Humans belonging to Clovis and Folsome cultures entered in America, teeming with a remarkable diversity of Africa like creatures, but confronted an extinction crisis that was possibly precipitated by their own arrival.

I'm Dan Florries, and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck.

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We hardly know our actual beginnings America, even when the stories are set in places we recognize.

The characters of our deep time history can be alien to the point of fantasy.

But while it may sound unlikely in the twenty twenties, there's no place quite like downtown Los Angeles for acquiring some sense of how the human story began on the continent.

Rancho Librea Tarpits, just off Wiltshire Boulevard in the heart of a sprawling Pacific coast city, is today the most successible place in the country for picturing in the minds eye the wild new world migrating humans found when they first saw America.

True enough, there's a sense of time travel shock, having your lift drop you in the middle of swirling, honking la traffic, only to stand face to face minutes later with Columbian mammos fatally mired in tar, trumpeting their despair.

Even if the mammoths are robots and their forlorn cries don't drown out the traffic, they and Librea and the Page Museum still work a kind of magic.

Twenty thousand years drops away if you let it, because Librea preserves tangible remnants of a world at the far ends of the earth for ancestors of ours whose migrations had begun in Africa.

The Page Museum is a working laboratory of paleontology, where visitors can watch scientists labor over the site's latest discoveries.

Many of those are the remains of scavenger predators once lured by the cries of snagged mammoths, or the scin of decomposing horses, camels, or ground sloths trapped by surface tar near what was once a water source and a dry landscape.

The skulls and tusks of the elephants extracted from Librea are impressive, but anyone who tours the museum has to admit the most stunning display is the wall, backlit and yellow of hundreds of dire wolf skulls.

The strapping cane.

It's indigenous to America, but memorably revived as fictional wester ROAs fauna and Game of Thrones left the most remains here of any species, eighteen hundred individuals.

The fossils of hundreds of coyotes, a brawnier version than our modern animal, make up the third most common species here, But in second place are those ultimate ambush predators of the Pleistocene, the western subspecies of sabertooths, heavily built cats with a fearsome snake like jaw, gape and enormous fangs.

The replica skull of a sabertooth from Librea sits a few feet away as I write this.

Its rapier sharp canines capable of tearing open a sloth or mammoth calf, gleaming in rich afternoon light, Each fang measures a full eight inches from gumline to tip.

The vast assemblages of hyperconnivore bones at Las joined the skeletal remains of mega herbivores, mammoths and macedons, giant bison, pronghorns, lamas, California turkeys, and many more.

The predator list is lengthier than just wolves, coyotes, and sabretooths as well.

The cats whose remains have come out of the tar include American cheetahs, step lions, and giant jaguars.

Immense, hyperactive short faced bears twice the weight of a grizzly died in the asphalt.

So did the enormous Miriam's terratorn applies to seeing bird of prey with a ten and a half foot wingspan.

The remains span indigenous creatures spawned by continental evolution and migrants from Asia, some ancient to America, some recent arrivals.

The mammals and birds may seem alien are vaguely African, but in fact this bestiary was purely classically American, the America of the Pleistocene.

The Rancho Librea victims that left their bones and skulls in Casinar were once representatives of one of the grand ecologies of planet Earth.

This was a different America than most of us conjured.

When we imagine the continent Europeans found five hundred years ago.

But this libreal world wasn't like the pre chick Salube age of the dinosaurs absent of humans either.

Late in the Pleistocene, our human forebears joined American ecologies as the newest predator.

Here.

These first Americans lived their lives among Librea creatures and created the first coast to coast human societies in American history.

Their presence began to leave the continent, and this rich aggregate of impressive animals forever changed.

The first time we became aware that humans were actually in America during the Pleistocene was barely one hundred years ago, and the place that happened was along the New Mexico Colorado border.

In the days following a flood in the dry Cimarron River, an African American cowboy named George mcjunkin was riding through grassy parkland a few hundred yards below the rim rock of a miles long mesa that extended eastward from the rocky mountains, checking for ranch fence lines damaged by the flood.

Suddenly mcjenkin's horse braced its hoofs, furrowing into foot deep mud at the edge of a ragged scar.

Floodwaters had cut into the slope below the Mesa.

Mcjenkin leaned out of his saddle to peer into a fresh chasm sliced into the brown shale.

What he saw changed the story of America forever.

On a similar rainy August day in twenty eighteen, some thirty five of us are stepping through the lush grass of that same slope as it angles up towards the rim rock of Johnson Mesa.

We're following David Eck, a New Mexico State Lands archaeologist with a long ponytail halfway down his back, who is leading us towards the very spot where George mcjenkin's horse had pulled up one hundred and ten years before.

The topography is now a grassy, shallow drain called wild Horse Arroyo, and as we crowd around its edges, it seems somehow too commonplace to be the scene of one of the continent's most significant historical finds.

Nonetheless, this in the flesh is the legendary fulsome archaeological site.

What mcjunkin had done about where we now stood talking was to spot in the flood gashed arroyo bones of an immense size.

They turned out to be from a herd of bison antiquis, an extinct form of giant bison, but the bones themselves weren't the pas de raisi sants.

