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- [00:02]
Dan Flores
Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsom cultures entered an America teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa like creatures, but confronted.
- [00:11]
Steve Rinella
An extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their own arrival. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the.
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Dan Flores
American west.
- [00:21]
Steve Rinella
Brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season that calls us home. A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly. Clovisia the Beautiful we hardly know our actual beginnings in America. Even Even the stories are set in places we recognize the characters of our deep time. History can be alien to the point of fantasy. But while it may sound unlikely in the 2000s, there's no place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense of how the human story began on the continent. Rancho La Brea Tar Pits, just off Wilshire Boulevard in the heart of a sprawling Pacific coast city, is today the most accessible place in the country for picturing in the mind's eye the wild new world migrating humans found when they first saw America. True enough, there's a sense of time travel shock, having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling, honking LA traffic, only to stand face to face minutes later with Colombian mammoths fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair. Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries don't drown out the traffic, they and La Brea and the Page Museum still work a kind of magic. 20,000 years drops away if you let it, because La Brea preserves tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun in Africa. The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries. Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once lured by the cries of snagged mammoths or the scent of decomposing horses, camels or ground sloths trapped by surface tar near what was once a water source in a dry landscape. The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted from La Brea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum has to admit the most stunning display is the wall, the backlit in yellow of hundreds of dire wolf skulls, the strapping canids indigenous to America but memorably revived as fictional Westeros fauna in Game of Thrones left the most remains here of any species. 1800 individuals, the fossils of hundreds of coyotes a brawnier version than our modern animal make up the third most common species here. But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of the Pleistocene. The western subspecies of sabertooths. Heavily built cats with a fearsome snake like jaw gape and enormous fangs. The replica skull of a saber tooth from La Brea sits a few feet away as I write this. Its rapier sharp canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf. Gleaming in rich afternoon light. Each fang measures a full 8 inches from gumline to tip. The vast assemblages of hypercarnivore bones at La Brea join the skeletal remains of mega mammoths and mastodons, giant bison, pronghorns, llamas, California turkeys and many more. The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes and saber tooths as well as the cats whose remains have come out of the tar, include American cheetahs, steppe lions and giant jaguars. Immense hyperactive, short faced bears, twice the weight of a grizzly died in the asphalt. So did the enormous Miriam's Pterotorn, A Pleistocene bird of prey with a 10 and a half foot wingspan. The remains span indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia, some ancient to America, some recent arrivals. The mammals and birds may seem alien or vaguely African, but in fact this bestiary was purely classically American. The America of the Pleistocene. The Rancho La Brea victims that left their bones and skulls encased in tar were once representatives of one of the grand ecologies of planet Earth. This was a different America than most of us conjure when we imagined the continent Europeans found 500 years ago. But this La Brea world wasn't like the pre Chicxulub age of the dinosaurs absent of humans either. Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears joined American ecologies as the newest predator. Here these first Americans lived their lives among La Brea creatures and created the first coast to coast human societies in American history. Their presence began to leave the continent and this rich aggregate of impressive animals forever changed. The first time we became aware that humans were actually in America during the Pleistocene was barely a hundred years ago. And the place that happened was along the New Mexico Colorado border. In the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River. An African American cowboy named George McJunkin was riding through grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rim rock of a miles long mesa that extended eastward from the Rocky Mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood. Suddenly McJunkin's horse braced its hooves furrowing into foot deep mud at the edge of a ragged scar floodwaters had cut into the slope below the mesa. McJunkin leaned out of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced into the brown shale. What he saw changed the story of America forever. On a similar rainy August day in 2018, some 35 of us are stepping through the lush grass of that same slope as it angles up towards the rim rock of Johnson Mesa. We're following David Eck, a New Mexico State lands archaeologist with a long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us towards the very spot where George McJunkin's horse had pulled up 110 years before. The topography is now a grassy, shallow drain called Wild Horse Arroyo. And as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's most significant historical finds. Nonetheless, this in the flesh is the legendary Folsom archaeological site. What McJunkin had done about where we now stood talking was to spot in the flood gashed arroyo bones of an immense size. They turned out to be from a herd of Bison antiquus, an extinct form of giant bison. But the bones themselves weren't the piece de resistance. At the time, the sciences of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firm that American Indians had arrived in North America only a couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans. In 1926, the Black Cowboy's plea to have a scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver. Something of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil bison that might make exhibits in his museum. His team began an excavation of the site in May of 1926 and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of bison of a monstrous size. That was exciting enough. But in their second season of work, on August 29, 1927, Figgins crew troweled up Big History paydirt as David Eck was gesturing to the dimensions of this near century old dig. In the pocket of my light Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I could fit into my palm. In shape it was oblate, think a flattened football, but with an end bitten off. Beneath my fingers, I could feel an irregular surface made so by labor