February 19, 2025 • 48 mins
In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, host Clay Newcomb navigates the archaeological journey of the “peopling” of America and the mystery of the Clovis people. Archaeologists Dr. Metin Eren and Dr. David Meltzer discuss the Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis, and how the Clovis First theory crumbled. Author and indigenous historian Taylor Keen explains how the insistence of the archeology establishment in the Clovis First theory was potentially politically motivated.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's just it's just such mystery and that's the that's
why these are so cool. Yeah, and the fact that
we could find these Clovis points, this technology that is
indicative of this time period can be found from Alaska
to Florida, from Maine to New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Oh, even Central America.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I mean they these people covered the continent. Yes, so
you could you could find one of these in your regard.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Oh yeah, definitely, one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
If you consider yourself a connoisseur of wild places, wild history,
and the wild human story on this continent, this episode
is for you. We're diving into the mysteries of the
Clovist people, and if you don't know who they are,
Brent Reeves, no problem, because the experts don't really know either.
But modern archaeology is uncovering some incredible new stuff. We're
(01:01):
gonna learn about the Clovis type site in New Mexico,
what a Clovis point is, We're gonna dismantle the Clovis
first theory, and we'll get into how archaeology can be
used as the political weapon. The ride will be rocky,
but I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss
this one. One quick thing before we get started. Brent Reeves,
(01:25):
Bear Newcomb and I will be at BHA's Black Bear
Bonanza in Bentonville, Arkansas, on March first. We'll be there
all day. This is an event all about black bear hunting.
Ton of Fun and Bear nukelem and E's Bear Hunt
Spring Bear Hunt in Montana. The film for that will
(01:45):
be up on the Meat Eater YouTube channel on February twentieth.
Don't miss it. My name is Clay nukemb And. This
is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten
(02:05):
but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where
we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives
close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made,
purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be
as rugged as the place as we explore. I'm in Ohio.
(02:39):
I'm at Kent State University. I'm here to meet doctor Metton.
Aaron Meton's going to take me into his lab. He
is the expert of the country on Clovi style stone
points and really just the stone age there. He is.
Hey man, I'm good. Good to see you, bro, you too,
(03:01):
Come on in heck yeah, thanks for meeting me on
a Saturday.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Oh God, this is Henry bad Way.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
He looks like a cross between a beagle and a
basket of hound.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
He is a cross between a beagle and a Cavalier Spaniel.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Oh really, Henry com what are you daring? Doctor Aaron
is more personable than you might envision a stuffy archaeologist.
He leads me to the fourth floor and we enter
through a metal framed door with one of those tall
rectangular windows with wire in the glass. Meton's given off
(03:34):
the energy of a second grader taking his parents into
his homeroom class for the first time. I've traveled from
the Ozarks to Ohio to see his experimental Archaeology lab.
It's the only one like it in the world. Here
they test ancient weaponry and tools.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, welcome to the Kent State Experimental Archaeology Lab.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It's the whole wing.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
We're pretty lucky because this used to be storage before
I got here. But then they gave me the whole
wing and said to build the love of your dreams,
and so everything you see, everything's a replica from either
I've made, or my students have made, or doctor Michelle
Beber's made.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
And yeah, so it's like part library, part stone age
hunting storage shed. I think I'm looking at maybe fifty
adelaid darts over there. This place is a real nerd hut,
walled wall, bookshelves, filing cabinets, five gallon buckets, with flint flakes, maps,
(04:35):
and random stone points lying around everywhere. It's just the
kind of place to begin to tell the big story
of ancient America. But when you're here, it's kind of
weird calling this place America because the Paleolithic world knew
nothing of such a place. Calling this place America is
like someone getting a new name after they've become an
(04:57):
old old man, because human history here is deep, and
this lab is dedicated to the scant but telling details
we have about this old man we now call America.
The main thing I noticed that makes this different than
just like a standard library is the dirt on the floor. Yeah,
(05:18):
it's like a workshop slash library. There's like boot tracks
and flint chips and stuff laying around.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
That's the whole lab, right, I mean, this is this
is very much like a working archaeology and engineering laboratories.
People are always making stuff and breaking stuff, and you know,
we usually do like a big clean once or twice
a year, usually once a year.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
But it looks awesome. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
So it's yeah, we're real lucky.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Where there are no oxen, the stables are clean, and
it's clear there's some real science going on here. He's
got machines for smashing stuff. He's got chronographs, life size
animal archery targets, and enormous collections of ancient stone points.
And there's a pottery shop in here. So you guys
(06:10):
are are trying to understand even like a lot of
the physics of how people use stone tools to survive,
to kill stuff, to butcher animals.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Oh yeah, Like so we want to understand, like what
makes an optimal spear point. You have to understand that, Like,
you know, we're dealing with time periods in the Stone
Age that are hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
So people had the opportunity to have natural experiments over
generations to figure out how stuff works.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And we're just playing around. This is like life and death,
life and death. So they figured out what works.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
And what's amazing is it takes in a lot of
cases twenty first century cutting edge engineering technology to figure
out what these folks learned just throughout paying attention and
really just being observant to what's around them.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Stone age technology is astonishing. You may remember a meat
eater video we did with doctor Aaron and doctor David
Meltzer where myself along with the crew, butchered an entire
bison using stone tools. It's on YouTube. We thought it
was going to take all day, but we finished in
a couple of hours. It was almost as fast as
(07:27):
using modern knives. Doctor Aaron published a paper on it.
We're about to dig into this deep history, but I
first need a little refresher on what archaeology actually is.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Archaeology is the study of ancient technology, and then we
can use what we learned from ancient technology to make
inferences about ancient people's behavior, how they lived, sometimes in
rare cases, maybe what they believed, stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
So this is a hard hitting question. What was Indian Jones?
He was an archaeologist, Now, how was he studying ancient technology?
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Hee?
Speaker 3 (08:08):
With that word is a whole part for me to understand.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, all of archaeology would be considered studying ancient technology.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, because a pot, a table, a building, the holy Grail,
the holy grail, that is technology.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
The holy Grail. Technology was amazing, But archaeology studies human
made stuff that's left behind called artifacts. Future archaeologists will
be studying iPhones, but the iPhone of the Ice Age
was a tricked out style of point that we're going
to learn about called the Clovis point. Archaeology fits under
the bigger umbrella of anthropology, which is the study of humans.
(08:49):
Forgive my ignorance, but I need some more clarification on
something else. So, okay, where does paleontology fit into go?
Speaker 2 (08:57):
So, paleontology is the study of ancient animals, but palantell.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
The intelligence is the study of essentially bone, essentially bone
in the fossil record.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
That's exactly right. You know, people always you know ASKO,
do you study dinosaurs? Right? And what I will say
is I wish I did because that'd be sweet. But
the last dinosaur went extinct around sixty five million years ago, right.
The first creature that really kind of is a human
human like is six to seven million years ago. So
(09:30):
sixty million years separates the last dinosaur and the first
human like creature.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
If we were biting into a chicken leg, we've just
been nibbling on the crispy skin, but we're about to
get into the meat. I want to understand the chronology
of our understanding of the peopling of America, where they
came from, and win. This involves a term we're going
to come to understand intimately.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
There was a huge debate in the late eighteen hundreds
early nineteen hundreds as to whether or not there was
a Stone Age period in the New World, right, because
the Stone Age is generally defined as the Pleistocene period,
which is ten thousand years and earlier. At this point
in Europe, they were pretty confident, right, they had start
(10:25):
to uncover Neanderthal remains. A Dutch pale anthropologist named Eugene
Dubois had uncovered Homorectus in Southeast Asia. You know, America
wanted to have as old in antiquity as Europe. There's
kind of some competition there, and so there's this huge
debate and Dave Meltzer's book The Great Paleothic War, it's
(10:47):
several hundred pages going into that debate, and it's pretty entertaining.
It's just like just gossip and pretty good.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I want to stop you right there. Why were people
so worked up about that, Like, why would we want
to have as deep a history as Europe? I mean,
is it literally just like we just want to think
we're as old as them? Or is there some something
I don't understand, some economic benefit or some cultural benefit.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
No, no benefit other than ego. I mean, we're American,
so we got to be first, and we got to
have the oldest.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Like I've been holding out on you, I didn't just
go to Ohio to Meton's lab, but I also went
to Dallas, Texas to the campus of SMU. Doctor David
(11:43):
Meltzer is an og archaeologist and author, and he's going
to give us a granular walkthrough of the deep story
of America. But first we've got to talk about Foalsome,
New Mexico.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
So when we were last talking, Clay, you remember we
were in Fulsom New Mexico. And Fulsom New Mexico was
a turning point in the story of the peopling of
the Americas, because up to that moment in time, nobody
was really confident that we had any evidence whatsoever that
people had been and arrived in the Americas in Ice
(12:17):
age times. Fulsom broke that barrier after literally fifty years
of controversy, Fulsom came along and we had clear cut
evidence for the first time of human artifacts, genuine human artifacts.
