Ep. 931: Eating Rotten Mammoths

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Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can’t predict anything.

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00:00:38
Speaker 3: L I T E.com.

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Speaker 1: All right, man, we’re here to talk about my all time favorite subject. The subject that has enthralled me since I learned that it was a subject ice age hunters, Clovis Folsom, the, the, the, the first Americans, this subject, and my two favorite guys to talk about this subject are here.

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Speaker 3: Dr.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: David Meltzer, who’s the Henderson Morrison professor of prehistory. at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He’s been on the show before a couple times.

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Speaker 3: And Dr.

00:01:09
Speaker 1: Matton Aaron, professor of anthropology at Kent State University, who has also joined us on the show before. And before we get into the main thing, well, let me say this. One would think that when talking about stuff from 15,000, 14,000, 13,000, 12,000 years ago, it wouldn’t change, that the understanding would be static at this point. but this is remains. And what, what’s so enthralling about it is it remains a kind of like dynamic subject, new ideas, new findings.

00:01:43
Speaker 3: It, it changes.

00:01:45
Speaker 1: It’s crazy to something that’s that old that our understanding of something that old could evolve, but it’s like a, it’s a great intellectual exercise before we get into what your, your latest theories, your latest understandings of who these people were, what they did, how they lived, what they killed or didn’t kill. Um, Help me understand what I’m holding up right here. I’m holding up a Clovis point that’s, what, nine and a half inches long?

00:02:12
Speaker 3: Yeah. Easily, yeah. And I saw it, and I thought it was a novelty item.

00:02:16
Speaker 1: Like, when you’re a little kid and you buy those giant chocolate bars or giant erasers.

00:02:21
Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean?

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:02:22
Speaker 3: At, like, tourist shops. But this is a mold. This is a… A cast of a real thing. Yeah.

00:02:28
Speaker 2: Well, it’s a real thing, but how do we know it wasn’t 12,000 years ago? Somebody wanted to make a giant chocolate bar.

00:02:34
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:02:34
Speaker 2: As a novelty.

00:02:35
Speaker 3: That’s what I’m wondering about.

00:02:36
Speaker 2: We don’t know. We don’t know. And unfortunately, the context of that find is not sufficient for us to really be able to tell.

00:02:43
Speaker 3: What an incredible specimen.

00:02:45
Speaker 2: Oh, it’s amazing.

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Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:02:46
Speaker 2: It’s a Clovis point on steroids.

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Speaker 1: I have a, you know, the people that do the archeological drawings, he drew me a real life size one, but he drew me the wrong point.

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Speaker 3: Because this would have been a much bigger… This would have been a much bigger.

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Speaker 2: Look at the other ones that Meton brought.

00:03:01
Speaker 3: Well, that’s what… Yeah. So, this would be… I got to be….

00:03:09
Speaker 1: Not everybody’s watching this on video. Can one of you guys tell what we’re looking at?

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Speaker 3: Meton, go. Yeah.

00:03:14
Speaker 1: I’m looking at a Clovis point, but what do I mean when I say I’m looking at Clovis point?

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Speaker 4: It’s a giant lance weapon tip. And we don’t know what weapons they were using, but… The one you’re holding, like you said, is about nine, ten inches. Um, it’s got a concave base, it’s got straight parallel sides, and the Clovis Point has these channels on both faces, and those are called flutes.

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Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

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Speaker 2: And think about those, to visualize it, think about World War I bayonets.

00:03:44
Speaker 3: Right? A groove. There you go.

00:03:46
Speaker 2: Up each face.

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Speaker 3: The old blood groove on a bayonet.

00:03:48
Speaker 2: The old blood groove.

00:03:49
Speaker 3: Groove, yes.

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Speaker 4: And that was a hypothesis, actually, for the function of flutes for a long time, was that you stick your animal and blood shoots out those grooves. The issue, though, is if you’re attaching that to some sort of spear, right, you’re going to have lashings, maybe, or some sort of adhesive. And so, like.

00:04:04
Speaker 2: It’s not a good drink.

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Speaker 4: It’s not a good… Yeah, exactly. Not a good groove for bloodletting. So there’s been other hypotheses for why people fluted But I don’t think it’s known as a… Oh, why?

00:04:16
Speaker 1: Because the way they hafted it on there.

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Speaker 3: Definitely.

00:04:19
Speaker 2: Well, yeah.

00:04:20
Speaker 3: I don’t know that. I don’t know. It’s just one of the things that gets thrown out there.

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Speaker 2: In the sense that that is a function, but was that the purpose? Was that the intended purpose of it? We don’t know.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, understood.

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Speaker 2: Because a lot of people have made arguments about, well, you’re just showing off because… putting a flute in, and Metten knows this more than anybody, really, because he’s a master flintknapper, that’s the point at which it’s most vulnerable to breakage, right? When you’re making one of those points, when you’re driving one of those flute flakes off, because what, Metten, they’re two millimeters?

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Speaker 3: Well, I’ll point out, under Metten’s instruction, I fluted one.

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Speaker 2: Show the video, people.

00:04:58
Speaker 1: I mean, he kind of like, he pretty much set it up for me, you know, but I fluted one.

00:05:04
Speaker 3: You know what?

00:05:05
Speaker 2: And That’s not easy.

00:05:07
Speaker 1: But he had done all the prepping and set me up with practice shots and everything.

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Speaker 3: So, yes. The flute, one more.

00:05:17
Speaker 1: I want to get back to these different sizes and stuff, but when you pressure test these for strength.

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Speaker 3: That’s a detriment, right?

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Speaker 4: The flute, no.

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Speaker 3: Like the signature flute is not a structural detriment?

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Speaker 4: No, in fact, it’s an advantage. And we published a paper 10 years ago on this where… What we showed was that fluted points actually can, they act like a shock absorber. So in the same way that a car, when it crashes into something, the front end crumples, protecting the people inside, the base of a Clovis point, because it’s thinner because of the flutes, Upon impact, it reduces the compression stress on the point and actually reduces the amount of breakage.

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Speaker 3: Oh, is that right?

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 4: Now that’s a structural property of that shape with the flutes.

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Speaker 3: With the flutes.

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Speaker 4: Now, we don’t know if that’s why they made the flutes, but when you have flutes on a point, you get that property.

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Speaker 2: You don’t have to understand the sort of mechanics of it and the engineering properties of it, but you understand that, well, you know what? If you flute that thing and it’s thinner at the base, um, the points will be less damaged during use.

00:06:27
Speaker 3: Got it. Yeah. Right.

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Speaker 2: Just like a baseball player, you know, in center field, you know, there’s a high fly ball coming toward them. They’re not calculating parabolas, right. And, and how it’s going to come down at them. They’re just running for the ball because they sort of intuitively understand that.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. Got it. Uh, you also brought The other end of the continuum. The other end. Yes. Which is, so here I’m holding a Clovis point that’s inch and an eighth long. Yeah, maybe.

00:06:56
Speaker 4: Maybe, yeah.

00:06:57
Speaker 3: And they come even smaller. Yes.

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Speaker 1: And this brings up, this, I guess, adds to the mystery, is you’re so, that these people, and can you tell people, and can you remind folks in whatever way makes sense in terms of B.C. or blank years ago, When were these things being manufactured in what is now the United States?

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Speaker 4: About 13,000.

00:07:22
Speaker 3: 13,000 years ago.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: That you could have one of these that’s nine inches, nine and a half inches. You could have one of these that’s an inch.

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Speaker 2: Both polluted.

00:07:33
Speaker 1: But they’re exactly, right? They’re so married to the styles. Well, that’s like the shape and the fluting that, that you would think, do you know.

00:07:44
Speaker 3: What I’m saying? It’s just that they’re like, no, I don’t care about how long it is. I just need it to look like this.

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Speaker 4: Yeah. But I think this is an interesting point you bring up because roughly they’re the same shape, right? They’re both Lancelet. They have concave bases, parallel sides, but that’s a very general way to look at the shape. Right. And, and so I think, You could say in the same way that there’s a lot of variation in the human species, right? And Danny DeVito and Shaquille O’Neal, but they’re all human. There’s a lot of variation in Clovis.

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Speaker 3: I see.

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Speaker 4: And so, yeah, they have the general anatomical similarities, but there’s still a lot of variation within that.

00:08:23
Speaker 3: Got it.

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Speaker 2: Which is not unexpected, of course, because these groups are out on a landscape. They’re moving. They’re out on that landscape for the better part of, what, 700 years? Yeah. and they’re in all corners of North America, and you’re going to have what we’ve called sort of cultural drift, right? Is that somebody’s making something and they’re not making it quite like dad made it or mom made it, right? No reason why mom couldn’t have made those. And so you’ve got variants that will just accrue over time. And so while you can generally argue, okay, we’ve got Clovis points in the Pacific Northwest, which kind of look like Clovis points in the Northeast. So, yeah, in a general sense, they’re all very, very similar, like Metin’s metaphor. But there’s enough variation that we’re seeing, in all likelihood, sort of time and space slipping by. And with that, changes in the styles in which people are making things, simply because they’re not making clones, right? They’re human artisans who are producing these kinds of things, and there’s inevitably going to be variation.

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Speaker 4: And I think another contribution to that variation, right, there’s stylistic drift. But we just completed a 10-year project funded by the National Science Foundation where we looked at, we basically did a Clovis Point Olympics. And we tested small ones and big ones and thin ones and wide ones to see whether or not they all functioned the same way. And they don’t. And so another reason why we may be getting lots of variation in Clovis is because this particular Clovis Point is for butchery. This one is for hunting. This one is maybe even for digging.

00:10:04
Speaker 2: Well, not necessarily for those things, but better at.

00:10:06
Speaker 4: Better at, yes, that’s exactly right, yeah.

00:10:08
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, you mean when you’re looking at it now without understanding what it was originally crafted for, But when you look at now, like, well, let’s just try to take a guess.

00:10:20
Speaker 3: Like, what would it be good for?

00:10:22
Speaker 2: Yes, that’s exactly what their experiments, what Mettner’s team’s experiments showed was that some of them had really great penetrating power.

00:10:29
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:10:29
Speaker 4: Right.

00:10:29
Speaker 2: And it wasn’t necessarily that big hunker. No, it was the smaller ones. It was the smaller ones.

00:10:34
Speaker 3: Right.

00:10:34
Speaker 2: You know, we always sort of think about big mammoth. You need a big point.

00:10:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.

00:10:39
Speaker 2: No, not necessarily.

00:10:41
Speaker 1: On the subject and what we want to talk about today. Add to this, but I’ll say this and you can add to it if you feel that it’s wrong. The primary questions that animate conversations around Clovis, the primary questions would be, there’s this big, long-running, burning one, which is, did humans.

00:11:09
Speaker 3: Manage to drive….

00:11:13
Speaker 1: Woolly mammoths and macedons to extinction did like were they were they really able to come in like and kill these things off or if it wasn’t that was it some degree of um they contributed to the die-off of mammoths and macedons right and other big megafauna right and the reason that has the reason that argument has teeth is it kind of opens up this idea of It becomes a debate about, well, how destructive is the human species and how long has the human species been destructive?

00:11:45
Speaker 4: Right.

00:11:45
Speaker 3: Right. A lot of there’s this.

00:11:48
Speaker 1: Kind of, there’s almost a moral element to it. If you could look and be like, man, 13,000 years ago, humans were driving animals to extinction through hunting.

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Speaker 3: And it, I don’t know.

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Speaker 1: That can be weaponized in some way, or it can be used to rationalize certain behaviors or it’s just interesting.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 1: So that debate animates discussion of, of Clovis is like, it’s kind of like part of why we talk about Clovis today. Another, I would say the other major thing from my view, the animates, the discussion of Clovis is.

00:12:21
Speaker 3: Who were the first Americans, right? Right.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: Did, did, is this, was this a group of people that, that showed up in what is now the lower 48 or Alaska in the lower 48, that they show up where they had this common culture, a common language. They knew who each other, they knew each other and they showed up and then they sort of proliferated as a people. And then eventually this people through distance and time kind of form these other unique cultures. or the or conversely disparate peoples showed up here and they coalesced into this this unified culture um and for 700 years kind of became like americans you know in some way.

00:13:18
Speaker 3: Do you agree with that or is there any i’m missing.

00:13:21
Speaker 2: Where do we start?

00:13:22
Speaker 1: I mean, in terms of the big animating, the reason that keeps it relevant.