intensive flaking to create a pointed blade that dwindled to a remarkably thin base. The delicacy of that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped from the flint on both sides. In that first summer of digging, Figginson's paleontologists had unearthed two of these points in the loose dirt of the site. Eventually, the Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points scattered amongst the bones. But it wasn't just the bones and not the points that made Folsom what American Museum of Natural History scientist Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest event in American discoveries. When the second season crew at Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison, they were greeted by the sight of one of these fluted points embedded to 2/3 its length in the bone. The bar for proof that humans were part of the American Pleistocene had always been an extinct animal, preserving evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed by human technology. Now, outside the tiny burg of Folsom, New Mexico, that bar was hurdled. America too had an antiquity. How much of an antiquity was still in question? Because radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future, Figgins claimed the site was 400,000 years old. Eventually, archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day, a band of three dozen humans had driven into a box canyon, killed and butchered 32 giant bison of the species Bison antiquus in the spot where I was now standing. And they had done this 12,450 years ago. No one knows now what these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons. Their beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by at addles or spear throwers. But not knowing much about these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both the points and the people Folsom after the nearby town. Yet Folsom wasn't the book of genesis for America's human history. Six years after the Folsom discovery, there was another dramatic revelation. Out on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains, an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named Clovis exposed the bones of long extinct American elephants. A remarkable 28 of them. Science and the reading public knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants in the deep past. But unlike 19th century Mastodon finds in the east, this time the skeletons were intermixed with large 5 to 6 inch long projectile points and tools of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than the Folsom people. We now know that even these elephant hunters were not the first. What has very recently produced certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely in boats following shorelines out of Asia, are human footprints. To be precise, 61 footprints, left primarily by children or adolescents in the soft mud of a lake shore some 23,000 years before the area became New Mexico's White Sands National Park. That blockbuster find by a Park employee in 2019 ultimately drew a team of researchers from the U.S. church Geological Survey to date. The seeds of a species of grass crushed by the footprints. Their dating indicates a time frame at the height of the glacial maximum when it would have been impossible to come overland to America. The human footprints aren't the only tracks researchers are finding. There are also mammoth tracks and prints of dire wolves and giant ground sloths. In one fascinating interaction with the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down, walked a stretch of lakeshore and returned by the same path, which in the interval, both a mammoth and a ground sloth crossed. The mammoth paid no obvious attention, but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs and what may have been alarm. So far as we now know, only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early. They remind me of Viking visitors to America a thousand years ago. Their numbers must have been small, with much of America still empty of humans. So 10,000 years later, the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the first human culture to spread across all the Americas. An overland arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave 13,000 years ago. The rapidity of their spread suggesting that they encountered few, if any other human cultures along the way. Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida for more than three centuries, until a mature United States spread coast to coast. In fact, Clovis stood as the sole human culture that once draped across our entire country. So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America was Clovisia the Beautiful. We are still struggling to understand them. They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs or any defining events. We have no sense of their gods or the philosophies they believed in or what language or family of languages they spoke. We know a great deal about their tools, and we're developing a sense of them from their bones and more recently, from their genetics. But starting 13,050 years ago, and lasting until 12,750 years ago, the Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals and changed the continent. Their name comes from the place where we first became aware of their existence. An ancient arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis, New Mexico, on the windswept southern high plains. Getting in close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because it taps ancient imperatives still within us. The relationship between prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side is very good at the algorithm. But prey do have to learn numerous examples from around the world testify that upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate us with a threat. There is a term of art for this biological first contact. Wild animals had to learn to be afraid of us. Many died standing and looking, never absorbing the lesson. Finding naive animals that were easy for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species migrations around the world. But just who were these Clovis people who left so many sites across America? More than 20 excavated ones so far, including some 70 butchered elephants. One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed that the direct ancestors of the Clovis people reached America 18,000 years ago from Europe. To say that the scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across Atlantic ice claims barely does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it. While Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna and flint points crafted by Western Europe's Solutrean culture superficially resembled Clovis points, Other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that the two groups were the same people. Linguistic and genetic conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument. Once scientists were able to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia rather than Europe into the Americas. We now suspect that the people who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years on the Bering land bridge itself, Itself the so called Beringian standstill, apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward. That long pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestication of another animal engaged in their own return to America. 