There was no question about these in direct association with
what we're known to be now extinct Ice age bison.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I have no doubt that you remember Bargrea's Hall of
Famer George mcjunkin, who discovered the Falsome site in nineteen
oh eight. It's here where they found the first falsome points,
which were beautifully crafted, lanceolate shaped, thin sharp stone points
that are fluted on both sides. Fluting means that with
a single strike they flaked off the entire side of
(13:05):
a point. They do this on both sides to create
a mysteriously thin point. Might be best to like google
it if you want to envision what it looks like.
We did a whole series on Fulsome starting with episode
twenty eight to Bear Grease, and we have a meat
eater film on YouTube where I killed a bear with
a falsome point. But after the Fulsome discovery, a new, unidentified,
(13:28):
slightly different type of fluted points started showing up all
over the country. These newly found points had smaller flutes
than falsome, but they were using the same napping technology.
It was kind of like a grandson making a variation
of his grandfather's design.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Well, in the wake of fulsome and those very distinctive
fluted points that we've talked about before, suddenly everybody realized
these things are all over the continent, and you know,
you can go to Ohio, you can go to Florida,
you can go to the state of Washington, and they've
all got these very distinctive fluid points. Except they didn't
actually quite look like fulsome, and so there was a
(14:11):
little bit of confusion. You know, they used terms like
generalized fulsome because they didn't quite it didn't quite fit
the type right. Well, what happens after that is, you know,
suddenly everybody's looking for these sites. Everybody wants to dig
up these sites. About half a dozen years later, fella
by name of Edgar B. Howard, who was at the
(14:33):
Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, have been working on
these old sites and he'd gotten wind about a locality
outside of Clovis, New Mexico, and he'd been told he'd
gotten word that in these dunes along the term is
blackwater draw that these dunes along Blackwater Draw were producing
(14:57):
large animal bones.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
TD. B. Howard was a real deal Indiana Jones type,
and he was headed to check out these bones near
Clovis and Blackwater Draw. And this guy was a he
hadn't been an archaeologist's whole career. He was like an
adult onset archaeologist. Yeah, he was like, there's.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Forties or oh yeah. So he had heard that megafonnel
remains had been kind of uncovered in this gravel quarry
that was being excavated. So it's thought that the Clovis
site is a spring and there would have been lots
of water resources around kind of been like a watering hole.
So all sorts of animals would have been coming to
(15:41):
that spot. And you know, sometimes that would make a
really good hunting locale, right, do you take advantage of
these animals because they need water? But sometimes they would
also die just naturally through natural causes at that spot.
And when he went and started to explore and he
got teams looking around, they start to find these points
(16:03):
that were larger than Falsom points. At the time, they
thought they were cruder. And the flutes, you know, those
grooves that extend from the base upwards rather than Falseom,
where they go the whole way. These flutes would only
go a third of the way up the spearhead right,
sometimes half, sometimes a little bit less. And what's amazing
(16:24):
about Blackwater draw this site is they were finding Clovis
points underneath Falsome points. And so this was the first
time where they actually had really concrete evidence based on
the law of superposition that, wow, Falsom isn't the oldest.
There are older cultures and Falsome because when we dig deeper,
(16:45):
we're finding different artifacts. And that's what the law of
superposition is. It's just basically generally the deeper you go,
the older things get.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
It wasn't just these unusual points that made the Clovis
site different. There were other types of bones here that
really put Clovis on the map. This place would become
known as the Clovis type site, which is a term
used to describe the original place that something important is found.
Did you hear him say that this famous place, this
(17:17):
Clovis site as it would be come known, was a
commercial gravel pit. Talk about two different types of folks
interested in digging gravel miners and archaeologists. These guys are
on like completely different spectrums. Oh, no question, I mean
like as far apart as you could possibly be.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
And you know what, the situation, it's actually kind of
sad because it gets worse in the nineteen fifties. They
bring in these giant road graders and trackos and everything,
and there's photos that you can see of bulldozers in
the background and a bunch of folks in the foreground
frantically excavating bones.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Wow, I'm just looking now at one of the books
on clothes and it says the New Mexico Highway Department,
prospecting for gravel to use in local road improvements, struck
a deposit on the Anderson Carter ranch, not far from
where Whitman and Anderson had made their discoveries. To other archaeologists,
(18:16):
mammoth bones were dislodged and pulled up by heavy construction machinery.
Soon thereafter, some of the fossils were placed on display
in nearby portales. Other bones were carted away by workers
and curious onlookers. Some people were taking stuff away only
to show up later on porches, in cupboards, and in garages.
(18:36):
One local farmer who made off with a hefty chunk
of mammoth bone eventually used it as a doorstop. Luckily,
eb Howard caught word of these happenings and rushed back
to Clovis.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
But what they discovered, and this is what eb Howard
realized in November of nineteen thirty two, was we've got
another instance kind of like full except it's not just bison.
There's also mammoth at this site. And so he excavates
there in the early nineteen thirties over a series of
(19:11):
about half a dozen years, and they recover in association
Fulsome points with bison and what will come to be
called Clovis Points with mammoth.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And that's really important because the Fulsome site was with
these bison antiquis, correct, which were an extinct species of bison.
But still there was some question amongst the people that
but like, well, maybe they weren't really bison antiquis, maybe
it was something different. But mammoth we knew for sure.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
That's an excellent point, because you know, bison, we're still
wandering around, right And it was really a question of
are these truly ancient bison or not? And people were
reasonably confident in that. But when you've got projectile point
associated with a mammoth, there's no ambiguity. Yeah, mammoths are
not wandering around the American high planes.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
And they're still trying to answer this question of were
their humans here during the Pleistocene. Do you remember where
you were in November nineteen thirty two when they discovered
mammoth bones in association with Clovis points. Well, most of
us weren't alive, but you get the point. Pun intended
that this was monumental and to bring us all up
(20:30):
to speed. The Fulsome site dates back between ten thousand,
two hundred years and ten thousand, seven hundred years ago,
but that site was found first, so it's a little confusing.
But it was younger than the Clovis site, which was
found in nineteen thirty two. And the Clovis period is
basically the prior one thousand years, dating it back to
(20:55):
just under twelve thousand years old. But we need to
know it exactly what it means when we say Clovist technology.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So Clovist technology is comprised of stone and bone artifacts. Now,
the iconic Clovist artifact is what we call the Clovis
fluted point right, and so this is a spear point
that could have been used as a projectile for like
the Atlatl dart. It could have been used as a
spearhead for thrusting spears. It could have been used as
(21:27):
a knife in knife handles.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Right, it would not have been used in archery because
it was way older than archery. Really, maybe you tell.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Me, Well, so this is the thing. People assume that
the bow and arrow occurs very late in North America,
but I don't know. I mean, we get evidence of
the bow and arrow in South Africa. I want to say,
something like seventy thousand years ago. Wow, So it's very
possible that, you know, because technologies are like biological species,
(21:58):
they can emerge, they can also go extinct. So it's
possible that at some point, as people are moving across
Asia and Siberia, they lose bow and arrow technology and
then when they come to the New World they have
to reinvent it.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
So a close point, it's within the realm of possibility
that could have been.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Could have been used with a bone.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
I can't wait for Steve Ornelle to hear this.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Is it's now. I'm not saying they did. So it
is possible. We don't know, I mean, and to be honest,
we also don't know that they use the at laddle.
We don't. We've never found a Clovis at laddle. We've
never found a Clovis spear.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
That's preservation bias potentially, that's yeah, So like an at
laddle thrower would have been made of organic matter, would bone. Yeah,
I'm not saying that Clovis folks use the bone arrow,
But what I'm saying is we can't say that they
didn't use the more. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
But so this gets to that really pesky answer. I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Oh, strings and aerow shafts are also organic matter. And
a man whose name rhyme's with Cleves Stinella, once chotted
me for shooting a Paleo point out of my bow,
saying it wasn't historically accurate. But that's water under the bridge.
Let's get back to these presumed emphasis on presumed Clovis
(23:19):
mammoth hunters.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Now, the other thing to keep in mind is, do
you know how many sites on the entire continent of
North America we have with Clovis points in association.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
With mammoth thirteen?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Fifteen, fifteen, you're close, yeah, fifteen. So let's say hypothetically.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
That sounds like a lot to me, but it's probably
really not.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Well, fifteen on the entire continent of North America, right,
fifteen is not a large nub.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Do we not have Clovis points lodged in mammoth.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Well, that it's funny. That was exactly what's going to
bring up next. We've never found Clovis tips, Clovis point
stone lodged in mammoth bones. Now that's really interesting to
think about because in Europe we find stone points, bone
points lodged in animals going back hundreds of thousands of years, right,
(24:12):
hundreds of thousands of years. So the question is why,
why in Europe during the Stone Age? I'm jealous, are
we getting direct evidence of shooting? We get that over
and over and over again in Europe, not once in
North America with a mammoth, with a mammoth. Why, I
don't know we have something like that.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
We have over ninety Clovis points in association with mammoth.