At the time, the sciences of ethnology and archaeology in the United States were firmed that American Indians had arrived in North America only a couple thousand years prior to the coming of Europeans.

In nineteen twenty six, the Black Cowboys plea to have a scientist look at his bone pit reached Jesse Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver.

Something of an amateur himself, Figgins was mostly interested in fossil bison that might make exhibits in his museum.

His team began an excavation of the site in May of nineteen twenty six and quickly began finding the skeletal remains of bison of a monstrous size.

That was exciting enough, but in their second season of work, on August twenty ninth, nineteen twenty seven, Figgins's crew traveled up Big History pay dirt.

As David Eck was gesturing to the dimensions of this near century old dig in the pocket of my light Patagonia jacket, my fingers closed over an object that I could fit into my palm.

In shape, it was oblate, think a flattened football, but with an end bitten off.

Beneath my fingers, I could feel an irregular surface, made so by labor intensive flaking to create a pointed blade that dwindled to a remarkably thin base.

The delicacy of that base was a result of matching flutes skillfully popped from the flint on both sides, and that first summer of digging, Figginson's paleontologists had on earthed two of these points in the loose dirt of the site.

Eventually, the Denver team would find eight of these stunning fluted points scattered amongst the bones.

But it wasn't just the bones and not the points that made folsome what American Museum of Natural History scientists Henry Fairfield Osborne labeled the greatest event in American discoveries.

When the second season crew at Folsom flicked the dirt from the ribs of an extinct bison, they were greeted by the sight of one of these fluted points embedded to two thirds its length in the bone.

The bar for proof that humans were part of the American places scene had always been an extinct animal, preserving evidence that as a living creature, it had been killed by human technology.

Now outside the tiny berg of Folsom, New Mexico, that bar was hurdled.

America two had an antiquity.

How much of an antiquity was still in question because radiocarbon dating was yet three decades in the future.

Figgins claimed the site was four hundred thousand years old.

Eventually, archaeology and paleontology would agree that on an October day, a band of three dozen humans had driven into a Box canyon, killed and butchered thirty two giant bison of the species Bison antiquis in the spot where I was now standing, and they had done this twelve thousand, four hundred and fifty years ago.

No one knows now what these ancient bison hunters call themselves or their weapons.

Their beautiful fluted points were likely attached to darts thrown by at adults or spear throwers.

But not knowing much about these early Americans didn't prevent the scientists from naming both the points and the people Fulsome after the nearby town.

Yet Fulsome wasn't the book of genesis for America's human history.

Six years after the Fulsome discovery, there was another dramatic revelation.

How on the featureless sweeps of the southern Great Plains, an ordinary gravel excavation near a tiny farming town named Clovis exposed the bones of long extinct American elephants, a remarkable twenty eight of them.

Science in the reading public knew that America had harbored various kinds of giant elephants in the deep past, But unlike nineteenth century mastodon finds in the East, this time the skeletons were intermixed with large five to six inch long projectile points and tools of an unknown and apparently even more ancient population than the Fulsome people.

We now know that even these elephant hunters were not the first.

What has very recently produced certain evidence for even more ancient arrivals in America, likely in boats following shoreline out of Asia.

Are human footprints to be precise sixty one footprints left primarily by children or adolescents, in the soft mud of a lake shore some twenty three thousand years before the area became New Mexico's White Sands National Park.

That blockbuster find by a park employee in twenty nineteen ultimately drew a team of researchers from the US Geological Survey to date the seeds of a species of grass crushed by the footprints.

Their dating indicates a time frame at the height of the glacial maximum, when it would have been impossible to come overland to America.

The human footprints aren't the only tracks researchers are finding.

There are also mammoth tracks and prints of dire wolves and giant ground sloths.

In one fascinating interaction, the tracks appear to show that a young woman carrying a child on her hip, who she occasionally put down, walked a stretch of lake shore and returned by the same path, which in the interval both a mammoth and a ground sloth crossed.

The mammoth paid no obvious attention, but the sloth reacted, rearing on its hind legs and what may have been alarm.

So far as we now know, only a scant few intrepid souls came to America this early.

They remind me of Viking visitors to America.

A thousand years ago, their numbers must have been small, with much of America still empty of humans.

So ten thousand years later, the elephant hunters we now call Clovis made up the first human culture to spread across all the Americas, an overlan arrival that became a rapidly advancing wave thirteen thousand years ago.

The rapidity of their spreads suggesting that they uncomp hundred few, if any, other human cultures along the way.

Clovis people occupied every American state from Alaska to Florida for more than three centuries until a mature United States spread coast to coast.

In fact, Clovis stood as the sole human culture that once draped across our entire country.

So for three centuries, a very long time ago, America was Clovisia the Beautiful.

We are still struggling to understand them.

They left no oral or written histories of their monarchs or any defining events.

We have no sense of their gods or the philosophies they believed in, or what language or family of languages they spoke.

We know a great deal about their tools, and we're developing a sense of them from their bones and more recently, from their genetics, but starting thirteen thousand and fifty years ago and lasting until twelve thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago, the Clovisians placed their stamp on the country and its animals and changed the continent.

