00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything presented by first, like creating proven versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear for every hunt. First like go farther, stay longer. All right, everybody, Uh man, We're gonna get into something where this is my favorite topic of all time. And these are two. We have two guests today that I've been wanting to get on. I'm gonna when I get into why uh why you're here, You're gonna be extremely embarrassed. Okay, not no, flattered and embarrassed. That's how much? How how jealous? I am good of you? Too good? But first, your honest is here, Brody? Like, how many times have you won Media Tribune? Now, Brody? Two out of how many four? Bretty got a perfect score. Brody got a perfect score. But we realized. I realized something that there's a correlation between age and winning. See, I thought it was just reading articles, very small sample size. Steve, you can live with the head with your head in the hole and be old. No, it's over. I realized over the years you accumulate answers to things, and it's just a race to durking On and Dirk and smoked everybody. Then we know what was being on. My wife thinks it has to do with memory too, I mean bad, because it's not always good to remember everything right. You want a quick, funny Pat Dirkin story from last week? You know how those Wisconsin boys that Doug Durhan, who's a huge man rolls around with, are all large and individuals. Have you noticed that? Yeah? And they keep getting bigger as the night goes on, and by the time Keefer shows up, you think like, there can't be a bigger man in Richland, Like the largest man in Richland County is now here. And then and then his labrador gets out of the truck and it's the only lab on the planet where the truck raises the dog gets up. You're like, what is going on here? Can you imagine getting punched by Keefer? Oh my god? Or punched by Doug No, no, I think your bones would come out the other side of your skin. They Doug punched you, And you realize why they walk around like a little hunched over It's like nothing is built for them anyway. Pat Dirkin walks out into the middle of this group of gentlemen. And Pat, comparatively, he's not from Richland County. He's not from Richland County. Comparatively, he is quite small, one could say pint sized. And you know, I said, I asked Pat. I was like, Pat, what what have you not been eating? And he said, I used to march in a company of eighty men. And I'll tell you right now, I'm average sized. Uh who else? Phil Karan? But then I want you guys now to introduce yourselves and I'm Gonnay're not gonna embarrass you, aren't you? Guests like talk about you, where you work, whatever however you want to do it. It's a quick intro. Okay, Um, my name is Dan Mann. I work in the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, but the Arctic Biology deal, well that's changed recently. I used to be in the geography department, which was in GA Sciences, and then last year I quit and I went to the Now I'm back in the Institute of Artic Biology. Senior senior research scientists in the Institute of Arctic Biology Pamela uh Ham Groves, and I'm also at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and I've been in the Institute of Archebiology since. Okay, now comes the part where I'll tell you how uh I met you. Guys, you probably remember this. Do you know what an individual named Mike Cons? Very well? Okay, many years ago, many years ago, I was in Mike cons field camp. I think it wasn't like by the Iva Tuck Tuck. Yeah. I was in his field camp doing uh, doing some I was working on. I was working on my own research project, which involved tagging along on his one of his research projects. And we were up hunting arrowheads out of helicopters on the north slope, which is prime pickings for arrowhead hunting. You two happened to come through while I was there. You happened to pass through, Okay, and Dan, you said a sentence that I stole from you and I have used a thousand times since then. You're the one to introduced to me the term alder choked hell hole. I think it was alder haunted hell because there was also a bear haunted hell hole, and it can be a moose haunted hell hole too. No, it might have been, but I swear it was alder. You had described going through an alder choked hell hole. And you guys were coming from doing what I thought would be the greatest job of any job on the planet. You were just coming off of a river trip where you floated out like umpteen dozen miles of Arctic river for the sole purpose of finding old asked bones eroding out of the river banks. And you had found a horse skull a place the scene horse skull that you were feeling good about. I just over. So how old were you? Well, I'm forty seven now, so I must have been. This has been in like two thousand four. So you you were working for Outside magazine and did you do a story? I'm Mike and his that was a Tony Baker, remember him? He was he passed away, but he was an enthusiast. Yeah, he was incredible that he was like the world's expert on making certain tool types. Yeah, I think that was amazing. Um. I'm curious to know how you how you two passed through If you got there by a helicopter. Well, here's the deal with like, you'll have to explain that. But this place was so out there. Um. I think if you like look math mathematically, like what's the remotest place in North America. I think it's and you factor in I don't know what the what the hell you factor in, but like proximity to to any road populations and rolls, it's kind of like there, it's the pole of inaccessibility. And they had to take a I can't remember what aircraft they used, but I was in it. They'd put fuel drums in the back of an aircraft on parachutes, the CASA from the BLM Fire Service, okay, and they kicked the fuel drums out here and there so that the helicause the helicopter couldn't get there on a tank of gas. And so you'd be flying along in the helicopter and you'd have to land on some little knob and go down into an alder choked hellhole and roll the barrel back up because it would have rolled off a where off the landing zone. And they roll the barrel back up, uncorked the barrel, hand pump gas into a helicopter, and you passed through, I guess, because you were just coming or going and it was kind of a hub. It's like a well, there's a landing strip at Iva Tuck. So you could fly small single engine planes in there from Fairbanks and then from Iva Tuck in the BLM days. Then there'd be helicopters that would ferry us out to wherever we were going to work, and then a week or two later, whatever the time frame was, pick us up. We'd usually go back to Iva Tuck, pick up more food, and go out again. And you were you were hiking when you were doing these excursions. Most of the time canoeing. We did some hiking, but we have inflatable canoes that you could roll up and stick in the helicopter. And then that was my I was trying to envision a helicopter camp in which you were passing through how like you're showing your horse hat out the window or you come intro on a canoe. I didn't get to see the horse said, so it was a landing strip with a camp. And then we see this is we do like an aviation version of spike camping. So they got the way this this mike cons worked. I'll just explain the whole damn thing. Now. This is in the npr A, the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska, which currently is like relative to everything else, like relative to everything else on the continent is like like unexploited wilderness, but it is the petroleum reserve, and so they have, you know, the powers that be, UM have the right to exploit the the oil resources, the mineral oil resources. There should there be need for this, And there's how many, like there's like four patrolling reserves in the country, a couple of mere Ina, California. It's basically like oil in the bank for an emergency, but they can tap it for whatever reason. And I don't know what it takes to be able to tap the oil, but it generally just sits there and it's kind of like it's safe in the ground. Um should we ever have you know, world War three, we have this oil to exploit. They were looking to do some leases that but they hadn't mapped, um, they hadn't done a cultural survey of the landscape. So that was sort of why this big giant arrowhead hunt was going on, is they were out mapping cultural sites. They didn't call it a giant arrowhead hunt. They were out matching. They were out mapping cultural sites which might in the future, UM make areas that would be hands off two oil X to oil drilling stuff you'd have to work around okay, because there's like significant cultural findings there. It would basically come down to they'd get helicopters, or in our case, we had to our like our group had two helicopters that operated out of this big landing strip. Or you could also land fixed wing aircraft. But then we would spike camp using the helicopters to land in places where you couldn't land fixed wing aircraft. So you'd go into a new area, like you might go a hundred miles over yonder and set up a camp and then arrowhead hunt out of a helicopter from the spike camp. Were you looking for known cultural sites? Are looking for? You look for places where if you were camping, that's where you'd camp and you'd land there. Like let's say you got two rivers coming together and you got a big like v of land and it benches out, so like a finger wrinch coming down, it benches out. You're twenty ft above the confluence of two streams. You can see every direction you got water. There's a big flat spot. You land uphill from it or whatever on whatever place you could land. You walk down there and a lot of times you go down and be like, oh, there's a big tent ring. Oh mossed over, but you can see the rocks, and you look an exposed ground, and everywhere on the exposed ground flint chips, projectile points because no one had ever picked it over, no one ever picked it over. Everything here's you know, I mean, there's still stuff laying around here, but it's been people been picking it over since. I mean they knew as sooner got done making stone points, they started picking them up. And then in the dirty third, he's like in the dust bowl it became like a real thing to hunt arrowheads. But there it's like some dude dropped something ten years ago, just still be laying there. And kind of what prompted this area is cons had found this site called the Masa site. We're gonna get back to you guys real quick here. This maze site is this prominent mesa It sits out you get you watch it. Can you guys describe the maze site? Yeah, So what happened was, um, back in the seventies they were doing some exploratory well drilling. You gotta get Mike down here to tell you about this dude. We've been trying Oh he'd love this. He you gotta do it. Heating. He's waiting for well the pandemic to and they have to take is gonna need to call them and be like, Mike, the pandemic isn't ending. You got to take your studio the Fairbanks. But anyway, so they were doing this exploratory well dwelling drilling and they had Mike along as the archaeologist, and they were like, we need some shot rock, some fill to make road beds. So they said, look, there's a mesa over there. When you guys go check it out and tell us there's no arrowheads, and then we'll go blow it up and then we'll make a road and we'll use it all for the fill to make highways or the make you know, to the drill pad. So Mike went up there and he went, holy cow, there's like projectile points everywhere. So sad you can't blast this place. So he collected a little bag that had some charcoal and it brought it back to town and it sat on his shelf for like a decade. And then another colleague of ours, Rick Ranier, said, one day he goes, you know those stone projectile points you found from that may say, they're really strange. Why don't you let me radio carbon date that little bag of charcoal you brought back. So, yeah, they sent it in and it was like eleven thousand years old. It's like super old. And the projectile points you've talked to Meltzer already. Yeah, so they're they're very close and styled to fulsome points which are like early Paleo Indian or the kind of late Paleo Indian. Anyway, they're old from down here this area. And so suddenly they had this really significant site on the Mesa and so Rick and Mike published his paper in Science magazine, and Ted Stevens saw it in our old Senator and he said, he called him up and he invited him to Washington, d C. And he said, how much money do you guys need to continue