Not one stone point is lodged in any of the bones.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Could it not just be simple statistics that there were
less people here for a shorter period of time, So
statistically us.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Find in that it could be another.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
I mean humans have been there longer, Yeah, most likely.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
But I think the question though, is even at the
equivalent period, which would be the Magdalenian period in Europe,
which is a Stone Age culture right before the end
of the Ice Age, right, you'll get stone points and
stuff embedded in bone. Then, so why not at the
equivalent period in northern America. So I think when we
do find Clovis points in association with mammoth remains, it
(25:17):
is very possible that that animal is hunting. But you
also have to remember that these animals, mammoths, they were
going extinct, right, and ten thousand years ago we were
facing a climate change that is kind of hard to comprehend.
We were going from the Ice Age to the Holocene,
so these animals environments were kind of collapsing around them.
(25:39):
So there may have been more frequent dead mammoths then
for people to scavenge the right.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Because it was a population in the klon, it was
a population in decline. They were dying, they were dying.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
So again, I think a lot of folks have seen
research that my cell and my colleagues have done and
they immediately like, oh, you thinkvist didn't hunt mammoths. No,
not at all hunting mammoths. What I don't believe is
Clovis did not hunt mammoths to extinction.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. You called it a stereotype
that closed people hunted mammoths. You could you could almost
see that being used as like a like a stereotypical
slur back in the day those mammoths and the mammoth
and the Clovist people are like, man, we we're just
finding them dead.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
We're not even killed.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Them at offen.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
We didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Yeah, those dirty mammoth hunters. Yeah, I love a good mystery.
Why do you think that we don't find points lodged
in mammoth bones in America? And this is relevant to
the story because in modern times Clovis culture became synonymous
with MegaFon of hunters and even known to only hunt
(26:49):
mammoth and that just isn't true. They were hunting all
kinds of stuff. It's just intriguing to think about these
people killing giant, ancient wooly elephants with these Clovis spear points.
But we really don't have any hard evidence of that.
But that brings up a theory that's becoming less and
(27:09):
less relevant, and it has to do with humans causing
the extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
And in fact, there's a whole body of claims out
there that humans were actually fairly voracious hunters to the
degree that they were the cause of the extinction of
these animals, because of course these animals are no longer here.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah. Do they call it plastiscene overkill?
Speaker 4 (27:30):
They do, indeed, blitz grieg model, Yeah, and that all
ties back to that sort of traditional notion. You come
down through the ice free corridor, you look out out
in front of you, and it's just the landscape teeming
with these large animals that have never peered down the
shaft of a spear, have no idea how to respond
to a human, and just stand around while they get
well shafted.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Okay, archaeology, dad joke, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
So I don't buy it, and I don't buy it
for a number of reasons.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Here's the reasons why it's unlikely human hunters caused what's
called the Quaternary megafaunal extinction or the ice Age extinction,
that took place between fifty thousand to nine thousand years ago.
Number one, human hunters lived high on the hog killing
naive animals and killing the final animals in the population
(28:23):
could be difficult. They'd probably just move on when the
hunting got hard, leaving some stragglers for seed. Number two,
Hunting these huge animals was risky. They're hard to kill.
It was a low success rate type hunt, and you
might get killed doing it, so it was just risky.
The last reason is the most compelling to me, and
(28:44):
we only have hard evidence that these Clovis people killed
five types of big megafauna.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Here's doctor meltzer, mammoth, mastod on, gompethier, horse, and camel. Yeah,
so five genera. We have reasonably good evidence that people
killed the animals at those sixteen sites. Thirty eight different
genera went extinct. So what about the other thirty three genera?
We don't have any evidence that people were hunting giant peckery's,
(29:14):
giant tapers, giant beavers, giant ground sloths. Right, there's all
these other animals that went extinct. So why is it
that we don't have any evidence If people were responsible
for coming into this continent and blasting their way through
and hunting in the sort of bloodthirsty rage all the
way through the hemisphere. Where's the evidence. It's just not there. Now,
(29:35):
take that and contrast it with bison. Bison started getting
were hunted as early as Clovis times. We have Clovis
age bison kills at the Clovis type site. Bison will
then be hunted for literally the next twelve thousand years,
but they don't go extinct.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
They're still here today. Absolutely, it seems clear that humans
didn't cause the court extinction. I want to ask doctor
Aaron more about this overkill hypothesis once again, you're gonna
need to know something going in. The Anzac child that
he's about to talk about was a two year old
from the Pleistocene found buried on a Montana ranch in
(30:18):
nineteen sixty eight. Is that idea still pretty well received?
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Oh it's yeah. I mean, in fact, there was a
paper published recently in Science Advances where they did an
isotopic analysis of the Anzik baby skeleton and they found
that the diet was consistent with a plysisne big cat right, right, Yeah,
you might have seen that.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Yeah, Well so where they analyzed the DNA, Yeah, this
two year old child and decided that the mother was
basically eating a diet.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Of mammoth and yeah, of meat, right, mammoth and stuff,
and great, that's fine. But the paper then says because
of that one, fine, humans cause the extinction of mammoths
the North America.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Is that I mean, do you think some of that
is informed by just the modern bias of like human
intrusion on the landscape. So it's like an environmental statement
of like we're wrecking the planet.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
They're trying to use that as a signal to point
to a very good cause. Preserving the environment and species
is so important. And showing that the Anzac baby and
its mother ate meat, that's a huge leap then to say, well,
because they ate meat, well, we cause the extinction of
the mammoths in North America.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It's kind of bewildering to hear about archaeology being used
as a political tool. But we're about to hear a
lot more about this, But let's get back into Clovis.
This site would become the prominent American discovery of the
twentieth century, and for the next forty years there would
be an idea called Clovis First, meaning these people that
(32:14):
make these Clovis style points were the first Americans Clovis First.
So this Clovis First thing answered the big question we'd
been asking for a long time about how long people
had been here, and this ceiling that the Clovis First
theory put on, this thing was about that thirteen thousand
year mark.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
But there was trouble, and so the argument that sort
of emerged in the nineteen sixties was that Clovis groups
were first.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
And they came from Asia, and they came.
Speaker 4 (32:45):
From absolutely yeah, they came from Northeast Asia, come into
the Americas and basically start eating their way from one
end of the continent to the other. But what also
was happening simultaneously in the nineteen sixties was that people
were saying, are we absolutely certain that Clovis's oldest? Could
there be stuff evidence of people here prior to Clovis,
(33:07):
And that triggered a huge kerfuffle in debate. A lot
of it was because people would make claims about sites
of great antiquity and the claims simply did not pass
critical muster, and so archaeologists, I mean, we have long memories.
It's an occupational hazard, right, And so we got really
(33:28):
kind of skeptical and even maybe cynical about the idea
of pre Clovis.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
My friend Taylor Keene is a Cherokee in Omaha. He's
a graduate of Harvard and a professor of business at
Crichton University. He's also an Indigenous historian and author. He
wrote a book called Rediscovering Turtle Island, which is about
the peopling of the Americas. He and many others believe
(33:53):
that the original persistence of the archaeological community in denying
the deep antiquity of human here was rooted in bias
that helped build the justification narrative for America's westward expansion.
Speaker 5 (34:09):
So, if there's anything I learned from writing a book
on this topic, to me, it started with some very
basic human questions of how long have my indigenous ancestors
been here? And pretty quickly, especially in the academic narratives,
what you're going to find is some fairly fixed biases
(34:30):
around different theories. Primary one of those is around the
baron straight theory and then the Clovis first theory, and
that was embedded in anthropology as a barrier to anything
being before those time frames. For sure, I think that anthropology,
especially the Bureau of American ethnology was created at a
time when we were experiencing the vanishing race of indigenous peoples,
(34:55):
and I think it was a hopeful prophecy for the
European settlers who had colonized this, because that would have
been much easier than having to deal with the people
for a long time. So whatever we could do reasonably
within science to limit how far indigenous peoples have been
here seemed to be the cultural norm.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Taylor believes the dogma and persistence of the Clovis First theory,
which remember helped break this ice age barrier, was politically motivated.
It's complicated though, because Meltzer is saying the theory was
simply based on the evidence that we had at the time.
I have a feeling that both of these things could
(35:40):
be true at the same time. But I'm still trying
to understand why this is political.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
So much of manifests destiny. There's a famous painting, and
I always forget the name of it, but it shows
basically Lady Liberty floating as a ghost across the plains,
and you see the advancing railroad. You see a handful
of indigenous peoples. But it's a god given right for
(36:08):
European colonization to happen here. And I think the mindset
is that, you know, this was the new Jerusalem for
some of the Rosicrucian thinkers coming out of the Enlightenment
and all this New Atlantis type of theory, and all
of a sudden, it was a view that America could
become that and it was the God given right of
(36:31):
the colonizers to take it and to do with it
what they were. But to get there you need a narrative.
