Ep. 694: Did Clovis Hunters Kill All the Mammoths?

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 694: Did Clovis Hunters Kill All the Mammoths?

Release Date: April 21, 2025

In Episode 694 of The MeatEater Podcast, host Steve Rinella delves into one of the most intriguing and debated topics in North American archaeology: Did Clovis hunters drive the megafauna, such as mammoths, to extinction? Joined by esteemed guests Todd Surovel, Director of the George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, and Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archaeologist and Adjunct at the University of Wyoming, the episode explores the depths of the Clovis First hypothesis, the Overkill hypothesis, and alternative theories surrounding the peopling of the Americas.

---

1. Introduction to Clovis Culture

Steve Rinella opens the discussion by highlighting the significance of the Clovis culture, traditionally viewed as the first widespread human culture in North America, renowned for its distinctive fluted stone points used in hunting large game.

[28:07] Spencer Pelton: "Just stone tool technology at the most basic level. But I think it's also come to be associated with a lifeway, highly mobile use of really high quality raw materials. Seemingly a preference toward hunting large-bodied animals."

2. Experimental Archaeology: Testing Clovis Weaponry

The conversation shifts to George C. Frison's pioneering work in experimental archaeology, where he tested Clovis points on African elephants to assess their effectiveness as hunting tools.

[03:27] Todd Surovel: "Absolutely. He had no doubt. He's the only guy in recent time who's hit a Clovis weaponry."

Todd explains Frison's method of using Clovis points on ostensibly dead elephants in Zimbabwe, demonstrating their functionality in hunting.

3. The Overkill Hypothesis

Central to the episode is the Overkill hypothesis, which posits that early human hunters, equipped with advanced weaponry like Clovis points, were primarily responsible for the rapid extinction of numerous megafauna species.

[50:12] Todd Surovel: "I think there's a lot of really strong evidence for it."

Steve and Todd discuss the abundance of mammoth kill sites, noting that Clovis points are frequently found in association with mammoth remains, suggesting a targeted hunting strategy.

4. Archaeological Evidence and Debates

Despite the strong correlation between Clovis tools and mammoth remains, Rinella raises concerns about the absence of kill sites for other megafauna, questioning the breadth of the Overkill hypothesis.

[50:55] Todd Surovel: "We did a study comparing the density of mammoth kill sites in Clovis times to all other elephant kill sites from the rest of the world... It's actually a huge number given the amount of time and space we're talking about."

Spencer Pelton adds that the Clovis record is dominated by evidence of hunting large animals like mammoths and bison, while there is scant evidence for hunting other large species such as ground sloths or giant beavers.

[57:10] Todd Surovel: "The bigger the animal is, the less common they are in the landscape. When you see this focus on these large animals, it tells you they're really specializing in the predation of these large animals."

5. Alternative Migration Theories

The guests explore alternative theories to the traditional ice-free corridor migration model, particularly the coastal "Kelp Highway" hypothesis, which suggests that early humans migrated along the Pacific coast using boats and subsisting on marine resources.

[48:34] Brody: "What about during that same era as Clovis? What archeology is there at the same time as Clovis?"

[112:34] Spencer Pelton: "Spencer Pelton discusses the lack of archaeological evidence supporting extensive coastal migration during the Clovis period, emphasizing that the kelp highway remains more of a theoretical framework due to the scarcity of dated sites."

The debate intensifies as Spencer points out that obsidian sourcing studies reveal Clovis peoples utilized inland resources, contradicting the coastal migration narrative.

[118:09] Spencer Pelton: "The hypothesis was that if people were tied to coastal regions, then we should have coastal obsidian in these sites... but every single piece of obsidian used in these oldest sites in Alaska comes from interior sources."

6. Implications for Megafaunal Survival

Todd Surovel presents a compelling argument linking human population densities to megafaunal survival, proposing that only in regions with low human densities did large mammals like caribou and bison survive the Pleistocene extinctions.

[84:33] Spencer Pelton: "She's like, prestige. I thought that was great. Word choice."

[86:57] Steve Rinella: "So, you have these large mammals, cases of large mammal survival in environments where people simply couldn't reach sufficient densities to drive them to extinction."

7. Political and Cultural Dimensions

The episode doesn't shy away from addressing the political and cultural implications of the Overkill hypothesis, particularly its impact on Indigenous narratives regarding land ownership and historical presence.

[128:24] Spencer Pelton: "Just because something's human, universally human, doesn't make it, it doesn't abdicate us for moral responsibility to deal with it."

[131:38] Spencer Pelton: "Now that 13,000 years is no longer old enough. You have to keep pushing it back a little further."

8. Conclusion and Future Directions

As the discussion wraps up, Rinella emphasizes the need for continued archaeological research to uncover more definitive evidence about early human activities and their ecological impacts.

[135:25] Steve Rinella: "So how do people find your work? Like, what should they check out? I have one of your books upstairs, the Badger."

[136:03] Todd Surovel: "Search the Frison Institute. We're happy to take donations. Every dollar goes to research."

The guests advocate for supporting research institutions dedicated to unraveling the complexities of Clovis-era archaeology and understanding the true extent of human influence on prehistoric ecosystems.

---

Key Takeaways:

• Clovis First has been the dominant theory explaining the peopling of the Americas, emphasizing a migration through an ice-free corridor and an associated extinction of megafauna via the Overkill hypothesis.

• Overkill Hypothesis is supported by the prevalence of mammoth kill sites with Clovis points but faces criticism due to the lack of evidence for the hunting of other large species.

• Alternative Theories, such as the Kelp Highway, propose coastal migrations, but lack substantial archaeological evidence to support widespread early coastal settlements.

• Human Population Density plays a crucial role in megafaunal survival, with large mammals persisting in regions with low human presence.

• The debate intertwines scientific evidence with cultural and political narratives, highlighting the importance of objective research in understanding our past.

For those interested in exploring this topic further, Todd Surovel directs the George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (frisoninstitute.com), while Spencer Pelton shares his research and insights through a ResearchGate profile and his Substack newsletter, Social Stigma.

---

This summary captures the essence of Episode 694, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't tuned in, while maintaining the depth and nuances of the conversation.

Transcript

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[Steve Rinella]

This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[Todd Surovel]

We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

[Steve Rinella]

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk. First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light.com F I R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com all right, everybody. Today we're going to dive in once again on my favorite subject of all subjects on the planet, which is first Americans who got here first. What were they doing when they come? How'd they get here? Did they kill everything? Did they kill all the mammoths?

[Todd Surovel]

All.

[Steve Rinella]

All this question and we have found. I'm going to explain this all in greater detail. We have found some fresh perspectives coming out of fresh to me at least, because I'll explain the whole controversy. This is a very, this is a controversial subject. The first Americans and we have had on in the past a number of times, David Meltzer to talk about the peopling of the Americas. And today we're going to hear from. Is it fair to call you guys all colleagues because you talk about the same stuff?

[Spencer Pelton]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Enemies. Enemies. And I'm trying to soup it up.

[Todd Surovel]

We have, we have disagreements, but we work well together.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, no, he respects you guys and he says you do good work. So Who I'm talking about here today in the, in the studio with us is Todd Surovel, who is the director of the George C. Frison Institute of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming. If you're interested in the peopling of the Americas and Clovis hunters and stuff, you might go in and check out the late George C. Frison, because he did a lot of, I guess you call experimental archaeology. Right.

[Spencer Pelton]

Like he went to Africa and experiments, dug some. Some of the most major sites. He's just kind of like, we call him the godfather of Wyoming archaeology.

[Steve Rinella]

And, and, and, and he went to Africa to test out stone tools on elephants, correct?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, he did. In Zimbabwe. They were. They. They had a overpopulation problem of elephants and they were calling them. So he took advantage of that opportunity to test Clovis weapons on actual African elephants.

[Steve Rinella]

Alive.

[Todd Surovel]

Ostensibly dead and dying is my understanding.

[Steve Rinella]

Got it.

[Spencer Pelton]

Finished him off.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But he just wanted to see how it would perform.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. Was it a functional weapon for killing an elephant? Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And what did he determine?

[Todd Surovel]

Absolutely. He had no doubt. He's the only guy in recent time who's hit a. An elephant with a Clovis weaponry.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

A lot of people have done it actually with, with deceased elephants, but George did it with living elephants.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Nowadays you guys are constrained by the, the ethics folks. That's a hard one to get across review boards. Here's what I'd like to do. I'm going to stab some elephants. And Spencer Pelton from the. He's the Wyoming state archaeologist and an adjunct at the University of Wyoming's archaeology and anthropology department.

[Spencer Pelton]

That's correct. We should also clarify. Todd was my major advisor. This is like, this is kind of like your met and melter relationship. Oh, a little bit of a. You know, he brainwashed me into thinking like. Like he did, so.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Guest]

So now you have strength in numbers.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Spencer Pelton]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Man. I'm reading a book right now. We're trying.

[Todd Surovel]

We.

[Steve Rinella]

As a guy we had on the show. Do you remember. Remember the gun writer and he's a big safari dude. I'm trying to get him to come back on Thomas McIntyre, but his name doesn't look quite like McIntyre. Thomas McIntyre. You know him? He's like a gun. Like, Like a gun writer.

[Brody]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You don't know what I'm talking about.

[Guest]

I remember listening to that.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Like, what's super interesting about him is, I mean, a bunch of things, but he went. He got super into Africa and spent his whole life hunting in Africa. And a Lot of the places he hunted in Africa has now been taken over by Islamic radicals, Islamic fundamentalists. So like. Like he used to hunt. And there's a country no one's ever heard of in Africa called, see.

[Todd Surovel]

Eritrea.

[Steve Rinella]

No, no, west, not on the coast, but it's like. Damn.

[Spencer Pelton]

Democratic Republic of Congo.

[Todd Surovel]

Cameroon.

[Steve Rinella]

Humiliating.

[Todd Surovel]

Cote d'ivoire.

[Steve Rinella]

Come on, come on.

[Guest]

Get out my map here.

[Steve Rinella]

You can't do that. Yeah, you can't bring it up. It's like. It's like. Okay, Africa countries map fo. I know right where it is.

[Brody]

This should go quick.

[Steve Rinella]

It's. No, it has got some coast.

[Todd Surovel]

Burkina Faso.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Guest]

Yeah, yeah. See, no one's ever heard of it.

[Steve Rinella]

You can't hunt there anymore. And those same dudes that those green brays were mixing it up with, like in Chad are in that area. Anyhow, in his book, he has a long thing. The book is called Rain Without Thunder or Thunder Without Rain. Thunder Without Rain. It's about. It's like a history of the Cape buffalo. But in there he's got a lot of stuff about human history. And he's in this big section right now about poisons.

[Spencer Pelton]

Like poisoning spear points.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, my. Well, you might think that till you read the book, it was very important to poison the shaft. Not the point anyhow. The stuff they could take down with plant poisons. Plant toxins and quick.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, there's a. There's a classic anthropological video of the Kung San or the Johanssi, the bushman in the Kalahari hunting giraffe with these tiny little arrows. They just got to get a couple arrows in it and then track it till it dies. I. I thought their poison was insect based, though.

[Steve Rinella]

He gets into the. No, there's three. He gets into the three plant genuses. This is a big, thick book. He gets into the, like the debt, the big sort of the big three. The big three of plant poisons and any. And he kind of juxtaposes those to the toxins that they use, the South American toxins, which more of like a paralyzing toxin, and then these different plant toxins they use. But it just gave them, like, tremendous efficacy on huge killing. Huge shit. And some of this stuff just tips right over.

[Brody]

You're trying to interview him again? Yeah, I don't think it'll happen. He's dead.

[Steve Rinella]

No. Yeah. When?

[Brody]

2022.

[Steve Rinella]

His book. He can't be dead in 2022. His book came out in 23.

[Brody]

No more Canvas Safaris. Noted outdoor writer Thomas McIntyre dies at 70. That is November 7th, 2022. We're gonna need to do.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, how does book come out in 23?

[Brody]

I don't know. We.

[Steve Rinella]

We talked about post.

[Brody]

Yeah. Chris Farley's last movie came out six months after he was dead.

[Steve Rinella]

H. No. Really?

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah.

[Brody]

I don't think it's that uncommon. What? Heath Ledger's Joker came out how long.

[Todd Surovel]

Phil after he died.

[Steve Rinella]

Talking about that he died. I feel like we should in the studio. We should have a picture of people who passed on.

[Spencer Pelton]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

There. I don't know. You shouldn't me.

[Guest]

We'll all be there someday, Spencer.

[Steve Rinella]

It's a good little bit of research right there. Yeah. Damn.

[Guest]

When I was doing my. My research in graduate school, I came across articles from like the 60s and 70s where they were saying the next big thing in. In archery hunting was going to be poison.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, they use it in Mississippi, you know. Yeah. And that.

[Guest]

But they were like a spade of law after this became like a. A thing. There's a spate of laws passed to prevent you from using.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah.

[Brody]

A lot of stories explicitly say you said blood clotting.

[Listener]

What poison? Didn't they?

[Steve Rinella]

Who does?

[Listener]

I think that's what you're talking about.

[Steve Rinella]

They do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can still use that poison. It's real. It's common there. Like I got a buddy. I got a buddy. You look at him, you just think he's a normal guy walking down the street, but he's poison arrows at deer. What. What. What the late. The late Thomas McIntyre gets into. That's really heartbreaking me. I like that guy. Where he gets into is that there's this other book. See, I'm going to be going to Africa this summer, so I'm kind of going to move in. I've been reading a lot about the World War II Pacific theater. I'm going to start moving into Africa stuff. There's a book called White Hunter, Black Poacher that I want to read next. And it kind of gets into this with like. As whites were coming in and safari culture was taken off, there was this effort to sort of like demonize indigenous hunting methods. And so because they were pushing this, like, the only humane way is shooting these large boar rifles and poisons are that all these methods they use are inhumane. And this is more humane and like. And then this effort too to declare these big game ranges. And if you're like a white dude hunting the game ranges, you're like on safari. If you're a black dude hunting the game ranges, you're not doing conservation. You're A poacher. You're this, you're that. And this sort of ethical battle over who has access to the resources which I'm just now digging into. But I was. I wanted to have Mona talk about Kate Buffalo.

[Brody]

I'm looking at his Goodreads page. His last published work according to them was 2012 and they're pretty thorough.

[Steve Rinella]

That's a bald faced lie, buddy. Because did you type in second editions? Did you type in Thunder without Rain?

[Brody]

No, but I.

[Steve Rinella]

You're lying. Bald facedly.

[Listener]

Well, Spencer's not lying.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what I meant. Well, no, because I feel like if you read lies and put them out.

[Listener]

You'Re a liar too.

[Steve Rinella]

You're a liar too. All right, moving on. We're gonna get. We're gonna die. We gotta have plenty of time to talk about Clovis. Clovis Hunters. But real quick, someone wrote in Mad because I have this. There's a few problems I always have that like it would take like electroshock treatment to have you quit having the problems. One problem is the. The whole Roosevelt Roosevelt thing which like Franklin Ruse, Theodore Rose. Did you know there's a split in the family?