25,000 years ago, Gray wolves were abundant in Beringia. Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the animals they killed, they had leftover lean portions they were willing to share. Some of the wolves had a mutation that made them hypersocial, and puppies with that gene may have been able to bond with humans. There probably also were wolf puppies, known today as gifted word learning animals capable of picking up human language. By the time the two species got to America, humans and their tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history. Or so goes one theory about dog domestication. Clovis genetics are best represented by a male toddler from a 12,800-year-old burial in Montana. He's known as the Anzik Child, and he's from a site not far from today's Bozeman. The Clovis child was buried with a large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points Painted in red ochre after he played an epic role in reconstructing a history of two continents. In 2014, the Anzik Boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields river, near where he had lain for nearly 13,000 years. While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study, we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history. And if this closest living relative of mammoths offers clues, America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, Especially acute in what biologists called situational intelligence. Their trunks were elephant analogs to our opposable thumbs, with as many as 150,000 muscle subunits as ecological chemicals. Keystone creatures whose activity shaped landscapes, Mammoths and mastodons foraged in ways that likely transformed American vegetation, the way modern elephants do in Africa. They traveled their huge ranges with an unusually powerful geographic memory. As a recent study of a woolly mammoth's lifetime movements through Alaska 17,000 years ago, reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios of that reference geography in its tusks, now indicate, all elephants are what biologists refer to as K species, meaning they do not come into sexual maturity until they're 15 years old or older, a state brought on by periodic must. The pachyderm version of sexual heat, from insemination to giving birth, probably took two years, A generational turnover low enough to make population recovery difficult in the face of a new threat. And by the time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of extinctions that had been going on for 75,000 years. But as the Rancho La Brea, Folsom and Clovis sites show, elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still occupied the ground where we now commute and go to sleep in our suburbs. Only they all disappeared quite suddenly and mysteriously, long, long ago. That disappearance is one of the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history. As Darwin's ally in the breakthrough to understanding natural selection and evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote, In fact, we present day Americans live in a zoological impoverished world from which all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared. Wallace was using recently in a big history sense, all those hugest, fiercest and strangest animals vanished from America between about 30, 13,000 and 9,000 years ago. In fact, we lost 30 genera and 40 species, all of them our very largest creatures, right down to our present moment. These ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event since humans have been in North America. But science has never grouped the so called Pleistocene extinctions with the five great planetary extinctions of Earth history. It's different from all of those which were global extinguished life on both land and in the oceans and showed no size bias in the creatures they marked for disappearance. The Pleistocene losses didn't happen in oceans in Africa or in southern Asia. They devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South America and Australia. Something very odd seemed to be unfolding in specific parts of the planet during the late Pleistocene. But there is a common thread. Those were all places where human predators out of Africa seeking out large animals to hunt were arriving for the first time. The Pleistocene extinctions, in other words, looked very much like the first, first act of the Anthropocene, the beginnings of what we now call the sixth extinction.
- [24:59]
Steve Rella
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- [26:14]
Steve Rinella
This has been a prelude to introducing you to a scientist who was able to imagine how this might have happened. Paul Martin, who passed away in 2010, was one of the country's late 20th century intellectual giants. He was also lucky enough to have a brand new tool to play with. Radiocarbon dating. Invented in 1946 by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel Prize for it, that new tool almost overnight allowed an understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions. When did the various animals disappear? Exactly. And how did the arrival of humans in America line up with those dates? I got to meet Martin at a point in his career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a target at a shooting range. At a time when politics and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples as ecological examples for the modern world. There were those who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for extinctions as politically incorrect. The popular Native American writer Vine Deloria, Jr. Was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologists. Between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago, the Solutrean culture had similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Pleistocene creatures. Clovis and Folsom were not Indian stories, Martin insisted. They were big history human stories. Martin and I arranged to get together on his visit to the University of Montana, where I taught. After two days of wide ranging conversations, I began to think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking. When his body had slowed from polio, his vast energy had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind. The crux of the Pleistocene story Martin told me was that North America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans. And when we finally arrived in numbers in the form of the Clovisians, the well known slaughter humans had made on island biologies all over the world, came to America. We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs and fire and baggage like rats. The predation we engaged in changed local ecology so substantially that that animals evolved in our absence couldn't survive. Once we arrived, I realized Martin was giving me a command performance of his planet of Doom theory. A modern version now buttressed with science, history and details. As Martin put it in his 2006 Twilight of the Mammoths. I argue that virtually all extinctions of wild animals in the last 50,000 years are anthropogenic. By the time the destruction was over, only a handful of America's biggest animals remained. And those were either European or Asian, like caribou or bison that had prior experience with humans. Or they were native ones, like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little inducement for hunters. Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years of evolution. In 2001, independently of Martin, an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy, developed a computer model to test this American extinction story. Alroy's computers modeled an absolutely classic ecological release. By 1500 years after the human arrival, excepting a few scattered remnants hunters had overlooked, but were now too separated to exchange their genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity, 75% of America's Pleistocene bestiary had been gutted. Alroy's computer model predicted the extinction or survival of 32 of 41 Clovis prey species. He concluded, long before the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe. Southeast of present day Tucson, along the Santa Cruz river, there are three famous Clovis sites. You suspect in long ago Clovis Lord. This may have been a legendary event. Or given that many similar stories follow it in the historical record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all, just the way things were done. What seems to have happened is that at the most westerly location, now called the Lanner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group of 15 mammoths. The herd apparently huddled together for defense against the assault. But 13 of them, all adolescents and calves, died in the spot. Archaeologists found exactly 13 Clovis points in their remains. But it must not have been an easy thing. In different locations a few miles away, the Escapool and Naco sites, Archaeologists found two adult mammoths who had apparently fled the slaughter. The large male had died with two Clovis points in his body. But the female must have put up a tremendous fight to protect her young before, mortally wounded, she had fled. In her remains, there were no fewer than eight embedded Clovis points. The hunters who killed those mammoths appear to have been absolute professionals. Our best strategy for understanding America's Pleistocene extinctions may be on an animal by animal basis. Clovis hunters almost certainly wiped out the elephants and and fulsome people the giant bison. But animals like dire wolves, giant beavers and big cats may have simply been out competed by gray wolves and modern beavers and cougars. Smaller size and earlier sexual maturity fitted the replacements better for an America now inhabited by human predators. The first examples on the continent for what biologists called anthropogenic evolution. Horses and camels do remain enigmas. Sites of Clovis age in southern Alberta and Colorado. Show horse and camel kills, but nothing like the vast number of horses from Solutrean sites in Europe. And why did various camelids survive in South America, providing later native people domestic possibilities, but not farther north. As for the Clovisians themselves, they remain maddeningly elusive. They are us, of course, but it's difficult even to know your recent relatives if all you have to go on are their tools and diet preferences. We know that with the fluted point, a purely American invention not found in Siberia, their thinkers had solved the ancient technology hurdle of affixing points solidly to wooden spears or darts. We also know that they were consumer connoisseurs of the best the world had to offer. Clovis artisans fashioned their toolkit from the hardest, sharpest, most vividly colored flints and cherts in North America, whose outcrops existed as a Geographic atlas in their heads. They journeyed hundreds of miles to those sources, as if on quest to special magic. Some of their tool caches featured multiple gorgeous unused points of 8 to 9 inches in length, with sacred red ochre still adhering to them. One Clovis mystery has always been why no art? Why nothing like the grand, grand paintings of animals on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lascaux and Altamira in Europe? There are pebbles incised with cross hatching. There's an elephant carved into a piece of ivory. Otherwise, we had no hints what they thought of the animals they hunted, of America, of their lives in general. That may be changing with a new 2019-2020 investigation of the rock art of a region in the Colombian Amazon known as Serrania la Lindosa. But we'll have to wait to see if the images there really are Clovis or Folsom ones. One recent theory is that the Clovisians may have been a Northern hemisphere wild type, a group of hyper aggressive Siberian Vikings. According to modern a high fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone. But who they were really is us. My 23andMe profile shows 3% of my genes are Native American, a common figure for those of us whose European ancestors arrived in America 300 or more years ago. Clovis heredity is within us. The Clovis story resonates because we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals. The culmination of 40,000 generations of hunters. They must have had a sense of that timeless tradition. But to me, the biggest question is what did they think? What did they do when so many of the animals they lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last few scattered survivors until there were none. What they faced is mirrored by our own 21st century circumstances. Like us, they'd lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt had every expectation that the world would continue as it always had. And so long as there was a Siberia or a Beringia or an America out there, it did. But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals. Much as we are doing today, the Clovisians ran into a wall of limits.
- [37:16]
Randall
When I think about certain areas of inquiry. I think that in a lot of spaces there's room for huge discoveries. Meaning we could find life on another planet, right?
- [37:34]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
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Randall
There could be huge medical, you know, you could picture where we have some medical breakthrough and like, increase life expectancy by 25 or 50. Like, I wouldn't be shocked. But do you feel that our, our understanding of pre human and early human North America is like, down to the details now? Like, it's kind of all there. It's just details.
- [38:06]
Dan Flores
Well, I, I tend to think that there are some big discoveries yet to be made.
- [38:12]
Randall
Yeah.
- [38:12]
Dan Flores
Now I will say that the advent of genomic research, you know, on, on human remains all over the world is telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before. And that's kind of the modern version of, you know, radiocarbon dating in the 1950s and stuff. We've now got a way to analyze human remains that is giving us a sense of how people spread around the world and what connections they had with one another. So I, my guess is, and, you know, it's probably a pretty easy thing to guess is that there's got to be something big out there and it's likely to involve something technological like those two, where you have a sudden breakthrough and it's possible to do something you've not been able to do before.
- [39:06]
Randall
Mean you find somewhere in South America, you find a genetic marker from 12,000 years ago and it just doesn't make sense.