The land needs to be a wilderness. The people that
were there before need to be savages, and it was
our manifest destiny to take over the West. That's the backdrop,
that's the psychology within the academy. Anything that was before
(36:53):
theory was rejected.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
It's possible that America wanted a narrative that people hadn't
been here that long, and on the other side, many
indigenous people wanted to give their ancestors full credit for
how long they'd actually been here. Taylor believes it's possible
that humans have been here in the Americas for as
long as one hundred thousand years, but that's like the
(37:18):
furthest extent. But he thinks for sure forty or fifty,
but at this time there really isn't hard evidence to
support that yet and none may exist, but that thing
could still be true. It's possible for something to be
true but there be no evidence. And my analysis and
(37:39):
personal opinion is that at one time these biases to
build this pro American narrative were probably real, but modern
archaeologists like Meltzer and air and are humble, realistic, and
seem to be open to whatever the real evidence shows.
At some point, I'd like to talk about modern journalists
and popular TV host Graham Hand, who believes the archaeological
(38:02):
community is still not wanting the human arrival dates to
be too deep In time. We'll get to that, But
to get back to the mission of this podcast, here's
doctor Meltzer talking about when the Clovis first theory began
to crumble.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
But then starting in the late seventies and early eighties,
there were some sites that came online that were actually
pretty impressive and that provided pretty compelling evidence that indeed
people were here a whole lot earlier. Fast forward to today,
we've got a number of sites now that give us
(38:41):
reasonably confident evidence and data that make it clear that
folks have been here a lot earlier than Clovis. What's
a lot earlier minimally, we think that folks are here
around fifteen sixteen thousand years ago. Now that actually had
implications for how they got.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Here, Now that that would predate Clovis by like two
three thousand years exactly right. Clothes first began to crumble
in the nineteen seventies, but it takes decades for theories
and sights to gain credibility. And that's exactly why Meltzer
(39:23):
didn't mention White Sands, New Mexico, that has footprints dating
back over twenty three thousand years. Many people just don't
believe all the questions about those prints have been answered.
And if this podcast is a fried chicken leg and
we've already had one meaty bite, we're now at the
(39:44):
meat close to the bone. And if you're opposed to
learning some stuff, I'd suggest you just turned this podcast
off right now. We're about to talk about the ideas
around the ice Free Corridor, which for decades people believed
the Clovis people traveled through this ice free Corridor to
get from Alaska's burying land bridge into the interior of America.
(40:07):
The corridor was created by two abutting glaciers, my beloved
Laurentidde and the Coridialian ice Sheet. Here's some hard hitting knowledge, boys.
So what site is the most definitive site today that
bumps it back to that fifteen.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
Well, there's several. You've got some here in Texas, the
Gault site, which is just outside of Austin. We've got
sits in the Pacific Northwest, like Cooper's Ferry. We've got
sits in southern South America like Monteverde, and so in
monta Verde dates you know, fourteen six, fourteen seven, And
if you think about it, if they're down there by
(40:48):
fourteen six or fourteen seven, they came across the land
bridge a hell out earlier.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
And we and oh man, we're like moving so fast.
We know that the people, the peopling of South America
came through the North American continent through genetics exactly.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
But let me actually throw a wrinkle into this first. Okay,
remember we were talking about the ice Free Corridor, and
I'm gonna bring genetics into it. By the way, So
the Ice Free Corridor, it was traditionally thought, you know,
it opened just about the time of Clovis well doing
some work. We obtained several cores from the center of
the ice free Corridor region. The ice free corridor runs
(41:27):
from slightly northwest to slightly southeast, and it opened like
your winter coats where the zipper comes down from the
top and up from the bottom.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
And it's gone from Alaska to Montana basically exactly.
Speaker 4 (41:42):
So if you can imagine, then you're unzipping your winter
coat from the top and the bottom. The central portion
of that coat is going to stay closed latest. Okay,
So we obtained cores from lakes in that central portion,
and we looked at the vironmental ancient DNA. There's been
(42:03):
a revolution in our ability to understand past environments. We
can take a sediment core, So think about drilling a
core down into the sediment at the bottom of a lake.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
You then extrude.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
That tube of sediment and then you find slice it
and you look at the DNA fragments that are preserved
in that mud. Because a square centimeter of dirt will
contain billions of fragments of DNA. Billions with a.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Beak of animals that urinated, defecated, did.
Speaker 4 (42:41):
Absolutely, absolutely anything that was hanging around that lake. Okay,
and what we discovered that organic life does not come
to this lake until around twelve thousand, six hundred years ago. Okay,
So wait a minute. We just said people were in
the America sixteen thousand years ago. If there's nothing growing
(43:02):
in the ice Freak Corridor until twelve six how the
heck did people get through that corridor? They didn't, right,
That corridor stayed closed relatively late, and when it did
finally open, it was not biologically viable. If you're coming
from Alaska down to Montana, you're not packing a lunch
and doing it in a day, Okay, You've got to
(43:24):
have resources. Those resources weren't available. So what does that
tell us they didn't come down the ice free corld.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
It would have been like a ice hallway.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I mean, there wouldn't have been a bunch of animals
there and nope, nope, and even vegetation maybe. I mean
it would have been much flat through an ice.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Box exactly, and through mud and lakes and just glacial debris.
It would not have been a pleasant So.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
The ice free Corridor was That's the way that we
believed people got into the interior of the continent. Traditionally,
until like ten years ago, pretty much with basically with
these mud, these dirt cores and them saying, hey, there
was nothing here right until twelve thousand years ago.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, So what does that mean?
Speaker 4 (44:10):
Well, that means they got here some other way. Wow.
And the other way is down the Pacific coast.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
So the first Americans undoubtedly came by water period. Interestingly,
decades ago, the head honcho leaders said this wasn't a possibility.
Speaker 5 (44:30):
Here's Taylor John Wesley Powell, who was the original inaugural
director for both the Smithsonian but more importantly the Bureau
of American Ethnology. The very first paper that was written
on the academy. So think like legal case law. If
you write the first piece of case law, everyone else
(44:51):
has to follow you. And I'm going to paraphrase the
title of it. On the Limitations of certain Anthropological data
is what it was called. Since he laid out the
burying straight theory and a very calculated line. He said
something along of the lines of we will entertain no
extra limital diffusion, meaning people didn't come from across water
(45:16):
or from somewhere else. Now, this is to the people
that invented the canoe and seafaring canoes up in the Arctic. Obviously,
we've navigated waterways for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Many in the indigenous communities believe these statements to be
politically motivated, But I think modern archaeologists would just say
that we didn't have the data, we didn't have the
hard evidence. And I can sympathize with both sides. The
field of archaeology is limited to hard evidence, and it
just didn't have it. But we've seen even in modern
(45:55):
times how people are politicizing science, and the ancient stories
of indigenous people just seem to get truer and truer
as time goes by. As we wind down, I've got
a Clovis point in my hand, and I'm mesmerized by it.
It's just it's just such mystery, and that's the that's
(46:19):
why these are so cool.
Speaker 6 (46:20):
Yeah, such a mystery, and the fact that we could
find these Clovis points, this technology that is indicative of
this time period can be found from Alaska to Florida,
from Maine to New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
Oh even a Central America.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
I mean they these people covered the cont Yes, so
you could you could find one of these in your yard?
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Oh yeah, definitely, one hundred percent. The cool thing about
the stone Age is the stone Age is everyone's history, right,
That is the story of our species and how the
modern world looks the way it does today.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
We've learned so much on this episode. I hope our
brains don't overheat from all this new knowledge. But I
think this will give us a good foundation for understanding
some of this continent's earliest history. And I find this
stuff valuable when I'm in a wild place alone, and
the thoughts of humans in the Ice Age chasing mammoths
and the great mystery around their lives is just almost overwhelming.
(47:28):
I really love this stuff big thanks to my distinguished guests,
Doctor Aaron, Doctor Meltzer, and Taylor Kean. Thank you so much.
I can't thank everybody enough for listening to Bear Grease
and Brent's This Country Life podcast Keep the Wild Places Wild,
(47:49):
because that's where the bears live.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
You know, we've been talking about extinctions and hunting and stuff.
What I want someone out there to do, if you're
into like movie are TV shows. I want someone out
there to combine the stone Age genre with the zombie
apocalypse genre. And what I want is I want a
TV show where the megafaunam have been zombified and that
(48:16):
is the reason why they went extinct. And like Clovist
folks have to defend themselves against a zombie mammoth or
a zombie short faced bear. But I'm just like, why
hasn't anyone combined zombies with stone age.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
If Hollywood, somehow ever gets into this lab, they're going
to get there.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Can we do like an audio trademark, so if someone
wants to pick up this idea, we get the royalties.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
I mean, I'll give it all to you man, I mean,
this is your brain chilt.