[Guest]

No, I didn't.

[Steve Rinella]

That screws me up. And the other thing is, what else screws me up? Is one of my. One of the proper name for my highest honor. Not referring to my honorary PhD but referring to me being a National Wild Turkey Federation or like to me being a Royal slam holder, which I often refer to as a super slam holder. Guy wrote in Very Mad that I routinely get wrong what it is and insult the good folks at National Wild Turkey Federation. It's a Royal slam.

[Listener]

And you're saying what a super slam.

[Steve Rinella]

I always say super slam, which is like less than what I have.

[Listener]

No, it's not.

[Steve Rinella]

This guy's wrong.

[Listener]

It's harvesting one wild turkey subspecies species in every state except Alaska.

[Steve Rinella]

No, no, no, no, no, dude, it's right here. The Royal slam. According to this joker, Phil get on Goodreads. What's his name? According to Brett. Brett says just. It seems like this is the kind of thing you don't need to argue about since the Internet came out. But like it's like.

[Brody]

I will read you what Andy. NWTF defined. Please let's go with and wtf. Grand Slam is all four US Subspecies. Royal Royal Slam is the Grand Slam plus the Goulds got it. World Slam is Royal Slam plus the oscillated Wild Turkey.

[Steve Rinella]

That's where I'm. That's where I. That's where I'm that's where I'm not hip.

[Brody]

And then what? Brody was talking about the US Super Slam harvest. One wild turkey subspecies in every state except Alaska.

[Listener]

So you're. You.

[Guest]

So bread is right.

[Steve Rinella]

That's right.

[Listener]

You say that you're a super slam holder or.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I. But I say it wrong.

[Listener]

That's what I'm saying.

[Steve Rinella]

I am a royal slam holder.

[Brody]

Which is all for us subspecies plus the ghoul.

[Guest]

So does that change how it matches up against your honorary doctorate?

[Steve Rinella]

You know the problem with having an honorary doctor as opposed to regular one? You're like, if you do your. I don't have a resume. But we're at a. Make a resume. You're not allowed to put it under education.

[Brody]

Oh, where do you put it?

[Steve Rinella]

Honors awards. And that's a problem.

[Guest]

It's a tell. It's a real tell.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, because then people look and they're like, yeah, I don't like that. But if I had an honors thing in my resume, it would be like royal slam holder. And then. Okay, we're not going to talk about these artifacts that just came out of. Just not even going to talk about it. The artifact. The 6,000 year old hunting kit, which is in like pretty nice shape coming out of a cave in Big Ben national park in Texas. Because on radio live, Spencer's going to be talking about the guy that did the work.

[Brody]

In a few weeks. We're going to interview the guy who found it.

[Steve Rinella]

Can't talk about it now. Okay, hold on. Hold that thought for a minute. There's one last thing I want to talk about because this is going to segue. Forget I said that. Because I want to segue that into these boys. Yep. But you know what's really funny that I've been laughing about is a word choice thing. Alaska Fish and Game department, you know, they're doing like. They're doing like a tag lottery and they. They refer to a tag. I can't get enough of this. They referred to a big game tag as prestigious. As though holding it like if you look up, like, look up the word prestigious. Just read it real quick. What does prestigious mean? It'd be like holding the tag. You'd put it in the honors section of your resume.

[Brody]

Inspiring respect and admiration. Having high status.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

So you're like. Yeah, you'd be like. That would be like a. Like a thing you like, you'd bring. If you're on a date.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Brody]

It's good marketing.

[Steve Rinella]

With someone that's a little bit out of your league.

[Guest]

I'm a prestigious tag.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, you might be curious to know that I own a, that I hold a Kenai caribou tag in Alaska. You know, and she'd be like, prestige. I thought that was great. Word choice. Prestigious. It's a prestigious caribou tag. Oh. So back to this atlatl kit. I want to hear what you guys think about this. This will be our. This will be how we get into it. You guys know Matt and Aaron who's been on the show.

[Spencer Pelton]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Recently, one of our, one of our esteemed colleagues. One of our esteemed colleagues, Clay Newcomb did a bear grease podcast about some of the ins and outs of the Clovis first idea and you know, the peopling of the Americas. He did a little thing on that. A lot of the guys we work with are all equally fascinated by this subject. And in there Clay is at with Metin and Clay is observing that what I always tell him, which is during the ice age period. We're talking about whether you go back, let's just for just for convenient memory's sake, we go back like 10,000 years ago they weren't shooting bows. And he's like, well, how do you know they weren't? And you see he correct. So he corrects claim like oh, tell me more like how do you know that there were no bows? And he said, well, because I told him that. So when this 6,000 year old hunting kit comes out of this cave in Texas and lo and behold, it's not a damn bow. I sent it to Clay to say note, notice no bow. It's an Adolatl and b. And are you guys at a ladle or atlatl?

[Spencer Pelton]

Guys at a lateral all the way.

[Todd Surovel]

I say atlatl.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh wow. Get heated.

[Spencer Pelton]

Interview over.

[Steve Rinella]

So am I who's right? Is it just impossible to say what, what Pete? Like if, if someone when, when, when humans and what is now the United States of America interacted with, with mammoths, is it impossible to say that they were. Is it impossible to say they weren't shooting bows at them?

[Spencer Pelton]

I don't think it's impossible. I mean those, those projectiles are just so big. I just don't think they would work very well on a bow. And I think that's the assumption. Right. Also like the oldest direct evidence for bows in the world is would probably.

[Todd Surovel]

The Mesolithic in Europe, The Happy Paleolithic, 20,000 Israel probably.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, really? They haven't that long ago.

[Todd Surovel]

Well, it depends. I mean the way we infer bows is usually based on the size of the stone point because we very rarely find the bows themselves. Oh, I actually found one once in denmark that was 6,000 years old. That's incredibly rare. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

So what was that boat made out of?

[Todd Surovel]

I don't know. I was a kid at the time. I was maybe 22. Is my first archaeological field experience. And it was a, it was a, about a 10 inch piece of a bow that had broken and it was recycled as part of a fish trap.

[Steve Rinella]

What?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, we were digging in this like they call it Gucci. It's like this really muddy sediment and they would make these fish traps that were like V shaped fences that went to a woven fish trap. And the tide would come in, then would go out and the fish would get funneled into that trap. So we were coming across all these little round pieces of wood standing vertically that were the posts for that fence. And I came down on one that was D shaped. And the old guy who had been doing archeology over there forever took one look at it and he's like, that's a bow. He dug it out and sure enough it was nice shaped end piece of a bow.

[Steve Rinella]

Are you serious?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, it was wild, but that's really rare. Like normally we're inferring the technology from the hard parts that are preserved. Right. So finding bows themselves is really, really uncommon. We do have atlatls, we do have bows. But the basic argument that's usually made in distinguishing between bow and arrow and atlatl is the size of the point. Once they get really small, we say, well, arrows are there. We have bow and arrow.

[Steve Rinella]

But that's testable, right? I mean, like, sure, people could mess around and see, can you shoot a Clovis point?

[Spencer Pelton]

I think people have done like ballistics experiments.

[Todd Surovel]

David did that for his thesis.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah. David Howe, one of our master's students, has a great, he's a great public science communicator in his own right. But he did some ballistic experiments with like a crossbow and just basically made points of, you know, from that big, like, you know, say a centimeter long up to the size of like a Clovis point and tested the accuracy of, of those things the further, like according to size. And I, I don't remember his conclusions.

[Todd Surovel]

But he concluded that you get to a certain size and the accuracy declines dramatically with bow.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah. And if you look. So if you look at like a stratified archaeological site, like a rock shelter that's just got layers and layers of stuff, if you map out the widths of those projectiles through time. There's usually this dramatic decrease in width in. In Wyoming, for instance, it's like 1500 years ago or so, and that's generally assumed to be demarcating the. The transition to bow and arrow.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Spencer Pelton]

Or you've been using spear throwers. Spear thrower. Spear throws. And all of a sudden you get a bow and your projectiles just decrease in size really rapidly.

[Steve Rinella]

Got it. You know that dude I was talking about, Clay Newcombe?

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

He killed it. He put up. He put a Folsom point on an arrow and killed a bear with it. And the bear piled up in 20 yards.

[Todd Surovel]

I think I was it. Was that on YouTube? Yeah, I think I saw that.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, he shot what. He shot it from, like, three yards or something like that. He dug underground. He dug an underground pit and then had a bait pile because he knew he wanted to, like, he wanted to almost be shooting up into the bear. So he was underground because he wanted a good angle on it.

[Spencer Pelton]

That's some next level shit, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

You know, Folsom points are interesting because they're really, really fine. Like a nice, really well made Folsom points, really light. I think it would work just fine as an arrow point.

[Steve Rinella]

Let me hit. I want to do something real quick. I'll try to do it quick. I want to lay out the current. I want to lay out the. What is the debate?

[Todd Surovel]

Which debate? There's many debates. The big debate.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, the big debate. I want to lay out the. Or maybe you guys, one of you guys want to do it, lay out to me. But I want you to give the other side a fair shake. No, I want to do it.

[Guest]

Because.

[Todd Surovel]

I don't want to make you arm.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't want. I don't want to make you argue someone else's argument. Okay.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, I don't mind making that argument.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, okay. Lay out the debate. Unless you want me to do it.

[Spencer Pelton]

Well, you did just get this honorary PhD. Maybe this is your oral exam.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm sure it wasn't in this, but I'll. All right. For most of my life. For most of my life, the dominant narrative about the first peoples to come into what is now the United States of America was that Sometime, you know, 13,000 years ago, some big game hunters came over the Bering Land Bridge, not thinking they were probably not thinking they were going somewhere like the Bering Land Bridge. It was not a narrow. It's not like Moses parting the Red Sea. It was like a body of land the size of Texas. Generations probably lived and Died on it without knowing they were going anywhere. Came into Alaska, were prevented from going south because there was just massive ice sheets. This is like the ice age, big glacial ice sheets. Eventually this thing opened up. It's been described like an ice free corridor opened up. And it's been described as if you imagine a long coat that has a zipper on the bottom and a zipper on the top. The glaciers melted, created this thing called the ice free corridor. And these hunters kind of spilled down onto the American Great Plains around the site of Edmonton, Alberta, and then raised hell on mammoths. Killed man, white, managed to wipe out mammoths and a bunch of other megafauna. And it was this like distinct culture. They had a distinct projectile point they made and with stunning speed, colonized the United States. Down in the Mexico. They were everywhere. They were in Florida.

[Todd Surovel]

South America too.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, they were in Florida. They're in Washington state. Their points are up in Michigan. They were just poof, everywhere. And then out of that group eventually like came all these different cultures and. And then you start seeing these distinctive cultural markings. In the last, I don't know, handful of years, it's become these, these new archaeological sites have thrown this into question. Putting forward the idea that people were here much longer, that the people that were here earlier weren't Clovis, and that Clovis kind of came, Clovis evolved here from other peoples that showed up here. The ice free corridor thing isn't true. And these new people seemed. These new people instead came earlier. They came in boats down the coast and then they somehow morphed into these mammoth hunting Clovis people. How's that?

[Todd Surovel]

It's pretty good.

[Steve Rinella]

Really?

[Spencer Pelton]

That's a good synopsis.

[Todd Surovel]

Well, yeah, I mean there's a. There's a number of different issues there. Right. Like there's the, the date of arrival to Alaska. There's the date of getting south of the ice sheets. There's the issue of how did they make a living? Did they drive this extinction event. There's a number of separate issues there. Did they take the coastal route versus the inland route? And you're right that we've sort of tied up Clovis with ice free corridor, pre Clovis with coastal. We don't necessarily have to tie these things together or like Clovis with overkill or pre Clovis with not overkill. Right. All these things we can sort of view independently.

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[Brody]

Tell you about an exciting new project. I am thrilled to introduce Mertelli. It's a word game.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, wait, wait, wait, you can't call it that.

[Brody]

Why?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, because of copyright stuff. That name is probably property of the New York Times or something.

[Brody]

Oh, well, what should we call it?

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know. What is it exactly?

[Brody]

Well, it's a lot like wordle. Players get six tries to solve a five letter word from categories like hunting, fishing, animals, nature. Then you get to compare your score to the scores from the meat eater crew and new games will drop every Monday morning on our website.

[Steve Rinella]

I think the perfect name would kind of sound like wordle, you know, have two syllables and end with le. Oh, and it has to be an outdoorsy word.

[Brody]

Hmm. Introducing meat eater, Turtle. It's like Wordle but better. You can play it right now at themeedeater.com games.

[Steve Rinella]

Let's start with this. When I say like, what is tell people, like what is Clovis? When we say Clovis, what are we talking about?

[Spencer Pelton]

Just stone tool technology at the most basic level. But I think it's also come to be associated with a lifeway, highly mobile use of really high quality raw materials. Seemingly a preference toward hunting large bodied animals. Widespread across North America and you know, to some extent in South America. If you're looking at like fluted fells.

[Todd Surovel]

Cave points, fishtail points. Yeah. And another really clear attribute of Clovis is wherever you find it, it dates within a very, very narrow time range. Depending on who you ask, the CLOVIS period is 300 to 500 years.

[Steve Rinella]

That was it.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, yeah. Like, they're really consistent dates across the country. What Spencer mentioned that it's sort of a pan continental phenomenon. I think that's a really important part of the story because that's not really a thing. After Clovis, you do get this regional differentiation and never again do you see it. Right. So it suggests that there's really something special about Clovis and. Right. The traditional explanation was is that this was the technology made by the first people, and they're spreading this technology across the continent. That's why it's everywhere. It's interesting because it's a really unique kind of spear point. It wasn't used as fluted points. Right. Where they take these flakes from the base were used for a very brief period of time and never again. So it's like this really, really good cultural marker of this particular time period, and it is a pan continental phenomenon. So how does that happen if people are already here? Well, the argument, I suppose, is it's like a really popular stylistic idea of how to make a point that spreads among existing populations.

[Guest]

Can you describe what you mean by a. A flute and a point? Like if someone's never. If they picture a stone point, they have one image in their mind, maybe a couple images. But like, what is a flute?

[Steve Rinella]

What's.

[Guest]

What does a Clovis point look like if you're going to draw it?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. So the. I would say when most people think of an arrowhead or spear point, Right. They're thinking sort of the notched variety. We've got sort of a triangular, bifacially flaked piece of stone that had notches coming in from the corners or the sides. That's a later invention that comes a few thousand years after Clovis. With Clovis, we're talking about what we call a lanceolate point. So it's long, it's narrow, it comes to a tapered end, and the base is basally indented. It's concave.

[Steve Rinella]

Hold that thought. Brody, would you be a mega favor?

[Todd Surovel]

Sure.

