#1975 - Dan Flores

54:53I mean, I'd focus very specifically on Coyotes in the one book and wrote about the animals, all these grand animals of the great planes. This part of North America that wants up until about 120 years ago was our version of the Serengeti. And somehow while East Africa and Southern Africa managed to get these great game parks preserving their large charismatic animals here in the United States, we ended up privatizing all the great planes, turning it into farms and ranches and losing our ability to do that, at least until the present day, where we're trying to accomplish something like returning the American Serengeti.

55:34But those two books kind of set me up for stepping back and looking at a really big picture of this. And so I was inspired, I'll admit, by Yvall Harari's Sapiens, you know, his big history of humans across time. So what I was compelled to do with Well New World was to write a book that was a big history of North America and the relationship that people and animals have had in North America starting from, I mean, the book actually starts with the aftermath of the Chicksalube impact. That's the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals. And the reason I started there is because that's the moment at which North America starts acquiring its BC area, its creatures.

56:35In the aftermath of the dinosaur age, both through continental evolution in North America and through acquiring animals from other parts of the world as they crossed the land bridges and enter North America, in that, those millions of years after the Chicksalube impact, Chicksalube, by the way, is the name of the little Mayan village on the North Coast of the Yucatan near where that asteroid hit 66 million years ago. But in the Macedon and Sabritude cats and Buffalo and Pronghorns and camels and horses, I mean, it happens through continental evolution, as I said, and also through this migration from other parts of the world.

57:33But what I try to create with that and try to set up with that is this BC area of creatures that when humans finally get here. And I mean, after all, North and South America, the last places on earth humans find, except for a few islands in the Pacific that we get to later, the last grand continents on earth that humans get to are North and South America. By which time we have had, well, if you date us back even to Neanderthals, which goes back about 800 ,000 to a million years, and you assume that we and Neanderthals are obviously close enough to one another that we can hybridize. I mean, I don't have you done 23 in me?

58:16Yeah, I got a lot of it. Yeah, that's so do I, you know, and my wife has even more. And I think all of us that are from particularly sort of north western European backgrounds have ended up with a lot of Neanderthal, you know, for some people as much as 2 .5 % of their genes. Yeah. And it produces, you know, it makes you different than you would be otherwise. I suppose the late cordon 23 of me, I have less hair on my back that would, if I didn't have Neanderthal genes. I'm a little taller because of Neanderthal genes. All kinds of things like that. So, so if you date the human story even back and I started, I started our story as wild animals in Africa.

59:06And I bring us in one of the early chapters and the first chapter really up to the point where we're leaving Africa going into Europe, going into Asia. And of course, that process, again, if you start with Neanderthals, it goes back 800 ,000 years out of Africa into the rest of the world. But the Neanderthals never get to to the Americas. But when modern humans, we emerge about 315 ,000 years ago in Africa. And when we spread out of Africa and replace Neanderthals in Europe and denosive ones in Asia and finally get to Siberia about 45 ,000 years ago. As soon as there's a possibility for getting farther east, in other words, into North America, we take advantage of it.

1:00:01And I mean, as I argue in this book, the reason we do this, this is kind of one of the reasons why all of us love to find spots where it's a beautiful morning. I'm out here on this mountain. I don't there's not another soul in sight. It's just me and the world. That compulsion, I think, is really ancient. And it's what drew us out of Africa to other parts of the world start with. And what we're looking for are animals that have never encountered us before. Because they're naive about humans as predators. So this compulsion to travel finally to get to the great plumb of the Americas as the last great spot we get to on Earth drives us to the point where I don't know if you caught the news out of White Sands National Park about three or four years ago about the footprints that were discovered there, 23 ,000 years old.

1:01:12I mean, that's at the height of the glacial maximum, man. That's when the ice is at its greatest extent. And somehow people have gotten out of Asia, we think probably along the coastlines into what is now the United States. And the place that always seemed to draw them is the country south of the Rocky Mountains in waters in New Mexico and Arizona. And these people managed to get 23 ,000 years ago into waters now in New Mexico and left 79 footprints that have been carbon dated based on seeds that their feet crushed as they walked along the marshy shore of this lake. So we know that people probably coming down the coastlines maybe in some kind of craft managed to get here as long ago as 23 ,000 years.

1:02:05But what really, of course, propels the great human migration into America is when the ice sheets finally open at about 16 ,000 years ago as the glacial maximum begins to recede, there's an ice -free quarter that opens from Alaska down into Alberta and Montana. And at that point you get this massive migration, probably not massive to start with, maybe not very many people at all, but they encounter a wild new world, a world that is populated by some creatures they recognize, many ground sloths and so forth, humans have never seen before. And so we enter this American paradise of animals some 16 ,000 years ago in large numbers of humans and spread within about three centuries all the way to the tip of South America.

