Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 196: A Sea of Bones

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Ep. 196: A Sea of Bones · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:09
  Speaker 1: This is Me Eat podcast coming in you shirtless, severely
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  Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case underwear listening Hunt podcast. You
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  Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
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  Speaker 1: where you stand with on X. All right, super special
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: guest Larry Todd. Larry, tell everybody what you do. Um, well,
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: I'm trained as an anthropologist archaeologist, but actually what I
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: do more than that is something called taff onom me,
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  Speaker 1: which is the study of what happens to dead things. So, um,
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  Speaker 1: my real passion when I started archaeology was looking at
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  Speaker 1: bison kill sites. And to study a bison kill site,
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  Speaker 1: you can't just look at the patterns you see when
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  Speaker 1: you have excavated and say, well, people did this, and
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  Speaker 1: people did that and people did the other. You've got
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  Speaker 1: to look at what the carnivores did after the people
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  Speaker 1: left the site, and what the decay of the bones
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  Speaker 1: did to dispersal of things, and what um the rate
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  Speaker 1: of deposition does to what bones are preserved, and looking
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  Speaker 1: at all those sorts of things that happened after the
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  Speaker 1: death of an animal until it enters the laboratory. Is
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  Speaker 1: the field of taffonomy. We say, when you say kill sites,
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  Speaker 1: I mean places where ancient people killed large groups of animals.
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  Speaker 1: I specialized mostly in big bison kill sites, but I
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  Speaker 1: also did a couple of mammoth sites, and did sites
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  Speaker 1: where people suspected that horses had been killed, and a
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  Speaker 1: variety of sorts of things. I was sort of a
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  Speaker 1: um taffonymous for higher. Can you break down the word taffonomy,
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  Speaker 1: It's it's from the Greek and um taff is death.
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  Speaker 1: Anonomy is study of So a word that's similar that
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: you may have heard is epitaph, the words that are
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  Speaker 1: on a tombstone. So um. The original definition was the
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: study of death and burial. Do you got your epitaff
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  Speaker 1: figured out yet? No? I don't do you? No, man,
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  Speaker 1: I don't have one yet. About mcwayen, I didn't think
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: of it either, said he already knows what he wants.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Make a good t shirt too. Once you got to
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: wear it on your shirt and then have him put
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  Speaker 1: it on your tombstone. So taffonomy, am I saying? Right? Yeah, taffy.
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  Speaker 1: So what's a large kill site like? What at what
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  Speaker 1: point do you get what at what point do you
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  Speaker 1: get interested? Oh? I get interested, um with a single animal.
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  Speaker 1: But the ones that you focus on the most because
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  Speaker 1: there's the highest information potential are ones that have anywhere
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  Speaker 1: from can to I've worked on sites where there's close
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  Speaker 1: to eight hundred to a thousand animals single sort of
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  Speaker 1: cliff jumps um cliff jump. Well. One of the sites
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  Speaker 1: that I spent about eleven years on is a site
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  Speaker 1: in on the Nebraska National Forest called the Hudson Man Site,
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  Speaker 1: and there's probably eight hundred bison there from the little
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: bit we saw of it. And one of the interesting
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  Speaker 1: questions there and on many of the early sites, the
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  Speaker 1: payment about ten thousand years ago. Uh, And one of
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  Speaker 1: the interesting questions is how they died and whether it
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  Speaker 1: was a kill. And there's a whole series of things
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  Speaker 1: like that that go into the taff onomy step one
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  Speaker 1: as you find a bunch of bones and is it
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  Speaker 1: a natural death or is it a kill site? Um.
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  Speaker 1: But one of the interesting things about you know, your
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  Speaker 1: question about jumping over a cliff is many of the
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  Speaker 1: early sites, the earliest sites in North America, the ones
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  Speaker 1: from about thirteen thousand, tell about eight thousand, aren't associated
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  Speaker 1: with jumps. UM, but they hadn't started that strategy. Maybe
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: they hadn't started it, or maybe they didn't need it. UM.
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  Speaker 1: I think that UM. Probably the early people's in the
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  Speaker 1: America were such specialists in bison behavior that they probably
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: made our PhDs new is zoology and ecology seemed like
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: kindergarteners of knowing what vice are going to do given
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: any given situation, the cloud cover, the bugs, the wind
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  Speaker 1: direction when it's last reigned. They could probably use the
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  Speaker 1: bison behavior to help get them into a place where
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  Speaker 1: they could kill them, regardless of whether there was a
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  Speaker 1: jump there. And so some of them are in big
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  Speaker 1: open areas with no cliffs, no arroyo, UM, no obvious
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  Speaker 1: sort of containment. And they probably at that time, UM,
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  Speaker 1: they're probably encowering groups that haven't had a lot of
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  Speaker 1: human pressure. Perhaps, Yeah, very definitely. They probably there The
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  Speaker 1: animals that they were praying upon would have been used
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  Speaker 1: to the way wolves would hunt them or other social
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  Speaker 1: predators were, and all of a sudden you have this
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  Speaker 1: different sort of social predator shows up on the scene.
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  Speaker 1: And UM, something we might talk about a little further
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  Speaker 1: on is one of the things I'm really worrying about
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  Speaker 1: now is thinking about how that animal memory of kill
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  Speaker 1: events feeds into how you can hunt inner region and
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  Speaker 1: how often you can work through in mountain areas where
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  Speaker 1: I'm working now, how often you can effectively run a
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  Speaker 1: mountain sheep trap. Do you have to wait till the
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  Speaker 1: next generation of mountain sheep shows up? Or is there
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  Speaker 1: going to be somebody there in the herd that's gonna
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: you know, don't go up that ridge, you know, if
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  Speaker 1: these sort of conditions, Yeah, yeah, to wait till their
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  Speaker 1: memory faded before he came back, which is um. As
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  Speaker 1: an anthropologist, it's both sort of interesting and almost heretical
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  Speaker 1: to talk about that, because if you're talking about memory
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  Speaker 1: and information being passed down from and stored in the
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  Speaker 1: group from one generation to the next, you're talking about
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  Speaker 1: what we usually classify as culture. And we usually when
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  Speaker 1: we talk culture, UM, we usually say that's ours. You know,
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  Speaker 1: humans are defined by culture and everybody else nana, Nana
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  Speaker 1: doesn't have it. And so I'm trying to really think
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  Speaker 1: about in terms of hunting and landscapes of multiple cultures
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  Speaker 1: colliding human cultures versus the game, animal cultures information. If
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: you spend much time talking to um uh Kaufman, the
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  Speaker 1: migration researcher a little bit. I'm working. I'm working more
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  Speaker 1: with Arthur Middleton, who uh did the elk migration stuff
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  Speaker 1: from Cody into the Yellows, because what you get into
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: there is what's interesting about their work with tracking collars
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  Speaker 1: on modern animals. As you see, um, what like what
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: level of exposure like a newborn has when you have
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  Speaker 1: a fawn or a calf hit the ground and it
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  Speaker 1: is taken somewhere by its mother. Its ability to retain
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  Speaker 1: that information after the death of the mother, and like
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  Speaker 1: how well it can retrace routes and it's pretty stunning. Man.
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  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, I'm spending next week in
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  Speaker 1: Berkeley with Middleton to talk about how we can better
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  Speaker 1: integrate uh my archaeological data from the High elevation. So
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: I'm working in some of the same areas that he
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  Speaker 1: has the Elk GPS color data on UM in terms
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: of answering questions that he's interested in, like, um, what's
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  Speaker 1: the long term fidelity of these migration quarters? How long
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  Speaker 1: do they go back in time? And UM I'm interested
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  Speaker 1: in whether the corridors that the elk are using today
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  Speaker 1: um My, my expectation is they're using sort of the
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  Speaker 1: least cost path across the landscape. Um, that may have
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  Speaker 1: been used by elk, and we know it's used by elk,
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  Speaker 1: that it may have been used by bison that are
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  Speaker 1: going into high country in the past, mountain sheep and humans.
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  Speaker 1: So the the elk migration quarters may be giving us
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  Speaker 1: a clue to what the past archaeology or the past
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  Speaker 1: human landscape of high elevations was, and the archaeology can
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  Speaker 1: also help um the wildlife people, uh, potentially see how
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  Speaker 1: long those quarters have been there. Yeah, let me let
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: me do this from it, just to help people go
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  Speaker 1: up speed. Uh, you start talking about the main site.
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  Speaker 1: You can talk about that one or pick um sort
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  Speaker 1: of your favorite site that you can think of like
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  Speaker 1: a big kill site from from the from a very
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  Speaker 1: old big kill site, and lay out what the body
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  Speaker 1: of evidence is that you wind up working with to
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  Speaker 1: ascertain what happened there, because because I would just I
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  Speaker 1: would automatically think, like, wouldn't it just be that you
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  Speaker 1: look for spear points and if there's spear points, then
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  Speaker 1: it must have been people killing them. Explain how it
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  Speaker 1: gets more complicated. That was sort of the assumption, and
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  Speaker 1: I probably will stick with Hudson May because some recent
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  Speaker 1: sites in the news, like there's a big mammoth site
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  Speaker 1: down in Mexico that was okay. UM. So the uptell
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  Speaker 1: about nineteen seventy or late nineteen sixties when people approached
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  Speaker 1: the big kill sites that starting with Fulsome right on
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  Speaker 1: up through the others. The sites themselves were pretty much
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  Speaker 1: thought of as being quarries, UH that you'd extract the
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  Speaker 1: bones from for exhibit, and then you'd also extract the
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  Speaker 1: points from. But they didn't really do a lot of
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  Speaker 1: work to kind of try and tie the two together
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  Speaker 1: like it is coming and sift all the dirt out
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  Speaker 1: and look washed them with water on some UH. Around
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  Speaker 1: nineteen in the late nineteen sixties, a researcher down in Colorado,
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  Speaker 1: UH named Joe Ben Wheat excavated a site called the
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  Speaker 1: Olsen Chubbuck site. What he did there that was sort
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  Speaker 1: of remarkable, as he started mapping and recording every bone
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  Speaker 1: in the site, sort of like you'd have a jigsaw puzzle.
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  Speaker 1: And he came up with the idea and he tried
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  Speaker 1: to do the analysis that the site itself, the bone
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  Speaker 1: bed itself, is a key artifact that in looking at
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  Speaker 1: the distribution of where the cows are and the calves are,
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  Speaker 1: and which how the carcasses are cut up and dispersed,
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  Speaker 1: and that sort of stuff can give you a tremendous
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  Speaker 1: amount of information. So and then several years after that,
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  Speaker 1: UM George Frizzen from Wyoming followed up with a site
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  Speaker 1: called the Casper Site where he kind of took that
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  Speaker 1: perspective into account as well the site as an artifact
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  Speaker 1: and then tried to plug in bison paleo ecology of
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  Speaker 1: how they lived on the landscape and what had happened
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  Speaker 1: after it. Explain your term whether the site is an artifact? Okay, Um,
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  Speaker 1: we all when we think of you talked about you
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  Speaker 1: find the points with the bones. We all know that
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  Speaker 1: a nice piece of stone. That's been the definition of
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  Speaker 1: an artifact. Oh, an artifact humanly produced, humanly creative. Like
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  Speaker 1: if you could pick up if you pick up a
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  Speaker 1: bone and it has cut mark, you pick up an
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  Speaker 1: ancient bone. Is the bone the mini has cut marks
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  Speaker 1: on it, it's an artifact. And the idea of the
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  Speaker 1: bone bed is artifact is that just like the individual
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  Speaker 1: flake scars on a flake, piece of stone have to
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  Speaker 1: be looked at altogether to understand it. You don't just
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  Speaker 1: have that individual bone with a cut mark on it,
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  Speaker 1: but you need to know how it's positioned next to
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  Speaker 1: this one and that one, and where it is um
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  Speaker 1: within the bone bed, and that you need to look
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  Speaker 1: at the whole picture rather than individual pieces. So the site,
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  Speaker 1: the bone bed, that pile of dead animals um could
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  Speaker 1: be conceived of as an artifact. Yeah, you know a
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  Speaker 1: thing we talked about um that we talked with the
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  Speaker 1: David Melzer ones and we're talking about the full sume site.
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  Speaker 1: An interesting thing like like you're getting at with the
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  Speaker 1: full sum site is uh, I think the ribs slabs
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  Speaker 1: are not there, which suggests that when they butchered those
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: things whatever twelve thou years ago, when they butchered them,
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  Speaker 1: they hauled out the ribs on the bone because it's
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  Speaker 1: not in the bone bed. So that's like that they're
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: the absence of something. Is the absence of something becomes interesting? Huh,
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Well that's and that's where you start looking at both
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: what's there and what's missing. So we're up to the
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  Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and that was sort of the in seventies.