Their name comes from the place where we first became aware of their existence, an ancient arroyo on the outskirts of the small town of Clovis, New Mexico, on the windswept southern high Plains.

Getting in close to wild creatures holds a fascination that resonates because it taps ancient imperatives still within us.

The relationship between prey and their predators involves learning curves, and each side is very good at the algorithm, but prey do have to learn.

Numerous examples from around the world testify that upon initially encountering humans, many wild creatures did not associate us with a threat.

There is a term of art for this biological first contact.

Wild animals had to learn to be afraid of us.

Many died standing and looking, never absorbing the lesson.

Finding naive animals that were easy for human hunters was a powerful motive for our species migrations around the world.

But just who were these Clovis people who left so many sites across America, more than twenty excavated ones so far, including some seventy butchered elephants.

One recent theory that briefly achieved traction in places like National Geographic came from the Smithsonian's Dennis Stanford, who believed that the direct ancestors of the Clovist people reached America eighteen thousand years ago from Europe.

To say that the scientific community scoffed at Stanford's across Atlantic ice claims barely does justice to the profound skepticism that followed it.

While Paleolithic hunters in Europe and America did pursue similar megafauna and flint points crafted by Western Europe's soul Utrean culture superficially resembled Clovis points, other researchers dismissed Stanford's claims that the two groups were the same people.

Linguistic and genetic conclusions have since refuted Stanford's argument.

Once scientists were able to analyze genomic evidence from archaeological sites, they quickly confirmed a trail of genetic kinship stretching from Siberia rather than Europe into the Americas.

We now suspect that the people who ultimately swept into America first spent several thousand years on the bearing Land Bridge itself, the so called Baringian standstill, apparently awaiting more favorable conditions to move southward.

That long pause in Beringia may have produced humanity's first domestic cication of another animal engaged in their own return to America twenty five thousand years ago, gray wolves were abundant in Beringia.

Since human hunters only ate the fattest parts of the animals they killed, they had left over lean portions they were willing to share.

Some of the wolves had a mutation that made them hyper social, and puppies with that gene may have been able to bond with humans.

There probably also were wolf puppies, known today as gifted word learning animals capable of picking up human language.

By the time the two species got to America, humans and their tamed wolves had formed a partnership for the rest of history, or so goes one theory about dog domestication.

Clovis genetics are best represented by a male toddler from a twelve thousand, eight hundred year old burial in Montana.

He's known as the Anzac Child, and he's from a site not far from today's Bozeman.

The Clovis Child was buried with a large cache of artifacts that included eight Clovis points painted in red ochre after he played an epic role in reconstructing a history of two continents.

In twenty fourteen, the Onzac Boy was reburied by local tribes in Montana's Shields River, near where he had lain for nearly thirteen thousand years.

While we have no surviving mammoth or mastodon populations to study, we do know a good deal about Asian elephant natural history, and if this closest living relative of mammos offers clues, America's ancient elephants would have been highly intelligent creatures, especially acute in what biologists called situational intelligence.

Their trunks were elephant analogus, who are opposable thumbs with as many as one hundred and fifty thousand muscle subunits, as ecological keystone creatures whose activities shaped landscapes.

Mammos and masdons foraged in ways that likely transformed American vegetation the way modern elephants do in Africa.

They traveled their huge ranges with an unusually powerful geographic memory, as a recent study of a wooly mammos lifetime movements through Alaska seventeen thousand years ago, reconstructed by analyzing strontium isotope ratios that reference geography in its tusks, now indicate all elephants are what biologists refer to as case species, meaning they do not come into sexual maturity until they're fifteen years old or older, a state brought on by periodic must The pacoderm version of sexual heat from insemination to giving birth probably took two years, a generational turnover slow enough to make population recovery difficult in the face of a new threat, and by the time humans were entering America, mammoths, mastodons, and other archaic elephant species were already suffering from a background rate of extinctions that had been going on for seventy five thousand years.

But as the Rancho, Librea, Folsome and Clovis sites show, elephants and big cats and many other remarkable creatures still occupied the ground where we now commute and go to sleep in our suburbs.

Only they all disappeared quite suddenly and mysteriously long long ago.

That disappearance is one of the most profound ecological and aesthetic events of continental history.

As Darwin's ally.

In The Breakthrough to Understanding Natural Selection and Evolution, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote, in fact, we present day Americans live in a oological impoverished world from which all the hugest and fiercest and strangest forms have recently disappeared.

Wallace was using recently in a big history sense.

All those hugest, fiercest, and strangest animals vanished from America between about thirteen thousand and nine thousand years ago.

In fact, we lost thirty genera and forty species.

All of them are very largest creatures right down to our present moment.

These ancient losses make up the most dramatic extinction event since humans have been in North America.

But science has never grouped the so called Pleistocene extinctions with the five great planetary extinctions of Earth history.

It's different from all of those, which were global extinguished life on both land and in the oceans, and showed no size bias in the creatures they marked for disappearance.

The Pleistocene losses didn't happen in oceans in Africa or in Southern Asia.

They devastated life on Earth only in Eurasia, North America, South America and Australia.