1:03:02It's kind of one of the great colonization stories in world history. That's amazing. Now at this point in time, what weapons do we think that they were using the hunt with? Were they using Adeladels? Were they using spears? Were they using, well, combination of these things? They were definitely using, so the first successful group that sort of spreads coast to coast. I mean, our first American culture that spreads from the Pacific to the Atlantic as a consistent culture of people. And I titled this particular chapter in the book, Clovisia the Beautiful because they establish a world that lasts longer than the United States has lasted so far.

1:03:47Their America the Beautiful, Clovisia the Beautiful last well over 300 years. And they're probably using spears, but they have come up with a great new technology which is the fluted point. They figured out away and fluted points aren't found in earlier times even in Siberia. So this was a purely American invention. They figured out a way to take flint points and flute the bass on either side so that you can solidly and very securely attach a spear to them. And they'll remain in place without flipping off or breaking off. So the fluted point is one of their great technological inventions. But the other thing that they bring to the game, Joe, is they come out of a tradition of at least 40 ,000 generations of hunting big animals.

1:04:49I mean, they know how to do this at literally a professional level. They are extremely good at it. I mean, one of the stories I tell in this early chapter, Clovisia the Beautiful, which is the second chapter of the book is of an episode that takes place in southern Arizona, what's now southern Arizona, about 13 ,000 years ago, when a group of Clovis hunters surround herd of mammoths. And in this herd is a bull, a herd bull, a herd cow, and 13 calves in adolescence. There are three archaeological sites associated with this particular episode. And one site, the most westerly, all 13 calves in adolescence archaeologists found dead in one spot each with a single Clovis point in its body.

1:05:50East of there in two different locations, the herd bull was found. He had run about three or four miles. He had two Clovis points in him and he finally bled out and died. But they found the cow about eight miles away. She had eight Clovis points in her before she died, indicating to the archaeologists who've studied these sites that the cow and classic elephant fashion had fought to defend those calves and those adolescents. She had put up a huge fight to try to defend them and ultimately she hadn't been successful. They had all been killed. She runs away and finally dies with eight Clovis points in her.

1:06:37But that's one episode out of, I mean we have no idea how many. There are something like 78 Clovis sites around North America. I mean we don't actually know when the transition to get to your question happened to add adults. But when the Clovis period is over, it's basically when the mammoths are done. I mean these people seem to have been fairly specialized as big game hunters. I mean they killed other animals but they really went after mammoths a lot. But they were succeeded by a group known as the Folsom people and the Folsom people used add adults. I mean I opened the book with the discovery of the first Folsom site.

1:07:24It's in Folsom New Mexico discovered in the year 1908. Can we pause this for a second because I have to pee and this is too fast and if we need to hold a send. 1908 Folsom people. Yeah we'll come back. We'll be right back. Okay. We're back. So 1908 they discover Folsom sites. Yeah. The first Folsom site. I mean so I don't want to spend too much time on this because this is all basically just the first couple of chapters of the well -known world. The rest of it is about subsequent history down to the present. But the Folsom discovery is really kind of important in the whole American history story because up until this point, this is the kind of thing that the Europeans are really good at of course.

1:08:11They sort of cast dispersions on America because their argument was America is really marginal to world history. I mean you guys we've had we know that we had people interacting with cave bears and mammoths and we have an ancient history going back to Greece and Rome and you Americans you kind of just you know you don't have much going on at all. And so what the Folsom site did was to give America an ancient history. A history that made us a major part of this world story that I was kind of alluding to when I was describing people finally discovering the Americas as the last Grand Continent on Earth.

1:08:58And what that what happened with the Folsom story is that there was a there was a flash flood on a river called the dry Simuron River in the August of 1908. And in the aftermath of that flash flood this African -American cowboy name Charles McJunkan is out riding fence for one of the local ranchers seeing what he's going to have to repair. And as he's riding along his horse suddenly pitches up and it's hooves slide in the mud right to the edge of this freshly cut about 30 foot chasm in the slope that he's riding. And when he leans out of his saddle and looks down into this this cut what he sees are bones of a gigantic size that he's never seen before.

1:09:52I mean this is a guy who he had been on the Buffalo hunting planes back in the 1870s so he had seen Buffalo butcher. He knew what bones from big animals look like but these were giant bones. And so this guy McJunkan started trying to call attention to this site. He never was able to do so and get any archaeologist out or paleontologists out to look at it. He dies in 1922 but about four years after his death this museum curator from Denver a guy named Jesse Figgins comes down and brings a crew down and what Figgins is interested in. He's sort of an amateur guy himself. He's just interested in some fancy big bones for his museum up in Denver.