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  Speaker 1: That was respective of, um, these bone beds are artifacts,
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  Speaker 1: and then this caff onomy stuff sort of reared its
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: ugly head. And one of the things that taffonomy does
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: is it's sort of the wait a minute, let's take
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: another look at this science. Uh, it's sort of often
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  Speaker 1: points out what you don't know and why you don't
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  Speaker 1: know it, rather than as the way the way we
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  Speaker 1: normally think of science as accumulating information. Uh, Taffonomic analysis
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  Speaker 1: more often than not leaves you with, well, we're not
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  Speaker 1: sure about that, we don't know that or the other.
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  Speaker 1: So go back to that bone bed. As an artifact,
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  Speaker 1: everything in it is telling you something about human behavior.
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  Speaker 1: And so that if a bone's missing, people took it away.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: If your carcasses are completely disarticulated, people cut them into
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  Speaker 1: little butchering units and depositive than they're quartering it out. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: And if bones were broken, human broke. Humans broke them
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: to get out the marrow. So from the bone bed
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  Speaker 1: is artifact perspective. Everything there was telling you about human
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  Speaker 1: behavior to give you a really rich picture of what
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: was going on there. And where the taffonomy comes in
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  Speaker 1: is going Now, wait a minute, we start looking at
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  Speaker 1: some of these bones and they've got wolf tooth marks
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: on them. Uh, don't you suppose the wolves were taking
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: away some of the bones as well when they were
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: coming in after the humans were there. You start looking
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: at other the bones and yeah, they're broken, but they're
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  Speaker 1: broken with the center part pushed down into the ground
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: as if something had stepped on it later. So you
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  Speaker 1: can't just look at the frequency of bone breakage and say, um,
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  Speaker 1: humans broke every bone. Um. Just because carcass is not
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: completely all together in a skeleton doesn't mean that humans
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: had taken it apart into those individual parts. We've all
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  Speaker 1: walked across the landscape and seeing dead things, and more
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: often than not, they're not all completely together, scattered, there's
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: a there's a shin bone, and yeah, I wonder where
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: the skull is. You never find them. But for a
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: while when we were doing archaeology, we sort of forgot
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: about that. We'd look at the site as if any
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: of those processes happened or stopped happening just as soon
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: as humans left way and it was frozen in time.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: And so the taffonomic study tries to bring all those
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: other factors into account of how many of the bones
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: do have the carnivore tooth marks. What percentage of them
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: have cut marks relative to tooth marks. What breakage appears
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: to have happened um paramortem soon soon after death as
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: opposed to long after death, where so you can maybe
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: separate out um the human breakage from the trampling breakage
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: from the dry bone breakage later um scattering. One of
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: the studies I spent did my doctoral dissertation work on
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: is I spent a lot of time looking at how
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: recently dead cows would get dispersed across the landscape and
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: measuring the distance from for example, a hip to where
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: the femur went and how that changed and started going.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Because you can do and you can do it with
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: a known individual, and then when you go to an
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: archaeological site, you can start measuring the bones and start
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: begin recognizing the bones of individual animals and see how
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: they get dispersed, and see if the dispersal patterns you
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: see within the bone beds differs from what you see naturally.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: So part of what taffonomy does is tries to establish
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: some of those natural patterns uh without assuming that every Again,
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: one of the strange things that archaeologists do is we
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: tend to have this idea that humans create patterns in
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: the world and everything else creates chaos and randomness. And
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: we all know by looking at for example, away streams
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: move cobbles around. Uh, they sort them by sizes, they
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: sort them by shapes. We're not We're just one of
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: many pattern creating creatures. So you can use as your
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: standard basic methodology of if you see a pattern, we
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: did it. And so taffonomy tries to understand all those
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: other sorts of patterns that can go into it. And
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: as I mentioned before, that sort of gets you into
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: that Hey wait a minute, Wait a minute, Wait a minute.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: So you asked me to talk about a specific site
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: and the side um that I said. I spent eleven
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: years on the Hudson Man bison kill site. It was
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: called the Hudson Wing buy some kill site when we
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: got there. Uh, and there's close to eight animals. You're
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: not gonna tell me this buzz kill story, right, I
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: don't want to be a kill site. Yeah, well, we
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: don't know. My bottom line now is after you do
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: the taphonomic analysis, you get to the well, it could
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: be a kill site. Um, but there's a lot of
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: things that don't necessarily mean there's some points there. Um,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: does that mean that the people killed the animals. There's
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: twenty three points and eight hundred animals, so sort of
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: as a and that's doesn't fit the pattern we see
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: If okay, these eight hundred animals are stretched out of
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: what size patch of ground they're oh, in the size
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: of this room, you know, um, thirty by twenty ft,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: there's probably like no, no, they're over hughes area. But
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: in the size of this room there could be the
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: remains of fifteen to twenty animals. It's just a solid
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: sea of bone, bone on bone on So they cover
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: oh maybe seventy by fifty so a little less than
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the size of a square football field. And in the
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: US were spread out over how much time looks like
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: almost instantaneously you can look at if you can assess
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: time of death by looking at tooth eruption and wear patterns.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: And so if there's um mass kill, a mass death, UM,
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: there's going to be a snapshot of the age structure
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: of the population. And since um bison are birth pole species,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: they have most of their calves within about a two
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: week period in the spring, and the biological schedule of
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: when the teeth erupt and when they start wearing from
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: chewing on grass is predictable. You can look at the
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: jaws of the calves in a sight like that and
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: tell how old they were at the time. So, um,
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: you can all these calves that all have the same
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: Hudson man looks like they were like four months old. Um,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: so sort of middle of the summer, late summer so
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: and then and then you know in the age structure,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: then you'll have a gap in the age structure. And
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: then you'll have animals that are a year and four
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: months old and two years and four months old. And
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: when you get that nice discrete um sets of age structures,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: that tells you you've got a catastrophic a mass depth
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: of all those animals dying at once in the twenty
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: six points, how I forget the exact how like, how
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: directly affiliated are they with the bones stuck into them? No,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: some are um, some are associated in the same stratigraphic
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: level as the bone, some are slightly above it, some
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: are slightly below it. Um. There's one point that was
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: reported to have been stuck into a bone. But when
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: we went back through the collections, the point and the
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: bone that's associated with have different catalog numbers and say
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: they're from different parts of the site and someone pulled
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: it out well, or that somewhere in the recording process
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: it wasn't recorded in a way that we can today
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: go back to it and say, yeah, we're a hundred
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: share of that bone was stuck in that. So when
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: we record a bone on a site like that, and
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: like I said, there's um two hundred some bones and
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: the skeleton of a bison and eight hundred bison, getting
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: sort to do the work and imagine how many bones
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: might be there when we recorded site today, UM, with
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: this taffonomic perspective on the in in mind. Before we
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: remove it from the ground, we record about twenty nine
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: separate observations on each individual bone that goes into a
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: massive data set. So you don't have that that problem
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: down the line of which bone was where it's like, um,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: Digging a site like a bone bed is like taking
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: apart a hugely complex jigsaw puzzle that you're wanting to
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: be able to tell somebody in the future how to
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: put it back together exactly like it was. So you
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: don't just say there's blue pieces over here and red
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: pieces over there. Every piece of that puzzle has an
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: inventory number and its exact location is is pinpointed, so
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: that no the way you think of execrating a site.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: So at Hudson May we went in. I was thrilled
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: to go into being able to dig the largest known
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: paleo Indian bison kill site in North America. And one
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: of the things that the original researchers noted were that
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: there were no skulls there, that they've been taken somewhere else.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: Ud skulls gone, eight hundred skulls gone, um, which led
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: to an interpretation if there must have been some sort
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: of ceremonial thing, you know, because this we gotta add
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: we laughed all this all time. Everything they can't understand
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: become ceremony exactly. That's that's in there with um. Only
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: humans create patterns, and if we don't see a pattern
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: that we recognize, it must be a ceremony there. It's
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: a corollary to that. It's like everything, like you know,
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: there's three skulls lined up, must been ceremonials. Sometimes you'll
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: get to two. Yeah, ceremonial. You see, my kids do
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: stuff so they're not they line everything up their Halloween candy.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: Is it ceremonial. I don't know, it's just lining. Shut up.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: So that was one of the interpretations of you know,
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: the skulls were missing as a matter of fact, when
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: I first started working there with the Forest Service, and
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: they had this idea to kind of attract funding and
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: attractive skin attention to call it the Lost Skull Learning Center. No, yeah, yeah, okay, okay,
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: keep going. So I keep like interject because here's the
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: problem in talking to me. Then the problem with you
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: talking to me is, I know, like I've heard of
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: all this stuff. I don't really know what goes on
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: behind the scene story. Yeah, like I know the version
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: that it was like that they slaughtered eight hunter him
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: in a giant pile. Yeah, I didn't know that. Then
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: later that story maybe became more complicated. So so we
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: got we got missing skulls. The other argument that was
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: used early on was that all the animals were completely disarticulated,
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: cut into bits and pieces. Um. The other argument is
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: even though there wasn't one there now, there had been
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: a cliff there in the past that's been filled with sediment.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: Oh the sink whole, Well, it's it's a it's natural cliff.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: There's other sides sinkholes. So you've got a cliff on
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: one side, and then about seventy potential cliff area about
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: seventy away, you've got this pile of bones. And so
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: they're saying, well, the animals went over a cliff, they
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: cut them apart, they drugged these bones over here for
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: the secondary processing. So that's what I thought was going
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: on there when we started recording the site, and one
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: of the first things we noted is when we got
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: down into the bone bed, there weren't complete skulls, sure enough,
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: but there were lots of maxillary tooth throws up her
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: tooth throws. There were lots of the petros portion, the
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: big hard portion of the in the inside of the head,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: there was uh, the occipitals the base of the skull.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: There's lots of portions of skulls, but no complete skulls really,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: And then you start thinking, uh, one time we killed
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: h I brother killed elk and we quartered it out
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: and it was a cow. I love the head lander.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: Week later we went back to see what the grizzlies
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: did to it. I guess what was left. Not They
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: started right at the nose and work their way back,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: was that ball of like that ball of bone. That's
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: funny one the other because you're now you're peaking my interest.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: So um. One of the things we record is if
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: you imagine a bone laying on the ground and it's
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: not laying completely flat. Well, let's say we've got a
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: bone laying on the ground and it's flat. I talked
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: about those twenty nine attributes to record on each bone,
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: and one of them record we record is the degree
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: of weathering. You know, when you first expose a bone
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: after an animal dies, it's nice and clean and solid
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: surface and all that sort of stuff. Go back and
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: look at that bone two years later, and it's starting
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: to crack and the pieces of it are starting to
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: chew up, and there's becomes porous and linear fractures through
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: it and all that. We've developed coating systems to describe weathering,
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: and so we record the weather degrees of weathering. Uh.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: One of the sets of attributes to record are the
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: weathering on the top surface of the bone and the
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: weathering on the bottom surface of the bone, with the
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: idea being if the bones laying there on the ground
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: surface and not being moved, there's a good chance that
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: it's going to be weathered more intensively on the top
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: and the bottom, like like a year old drop antler. Yeah,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: you'll like exactly, yeah, and then you know it's like
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: it's been there, but it hasn't been there that long.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: So imagine that going on in this pile of eight bison,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: and you're starting to get some sand and sediments blowing in.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: It's going to start covering up the basis of some
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: of those bones, and they're gonna start kept in place.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: They're sort of um, not glued down, but they're held
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: in place by the sediments and it's not blowing in.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: And one huge nineteen thirties dust storm, you know, it's
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: accumulating a little bit by a little bit, by a
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: little bit by a little bit. That it may take
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: fift wenty years for a foot of sentiment to build up.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: Think of how big a bison skull is. It'll stand,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: you know, a foot and half from the teeth up
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: to the top of it above the ground surface. So
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: while many bones of the skeleton can be completely buried
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: within a few years, they're still going to be the
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: tops of those skulls sticking up above the ground, continuing
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: to weather. Continuing to be trampled on, continuing to be
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: broken into bits and pieces. So unless you have very
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: rapid sedimentation across the site, you're not going to find
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: the skulls. Yeah. So um so that came into play.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: And then we stuff combined non on them. Yeah, or
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: the next herd of bison that runs across that area
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: trampling on it. Um. All those sorts of things can
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: reduce the skulls to lots of not the sort of
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: hang on your wall quality skulls, but they're still were
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: there their bits and pieces. So that sort of took
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: the law Skull Learning Center out of the category of
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: being not just silly, but maybe maybe the eroded school
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: learning center. Yeah. That we got that ruin the wrong
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: learning center, which is what learning is all about, isn't it. Um.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: Then we started looking at things like um, as I said,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: we record each individual bone and start doing measurements of
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: the articular surfaces, and you can match those to the
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: other bones they go to. And so rather than saying
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: these animals have all been brought from point A to
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: point B as little discrete groups, it looks like each
