00:00:00 Speaker 1: M a guy that introduced me to the Folsome site. He couldn't get excited about certain cultures because they used a lot of junk stone and their points recruited. In course, the guy had been an engineer. He wiped the Folsome point. To him, it was like, no, that's a good people. His attitude though. This week on the Bargrease podcast, we're on our fourth and final episode in our series on the Fulsome Archaeological Site, and we're talking about stone points. We're in search of understanding the ancient, mysterious and difficult process of fluting stone. We'll discuss the radical design and the mechanics of these stone points and infer some stuff about the culture of these people based on all that we have, these beautiful stone points that we call Fulsome points. Of all their material possessions, these stones are the only thing that have outlasted the erosive nature of time. Well be talking with a new guest, anthropologist, Devin Pettigrew, who will walk us through the design of these points and the history of addle Addles, and one last time will tap into the knowledge of Dr David Meltzer and Steve Rinella. We dove in and went to the dad gum bottom of the river, and we're finally coming up for air as we'll discover the answer to our original question of why does any of this matter? The flutes on these points don't play any music, but they paint an incredible picture of who these people were. I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. If you think about like early Germanic flintlock rifles in the Americans, they were extremely well made. There was an art to them, and they re graved them. They didn't have to do all that stuff, but they could with fulsome they're just very concerned about, you know, making these points extremely well made. Somebody put a lot of extra time and that's and they really needed to. 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 that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. On this episode, we're gonna look into the technology and designed to the fulsome Stone Point. These points were first discovered in the wild Horse arroy oh in fulsome New Mexico, scattered amongst the remains of thirty two bison antiquous. If you've been listening to this series, you know all this stuff. These bison were killed some ten thousand years ago by ancient human hunters, some of the first Americans. The technology at this point was radical in terms of its engineering, and the reasoning of the ancient hunters to employ this risky style of point is a mystery. All the experts agreed the design has utilitarian function, but the reward of that function came with great costs, and some believe there was more to the point than just in the field performance. Was it cultural, was it spiritual? There was it the tendency of early man, just like it is today to push engineering to the furtherest side of the pendulum before the system breaks. Will never know the full answer, but we're in search of why they fluted these points. I feel pretty good about what we've learned regarding the events of this ancient hunt that we've been dissecting. We've covered a lot of ground while we've been in pursuit of our layman's PhD on Fulsome from George mcjunkan, the former slave we found the site, to the speculation on how the kill went down to gourmet butchering, to who these ancient people were and how they lived along the way we've been leaning on the inside of Steve Ronella Meat Eater is insight an ability to ask some interesting questions have helped open a broader vista on this subject. Here's Steve opening up our conversation on the uniqueness of the fulsome points and the inferences that can be made about these people because of their craftsmanship, the fineness of a fulsome point. It's the craftsmanship that goes into making a fulesome point where you make this like very perfect point. Every one of them kind of falls into a certain like dimensional characteristics, certain shape. You do something really hard to make like a point, and then you do something like knock these channel out of each face running the length of the point, which has a very high failure rate. So even people now like contemporary naverage to try to experience it. It's hard. It's like to make the thing and knock the thing out. Most are not gonna work. Just a delicate seeming but probably very deadly thing and so finely wrought and from such perfect stone that I think that adds a lot to the mythology of the folsome hunter. And to demonstrate I mean, I used to be friends. He passed away, but a guy that introduced me to the Folsome site. His name was Tony Baker. He come from a long line of anthropologists and arrowhead hunters. He would talk about some cultures just the projectile points. He didn't seem to like the culture. I don't mean a way like judging them. He couldn't get excited about certain cultures because they use a lot of junk stone and their points where and their points were crude in course, and he he was making insinuations about who they were, the character they were. They weren't picky about the stone they used. They were sloppy. They would leave, you know, they would leave like like patentation on that they wouldn't clean every face, so sometimes they had like a like a patina to it. And he was just like dismissive, not like dismissive, like not the religion or the belief system. He just couldn't get excited about people that made that use cruddy stone to make a rather crude implement The guy had been an engineer. He liked the fulsome point to him, it was like, no, that's a good people. What's kind of his attitude? You know? Think about if you use that same idea and projected into the future of what people would say about us. It's a judgment you make when you want when you're driving down the road, man, you see you know, you see a nice house, everything's organized, a nice beautiful garden, Like there's a boat, boat looks rigged up, ready to go. It looks an industrious person, you know. And then you buy a place and everything's all fallen down and in disrepair and junk everywhere. You most I'm not saying you most people make up old passing judgment about what that person's um. They're they're sort of like like how they feel about craftsmanship, how they feel about organization, how whether they're fastidious and tidy, you know, and and in a similar way, I look at that point and I'm like, holy cow, man, just a lot from that, just a beautiful point. Let's say someone somehow anthropological techniques get very so sophisticated that we learned somehow that the folesome hunters really yelled at their wives all the time, terribly rude to their wives. I'd be like, oh man, I didn't. That kind of goes against my impression. Never mased on the projectile never never make your hero staf you never want to meet your hero based on the projectile points. I find that very disappointed. Perhaps they were a little bit thuggish with their lives. It's a very real idea that how we manage our material things reflects some parts of our internal value system. Do you think that's fair? Do you think that we're coming to accurate conclusions when we infer this much about these people from the craftsmanship of their stone points. I figure it's pretty accurate and no doubt an interesting thought. Like I said before, Dr David Meltzer of s M, you literally wrote the book on fulsome and before we get much further, we need to understand what a fulsome point looks like and how it's made. And it would probably help if you took a second and googled fulsome point and looked at an image of one. Here's Dr Meltzer describing what they look like. So fulsome points are some of the really wonderful examples of flint napping you will ever encounter. They tend to be about I'm gonna do this in centimeters because because I've been doing dr meltzer. Okay, so if you were a falsome point, you'd be in an inch and a half to two inches long. Okay, there we go. Um, we're gonna have to go millimeters though here clay, because I can't tell you what two to three millimeters in thickness is understood, like an eighth of an inch thick, less than a quarter, much less than a quarter. We might be we might be talking sixte Uh, make them about an inch wide and uh, they have this very distinct flute. Think of it as a twentieth century bayonet, right a groove up the face. And in fact, when they were first discovered, it was thought because when they were first discovered it was you know, World War One was just a decade less than a decade old, it was thought that these were actually blood letting channels. But then they realized that for better penetration, well, for better penetration, and then you know, the animals bleeding and it just goes down that channel and out right. Well, as it turns out, these points were hafted by which we mean they were attached to spears, and the base of the point would have been anchored in the tip of a spear, and it would be wrapped and held in place and the um. There might be some fore shafts or perhaps a notch at the top of the spear in which the point would be wrapped up. I've got one in my hands. This is uh, this is not authentic fulsome and in fact that's a replica of falsome point. But the base of the point would have been hafted or anchored into the tip of the spear. It might have been wrapped by sinews. They might have used some sort of mastick to kind of glue it in there. But what that means is that the fluid itself would have been buried inside the haft area, so it couldn't have been a very good blood letting channel. Uh. These points were beautifully symmetrical. They were often finely trimmed, with what we referred to as gentle sort of pressure flaking up and down the edge, quite sharp, and would be you used for um hunting. These are not necessarily points that often had multi uses, so earlier Clovis points we often see that they were used as knives as well as projectiles. These things are built to hunt. These are really this is a specialized point. