00:00:05 Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty eight in central Montana, construction workers digging with a backo discovered human bones. It was a child buried twelve thousand, nine hundred years ago in the Pleistocene the Ice Age, which is a time period that has remained a mystery for archaeologists until now, because in twenty fourteen, forty six years after the discovery, a new technology emerged that told us who this child was, as it became the first and only Clovis era human DNA to be fully sequenced, giving us insight into the first Americans. In this episode, doctor David Meltzer will tell us what we learned from America's oldest bones. I doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. 00:01:03 Speaker 2: We've got enzac in Montana, We've got these individuals in southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we can see a tight connection between the two in a genetic sense. But there's also something lurking in those genomes at Lego Asanta. Geneticists refer to it as a ghost population. Does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has simply disappeared and the only record we have of it was that there was some sort of gene flow or interaction and why is it only in South America? 00:01:40 Speaker 3: And hey, don't forget that. 00:01:42 Speaker 1: On June ninth, there will be a new drop on the bear Grease feed to go along with bear Grease. What you're listening to now the Bear Grease Render Brent's this country life podcast. But now you'll be able to listen to Lake Pickles Backwoods Universe. This is our wildlife biology podcast and it's really good. We're going to learn a lot. But now we're on to the peopling of America. Roll the intro Reba. My name is Klay Nukem, 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 as designed to be as rugged as the place. 00:02:46 Speaker 4: As we explore, there's a whole sort of new synthesis emerging, a new view emerging about the peopling of the Americas, which is making it clear that the traditional interpretations that we had people get to Alaska, they come through the ice free corridor. 00:03:10 Speaker 2: Boom, it's all done. It's Clovis. It just doesn't work anymore. And it really hasn't worked for quite some time, right, because we've had these pre Clovis age sites now for the better part of fifteen twenty years. But what's happening now is that we're getting a much better picture, a more nuanced picture of the process itself and the routes that they may have taken, and getting back to the DNA who they were. 00:03:38 Speaker 1: I want to learn about the peopling of America, about who were the first people that came here. This is a conversation that's been heated since the late eighteen hundreds. The technology in the last ten years has changed the conversation. This is doctor David Meltzer, an archaeologist, author and from SMU in Dallas, Texas. He's a great communicator. 00:04:07 Speaker 2: It used to be that I had lots of questions as an archaeologist, who are these folks, where did they come from? Who are they related to? These are not questions I could answer with archaeological remains. Right, I can look at a projectile point over here, and I can look at a projectile point over there, and I can infer that they're made in a similar fashion, they have a similar style. Maybe they're related, but I'd never know that for sure. Right, But with ancient DNA, if I have skeletal material that we can extract the DNA from an ancient individual, which we do very carefully and with considerable respect. There's a lot of ethical issues tied with ancient DNA, As you might imagine, I can identify ad mixture, ancestry, who these people are, where they came from, who their ancestors were in Northeast Asia and the like. And it's been it's been an absolute sea change in terms of our understanding of the peopling process. So we know from the ancient genetic record, ancient genomic record, that we had groups that were living in Eastern Asia China today, forty thousand years ago, very distinctive genomically. They've been isolated for some time. When we say distinctive genomically, we're not talking about them being you know, superior or inferior or anything like that. What we're actually measuring are genetic traits that have absolutely no bearing on their fitness. These are parts of your genome that actually don't do anything. So you can look at two different populations and there will be a certain amount of genetic distance between them. So we can use we can use DNA as a clock. This is just wild stuff. Is this would not have been imaginable, you know, forty years ago. 00:05:52 Speaker 1: How long have we had this technology? 00:05:54 Speaker 2: Well, so the first ancient North American genome was twenty fourteen, just a shade over ten years ago, ten years ago, ten years ago. Yeah, no, Clay, if we had had this conversation in twenty ten, it'd be over in about five minutes because I'd have nothing else to say. 00:06:10 Speaker 1: Really. Yeah, it's exciting to live in the times of new technology being developed that's solving ancient mysteries. But it can also be a little unnerving as it up ends long held philosophies, and I sometimes wonder if our certainty at some point won't be disrupted again in the future by even more cryptic technology. But we need to understand what we are certain about. We need to talk about bones. So what discovery of human remains was found that opened the key to these place to see people? 