Something very odd seemed to be unfolding in specific parts of the planet during the late Pleistocene, but there is a common thread.

Those were all places where human predators out of Africa seeking out large animals to hunt, were arriving for the first time.

The Pleistocene extinctions, in other words, looked very much like the first act of the anthroposcene, the beginnings of what we now called the sixth Extinction.

This has been a prelude to introducing you to a scientist who was able to imagine how this might have happened.

Paul Martin, who passed away in twenty ten, was one of the country's late twentieth century intellectual giants.

He was also lucky enough to have a brand new tool to play with, radiocarbon dating, invented in nineteen forty six by Willard Libby, who won the Nobel Prize for it.

That new tool, almost overnight allowed an understanding of something very crucial about the Pleistocene extinctions.

When did the various animals disappear?

Exactly, and how did the arrival of humans in America line up with those dates.

I got to meet Martin at a point in his career when he seemed to bear a resemblance to a target at a shooting range.

At a time when politics and many university departments embraced the idea of ancient peoples as ecological examples for the modern world, there were those who saw Martin's argument that early humans were responsible for extinctions as politically incorrect.

The popular Native American writer Vine Deloria Junior was vitriolic in his condemnation of Martin, which I could tell mortified and baffled the paleobiologists.

Between eighteen thousand and twelve thousand years ago, the Solutrean culture had similarly wiped out Europe's remaining Plecesne creatures.

Clovis and Folsom were not Indian stories, Martin insisted, they were big history human stories.

Martin and I arranged to get together on his visit to the University of Montana, where I taught.

After two days of wide ranging conversations, I began to think about Martin in the manner of a Stephen Hawking.

When his body had slowed from Polio.

His vast energy had lit a turbocharger that accelerated his mind.

The crux of the Pleistocene story Martin told me was that North America was a continental island remote from the evolution of humans, and when we finally arrived in numbers in the form of the Clovisians, the well known slaughter humans had made on island biologies all over the world came to America.

We were a brilliant new predator with sophisticated weapons, dogs and fire and baggage like rats.

The predation we engaged in changed local ecologies so substantially that animals evolved in our absence couldn't survive once we arrived.

I realized Martin was giving me a command performance of his Planet of Doom theory, a modern version now buttressed with science, history and details.

As Martin put it in his two thousand and six Twilight of the Mammos, I argue that virtually all extinctions of wild animals in the last fifty thousand years are anthropose.

By the time the destruction was over, only a handful of America's biggest animals remained, and those were either European or Asian like caribou or bison that had prior experience with humans, or they were native ones like pronghorns that carried so little fat they offered little inducement for hunters.

Otherwise, the Clovisians erased millions of years of evolution.

In two thousand and one, independently of Martin, an Australian paleobiologist at the Smithsonian, John Alroy developed a computer model to test this American extinction story.

Alroy's computer's modeled an absolutely classic ecological release by fifteen hundred years after the human arrival, accepting a few scattered remnants hunters had overlooked, but were now too separated to exchange their genes and dying out from lack of genetic diversity.

Seventy five percent of America's Pleistocene bestiari had been gutted.

Alroy's computer model predicted the extinction or survival of thirty two of forty one Clovis prey species.

He concluded, long before the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe.

Southeast of present day Tucson along the Santa Cruz River, there are three famous Clovis sites, you suspect and long ago Clovis Lord.

This may have been a legendary event, or given that many similar stories follow it in the historical record of America, maybe what transpired here wasn't legendary at all, just the way things were done.

What seems to have happened is that at the most westerly location now call the Leaner site, a Clovis band surrounded a family group of fifteen mammoths.

The herd apparently huddled together for defense against the assault, but thirteen of them, all adolescents and calves, died in the spot.

Archaeologists found exactly thirteen Clovis points in their remains, but it must not have been an easy thing.

In different locations a few miles away, the Escapool and Naco sites, archaeologists found two adult mammoths who had apparently fled the slaughter.

The large male had died with two Clovis points in his body, but the female must have put up a tremendous fight to protect her young before mortally wounded.

She had fled, and her remains there were no fewer than eight embedded Clovis points.

The hunters who killed those mammoths appeared to have been absolute professionals.

Our best strategy for understanding America's pleistocenic distinctions may be on an animal by animal basis.

Clovis hunters almost certainly wiped out the elephants and folsome people the giant bison, but animals like dire wolves, giant beavers, and big cats may have simply been out competed by gray wolves and modern beavers and cougars.

Smaller size and earlier sexual maturity fitted the replacements better for an America now inhabited by human predators.

The first examples on the continent for what biologists called anthropogenic evolution.

Horses and camels do remain enigmas.

Sites of Clovis age in southern Alberta and Colorado show horse and camel kills, but nothing like the vast number of horses from Solutrean sites in Europe.

And why did various camelids survive in South America, providing later native people domestic possibilities, but not farther north.

As for the Clovisians themselves, they remained maddenly elusive.

They are us, of course, but it's difficult even to know your recent relatives at all.

You have to go on are their tools and diet preferences.