00:13:28
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:13:29
Speaker 2: Absolutely agree.

00:13:30
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:13:30
Speaker 2: Okay. And I can say that certainly the weaponization aspect, when you look at when Overkill, the notion that people came in and wiped out all of these different animals, and the current tally is 38 different genera. Okay? So everything from mammoth and mastodon, giant ground sloths, various, you know, peccaries, tapirs, horses, camels, et cetera. That really hits its stride in the 1960s. And it’s tied to the environmental movement. You’ve got Rachel Carson, Silent Spring gets published. Everybody’s reading Aldo Leopold. All of these things, people are getting concerned about the environment. And this was a good, This was a good homily. This was a good lesson. Look what we did before. Let’s not do it again. Now, the problem is, I don’t think people did that before, right? There’s lots of reasons to protect the environment. What people did 13,000 years ago or not isn’t one of them.

00:14:33
Speaker 3: Got it, yeah.

00:14:34
Speaker 2: So I agree. It’s sort of been part of the discussion. And in fact, it’s been part of the discussion since the 1850s when people first noticed the bones of these giant animals and said, what happened to them. And one of the very early hypotheses was were they killed off by Indian arrows? So it’s been talked about.

00:14:55
Speaker 3: Someone floated that in the 1800s? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

00:14:58
Speaker 2: Charles Lyell, on his visit to the United States, his second visit to the United States, published in 1849, talks about it. Because people were wondering, where are they now? Because they knew enough about the geology to know that these animals had been around relatively recently, at least in geological time.

00:15:17
Speaker 3: Right.

00:15:17
Speaker 2: I mean, they were found in near surface deposits and the bones seemed in pretty good condition. They weren’t fossilized, mineralized. So, yeah, no, it’s been a it’s been a long standing question.

00:15:29
Speaker 3: I had no idea that someone threw that out there at that time.

00:15:32
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, but they dismissed it because it made no sense to them because they knew that, you know, the ability because at that point, I think it’s fair to say people hadn’t killed off all the passenger pigeons. People hadn’t actually caused the extinction of animals prior to that. So they probably had a hard time perceiving the ability as we do now, given the technologies that we have, how easy it would be to drive an animal to extinction.

00:16:04
Speaker 3: Yeah. Someone should visit that dude in his grave.

00:16:08
Speaker 1: And be like, listen, I know that you got dismissed outright in 1850, but had you waited a century, your idea would have gotten more traction.

00:16:15
Speaker 2: Absolutely.

00:16:16
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

00:16:17
Speaker 1: You would have tapped into the zeitgeist if you waited 120 years.

00:16:20
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:16:22
Speaker 2: Uh, and it is, um, it is an interesting thing because it does tie into the notion that, um, this sort of romantic notion of these big game hunters. You know, they’ve come across the land bridge. They’ve blasted down into North America and they look out across a landscape with these aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom. And mind you, some of the animals that went extinct only weighed 20 pounds. They’re lumped in there with megafauna and I’ve never gotten that. I’ve never understood that. But okay, so bunnies are megafauna.

00:16:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I got it. I’m guilty of that. I’m guilty of being like, yeah, all the big animals, all the big animals went away.

00:17:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, except for moose and caribou and bison and all the other big animals that didn’t go away.

00:17:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I understand.

00:17:12
Speaker 4: I understand.

00:17:13
Speaker 2: And we are trying to understand that as a package, right? These people come across, presumably they’re related. They must have been successful at colonizing landscapes like the Bering Land Bridge. and then they spread out. But one of the things that we’ve learned from the genetic record is that this is a fairly, mind you, we have limited ancient DNA from this time period, right? So we have limited information about who these people are specifically. But one of the things that we do know is that we have early on very, very different cultural patterns among very closely related biological populations. So the cultures will change and they will change fairly rapidly. So we’ve got people who are very closely related to Clovis living in the Great Basin who have a fundamentally different material culture, who we haven’t found any evidence that they’re out killing big game because, well, if you’re in the Great Basin, Western North America, there’s not a whole lot of mammoth or mastodon wandering around out there.

00:18:20
Speaker 3: Right?

00:18:21
Speaker 2: Uh, so the cultural patterns are not necessarily in sync with the, what we understand, at least at the moment, uh, to be the biological patterns.

00:18:30
Speaker 3: Got it. Yep.

00:18:33
Speaker 4: Yeah, uh, regarding the second question you brought up, right, did they, were they here and coalesced or, and became the first Americans? The Clovis Point has never been found outside of the Americas, North America, right?

00:18:49
Speaker 3: And so.

00:18:50
Speaker 4: So by definition, it is.

00:18:52
Speaker 2: It’s an American invention.

00:18:53
Speaker 4: It’s an American invention, which means.

00:18:55
Speaker 2: There had to be people.

00:18:55
Speaker 3: That point has not.

00:18:56
Speaker 2: Has not.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: Been found in South America. No.

00:18:59
Speaker 4: And it’s not been found in Europe or in Asia.

00:19:02
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:19:03
Speaker 4: Right? So if the Clovis Point was invented.

00:19:05
Speaker 3: In North America… So just.

00:19:08
Speaker 1: To help people a little bit on geography, you mean if I’m over in Nome, Alaska, and I go whatever the hell it is, 70, 80 miles, and I hit.

00:19:20
Speaker 1: And I hit Asia, and I look up and down the beach, I’m not gonna find a Clovis point.

00:19:28
Speaker 4: We have not found any Clovis points in Northeast Asia, which means it was invented in North America, which means there had to be people here to invent it. So by logic alone, there had to have been groups pre-Clovis on the landscape somewhere to have come up with that first. American invention.

00:19:51
Speaker 1: Are there good, rock-solid, indisputable Clovis points in Alaska?

00:19:56
Speaker 2: I know what my answer is. I’m waiting to hear hers.

00:20:03
Speaker 4: There are fluted points in Alaska. But they are later in time. And they come from when Clovis folks and related Clovis groups went from south to north through the ice-free corridor back into Alaska. But there’s never been a Clovis point of Clovis age found in Alaska.

00:20:27
Speaker 2: The dates, and you can actually quite literally track them in a time-transgressive manner going up the ice-free corridor.

00:20:34
Speaker 3: Is that right?

00:20:35
Speaker 2: Absolutely.

00:20:36
Speaker 1: No, because you’ve got- Because stuff like the Mesa site and stuff is fluted, but that’s much younger than Clovis.

00:20:42
Speaker 2: No, Mesa is not fluted.

00:20:43
Speaker 3: Oh, it’s not?

00:20:44
Speaker 2: Okay, I’m sorry. There’s other sites, Hutu site, Bedwell site. What’s the Ted Gables? Yeah, there’s fluted points up there. And they date, let me think about this, probably 500 years later?

00:21:06
Speaker 4: Yeah, in the 12s.

00:21:07
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:21:08
Speaker 2: They’re in the 12s. And in fact, there’s fluted points in that corridor region that are also dating in the 12s rather than at 13. And so it almost looks like the corridor, let’s just back up for a second, right? You’ve got these two massive ice sheets that during the Pleistocene are bumping into each other, basically down the spine of the Rockies.

00:21:35
Speaker 3: Okay. Okay?

00:21:37
Speaker 2: At the end of the ice age, they pull back, they retreat, and they do this around 14,000, 14 and a half thousand. Initially, it’s just this vast mud flat, right? Melt water everywhere. There’s not a whole lot of things growing there, living there.

00:21:56
Speaker 3: I’ve been in places like that in Alaska.

00:21:58
Speaker 2: There you go, right? But this place is 1500 kilometers long. and there’s nothing growing, you’re not gonna go down that corridor, right? You’re gonna have to wait for the plants to colonize, the animals to then follow, right? That doesn’t happen until around 13, maybe slightly later, maybe slightly earlier, but not early enough. Clovis is already down here by then, okay? But then later, as these groups are expanding in North America, some of them make their way back up that corridor, because by then, you’ve got bison, it’s grassland. Now what happens around 10,000 years ago, maybe 11, is that you’ve got boreal forest moving in. And once the boreal forest move in, that corridor is shut down, right? You’re not gonna be going up and down that thing anymore. So it really looks as though people came in.

00:22:53
Speaker 3: Just because it’s not like super productive grassland.

00:22:56
Speaker 2: I mean, what are you gonna get in a boreal forest?

00:22:59
Speaker 3: It’s just less draw, yeah, I understand.

00:23:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely.

00:23:03
Speaker 2: But when you have bison up and down that corridor, and in fact, you brought up Mesa, that’s a really good case to bring up because it looks like these groups are following, tracking bison up and down this corridor, well, up this corridor. And what you see at Mesa looks an awful lot like what you’ve got on the Northern High Plains at 10,000, 10 and a half thousand, 11,000 years ago. So we can make the connections, but the connections are not from the North down to the South. They’re from the South back up to the North. It’s the craziest thing.

00:23:35
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:23:35
Speaker 1: I was first introduced to that idea. And I think that it was the word was the word back drift or something.

00:23:42
Speaker 3: Was that a word?

00:23:43
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Backwash.

00:23:46
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:23:49
Speaker 1: So who, where right now, if you, I don’t know, what’s the fashionable idea right now of like, And I don’t mean to make it trivializing, but the idea right now, if you had to make a guess, and no one’s holding you to this, but.

00:24:09
Speaker 5: If you had to make a guess, who and when and how, who first stepped foot in.

00:24:22
Speaker 1: What is today, however you want to put it, like, washington state idaho panhandle montana north dakota minnesota like the where did the first human step in what is now the lower 48. what was he doing name rank serial number yeah uh like when right if you had to guess And I’m setting this up. You have to take this seriously. You spent your life publishing on this. You have a reputation at stake. But just casually.

00:25:03
Speaker 2: It’s going to die right here in your studio.

00:25:05
Speaker 3: Just casually.

00:25:07
Speaker 1: Tell me a thing that wouldn’t surprise you. I know you guys hate conversations like this, but tell me a thing.

00:25:12
Speaker 3: That wouldn’t surprise you. It’s fine.

00:25:14
Speaker 2: It’s fine. Look, I think that there is compelling evidence. We’re going to do this evidence-based, not faith-based.

00:25:22
Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah.

00:25:23
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:25:24
Speaker 2: I think there’s compelling evidence that people were here 15,000 years ago, plus or minus. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were here earlier. Getting them here earlier is complicated just because of the geology and because of the routes that would have been available. We just mentioned that this interior corridor was not going to be available until around 13. So if people were here at 15, they had to come some other route. The coast… was open. ICE had pulled back from the Pacific margin by 17, 16 and a half. So that’s a route that you can take into the Americas and be here by 15. We know from the genetic record that we have that ancestral Native Americans split off from Northeast Asian populations sometime around 25, I would not be surprised if people were here at 25,000, right?

00:26:27
Speaker 3: Like that wouldn’t shock you?

00:26:29
Speaker 2: No, no. I mean, it would just make us have to think, well, how did they get here? Who were they? And how do they relate to everybody that we have after 15?

00:26:38
Speaker 3: Got it.

00:26:39
Speaker 2: Right? And look, if people were here at 30, we’d have to give that a rethink as well. Okay, does that mean that the genetic evidence we have is just insufficient? to tell us when these ancestral Native American populations first emerged? Does that mean that these groups that were here earlier were not related to ancestral Native Americans as we know them that were here at 12? You always have to follow the evidence and you can sort of set up parameters of the problem and say, but you always have to sort of add the caveat As we understand it today, based on the evidence that we have today, this is the thing that has greater prior probability. This is the thing that has less. Some years ago, about 10 actually, there was a paper published that suggested people were here 130,000 years ago. That one is really hard to sort of make sense of.

00:27:40
Speaker 3: That gets even more complicated.

00:27:41
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, because then you’re not really talking about modern Homo sapiens. And so we just don’t see any evidence. archaeologically or genetically to suggest that those folks were here. Because we don’t even see them in parts of Asia by then.

00:27:59
Speaker 3: Got it.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, how seriously can you take, this is some stuff we’ve discussed in the past, but how seriously can you take any idea that it wasn’t Siberians?

00:28:16
Speaker 3: None.

00:28:17
Speaker 4: There’s no, they came from Asia.

00:28:19
Speaker 2: For the viewers at home that are not watching on TV, I’m shaking my head no.

