lot of that stuff, and they're they're big on um, like they know the importance I think now of sort of keeping that culture around because people like us are interested in that, you know, and there's value to that. But the one thing that has changed is like the metal, right, like they like files and machetes, and when the machete wears out, they turned that into ah an arrow point. I think you were saying right, you talked to Roving about how he made Did he ever learn how to make the points? I don't know. He remembers people using um where their bow and arrow gear was all native material. Now the only non native material is tip, which is steel. But he remembers the people using the basically a point made from cut from bamboo, and we saw those in Bolivia, those bamboo tips. So in one generation, that entire progression he's experienced. Yeah, we'll check this out. So I was there five or six years ago, and they do they hunt for fish with bows. It's one of the main ways they fish is bow fishing. I was down there five or six years ago, trying to sell them on polarized sunglasses. Okay, not ever already put them on, but check this ship out and put these you can see those fish well there didn't like the field, okay. And also shoes didn't want shoes five or six later, five or six years later. I'm not I'm not, I'm not even kind of joking. Everybody polarized sunglasses all day long, and and inn five or six years shoes, so you sing replicate me and many other people and many other people liking But it was just like it was. They were, you know what it is, and and the honest brought us up earlier it was ego tourism. We're just a constant, steady exposure to well healed outsiders who are coming down, and a lot of them like because it was still cutting edge location. A lot of them industry folks, okay, who come down with tons of ship and and just like, hey man, I brought a bunch of sunglasses done when I got back. When I went down the first time, the first thing I did when I got home was sent down. I'm not kidding. I sent down a shipload of files because they were talking about what a bitch it was to get a file, and that's how they made their fish points and ship and files were the dope, right, But it was very expensive to get a file and hard to find a file, and I sent down files. Now, I also point out that um, my main friend on there, he has an email address, so it's all very confused where he has an email address but makes his own bows and arrows from native jungle material. And if he wants to catch a fish, he goes to a to a palm and finds the fruit on the ground and cuts the fruit out open and pulls out a larva and takes the larva and puts it on a hook and catches the fish and uses that fish to catch another fish, and that fish catches the big fish that he eats, and he hunts and fishes. He hunts, fishes and farms year round except for on occasion when dudes like us go down and want to go out and see how they do ship, and them taking guys like me out to show how they do ship corrupts how they do ship absolutely or from their perspective, it doesn't krupt at all. It's just great stuff to know. It's the same way if someone came to me and they're like, hey, man, um uh, you know you guys wash your dishes by hand every night. Why not when you buy a new house, fit that sun bitch out with a dishwasher. And I'm like, hey, that's a great idea. These dishwashers are sweet. So from like, it's like a kind of colonialism, not colonialism, but it's like a colonial perspective to sort of be like, I hold the power to decide that you will or will not be exposed to these new materials. In fact, they're down there like, hey, you know, it turns out I got these polarized sunglasses in They're great because I can see fish and shoot them better the innocent It's it's what it is I think is I would just say two things. I think what you're just driving is a perfect description of probably what happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Europeans went around the world and contacted indigenous peoples in the way we were talking about with how the market transformed the buffalo hunt, uh in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I think this is just a kind of a microcosm description of it. And the other thing I think I would say is that you know, we're all in the same boat because technology is proceeding so rapidly all around us that we're all getting introduced, not on a daily basis, necessarily, but maybe on a monthly basis to new technologies that we can either accept or reject. But if we reject them, a lot of times we end up kind of disadvantaging ourselves because compared to everybody, Yeah, it shifts without you and it leaves you behind. And so I think the truth is we're all in this same boat. The world is going at hyper speed. Technology can easily leave somebody behind in their lifetime or either maybe in a decade or in a couple of years. And so we're finding ourselves sort of living that same experience that you've just been describing then and that I was describing earlier from centuries ago. Um, and it's happening all around us. Yeah, I think I hijacked your concluding thought. No, you never do that, what are you talking about? No? Uh, yeah, it is like it's a perfect paralleox. And now, instead of like other the other tribes saying no, I don't want the tools or the metal, you know the machetes. They're sort of like Romans groups like very much adopted the eco tourism and that's giving them wealth and like helping his village prosper. It's like the school there, I mean it took us actually didn't take that long to get there. We got there from New York in twenty four hours to the village itself, um, and that included a couple of hour boat ride, you know. But inside the village, when you go by the school, the school, it's like you look in the window and you're like, oh, well, it looks like every other school I've seen recently, you know, kids just well and they were in uniform and uh, you know, half high high teacher to pupil ratio. But he was telling us that the other you know, camps along the river hadn't really got gotten into that yet. And it's created some jealousy, you know, their village is actually growing. Yeah, well not just jealousy, but even inspired a a curse from a nearby shaman. Yeah. Well, I think, uh, you know, it's it's happening at differential rates for everybody, but I think we're all kind of caught in it. And maybe it's useful to see indigenous people's confronting it because that kind of is a mirror back on how all the rest office are having to grapple with the speed of technological change. My handful of experiences down there has um change in a remarkable way. How I view parts of our portions of our own nation's history that I'm interested in. All the parallels. Someone could very easily come in and point out that there that they're false comparisons, false analogies. But um uh, because it's not perfect, the timelines aren't perfect. But it's just fascinating, particularly the evolving relationships of people and animals and the market influence and to see people um going through a very speedy version of what we went through of within a single generation being engaged and being introduced to market hunting, engaging in market hunting, realizing where market hunting is going, and looking for a sustainable model to have that play out in a person's lifetime. You're seeing like like in some way, you're seeing a hundred years of American history can pressed down really tightly in part because of the technology you're talking about, where ideas can cycle in so quickly. Yeah, it's both ideas and uh, you know, the goods, the technical, logical, uh possibilities all at the same time. And I think you're exactly right. We're seeing it in a sort of a hyper drive microcosm, replicating the last five years of world history but happening in the space of a few years. Yeah. I don't know if that's good or bad. Any other final things. Yeah, that's intense. That's my final thought. Dan, anything you'd like to add, Thanks for having me on and say thanks for coming. Thanks to both you guys for being here. This makes it easy to do a podcast when we're sitting here on my couch. Yeah. Again, I want to thank you, and I really want to implore I really hope people do go check out your books, especially if if you've always you know, if you tend to only and I'm guilting this too, if you tend to only view a wild life from the perspective of hunting right and through that kind of media, I think it's helpful to to to step into um a historian like a trained historian shoes and look at wildlife a little bit because it, uh, it adds a layer to it that you don't get in the kind of normal conversations about wildlife and wildlife management that we engage in UM, where we're talking about like what we're doing now, what's going on now, threats at wildlife habitat now to step back and go like, oh, so that's the that's how we arrived at where we're at. Those are the things that shaped our understandings, the mistakes we've made, the successes we've had. UM. I think it's really enlightening. So yeah, hopefully you go check out Dan's uh not just his not just his books, but if you want to dig into the deep web, you'll find some of your academic pieces from your your past life as a peer reviewed journal, peer reviewed historian. So again that Dan, thank you very much for joining him. Thank you man and also Man, I just want to remind everyone please UM go and give go and give a big gas five star review. Me need your podcast. Thank you very much,