- [39:15]
Dan Flores
It doesn't make sense. And you have to, and people have to explain it. You know, and it may take a while. It takes science often a lot of time to explain things. And there are a lot of kind of false leads and ideas that are put out there that don't last. I mean, that's just the way, you know, human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge works. But yeah, I think there's going to be, you know, we're going to know in the case of the Pleistocene extinctions, I think in another 30 or 40 years there's going to be something, some kind of technological breakthrough that enables us to suddenly know a lot more about this than we've known. I mean, one to me is the, is, you know, the, our sudden realization that a lack of genetic diversity can be pretty murderous on a, on a species because if you start separating a population out so it's not possible for them to breed anymore and exchange genes, they become, they become weak. I mean, there are instances where, you know, it's impossible for them to reproduce. And so I think all of that, that's another Variation, obviously of the genetic revolution. But I think all those things point to some new breakthrough in the future that's, you know, it's going to be fun to see. I mean, I'm glad to hear a bunch of things like that.
- [40:33]
Randall
I'm glad to hear this because I was starting to worry that it was going to get boring. These questions were going to get boring as things just got more like, here's the story.
- [40:42]
Dan Flores
Yeah, yeah, no, I don't think they're going to get boring. I think it's going to be, it's going to be fun and we're going to still be interested, you know, just like all of us are still interested in this. I mean, none of us is really trained in the fields of paleobiology or anything like that, but we find it fascinating to want to understand how this happened and we want to know more about ourselves. And that's what a lot of this is about.
- [41:08]
Randall
Do you remember the writer? He was a very funny guy. The writer Jack Hit.
- [41:15]
Dan Flores
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [41:17]
Randall
He once observed, he was talking about that he has a hard time taking paleontology seriously because it was a discipline that he found the most knowledge about it was held by 13 year olds. He's talking about dinosaurs.
- [41:34]
Dan Flores
Yes, it's true. Yeah, that's true.
- [41:37]
Randall
And anytime this is a feel like this stuff like, like Ice Age America is definitely a hobbyist realm, you know, I mean, there's a lot of room for hobbyists, right? Like, like I'm a hobbyist. There's a lot of room for hobbyists.
- [41:49]
Dan Flores
Yeah, well, that's right.
- [41:50]
Randall
You can stay up breast, you know, you can stay abreast of the subject, I think.
- [41:54]
Unnamed Participant
What's, what's. There's sort of a tension in this subject for me between, like when you describe people seeking out a new frontier or moving across the landscape and being drawn in by certain topographical features, it's something that resonates with me and I find it sort of part of the human condition. On the other hand, there are certain things about these people that are totally unknowable. Like even with all the technological advances we have ahead of us, we don't have their voices and we don't even know what their voices sounded like, you know. And so whenever I'm playing with this subject in my mind, I always get stuck on that sort of contradiction between what's very familiar and what is and will probably always remain totally alien.
- [42:54]
Dan Flores
Well, that part probably will remain completely alien. I mean, we call, you know, we have named these paleocultures in North America. Things like Folsom and Plainview and Clovis. And those are all names of towns near which paleontological and archaeological sites were found. I mean, we have no idea what they called themselves. They, for sure, probably didn't call themselves Clovisians, you know, or Folsomites or whatever the Folsom term for the people would be. I mean, they. We. So we don't know that, and we're very likely not ever to know that. What I am still a little disappointed by, and I'm hoping that this site in. In South America pans out as a. As an actual rock imagery site for Clovis and Folsom, is the lack of art, especially in comparison to Western Europe, where there's. There are all these marvelous cave paintings that, I mean, tell you so much about. I mean, they're one of the pieces I read when I was researching Wild New World was about how the artists at Chauvet Cave got the rhythm of the foot footprints, the feet hitting the ground of quadrupeds. Exactly right. And this particular article said it wasn't until the 1890s that modern painters were able to get the rhythm of how horse hooves hit the ground when they were running at the same level of expertise that these guys did 15, 16,000 years ago. And so that's very exciting and tells us a little bit about those people. And it's just disappointing that, you know, we have nothing like that in North America.
- [44:46]
Randall
I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll talk about. They'll say, when cave people were here. And I'll say, be careful, because it seems like what you're imagining. Like, it seems like the Ice Age people that were here didn't have a real affinity for caves.
- [45:05]
Dan Flores
Well, they did.
- [45:06]
Randall
They probably had. They weren't like. They weren't like. They're not quite contemporaries. But what was happening here 12, 13,000 years ago was a very similar lifestyle in Western Europe, 30,000, 40,000 years ago. And there are parallels, but there also seems to be differences. And, like, you're saying, like, where's all the cave art?
- [45:25]
Dan Flores
Yeah, where's the art? And I mean, and it's interesting to me, since you brought that up, that the first archaeologists in North America who were looking for evidence of human antiquity here looked in caves. They went to places like Carlsbad and stuff and looked in caves. Because this was the. I mean, they were thinking by analogy, this was the example they had in Western Europe. This is where these people are. And so they were Looking in places like Carlsbad Caverns for evidence that early humans in North America would have done the same kind of thing. And of course, accidentally on the way back, a guy by the name of Edgar Hewitt, on the way back from one of those expeditions, happened to go.
