00:00:00 Speaker 1: M Nowadays, we have artists, we have writers, we have musicians. In those days, they probably had what we could see as artists, writers, musicians, but they're not writers. They're weaving stories with their voice and they were probably making music where we do have them staying in place. That's when you know we start to see the other kinds of artifacts that are not just used for slaughtering thirty two animals. On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we'll be talking more about the Fulsome archaeological site with Steve Ronnella and Dr David Meltzer. We're gonna learn what these ancient hunters did with the meat, how they likely lived, and right at the end, we'll talk about the controversy the Fulsome site stirred up with those that believe the Bible. We'll even talk a bit about the arrival of man on planet Earth, and will be continuing to hack away at the question of why I any of this is important or relevant. The story is robust, the drama is thick, and you could cut the suspense with a Fulsome stone point. You're not gonna want to miss this one. Instead of George mcjunkin having said someone's got to come look at this right. He had just found some stuff and periodically went back and dug around the shovel and put the point in the coffee can. If that had happened, then we'd still think that humans have been here for three thousand years. My name is Clay Nukelem 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 lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear. It's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. This is Steve Ronnella talking about the fulsome site of the more than a handful of significant anthropological sites that I visited in my in my wanderings. Um, that one is one that's just easy to visualize. I went to the Lindenmeyer site and you and you go there and you're like, you can get it, but you don't totally get it. Um. I went to the Clovis type site, which is called black Water Draw. You go look at black Water Draw and you get it, but you don't. You can't really get it. Wild Horse Arroyo and the Fulsome site. Like you go there, man, I don't know. It's just something about it. You can just picture it. You can picture it, everything about it, how they did, what they did. It's just it's one. It's one of those great locations to visit. This is the third part in our series on the Fulsome archaeological site. We're going to get another layer of info from Dr David Meltzer about these ancient people. After this one will have completed seventy five percent of our journey towards getting a layman's PhD on Fulsome. But for those just jumping in, here's the lowdown. In nineteen o eight, too freed slave named George mcjunkin found some peculiar bison bones in in Arroyo in northeast New Mexico. He tried to get some folks to come check it out, but they didn't come until after his death in nineteen The leading archaeologists in the country would proclaim the site the most important in North American history at the time. We talked about George mcjunkin in Part one. In Part two, we talked about the nuts and bolts of the Fulsome site. And how they unearthed the remains of thirty two bison antiquis a relic form of ice age bison no longer here. But the real kicker was they found around twenty stone projectile points in the bone pile, giving us undisputable evidence that they were killed by humans, thus proving human antiquity in the America's was much older than we thought. And like icing on a cake, the stone points were of a style that had never been documented. They were a unique fluted technology that will become known as foalsome points. These fulsome hunters weren't cartoon cave men. These were human beings with the same cognition, desires, and rudimentary needs as us. In these people experienced pain and discomfort, emotional highs and lows from relationships, disappointment and failed dreams, hope in what the next month might bring for their family. I don't have to tell you to do this, but put yourself in the shoes of the fulsome people. Imagine the cold, wearing clothes made of animal skin. Imagine no knowledge of the world beyond what you can see. Imagine being a pleistocene human because the life that you live is a very rare human experience to put the fulsome people in our lives into contexts do on these numbers. It's estimated that a hundred and seventeen billion Homo sapiens have lived on planet Earth since the dawn of time. By the year one thousand, there were three hundred thousand people on the Earth. By sixteen fifty, roughly fifty million lived here. By the year eighteen hundred, there were one billion. In one we have a population of seven point eight billion. The population of the Earth today represents about seven percent of the humans that have ever lived. It's hard to make sense of these numbers, but we can easily say that most humans that have lived have lived much different lives than us. No demographic data exists for of human history. I got all these numbers from an article on p RB dot org called how many people have ever lived on the Earth. It's pretty interesting, But what are the implications of a species doing stuff way different than we've ever done? What are the implications of being trapped in time and thinking that our lives are normal. That's exactly why looking back into the lives of these fulsome hunters has value. On the last podcast, we heard from Steve Ronella of meat eater, and he helped walk us through the bison kill. He and Dr Meltzer believed that the bison were herded into a box canyon where they were met with a quote rain of spears. But Steve has another unanswered question, and hey, I can't say this with enough certainty. If you haven't listened to the first two podcasts, go back and listen to them in order. Here Steve jumping right in with some more unanswered questions. Here's some things we know that they were dealing with an animal that was they could manipulate. They hauled meat away. They hauled some meat away on the bone. They took the tails somewhere, probably the tail stayed with the hide, and they took the hides away because the tailbones aren't there. Here's the thing that kills me. They had that many animals on the ground, it had to have been days worth work. But they can't find where they slept. Somewhere around there within a couple hundred yards has to be the coolest place on the planet. If they had been well preserved, was where they slept and butchered all that stuff and cook stuff. Well, let me ask you a question about like finding their camp site. So when I was at the Falsome site, I was struck by how small it was. It's not like they came in there with you know, big caterpillar cranes and started, you know, just cleared out four or five acres or ground. And I mean the whole fulsome site that they actually excavated can't be more than sixty seven the feet by sixty seventy ft. So it's just this square. And now granted they took that square and they dug out every single grain of sand and dirt from the surface to like ten ft down, I mean essentially, so, but you gotta remember there was there was the two digs. The first guys went in there with a wrecking ball in the nineteen twenties. Ye later people went in there. Meltzer went in there. Let's be honest, he went in there in a way that in a hundred years will probably regarded as that he went in there like a wrecking ball. Part of the restraint of modern day archaeologist anthropologists