8 Burst results for "Clovis Hunter"
Bear Grease
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Bear Grease
"I've always loved turkey hunting. The emerging energy of spring bringing the hardwood timber back to life is euphoric for the micro windows you're immersed into it. I love the charismatic flowering trees like red buds and dogwoods and the intricate early growing plants like crested iris and may apple. All indicators of one thing. As a kid watching VHS videos in the 1990s, I remember old Harold knight saying when the oak leaves are as big as a squirrel's ear, the turkeys will be goblin. And therein lies The Crown jewel of the spring. The reason we love it. Goblin, turkeys. I love the audio sensation created by unseen gobbles, which enlivens the imagination. The act of turkey hunting is implanting yourself into the ancient and natural system of a spring morning. And maybe what I love most of all is the amount of roving across the landscape you've got to do to find one. This is doctor Mike Chamberlain at the university of Georgia. His passion has ignited a widespread interest in wild turkey biology as he and others have sounded the alarm of concern. Specifically for turkeys in the southeastern United States. Let me know if you agree with my sentiment here. Have you ever been heartbroken? Doctor Chamberlain, I have a live philosophy that I would like to share with you. It goes way back in newcombe lineage. And it's that you can not trust a ground nesting bird. Okay? If you put your heart into a ground nesting bird, you're going to get burned, okay? My grandfather, Lou and Newcomb. He died in 2014. He was 94 years old. He was a bird hunter. Just the epitome of a southern bird dog trainer, you know, I was born in 1979. Which would have been about the time that quail, the quail demise came. And I spent my whole life bird hunting with him and he lamented the loss of coil. My grandfather had this love of this animal and this thing that he did and he invested his life in. In the last 35 years of his life, the bird just wasn't there. And then, I grew up and loved turkey hunting. And when I was in high school in Arkansas, we had good turkey home. I learned to love it, killed turkeys, and then all that just kind of dissipated. And that's when my philosophy came, do you think this is reasonable? If you're from Arkansas, yes. The same challenges that Arkansas has faced. There are many, many agencies facing throughout the species range, not just in the southeast, but in other parts of the country as well. I've heard it said it's kind of death by a thousand cuts in some way. That's a Zachary. There's no smoking gun. It is death by a thousand cuts, literally. I'm from Arkansas and our turkey populations are currently down 60% from our population peaks in the early 2000s, so it's easy for me to see our problem. But it has wider implications than just unfilled tags. I'm interested in how wildlife affects the trajectory of people's lives. And this goes way back. Even to the very beginning, the Clovis hunters likely built their culture around populations of megafauna like woolly mammoths. Folsom hunters around bison antiquis, the planes Indians tribes arose with the buffalo herds. Daniel Boone made a living off bear, deer and fur bearers. My grandfather lived in the heyday of southern quail hunting, and the flutter of quail wings dominated his vacant thoughts. Wildlife can have big implications for people who live close to the land. Things beyond our control shape our lives all the time. And in that statement, I want to make a big picture connection so stay with me. I am a product of the 1990s. I came into that decade age ten and left that decade at age 20, which is an important period. What I didn't know is that I built my foundational expectations on the peak turkey numbers of the modern era that some argue weren't sustainable. I wonder if the Clovis hunters felt the same way as woolly mammoths slipped through their fingers. Would they have had enough cultural memory to recognize the decline. I don't know. Interestingly though, we do. And it's in large part due to outdoor media in the 1990s that was television. During that time, I was influenced by a man named Wilbur primoz for Mississippi. He lived about a 105 miles slightly northeast of east fort Mississippi, where Jerry clower lived. Interestingly, Jerry's outdoor experience focused on coons and possums, not game animals like deer and turkey. Why you might ask? Because they didn't have big gay animals or very many of them back in Jerry's early years. However, the turkey reintroduction efforts of the 1970s, 80s, produced the 1990s. And you can almost hear the turkey eggs hatching. It was an incredible time to be a turkey hunter. Saint Mary's got to come up a little bit to see yourself. This is mister will primoz. All of a sudden we had loads of turkeys. We had an explosion of turkey call makers being successful and people rising to the top throughout outdoor media brands. One of those people was an energetic black headed man with a tightly trimmed beard named will primos. So when did you start turkey hunting? Your family, your dad, turkey Hannah, no, my uncles and all the family around me started turkey hunting. And so I would watch them as a young man I grew up quail hunting with my uncle Gus and then the Turkish started just coming everywhere. They were only on the river way back then. The Mississippi. Okay. Inside the levee. And that's where most of the people turkey on it. So finally, I got out of college, things rolling, but I was, you know, the first turkeys you killed, you were deer hunting. Probably one of you supposed to shoot them. You know, but really springtime turkey hunting, that started sometime in my early 20s, late teens, yeah. And just a little fire under me, you know? Just absolutely loved. Okay, would you tell me if this statement would be agree with this statement that? Father late 60s, early 70s, or some period of time in that time. World War II had happened, baby boomers were in their prime. They had money, they had free time. I mean, that's when a lot of the American hunting heritage, it didn't start then, but a lot of the things that kind of weave lived off of began then. I mean, just kind of with a revolution and widespread pop culture nature of knowledge about turkey hunting. I definitely think it was after the end of World War II. World War II almost decimated the wild tricky. And it did so, McCall's, everybody was going to war, and depression was owned in the 20s, the depression was hard on the turkey too. And people with humans killing them. Humans killing them. Filling up a trough with corn and getting a one end of it. And when enough turkeys got the heads in that thing, raking them with a shotgun. And feeding the family. I see. So, you know, until.
Bear Grease
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Bear Grease
"That's removed. So there's no way I thought that was gonna work. Oh, it's nice. Really, you're holding this three inch long point. Hitting it with a big clubby looking hammer basically, right? And it takes off this delicate flute off the side. And awesome. When you see this process happen, it almost seems miraculous that this long flute just peels off with a single strike. But he's just halfway through. He's still got to do the other side. But I'll save you the stress and drama. Rick was successful at getting a partial flute on the other side, but it wouldn't have been considered a true Folsom style point. Rick said it would be closer to the partial fluting of the Clovis style point. And if you're interested in watching Rick make a point, I'll put a short clip on my Instagram, and you can also follow Rick at pack rat bushcraft on Instagram. The biggest question that remains unanswered is why did they take the risk of such extreme fluting? The point would have killed animals without the fluting, but they employed this technology across vast geographic regions for 1000 years. Think about this. What other technologies in human history have been used for that long? The wheel, the plow? We've been using some form of gunpowder and guns for a little over a thousand years. At the time they might have thought about the fulsome point like we do gunpowder. As an essential thing. Here's Steve and I are talking about the longevity of the technology and entertaining a very interesting idea. The consistency that you see that is clearly handed down through human communication that spread across broad geographic distances for long periods of time. That these people were able to pass down values that yeah, they passed on a technique of a way to make a point. But think about you and I were trying to do with our kids right now, Steve is like we're trying to pass down a value system to them. And all that's left of the Folsom hunters is this piece of stone. Yeah. But there was a bunch of other stuff that came with that too. The culture, what they valued, what they worshiped, what they saw beauty in was translated and it was taught to that son just like it was his ability to nap Folsom point because it wasn't just like one generation and it was thousands of years of people and they did it the same. And that's why that brings up an interesting point is why did they flute this? And I want to hear your thoughts on why they floated it because it's clear that this was a difficult process, the advantages of it killing stuff are because that's the way we would look at it as hunters is like, what's the advantage of this projectile point killing something more efficient so that my family eats rather than starves. And so that's a pretty heated debate. There's an idea that is tossed out there that it was non utilitarian that the point was fluted that it was and I'm not saying I buy it. I'm just saying I like the idea. I used to like that idea too. I used like the idea too. And let's just be fair and acknowledge right now. We don't know, we don't know. We ain't gonna find out. But hear me out. Ice like that, too. Then I realized that there's a joke. There's a joke among anthropologists. If you don't understand, what do you do? You say that muscle had spiritual significance. Religious significance. If you dig a site and you find that there's 5 bison schools at the site and the bison school seem to have been roughly arrayed in a circle, it must have had spiritual significance. Not that. What are they doing that day? And how those carcasses were scavenged by dire wolves and dragged around or whatever happened to just so happens that that's how it ends up there. Or that you're finishing up and your kids are messing around and they put them in a little pile, you know, that tendency to look at things and be