00:28:25
Speaker 1: So when people bring up this idea that Europeans came or Pacific Islanders out of the South came or whatever, it’s just that you feel the evidence is still strong. or overwhelming that these are Siberians?

00:28:45
Speaker 4: Oh, there’s no feel about it. The idea that Stone Age people crossed the Atlantic, I think is one of the most falsified hypotheses in paleo and archaeology. I mean, it isn’t supported genetically, archaeologically, chronologically, the oceanographers didn’t show it, it didn’t work. I’ve published several papers and so have you. on that idea that maybe the first Stone Age Americans came from Europe, and no matter how you slice it, it doesn’t work. And so.

00:29:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean, if they came here, they suffered complete and total genetic amnesia, cultural amnesia. I mean, they forgot everything that they were doing in Europe, and they forgot to bring their DNA with them. you know because uh all of the dna that we have both ancient and modern in the americas is native american.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: When you look at this question globally of pioneering populations of humans do you do you ever see you know new zealand or australia or wherever do you ever see where a where a population gets somewhere but it doesn’t work out and they and they they don’t they don’t thrive they blink out yeah for whatever reason yeah and then and then thousands of years go by and it gets re-hit or does or do humans usually have a way of when they get somewhere it.

00:30:14
Speaker 4: Works see that’s a really tough question because in the old world europe asia africa you’re it can be difficult if you don’t have bones to know whether you’re dealing with Homo sapiens, or Homo erectus, or Heidelbergensis, or Neanderthalensis. There’s all these other hominins, Denisovans, that are running around. And so, and they’re oftentimes using the same stone tool technology, right? So, you don’t know if you’re dealing with a Homo sapiens site who’s making some sort of discoid core or a Neanderthal.

00:30:47
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:30:48
Speaker 4: This is one reason why to understand the mechanics of prehistoric colonization, North America is so valuable. And I think there’s some regions in particular, like the Great Lakes in New England, that are really great because you had glaciers covering the Great Lakes. And so when the glaciers recede and we get- Gave you a nice clean slate. It’s a demographic blank slate. I got you. And so that’s why it’s really great to study colonization processes there.

00:31:14
Speaker 1: That’s an interesting point, man. It doesn’t have what makes Africa so complicated.

00:31:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes.

00:31:20
Speaker 3: Got it.

00:31:21
Speaker 2: But failed migrations is what you’re asking about. And back.

00:31:27
Speaker 1: Like, not just failed migration, but failed pioneering events.

00:31:31
Speaker 3: Oh, no, that’s… Yeah.

00:31:32
Speaker 2: No, I actually argued that many years ago in a paper, just on sort of first principles. The idea that absolutely every movement into a landscape was successful. Which is not to say that a movement wasn’t successful, but groups within that could have disappeared for want of an ability to cope with an environmental disaster, right? One can only assume, even though it would be extremely difficult to test, one can only assume that groups that are moving out of Africa 100,000 years ago and moving out across the globe, some of them must have not made it. Now, one of the things that’s been most interesting coming out of the genetic record is that we have what are referred to as ghost populations showing up in ancient genomes. These are signatures of DNA that are unrelated to any modern population. So clearly there were other groups with whom ancestral Native Americans interacted with. What became of them, right? And were they possibly, and we don’t know this, but here’s one possible case, were they here when Native Americans showed up? and there was interaction between them and for all intents and purposes, they disappeared as a population. This gets back to your question earlier. This is why this question about the peopling is so dynamic and is constantly right there on the front burners of us trying to figure out because the more we learn, the more complicated the story is. When I started, which was a while ago, It was very simple, right? Mammoth hunters. They come into Alaska, they go down the ice-free corridor, they start killing.

00:33:27
Speaker 3: Everybody, they spread it over.

00:33:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was a nice story, but there was no nuance to it. And what we’ve been learning over the years, and this is actually one of the reasons why we just published this piece on scavenging, was that we wanted to sort of critique the… the stereotypes we wanted to sort of explore variation and nuance and are there alternative explanations for data that we’ve just kind of in a very common sense way interpreted over the years.

00:34:01
Speaker 3: Yeah. Let’s get into your, let’s get into your new paper. Segway. Yeah.

00:34:08
Speaker 1: Tell me whichever one you want us to do it. Like, like tell me the, give me the gist of the.

00:34:13
Speaker 3: New paper you have about, about scavenging.

00:34:19
Speaker 4: So pretend you’re a scientist.

00:34:21
Speaker 3: Okay. Got it. And I do that all the time.

00:34:24
Speaker 4: Oh yeah.

00:34:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:34:25
Speaker 4: That’s great.

00:34:26
Speaker 2: I play a scientist on TV, but I’m not one.

00:34:29
Speaker 4: And you have a very simple question.

00:34:31
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:34:32
Speaker 4: How many baseball hats of the home team are in the stadium on game day?

00:34:38
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:34:39
Speaker 4: And you have a hypothesis, right? There’s going to be more green hats. Cause that’s the color of the home team than red hat, which is the away team. Okay. Okay.

00:34:47
Speaker 3: And I think that because it’s the home team.

00:34:49
Speaker 4: It’s the home team, right?

00:34:49
Speaker 3: And their fans live around here.

00:34:50
Speaker 4: Exactly, right? So you’ve got your hypothesis and you now want to test it. So you hire some dude to.

00:34:57
Speaker 2: Has to be a dude, I’ll bet.

00:34:57
Speaker 4: Well, only dudes are dumb enough to go count, right? So you hire some dude to go to the stadium on game day and he counts all of the hats, okay? Comes back to you and he’s like, all right, scientist Steve, Dr. Steve, there were 15,000 green hats. Okay. There was 10,000 red hats. You’ve got your data. You’re like, supports my hypothesis.

00:35:21
Speaker 3: Great.

00:35:22
Speaker 4: A couple years go by, and then you learn that the guy you hired to count all the hats is red, green, colorblind.

00:35:32
Speaker 2: You hired me for the job. It was a bad move, Steve.

00:35:35
Speaker 3: Bad move.

00:35:36
Speaker 4: So how do you know what the answer is? You don’t. And so what our paper shows is that archaeologists are currently.

00:35:45
Speaker 3: I don’t know where you’re going, but I love the analogy so far.

00:35:47
Speaker 4: What our paper shows is that archaeologists are colorblind to hunting versus scavenging and the interpretation of those two things in the sites we dig up. We can’t tell the difference.

00:36:01
Speaker 2: The term is equifinality.

00:36:03
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:36:05
Speaker 2: In that multiple processes can result in the same product. They can result in artifacts being found with bones. They can result in artifacts that got snapped, found with bones. And we were talking this morning on the way over to the studio, um, the experiment that we did with you guys in what, four years ago now, which was.

00:36:30
Speaker 3: Just refresh people.

00:36:31
Speaker 1: We, uh, These guys were conducting an experiment where we were using stone tools to butcher a freshly killed bison carcass. And then they took great interest in how did the tools break? How did the tools dull? Where did the tools wind up? When you lost them or broke them, what did it look like? Meaning, so then you have not a collection of tools from having killed the animal, you had a collection of tools from having butchered the animal.

00:37:00
Speaker 4: I’m also just thinking of the famous efficiency part of that experiment. and Dr. Michelle Bevers’ meat per minute.

00:37:07
Speaker 2: No, meat per minute.

00:37:07
Speaker 3: Measure. Okay.

00:37:10
Speaker 4: Which is published in the scientific literature.

00:37:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. So what we found in that, one of the things people have said, and I’m guilty, right? I’m not going to paint anybody else with this brush.

00:37:24
Speaker 4: I’m included here.

00:37:26
Speaker 2: You know, you look at these busted points and you say, oh, well, that must be end shock as a consequence of impact. Well, what we discovered- was in the points that you guys were using some of them snapped just like things that i’ve interpreted as end shock from use and impact.

00:37:43
Speaker 3: Yeah right like hit a shoulder blade and broke yeah.

00:37:46
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah uh so those are the kinds of things that make you pause and you realize you can’t automatically assume that just because you have these things with a mammoth that therefore these were the items that were used to kill it okay that’s the red green colorblindness that Metin is talking about that we have. And it’s important to stress this fact. We’re not saying every site with a mammoth was a result of scavenging.

00:38:17
Speaker 4: We’ve never said that.

00:38:18
Speaker 2: We’ve never said that. What we’re trying to do is think harder about how we can discern what the process was that caused that product.

00:38:32
Speaker 3: Right?

00:38:33
Speaker 2: And this is a problem in which, because there are multiple processes, you run into that issue of equifinality because you can just as easily explain these things as a consequence of scavenging as you could hunting. And we would love to know, is there an unequivocal, demonstrable diagnostic test for one or the other? There isn’t even a diagnostic test for scavenging. I went into this paper thinking, oh, Well, we can tell scavenging because we have some instances of Clovis points that were used, or actually, I’m sorry, ivory shafts that were used to pry apart mammoth feet. And I’m thinking, well, that has to be scavenging because rigor mortis had set in, right? The animal was already dead. But then in the course of doing this research, you know, one of the things that we learned was that rigor mortis under certain circumstances can kick in pretty quickly.

00:39:29
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:39:30
Speaker 2: So that animal might actually have been very recently killed by that hunter who then wanted to pry apart the feet.

00:39:37
Speaker 3: What do you mean by pry apart the feet?

00:39:39
Speaker 2: Get into the joints there to break apart the portions of the foot to get it foot pad me.

00:39:46
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:39:47
Speaker 1: I thought I was picturing that you meant like move his legs apart. But you mean like literally like break the feet apart.

00:39:52
Speaker 3: Exactly.

00:39:53
Speaker 4: I got you.

00:39:53
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

00:39:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you know, every time you sort of think, okay, well, this is clearly a signature of hunting or clearly a signature of scavenging. Then you think a little harder about it. You realize, well, geez, the only instance that we sort of came up with in this paper, uh, is that if you see a beached whale from 200,000 years ago, long before people had marine technology, long before they went out in boats and could harpoon things, and it’s been butchered on the beach, that’s scavenging.

00:40:26
Speaker 4: Because they’re not going to get in a whale.

00:40:27
Speaker 3: Sure. Right? Yeah. But.

00:40:29
Speaker 1: See, you know when I said that I had a thing that was going to trip you guys up?

00:40:35
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:40:35
Speaker 3: And it was going to blow your minds and make you question your career?

00:40:38
Speaker 2: I’m still waiting for it.

00:40:39
Speaker 3: It has to do with whales.

00:40:40
Speaker 4: Oh.

00:40:41
Speaker 3: But I’m going to.

00:40:42
Speaker 2: You’re going to wait?

00:40:43
Speaker 3: No, I’m going to wait a minute to bring it up. No, I’ll bring it up now.

00:40:45
Speaker 2: Go ahead. Don’t leave us hanging, Steve.

00:40:48
Speaker 3: I was with some whale hunters and none of it.

00:40:51
Speaker 2: Oh, very cool.

00:40:51
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:40:52
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:40:52
Speaker 1: And we were talking a lot about, I mean, they use contemporary weaponry now, but we were talking a lot about what.

00:40:57
Speaker 3: Their ancestors, how their ancestors hunted whales.

00:41:01
Speaker 1: And I was thinking about you guys, because I feel, and maybe you can correct me on this. I feel that somewhere in your head, it’s a little bit like you feel that it’s a little bit outlandish. Or a little bit, you’re skeptical that humans could have killed these things.

00:41:20
Speaker 3: Oh, no. Mechanically.

00:41:22
Speaker 1: Or maybe you have no skepticism about this. But I was like, but how would someone view, I mean, but like, so if it’s not in your head, I think it’s in some people’s heads.

00:41:31
Speaker 3: Like, really?

00:41:32
Speaker 1: You’re going to take a spear and kill a mammoth? But then I was thinking, like, Bahamut, we know, like, as a matter of fact… that humans were using stone-tipped, bone-tipped stuff and killing huge whales. Well, absolutely. But I think that, and I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, and you’re shaking your head like you don’t have a problem with them killing it, but I think that there is a sense from some people, like, how could they have walked up with a spear and killed a mammoth?

00:42:02
Speaker 3: I’m like, I don’t know. How’d they kill whales?

00:42:05
Speaker 2: So I’ve given talks over the years where I’ve had hunters in the audience.

00:42:12
Speaker 3: Uh-huh.