is to leave some of that stuff intact, because you just know that through technological progression, the same way that when those guys dug into twenties, they were looking for they wanted big bones, and they wanted stone tools, and they were there just washing stuff away, all the seeds and pollen in small flakes and things that maybe like little some ability to extract DNA from other contemporaneous creatures that might have been associated just gone right. You can imagine some future in which someone could go in and tell you a lot more. They'd be like, I don't know, maybe like it was this temperature that day, there were fires burning somewhere nearby. There there there's evidence of a mixture of male and female humans based on dander, you know who knows. But in they weren't gonna imagine radio carbon dating. Yeah, if you just said to a guy, you know what, hang tight on that, because before long you'll tell you the exact date this happened, he'd been like, give me a break. I mean, basically, we think we're so technologically advanced in one but we are going off of just hints. I mean, some cowboy back in you know, nineteen o eight randomly saw a bone sticking out of a bank, went and pulled a bone, and here we have the falsome site. And now we're banking almost we're banking so much off the seemingly coincidental find by this cowboy, and in that arroyo's channel moves all the time. When I went there, I went in the new channel which is over Yonder Aways and now the channels off in a different direction now, and I was over in the other new channel off Yonder that's been cut since mcjunkin. Guess what I found? It killed me. I found a big bone sticking out of the wall. And I was with, you're down there as with an archaeologist. This bone is twelve feet from the top of the ground. I told you the story before, and there was every part of me wanted to pluck that bone out of there. And that guy was with the state archaeologist. I was with having none of it. He took some photos of this isn't in the Runella collection. He took some photos of it. He took a GPS way point of it. But I was like, how can you resist? He's a pro. Did they ever go back? I don't know. I don't think so. You know, there's a little bit of restraint place. You and I both like arrowheads a lot. The argument about picking up junk on the ground, as hard as it is not to pick it up is you never know that you might be standing on the next fulsome site and you just ruined it that instead of George mcjunkin having said someone's got to come look at this, right, he had just found some stuff and the periodically went back and dug around the shovel and hauled it off and put in a put the point in the coffee can, and then gave it to his grandkid in Illinois. Right, And that would have turned into what it turned in. And we still think if that had happened, then we'd still think that humans have been here for three thousand years. Steve brought up two interesting points that we'll talk about later, radio carbon dating and the cultural effects of blowing up our understanding of human antiquity. How's that for foreshadowing. But first I want to talk to the fulsome authority, Dr David Meltzer of SMU. We're gonna jump right in after the kill and asked the question of what did they do with the meat? I want to talk about this idea of what we now call gourmet butchering when they essentially took the prime cuts. And I think it's kind of interesting because we have this idea that Paleo Indians or even Native Americans would have used every scrap and every possible piece of meat and bone for their subsistence. But these people didn't have refrigeration, they didn't have preservation of or they didn't have modern preservation techniques for meat. So talk to me about the evidence that we have and what they used, what they took with them, what they preferred, how they did it. We actually need to clarify this a little bit in the sense that gourmet butchering it's a term that is used to describe the fact that they're basically taking all the good cuts and moving on. And that's certainly true of a lot of fulsome sites, but not all sites from this time period. If you're there, if you're hunting in the summer, your point is well taken. There's not a whole lot that you can preserve. Um you can you can butcher the meat hanging out really quickly, hope it dries and the blowflies don't get into it, right, or if you're living on the northern plains, yeah, actually you can make a kill and if you're there through the winter, you can actually preserve it. We have some fulsome sites where people overwintered, and in those instances they are using everything alright because it was cold, just because it was cold, and if you're snowed in, you don't have a lot of options in terms of game that's wandering around or your ability to go after them. In fact, you know what's the old phrase they used to use in Chicago and the meat packing plants use everything from the squeak to the tail. Right, we have gourmet butchering at the Fulsome site proper and at a number of other fulsome sites where we had people on the move in the fall. They were going someplace to hunker down for the winter, and that tells us they were on the move absolutely absolutely, because they're only taking the good cuts. You know, had they had they stayed in that spot, we probably would have seen a very different record because had they stayed in that spot, had winter set in and they had these thirty two animals, you can be pretty darn sure that by January they're cracking open the towbones and sucking out the marrow, because in fact, we see that at other fulsome period sites where people are hunkered down, so they're using absolutely everything. This idea of gourmet butchering is a polite way of saying they left a bunch of usable meat. Today, this would be illegal under our modern wanton waste laws. This is not a slight against these people at all. That would be a form of historical revision, applying today's value system out of context. But it's an interesting thought. If you remember, in the Boon series, Old dB reported that while he was tracking the Indians that had kidnapped his daughter Jemima, he found a quote, writhing snake that the Indians had killed and not used. Secondly, they killed a buffalo and only took the hump meat. Again, this is not a slight against these people, but it does dismiss the romantic idea that one hundred percent of the time indigenous people used one of the commodities from the animals they killed. Here's some more from Dr Mincer. So what did they take at the full sum side? They took the good stuff. So they took hump meat right from the thoracic vertebrae, because the vertebrae are gone. Yeah, in in a lot of cases, and in some cases it looks as though they simply stripped out that big hump meat and left the big thoracic vertebrae there, so they would have deboned deboned it. In some cases it looks as though they snapped off entire rib racks. We have the ribs broken right at the head where it connects up the spine, and it looks like they would just grab a whole rib brack, snap it off and haul that away. They took long bones, particularly the upper uh limb bones bison bison drumsticks. I like to refer to them, because those would be easy to transport, right, You just kind of sling that on your shoulder and you go for a hike with it. What do they leave behind? They left behind heads, butts, and feet. We also know that they did eat the tongues