like, huh, most have had spiritual significance. There's also just a lot of who knows a long time past. Another give you something on the converse side real quick. I could see the fact that they did it a certain way and they did it that way for a long time. Being a way to make you think that it must have had spiritual significance, right? But it could also be that these were people who lived in extreme isolation at that time. I mean, there were, there were people, there were at the time of the Folsom hunters. There were human beings stretched from Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America, but these people bison hunters out on the plains might have been living in such a sort of cultural isolation that they had an idea. They had a thing they hunted in the way they hunted it and they went thousand years whatever it is without someone coming in and being like, no, no, no, you've always got it all wrong. Here's how you make a good productive. Yeah, here's how you make a good project up one. So maybe there is the way they did it, work for them, and they weren't subject to a lot of new ideas and here's this like these people that had this lifestyle that they live far longer, far longer than any notion of the United States of America has been around. They were at it for a long time. Yeah. Just me sitting here in a chair. My valueless interpretation of it is that it was just it was a function of the equipment they were using. Here we go again with Steve trying to completely rationalize the functional argument for the fluidity of the Folsom points. Here he is with his final thought on making these things. Another cool thing is that certain sites they'll find where someone's making one and they break it. So they're channeling it and break it. There are museum specimens of a never used Folsom point broken and lying next to it and matched to it is the channel flake that came out of it. Knocked the channel out once knocked their channel out, broke the thing, dropped it all done. At the end of the ice age, people who probably wouldn't have been unreasonable, they would have run into a one of the last mammoth roaming around and then some dude day goes, oh, here's a point. Oh, here's the channel, like, and they matched pears. But that I just can't, I think it's utilitarian, man. It just doesn't make it to a coldest point. The Clovis hunters who are using that landscape ahead of the false hunter's probably had were probably after that opportunities on much bigger animals because they were like, this is occurring at what we call the pleistocene housing transition. So the end of the ice ages and you had all this megafauna vanishing. Giant ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, or vanishing from the landscape. The guys before had a very beautiful, finely wrought point that was big, and then here's this, it's tidy. These big huge animals start to vanish. And then who lives there next? People are making a smaller point. Great point on the size of the Clovis points as compared to the size of the animals they were hunting. But you'd think a guy like Steve would like to entertain a little more romantic thinking in his life. However, I think his point about its utilitarian design is well taken. But maybe it's not that cut and dry. It's possible that it could have been viewed as highly functional, but also held significant beyond that. Let's see what doctor Meltzer has to say. We actually don't know why they flew at these points. There's no particular obvious reason with some colleagues we have hypothesized that the way in which these things were fluted and the way in which these things were have to disappear might have actually served kind of as a shock absorber in the sense that the waves of force would travel through and instead of the point banging into the back end, the base of the flute, where it was thinnest, and again, one to two millimeters thick, it would just crumble. Like a bumper on a car. The bumper on a car is intended to give way it crumbles so your car doesn't break when you hit something. The base of the flute was so thin that it might have crumbled and prevented the entire weight. So the wave of force travels through, it's going to rebound back, but if the base crumbles, all that energy is going to get dissipated. You can remake the portion that broke off and use it again. Exactly. That is the most unique thing about these Folsom points is the mystery of the fluting. I read in your book where it's been discussed that perhaps it was non utilitarian, which means that it served no functional purpose, but was a cultural purpose. And I would like to make a comment on that, doctor melter. As a bow hunter, and as a hunter, when we see this throughout history that cultures do distinguish themselves in establish, identity through the way that they hunt, we do it today. I do it every day of my life. The weapons that I used to hunt are part of my tribal identity, of course. I really like this idea that it's kind of a romantic idea that these people would have been doing something that took an incredible amount of skill to do and actually jeopardized, they say that there's a high percentage of failure when you get a point to the 30 to 40% failure rate in manufacturing. So it's totally inefficient. Absolutely. Absolutely. But why the humans do all the weird things that we do exactly are completely non functional think that to think that this style, this technology, this is essentially a technology that would have been passed down from generation to generation and there may have come a point when the guy was like, why are you still fluting those silly things? They break every time. And you know, at some point that shifted away from that technology, just like it would today, but so much mystery inside of a fluted, Folsom point. Right. But you know, there's hunting magic too. You're going to go out there and you want to have your best weaponry. But, you know, you also want to have your distinctive points. You're going to make your stuff. You're going to be in charge of your gear. And you know, there may be a bit of ceremony associated with going out on a hunt because look, going after an animal that was that big and could be that dangerous there's two risks in hunting. One is the risk you're going to come home empty handed. And the other risk is you're not going to come home at all because you're dead. Right? And so in some in some projectile points, at some sites, you see bits of red ochre, right? They're putting and it may not just be sort of part of the mastic that's holding the point on. It may be that there were ceremonies in advance of the hunt. And everybody's got their own weaponry that they make their own particular way. One of the things that was really interesting to me at the Folsom site, which I could never possibly prove, but it's just one of those things that, you know, I'll bet it's right. I look at the assemblage of the projectile points from that site, and I am convinced that I can identify at least three separate nappers based on the style of the points that they make. And how would you ever prove that? You can, right? But I look at these things and I say, you know what? That really looks like the same person. Yes. And I'm not saying the same guy. Who knows? Maybe the women were making false and points too. I'm willing to bet the same person made this point and that point and a different person made those two points. And think about it too if you want credit? I don't know when you go out hunting with guys. Do you say it was my shot? I had the kill shot. And you can tell because that's my arrow. Yours is over there stuck in a tree. So you would have been able to distinguish. Yeah. You know, that is so unique even today amongst Flint mappers. Is that it's a craft. It's an art. It's almost like a fingerprint. Back in September, I got a Helix Mattress, and I'm being quite serious when I say it is the most comfortable mattress that I have ever slept on. What's unique about helix is that you take a quiz that takes just two minutes to complete and it matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect customized mattress. Everybody has a unique sleep pattern. 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Bear Grease
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Bear Grease
"On its plaster cast, and you can see the teeth in here. Wow, right? And there's the back of the skull, so that is a bison and tick with skull from the bullshit. Yep, and it's a big and it's pretty wild being in the same room with the skull of a bison antiques. If you want to see a cell phone video, the skull, you can check out my Instagram clay underscore newcombe. Doctor melzer is a unique guy when it comes to Folsom. The site was originally excavated between 1926 and 1928, but 70 years later there were unanswered questions that he knew our modern techniques and technology could now answer. Primarily carbon dating, which we'll talk about more in part three of this series. Like a dramatic movie sequel in 1997, doctor melzer and his team went back to Folsom. They dug up the place again with new questions about the site's geology, its antiquity, which is the site's age. The paleo topography, which is its former geography, and its depositional history, which basically means the layers that covered the site. Here's doctor melzer talking about the uniqueness of the Folsom site. For 50 years, there had been this very heated debate over how long people had been in the Americas and all manner of contenders were put forward. This is evidence that people have been here since the pleistocene. This is evidence that people have been here for 300,000 years. Here's evidence that people have been here for 350,000 years, but in each and every instance those sites failed to prove what they were claimed to prove, and they failed because of various reasons. The artifacts weren't actually artifacts. The artifacts were not in the geological deposits that were said to be that old. The artifacts had rolled downhill and ended up next to ancient animal remains, but they were not necessarily in what we call primary context. That is to say they didn't enter the deposit. At the same time, as those ancient animals enter the deposit. And so you had literally decades of people arguing back and forth over how long people had been in the Americas. When Folsom came along, it was just as advertised. What you had was a spot on the landscape where hunters had confronted and killed a herd of bison. We now know there were about 32 animals that were dispatched that day. And in the process, left behind their artifacts in ways that made it absolutely clear that those animals and those people