00:06:49 Speaker 2: Well so, in terms of North America, right, the first ancient genome was the Anzik child. So The Antik child was discovered in the nineteen sixties, and the story, as I understand it, was a rancher was sort of doing some dirt work on his property with some heavy equipment, Montana and just outside of Wilson, Montana. In fact, it was quite close to where we did the bison butchering experiment, and I kept looking off in that distance thinking I'm close. 00:07:19 Speaker 1: Wow. 00:07:21 Speaker 2: And the Anzik child was interred with grave goods some really distinctive Clovis points, so we know that the Anzick child was a member of that Clovis cultural group. 00:07:34 Speaker 1: How this came about was that a backo operator was digging gravel off a ranch owned by a family named Anzik. He hit an unusual layer of dirt and recognized his stone point. He got off, and he discovered human bones there too. What he'd later learn is that he found a formal burial of a one to two year old male child, buried with one hundred and twenty stone own tools in six non human bone adladal four shafts, and some elk antlers dusted with red ochre, and the human bones appeared to have red ochre on them as well. It makes you wonder if they buried the child with the things they thought it would need for the afterlife, the things they relied on most stone tools. 00:08:26 Speaker 3: But here is what they learned. 00:08:29 Speaker 2: Subsequent radiocarbon dating demonstrated that Anazik was around twelve seven hundred years ago, so late Pleistocene, Late Ice Age, and when Eski's group did the sequencing, what they discovered, what we discovered and published in twenty fourteen was that that individual was part of a population movement into the Americas that we subsequently identified as Southern Native Americans. Now we all know that Montana's not in southern portion of the continent. But what Anzik signified was this was one member of a population that subsequently would spread throughout the hemisphere. Whereas the other sort of fork in the road, right, so one fork goes south, the other stays north. Those are Northern Native Americans. 00:09:18 Speaker 1: So Anzik all connected anzimatically to this Anzik child. 00:09:22 Speaker 2: It all sort of gets channeled back through Anzik or through others of that population, right, So Anzik is not sort of the founding population per se, It's a member of that early population. 00:09:33 Speaker 1: This discovery of this Anzik child was is the only pliest scene human remains that we were able to extract good enough DNA from to really do the type of genetic research and discovery that you're talking about. 00:09:49 Speaker 2: Fact, that's correct so far, So all. 00:09:51 Speaker 1: This is based upon one really good specimen. 00:09:55 Speaker 2: Well, there's actually more to it, okay. So anzik Is so far are the oldest genome that we have in the Americas. However, we have others that come along pretty soon thereafter, and that help fill in the picture of the dispersal of these populations throughout the hemisphere. We have some in southeastern Brazil that date to so anziic is twelve seven. We've got ones in South America, southeastern Brazil that are around ten and a half. We've got in Spirit Cave and Nevada that's about ten to seven. What's really striking about the genetic data, so again, you know we've got data from Montana, we've got Nevada, we've got Brazil, we've got various other places in South America. Is how closely linked they are and how similar they are at the genetic level. What that tells us is that this is a population that was actually moving pretty fast because there hasn't been that much change in the time from Anazik down to southeastern percent. 00:11:01 Speaker 1: Yes, so it wasn't like five thousand years no, no, no, yeah, so it's literally people generations, maybe a little more than that, but yeah, that's that's the tendency, right, is that it happened really fast. 00:11:14 Speaker 2: We call them quick waivers. They you know, it's just a fast moving radiation throughout the hemisphere. 00:11:21 Speaker 1: Can you imagine moving on foot from Montana to Brazil? What was pushing these people? Why did they move? These are answers we will never know. But maybe one day they'll have a technology that can read the thoughts and understand the motivations of people by the DNA. 00:11:39 Speaker 3: Extracted from their bones. 00:11:46 Speaker 1: One of the most interesting things about the Anazac child was recorded in a peer review paper in the Science Advances journal, in which an isotope analysis was done on the bones and in that they can determine and the type of protein that the mother ate when she nursed the young child, and they found that her diet was more closely related to a scimitar cat, a carnivore, than anything else. They use this study to say that these people were eaten a lot of big mammal meat that is pretty durned crazy. But our next question is what did these bones tell us about where these people came from. 00:12:32 Speaker 2: So we've got these two populations, one in Eastern Asia and one sort of in the region around Lake Baikal, probably around twenty five twenty three thousand years ago. There's there's interaction. These groups or