out of them. And we know that because of cut marks on the jaws, yes, where the tongue attachment was, and and and we we know that this is a delicacy. Honestly, it's not for me. I I don't do tongue, but certainly um in documented historic times and still today, tongue is considered a delicacy of bison and raw tongue. Dr Meltzer has in his lab at s Mu the jawbone found at Fulsome that has the cut marks from a stone point pretty wild. If you've never had tongue, it's nothing more than a fine grained muscle. Once you remove the outer tongue skin, it's the most accessible chunk of meat on an animal that doesn't require skinning, back, hide, and hair. It would kind of be like I have been the fries out of a fast food bag and eating them before you knocked down your burger. But let's get into some bigger questions. That's a lot of meat. I mean, I think about what it takes the process a single animal that we would kill in modern times, with modern conveniences and modern transportation. We've got side by sides, we've got mules and horses, we've got trucks. I can't imagine carrying away that much meat. So my next question is like, who were these people and what were they doing? We actually know where they've been. We think we know where they were headed, and we know the time of years, so we can conjure a story, an inference, a narrative. What we know. What we think we know is that they've been on the Texas Panhandle. And we think we know that based on the types of stone that was used to manufacture their protective point. How far would that be? Oh, we're talking hundreds of kilometers? Is it that far? Oh? Yeah, alright. So what we know is that, or what we infer, is that these folks had most recently been in the Texas Panhandle area, in the area around Amarillo, where they obtained what's known as alibates agatized dolomite. We just call it churt and to Covist Church. The distance is just straight line distances from there to Folsome are on the order literally of hundreds of kilometers Amarillo, the alibate sources about two hundred and sixty kilometers away. Um. The source for to Covis is almost in three seventy kilometers. It's like a hundred fifty miles. Absolutely absolutely, And the reason we think that they were there most recently before they got to Folsom is that that's the dominant material at the site. We have other material that they had actually collected in far northeastern Colorado, and what you're seeing there is their cycle and so far as we can infer it based on the projectile points that we found, because we found points that were made out of stone from each of those three areas and some points between the home range of a wild animal. There you go, and if you look at a map, all of those river systems, like the Canadian River and its tributaries. If you're leaving and kind of heading north northwest out of the Panhandle, a lot of those drainages, they won't necessarily take you right to the Folsom site, but they're going to take you into the neighborhood, and there's a number of passes that go through there. The most famous, of course, is Raton Pass, where the Santa Fe Trail came through. But just north of the Fulsom site is another pass known as Trinchera Pass. It's not as well known as Raton Pass. But let's say that you've moved out of the Panhandle of Texas, You've headed sort of northwest out of that area. You end up in the neighborhood. You're gonna have to get through this sort of range of high basalt maces and volcanic peaks, and you're heading for Trinchera Pass. You're going up, going up, and you spot a small herd of bison, you know, off in the distance. You send scouts kind of around and they come back and they say, you know what, there's a bottleneck. There's a pinch point on this So from tren Cherra Pass you could see the fullsom side. Can't quite see it, but if you were headed there, as it happens, the full sum side is what eight kilometers from the pass, and that's why I think that's where they were headed. I say, so you make the kill. And because it's September October whenever you know plus or minus right, this is an area that gets a lot of snow. You don't necessarily want to be stuck there in the winter. It's higher elevation. It's like it's seven it's seven thousand feet seven thousand. I was actually quite wrong about an aspect of this narrative, which I'm gonna tell you about in a second. My original thinking, what, okay, so you make the kill, you butcher the animals, you take all the good stuff, right, You've done your gourmet butchering gig, and then you just continue on throosin chair Pass, you drop down into southeastern Colorado, and you know, you find someplace to overwinter. Here's the part where I was wrong. It's always good to ad bit those sorts of things. Keeps you honest. I thought, there's no way you're gonna want to spend the winter at seven thousand feet all invasion. It's just gonna be too cold, too much snow, it's gonna be too miserable. You're gonna find someplace lower down, protected valley, etcetera, etcetera. Then I got invited by a colleague out in Gunnison, Colorado, who said, hey, I've got a fulsome site here. Well, as it turns out, that fulsome site is at about eight thousand feet. It's in one of the coldest places in North America, in the Gunnison Basin, and it was occupied through the winter. So I was so here, I'm thinking, Okay, these guys are gonna go to Florida, right, I'm exaggerating. But no, as it turns out, these folks were pretty darn adept at dealing with winter, as I wasn't. When I was sort of originally sort of thinking about folsom was that they had to ski dattle out of there. No, no, I think what they were doing so they get there, they make the kill. We know they've been in northeastern Colorado before, so I think they used trin chair past to get past that geological formation dropped down into southeastern Colorado. Where they went from there, I don't know. And so what I'm envisioning is that these folks were sort of moving up and down the front range. They weren't necessarily going deep into the mountains um. They were mostly exploiting the environments that were on the edge of the mountains, on the edge of the plains um And probably we're making a pretty darn good living doing so. I just can't get past the mystery of who these people were and what their daily lives might have been like. They are absolutely shrouded and uncrackable mystery. I've got more questions. Do we know much about their social groups or do we have any did these people at this time? Did they did they make art? Did they have social hierarchy? What do we know about the falsome people? Yeah? So art definitely. The amount of artistic expression is hard to gauge. And the reason is is that in some societies artistic express ushian is material. So you've got groups that are in Europe at this time that are painting spectacular paintings on cave walls. But artistic expression can also be elaborate stories and things told around the campfire. Nowadays, we have artists, we have writers, we have musicians. In those days they probably had what we could see as artists, writers, musicians, but they're not writers. They're weaving stories with their voice, right, and they were probably making music. We haven't found a lot of musical instruments from this time. They were making um material culture that was decorative. We didn't find any of that at Falsome. I mean Falsome is. You know, this is a hunting group. They're just it's just