We know that with the fluted point, a purely American invention not found in Siberia, their thinkers had solved the ancient technology hurdle of affixing points solidly to wooden spears or darts.

We also know that they were consumer connoisseurs of the best the world had to offer.

Clovis artisans fashion their toolkit from the hardest, sharpest, most vividly colored flints and church in North America whose outprops existed as a geographic atlas in their heads.

They journeyed hundreds of miles to those sources, as if on quests special magic.

Some of their tool caches featured multiple gorgeous, unused points of eight to nine inches in leaked with sacred red ochre still adhering to them.

One Clovis mystery has always been why no art?

Why nothing?

Like the grand paintings of animals on the cave walls of Chauvet, Lasco and Alzamira in Europe, there are pebbles in size with crosshatching.

There's an elephant carved into a piece of ivory.

Otherwise we had no hints what they thought of the animals they hunted, of America, of their lives in general.

That may be changing with a new twenty nineteen to twenty twenty investigation of the rock art of a region in the Colombian Amazon known as Sarania La Lindosa.

But we'll have to wait to see if the images there really are Clovis or fulsome ones.

One recent theory is that the Clovisians may have been a Northern Hemisphere wild type, a group of hyper aggressive Siberian vikings.

According to modern science, a high fat diet is a strong trigger for enhanced testosterone.

But who they were really is us.

My twenty three ande meters profile shows three percent of my genes are Native Americans, a common figure for those of us whose European ancestors arrived in America three hundred or more years ago.

Clovis heredity is within us.

The Clovis story resonates because we imagine them as ancient versions of ourselves, explorers of hidden continents, the last of the masterful hunters of enormous animals, the culmination of forty thousand generations of hunters.

They must have had a sense of that timeless tradition But to me, the biggest question is this, what did they think?

What did they do when so many of the animals they lived among began to disappear, to dwindle to a last few scattered survivors until there were none.

What they faced is mirrored by our own twenty first century circumstances.

Like us then lived as their ancestors did, and no doubt had every expectation that the world would continue as it always had, and so long as there was a Siberia or a Baringia or an America out there, it did.

But Earth proved finite, and so did its animals, much as we are doing today.

The Clovisians ran into a wall of limits.

When I think about certain areas of inquiry, I think that in a lot of spaces there's room for huge discoveries, meaning we can find life on another planet.

Right, Yeah, there could be huge medical you know, you can picture where we have some medical breakthrough and like increased life expectancy by twenty five percent or fifty percent, Like I wouldn't be shocked.

But do you feel that our our understanding of pre human and early human North America is like down to the details now, like it's kind of all there, it's just details.

Well, I tend to think that there are some big discoveries yet to be made.

Yeah.

Now, I will say that the advent of genomic research, you know, on human remains all over the world is telling us a lot of stuff that we've never known before.

And that's kind of the modern version of you know, radiocarbon dating in the nineteen fifties and stuff.

We've now got a way to analyze human remains that is giving us a sense of how people spread around the world and what connections they had with one another.

So my guess is, and you know, it's probably a pretty easy thing to guess, is that there's got to be something big out there, and it's likely to involve something technological like those two where you have a sudden breakthrough and it's possible to do something you've not been able to do before.

I mean, you find somewhere in South America, you find a genetic marker from twelve thousand years ago, and it doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense, and you have to and people have to explain it, you know, and it may take a while.

It takes science often a lot of time to explain things, and there are a lot of kind of false leads and ideas that are put out there that don't last.

I mean that's just the way you know, human knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, works.

But yeah, I think there's going to be you know, we're going to know in the case of the pleciscene extinctions, I think in another thirty or forty years, there's going to be something, some kind of technological breakthrough that enables us to suddenly know a lot more about this than we've known.

I mean, one to me is the is, you know, the our sudden realization that a lack of genetic diversity can be pretty murderous on a on a species, because if you start separating a population out so it's not possible for them to breed anymore and exchange genes, they become they become weak.

I mean, there are instances where you know, it's impossible for them to reproduce, and so I think all of that that's another variation obviously of the genetic revolution.

But I think all those things point to some new breakthrough in the future that's you know, it's going to be fun to see.

I mean, I of things like that, and I'm glad to hear this, because I was starting to worry that it was going to get boring.

These questions were going to get boring as things just got more like here's the story.

Yeah, No, I don't think they're going to get boring.

I think it's going to be it's going to be fun, and we're going to still be interested.

Uh, you know, just like all of us are still interested in this.

I mean, none of us is really trained in the fields of paleold biology or anything like that, but we find it fascinating to want to understand how this happened, and uh, we want to know more about ourselves, and that's what a lot of this is about.

Do you remember the writer, Uh, he's very fun.

Any guy, the writer Jack hit Oh yeah, yeah.

He once observed he was taught about that he has a hard time taking palaeontology seriously because it was a discipline that he found the most knowledge about it was held by thirteen year olds.

He's talking about dinosaurs.

Yeah, it's true.

Yeah, that's true.

And this is a feel like this stuff like like ice age.

America is definitely a hobbyist RealD you know, I mean, there's a lot of room for hobbyists right, like, like, I'm a hobbyist.

There's a lot of room for hobbyists.