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a point that is intended to bring down an animal. But a lot of the time because it's so thin, it's it's thinness makes it fragile. We often see impact damage. You know, when stone meets bone and high velocity, it breaks. Dr Meltzer just brought up the weakness of the Fulsome technology. It's thin and it breaks easily. However, that's also its greatest strength. Thin points penetrate well, can be made very sharp and are easily resharpened when the tips break. Devin Pettigrew isn't at the Apologist and got his PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research is in experimental archaeology and he focuses on the tools and weapons of early hunter gatherers. He's an expert on ad laddles, and we're gonna talk about those, but first he's gonna describe Fulsome points. Several times in this podcast you'll hear us talk about Clovis points and we'll describe them in contrast to the Fulsome point. So it would be good if we understood what they were. It's handy to think about the different style of points as different kinds of broadhead technology, like cut on impact, fixed blade heads, or expandable broadheads. The Clovis technology is older than Fulsome technology, and it's easy to see that Fulsome was the next step past Clovis. Clovis is a partially fluted point, and basically about one third of the base of the point had the slabs taken off the sides of it. The removal of the sides is called fluting. Fulsome points are fluted the entire way down the side to achieve maximum thinness on the point. You can imagine people going, well, if a little fluting is good, I bet a lot of fluting would be even better. If that doesn't sound like human behavior, I don't know what does. Here's Devon describe for me a falsome point, like if no one had ever seen it and you just had to use words, how would you describe? I would say, we're dealing with a Lancelot style point, so you can they give like a lance head. It's kind of long and narrow, Yeah, long and narrows runs straight up the sides and it doesn't have a corner, it doesn't have notching in at the base. Um, it's got a slightly concave base. They're usually thin and they're made of high quality material. They're very carefully flaked, and then they have driven up the face on both sides from the base a big flute. And what this is it's a flake that runs almost the entire length of the point and just takes this handle. It takes the side of it. So if it's like a three inch imagine a three inch point and you just could just take a saw and just cut a slab at the side of it all. Yeah, if you if you could just I would say taking if you could take your point and take a galuge and just gouge out a nice channel out of both sides, both sides. Yeah, but you have to do it with its one motion. Yes, So I mean they got to get right at one time pop hit it. Yeah. And probably what they had since they were doing this, I mean this was a cultural you know, what we call an industry is stone tool industry. They had a specific method of doing it that they that everybody knew and that worked for them and probably for close or clothes points and fulsome points that were fluted. That probably entailed some kind of a vice or a way to hold the point tightly and then make a very controlled strike, probably with what we call indirect percussion, where actually taking the tool that's going to do the work of not driving off the flake, and you're taking another cool that you use as a hammer to it to strike that. Okay, so you can set like it'd be like you're trying to knock a flake off a rock. You put a chisel on top of the rock and then clack it with your hammer. You can get the indirect, indirect percussion and direct if your your chisel analog is right on, because you could get the angle of it just right. You could put it right where you want it and hold it just straight at angle and then whack. That's probably how they're driving off those flakes, and you know, a very controlled fashion. That was you know, extremely they had an art down these things. The craft involved in making these points is undeniable, and I want us to be immersed into the process of making a fulsome point. I want to hear it there's some real world drama because of the investment of time and using the valuable material that much energy was expended to acquire and the risky fluting process right at the end either makes or breaks the point. No pun intended. It seems like the Burghers podcast. There's a lot of punts. But I want you to meet my friend Rick Spicer. He's an experienced mountaineer and a bushcraft expert. He's one of the owners of a cool outdoor store in Fayetteville, Arkansas, called the pack Rat. Aside from climbing big mountains, Rick is a primitive bow hunter. He makes his own bows and naps his own stone points for hunting. I asked Rick if he'd be willing to try to make us a fulsome point, which he doesn't do very often, but he agreed to try. Okay, So what I've got here are a handful of different preforms or by faces is another term that they're often referred to as. And a preform is simply kind of like a first stage of a stone point that uh, you know, an indigenous person. First people would have created that would have been lighter weight that they could have carried with them, and then from there they could have further refined that more into a specific tools. This would have been this, This is like a three point This would have been like a big rock, so they wouldn't want to carry, so they would have gone to you know, like in a um you know, alibates or or quarry a stone corry. They would have corried this and obviously stones heavy, like they don't want to carry any more than they have to, so they would have corried this out. They would have done what's called spawling. They would have cracked off pieces of that, and then from those spalls they would have further refined those down into these bifaces or preforms, and then they would have hauled those off to their hunting sites and then a camp they would have further refined those into specific tools. Exactly, so you have so you've already built these preforms for us today because that would have taken Tell me how you're gonna turn that into a falsome. Yeah, so that's you know, where the rubber meets the road, right, and so the thing right right right, So the thing that's so unique about the falsome is the fluting process. And basically what you're doing in that process is you're striking it at the base of the preform to remove a very large flake off of it when you're thinning that point down to basically the maximum amount, so that when you fit it in the foreshaft, it's very very easy. You're basically just splitting a stick and sliding it into the end of it and by removing these flutes, and what's really unique is the way that there. It's symmetrical there, it's on both sides, and to do that on a folsome point and not break the thing is really really hard. So talk to me about how they think they did that with the jigs with Yeah, So there's kind of three ways you can go about getting a flake to release on one of these types of points. One way is through direct percussion um and it's the most simple, but it's arguably the most difficult. And basically, you're gonna hold the thing in your hand and you're gonna strike it with a hammerstone or an antler or something like that, and you're just gonna try to