had been on that very landscape at the same moment in time because we had spear points, what we now know is false and fluted points in direct association with the bones and what I mean by that is we had a projectile point in between ribs. It had sat there since that animal was killed, right? There was no question that that was some sort of adventitious association that somehow a projectile point had worked its way down into the dirt into the earth ten feet below the surface and ended up in between two bison ribs. Right. No, that animal was stabbed by a human, and because that animal was a now extinct form of bison, which went extinct at the end of the pleistocene. That was the first absolutely definitive proof that people had been in the Americas at the end of the pleistocene. The only question remaining after that was how much earlier might they have been? Right. But that's what made fulsome different. It was just as advertised. When you look back at the history of archeology itself as a study, there was an incredible amount of drama and ego involved in the discussion of human antiquity. It was highly competitive regarding who discovered what and where. So it's hard to overstate how important the find was because it was so indisputable. Here's another component of understanding Folsom and archeology that will help us. This is Steve describe into us what is called a type site. A lot of bygone cultures will have a thing called the type site. The type site is where they were identified. When we talk about Folsom hunters, the fulsome culture was identified at, wild horse Arroyo, your fulsome, New Mexico, was when it was first identified. The identifying feature of the Folsom culture. I was called Folsom hunters. And they took the name Folsom simply because that was the English name of the town. Sure, that was probably a brand new town. That has nothing to do as a descriptor of these people. Not at all. Just to keeping in the same state. It's the same point in the same state. When we talk about a Clovis hunter, it just so happens that the projectile points which stand for the hunters that made them were first identified near Clovis, New Mexico. They were there over 10,000 years before anyone even thought to name to make it to the place clothes. We happened to right now doing our conversation about Folsom near shattering Nebraska. Were you and I had to walk out and find holy cow. Look at this insane projectile point. Diagnostic, unfound point. And then we realized it was this whole culture of people and they made this point. They might wind up calling them the shattering hunters. I think they'd call it brunel newcombe. Okay. But if they were consistent with the days of yore, that's what they would wind up name them. Folsom hunters were identified near false New Mexico and so they the name, the nearby town name was applied to the culture. When we talk about a culture atom, like, what do you imagine? A culture of people. We know them when we see them based on the point. With our understanding right now, it's the point. The point has to be present. The projectile point that they like to make has to be present, meaning, if we know that the wholesome culture was active, 11,700 years ago. If you went down to South Florida and found a human campsite from 11,700 years ago that had a different projectile point, you wouldn't call it a Folsom site. Okay, so it's not two. Yeah, it's not when it's who and when. It describes a culture just like the culture of us to drive Chevrolet pickups. Sure, and there's another culture in France that drives some other kind of pickup. The Folsom culture is identified by the type of technology they use when making stone points, but this culture was also associated with something else, much bigger. They were tightly associated with a relics form of bison called bison antiques. Not something that went extinct, a relic form of the animal that lives here now. It was bigger, had different sort of horn configuration. It was about 25% bigger. They call it like bison antiquus. They had a lot of fidelity to a certain style of point. They had a lot seems to have a lot of fidelity to bison and they lived and what is now the American great plains. That's where they're found. So you can find them in the Panhandle of Texas. You can find them in New Mexico. You can find them in Montana. You can find Folsom points in southern Saskatchewan. You can find them all way the western Nebraska, but they stayed to the great plains. Where the most of the planes buffalo were. Yeah. And at the time, it was probably cooler and wetter, but it was an open grassland, and it was just going by how few Folsom sites there are and how widely dispersed they are and kind of the imprint of those people. It was probably insanely low population densities. I can't no one can say this for real, but I've run this by professional anthropologists. It's not unreasonable to think that a band of these hunters, which would be an extended family group. These bands of people, it makes sense that they were maybe they maybe didn't exceed ten or 20 individuals. It's not unreasonable to imagine that they could go a generation without it encountering individuals that you're not immediately related to. It seems very few people occupying that landscape at that time. Take a minute and imagine the North American continent 10,300 years ago with human populations that scarce. By the time Europeans arrived here, roughly 10,000 years after the Folsom bison kill, which would be about 600 plus years from the present backwards from the present. The place was basically like an urban center crawling with people. The civilization of the American Indians was in full swing at highly developed compared to when the Folsom hunters were here. Some American Indians are undoubtedly the descendants of the Folsom hunters. Wildly, though, of all the things these Folsom hunters used in life, there is one thing that has outlasted the rigor of time that we infer an incredible amount of data from. One of the things I like about the projectile point, since it's made of stone and it lasts a long time. So it winds up being some people that are ninja what we'd call Indian arrowheads. Sometimes don't get the fascination with it. A way to think about it, it's not so much that it's the arrowhead. It's just a piece of something that survived sometimes in a perfect state from the time they handled it. Their bones are gone, to large measure, they're homes and structures, the things they wore, the wood that they employed, I'd be as excited to find a spear shaft, but they're not laying around. It's like, but here's the thing that a guy can drop that thing. And it's considered for 12,000 years. What other thing can you drop on the ground? We talk about how long our stuff lasts, right? How long plastic glass? You set a plastic bottle. Underground for 12,000 years to come back and look at it. There might be something, but it ain't gonna look like a portable. Imagine archeologists 10,000 years from now. Well, I doubt this place will be around. But them taking just one of your material possessions and making vast inferences about your entire life from it. I wonder what they'd say. I had some questions about how an archeological site is verified, so it's legitimacy is known. I think it's important for us to understand the bigger picture of what's happening here beyond some dudes digging up bones and finding stone points, Q, the Randy Travis song. It's a pretty complex world and there were many missteps in early archeology and in the original excavation of the Folsom site that almost disqualified it. So from an archeological process, there's a prescribed way that a site should be excavated and understood. As I understand it, there were other sites in Texas and Nebraska and maybe even in Kansas that potentially had similar type evidence of humans in these older animals that are now extinct, but they were mishandled and so they have to be it's like evidence coming into a courtroom that was acquired the wrong way in the judge goes. I can't use this. That's exactly how it played out. But we also need to put a little bit of historical context here. This is the late 1890s, early 1900s, the teens. There weren't clear cut methods for field excavation. A lot of these excavations were not conducted by what we would now recognize as sort of professional scientists, professional archeologists, professional geologists, and they didn't know what they were doing. It's really what it came down to. So we had this site out in Frederick, Oklahoma, where it was a gravel quarry. And the folks who were working the gravel query said, oh yeah, we've got artifacts associated with mammoth bones. Well, you know, it requires a certain amount of expertise to sort of really be able to in an excavation know, okay, these are deposits of a certain age. These are things that are associated with those deposits. We know that they belong in those deposits. And so because there were not agreed upon field techniques and clear cut field techniques at the time, and because some of these discoveries were made by folks who really didn't understand what they were seeing. And they weren't even archeologists. You know, they're guys that work at the quarry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're just their job is just to shovel that stuff out of the way. So you find an artifact in the spoil pile over here and you find some bones in the spoil pile over there. That doesn't mean that that artifact and that bone were associated back 20,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago. In retrospect, a couple of those sites, not the one in Frederick, but one out in Colorado city, Texas. In retrospect, we looked at the artifacts and we said, well, you know what? There is a possibility those artifacts could have been associated with that bison. But the problem was, in 1924, and this is a few years before Folsom, the bison was being excavated by a fella, who was just a local guy. He had discovered this bison in this creek bed and he wrote to the museum and said, you guys want it. So the folks folks in Denver said, yeah, we'd really like to have that bison skeleton. And they gave him instructions on how to get it out of the ground, plaster it, and put it into crates and ship it up to Denver. He excavates the bison, plasters it up. He puts it into a crate and the crate had been, you know, the folks in Denver had said make a crate, you know, this big by this big by this big, and so he had this giant plastered bison. Couldn't fit it into a crate. Instead of building a bigger crate, he simply knocked off chunks of the bone. Shoved it in there. So this was not done well, right? And even