Yeah, well, that's right.

You can stay up breast, you know, you can stay abreast of the subject.

I think what's what's there's sort of a tension in this subject for me between like when you describe people seeking out a new frontier or moving across the landscape and being you know, drawn in by certain topographical features.

It's something that reson with me, and I find it sort of part of the human condition.

On the other hand, there's certain things about these people that are totally unknowable, Like you know, even with all of the technological advances we have ahead of us, we don't have their voices, and we don't even know what their voices sounded like, you know.

And so whenever I'm playing with this subject in my mind, I always get stuck on that sort of contradiction between what's very familiar and what is and will probably always remain totally alien.

Well, that part probably will remain completely alien.

I mean we call you know, we have named these paleol cultures in North America, things like Folsome and plain View and Clovis, and those are all names of towns near which paleontological and archael logical sites were found.

I mean, we have no idea what they called themselves.

They for sure probably didn't call themselves Clovisians, you know, or Fulsomites or whatever the fulsome term for the people would be.

I mean they So we don't know that, and we're very likely not ever to know that.

What I am still a little disappointed by, and I'm hoping that this side in South America pans out as a as an actual rock imagery site for clovis In fulsome is the lack of art, especially in comparison to Western Europe, where there's there are all these marvelous cave paintings that I mean tell you so much about.

I mean, they're One of the pieces I read when I was researching Well in the World was about how the artists at chove A Cave got the rhythm of the foot footprints, the feet hitting the ground of quadrupeds exactly right.

And this particular article said it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that modern painters were able to get the rhythm of how horse hoofs hit the ground when they were running at the same level of expertise that these guys did fifteen sixteen thousand years ago, and so that's very exciting and tells us a little bit about those people.

And it's just disappointing that, you know, we have nothing like that in North America.

I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll talk about they'll say when cave people were here, and I'll say, be careful, because it seems like what you're imagining, like it seems like the Ice age people that were here didn't have a real affinity for caves.

Well they probably had, ye.

They weren't like, they weren't like they're not quite contemporaries.

But what was happening here twelve thirteen thousand years ago was a very similar lifestyle in Western Europe thirty thousand years ago.

And there are parallels, but there also seems to be differences.

Like you're saying, like, where's all the cave art?

Yeah, where's the art?

And I mean, and it's interesting to me since you brought that up that the first archaeologists in North America who were looking for evidence of human antiquity here looked in caves.

They went to places like Carlsbad and stuff and looked in caves because this was the I mean, they were thinking by analogy, this was the example they had in Western Europe, this is where these people are, and so they were looking in places like Carlsbad caverns for evidence that early humans in North America would have done the same kind of thing.

And of course, accidentally, on the way back, a guy by the name of Edgar Hewett, on the way back from one of those expeditions happened to go past the Clovis site and had some cowboys say, well, you know, we've been finding these kind of strange looking a lot urge two like objects here on the ground.

No caves anywhere around, but they're just kind of lying out here on.

The plains on what was a wetland.

Yeah, what was a wetland?

And you know, no caves around anywhere.

So it's kind of one of those ways.

I think that the people of antiquity, the paleo hunters in particular in North America, are pretty damn distinctive from the people in Western Europe, And in this particular case, I wish the distinction weren't so great, because I would love to be able to find some art that they did but so far not much.

Along the lines of like preconceived notions that people have when they sort of look at this era of prehistory as just sort of one block and then all of a sudden, you know, the Stone Age goes to the the Bronze Age, something like that.

I think one of the things that you've always opened my eyes to is paying attention to these advancements in technology, which I think most people wouldn't think of them as technology.

But you know, we were just looking at stone points at the Archaeological Repository and Laramie, and you look at the level of artistry and mastery in these in these objects, and it very much is like a technology.

It's not like these people were trapped in some era, right, there's this there's this long history that's played out in just the material objects that they leave behind.

Yeah, I mean, and you know, things that to us do not look particularly significant, like the flute on the sides of Clovis and fulsome points.

I mean that you can almost miss that when you look at those points, but that very clearly was a major technological innovation because it finally allowed the you're fastening of a point to a dart an add addle dart or a spear, and so it was.

It was one of those human genius breakthroughs where someone realized, if I just you know, make a flute, make an indentation running down each side of this point, I can now secure my adlett dart to it and it won't pop off upon hitting an animal.

It will stay secure and penetrate through the skin.

And that's kind of you know, as I said, it's not something that you look at and go wow, this is like the invention of the model T.

Nonetheless, Yeah, for these people, it effectively was a huge leap forward.

Yeah.

I want to return for a minute to a comment you made about as the picture becomes clear or the picture changes about this error we're discussing that you look too technological enhancements, technological improvements which might upend some of our notions.

Uh.

After you said that, it made me think about a conversation I had with an anthropologist who focused on the like the prices scene Holocene transition at Colorado State, and I was kind of saying to him in a discussion, I was kind of saying to him like, well, as we find more sites, it'll get clearer.

And he's really pessimistic about about that about sites.

I'm like, well, you know, some guy building the road and he's like, how many roads have we built?