this research? And Mike was so, what was his interest in it? It was Alaska, So he was just a tireless promoter of Alaska, called him n He didn't care fills oiler arrowheads. Well, he was interested in the native people and stuff. And so Mike, you gotta ask Mike this. But the way he's told people will come on the show, well he will Eventually Mike said, I was just so surprised that I should have said five hundred thousand dollars a year, but I just said a hundred and twenty thousand, and that's what he got. And so the next ten years or something, Uncle Ted made a line item in the federal budget that Mike consit BLM and Alaska we get a hundred and twenty thousand years to do whatever he wanted with. Dude, that's classic pork barrel, right, And that's that he brought Pam and I in then because it was like, oh, we need somebody go collect bones. Oh so you guys are rolled into the MASA site deal. Yeah, we worked It wasn't good introduction. You just stumbled upon Steve so you were did you? Uh? So you worked up like talk about the Maza, like what it looks like and it's not it's not miles long. You've been there, right, Yeah, Okay, so it's it's a Mike again. You have talked to him. But it's a place where the Native people came eleven thousand, eight hundred to about ten thou years ago, and it was a hunting lookout. So you went there to kind of check out the caribou and probably the bison. And to repair your stone points, okay, because they was always breaking. Whenever you miss something or whatever, you hit a bone, you break the point. So that you picture these guys sitting up there like telling tall tales and repairing their little projectile points. Right, and they left, they'd have little horrors. So they're all these horrors. There's probably fifty different little horrors. What's that just a pole of charcoal where they had little campfires. Take a little fire and it's yeah, it's a Tennessee pronunciation of hearth. Yeah, And so I was just dragging it out. But they're all these like Steve was saying, all this, uh, debotage, all this these flakes, and then occasionally they have a broken point they couldn't repair and they just toss it. So it's an amazing but hundreds of them. Yeah, Now it turned out it was a gold mine for these things. But it has a very peculiar geology. And this is kind of interesting if you're into the geology. A lot of those other sites you visited out towards Utkok, they're on sedimentary rock and as a result, the frost action breaks up the rock and it all kind of um slushes downhill with frost action. The Mazis site is peculiar because it's on this dolar rite and its deeply fractured bedrock and so the water it doesn't frost heave basically, so that anything that was there ten thousand years ago is still there. But if you go to another kind of outcrop, like a lot of those you visited at by Uta Cook, it's long gone. It's down in the drainage somewhere. So it's just like amazing kind of coincidence of a place where ancient people used a lot because it's amazing lookout site and the geology was perfect for preservation, and this was the oldest site that had been found in Alaska at that point of well, in the northern part of Alaska when because when humans first came into North America, you know, they crossed the Baring Land Bridge and had to move through northern Alaska before they could get anywhere else on the continent. So these were the early people. And the other thing that's kind of interesting is it's of course the men that were sitting up on top looking out, and nothing has been found of like a village or an actual settlement where the women and the kids would have been, because that's down in the lower landscape that gets washed away as the river's meander and whatnot. So that's what's the maids is so special because it's such a stable spot geologically. How many yards long is that? I mean it was a couple yards on top, it's probably two yards, and it's three sides are steep cliffs and so there's only one. Remember, there's kind of a ramp that goes up outside, so it's kind of the other thing. You gotta ask Mike about this, But my theory always was that, you know, you you kill cariboo, you drag them back there, and then you're probably gonna dry the meat because I don't think they're living there during the winter. So it would be a perfect place to um prepare smoke meat and hides that are safe from the predators and the scavengers because you're up on this kind of fortress, right, so it'd be easy to keep the you know, the bears and so forth away. Did you guys find on the maze of did any bones come off that? Yeah? There was. You look at each other, now, well there was one bone fragment. They discovered really late in the excavation, and nobody knew what it was. It was just like this little piece of burnt long bone. And I'm looking at him because Mike was hoping she could figure out from the d NA what the species was. But you couldn't get DNA out of it. No. Once, maybe now somebody would have the tech analogy. This was in uh, the nineties, when the ancient DNA technology wasn't so good. And Uh, this DNA sits in a dead piece of tissue like bone at degrades over time, and especially if it's been burned, the high temperatures cause further degradation. So it's really hard to get DNA out of old samples like that. Where's that bone sitting now? I don't know. But now that you brought this up, I think we should send it to Beth and see if she can get some DNA out of it. Now she's been on the show, Best Shapiro. She talked about bison. We talked mostly about mammoths. No, we talked a bit about bison. I want to get into bison with you guys too. How to clone a mammoth? Yeah, we talked about that when we talked about that book we're trying to get her back on and apparently her husband's and Neanderthal researcher, Yeah, which I think has gone back to Neanderthal. How's it that's okay? I think it's bags being okay to see Neanderthal. I like, uh, so many of these new discoveries are new technology discovering something that's been on somebody's shelf or in somebody's drawer that was actually taken from the ground and in the seventies of the sixties, the fifties, um, and it's just like it's the ultimate horders sport, right. It was like, oh, don't throw that away. So here's the perfect example of Pam, tell them about your polar bear skull from Lonely. But Pam, before you do that, I just needed to put a button on the bone. So you don't know what You don't have a theory about what the bonus. Uh my, guess it's probably caribou, just because caribou were by far the most common and easy to hunt, and because you guys gave each other knowing glance. So I thought maybe you felt that it was like a human bone, but you didn't want to bring it up. No, And we've look for human and bones and never found any. I mean when we've collected bits and pieces of bones, we could that be human. And I've had brought some back and this could be and then it usually ends up being a caribou something because it's the size. Okay, So so do the polar bearing And I want to return later to in your wanderings, um, what would be uh like? I want to get back to the human the human bone questions. So the polar bear story, of course, starts with Mike Couns. So we were and Rick, we're near the other guy from the Mesas. So the UM four of us were up actually right on the north coast of Alaska near an Old It was a do line site lonely that distance early warning site or early radar site from the Cold War? What was the word? Do line line distance early warning to these old big radar screens and to prevent red dawn. Right, So anyways, we'd we'd land, the helicopter dropped it, the four of us off and um Dan and Rick went one way with their little handgun, and Mike and I went the other way. And Mike had a shotgun and right before we left, we said, s Mike, because normally we worked further inland and the coast. And do you ever see polar bears along this stretch? No, never this time of year. So Dan and Rick are walking along with just their little handgun, and they look on the beach and there these really fresh polar bear tracks, which are really distinctive because in polar bears you can see the hair. They have all that hair on their feet and so well the hair shows up in the track in the moll. They were so fresh, and because the tide had just gone out, so it was really obvious, and so it was kind of foggy. So they're looking around and that the helicopter disappeared in the fog, you know, so there was no way you could have waved a warning. So they're going one way and Mike and I are going the other way. And then I said to Mike, so do you ever find bones up here along the coast? And he goes nah. And so we're just walking along and I looked down and there's this bear skull and I pick it up and it's a polar bear skull and it's like in perfect condition, and so we go, oh, well, it must have been a polar bear that just died, and so we collected it and then we brought it back and had it stored in our bone collection. And then it was a couple of years later. We had some extra or Mike had extra money for radio carbon dating, which is how you can tell how old a bone is, and we decided that we wanted to put everybody round up the need this thing you can find. Well, when we decided, we'd already dated and I'm sure we'll get into this. We dated all these different herbivores caribout, mammoth, bison, horse, muscox, and so let's do a bunch of carnivores. And you don't find nearly as many carnivar bones as you do herbivores because there's you go up the trophic levels, there's fewer and fewer animals. So I said, oh, I got this polar bear skull. You know it's modern, but maybe maybe it's a hundred years old or something. So we sent in a date and it came back and it was greater than forty five hundred years, which is about the limit of radio carbon dating. So you say it's infinite. And we said, wow, that's amazing. I wonder if that's right. So we sent off two more dates to a different lab, two more samples to a different lab to get it dated as well, and both of those came back at greater than fifty thousand years. So it's like, wow, this is the way on the beach. Polar bear was just sitting just above the high tideline on the beach. And so then I started looking and no ancient polar bear skulls have ever been found. There's some there's one old polar bear bone from Svalbard, part of a jawbone, and a couple bone polar bone polar bear bone fragments from Norway that are maybe around a hundred thousand years and then there's our polar bear skull. Of course, it wasn't in any kind of stratigraphic context, so all we could say is it's older than radio carbon age. And do you think it had been moved a lot over the time. No, because it was in such good condition it couldn't have reworked. And so we actually ended up, um, we've collaborated with Beth Shapiro on a bunch of ancient DNA, And so he said to Beth Hey, we got this old polar bear skull. Are you interested? She said, of course, and so we sent her a sample. And actually last night we were just reviewing this manuscript that's um in review to be published on the DNA of this polar bear. And what all can you tell about it? Are we allowed to say anything? Come on? First off, the it's a female and um, it's named her Bruno. Yeah, it should be Brunella. But but it's in incredibly good shape so it hasn't been battered, so we think it was probably safely stored in perma frost for ninety thousand plus years. I got it. Yeah, but the basic polar bear story, you gotta get to talk about this, but you'll be really interested because it has a lot to do with Southeast Alaska and the ABC bears. So Admiralty Bear enough in Chichikov. So if you did you hear all this stuff from her about the polar bear jeans, I've heard it from other folks, but just remind us like, like, uh, polar bears seem to be closely related to brown bears from the A. B. C's and they're not. And polar bears are you know a younger species than Yeah, then brown bears, like the split went that way rather than the other way. Yeah, though it's I might be screwing us all up. Well, everybody else is confused about it too, But what seems to have happened was, um, whenever there's a warm time in the Arctic, we start losing sea ice. Like what's going on right now. So the polar bears are kind of shipped out of luck, so they tend to come on shore, and when they come on shore, they encounter brown bears, and for some reason, female brown bears, female polar bears kind of like male brown bears. So there seems to be uh, brown bear jeans go into the polar bear population via male brown bears