[Steve Rinella]

Can you run into my office and grab my Clovis thrusting spear in the corner? And then I got on my desk, I got some Clovis and Folsom points.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yep.

[Todd Surovel]

And then. And then the flute, the word comes from like the flutes in a column. Right. It's like. It's a groove. So the really special thing about Clovis points and similar points that follow, like Folsom points and other regional varieties of. Spencer's got something.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, dude, that's badass.

[Spencer Pelton]

You met this dude when you. This is a good visual aid. Tyson Arnold drew that, wanted me to hand it off to you as a gift for your studio. Whatever.

[Steve Rinella]

That's so cool.

[Brody]

Beautiful.

[Talkspace Ad]

Right on.

[Steve Rinella]

Where do I hold this, Phil?

[Todd Surovel]

That's put right there.

[Steve Rinella]

It's great.

[Spencer Pelton]

The line draw drawing of one of the points from a site called the East Wenatchee site.

[Steve Rinella]

What's nuts is this is. This is like the size.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, that's, that's, that's a big one.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that's like a giant.

[Spencer Pelton]

Wow.

[Todd Surovel]

That's a really big one. Usually they're like the. A big Clovis point is usually half that long. That's. That's exceptionally large.

[Steve Rinella]

But when we're talking about for, for folks watching on YouTube, this is the, the flute.

[Todd Surovel]

That's the flute. So you take.

[Steve Rinella]

And that's a real. If you're a flint napper, it's really hard to do that. Like a high failure rate.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Guest]

It's almost like if you picture a blade, if you were to be able to pinch it sort of on the back end. That's sort of the shape, right?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, yeah. You know, when they were first found, archaeologists sort of made analogies to blood grooves on bayonets.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, I remember reading that.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. That was like one of the original ideas as to why they were doing that.

[Steve Rinella]

That three to five hundred year period. Can, can I, I want to take a stab at like a little bit. Just trying to describe what you're saying about. Did that mean that everybody caught on or did that mean like, does it make more sense that the reason everybody was. I can't say everybody. Well, let me ask this question. During this three to five hundred year period, if you find a Clovis point, you date it. It says 3 to 500 year period. Can. Do you go anywhere else? Can you go anywhere in the US and find other technologies that sit right inside that too, like that there was different or is everything from that window Clovis.

[Todd Surovel]

It's a really good question. Generally speaking, everything from that window is Clovis except for the site we just dug.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, I mean there's a little bit of evidence that Great Basin has some different stuff going on.

[Todd Surovel]

That's true.

[Spencer Pelton]

Some stem point components. By stem points, we mean they're not fluted. They're kind of. There's more of a stem. So the bottom, the base of the point kind of constricts more as a shoulder. Some of those components seem to overlap with Clovis a little Bit from, from the great base and very different technology. And you look in some of those rock shelters there and the lowest, most components there seem to overlap with Clovis slightly. Although Clovis still seems to have some, some slightly older dates in that stuff.

[Steve Rinella]

Got it. And then we talked about this, Spence, we talked about this where. What's kind of upset this idea that Clovis. The Clovis first idea was that they keep. They find these older sites and I don't know if you're going to regret your word choice, but you said a problem with these really old archaeological sites is they're not normal sites. Yeah, like, like there's been tons of stuff in the media, you know, or was that time like the, the footprints in White Sands? Okay, you got that. You got the dude out in Chesapeake Bay who's, who's finding. Claiming to find really old stuff eroding out of banks in Chesapeake Bay. I know you're only spe. Oh, here. Oh, here's the points. See we wound up having this picture show up. Brody.

[Listener]

Oh, gotcha.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, this is like an actual size. Would you guys say that's a more normal. Yeah, yeah, that's a rep. I can't remember what one. That's a replica. That's a replica. No, no, no. This is a handmade one. And then here's one hafted two way knife.

[Spencer Pelton]

These met and pieces.

[Steve Rinella]

Met and pieces. And here's 1/2 to 2 a dangle that spear right in front of this. So it's in built Phil's picture. Here's a. Here's a Clovis point hafted and it's like gripping it like imagine there's that, that the wood is grabbing it like this and it's bound.

[Spencer Pelton]

Got it. That's a hell of a flint knapper, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Not many people grabbing like this.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, split shaft we call it.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, tell me about these really old sites and, and well let's, I.

[Todd Surovel]

Mean if we're going to talk about them not being normal, let's talk about what is normal.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, tell me what. Yeah, what's a normal site?

[Todd Surovel]

So you know a lot of Clovis sites. Many of the early ones were large mammal kill sites. The first excavated Clovis site was actually the Dent site in Colorado. It's mammoth kill A few years later. Clovis points, flakes, tools. Bone rod is found with mammoth bones at Blackwater Draw. The Clovis site that gives the Clovis complex its name. That pattern has been repeated over and over and over again. Depending on who you ask. 15 to 20 sites where we have Clovis artifacts associated with mammoths, mastodons and gomphotheres. You know what gomphotheres are?

[Steve Rinella]

No. Oh, yeah, it's that it kind of. They got those big armored plates on them.

[Todd Surovel]

No.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, that's not.

[Todd Surovel]

It glyphed it on.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay. No, I don't know.

[Todd Surovel]

Golfother is related to a mastodon. They're in Central America and South America. Okay, so in northern sonora, Mexico, last 20 years or so, a Clovis Gonfather kill site was found. So this pattern appears.

[Steve Rinella]

Phil, can you put one of those on the screen?

[Listener]

They have a shorter trunk.

[Todd Surovel]

I am not an expert in.

[Spencer Pelton]

I think I know they oftentimes have two tusks too, right? There's some differentiation.

[Guest]

That's what I was. For whatever reason, that's what I was picturing in my head.

[Todd Surovel]

The early ones definitely have strange cranial morphology things going on.

[Steve Rinella]

You want to spell that for me? If you can.

[Todd Surovel]

G O M P H O T H E R E. So that's one aspect of Clovis. We also have Clovis bison kills, least two of those. One in Oklahoma, one in Arizona. And then we have Clovis campsites. And these are basically, you have hearth features, fire pits, people working around them, and you have butchered remains of usually large mammals. The site we recently dug a lot of bison. And this is sort of typical hunter gatherer archeology. Right? You have the things that hunter gatherers do. You have hearth features. Yeah, they have the downward facing tusks and the upward ones.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh yeah. Man, I'd get after one of those. Man, that'd be a sweet school lab. Look at that thing. What's that called again?

[Todd Surovel]

Gomphothere.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, it's right there.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, the genus, it's like a Star wars looking thing.

[Brody]

That's a good way to describe it.

[Steve Rinella]

So that was like an elephant species down in South America.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. And in Central America they probably made it into the southern US because this Juan clove is gone for ther kill. It's called El Fin del Mundo. It's not far from the Arizona border, maybe 100 miles south in Sonora.

[Steve Rinella]

Wow.

[Brody]

This says they were on all continents except Australia and Antarctica.

[Todd Surovel]

Okay, so Clovis archaeology is pretty typical for hunter gatherer archeology. I mean, you have these domestic sites where people are camping, sitting around fires, making and repairing tools, cooking bone beds, scraping hides. Then we have bone beds. And we also of course have the Anzac burial Not far from here, Right. We have human remains.

[Steve Rinella]

Is it true that. No. Is it true that no one's ever found a Clovis point actually stuck into mammoth bone?

[Todd Surovel]

That is true.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

Now there was a case from Brazil somewhere where there was a. Some kind of lithic stuck in. I want to say gomphother skull, but I saw that a long time ago. I need to check that.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you know that there was a rumor at the Clovis type site? For a long time people were just hauling that stuff away. And I went there once and did a lot of reading about it and there was like a rumor that some bus driver that like they took kids out to see it and some bus driver allegedly took home a mammoth skull that had a point embedded in its eye socket. But it's just like, it's just, it's just rumor.

[Spencer Pelton]

I've never heard that.

[Steve Rinella]

You never heard that rumor?

[Todd Surovel]

I've heard that rumor twice because I listened to you, your conversations. Both times it came from you.

[Steve Rinella]

Dude, everybody's saying it.

[Guest]

Nobody's talking.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm gonna find, I'm gonna find where I'm gonna like I couldn't have made that up. The bus driver. That a bus driver took some kids to see it and haul the thing home with them. I wouldn't have made that up. It's too like much detail. I gotta find where I read that. Wherever I read it, I think is on my bookshelf.

[Todd Surovel]

If you find it, let me know. I want to see that.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah. I think when I made that comment to you about Clovis sites looking normal and everything before it not this is what exactly what I'm meaning. Like you can dig a site that's 2,000 years old, 5,000 years old, 6,000 years old. It all has roughly the same characteristics as like a Barry Clovis campsite because hunter gatherer campsites look a certain way. There's like concentrations of artifacts where people flint napped and there's heart features that people congregated around to talk and eat and work, hide and things like that. The pre Clovis record to this point has nothing like that. It's all weird stuff. And I think in a more general sense like the, the burden of proof for this stuff for like over a hundred years now has simply been find obvious human made artifacts in a sealed geologic context, just a good stratigraphic context. And I think in our view you can point to any number of these sites that date before Clovis. And you can. And you can say either the artifacts Look a little weird or there was some.

[Listener]

I gotta stop you. When you say weird, what do you mean?

[Spencer Pelton]

I mean not obviously human made. There's a lot of natural processes that can produce things that look like artifacts. Rocks falling off a cliff and striking something, getting entrained in a water course and breaking up that way. This is one of the brilliant projects that met and actually initiated looking at rocks in Antarctica where we know there wasn't people and seeing the range of variation and how rock is just naturally modified by the, by the environment. Really great idea. That's why he's doing that is because there's a lot of natural processes that can break up rock to make them look like maybe they were broken by people when they actually weren't.

[Steve Rinella]

So these old, old sites, well what is. Okay, at what day does it become in your mind? When does it like tail off? Like you got really good sites up to what date and then, and then you got your weird sites.

[Todd Surovel]

13,000.

[Steve Rinella]

And that's all the calibration stuff is that like as we understand years, calendar.

[Todd Surovel]

Years, and we're talking about south of the ice sheets, north of the ice sheets it's a different story. But south of the ice sheets, 13,000 and onward. Beautiful, normal, typical hunter gatherer archeology. To give you an example of the kind of thing Spencer was talking about, he and I in Sarah Lawn excavated a mammoth two, three years ago. That mammoth was 13,200 years old. We were really excited to excavate it because it's right on the cusp of Clovis. And we thought maybe this is a mammoth killed by people. Now right above the mammoth, mammoth was strangely kind of near the top of a hill on this slope. On the top of that hill there was a bunch of chert or flint, like really good material for making stone tools. And that mammoth was buried down on these old gravels, kind of like in a base of a little draw. And we kept finding little flakes but all of this local raw material and they're all tiny, like 2 millimeters. And this is like a perfect scenario for producing things that you could interpret as human made artifacts that clearly aren't. There's all of the local material, most of it is, has cortex, meaning it's just like a little chip taken off of a natural cobble. Looked nothing like a typical lithic assemblage. And there are pre Clovis sites like that where you have these things that look sort of like artifacts, but they're probably not. But they're interpreted to be artifacts and there's also a lot of really strange things that show up in pre Clovis sites that are argued to be evidence of humans that aren't the typical things like chipstone artifacts. And I made a list of those kinds of things if you're curious.

[Steve Rinella]

Hit me with the list. Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

All right, so footprints, drag marks, fingerprints, coprolites. You know what coprolites are?

[Steve Rinella]

Fossilized poops.

[Todd Surovel]

Seaweed. Balls of seaweed. Underwater meat caches. Spencer pointed that one out to me. There's three cases of underwater.

[Steve Rinella]

Dude, I'm big into those, man. You want me to tell you about those?

[Todd Surovel]

Well, yeah, I do, but I will note there are no.

[Steve Rinella]

That's fascinating.

[Todd Surovel]

No underwater meat caches after Clovis. To my knowledge, they're only a pre Clovis thing.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, man.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm stopped telling people about underwater meat caches.

[Todd Surovel]

Cut marks. So like marks on bone, Right? You guys know about those?

[Steve Rinella]

Can we back up to the underwater meat cache?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

What was the site that was interpreted to be this? There was a site somewhere where someone had piled up mammoth meat under a pond, filled the intestines full of gravel, and then used these gravel filled intestines to weighed it down under that pond. That's badass.

[Todd Surovel]

That site is in the Midwest. I think it's the burning tree mastodon. It's one that Dan Fisher at the University of Michigan published. Yeah, I think that's the one. I'm not sure, not certain.

[Steve Rinella]

And obviously the intestine rotted away. So it's just gravel in a wine. You're not buying it.

[Todd Surovel]

I mean, weird stuff, right? This is.

[Steve Rinella]

This is.

[Todd Surovel]

This is our point. I'm gonna keep going now. Okay. Bone embedded in bone.

[Steve Rinella]

What's that mean?

[Todd Surovel]

Like you have a mastodon bone and there's like another piece of bone like stuck into the ribbon that was healed around it that they argued was a spear point.

[Steve Rinella]

And not to not two of them duking it out.

[Todd Surovel]

That's what other people have said. Yeah. Other bone modifications. Like the ways that bones have been fractured. Like you have no artifacts, but bones are fractured in weird ways that seem like only humans could do it. And the last one on the list is a pit full of grasshoppers. Okay, so this is I just told you about probably 20 pre Clovis claims, right? All this weird stuff as opposed to like what we'd like to see is like, let's just say some flakes from napping stone around a hearth feature in a really good stratigraphic context. It's well Dated. There are millions of those on this continent. There are zero of those in pre Clovis.

[Steve Rinella]

That's it.

[Guest]

When you're talking about stratigraphic context, like we're talking about eroding banks, you're talking about digging out a hillside. Like what are, what are you. When you're thinking about where to look for a site, sort of what are the considerations in mind? What is like a normal site versus what makes things unusual?

[Spencer Pelton]

I can speak to Wyoming at least. The best, the best places to find buried archeology in Wyoming are like rock shelters and floodplains. In Wyoming and Montana, you walk around the landscape, which you guys do a lot, hunting, fishing, whatever. Most of the landscape that you're walking across has basically zero potential to preserve an archeological site. If you're on the side of a hill, if you're on a really high surface that gets wind scoured all those areas, you can drop artifacts there. But if they aren't buried immediately with like datable material or whatever, you can't really preserve that archaeological site. Right. You have no idea how old it is. But if you drop that stuff in a floodplain that receives annual flood events, it's going to get buried slowly over time and get sealed within that stratigraphy and allows us to go back later and actually have with some degree of certainty an idea of how old that stuff is and that it's not, say, mixed with something that's like 10,000 years younger or 10,000 years older. It was, it was just laid down in a really specific location conducive to preservation. It's actually kind of rare. I like if you think about just the range of human behaviors that you do every day, even if you're out hunting or whatever, most of the stuff you do is not going to be preserved in the archaeological record. It has to be this confluence of like behavior and geologic context coming together to really preserve that activity.