It's just it's just such mystery and that's the that's
why these are so cool. Yeah, and the fact that
we could find these Clovis points, this technology that is
indicative of this time period can be found from Alaska
to Florida, from Maine to New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Oh, even Central America.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I mean they these people covered the continent. Yes, so
you could you could find one of these in your regard.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Oh yeah, definitely, one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
If you consider yourself a connoisseur of wild places, wild history,
and the wild human story on this continent, this episode
is for you. We're diving into the mysteries of the
Clovist people, and if you don't know who they are,
Brent Reeves, no problem, because the experts don't really know either.
But modern archaeology is uncovering some incredible new stuff. We're
(01:01):
gonna learn about the Clovis type site in New Mexico,
what a Clovis point is, We're gonna dismantle the Clovis
first theory, and we'll get into how archaeology can be
used as the political weapon. The ride will be rocky,
but I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss
this one. One quick thing before we get started. Brent Reeves,
(01:25):
Bear Newcomb and I will be at BHA's Black Bear
Bonanza in Bentonville, Arkansas, on March first. We'll be there
all day. This is an event all about black bear hunting.
Ton of Fun and Bear nukelem and E's Bear Hunt
Spring Bear Hunt in Montana. The film for that will
(01:45):
be up on the Meat Eater YouTube channel on February twentieth.
Don't miss it. My name is Clay nukemb And. This
is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten
(02:05):
but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where
we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives
close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made,
purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be
as rugged as the place as we explore. I'm in Ohio.
(02:39):
I'm at Kent State University. I'm here to meet doctor Metton.
Aaron Meton's going to take me into his lab. He
is the expert of the country on Clovi style stone
points and really just the stone age there. He is.
Hey man, I'm good. Good to see you, bro, you too,
(03:01):
Come on in heck yeah, thanks for meeting me on
a Saturday.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Oh God, this is Henry bad Way.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
He looks like a cross between a beagle and a
basket of hound.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
He is a cross between a beagle and a Cavalier Spaniel.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Oh really, Henry com what are you daring? Doctor Aaron
is more personable than you might envision a stuffy archaeologist.
He leads me to the fourth floor and we enter
through a metal framed door with one of those tall
rectangular windows with wire in the glass. Meton's given off
(03:34):
the energy of a second grader taking his parents into
his homeroom class for the first time. I've traveled from
the Ozarks to Ohio to see his experimental Archaeology lab.
It's the only one like it in the world. Here
they test ancient weaponry and tools.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Yeah, welcome to the Kent State Experimental Archaeology Lab.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It's the whole wing.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
We're pretty lucky because this used to be storage before
I got here. But then they gave me the whole
wing and said to build the love of your dreams,
and so everything you see, everything's a replica from either
I've made, or my students have made, or doctor Michelle
Beber's made.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
And yeah, so it's like part library, part stone age
hunting storage shed. I think I'm looking at maybe fifty
adelaid darts over there. This place is a real nerd hut,
walled wall, bookshelves, filing cabinets, five gallon buckets, with flint flakes, maps,
(04:35):
and random stone points lying around everywhere. It's just the
kind of place to begin to tell the big story
of ancient America. But when you're here, it's kind of
weird calling this place America because the Paleolithic world knew
nothing of such a place. Calling this place America is
like someone getting a new name after they've become an
(04:57):
old old man, because human history here is deep, and
this lab is dedicated to the scant but telling details
we have about this old man we now call America.
The main thing I noticed that makes this different than
just like a standard library is the dirt on the floor. Yeah,
(05:18):
it's like a workshop slash library. There's like boot tracks
and flint chips and stuff laying around.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
That's the whole lab, right, I mean, this is this
is very much like a working archaeology and engineering laboratories.
People are always making stuff and breaking stuff, and you know,
we usually do like a big clean once or twice
a year, usually once a year.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
But it looks awesome. I love it. I love it.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
So it's yeah, we're real lucky.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Where there are no oxen, the stables are clean, and
it's clear there's some real science going on here. He's
got machines for smashing stuff. He's got chronographs, life size
animal archery targets, and enormous collections of ancient stone points.
And there's a pottery shop in here. So you guys
(06:10):
are are trying to understand even like a lot of
the physics of how people use stone tools to survive,
to kill stuff, to butcher animals.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Oh yeah, Like so we want to understand, like what
makes an optimal spear point. You have to understand that, Like,
you know, we're dealing with time periods in the Stone
Age that are hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
So people had the opportunity to have natural experiments over
generations to figure out how stuff works.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And we're just playing around. This is like life and death,
life and death. So they figured out what works.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
And what's amazing is it takes in a lot of
cases twenty first century cutting edge engineering technology to figure
out what these folks learned just throughout paying attention and
really just being observant to what's around them.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Stone age technology is astonishing. You may remember a meat
eater video we did with doctor Aaron and doctor David
Meltzer where myself along with the crew, butchered an entire
bison using stone tools. It's on YouTube. We thought it
was going to take all day, but we finished in
a couple of hours. It was almost as fast as
(07:27):
using modern knives. Doctor Aaron published a paper on it.
We're about to dig into this deep history, but I
first need a little refresher on what archaeology actually is.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Archaeology is the study of ancient technology, and then we
can use what we learned from ancient technology to make
inferences about ancient people's behavior, how they lived, sometimes in
rare cases, maybe what they believed, stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
So this is a hard hitting question. What was Indian Jones?
He was an archaeologist, Now, how was he studying ancient technology?
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Hee?
Speaker 3 (08:08):
With that word is a whole part for me to understand.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah, all of archaeology would be considered studying ancient technology.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Yeah, because a pot, a table, a building, the holy Grail,
the holy grail, that is technology.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
The holy Grail. Technology was amazing, But archaeology studies human
made stuff that's left behind called artifacts. Future archaeologists will
be studying iPhones, but the iPhone of the Ice Age
was a tricked out style of point that we're going
to learn about called the Clovis point. Archaeology fits under
the bigger umbrella of anthropology, which is the study of humans.
(08:49):
Forgive my ignorance, but I need some more clarification on
something else. So, okay, where does paleontology fit into go?
Speaker 2 (08:57):
So, paleontology is the study of ancient animals, but palantell.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
The intelligence is the study of essentially bone, essentially bone
in the fossil record.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
That's exactly right. You know, people always you know ASKO,
do you study dinosaurs? Right? And what I will say
is I wish I did because that'd be sweet. But
the last dinosaur went extinct around sixty five million years ago, right.
The first creature that really kind of is a human
human like is six to seven million years ago. So
(09:30):
sixty million years separates the last dinosaur and the first
human like creature.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
If we were biting into a chicken leg, we've just
been nibbling on the crispy skin, but we're about to
get into the meat. I want to understand the chronology
of our understanding of the peopling of America, where they
came from, and win. This involves a term we're going
to come to understand intimately.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
There was a huge debate in the late eighteen hundreds
early nineteen hundreds as to whether or not there was
a Stone Age period in the New World, right, because
the Stone Age is generally defined as the Pleistocene period,
which is ten thousand years and earlier. At this point
in Europe, they were pretty confident, right, they had start
(10:25):
to uncover Neanderthal remains. A Dutch pale anthropologist named Eugene
Dubois had uncovered Homorectus in Southeast Asia. You know, America
wanted to have as old in antiquity as Europe. There's
kind of some competition there, and so there's this huge
debate and Dave Meltzer's book The Great Paleothic War, it's
(10:47):
several hundred pages going into that debate, and it's pretty entertaining.
It's just like just gossip and pretty good.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I want to stop you right there. Why were people
so worked up about that, Like, why would we want
to have as deep a history as Europe? I mean,
is it literally just like we just want to think
we're as old as them? Or is there some something
I don't understand, some economic benefit or some cultural benefit.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
No, no benefit other than ego. I mean, we're American,
so we got to be first, and we got to
have the oldest.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
Like I've been holding out on you, I didn't just
go to Ohio to Meton's lab, but I also went
to Dallas, Texas to the campus of SMU. Doctor David
(11:43):
Meltzer is an og archaeologist and author, and he's going
to give us a granular walkthrough of the deep story
of America. But first we've got to talk about Foalsome,
New Mexico.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
So when we were last talking, Clay, you remember we
were in Fulsom New Mexico. And Fulsom New Mexico was
a turning point in the story of the peopling of
the Americas, because up to that moment in time, nobody
was really confident that we had any evidence whatsoever that
people had been and arrived in the Americas in Ice
(12:17):
age times. Fulsom broke that barrier after literally fifty years
of controversy, Fulsom came along and we had clear cut
evidence for the first time of human artifacts, genuine human artifacts.