breeding with female polar bears. So then during cold time, so picture the height of a glaciation, it's super cold. The Arctic is frozen. There's no leads, okay, So if you're hunt if you're a hyper predator like a polar bear, and you're hunting seals, you're kind of out of luck because you need a place for the seals to come up, right, So the polar bear population, you're saying the lead, you mean like cracks in the ice opening, so the polar bear populations tend to move south. So during the last glacial maximum, like twenty years ago, they were polar bears off the coast of Ireland and they were all the way down to the southeast Alaska. Oh yeah, so what we used to think happened then this was like last year. This is what we thought happened, wasn't It's amazing how how quickly ship about a long time ago changes. So when the glaciers started the retreat about eighteen thousand years ago, polar bears got stranded in southeast Alaska, Okay, So you picture the sea ice is retreating back across the gulf and then up the bearing straight. So you got these poor polar and they're like stranded on these islands. And then what we think happened that we thought last year, what happened. Brown bears invaded from like Yellowstone and down here southeat the ice sheet, and they came in and they met these beautiful female polar bears and they made it. And then we had polar bear mitochondrial DNA, because that's inherited from the females, is now in the DNA of these brown bears around you know on Prince of Wales Island and so forth. Okay, so, um, there's this inner breeding, but it turns out from the old fall Bard mandible that pay mentioned in this from Bruno, this new bear it's much more complicated, and there's been multiple hybridizations between these two bear species and that's continuing today, right, yeah, the today it's kind of confusing because the you know, you read about like in Churchill where there's brown bears and polar bears are mating, but apparently there's only one female polar bear that's actually produced fertile offspring from those crosses. She's had like eight cubs. She's had eight cross cubs that they were all sexually viable. Well supposedly, yeah, but I mean he really knows because they're all wondering around everywhere. But so, yeah, which is where the name groller bear comes from. It's only groller right because oh yeah right, people screwing it up. But what's the larger thing is interesting though, is that you know, we used to think that species were just like unique, right and like to be like a black bear and um, a polar bear and a brown bear. But that's not true at all. That we're finding more and more species, and bears are not alone in this. Ravens are another group That's this is becoming more more and more apparent. Is the species aren't like ice later little islands. There's often a lot of hybridization going on and this has been really important in their evolution. And if you want to be hopeful about something in a time like this, where the climate is changing really rapidly and we have all these ecosystems moving around, this is the perfect time for that. So in some ways we see a lot of extinction, but we also see a lot of new things happening evolutionarily. Yeah, we were just talking about mule deer moving into Alaska. Yeah, so maybe it will get mule deer and caribou Hybrid'll think of a good name for a mule deer caribou hybrid as you're sitting there, mulebo. Hey, before we move on, I have a question. One more question about the mazis that you were saying that they were often sitting up there repairing their points. How do you know they were repairing and not just making new ones? Um again, this you gotta talk to the archaeologist, but he won't come on the show. Well, you just gotta go to him because around these little horrors, okay, they're all these broken points. Okay, so we know that they were once mounted. They had these little fore shafts. We're talking about not bows and arrows. We're talking about spear throwers here. So you had a little foreshaft that went on a longer thing and have feathers on the end, and then you're throwing it with an out laddle. So they often break, and so little horrors, broken points, and then a lot of flakes from making new points of repairing the old ones. And it's really funny. If you look at some of the Mason points or fulsome points, you'll see that they have a beautiful bass and they go up and then they had the shoulder and the shoulders where the point broke, and then the guys were like, oh, hell, I could fix this, and they just sharpen it up again. At the time that I was up at the Mason site, I do want to move away from archaeology and get into you guys, especially which is paleontology, right, But the last arc alogy point here when I was up there, the enthusiasm around the site was that there was a lot of people talking about in that community, people talking about like pre Clovis. So at that time, for for for many decades, I think it was held that like Clovis was this initial human culture. And then uh, there was this theory that there had to have been like Clovis had to have arisen from something, right, there had been a culture that created Clovis. So people were excited about that. And if I remember right back then, a possible explanation for the Masas site was that these people that that were occupying that site and hunting there had possibly hadn't come like their direct ancestors and in a few generations hadn't arrived from Siberia, but had maybe back filled they had been. They were coming from the south and sort of recolonizing the north which their very distant ancestors might have passed through. Is that still a fashionable notion or don't you track the changing theories that much? You know what what melts you say? I can't remember. I asked him about it too, Do you remember what melts you said about that? Joan and Yanni got to hold those fulsome schools when we when we visited Meltzer, Dan and Meltzer were in grad school together. So you guys still friends, are you like rivals? I'm not an archaeologist. Yeah, I've worked with David the Fulsome site. Oh you did the Fulsom site. Well, I was doing the geomorph around the Wholesome site. Oh man, Yeah, that's a great place. Steve, he's like, he's like Forrest Gump archaeology. I've never been in the full Som site. You gotta go there because it's an amazing, amazing place. But um, yeah, so that's just the backwash hypothesis is what you're talking about. It doesn't like this, so that's why we're hesitating. Tony Baker was big into it, was he? But he was he was an enthusiast. Yeah, a lot of people are big into it because it's looking now. And you guys know this from talking to day Meltzer. Is it um first um dispersal the humans into the New World was probably along the Northwest coast, so probably down to southeast Alaska, and so then Clovis took off, probably as people broken from the coast into the interior kind of habitats and bison by that time would have ranged all the way up through the ice free Corridor up into the Yukon and onto the north slope, and so it would have been you know, probably good hunting. So they could well have spread back to the north. And that's why Mason Points look so much like Falsome Points is because they originated from the lower forty eight. Those people. But you're you're like on the edge of there's still a lot of archaeological controversy about this. Shouldn't listen to us. Yeah, we're not archaeologists. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna swing us into paleontology. But watch watch all smoothly I do it. Okay, okay, Uh those fellers sitting on top of the Maza site, what are they? What were they seeing? You put in a good four day hunt on the Maza site, like what walks past? And had they been there a thousand years earlier, would it have looked way different in terms of what would have walked past? Um, it could have. The thing is you probably could have sat there for a couple of days and not seeing anything walk past. That's one thing that people familiar with exchanged people think Alaska is you know, this wilderness just crawling with animals and even back then that there were all these mega fauna we call them the large animals. Still they were dispersed over a huge area and the caring capacity of the land probably wasn't all that huge, so um, that's why it was important to have a strategic lookout. And since there's no trees, you could see a long way, so especially if it happened to be a mammoth, you could probably spot it way off in the distance. And so like, these animals aren't like they're not living in a valley, like they're constantly traveling as like for their food needs or reproduction or migration or it's it's not clear how far they would have traveled. Basically, an animal wants to travel as little as possible because moving uses up energy and it just depends on what food resources are available to you. But they probably had some seasonal movements between winter and summer feeding grounds. And just like caribos, most caribou populations in the north are migratory and some of them travel a thousand kilometers, some of them travel fifty kilometers, so it really depends on their habitat. But that said that the herbivores that could have been seen from the masa site would have included caribou and musk oxen and which still exists on the north slope today. And then there also could have been mammoths, bison, and horses. And then if they had really sharp eyes, they could have also seen bears, wolves, And there were lions running around up there, and not a lot of them, but they could have seen those animals. What was the lion like big, a little like a mountain, like an African lion, a little bit bigger than any living lion um And their thought because of the lack of a maine, and we know the lack of a man from the cave paintings in Europe, that they were probably not living in prides. They were probably much smaller social groups, because that's what the main is for as the boss around other big lions. So, but one of the interesting things we found with our bone collections on our slope is that the horses are the main um large animal as the numerous really like they would outnumber caribou back then. Probably yeah, how many kinds of horses? Just one? Okay, in the late part of the ice age they were more earlier. But what did it look like? It looked kind of like, um, you ever seen pictures of the little ponies from yakutsk, Okay and they have this incredibly long hair I know what only my daughter has, like a like an encyclopedia of horses. Yeah, okay, so the picture a kind of a large, fat Sutland pony with really really long, real sturdy, very sturdy, and these little tiny holes like you know, like this big which immediately tells you something about the landscape, right, because they wouldn't have all that tussocks and pete up there. Yeah, big feet, you would think you would associate larger feet would always be the preferable foot for anything to do with Alaska. Yeah, we can talk about that when we talk about why they're not there anymore. But the thing about um that Dan started to allude to is the horses and lions. When we compiled this huge collection of all these bones, the lion bones that we had dated track and number the horse bones. So our theory is is that lions specialized in hunting horses. Horses went down, lion numbers went down. Yeah, And and that would make sense, especially if they were solitary or small groups like a horse would be much easier prey than say a mammoth or even a bison with horns. And it appears that there were lots of horses, so it would have been easier to find a horse to munch on if you were a lion. Can you, guys, explain a little bit about you elude your bone collection? Explain a little bit about how you built up a bone collection. The first thing that we should say is, uh, collecting these bones. It was all on federal property and we did it either while we were working for the Bureau of Land Management or when we had a permit from the Bureau of Land Management to collect these bones. And all the bones are in the University of Alaska Museum or Sciences. Yeah, your chel we don't have our walls adorned with skulls and tusks. It's all federal property and it's all Uh, there's a database you can access online and all the bones are listed in there. And you're probably and I'm guessing, very meticulous about where it came from. What was the context? Yeah, I have all that information on my computer. But um, yeah, So so that's the first thing that we collected these bones, and it's it's a federal crime to go onto