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