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: carcass is kind of scattered within a couple of meter area.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: You know, it's what happens if you kind of be
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: there and fall apart and get scattered. It's not everything
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: is randomly dispersed, and here and there the carcasses are
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: in the point where the unless people are dragging complete
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: bison carcasses across the landscape for seventy there in the
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: position where they died. Well, I gotta pause you from
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: it now that you're deconstructing, like the initial hypothesis, what
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: like I honestly like, how did someone like what size
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: group of individuals would they postulate would have even been
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: capable of butchering eight hundred bison? Eight hundred bison in
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: the mid to late summer. I mean sort of incorporating
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: idea that we're talking about groups of individuals that might
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: have been ten to thirty individuals roaming around, yeah, to
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: the labor force to butcher that many animals as completely
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: as they were argued to be butchered, would be boy,
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: you know, we could call out half the town of
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Bozeman for a weekend and maybe get it done. Yeah,
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: six to ten people per animal. Yeah, right, and then
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: we're talking about and they're not just in a summertime, right,
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: They're not just stripping the meat off. The argument was
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: they were um then cutting him into segments. They were
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: moving him across the landscape. Then it has brought a
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: hunter butcher over there had been like bullshit man the summertime, right,
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: Well that's yeah, what's the tooth eruption? And where they're
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: gonna be going bad? Quick, bad? I mean yeah, it's
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: not like you're gonna be um. You talked about looking
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: at the grizzly gnawing on the skull. Imagine what's going
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: to happen to the grizzlies and the wolves and everybody
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: else there when you've got eight hundad hearts. It's gonna
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: be whol like when a whale washes up on the
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: beach in Alaska, you know. And I realized they got
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: like thirteen polar bears. So it's gonna be a dangerous
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: place to be if you're you're a hunter and gathered family,
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: you're not gonna wait around there. So there are all
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: sorts of things. And then eventually, uh, we got in
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: the big equipment, the heavy equipment, and exavated some big
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: trenches back to where the cliff was supposedly because if
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: you know, again, you're always trying to evaluate the models
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: of Okay, it's not looking like a jump over a cliff,
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: but let's go to the base of the cliff and
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: see what's going on there. And what we found is, yeah,
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: there's a bedrock um cliff there. But you can follow
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: the buried soils um from where the bone bed is
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: back towards the cliff, and as they approached the cliff
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: they form a gentle surface. That cliff was already be
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: buried at the time the animals died. And just looking
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: at this like the sediment whatever the sediment lines, you're
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: you're reconstructing what the old land surface looking. So then
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: for a while, UM, the crew would joke about things
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: and well, maybe it isn't a bison jump, maybe it's
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: a bison stumble they were running down the hill, or
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: what about they got burned up. That's um, that's we
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: don't see um, and that's we And we talked about
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: taff On. I mean the things taff On I must
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: get excited about is research opportunities, like boy, a grass
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: fires killed a cow. Let's go look at it to
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: see what happens, to know what parts of the skelet
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: and how badly they get burned. We don't see any
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: of that kind of burning in the bone bed itself.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: And remind me to talk about burning in the bone
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: bed in a minute. And they couldn't have got stuck
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: in the mud. Now there's not you know, if you
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: get stick in the stuck in the mud. We've got
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: some sites like that and you find things like the
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: feet and the toes and the limbs down in the mud. Uh,
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: you know they were so damn get out and there
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: can be a foot and half difference between the elevations
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: of the feet and the rest of the body where
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: it finally comes to life. These are smeared across one
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: land surface. So lightning strike couldn't do that. Could maybe
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: if they're all that's one of our suggestions that is
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: potentially if they're um heard it, they're together, you know,
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: the one lightning strike could do it. What about when
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: tornadoes them not in tornado country young in Nebraska. We're
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: in northwestern Nebraska, so tornadoes could be possible and I
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: don't know they're there. Again, what things you wish for?
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: Wouldn't it be fun to find a hurt of cows
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: have been killed by a tornado. Well, I don't know
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: whether I'm sure they get killed, but um, in that
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: sort of number, they probably get killed one, two, three
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: at a time. Do that Does it aggregate them in
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: the tornado or does it scatter them across the landscape?
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Don't know? Um. You ask about fire, um, and we
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: don't see evidence of direct burning on the animals. But
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: they're down below where this cliff was and sort of
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: a swale next to a damp area where you might
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: aggregate it a prairie fires burning. And one of the
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: things that happens in fires when they burn over areas
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: like that is they'll often suck the oxygen out of
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: low lying areas, so they may have asphyxiated. So by
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: the time we got done at Hudson Man, the original
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: excavator was really sort of irritated at it um. And
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: we never said that it wasn't a kill site. Did he?
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: Did he double down? You know? I'm reading a book
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: by I read a book by an entomologist that's going
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: to come on the show named Justin Schmidt, and he
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: studies UH insect toxins. But he has a early in
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: his book, he has a thing he's pointing out like, uh,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: this is no offense to you. He says. The reason
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: all the great discoveries are made by young scientists is
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: because they don't give a shit about what everybody thinks.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: And then you come up with something, and then most
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: of them then spend the rest of their life trying
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: to defend their initial idea and encircle their initial idea
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: because they're really reluctant to be that they were wrong.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: Uh huh, and like that. That's like the Java sciences,
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: to not fall in love with the idea in the
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: first place, and to continually be trying to figure out
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: how you could be wrong. And again, that's why I
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: like the field of taffonomy, because that's sort of its goal.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: You're always asking that, well, we don't understand all the
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: things that create and every side I've dug um, you've
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: got sort of your textbook, what's you go about taffonomy on?
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: But then you realize that it's in a slightly different
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: situation where it is on the land surface. Um, you
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: know it's in shade, Is it in where snow drift forms?
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: Is it in an area where if we haven't studied
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: those taff on And you realize you need to go
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: back to the modern world or come to the modern
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: world and study those processes again to make sure that
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: you understand them. So you're continually in that cycle of
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: of saying, this is what we think we know, but
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: then yeah, but what about this. I think one of
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: the most embarrassing things that ever happened to me was
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: I was giving this sort of presentation years ago, soon
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: after I got married, and I had my wife, my
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: arm around my new wife, and I said something to
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: the crowd like yeah and I embrace ignorance. Um. That
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: didn't go over very well, because the point is, you know,
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: if you really want to learn something, step one is
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: to say yeah, I don't know that, or what are
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: the alternatives. So in the Hudson Man case, UH, we
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: came away from it saying, yeah, these animals died, and
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: there's indications that humans were in the area, maybe soon after,
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: maybe a little after. But whether it's a functional association,
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: we can't say for sure, because there's always always unexplained
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: um patterns that may not have anything to do with
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: a kill event. So we took a perfectly good story
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: and turned it into uh, who knows, which means there's
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: it opens the door for new research. I I always yeah,
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: like it's just as interesting now. I always root for
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: everything to be a kill site, human kill site. We
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: do because that's really that's fun. That's but it is.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: It does bring up like, if not that, what then
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: how does eight eight? Like if you're seeing eight hundred
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: or something in the field, that's a lot of that's
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: a lot of lot of big animals. But you look
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: at um, you know, go to the museum Rockies here, Um,
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: there's big piles of dead dinosaurs in single bone beds.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: They don't always occur as one to their sites where
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: there's in the tens to twenties to thirty animals in
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: the same place. Um, And they make a good another
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: good control to study if you can't in that case
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: say well it's a human kill site. Something. There are
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: processes that killed large groups of animals over and over
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: again without having humans on the scene. So what's your
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: best guests Like, let's I know you guys don't like
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: to do this in your business, but what's your like
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: why are there seven whatever? Like, why are those as
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: it projectile points or scrapers or projectile points? There's some
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: scrape what are they there? For they could have if
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: the animals died. Humans could you know, we're great scavengers
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: as well as good hunters. Um they also it's by
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: a spring, there's and I said there were points both
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: in the bones below the bones above the bones hell.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: They could have come there twenty years later and camp
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: next to that spring where most of the bison were
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: completely buried. There's lots of ways you can get close
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: associations and and settlements across landscapes without being It could
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: have just been a good hunting spots there. And yeah,
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: I saw eight hundred to something. I'd probably come back
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: and check it a year later, going on a lot
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: of the planes. Any place where there's a water source
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: and there's a spring right there is going to be
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: one of your hunting locations over and over and over again. Yeah,
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm sure you've been to the labraa target
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: l A. Yeah, like there you have. I don't know,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, I like hundreds and hundreds hund FireWolves and
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: that whole Yeah, there's like, yeah, there's a wall of
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: like forty some diables that came out of that thing.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: But it was active. It was like collecting carcasses over
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: so much time I remember seeing that. I remember like
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: someone was postulate and like there's so many bones, Like
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: what was going on here? How could there be so
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: many bones? When someone said, like one event in that vicinity,
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: one event per decade, would account for all of these bones.
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: Meaning a mammoth calf get stuck in the tar, uh,
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: saber tooth or some scavenger goes out to eat it
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: get stuck in the tar, A few birds come down
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: to scavenge, they get stuck in the tar. If that
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: happens every decade over the whatever that that thing is
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: collecting things. When it's all said and done, you open
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: it up and it looks like like it looks like
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: a got dumped out inside there, you know. But it's
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: just like a gradual But but the eight D and
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: one pile is so like intriguing, Yeah, it is, especially
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: when you see like like if you were to look
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: at eight hundred cattle in a pasture sunk, that's gonna
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: be you know, like I say, almost a football field
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: full of dead animals. Oh man, the stanch, Oh yeah,
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: the stanch. But again, um and one of the things
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: that I I don't like to call bone piles like
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: that kill sites because even if we can demonstrate unambiguously
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: that people kill them, if you really want to take
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: full advantage research advantage of them, you can also study
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: them as um other predator and scavenger food sources, and
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: how does those kill sites produced by humans feed into
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: the ecology of the other scavengers in the environment. So
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: you can really start trying to reconstruct an ecology of
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: the area if you approach the site, not just by
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: trying to learn about people. Yeah, you know that that
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: that's the thing that when I was talking about Librey,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: I forgot what the point I was going to get at.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: When you look through the Hudson mang do you find
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: were there all kinds of like wolf bones and bare
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: bones mixed in, like stuff that had gotten killed while
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: they're in their scavenge And no, but there are um
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: bones that have the tooth marks of the scavenger. So
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: unlike LaBrea, where if you're a scavenger that's trying to
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: get that tasty, dead, smelly, rotting thing and you fall
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: into the tar and you get trapped yourself here, there
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: wasn't that natural trap just come and eat your fill,
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: or unless a grizzly came and you were a coy
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: out and it killed you too. Potentially within a few
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: months all the meat was gone. Yeah. Uh, so we
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: study you know, talked about taffono me and all the
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: meats gone. We study things like, um, what happens through
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: times as maggots consumed carcasses and and what parts can
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: get and you see things. Well, one of the really
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: fun patterns at Hudson Man that we see, um, the kneecaps,
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: the patela's are often in place at the lower end
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: of the femur and the proxy. You know, they're right
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: there where they belong in the skeleton. How does that
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: happen even though they lay in loose ones everything rob
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: It's a way. Yeah, but think if you've watched an
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: animal rod um and I've spent more time doing that
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: than it's probably healthy. Um. The lower legs up through
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: at least the knee. When the meat rots away, the
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: hide often contracts and holds it down around it. So
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: seeing things like a kneecap in place on a carcass
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: that you found in an archaeological site is probably a
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: pretty good indicator that that animal wasn't skinned. Oh so,
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: if it wasn't skinned, it's really hard to get to
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: the meat because it could have been in case, it
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: could have been into the dirt by the time, yeah,
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: by the time that the because of your very burying
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: incrementally that dried hide around. It's almost like armor, you know,
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: it's it's raw hide. It's tougher than hell, and it's
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: going to hold that in place through a long period
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: of time on on some of those did you see
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: that thing recently came out? This is over in Europe.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: I can't remember what country is in where they found
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: where guys have been stashing uh, not even like shank
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: like the meat used to make just forearms, like the
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: like the station those in a cave. Yeah, or what
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: they found was bones in a cave and they were
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: wondering why they had to scrape the hide off them
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: because instead of just stripping it off, and someone postulated
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: that they dried and they were throwing them in the cave.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: That they always threw the from the hoof to the
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: knee in a cave just a story in there, and
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: later they'd go and scrape it and you've got to
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: scare the dry hide off to get the mary because
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: they're like, why else would they need to have scraped
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: knife that away when on a fresh amimy you just
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: back yeah, like a like a banana. And that's if
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: you'd read that study. It's kind of that's sort of
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: taking Taffenen taff onomy to an extreme. I don't think
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: i'd do this, and that they were saying, boy, after
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: a week or so, it starts to taste a little rank.