federal property and collect archaeological or paleontological specimens. You can end up in jail or with a big fine. That's if it's fossilized. Right. Well, no, it doesn't have to be fossilized because many of these bones that we find they've been stored in a deep freezer in the Arctic for thousands and thousands. But you can pick up a shed antler from a caribou, right, But if you found a mammoth bone, that would be regarded as paleontological, even if it was just came out of tundra and was looked like a fresh bone, even if it had meat on it, it's still so um. Yeah, the key thing is the paleontological aspect, in other words, how old the thing is. Yeah, and there's been a couple of incidents where professional like river guides have the story. Yeah, okay, so we don't need to go into that. So but if you could tell the story, I would love. I never knew enough detail to tell the story. Can I tell you a version I've heard? Is that uncomfortable? Sure? You want to put this on your podcast? Well know what kind of Okay? Yeah, you know this lady? Huh no, no, But let me tell you a version I heard. I heard that there was a gentleman in the lower forty eight who had a living room display. Am I right, had a living room display of a nice man with tusk and someone got to wonder and how the hell did he get a man with tusk? And that led to a UM investigation. Yeah. The story I heard was somehow a photograph got on a website and it was like, come on my river guided tour and you might be able to find things like this. And then there was some photograph floating around of the guy's living room. So that was how the two were connected. But it's so ironic, like if you still remember going to this uh uh pilot's house and Kotsubue once and you know, I was like, hey, do you ever spind any bones? And he goes, come on in, I'll show you. And the guy had this incredible collection of mainly bison but also um bear and mammoth, and I was like, what are you gonna do with this? And he goes, don't tell anybody I have it. Yeah, So there's a lot of this stuff floating around. It is legal if it is from your your mining claim is it is it all? Isn't there also something where Native Alaskans are allowed to take those things and keep them or am I am I wrong? But I think if it's on their private property, so it's like their own allotment or their corporation tribal lands, Yeah, than it is. But anyway, it's it's a sensitive thing, and you know, you really got to be careful because there's what shocked me about this river Guide incident. Was it Bureau of Land Management, Department of Interior actually has a task force whose job it is to investigate these things and go after people. And it was like, holy, they have undercover agents and yeah, it's it's like I think, scaring online sales and stuff of Yeah, I think it'd be important to talk about why we have these laws. Well, yeah, the most, probably the strongest emotions about this come from the archaeologist, because they go, do not pick up an arrowly. I've gotten I've gotten a huge trouble just picking up something. You look at this saying where do you get that? Put that down because you're you're taking it out of context. And so therefore they go out and they're trying to figure out something about some archaeological site you've you've been messing with the day and be like if someone messed up a crime scene almost, yeah, exactly. That's a really good analogy. So the same with these bones. You know, you a bone that's out of context that you don't know, somebody's uncle found it, you know, like who knows where, and it's it's pretty much useless scientifically, and it's just gonna sit in somebody's you know, coffee table and decay and then they'll somebody will throw it away, so it's it's like gone. So the best thing is if you ever run across one of these things, even like an arrowa just take a photograph of it and then I call up your friendly archaeologists and say, hey, I found this amazing point and it's going to change our ore the history of the world. I think it's pretty interesting that at some point in our recent past, we you know, thought to think that far ahead, that hey, this stuff is so important that we should make like federal rules and laws, you know, to protect it. Like it seems like a lot of foresight for I don't know, sometimes it doesn't seem like we have that. Yeah, because you know, there are all those museums that have human archaeological remains, and now they're busy repatriating remains to the uh oh yeah, digging people's graveyards. Hundred fifty years ago, people just ransacked archaeological sites. And you know, I was reading a thing recently about the there was a thing in the Atlantic about um people working on the coastal passage of early humans and they were talking about remember when we went spear fishing with Greg and Alex the Channel Islands. They're talking about in the Native people's on the Channel Islands, them remembering people digging they're grave the graveyards of their ancestors. They remember archaeologists digging those graveyards, complaining about the stench of rotting carcasses. Wow, digging active. Yeah, And what it got into was it got into a uh why there's a great reluctance on the part of some Native people to participate and the archaeological process like a star in their mind is like like like literally the bones of their grandfather's being hauled off. Yeah, like literally the bones of their grandfather's being dug up by archaeologists and haul the way to a museum. So back to how you make a bone collection. So yeah, so you ca you covered your ass. It's a legit bone collection and it's not into your living room. So we fly into a place like I've a tuck and then put all our stuff on helicopter and get flown out and we say, oh, that looks good and the helicopter what is all your stuff? So if it's just the two of us, we have one inflatable canoe. We have a sleeping tent and a cook tent um some years we carry it an electric fence for bears and then you know, just a little camp stove and food freeze dry food. No, you're not an actual food. You pack food, do a little fishing on the way when you're floating. Occasionally we don't because of the bears, just you know, just complicates things. But we usually eat until Dan couldn't eat couscouse anymore, couscous polenta rice. So we're usually happy for three weeks or so. So three week river trips. Yeah, so that I mean it's actually kind of boring. You you float along and then she says, oh, there's a good gravel bar, So she gets off and she walks the gravel bar and I peddled the canoe up wind to the other end of the gravel bar and pick her up. And then she usually shows up with a bunch of bone fragments and we lay them down the sand and we look through them and go, well, that's interesting, that's not interesting. That's well preserved, that's not well preserved. And if they're not if they're not collectible, we just thrown back in the river, so they never leave the place where they were. Yeah, so we we rarely. I mean we probably collect like one percent of the bones that we actually encounter on a good day. How many bones do you find doing a trip like that, Oh, on a really good day. Uh. It's interesting because there's a sort of assorting process that the river does with bones, and so there are certain places and gravel bars that kind of accumulate bones. And so you could on one gravel bar fine like maybe five t b o s or humorous or femurs from different species. Um. But on a really good day, I would guess we might end up collecting fifty bones. And most most commonly you'd find longbones like the leg and armbones and footbones. And then of course a mammoth bone is a lot more significant than a little caribou bone um. And then skulls are pretty exciting when you find skulls. You know, there's a lot of mammoths are big animals, right, so they're bones just blow up sort of. So there's a lot of mammoth material, and tusk are big and they're well preserved. But we never collect husk anymore, you don't know. So if you find a tusk, you kind of go, that's cool, and you put it back in the river, just leave it land. Do you throw it out in a deep hole or do you just leave it lane where you found it. Usually put it back in the water because it's easier on him and they'll get reburied that way. But the st just I've told his story hunter times. But when I was doing that stuff with cons and they'd find those sweet spear points and then uh, photograph them drawn, they showed me how they draw them. They sketch them, photograph and then just stick them right back in the moss. Man. It was like it took every like to walk away, like I'm gonna sneak back here in the dark, but it never got dark. We have collected some big tusks, and yeah, one of the tuts we collected. I don't know if you saw this article that Matt Willer was the first author on that came out and just recently. Yeah, oh yeah, no, we're hot on that wondering mammoth thing. Yeah, so this was a tusk that we found. Have you guys found that tusk? Yeah? So this is another Mike kun story. So Mike said, he said, well, you guys go out and to the eastern part of the dune field, which is kind of the northern part of the n p r A. So we were flying around and we saw this gigantic mammoth tusk. Home at backup you're bone hunting from the air, or you're flying to a river to float it. Well, we were kind of doing both, but it's a land it's so pactful of good stuff. You can just fly over and pick it out with the naked The tusk was so big that you could see it from the helicopter at about five feet. So we land and it's what is it doing. It's just sitting on the side of the river. So we're like looking at this thing that, No, this is not worth anything. It's a bold tusk. So it's a huge diameter. It's probably eight feet along the arc, but it's all just laying out, just laying there. Would you say it's not worth any thing? Already? It was like a beam of sunlight shining through. Do you gather that it's worth a lot to the folks in this room? There is a lot of interest here. Yeah, So what we told Mike can He goes, well, what was your question? I couldn't you were being facetious? Are serious that you just you're seeing like that something like this? And you go it wasn't well enough preserved. But wait, we're gonna get to what happens when you find it really well preserved one. So we go back and Mike goes, well, I want to see this thing. So it comes out with a shovel, and sure enough he finds the pair because the other one, So then we have this was the other one. It was in the creek. It was like right there because they're really big, so the creek is not able to move it very far. So we have these these folks, these ridiculous photographs of Mike posing with these two enormous mammoth tests. I think he used it for his Christmas card or something that way, Like I said that, we brought this bathroom scale out there with us. The way they were like a hundred and four he pounds. Can you imagine this bull mammoth is carrying this weight. Okay, So we're there and it's like, I'm like, this is a total waste of time, you know. So we started looking around and we find another tusk and it's sticking out of the gravel. So um. We started digging around and we would come up with the skull. Two beautiful tusks there, exquisitely preserved. Also a bull, so the really big diameter at the base but not so long. They must have died in a fight. Well, this was a little bit up stream. So we brought this back of radio carbent dated it and it was very young, relatively young. It was like eighteen nineteen thousand, and that's the one. It was so well preserved that we decided to section that one and do the um the annual growth ring. Yeah, tell the whole damn story now. But they fit to go to like ice cream cones and all that stuff. Yeah, well, so hey, he said it so that the tust grow kind of in a con cold it's like a stack of ice cream cones, okay, And so by the hardest thing about this whole analysis was we have this machinist friend, and it was how are we going to cut this thing down the axis? And it's it's cut this kind of slow helical bend to it. So that that took us eight took eight people eight hours with the band saw to cut the thing, and it was it was incredibly complicated, but we ended up section it in two and hopefully one half is going to show up in the museum at some point. And so then you could see the little growth rings and you have to sand it way down. Yeah, So then it's polished and then it can be analyzed for these and once it's polished, you can see the growth rings. Yeah. So then from that it was apparent the thing was about what thirty five years old or so he wasn't very old young what was their lifespan, assuming they you know, hauled Ukraine? Yeah, if they reached it's not it's like elephants, yeah, somewhere like that. So he wasn't old at old, he was kind of middle aged crime yeah, and he's a middle age at thirty five. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, So when Matt Wilder did the strontium isotopes and the nitrogen isotopes on this thing. He put together the scheme where he could track what you gotta explain that, but how he went around gathering up all those rodent teeth and stuff. Yeah, so it's there's actually more to it than that, because there was a there was a grad student before who started this thing working on salmon because you can trace where the salmon are coming from from the strontium in the the water from their streams stable is tope and it um. It's the same as true of carbon, and that's what radio carbon dating is based on, these stable isotopes that can break down over time. And so yeah, so Alaska has this really diverse geology and it it varies in the amount of the strontium, this rare earth element. So by looking at the amount of strontium in different years of the mammoth tust he was able to figure out, well, where did that mammoth probably lived during that year of his life? And and if you looked at like a mouse that has a very small home range, it would just an all consistent strong teum value because he wasn't ranging across different zones with different strong levels exactly. So from that um they were able to put together where this animal probably ranged. And we think it probably was born somewhere down kind of on the lower Yukon and then wandered around up past Fairbanks and then later in life came back across up the Coya Cock when across the bricks range, ended up on the north slope where we found it. And the interesting thing from the nitrogen isotopes, um, it looks like the thing probably starved the death, because when you begin to starve to death, you begin to break down your muscles and they have a characteristic um nitrogen isotope ratio, so you're like eating yourself. And so we think the things starved the death. And your question is, well, why would a thirty five year old middle age bull mammoth starved the death? I don't know why the animals die. But we never found any of his leg bones. We dug and doug we never found any, so we don't know. So we didn't find the rest of his skeleton to know if see if he had any injuries that were obvious or anything. Yeah, you can see why a leglass mammoth wouldn't live. I can jump to out that might be a paper for you. Obviously he had no legs. Do you guys ever find stuff that, um, there's a concern for preservation, like it's gonna like somehow deteriorate if you don't get it like handled or treated in some way. Well, we have, um occasionally found places seen arabone still with soft tissue. And Bison Bob, the skeleton we found had a lot of soft tissue and so obviously that has to be frozen or it would just run away. Tell the story of Bison Bob. But like what you were doing when we found Bison Bob, we were paddling down the river. We had actually just paddled through a hailstorm and we had a favorite campsite a little bit downriver, so we were looking forward to getting to our campsite. So you've been on one river enough to it you'll do one river more than once. Oh, we've been doing them for twenty years, so every bend has a name and we have our favor Why are you doing the same rivers over and over again? There's a couple of things. First of all, there are not many rivers that have the right characteristics to preserve bone it has to be a fairly slow river with um and fine settlements. If it's a bouldery river that's really fast. Any bones that get incorporated in the river get broken up. And also and going to the same places over and over again for twenty years, you really get to know and understand the system in a way that you can't if you just bop in a couple of times over a space of a few years. Since to me, that's one of the really important lessons of this research we've been doing, is having these long term data sets and really getting to know the area. To me, it's really helped us understand how the system functions and be able to better put together the information we put in papers about how the animals lived. So anyways, what was the first time you go down the river? Is it way better pickings than the second time? Stuff? Con Every year is different, and that's when people say, don't you get bored? And you never get bored because every year is different, and it might be related to how much of a spring flood there was, or you know, if some bank got cut away and so, and how high the river is, how clear the water is. Um one year, it seemed like we drug our canoe almost the whole way because the water was so low, but it was really clear, and so we were finding bones in the bottom of the river channel that we never would have seen. And you'd floated over a bunch of times. Yeah, and so every year it's like a clean slate and you ever got to get in, get into your swimsuit and go down there and swim down and grab something. Well, not a swimsuit, but I sent a picture somewhere of Dan and a dry suit with flippers and a mask. And my niece was with us and she had a wetsuit and they did try snorkeling to look in the bottom of the river. But um, my niece when she came up with us often would just walk in the river and find stuff or you feel stuff with your feet, so so that that snorkel trick didn't work good for you. Uh no, it didn't work well at all. Visibility, let's just leave it down. It's a great photo. Was it a personal comfort thing or a visibility thing? Both? Actually, the river is really cold, So after about an hour of flopping around in there and then you know, it's little things like you know when you have flippers and you gotta walk backwards to get out, and then you fall over and everybody's laughing at you, and you just try. Suit has big bubbles of air and so you kind of look like a hunchback of Notre Dame and you can't dive down. Yeah, it just goes on and on. So that's not recommended now, even though you and I understand going back to the same place twenty years in a row. And I feel like the same way about certain places I like to go hunting, you know, and just the intimacity you gain over and over and over. But at the same time, we all pour over maps all the time looking for like the next great spot. So do you do that also and kind of look at the great certain rivers and go, man, that one could be the honey hoole. And that was the advantage of working with Mike and BLM is having the helicopter. And that's like when we on the Wandering Mammoth, we had the opportunity to fly around to different places, and so over the course of the decades we did check out a lot of other places. But unless you have a helicopter, most of those places you just can't get there. Mike's annual budget for those helicopters. When you were there, it was over a million dollars a year. There were some summers we had three aircraft and so we could literally just look at a map like you were suggesting, and just go, hey, we want to go check out this river, and he should sure go And it would be like, I don't know, twenty grand. We'd blow in an afternoon flying around and sometimes it panned out and sometimes it didn't. Now we're really hobbled because now it cost us if we drive the cold Foot Okay, at the southern edge of the Bricks Ranage, it cost us ten dollars to charter a beaver for a drop off and a pick up. So that means we only get one river, and we only have one reach of that river that we can float where in the old days when Mike before Mike retired and he was the Emperor of the Arctic, and that we could get like ten times more done, you know, in a little field season. So Bob the bison, hailstorm, So hailstorm. We're paddling. We're hoping to get to Cottonwood Bluff campsite, and but as we paddle, we're always looking and there's something up there on the river bank, and then we're we always try and guess ahead what it is. It's a bison, No, it's a muskox. And so we got to it and it was bison skull kind of partially buried right at the river level, upside down, and we could see one horn and part of a mandible, and so we stopped. And for some reason, skulls are the most exciting bones to find, and so we dug it out carefully. Let me stop you real quick when you see a bison skull, you know, just based on what we understand about the timeline there, you know, it's at least what years old, So just the fact that you laid eyes on it, you know, here's something. Yeah, so and um, so we excavated it and it turned out to be a complete skull with the mandible there and one horn sheath. The other side just had a horn core, but it was in immaculate condition. So we dug it out and we put it in the water to kind of rinse it off, and all this gunk came out of the eye orbit like it was the rotten eyeball still in there, and so we were working kind of focused on the skull, and then as we were cleaning it up, looked around and just a little bit up the bank, oh there's a few more bones and oh, look at that's a bison metatarsal, like a kind of risk of like not really with the skull. The skull also had a lot of the brain was still in there, so that all drippled out into the river. I was pretty discussing this kind of white fatty stuff. I've dealt with that inside. Yeah. So so we saw these bones close by, and then you know, we started looking farther and farther up the bluff and there were more and more bones and we go, wow, there's a lot here, and um, but then it was getting late, so we put the skull in the canoe and went and camped, and the next day went back. It was just like a hundred yards back up river and went up the bluff about thirty ft and we could find bone oones sticking out of the bluff. It's very fine sandy sediment, and so we started retrieving bones and then uh, a lot of the bluff was still frozen and the bones were frozen in. So we had this one little bucket and one of us would go down to the river and fill the bucket up and carry it up and pour it over. It took three days, I think to get all the bones out, and as we went farther into the bluff, that's when we started to find hair and uh tissue, and like the front legs when we excavated them, the bones were still articulated, attached to each other, you know, and the um humorous and the radius aulna were attached. And we found, oh, a bunch of the vertebrae from the back. We're still all our puculated. But the neatest thing we're actually the holes because it was a big bison. It was a bowl and they've got three thought it was probably twelve years old, very matura bal and they're they're very tall, tall, and you know how buffalo are kind of um narrow if you look at them from the front or from the back, so like that, but kind of on steroids, so even taller, and but with these dainty little holes. So the holes were like I don't know, something like that, no, and then like a little high heels, and it still had the sheaths, the hoof sheets were still attached. I mean, just so our listeners get a better idea. You're you're showing me like four inches across a little lemon, so like almost smaller than like a caribou. So yeah, yeah, yeah, So again we're talking running on hard surfaces. They're not running on tundra, grassy plane. Yeah yeah. And so that if you look on the bottom of the of the hush sheath that still had the little scratches where he'd like run over rocks and stuff. Really but it looked like it was from an animal that had died like three weeks ago. It was so fresh. And we found three sheets and then we also found it's a sediments um we thought out and came off. There was this little point sticking out and eventually that became the other horn sheath, and so we eventually found the only really big bone we were missing was one scapula, and then there were some of the little wrist and anklebones. But we found all the little vertebrae from the tail go down to these tiny little things like half inch in diameter. So, what what does your canoe look like? Yeah? We we ferried. We made numerous trips back to camp, and we had we actually had a tarp that we spread them out on. But then this was the other lucky thing about Mike if we did have a satellite phone. So we called up and said, hey, Mike, we've got this bison skeleton and it's actually starting to smell, and their flies coming around, and we're worried that some bears gonna come. And so he sent the helicopter over and we uh flew it