00:42:13
Speaker 2: And I’ve talked about killing mammoths, where you’ve got a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it. And I’ve seen a lot of shaking heads where people are saying, no way am I doing that to a six-ton animal.

00:42:25
Speaker 3: Thank you very much. It would seem insane. It would seem insane.

00:42:29
Speaker 2: No, but people did.

00:42:31
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:42:32
Speaker 2: I don’t think there’s any question that people were hunting animals of all sizes, right? And the question is, how often? What was the frequency? To what degree was it a critical element of their diet? Was that the only thing they were doing on the landscape? I mean, this is the thing that we’re sort of trying to get around is the sort of singular model.

00:42:58
Speaker 4: The stereotype.

00:42:59
Speaker 2: The stereotype. You know, we want to understand the complexity of people’s lives, their hunting strategies, their foraging strategies, Which facultative scavenging, and this is what this paper is all about, the idea that if there’s a four-ton animal dead on the landscape, why would you not take advantage of it?

00:43:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. Right?

00:43:28
Speaker 1: Were you able to look, because when I was looking at the work that you did, you addressed this, but I just want to tee it up, to be, In my head, just as a guy today that wanders around out in the woods a fair bit, and in a lot of places, it’s just like, there aren’t, it would be exceptionally rare, exceptionally rare to stumble across a salvageable, untouched, fresh carcass.

00:44:00
Speaker 2: It happens.

00:44:02
Speaker 3: It happened twice.

00:44:04
Speaker 1: The lake I grew up on, I can think of two cases. A deer swam up, went through Bob Starrett’s yard, and snapped its neck on Bob Starrett’s fence.

00:44:11
Speaker 2: Darn for Bob Starrett. Why did he have a fence?

00:44:13
Speaker 1: Well, another one came through and got hung up. And one came through and got hung up on Chet Utzinger’s fence.

00:44:19
Speaker 2: Oh, Bob and Chet, man.

00:44:20
Speaker 3: So, sure.

00:44:22
Speaker 1: And we scavenged those carcasses. But it’s just not. It’s so exceptional that I can tell you about these things that happened when I was, I’m now 52. I can tell you about these things that happened when I was a teenager as being outliers. And they involve fences, human-made fences. But it’s just like, you can’t, it’s not reliable from my view. It’s not reliable to wake up in the morning and be like, kids, me and mom are going to walk until we find a fresh dead thing.

00:44:56
Speaker 3: And then we’re going to butcher it and bring it on home. Okay.

00:44:59
Speaker 2: I’ll let Metten respond to that, but then I want to talk to you about reliability.

00:45:02
Speaker 3: Okay. Go, Metten.

00:45:03
Speaker 4: So, I have an admission to make, and it’s that you are actually the inspiration for this paper.

00:45:11
Speaker 3: Oh, great.

00:45:11
Speaker 4: And it’s because.

00:45:13
Speaker 1: Because of my view on the improv.

00:45:15
Speaker 4: On April 21st, 2025, episode 693, you said, when you’re out wandering around the mountains… Oh, God, you actually have the entire quote. or out wandering around the woods… you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff. If you wanted me to produce a dead thing, I would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wandering around.

00:45:40
Speaker 3: I stand by that.

00:45:42
Speaker 4: So, I’ve always laughed at the idea that they were just finding carcasses lying around, right? And I heard that quote and it just got me thinking, right? It got me thinking about scavenging, it got me thinking about scavenging during the Lake Pleistocene when it was a very different environment.

00:46:04
Speaker 2: A lot more animals.

00:46:06
Speaker 3: A lot more animals. Yeah, sure.

00:46:08
Speaker 4: Very different animals. And it got me thinking about our modern experience versus how and why we interpret the things the way we do over the centuries of the Clovis archaeological record.

00:46:24
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:46:25
Speaker 4: Right?

00:46:25
Speaker 2: Where you had thousands and thousands of people who are spending every day of their lives outside. I mean, how often are you out in the field?

00:46:36
Speaker 3: Not like that. Exactly. Where am I at right now?

00:46:39
Speaker 2: And you’re out there for a week at a time, two weeks at a time in a circumscribed area.

00:46:44
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:46:45
Speaker 2: But if you’re spending your entire life out there and let’s just say a life expectancy of 45 plus or minus.

00:46:51
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:46:51
Speaker 2: We don’t know, but that’s generally the sort of estimation that’s, Thousands and thousands and thousands of person hours out on that landscape, on a landscape that has a hell of a lot more game on it than the landscape does today. And it’s got elephants out there. And elephants on that landscape are going to last for a long time, right? It’s not like a mouse dies and you’ve got to get there and scavenge it really quickly.

00:47:19
Speaker 1: Even if stuff’s working on it, they’re going to be working.

00:47:22
Speaker 3: On it a long time.

00:47:23
Speaker 2: Absolutely.

00:47:24
Speaker 4: And sometimes they can’t work on it. Because in winter months, and this is, we learned so much about carrion ecology and scavenging in the broader biological world. In the winter months, some carcasses just are not accessible because they freeze, which is something humans don’t have to worry about because we’ve got stone tools and fire. I think the other thing to keep in mind too, right?

00:47:48
Speaker 2: Hang on. You found that example in Dale Guthrie’s book.

00:47:50
Speaker 4: Yes, it was.

00:47:52
Speaker 2: There’s a… The case of Blue Babe, the sort of freeze-dried bison, there’s a carnassial tooth from, is it a lion?

00:48:00
Speaker 3: A panthera?

00:48:03
Speaker 2: In the hide. And Guthrie’s interpretation, and I think it’s a reasonable one, is that that cat was basically trying to get into the carcass and it was frozen. It snapped the tooth off.

00:48:14
Speaker 3: Oh, I pictured him breaking it. I don’t know. I didn’t know that theory.

00:48:16
Speaker 1: I know about this, but I always thought that it was suspected or that he broke it off and fighting with the thing.

00:48:25
Speaker 2: Oh, that’s entirely possible too.

00:48:27
Speaker 3: But broke it off, trying to get a frozen thing ripped apart.

00:48:31
Speaker 2: It would be more likely that it would break if the thing was frozen.

00:48:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. Go ahead.

00:48:35
Speaker 4: Well, I was going to say, you had two examples where you found carcasses, right?

00:48:40
Speaker 3: I got a lot.

00:48:40
Speaker 4: Well, okay, so a lot.

00:48:41
Speaker 3: But I’m saying they’re unique enough that I remember them.

00:48:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, fair enough.

00:48:45
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:48:46
Speaker 4: But imagine you, 10,000 ewes, right? You’re the Clovis population.

00:48:52
Speaker 1: I want to clarify my point, but I want you to go, but I want to clarify my point. Yes, but not reliably.

00:48:59
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:48:59
Speaker 3: Let me, let’s talk about it. Take it away. I’m not going to interrupt you again, but I just want to clarify what I’m getting at. It happens, but I would never plan on it. No, no, no, no.

00:49:08
Speaker 2: That’s the whole point of facultative scavenging.

00:49:10
Speaker 4: You can’t plan.

00:49:10
Speaker 2: You don’t, you don’t plan on it.

00:49:11
Speaker 4: No.

00:49:12
Speaker 2: Just like you don’t plan on hunting, right? What do you mean you don’t plan on hunting? You’re out there looking for animals. Are you going to see them?

00:49:19
Speaker 4: All the time.

00:49:20
Speaker 2: All the time.

00:49:21
Speaker 3: Okay.

00:49:22
Speaker 2: Look, nobody is saying that folks.

00:49:25
Speaker 4: Depended on scavenging.

00:49:26
Speaker 2: Depended on scavenging. What we’re saying is like all other animals, all other predators in the animal kingdom, they all scavenge.

00:49:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:49:35
Speaker 2: Herbivores scavenge.

00:49:37
Speaker 3: Oh, God. Deer scavenge.

00:49:39
Speaker 2: Hippos, giraffes, chimps will scavenge, okay? So why would we assume that humans are any different, right? We’re not arguing that, don’t make the assumption that humans were solely scavengers, in which case it would be an unreliable strategy, without question. If they’re facultative scavengers, if they come across something, then the question is, what’s the cost-benefit Is it worth tracking where you haven’t seen any big animals for quite a while? I mean, goodness knows you’ve been on unsuccessful hunts before. Have you not?

00:50:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, plenty. Yeah.

00:50:16
Speaker 2: So if you’re on an unsuccessful hunt and it’s been quite a while since you killed anything and there’s a dead elephant laying there, are you going to pass it up?

00:50:24
Speaker 3: No.

00:50:25
Speaker 2: Exactly.

00:50:29
Speaker 4: And when you look at the 15 sites where we have, good association between Clovis artifacts and proboscideans.

00:50:37
Speaker 3: Can you dig in on this for a minute?

00:50:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:50:39
Speaker 3: This number.

00:50:40
Speaker 4: Yeah. This is where we’ve got Clovis points and maybe flakes or scrapers in a secure context with elephant bones such that there’s reason it’s reasonable to assume that those artifacts were involved in the dismemberment in some way of that animal.

00:50:59
Speaker 2: Or the killing of that animal.

00:51:00
Speaker 4: Or the killing of that animal, right?

00:51:02
Speaker 1: But yeah, I never knew this number until fairly recently.

00:51:08
Speaker 3: There’s like a number.

00:51:09
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:51:09
Speaker 3: It’s like, there’s 15.

00:51:11
Speaker 2: Well, there’s actually almost 100 sites in which people have claimed. But of those, the most secure ones where the artifacts and the bones entered the geological record at the same instant, put it that way, that we feel that, yeah, okay, these things interacted in some manner. And the question is, what was the nature? Did they kill the animal, then dismember it? Did they come upon a carcass and then dismember it? Did they shoot at it and the animal wandered off and died? There’s lots of different possibilities. And so what we’re trying to do is disentangle all of these possibilities.

00:51:48
Speaker 4: So you’ve got these 15 sites and they’re likely spread across the 700 years of Clovis, right? When you think about that, like per decade or per century, that’s not a lot of sites per year, right? So let’s say hypothetically, seven of those sites are scavenging, right? That’s not a lot of scavenging that’s going on in terms of the sites that we found. And there’s not a lot of hunting of mammoths that’s going on either, right? So I think the issue is that we can’t take our personal experiences in the modern day of not finding carcasses or anything and try to impose that on the past because there’s a different timescale, right?

00:52:35
Speaker 2: The past is a foreign country.

00:52:38
Speaker 4: Yes.

00:52:39
Speaker 3: That’s my third favorite quote.

00:52:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And when you look at scavenging… Even today, it’s very limited in modern day hunter groups, hunter gatherer groups. Our co-author, Jim O’Connell, working with the Hadza.

00:52:55
Speaker 3: Oh, okay.

00:52:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is why I wanted you to talk about this because you guys discussed this.

00:53:00
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:53:00
Speaker 2: No, in fact, the best thing about this paper that certainly I enjoyed the most was working with O’Connell, who has spent a lot of time with hunter gatherers, working with John Speth, who… knows more about sort of the ethno-historic record, you know, the records from the 1500s and 1600s before all the changes that take place and what was going on then. And with Brianna Pobinar, who has spent a lot of time looking at the earliest archeological records, you know, we sort of brought together this group of people with very, very different perspectives. What O’Connell brought to the table was, yeah, the Hadza, if they’re given the opportunity to scavenge, they will. He said, they, If they see vultures circling in the distance, they’ll go check it out.

00:53:50
Speaker 4: They’ve gotten very good at confronting lions. And we’ve got instances of Hadza, small groups of Hadza, even just a couple people, driving off prides of lion.

00:53:59
Speaker 3: Got it.

00:54:00
Speaker 4: Just with a couple shots.

00:54:01
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:54:02
Speaker 2: And what he said was about 14% of the meat that they got during the time that he was tracking with them came from scavenged animals.

00:54:12
Speaker 3: Is that right? Yeah.

00:54:13
Speaker 2: So we’re not saying it was the major component of the diet. Nobody would, right? Because to your point, it’s not reliable.

00:54:18
Speaker 3: But it’s part of the groove. It’s like it’s part of what happens.

00:54:22
Speaker 2: You know, there is, and Metten did a huge amount of work on sort of tracking the biological side of this. But one of the things that comes out of that discussion is that it’s really a continuum between hunting and scavenging. And sort of where you are in that continuum depends on availability and opportunity and so on and so forth. There’s even some suggestion that T-Rexes were scavengers. I don’t know how the heck you would prove that.