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: They were actually tasting it themselves. The marrow starts to
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: taste wheat rank after week. One of the things that
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: I had a student who was a biochemist a few
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: years ago, and I had another student that was an archaeologist,
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: and we were watching carcasses rot and he started questioning
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: whether if you've seen a big carcass rot during the
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: middle of the summer and the maggots infested, they start
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: piling out, you could collect quarts of maggots. And he's saying, well,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: I wonder if people would eat those maggots. You know,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: they're probably little fatty. I'm sure they're good for you. Well,
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: what what the student who was the biochemist did. We
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: started collecting tissue samples from carcasses that died during the
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: winter and found out that once the magots infested and
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: throughout the winter that it would be okay to eat.
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: When the maggots infested, they start bringing in a bunch
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: of other toxins, so the toxicity of the meat once
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: it's maggot infested goes up. Really, so probably the maggot
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: harvesters of the high Plains wouldn't be a very very
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: good subsistent strategy. You know, it's a good taffonomy story
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: for you. Uh. One time my old man um when
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: we were kids, my dad like hit a buck with
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: his bow and he killed it quick, but we never
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: found it. We didn't realize it when it ran into
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: a corn field, and we later realized we must have
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: stumbled it over ten times without finding it. But he
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: hit it like the arrow came down high straight below
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: puncture along but didn't make an exit hole. So it
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: runs off and we don't know how, but we missed it.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: I mean we were like probably had have walked over
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: in a field, but we would go check on it later.
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: And one time we're out there rabbit hunting and we
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: go to check on you know, Dad's dead deer because
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: by the time he found it was rotten um and
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: there's a hole in its ribs. There's a hole in
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: its side, and I peered down in that hole and
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: there's a possum living in there, and actually hauled him
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: out by the tail. But you can imagine if like
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: that possum would have died and then it gets the case.
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: It looked like it was like a fetus. This was
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: the deer's last meal. Yeah, like no one would ever
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: be like, oh, you know, it probably haven't a possum
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: crawled in there and died. You know, this wouldn't be
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: what came to mind. Uh. You know, there's a site
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: in Colorado. I don't hopefully I can explain enough. You
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about. There's a site in Colorado
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: where there's a lot of debate about whether it was
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: a mammoth kill site or whether it was a spot
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: that a few mammoths got washed up in a gravel bar.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: You know what I'm talking about. North I think it's
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: like between Denver and Fort Collins and there the dance site,
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: the one out by Greeley. Maybe what's the dance site.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: It's um one of the It's like one where people
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: can't tell if they died or got killed. It was
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: the site where it was first excavated with mammoths and
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: points that were eventually called Clovis Sitte points before the
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: Clovis site was and the association wasn't really established, and
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: it was so that might be the one, but it
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: was like the idea was here. Let me tell you
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: the one last detail. Remember it was the people that
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: are arguing there was a kill site. We're arguing that
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: somehow they were crossing a river and then going and
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: you know, how do you get like a little cut
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: You'll have a high bluff or a high cut bank,
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: but now you find like a little gap, like a
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: little washout, and animals will use that to get through
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: the thing. There was the idea that they had somehow
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: ambushed these mammoths coming up through that thinking it was
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: a good spot to get them, and so over time
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: maybe they had killed a couple there. But then someone
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: later was like, how how do we know it's is
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: not a place where carcasses would wash up on the
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: beach or whatever. I'm not wish I could do a
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: better job. I'm not familiar with that one, but I
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: am familiar with a site where that was a question.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: We um there's a site in Wyoming near Wherland, Wyoming
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: called the Colby Mammoth site. I've heard of that where
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: there's um seven mammoths and a lot of the bones
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: occur in two piles. And when George Frison originally excavated
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: and reported on the site in Science magazine, he hypothesized
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: that those piles were areas where people killed mammoths or
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: scavenged mammoths and then taking some of the bones and
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: piled over the meat that was left there, packed snow
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: and stuff in to put it into sort of freezing
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: um storage to where he'd come back later. So he
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: saw the bone piles as being meat caches, and he
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: published that in Science magazine, you know, one of the
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: top scientific journals in the world, as being this Science
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: and Nature. Yeah, published it in Science um as being
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: a paloon Indian meat cash. And one of their responses
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: to it was and they were in the bottom of
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: an arroyo where the piles were. One of the responses
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: to it, by a fairly well respected researcher was sort of, well, George,
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: how do you know that those piles aren't just like
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: what you're talking about sort of the mammoth bone pile
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: equivalent of driftwood. If you've got water moving down a
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: winding arroyo, aren't bones going to accumulate in some areas
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: in big miles. And one of the things that I
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: really respect people like George prison Um about is rather
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: than taking that defensive position that you were um talking
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: about before, his response to say, well, yet could be
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: how do we figure that out? So he and I
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: um the university that was at the University of Wyoming,
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: and I was working on my PhD on collections there.
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: Um they had a mammoth skeleton or an elephant skeleton
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: in their bone comparative collection. So we took the elephant
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: skeleton out to one of the streams north of Laramie
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: where we could damn up the stream, lay the elephant
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: bones in the bottom of the stream, record their positions, UM,
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: release the water, record the current velocity, UM, damn up
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: the stream again, come back and measure which bones had
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: moved and how far they moved. And we did that
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: a number of times so that for each bone in
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: the elephant skeleton we could develop what we call a
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: fluvial transport index. The same stream will deposit rocks get
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: towards the headwaters. Big rocks you get down towards the mouth,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: and some bones light bones will float on while the
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: other role. So we developed this index of which bones
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: would be most likely to be transported by flowing water,
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: and then we went back to the Colby bone piles
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: to see if they matched um, that sort of transport profile,
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: and they didn't did not, So you can you can
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: take things like that, are these bones transported by water
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: or not? In any your next step is how do
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: we develop the methods to assess that? So what do
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: they think happen at what was the leading theory about
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: what happened at that side? I think we're still into
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: the prison's original interpretation of meat cash is probably most likely.
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: It looks like one of them may have been where
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: they did that, pile the stuff on and came back
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: later and opened it up and got the meat back. Uh.
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: Second one doesn't look like they ever did that. But again,
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: if you're highly mobile people across the landscape, UM, you're
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: probably gonna cash food wherever you can as a backup
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: strategy if things go wrong, and even the bone piles
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: and sites during the winter where they don't necessarily put
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: them in cash piles, you're gonna know that next spring,
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: if you're hungry, you can go back to that site
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: where you killed the fifty bison in December and it
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: might not be the tastiest stuff in the world, but
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: there's a food source there. So yeah, like if you
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: read uh, I always thought about Stephenson the articles Bloorer
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: when he was traveling in the Canadian Hierarchtic and he
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: was usually traveling with Intuit hunters did kill everything they
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: ran across and put it, they put in a pile
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: and keep going because and then they had in their
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: head just where all this stuff was. And I was
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: just we just interviewed another guests who just finished the
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: book about the Greely Polar Expedition, and yeah, every point
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: you just would go because that you're in your boat,
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: you just go and drop stuff every point because then
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: if you both say, create a sort of like travel
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: line that you knew you could rely on your bread
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: cry ms of safety, and they would and you'd leave cashes,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: and they'd always leave a note in there and a
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: container saying like there's this at this point, this at
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: this point, so that other people could find it and
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: go about sort of recovering these surplus food sources. That
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: you didn't want to have with you because it was
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: too vulnerable to have it with you. One of my professors,
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: Um Louis Binford, spent a lot of time with the
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: nunimut Xs to brow up by in the Brooks Range,
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: and they talked. He talked about how you could talk
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: to the old Nunimute and they could tell you where
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: things were cashed pretty much all over Alaska. They may
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: never have been there themselves, but you've been there, and
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: you left something in this little dry spot, and when
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: you came back to camp, you tell these things that
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: liked us would seem like really boring stories, like there's
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: three sticks of wood in this cave down by that river.
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: And so the greatest quote from that was he said
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: one of the one of his informants, said, you know,
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: lou every dead Eskimo, remember something he didn't pick up
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: and put in a cat when he should have. Yeah,
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: that's interesting. Yeah, Um, I mentioned you before. I think
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: it was before we started recording. I mentioned you, Mike
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: cons Yeah, he found a he you know, he when
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: he was doing his work up in the North Silpe
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: of the Brooks Range. They were looking for like the
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: goal would be that you'd find evidence of the very
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: first Americans that would you know, would have been in
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: western Alaska after crossing from Siberia. UM. But one of
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: the things he found was an old cash of trapping
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: equipment and Russian made a Russian made shotgun, very old.
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: You know that someone had whatever put it there and
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: figured it'd come back and never got back to it. Yeah,
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: but you know that that's UM. Today we think of
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: our lifestyles if we cash stuff in our closets, um,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: you know, when we put our winter clothes up and
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: get our summer clothes out. But if you're mobile across
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: the landscape, there's a lot of stuff that you don't
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: need all year long. You're gonna be cashing stuff for emergencies,
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: but you're also going to be cashing your summer gear
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: when you're going into your winter range, and you know,
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: you don't pack everything, so that a lot of the
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: archaeological record is not only stuff people lost intentionally, but
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: stuff you put up and may not get back to.
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: And so those are really spectacular if you can find them.
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: Have you ever found a mountain Man cash like they
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: used to make. No, there's been a few of those
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: have been recovered over the years beaver hides and yeah,
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: and you you read accounts of like where they dug
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: their cash bits and put the stuff in it and
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: then they couldn't get back because they got killed or
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: this that would be really fun to dig. Yeah, yeah,
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: like they had a way they could sort of make
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: a like a safe storage place for for traps and
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: dry beaver highs of those. I want to squeeze one
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: in before we leave the hunt, Hudson Man, didn't you
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: say it to be a game that one of the
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: reasons they thought that it was a kill site was
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: because of the way that the animals were cut up
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: and quartered. And so now that you think that that
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: wasn't the case, what's the explanation of that. Well, they
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: dead things fall apart, and if you were to look
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: down on the bone bed, it looks like just this
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: jumble of scattered bone. But then if you start, like
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: I mentioned before, recording dimensions of articular surfaces and stuff
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: like this, the things that look like they're totally random
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: are carcasses that have dispersed within a fairly small area. Yeah,
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: the bones aren't completely articulated, but if you were setting
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: on that it wasn't very like organized like butchering shoulders
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: over here hands. If all four of us were to
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: die in this room and be left to decay um
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: with the natural disperse, my femur might be over next year. Cranium.
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: That didn't mean a damn thing about Yeah, and and
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: they must you got whacked in the head with my
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: femer would be sort of that. Yeah, alright, Hey, tell
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: us about what's going on with the I don't think
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: it's been fully published yet, but a lot of people
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: have been sending me the articles, and I've been reading
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: everything I can find about the what might be you're
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: you're probably gonna go down there and has killed the
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: whole thing. But what might be mammoth traps north of
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: Mexico City, uh tilte Pec mammoth tilte Pec two mammoth site. Um.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: This is a new thing, right, it's um. Yeah, they've
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: been working there for about ten months. It's the second
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: mammoth that was discovered there. And m December of two
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: thousand and fifteen, they're putting a water pipeline about two
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: kilometers north where this recent find was and they found
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: a nearly complete mammoth skeleton. No, no, I'm talking about
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah there's one they're digging. Yeah, this is that got
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: their their antenna's up for mammoths might be in this area.
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: And they they reconstructed that when they built a hall
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: of mammoths and use them to dispose. Yeah, okay, I
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: don't know what happened that one um at the time.