though they found artifacts with the bison, they didn't realize that that was of interest, or significance. Wow. And so they just ignored them, and it was only after the fact somebody was visiting Denver and said, hey, you know, I'd watched your guys excavate this thing down in Texas and did you know they have points that came out with the bison and the folks in Denver said, we had no clue. So, you know, you can't basic case for people having been here a very long time ago or hunting bison or a very long time ago when you had that kind of excavation. And so that very well could have been a totally legitimate site. And I think it is actually the Folsom site was originally excavated by an amateur archeologist named Karl shwa heim. He was a friend of George's. He was hired by the Denver museum of natural history to get them a bison antiquis skeleton. But while he was digging, he found a stone point. He made some sketches and notified the museum in this really perk their ears up and they told him if you find another one, Carl don't dig it up, leave it in place. Luckily, he did find another one, and they were able to send down a bona FIDE archeologist to verify in situ or in place. This then attracted the attention of the world. But I've got more questions. You know, and that brings me to kind of my biggest overarching question inside archeology that is just so it's intriguing to think about this is that how much of Planet Earth have we excavated to understand what is here. I mean, it feels like we're just going off these very like if you took the volume of the earth and said, how much of that volume has a professional archeologist in modern times actually excavated? It would be a number so small, it would be unbelievable. And so we're basing so much of what we know off these little bitty spots, but who's to say there's not another incredible spot 50 feet from the Folsom site that's gonna redirect history again. But you're absolutely right. A lot of these sites are deeply buried. A lot of these sites will never see the surface again. A lot of these sites disappeared over time. You've got erosion. If you were around on the high plains in the 1930s during the dust bowl, it would have been the worst time to live there, but it would have been the best time to do archeology there. Because what was happening was that basically the surface is blowing away. And what it did was is exposed. A lot of these old ice age pleistocene age, Lake beds, and they're all manner of bones and artifacts that came out of these sites, but of course once all that stops blowing, a lot of the archeological discovery is necessarily based on chance encounters where you've got ranchers that are putting in a stock tank. You've got farmers that are plowing. You've got a road that's getting cut, and you just get lucky. Or a George mcjunkin exactly a cult of wild horse aro. You know, George mcjunkin is such an interesting character to me. You know, this is a guy who is clearly really intrigued and interested and fascinated and wants to learn about what's around him. So he was the right guy at the right moment in the right spot. And it changed American archeology. We just can't get away from old George now can we? I kind of get obsessed with these characters that's not learn about them. And I'm considering a junk and tattoo. That. That's not true. I don't do tats. But I do need some more info on the actual site. From this, I think we'll begin to understand how archeologists think. Let's talk in specifics about the Folsom site and what was found there. So this flood in 1908, unearthed these bones that George mcjunkin found. So we know how they were found in the series, but what did they find there? So the initial excavations at Folsom took place in 1926, 1927, in 1928 as well. Unfortunately, the site was excavated by paleontologists. The site was excavated by folks that were interested in bones. And while they did a decent job, they, well, the term is telling. They referred to the Folsom site as the Folsom bone quarry. Their quarrying bone out of this thing. So they're not viewing it as an archeological site where it archeological site meaning it has evidence of humans. Well, I mean, they saw it as a bone query that had evidence of humans. But what they weren't doing was paying really close attention to the things that we as archeologists pay attention to. Where exactly were those artifacts found? How were the bones distributed? This is one of the things that really challenged us when we started excavating there was that there's basically where no maps of their excavations. Now we're archeologists. We're fairly compulsive about things. We're fairly compulsive about a lot of things, because when you're excavating an archeological site, you're destroying it. So you've got to make very, very careful records all the way through the process. Maps, photographs, detailed measurements, all this stuff. And the folks who were basically quarrying this for bone, were doing none of that. And so when we started, they had identified on their maps, here's a skeleton here. Here's a skeleton here. Here's a skeleton over here. They weren't nice discreet skeletons of animals. These were bone piles and they hadn't quite recognized that these were discard piles. They were not, you know, here's an animal stretched out on the ground. And of course, you know, they weren't paying attention to a lot of the things that we only subsequently started paying attention to, like, what's the surface condition of the bone? Because that tells you something about how long it was sitting out, exposed before it got covered by the sediment. They weren't really paying much attention to the sediment itself. What's the nature of the sediment? How did it originate? Why is the site in this particular spot? Where did the kill take place? There were so many unanswered questions. The thing that they did in the 1920s was they clearly showed people who had been here since the pleistocene. They did that just fine. But there were so many questions about the site that were unanswered. That's why I went back 70 years later because I said, you know, it's the most famous site in North America, one of the most famous sites in North America, and we know almost nothing about it in terms of what we hope and expect to know nowadays about an archeological site. It's funny, in 1928, when they finished up the excavations, barnum Brown, who had been in charge, said, there's nothing left. Don't bother to come here. We've excavated the whole thing. What I realized, and this was actually before we went out there. I was talking to a vertebrate paleontologist here at the university. And he said, oh, barnum Brown said that about all his sites. And the reason he said that about all his sights is he didn't want anybody coming in after him to go to dig the sites. So he said, you can probably ignore that. Wow, I bet that was encouraging. How many more bison did you discover when you did the excavations in the late 90s? Well, because we know there were a bison kill of 32 animals. We know that now. And so how many did they find and how many did you find? Well, so this gets back to the issue of they were just counting a pile of bones as an animal, right? They didn't really have a clear sense of how many animals they were. They had a clear sense of how many animal piles, how many bones that there were. But they did estimate that they were probably at least a couple of dozen. Okay. What we did and this is sort of the typical way in which you estimate the number of animals that were once present in a kill is that you take bones that, well, in this case, we were taking basically bison ankles. So bison have two ankles, a left and a right. And so what you do is you count up how many right ankles you have or how many left ankles you have. And you say, okay, I got 32 right ankles, or I got 30 right ankles and 32 left ankles. Well, there wasn't an animal walking around on three legs. You probably had 32 animals. I say, where did they teach you this kind of reasoning, doctor Meltzer? This is brilliant. No, well, it's not me. But see, this is the kind of thing that you didn't do in the 1920s. Yeah. This is why we had to go back. And in fact, by literally counting up all of the elements, that gave us insight into what the hunters were eating and what they took off site because you know, okay, so there's 200 plus or minus change of bones in a bison skeleton. There is X number of ribs. There's X number of thoracic vertebra, and so you've got 32 animals. So if you've got 32 animals and X number of ribs, 32 times X gives you the total number of ribs, and then you double it because you got a left side and a right side. So then when you go to the site, and you say, well, I've only got three ribs here. You know what you're missing. They took those ribs with them. And we have pretty clear evidence that these folks were literally taking rib racks off of these animals because we have an undercount of what we ought to have in terms of ribs in terms of thoracic vertebra. Those are the big sort of structural high spinous process ribs on a buffalo hump. That's what makes the hum, right? Yeah. Really good meat there. So we're missing a bunch of upper leg bones. And that's where the bulk of the meat would be in the hams of those big bison. Think of them as bison drum sticks. So when we go to the site, we do all these detailed counts of all the bones, how many should there be? How many are we missing? And are we missing them because of erosion or the bones, you know, fell apart, or are we missing them because the hunters when they did all the women took them with them? Exactly right. We're proud to welcome and introduce a new sponsor. Chevy Silverado, the strongest, most advanced Silverado ever. We all know a Chevy guy amongst our buddies, and this community of die hard, Silverado fans and hunting and fishing continues to grow. True story boys, I bought a brand new Chevy Silverado in 2015. I have now a 176,000 miles on that truck. I have driven it all across the United States of America, hall and mules, no joke, four trips to Montana, trip to Colorado, trip to New Mexico, hall and mules, and I've never done anything to that truck, but changed the old service to transmission and put a new set of brakes on it. No joke. I love my Chevy Silverado. 