[Brody]

When Clovis was happening in the Americas, what did the technology look like on the rest of the planet, like during that three to five hundred year window?

[Todd Surovel]

Well, that's a lot of planet.

[Brody]

What about where they just came from? Like the last place they were before the Americans?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that slot, that salon, a river site where they had that badass woolly rhinoceros.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yana. Rh.

[Todd Surovel]

Yana. Rhs. Way up and.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, tell them about that.

[Todd Surovel]

That. That's.

[Steve Rinella]

Those guys are bad.

[Todd Surovel]

That's like 20,000. That's 20,000 years before Clovis in the high Arctic and in a warm period in the middle of last glaciation, where they've got I think spear shafts made out of rhinoceros horn, bow needles, beads, amazing things.

[Brody]

But what about during that same era as Clovis?

[Todd Surovel]

So if we go north to Alaska, just prior to Clovis, there's plenty of good archaeology starting at about 14,000. It looks similar to Clovis. I mean people are making bifacial projectile points. The one big difference is they're making a lot of microblades, these really tiny, really long, skinny sharp flakes that then they, you know, they'll haft in a long piece of bone to make a really deadly spear point. You have end scrapers. Pretty typical hunter gatherer stuff. The really, maybe the biggest difference at that time is if you were to go say to Israel, Middle east, you're right on the cusp of the origins of agriculture around Clovis times. And within a thousand years people are growing crops. I think.

[Steve Rinella]

What is your take on the overkill hypothesis?

[Todd Surovel]

I think there's a lot of really strong evidence for it.

[Steve Rinella]

I love it and I love it. There's nothing I like more than the overkill hypothesis.

[Listener]

You're talking about the blitzkrieg, right?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, the idea, well, the idea that again, there's an ongoing debate about what role did humans have in wiping out everything that was bigger than a modern American buffalo. Like when it was over, like none of that during this period of time, like let's say from 20,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, I think nine genuses, so nine genera of animals went extinct, 35 genera, 35 genera in North.

[Todd Surovel]

America and 40 some genera in South America. So let me, let me can.

[Steve Rinella]

I hate you. I want to add the little wrinkle before you start.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Folks will say we have 13, 14, 15 mammoth kill sites, we have zero giant ground sloth kill sites, we have zero. What was that? Big ass, 100 pound beaver, cat.

[Spencer Pelton]

Giant beaver, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Where are all the kill sites of those? Like where are all the short faced bear kill sites? If they were killing all this, where is it all?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, that's the right question. You know, I, I was telling Spencer this this morning that I started out incredibly skeptical of overkill for exactly that reason. Right. Like his archaeologists, we work in a material world and we look at material evidence and when there's no material evidence, it's like how do you believe something actually happened if there's no evidence for it? So yeah, it's a sticky problem. When we talk about mammoths, there's actually a huge number of mammoth Kill sites. When you say only 14, it's actually a huge number given the amount of time and space we're talking about.

[Steve Rinella]

You feel that that is a lot.

[Todd Surovel]

It's a gigantic number. We did a study comparing the density of mammoth kill sites in Clovis times to all other elephant kill sites from the rest of the world. Elephants are interesting, Right, because as you mentioned, they used to occupy every part of the world except places they couldn't swim to. Right. So you have them in Africa, Europe, Asia, north and South America. It's really their absence that's the unusual thing.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Even like Wrangel island, the Greek island.

[Todd Surovel]

Kibelof islands, dwarf mammoths in the Mediterranean islands, Channel Islands. Yeah. And if you look at it in terms of the density of mammoth kills in time, especially in a 400 year time period, I mean, it's a huge number of sites that. It's really surprising to me that we're questioning whether Clovis people were hunting mammoths and whether they affected their populations, given the absolute incredible abundance of evidence that we have for it. Yeah, 14 is not a very big number. But given the total number of Clovis sites that actually speak to what Clovis people were doing, what they were hunting, it's a huge number.

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[Listener]

Is there any guesses, like during that Clovis period, is there any guesses how many of them were like, say in North America in that time period?

[Todd Surovel]

How many Clovis people, how many People? Yeah, sure. We can sort of estimate that by looking at modern hunter gatherer population densities. It's a really complicated problem because, you know, first if they're. First they start at basically a population of zero, and then they grow to some, presumably some carrying capacity or some environmental limit. Right. And the number of people is going to vary across the continent. But when I tried to estimate it once, I got numbers in the neighborhood of 30,000 to 100,000 people.

[Brody]

What about mammoth populations?

[Todd Surovel]

We can estimate that too. I'm not going to make up numbers, but I don't know off the top of my head, but it's a lot. It's a lot.

[Steve Rinella]

Is it fair when you talk about that? 14 is a lot of sites as you're saying that? I'm kind of thinking in my head of, you know, I've done a lot of hunting throughout my life. I'm trying to think if I ever made, if I ever made a archeological site.

[Todd Surovel]

Well, you absolutely have.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, no, but I'm saying like that I made a discernible that was preserved like where they're like, oh, a guy killed a deer and then left his like, like bullet fragments, a knife blade, and it's all sealed up in some river bottom somewhere.

[Spencer Pelton]

I think it'd be. I think it's probably pretty rare. I mean, you probably haven't.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what I'm thinking is like most.

[Spencer Pelton]

Of the animals you've butchered out, right? You've. You've left some stuff there. The coyotes have dispersed it. So what was an archaeological site in the moment now becomes just kind of a scatter of chewed up deer bone or whatever. It's no longer really discernible as an archaeological site. So, yeah, I mean, just, just like the preservation of archaeological sites period is kind of a miraculous thing. And to have synd 14 mammoth kills, given all the ravages of time and the unlikelihood for these things to be preserved and the very small number of sites from that time period in general, it's a lot like a substantial percentage of the, the Clovis sites that have ever been excavated are mammoth kills.

[Todd Surovel]

It's the most common animal in Clovis faunal assemblage is mammoth. Which is, which is shocking, right, because if you just go out there hunting and you, and you sort of, if you take the attitude, I'm going to kill whatever I come across, you're not going to encounter mammoths a lot, right? You're going to have funnel assemblages dominated by rabbits, squirrels. It's going to be way more deer kills than mammoth kills. The bigger the animal is, the less common they are in the landscape. Right. So when you see this, this real focus on these large animals, it tells you they're going after those things, and they're ignoring opportunities to go after these smaller animals. Not to say they didn't occasionally take them, but they're really specializing in the predation of these large animals.

[Steve Rinella]

Why?

[Todd Surovel]

Because you get the most bang for your buck. I mean, you bring down a mammoth, let's say it takes you two days, you get enough food to feed 30 people for a month. It's sort of like, wow. Yeah, Yeah.

[Listener]

I was going to ask, is there any evidence, like, average size of, like, a Clovis group? Like, how many people would be.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, this guy just tried to answer that question.

[Steve Rinella]

How many?

[Spencer Pelton]

We've been working on this Lel Clovis site in Wyoming for how. We worked on it for a decade. Opened up a site in 2014. A few years ago, we decided we'd try to actually chase out how big this site is. The site's buried 10 to 15ft deep. So it's not like you can just walk over and chase out the artifacts and say, like, okay, the site's right here. So we ended up sinking all these really deep augers and this systematic grid over the site, screening all the dirt out of it and finding these little tiny artifacts. We ended up finding a site that was a couple acres big. If you compare that to the size of ethnographically documented campsites where we have known numbers of people, it's somewhere between 30 and 50 people. So in that site in particular, too, it looks like there's these kind of. These clusters of houses kind of around this mammoth kill. Got at least three of these pretty big clusters, each of which might contain, say, two, two to four houses. So it all kind of adds up to about that number. We might not have found the edge of the site. I think we did our best, but it seemed like. It seemed like we about chased the edge of it out. So if you compare just the. The amount of space that hunter gatherers use in the campsite to the space of that site, we land on this number of about 35 people or so.

[Steve Rinella]

And that thing could feed him for a month.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, but it. But that mammoth, I don't think they ate much of it. That's. That's my interpretation.

[Steve Rinella]

Why is that?

[Todd Surovel]

This mammoth, it was largely an anatomical order when it was excavated, meaning the bones are still sort of laid out in anatomical order. So it wasn't heavily butchered. If they did butcher it, they did not move any bones. So it's possible, like in all these.

[Steve Rinella]

It'S called the gutless method.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. Yeah. They certainly could have filleted a lot of meat off of this mammoth. But in all these house areas that we dug, we dug four of them. The only mammoth we got was ivory. And they were working the ivory. But we have no rib fragments, no foot bones. And we also have a lot of evidence for use of other big animals, mostly bison, around in these houses. So they're sitting next to this big dead elephant. It's a sub adult. It's probably in its twenties. It's probably, I don't know, five ton animal. It seems barely butchered. And they're not really moving the bones around except for the ivory. And they're. And they're eating bison.

[Steve Rinella]

So what do you make of that? I guess you don't. Who knows?

[Spencer Pelton]

There's a lot of animals. And I mean, like, when you all butcher animals, right? Like, you can kind of stop whenever you can. You can always get a little bit more marrow out of the animal or do. Or you can. Like maybe you want to take the liver or whatever. A lot of times you don't do that. Right. Because you don't need to. Same thing here. If you have animals at your disposal and you don't need to go to all that crazy effort to get every last calorie out of that animal, then you're just gonna take what you want and move on.

[Todd Surovel]

Do the gourmet butchery.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. You know, you hear people talk about. And when I say people, I mean like people in the discipline that you're in. Like right now I'm holding in my hand. If you're watching, I'm holding my hand a Clovis point that's half to don do a knife blade. So I'm doing some devil's advocacy here. So what we know, if you look at the archaeological record, this is half the dandu wouldn't handle with sinews.

[Todd Surovel]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

The sinews rot away, the wood rots away, and all you have is the stone left and some bone. Earlier I mentioned that they've never found one of these points embedded into mammoth bone. And I don't even know how possible that is. I'm sure you could study it. Whether it's like if you took a mammoth femur and jabbed it with this, do you ever get it to actually stick and dry in there? And I don't know. So you have Bones. And you have stone, we assume, because the stones there, we're like, oh, they stabbed it. They. They stabbed it. And these are stuck in there because that's how they killed it. Right. Someone else who's pushing a narrative that they weren't mammoth hunters says, well, they found it laying dead. And then they. Not the stone. The point didn't get there on the end of a spear shaft. It was there because it was on their little knife, which they cut this dead one up with. As a, like, as an outdoorsman, what I always laugh about, about that explanation is, and you guys could back me up on this. When you're out wandering around in the mountains or out wandering around the woods, you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff. Like it, like I can almost go out and say, like, it doesn't happen.

[Guest]

On the two lane highway. Yes, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But I'm saying out, right out.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Encountering all this fresh dead stuff. If you wanted me to produce a dead thing, it'd be much more like I would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wander around until I found it. Do you know what I'm saying? So I've always laughed that. But that's like an idea is that. Is that they were just finding them laying around everywhere.

[Spencer Pelton]

And if you did find one, would you go, shoo? Hey, that's good eating. I don't think so.

[Todd Surovel]

So, yeah, I mean, I've had this argument with colleagues, right? They're like, this, this site we're digging la proll, there's this dead mammoth there. There's not a Clovis point in it. There's a Clovis Point about 40ft away from it.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, there is?

[Brody]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

You know, somebody we paid to dig.

[Steve Rinella]

Seriously?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Spencer Pelton]

In an excavation unit.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

40Ft away.

[Todd Surovel]

It's a big site. There's this camp. There's this dead mammoth in this really cool camp around it, right? And the Clovis point is in the camp area. But people will say to me, not in with it, not in the mammoth. People will say to me, how do you know that mammoth wasn't scavenged? And the argument I make is exactly what you just made, which is there are a hell of a lot more opportunities to exploit alive mammoths than dead ones. Also, you know, there's sort of this divide in the discipline about whether we see Clovis hunters as sort of living in this land of abundance, as Spencer sort of just described. Why eat this really lean mammoth if I can access bison anytime I want? Sort of the idea I'm the first person in this land and these animals are naive to me and like it's easy living versus these are the first people in the land. They're kind of lost. They're scared of these big animals. They don't know the animal behavior. It's dangerous to hunt them. So they're being really cautious. Right. Mammoths are too dangerous to hunt.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. But they've been dealing with them for. They've been dealing with them for generations and thousands of miles.

[Todd Surovel]

I'm on your side, man.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean I think these people think about in their.

[Todd Surovel]

You're right. They have like a hundred year generation. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because they were. There's mammoths in Siberia.

[Todd Surovel]

Absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

They'd know no, like they would know no reality. They would know no reality in which even their most distant ancestor wasn't dealing with them.

[Todd Surovel]

I would say even if they came into the Americas and had never seen a mammoth, they would really quickly learn how to learn how to expertly prey on that animal and they would enjoy the hell out of it. In part because of the danger, in part because you bring down all this meat, you can make your life for all your friends better. You can use that for social capital. You get a lot of prestige bringing down an animal like that. Right. So yeah, I very much think this was a good time to be a human. When you're the first, first person in a place. You guys understand that as hunters, right. You want to hunt where nobody else hunts.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

So the big animals are. It's where you have the best opportunities, where you have the most animals. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

We see this, this is explained at various times of people is like you can find isolated instances of what it might have been like for them. Because when you look at when whalers or like as soon as trans oceanic shipping and whalers started hitting these islands that no one had ever been on. Like no one found the Seychelles until transoceanic shipping. Like no one found it. There's one mammal, a fruit bat. Only one. It's so far out there, like no mammal had found it except for a flying mammal. When dudes get on these islands, they're just picking up, they're walking around, just grabbing birds by the neck. Birds are trying to land on them. They're like literally carrying, just like picking up and carrying turtles and stacking them in their boats upside down.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. This. The survival of giant tortoises on the Seychelles. The survival of giant tortoises in the Galapagos. Both thing. In both, both the same thing in both cases. Right. No humans until the historic period.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And otherwise people that get there, like, we just filled our boat.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like with live ones.

[Todd Surovel]

So we. About the knife question, you know, we. I did a study with Dave Kilby and Bruce Huckel and others looking at this question of Clovis as knives and the idea of whether, you know, Clovis points could actually kill a mammoth or not. And. And one thing we looked at was where you find complete points versus broken points. Complete points. People generally don't discard functional tools. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

And we know from like later bison kills that you really commonly find complete points in bison kills because you kill this big mass animals, you lose the points. You lose them in the mess and you don't get them back. It's like a really common place to find complete points. In camps. You find the broken points. When they do retrieve the weapons, they're broken and they retooled. You find the broken ones in camps and the complete ones in kills. So we looked at this for Clovis and we find absolutely, in these mammoth kills, you have a lot of complete points. If these are knives, you have to ask yourself, why are these people discarding 6 inch, beautifully functional.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, it takes you forever to make.