back to Iva Tuck and then flew it to Fairbanks and stuck it in a freezer. And what were you able to find out about that animal? Um? And why do you think it was so well like? How did it get so well preserved? Yeah? That and if you can't and when you're explaining that, is also explained how an animal of that size could just die out there somewhere and not get scavenged. Well? And then can I ask a follow up? I'm still I'm still stuck on the on the eyeball socket and the brain in there. Is that if there's any like soft tissue from that creature that would be worth saving, that, would you know give you information you couldn't find from from hard tissue bone? Um, I guess it will from the hair. You can do various isotopic analyzes, and we haven't done anything with any of the soft tissue. It's all frozen. But um, what was Janice's question. Well, one theory that we came up with is along that stretch of river there's a lot of quicksand and because sometimes you're walking along dragging the canoe or something, and all of a sudden you go and get sucked in. And so this is another thing about bison with small feet, they'd be really vulnerable to quicksand going in. And um, so one theory he is because he was a bull in his prime, that he got stuck in quicksand and couldn't get out, and so he might have died actually in the river, in which case, uh, he wouldn't have been heavily scavenged because come winter he would have just gotten buried over by the river sediments frozen in. And then we think because the sediments that we actually we found his skeleton in were about eleven thousand years old, so probably he died over forty thousand years ago and was just interred in these sediments and then at some point the river moved away from where he was and then it moved back exposed him. He toppled down the bluff a little and got reburied, and then if we hadn't come along and found him, he would have toppled into the river again, but by then the bones would have gotten dispersed more and more. And because we went back to that section twice more that summer to see if we could find anything else, and the whole face of the bluff had just collapsed. So if we hadn't been there, when we'd been there, you never would have known here. It was totally serendipitous that we do you feel like, um, the permafrost thawing out thing, like is it a raise against time? Like finding super well preserved specimens like that? Like have you run in like have you seen evidence of you know, the permafrost dawing like being a real thing. You're like the lion cubs with with hair on him and the increasing Yeah, yeah, like do you see? Yeah? So you think it would be right? I mean, there's global warming, mean annual temperature of Alaska's going up significantly, But what what's happening is on the ground, there's so much insulation from the overlying vegetation that we're not seen yet widespread summer Carston so melting and thawing. So I don't it's not, um, I don't think thawing is accelerating. What this is why we're working along these rivers because the river is doing the thawing for you, and it's done the same thing for you know, a hundred thousand years, just as it meanders across though, just going back and forth, back and forth over time. So it's not like the whole place is thawing and we're not in a race to save um do you hear Do you hear that all the time? Though, I feel like it's like a like it's like a Natgio. Well, I'm not going to get that funding talking point that it's like everything's coming out it's a race against the clock. On the north coast of Alaska, the rate of coastal erosion is definitely increasing, and that also I think has to do with less sea ice and forming, which protects the coastline storms. It's causing more erosion. Also, I think we're also hearing, you know, the Russians are really in the mammoth tusk hunting now, so you kind of get the impression that, oh, yeah, they're all coming out of the permit frost. Now they're everywhere in Siberia, but they're not. I mean they know exactly where they go and they're using like steam hoses and you know they're mining for mammoth tusk. Yeah. So it's not like the whole Arctic is melting down now. It's just it's happening in specific places, like Pam said, like the coastal zones, but a lot of the you know, the north slope interior is not not yet feeling the big thaw, but it'll happen. It's a bigger issue in places like interior Alaska where the perma frost is much warmer, like Fairbanks, where it's more borderline. Yeah, borderline. It doesn't take that much to melt the firmer frost. If for my frost is one years when I was with Mike Coins, I think I can put this in the thing I wrote. I was saying to Mike, so, what's the coolest thing you could find? And to quote him, he said, I'd be flying along in my helicopter and there would be a fucking hand sticking out of the ground. Yeah, when you're drifted along. Um, yeah, we're always looking that you would find that you would find remains and it would be that here's here's some person from years ago, thirty thousand years or whatever the hell, and it'd rewrite all understanding that would be fully clothed, but have all the tools pointed out the map a Teo del Fuego. Yeah, exactly that. That when when Mike expounded on it um and I know he was we were having you know, I don't mean to make him seem uncouth, but I mean he was. We were just kind of musing around the table and it would be that there would be like a family group of people, I mean, because of the perma frost, would be all the things you never find, Yeah, what was in their bag, how they're tent, like how their shelters were constructed or whatever, Just like that, like the bison bob, the bison bob of a nomadic ice age hunting group. That's one reason Mike flew us up there was he figured if they got these poor people out there looking for bones and if they see a human bone, then they'll call me. So we were like, you know, looking for him. That was part of our mission. Find something unusual, call him, will come fly in. He'll find that little hand sticking up and then he'll he'll say, you guys, go back to camp. I'll take care of this. I'll take it from here. It's an issue of numbers. Like I said earlier, that you know, we find lots of the herbivores, there are a lot more herbivores, and then you find many fewer carnivore bones, and then humans. There were probably even fewer humans than there were carnivores running around up there. So the chances of stumbling upon the family that got stuck in quicksand in the river is really slim, but man like it will probably never who knows, but it has to be there. But we, I mean we were. There has to be a group of you know, ice age hunters that whatever landsliders. All I kept looking just for you know, the clumsy guy who dropped his toolkit. Somewhere you'll find the whole little assemblage. So have you met this guy named Eski Willardslove so he remember that he's Danish and he's a trip but he's one of the DNA guys and he's in Copenhagen. He's a colleague of Dave Meltzers. So archaeology is kind of moving on now getting away from arrowheads and finding you know, people buried in mud, and they're getting into like environmental DNA, so DNA of people that's preserved in sediment, and that's really the new horizon. And I think if Eski had his way, he would um come up to Alaska and other parts of North America and take a bunch of lake corps and try to find a lake where people had camped on the on the beach and then they'd like you know, peat in the water or you know, just the refuge had drained into the water, and we pick up the ancient DNA preserved in these lakes, which would be like final like dead end resting places for it. Yeah, and that would be fairly conclusive. You know. Then you could date the lake sediment and you could say, oh, well look there are people there fifteen thousand years ago or something. That's kind of how can he not have his way money, It's all just I mean, that'd be It's would be a very expensive project, but we'll see what happens, I think, because he'd want to do hundreds of sites. Yeah, you'd have to do it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, because you'd have to find a lake where people camped, and then they'd have to be enough human DNA excreted into the lake water to show up in the lake sediment. So it's not a sure thing. And if it's on a hillside, there's no way it's can still be there, right. That's the whole geologically stable thing is that because they feel like there's no more surprises with physical artifacts or or physical tissue. I think Steve probably has a good feeling feel for this after you know trapes and around with Mike. I mean, it's a huge piece of real estate and you're looking for these little needles and haystacks and the preservation thing you like, point one of one percent of the sites would ever be preserved and then you'd have to find it. So it actually might be more efficient to go with the lake study with the DNA. And also if you were to find human remains, there are all these ethical and political questions about what kind of sampling you can into a nightmare man, so um, getting the environmental DNA would be a lot more straightforward than and actual although it would be really exciting to find old human remains. Yeah, has anyone ever pulled animal DNA off an ancient arrowhead? Yeah, um, it was first done with proteins from blood, you know, in the little kind of crevices of projectile points, and a lot of people didn't really believe that. They're like, well, how do we know that that animal protein is actually that of a deer or bison or something. But more recently people have been extracting ancient DNA from projectile points. But it's like Pain was saying that there's a huge preservation problem because DNA is a very delicate compound. It breaks down. So the artic is the ideal place if you're gonna find such a thing. And going back to the Masa site, m I really wish that all those old Masa points have been kept in a freezer because maybe they still have the But the trouble there is I don't think they were handled correctly when they were dug out of the ground. This is another thing about archaeologists today. They become enlightened and they always go, well, we're not going to dig the whole site. We're gonna leave that because in ten years will be a whole bunch of new techniques, which you know, tell us a bunch of things. Yeah, that's when I was. When I was with those guys, they would talk about um they were they were always discussing where they might go back, like which these campsites might warrant going back, and like dig it right, and you imagine it's going there with a shovel and digging, But it would be that they might do a square meter, right, just do one square meter and then and then in a hundred or whatever, in three years, when there's completely different innovations and technology, someone could go to another meter and apply there, you know, new academic rigor to that. That was one of the funny things that the Masist site when Tam wasn't there. But I was up there one one summer day with Mike up on top, and they were digging these squares and they were like ten of them, and everybody had a square and they had a little trowel with a brush, and I was like, oh my god, how can you guys be doing this? This is really boring. Why don't just give me the shovel and let me dig find some stuff. Yeah, so Mike goes, oh, you can't do that, but here's one that we've dug and We've dug it all the way down to gravel and there's nothing left. And I said, well, can I dig that? And he goes, yeah, based a waste of time. So I got to shovel. I just started digging, and they were just all aghast, like why are you letting him do this? And sure enough, about two ft down had a little projectile point that it somehow wriggled down through the gravel. But he was likew irritated. I know that this is another thing that changes all the time, Like what happened all the stuff? What happened all the bison and short faced bears and step lines and wooly mammoths? And I was real hot on uh for a long time. I was hot onto the places scene, the blitz Creeg hypothesis because it was so tidy. It was like dudes came and killed them all right, and just just great, you like folded up and put in your pocket. You know, it's just like a perfect explanation. Yeah, what what's the latest? Like why that time did like nine genera like nine genera of animals, so like nine genuses of animals vanished from the Western hemisphere. What was so special that all those dozens of animals when extinct, well, there was significant