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So doctor melzer never fully got to the answer of my question about how many more bison he found when he redoubted fulsome. We need some answers, Doc. How many bison did your team find that were not found in the original excavations? Because an estimate. I mean, did you find 5 more? Well, whole skeletons are numbers of bones. Well, how many bison skulls did you find that they had not found? Oh, let me think about that. You know, usually the people that I deal with doctor Meltzer kind of can say offhand, how many bison and tick with skulls they found in their life? You're the only one I've talked to that it's like, well, I don't know. You know, I talked to a guy on one of my previous mercury's podcasts and I asked him how many times he'd been bit by venomous snakes. Oh, and he said, he said, I don't know. I've lost count. And he had been bit about 20 venomous snakes in his life. 20 plus. You're kind of like that guy. Well, you know, I'm talking about mister Fred lali from episode 12. Actually, I have the total numbers. So the Colorado museum collected 1600 elements, the American museum, 2000. We collected about 700. So there's a total of about 4300 bison elements. So you probably found 20% more roughly. Yeah. Mind you, we're not finding whole bison and complete parts. So we found about 17 cranial parts. We found at least three. Yeah, we have at least three intact crania, and many more exciting to dig up a bison skull. Were you there when were you the one digging when this happened? Actually, no, I got out of the way. So did your team find any points? No. Was that surprising to you? No. And the reason is, is that they literally had excavated back in the 1920s, most of the site. So if you imagine a kill site with that many animals, I guess there would be a central area and then kind of fringe animals out to the side of it and you guys kind of were finding well leftovers. We were finding the leftovers of the excavation, rather than the leftovers of the kill because I think we were in an area of the kill where a lot of the processing and butchering was taking place, but because we were where the area of processing and butchering was taking place, there weren't necessarily points there. Okay, so let's think about this in terms of a bison kill. Okay, so we've got a conundrum. We have no way of knowing really what happened that day in the fall some 10,000 years ago. I wanted to get some clarity from doctor melzer about what we 100% know. So we're trying to make sense of how the heck that these ancient humans could have killed that many big animals in one spot. How certain are you your hypothesis? I mean, when you really think about the amount of evidence that we have, and the kind of conclusions that we're coming to, it's kind of mind boggling to me because we have bones and we have points. We have the topography and now you have in depth researched what the land would look like at that time from the excavations that you've done. How certain are you? I mean, you being the chief authority on this. Are you just guessing? Okay. How it went down. That's inference, right? How they made the kill. The time of the year, they made the kill. Did they maneuver the animals and killed them in the Arroyo, or did they kill them in the tributary? I have to infer that, right? Okay, so that part. Absolutely. And in fact, when we wrote all this up in the Folsom book, you know, I made it clear. Here's one alternative explanation. Here's another. Now, the first part of your question was, am I sure this is a kill of 32 animals? Yes, absolutely. Yes, yes. Yeah, because there's no other way to account for it, right? So one of the things that we do as archeologists is, okay, you've always got to make sure that things are not there naturally. Before you can conclude that they're there culturally that is to say before you can conclude that they're there as a consequence of.
Bear Grease
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Bear Grease
"On its plaster cast, and you can see the teeth in here. Wow, right? And there's the back of the skull, so that is a bison and tick with skull from the bullshit. Yep, and it's a big and it's pretty wild being in the same room with the skull of a bison antiques. If you want to see a cell phone video, the skull, you can check out my Instagram clay underscore newcombe. Doctor melzer is a unique guy when it comes to Folsom. The site was originally excavated between 1926 and 1928, but 70 years later there were unanswered questions that he knew our modern techniques and technology could now answer. Primarily carbon dating, which we'll talk about more in part three of this series. Like a dramatic movie sequel in 1997, doctor melzer and his team went back to Folsom. They dug up the place again with new questions about the site's geology, its antiquity, which is the site's age. The paleo topography, which is its former geography, and its depositional history, which basically means the layers that covered the site. Here's doctor melzer talking about the uniqueness of the Folsom site. For 50 years, there had been this very heated debate over how long people had been in the Americas and all manner of contenders were put forward. This is evidence that people have been here since the pleistocene. This is evidence that people have been here for 300,000 years. Here's evidence that people have been here for 350,000 years, but in each and every instance those sites failed to prove what they were claimed to prove, and they failed because of various reasons. The artifacts weren't actually artifacts. The artifacts were not in the geological deposits that were said to be that old. The artifacts had rolled downhill and ended up next to ancient animal remains, but they were not necessarily in what we call primary context. That is to say they didn't enter the deposit. At the same time, as those ancient animals enter the deposit. And so you had literally decades of people arguing back and forth over how long people had been in the Americas. When Folsom came along, it was just as advertised. What you had was a spot on the landscape where hunters had confronted and killed a herd of bison. We now know there were about 32 animals that were dispatched that day. And in the process, left behind their artifacts in ways that made it absolutely clear that those animals and those people had been on that very landscape at the same moment in time because we had spear points, what we now know is false and fluted points in direct association with the bones and what I mean by that is we had a projectile point in between ribs. It had sat there since that animal was killed, right? There was no question that that was some sort of adventitious association that somehow a projectile point had worked its way down into the dirt into the earth ten feet below the surface and ended up in between two bison ribs. Right. No, that animal was stabbed by a human, and because that animal was a now extinct form of bison, which went extinct at the end of the pleistocene. That was the first absolutely definitive proof that people had been in the Americas at the end of the pleistocene. The only question remaining after that was how much earlier might they have been? Right. But that's what made fulsome different. It was just as advertised. When you look back at the history of archeology itself as a study, there was an incredible amount of drama and ego involved in the discussion of human antiquity. It was highly competitive regarding who discovered what and where. So it's hard to overstate how important the find was because it was so indisputable. Here's another component of understanding Folsom and archeology that will help us. This is Steve describe into us what is called a type site. A lot of bygone cultures will have a thing called the type site. The type site is where they were identified. When we talk about Folsom hunters, the fulsome culture was identified at, wild horse Arroyo, your fulsome, New Mexico, was when it was first identified. The identifying feature of the Folsom culture. I was called Folsom hunters. And they took the name Folsom simply because that was the English name of the town. Sure, that was probably a brand new town. That has nothing to do as a descriptor of these people. Not at all. Just to keeping in the same state. It's the same point in the same state. When we talk about a Clovis hunter, it just so happens that the projectile points which stand for the hunters that made them were first identified near Clovis, New Mexico. They were there over 10,000 years before anyone even thought to name to make it to the place clothes. We happened to right now doing our conversation about Folsom near shattering Nebraska. Were you and I had to walk out and find holy cow. Look at this insane projectile point. Diagnostic, unfound point. And then we realized it was this whole culture of people and they made this point. They might wind up calling them the shattering hunters. I think they'd call it brunel newcombe. Okay. But if they were consistent with the days of yore, that's what they would wind up name them. Folsom hunters were identified near false New Mexico and so they the name, the nearby town name was applied to the culture. When we talk about a culture atom, like, what do you imagine? A culture of people. We know them when we see them based on the point. With our understanding right now, it's the point. The point has to be present. The projectile point that they like to make has to be present, meaning, if we know that the wholesome culture was active, 11,700 years ago. If you went down to South Florida and found a human campsite from 11,700 years ago that had a different projectile point, you wouldn't call it a Folsom site. Okay, so it's not two. Yeah, it's not when it's who and when. It describes a culture just like the culture of us to drive Chevrolet pickups. Sure, and there's another culture in France that drives some other kind of pickup. The Folsom culture is identified by the type of technology they use when making stone points, but this culture was also associated with something else, much bigger. They were tightly associated with a relics form of bison called bison antiques. Not something that went extinct, a relic form of the animal that lives here now. It was bigger, had different sort of horn configuration. It was about 25% bigger. They call it like bison antiquus. They had a lot of fidelity to a certain style of point. They had a lot seems to have a lot of fidelity to bison and they lived and what is now the American great plains. That's where they're found. So you can find them in the Panhandle of Texas. You can find them in New Mexico. You can find them in Montana. You can find Folsom points in southern Saskatchewan. You can find them all way the western Nebraska, but they stayed to the great plains. Where the most of the planes buffalo were. Yeah. And at the time, it was probably cooler and wetter, but it was an open grassland, and it was just going by how few Folsom sites there are and how widely