[Guest]

That's been in their hand the whole time, presumably, cutting it.

[Todd Surovel]

Right. Like the Tanako mammoth. You've got eight of these inside the animal. And by the way.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

You keep asking about, like, artifacts embedded in the bone and mammoth bone that has been found twice, I think in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe at the Laner site, which is a mammoth kill in Arizona. There are two Clovis points. Right. Between the ribs of a mammoth.

[Steve Rinella]

Right.

[Todd Surovel]

We'd expect them to find them, you know, so, yeah, not embedded in the bone, but pretty much in a place where you shouldn't be questioning what this association between a weapon and a dead animal is. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

That is a good point. That if you got that big old pile, all them guts and shit, you know, that you. If you had stabbed them in there, you might not retrieve them out. I mean, I've cut my hand on broadheads that I couldn't find inside deer.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. And especially if they have a foreshaft. Right. Because the foreshaft detaches. And if it's way in the body cavity. And if you know one thing interesting about butchering mammoths, if they fall on one side, forget about that side. They really only butcher like one side of the animal because you can't turn it over.

[Steve Rinella]

Right.

[Todd Surovel]

So if you shot it from that side, you might Lose every weapon that went in from that side.

[Brody]

What other tools did Clovis people have? Like, was there anything that would be redundant if you were to use that as a knife? Did, like, do we already know? Oh, they had a knife sort of thing.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, it's. I mean.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, Brody, can you. Can you run me another hair? And dude.

[Brody]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You didn't grab. Did you bring my bone? My bone shafts down, the little white ones. You grab those.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Listener]

See you guys in a minute.

[Steve Rinella]

Brody's getting a workout.

[Spencer Pelton]

We've got a. I mean, I don't.

[Guest]

Sit in that chair.

[Spencer Pelton]

It's a pretty great sample of Clovis tools from this LA site we keep talking about. You know, Stone Age tool kits don't actually change a ton between Clovis and, like, the recent pass on the plains. You need the same stuff. You need stuff to cut things with, you need stuff to poke holes with, you need stuff to scrape with. It's like basically the three things that stone tools do. So stone knives and Clovis assemblages, in my experience are just really large flakes. Sometimes they're retouched on one edge, in my experience, just messing with hides. I find quartzite to be the best medium to use. I think it's because it got a little grit to it and it kind of cuts into the meat a little better. There's also. At the LA prow site of Big Chopper, I watched you guys as bison butchery experiment. One thing you're missing, it met and tried to make you as a big chopper to get those ribs off.

[Steve Rinella]

Got it.

[Spencer Pelton]

But at Le Pro, we have this cobble.

[Todd Surovel]

We have two of them.

[Spencer Pelton]

Two choppers. Yeah. Cobble that fits just perfectly in your hand with like three flakes taken off of the edge of it. Something you can just bash with. Really common tool type, like in any large mammal butchering.

[Steve Rinella]

Like a hand axe.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, yeah. In fact, you find them in the old one, like 1.8 million years old are the oldest choppers. And you find them in Clovis too.

[Spencer Pelton]

I'd say one. One underappreciated aspect of these hunter gatherer toolkits is stuff to make clothes with. This is what I studied primarily for my dissertation, and that's scrapers. So you just. A stone scraper retouched on one end. You stick it into a handle to get some leverage, and it's what used to scrape dry hide to make it more pliable. Also perforating tools that you'd use to prepare seams to sew clothing with. Because you're using.

[Steve Rinella]

Those are cool.

[Spencer Pelton]

Using these bone needles. Right. And bone needles don't have really the tensile strength to perforate leather all the time. So you prepare a seam with little perforators and stitch it up. It's really kind of the. The bread and butter of a Stone Age tool kits. These things where you scrape things to scrape, hide, perforate hide and cut up animals with.

[Todd Surovel]

I would say there is one knife form possibly which is the ultra thin biface.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

Which is a really, really beautifully made super thin bifacial knife that we've found a few at LA Pro. They're more commonly associated with Folsom which follows Clovis in the West. But there are known Clovis examples, probably knives.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh yeah. I have a confession to make in all my like casual Joe below reading about Clovis hunters and Folsom hunters. I had never heard of what I'm holding in my hand until I was looking at that chart hanging at your office like then met and sends me some of these. These are out of. These are replicas of some pieces that came out of Ohio, I believe.

[Todd Surovel]

Sheridan Cave. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I'd never even heard of this. When I opened the package up I thought it was some kind of little point. But this is like a piece. This is a piece of a Clovis toolkit. That is. People debate what the hell this was. Right?

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Talk about that. Can you get a good on that, Phil? You getting it? Looks great. Just to give a quick little more analysis. It's. There's this bevel cut into it and it's striated like it's cut like you wanted. Just going out on a limb here like you wanted to make it a little more grippy.

[Spencer Pelton]

What the hell is that? So these are bone rods, commonly called bone rods. They've been found in a lot of clover, including the Clovis type. Site has a really beautiful example of one of these. I've only found one in my career. It was at the Powers 2 hematite.

[Steve Rinella]

Corey, what kind of bones?

[Spencer Pelton]

I'm guessing it was a piece of cortical bone. Like a long bone from a bison.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Spencer Pelton]

Not exactly sure. I don't know what these are. But my assumption is that it has something to do with the weaponry system Powers two. This, this ochre mine is for whatever reason just completely filled with Paleo Indian weaponry. We found like 170 points at this.

[Steve Rinella]

Site at an ochre mine, at an.

[Spencer Pelton]

Ochre mine in southeast Wyoming. And we found one of these associated with the Clovis folsom layer at Powers 2, which is also filled with projectile points and flakes and stuff. So my assumption is that it has something to do with the weaponry system. What that is, I don't think anybody has really ever satisfactorily explained that.

[Listener]

When you say weaponry system, you mean it was linked to the Clovis point.

[Spencer Pelton]

Somehow or perhaps using the Hafting system or something like that?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. You could see this is a 4 shaft somehow.

[Listener]

Right.

[Todd Surovel]

The Clovis point there and some other kind of wedge on the other side.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, a guy online figured it out. I was reading that guy figures out a lot.

[Spencer Pelton]

What would we do without guys online?

[Steve Rinella]

He was saying. So I got to read about different dudes debating it, right. And there's a dude saying that like if. If you wedge that thing in when you're trying to. I couldn't. He didn't have any visuals, but basically saying like he wedged it in on the hafting process. And then as you lash that piece, it like tightens. That was his take on it. It like tightens the, The, The. The spear point. But he didn't have any pictures to explain what the hell he was talking about. But it's like I had never heard of that thing.

[Todd Surovel]

They're not common. You know, there's. In 1936 in the Clovis site when they found the first mammoth remains in Clovis Points. They had one of these in the mammoth bone bed. But it's not common to find them in mammoth bone beds. That. That might be the only case because it.

[Steve Rinella]

It's like. Also imagine because it's organic and hauls it away or it rots.

[Todd Surovel]

If you have bone preserved, these will be preserved. If they were there.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Todd Surovel]

Left there. But again, like nice functional implements, which these appear to be. Right. They don't appear to be broken. People tend not to leave these things behind. Pretty sure there were some of these in the Anzik burial.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah. The East Wenatchee site. There's several of these associated with like. I don't. How many points are from there? A couple dozen Clovis points seems to be consistently associated with weaponry, though. The only other theory I've heard about these is dog sleds or something.

[Todd Surovel]

Well, that's. That was Grammy's argument about East Wenatchee. And I think those were. Were bi. Beveled.

[Spencer Pelton]

Oh yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

So. So they didn't have a point on one end. They had a bevel this way and a bevel. An alternate bevel on the other side. And Gramley argued That they were lashed together to make it the runner on. Yeah, that's really silly idea.

[Steve Rinella]

Come on.

[Brody]

Do you ever find evidence of Clovis points being picked up by ancient humans like 5000 years later and they find a use for them and all of a sudden there's a Clovis point in with like a woodland site somewhere?

[Steve Rinella]

Yes.

[Spencer Pelton]

I know one example off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure everybody cites this one example. I've actually never tracked down the citation to it, but I've heard over and over again my entire career that somebody found a Folsom point in a pueblo.

[Steve Rinella]

Yes. Yeah, that's what I heard.

[Todd Surovel]

Me too.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what I heard.

[Brody]

That's the one example of that like.

[Steve Rinella]

Happening like an Anasazi. What? So the so called Anastasia ancient Puebloans that some pueblo had one where some dudes like, look at that. Brought it home.

[Spencer Pelton]

I think everyone's, everyone's into old stuff, right. That's why I'm into archaeology. I think we have to assume people had a fascination for the past.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. I bring home old shell casings. I wouldn't bring home a new shell casing.

[Spencer Pelton]

Probably collect some bones.

[Steve Rinella]

If I find a straight wall shell casing that's got some holes rotting through it, I'm going to bring that sucker home 100% man.

[Spencer Pelton]

You got.

[Steve Rinella]

What if I found one of my buddies I'm not bringing home?

[Spencer Pelton]

You got a spot in your garage where you just stack all your old, all your treasures.

[Guest]

Look at this. A 27 Nosler case. It's got to be. You know, we could be up to 15 years old.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Bringing that home.

[Todd Surovel]

Steve, like, like 20 minutes ago you asked about the absence of evidence for like hunting all these megafauna.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

Can I say something about that?

[Steve Rinella]

Say everything you want to say about that.

[Todd Surovel]

So when you talk about like the giant beaver. Right. Those guys, my understanding is they're living in the Northeast, in the Midwest. In terms of what our evidence for Clovis subsistence in that part of the world, we have about two bones that happen to preserve in a fire and they're both caribou. Bottom line is there's this huge blank spot in what Clovis people were doing in that part of the country where that animal lives. We basically have no evidence for anything.

[Steve Rinella]

Any subsistence at all because it's not suitable to preserve.

[Todd Surovel]

Right, right. So is the absence of evidence of hunting of giant beaver meaningful? Probably not. Right. We can't really interpret it one way or another. And a lot about the Clovis Record of faunal uses that way. Like if you say, well, there's no evidence for Clovis use of sloth, well, would you expect to see it in a mammoth kill site? Probably not. Right. And that's what most of our sites are. So is the absence of sloth in mammoth kill sites interesting? Probably not. Now, if we go to the Aubrey site in Texas, this big Clovis campsite, they do have sloth dermal ossicles, which are these little pieces of bone embedded in the skin that armored these giant ground sloths. Is that evidence for Clovis hunting of ground sloth? A couple derma ossicles and a Clovis campsite. It's pretty ambiguous. Right. So the record is really hard to interpret. I will say there is recently published a sloth kill from Argentina called Campo Laborde. Laborde. It's late Pleistocene big, I think, megatherium. I'm not sure which sloth. So there is some evidence for sloth use in South America. But just maybe to end this big train of thought, the most damning evidence for human causation of the megafaunal extinctions to me is you don't have to do archeology. If you just did paleontology around the world, everywhere that people went to, and you just looked for a big extinction event in the last 80,000 years, and you find one in every case, in every landmass that marks human arrival.

[Steve Rinella]

100%.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

And it's not just the North American thing, right? It's not just a South American thing. It's an Australian thing. It's a New Zealand thing. It's a Europe thing. Thing. It's an Asia thing. It's all the islands. It's Hawaii, it's Polynesia thing, it's the Caribbean. There were giant ground sloth in Caribbean that survived the Pleistocene holocene transition until 6,000 years ago.

[Steve Rinella]

That. That one. That's one of the biggest smoke and guns, in my view, on the overkill hypothesis.

[Todd Surovel]

Absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

You get the Wrangel island off Siberia. No one found it. Mammoth and mammoths stayed there till 4,000 years ago.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, yeah.

[Guest]

I remember reading Paul Martin's book Twilight of the Mammoths, and I forget where it is in the book. It's either at the beginning or the end. But he tracks the spread of humans around the globe and lists all the stuff that went missing at the exact same time. And you get through to the end of it. I just remember reading that segment and just being like, God, it's almost too perfect.

[Todd Surovel]

Like, how did that's remarkable.

[Guest]

Yeah, I mean it like I, I put that book down and it was like you just watched a, a video on YouTube that's meant to convince you of something. You know, it was just like, I don't, nothing else makes sense to me now.

[Steve Rinella]

You know what else is great about it is you say, what about Africa doesn't happen in Africa. And it's because you get like co evolution.

[Todd Surovel]

That was Paul's.

[Steve Rinella]

There was no. Yeah, there was no, there was no sudden arrival. Yeah, the animals there have been like, hey, that little thing, you see something walk around two feet, watch your ass. Like, word got out.

[Listener]

So what, what would you guys say then? If you're leaning towards human cause, what would you say to the people that are like, well, it was like the climate was changing, the environment was changing, like these animals just couldn't adapt.

[Spencer Pelton]

The climate environment have been changing for millions of years prior to that. That'd be my response.

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[Todd Surovel]

You know, the North American and South American cases are especially tricky because it happens at this really wild time when we're coming out of the glaciation, right? These massive mile mile thick sheets of ice are melting back, sea levels rising. All these ecological communities are reorganizing. You can imagine that could revolution havoc on animal populations, right? And at the same time, you bring in this highly effective cultural predator that these animals have no experience with. And it's the coincidence of all this stuff in time that has made it Such like a difficult problem to answer and it's why we're still debating about it. But I would say tell me a climatic or ecological explanation that can drive an extinction event over two continents, from the Arctic to the tropics and back to the subarctic and South America, from the arid west to the humid east. What climate change can do that? What is the actual mechanism that could drive an extinction event so severe? And I don't know of one.

[Steve Rinella]

And there's the other thing, is that as dramatic as that seemed, these species had survived other cycles like that.

[Todd Surovel]

Dozens of them.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, there were two, dozens. There were interglacial periods where sea levels were high. Like right now you hear a lot about rising sea levels. There were periods between glaciations during the Ice age when, like the pedestal, when the Statue of Liberty would be standing in water, like the pedestal would be underwater during some of these periods. And the shit didn't go extinct then.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yep.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. That was the most recent interglacial we call stage five E. 120,000 years ago was warmer than today. There were hippos living in England, for example. Yeah, yeah. And that was one of many previous interglacials. It happened over and over and over and over again. The ice sheets oscillated back and forth and back and and forth. And there are ecological transitions with all of these. These animals made it through. That's right. Until people show up. And if we look at the last dates on these animals, at least the ones that we have good samples for, they all go extinct within 300 years of Clovis arrival.

[Listener]

Except for caribou.

[Todd Surovel]

Caribou make it through. Bison make it through. Moose make it through. Elk make it through. We can talk about wife if you want to talk about that.

[Steve Rinella]

Why?