members of these groups kind of bump into one another and then split off as a sort of combined entity. A combined population. That's the group that will become ancestor to Native Americans. That's the group that will make their way across the land bridge. They'll do it in at least a couple of different pulses. They'll be the initial one, and those will be the folks that will make it all the way down into the lower forty eight, throughout South America and so on. Then there'll be a slightly later one which will come into Alaska and stay and not go any further south and ultimately disappear from the genetic and archaeological record. Okay, wow, we could never see disappearance in the archaeological record. Before we could see artifacts, but we had no idea who made them and whether the people who made them had descendants among modern groups. All modern people have ancestors, there's no question about that, right, But not all ancient people that we see in the ancient DNA record necessarily had descendants, because some populations disappeared others were replaced, either you know, locally or regionally or whatever. Humans move and humans been moving for a long time. Yeah. Yeah, so we can start to see that kind of thing. We can see people and populations disappearing. 00:14:11 Speaker 1: All from basically finding bits of DNA and. 00:14:16 Speaker 2: Well bones in bones exactly right. So when you're doing ancient DNA on skeletal remains, what you're doing is you're getting that individual's genome. But it's more than just that individual, because your genome, my genome. All of these things are a record of all of our ancestors and the big picture. 00:14:38 Speaker 1: This would be like sorcery to someone one hundred years ago. 00:14:43 Speaker 2: Oh, no question. 00:14:44 Speaker 1: Like if you said, I can tell you everything about where you're from, who your people were, I mean. 00:14:51 Speaker 2: Really, well, it's a scale thing though, right. I mean, by the way, don't buy any of those things that the genetic ancestry testing companies are telling you about. We can tell you exactly who your ancestors. No, there's a lot of arm weaving with a lot of that stuff. Really, yeah, yeah, yeah, Now what we're looking at are population level trends, right, Okay, so we're not able to take your DNA and precisely show. 00:15:15 Speaker 1: Who your ancestors were. 00:15:17 Speaker 2: That makes sense, But we can look at it as a population and we do. 00:15:22 Speaker 1: What if you told a human living in the Pleistocene that inside their bones were the inscriptions of their ancestors. I think they tell you that they already knew that. I find this bizarre and oddly circular. Author Barry Lopez and his book Arctic Dreams, raises the question of how far modern man has actually come. He questions whether all we've accomplished is quote a more complicated manipulation of materials, more astounding display of his grasp. 00:15:55 Speaker 3: Of the physical principles of matter. 00:15:58 Speaker 1: We are dazzled by mere styles of expression end of quote. I think what he's saying is that modernity has produced a very technical quote style of expression like sequencing DNA, where previous humans might have been more spiritually acute and expressed life in different ways. 00:16:20 Speaker 3: I like thinking about this kind of stuff. 00:16:32 Speaker 1: This is the perfect time to stop for just a second and review some basic stuff that will help all this make sense. The Clovis era is a term used to describe a group of people that we're here in what is now America roughly thirteen thousand years ago. They spanned the continent and made uniquely fluted stone points. That's basically the only way that we know who they are is because of their technology. For decades, people thought that these the Clovis people, crossed the burying land bridge out of Asia in the Pleistocene and came through an ice free corridor between the glaciers into the interior of North America. 00:17:11 Speaker 3: But through this. 00:17:12 Speaker 1: Ice core technology that we learned about on episode two ninety eight of Bear Grease, we're realizing that that ice free corridor travel path wouldn't be possible. All that information is going to be valuable in just a little bit. 00:17:26 Speaker 2: But I'm gonna throw a wrinkle in here, anazak is Clovis. We still don't have a pre Clovis genome, so we don't know whether the earlier population that comes into the Americas, who are they and how do they relate to Clovis, and were they part of that quick wave? Will presumably not because that quick wave is Clovis down to you know, South America. We're looking. 00:17:59 Speaker 1: So it's just so hard to find human remains that are over ten thousand years old. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. Like there were hundreds, clearly hundreds for sure, even thousands of people, oh yeah, across the landscape, across all spread out, all across North America, and we can't find any of their bones because it's organic matter, it deteriorates. What we find is what you specialize in, which is stone points and archaeological like physical evidence that humans were here. And so just these really unique situations where something happened, where bones were preserved. It's like literally searching for a needle in a thousand haystacks. 