- [46:06]
Steve Rinella
Past the Clovis site and had some.
- [46:09]
Dan Flores
Cowboys say, well, you know, we've been.
- [46:12]
Steve Rinella
Finding these kind of strange looking large.
- [46:15]
Dan Flores
Tool like objects here on the ground. No caves anywhere around, but they're just kind of lying out here on the.
- [46:22]
Randall
Plains on what was a wetland.
- [46:25]
Dan Flores
Yeah, what was a wetland. And you know, no caves around anywhere. So it's kind of one of those ways, I think that the, the people of antiquity, the paleo hunters in particular in North America, are pretty damn distinctive from the people in Western Europe. And in this particular case, I wish the distinction weren't so great because I would love to be able to find some art that they did, but so far, not much.
- [46:55]
Steve Rella
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- [48:10]
Dan Flores
Along.
- [48:10]
Unnamed Participant
The lines of, like, preconceived notions that people have when they sort of look at this era of prehistory as just sort of one block. And then all of a sudden, you know, the Stone Age goes to the Bronze Age, something like that. I think one of the things that you've always opened my eyes to is paying attention to these advancements in technology, which I think most People wouldn't think of them as technology, but, you know, we were just looking at stone points at the archaeological repository in Laramie, and you look at the level of artistry and mastery in these. In these objects, and it very much is like a technology. It's not like these people were trapped in some era. Right. There's this. There's this long history that's played out in just the material objects that they leave behind.
- [49:05]
Dan Flores
Yeah. I mean, things that to us do not look particularly significant, like the flute on the sides of Clovis and Folsom points. I mean, that. You can almost miss that when you look at those points. But that very clearly was a major technological innovation because it finally allowed the secure fastening of a point to a dart, an ad. Adult dart, or a spear. And so it was a. It was one of those human genius breakthroughs where someone realized, if I just, you know, make a flute, make an indentation running down each side of this point, I can now secure my atlante dart to it. And it won't pop off upon hitting an animal. It will instead stay secure and penetrate through the skin. And that's kind of, you know, as I said, it's not something that you look at and go, wow, this is like the invention of the Model T. But nonetheless, yeah, yeah, for these people, it effectively was a huge leap forward.
- [50:13]
Randall
You know, I want to return for a minute to a comment you made about. As the picture becomes clear or the picture changes about this era, we're discussing that you look to technological enhancements, technological improvements, which might upend some of our notions. After you said that, it made me think about a conversation I had with an anthropologist who focused on the, like, the Pleistocene Holocene transition at Colorado State. And I was kind of saying to him, in a discussion. I was kind of saying to him, like, well, as we find more sites, it'll get clearer. And he was really pessimistic about.
- [50:58]
Dan Flores
About that, about.
- [50:59]
Randall
About sites. I'm like, well, you know, some guy building a road, he's like, how many roads have we built? I mean, like, look at all the roads we built. Look at all the farm fields we cleared, and we have a handful. Like, I don't think increasing road building, you know, at the. At the decreased rate that we're building roads and clearing fields, that I don't think it's going to be that it's new sites. You know, he was really wasn't optimistic about finding crazy sites. I think that what. I think that we've kind of found what is there to find, you know, barring some unforeseen thing. But, but I, I think that.
- [51:36]
Steve Rella
I.
- [51:36]
Randall
Don'T think you can go and say the same thing about South America. Right. Especially all that. Like, like areas that are heavily forested and jungle areas, like places that haven't been through like our dust bowl when we had a good chance to see the western landscape stripped clean of topsoil and vegetation. Like there could be some amazing stuff laying there. Yeah, it rots quicker, but it could be there, you know.
- [51:58]
Dan Flores
Yeah, it could be. And I mean, you know, and so lidar, I suppose at this stage of the game, I mean that's certainly a technological breakthrough that's enabled the discovery of all sorts of new, particularly buildings, Mayan structures that are suddenly now visible from above in a way that they never are on the ground. But lidars, as far as I am aware of it, it probably is not fine grained enough to do something like the sort of archeological sites that, that you're talking about.
- [52:29]
Randall
But no, I wouldn't think so.
- [52:31]
Dan Flores
No. I tend to agree with the anthropologists you are talking to. I think we've got the sights. I think what we probably can improve the interpretation of those sites with is going to be something like these, these big leaps forward we had with radiocarbon dating which was, you know, that was a huge game changer 75 years ago and, and now the genomic revolution, the genetic revolution, which is another enormous game changer for all kinds of things, including these sort of extinctions from the Pleistocene Holocene boundary. So I think it's going to be something like that. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's probably going to be something that suddenly enables us to interpret what we have in a way we've not been able to.