knock the flake off. But there's so many things that can go wrong trying to do that, to get the angle right, to hit it in the right spot, all that type of stuff. You end up breaking a lot. The second way is going to be through indirect percussion, and that's where you use what's called a punch. Typically you're gonna put that on the side or basically lead on the platform and then hit that that tool with another tool with the hammer. That allows you a greater degree of control over the angle and the striking surface. But it it's still a lot too Now you're working with like multiple things and trying to hold it all together, which is really hard in the final way. And I think a lot of you know, anthropologists and certainly nappers would agree that it's likely that they were using a jig of some kind. Now, modern nappers have man made jigs that they've used out a lumber and that sort of thing. But I have seen him. I've never done this myself, but I've seen demonstrations where basically you're driving a couple of sticks into the ground. You're putting the point upside down and bracing it up against these two sticks, which provide a stable surface to press against. And then they're using a lever to sort of gradually apply pressure and basically like pop that flute off of the back. Yeah, and it's a it's a very like say, I don't have experience to doing it. I've not used jigs before. I've always used either direct percussion or indirect percussion. But I also break a lot of points, you know, in the process. So with this though, um, we're using heavy duty tools at a late stage point in the process where it's brittle, it's thin in the likelihood of doing something wrong and busting the thing is really really They say that they estimate thirty failure even with the falseome people, Well, let's do it. Yeah, let's get get it going. So I'm gonna basically work away. Rick is working on building a platform at the base of the point that will give him a specific spot to strike that in theory, will cause the entire side of the point to flake off with one strike. The likelihood of failures seems really high to me. What are the chances this is gonna be is gonna work? I'd say there's a fifty percent chance I'll get a decent flute on it. There's probably a twenty chance that I'll break it, and a ten percent chance that we're gonna get a flute that's even remotely close to a fulsome style flute. Yeah, yeah, So the platform is ready to go again. This is a direct percussion method. So I'm gonna take uh, in this case, the copper billet, and I'm gonna strike it at a steep angle to try to get a flute to release down the center of this thing. I did there again, that's what happens. But the the yeah, I'll tell you what. I'm gonna clean it up just a little bit. And what basically what this means now is we're gonna end up with a shorter point because I knocked the rear one of the ears off. His first hit, broke the base. He's gearing up for his second strike. Here we go. Okay, that's not yeah, you can see that if I flipped it over, there's the flute that's removed. So it was in no way I thought that was gonna work. It's nice, it really really you you're holding this three inch long point, hitting it with a big clubby looking hammer basically right, and it takes off this like delicate flute off the side. That's when you see this process happen. It almost seems miraculous that this long flute just peels off with a single strike. But he's just halfway through. He's still got to do the other side. But I'll save you the stress of drama. Rick was successful at getting a partial flute on the other side, but it wouldn't have been considered a true fulsome style point. Rick said, it would be closer to the partial fluting of the Clovis style point. And if you're interested in watching Rick make a point, I'll put a short clip on my Instagram and you can also follow Rick at pack rat Bushcraft on Instagram. The biggest question that remains unanswered is why did they take the risk of such extreme fluting. The point would have killed animals without the fluting, but they employed this technology across vast geographic regions for one thousand years. Think about this, what other technologies in human history have been used for that long? The wheel, the plow. We've been using some form of gunpowder and guns for a little over a thousand years at the time. They might have thought about the fulsome point like we do gunpowder as an essential thing. Here's Steve and I talking about the longevity of the technolo bology and entertaining a very interesting idea. The consistency that you see that is clearly handed down through human communication, that spread across broad geographic distances for long periods of time that these people were able to pass down values. They yeah, they passed on a technique of a way to make a point. But think about the like you and I are trying to do with our kids right now, Steve is like, we're trying to pass down a value system to them, and all that's left of the folsome hunters is this piece of stone. But there was a bunch of other stuff that came with that too. The culture, what they valued, what they worshiped, what they saw beauty in was was translated and it was taught to that sun, just like it was his ability to nap a falsome point, because it wasn't just like one generation and it was thousands of years of people and they did it the same. And that's why that brings up an interest point is why did they flute this? And I want I want to hear your your thoughts on why they fluted it, because it's clear that this was a difficult process. The advantages of it killing stuff are because that's the way we would look at it as hunters. It's like, what's the advantage of this projectile point killing something more efficient so that my family eats rather than starves, and so that's a pretty heated debate. What I there's an idea that is tossed out there, that it was non utilitarian, that the point was fluted, that it was you know, and and and I'm not saying i'd buy it. I like the idea. I used to like the idea too. I used like the idea too. And let's let's just be fair and acknowledge right now we don't know, we don't know, we're gonna find out, but hear me out. I used to like that too. Then I realize that there's a joke. There's a joke among anthropologists. If you don't understand it, what do you do? You say that it must have had spiritual significance or religious significance. If you dig a site and you find that there's five Bison schools at the site, and the Bison schools seemed to have been roughly arrayed in a circle, it must have had spiritual significance. Not that whatever they were doing that day and how those carcasses were scavenged by dire wolves and dragged around or whatever happened, it just so happens that that's how it ends up, or that you're finishing up and your kids are messing around and they put them in a little pile. You know, that tendency to look at things and be like, huh, must have had spiritual significance. It's just there. There's also just a lot of who knows a long time past. Now, let you give something on the converse side, real quick. I could see the fact that they did a certain way, and they did it that way for a long time, being a way to make you think that it must have had spiritual significance, right, But it could also be that these were a people who lived in extreme isolation at that time. Not that there, I mean there were there were people. There were at the time of the Falsome Hunters. There were human beings stretched from Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America. But these people, these bison hunters out on the plains, might have been living in such a sort of cultural isolation that they had an idea, They had a thing, they hunted in a way, they hunted it, and they went thousand years whatever it is without someone coming in and being like, no, no no, no, you've alays got it all wrong. Here's how you make a good project. Yeah, here's how you make a good projectile on. So maybe there's this is the way they did it worked for them, and they weren't subject to a lot of new ideas. And here's this like these people that had this, this lifestyle that they lived far longer, far longer than any notion of the United States of America has been around. They were at it for a long time. Just me sitting here in a chair. My valueless interpretation of it is that it was just it was a function of the equipment they were using. Here we go again with Steve trying to completely rationalize the functional argument for the fluting to the falsome points. Here he is with his final thought on making these things. Another cool thing is that at certain sites they'll find