00:18:44 Speaker 2: It's a challenge. So throughout the hemisphere North and South America, there's maybe twenty five thirty human remains older than about eight thousand years. That's a hell of a small population on which to you know, create any sort of inferential basis for what the first people look like. Now, the thing that's really interesting is that at this time in Europe we've got all sorts of skeletal remains, right, So, yeah, it's a preservation issue, but obviously, you know, Europe must have preservation issues there as well. But the difference is is that their base population of individuals that were living at that time is so much larger that if you take one percent of that population and then one percent of the population that's living in the America's which is a lot smaller, you know, what are the odds that you're going to get well preserved human vas Yeah, yeah, I mean it is the case that throughout most of eastern North America, bone does not preserve in sediments. 00:19:50 Speaker 1: Eastern North America being the eastern deciduous forest where have a lot of rainfalls at a lot of biological a lot of soils and all that stuff. In the West, it would be better. 00:20:03 Speaker 2: Better chances, absolutely absolutely, But you know, preservation depends on just so many things. You know, was the individual interred, what was the context of the burial, you know, where scavenger is able to get to the you know, the remains or you know, these people were highly mobile. They did not have cemeteries, you know, at this period of time. Actually the first cemetery we see is probably around ten thousand years ago. But as I mentioned earlier, you know, this is something that is now being done much more in concert with Native American groups, because these are the ancestors of these individuals, right. The people today are descended from these first Americans, and so a lot of the you know, the first decade or so of ancient DNA work, and this is true globally, there was a bone rush, right. Every time you found a bone, somebody wanted to sequence it and say, you know, because you learn something new with each new specimen. We're starting to calm down a little bit because, you know, we're starting to get the picture together. We're filling in you know, it's much more filling in the details rather than creating the whole canvas. But we're also doing much more collaborative work with the native groups because you know, they're interested. They might not necessarily be interested in the same kinds of things we're interested in, but we find that out right, we do what we can to sort of respect the descendants, the descendant communities, and at the same time sort of look into and try and understand their history. And really, this is this is human history, right, This is the story of people essentially coming out of Africa and making their way around the globe. It's an amazing story, because one of the things that's always struck me is the vanity of Europeans when they started sailing around the globe. You know, they talked about exploring all these places and going where no man has gone before, throwing in a star trek reference here. But the reality is is every place they landed there was somebody there, right. Yeah, you know, so hunter gatherer groups, foraging groups leaving Africa managed to pretty much populate the entire globe, with the exception of Antarctica, and even then there's some question about whether indigenous groups got to Antarctica before James Cook approached it in the late seventeen hundreds. 00:22:28 Speaker 1: Humans seem to be really good at dividing up based upon really the quite small cosmetic and cultural differences within our species. But doctor Meltzer makes a good point, this is the story of mankind. As I learned about archaeology, what is most astonishing to me is how random the data points seemed to be for because I mean, like we talk about Clovis this well, first of we talk about Folsome, this incredible archaeological discovery discovered by George mcjenkin, who you know, is just this cowboy get out on his ranch and he finds these bones and he gets old there. And then the Clovis site is basically a commercial gravel pit where they're digging up stuff and they and they find it. The Anzik child is discovered when they're doing excavation on just some rancher's random place. And I mean it feels like as a species, we would be like globally like, okay, everyone, we're gonna grid off the earth and we want every man, woman and child to go out and excavate the land that they own and look for evidence of deep human antiquity. Ready, go report back to us in a month, and we we grid off the whole earth and we find everything that is not even remotely I mean that's a fairy tale, like like you know, how much has been destroyed? How much is there? Is there an archaeological site under my house in Arkansas that would change the world and the whole story, But we're never gonna dig it up in my lifetime because my house is. 00:24:11 Speaker 2: There, you know. 00:24:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, funny fact. What do you think about that? 00:24:15 Speaker 2: Well, I think you should move your house and we can see what's on it. 00:24:19 Speaker 1: I do find stone points in my yard. 00:24:21 Speaker 2: Okay, Well there you go, then it really is good. 00:24:23 Speaker 1: Reason to move to your house