00:54:48
Speaker 3: Go ahead. Do you remember the writer, if you ever hear the writer Jack Hitt? Yeah.

00:54:54
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.

00:54:55
Speaker 3: He’s hilarious. Jack Hitt wrote a.

00:54:56
Speaker 1: Piece about, Jack Hitt wrote this big piece about, he was a big dinosaur guy in town.

00:55:01
Speaker 3: Jack Horner. Yeah, Horner. He was on the show one time.

00:55:04
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:55:05
Speaker 3: Jack Hitt was writing about that stuff.

00:55:08
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:55:08
Speaker 1: And he was expressing skepticism of anyone that would go into a field where the experts are mostly 13-year-olds. So I have kids young enough where they all go through the dinosaur phase. So having had kids that went through their dinosaur phase in recent years, where that came from was someone started looking at, by the skull structure of a T-Rex, what must have been like an incredible olfactory capability.

00:55:44
Speaker 3: And so why would they need to smell so good was the idea.

00:55:48
Speaker 1: Like they have all these chambers and whatnot for smell. So, um, being like, they weren’t, they weren’t a site predator, perhaps they were wandering around being like, yeah, you know, I mean, 10 miles away, there’s some rotten thing. That’s kind of what pushed that idea was that they seem to have like an incredible olfactory structure.

00:56:12
Speaker 4: Yeah. I would be skeptical that T-Rex was only scavengers. Cause what we learned from the biological.

00:56:18
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.

00:56:19
Speaker 1: No.

00:56:19
Speaker 3: Oh no.

00:56:20
Speaker 1: Um, but that’s what everyone got all hip to that. And it’s like, it’s, it’s a thing that happens. You got to realize this is a thing that happens is it winds up being.

00:56:28
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:56:30
Speaker 1: And, and, with all due respect, like some of your work is like this way too. It winds up being, it upsets a narrative that like T-Rex must’ve just wandered around ripping shit to shreds and killing everything in its path.

00:56:46
Speaker 3: And then someone’s like, I don’t, why do.

00:56:48
Speaker 1: You think, why do we think that? And then everybody’s got to go, yeah, I don’t know why I thought that. I just think because the cartoons and stuff.

00:56:54
Speaker 3: I don’t know.

00:56:56
Speaker 1: I don’t know why I thought that. And they’re like, well, he was really good at smelling. Maybe he’s really good at smelling rot and stuff. And that was his group. And it starts the conversation. So the same way we talked about it. It was like this image, and I always held it, of these big dudes wandering the landscape, whacking mammoths.

00:57:12
Speaker 3: Left and right. I don’t know. It’s just, why do I think that? I don’t know why. It’s conventional wisdom. It’s seductive.

00:57:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is.

00:57:19
Speaker 3: It is.

00:57:19
Speaker 2: It’s appealing. It’s romantic. It’s, you know, hey, these guys made it all the way over here from Siberia. You know, they must have been tough dudes.

00:57:25
Speaker 3: Killing mammoths left and right. One for breakfast, one for lunch.

00:57:30
Speaker 4: Yeah. We can’t tell the difference though with any one archeological site. Yeah. I mean, we went through every single potential criteria, broken Clovis points. impact scars on the Clovis points. These things called emlets, which are microscopic linear impact traces, which are thought to occur when a projectile enters an animal, right? And you get these little microscopic lines on the point. You get those same lines from hitting a bush. We’ve done experiments, right? Or hitting grass.

00:58:05
Speaker 2: If you just throw and miss, you don’t get those things.

00:58:08
Speaker 4: Same thing, right? So of our 15 sites… both of us suspect at least some of those were hunted, right? Some of those mammoths at those 15 sites were hunted. Some of them, I think were probably scavenged, right? We don’t know, but we can’t tell. So we don’t know if it’s all 15 were hunted and zero were scavenged. All 15 were scavenged, zero were hunted.

00:58:31
Speaker 1: And you had to have contemplated the middle ground, which is what you come across when it’s all messed up for whatever reason.

00:58:39
Speaker 3: And then you go over there and kill it real quick.

00:58:41
Speaker 2: Well, one of the things that came out of the animal literature was that wildlife biologists can sometimes have a hard time telling whether something was hunted or scavenged and who scavenged it, right?

00:58:53
Speaker 4: And that’s just a couple days later.

00:58:54
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:58:55
Speaker 2: You know, if it’s out there in the rain, in the snow, if it’s really high heat, you know, you just can’t tell unless you’ve got a wildlife camera that caught it in the act. And we don’t have wildlife cameras that caught people in the act going after a mammoth can.

00:59:13
Speaker 1: You can you help tie this work tie this discussion about were they like were they they’re perhaps killing it perhaps killing some perhaps scavenging some your curiosity about this has to be fed by this bigger question, right? Your, your curiosity about this is, is, is spawned from your interest. You’re motivated by this big discussion of how probable is it that humans killed all this stuff?

00:59:50
Speaker 3: Like, can you connect these?

00:59:51
Speaker 1: Like, do you, do you view this discussion as totally outside of that? Or do you think it informs the discussion? That the Pleistocene extinctions were driven by humans.

01:00:01
Speaker 4: I think for me, what this research shows is that we cannot use archaeology to test that question of overkill.

01:00:12
Speaker 3: Got it.

01:00:14
Speaker 2: So a couple of things for me. One of the things is I’m really interested in how people adapt to landscapes.

01:00:22
Speaker 3: Okay.

01:00:23
Speaker 2: And I want to know about how they respond to the environmental and ecological challenges of surviving on that landscape. How are they successful on that landscape? What is the impact of the environment and the climate of that landscape on their adaptations? What is the impact of their adaptive strategies on the resources on that landscape? So for me, it’s not so much the specific question of extinctions, though I’ll get to that in a moment, it’s really the larger question What was it like to come into what was either an empty continent or a continent that was at the very best lightly populated, where there hadn’t been much of a human footprint or human impact up to that point? What are folks doing on that landscape and how do they do it and how did they figure it all out? Because one of the things that’s really clear is that by around 11,000 years ago, you’ve got people in very different parts of North America developing adaptive strategies, incorporating lots of different resources in their diet. I think that’s happening earlier as well, but that’s a sidebar. So they clearly had figured stuff out. So I want to know about that process and I want to know how it unfolded and what the impacts of in both directions of the environment on the people and people on the environment. Extinctions is one piece of that, obviously, right? And the problem that I have with overkill in addition to what Metin just mentioned is that it’s also the end of the Pleistocene. So all sorts of things are happening at the end of the Pleistocene. And so the question becomes an even larger equifinality issue. If the Pleistocene is coming to an end, how can you say it was just humans until you’ve factored out and precluded the possibility of all the changes that are taking place at the end of the Ice Age as the Earth emerges from the grip of 20,000 years of cold, right? That can’t not have had an impact on all of these different animals. But the thing that makes it a really interesting and challenging question, and which is why I think I don’t want to just stop at saying, oh, it was humans or not humans. I want to find out how do you kill off mammoth and horses and camels on the great grasslands of North America, mastodons in the forest, giant beavers in swamps, glyptodonts in Florida, animals with very different ecological tolerances, ecological thresholds, very different adaptations, it’s too easy an answer to say that humans killed them all. Because we don’t have any evidence that humans killed, you know, 36 of the 38 or, you know, okay, right? So that becomes, for me, the more interesting intellectual challenge that we have to address. And so, yeah. If humans were responsible for killing the last mammoth standing, fine. Does that mean they’re a cause of the extinctions? I don’t think so. Because everything that we’re seeing in the environmental record and in the ancient DNA record is that they’ve already started to swirl around the drain long before humans showed up. So if you want a cause, it’s not gonna be the last mammoth that was killed by a hunter. It’s gonna be processes that were set in place thousands of years earlier. And that becomes a question of how do we understand that in terms of what’s happening at the end of the Pleistocene, at the end of the Ice Age, climatically and environmentally and ecologically.

01:04:22
Speaker 1: This question is a little out of order. I should have asked earlier. All those animals you just named. So go through that list again. The big stuff that vanished. Or hit me with four or five big things that vanished.

01:04:37
Speaker 2: Mammoth, mastodon, gompother, camel, horse, iremotherium, nothrotheriops, mylodon, glossotherium. How many do you want?

01:04:46
Speaker 3: That’s plenty. Because it demonstrates this point that I want to dig in on for a minute. Okay. We have 15 sites. We have 15 sites where we have.

01:04:56
Speaker 2: Proboscideans.

01:04:57
Speaker 3: Human tools.

01:04:59
Speaker 2: With mammoth and mastodon.

01:05:00
Speaker 3: Mixed in with proboscideans. Mixed in with elephants. Yeah.

01:05:04
Speaker 4: Um.

01:05:07
Speaker 1: But we don’t have those with giant beavers. We don’t have those with giant ground sloths.

01:05:12
Speaker 2: We don’t have them with, uh, Aztlana legus, the extinct bunny. Uh, we don’t have them with, um, you know, the little tiny antelope that disappeared.

01:05:21
Speaker 4: Okay.

01:05:21
Speaker 3: So hear me out. Wait, wait, wait, Steve. One more thing, please. Yeah, go ahead.

01:05:25
Speaker 2: We don’t have them with the spruce tree that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene.

01:05:29
Speaker 4: Okay.

01:05:30
Speaker 3: I didn’t know about that spruce tree. Yeah. Really? Yeah, absolutely.

01:05:34
Speaker 2: And Paul Martin, bless his heart, wonderful guy. He was the guy that was really behind the overkill stuff. He was a terrific guy. He tried to explain why humans might have caused the extinction of the spruce tree.

01:05:46
Speaker 3: Really? Yes, he did.

01:05:48
Speaker 2: It’s in his 2005 book.

01:05:49
Speaker 3: Kids run around machetes whacking away at.

01:05:51
Speaker 2: Them all the time. No, it was setting fires out of season.

01:05:54
Speaker 3: Okay. Got it. Yeah. All right.

01:05:57
Speaker 2: I’ll let you finish, sorry.

01:05:58
Speaker 1: No, no, I don’t have a point. It’s just, it’s kind of a question to be like, if, let me ask a sub, I got a sub question. Is there, do we have any mammoths or mastodons that have a projectile point jammed into it?

01:06:16
Speaker 3: And does that even happen when you test it?

01:06:19
Speaker 4: We do in the old world. So in Europe and in Asia, we actually have stone points embedded in bone. We do not have a single Clovis point embedded in any proboscidian bone in North America.

01:06:37
Speaker 1: And because of all the stuff you do, I’m sure you have gone around with fresh bone, jabbing points into it.

01:06:44
Speaker 3: Oh, it happens. Is it hard to do? Is it hard to pull off?

01:06:49
Speaker 4: I mean, I’ve never stabbed… an animal with Clovis points.

01:06:54
Speaker 3: Um, no, I mean just like cattle bones or something.

01:06:56
Speaker 4: Oh, uh, yeah, I don’t know.

01:06:57
Speaker 3: Maybe you should, I don’t know. Yeah. Shoot some, shoot some.

01:07:00
Speaker 4: Like, well, George Frison did. He got, he got, uh, Clovis Point embedded in bone.

01:07:05
Speaker 3: Yeah. He did. Yeah, he did. Okay, that’s what I was curious.

01:07:07
Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s happened. It’s happened.

01:07:08
Speaker 3: It’s not like a one in a thousand chance. Oh, no.

01:07:11
Speaker 4: In the old world, there’s several archaeological examples of that occurring, which is very strong evidence that that particular animal was hunted.

01:07:18
Speaker 2: Which I think is where you were going with that, and that’s a fair point.

01:07:21
Speaker 1: I just, that was like a sub-question because it kind of informs us. It’d be the, I don’t even have this formed in my head yet, but we have these sites where they’ve killed elephants, and I’m… I’m just trying to make a word that lumps mammoths and Colombian mammoths and all that kind of stuff.

01:07:37
Speaker 3: Mastodons.

01:07:38
Speaker 1: They’ve killed elephants. So, but we don’t have sites where they killed giant ground sloths. We don’t have sites where they’ve killed saber-toothed cats. So I would look and I’d say, well, they had, if I’m assuming that humans killed all this big stuff off, I would be like, well, man, it sure seems like they had a preference. Mammoths were the ones to get Because we don’t have this other stuff. So they’re going out and they’re being like, no, I’m going to look for a mammoth and get it. If it’s scavenging, why don’t we have scavenged? If it’s just opportunistic scavenging, where are all the scavenged giant ground sloths? Where are the scavenged giant beavers?