dispersed they are and kind of the imprint of those people. It was probably insanely low population densities. I can't no one can say this for real, but I've run this by professional anthropologists. It's not unreasonable to think that a band of these hunters, which would be an extended family group. These bands of people, it makes sense that they were maybe they maybe didn't exceed ten or 20 individuals. It's not unreasonable to imagine that they could go a generation without it encountering individuals that you're not immediately related to. It seems very few people occupying that landscape at that time. Take a minute and imagine the North American continent 10,300 years ago with human populations that scarce. By the time Europeans arrived here, roughly 10,000 years after the Folsom bison kill, which would be about 600 plus years from the present backwards from the present. The place was basically like an urban center crawling with people. The civilization of the American Indians was in full swing at highly developed compared to when the Folsom hunters were here. Some American Indians are undoubtedly the descendants of the Folsom hunters. Wildly, though, of all the things these Folsom hunters used in life, there is one thing that has outlasted the rigor of time that we infer an incredible amount of data from. One of the things I like about the projectile point, since it's made of stone and it lasts a long time. So it winds up being some people that are ninja what we'd call Indian arrowheads. Sometimes don't get the fascination with it. A way to think about it, it's not so much that it's the arrowhead. It's just a piece of something that survived sometimes in a perfect state from the time they handled it. Their bones are gone, to large measure, they're homes and structures, the things they wore, the wood that they employed, I'd be as excited to find a spear shaft, but they're not laying around. It's like, but here's the thing that a guy can drop that thing. And it's considered for 12,000 years. What other thing can you drop on the ground? We talk about how long our stuff lasts, right? How long plastic glass? You set a plastic bottle. Underground for 12,000 years to come back and look at it. There might be something, but it ain't gonna look like a portable. Imagine archeologists 10,000 years from now. Well, I doubt this place will be around. But them taking just one of your material possessions and making vast inferences about your entire life from it. I wonder what they'd say. I had some questions about how an archeological site is verified, so it's legitimacy is known. I think it's important for us to understand the bigger picture of what's happening here beyond some dudes digging up bones and finding stone points, Q, the Randy Travis song. It's a pretty complex world and there were many missteps in early archeology and in the original excavation of the Folsom site that almost disqualified it. So from an archeological process, there's a prescribed way that a site should be excavated and understood. As I understand it, there were other sites in Texas and Nebraska and maybe even in Kansas that potentially had similar type evidence of humans in these older animals that are now extinct, but they were mishandled and so they have to be it's like evidence coming into a courtroom that was acquired the wrong way in the judge goes. I can't use this. That's exactly how it played out. But we also need to put a little bit of historical context here. This is the late 1890s, early 1900s, the teens. There weren't clear cut methods for field excavation. A lot of these excavations were not conducted by what we would now recognize as sort of professional scientists, professional archeologists, professional geologists, and they didn't know what they were doing. It's really what it came down to. So we had this site out in Frederick, Oklahoma, where it was a gravel quarry. And the folks who were working the gravel query said, oh yeah, we've got artifacts associated with mammoth bones. Well, you know, it requires a certain amount of expertise to sort of really be able to in an excavation know, okay, these are deposits of a certain age. These are things that are associated with those deposits. We know that they belong in those deposits. And so because there were not agreed upon field techniques and clear cut field techniques at the time, and because some of these discoveries were made by folks who really didn't understand what they were seeing. And they weren't even archeologists. You know, they're guys that work at the quarry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're just their job is just to shovel that stuff out of the way. So you find an artifact in the spoil pile over here and you find some bones in the spoil pile over there. That doesn't mean that that artifact and that bone were associated back 20,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago. In retrospect, a couple of those sites, not the one in Frederick, but one out in Colorado city, Texas. In retrospect, we looked at the artifacts and we said, well, you know what? There is a possibility those artifacts could have been associated with that bison. But the problem was, in 1924, and this is a few years before Folsom, the bison was being excavated by a fella, who was just a local guy. He had discovered this bison in this creek bed and he wrote to the museum and said, you guys want it. So the folks folks in Denver said, yeah, we'd really like to have that bison skeleton. And they gave him instructions on how to get it out of the ground, plaster it, and put it into crates and ship it up to Denver. He excavates the bison, plasters it up. He puts it into a crate and the crate had been, you know, the folks in Denver had said make a crate, you know, this big by this big by this big, and so he had this giant plastered bison. Couldn't fit it into a crate. Instead of building a bigger crate, he simply knocked off chunks of the bone. Shoved it in there. So this was not done well, right? And even though they found artifacts with the bison, they didn't realize that that was of interest, or significance. Wow. And so they just ignored them, and it was only after the fact somebody was visiting Denver and said, hey, you know, I'd watched your guys excavate this thing down in Texas and did you know they have points that came out with the bison and the folks in Denver said, we had no clue. So, you know, you can't basic case for people having been here a very long time ago or hunting bison or a very long time ago when you had that kind of excavation. And so that very well could have been a totally legitimate site. And I think it is actually the Folsom site was originally excavated by an amateur archeologist named Karl.
Bear Grease
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Bear Grease
"In the rib, Steve means the point was laying in between two ribs. It wasn't stuck in a rib, but it was just as conclusive. We heard briefly from doctor David melzer on part one. He's the national authority on the Folsom site and how would one know that? Well, he literally wrote a giant book called Folsom. It's basically a textbook on everything known about the place. Doctor Meltzer isn't just a Folsom expert, though. He's dedicated his academic career to the people of the pleistocene era, which is a block of time that began a couple million years ago and ended 10,000 years ago. The time period from then until now is called the holocene. We live in the holocene. If you know these two words, pleistocene and holocene, you're pretty much be in the loop for talking about the recent history of Planet Earth. Doctor melzer is the author of multiple books on the pleistocene, including first peoples in a new world. The great Paleolithic war and search for the first Americans. I went to the campus of SMU in Dallas, Texas, where he works. We'd hardly greeted each other when he asked me to follow him into his lab. It was full of bones and stone tools. Ancient stuff. A skull that's been turned upside down because when we got it in the ground, it was top of the head facing up, right? So we plastered it, and then we cut underneath it, lifted it out. And so now what you see is the plastic. It's resting on its plaster cast, and you can see the teeth in here. Wow, right? And there's the back of the skull, so that is a bison and tick with skull from the bullshit. Yep, and it's a big and it's pretty wild being in the same room with the skull of a bison antiques. If you want to see a cell phone video, the skull, you can check out my Instagram clay underscore newcombe. Doctor melzer is a unique guy when it comes to Folsom. The site was originally excavated between 1926 and 1928, but 70 years later there were unanswered questions that he knew our modern techniques and technology could now answer. Primarily carbon dating, which we'll talk about more in part three of this series. Like a dramatic movie sequel in 1997, doctor melzer and his team went back to Folsom. They dug up the place again with new questions about the site's geology, its antiquity, which is the site's age. The paleo topography, which is its former geography, and its depositional history, which basically means the layers that covered the site. Here's doctor melzer talking about the uniqueness of the Folsom site. For 50 years, there had been this very heated debate over how long people had been in the Americas and all manner of contenders were put forward. This is evidence that people have been here since the pleistocene. This is evidence that people have been here for 300,000 years. Here's evidence that people have been here for 350,000 years, but in each and every instance those sites failed to prove what they were claimed to prove, and they failed because of various reasons. The artifacts weren't actually artifacts. The artifacts were not in the geological deposits that were said to be that old. The artifacts had rolled downhill and ended up next to ancient animal remains, but they were not necessarily in what we call primary context. That is to say they didn't enter the deposit. At the same time, as those ancient animals enter the deposit. And so you had literally decades of people arguing back and forth over how long people had been in the Americas. When Folsom came along, it was just as advertised. What you had was a spot on the landscape where hunters had confronted and killed a herd of bison. We now know there were about 32 animals that were dispatched that day. And in the process, left behind their artifacts in ways that made it absolutely clear that those animals and those people had been on that very landscape at the same moment in time because we had spear points, what we now