find stone points in my yard. 00:24:26 Speaker 2: So there's there's a bunch of things. First off, you're absolutely right in that it's complicated. Sites are found randomly. Sites are found owing to construction erosion, dumb luck. The person happened to be walking along at the moment that something eroded out, and if they'd come twenty minutes later, it would have washed downstream and they'd never know. This is why we as archaeologists when we're out in the field, we're talking to ranchers, we're talking to farmers, we're talking to people who are following you orders and surveying that you know, one square mile around their house, and they're the ones his eyes are on the ground all the time. Okay, But at the same time, we're also thinking, and we're also using techniques like remote sensing, techniques like understanding the local geology, like understanding erosional and depositional processes. The best example, wonderful example of this is fellow by name of Reed Firing at the University of North Texas. Reid has two PhDs, one an anthropology, one in geology, and reads a pretty savvy guy, and he was looking at the geology in his neighborhood literally, and he got to thinking, you know, the ice age stuff is now buried under about eight to nine meters a sediment, and he got it into his head that well, they're digging a dam and they're cutting an overflow sluice way by that dam, and he just decided, well, that's a really good opportunity to go look eight meters below the surface. He starts walking down that contact between the end of the place to scene and the Cretaceous. Right, So you've got twelve thousand year old sediments sitting on top of sixty million year old rock, and what does he discover? The Clovis point, right, So just like walking around yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you take that sort of knowledge and apply it, it's not a completely random thing. But you know, the prepared mind will find things, and Reed certainly was. And that's it's so called. It's the Aubry site. So it's one of the oldest Clovi sites we have while and it was discovered because he was savvy enough to know where to look. 00:26:46 Speaker 1: I bet those damn builders wish he hadn't found. 00:26:50 Speaker 2: It did not have anything, it did not slow the dam It all worked out just fine for all concern. 00:26:58 Speaker 1: The bones have answered the question of where Clovis people came from. But now I want to try to understand how they got here. Meltzer is going to bring up something called the Kelp Highway, which is the theory that after crossing the Burying land bridge, humans moved down the coast, utilizing the rich ecosystems provided by Kelp. 00:27:21 Speaker 2: Well, okay, so we've now established that people came down the coast, and the question is, well, what resources were they using? There is an interesting theory about the so called Kelp Highway that would have provided a rich resource base for groups. Certainly there's a lot of help out there today. The obvious question is what did it look like at the Pleisto scene sixteen thousand years ago when people were coming down that coast. I don't know. I don't know that any of us know, because you know, these are sea plants where we haven't got a really good geological record of the history of Kelp along the coat. 00:28:00 Speaker 1: You can't do the core. 00:28:02 Speaker 2: Well, you know what we have we again this. 00:28:07 Speaker 1: Is I thought maybe I gave him a new idea. Well, I was going to be like call it the clay Nucombe core because I told you to get a core of the Kelp. 00:28:15 Speaker 2: Well, the problem is, you know what the Pacific Northwest coast looks like, right, it's constantly getting pounded. Uh, the odds are against you. I would tell you, by the way, that the fellow who found the Titanic years ago, one of his people contacted me and they said, you know, he was thinking, now that he's found the Titanic, that maybe he would do some work on the Bearing Land Bridge and look for sites and would be interested. And I said, sure, nothing everything side, Yeah, nothing, nothing happened. I told him that, you know, the odds were actually not very. 00:28:48 Speaker 1: Good, just because the ocean would have just yeah yeah, well volatile down there. 00:28:54 Speaker 2: You can do bathometric studies, right, you can. You can map the seafloor and you can see valleys, you can see river drainages in the like. But are you going to find an archaeological site. I mean it's hard enough to find stuff on land and doing it in sixty meters of water icy water. Yeah. So yeah, that one never came to pass. It would have been kind of fun though. Wow. Yeah. 00:29:17 Speaker 1: So okay, so you're telling me about what we know about the water route. 00:29:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, well, don't think of it as a water route, think of it as a coastal route. Okay. I suspect they were taking small animals and maybe even plant material out of tide pools. They were probably hunting animals that would have been in that same ribbon of dry land along the ice sheet. And before you get into the water, large mammal hunting, large sea mammal hunting is a much later thing and it usually requires boats, and we don't Now we don't have any evidence of boats. Does that mean they didn't have boats? No? I mean we just don't have any boats. Yeah, yeah, or exactly. I mean, what are the odds that you would actually find something like that? 00:30:05 Speaker 1: Now, so there are archaeological sites along that coast, no kind of. 00:30:10 Speaker 2: No, No, that's that's another challenge. 