01:08:24
Speaker 2: Go ahead.

01:08:25
Speaker 4: Well, there’s two issues there, right? The first is taphonomy. and how well certain animals survive on the landscape after they die. And mammoth bones are thick. They often also are found near watering holes. They can be gently buried. So you’ll have a greater chance of finding mammoth bones than any other of those things. And just be- For bison, which we’ll talk about in a moment. Also too, they were probably hunting bunnies and all those other things, Sure. Just because we don’t have the sites. Right. So I think the other thing. Yeah.

01:08:59
Speaker 3: I can see like, like rabbit bone. Yeah. It just gets crunched up by stuff and eat.

01:09:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:09:06
Speaker 4: And so it’s really important to separate out the, the question of hunting and what they hunted versus did they cause the extinction of these animals? Right. Right. I wouldn’t be surprised if they hunted bunnies, right? But there’s no evidence that they caused the extinction of those things.

01:09:26
Speaker 2: And I would add to, you raise an interesting question, right? If they were scavenging, why aren’t we seeing scavenged arimatheriums, giant sloths, right? We’re not entirely sure that all of these animals were even around when these folks were here.

01:09:43
Speaker 3: Gotcha.

01:09:44
Speaker 4: Okay.

01:09:45
Speaker 3: That’s a great point, man.

01:09:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

01:09:48
Speaker 3: Because you probably can’t make a perfect timeline.

01:09:51
Speaker 2: Well, no, we can’t. And in fact, when you actually look at the last, they’re called last appearance dates, which is the last radiocarbon date that we have on an animal.

01:10:01
Speaker 3: Okay.

01:10:03
Speaker 2: Of the 38 different genera, about 20 of them, 20 or 18, don’t hold me to the specific number, are gone by 20,000 years ago.

01:10:14
Speaker 4: Oh.

01:10:14
Speaker 2: Right?

01:10:15
Speaker 1: Right.

01:10:16
Speaker 2: So, yeah. I mean, it’s a fair point to say, why weren’t they scavenging the other things? Why were they scavenging mammoth? Well, mammoth and mastodon actually survived up until around 10,000 years ago. And in fact, mastodons were living in the Great Lakes area when Folsom people were killing bison out on the high plains. Is that right?

01:10:37
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah.

01:10:38
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. And so what that is telling us is that if you are going to scavenge… That’s the big hunk of meat that’s laying on the landscape for you. We know that they were there. We don’t know about the other three dozen generally. But also, they’re going after bison. They’re hunting bison at this time. So we know that they are, in fact, hunting. And it’s really interesting. In a number of Clovis sites, the targets are not necessarily mammoth. There are bison in some of these Clovis sites.

01:11:13
Speaker 3: Got it.

01:11:14
Speaker 4: The other thing we learned in this research is that elephants last much longer on the landscape after they die than lots of other animals. So just the pure chance of humans coming across an elephant carcass would be higher than a bunny or a caribou.

01:11:33
Speaker 3: I mean, just because of how huge it is.

01:11:35
Speaker 4: How huge it is. And there are documented cases of elephants lasting seven months on the landscape and then they get scavenged. right after that point.

01:11:45
Speaker 2: So.

01:11:46
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:11:46
Speaker 2: And you know what? Your question makes me think too. I don’t think we’ve systematically gone through all of these sort of early kills of deer or bison and sort of did the same kind of vetting of those as we’ve done mammoth kills or mammoth scavenging events.

01:12:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’d be interesting.

01:12:08
Speaker 1: When you look at other stuff, do you see more definitive killed kind of stuff going on.

01:12:14
Speaker 2: I mean, that’s what I would think. But you know what? We haven’t sort of turned our sort of critical eye on that.

01:12:21
Speaker 4: Although the more we do comparisons between Clovis and post-Clovis hunter-gatherer groups, archaeologically, the more similarities we tend to find. You know, we used to think that fluting was a Paleo-Indian behavior. And then we excavated Goodson Rock Shelter in Oklahoma, where… We dug two meters down, we found fluted bifaces. We thought, oh my goodness, this is one of the first Clovis rock shelters ever found. We were so excited. We get radiocarbon dates. We get radiocarbon dates from two meters down where we’re finding the fluted bifaces. The radiocarbon dates come back 4,500 BP. And we’re like, oh, those must be wrong. Charcoal can move between layers in rock shelters. So we do optimal stimulated luminescence or OSL dating of that same layer. The dates come back, 4,500 BP. Oh, those must be wrong. Sand grains can move, right? It was the third field season we’ve been sweating and getting bit by ticks and all this sort of stuff.

01:13:29
Speaker 2: Very unpleasant.

01:13:30
Speaker 4: We find notched, archaic projectile points that we know from other sites date to 4,500 BP made on the same exact stone raw material as our fluted bifaces. And we had to succumb to the evidence at that point.

01:13:47
Speaker 3: So these folks were making like two kinds.

01:13:49
Speaker 4: No, what they were doing was they were, it’s convergent evolution. They were basically, they had independently come up with this fluting technique. And on the way to making their notched points, they were fluting their bifaces. And then the fluting was erased in the final stage.

01:14:07
Speaker 3: Got it.

01:14:08
Speaker 4: We didn’t know fluting occurred. I didn’t know fluting occurred in post-Clovis periods.

01:14:12
Speaker 3: Got it.

01:14:13
Speaker 4: But there’s very little sort of back and forth, I think, or not as much between Paleo-Indian and post-Paleo-Indian archaeological sites.

01:14:22
Speaker 2: Which is largely because of what you were talking about earlier, Steve, which is that this has been so much of the attention has been focused on Clovis. And look, we’re just as guilty as everybody else.

01:14:33
Speaker 4: Yeah, it’s awesome.

01:14:34
Speaker 2: Right?

01:14:34
Speaker 4: Clovis is awesome.

01:14:35
Speaker 2: It is really pretty awesome. And it’s what gets all the archeological attention, but we haven’t sort of systematically evaluated all the other things that came later in the same way.

01:14:45
Speaker 4: And that partially has to do with the fact that we find so little Clovis that we pour over every flake scar and every small chip and everything. In later time periods where you’ve got sites that are acres and millions of artifacts, they just don’t sort of analyze things as closely as often as I think. Yeah.

01:15:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:15:07
Speaker 2: And because, um, and getting back to the whole extinction issue, right. There’s more riding on it 13,000 years ago in terms of the possible role of humans in the demise of all these animals.

01:15:19
Speaker 3: Right.

01:15:19
Speaker 2: So the, um, there’s, there’s, it’s a greater question to answer. And so that’s why the focus, you.

01:15:30
Speaker 1: Know, uh, on the question of, um, Big stuff is easier to scavenge. I mean, just, it’s big.

01:15:38
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:15:39
Speaker 1: So it takes a long time to go away. Are you familiar with Viljom or Stephenson? He was an Arctic explorer. He spent a lot of time cutting across, like, early 1900s. He was up on the Arctic coast of Alaska. He went into the high Arctic, Victoria Island and stuff. He made a lot of first contacts with people. They knew about white people but hadn’t encountered them. He’s got a couple books about his wanderings. At one point, they’re hurting for food, and they find a whale. This is in northern Alaska. They find a whale, and he talks about they had to boil it and boil it, the tongue. They had to boil it and boil it and boil it to desalinate it enough to be able to eat it. And they later run into, in his time, one of his books is My Life with the Eskimo. He used the word Eskimo. They run into some Eskimo who said, I can’t remember how many, it’s multiple. That’s been there for years. So then it was still like, here’s this guy scavenging a whale that people are like, oh no, I can’t remember, it was two years, whatever.

01:16:45
Speaker 3: They’re like, oh, that thing’s been there for forever. And they’re still eating on it.

01:16:49
Speaker 4: Well, and this is where I think working with and learning from John Speth was incredible. Because for years, he has systematically searched and read through the ethno-historic literature on hunter-gatherers. Not the post-World War II literature, but everything basically pre-World War II. And while scavenging is incredibly rare post-World War II, pre-World War II, he finds it everywhere. Hunter-gatherer groups around the world, from Argentina to Alaska to Asia, all over, they’re scavenging everything. Mm-hmm. And in fact, oftentimes they prefer the putrid meat to fresh meat.

01:17:33
Speaker 3: Got it, yeah.

01:17:35
Speaker 2: He gives the example of, just to sort of put this in some sort of local context, he talks about Mandan and Hadatsa groups in the early sort of 1600s, 1700s, bison that would wander out onto the ice.

01:17:52
Speaker 3: Sure.

01:17:53
Speaker 2: Break up, they’d fall in ground. they’d float downstream. And Mandan and Hadassah groups would just pull them out. They’d be pretty bloated at that point.

01:18:04
Speaker 3: I’ve written about this. It was part of the seasonal plan.

01:18:09
Speaker 1: Part of the seasonal plan was that shit washes downriver.

01:18:12
Speaker 2: And you were wondering about reliability of scavenging.

01:18:15
Speaker 3: There you go. Yeah, you’re right. That contradicts it. Yeah.

01:18:21
Speaker 2: No, and it didn’t. Somebody was asked, well, what about the smell? And John has this great quote in the paper, a Native American, said, we don’t eat the smell.

01:18:36
Speaker 1: But when I was just hanging out, though, I was just hanging out with Inuit folks, and.

01:18:45
Speaker 3: They still eat a lot of what they call fermented walrus.

01:18:49
Speaker 4: Right. Right.

01:18:50
Speaker 3: And other things.

01:18:51
Speaker 1: And talking to them about it, it wasn’t that someone once upon a time, I’m guessing here, but it wasn’t that someone once upon a time said, I could really go for something fermented. What it probably was, you kill a bunch of walrus because there’s walrus around.

01:19:07
Speaker 3: You can use some of it. You can’t use all of it.

01:19:09
Speaker 1: And you dig down and get into the permafrost and bury some and cover it up with rocks so polar bears don’t get it. And then when you’re really hard up, you go, and it’s like, it’s a little rank. But I’m not going to starve to death over this. And so you eat it, your children eat it, their children eat it, and eventually it becomes a thing that is acceptable. But its birth, the birth of the idea was trying to store stuff over, right? And so you can imagine that people’s tolerances for these things, stank or fermentation or rot or whatever, probably grow into taste, probably grow into a thing that you don’t mind, that it’s normal and you like it, right?

01:19:59
Speaker 2: It’s custom and culture.

01:20:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:20:01
Speaker 4: Especially when it’s been done for two million years.

01:20:04
Speaker 3: Sure.

01:20:04
Speaker 4: I mean, like when you’ve got little homo habilis, they’re not going out and hunting rhinos and hippo, right? That’s a three foot tall hominin that barely can make stone flakes. So they are scavenging. No one questioned whether Homo habilis was scavenging, right? So I think, and you had a quote this morning, that scavenging, when hunting gets added with Homo erectus, scavenging doesn’t go away. And I think the ethno-historic literature shows that to be the case.

01:20:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, credit to Mary Steiner, who’s worked a lot on Neanderthal sites. And Mary pointed out, because Neanderthals, there’s no question these guys were hunting. They were serious dudes. And what she said is, you know, it’s unfortunate that we haven’t really thought about Neanderthal scavenging, because that is, in a sense, a form of gathering. You’ve got hunting and you’ve got gathering. And if you think about scavenged meat, It’s low cost. It’s low risk. It’s nutritious. And if you don’t know where you’re going or what you might find up ahead of you, it’s right there in front. And why would you pass it up? Because again, you’re not going to have those sort of food taboos. I mean, when we think about scavenge stuff, right? You’re not going to buy a package of ground beef in the grocery store that’s kind of turned brown, right? You won’t touch that.

01:21:36
Speaker 3: Well, I do have one story, but.

01:21:39
Speaker 2: And how’d you feel after.

01:21:40
Speaker 3: You ate it? Yeah.

01:21:43
Speaker 2: So, you know, for them, it… Yeah, these folks are subsistence hunters and gatherers. And subsistence, I think, has a pretty wide bandwidth.

01:21:54
Speaker 3: Sure.

01:21:55
Speaker 2: Much wider than our experiences, certainly. And much more opportunities than our experiences as well.