know is false and fluted points in direct association with the bones and what I mean by that is we had a projectile point in between ribs. It had sat there since that animal was killed, right? There was no question that that was some sort of adventitious association that somehow a projectile point had worked its way down into the dirt into the earth ten feet below the surface and ended up in between two bison ribs. Right. No, that animal was stabbed by a human, and because that animal was a now extinct form of bison, which went extinct at the end of the pleistocene. That was the first absolutely definitive proof that people had been in the Americas at the end of the pleistocene. The only question remaining after that was how much earlier might they have been? Right. But that's what made fulsome different. It was just as advertised. When you look back at the history of archeology itself as a study, there was an incredible amount of drama and ego involved in the discussion of human antiquity. It was highly competitive regarding who discovered what and where. So it's hard to overstate how important the find was because it was so indisputable. Here's another component of understanding Folsom and archeology that will help us. This is Steve describe into us what is called a type site. A lot of bygone cultures will have a thing called the type site. The type site is where they were identified. When we talk about Folsom hunters, the fulsome culture was identified at, wild horse Arroyo, your fulsome, New Mexico, was when it was first identified. The identifying feature of the Folsom culture. I was called Folsom hunters. And they took the name Folsom simply because that was the English name of the town. Sure, that was probably a brand new town. That has nothing to do as a descriptor of these people. Not at all. Just to keeping in the same state. It's the same point in the same state. When we talk about a Clovis hunter, it just so happens that the projectile points which stand for the hunters that made them were first identified near Clovis, New Mexico. They were there over 10,000 years before anyone even thought to name to make it to the place clothes. We happened to right now doing our conversation about Folsom near shattering Nebraska. Were you and I had to walk out and find holy cow. Look at this insane projectile point. Diagnostic, unfound point. And then we realized it was this whole culture of people and they made this point. They might wind up calling them the shattering hunters. I think they'd call it brunel newcombe. Okay. But if they were consistent with the days of yore, that's what they would wind up name them. Folsom hunters were identified near false New Mexico and so they the name, the nearby town name was applied to the culture. When we talk about a culture atom, like, what do you imagine? A culture of people. We know them when we see them based on the point. With our understanding right now, it's the point. The point has to be present. The projectile point that they like to make has to be present, meaning, if we know that the wholesome culture was active, 11,700 years ago. If you went down to South Florida and found a human campsite from 11,700 years ago that had a different projectile point, you wouldn't call it a Folsom site. Okay, so it's not two. Yeah, it's not when it's who and when. It describes a culture just like the culture of us to drive Chevrolet pickups. Sure, and there's another culture in France that drives some other kind of pickup. The Folsom culture is identified by the type of technology they use when making stone points, but this culture was also.
Bear Grease
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Bear Grease
"Era, which is a block of time that began a couple million years ago and ended 10,000 years ago. The time period from then until now is called the holocene. We live in the holocene. If you know these two words, pleistocene and holocene, you're pretty much be in the loop for talking about the recent history of Planet Earth. Doctor melzer is the author of multiple books on the pleistocene, including first peoples in a new world. The great Paleolithic war and search for the first Americans. I went to the campus of SMU in Dallas, Texas, where he works. We'd hardly greeted each other when he asked me to follow him into his lab. It was full of bones and stone tools. Ancient stuff. A skull that's been turned upside down because when we got it in the ground, it was top of the head facing up, right? So we plastered it, and then we cut underneath it, lifted it out. And so now what you see is the plastic. It's resting on its plaster cast, and you can see the teeth in here. Wow, right? And there's the back of the skull, so that is a bison and tick with skull from the bullshit. Yep, and it's a big and it's pretty wild being in the same room with the skull of a bison antiques. If you want to see a cell phone video, the skull, you can check out my Instagram clay underscore newcombe. Doctor melzer is a unique guy when it comes to Folsom. The site was originally excavated between 1926 and 1928, but 70 years later there were unanswered questions that he knew our modern techniques and technology could now answer. Primarily carbon dating, which we'll talk about more in part three of this series. Like a dramatic movie sequel in 1997, doctor melzer and his team went back to Folsom. They dug up the place again with new questions about the site's geology, its antiquity, which is the site's age. The paleo topography, which is its former geography, and its depositional history, which basically means the layers that covered the site. Here's doctor melzer talking about the uniqueness of the Folsom site. For 50 years, there had been this very heated debate over how long people had been in the Americas and all manner of contenders were put forward. This is evidence that people have been here since the pleistocene. This is evidence that people have been here for 300,000 years. Here's evidence that people have been here for 350,000 years, but in each and every instance those sites failed to prove what they were claimed to prove, and they failed because of various reasons. The artifacts weren't actually artifacts. The artifacts were not in the geological deposits that were said to be that old. The artifacts had rolled downhill and ended up next to ancient animal remains, but they were not necessarily in what we call primary context. That is to say they didn't enter the deposit. At the same time, as those ancient animals enter the deposit. And so you had literally decades of people arguing back and forth over how long people had been in the Americas. When Folsom came along, it was just as advertised. What you had was a spot on the landscape where hunters had confronted and killed a herd of bison. We now know there were about 32 animals that were dispatched that day. And in the process, left behind their artifacts in ways that made it absolutely clear that those animals and those people had been on that very landscape at the same moment in time because we had spear points, what we now know is false and fluted points in direct association with the bones and what I mean by that is we had a projectile point in between ribs. It had sat there since that animal was killed, right? There was no question that that was some sort of adventitious association that somehow a projectile point had worked its way down into the dirt into the earth ten feet below the surface and ended up in between two bison ribs. Right. No, that animal was stabbed by a human, and because that animal was a now extinct form of bison, which went extinct at the end of the pleistocene. That was the first absolutely definitive proof that people had been in the Americas at the end of the pleistocene. The only question remaining after that was how much earlier might they have been? Right. But that's what made fulsome different. It was just as advertised. When you look back at the history of archeology itself as a study, there was an incredible amount of drama and ego involved in the discussion of human antiquity. It was highly competitive regarding who discovered what and where. So it's hard to overstate how important the find was because it was so indisputable. Here's another component of understanding Folsom and archeology that will help us. This is Steve describe into us what is called a type site. A lot of bygone cultures will have a thing called the type site. The type site is where they were identified. When we talk about Folsom hunters, the fulsome culture was identified at, wild horse Arroyo, your fulsome, New Mexico, was when it was first identified. The identifying feature of the Folsom culture. I was called Folsom hunters. And they took the name Folsom simply because that was the English name of the town. Sure, that was probably a brand new town. That has nothing to do as a descriptor of these people. Not at all. Just to keeping in the same state. It's the same point in the same state. When we talk about a Clovis hunter, it just so happens that the projectile points which stand for the hunters that made them were first identified near Clovis, New Mexico. They were there over 10,000 years before anyone even thought to name to make it to the place clothes. We happened to right now doing our conversation about Folsom near shattering Nebraska. Were you and I had to walk out and find holy cow. Look at this insane projectile point. Diagnostic, unfound point. And then we realized it was this whole culture of people and they made this point. They might wind up calling them the shattering hunters. I think they'd call it brunel newcombe. Okay. But if they were consistent with the days of yore, that's what they would wind up name them. Folsom hunters were identified near false New Mexico and so they the name, the nearby town name was applied to the culture. When we talk about a culture atom, like, what do you imagine? A culture of people. We know them when we see them based on the point. With our understanding right now, it's the point. The point has to be present. The projectile point that they like to make has to be present, meaning, if we know that the wholesome culture was active, 11,700 years ago. If you went down to South Florida and found a human campsite from 11,700 years ago that had a different projectile point, you wouldn't call it a Folsom site. Okay, so it's not two. Yeah, it's not when it's who and when. It describes a culture just like the culture of us to drive Chevrolet pickups. Sure, and there's another culture in France that drives some other kind of pickup. The Folsom culture is identified by the type of technology they use when making stone points, but this culture was also.