a kill site. But where we do have them staying in place, that's when you know, we start to see the other kinds of artifacts that are not just used for slaughtering thirty two animals. In terms of their social hierarchy or not, we tend to think that these are egalitarian hunter gatherers. Tell me what that means. So you know, you sort of think about chieftains where you've got somebody who's in charge. We don't think that that's that the society was necessarily stratified in that manner. We start to see social stratification haves and have nots much later in prehistory, and it's often detected in burials, where you have individuals who get buried with lots of grave goods, whereas individuals who get buried maybe with a few tools that they use over their lifetime. I want to read an excerpt from Ian Tattersall's book Becoming Human. He's one of the world's leading paleo anthropologist. Here's a passage from his book. Quote. All of this, of course, begs the question of the origin of modern human behaviors. As we've seen, we find dramatic evidence for art, music, and symbol very early in the Upper Paleolithic record in Europe, well over thirty thousand years ago, and symbolism lie is at the very heart of what it means to be human, as I emphasize in the next chapter, for if there is one single thing that distinguishes humans from all other forms of life, living or extinct, it is the capacity for symbolic thought, the ability to generate complex mental symbols and to manipulate them into new combinations. This is the very foundation of imagination and creativity, of the unique ability of humans to create a world in the mind and to recreate it in the real world outside themselves. Other species may exploit the outside world with great efficiency, as we saw in the case of the chimpanzees, but they still remain in essence passive subjects and observers of that world. Even Neanderthals, remarkable as they may have been, were, in all likelihood hardly more liberated from this condition. End of quote. We didn't find art or symbolism at the Fulsome side. It was just a random kill site. But you don't have to stretch very far to infer that people sophisticated enough to make Fulsome points likely had art and music. When I think about early humans, I can't get away from these early indicators that we weren't just your average terrestrial mammal. The Fulsome site is one of these early indicators. Tattersall said, quote, Humans in general are and were slow moving creatures, and modern humans are incomparably successful hunters because they exercise craft, guile, and unparalleled perception of the cues offered by the outside world. Probably hunting by guile, as we know it is a peculiar property of our own species. End of quote. Stacking up these bison was a really human thing to do. In Tattersall's book, he talks about how humans arrival was unprecedented on the Earth, and the major factor of this uniqueness is in our ability for what he calls self reflective insight. Remember that phrase. He said, quote the depth, complexity and biological importance of human interpersonal relationships, which far exceed any other animal, would be impossible without the capacity for self reflective insight. End of quote. I guess my point is this, A bunch of apes couldn't have killed thirty two bison with stone points, butchered them and used the meat for an entire winter. What I'm trying to say is we aren't apes. Though from a merely biological standpoint, our bodies aren't much different, but humans aren't just bodies. A Neanderthal could have told you that humans had something very special that escalated quickly to steer the ship in a slightly different direction. I wanted to ask Dr Meltzer how these fulsome hunters would be related to more modern tribes of Native Americans. Here's what he said. Okay, it's very, very difficult to take a modern day tribal unit and trace it back ten thousand years because people move, people admix, groups split up, groups come apart, Which is not to say that there weren't tribal groups back then, and in fact, they're almost certainly were. But remember too that these are people who had been in the Americas or whose ancestors had first arrived in the America's you know, maybe a few thousand years earlier. And if we assume that the first people who came into the America's, let's just say it was a single group speaking a single language. Over time, as the groups would disperse out across the Americas, they would become isolated from one another. Initially you would get new dialects emerging, and then you'd get separate languages emerging. But if you're still early in the process, there's certainly going to be far fewer language groups, far fewer tribal groups than there would be ten thousand years later. Okay, so humans, basically, I mean, we're social animals and we socially structure ourselves. So would the groupings have looked like they do today in modern times? Um hard to say, because it's impossible to draw a nice clean lines between them. But would they have banded together in groups of you know, twenty five or occasionally get together, you know, several groups of twenty five would get together in groups of a hundred and you know, swap stories, marry off their kids to one another almost certainly, right, they're highly mobile hunter gatherers, and think about this too. They're on a landscape with not a lot of other people, so it's obviously advantageous to them to be able to maintain contact with these other groups. You know, in those days, it made more sense not to shoot first and ask questions later, because it made more sense for the the health and welfare and survival of your group to be able to meet up of another group who maybe you haven't met before but are probably distantly related. And even if they're not, you tell stories to each other that create a relationship and create an alliance. Because if you're out on a landscape with not a lot of other people, it's really helpful if you encounter another group and they say, you know what if you go However, they measured time right, if you go this many days or this many weeks in that direction, you will find this hunter gatherers. It's really striking mobile people know about a huge landscape. They haven't necessarily been over that entire landscape. They've talked to other people, and so in the early twentieth century anthropologists working in the High Arctic would talk to native individuals who could put together a map of hundreds of thousands of square miles, and they hadn't actually done all that themselves, but they listened very carefully to the people that they met, who they had traveled. Where did you travel, what did you see? Let me tell you where I've traveled and what I've seen. I mean, look, this is survival knowledge, right. You want to be able to know. Okay, I'm in a place I've never been before, but I've heard about it, and I know that these kinds of things are available if I keep going in that direction. I see that mountain peak. You know, I was told we met somebody years ago who told us about that mountain peak and that if you go to the other side, there's gonna be this really beautiful valley and you're gonna find game there. Or you're in a small group of you know, there's sort of a magic number twenty five. You know, these these hunter gatherer groups, you know, plus or minus right, and your kids get to be a marriageable age. Okay, when you encounter another group, they've