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: Their story was it got bogged in the swampy ground
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: next to a lake. And so they were putting in
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: a new landfill, Reese digging the big pit for the landfill,
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: and they started noticing mammoth bones coming out and they
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: were they were intentionally looking for them because of this
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: previous fine, so they were cutting into the lake sediments
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: and they thought, well, we found mammoths here before, we
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: should look at that. And sure enough they started seeing
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: mammoth bones and this is this a wooly mammoth. It's
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: a Colombian man was bigger than bigger. Pretty impressive credit.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: So they're more of a southerly warmer climate man. Yeah.
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: So um, they were fortunate that they had people on
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: site to look for the mammothbones. Uh. They after they
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: were exposed in the cut bank there, they could go
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: in and do some excavations and they uncovered remarkable sets
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: of mammoth bones. I think the wellness I've been reading
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: through the press release that they put out last week. Um,
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: the things that I can say about the site that
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: are observations that are facts are that their salvage excavations
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: uncovered bones. Most of them were mammoths, but there was
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: also a couple of camel bones, there was a horse tooth.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: And they're deposited in finally bedded deposits. Some of them
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: are clay layers and some of them are volcanic ash layers.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: And those finally bedded deposits are in set into older
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: lake deposits. So that's what we know about it. That's
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: what from my reading of it I was take away
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: as observations from that. The whole set of interpretations that
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: kind of roll out in the press release are that
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: there were fourteen mammoths there, that they were found in
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: two large excavated pits, that there were systematic, regular hunting
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: of them, that it was intensive use of the mammoths
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: that were there. For example, we say, uh, the mandibles
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: the jawbones are turned upside down, so obviously they were
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: cutting the tongues out of the mandibles are upside downs. No,
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: that's what I was curious about. Uh, no bone because
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: the press is even being like and their tongues wounds
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: twelve kilo tongues, and they would have been yeah, just
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: because and again, what's the likelihood that if you're laying
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: on the ground your jaw bones is going to turn
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: this way as opposed to you know, it's fun fun.
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: So that was just because it was upside down. It
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: was just again someone getting the tongue. Easy access to
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: the tongue from the bottom. You know, when you cut
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: into a bison to get its tongue out, if it's
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: if it's fresh, you can open up and get the
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: tongue out. But even when I cut tongues out of stuff,
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: I can't tell you what way I leave the head. No,
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: and the way you leave it stuck. So let's leave
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: the tongues for a minute. Um. The bones weren't fully
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: articulated in these new areas. Again, they were scattered, like
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: we talked about it, Hudson may um. So that's obvious.
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: Butchering um. They said that they found well, uh in
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: one area they found six right scapulus um no left
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: scapulus shoulder blades, so obviously people must have taken the
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: left scapulus. Well, that's pretty good. Let me that's the
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: tasty one. Let me give you, let me give you
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: one bad taphonomic joke, and then um we'll get back
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: to the real world. UM. I would say it's anomalist
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: to find all, right, scapulus because we usually find the
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: scapulus from the other side, because if they weren't left, tada,
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't find them. That's good, that's um. So the
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: whole series of things there, let's go back to sort
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: of down the list for well, okay, yeah, because there's
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: a there's one that they felt was laid out ceremonially
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: because they had been injured in the past. Well, it's
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: it's tusk had been broken in the past and um,
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: and they honored it by laying it out ceremonial. They
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: moved its scapulus or its pelvis up by its head.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: There was another um uh tusk from another animal is
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: placed around it. It's sort of one of those classic
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: examples of there's patterns and the piles of these bones,
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: and the only explanation that's grasp at is humans must
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: have done it. So I think it's a fabulous site. Um.
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: Every one of their sort of um things that they've interpreted.
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: I see his research questions rather than answers of it's
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: a stuff the press. Well, the press do, but I
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: think in this case, and I don't want to sound
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: derogatory about this, the excavators may have as well, because think,
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: if you're faced with this amazing quantity of mammoth bones
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: in an area where people are digging a landfill, and
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: you know it's an important research thing, and you go
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: to the press, you're gonna want to make it sound
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: as important as possible to be sure it doesn't get destroyed.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: I would do that, you know, Um, here's here's this
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: abulous site and you're talking. You've got to make it
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: a site that is worthy of preservation and further research
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: so that next time something's found. So I'm not saying
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: they necessarily did that, but in the back of if
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: I were faced with a pile of mammoth bones that
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: and pressing, I'd be really worried about the preservation of
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: them in future areas of the site and trying to
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: get everything I could for preservation and protection and funding
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: and start running the coolest version to start running the
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: coolest could maybe be true. So I don't think at
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: present and on this site, there's no scientific publication associated
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: with it. There's one sometime, but right now it's one
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: like four page press release that every one of the
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: newspaper articles have been taking this one press release and
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: spending it a little different. Would you would you welcome
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: an opportunity to go down there and have a look.
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: I'm retired and I would love to, But to do
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: a site like that effectively need somebody with a lot
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: of energy and a lot of time. It'd be Oh,
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: I'd love to look at it. I would be on
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: a plane in a minute just to go drool on
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: a site like that. Um, just because as they sort
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: of mentioned in some of the press releases, and this
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: is where I get to like an Hudson Man and
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: a lot of others in terms of really understanding the
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: past of these landscapes we live on. At one level,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: it doesn't matter whether it's a human kill site or not.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: Understanding the past ecology and life ways of the mammoths
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: in that environment that we know that in some instances,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: in what fourteen fifteen sites, humans were preying on mammoths
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: directly understanding the biology and the coology of those mammoths
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: is key. So regardless of whether the site has human involvement,
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: it's a key site. Are they finding human are they
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: finding artifacts? Report no stone tools from it, which again
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: is sort of surprising. If you've got fourteen mammoths and
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: you never once re sharpen a stone tools disposable to
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: um and you never lose one, you know, think about
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: all the huge piles of guts and gore and just
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: bloody stuff that you're gonna be dropping tools and losing.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: How could you not lose something? So I'm buzz killing.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: I'm skeptical about the site. Um. And another thing that
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: I'm skeptical about is that they're excavated pits. Uh. They
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: talk about the site six deep holes. Oh my kid.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: I just sold my kid this morning about this. They
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: would tell me how they actually do it. He says,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: they put sharp sticks in the bottom. I don't know
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: where you got that you do that? Um? The geology, well,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: they don't talk about the geology of the site. They
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: I know it's radio So I brought in some good pictures. Um,
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: this is what the site looks like. There's a pile
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: of bones. You can see there's sentiments here and then
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: right over here. This is the sort of drop off
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: there is are indeed strop steep drop offs adjacent to
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: the bone. They think that natural. They think that's the
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: cut that was at looks like no man like a ledge,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: like a like a imagine a six ft high cut bank. Well,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: they talk cut bank real high potential. They talk about
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: in the article that at the time the site was forming,
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: the lake that it was forming around was its level
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: was dropping. It was drying up. So as a light
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: level is dropping, any water that's running into it is
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: going to cut in channels into it. So first they're
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: gonna have to tell me that these aren't erosional channels
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: cutting into that lower light level. UM jumping to the
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: conclusion that you've got um more recent sediments, UM in
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: older sediments, and the only way that can happen as
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: humans digging a hole. Uh, that's a that's quite elite.
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: We've all eaten a lot of the bison kill sites.
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: We found find that our inner ryos have the same
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: sort of sedimentation old drainage. Bison killed in the bottom
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: of it, sediment builds up over it. People didn't dig
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: the drainage. Um, I don't know. The pits is a
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: stretch for me. Um, just to get You were talking
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: earlier about how many people it would take to butcher
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: eight hundred bison. How many people is it gonna take
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: to dig a what is it? Eighty long by wide
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: hole two deep? Um, you know that's half the size
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: of a football. That's some Egyptian grade business. Was gonna Yeah,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: and um, why are you going to invest that much
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: labor where you're not out hunting in an environment with
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: that supposedly fairly rich in mammoths. Yeah, it's gonna You're
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: gonna be sure you're gonna get them if they're right there.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: But we talked about one of the things that I've
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: been worrying about recently a lot. Well, let me ask
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: stop from it. Why did you not like, okay, when
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: this comes out? Why do you not right so it
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: comes I was reported in the New York Times, why
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: do you not write a letter? Do you just waste
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: your time? Like? Why did you not write a letter
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: to the editor saying like here a minute and kind
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: of like layout, Why do you let the why why
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: did why do you guys let the whole thing run
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: and catch on fire, and guys like me telling their
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: kids all about it. Good question, Um preservation, like he said, well,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: um laziness. Um uh, you know that it's not my problem.
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: I'm retired. Um. Um, we've heard these stories. I don't
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: good questions. It doesn't burn you up at this stage.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: It sort of runs off the back. We've heard that
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: over and over and over and over and over again. Um.
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: You often get this buzz of of press and then
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: you start looking at the story a little deeper and
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: you find out, well, it's not that simple. I find
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: that's the thing is because I like to follow anthropology.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: It is like I do find that the stories generally
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: get less interested with the exception of the woman's skull
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: they found out in the Yuktahan underwater. Oh, I'm not
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: familiar with that. Better. I thought that one got better.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: It's the old I mean, I think it was one
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: of the one of the oldest pieces of human remains
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: in the New World. And how did it get better?
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: Oh because they found all the stuff that it was with. Yeah,
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: all the other bones that were down in there, and
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: and um, you know, like there was they were able
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: to term as like a young woman and like injuries
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: and yeah, and stuff that was just wanted being good.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: And then that dude that they've had seven thousand ye
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: old dude they found in Europe, the Iceman. Yeah, that story.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: You know, here's something that's really interesting about Aussie that's
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: not related to Ausi at all. Uh but he's about
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: three thousand years old, four thousand years killed by an arrow.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: Well it died, but yeah he has it was carrying
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: arrow in them and there they can reconstruct his diet
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: based on what's in his stomach. They were looking at
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: the lichens that were growing just amazing tricked out boots.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: They had three different kinds of hides on him and stuff.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: The fun thing right here, um, in this area of
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: the world to know about is the oldest article artifact
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: from an ice patch anywhere in the world comes from
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: the Beartooth Mountains here. Yeah, that's a ten thousand years old,
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: so about three times the age of Aussy. Really is
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: something that Yeah, there's uh add a laddle a dark
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: shaft researcher here in Bozeman. Craig Lee founded a few
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: years ago radiocarbon dated He's been working on these high
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: elevation ice patches that are melting out and exposing the
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: stuff that was trapped in. So right here, yeah, right,
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: But I remember the guy there was a dude. I
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: remember two things like this in Canada. But I know
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: something fun of the old birch, I believe, but don't
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: quote me. It was still armed. No, it's just got
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: the shaft and the point is not it and it's
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: kind of warped from being it's got the marks on it,
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: and it's got the notch where the point would have
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: went in it was it was a decorative at all. Well,
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: it has a couple of marks on it that he
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: thinks maybe ownership marks. If you know, if you've got
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: a dart and several darts end up in an animal
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: and you want to say, well my dart got it. No,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: that's my dart, So you do occasionally put marks on
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: it to be like everybody uses different fletching and the arrows. Yeah, ship,
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: So I don't know, just I like to bring that
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: up just because we start talking about all the fabulous stuff.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: And I do a lot of work with kids. Um
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: and I grew up in a small town called Matici, Wyoming,
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: where you think you're in the back of nowhere, and
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: there's nothing neat going on there. So when I work
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: with kids in this area, I try and bring up
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: things like that, did you know the oldest one of
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: those in the world comes from right here in the
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: backyard I find people. I was telling someone this morning
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: about how you know where Wilsol is? I mean, drive there,
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: you know, be there in time for lunch. For a
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: long time. That was the oldest human remains and new
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: roles oft. Yeah, a little boy named a zik one. Yeah,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: so as I write down the road, it's picture. Uh,
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: let me lay at like a bigger idea, a bigger
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: notion on you. Do you feel that? Um? Do you
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: feel that? For a while, we really had this idea
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: that early humans, that the earliest Americans, the first Americans,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: where he's hard hitting, very successful, big game hunters, and
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: they're going around slam mammoths left and right, killing all
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: kinds of big stuff, wiping animals off to you know,
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: wiping all the mega faun off the face of the earth. Um.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: And then my like, like my my casual observational following
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: of anthropology is that that narrative has become disrupted and
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: that it's like they were eating lots of other stuff. Um,
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: places that we thought they'd killed them, they weren't actually
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: killing them. They had a lot of clams, they ate
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 1: a lot of turtles, they had a lot of seeds
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: and nuts and yeah maybe now and then they got
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: lucky and found a crippled up mammoth and killed it
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: and ate it. Like like, where do you sit on that?