[Todd Surovel]

So I think there's a single unifying explanation for all large mammal survival that even applies to sub Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, which is that large animals survive in places where people can't reach sufficient population densities to drive them to extinction. Okay, so if we. Let's just take the case of bison. Right? Bison survived, but actually bison went extinct over most of their range at the end of the Pleistocene. They lived coast to coast. You find bison in the rivers in Florida. You find them on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. You find them in Mexico, Rancho La Brea. Yep, full of bison. Right. Today the bison pretty much limited to the mid continent, or at least historically they were. Why is that? Well, when people don't have other foods to fall back on, basically the only way a predator can drive a prey to extinction is if they have another food to fall back on. This is why a lynx can't drive snowshoe hare to extinction. Right. Because as soon as that hair population goes down, the lynx population goes down with them and the hair rebounds, the lynx rebound.

[Steve Rinella]

That's a good point, man.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, right. So. So it's hard for a predator to drive its prey to extinction. It can only do that if it can switch to something else. Right. So what I would argue if we're talking about bison, is that in the Great Plains, there really weren't good switching options for people who lived in this part of the world that could really sustain. Like you couldn't drive bison to extinction and then switch and basically make your entire economy based on pronghorn or something else. And that's also, I think, the general story that explains the survival of animals in the high Arctic, let's say in musk ox and caribou, there's no real switching options there. Right. So if you really slam those populations, your population gets slammed right behind them. If we're going to talk about Southeast Asia, we're talking about dense tropical forests that there are very few people in until very recently. If we're talking about sub Saharan Africa, we're talking about a massive, absolutely massive, semi arid desert that people have been living in in very, very low population densities for a long time. You didn't really have pastoralists, people herding until the last 2,000 years. And that's really when those animals started getting slammed in Africa. So in general, I would say, you know, you have these large mammals, cases of large mammal survival in environments where people simply couldn't reach sufficient densities to drive them to extinction.

[Steve Rinella]

You know what comes out of like, contemporary biology that what you're talking about makes me think of is if you look at the southern caribou herds, so we used to have caribou. I mean, when I say used to, I mean, even in the 1900s, right? Yeah, in 1920, 1930, you had, I don't want to say decent numbers, but you had caribou in Washington, you had caribou in the Idaho panhandle, you had caribou in Montana, Minnesota and Maine. And I've heard biologists, when talking about, like, well, what was different is it be as human landscape development and landscape changes happened, it allowed whitetail deer and moose from logging practices and road building, it allowed whitetail deer and moose to move into these areas and it made it that wolves could sustain themselves because in these Areas they had like, very limited number of caribou and there wasn't like a wolf predation problem. And it was what you're talking about. There was nothing for them to fall back on. So as caribou numbers would dwindle, wolf pressure would just go away. But now wolves don't move out because they're like, they're still picking away on whitetail deer, they're still picking away on moose. And any caribou that turns up, they're going to hammer it because they're always present.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, that's super interesting.

[Todd Surovel]

It's exactly what I'm talking about. You have to have something to fall back on.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Todd Surovel]

Right. Otherwise you get stuck in that predator prey cycle. Yeah. And I really think you can explain large mammal survival across the globe with that one principle. I mean, you guys live in a place when we live in a place where large mammals. We're famous for large mammals. Right. We've got bison and elk, moose, pronghorn deer. Why? Why are these spaces famous for large animals? Well, because hardly anybody lives here. Right. That's really always been the case in this part of the world, the Rocky Mountains, because it's high, it's dry, it's a hard place for people to make a living. And it's those places that these large animals can really thrive because the predation pressure from humans is really, is really low.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that's interesting points. You look at like Appalachia or whatever, they had bison, they had elk, they had wolves, they had cougars, and for a long time they didn't. And then you have these, like, spots like, you know, the Northern Rockies, which was able to hang on to, like, a relatively intact ecosystem. And you go up to Alaska and they were able to hang on to like, their, their like, suite of megafauna survive the initial human pulse. It's a good theory. I like that.

[Brody]

What percentage of people in your field believe in the blitzkrieg hypothesis? And how has that changed during, like, your career?

[Todd Surovel]

So I'd like to. I wish we could answer this independently because I'd love to hear what he has to say.

[Brody]

You can both write down a number.

[Todd Surovel]

First thing I'll say is that when I was in graduate school, Paul Martin, who's the real champion of that, was a friend of mine. He was retired. He was really nice to me. And I'd go up to his office and I'd argue with him all the time about this. I didn't believe in it at all until I left and did some science. And I ultimately decided Paul was right.

[Brody]

It wasn't because he was nice to you.

[Todd Surovel]

It was not. No.

[Guest]

When I wrote a review on that Twilight of the Mammoth for dance class, I remember you'd write the book reviews and he'd write a couple sentences at the bottom. And I'll always remember this. The first thing he wrote on there was, Paul Martin was a delightful dinner companion and I've enjoyed many evenings.

[Todd Surovel]

He was a great guy. I'm gonna answer. I'm gonna say somewhere between 1 and 2% believe this.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, wow.

[Todd Surovel]

What would you say, Spencer?

[Steve Rinella]

No.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah. I mean, you're.

[Steve Rinella]

That's it.

[Spencer Pelton]

You're talking to an endangered species here. Steve, Right in the studio.

[Brody]

So the number's going down. You think.

[Todd Surovel]

You know, the point you raised of where's the evidence? Like, if people drove horse to extinction, why do you have two horse kill sites? Is. Is a. Is a argument that really resonates with a lot of people. They don't really. I would say a lot of people haven't thought about the nature of the sample and the sample size that we have.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

And that maybe that's actually quite a bit of evidence for horse hunting.

[Spencer Pelton]

But, yeah, I'll say, like, I mean, to start with, like, very. A very low percentage of archaeologists actually study this stuff. Right. Like Paleo Indians. There's a very small segment of archaeology alongside all the complex civ people and just the people that do everything else. So, like, for instance, in my experience, I didn't really think about this stuff at all until I went to Colorado State University for my master's. And my advisor there, Jason LaBelle, was invested in Paleo Indian stuff and kind of trained me up on that. But even then I was like, you know, it sounds good. Like, Monteverde looks solid. All these pre Clovis. We need to be going out there and digging deeper, I guess. And it really wasn't until Todd brainwashed me at Wyoming. But it is true that when you actually buckle down and start thinking critically about this stuff and really invest your intellectual energy into understanding, just kind of comes into focus. I mean, it's really obvious to me that Clovis was basically the first people and they drove the megaphone to extinction. But I don't think that that's a very popular view for a number of reasons. I mean, one, it's just a small percentage of archaeologists that are invested in this stuff. And then among those that do, I just got to say, like, archeology prioritizes discovery and newness. Right. And we can't really escape that. I do. I love discovering stuff. And so everyone's constantly wanting to push it back. And I think there's a little bit of wishful thinking there. Like, did we really find the oldest. It's kind of a bummer, right? It's like an existential crisis for people that have invested a lot of their time and energy into finding the oldest thing to be. Like, well, we did it. Now, what is a bit of a. It's a bit of a bummer to some folks, I think.

[Guest]

Now, if. If the number is 1 or 2% of that 98, 99%, how divided is that block of thinking?

[Todd Surovel]

Like, are they in terms of the cause?

[Guest]

Yeah, like. Like, are there. Could you subdivide that quickly into a couple different camps? Or what's the. I'm just curious about the.

[Todd Surovel]

I don't think so. I mean, I think Spencer's right that, like, most people aren't invested in this. Like, if you're. If you're a Maya archaeologist studying, you know, pyramids and things in the Guatemalan jungle, your experience with overkill is, you know, what you learned as a graduate student and what you're teaching in your intro to archeology class, right?

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Todd Surovel]

I would guess that most of those people believe there's some sort of climatic and ecological explanation. The other contenders, by the way, is something called hyper disease. Heard about this? Yeah.

[Listener]

What about. What about that? It was just like a combination of factors that all hit at the same time.

[Todd Surovel]

That's a really good point. Right. Like, these are not what we call mutually exclusive. They're all. They all could be operating simultaneously. And there's a fourth contender that is.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, who's that dude? That's real into those little micro blasts or whatever. He's micro glass.

[Todd Surovel]

Richard Firestone was the original guy.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, it's funny. I did a tour of the Lindenmeyer site.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And the day I was at Lindenmeyer Lindemayer's big Folsom site, I'm just telling the audience here it's kind of cool because it's right on the. It's north. It's between Denver and Fort Collins.

[Todd Surovel]

North of Fort Collins.

[Steve Rinella]

Is it north Fort Collins? And it's a huge. They argue, a huge Folsom winter campsite. And some people argue that it's. This sounds a little out there. That because of the rock faces on the mountains, it's easy to explain where it is and that you could have had. That this might have been a place where Folsom hunters from all across the Great Plains, you Could say, no, no, no, just follow, you'll know. Look for the big white slash on the peak. If you've never been there, that's where we'll be. Sounds fanciful.

[Spencer Pelton]

So the guy that came up with that idea, I think was my master's advisor, Jason LaBelle. Okay, I believe him. The big exposure of White river group up there, it's visible for miles in every direction. And yeah, it's right at the margin of the, you know, the high plains in the Colorado piedmont. It's kind of at this eco tone it makes. It all makes sense to me is like it's the biggest. It's the biggest Folsom site that exists.

[Todd Surovel]

For the capital of the Folsom world.

[Steve Rinella]

When I was there, there was a dude because they've done all the stratigraphy there, so they've done a lot of dating on stuff. And there was a guy there collecting those little things he's looking for to prove that it was like a. That the, the Pleistocene extinctions were some kind of bombardment of comets. Comets killed them all. You didn't put on your list what.

[Todd Surovel]

I did a study of that.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, tell me, tell people about that idea.

[Listener]

Oh, go ahead.

[Todd Surovel]

Well, yeah, comets.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, then we can get into the Brody's idea about a bunch of shit was happening all at once.

[Todd Surovel]

I think it was the. I think it was 2007. This paper was published in what we call PNAS Proceedings.

[Steve Rinella]

Sounds like a rap.

[Todd Surovel]

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Pnas, where they had taken these, collect the sediments from a bunch of terminal Pleistocenes end of the Ice age sites. And they would take these sediment columns, so they just collect sediments in very fine intervals through sort of the Pleistocene Holocene transition.

[Steve Rinella]

What year was this going on?

[Todd Surovel]

It was published in 2007.

[Steve Rinella]

See, that's when I was there 2006, I was working on. I was there around 2005, 2006.

[Todd Surovel]

So they found consistently at a certain time point, I want to say 12,700 years before present, approximately. They claimed to find high concentrations of weird things. Those things included little tiny metallic spheres. They call them titanomagnetites. It's like iron oxides with titanium. Little tiny spheres like the diameter of your hair. They said they had high concentrations of magnetic particles. So they would literally like put this sediment in water and then run a super strong magnet through it, collect the magnetic particles and count them up through these sediment columns. They say they'd peak right at this horizon. They did the same thing for what are called platinum group elements like IRIDIUM that's used to identify the extinction of the dinosaurs. When that meteorite hit. And there's this high iridium content concentration, all this weird stuff. And all of us, a lot of us who had been digging sites like this and digging through sediments of this age were like, oh, my God. It's all this weird extraterrestrial stuff that we had never seen before. We've been digging through it our whole life. I just wanted to see it myself. And I was working on a site at the time, and I had friends who were working on sites where we could collect these samples and just replicate, do what they did and replicate their analyses. And we failed to replicate any of them. We didn't find high concentrations of microspheres, magnetic particles, or platinum group elements. Completely failed.

[Steve Rinella]

For what that's worth, where does that idea stand right now? Is it fashionable in your community?

[Todd Surovel]

No, no, it's complete. It's. It's funny, you know, we thought that the early kind of pushback against it would make it go away. It didn't. It's. They're still publishing papers in support of it. And I would say the vast majority of people in geology and archaeology, they don't take it seriously. I mean, a massive extraterrestrial impact that drives an extinction over two continents doesn't leave like a whisper of dust. There ought to be like massive geologic evidence for craters and tsunamis and fires, and it's just not there.

[Brody]

If it's 2% right now, believe in blitzkrieg, what was it 20 years ago? What do you think it'll be 20 years from now?

[Spencer Pelton]

That's a good point.

[Todd Surovel]

That's a really good question.

[Spencer Pelton]

When I break down these arguments and you kind of look at the timing, I would say that we're like in a post Clovis first world longer than we were ever in a Clovis first world at this point. The Clovis first paradigm was basically like, let's say 1973 with Paul Martin's paper.

[Todd Surovel]

That was the height up to like.

[Spencer Pelton]

Pinnacle, up to basically like 1997 when Monteverde became accepted as a pre Clovis site. That was kind of like the Clovis first era. Ever since Monteverde came out, it's basically just been gaining more acceptance that there was stuff before Clovis.

[Brody]

You guys are an endangered species.

[Guest]

You're like the guys at the record store saying there's no good music anymore.

[Spencer Pelton]

Where our habitat's fragmented, there's like a relic population in Kansas, some in Alaska.

[Todd Surovel]

I have this sort of Maybe schizophrenic perspective about it. Like sometimes I look at the record and I kind of feel like Neo in the Matrix. Like I can see something that nobody else can see. Like, oh my God, it's so obvious that Clovis is first. And then half the time I feel like a guy with a tinfoil hat, like believing in crazy conspiracies, like, why the hell can't I see what everybody else sees?

[Brody]

What would need to happen to convince everyone else to agree with you?

[Todd Surovel]

Oh no, that'll never happen. I mean archaeology, the record is too crappy. We all look at the same evidence and interpret it like completely differently. It's pretty amazing that way we're never going to get consensus.

[Steve Rinella]

And you think that could happen? That would work the other way for sure.

[Todd Surovel]

Oh yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

The thing that could have to work the other way is someone finds a bulletproof 17,000 year old site. Bulletproof?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Spencer Pelton]

I would love for that to happen. Honestly. It'd be great to open up this whole other world that we knew nothing about, a whole other record to study. I just, I don't think that's happened yet.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, if I had to crystal ball it now, I always put it like this just to make a graphic like God has a gun to your head and he says what happened to the megafauna? And he knows he's omniscient and you have to guess right or else you die. So the, so the screws are to you. There's no room for playing games. I would say in that moment my life's on the line. Right. I would say something was going on where there was turmoil, numbers were depressed, there was some upheaval and into this upheaval came humans and, and, and, and tipped it, tipped it to extinction. But something was going on where it wasn't like peak, but maybe they would be like wrong.

[Spencer Pelton]

Steve, it was my creation that forsake me.

[Steve Rinella]

Sure. You know, but I'm saying if I had to make a life or death.

[Todd Surovel]

So Vance Haynes made that argument and he had good, like he worked on these sites in the San Pedro River Valley in Arizona. These beautiful Clovis sites, really well preserved surfaces. And he thought there's really clear evidence that when people were there at Murray Springs and Laner and Blackwater Draw that there was a drought and that these, these mammoth populations were depressed. They're kind of stuck to these water holes and people were just basically the coup de gras. And it's a, it's a, it's a really good Argument for the Southwest. But we're talking about the southwest in two massive continents. Right. So again, if we're going to have some kind of ecological upheaval that spans two continents from the Amazon to the east coast, now what is it?