There was no question about these in direct association with
what we're known to be now extinct Ice age bison.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
I have no doubt that you remember Bargrea's Hall of
Famer George mcjunkin, who discovered the Falsome site in nineteen
oh eight. It's here where they found the first falsome points,
which were beautifully crafted, lanceolate shaped, thin sharp stone points
that are fluted on both sides. Fluting means that with
a single strike they flaked off the entire side of
(13:05):
a point. They do this on both sides to create
a mysteriously thin point. Might be best to like google
it if you want to envision what it looks like.
We did a whole series on Fulsome starting with episode
twenty eight to Bear Grease, and we have a meat
eater film on YouTube where I killed a bear with
a falsome point. But after the Fulsome discovery, a new, unidentified,
(13:28):
slightly different type of fluted points started showing up all
over the country. These newly found points had smaller flutes
than falsome, but they were using the same napping technology.
It was kind of like a grandson making a variation
of his grandfather's design.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Well, in the wake of fulsome and those very distinctive
fluted points that we've talked about before, suddenly everybody realized
these things are all over the continent, and you know,
you can go to Ohio, you can go to Florida,
you can go to the state of Washington, and they've
all got these very distinctive fluid points. Except they didn't
actually quite look like fulsome, and so there was a
(14:11):
little bit of confusion. You know, they used terms like
generalized fulsome because they didn't quite it didn't quite fit
the type right. Well, what happens after that is, you know,
suddenly everybody's looking for these sites. Everybody wants to dig
up these sites. About half a dozen years later, fella
by name of Edgar B. Howard, who was at the
(14:33):
Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, have been working on
these old sites and he'd gotten wind about a locality
outside of Clovis, New Mexico, and he'd been told he'd
gotten word that in these dunes along the term is
blackwater draw that these dunes along Blackwater Draw were producing
(14:57):
large animal bones.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
TD. B. Howard was a real deal Indiana Jones type,
and he was headed to check out these bones near
Clovis and Blackwater Draw. And this guy was a he
hadn't been an archaeologist's whole career. He was like an
adult onset archaeologist. Yeah, he was like, there's.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Forties or oh yeah. So he had heard that megafonnel
remains had been kind of uncovered in this gravel quarry
that was being excavated. So it's thought that the Clovis
site is a spring and there would have been lots
of water resources around kind of been like a watering hole.
So all sorts of animals would have been coming to
(15:41):
that spot. And you know, sometimes that would make a
really good hunting locale, right, do you take advantage of
these animals because they need water? But sometimes they would
also die just naturally through natural causes at that spot.
And when he went and started to explore and he
got teams looking around, they start to find these points
(16:03):
that were larger than Falsom points. At the time, they
thought they were cruder. And the flutes, you know, those
grooves that extend from the base upwards rather than Falseom,
where they go the whole way. These flutes would only
go a third of the way up the spearhead right,
sometimes half, sometimes a little bit less. And what's amazing
(16:24):
about Blackwater draw this site is they were finding Clovis
points underneath Falsome points. And so this was the first
time where they actually had really concrete evidence based on
the law of superposition that, wow, Falsom isn't the oldest.
There are older cultures and Falsome because when we dig deeper,
(16:45):
we're finding different artifacts. And that's what the law of
superposition is. It's just basically generally the deeper you go,
the older things get.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
It wasn't just these unusual points that made the Clovis
site different. There were other types of bones here that
really put Clovis on the map. This place would become
known as the Clovis type site, which is a term
used to describe the original place that something important is found.
Did you hear him say that this famous place, this
(17:17):
Clovis site as it would be come known, was a
commercial gravel pit. Talk about two different types of folks
interested in digging gravel miners and archaeologists. These guys are
on like completely different spectrums. Oh, no question, I mean
like as far apart as you could possibly be.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
And you know what, the situation, it's actually kind of
sad because it gets worse in the nineteen fifties. They
bring in these giant road graders and trackos and everything,
and there's photos that you can see of bulldozers in
the background and a bunch of folks in the foreground
frantically excavating bones.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Wow, I'm just looking now at one of the books
on clothes and it says the New Mexico Highway Department,
prospecting for gravel to use in local road improvements, struck
a deposit on the Anderson Carter ranch, not far from
where Whitman and Anderson had made their discoveries. To other archaeologists,
(18:16):
mammoth bones were dislodged and pulled up by heavy construction machinery.
Soon thereafter, some of the fossils were placed on display
in nearby portales. Other bones were carted away by workers
and curious onlookers. Some people were taking stuff away only
to show up later on porches, in cupboards, and in garages.
(18:36):
One local farmer who made off with a hefty chunk
of mammoth bone eventually used it as a doorstop. Luckily,
eb Howard caught word of these happenings and rushed back
to Clovis.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
But what they discovered, and this is what eb Howard
realized in November of nineteen thirty two, was we've got
another instance kind of like full except it's not just bison.
There's also mammoth at this site. And so he excavates
there in the early nineteen thirties over a series of
(19:11):
about half a dozen years, and they recover in association
Fulsome points with bison and what will come to be
called Clovis Points with mammoth.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
And that's really important because the Fulsome site was with
these bison antiquis, correct, which were an extinct species of bison.
But still there was some question amongst the people that
but like, well, maybe they weren't really bison antiquis, maybe
it was something different. But mammoth we knew for sure.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
That's an excellent point, because you know, bison, we're still
wandering around, right And it was really a question of
are these truly ancient bison or not? And people were
reasonably confident in that. But when you've got projectile point
associated with a mammoth, there's no ambiguity. Yeah, mammoths are
not wandering around the American high planes.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
And they're still trying to answer this question of were
their humans here during the Pleistocene. Do you remember where
you were in November nineteen thirty two when they discovered
mammoth bones in association with Clovis points. Well, most of
us weren't alive, but you get the point. Pun intended
that this was monumental and to bring us all up
(20:30):
to speed. The Fulsome site dates back between ten thousand,
two hundred years and ten thousand, seven hundred years ago,
but that site was found first, so it's a little confusing.
But it was younger than the Clovis site, which was
found in nineteen thirty two. And the Clovis period is
basically the prior one thousand years, dating it back to
(20:55):
just under twelve thousand years old. But we need to
know it exactly what it means when we say Clovist technology.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So Clovist technology is comprised of stone and bone artifacts. Now,
the iconic Clovist artifact is what we call the Clovis
fluted point right, and so this is a spear point
that could have been used as a projectile for like
the Atlatl dart. It could have been used as a
spearhead for thrusting spears. It could have been used as
(21:27):
a knife in knife handles.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Right, it would not have been used in archery because
it was way older than archery. Really, maybe you tell.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Me, Well, so this is the thing. People assume that
the bow and arrow occurs very late in North America,
but I don't know. I mean, we get evidence of
the bow and arrow in South Africa. I want to say,
something like seventy thousand years ago. Wow, So it's very
possible that, you know, because technologies are like biological species,
(21:58):
they can emerge, they can also go extinct. So it's
possible that at some point, as people are moving across
Asia and Siberia, they lose bow and arrow technology and
then when they come to the New World they have
to reinvent it.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
So a close point, it's within the realm of possibility
that could have been.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Could have been used with a bone.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
I can't wait for Steve Ornelle to hear this.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Is it's now. I'm not saying they did. So it
is possible. We don't know, I mean, and to be honest,
we also don't know that they use the at laddle.
We don't. We've never found a Clovis at laddle. We've
never found a Clovis spear.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
That's preservation bias potentially, that's yeah, So like an at
laddle thrower would have been made of organic matter, would bone. Yeah,
I'm not saying that Clovis folks use the bone arrow,
But what I'm saying is we can't say that they
didn't use the more. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
But so this gets to that really pesky answer. I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Oh, strings and aerow shafts are also organic matter. And
a man whose name rhyme's with Cleves Stinella, once chotted
me for shooting a Paleo point out of my bow,
saying it wasn't historically accurate. But that's water under the bridge.
Let's get back to these presumed emphasis on presumed Clovis
(23:19):
mammoth hunters.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Now, the other thing to keep in mind is, do
you know how many sites on the entire continent of
North America we have with Clovis points in association.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
With mammoth thirteen?
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Fifteen, fifteen, you're close, yeah, fifteen. So let's say hypothetically.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
That sounds like a lot to me, but it's probably
really not.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Well, fifteen on the entire continent of North America, right,
fifteen is not a large nub.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
Do we not have Clovis points lodged in mammoth.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Well, that it's funny. That was exactly what's going to
bring up next. We've never found Clovis tips, Clovis point
stone lodged in mammoth bones. Now that's really interesting to
think about because in Europe we find stone points, bone
points lodged in animals going back hundreds of thousands of years, right,
(24:12):
hundreds of thousands of years. So the question is why,
why in Europe during the Stone Age? I'm jealous, are
we getting direct evidence of shooting? We get that over
and over and over again in Europe, not once in
North America with a mammoth, with a mammoth. Why, I
don't know we have something like that.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
We don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
We have over ninety Clovis points in association with mammoth.