got kids of marriageable age. Hey, Gus is advantageous. Yeah, you know, that's such an interesting thing you're bringing up, because what it makes me think about. I'm very interested, and I think the intrigue of trying to understand who these people were is comparing them to who we are today. I think about the social structure and the things that they would have queued in on that may be would have been lost inside of a world where we don't get all our information from life from talking and looking in the eyes of someone and building a relationship with them. I mean, we get we get our information from life for from our phones and from books, which is a good thing. These are positive things. But these people, the data point for their life in so many ways would have been these personal relationships that they had with people. It would have been wonderful to sort of be a fly on the wall in all those conversations because you would see that's there, that's their Internet, that's the place to see in social network. The place to see social network wasn't Facebook, it was just face. You'll chuckle later with that hits the bottom. I wonder if the fulsome Hunters had a comedian in the group. I want to dive into some serious science. My whole life. I've heard the term carbon dating thrown around, and it seems like we base a lot of what we know about ancient time frames on it. In the scientific world, it's believed to be rock solid science. But I've heard a few murmurs of the validity of carbon dating. And I want to end the personal drama. Here's what I asked Dr Meltzer, and hey, stick around if you get bored on this part. At the end, we're gonna talk about the Bible and the age of the Earth and it's gonna get wild. Man, what a booby trap. Okay, I'm gonna take your word for this, and I'm gonna base the rest of my life off of this answer. No pressure is how certain are we that carbon dating? It's like rock hard science. And that's a dumb question because I think I know what you're gonna say. But like in in fifty years, are my kids gonna be like, man, they used to radio carbon date stuff? Boy, they were way off. Oh No, it's good. It's solid and and and it's been proven over and over again for the last what are we up to now? Nifty two? Right, We've had so many independent checks on this that every time time and again we've been able to use and demonstrate that radiocarbon is both reliable, which is to say, if you do it again, are you're gonna get the same answer? And valid, which is to say, is it the right answer? And and mind you, when the technique was first developed, what they did was they took things of known historic age and they said, Okay, here's some wood from an Egyptian tomb that we know from you know, hieroglyphic records, and you know the Rosetta stone and all that stuff is basically four thousand years old. You get a radiocarbon date, it says it's thirty years old plus or minus ND. So, yes, it's just been tests. I mean, this is this is like, this is something that we know is pretty is solid. Okay, So doctor Meltzer and the scientific community believe this is rock hard indisputable science. And I can get behind that. But what is it? Let's ask the doc. I think it's important for us to have an understanding of radio carbon dating. It's just stuff a brother should know. Talk to me about carbon dating. So the way we know how old things are is through radiocarbon dating. This is a process that was invented in the very late nineteen forties, earned a Nobel Prize to its inventor in nineteen sixty, Willard Libby. And what Willard Libby figured out is that we know, of course, that there's garden variety carbon, and that's carbon twelve. Libby's insight was that there are other isotopes of carbon that was known, and isotopes are basically unstable forms of these these elements. Carbon fourteen is radiocarbon. So what Libby realized was that in addition to all the carbon that's floating around in the upper atmosphere, you've got nitrogen and you've got cosmic radiation that produces these neutrons. They hit the nine, rogen drives off a proton and it chemically becomes carbon. It's got the same chemical structure as carbon, but it weighs more carbon fourteen because it's got the atomic mass of nitrogen. So you've now got carbon twelve, which is the garden variety carbon, forming with oxygen to form C O two. And you've now got this isotope, this slightly heavier form of carbon, carbon fourteen joining together with oxygen to form C O two. What do plants use for photosynthesis, they use CEO two. Okay, they're ingesting c O two as part of the photosynthesis process. Animals including us, eat plants, and so we're absorbing both the standard amount of carbon twelve that's out there, but a tiny, tiny fraction. I mean, you're not radioactive. You've got radio carbon in you, but you know you're not going to glow at night or anything like that. You've got this form of carbon fourteen in in an organism. When the organism dies, the carbon fourteen is no longer being replenished and it starts to decay back to carbon twelve, gives off a little beta mission, changes the structure, and suddenly you've got plain old carbon. That process of decay has what's known as a half life, which means that every five thousand, seven hundred thirty years, half of the radio carbon that was in a piece of wood, an animal bone, any kind of organic thing is now gone. Another five thousand, seven hundred and thirty years, half of that is gone. So you measure the amount of decay that's taking place in a nutshell. If you measure the amount of decay taking place, you know how long ago something was alive. We know with great accuracy how long it takes for carbon fourteen to turn into carbon twelve because of this half life nonsense. And remember carbon fourteen is only in that form when it's active and has interacted with the atmosphere. Okay, organic matter, which is stuff that was once alive. This will be plants or animals. So a rock isn't organic matter. But plants and animals have carbon in them, and when they're preserved like the bison bones fulsome or seeds in a soil deposit near the bones, their carbon gives us a timestamp telling us when that thing was alive. However, maybe one of the best quality assurances we have on carbon dating comes from us understanding how the dates can be messed up. Here's what Dr Meltzer has to say about that. It's remarkably accurate, but it's a statistical inference, and it's a statistical measure. So naturally you have plus or minus okay um and the plus or minuses can be plus or minus twenty years, plus or minus fifty years. Now, there's a complication in radio carbon dating in that the amount of C fourteen in the atmosphere over time has varied, and it varies for a variety of reasons. Um So, for example, changes in the Earth's magnetic field, changes in the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the atmosphere, changes an ocean circulation. Most of the world's C O two is actually stored in the oceans, and so if ocean circulation changes and it starts belching more C O two out into the atmosphere, it's going to change the amount of C fourteen. So at different points in the past you've had more or less C fourteen than at other points in the past. And more importantly, the fact that we know where it's wrong and why it's wrong, and how we calibrate it is further indication that we understand it. So let me give you two more examples of things that screw up