I mean, like, look at all the roads we built, Look at all the farm fields we cleared, and we have a handful.

Like I don't think increasing road building, you know, at the at the decrease rate that we're building roads and clearing fields that I don't think it's going to be that it's new sites.

You know, he really wasn't optimistic about finding crazy sites.

I think that what I think that we've kind of found what is there to find, you know, barring some unforeseen thing.

But I think that I don't think you can go and say the same thing about South America, right, especially all that like like areas that are heavily forested and jungle areas, like places that haven't been through like our dust bowl when we had a good chance to see the western landscape stripped clean of top soil and vegetation, Like, there could be some amazing stuff laying there.

Yeah, it rots quicker, but it could be there.

Yeah, it could be.

And I mean, you know, and so Lidar, I suppose at this stage of the game, I mean that's certainly a technological breakthrough.

This enable to discovery of all sorts of new particularly buildings mayan structures that are suddenly now visible from above in a way that they never are on the ground but lightar's, as far as I am aware of it, it probably is not fine grained enough to do something like the sort of archaeological sites that that you're talking about, but I kind of wouldn't think so now I tend to agree with the anthropologists you were talking to.

I think we've got the sites.

I think what we probably can improve the interpretation of those sites with is going to be something like these big leaps forward we had with radiocarbon dating, which was you know, that was a huge game changer seventy five years ago, and now the genomic revolution, the genetic revolution, which is another enormous game changer for all kinds of things, including these sort of extinctions from the Pleistocene Holocene boundary.

So I think it's going to be something like that.

I don't know exactly what it is, but it's probably going to be something that subtenly enables us to interpret what we have in a way we've not been able to.

Yeah, I think what we're talking about here a lot is how we can change your understanding of this subject looking forward.

But I also wonder if you can look backward at your own career, just in your lifetime, how much has changed in terms of knowledge about this subject, and also how conversations have evolved over time.

Well, I would say, you know, I mean, I may look as if I come from the early twentieth century, but I'm actually more a mid twentieth century artifact.

And so I was born at about the time that radiocarbon dating won the Nobel Prize for a guy, and I have not I will say that during the sixties and especially the seventies, the late seventies, when I was in graduate school, there was a strong disinclination to believe that humans had played much of a role at all.

And what it reminded is, i've looked back on it now, it reminds me of the sort of reluctance that a lot of people feel about climate change.

It's that humans couldn't have done that.

We couldn't have done that.

I mean, a bunch of animals became extinct.

That had to have been climate That had to have been a comet strike that had to have been something other than humans, because I mean, there's just no way that's not possible.

People armed only with ad adomles and spears and so forth could not do those sorts of things, And that of course played into and went along with this sensibility back in those same years where we were kind of in a way first discovering native ecology and indigenous knowledge about the world, and we were of course looking for some examples, looking desperately for some examples of human beings to say, these people did it right, here's the way you do it.

We're not on the right track, we're doing it wrong, but they did it correctly.

And of course, arguing that you know, early arrivals in North America like Clovis and fulsome people may have wiped out species that ran against that sentiment that, well, we're trying to find in the past some humans who really lived well on the environment, and so that change I think sometime I don't know, probably in the early two thousands, when after one kind of alternative explanation after another was advanced and none of them really seemed to work.

They never did manage to convince many people.

I mean, you know, Ross McFee of the American Museum and Natural History advanced.

Well, maybe some new disease swept through North America and killed everything.

Well, of course there was no candidate disease.

And then the other problem was, most diseases don't kill everything.

I mean, they usually leave some piece of a population that often rebuilds with immunity.

I mean, all of us are examples of Old World diseases that killed many of those that our ancestors survived and allowed us to be born today.

So alternative explanations have not so far really worked.

And what I've kind of been noticing in the last ten or fifteen years has been a kind of a reluctant I would say, reluctant, but still a sort of a growing consensus that the human arrival in North America still seems to be the best explanation we have for what happened to all those animals.

And what I ended up arguing in Wild New World is that I think, you know, we talk a lot about the sixth extinction today.

I think the six extinction started thirty five thousand years ago.

I mean when human started spreading around the world.

Yeah, I mean, it's just in contrast to an asteroid strike which wipes out seventy five percent of Earth's life in a matter of a few weeks.

This has just been a thirty five thousand sort of slow motion extinction that's been going on for a very very long time, and so it's good for us to be alarmed about a six extinction.

I just sometimes try to point out to people I think this has actually been happening for a long time.

I recently had a discussion with an attorney who's Native American and he works in repatriation, and his particular focus is on getting the remains of his ancestors back from museums.

Yeah, I said to him, I said, would you ever strike a deal where they get a gram of each of those bones and then you get the bones back?

And he said, we would never even consider something like that.

I don't expect you to answer this, but like, what would be some things that you consider when you think of the tension around a desire to study apply modern analytics to human remains, and where that rubs against cultural sensitivities about playing with remains of someone that you rightfully or wrongfully consider to be your ancestor, even if you're separated by nine thousand and ten thousand years from them.

Yeah, that's really like what kind.

Of things bounce around in your head.

I'm not asking you to say what we ought to do, but like, how do you even approach that?