01:22:05
Speaker 3: Uh, you guys both know of at least Mike cons the, and.

01:22:09
Speaker 2: I’ve, I’ve worked in the Arctic with him one season. I, again, serious person, follow the facts, do your research.

01:22:17
Speaker 1: And then like I’m doing with you at times, I’m like, but, but you know, if you had to guess anyways, I was up with him in the Arctic and I’m, and I’m pressuring him about what would be the coolest thing to find.

01:22:32
Speaker 3: What do you hope you find?

01:22:33
Speaker 1: What would be the coolest thing you’d find? And he indulged me and he said, I sometimes imagine, he’s explaining to me, I sometimes imagine that I’m flying along in my helicopter and they’re out of the ground as a fucking hand. And he’s like, and it’s just a landslide, like a landslide, like an encampment.

01:22:58
Speaker 3: And then it freezes.

01:23:00
Speaker 1: And he goes, and under that landslide, melting out of this ice is just everything.

01:23:06
Speaker 3: Yeah. It’s everything. It’s the dogs, the clothes. Yeah. It’s like, you know, it’s Pompeii.

01:23:14
Speaker 4: Right.

01:23:15
Speaker 3: Right.

01:23:15
Speaker 1: It’s like Pompeii and Mount Vesuvius where there’s a dude like, or, you know, there’s a person literally doing a thing and.

01:23:21
Speaker 2: They’re like, right. They’re in their fetal position.

01:23:24
Speaker 3: Yeah. He said, yeah, that would be cool.

01:23:28
Speaker 2: Well.

01:23:29
Speaker 3: What, like.

01:23:30
Speaker 1: What, it doesn’t need to be that fanciful, but like, what could we find? And, and I, I put this question to another anthropologist one time and I’m like, but God, there’s gotta be so much stuff out there. He’s like, I don’t know, look at how many roads we’ve already built, how many foundations we’ve already dug. Um, I, this individual is saying, I, I’m not optimistic that we’re gonna find all kinds of new, amazing stuff.

01:23:59
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:24:00
Speaker 1: Well, like, but what, what would be an exciting thing? That’s that’s somewhat probable that would stir the conversation around the first Americans up.

01:24:15
Speaker 2: First, let me talk about Mike’s dream.

01:24:17
Speaker 4: Okay.

01:24:19
Speaker 2: Mike’s fantasy.

01:24:21
Speaker 3: Um, again, I pushed him on this.

01:24:22
Speaker 2: No, no, that’s fine. Um, regrettably it’s coming true because of climate change.

01:24:27
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.

01:24:28
Speaker 2: Ice fields are melting. And there’s a whole sort of subdiscipline that’s emerging now where people are going to these areas where glacial ice is disappearing and they’re finding stuff. So far, no hands sticking out of the ground, which actually would be pretty hard to see from a helicopter. But, you know, Mike needs to stick around a little while longer and find those things.

01:24:55
Speaker 3: His dream might come true. Yeah, because who knows what’s hiding under all that ice. Yeah.

01:25:01
Speaker 2: Look, my sense would be what I would like to see, right? And this is actually something that we’re working on now, is getting far more ancient environmental DNA on landscapes and on animals. Because leaving aside, I’m an archaeologist, but let’s just leave aside all the archaeological stuff. Partly for reasons that Metin said. We’re not going to be able to answer this question with archaeological data. What we really need to find, what we really need to develop is a knowledge base and data. Let me pause for a moment and give a bit of an explanation. If you go to a lake and you get a sediment core out of that lake and you thin slice it like a salami and you take just a little square centimeter of dirt out of that, you can recover all of the plants and animals that were on that landscape at that moment in time, okay? If the animals were taking a leak, if they were dropping a turd, if they were shedding, I mean, you moving across, you could find your DNA all over this room, Steve, okay? What that does for us, if we really want to understand environmental change, species changes over time, we can’t just look at what is a mammoth doing. We’ve got to look at what the environment around that mammoth is doing and how that’s changing. And so for me, and again, this is something that we’re working on, is we need to develop It’s kind of mundane. It’s not as exciting as seeing a hand sticking out.

01:26:54
Speaker 3: No, you can’t beat the hand, man.

01:26:56
Speaker 2: No, no. I’m conceding ground. I defer to Mike on all of this and other questions. But what we need to do is develop that knowledge because then we’ll be able to say, look, these animals are starting to swirl down the drain at this point in time, and here’s the reason why. we’re seeing their vegetation changing. We’re seeing that biological community evolving over time because of this ultimate driver, which is the climate that’s changing at the end of the Pleistocene. So that’s what I want to find is find those sites. And we’ve got several of them going right now, working with my colleagues at the Center for Geogenetics in Copenhagen, where we’re actually looking at a number of these localities that are terminal Pleistocene. where we’re looking at the presence of the plants and the animals that are out on that landscape, just trying to get so that we can answer that question. So much as I would love to be able to say, if I found this one thing, it could solve all of the questions that we’ve been asking, there isn’t gonna be one thing. This is not like, what’s that movie with Billy Crystal, One Thing?

01:28:08
Speaker 3: No, I don’t know.

01:28:10
Speaker 2: Where they go off to a dude ranch?

01:28:12
Speaker 3: Oh. City slickers.

01:28:15
Speaker 2: City slickers.

01:28:15
Speaker 3: Right.

01:28:16
Speaker 2: And Jack plants. There’s not going to be one thing. Okay. Um, it’s going to be a lot of work on a lot of different things.

01:28:25
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:28:26
Speaker 2: Do you have one thing?

01:28:27
Speaker 4: I do.

01:28:28
Speaker 2: Oh, thank goodness.

01:28:29
Speaker 4: Okay. And I think it’s because for several years now we’ve done all these experiments Mm-hmm. And we’ll do one experiment, we get a result. We’ll do a very different experiment, we get the same result. Like, again, we’re finding the more experiments we do, the more equifinality there is.

01:28:50
Speaker 3: Okay.

01:28:51
Speaker 4: So what we’re learning is how much we can’t know about the Stone Age. And that sucks. Mm-hmm. I didn’t go into archaeology and the Stone Age to learn about all the things I can’t actually know about.

01:29:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a bummer.

01:29:06
Speaker 4: It’s a bummer, right? No one does that.

01:29:08
Speaker 3: I found out you can’t find anything out.

01:29:10
Speaker 4: Yeah. And really, we’re in a lot of ways, I think, looking at maybe the extent of some archaeological interpretation.

01:29:19
Speaker 3: You think so?

01:29:20
Speaker 4: So for me, I would take the single Clovis point embedded in a mammoth bone. That would be awesome, right? But I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. If someone finds a Clovis point embedded in a mammoth bone, they’re gonna say, overkill, we killed all the mammoths, done. That proves all these other 15 sites were definitely kills. And I’ll tear my hair out because I’m like, no, we suspected they hunted. This is confirmation, strong evidence. And that’s really all I’m looking for is some strong evidence. Because I think they hunted these things.

01:29:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s true. It would be nice to have an unequivocal case.

01:29:57
Speaker 4: It would be great. But I’ll tell you, the reaction is.

01:30:03
Speaker 3: I see what you’re saying.

01:30:04
Speaker 1: Because if you had it, if you find the one where the shoulder blade has the thing sticking into it, then all the other pieces laying around, all the other broken points laying around and stuff, it would kind of inform your understanding of what you’re seeing elsewhere.

01:30:20
Speaker 4: Well, see, and this is where.

01:30:21
Speaker 3: It wouldn’t override it, but it would inform it in some way.

01:30:24
Speaker 4: No, but see, this is where you can’t take a single case… and then justify all the equivocal cases. That’s just, it’s illogical and it’s not good science. It would show that, yeah, it would be great confirmation of this thing that we suspect is happening.

01:30:45
Speaker 1: Do you know that when I was first introduced, the historian Dan Flores, many, many years ago, took me to the Blackwater Draw site, the Clovis type site.

01:30:58
Speaker 3: Closed New Mexico.

01:31:01
Speaker 1: It was closed. We always laugh about this. It was closed and we jumped the fence and went and looked around.

01:31:06
Speaker 4: I’ve done that.

01:31:06
Speaker 3: Long time ago.

01:31:09
Speaker 1: I then started reading about it and in my head, I’m sure I’ve told you this story. In my head, I read somewhere how it sits in my head that I read how at one point in time, a school bus driver that had taken local school kids to see the Blackwater draw site, found a mammoth skull with a projectile point embedded in the eye socket and took it. I then later had people go, find that for me. I cannot find it.

01:31:44
Speaker 3: How would I have made that up? Like, I can’t find where I read it.

01:31:52
Speaker 4: Was it a dream?

01:31:54
Speaker 2: Yes.

01:31:56
Speaker 3: But like, by all, I’ve looked. I’ve looked. Was it a pamphlet? I don’t know. It’s not findable. It’s not findable digitally. Like, I don’t know. But I swear. And I went and told people that.

01:32:11
Speaker 1: I’m like, hey, did you know that a bus driver one time took some kids out here and found a mammoth skull with a projectile point stuck in it and dragged it home? And I would tell people this. At some point, someone called me out and I’m like, can you point this out to me? What are you talking about? And I’m like, yeah, I’ll go find it.

01:32:26
Speaker 3: I can’t find it. I dreamed it.

01:32:29
Speaker 2: You dreamed it because, well, think about it. You know how big a mammoth skull is.

01:32:34
Speaker 3: I don’t know, but how would I have made that up?

01:32:35
Speaker 4: Like a bus driver?

01:32:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.

01:32:40
Speaker 4: Were the kids on the bus? Yeah.

01:32:42
Speaker 2: Did they help carry the skull?

01:32:43
Speaker 3: This is a call to listeners. This is a call to listeners. If you can help me out and find whatever the hell.

01:32:51
Speaker 4: Or you are that bus driver.

01:32:53
Speaker 3: Yeah. In another life, I was the bus driver.

01:32:55
Speaker 4: No, not you. Maybe the bus driver’s listening right now.

01:33:00
Speaker 1: If your grandpa was a bus driver and every time you walk into his old barn, there’s a skull laying there, the piece of stone sticking out of the eye socket.

01:33:08
Speaker 3: Can you please send me a photo of him?

01:33:10
Speaker 1: You know i because i don’t know it was mike kunz’s hand but but i read it somewhere and i i it’s embarrassing i was like embarrassed i can’t remember who who challenged me on it but i was embarrassed to be like i don’t know i don’t know.

01:33:26
Speaker 2: Yeah one gets these things in one’s memory and then over the years the memory gets embellished in ways subconscious but a bus driver Yeah, well, that’s just a nice detail.

01:33:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:33:37
Speaker 2: I will tell you, I mean, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in and around that locality over the years.

01:33:42
Speaker 3: You haven’t heard his story?

01:33:43
Speaker 2: No. I’ve heard other rumors, but that’s not one of them.

01:33:47
Speaker 3: I think it’s an apocryphal. At this point, it’s an apocryphal story.

01:33:52
Speaker 2: It probably is.

01:33:53
Speaker 3: It traces back to me. Yeah, right.

01:33:56
Speaker 2: You’re actually patient zero on that particular epidemic.

01:33:59
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:33:59
Speaker 3: Yeah. So tell me what you guys are working on now. Like, what’s next? In this world.

01:34:08
Speaker 2: In this world.

01:34:09
Speaker 3: In the Ice Age world.

01:34:10
Speaker 2: So I’ve been working the last few years on a site that’s at 10,000 feet. Oh, you’ve been.

01:34:16
Speaker 4: Talking about this.

01:34:17
Speaker 2: In the Rockies.

01:34:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, tell people about this site.

01:34:19
Speaker 2: So this is a site that was originally excavated by the Smithsonian in the 1990s. And, you know, really interesting work that they did there. And just… out of curiosity, I know when I’ve been on the show before, we’ve talked about our work at the Mountaineer site in the Gunnison area.

01:34:38
Speaker 3: Oh, that’s what I thought you were getting into, is the Gunnison. Oh, yeah.

01:34:41
Speaker 2: No, this is a different one.

01:34:42
Speaker 3: Okay, I’m sorry. Go ahead. Yep, sorry.

01:34:44
Speaker 2: So just to, for those who didn’t hear the previous podcast, and I can’t quote a chapter and verse of which podcast it was, it’s met and put of your quote.

