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