where someone's making one and they break it. So they're in they're channeling it and break it. There are museum specimens of a never used falsome point broken in lying next to it and matched to it is the channel flake that came out of it, knocked the channel out, went to knock the air channel out, broke the thing, dropped it all and done. At the end of the Ice age, people who was probably wouldn't have been unreasonably they would have run into a one of the last man and throw them around. And then some dude today goes, oh, here's the point. Oh here's the channel flake and they matched pairs. But that, yeah, that's I I just can't. I think it's utilitarian. Man, it just doesn't make it just compared to a close point. The Clovis hunters who were using that landscape ahead of the fulsome hunters probably had were probably after had opportunities on much bigger animals because they were you know, this is like this is occurring at what we call the Pleisscene Hollo scene transition, so the end of the ice ages, and you had this all this mega faun and vanishing giant ground sloths, mammoths, masodons or vanishing from the landscape. The guys before had a very beautiful, finely wrought point that was big, and then here's this, like it's just it's tidy. These big, huge animals start to vanish, and then who lives there next? People that were making a smaller point great point on the size of the Clovis points as compared to the size of the animals they were hunting. But you think a guy like Steve would like to entertain a little more romantic thinking in his life. However, I think his point about its utilitarian design is well taken, but maybe it's not that cut and dry. It's possible that it could have been viewed as highly functional but also held significance beyond that. Let's see what Dr Meltzer has to say. We actually don't know why they flute at these points. There's no particular obvious reason. With some colleagues we have hypothesized that the way in which these things were fluted, and the way in which these things were half to two spears, might have actually served kind of as a shock absorber in the sense that the waves of force would travel through and instead of the point banging into the back end the base of the flute, where it was thinnest and again, you know, one to two millimeters thick, it would just crumble like a bumper on a car. Right, the bumper on a car is intended to give way. It crumbles so your car doesn't break when you when you hit something. The base of the flute was so thin that it might have crumbled and prevented the entire way. So the wave of force travels through, it's going to rebound back. But if the base rumbles, all that energy is going to get dissipated, and you can you can remake the that portion that broke off and use it again. That is the most unique thing about these folsom points is the mystery of the fluting. I read in your book where it's it's been discussed that perhaps it was non utilitarian, which means that it served no functional purpose, but was a cultural purpose. And I would like to make a comment on that Dr Meltzer, as a as a bow hunter and as a hunter, when we see this throughout history, that that cultures do distinguish themselves and establish identity through the way that they hunt. We do it today. I do it every day of my life, like that the weapons that I used to hunt are part of my tribal identity. Of course, I really like this idea that it's kind of a romantic idea that these people would have been due in something that took an incredible amount of skill to do and actually jeopardized. They say that there's a high percentage of failure when you get a point to the thirty failure rate in manufacturer, so it's totally inefficient. But why the humans do all the weird things that we do. Think that to think that this this style, this technology, this is essentially a technology that would have been passed down from generation to generation. And there may have come a point when God was like, why are you still fluting those silly things? They break every time? And you know at some point that shifted away from that technology, just like it with today. But man, so much mystery inside of a fluted falsome point. Right. But you know there's hunting magic too. You're going to go out there and you know you want to have your best weaponry, but you know you also want to have your distinctive points. Uh, you're gonna make your stuff, You're gonna be in charge of your gear, and you know there may be a bit of ceremony associated with going out on a hunt because look, going after an animal that was that big and could be that dangerous. Um. There's there's two risks in hunting. One is the risk you're gonna come home empty handed. The other risk is you're not gonna come home at all because you're dead, right, And so in some in some projectile points, at some sites, you see bits of red ochre. Right, they're putting um and it's it may not just be sort of part of the mastic that's holding the point on. It may be that there were ceremonies in advance of the hunt, and everybody's got their own weaponry that they make their own particular way. One of the things that was really interesting to me at the fulsome site which I could never possibly prove, but it's just one of those things that you know, I'll bet it's right. I look at the assemblage of the projectile points from that site, and I am convinced that I can identify at least three separate nappers based on the style of the points that they make. And how would you ever prove that? You can't write? But I look at these things and I say, you know what that really looks like the same person. And I'm not saying the same guy who knows you know, maybe the women were making falsome points to UM, I'm willing to bet the same person made this point and that point, and a different person made those two points. UM. And and think about it too, if you want credit. I don't know. When you go out hunting with guys, do you say it was my shot? I had to kill shot? UM? And you can tell because that's my arrow, yours is over there stuck in a tree. Uh so you would have been able to distinguish. Yeah, you know. That's that is so unique even today amongst flint nappers, is that it's a craft, it's an art. It's it's almost like a fingerprint. I wanted to ask all these experts the same question, so I've asked Devin too, why the Folsome hunters fluted their points. You might find some overlapping these guys opinions, but they all bring a little different perspective. Here. Devon will go into the detail the physics behind the design of the Folsome point, and he's the guy to know because he's done some real experiments using stone points on bison. The question of the age is why did they use this style of point? Why do you think they did it? Part of it is um. You have um a cultural momentum aspect where tools evolved out of earlier tools. So before Folsom we have Clovis points, and that's when we start seeing fluted bases, but they're not closed. Points are generally larger and they're not fluting the whole base. So this was an older technology Clovis came before. In Clovis, they did not flute the entire face of the point, usually face. Yeah, and then you see this this technique is kind of perfected. And with Foalsome, they're just very concerned about, you know, making these points extremely well made. You know, I'd say part of it is just you know, you can look at different cultures today and look at things that we make, and and some of us are some cultures are more concerned with something that's functional. It doesn't have to be like, you know, perfect. If you think about like early Germanic flintlock rifles in the Americans, they were extremely well made. There was an art to them, and they engraved them. They didn't have to do all that stuff, but they could. Yeah, there was some cultural value assigned to the esthetic beauty of it. Yeah, there's a social value to it. And the the key there to think of is that they could do it right. They had the time and the resources available. It's not like it was, you know, because they were engraving rifles that put their lives at risk for some reason. So they had the resources available and the time available apparently to make points that looked that way. I want to hear why it was functional for these points to be this way, But you're saying that there was some there clearly because of the craftsmanship of them, there would have been some just aesthetic value. Probably, Yeah, we can suspect that was probably the case, you know, So there would have been there would have been pride in this point. Somebody would have been like, check this thing out. Yeah, I mean, if you look at some of