- [53:22]
Unnamed Participant
Yeah, I think what we're talking about here a lot is how we can change our understanding of this subject looking forward. But I also wonder if you can look backward at your own career just in your lifetime, how much has changed in terms of knowledge about this subject and also how conversations have evolved over time.
- [53:49]
Dan Flores
Well, I would say, you know, I mean I, I may look as if I come from the early 20th century, but I'm actually more a mid 20th century artifact. And so I was born at about the time that radiocarbon dating won the Nobel prize for a guy and I have not. I will say that during the 60s, and especially the 70s, the late 70s, when I was in graduate school, there was a strong disinclination to believe that humans had played much of a role at all. And what it reminded, as I've looked back on it now, it reminds me of the sort of reluctance that a lot of people feel about climate change. It's that humans couldn't have done that, we couldn't have done that. I mean, a bunch of animals became extinct. That had to have been climate. That had to have been a comet strike. That had to have been something other than. Than humans, because, I mean, there's just no way. That's not possible. People armed only with ad adults and spears and so forth could not do those sorts of things. And that, of course, played into and went along with this sensibility back in those same years where we were kind of, in a way, first discovering native ecology and indigenous knowledge about the world. And, and we were, of course, looking for some examples, looking desperately for some examples of human beings to say, these people did it right, here's the way you do it. We've. We're not on the right track, we're doing it wrong. But, but they did it correctly. And of course, arguing that, you know, early arrivals in North America like Clovis and Folsom people may have wiped out species that ran against that sentiment, that, well, we're trying to find in the past some humans who really lived well on the environment. And so that changed, I think, sometime, I don't know, probably in the early 2000s, when, after one kind of alternative explanation, after another was advanced and none of them really seemed to work, they never did manage to convince many people. I mean, you know, Ross McPhee of the American Museum of Natural History advance, well, maybe some new disease swept through North America and, and killed everything. Well, of course, there was no candidate disease. And then the other problem was most diseases don't kill everything. I mean, they usually leave some piece of a population that often rebuilds with immunity. I mean, all of us are examples of Old World diseases that killed many of those that our ancestors survived and allowed us to. To be born today. So alternative explanations have not so far really worked. And what I've kind of been noticing in the last 10 or 15 years has been a kind of a reluctant, I would say reluctant, but still a sort of a growing consensus that the human arrival in North America still seems to be the best explanation we have for what happened to all those animals. And what I ended up arguing in Wild New World is that I think, you know, we talk a lot about the sixth extinction today. I think the sixth extinction started 35,000 years ago. I mean, when humans started spreading around the world Yeah, I mean, it's just in contrast to an asteroid strike, which wipes out 70%, 5% of Earth's life and, you know, a matter of a few weeks. This has just been a 35,000 sort of slow motion extinction that's been going on for a very, very long time. And so it's good for us to be alarmed about a 6 extinction. I just sometimes try to point out to people I think this has actually been happening for a long time.
- [57:58]
Randall
I recently had a discussion with an attorney who's Native American, and he works in repatriation, and his particular focus is on getting the remains of his ancestors back from museums. I said to him, I said, would you ever strike a deal where they get a gram of each of those bones and then you get the bones back? And he said, we would never even consider something like that. I don't expect you to answer this, but, like, what would be some things that you consider when you think of the tension around a desire to study, apply modern analytics to human remains and where that rubs against cultural sensitivities about playing with remains of someone that you rightfully or wrongfully consider to be your ancestor, even if you're separated by 9,000, 10,000 years from them?
- [59:16]
Dan Flores
Yeah, that's a really.
- [59:17]
Randall
Like, what kind of things bounce around in your head? I'm not, I'm not asking you to say what we ought to do, but, like, how do you even approach that, that. Right.
- [59:23]
Dan Flores
Well, what, here's what I, I kind of suspect. I think we're living through a moment, and I think the moment has been caused by the previous lack of respect that so many bone merchants in the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries brought to the game of archeology, where they paid not the slightest attention to the desires, wants of the local people who very well could be connected to the, the, the ruins or the, the excavations that they're doing on human remains. And so what I think is that we're experiencing a moment that's kind of a backlash against that.
- [60:15]
Randall
Yeah.
- [60:16]
Dan Flores
And I tend to be one of these kind of people who thinks that, you know, we're really kind of all the same, actually. And what we're interested in is the human story, the big story of all of us, which is why I'm intrigued by, you know, humans coming out of Africa, spreading through Asia, coming to North America, going to South America. And I know that people get hung up on the idea of, okay, this, this particular culture has this view of how the world should be conducted and how scientific research could be Conducted. But I am very much interested in the big story of humanity. And I think ultimately most people are interested in that. And so I think when we get past this moment where we're sort of boomeranging from centuries where we had no respect for the remains of these people, that in another who knows how long, but in another century, in fact, I know Native people who have already reached this position where they, too, are intrigued and interested and they want to know. And so I think that at some point in the future, I don't know how far out it is, that there will be some relaxing of that kind of reluctance to allow science to try to answer some of these great questions. I just think it's a. You know, the pendulum has swung at the moment at a. To a degree that Native people are. They don't want this to happen.