[Spencer Pelton]

I also feel like we should. We haven't talked about Alaska yet.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, here's some Alaska stuff, man.

[Spencer Pelton]

So like there. There are pre Clovis sites in the western hemisphere. They're in Alaska.

[Steve Rinella]

That's where it makes sense.

[Spencer Pelton]

There's clear evidence of human occupations. Clear campsites about 14,200 years old. They contain mammoth remains. They contain these little micro blades, seemingly among the first technologies that people brought here from northeast Asia.

[Todd Surovel]

You see the same technology in northeast Asia.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect for the first people in the western hemisphere. They're carrying Asian technology, living in Alaska.

[Todd Surovel]

And exactly when you'd expect to see them too.

[Steve Rinella]

And that's a good point, man.

[Spencer Pelton]

And it coincides with. We did a study back in 2015 looking at when megafaunal populations decline between Alaska, United States, south of the ice sheets and South America. Basically, slightly before we find archaeological evidence for human occupation in Alaska, megafauna starts to decline to extinction. And that's important because when you look at the archeological survey in Alaska, that's been done compared to that, that's been done south of the ice sheets, it's very slim. There's like two highways and a few little patches of archaeological research. And lo and behold, everywhere people look in Alaska, they find pre clovic sites, Especially in this place called the Tanana Valley outside of Fairbanks. Just a lot of pre Clovis evidence there. And we haven't really looked that hard in Alaska. It's a super difficult place to do archeology. But we found pre Clovis sites immediately, despite the 150 years of research we've done south of the ice sheets. Very little.

[Todd Surovel]

And they're normal.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, and they're normal.

[Todd Surovel]

It's not weird shit. It's like chip stone around hearth features, butchered animal bone. It's normal stuff. And what we call discrete stratigraphic levels, Meaning they're just like really clear occupations if you were to look through them. Yeah, yeah.

[Listener]

So those. Do you think those people hit Alaska and just stayed or did they, like some states get absorbed into Clovis or.

[Todd Surovel]

I would say they're the ancestors of Clovis. Some stayed and some move south. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Have you ever been to or looked at the stuff from the mesa site?

[Todd Surovel]

I have the book. I'VE never seen the stuff.

[Steve Rinella]

That's cool. But that's, that's not, that's not as old though. No, it's cool. I went to that mesa. It's badass, man.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You can just picture people wanting to get up on that thing and look around, you know, I didn't go on top of my SAT and looked at it, you know. But that's not old, right?

[Todd Surovel]

It's Pleistocene. It's, it's like maybe 12, 000 years old.

[Steve Rinella]

Something sticks my head or sound of something.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, maybe 2,000 years after people arrive in Alaska. And it's probably the argument is those are plains bison hunters coming back north. Based on the artifact form.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what they had introduced me to is this idea of backfill like that. You get the initial waves of people coming through, but then at some point in time, people move back the other direction.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, back migration is kind of ubiquitous.

[Steve Rinella]

Clouds up the record, you know.

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[Brody]

What part of the Americas moved on from Clovis the quickest? And which ones held out the longest?

[Todd Surovel]

Probably the Great Basin was the quickest. Spencer mentioned. There's some really old stemmed projectile points that some Great Basin archaeologists argue are as old, if not older than Clovis. You also have Clovis points in the Great Basin, but there's some very old old dates on these stemmed projectile points in the Great Basin. I don't know that we have really good age control on post Clovis. Projectile point types, except in the Rocky Mountains. And we, you know, at Leperell, another really cool thing we found is the Folsom Point. And we have. We. We appear to have a single occupation where people killed mammoths, killed bison. It was buried by a flood probably 10 years after they killed that mammoth. And on the same surface, we've got one Clovis point and one Folsom point. This would be the oldest case of Folsom ever found. So. And that would probably be. You know, that's pretty early. We know Clovis persists after that, too. So there's like, this long period of overlap where both are being made.

[Listener]

So there was this major extinction event with large animals. Like, what happened to the Clovis culture? Like, when that extinction event happened, did they just. What happened to them? Did they evolve into other cultures? Did they.

[Spencer Pelton]

I think it's pretty clear now. I mean, it's. It's Folsom in the Rocky Mountains, at least. And then other regions of the United States have these other post Clovis fluted point traditions.

[Listener]

Because when you talk, when you give them these different names, like Clovis Folsom, it's like there was this people, and then there was this.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, we should be trying to make that distinction. I mean, they weren't. Clovis wasn't a people. It was a stone tool. Technology.

[Guest]

Yeah. Where did cell phone people come from?

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah. The way I look at it, and like, this is like getting into the realm of hand waving. But Folsom points are a lot smaller than Clovis points if you put them side by side. You oftentimes don't get that when you're just looking at books and illustrations of this stuff. But Folsom points are generally at least half the size of Clovis points.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm not gonna make you go, you didn't break down.

[Listener]

Just imagine something smaller than that.

[Spencer Pelton]

You can imagine a scenario, right? We're like, well, right here, Clovis points have a distinct function from Folsom points. Maybe they're a thrusting spear, not an outlatl dart. You introduce another weaponry system into your toolkit, and they. They're used at the same time.

[Listener]

And that'll also affect the culture.

[Spencer Pelton]

Right. Like, so, I mean, Clovis points basically disappear when. When the mammoths disappeared, seemingly. So they're probably a pretty closely linked thing that Clovis points were used to hunt mammoths. And then once mammoths were gone, didn't have much need for them anymore, and people started making these little Folsom points a lot more often.

[Steve Rinella]

You don't need to hold that. I was just showing.

[Spencer Pelton]

I want to look at you.

[Todd Surovel]

You very quickly start seeing regional diversification in the way people are making a living.

[Listener]

Right?

[Todd Surovel]

One thing I visited this site, find el Mundo in Mexico. And I visited another site where they found some Clovis points on the surface. One thing that really struck me there was here you're looking at this Mexican Clovis point, right? You drop that in Wyoming, you wouldn't know it was from Mexico. You drop it in South Carolina, you wouldn't know it's from Mexico. And they find him, right, with these gompha, these, with these elephants. But in this same site, which is this really highly eroded surface site, I'm seeing marine shells brought in from the Gulf of Sea of Cortez and ceramics, right. You start to see this super regional specialization. But in Clovis, everybody's doing the same damn thing everywhere. It's really, really striking. Go to Missouri at the Kimswick site, you've got a dead mastodon full of big Clovis points. Mexico, Wyoming.

[Steve Rinella]

Dudes had it figured out that was.

[Todd Surovel]

The way to make a living, apparently.

[Listener]

What was going on on the west coast, you know, with the kelp? You had the kelp highway theory. Like what archeology is there at the same time as close?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, that's a really good question. So the first thing I should note is, you know, the, the coastal migration thing has been around for a long time. The idea has been around since at least the 1940s that this was another way to get around the glaciers. It really became in Vogue in 1997 when Monteverde was accepted to be pre Clovis and real because. But the argument was in order to get them down there that early, the ice free corridor simply wasn't an option. So the coast had to be the case. Right. So ever since then, like everybody has assumed it's the coast. I should say that these again aren't mutually exclusive. You could take both routes. Right? Right. But there's been a huge amount of work now on the west coast because of that, because everybody's kind of assumed that's the entry point. And my understanding is that there is very little archaeological evidence from the Pleistocene at all.

[Listener]

Like not. You're not seeing different technologies at the same time as Clovis was going on.

[Todd Surovel]

Or we don't really have anything Clovis age over there. The closest thing is maybe on the Channel Islands in California, there's very early humans are getting out there pretty Early.

[Spencer Pelton]

I don't think there's any weaponry associated with.

[Todd Surovel]

No, there's some really funky points out there, but. But that stuff's kind of hard to date because you're dating off in marine shells and there's a lot of old carbon in the ocean. So those dates tend to be too old. There's a very famous human remains from Prince Wales. Well, not. You're talking about Alaska? No, I'm talking about on the Channel Islands. Oh yeah, no, I've heard Arlington Springs woman, but she had a lot of marine resources in her diet, which means the dates are too old. But it was kind of like it was basically a Clovis aged date before you did the correction for that. But we really don't have a good sample of dated stuff from the Pacific coast. I will say there are Clovis points that have been found basically on the beach. There's one from an island off the coast of Mexico, a Clovis point.

[Steve Rinella]

But you're also looking for sites in coastal rainforest.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, it's a really challenging environment.

[Steve Rinella]

You know what makes me optimistic though is I was with the geologist up there who works in Alaska. And you know, you always heard when people talk about the kelp highway theory or the coastal migration theory, everybody's like, yeah, but all that stuff's underwater. But he was, he has these shoreline maps, tons of. It's not because of isostatic rebound.

[Todd Surovel]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

So when you had all that ice on, on top of the. I'm not telling you, I'm telling folks at home, when all that ice was on the. Laying on the earth, it so heavy that pushed the crust down and sank it. And there's still like seismic activity in southeast Alaska from. As the ice melted off, the land pops back up. So when you look at these shorelines, it's this like, it's this wave like undulating thing where some of that ice age shoreline is 100ft up the hill.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

So it's like there could be stuff there.

[Spencer Pelton]

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, like.

[Steve Rinella]

Like what I'm saying is you can't just say, well, it's all underwater.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, I have no doubt that there's some archaeology underwater. I, I think it's.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, they found some underwater, but I'm saying it's not uniformly all at the same depth. It's like a real hodgepodge of, of like, you know, the, the geological history is a real hodgepodge of stuff that's way up in the forest or down underwater. So I, what I'm saying Is I might find me an old ass site.

[Spencer Pelton]

Well, there's that notion, right, that some of, some of the isostatic rebounds kind of kept some of these coastal areas above water. But also, why would you expect that people would never maybe go in inland for a night and former campsite. Right. I mean, basically the assumption is that.

[Steve Rinella]

Follow a river, people are just living.

[Spencer Pelton]

On the beach because that's.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, dude, have you been there?

[Spencer Pelton]

The beach is nice sometimes.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, it's not that it's nice. It's. It's an overwhelming abundance of food.

[Todd Surovel]

It's not easy to get.

[Steve Rinella]

Not easy to get.

[Todd Surovel]

It's in the water.

[Brody]

It's.

[Steve Rinella]

No, all right, but, but dude, listen, I'm telling you, get into the shellfish and the salmon. Go, go talk to anybody that lives there now.

[Todd Surovel]

All right, but, but picture yourself at the end of the ice age and, you know, you come down into Seattle and it's like, oh, we could live off shellfish and ignore these mastodons and bison.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Todd Surovel]

Or we'd go after these big animals.

[Listener]

Shellfish don't hurt.

[Steve Rinella]

But they've had coastal. No, but they, but they've had coastal cultures there. They've had coastal cultures there continuously.

[Todd Surovel]

I get that's the argument.

[Steve Rinella]

Always more abundant. Who were always more abundant than interior peoples? And even many of the interior peoples go to Alaska or the Pacific Northwest. Many of the interior peoples are still reliant on anadromous fish, like marine resources.

[Todd Surovel]

You can't ignore it in that part of the world. There's a good reason why you do that now. Yeah. I'm saying in the Pleistocene, that's probably not your best option. Also, if we're talking about that. Look, let's look at this.

[Steve Rinella]

This is our first real argument.

[Todd Surovel]

Let's look at this idea. People have thousands of years of coastal adaptation. Where's that in the archaeological record? That's an assumption. Two, people are living at high population densities. Where are they? Why can't we find them? Three, we don't really see intensive use of marine resources until, let's say, four or five thousand years after Clovis in that part of the world. Yeah. Part of that is sea level rise. But still, you know, I think part of the success of the kelp highway hypothesis is that it's a good marketing campaign. And I want to rebrand the ice free corridor to the meat highway.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh.

[Spencer Pelton]

I was pretty enamored by the kelp highway thing too. I mean, it's a really elegant theory. I. And I'm not. I'm really not on it at all. It's, it's a cool, cool idea.

[Steve Rinella]

It makes a ton of sense when you think about, I mean, plus, here's the thing. You can like the, the life in kelp beds and then you can eat the kelp.

[Spencer Pelton]

I mean, it makes sense until you look at the, until you look at the evidence.

[Listener]

But also, like you mentioned meat versus shellfish. But what, what's saying that they weren't killing large marine mammals?

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah. In fact, that if there's a coastal thing, that's what I think they would be doing.

[Listener]

Right.

[Todd Surovel]

Is focusing their effort on large marine mammals, mostly, you know, seals, maybe some whales.

[Spencer Pelton]

I'm being reminded of, like Ben Potter's study, that obsidian sourcing study. You probably know more details about it than I do, but basically an archaeologist in Alaska, great archaeologists out of, out of Fairbanks named Ben Potter did a big obsidian sourcing study of all the oldest sites that they know about in Alaska. The hypothesis was basically like, if people were tied to coastal regions, then we should have coastal obsidian in these sites, because there are obsidian sources kind of right on where that corridor would be. Lo and behold, every single piece of obsidian used in these oldest sites in Alaska. The people that are the ancestors of the first Americans, they're from interior sources, from mountain sources in the interior of Alaska. Really no evidence that people are utilizing the coastal regions of Alaska.

[Steve Rinella]

Son of a gun. Well, I'll settle on this if I took your ass and dropped you off somewhere on like, wherever. Okay. Some remote area in southeast Alaska.

[Todd Surovel]

I've been there.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, and you know what? You know where I wouldn't wind up finding you? Up in the mountains, that is, I would find you down on the beach getting fat off kelp, greenling and clams.

[Todd Surovel]

Until I got enough expertise to effectively hunt bear and caribou.

[Steve Rinella]

Dude, that's a great point. Yeah, no, I got you. No, what you're saying is good, but it is, it is an enticing idea. And then, Mel, I don't want to go, I don't want to go too deep in this. But then I don't know if you know, like Meltzer's whole deal with going up and all that, the whole trying to put the, Trying to figure out is there any kind of like plant pollen evidence of an ice free corridor. And so they go up to these places on the out, you know, where the ice free corridor supposedly existed, and they go into these ponds and pull up sediments and try to go find sediments that would be at the right time. So you go 13,000 years ago. And he'd be like, okay, show me evidence at 13,000 years ago that there were mammoths and vegetation. And he's like, it's a rock garden. Right. It was water and rock. Yeah, but I don't know. I don't know. I'm just saying how he explained it. I never read anything in terms of.

[Todd Surovel]

The availability of both migration routes.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Like, was there a green, verdant, ice free corridor?

[Todd Surovel]

It's a real. There is now. Right. So at some point there had to be. And the question is, when does that go from being a barrier to something that humans can actually traverse? That's, that's a question for both migration corridors. It's a really challenging thing to answer because, you know, if we're thinking about a 10 mile space, we can study that by drilling a core in a lake and studying the DNA or the pollen out of it. We're talking about something that's 1200 miles long. Is that what we decided for the ice free corridor?