radio carbon dates, just to confirm that we actually look for these kinds of things so that we can adjust for these kinds of things. Industrial Revolution, you start burning coal, what are you doing. You're dumping huge amounts of dead carbon into the atmosphere. That's going to change the relationship or the relative amount of C fourteen to C twelve. So, yeah, if you date something from the Industrial Revolution, the ages are going to be off. Atomic bomb testing Okay, so I'm older than you. I remember when did atmospheric bomb testing. This was actually something that happened in the nineteen fifties when they were still blowing up atomic bombs in the atmosphere. So when they would make the sample to put it into the radiocarbon counter, they create this this slurry sample and they literally walk across the lab and dump it into the counter. Well, what that was doing? What does it atomic bomb do? It creates all manner of fresh new radiocarbon. So unlike the Industrial Revolution, which is dumping old carbon, atomic bombs are basically dumping new stuff. And so some of these dates were coming, you know, fifty years into the future, right, and then they realized, oh, we better make this a closed system where this stuff is not being exposed to the atmosphere. That's that's really interesting because errors if you know where the air comes from, then then it can can make your your whole system more solid. It makes it much more robust, which is why when people say, well, you know, it's just a radio carbon date, you can't trust it, And I said, oh, come now, context is king. Here's Dr Meltzer explaining how fulsome fits into the bigger picture of human history in the America's. Dr Meltzer walked me through what we know of human history in the new world in North and South America, the timelines and kind of show us where Fulsome fit in sure in the America's and we don't actually call it the new world because by Ali people were here long before Europeans showed up, you know, to them, it actually was a new world. So one of the things about Folsome that was absolutely critical was that Folsome established for the first time in fifty years, a clear chronological anchor point for the history of people in the America's because what Folsom did was it showed that they'd come in the place to scene. Within a few years after Fulsome, about six years actually, additional work had shown at a site called Clovis that people had been here slightly earlier than Folsome. We now know the dates on Clovis are about thirteen thousand or so calibrated years, about eleven thousand, five hundred radio carbon years. And for a long time it was thought that Clovis were the first Americans, the first people who came into what was then a truly new world, and that stayed that way for the better part of the twentieth century. But there were fines that were being made in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies nineteen eighties that seemed to hint that there might be a older than Clovis or a pre Clovis presence in the America's But it really wasn't until the late nineties that work that was done by Tom delahay Um at then the University of Kentucky now at Vanderbilt in South America at a place called Monte Verde that showed that people were in fact in the America's prior to Clovised times by at least a thousand years. So if you think about the prehistory of the Americas, it means that people were probably here by around fourteen and a half thousand years ago, and that's calibrated years. But if you think about it, the oldest site that we have found cannot be the first site in the hemisphere, because these are it's in the it's in the middle portion of this well, it's actually in far southern South America. So for one, you've got to assume that people must have come across the land bridge into the America's a whole lot earlier than they arrived in southern Chile southern South America. And the other thing is is that the odds of us finding the very first site in the America's are infinitely small and absolutely so we know people were here before then. Now we're assuming that they they came across the land bridge and it wasn't water access from somewhere in South America. No, they walked here. We know when people start sailing across the South Pacific it's about three thousand years ago. There was no sort of cross ocean water route into the America's in ice age times. We also have interesting convergence from genetic evidence from ancient d n A. And this is work that I do with colleagues in Copenhagen at the Center for GeoGenetics where UM we have shown that groups in Northeast Asia probably split off into several subgroups, probably around twenty three twenty four thousand years ago. There in the America's um sometime after around fifteen and a half thousand years ago, possibly earlier. But these are the genetic estimates that we have, So we have this kind of nice convergence of the archaeological and the genetic records which are telling us that at least by fifteen and a half thousand years ago, we have people dispersing across the Americas. But the thing that you always have to kind of keep in the back of your mind is, you know, right around the corner you can find an older site. We may get older evidence from the genetic record, the ancient DNA record of earlier populations that we hadn't detected before. So there's always the possibility that you're gonna find or pssibly could find still older presences. And so this Monteverde site is currently the oldest site that we know of in the America's And let me ask you a question. Are you saying that that the the human DNA from the indigenous people down there today are connected to Asia? Yeah? Oh yeah, so that's why you said they walked there. Oh well, it's it's it's more complicated. We now have sites in North America that are as old and possibly older than Monteverte. Monteverde was the first one that said Okay, they're here before closed times. That's a long walk from Alaska to South America. Well yeah, and and actually, based on the genetic evidence, we think they did it pretty quickly because we've got's incredible. Yeah, we've got genomes from South America and from North America. You know, areas that are separated by literally thousands of kilometers, and yet genetically speaking, they're really closely related to one another. So there hadn't been that many generations of time lapse between. Got a thousand questions that we have town for why did they go that far? Well, you've just walked into a continent where nobody's home, and you're looking around. You haven't seen any smoke on the horizon, you haven't seen any freshly killed animals. You're realizing, Wow, I'm all alone here. And you know, humans are curious, humans explore. There's an advantage if you're in an unknown landscape to mobility is insurance. It doesn't matter what's right around you right now, it's what's over the next hill when things go badly where I am right So there's a there's a real advantage to moving and and the fact that they were traveling is by what we measure as archaeologically breathtaking speed, tells you that they were really fast learners. They made it all the way over from Siberia for goodness sakes, they knew that they knew what they were about. So what are the sites that are older than the Monteverde site that are in North America. So You've got a place in Oregon called Paisley Cave UM which has produced UM a really interesting record including