those, you're like, wow, I mean they really I wonder what they called them, Devin, because they sure didn't call them falsome points, because falsome New Mexico would name till like you know, sometimes the eighteen hundreds they wou would have called they would have had to have. Yeah, Unfortunately that's one of those mysteries we'll never know. But yeah, I mean some of those you look at him and you're just know, somebody put a lot of extra time, and that's and they really needed to. So it's an interesting thought to think that these people would have had a specific, widespread name for this style of point. It would have been a common word, but it existed and disappeared before written languages appeared on the earth. Will never know, but they sure as heck didn't call them falsome points. As a matter of fact, false New Mexico was named after the fiance of the American President Grover Cleveland. Her name was Frances folsom Man. She got more than she bargained for. And I'm about tired of people naming stuff after famous leaders or their girlfriends in hosts of gaining political collateral. You guys remember the Cumberland Gap, don't you. Naming conventions are weird and rarely just though human technology has changed, we know that human nature hasn't. And some ancient hunter mayn named the dad Gum Point after his girlfriend. We'll never know. But we've got more important questions with more definite answers. Back to Devon, So why was this point so functional? Because it had it had probably had some function to had to have. Yeah, to answers that, I have to go in a little bit of about my background of my research, which big part of it was these what i'd call realistic experiment And if you're familiar with at Ashby, you'll you know you're probably familiar with this because these are the kinds of experiments that he prefers to test hunting arrows and what you do is basically have a carcass of an animal. It's um. We don't kill them, the rangers kill them. They've just died. And then we perform a projectile experiment on him where we were throwing replica at levels and darts and shooting arrows and tracking the velocity, tracking where they've hit, and then butchering him with stone tools and then taking the bones and cleaning him and we keep all the meat and so that allows you to track you know, specific impacts too, specific bones. You can look at the performance as they penetrate and all that. We've done one on a bison, and included in that were big heavy darts, a couple of of a Lettles that are big, strong throwers, stronger than myself Donny Dust. You may he's a self described modern caveman um. The problem we run into with the closed points is that at Lettle darts, like I said, they're flexible when you throw them that they flex and they compensate for the arching motion of the throw, and they actually continue to flex down range when they hit with a lot of momentum, lot of energy that acts not only on the target but back on the projectile. So you have to have a really well designed, really robust shaft. If you have any bindings, you know where the foreshaft fits in, where the point is hafted on. All that has to be really well engineered. And if you're hunting big animals, that's what you want. You know, Donny was able to throw a point that heavy ash s dart and hit a bison rib and it fractured the rib and half and continue to penetrate into the vitals of the bison. And we're getting, you know, penetration through and through that animal with these heavy darts, passing all the way through like poking out the other side. Yeah. So these weapons are powerful. The problem is when they hit with kind of a skewed angle, you can have a couple of different things happen. That's not good. The halft fails because the notches, the wooden notches that are holding the point in snap and you like, you don't get any penetration. So if the point impacts the animal at an angle, yeah, at a slight slightly skewed angle. Um, and if especially if it's hitting bone, that's the real problem. Because you have these animals needed a broadside. You need to hit them like perpendicular to that bone. You you would preferably hit them, Yeah, but that's not always going to happen, just because of the nature of the weapon, or you might have it that the point is dislodged from the haft and it's kind of turned sideways, you know, breaks through, Yeah, and you get failed penetration. That happened a few times. That happened with unfluted Clovis forms. When you flute these things, they're fitting kind of down deep into the notches. That does a couple of things. First off, it reduces that lateral motion so that they're locked in there with those those fluting channels. And then the second thing it does is that those flutes slim down the half. And if you're hunting a big animal, you want an efficient projectile. You know, we know that as hunters. This is something that I see archaeologist overlooking sometimes is if you're hunting big animals, there's a real incentive to make an effective, well designed protectile. Point. Part of what's that that's going to entail is a slim haft because when the hafting part goes in, if it's big and bulky, that's when you see a lot of deceleration suddenly. Okay, So a thinner point means there's more wood around the base of that point the halft, so that it's stronger when it impacts. Yeah, would or we find these weird things called the people called bone rods, and actually there are. There's at least one uh for shaft with the actual haft the notches cut for a point to fit in. I know, I believe it's from Oregon and that's made out of antler or bone, and that's that's ancient. So they were trying to compensate for the wooden shaft breaking when it hits. There's what they said, Man, we're gonna we gotta do something different, and they used it antlin tip. There's a possibility that that some of those bone rods, those those kind of uh slat like segments are used in as notches. It would certainly make a more sturdy half. That's an idea that comes out of these these realistic experiments. You know, you're you're trying to reverse engineer these things and use them in these trial and arry experiments. You get you get certain insights like this, the channels lock in the point, reduce lateral movement and since you have a long half with a case of close points. You have a bit of blade sticking out. They have a lot of leverage to break those those hafting notches, and you want it to be slim and you know, good at penetrating. The way I think of clothes and Fulsome points is that they're coming out of this this tradition of lanceolate points and where you you have things this way, you know they fit down deeply into these these four shafts. You want them to be good at penetrating. And so one way you can you can try and resolve this issue is by fluting the base. And so maybe what's going on with Fulsome is they're really trying to lock in those points. They're trying to make them durable. They're part of a composite, durable, heavy shaft that carries a lot of energy but is able to breakthrough bones. You know, that to me explains it. Yeah, So by having the flute go all the way to the tip of the point, you can really shove that thing in deep. So that would have meant there would have been would way up on the point and there would have been blade that would be below blade along the margins of the halft. Yeah, so they were One benefit there is that you support the stone. It's not very flexible obviously, and uh you get these bending fractures. Where would you put the sinew to attach the further down the base. They were grinding the bases so that they don't you know, when you wrap it with sinew, when you do get those those uh skewed impacts or any kind of impact that pushes the point you know, to the side and the half they can it can cut through its own bindings. So they ground the bases. So they would have put sin you like, on parts of the blade up the up the base that was ground, and then you just have this transition where they're no longer grinding them and so the forward section of the point is un ground. Sharp Devin did a great job of explaining the details of the functionality of the hafting advantages of the fulsome style point using his real world experience. So now we've got an understanding of the broad picture of the potential reasons why they implemented this radical technology. But here's an interesting question, when did they move away from this technology? When did they stop doing that? So there was a point when we know that they started fluting points, and then when did the technology shift after fulsome so Clovis folks develop the technology and um, they're fluting points. Uh full some take it to really kind of an extreme. I mean when you're taking a point that to begin with is only four millimeters or so in thickness, and then you're driving off a thin flake that maybe just one to two millimeters. Um, that's serious skill. So the technology kind of the pendulum swung really far. Yeah, that happens all the time and everything that absolutely. So eventually they were like, hey, guys, this is we've gone too far down that road. Let's back up. I guarantee you this happened because this happens in my life with my dad. My dad gives me a hard time about gear that I use, you know, because he used this kind of gear and I use this kind of gear. I guarantee you. There was some falsome grandpa who was like, Dad, come those young kids. They quit flute those points. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah. So this stuff that comes after falsome is unfluted, but it works just as well. Um, which told you that fluting wasn't necessary because you could do it, you know, for the next town of ten thousand years, nobody was fluting points and they were still killing. But those guys that started doing stuff different made fun of the old falsome fluters or just said, look at all that stone you were wasting because of the time, you can't get it right. Wait a minute, fluting wasn't necessary. What's the whole point of this podcast? My romantic stone point dreams are crushed, and I'm intrigued by this idea of the shift to a new design and how that happened. I wonder how long it took. I wonder if it upset people. I wonder if it was a fulsome fluters kid that started doing something different, or an outside influence from another region. We'll never know, but it's probably not much different than the reasons you and I changed gear over time. Maybe we just got tired of the old stuff and wanted to try something new. That seems to be a trend in human history. Here's Steve and I talking about the technology transition. You know what's wild to think about is a falsome hunter would have been walking across the landscape, or would have been in a camp a historical camp site, and would have picked up a Clovis Point, which pre dated him, and he probably would have been having. They probably had podcasts back then where the Falsome people talked about the Clovis people, like we're talking about Falsome. There are sites where post post Colombians, So when we use like pre Colombian times, like like pre contact times, there are post Colombian Native American sites where in their collections of things were folsome points. So they saw them as significant, and the old recognized it as something and kept it and kept it among their things. They had to have talked about the technology too, because they would have seen the difference in technology and understood that something changed and they did something different than they used to, and they had to would have thought that what they're doing now is better than what those guys were doing, or they would have done it like the guys back then, because they were shooting it out of bows. They were probably like, huh, that's like a flag. That's not gonna work. It's like a flagon out of an arrow, out of a little thin, little arrow. You'd have to think they would have looked and been like, yeah, I could I could figure that out, Like I could, you know, I get what they were doing there, but it's not something that I would make not how we do it now, but at the time, apparently that's a good point. They were like those hillbillies. So we've been focusing on the stone projectile point, but we haven't talked about what they used to throw them. Devon is an expert in addle addles. He's dedicated much of his research to them, and he's very good at throwing them. For us to finalize our Layman's PhD, we need some intel on this primitive tool because they have been the primary hunting tool of humans longer than they haven't. Here's Devon talking about add addles, So why don't you just describe for me what an addle addle is? The original word you'd pronounce it something like luck, and that's from the Aztec language. Don't want language, so we've we've anglicized it at ladle and say it again. How would they said it? Wow? Just really short. Yeah, the last tl is pronounced like you put the tip of your tongue against roof of your mouth and blow around the sides. Luck and a lot of language, you know, words in their language like kettle quack are pronounced that way. We've anglicized it at ladle and all it is really is a it's a lever to assist the body, assist your you're throwing the length that you're throwing arm, and because you're you're lengthening out that throwing arm. And of course we don't when we throw things, we don't just like push them straight out. We throw with an arching motion. Then the dart, the spear which we call it dart because that's an archaic English, means just a light usually fletched spear, which was precisely what they were. So it would be like like what we would call an arrow, except longer, yeah, except bigger. It's kind of like it would have fletchings on it, and most of them addle addle dart would have fletchings, would have feathers that would guide the flight of it. Usually yeah, not all of them. You know, if you look at what Native Australian people were using, they were using unfletched forms, and most of them pretty big. So these things range in size from you know, pretty small just like five feet tall to overt the arrows. The darts could be from five ft yeah, so there's a huge range of variability in the weapon but the dart has to flex because when you throw it, you're making this arching motion, so it basically it's compensating for for that arching motion and maintaining a straight trajectory. And basically you you start off just as you would normally throw something with kind of the big muscles of your your shoulder and like putting your torso twists into it, stepping forward a little bit, and then as you come in to the throw, you turn your wrist over and that final wrist snap is what gives a lot of the velocity to the dart. The motion that you just made look like a picture throwing a baseball, yeah, I mean, or a quarterback throwing a football. Yeah, the wrist snap that puts a spiral on a football or puts a waist on a baseball. Yeah. You think about a quarterback standing back there and then he just steps forward and smoothly throws right right to the target. That's what you're doing. You're casting this thing. You cast the dart with the outlettl and kind of a controlled motion. If you look online and like any almost any archaeology museum, you see this ridiculous depiction where a guy is holding one of these things down by his waist and then he's like running in and all this there's all this body motion. Well, you can throw him that way for distance. That's not what you're gonna be doing when you're hunting. You know, You're you're standing there and maybe taking a little step forward and just smoothly casting it right where you wanted to go. You know, when I think about an adellile and someone hunting with it, it's almost hard to fathom how you could be proficient enough to, yeah, for your food source to be totally depending upon your ability to be accurate. But then when I see you making this motion right here, it's like, I'm pretty decent at throwing a football, right, And it's because I've done it in my whole life. Yeah, And it's no different, is it. These people? This is just an extension of their their body, of their mind. They just yeah, it's you know, javelin's one thing, and there are ethnographic cultures that are really good with javelins, and they're they're quite proficient hunting with them. But when one way we've we've come to think about this is it's easier for most people in society. More people in society to learn to use this and to put power in it without having to be you know, big and strong, or without having to throw with some you know large or you know big body movements. So if you so, if you're hunting deer, you know, elk, just imagine sneaking around with one of these things up and in the ready, and when you're ready to throw, it's just a smooth step forward and cast right to the target. Yeah, it is more challenging with a bow, you're you're stealthier. You know, you can shoot it from a crouching position. There's less body movement. So if you're hunting a swift, wary animal like a white tail, it's it's just a stealthier weapon. But with an outlettle and dart, you know, you can hunt medium sized, small animals like that. But after the bow comes in, it seems they continue to use it, particularly for large animals like bison in open environments, because these these darts, they you can make