[Spencer Pelton]

9 to 1200 is what we looked at.

[Steve Rinella]

That was how wide it is.

[Todd Surovel]

No, that's, that's the length. That's the length of. So like, how do you know when that thing is open versus closed over a stretch? That humans can actually migrate? It's incredibly challenging. If you date different geologic deposits in different places, you get different answers and there's a lot of disagreement. The dates that I generally see are anywhere from. It was open from 14,500 or some people say it's open around 13,000. What is really clear to me is that it's open right around the time Clovis explodes across North America.

[Steve Rinella]

Can I bolster your, can I bolster your argument for you?

[Todd Surovel]

Sure, I'd love that.

[Steve Rinella]

Think about this, man. This thing I think about when I think about the kelp highway too is, let's say, let's. Okay, let's say the ice free corridor was real shitty and it wasn't great, but you were just, you were making a moon shot. Right. You're dying of curiosity. So you start picking into there and why would someone do that? Like, why would anyone take the risk? They wouldn't want to go into marginal habitat. But think about this. Let's go back to the coastal theory. You go to like Glacier Bay or any number of areas in B.C. any number of areas in southeast Alaska, we're still today, still today that ocean land interface is a wall of ice. So people coming down on the boat had to have been okay with the idea that like it's true as far as they could see, it was a wall of ice.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, absolutely far.

[Steve Rinella]

And they would have had calving like calving glaciers. And it would have been like, let's.

[Todd Surovel]

Go, let's check it out.

[Steve Rinella]

So someone, there has to be a thing where someone's like so dying of curiosity that they have. And they have to have the faith to be like, I have a feeling, I don't know why. I just have a feeling that if you go and again, 30 miles, maybe we'll find a place where it's not a hundred wall foot wall of ice on the beach.

[Spencer Pelton]

The elephant in the room is also that it would have required a pretty sophisticated technology of maritime travel. Right. That we really don't have any evidence that existed at that time.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, they found Australia though.

[Spencer Pelton]

That's a much smaller task than circumnavigating the Pacific Ocean.

[Todd Surovel]

The North Pacific, yeah. Australia, we're talking about maybe 50 kilometers of tropical.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, that was it.

[Todd Surovel]

Water. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Chip shot swim that.

[Spencer Pelton]

The other thing I think about with this, with coastal versus inland is I've like, I've only watched one season of that show alone, but it was a season where this dude had spent some time with some Siberian ranger herders. He was an excellent outdoorsman. Ended up building like a drift fence and killing a moose on this show and subsisting off his moose. And all the while there's somebody else on the show that is just like meekly checking like a little fish trap every day and they're getting out these little graylings or something and just starving to death, eating these tiny fish while this dude's sitting high on like this fatty moose meat, man. And that guy devoted his energy towards the correct endeavor. I would say he won that season.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, but you're not.

[Listener]

If you could string up a net and catch a hundred salmon in one.

[Steve Rinella]

Go, thinking of salmon runs, you're not thinking of clam better. Like it's two different arguments what people did. I don't know. But like you're not thinking of clam beds, you're not thinking of kelp beds and you're not thinking of salmon runs.

[Todd Surovel]

All these things live in the water, in really cold water.

[Steve Rinella]

No, you got. No, in that area.

[Todd Surovel]

In that area you're saying low tide clam beds.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, but there's a 20 foot tide swing.

[Listener]

You could walk across a mile of some of that stuff without hitting water.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, it's nothing but food. It is nothing but food on those clam beds.

[Todd Surovel]

I think that people are driven by package size, giant clam beds.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't think it was. Yeah, there's a lot to it. There's a lot to it like the date stuff. But the food abundance thing I think that. The food abundance thing I think is overwhelming amounts of food. So I don't think that that was the problem.

[Todd Surovel]

You know what's interesting about this right is we're arguing about evidence that doesn't exist in both cases.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what makes it maybe that's how we know it's time to stop.

[Listener]

You can never be wrong. Is there an explanation for what would have kept that ice free corridor open?

[Spencer Pelton]

Just the end of the ice age those Laurentide and the Cordier and sheets just kind of gradually receded that you know the law apart from each other recede completely until what 6000 years ago or something because it grew out of the Hudson Bay and eventually it, the last of it disappeared around that time ago. But yeah it basically by the time it reached a certain point like winter temperatures wouldn't have pushed it together again and then it was open.

[Brody]

Do we have any Clovis age skeletons of humans?

[Steve Rinella]

Yes. What are you talking about? What are they like the ANZAC boy.

[Todd Surovel]

We have just west of you an infant from Montana.

[Brody]

My apologies for asking.

[Steve Rinella]

Two years old, the ANZAC child and they just found out he was. His mother had a diet that was very similar to what they find with large cats. She was eating big game.

[Brody]

So how many Clovis humans do we have?

[Steve Rinella]

One.

[Brody]

That's it.

[Todd Surovel]

There's. There's one from Mexico that's roughly that age from a cave in Mexico.

[Steve Rinella]

Is there?

[Brody]

Yeah, duh Steve.

[Todd Surovel]

But, but it's not clearly. It's not clearly Clovis and Anzac is the one.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. If it was found in the 60s or 70s and Will saw Montana and a bunch of ochre and a bunch of projectile points.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, so. So her mother the, the reconstruction was at least 40 mammoth in her. In. In his mother's diet which is a huge amount of man that badass.

[Steve Rinella]

And this pisses off Matt and Aaron and Meltzer because people are like see they killed all the mammoths and they're like well no, I can see that they were eating mammoths but how is this telling me they killed them all?

[Spencer Pelton]

For the record we like both Metten and Meltzer a whole lot. So and it's good to contextualize like we're literally talking about like a couple thousand years and maybe a half dozen sites of disagreement. Right. It's just that those couple thousand years and half dozen sites have really big Implications for these two issues about how people got here and whether or not they killed off these animals. And so that's why we talk about it so much. Right. Even though, like, it's like kind of a tempest in a teacup, if you know that phrase.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Spencer Pelton]

A couple people arguing about. Yeah. Half dozen sites in a couple thousand years. They do have pretty big implications for the peopling of the Americas.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I already told you, this is the primary thing I think about. What was that quote? Was that Dan Flory's quote? It wasn't his quote, but he told us that quote. The reason the, the reason they're fighting so much is there's so little.

[Guest]

Yeah, exactly. Talking about academics, the reason the arguments are so impassionist, because there's so little at stake.

[Todd Surovel]

I've heard that attributed to Henry Kissinger.

[Steve Rinella]

But there is a lot. But here I want to like this. Should. We should have said this in the beginning instead of at the very end. But where this becomes political and where it becomes social and where it becomes cultural. Well, it's a lot of places, but one of the places it becomes this is. Is it innately human that we destroy our environment? Right. Is it sort of this innately human ancient practice that we drive things to extinction? Is it just who we are and we've always done it that way, or did we like become evil later and so people will look and like blitzkrieg hypothesis. People can look at, let's say, extinctions. We're driving now with certain human activities. Isn't it nice to be able to go like, oh, we've always done that. What do you think happened to all the mammoths? There's nothing new. It's always how it's been.

[Spencer Pelton]

Just because something's human, universally human, which I think that tendency is, doesn't make it, it doesn't abdicate us for moral responsibility to deal with it?

[Steve Rinella]

No, of course not. Like slavery is inherently human.

[Spencer Pelton]

It's a universal practice that because we live in a liberal democracy that decided it was a bad thing, we got rid of. I should know, like how many places in the world, for instance, have thriving large game populations outside of the American West? Not many. And the only reason we have them here. Right. Is because there's state sanctioned conservation laws that, that have allowed that to happen. Otherwise we'd be in the same boat. We'd have no big animals left.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Spencer Pelton]

So I, I think that argument that like, by acknowledging this, we're kind of surrendering our moral obligation to do something about it. It's not a good argument to make. Just because something has happened forever doesn't mean we need to keep doing it.

[Steve Rinella]

Kahit. With one more way. This where the rubber meets the road. If you turn around and look above your head, you're going to see a war club. That war club was given to us by a guest who didn't sit where you're sitting, but he sat in that seat in our old studio named Taylor Keane. Okay. And Taylor Keane felt that part of this thing of like, he would argue that human history in the new world goes back 50,000 years. Okay. He thinks it's way older. And he thinks that this like 13,000 year Clovis story is a way of. Is a way of. He thinks it helped fuel Manifest Destiny to say, well, they haven't been here that long. Like the people were displacing our new arrivals too. We're just another new arrival. I don't agree with him because I think that if you had gone to sort of like the architects of Manifest Destiny, whether you go back to Jackson, you go back to Jefferson, and you had said, hey, hey, hey, before you do this, bear in mind Native Americans have been on the landscape 50,000 years, not 13,000 years. They wouldn't have been like, yeah, you're right, you're right, we better all leave and go back to Europe. And also, they wouldn't have been able to comprehend the timeline anyways because they weren't living on that timeline. So I think that his argument is false, but he feels that this 13,000 year arrival thing, and I've encountered this perspective from a handful of friends of mine who are indigenous friends of mine, that it. That it's meant to sort of. It's meant to kind of die. It's meant to kind of deflate or call into question indigenous ownership of the landscape to be like, your people showed up. Our people showed up. Like, no one's from here. People just showed up. And they've always been fighting over it anyways. And we're just the latest of another people to come here and fight for it.

[Spencer Pelton]

It's an interesting debate. Let me contextualize a little bit. So until the Folsom site was discovered, the widespread notion among people that studied this stuff was that Native Americans had only been here about three or 4,000 years.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Spencer Pelton]

And when the Folsom site came out and there was this revelatory thing that people have been here since the Ice Age, it was of enormous benefit to Native Americans because it established that they'd been here a very long time. 13,000 years is a really long time.

[Todd Surovel]

650 human generations approximately.

[Spencer Pelton]

So, yeah, fast forward almost a century now. Now that 13,000 years old is no longer old enough. Old enough. You have to keep pushing it back a little further. I think 13,000 years is a really long time, and it's certainly enough time to establish that you have some sort of patrimony over the land of this country. I don't quite understand the argument that it's not quite long enough to establish that it's a really long time.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, it is.

[Todd Surovel]

The scientific study of the human past in North America has confirmed that the descendant communities today, their ancestors were these people that they arrived 650 human generations ago.

[Spencer Pelton]

Anzac showed that.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, Anzik did show that, and, and other. And other human remains. You know, if we look at, if we go back, I assume you guys have ancestry in Europe and we ask, how long do we have ancestry in Europe? It's almost certainly less than that because there have been multiple populations that have run over Europe repeatedly. So 13,000 years is longer than anybody in Europe. Most people in Europe could truly lay claim to some place as a homeland. It's a long damn time.

[Steve Rinella]

That's an interesting point. Do you know I'm 2% African?

[Todd Surovel]

I didn't know that. Who told you?

[Steve Rinella]

My wife always tells me to keep that down because she said I kind of oversell it.

[Spencer Pelton]

As long as you don't use it as an excuse to, like, get away with any linguistics, turn the phrase.

[Steve Rinella]

She's like, I'd keep it under. I'd keep it under your head. She doesn't want to impact my world view, you know. Okay, again, join today. I'm gonna have you guys tell people. I'm gonna remind everybody who you are. Then I'm gonna have you tell people how to find your work and how to follow what you guys work on. So Todd Surovel, the director of the George C. Frison Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wyoming, and Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State archaeologist and an adjunct at University of Wyoming. So if you find cool stuff in.

[Spencer Pelton]

Wyoming, probably either one of us, if.

[Steve Rinella]

You'Re like, good Lord, it's a mammoth skull, the stone point stuck in its forehead.

[Spencer Pelton]

I'm gonna get so many photos of rocks off of this.

[Guest]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, I gotta tell people's story. So I walk into. I walk into Spencer's office, and the first thing that greets me, just laying on the floor is a giant. The end of a giant dinosaur femur. So I said, what's that he goes, that's a rock. And I said, oh, I thought it was a big dinosaur bone. He said, that's what the guy that brought it to me thought it was. And then he said I could have it if I. I wanted. The guy that brought it just left it there.

[Brody]

So it was or was.

[Guest]

It was not.

[Brody]

It was not a dinosaur.

[Steve Rinella]

No, the dude that brought it is like, yeah, never mind.

[Guest]

But it was a very convincing dinosaur bone for not being a dinosaur bone. It was very convincing.

[Spencer Pelton]

£80 paperweight.

[Steve Rinella]

Just sitting there, sitting there on his floor. It's not in the collections.

[Listener]

He didn't ask you to come out to his truck to look at it first.

[Todd Surovel]

Come on, bring it in.

[Spencer Pelton]

Wheeled it in.

[Steve Rinella]

I would have been so excited. You would. This thing. I'd have been like, holy cow, man. Now I got it. Now I'm rich. So how do people find your work? Like, what should they check out? I have one of your books upstairs, the Badger. Well, I just got it.

[Todd Surovel]

Barger Gulch.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I had to buy that sucker.

[Todd Surovel]

I brought one for you.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, you did? Yeah, bought it on Amazon.

[Todd Surovel]

Search my name, you can find my website.

[Steve Rinella]

Spell your name out.

[Todd Surovel]

Surovel. S U R O V E L L. Okay. I do want to say that my job as director of the Friesen Institute is raising money to support archaeological research in our department. Mostly other people. Students, faculty, people like Spencer. So if you're interested in supporting the last breath of. Last dying breath of Clovis First Archaeology and people who believe in Pleistocene extinctions, search the Frison Institute. We're happy to take donations. Every dollar goes to research.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, excellent.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah, you can just Google me, too. I've got some talks on YouTube. I got a Research Gate page where all my research goes. Also write a newsletter on substack called Social Stigma. It's about basically political issues and archaeology and anthropology. That's free if you want to subscribe to that.

[Steve Rinella]

That's interesting. Good. All right, thanks, guys. Appreciate you coming on, man. It's been fascinating.

[Spencer Pelton]

Yeah. Thank you.

[Todd Surovel]

Yeah, thank you.

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[Brody]

To tell you about an exciting new project. I am thrilled to introduce Meat Eater wordle. It's a word game.

[Steve Rinella]

Wait, wait, wait. You can't call it that.

[Brody]

Why?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, because of copyright stuff. That name is probably property of the New York Times or something.

[Brody]

Oh. Well, what should we call it?

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know. What is it exactly?

[Brody]

Well, it's a lot like wordle. Players get six tries to solve a five letter word from categories like hunting, fishing, animals, nature. Then to compare your score to the scores from the Meat Eater crew and new games will drop every Monday morning on our website.

[Steve Rinella]

I think the perfect name would kind of sound like wordle. You know, have two syllables and end with le. Oh, and it has to be an outdoorsy word.

[Brody]

Hmm. Introducing Meat Eater Turtle. It's like Wordle but better. You can play it right now at themeedeater.com games.