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: On the extremes? And I know that this stuff bounces
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: in extremes, right, it'd be like all they was mammoth
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: and someone's gonna probably counter that with, yeah, they're all
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: vegan and in somewhere, right, how do you feel about
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: do you think that that's true, that that flow of
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: that perception is going through a change, and where do
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: you what version is? Right? Okay you um prefas that
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: was saying you wanted to look at a little bigger,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: sort of broader question. And I agree with that sort
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: of perspective entirely, and um, for years I was fascinated
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: with the peopling of America's that was one of those
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: things that just that's why I looked at these early
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: kill sites and mammoth sites and bison sized try and
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: understand you know why, because it is the most fascinating
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: thing in the universe. Oh and it's um like playing this,
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: it's not even debatable, it's not even a debatable point.
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: And excavating them is those It's just like playing this
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: wonderful game of pickup sticks. It's just the most fun
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: you can have doing So I was fascinated by it,
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: and in the last twenty years I become much less
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: fascinated with the peopling of the America's question because that
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: isn't the question. The question is why did we leave Africa?
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: The people in America's is we ended up everywhere in
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: the globe. We people the planet. Yeah, we're the biggest
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: invasive species, so because of people everywhere. So why is
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: it that we started expanding out of Africa in the
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: first place? And why do you move away from home? Curious? Curious,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: But there's also I think, getting back to the specifics
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: of your question. We're working on a site in northwestern
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: Ethiopia at about seventy thousand years of age, trying to
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 1: answer that question of what was going on with humans
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: in terms of our ecology right before we left African
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: expanded into the rest of the world, and traditionally, when
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: people have looked at human evolution and human movement into Europe,
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: just like in the People of America's they focused on
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: that big game hunter. You know that we can expand
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: because we're the apex predator into every environment we go into.
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: One of the things we're seeing on our seventy thousand
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: year old Middlestone age site on the tributaries of the
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: Blue Nile is that it's um northwestern Ethiopia. UM So
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: right around the time when we think that like anatomically
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: with the anatomically modern human split, right before we started
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: that diaspora, And what we're seeing is, yeah, there's a
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: few big game animals there, but there's also every other
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: damn thing that crawled, swam, wiggled, walked um. I think
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: one of the things that makes us effective is not
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: the big game hunting per se, but that we are
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: just so plastic in our diet. We are the classic omnivores,
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: which means that you can move into any environment out
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: there and you're gonna find something to eat. Julie, I've
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: just heard the other day the eight I think it's
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: eighties some percent of the animals on the planet are carnivorous.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: It's the dominant form because you've got to go in
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: like all the fish and stuff. Yeah, it's the dominant,
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: the dominant way to be. So if you conivores or
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: a small minority which which gives you, that opens up
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: all those other niches. So I think the people of
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: the America's that the answer to the people in of
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: the America's um. The timing we still don't have down,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: but it's that we're just flexible and what we can
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: eat and what we can do. And when you plug
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: that into like we left because we could. We left
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: because we could and we had um uh. If you
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: can eat anything, you can go any damn where you want.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: You know, as you said, you plug in curiosity to
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: that you plug in even marginal population growth to where
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: if um, oldest kid, you know, why don't you go
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: over in that next valley? Like not like not propelled
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: by the need to go kill thousand pounds, because that
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: constantly ning out of thousand pound mammals that might sometimes
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: pull you, but um at other times. That One of
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: the things we're seeing along the Blue Nile is that
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: the tributary we're on is a seasonal river. It has
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: you know, a hundred meters wide twenty deep during the
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: rainy season, but then during the dry season it ends
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: up into these little puddles, and those little puddles are
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: where the game's attracted to. You can walk out into
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: those puddles and you pick up um meter long catfish. Um.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: You know, there's just so the dry seasons and this
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: run's countered to the ways and it's yeah, but in
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: the past, there no we well, we've we fish to
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: collect the fish, to bury them in the ground, to
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: collect their bones put into our comparative collection. The locals
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: give give us that sort of luck if you're doing
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: what with that? Um, Like, this guy's got it all wrong.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: But anyway, it's looking like in terms of resource predictability
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: in the past, models of when people left Africa suggested
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: we did it during the wetter phases of where you
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: can make it through the Sahara and down along the
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: Nile Valley. That obviously you're gonna do it when it's wetter.
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: But what we're seeing on this side is when it's
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: during the rainy seasons and during the high moisture season
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: is a really tough time to get away because the
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: game's dispersed. Uh, it's tough to fish in the rivers.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: You can't get the mollish, you can't get the fish.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: But the dry seasons are where the resources become predictable
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: because they're around those few remaining water holes, and so
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: you could move from water hole to water hole to
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: water hole around these small resources rather than the bit,
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: you know, following the big game. You're following the catfish
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: and the mollusk from one water hole like pearls on
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: a string down the river. It's just gonna suck you
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: down the river draining during the time of year when
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: you know, again we've thought of it in the past,
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: you're not gonna be out there in the middle desert
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: during the dry season. It might make it the most predictable,
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: the most likely. Not only the small stuff, but if
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: there's game animals in the area, they're gonna be coming
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: there to water. So you're gonna know that several times
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: a day there's gonna be game animals there as well.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: You know. Uh. We've been fortunate enough to travel a
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: little bit on rivers down in South America with Amerindians,
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: and they really like the dry season because the fishing
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: is phenomenal, and they always thought about when the dry
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: season dry seas dry season, they like it. They like
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: the dry season to travel because everything gets concentrated and
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: the depole wet season it's it's muddy and it's awful.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: It's terrible and you set around in your get rained
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: on and it's miserable. Yeah. The only thing that like
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: that they talked about the only thing like about the
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: wet season is if it gets so wet that you
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: have small little hills that become like refuge you and everything,
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: and you can go there and you can go there
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: and get a lot of You can go there and
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: animals will have to get up on those and then
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: you just pull up and kill them. That's fun. That's
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: the flip side of our dry season. You know, there's
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: there's two times a year when you've got these these
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: sort of landscape scale grocery stores because everything's there there,
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: your big costco. Yeah, they talk about it. You go
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: out if it gets like that, they would go out
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: in their boats and it's cleaning exactly where where everybody
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: likes to hang out. But yeah, they always talk about
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: the dry season being when you want to fish. Yeah. Um,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: so what's your like, uh, what's your theory on the
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, like where do you stand on the blitz
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: the blitz creak hypothesis idea in North America the humans
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: that that that humans came in, I mean just the
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: ideas of popular and seven and maintained remain popular for
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: a while. Humans came in and killed everything and that's
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: why the mammoths are gone because people killed him in
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: an them all? Are you are? Do you sort of
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: go against the grain on that? Or I don't know, Well,
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: what what is the grain on that now? I think
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: the grain on it now? Is this bullshit? I think
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: I would say that the scholarly consensus. Let's let's go
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: back to you know, we've been talking about Hudson Man.
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: We left that story with killing might be one potential
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: of it. Um when you look at plis the scene extinctions,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that having a new novel predator on the
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: scene had something to do with it. But if you've
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: got a climate change, if you've got vegetation change, if
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: you've got water source change, if you've got maybe new
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: diseases on the scene, it's hard to say which one
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: of them is the the killing stroke that. Uh, I
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: don't think you can say that humans had nothing to
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: do with it. Anyway you could. You know, you can't
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: put wolves back into Yellowstone and Novel Predator and say
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: they don't have something to do with game population numbers.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: So humans had something to do with it. But I
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: don't think the blitz Creek model. I think it's too simplistic.
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: I think it's um goes back to where we started.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: It falls back to that if there's a pattern all
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: these animals dying within a couple hundred year period, we
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: must have done it, because nothing else creates patterns. Uh,
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: here's no one for you. I was saying. I was
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: saying to someone the other day, their day, Yanni was there.
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: We were out doing a little arrowheadhunting on a buddy's
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: ranch because there was a spot where there's like a hill.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: He's got a barn up above his barn, there's a
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: little Benjy hill right above a creek, and there's sort
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: of this little erosion line that kind of marches its
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: way up the hill. And so one of the guys
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: out there that works on the ranch was saying, you
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: know a cool place to look is every year I'll
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: go up and look at that little erosion line. You'll
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: find a lot of flakes stone flakes. Um. And we
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: went up there and had to look around and found
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: a bunch of stone flakes and found one little small
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: little um. I mean like a little point the tip
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: was missing, but a little point the size of your thumbnail. Uh.
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: I was explaining to everybody, I don't know if you're needed.
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: If he wasn't ear shot, but I was because he
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: was off looking around too. I was explaining every like man,
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: all the low hanging fruits gone. And I was saying,
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: like you read about arrowhead hunting in like the thirties,
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: because for a long time, no one gave it, no,
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: no one cared like he's no one picked it up.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: Then all a sudden it became interesting. And then you
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: got all these guys like sheep herders from the thirties
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: and forties that would fill five gallon buckets full of
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: arrowheads and now saying there's nothing left. But before we
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: started our recording conversation here, you were talking about the
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: kind of like stunning amount of sights you're still able
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: to identify when you go out looking. Um. Touch on that, like,
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: I guess like different avenues of approach that I would
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: like you to take would be one how like like,
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: how much stuff is out there? Do you agree that
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: all the everything's been picked over and it's all gone? Now?
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: Have we not even scratched the surface on human old
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: human sights? You just opened up a whole warring of
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: rabbit holes. I'm trying to which one to go down.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: Um okay, let me A lot of a lot of
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: areas have been very heavily picked over, which from an
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: archaeological perspective is just devastating, which means you can find
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: an archaeological site, there will be a few flakes there,
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: and all you can say about it is people were
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: here sometime in the last thirteen thousand years, which we
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: knew before that when it was just like little chips. Yeah. Uh,
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: if the points are there, those are like like we
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: talked about, well, like a GPS puts a time stamp
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 1: on every time you're in a spot. If you've got
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: a point there, you've got a time stamp of when
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: people were there. So unfortunately, for years I grew up
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: hunting arrowheads. My grandpa took me out. That's sort of
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: what got me fascinated with it. People have been collecting
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: arrowheads in particular, which means they've been sort of erasing
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: time from the surface archaeological record, because unless you know,
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: like we talked about an individual bone in a site,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: knowing where it comes from as a puzzle piece, unless
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: you know where each one of those points come from,
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: it just has turned into a nice little piece of
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: rock rather than being a piece of the puzzle. So, um, yeah,
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: things have been picked over real severely. Uh, and it
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: means it makes our job even harder as an archaeologist
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: to try and understand human use of landscapes. Um. I
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: was talking to you a little bit about the things
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: that we find in remote areas away from where people
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: get in the high elevations of wilderness area is and
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: we do find points there. Uh. Most of what we
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: find are the small flakes. I think I mentioned in
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: the last um twenty years, we found close to a
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: little over two hundred thousand artifacts. Most of them are
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: the small flakes. And even in the remote areas, you know,
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: twenty miles from a trailhead, back in the wilderness areas, um,
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: we've been picking up Folks have been picking up the
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 1: points for the last hundred to a hundred and fifty years.
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: So even back there there um sparse and the record
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: is terribly degraded, got quite a collection of points, and
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: his strategy almost hesitates say what his strategy is. His
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: strategy is high mountain passes. Uh huh, it's um we
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: get remind me to get back to that here in
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: a minute. Um. And I need to make this point.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: High mountain passes means they're on forest service property, which
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: means he's probably got enough points to make it a
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: real easy felony offense. At this point, it's it's you're
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: asking a lot of somebody, which means no, let me.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: Let me go down the UK. I we do catch
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: and release archaeology up there. We found these two thousand things,
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: and damn you're all of them are there? Did you
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: talk him in him on the surface. I'm not going
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: to damage to the archaeological record by changing. Yeah, but
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: then some other chimp's gonna find him. I I often
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: get that down in the bar if you don't pick
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: it up, some other s O B will and I say,
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: my aspiration has never been one of those s O
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: B s. It's we talked him all into the mass. Um.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: You jabbed it as close as where you found it.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: You just tucked it into the mall. We we um.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: We use high precision g N S S receivers. We
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: have its location down to within ten centimeters, so if
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: we tucked it in, we could come back and find it.