01:34:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Mountaineer site.

01:34:55
Speaker 2: The Mountaineer site in Gunnison, right? We had a winter village, a Folsom Age winter village. So this other site, was up and over the Continental Divide from Mountaineer about, oh, I think 80 kilometers or so. And there’s a couple of substantial mountain passes between this other site and Mountaineer, one at about 11,000 feet and the other at about 11,500.

01:35:20
Speaker 3: Like highways cutting through them?

01:35:23
Speaker 2: Well, there are now. Slum Gullion Pass and Spring Creek Pass, for those of you that have a Colorado Atlas in front of you. And We were just, I don’t know, on a busman’s holiday visiting this site back in, I don’t know, six, eight years ago. And it had been interpreted by the Smithsonian, and I think reasonably enough, that it was kind of a way station because you’re at 10,000 feet at the end of the ice age. It’s a Folsom Age site, I should add. You’re at 10,000 feet at the end of the ice age. You’re not going to be hanging around. Mountaineer, we had reasons to think they were hanging around in the winter. Well, for one thing, it’s only at 8,000 feet, so it’s a lot lower. It was probably a good place to spend the winter for a variety of reasons that we’ve talked about before.

01:36:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, it held game well in the winter and animals would get in there and it’d be hard for them to leave and it would winter in there.

01:36:21
Speaker 2: Yep, yep. And people were sitting up on top of this mesa 1,000 feet above the valley floor where actually it’s warmer than on the valley floor and the basin floor because cold air sinks, right? So we had a good sort of case for that. Anyway, so the Smithsonian had done this work back in the 90s. And about four years ago, the collections came back to the Forest Service out in Western Colorado. And we got to looking at them, at the collections, again, just out of curiosity. And we were just dumbstruck to see some of the projectile points were made out of stone that came, we are convinced, from the Gunnison Basin. And then it occurred to us, oh, well, maybe these folks were on their way over to Mountaineer. Because we know when you look at the distribution of these Folsom sites in the Rockies and out on the plains, they tend to have circuits, right? So we did a bunch of work at the original Folsom site, you know, back in the 1990s. And these folks are kind of tracking up and down, the edge of the Rockies. They’re mostly out on the plains. They’re going from the panhandle of Texas up into Eastern Colorado, stopping at the Folsom site, moving around. In the Rockies, they’re sort of within the Rockies itself, right? The Rocky Mountains themselves. So we got to wondering, is there a connection between the folks that we know were in the Gunnison Basin and the folks that were on the other side of these two high mountain passes? So we spent three years excavating out there. It’s called the Black Mountain Site. And what we found was indeed they were there, but only briefly. They may have been there on a couple of separate occasions. So this really was kind of a waypoint. One of the local folks that put us up in the summers, they have a little sort of a dude ranch out there. A shout out to Fremont’s Ranch. It’s a wonderful place to stay. And Greg Pearson, who’s the kind of runs and guides out of Fremont’s, said, oh, yeah, that’s a spike camp. That’s what he calls it.

01:38:42
Speaker 3: Oh, really? Yeah.

01:38:44
Speaker 2: You must use the term as well.

01:38:46
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:38:47
Speaker 2: So he said, yeah, that kind of looks what I would call a spike camp, where you’re kind of there. You’re checking your weaponry and making sure it’s all good. They were making some points. They were discarding some other ones. But you don’t see the kind of tools that you find in a residential locality where people spend a long time.

01:39:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, sure. Right?

01:39:05
Speaker 2: So not a lot of scrapers. We had some engraving tools. I just spent most of last year doing the analysis of all the stone tools from the site. And it’s mostly just little tiny flakes because they were just making sure everything, all their gear was in good shape. Because if you think about it, you’re there at the end of the Pleistocene and you’re at 10,000 feet. You’re going to have to go up and over a mountain pass that’s 11. And then you have to go up and over another one at 11.5. And then you drop down into the drainage that will take you into the Gunnison Basin. You don’t want to start that trek alone. at five o’clock in the afternoon, right? So you hunker down at this nice little weigh station, you get yourself ready, and then the next morning you do your thing.

01:39:53
Speaker 3: One of the really- Was there bone at that site?

01:39:55
Speaker 2: Not a darn thing.

01:39:56
Speaker 3: Really?

01:39:57
Speaker 2: Not a darn thing. And I’ll tell you, I was out there a year ago last spring with my colleague, Eski Wilderslev, who basically invented environmental DNA. because we had taken some samples from there in 2023 to see if there was anything in the DNA that we could identify that would tell us what the plants and animals were because there is no bone preserved and didn’t see a darn thing. And Esky, we were passing through on our way to Santa Fe, kind of a circuitous route on the way to Santa Fe from Denver because he wanted to see the site to try and figure out, well, there has to be, why isn’t the DNA preserved? This is an ideal setting. And it has to do with some technical stuff about single-stranded versus double-stranded DNA, which we won’t go into. But we took a bunch more samples in 2025. And I was just in Copenhagen for a month working on some other projects, ancient DNA-related stuff. And I talked to the person who’s doing the analysis of the environmental DNA from this site. And one of the things that struck me, and this is all very preliminary data, is that she’s seeing a lot of plants in the DNA, but no woody plants, no trees. And one of the things that had always been sort of in the back of my mind was, okay, this is a great place for a way station because you would have been in the trees before you get up and over the tree line and have to cross these high elevation passes because then you’d have wood for fuel. But we weren’t finding any trees in the DNA. just a lot of flowers, right? Flowers are not going to keep you warm.

01:41:41
Speaker 3: So they were up in the Alpine.

01:41:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:41:43
Speaker 4: Yes.

01:41:44
Speaker 2: And so, uh, now this is all very, very, very preliminary.

01:41:47
Speaker 3: I’ll tell you what they were doing. They’re hunting sheep, bighorns. You’re done.

01:41:52
Speaker 4: You don’t have to do anything else.

01:41:53
Speaker 2: Thank goodness.

01:41:54
Speaker 3: I don’t know what they do with the bones. You better look over to the right or the left, I guess.

01:42:00
Speaker 2: You know, I’d love it if we found some sheep DNA, but there’s absolutely no animal DNA.

01:42:04
Speaker 3: Oh, man, yeah.

01:42:05
Speaker 2: So what they’re doing now, this was the initial run through doing what’s called shotgun sequencing, where you’re not necessarily looking for specific plants. And so I’ve asked them, can you go back and do what’s called capture DNA, where you’re using as bait, tree species to see if you can grab chunks of DNA out of the swirl, if you will, that are trees. Because that’s the only way that you’ll be able to be sure that there’s either trees there or not trees there.

01:42:37
Speaker 3: Got it.

01:42:37
Speaker 2: So hopefully we’ll have that answer in a few months. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been working on on the archaeological side of things.

01:42:47
Speaker 1: Wouldn’t it be great if that DNA stuff was so good that you could just be like, the people that were here were there.

01:42:54
Speaker 2: You know what?

01:42:55
Speaker 3: Someday.

01:42:56
Speaker 2: I’ve thought about that, Steve. I’ve absolutely… That’s my hand sticking out of the ground, right? Is the ability to say… That’s sophisticated. That would be… You know, in theory, it’s absolutely possible to a degree. There’s preservation limitations. Getting a full genome out of a sediment sample… is a challenge. You could probably get whether they shared uniparental mitochondrial DNA Y chromosome markers, but that wouldn’t necessarily tell you whether it’s the same people. It just tells you whether at some point back in the past, they have a shared maternal ancestor. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing.

01:43:41
Speaker 3: And Matt, what can we expect next from you?

01:43:43
Speaker 4: A couple of things. Actually, thanks to some of the meat eater listeners of this podcast, you know, a couple of years ago, we published a Clovis point and a Folsom point that Matthew Wendell, who’s a listener and a fan sent to us. And he said, Hey, can you analyze these?

01:44:00
Speaker 3: We did.

01:44:00
Speaker 4: We found all sorts of stuff. We learned, um, we published that in the scientific literature that’s happened again. Now, uh, Ben Galt in, in new England found a Clovis point or a fluted point from Nantucket Island. And he said, Hey, like, I’m interested. Can you, learn about anything. And so he sent it to us and we’re doing all the analyses now. And so, yeah, I mean, thanks to the meat eater, uh, podcast listeners, like we’re doing real research on Clovis and fluted points and we’re learning all sorts of stuff. So that’s awesome. So if anyone out there wants to send us more artifacts, we won’t keep them. We’ll send them back to you. Um, but we can do all sorts of awesome geometric morphometrics and microwear analysis and learn every Clovis point. We learned something, right?

01:44:42
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:44:43
Speaker 4: So we do that sort of thing quite a bit. But the big thing next for me is I’m going to Kenya in January. I’m really interested in the origin of all technology over 3 million years ago. And we published a new hypothesis last year or about a year and a half ago on how that origin of technology with stone tools occurred. And it all has to do with butchering and cutting carcasses up um, with naturally sharp rocks.

01:45:15
Speaker 3: Okay.

01:45:15
Speaker 4: And there’s a site, um, that dates to about 2.9, 2.8 million years ago.

01:45:19
Speaker 3: That’s early. Yeah.

01:45:21
Speaker 4: Where we think we may have, uh, some naturally sharp rocks in association with a carcass.

01:45:29
Speaker 3: Oh, really? Yeah.

01:45:30
Speaker 4: And so we’re going to go in and check those out and, and we’ll see.

01:45:33
Speaker 1: So someone or something was like, Hey, that’s got a sharp edge on it.

01:45:40
Speaker 3: I’m going to, beat snot out of this.

01:45:42
Speaker 4: And why this is really important, right, is that the practice of cutting came before stone tools, right? But if you look at the scientific literature, everyone thinks that the origin of stone technology was some sort of Eureka moment, like in 2001 Space Odyssey, where someone is like, you know what, I need to cut something, bam, I’m gonna go ahead and do that, and I’ve got my knife, right? But there’s no reason to suspect that’s the trajectory that things took. And really the only reason to make stone tools is if the behavior of cutting was already in place. And so I think that the exploitation of carcasses and meat potentially goes back much farther than we currently have maybe even back to a creature called artopithecus that’s like 4.4 million years old i could be wrong i probably am but we’re gonna investigate so how long we’ve spent over there this first trip to kenya because i’ve been to africa four other times this one will be about 10 days and then we’ll go for longer stints in in the near future so yeah so it should be good yeah.

01:46:52
Speaker 3: Well guys thanks for coming on the show man Thanks for having us.

01:46:55
Speaker 2: Always enjoyable.

01:46:55
Speaker 3: Yeah. I got to tell people a quick thing.

01:46:57
Speaker 1: I was going to bring it up earlier. I’m bringing it up now. You guys are welcome to come. We’ve been talking about how our Christmas tour tickets, I’ve been trying to explain the complexity of pre-sale and sale. It is officially pre-sale, which means they’re on sale. I’ll spare you the distinction between pre-sale and sale. Tickets are on sale for the Christmas tour. Monday, December 14th, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tuesday, December 15th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wednesday, December 16th, Madison, Wisconsin. Thursday, December 17th, Des Moines, Iowa. Friday, December 18th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Saturday, December 19th, Fargo, North Dakota. Get your tickets now. Nate, what’s the ticket address, man? just go to the meat eater.com. Look up the Christmas tour. The Christmas tour is where you go to get your laughs at Christmas. And if you got someone in your life, who’s a fan, a listener of the show or whatever, give them a couple of these bad boys. And, uh, as a early gift in a Christmas card, they are going to be grateful. Um, all right guys, thanks again for coming on.

01:48:14
Speaker 3: You have a stand. You can come on anytime you want.

01:48:16
Speaker 2: Thank you.

01:48:17
Speaker 1: Listen, if we ever just walk in here and you guys are sitting here, we’re going to record. Anytime you want to come on, you come on. Just keep us posted.

01:48:25
Speaker 4: For sure. And I think we always have ideas. So other collaborations in the future. All sorts of tests.

01:48:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, we’re supposed to be cutting up some ostriches or something like that.

01:48:34
Speaker 4: Oh, don’t worry.

01:48:38
Speaker 3: Thanks again. Again, Dr. David Meltzer and Dr. Metten Aaron, thanks for coming.

01:48:43
Speaker 2: Thanks, David.

01:48:43
Speaker 4: Thank you very much.

01:49:03
Speaker 1: Thank you.