prehistoric poop um human human which dates to pre closed times and has human DNA preserved in it. I did not notice. Yeah, there's sits here in Texas down just north of Austin known as the Galt site, and then there's an adjacent one it's probably it's probably the same site called the Friedkin Site UM, which have produced ages of fifteen thousand plus. So yeah, there's there's sites sort of hither and yon across North America that are consistently coming in in that you know, fifteen thousand plus or minus range of time. Here's Steve leading us into a very interesting part of how Fulsome impacted America. He's always stirring up trouble here with the Fulsome site. You got a projectile point laying in the rib of the thing. No rational reasonable person could come and make any argument that here's an ice age relic that was killed by a human being that proved once and for all that human antiquity in the New World went back a long ways, and it was problematic for people who had a certain interpretation of human timelines with respect to Biblical teachings, and it caused something of a religious crisis because it forced the idea that human habitation here fit outside of what was then a wide held understanding of how humans spread around the world based on a Biblical chronology. And it was a sort of you know, it was it was a spiritual discussion as much as it was about anthropology, that you had a deep ten thousand plus year human existence that did not fit into an understanding of of a of a certain very literal interpretation of the human timeline based on Genesis. I'd like to talk about the issue that Steve just brought up, which could be a can of worms for some of us and was for many in the nineteen twenties, and the issue is the antiquity of man as described by science versus what some believe the Bible describes. The real issue has to do with how portions of the Bible are interpreted. Many believed, and among them most archaeologists at the time, that man had only been on the North American continent for three thousand years, which fit within a literal biblical time frame. The fulsome sight said something different. I personally believe science and the Bible aren't at odds at all. But here's a good question. Why are we talking about this? Because this stuff is beyond important to me in my family, and I know many of you, and let me say, if you aren't interested in the Bible, please don't be threatened by my directness. This section is for the bros that are interested, and I know a lot of you are. Fist bump of agreement. I want to give you the lowdown. The first book of the Bible, called Genesis, tells the Hebrew seven day creation story of the universe, the Earth, animals, and man in the first couple of chapters. It also tells the human lineage of man all the way from the first humans Adam and Eve, up to modern historical figures that we now know exactly when they were here. And this is where the issue is. If you do the math, it puts the creation of the Earth and the first humans at about six thousand years ago, while science says the Earth is four point five billion years old, and that the first modern humans arrived here long before six thousand years ago. This is a big problem if you take this portion of the Bible literally, and as a person that absolutely believes the Bible is tricky business to say that portions of it you take literally and others you don't. But that is not what I'm saying. We use metaphors all the time to describe very literal things. It doesn't mean it's a fairy tale because a metaphor was used. It's not known, but it's believed. The Book of Genesis was written about thirty years ago. The first written languages started showing up about five thousand years ago in the Middle East, so the fulsome hunters were stacking up bison in New Mexico seventy years before the Book of Genesis was written. That's a relevant data point because up until written languages appeared, all history and important stories were passed down by the only means available, which was orally, and this method of generational transfer of information impacts the way that stories are told. Oral storytelling had to be simple enough for people to remember it, all the while carrying the essential architectural principles that were important and would last through time. The author John Lennox, in his book Seven Days That Divide the World says quote, the first obvious yet important thing to say about the Bible is that it is literature. In fact, it is a whole library of books, some of them history, some poetry, some in the form of letters, and so on, very different and content and style. And approaching literature in general, the first question to ask is how does the author who wrote it wish to be understood? For instance, the author of a mathematics textbook does not intend to be understood as poetry. Shakespeare does not intend us to understand his plays as exact history, and so on. I would highly recommend John Lennox's book. He's a mathematician at Oxford University in England and has publicly debated Richard Dawkins, a famous atheist, and if any of you hill Billies no John Lennox, I'd love to have him on the podcast. The essential principles that the story in Genesis carries through it could be whittled down to two main things. Number One, an entity of incredible intelligence and power strategically created the universe over your period of time through the natural processes of geology, biology, and science, the creation story as a sequence of seven days could be viewed as multiple periods of time, which at its elementary framework, is consistent with the geological and fossil records. I personally believe the seven days of Genesis weren't seven twenty four hour days, but rather they were epics of time. The second principle that the story carries with it strongly was that God made man different than the animals, which science completely agrees with in the sense of cognitive capabilities. The only thing God breathed his breath into, according to Genesis, was man. He gave the animals life, but not his breath. The most respected modern evolutionary biologists, who typically aren't too keen on the Bible, highlight and marvel at the oddity of human uniqueness. That breath parallels, the self reflective insight that Ian Tattersall spoke of, and the language, art, toolmaking, and symbolic thought that separates the species Homo sapiens so distinctly from every other species. Science attributes are cognitive abilities to natural selection, advantageous gene mutations, and pure mathematical chance. And to say that God did this doesn't negate that he used some of these processes to accomplish what we now see in humans. Man is the one who has pitted science and God against each other, but clearly I don't think they've got any qualms with one another. Genesis also famously tells the story of the fall of man when he ate to forbidden fruit, realized he was naked and became ashamed. This is oddly similar to this idea of self reflective insight. So my point is this that Genesis was never meant to be a scientific textbook, but rather a story carrying principles that could be understood by primitive man and by modern people in one that's a pretty major feat. It needed to be a story that could last the irrosive nature of time, kind of like a stone fulsome point, and it has done just that. Since we're having so much fun, let's go a little bit further. I believe the creation sequence