climate change going on, and I think one thing is you can't give one reason for all extinctions like it very it can vary a lot regionally, and so obviously the area that we know best is northern Alaska. And I think one thing about northern Alaska is the human density was never that high, and it's this vast area where these animals were ranging. So I don't think that human hunting had a huge impact on those animal populations. And are data from our bone collection shows that humans overlapped with horse and bison for probably a couple of thousand years, and possibly even with mammoths for a while, So it seems like they could coexist. And Dan's itching to say something, No, it's just um, it's it's kind of the same old story and science. You know. The first thing we do is we latch on a simple explanation like blitz Creek, people overhunted, they killed all the animals, and then you realize, well, that didn't kind of fit with some of the chronologies where people are rare, like on the North Slope or um other places like on islands in the tropical Pacific it's really well documented that all the endemic bird species went extinct after people showed up, so it was pretty obvious people killed them all or um moa and New Zealand is a really good example of overkill. So it works in some places but not in others. So then the second stages you go, okay, so it's not the same everywhere. It's complex, and then it just kind of keeps getting more and more complex because you realize, I think it was I think it's more like seventy genera globally of megafauna, so animals over a hundred pounds average weight when extinct globally globally. And then but when you start looking at the records globally, you see, well, in Australia, almost all those extinctions happened before forty years ago. In Africa on a like twelve percent of the megafauna when extinct. Well, I can tell you why that's true, because Africa always had humans. Yeah, that's one of the that's probably part of the explanation they could they had evolved together and it wasn't like a surprise attack. Yeah, but Africa is also different in other ways. It's a much more diverse set of habitats Africa is a huge kind and it's run in the equator and um the combination of the evolution with humans plus this kind of diversity of semiar a habitats that are changing all the time. But anyway, so but you see what I mean, The complexity grows on complexity, and I think everybody's kind of come around to this now where there's no one explanation it's going to fit all species. Some cases it is overkill, I think moa. Other cases it's climate change, which is probably what happened on the north slope where we went from um well drained substrate where you could make it with your little dainty bison hoves too. Now there's no way that animal could get around. It would starve in a week just because it's so bog sinking sinking into the in through the tassis and into the into the into the It's kind of counter intuitive that at the end of the last ice Age is the climate got warmer in northern Alaska, it became a less favorable environment for these large animal You kind of think, all it warms up and everything, there's more plants growing, but uh, the warmer temperatures allowed shrubs and peat to come in, which created this really boggy environment than than insulated the permafrost, so the water never drains away, and it's just and these were planes grazing animals for the most parts, or they were mostly grazing animals, so they needed large grasslands, and so in grasslands by their nature are kind of well drained, hard soils. And actually the youngest horse bones that we found on the north slope were in these sandy areas, well drained areas, which suggests to us that the horses retreated to these last little sandy grasslands, but then eventually that became too small to support them and they died out. Do you have a sense of how how long? Like it wasn't like one century the animals were there and then the next like how do you have a sense of how long this extinction event? That? That's a that's an interesting I was weighing on a little bit because I asked melts about that, Like I used to have it that that I don't know in my head, I started pictured that like thirteen thousand years ago, thousand and one day ago, all that ship was there and then and then like you know, twelve thousand and sixty four, whatever the hell, it was all gone, and we talked melts about this. He goes that that window of time keeps bad broadening, And it wasn't like everybody all died on one day. It was there was things that were that were fading out over the course of tenos and I'm sure regionally it was also, you said, back to the DNA preserved in sediment. So when an animal dies um in a permafrosting area, the DNA is often very well preserved if you can find it. So there's been there's two studies now, one from the Yukon one from Siberia who have looked at these LUSS sections so less as wind blown silt ok e s s right, you got it, and it's frozen. So both of them are showing are revealing that um, mammoth, bison and even Woolleye rhinoceros and Siberia survived way into the holy scene, so well into the present interglacial thousands of years after we thought they did based on when the last the most recent dated bonus is an article that came out about yeah right, yeah, you said in that nature. These guys are probably quoted in there, I know, but I was reviewing that paper bit yeah. Yeah. But so that's a really big deal because it suddenly is that gets rid of the overkill hypothesis because people have been in Siberia for thirty thousand years and yet rely ron ostros were stampeding around until eight thousand or six thousand. So it's really kind of this big wake up, like, hey, we got a new source of data. It's telling it's something totally different, and a lot of these animals were hanging on much more recently than we thought they were before. It demonstrates a vulnerability and getting your information from one from bones because like I think that I always returned to when I'm thinking about, you know, antiquity, and it gains it moves some paleontology to archaeology. Is it for a for a period of time, the oldest site in the New World it wasn't Chili, So how much ship is laying between there and the point of entry? Like the oldest site, and I know it's been surpassed since then, but the oldest sort of like academically agreed upon site was thousands of miles away from the point of entry, So you imagine how much junk was laying between there that you never found. And I want to put this to an anthropologist down in Colorado where I was sort of engaging his enthusiasm about finding more stuff, and he was, you know, like the bone thing. He just wasn't like optimistic that you'd find more Clovis sites are more fulsome sites, And I'm like, well, someone will turn it up, because but think of how much ground we've turned up, how many roads, we've built houses, we've built railroads, we've built everything that's happened. We have a few I don't feel that all of a sudden, now it's gonna be that we find tons more sites full of like bones and projectile points. It's gonna need to be. It's gonna be something else. Like it's just we're not gonna keep dragging this stuff off out of you know, this stuff up out of the ground. It's not gonna be come at like an increased ratio. And he was talking about the great planes. But to be able to dig into the stuff you talk about, now we've taken lake bed sediments and finding DNA and stuff, It's like that's a whole frontier. Man. It makes you, guys, help means for you guys, well, give us your job security, give us some money, we'll have job security. But we want to do that, we just don't have the money to get those. Course. One of the interesting things about this, though, is that, um it's I think it's pretty well accepted by most people now that if humans hadn't started producing greenhouse gases in like a mid hole of scenes solicity five or six thousand years ago, a lot of this was coming out of rice agriculture in Asia. If we hadn't started doing that, we would be back in the ice age now, which meant that a lot of those big animals would probably have survived. So we would have had little refugia for Willie. Rhino and mammoth would have been up on Wrangel Island and so forth, and horses would have been running around, you know, in northern Alaska, and we would have gone back into the ice age quick enough that the arranges could have re expanded and we would still have them. Is there an idea that human impact on the environment goes back thousands of years? It goes back probably five or six thousand years through greenhouse gases, And yeah, so we're slash and burn agriculture. We're burnie, we're clearing for us, so all that seal two goes in the atmosphere. We're creating these rice paddies, which are just hot bits for methane production and method is an incredible greenhouse gas. So if if we hadn't started messing around with a muld have stayed on that same cycle. Yeah, we could have stayed on the same cycle. We're during the intergoocials. During the warm times, big animals would have become scarce. They were driven into like far northern refugia, and then when the ice age came on again, it was like, yeah, we're back in business. You know, the Arctic prairie is back, mammoth steps back and they spread all over the place. Again. Here's my last question for you. They're not broading you. You might have a last one for you. How hip are you to the idea? Like, do you care about support these ideas where people are gonna do these sort of cockamami Yeah? Do you like cockamamie genetic things where you can, through various crossbeat breeding processes or whatever, create some approximation of a Pleistocene horse, create some approximation of a mammoth by like taking genetic information from mammoths and working it into contemporary elephants and then turning them back out and bringing back the ice age. Are you hip on this? I mean, like, are you like that's a good idea? Well, the big problem with that is the environment that those animals inhabitant is gone, and uh so where are they going to live? Well that this one feller in Siberia, doesn't he have the idea that just them being there will make the environment like them being there will turn it back into a kind of which came first, the chicken or the egg? And I I think that you have to have the environment before you can have the animal there. I don't think the animal. So you don't think that the grazing animals came and turned tundra into grassland? No? Okay, do you guys haven't talked about this? Yeah, let's put it modely. No, I don't think that's possible. Um, And it's not just me. That's Dale Guthrie, you know that is Yeah, he had that babe, he had that famous he had He had that famous dinner party where they served I don't think anybody really ate it, but but I think the whole rewilding thing is it's kind of like, that's a huge amount of resources, huge amount of scientific input and money input, And why don't we just save the animals we still got rather than trying to recreate something with these weird ass Like what was that that old book about the island of Dr Moreau or something, remember that where he would lived on this island. He created all these weird animals and they all went wild and ate everybody. So why are we messing with that? Why don't we just preserve like the African elephant and the white rhino and so farth and so on, instead of screwing around trying to reinvent something that, yeah it's gone. I'm not I don't get enthusiastic about that idea. I think that if if one if a proponent of that idea, we're here, I think they have this kind of fatalistic attitude that you'll never pull that off. You'll never pull saving like that. You're not going to save those things. And the next best idea would be to create a protectable place, try to like the grizzly bear thing out here on that road they're livingston. Yeah, yeah, that's first place old barrels around inside of inside of a log fortress. It's better that you could genetically engineer those grizzlies so they could be pettible. You know, they'd be nice. Grizzlies would be better. But grizzlies. Yeah, No, I think it's totally ridiculous. And I would think you guys, just the hunting community would be really against rewilding. I mean, it just seems like I haven't taken it seriously. I think you better because it is serious. I mean there's there's a lot of people. Yeah, I haven't taken it seriously as a UM. I only find it problematic when when it when people start talking about trying