Not one stone point is lodged in any of the bones.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Could it not just be simple statistics that there were
less people here for a shorter period of time, So
statistically us.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Find in that it could be another.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
I mean humans have been there longer, Yeah, most likely.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
But I think the question though, is even at the
equivalent period, which would be the Magdalenian period in Europe,
which is a Stone Age culture right before the end
of the Ice Age, right, you'll get stone points and
stuff embedded in bone. Then, so why not at the
equivalent period in northern America. So I think when we
do find Clovis points in association with mammoth remains, it
(25:17):
is very possible that that animal is hunting. But you
also have to remember that these animals, mammoths, they were
going extinct, right, and ten thousand years ago we were
facing a climate change that is kind of hard to comprehend.
We were going from the Ice Age to the Holocene,
so these animals environments were kind of collapsing around them.
(25:39):
So there may have been more frequent dead mammoths then
for people to scavenge the right.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Because it was a population in the klon, it was
a population in decline. They were dying, they were dying.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
So again, I think a lot of folks have seen
research that my cell and my colleagues have done and
they immediately like, oh, you thinkvist didn't hunt mammoths. No,
not at all hunting mammoths. What I don't believe is
Clovis did not hunt mammoths to extinction.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. You called it a stereotype
that closed people hunted mammoths. You could you could almost
see that being used as like a like a stereotypical
slur back in the day those mammoths and the mammoth
and the Clovist people are like, man, we we're just
finding them dead.
Speaker 3 (26:25):
We're not even killed.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Them at offen.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
We didn't do it.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
Yeah, those dirty mammoth hunters. Yeah, I love a good mystery.
Why do you think that we don't find points lodged
in mammoth bones in America? And this is relevant to
the story because in modern times Clovis culture became synonymous
with MegaFon of hunters and even known to only hunt
(26:49):
mammoth and that just isn't true. They were hunting all
kinds of stuff. It's just intriguing to think about these
people killing giant, ancient wooly elephants with these Clovis spear points.
But we really don't have any hard evidence of that.
But that brings up a theory that's becoming less and
(27:09):
less relevant, and it has to do with humans causing
the extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna.
Speaker 4 (27:17):
And in fact, there's a whole body of claims out
there that humans were actually fairly voracious hunters to the
degree that they were the cause of the extinction of
these animals, because of course these animals are no longer here.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Yeah. Do they call it plastiscene overkill?
Speaker 4 (27:30):
They do, indeed, blitz grieg model, Yeah, and that all
ties back to that sort of traditional notion. You come
down through the ice free corridor, you look out out
in front of you, and it's just the landscape teeming
with these large animals that have never peered down the
shaft of a spear, have no idea how to respond
to a human, and just stand around while they get
well shafted.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Okay, archaeology, dad joke, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
So I don't buy it, and I don't buy it
for a number of reasons.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
Here's the reasons why it's unlikely human hunters caused what's
called the Quaternary megafaunal extinction or the ice Age extinction,
that took place between fifty thousand to nine thousand years ago.
Number one, human hunters lived high on the hog killing
naive animals and killing the final animals in the population
(28:23):
could be difficult. They'd probably just move on when the
hunting got hard, leaving some stragglers for seed. Number two,
Hunting these huge animals was risky. They're hard to kill.
It was a low success rate type hunt, and you
might get killed doing it, so it was just risky.
The last reason is the most compelling to me, and
(28:44):
we only have hard evidence that these Clovis people killed
five types of big megafauna.
Speaker 4 (28:51):
Here's doctor meltzer, mammoth, mastod on, gompethier, horse, and camel. Yeah,
so five genera. We have reasonably good evidence that people
killed the animals at those sixteen sites. Thirty eight different
genera went extinct. So what about the other thirty three genera?
We don't have any evidence that people were hunting giant peckery's,
(29:14):
giant tapers, giant beavers, giant ground sloths. Right, there's all
these other animals that went extinct. So why is it
that we don't have any evidence If people were responsible
for coming into this continent and blasting their way through
and hunting in the sort of bloodthirsty rage all the
way through the hemisphere. Where's the evidence. It's just not there. Now,
(29:35):
take that and contrast it with bison. Bison started getting
were hunted as early as Clovis times. We have Clovis
age bison kills at the Clovis type site. Bison will
then be hunted for literally the next twelve thousand years,
but they don't go extinct.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
They're still here today. Absolutely, it seems clear that humans
didn't cause the court extinction. I want to ask doctor
Aaron more about this overkill hypothesis once again, you're gonna
need to know something going in. The Anzac child that
he's about to talk about was a two year old
from the Pleistocene found buried on a Montana ranch in
(30:18):
nineteen sixty eight. Is that idea still pretty well received?
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Oh it's yeah. I mean, in fact, there was a
paper published recently in Science Advances where they did an
isotopic analysis of the Anzik baby skeleton and they found
that the diet was consistent with a plysisne big cat right, right, Yeah,
you might have seen that.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Yeah, Well so where they analyzed the DNA, Yeah, this
two year old child and decided that the mother was
basically eating a diet.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Of mammoth and yeah, of meat, right, mammoth and stuff,
and great, that's fine. But the paper then says because
of that one, fine, humans cause the extinction of mammoths
the North America.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Is that I mean, do you think some of that
is informed by just the modern bias of like human
intrusion on the landscape. So it's like an environmental statement
of like we're wrecking the planet.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
They're trying to use that as a signal to point
to a very good cause. Preserving the environment and species
is so important. And showing that the Anzac baby and
its mother ate meat, that's a huge leap then to say, well,
because they ate meat, well, we cause the extinction of
the mammoths in North America.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It's kind of bewildering to hear about archaeology being used
as a political tool. But we're about to hear a
lot more about this, But let's get back into Clovis.
This site would become the prominent American discovery of the
twentieth century, and for the next forty years there would
be an idea called Clovis First, meaning these people that
(32:14):
make these Clovis style points were the first Americans Clovis First.
So this Clovis First thing answered the big question we'd
been asking for a long time about how long people
had been here, and this ceiling that the Clovis First
theory put on, this thing was about that thirteen thousand
year mark.
Speaker 4 (32:33):
But there was trouble, and so the argument that sort
of emerged in the nineteen sixties was that Clovis groups
were first.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
And they came from Asia, and they came.
Speaker 4 (32:45):
From absolutely yeah, they came from Northeast Asia, come into
the Americas and basically start eating their way from one
end of the continent to the other. But what also
was happening simultaneously in the nineteen sixties was that people
were saying, are we absolutely certain that Clovis's oldest? Could
there be stuff evidence of people here prior to Clovis,
(33:07):
And that triggered a huge kerfuffle in debate. A lot
of it was because people would make claims about sites
of great antiquity and the claims simply did not pass
critical muster, and so archaeologists, I mean, we have long memories.
It's an occupational hazard, right, And so we got really
(33:28):
kind of skeptical and even maybe cynical about the idea
of pre Clovis.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
My friend Taylor Keene is a Cherokee in Omaha. He's
a graduate of Harvard and a professor of business at
Crichton University. He's also an Indigenous historian and author. He
wrote a book called Rediscovering Turtle Island, which is about
the peopling of the Americas. He and many others believe
(33:53):
that the original persistence of the archaeological community in denying
the deep antiquity of human here was rooted in bias
that helped build the justification narrative for America's westward expansion.
Speaker 5 (34:09):
So, if there's anything I learned from writing a book
on this topic, to me, it started with some very
basic human questions of how long have my indigenous ancestors
been here? And pretty quickly, especially in the academic narratives,
what you're going to find is some fairly fixed biases
(34:30):
around different theories. Primary one of those is around the
baron straight theory and then the Clovis first theory, and
that was embedded in anthropology as a barrier to anything
being before those time frames. For sure, I think that anthropology,
especially the Bureau of American ethnology was created at a
time when we were experiencing the vanishing race of indigenous peoples,
(34:55):
and I think it was a hopeful prophecy for the
European settlers who had colonized this, because that would have
been much easier than having to deal with the people
for a long time. So whatever we could do reasonably
within science to limit how far indigenous peoples have been
here seemed to be the cultural norm.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Taylor believes the dogma and persistence of the Clovis First theory,
which remember helped break this ice age barrier, was politically motivated.
It's complicated though, because Meltzer is saying the theory was
simply based on the evidence that we had at the time.
I have a feeling that both of these things could
(35:40):
be true at the same time. But I'm still trying
to understand why this is political.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
So much of manifests destiny. There's a famous painting, and
I always forget the name of it, but it shows
basically Lady Liberty floating as a ghost across the plains,
and you see the advancing railroad. You see a handful
of indigenous peoples. But it's a god given right for
(36:08):
European colonization to happen here. And I think the mindset
is that, you know, this was the new Jerusalem for
some of the Rosicrucian thinkers coming out of the Enlightenment
and all this New Atlantis type of theory, and all
of a sudden, it was a view that America could
become that and it was the God given right of
(36:31):
the colonizers to take it and to do with it
what they were. But to get there you need a narrative.