00:30:13 Speaker 1: So we just have So what are the data points, like like Cooper's Ferry is inland, yep, off of the it's off the Snake the Snake River, Like, we'll think about it. 00:30:26 Speaker 2: Think about it. You're coming down the coast, right, so you've got this ribbon of land. You can make your way down the coast and once you get south of that ice sheet. Now mind you that ice sheet comes into Seattle really late. You had ice in Seattle as recently as fourteen and a half fifteen thousand years ago before it starts to retreat. But once you get south of that ice sheet, you get to the Columbia, make a left turn that takes you into the interior. Right, and then right there you go, and you're gonna find your way to a place like Cooper Ferry. So you could either continue south, you could make a left turn, go into the interior, go a little further south, make another left turn. Yeah. So once once you get south of the ice it's open season, it's open plans. 00:31:15 Speaker 1: And so the data points then become like we have this Anzik child in Montana that we can genetically trace. 00:31:25 Speaker 2: To populations in Northeast Asia. 00:31:27 Speaker 1: And we know they didn't come down the ice free corridor because there was a it was closed up until it. 00:31:33 Speaker 2: Was not biologically viable until after they got here. 00:31:36 Speaker 1: And so I mean the only thing left is they either flew airplanes or they came down the. 00:31:42 Speaker 2: Coast exactly right. 00:31:43 Speaker 1: And so there's no paleolithic archaeological sites like on the coast of Alaska and British Columbia. 00:31:50 Speaker 2: It would be lovely if there were that we could sort of, you know, if they left behind like Hansel and Gretel, right, a trail of breadcrumbs, a trail of archaeological sites. There is one site that based around thirteen that's off the coast of British Columbia, where they actually have some ancient footprints literally footprints coming into this continent. But that's one of the only ones that's and that's still not old enough, right, because if people are at Cooper's Ferry at fifteen and a half, then a site this thirteen thousand is, yeah, that's that's long after. 00:32:20 Speaker 1: Wow. It's currently believed that the first people arriving in what is now the Lower forty eight got here using a coastal route, and sites like Cooper's Ferry, which is along the Salmon River near Cottonwood, Idaho, force us to believe in the water route. At Cooper's Ferry, they've found stone points and burned animal bones that radio carbon date back to fifteen thousand, five hundred years ago. This is two thousand years before Clovis, thousands of years before the ice free corridor was biologically viable for a thirteen hundred mile journey. Paleo's sites are just hard to come by, so it's difficult to piece it all together. 00:33:06 Speaker 2: Well, I mean, think about this in terms of numbers. We are not talking about a lot of people. Not only is there not a lot of people in absolute terms, in terms of density, You've got relatively few people on a vast continent and they're not and they're highly mobile, they're moving all the time. Archaeological sites accumulate when people slow down and stop, and especially if you've got a large number of people slowing down and stopping. 00:33:37 Speaker 1: And these people weren't making impact. I mean, like today, like you think about the impact that a human would leave on the planet in a week's time period. I'm producing trash, controducing tire tracks and mud when I drive my truck to where I hunt. And these people didn't have plastics, they didn't have metal. 00:34:00 Speaker 2: Oh god, no, yeah. 00:34:01 Speaker 1: Every everything they had was organic matter that would rot in a period of years at most. So it just took these like really special circumstances for something to be preserved. It's just astonishing to me how how this like these little breadcrumbs that we have, But also how much we know off these small data points, right. 00:34:25 Speaker 2: No, we we specialize in getting large amounts of information from tiny amounts of data. Yeah, because we have to. 00:34:41 Speaker 1: It's astonishing to me to think about, like who these people would have really been. They were humans, just like a same mental capacity. They could have learned to fly an airplane, they could have learned complex math. We just have to assume that they wouldn't have had any sense of their uniqueness in the world. I mean in terms of like we now look back from this place in twenty twenty five, where we have this incredible technology and we have these like what we perceive as modern lives right on the cutting edge of time. Well, they were on the cutting edge of time fifteen thousand years ago. It was it's hard for me to think about a place to sene man waking up, getting the fire going, and just thinking, man, it's just another Tuesday, and I gotta figure out what we're gonna eat, and I gotta go out and you know, kill a deer, kill a mammoth, or I've got a We're gonna head south today and maybe we'll run into some other group of people. I mean, they didn't know they were They just thought this is what human life was. 00:35:44 Speaker 2: That's exactly right. 