them quite heavy, they carry a lot of energy, a lot of momentum, and they're they're very powerful, so it's easy to make the weapon powerful, which is hard to do with a bow and arrow. Fascinating stuff. The simplicity of the addladdle is hard to argue with, but we need to clear something up. What is the timeline of usage between a laddles and bows? I've always wondered that Devon's answers surprised me, and the complexity of that answer has to do with what he calls preservation bias. So that brings up a great point that we need to talk about. Is the timeline of an ad ladle in a boat? Just yeah, give us a give us a time picture of this technology when it came in. Yeah, so we don't know quite hold. The weapon is the earliest definitive examples, which and when I say definitive, we're talking about the parts of the actual outlet all themselves, not the projectile points. Is usually all we have to look at. It's really hard to tell what you're looking at just from a projectile point. But the oldest definitive examples come from caves in Europe and they date back almost twenty thousand years. The weapons probably a lot older than that. Well, when when you're talking about archaeology, it's so it's always so fascinating because like so they found an all they think years old, you know, what's the chances that was the first one that a human ever made, you know, precisely, probably didn't find that one precisely. Yeah, you have preservation bias. That's that's always the problem with the earliest evidence. Preservation bias. Now that's a new word. I like it. Yeah, that's that's one of the things arcy' all just have to contend with is the fact that when you're walking around as a hunter gatherer doing things on the landscape, how much of the stuff that you do and make and and leave behind, Like, how many of the hunts that you've you've undertaken are going to stick around? Sarcy all just can find them twenty years later, very few of them. So you have to build up enough culture on the landscape, enough people doing things that eventually you leave, you start to leave signs behind. So you're saying that maybe we're building these narratives off of stuff these people were doing that maybe wasn't even a major part of their life. I mean, that's not what we're talking about with the ad Alile. But that's possible because we're only finding the things that could be preserved, and so maybe that little sector of their life was maybe it was important. Maybe it wasn't. Yeah, it's just something they left behind and and we happened to find it. But there was other stuff they were doing that was not capable of being left but precisely it could have been massive. Yeah. I was talking to students the other day about those early footprints and Mexico, and I said, how many of the you've walked around on the earth, how many of the footprints you've you've left behind you think would last, you know, over twenty years. They're like none. Yeah, it's just all they did, all these things. You know, they made nets out of plant fiber and hide clothing, and it's extremely rare that you get that kind of evidence. And I mean even the hard artifacts you leave, like stone tools, they need to be in places where the site gets preserved and it's you know, not too buried, but it doesn't get washed away by a river. You know. There's all these variables that go into a preservation of archeological sites and then allows us to find them. So when did the When did the bow come in? So Adlile has been around for at least wind wind was bow technology. There's pretty good evidence for the earliest bow technology about seventy thousand years ago in Southern Africa. So the bow is older than the adel able are according to our evidence. Really yeah, which is kind of funny. The boat didn't spread rapidly. Uh. While we're looking at our projectile points that are striking lee similar to historic ethno, historic projectile points used with bone arrow technology in Africa, and they have all this, all the signs you know of of impact damage and residue analysis and all that. So we're this totally off the size of the point, well, the size of the point, the damage that they have incurred striking some hard object. Um, the microscopic where so there's macro and microscopic where you know macro being with naked eye. Microscopic if you look at inner microscope, you can see like impact striations from where they've penetrated something, residues left behind from the hafting where they were hafted, and definitely the size is very important. But if you look at these these points, they're very much like what people were using up to uh the historic period in Southern Africa. But in North America the boat didn't come along for a long time. There are suggestions that it was appearing in the Arctic five thousand years ago or more. But you know, again, we're just looking at at point sizes mostly and point styles, so we're not dealing with definitive evidence. By two thousand years ago, though it has entered down into and this what what caused it to actually start to spread is tricky because clearly people were connected for a long time, you know, from the far north into the middle of the continent. But it's finally started entering into the middle of the continent around two thousand years ago, so this is a long time after it started back over in Africa. So the technology just spread or did it spread? Do we do we know that it would have spread from human to human contact like sharing technology or was it covergent that two people had the same idea at the same time in different places. Yeah, was it disseminator or was it independent evolution or independent in mention of the technology and evolution of the technology. That's a really hard question to answer. Um. So we're looking at projectile points mostly, and we do have in North America we have out lettle artifacts dating back. The oldest complete complete preserved out Lettle is five thousand years old. A little bit older than that from Nevada, and we have other artifacts from the outletls themselves, going way back to the Plice scene. The hooks of the outlets made of mammoth tusks. We don't have that for bows. You know, you start to the bow is pretty much made out of organic matter, the whole thing. So, yeah, it's going to rock. And so the only the reason we know about ad leles is because they had a part of the ad ladle. The hook was made of something that was organic matter but harder, Yeah, like a bone, yeah, osseous bone or antler. So these were There are some mammoth tusks or mammoth ivory hooks that have come out of deposits in Florida. And then we have wooden example is preserved later on. So occasionally you do get wood preserving. That's when you have either extremely dry conditions or you're lacking oxygen. You have to have either water or oxygen. Devon continues on as we try to understand the transition of technology from ad laddles to bows in North America, or was the transition even that clear cut around two thousand years ago? In some places you have the sudden appearance of these really small points look much more to us like arrow points. But when we have it on an arrow and in some cases they're brand new styles. When we see that, we think, okay, this is being introduced by another culture and they may be trading the technology, or they may be another group that's moving into the area. Occasionally you also find that the older dart point styles are being now replicated in smaller in the smaller styles, and you get these two populations where you have a bimodality, we call it bimodality, where you have um to like size populations. You have like a big size population that that contains the dart category and then a smaller arrow population. And a lot of times they continue contemporaneous for you know, a thousand years or more. Wow. So they're you know, both the addle addle and the archery technology used used side by side. Yeah, these together, these people would have chosen a different weapon for a different type of hunt perhaps. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, they're there are sites. There was a side I was looking at. It's in the Great Basin and this this uh sand dune area where they they had driven bison up out of the river valley and into this the sandy area where they've gotten bogged down, and that's where the hunters ambushed them. And they ambushed them both with the bow and arrown and the outlet on dart because both at the same time. Yeah, because both size of the point. I wonder if I wonder if the archery guys, the traditional archer guys, were given the adele addle guys a hard time or vice versa. Right, come on, you're gonna use an ad l addle. Yeah, that's what grandpa, That's what great Grandpa used tradition. I mean they did, honestly. You know, as I as I hear the stories of technology of points and styles of points, I look at that today in our archery world or are hunting world, where there's their different different technology, different ways to hunt, gives identity to different groups. Feel like I'm a bow hunter, I'm a traditional bow hunter. I use this type of broadhead, and he uses that like I've always used weaponry among a thousand other things to build personal identity. And so I just can't help but think that the archery guys were they weren't just absent of thoughts about the guys that were using addleaddles. You know, there's all sorts of potential going on there. Maybe they had some slightly different tactics going on, but but I think it's perfectly you know, a viable to say how we do it today. We definitely build identity around these different weapons systems. So that's that's really importan and that's probably a part of the conservativism of hunting technology. And you know, there are multiple times in which in history people have conserved older hunting technologies and preferred not to to take on a newer technology. One of the prime examples is it is Paul and Easy because they used javelins. That was their primary projectile weapon, and they had the bow, but it was mostly a toy or for hunting like rats. Really yeah, but they fought and hunted with javelins and they just they just hung onto it. That was that wasn't then the rest of the world shifted to archery and other things. Yeah, yeah, I mean the bow is in Northern Australia as well, but most people in Australia used either the out lettle or woomera is one of the native words there for it, or javelins. Yeah, we kind of we tend to think of things from this technological deterministic perspective. When a new technology comes on the scene, everyone's gonna adopt it. Yeah, that's not necessarily the case. You know, there's there's a number of content x in which you would hang on to an older technology. You know, I think about adopting new technology in modern times probably the biggest deterrent for me. Like if you if there was some new, big, major archery technology, I would be like, why do I need it? What I'm doing works fine, Yeah, precisely, And so it's just like it might go for a couple of generations before my ancestors were like, Okay, we're gonna do this because they find some reason it's better. You're think of it this way, like you know how to use a shotgun or a bow really well, a new technology comes on the scene. It may have better ballistic properties, but it turns out it's a lot harder to make it, or it's a lot harder to maintain it. For you because you could just buy it, it's a lot harder to maintain it, and it's just kind of a pain to deal with. You know. Bows and arrows are they're great, but they're kind of I think of it as being high strung the intended there under yeah, exactly there under tension. They break when they break their no good, and they're harder to make, their harder to maintain. It's harder to make the string. But if you have addle, was just you're not gonna break that thing. No, it's it's very simple. It's not you're carrying around on the landscape. Is not intertention. It's ready to go at a moment's notice, but it's not intertention. It's not getting worn down from being strung easier to make, easier to maintain. Yeah, so if it works for you, why adopt something new? You just feel like a bow shows up in your camp and then everybody wants it. Six months later, add a laddles are in the trash and everybody's got a boat. Life moved a little bit slower, didn't that. Well. I feel really good about the ground we've covered with the fulsome technology and understanding the history of bows and adladdles. Don't let your kids forget that they're here today because your ancestors use ad laddles to kill critters and feed your ancient family. That is a fact. As we come to the end to this fulsome series. I want to bring it back to the original question that we started with, why does any of this stuff matter? You know, it blows my mind. Human life is so weird in that we live in we drive cars, but we're trapped into the present, and it's so hard for us to fathom that there were people wandering around this place, that this was how they lived by these these tools that we're talking about part of your daily life. When I find these stone points in my front yard, if if anyone in my family is home, I try to get them to come outside with me to look at it in the ground and and we pick it up, and we say, the dude that touched this last was planning to cook his dinner over and open fire. Number one, number two he made this, and they were they had to provide for their families with this stone point. That's a fascinating thought, but it's such a healthy exercise. I think, Yeah, the past is essential. I mean, this is what our identities are constructed of, and our understanding of the world and how it works as drives from the past. In fact, one of the things I always tell students is the past is so potent that and more were two the Nazis created a division of their government to to construct this view, this history of the Aryan race, and they reinterpreted all this archeological evidence they went to prove and they reinterpreted the archaeology, and they said, this archaeology is the archaeology there in people. Of course, it was all completely fabricated, but that's what they you know, that was a big part of their ideology and what allowed them to do what they did, all the terrible atrocities they did to convince people that this is right, so stood that history was going to play a major part in the modern culture they were building. Yeah, archaeology is extremely potent stuff. You know, It's like it's really powerful, and you have to get it right in a time when it's it's hard for people to even be able to track a couple of generations in their family, which is kind of bizarre that we can't because we have this in the last thousand years, we've had the ability to record history. I mean even just the advent of paper and printing presses and writing stuff down and written language, and we can we can record all this stuff, but typically people don't. I mean, people have a hard time learning what happened to their families and hundred years ago. Well it's there, you know, the history, even if they're not looking for it, it's there, and it's what's forming who they are. Man. Right at the very end, in the last sentence, after hours of conversation, we find the answer to the question we started with rafting a cute little boat. Why does any of this matter? History is forming who we are, regardless of our awareness of it. Even if George mcjunkin hadn't found those bones that day in that box canyon, would have shaped our identity as humans today. Many times I've expressed my interest in identity and the factors that influence it. Certainly the fulsome hunters would be a part of the puzzle of our macro identity as humans. As much as many of us would like to think we're independent, freethinking beings, that's kind of a facade. There are parts of our past that are fundamental and architectural it can't be changed, Like these ancient humans being hunters, being meat eaters and procuring their livelihood through craft and skill and interacting with the earth in a time when the very identity of what it means to be human is up in the air. The Fulsome Hunters give us an indisputable anchor point and identity that might help us put perspective on our own lives in modern times. You have to figure out what that means to you, But I feel like I know what that means for me. It makes me marvel at human life in and it puts perspective on my problems and struggles, and it makes me want to do all I can to keep my life simple. I'm forever grateful that I was bored when I was and that I'm alive in two I don't want to go back and be a fulsome hunter, but I do want to look back at those guys and glean some inspiration, some identity, some hope, and some just straight up grit from those people. Man Fulsome Hunters pretty wild. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Greece. We've been on this long series about Fulsome and we're about to switch it up and we're gonna talk about ducks in the next podcast, and maybe even some squirrels. One was an credible year for this podcast, and I personally learn a ton. Thank you guys so much for following along and supporting bear grease Hey. From all the people of the bear Grease Render Crew and all the people at Meat Eater, we wish you a very happy and prosperous new Year.

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