1:10:39But his crew starts digging into this site. And they began uncovering these giant bison what they're finding is a site of bison antiquist. These giant bison that became extinct about 10 ,000 years ago the ones that the Folsom people had particularly specialized in hunting. And as they're excavating this site in the first summer they come across just sort of lying in the debris a couple of points like they've never seen before which are three or four inches long and have these thin flutes on either side at the base. There's one right there. There's one right there. The Folsom point. So what Figgins' guys realize is that the hurdle for convincing the world, the scientific hurdle for convincing the world that humans had been present in America at the time everybody thought Indians had only been in America for maybe a couple of thousand years before Europeans got here.

1:11:49But the hurdle was finding an extinct animal out of the plush the scene indicating that it had been killed by human technology while the animal was still alive. And the next summer, I mean it happened to be a summer when the Smithsonian had just published an article by some fancy archaeologist saying North America has no antiquity in its history. Indians have only been here for at most 2000 years probably less than that. And within about two months that article coming out this crew finds the scapula of one of these bison they're excavating with one of these clovus points embedded three quarters of the way into the bone.

1:12:39And at that point they stop digging. They call on all the famous archaeologists in the United States. A guy named Alfred Kitter was the most famous archaeologist in America at the time and he comes, takes a look and proclaims this one of the greatest discoveries in American history. So they don't have radio carbon dating yet and nobody knows how old this is. All they know is that that particular bison species has been extinct for quite a while. Figgins says this site is 400 ,000 years old. But when we finally do get radio carbon dating about two decades later it looks as if a band of Folsom hunters using ad addels using spare throwers had killed 32 bison anticochus in what had once been a box canyon on the southern plains 12 ,450 years ago.

1:13:40And so suddenly that discovery in the early 20th century in the 1920s gives America a kind of an antiquity that it had never had before. And within a decade we discover the Clovis site, which is out on the Texas New Mexico border. And the Clovis site is of these elephant hunters who are actually even older than the Folsom people. And this pushes when they're finally radio carbon dated that site pushes the dates back to the 13 ,000 year range. So what these discoveries in the 20s and 30s are finally indicating that contrary to what most Americans of the 20th century think, America is a brand new place.

1:14:25History dates to the time Europeans got here in the 1600s. You know, Indian people have only been here a couple thousand years. Suddenly we realize America is this really vastly old place. And that sets up the subsequent story that I mean I try to what I try to do. I mean I was an English major as an undergraduate. So I'm kind of drawn to narrative storytelling. Telling a lot of stories. And when you write a book with about 66 million years of history, obviously had a lot of opportunity to tell stories because there are a lot of stories in a span of time like that. But when you say that the Clovis points and the Folsom points with the fluted part of it were so you could attach a stick to it.

1:15:12Yeah. There's no people in Europe that figured this out. No, this was an American invention. Where did they use in Europe? They were just using blade points sometimes with the ears at the bottom. So the ears. Yeah, the ears. So you have a triangular point and it has two ears coming out and you attach. You use the ears as a place to attach the raw hide. And so this was metal. No, not metal. What were they using? Flint. They were using flint as well. So when they were making these points, they were just doing it in a different way. They were doing it in a different way. So they'd figured out the same sort of technology kind of attaching a stick, but they had different methods that seemed to be just human ingenuity.

1:15:58When did they figure that out? Well, they certainly figured it out by what's called the salutary in culture, which is sort of a contemporary with clovist. They're hunting big animals. They're hunting mammoths and rhinos and things like that in Europe. So that's in the 16 ,000, 17 ,000 year. Right. Yeah. So this this fluted idea is a distinctive North American invention. Is there any difference in the quality of the type of the stone that was accessible to people in North America versus Europe? Well, I mean, both places had outcrops of flint and flint and obsidian, where the two types of stone you went for.

1:16:43But North America had some really great flint and obsidian outcrops. And one of the things that's really pretty fascinating about these clovist people, about clovicity of the beautiful, and it's and they were all over America, by the way, there are more of their points discovered in the southeast and in New England than there are in many places in the West. So this is not just a Western phenomenon. This just happens to be where we discovered them first, but they were all over America. But they went for they seem to be making pilgrimages to four or five locations that had the absolute best sharpest hardest flint in America.

1:17:32And they would go back to those spots again and again and again, kind of had a in their minds, a mental geography of where these locations were. Wow. Yeah. So they one of the great things about the whole clovist period to a little lesser extent, Fulsum, is that there are these spectacular blades that they did. And sometimes they would do blades that were like eight or nine or ten inches long. And there are some of them, caches of some of these blades of that size that indicate they were never used. They basically were kind of ceremonial objects. I mean, I kind of argue in the book, I mean, it's pretty much speculation because we don't really know a huge amount about these people.