Here & Now
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Here & Now
"So you're right you need to scale it. How do you do it. How do you get it so that you can get the billions of tons of carbon out of the two. There's a number of ways so so we have started in niche markets. So we have started for example. The ring. see a to coca cola. Switzerland and they put it in one of their fizzy drinks. You can make fertilizer. We have another project running in switzerland where we pump into greenhouse wets used fertilizer. Two years ago we started on kind of pioneers service where we remove. Co two from the permanent permanently for private individuals companies and even governments. And i think the idea behind is as you can think of it. In this way. So we have basic tesla's we have built a tesla roadster so we've demonstrated works but it's still expensive and we're at the moment looking for people companies or governments who by down the price so so there can one day be the equivalent of a model three so to speak. You're saying these companies they're paying you to offset the carbon that they're burning. Is that right not quite. So they're paying us not to offset offset is usually an avoided emission certificate. So you admit somebody else doesn't emit and you buy the certificate and thereby you carbon useful so that's offsetting what we are doing net zero. So they pass to remove their emissions. I sit and the more companies that do that. The more revenue you can make the more affordable this becomes the price will come down dots that's The only question is will come down fast enough. Can we sell enough fast enough to make it big enough fast enough. If you're selling this byproducts companies like coca cola and. They're making fizzy drinks with it. Doesn't that just release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Yeah completely but what it does is it. Replaces fossil carbon. That's otherwise used in that would create a new emission. So if you if you take the to and basically lock it away permanently creating what's called a carbon removal or negative emission. But if you use the two four for a product usually it's emitted at the end of the life but then you close the carbon cycle so like nature you create circular economy without adding new fossil. Co to into the into the mix and that's the other big thing we need to do. There are people who might say all right. Well this sounds good. But why don't you just plant a bunch. More trees invest in renewable power or just even more importantly fundamentally change our lifestyles and our economies. What do you say to that. And that's correct and we need all of that but in addition we need what we do as well on top. so it's cheaper not to emit in in many many cases then to clean up afterwards. So yes reducing your emissions makes sense but then there are cases like for example aviation where you will very likely have unavoidable emissions. Because you can't go switch to batteries we can talk about making fueled from the co two. We take from the that's a whole pathway. We also looking into but in essence that there will be always unavoidable emissions. climate science. Already knows that we don't have enough space on the planet to that just with trees offers about eight hundred sixty times more space efficient than trees so in essence you can think of it. As kind of industrial photosynthesis and it's a lot smaller and a lot. More efficient kristof. Boiler is head of climate policy for climb works. It's a swiss company that just opened. The world's biggest carbon air capture plankton iceland earlier. This month chris. Thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you It has been ten thousand years since woolly mammoths went extinct. Some scientists are dreaming of using advanced dna sequencing. And bring them back. Well others still debating what caused their disappearance in the first place. Jeff saint clair of member station w. s. u. in northeast ohio reports on that debate matenaer and often spends his afternoons napping. It's a very soothing. Sound that's napping with a k. He's a master flint napper fashioning stone tools in his experimental archaeology lab at kent state university. Aaron is making replica. Clovis points the large fearsome looking blades. I discovered in the nineteen twenties near clovis new mexico. They were the signature weapon of paleo indian hunters who spread across north america. Thirteen thousand years ago. They entered a landscape. Filled with mythical mega-fauna woolly mammoths mastodons giant ground sloth and sabertooth cats all of which soon disappeared scientists have long debated whether hunters armed with clovis. Tips caused these extinctions. Aaron is using his flint. Knapping skills to find out along with a mechanical spear thrower. It's basically a bow calibrated. Replicate the speed of a throne or thrusted. Spear aaron uses lumps of clay to mimic mammoth meat. He's testing how far clovis point penetrates three to one. So let's see how far went into this block here four inches and that's going straight into flesh. No hi no hair nothing. I mean if you're firing this at actual mammoth run as quick as you can. Are you going to do is annoy it. In a recent study aaron and his team fire different sized. Clovis points into the clay meet more than two hundred times. They found that at least in the lab. The large stone weapons are not very good at killing elephant like creatures. This evidence suggests that not only did we not cause the extinction of probo citizens. I don't think we could have todd. Serravalle an archaeologist at the university of wyoming isn't buying it. He spent the past seven years excavating aside along the platte river where he believes ice age hunters speared a mammoth and set up camp to butcher it. He has no doubt that clovis hunters routinely brought down elephants. I tend to believe the archaeological evidence over this experimental as it's not only that he thinks these hunters were so adept that soon. After arriving north america they killed off mammoths mastodons in the lake anytime humans. Colonizing new environment of massive wave of extinctions falls. It's called the overkill hypothesis. The idea that a paleo indians hadn't arrived here first europeans would have met mammoths in the new world david. Meltzer archaeologist at southern methodist university says the overkill hypothesis coincided with the emerging environmental movement of the late nineteen sixties earth day is created in nineteen seventy all that stuff is swirling around. While the idea of ancient extinctions at the hands of human served as a powerful warning meltzer says the dozen or so sites where mammoth bones and stone tools were found together are not a smoking gun. That's one crime we didn't commit. We're guilty of god. Knows a million other things but that's not one of them. He points to massive climate change. Fifteen thousand years ago that set processes in motion wiping out dozens of ice age species without human. Help the debate over whether we kill them off is more than academic it holds. Open the possibility that there may have been a time when humans weren't the most destructive force on the planet for npr news. I'm jeff saint clair afghanistan some more attacks today. Gunman gunmen killed two members of the taliban in jalalabad. That's the eastern state provincial capital and it follows weaken attacks that in islamic state affiliate claimed responsibility for but the islamic state is not the only taliban rival seeking influence in the new afghanistan. Let's talk more now with kathy. Gannon of the associated press..
Brothers of the Serpent Podcast
"clovis hunter" Discussed on Brothers of the Serpent Podcast
"Ninety five cents per coin and ethereal ms two thousand three hundred sixteen dollars and fifty five cents. Both of those have gone down in the past twenty four hours. Yeah yeah need to buy some more. It looks like the whole market is dropping good news for buyers right all right well. Let's get into that book dude. You want to start the book. I'm skipping the news stories okay. They're lame it's a bunch of borys news stories. Yeah jazz cards okay. So what were we recently on. The we ended with. We were talking about the barnes criterion. Which was the this guy. Tried to make a statistical analysis of a tools. And how you can tell if they're geo facts or artifacts remember that. Yeah and that's called. The bar is talking about the we. Were discussing this. The something about the regular flaking are there are there. Bulbs is there a certain angles of angles of holiday tack or whatever of impact. Yeah and the way he was describing. It was kind of weird right angles to the something. Yeah and then. Of course the. I don't know if it's a bombshell but i thought it was pretty damning. They drop in the book right at the end of that whole thing. Is that none of those. The barnes criterion is always applied when somebody finds tools that are too old but they've never applied it to the old one and olduvai gorge discoveries. Which are the ones in africa. That support the model about of africa ancient hamad. They don't apply to those tools will. Yeah because they know those tools are. That's what i'm saying. So that was basically the last thing we had covered in the book so the next section here is called. Recent examples of olympic implements from the americas. So despite the best efforts of barnes and brule the iliffe question continues to haunt archaeologists. Several anonymously old crude stone tool industries of olympic types. Have been discovered in the america's most archaeologists say siberian hunters crossed into alaska on a land bridge that existed when the last glaciation lowered levels during this period. The canadian ice sheet blocked southward migration until about twelve thousand years ago when the first american immigrants followed an ice free passage to what is now the united states. These people were these so called. Clovis hunters famous for their characteristics spear points. These correspond to the highly evolved stone implements of the later paleolithic in europe. Nevertheless many sites excavated with modern archaeological methods have yielded dates as great as thirty thousand years for humans in the americas..