- [61:47]
Randall
Yeah.
- [61:48]
Dan Flores
But I think it'll swing back. Yeah.
- [61:52]
Unnamed Participant
I think on Steve's. On Steve's question, there, there's implicit in that is this question about the. The scope of time that we're talking about when we talk about people arriving in North America and from. From the Pleistocene extinctions up until just say, 1500. And I wonder if you can just sort of put that. I always have a hard time wrapping my mind around big time. And so I wonder if you can kind of contextualize that what we're talking about versus the broader story of. Of humans spreading around the world.
- [62:36]
Dan Flores
Well, when. I mean, you guys all know this as well as I do, but, you know, when you're doing history, History, we always think of history, especially professionally and in the academy, we think of that as being something you do from written sources. And of course, written sources only exist for the human story back to about 3,500, 4,000 years ago. And beyond that, we have no written stories. And so it's. That sort of implies that, okay, so if you're interested in history, that's the end of it. 4,000 years back, you don't have any history anymore. There's no way. I'm. I'm not satisfied with that, obviously, because that's a very small slice of the human story. And the human story goes way, way farther back in time. And so, I mean, my whole take on something like writing that chapter about what I call Native America after the Pleistocene extinctions and the Holocene period began in North America, I tried to write a chapter about the next 10,000 years, which takes you down to 500 years ago, when Europeans and Old Worlders began arriving in North America. I was trying to sort of satisfy my own curiosity about that because I couldn't really find very many people who had ventured a guess as to how that story had unfolded. And in a book like that where I was interested primarily in the relationship between animals and people, I was trying to figure out how did it happen that when Europeans get here 500 years ago, they land on a continent that they're so impressed with. Now, maybe it's just in comparison to what they had done to Europe, but they're really impressed with the biological diversity of North America. It's kind of an Eden for the animals. And so the question was, how did we get from 10,000 years ago down to 500 years ago where native people managed to preserve all that? And that presented obviously a lot of questions to try to answer. And I'm sure there'll be people who improve on that story that I told. But that was kind of my own attempt to do something about the Native American story that I didn't see anybody else really making a stab at trying to interpret, probably because it's too daunting.
- [65:06]
Randall
But I think you did a phenomenal job because you distilled it down into an observation that here's 9,500 years of history and there's maybe like one.
- [65:16]
Dan Flores
Yeah, one extinction. One extinction in that time.
- [65:19]
Randall
That's right, we've done.
- [65:20]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [65:22]
Randall
The last 500 years has been a real ripper.
- [65:24]
Dan Flores
Yes, and a real ripper, there's no question about it. I mean, one. One piece I read in the National Academy of sciences from about 2019 argued that we have sacrificed in the last 500 years about a half a million years of evolved genetics on planet Earth as a consequence of all the destruction that we've made to creatures around the world. And most of the animals that have disappeared have been really charismatic and very.
- [65:58]
Steve Rinella
Common, like passenger pigeons.
- [66:00]
Dan Flores
Passenger pigeons survived in North America for 15 million years and they couldn't last 300 years after we got here. So there's certainly been that. And then there's that 10,000 year period we were just talking about where I could find evidence for only one extinction.
- [66:17]
Steve Rinella
And that was a flightless sea duck.
- [66:19]
Dan Flores
On the Pacific coast. But then of course, there's the period before that, the Pleistocene, where, if anything, the destruction was even on more massive a scale. And in that instance, not only do we sacrifice an enormous amount of biological diversity and genetics, evolved genetics, but it was the genetics of most of the really large and impressive animals of the globe. And so that's a story, in other words, that doesn't have it doesn't travel.
- [66:54]
Steve Rinella
Just in one direction.
- [66:56]
Dan Flores
It's as if humans realizing wow, we may have really screwed things up or things got screwed up for some reason because I'm not sure they quite understood what had happened but it seems to have produced a kind of a reaction where for nearly 10,000 years they are very careful about things. And you know, as I said that's a story that I really had to put together because I couldn't find anyone that was willing to make to venture a guess about how that had all played out and yet it's obviously a really big part of American history.
- [67:37]
Randall
Well Dan, I want to thank you for sitting and having this post chat with us.
- [67:41]
Dan Flores
You bet Steve, thanks. Thanks to both you guys. Randall, you guys were you know, many years ago terrific students in the classes that I taught at the University of Montana. It's fun to sit down and do this again.
- [67:56]
Randall
Thank you.
- [67:56]
Unnamed Participant
Likewise.