to like recreate approximations of things. Um, especially if you get into We Explored Us the Best Shapiro one time you get this idea of like what like, so, what exactly is a passenger pigeon? Right, Here's an animal that was in flocks of millions, right if you just you know the last one, like Martha died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Right. So let's say you made a thing and you're like, okay, here's three of them, and that's what they look, that's what they looked like that's them without flocks of millions changing forests, Like have you really made anything? Do you know? I mean? And is there public appetite for flocks of birds that could destroy entire agricultural fields overnight? So it's like to spend all this energy on something that where you can sort of look at and go like, yeah, it's hard to explain why, but that's roughly what you had sitting in that cage. But I don't care. What about a mammoth. But the way if they could honestly go, if they could, and it's been explaining to me that this isn't gonna happen if you could honestly go and find some things in the permit frost and here's a viable egg and here's a viable sperm, all right, and which is not how it's gonna go, and you combine those and create one. Behaviorally, they spent what they spent thirteen years with their mom learning how to do mammoth ship. So let's say you make one. What do you really have? Oh, I'd love to have a pet mammoth. But I don't think it's I just think it's a crazy idea. And I just think We've messed up so many things on this planet ecologically trying to intervene. And so why do that when, as Dan said, we've got all these crises now that we should be trying to overt. I mean, we spent a lot of time in New Zealand, you know, and it's just an ecological disaster there, introduced species and whatnot. And even in Alaska there reintroducing bison to places where they haven't been bison for thousands of years. But they they managed to really muddy the waters on that question. Well exactly, but I think um, even the exactly dubious bone fines. Yeah, and and for that matter, in muskox, which is my beloved species. You know, they were reintroduced to Alaska. Um, but that was after a much shorter time frame. They disappeared from Alaska in the late eighteen hundreds, and they were reintroduced actually not to their native range in Alaska, but to Alaska and Novak in the first place, right nineteen thirties, so actually they were in Fairbanks and then they went to now Novak, and then they made it back to the North Slope in the nineteen seventies. So it was about a hundred years they did. They disappear for the same reasons climate change or was that a legit over hunting. I think that it was basically the climate change. Muskoks populations in our bone collections suggest this that muskox and it persisted in Alaska for a really long time, but always at really low numbers, and so as the climate change, their populations were declining naturally, and they both Muskoks and Cariboo populations fluctuate naturally in response to all kinds of different environmental conditions. And it is possible that humans may have killed the last one or two muskox in in Alaska, but their population had declined on its own. And so that reintroduction I feel better about because it was such a short time frame. It's kind of like the elk reintroductions in Eastern Yeah, that that there's still viable habitat for them, and you're putting that, you're putting the actual animal back and not being like that, you're not adding a new species that you don't you're not sure how it's gonna interact with the other existing species that are already there. Some of the original rewilding people um weren't doing it through like Jeanette, they weren't proposing through genetic wizardry. They were proposing just take the closest ship you can find, so take African animals and cheetahs and whatnot and just caught them loose on the Great Plains and call it good. Which makes a lot more sense. Didn't you guys do a show on nil guy? And Texas? Texas has how many species of African and Asian antelope? Has got some? They have more, there's more in Texas, scimitar horned orcs. They have more in Texas than exist on native range, which you see, that's that's kind of different. That's not the genetic genetic engineering real wilding. And I think that part of real wilding is a you know, valid acceptable Yeah, And they've found they've had some cases where those well the American like you know, our our American bice and they've had cases where a species was saved because of private holders. Like there's no art, like you can't argue the point that private collectors, Britain cowboys who at the last minute went out and gathered up buffalo off the Great Plains, that if they hadn't done that, there wouldn't be any and and put them in a fence somewhere they'd be gone. I mean there's a couple of places where they held out, but you would have had a very very small thing. And if you look at how they actually were respread, so much of it funneled through these private individuals. And you know, it's easy to like look down at Texas and be like, oh, they're messing with this, messing with that, But there are cases where those privately held animals were not becoming like impactful toward putting animals back on the landscape. Um, we revisit the rewilding thing, but I think that, like you, like you said, I would rather take the money and expertise and stop the bleeding. Yeah, and not try to graft new stop the bleeding on the body, and not try to like graft new limbs, especially if it's passenger pigeons. Pigeons are nice. But although it would have been remarkable to see those huge flock. But sure they say the last big the last big flock was killed not far north of where I grew up. Really, do you know that Potoskey, Michigan? I think it was the last big like big Bang? Is there a monument there a big pile. I keep fluctuating on what I want to do when I retire. I was gonna I was gonna spend it devoted to a very arcane or very weird seeming pursuit of getting hunters orange laws standardized around the country. I thought you were going to become a large pumpkin enthusiast. Well, I was gonna become a large I was gonna become a large pumpkin enthusiast. I was gonna push to have it be that you had to wear an orange hat everywhere you went. That's it. Then I was going to push to have National Yelstow National Park turned into a wilderness area and have all the infrastructure removed. Now I might find and make monuments to where I think the last thing, the last big like the last thing went extinct, like on this place four the last buffalo in Kentucky was shot. Yeah, they've that would have redeeming social value, an artistic I do like them, huge freaking pumpkins man palettes. Yeah you can do both. Alright, guys, I'm glad he finally came down. Man, I've been pastoring the ship out of Crene to get you guys on the show. I want you to go back home. Talk to your buddy Mike, cons get him fired up. Tell him the pandemic will never end. It's a soft end. The end will look like this. The end will be that it's like a cold or the flu. That tell him that we're almost to the end. But it wasn't the end. He was looking for New York this fall. He did not. Oh, you shouldn't have told them that, But that really makes Crin seemed like not a strong producer. But she didn't find that. She hasn't been looking at flight Manifest's like, well, Mike, that that's awkward because my research indicates that you have left. I have receipts. I know. We're trying to wrap this up. But so Cal had to leave halfway through. He could not stay away. He asked me to ask a question. Uh, and it's or it's sort of you know, a good boat to put on it? And he said, in the Hunt for Hunting everything ancient, if it's a good bowl, let these guys do their questions, because what if they don't have a tight boat. I don't know, but I'm gonna save it for next time. Speaking of it's been a while since you've you've asked about concluders. That word hasn't been said on this podcast and probably over a year. Okay, get back to that. Here's Cow's concluding, Here's keeps Cows compluiter and the hunt for Everything ancient. Have you ever just discovered something modern that has been equally as surprising or interesting? Okay, yeah, no. So along one of these rivers that we routinely get down one day, we're paddling along and off in the alder choked hell hole was a purple older, and so it was like purple leaves with purple leaves. So you gotta imagine the sea of green green alder thick. It really unpleasant, full of mosquitoes. In the middle is one purple alder. So of course we got off and went in there and stomped around, got bitten by mosquitoes, and it was like, wow, maybe we can take one of these back and grow it and then become multi millionaires from you know, like selling purple alders. You load that in your canoe, load in this little this little route with a little sprout, a little tiny one took it back and spent hours and hours and hundreds of dollars trying to cultivate this thing and it died, so it's still out there though, in the middle of the alder choked hell hole. Yeah, because at least in Fairbanks, landscaping options are kind of limited. But alders grow like anything, so you could have purple alder bushes hedges, so you could have been like from the same mentality that brought as kutzo. Yeah, but there's already alders growing there, so yeah, you must have asked botanist about it. Is it a species or it's a um it's a weird just genetic. It's quite common and you know, plants have their um at variable chromosom numbers. Their genetics are really messy compared to mammalian genetics, and so apparently it's quite common to get these weird little anomalies like that. And um, if we ever go back there, did drop away point on it? Oh yeah, it'll cost you a lot though. All right, guys, thanks for coming down. Yeah, well, thank you. You guys didn't have any concluders anything we missed that you felt that you'd like to share with the world. Yeah, do like how to find your work and how to support your research or something. Yeah, I was gonna say we should it out of call. If there's anybody out there that would like to help fund this lake sediment research, you guys like to do, how they could help that out? Yeah, the University of Alaska has a very nice way to do things like that. You can just been my own. You can send me an email and then, um I'll get in touch with the foundation at University of Alaska. It's tax deductible your money. We've done this before, and money comes in, they put it in a special account. It can't be abused or stolen or anything else. We use that money for our researcher. We write a report to the donor and the foundation. People love it. And that's the Center for Arctic Biology, Institute of Arctic Biologstitute of Art Biology at University of Alaska, Fairbanks. But um, so someone could earmark that money, yeah, and just lock it into this is what it's going to be used for. It's not going to disappear into some overall you know, like university lawnmowering mowing fund or something. But I think I don't know. I hope the listeners, if you're out there somewhere, you realize that This isn't just some arcane field that we're pursuing. It actually has real uh implications for conservation in the future, because we really need to figure out what makes big animals go extinct, because there's a lot of big animals going extinct right now, and the more we can learn, the better. And so there's a lot of really basic research that remains to be done. And I think you kind of gather from our discussion today it reaches into archaeology and also into genetics, like Best Shapiro and my Tons and Dave Meltzer, the other archaeologists. So it's a really active field, this kind of interface between DNA evolution and conservation. I'm just glad they can't keep pointing their finger at hunters. Yeah, overkill is dead except on tropical islands, so you guys should feel relaxed about that. I got a challenge for listeners. Every time you're thumbing through UH I don't know, going through and you're find articles in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Times, nat GEO dealing with something to do with old ass bones in Siberia or Alaska, or something to do with mammoths, I challenge you to read the article then read all the citations and not encounter the names Pamela Groves and Daniel Man. It's impossible. It's impossible. You're always in there. That's good. I didn't know that al right, guys, thanks for coming down, Thank you, thank you,