Right?

Well, what, here's what I kind of suspect.

I think we're living through a moment, and I think the moment has been caused by the previous lack of respect that so many bone merchants in the eighteenth and nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought to the game of archaeology, where they paid not the slightest attention to the desires wants of the local people, who very well could be connected to the ruins or the excavations that they're doing on human remains.

And so what I think is that we're experiencing a moment that's kind of a backlash against that.

And I tend to be one of these kind of people who thinks that, you know, we're really kind of all the same, actually, and what we're interested in is the human story, the big story of all of us, which is why I'm intrigued by humans coming out of Africa, spreading through Asia, coming to North America, going to South America, and I know that people get hung up on the idea of Okay, this particular culture has this view of how the world should be conducted and how scientific research could be conducted.

But I am very much interested in the big story of humanity, and I think ultimately most people are interested in that.

And so I think when we get past this moment where we're sort of boomeranging from centuries where we had no respect for the remains of these people, that in another who knows how long, but in another century.

In fact, I know need of people who have already reached this position where they too are intrigued and interested and they want to know.

And so I think that at some point in the future, I don't know how far out it is, that there will be some relaxing of that kind of reluctance to allow science to try to answer some of these great questions.

I just think it's a you know, the pendulum has swung at the moment at a to a degree that Native people are they don't want this to happen.

Yeah, but I think it'll swing back.

Yeah.

I think on Steve's on Steve's question, there there's implicit in that, is this question about the scope of time that we're talking about when we talk about people arriving in North America and from the place to scene extinctions up until just say fifteen hundred, and I wonder if you can just sort of put that.

I always have a hard time wrapping my mind around big time, and so I wonder if you can kind of contextualize that at what we're talking about versus the broader story of humans spreading around the world.

Well, when I mean, you guys all know this as well as I do.

But you know, when you're doing history, history we always think of history, especially professionally and in the academy, we think of that as being something you do from written sources.

And of course written sources only exist for the human story back to about thirty five hundred and four thousand years ago, and beyond that we have no written stories, and so that sort of implies that.

Okay, so if you're interested in history, that's the end of it.

Four thousand years back, you don't have any history anymore.

There's no way.

I'm not satisfied with that, obviously, because that's a very small slice of the human story, and the human story goes way way farther back in time, and so I mean my whole take on something like writing that chapter about what I call Native America.

After the Pleistocene extinctions and the Holycene period began in North America, I tried to write a chapter about the next ten thousand years, which takes you down to five hundred years ago, when Europeans and Old Worlders began arriving in North America.

I was trying to sort of satisfy my own curiosity about that, because I couldn't really find very many people who had ventured a guess as to how that story had unfolded.

And in a book like that, where I was interested primarily in the relationship between animals and people, I was trying to figure out how did it happen that when Europeans get here five hundred years ago, they land on a continent that they're so impressed with.

Now, maybe it's just in comparison to what they had done to Europe, but they're really impressed with the biological diversity of North America.

It's kind of an Eden for the animals.

And so the question was, how did we get from ten thousand years ago down to five hundred years ago?

Where Native people managed to preserve all that, and that presented obviously a lot of a lot of questions to try to answer.

And I'm sure there'll be people who improve on that story that I told, But that was kind of my own attempt to do something about the Native American story that I didn't see anybody else really making a stab at trying to interpret, probably because it's too dawning.

But I think you did a phenomenal job because you distilled it down into an observation that here's nine five hundred years of history and there's maybe like one.

Yeah, one extinction, one extinction in that time we've done.

Yeah, the last five hundred years has been a real ripper.

Yes, and a real ripper, there's no question about it.

I mean, one piece I read in the National Academy of Sciences from about twenty nineteen argued that we have sacrificed in the last five hundred years about a half a million years of evolved genetics on planet Earth as a consequence of all the destruction that we've made to creatures around the world.

And most of the animals that have disappeared have been really charismatic and very common, like passenger pigeons.

Passenger pigeons survived in North America for fifteen million years, and they couldn't last three hundred years after we got here.

So there's certainly been that.

And then there's that ten thousand year period we were just talking about where I could find evidence for only one extinction, and that was a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast.

But then of course there's the period before that, the Pleistocene, where if anything, truction was even on more massive a scale.

And in that instance, not only do we sacrifice an enormous amount of biological diversity and genetics evolved genetics, but it was the genetics of most of the really large and impressive animals of the globe.

And so that's a story in other words, that doesn't have it doesn't travel just in one direction.

It's as if humans realizing, wow, we may have really screwed things up, or things got screwed up for some reason, because I'm not sure they quite understood what had happened, but it seems to have produced a kind of a reaction where for nearly ten thousand years they are very careful about things.

And you know, as I said, that's a story that I really had to put together because I couldn't find anyone that was willing to make to venture a guess about how that it all played out, and yet it's obviously a really big part of American history.

Well, Dan, I want to thank you for sitting and having this post chat with us.

You best see.

Thanks thanks to both of you guys.

Randall, you guys were you know, many years ago, uh, terrific students in the classes that I taught at the University of Montown.

It's fun to sit down and do this again.

What