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: But when I work with students, I see the archaeological record.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 1: One of my jobs is to leave it as much
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: on changed by me as possible, so that they can
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: come back later and demonstrate why that old s ob
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: Todd was wrong in his interpretations. If I start pushing
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: things down into the sod that far into a bone
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: on accident, or if they come back and start excavating
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: that site and the elevation of that point is five
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: centimeters different than everything else on it, uh, they're going
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: to say, well, these are two different occupations. Todd was wrong.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: That point isn't associate. So my I see archaeology as
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: sort of like medicine. The first rule is do no harm,
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: leave it as impact as possible. See an old lady
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: drop her purse, drop her drop her driver's license or
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: credit card, right whatever she drops, five bucks would be like, yeah,
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna take that five bucks because now I wouldn't,
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: but someone else would Yeah, exactly. And one of the
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: things that I as I get older I had now
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: have grandchildren, and I'm waiting for the day they're the
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: oldest one is three now where I can start taking
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: them back onto the landscape and showing them where these
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: points are in their natural habitat. Not only does that
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: make me super grandpa, but it connects the people that
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: you know, get to find that point with that landscape
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: in a different way. It's not just you know, this
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: open hillside, it's that hillside where these where I found
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: that point. So I think just that leaving him there
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: has that opportunity to connect people with a landscape in
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: a way they don't otherwise. Half let's step back from
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: it further. Um. One of the reasons we don't see
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: or that we don't envision wilderness areas is having a
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: lot of archaeology. Is by time the fur trader fur
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: trappers came into the mountains, a lot of the Native
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: Americans have been living there, had been killed by disease,
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: or they've been pulled out of the mountains to the
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: trading post down in lower elevations. It was an underpopulated landscape,
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: and so we've brought that that notion into the present
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: of high mountain areas. The passes and they were depopulated,
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: or you don't think of them like that historically, you
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: think that people were up there hunting. Yeah, we see, um,
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 1: we see, I get that idea. We'll be way up
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: in the mountains, no wonder if they every woe have
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 1: left the river valleys and even gone up in there.
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: We see, Um, we've got tepee ring sites, habitation sites
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: at over eleven thousand feet. We've got sites UM in
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: the high elevation where we find um April to March
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: Mountain sheep fetuses. They were up there in late winter.
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: We find um sites where there's bison fetuses from near
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: full term back to just beginning at high ele but
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: they were there year round. And we see sites that
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: are not Let me get back to my people were
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: there much more than we think in the past. So
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: getting back to the idea of wilderness depopulated, no people,
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: we eradicated the people from there. And so if we're
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: back into that same area picking up the artifacts the
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: arrowheads that demonstrate their presence, we're taking that one step
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: further by erasing their physical presence. And that just bothers
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: me that I'm with you that approaches to Yeah, we've
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: already killed vast numbers of them, and now we're going
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: to erase their presence by removing those artifacts from that landscape.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: You know, I'm kinstantly trying to do self improvement, Like
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: I'm really I'm exploring this idea right now of if
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: you're hunting on a tag, like I'm sorry, if I
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: was a perfect person and I did this once this year,
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: If I was a perfect person, you're hunting on a
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: hunting tag and you wound something and you feel that
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: you wounded it mortally but didn't recovery, you would not
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: you tag. Right. What I'm gonna try to do is
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: like it would be very very difficult for me, but
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: to see a point for a half a point and
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: believe it that to be hard. One of the things
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: we do is we take um latex molding material in
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: that country with us. We find that perfect point, we
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 1: may make a mold of it, catching release, catching release,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: you put the point back, you come back, and you
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: can make a cast that mold. You've got that three
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: dimensional memory right there. And I thought, um, wouldn't it
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: be great if outfitters caught onto that that you could
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: take people into the back country and rather than having
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: that person collect that point once and take it back
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: with him and give you a little tip. If every
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: year we went back and a new hunter, you can say, well,
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: let's look around here for some arrowheads. They find that arrowhead,
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: you make a mold of it, and the arrowhead goes
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: back in its place, and the hunter gets to go
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: back home with his memory. It's another sort of you know,
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: catching release, but of an economic value to the folks
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: that do often encourage the picking him up. I don't
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: want to I don't want you to think that I'm
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: like ap plying you for trade secrets so that I
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: can go and ransact of federal lance. But uh, as
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: much as you're comfortable, like when you're scouting, just rolling
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: through the mountains, scouting around, do you sort of have
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: you developed a sense of like this would be a
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: good place to look or do you have to treat
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: everything equal because you didn't know what it used to
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: be like? Or are you looking for you look like
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: you see stone flakes, you kind of know your eye
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: knows what to see for tent rings? Like how do
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: you sort of navigate if you're if you're trying to
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: look through it through human eyes? Right? From thousands of
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: years ago, what are you imagining when you walk through
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: the mountains? Let me give you and I'm gonna try
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: and work through three answers to that. UM. A couple
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: of years ago, I was down talking to some elders
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: on the Shoshone reservation in Wyoming about this catch and
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: release archaeology and they like that idea. And then I
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: asked him another question, which was, you know, every time
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: I'm in the mountains and I put my tent down,
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: and I start looking around where my tent as I
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: start finding flakes, and um, do you think or would
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: you be more comfortable with my leaving my tent there?
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: Or should I move it off your ancestral site? And
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: the guy I was talking to you thought about it
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: for a minute and he said, you know, if I
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: didn't see those flakes, I'd move your damn tent because
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: something's wrong with that place. So UM, sort of answer
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: one is good places to camp in the past or
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: good places to camp today, And so that's that's one.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: Second one is you sort of as you're spending more time,
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: like with anything else, you start to get that innate
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: feel for places that should have stuff. You know, it
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: just has that ping to it the right sort of
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: stuff and so rely on that a little. But again,
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: since UM we always want to evaluate our ideas rather
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: than just saying I know where stuff is. I've been
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: working with UM several people who are sort of UH.
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: One of my former students, Paul Burnett, is sort of
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: a g I. S. Modeling whiz, and we've developed probability
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: models based on where we've looked in the past, on
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: where there's the greatest probability of finding things in present.
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: We've got about ten variables of landscape dimensions that go
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: into this linear probability model and gives a probability model
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: for every ten by ten mem area across the forest
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: of from zero to off you're going to find something? There?
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: Is there something no we're at it's well like to
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: give you an example of and we've reworked this model
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: a couple of times. UM. One of the variables when
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: we first hit the model of where we didn't find
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: things was in heavily timbered areas. So heavily timbered areas
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: UM low probability of finding stuff. And then we started
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: doing post fire archaeology and you know it's not a
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: big gee whiz. MR Science one of the reasons that
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: you don't see things in areas where there's that much
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: duff under the trees is you can't see the damn ground. Um.
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: So we start doing work after fires and UM we
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: start saying stuff there, so you throw the tree cover
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: out of your model. UM, And we keep revising the
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: model and we go out every year and work with it. Yeah.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: When I was, when I was spent that ten days
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: hunting narrowheads with guys that are really good, like anthropologists
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: on the north slope. Um. The first thing was open ground,
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: it's if it's if it's moss, don't waste your time.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: And the second thing was that they liked is like
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: great place of the camp. And they found that in
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: that country. Um, confluences of rivers and they make that
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 1: sort of v, that v of land where they come
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: together and you'd find like flat benches on a nice
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: little rise above those confluences, good visibility that you're out.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: You're camped on that bench, you can see the valleys
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: around you, pretty flat ground, access to water, and they
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 1: love those spots. Well, yeah, you've let that cat out
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: of the bag. Yes, Confluences is one of the ten
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: variables we look at still today though. Man, oh yeah
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: when you're floating down the rivers great place. Yeah yeah, Uh,
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: you're retired, but you still work. So what what makes
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: being retired? Like how to find retired? No, no pesky paycheck? Um,
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: that's retirement, Yeah, I I say, And it's sort of joking,
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: but it's sort of true. Is I no longer have
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: that damn job getting in the way of my work? Um?
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: So I spend Yeah, and being a university faculty member
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: means administrative stuff and you know, endless things that are
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: draining your time. Uh. And what drainer doesn't drain your
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: time is in a university professors, interactional students. I really
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: missed that. Um. But just all the other sort of
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: things have build up. So since I've retired and what
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: university did you retire from? Colorado State and Fort Collins. Um.
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: Since I've retired, I've spent two to three months most
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: winners working on the projects in Ethiopia like I'm talking
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: about talked about. Then that's what we do in our
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: winter and that's their dry season and in the summer
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: I've been focusing on and again this is when I retired.
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: I wanted to get away from the data intensive things
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: like bison bone bit. I wanted to retire, and I thought,
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: what I'd really like to do in retirement is go
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: backpacking in the mountains, and so I decided to start
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: focusing on high elevation archaeology with this notion in the
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: back of my head that I'm not going to find
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: much and therefore I can still be doing archaeology, but
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: I won't have those huge data sets to deal with.
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: The first year, I went up there with students, UM,
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: we were gonna survey twenty miles along the Forest Service
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: Trail quarter UM in a ten day period, and I thought, boy,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: we can do that easy. We made it a mile
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: and a half and recorded six thousand artifacts, and I thought,
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: this isn't this We hit We had the hot spot
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: and that's gone on and on and on and on,
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: and right now are cumulative data set is over two
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: d thousand artifacts. So I'm again back in this huge data,
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: big data, lots of attributes. Um, oh my god, did
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: I get that wrong sort of thing. But it's it's
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: exciting because the areas where we're working in the wilderness
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: areas in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem are one of those
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: blank spots on the archaeological map of knowledge. So not
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: only do I get to embrace that ignorance again, here's
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: something we don't know about, and so every time we
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: go out, we're finding new and interesting things. And one
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: of the projects I'm working on now as sort of
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: to dovetail with that, is I've been working with some
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: of the people who have been doing the migration studies
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: of GPS coloring animals and following them and looking at
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: how they move across the landscape, and we've been beginning
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: to collaborate on whether those quarters that the game animals
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: are using may well have been quarters that people would
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: have used. So not only have I um failed in
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: retirement in getting something that is a lot more complex
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: than I thought, but you keep realizing that you can't
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: just do the archaeology to understand it. You need to
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: start worrying about the biology of all the other credits
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: that are using those landscape simultaneously. I like that you're
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: filling in the map like that, because I feel like
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: that that would wind up being helpful when people want
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: to develop pristine ecosystems, that you could talk about how
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of cultural sites there. I know, you
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: probably can't say like, oh yeah, but like from my
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: respect of you could weaponize that stuff and use it
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: to protect wilderness. It well, it has that's a double
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: edged sword. Even that some people who are anti wilderness
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: will make the argument, well, if you're saying that people
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: have been there forever, why should we keep people out today.
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: So you've got to watch how you make that just
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: because there's the other there's a real difference between weaponiss
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: between protect So people were all over here all the time,
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: and you're saying they were a major component of the environment. Okay,
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: let's put the road in there and get the ski area,
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: let's get everybody back up in there. Yeah, let's yeah.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: It's like, um, we're talking about mammoths and all the
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: people that want to do the DNA and recreate mammoth.
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: You know, you could make that same argument and folks
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: might say, well, let's read people the wilderness. Yeah, and
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: I'm not all out Well, you've got to, um, that's
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: one of those arguments that it's going to be there
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: anytime you start talking about finding archaeology in the wilders.
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: And I've had people say that to me seriously as well,
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: then why do we have wilderness. It's it's not that
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: the concept I got to think about it for a
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: minute'll come up with. It's just it's the law was
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: poorly written when it says worried man is only a visitor.
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: It might, you know, we might just reword the lot
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: where um contemporary use of it is only transient or
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, I got you, Yeah, anybody got
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: It's been great. It's a lot to take in. Um,
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: we should ask Phil if he's got anything he wants
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: to say to Sure, we can do that, and throw
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: to Phil af you do years, or Phil going in
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: you can do years. I don't have a whole lot.
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: I just, um, you steal a lot of arrowheads, fill
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: off the federal d never found one, never looked, never
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: looked though, So you have some hot tips today. I'm
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: going to use it to abuse the law, not at all,
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: at least I won't say well in front of Larry,
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: But it would be really bad if you did. Yeah.
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: I find a lot of discomfort and uncertainty, and I
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: guess I could. Uh, and so I that's a foolish
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: way to live. I understand that. But I I love
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: talking or listening to people like you. Who seem to
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: relish in it. Um. I you know, I'm sort of
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: one of those almost O C D organizing things when
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: we go into the back country. For example, I've got
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: a spreadsheet, UM that tells people their calorie out it
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: per day for the entire time for my food shopping list.