The land needs to be a wilderness. The people that
were there before need to be savages, and it was
our manifest destiny to take over the West. That's the backdrop,
that's the psychology within the academy. Anything that was before
(36:53):
theory was rejected.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
It's possible that America wanted a narrative that people hadn't
been here that long, and on the other side, many
indigenous people wanted to give their ancestors full credit for
how long they'd actually been here. Taylor believes it's possible
that humans have been here in the Americas for as
long as one hundred thousand years, but that's like the
(37:18):
furthest extent. But he thinks for sure forty or fifty,
but at this time there really isn't hard evidence to
support that yet and none may exist, but that thing
could still be true. It's possible for something to be
true but there be no evidence. And my analysis and
(37:39):
personal opinion is that at one time these biases to
build this pro American narrative were probably real, but modern
archaeologists like Meltzer and air and are humble, realistic, and
seem to be open to whatever the real evidence shows.
At some point, I'd like to talk about modern journalists
and popular TV host Graham Hand, who believes the archaeological
(38:02):
community is still not wanting the human arrival dates to
be too deep In time. We'll get to that, But
to get back to the mission of this podcast, here's
doctor Meltzer talking about when the Clovis first theory began
to crumble.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
But then starting in the late seventies and early eighties,
there were some sites that came online that were actually
pretty impressive and that provided pretty compelling evidence that indeed
people were here a whole lot earlier. Fast forward to today,
we've got a number of sites now that give us
(38:41):
reasonably confident evidence and data that make it clear that
folks have been here a lot earlier than Clovis. What's
a lot earlier minimally, we think that folks are here
around fifteen sixteen thousand years ago. Now that actually had
implications for how they got.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
Here, Now that that would predate Clovis by like two
three thousand years exactly right. Clothes first began to crumble
in the nineteen seventies, but it takes decades for theories
and sights to gain credibility. And that's exactly why Meltzer
(39:23):
didn't mention White Sands, New Mexico, that has footprints dating
back over twenty three thousand years. Many people just don't
believe all the questions about those prints have been answered.
And if this podcast is a fried chicken leg and
we've already had one meaty bite, we're now at the
(39:44):
meat close to the bone. And if you're opposed to
learning some stuff, I'd suggest you just turned this podcast
off right now. We're about to talk about the ideas
around the ice Free Corridor, which for decades people believed
the Clovis people traveled through this ice free Corridor to
get from Alaska's burying land bridge into the interior of America.
(40:07):
The corridor was created by two abutting glaciers, my beloved
Laurentidde and the Coridialian ice Sheet. Here's some hard hitting knowledge, boys.
So what site is the most definitive site today that
bumps it back to that fifteen.
Speaker 4 (40:27):
Well, there's several. You've got some here in Texas, the
Gault site, which is just outside of Austin. We've got
sits in the Pacific Northwest, like Cooper's Ferry. We've got
sits in southern South America like Monteverde, and so in
monta Verde dates you know, fourteen six, fourteen seven, And
if you think about it, if they're down there by
(40:48):
fourteen six or fourteen seven, they came across the land
bridge a hell out earlier.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
And we and oh man, we're like moving so fast.
We know that the people, the peopling of South America
came through the North American continent through genetics exactly.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
But let me actually throw a wrinkle into this first. Okay,
remember we were talking about the ice Free Corridor, and
I'm gonna bring genetics into it. By the way, So
the Ice Free Corridor, it was traditionally thought, you know,
it opened just about the time of Clovis well doing
some work. We obtained several cores from the center of
the ice free Corridor region. The ice free corridor runs
(41:27):
from slightly northwest to slightly southeast, and it opened like
your winter coats where the zipper comes down from the
top and up from the bottom.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
And it's gone from Alaska to Montana basically exactly.
Speaker 4 (41:42):
So if you can imagine, then you're unzipping your winter
coat from the top and the bottom. The central portion
of that coat is going to stay closed latest. Okay,
So we obtained cores from lakes in that central portion,
and we looked at the vironmental ancient DNA. There's been
(42:03):
a revolution in our ability to understand past environments. We
can take a sediment core, So think about drilling a
core down into the sediment at the bottom of a lake.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
You then extrude.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
That tube of sediment and then you find slice it
and you look at the DNA fragments that are preserved
in that mud. Because a square centimeter of dirt will
contain billions of fragments of DNA. Billions with a.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Beak of animals that urinated, defecated, did.
Speaker 4 (42:41):
Absolutely, absolutely anything that was hanging around that lake. Okay,
and what we discovered that organic life does not come
to this lake until around twelve thousand, six hundred years ago. Okay,
So wait a minute. We just said people were in
the America sixteen thousand years ago. If there's nothing growing
(43:02):
in the ice Freak Corridor until twelve six how the
heck did people get through that corridor? They didn't, right,
That corridor stayed closed relatively late, and when it did
finally open, it was not biologically viable. If you're coming
from Alaska down to Montana, you're not packing a lunch
and doing it in a day, Okay, You've got to
(43:24):
have resources. Those resources weren't available. So what does that
tell us they didn't come down the ice free corld.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
It would have been like a ice hallway.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I mean, there wouldn't have been a bunch of animals
there and nope, nope, and even vegetation maybe. I mean
it would have been much flat through an ice.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Box exactly, and through mud and lakes and just glacial debris.
It would not have been a pleasant So.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
The ice free Corridor was That's the way that we
believed people got into the interior of the continent. Traditionally,
until like ten years ago, pretty much with basically with
these mud, these dirt cores and them saying, hey, there
was nothing here right until twelve thousand years ago.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Yeah, So what does that mean?
Speaker 4 (44:10):
Well, that means they got here some other way. Wow.
And the other way is down the Pacific coast.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
So the first Americans undoubtedly came by water period. Interestingly,
decades ago, the head honcho leaders said this wasn't a possibility.
Speaker 5 (44:30):
Here's Taylor John Wesley Powell, who was the original inaugural
director for both the Smithsonian but more importantly the Bureau
of American Ethnology. The very first paper that was written
on the academy. So think like legal case law. If
you write the first piece of case law, everyone else
(44:51):
has to follow you. And I'm going to paraphrase the
title of it. On the Limitations of certain Anthropological data
is what it was called. Since he laid out the
burying straight theory and a very calculated line. He said
something along of the lines of we will entertain no
extra limital diffusion, meaning people didn't come from across water
(45:16):
or from somewhere else. Now, this is to the people
that invented the canoe and seafaring canoes up in the Arctic. Obviously,
we've navigated waterways for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Many in the indigenous communities believe these statements to be
politically motivated, But I think modern archaeologists would just say
that we didn't have the data, we didn't have the
hard evidence. And I can sympathize with both sides. The
field of archaeology is limited to hard evidence, and it
just didn't have it. But we've seen even in modern
(45:55):
times how people are politicizing science, and the ancient stories
of indigenous people just seem to get truer and truer
as time goes by. As we wind down, I've got
a Clovis point in my hand, and I'm mesmerized by it.
It's just it's just such mystery, and that's the that's
(46:19):
why these are so cool.
Speaker 6 (46:20):
Yeah, such a mystery, and the fact that we could
find these Clovis points, this technology that is indicative of
this time period can be found from Alaska to Florida,
from Maine to New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
Oh even a Central America.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
I mean they these people covered the cont Yes, so
you could you could find one of these in your yard?
Speaker 2 (46:43):
Oh yeah, definitely, one hundred percent. The cool thing about
the stone Age is the stone Age is everyone's history, right,
That is the story of our species and how the
modern world looks the way it does today.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
We've learned so much on this episode. I hope our
brains don't overheat from all this new knowledge. But I
think this will give us a good foundation for understanding
some of this continent's earliest history. And I find this
stuff valuable when I'm in a wild place alone, and
the thoughts of humans in the Ice Age chasing mammoths
and the great mystery around their lives is just almost overwhelming.
(47:28):
I really love this stuff big thanks to my distinguished guests,
Doctor Aaron, Doctor Meltzer, and Taylor Kean. Thank you so much.
I can't thank everybody enough for listening to Bear Grease
and Brent's This Country Life podcast Keep the Wild Places Wild,
(47:49):
because that's where the bears live.
Speaker 2 (47:52):
You know, we've been talking about extinctions and hunting and stuff.
What I want someone out there to do, if you're
into like movie are TV shows. I want someone out
there to combine the stone Age genre with the zombie
apocalypse genre. And what I want is I want a
TV show where the megafaunam have been zombified and that
(48:16):
is the reason why they went extinct. And like Clovist
folks have to defend themselves against a zombie mammoth or
a zombie short faced bear. But I'm just like, why
hasn't anyone combined zombies with stone age.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
If Hollywood, somehow ever gets into this lab, they're going
to get there.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
Can we do like an audio trademark, so if someone
wants to pick up this idea, we get the royalties.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
I mean, I'll give it all to you man, I mean,
this is your brain chilt.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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