00:35:46 Speaker 1: And then now fifteen thousand years later, we have, because of technology, because of history, because of written languages, because of communication, at this high level that we have, we're able to see this huge slice of the pie and go, holy smokes, those guys were just so unique. 00:36:03 Speaker 2: And yes, I think you're absolutely right. The only point that I would add is that I suspect at some level, at some degree, they must have realized looking around that there's not a lot of people here, right, there's wouldn't. 00:36:19 Speaker 1: That have been normal to them? 00:36:20 Speaker 2: Exactly right, exactly right. But think about it in terms of the first people coming into the Americas, where you know, they'd seen people in Siberia, they'd interacted with folks along the way, and suddenly they realize, you know, it's been months, it's been a really long time since we've seen smoke on the horizon, or a freshly killed animal, or bumped into somebody else. 00:36:42 Speaker 1: The place is uninhabited. Exactly They would have recognized. 00:36:45 Speaker 2: It, right, They may have recognized it or just thought, you know, maybe I just need to keep moving and I'm going to find somebody else. 00:36:52 Speaker 1: Right, What if they thought that was a positive or negative. 00:36:55 Speaker 2: Well, now that's if you're looking at your kids and they're getting to be a marriageable la you're thinking, boy, I hope we run into somebody really quick. Yeah, And that's actually one of the other things that's come out of the genetic record is that there's no evidence whatsoever of incest or I don't know if you necessarily want to talk about that. Sure, but with Neanderthals toward the end of their their string by you know, fifty thousand years ago, there was a lot of inbreeding really with modern human population, and they basically were running out of mates for their kids. With modern humans, you do not see that. So these folks, again, this goes back to if you're on an empty landscape, it pays to recognize strangers as friends. 00:37:42 Speaker 1: Wow, that's fascinating. It's mind boggling to think of so few humans on such a huge continent, especially as planet Earth now has over eight billion people. It's tempting to think that it would be nice to go back, but I'm sure all those people from the Pleistocene would like to be in our shoes, with excess food, air conditioning, and hospitals. This next section reveals one of the biggest mysteries of the Americas. Here, doctor Meltzer is going to introduce us to what they refer to as the ghost population. 00:38:23 Speaker 2: So one of the really interesting things, as we've talked about, we've got Anzac in Montana, we've got these individuals in southeastern Brazil. It's a site called Lego Asanta, and we can see a tight connection between the two in a genetic sense, but there's also something lurking in those genomes at Lego Asanta a well. Geneticists refer to it as a ghost population, and by that what we mean is that we've got segments of DNA that are clearly unrelated to everything else that are part of the genome of those individuals, and it's a signal that bears a resemblance to austral Asian populations, so Australia, New Guinea, that region of the world. So we've got these chunks, these odd chunks of DNA in these populations in southeastern Brazil that are part of the genome. But what's really puzzling about this stuff is that we don't see that austral Asian signal in any of the North American individuals that we've sequenced. We don't see it in any of the Alaskan individuals that we've sequenced. We don't see them in the Northeast Asian ones. So clearly there's ancestral genetic components and segments that are coming into the Americas, and we don't know does this possibly represent a pre Clovis population that has simply disappeared? And the only record we have of it was that there was some sort of gene flow or interaction. And why is it only in South America? If it came across the land bridge and into North America, you would expect to see this signal all the way down into the continent. R So we haven't quite figured out that. 00:40:18 Speaker 1: Do they not think that it's it potentially came from the South into South America? 00:40:23 Speaker 2: Not really, And let me tell you why we don't think that. And again with the caveat that with archaeology, you know, we're never at one hundred percent sure, but I'm going to say ninety nine point ninety nine on this one. We know when people start moving out across the Pacific, and we do know in fact that groups that moved out across the Pacific ultimately will touch down in coastal South America. They won't really spend much time there, right, But that's only about three thousand years ago, and that's only after folks developed the ocean going technology this, you know, the big outrigger canoes and that sort of thing to do that in the place to scene, No, I think it's pretty much again. 00:41:05 Speaker 1: So just to clarify, there's there's a genetic signal in South America that's not in North America. That it's from Australia. 00:41:14 Speaker 2: In that region, and that and that, and that's in South America and no place else. 00:41:19 Speaker 1: So what what do you think? This complete mystery? 