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: You know, I'm I don't like uncertainty, but unfortunately that's
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: the way the world is. And unless you want to
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: live in a delusional world, UM, you've sort of got
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: to embrace it. So the things that you can I
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: can control how many calories I take into the mountains
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: for twenty three days. I can't control what happened in
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: the past, and I uncomfortable with that. You deal with
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: the things that you you can put in some little
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: boxes and archaeology. One of the reasons I really love
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: it is because of that uncertainty. UM, I would hate
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: it to be in a field or a job. When
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: you retired, you say, well, I know everything I need
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: to know about this. I can just go fishing for
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: the rest. Not to say fishing is a bad thing,
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: but you can just play golf. I think you want
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: to talk about something you can never figure out? Fishing, Yeah,
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: it's the same thing. If you're an avid fisher person,
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: you're gonna be working for that forever and you don't
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: know if you if you do it right, it's always
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: slapping in the face with what you don't know. Wake
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: up and pay better attention and think about it this way.
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: And so to me it makes me feel more like
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: a kid all the time because you're always sort of curious.
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: You're asking why, why, why, like kids always do um,
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: rather than saying, I've got the answers. You know who
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: didn't cope with that? Well, uh, not that you would
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: know him. My father didn't cope with that. Well, my father,
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: uh didn't. He never you know, he didn't finish high
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: He didn't like formally finished high school. Right, but um,
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: he never fell in love with the h the journey
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: of knowledge, and would be dismissive of entire fields of
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: inquiry because they were always, as he put it, changing
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: their story. He didn't like it, so be that instead
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: of saying it would be really interesting to understand, like
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: why mammoths when extincton guy floats an idea and people like, oh,
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: that's a great idea, and then later someone pokes and
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: holes in it. It wouldn't be that he remained interested.
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: He would be they don't you know, they must they
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: don't know what they're talking about. And he would get
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: like angry about it and condemned the whole question because
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: they were changing their story again, So you can imagine
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: how you feel about like I think, like the African diaspora, right,
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: that changes all the time. And he would just get
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: where he didn't want to hear about it. It was
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: all hogwash. It can't be right if they're if additional
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: black and white? Yeah, which is he wanted to know
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: the damn answer now. If not, they're all stupid. No
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: one should even wonder about it sort of. Um, My
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: dad was a lot the same way. You know, he
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: never finished high school. He was a rancher, he you know, uh,
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: And he was real skeptical when I started talking about
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 1: going into this archaeology stuff. But first of all, why
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: don't you get a real job? Um? And secondly, year
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: you can ever get paid to do it? And then
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: I got the university jobs and I started getting paid,
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: and I started, you know, being an African and being
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: in France and extricating these bison sites. And he put
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: up with it because it brought the money in, and
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: it wasn't until that legitimized it. That legitimized it. But
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: it wasn't till he was almost gone. And I went
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: in to talk to him the night before he died,
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: and I was telling him about how it was going
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: to shift careers and go into the mountains and try
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: and understand what was going on there and trying to
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: see how the people in the game animals interacted and
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: get up there and start looking for nobody had never looked.
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: And he pulled off his oxygen masks and he said,
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: it sounds like you're finally doing something worthwhile. So, you know,
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: talk about another spur to to get out of the
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 1: academic and get into that. You know that I finally
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: got that. I got that stand got his piqued his curiosity.
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: It didn't matter, you know that I was academic full
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: professor at university. That was just you're finally, you're finally
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: doing something that matters. What have you learned. It's been
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: interesting in this post in retirement of like these mountain landscapes.
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: These I just think how complex and how intensively they've
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: been used, and that we've you know, we we for
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: years the archaeologists have specialized in the areas where we
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: can get to. It's like that we've specialized on bone
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: beds because they're easy to see. We specialized in planes
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: areas where you can drive a four wheel drive too.
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: And there's this whole other world that we know almost
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: nothing about. So when I was a kid, I wanted
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: to be there an archaeologist or an astronaut. So this
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: is sort of combining both of those because I'm in
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: a new world doing archaeology and everything we find there's wow, Um,
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: you know teep hearing stone circles at eleven thousand feet
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: that have habitation to what are they doing up here?
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: I you need you know, one of those thousand dollar
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: Swedish tents. Plot told it in place. But they're up
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: there in the high winds, they're doing things that So
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: I think just that, oh my god, what's there's this
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: world that I never knew existed is probably the most
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: exciting thing I've ever seen. It's it's what keeps you,
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: keeps you going. I wish I'd retired thirty years ago
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: where I had better energy, better energy to be up there,
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: like I said earlier, up for twenty three days, this summer,
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: and after about ten days, I got this message on
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: our in reach from our outfitter that said, do you
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: need anything? And I think he thought we'd ask for
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: a bottle of whiskey or some beef steaks or something
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: like that, and I said, yeah, we're about how to
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: ib profit to the age where you know, that becomes
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: a real serious thing. So I wish I could have
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: started into these unknown landscapes earlier. You know, it's funny, man,
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: we're um My brother and I were up in the
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: kind of like in the cell Alpine zone in some
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: of the similar area of what you've been talking about
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: and this, and had this conversation this September where we
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: found a very improvable bowl little beaver. Damn. I was like, man, like,
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: what the hell's that thing doing up here? And that
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: led us to talking about during the mountain man era,
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: like where are those guys whatever, like found this beaver
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: when we were just scouring this place out And then
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: that guy us talking about if you sat overlooking this
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: meadow we were on, I was like, how many years
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: would you had to sit here before someone strolled through?
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: If you were here two thousand years ago, three thousand
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: years ago, and we were like, as we're talking about this,
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: we imagine like it must have been you could have
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: sat here ten years and no one would have come by.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: I think, actually, but then maybe it's like maybe like
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: you're saying, like you've been seeing someone every month come
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: through there. I relish the isolation of being in the welders,
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 1: not saying people. And one of the reasons I've quit
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 1: hunting as much is by the time hunting season rolls around,
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: my empty welderness starts to become repopulated. But I'll bet
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: you that in the past, and what we're saying from
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: the archaeological record is that the year round own number
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: of people there was much higher than today. So rather
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: than thinking of it at two thousand years ago, how
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: long would you have had to set here until somebody
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: walked by? It probably should be flipped on its head
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: and said, how long would I be setting here before
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: some other s ob came by and spooked the game? Yeah?
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: Let me ask you. One of the things that I
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: really get fascinated by, or what attracts me to the
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 1: mountains is I've always got to get over that next
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: pass or look at that next drainage, you know, it
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: just especially get older, I go, God, will I ever
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: get over that pass into that drainage? And we talked
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: about people moving into areas and that curiosity has got
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: to be part of it. You know, you want to
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: tie the country together of what's over here and what's
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: over there, And yeah, I got that problem real bad.
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: There's a spot that's bugging the hell out of me
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: up in Alaska or we always get up and look
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: and you it's like we're in kind of this alpine
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: area is real beautiful and there's this deep trough of
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: like nasty looking timber. But then yeah, there's another one
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: popping up and it's like there's no way to get
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: in there. Like that's got to be the coolest place
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: in the world, you know what that was? Like, No
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: one's probably for three hundred years exactly at all in
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: that camp that was recently discovered above Gunnison. That's a
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: cool spot, the one up on the Folsom sites up there.
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: You know, I just read about it, and they're doing
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: some you know, fun stuff ten thousand feet above sea
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: level winter camps or even and I'm pretty substantial structures Again,
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: that's when those badass houses paved with rocks, and so
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: we tend to think of we We've talked about biases
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: like um, only humans great patterns, and another bias that
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: feeds into things like that is the older something is
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 1: the least sophisticated, the poorly more poorly made it is.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: And you know, we've got time and time again when
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: you look at the archaeological record of North America, in
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: many ways, the older stuff is often the most finely crafted,
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: the most sort of the best product, and if you
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: get more recent, it turns into the so that that
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: notion that we have that old is crappy, UM modern
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: is better, whether it's housing structures or um stone tool,
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: projective point technology just doesn't hold. And I love getting
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: back to that uncertainty, to take those things that we
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: just assume we know and saying now, wait a minute,
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: let's look at that a little differently. And and so
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: for me, the the how do you know that? That again,
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: it's like that young kids, daddy, why is sort of
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: That's what drives my sort of curiosity is I've always
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: got that sort of why, and and what if I
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: what if I picked that up and thought about it
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: from a different way, If I had one token to
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: a time machine. There's like three things. Well, one would
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: be that I would go with Daniel Boone over the
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: Cumberland Gap whoever the hell I can't remember you it
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: was pre Revolutionary war and do that little John with them? Um.
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: One that I would go like uh out with, you know,
• 1:48:02
  Speaker 1: like to hang out with some fulsome hunters twelve thousand
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: years ago. And the other one that I would go
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: to like out to Miles City twenty thousand years ago
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: to see how long you got to sit there for
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: a mammoth walks by? Like was there a bunch or
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: not many? What was just like you glass up shiploads
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: of them? Are you like you look and look and
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: look and can't find one? I would love to know
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: that thousand whatever, man, I would love to you. Well,
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: that's why we're time machine stuff. Of you like people
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: that would want to go back and watch them sign
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: the Declaration in Dependence. I mean that's cool, but that's
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: not other stuff. We're talking about that site in Mexico earlier. Um.
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: That's when those sites where you know, with that many
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: animals that well preserved, you can start trying to answer
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: for at least for that area to where as I
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: mentioned trying to answer those pale ecological questions as as
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: interesting as trying to say how people interacted with them. So,
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: you know, if I had my time machine, Um, one
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: of the things we've been finding in the mountains here
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: that I hadn't seen ever in the mountains or glass
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: trade beachs, and we think glass beads for trade period.
• 1:49:03
  Speaker 1: We've got one site where we've got glass trade beads
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: and metal that they're cutting into arrow points and things
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: like that that I submitted a butchered bison bone for
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: radiocarbon date and got a radiocarbon date back of sixteen
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: fifty And being an archeologically, that's wrong. We know that
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: trade bead shouldn't be any metal points here. Yeah, And
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: so we've submitted a couple more and they're coming into
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: that mid to late six from Mexico summer, coming these
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 1: by then, some of it coming in from the English
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: and French fur traders on the East coast. So I
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: would love to be in the mountains of northwest Wyoming
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: late sixteen hundreds, you know, a hundred and fifty years. Yeah,
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: And what's because that doesn't fit our picture at all,
• 1:49:51
  Speaker 1: you know, we think of Lewis and Clark is coming
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: through this area and being the first sort of interactions
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: with the Native Americans here hundred and fifty years they
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: were plugged into these hunting nettle wide trade networks. And again,
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: I coming from a small town like MATIZI I like
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: to highlight that of kid, you're from, not from the
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: back of nowhere. You're in a place that's been connected
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: with the rest of the continent forever. I've brought this up.
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: This will this is my final thought. I've brought us
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: a bunch of times where the historian Elliott West has
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: a piece where he talks about when Lewis and Clark
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: hit the Great Plains, there were Indians on the Great
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: Plains who had gone to Europe, met the King of France,
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 1: and come back again. So in terms of like discovering
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Yeah, it's a calm, it's
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: a much more complex period. And a lot of us
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: use that Lewis and Clark period is the baseline of
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: whether it's how many grizzlies they show saw, or the
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: bison populations and this and that and the other. And
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: if you consider that I think was the Crow tribe
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: in the late seventeen hundreds of their population from disease.
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: What's you know, that's removing huge numbers of key predators
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: from the environment. So by time Lewis and Clark's comes through,
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: the environment's reorganized in a way it may have never
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: been manipulated. Yeah, it's it's not um well or under manipulated.
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: You know, you all of a sudden, it's like manipulated,
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: meaning like impact of impact of man A lot of
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: our ideas of managing wilderness areas or management game is
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: to try and get back to that baseline that probably
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: never existed. That baseline of when Lewis and Clark came
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: through was probably artificial, and that it has been depopulated.
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 1: The ecology had been reorganizing for the last years into
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: something it may never have been. So it's it's and again,
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: how do you deal with that if you're a wildlife manager.
• 1:51:48
  Speaker 1: I don't know. It's just sort of throws a lot
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: of but it's one of those we probably need to
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: think about it. Yeah, my operating idea instead of trying
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: to pin it to a certain year, I just like
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: to operate on I would like to see more wildlife
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: tomorrow in more places than we have it today and
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: in better conditions. Yeah, it's like, I'm not gonna attempt
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: to tie it to what I'm trying to match. I
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: just want I can tell you one thing, I'd like
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: more of it in more places, and we certainly don't
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: want ship decline. Well, thank you very much for coming on. Man,
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: it has been great. Oh, thank you. This has been fun.
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: Thank you,