mirrors much of what modern science believes about the formation of the universe and planet. Here's the rough creation sequence of Genesis. Day one, light was created, the sun, day to the atmosphere and ocean. Day three, dry land and vegetation appear. Day four, stars and moon, Day five, sea creatures and birds day six, land animals, and lastly humans, and on day seven God took a break. The sequence begins with the sun and then goes to fishing birds, which come before the creation of man, and man arrives at the very end. Which this is a pretty consistent story with what we know of the fossil record, And all I'm saying is that it's pretty crazy that some ancient dudes got a wildly complex scientific sequence even remotely right in their oral story. There would have been infinite options for their explanation. To this day, modern science cannot explain the formation of the universe, and that is not my opinion, that is the consensus of science. We do not know. So actually, all of us that have any thoughts or opinions on the formation of the universe, and the reason man is the way is our writing on some version of faith. Science, by its very definition, can only understand and describe and measure that which is seen and able to be replicated. It doesn't claim to understand the metaphysical, which means beyond the physical, and it's a ridiculously Western and modern idea to think that there is no metaphysical. Science does a great job of explaining everything in its realm. But at the end it is saying there are things we can't explain, and we know that this isn't the end of the trail. And this is exactly where faith based philosophies start, and no, they can't be proven. That is the essence of faith, which I have found is rewarding and fun way to live your life. This is an incredibly logical and intelligent sequence, and it's not surprising that scientific literature doesn't validate the existence of God it hand. However, scientists can have personal opinions, and that's where things can get confusing and ideas go in and out of vogue. We could go on and on, because this stuff is fascinating. To get back to human life in our unusual arrival on planet Earth, here we go. Ian Tattersall said that the chro Magnuts, these were the first people in Europe, showed up quickly, fully formed in the fossil record and full of symbolism and art. At the end of Tattersall's book Becoming Human, he said, quote, it is frustrating, indeed, to come to the end of our story and to have to admit that we have little idea as to exactly how, when, where, or why our extraordinary consciousness was acquired. I respect his frankness about what science can explain and about what it can't. Later, he said that this cognitive ability was quote comparatively sudden, and that it came very late in our evolutionary history. I think the themes in both science and the creation story mirror each other. Here. Something happened very quickly that made humans what they are. The story of how our cognitive condition came about is shrouded in deep mystery. I'm certain that the fulsome hunters had an opinion about how humans got here, and if we were playing a game of telephone, the guys closer to the source of the intel were usually right. All that to say, I think the primitive humans that wrote the creation story in the Book of Genesis were onto something. And I'm with the cave men on this one, but I'm also with the real science that we know today. Man, that was like riding the bucking mal Can you believe that we talked about this for twelve minutes? I absolutely love it. I realize that my little spiel here doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this topic, and I'm not really interested in a debate. I'm just not geared up for that. I just wanted to give people that care about the Bible some food for thought. Additionally, in scientific and academic literature, the idea of intelligent design and creation has been minimized and even ridiculed, and in some places they've made it a point to label people who believe the Bible as ignorant. And I've even seen them use the word primitive as a descriptor for those of us who believe the Bible, And you know, maybe that's not such a bad label. So I guess my biggest point is for those that believe the Bible to say that this is actually a pretty intelligent way to try to understand the universe, and that there is no reason to fear good science. I want to get back with the closing thought from Dr Meltzer on how fulsome impact the archaeological community. He spent a lot of time learning about the history of archaeology and interviewing old archaeologists. Here's what he said. Early on, I was doing some research on it, and I wrote to a bunch of the folks who have been around in in the nineteen twenties, and I said, well, what was it like. And one of the comments that sort of stuck with me over the years was from Amiel Howry at the University of Arizona, and he said, you know what, we all felt relief that all of that argument and bitterness and controversy was finally over. We had now a clear data point. We knew people had been here for at least ten thousand years, and so we could stop arguing about that and start trying to understand. Okay, so what happened between ten thousand years ago and two thousand years ago when we've already known about all this archaeological stuff. You know, suddenly American archaeologists in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties have a really interesting challenge. And Fulsome triggered that It's been a wild ride learning about the Fulsome sight. But I have to go back to my original question why is this important? And I think at least some portion of that answer is pretty simple. Getting a small peak into the lives of ancient humans gives us a data point about normal human behavior, and this helps put our current lives and behavior in the context. When I hear the Fulsome story, the reverberation of human struggle is glaringou mankind has always struggled, and technology will never be able to take the struggle of being human away. It just shifts it to different areas. We went from defending our wooly mammoth kill from dire wolves to the American version of struggle would be like stressing out about paying bills, or buying our kids decent basketball shoes, or how to maintain our social status by what kind of truck we drive. I drive a pretty beat up truck, y'all, and for the record, so does Warner Glenn, James Warrens, and Roy Clarke think about it. But on the other hand, much of the world's struggle today is still dramatic and life threatening. People struggle with disease, abject poverty, finding clean water to drink and food to eat. The human story of struggle remains consistently. And I'll wake up that dead horse and whoop on him a little bit and say that the cave men that wrote the Book of Genesis recounted that God told them that the struggle would always be here. Turns out they were right. I can't thank you enough for listening to bear grease. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. I would also like to thank Dr David Meltzer for contributing his knowledge to the series. Be sure to check out all his books. But his contribution isn't over. In the final episode of this series, we're diving in deep to the actual fulsome point. It's gonna be really cool. Hey, please leave us a review on iTunes and tell somebody about this podcast this week and Merry Christmas your bear Grees and Hillbillies. H