00:41:23 Speaker 2: It's absolutely I mean, these are the things that make this fun. Right said, there's still so many questions to answer, and that's a big one. 00:41:32 Speaker 1: The ghost population of South America is some wild stuff. But it's worth noting that not all of the scientific community is an agreement that it's real. But that's how all this stuff works. Usually takes a generation or two to sort it all out. Potentially one day we'll understand even more as new information and technology unfolds, and this exact thing uncertainty spurs My last question to doctor Meltzer, with your career how do you manage the uncertainty because you have to be starting like there's I'm sure you've done stuff in your career where you said like, hey, this is the best information we have and here's what we believe, and then later that was proven wrong. 00:42:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's the fun of it, right. I Mean, our hypotheses, our theories, our inferences are not like our children. We're more than happy to discover something new that shows us oh okay, now we have a much better idea. What I thought before was wrong. I mean, you don't want it to happen too often, sure, sure, right, yeah, but it's really it's refreshing in a way because you're constantly learning stuff and by virtue of the sort of dearth of data. I mean, we have a tremendous amount of data. Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things, do we want more? Do we wish we had more? Absolutely? 00:43:04 Speaker 1: But there there definitely are are things that you can say with certainty that will never be pretty much reversed. I mean, like I'm thinking, like if we'd had this conversation in the year nineteen hundred, we would this would be an entirely different conversation. If we had this conversation in the nineteen forties. Oh yeah, it would be entirely different. We'd say, oh man, we got Clovis and fulsome and people have been here for thirteen thousand years. We also, through the you know, the latter part of the nineteen hundreds, would have thought that people came across the Burying land Bridge through the Ice Free Corridor and that's how they got here. And then now we're saying, well, it's a it's a coastal route. Yeah, Like, how twenty years from now will we still be saying that. 00:43:50 Speaker 2: Okay, I see we are route Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think there are anchor points that we can use. I don't think the ice Free Corridor is going to open any earlier than we thought. 00:43:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's like pretty that's like I saw. 00:44:00 Speaker 2: I'm confident on that one. So let's have this conversation in twenty years and find out if I was right or not. Yeah, but I think that's good. 00:44:06 Speaker 1: We're going to book this as a calendar. 00:44:07 Speaker 2: Of let's anchor that one right there. That's good. Was Clovis dating to you know, around thirteen thousand plus minus. Yeah, that's good. Have we found the earliest people in the Americas. No, I don't think. So is it going to go much before around fifty thousand years ago? I also don't think so. Here's what we're doing, This is this is really what science is all about. We are worrying away our ignorance. So I can say, just having this conversation here today, that I think the first people came into the Americas sometime between about sixteen and say twenty five thousand years ago. Okay, Do I think people could have come here one hundred thousand years ago? No? I don't, not at all, just because of the evidence that we have today suggests that's not the case. I don't even think they were or as early as fifty or forty or maybe even thirty. But that's just based on the evidence that we have today. Am I willing to accept the possibility that I could be wrong, Absolutely, because as you know, it's sort of alluded to the fact that I've been in this business for a while, and it's true, I've seen a lot of changes in the time that I've been in this business, you know. I mean, we all used to believe that it was Clovis first, and then it wasn't. We used to believe the ice free quarter was the way in and that it wasn't. So yeah, I've seen those changes. Yeah, and I've also you know, and it's it's humbling in the sense that it makes you realize, do not be too confident about what you know, because with archaeology there's always the potential for surprises. 00:45:53 Speaker 3: We're worrying away our ignorance. 00:45:57 Speaker 1: Attempting to answer these questions of the deep andiquity of man in North America is a grand intellectual feed and I think it's important and it adds weight to our modern human story of driving on paved roads and living in brick, air conditioned homes. I can't imagine living in modern times and having little curiosity about where people came from. To me, this curiosity is respect, and in this case, it's respect for these people that lived here, but also respect for the land itself. 00:46:34 Speaker 3: This is its story. 00:46:40 Speaker 1: I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease Brince this country life podcast, and I know that you're gonna enjoy Lake's Backwoods University. Please share our podcast feed with a friend this week and keep the wild places wild, because that's where the bears live. 00:47:01 Speaker 2: Fe