1:18:19But one of the things I I argue is that the unlike in Western Europe, they didn't leave us grand cave art of these animals that they were hiding. It's almost as if their tools were their art. And it was their tools kind of represented this ultimate technology, this sublime technology that they would actually create in some form in blades that they never really used to hunt just to have as ceremonial objects. Wow. So it's a, I mean, it's a really fascinating story. I mean, we've known about the clovist people obviously for a long time. We've been trying to figure out, of course, other explanations for what happened to the animals of the Pleistasean because we lost a lot of them during the Pleistasean.

1:19:18And people have proposed all sorts of other theories. But one of the strange things about this story, I mean, I tried to do a book that's based on all the latest science I could find and all the best people who are doing archaeology and paleontology and genomic science. I mean, it's one of the possibilities these days. It's we have genomic science. It's able to tell us things now that we've never known even over the last 15 or 20 years. And one of the fascinating things about it is that it's almost like climate change. We've tried to come up with every other possible explanation to let ourselves off the hook for climate change.

1:20:02But it almost looks like this is an old attribute of human self interest and human nature. We tend to not want to blame ourselves for very much at all. We tend to look for other excuses for things. And none of the other suggestions about what might have happened other than humans probably entered a continent with animals that were completely naive about us. And in the time that it took them to smarten up and confront us, we were able to scatter them enough that what we kind of think now is that we may have gotten like populations of mammoths so separated from one another that they couldn't exchange their genes.

1:20:50And they may have succumbed to, I don't know if you've probably heard of what happened to the mammoths on Wrangle Island. There was a group of mammoths out on an island in the sea off the coast of Alaska that were caught by rising waters in the bearing sea and were isolated and survived down to about 4 ,000 years ago. But even though humans never found them, even though the climate changed, the animals were fine until they finally reached a point where they had a small enough genetic diversity that as they enter bread with one another over and over again, mistakes began to build into their genome to the point where they finally became unable to reproduce.

1:21:38And 4 ,000 years ago without any other effect being present, they died out. Do we have biological remains or skeletal remains of clovus people and people from that time period? Yeah, we do. There's actually a clovus burial site in Montana of two infants, a young child and an infant. And they were buried with ceremonial clovus points, several inches long, covered in sacred what we think, with sacred red ochre. And that particular site in 2014, the local native people in Montana, as near Bozeman, and the local native people and archaeologists went out to the Shields River, the nearby Shields River.

1:22:39And after studying these young skeletons, they re -barried them in the Shields River, so they returned them to the earth in 2014. So they re -buried them in the same site where they found them? Near the same site. Yeah, they were found on the banks of the Shields River. That's interesting that they chose to do that, because I can understand why they would think to respect the bodies in Burium, but I could also understand like four science. Like what an incredible discovery. Yeah, well they did do science on them, but... Was there genetic material? There was not no physical tissue, no marrow or anything.

1:23:18Not that I'm aware, and I could be wrong about that, but I don't think so. Do they have an understanding of where these people might have come from originally? They seem to have come, yeah, and again, because we do have some sites, I mean the closest people ended up all the way down into South America, and we do have genomic evidence from some of the sites that have preserved enough DNA to make educated guesses about this, that their origin was probably the Lake By -Call region in Siberia, and that they probably, when the ice sheets opened, they probably came down in two different migrations, a kind of a northern Native American and a southern Native American migration they're often called, even though both groups ended up with genetic markers as far south as Colombia and Brazil and places like that.

1:24:16But yeah, so we've got enough genetic material that we are able to do that kind of thing. I don't think that burial site in Montana yielded any, but there were other sites that did. When did archery make its way to North America? Well, that was the next great, obviously the next great innovation, and the reason these innovations were important by the way, and to answer your question, it was about 2000 years ago, and it seemed to come from the late arrival of Intuit people, the ancestors of folks who are sometimes called Eskimo, the Intuit people seem to either adapt or bring archery with them when they got to North America, and the idea for that then diffused spread through all of North America within about five or six hundred years.

1:25:08So we know that archery absolutely existed 2000 years ago in Africa and in some other places. When did archery first, when did they believe archery was first invented? Let's find that out. That's interesting. Yeah. So just 2000 years of archery was incredible. You know, and what it meant was each one of these developments, particularly ad -addles and archery and bows, meant that you didn't have to do what Neanderthals had done, which is engaged in sort of hand -to -hand combat with large, strong, and sometimes really resilient creatures like wild horses or mammoths at close range. I mean, some of these Neanderthal sites, for example, I mean, the guys were just beaten to hell.

1:26:06I mean, they had their cheeks caved in, they had broken, I mean, thigh bones broken. They had amputated arms, all kinds of really severe injuries from taking on animals. But Neanderthals, one of the things we know from nitrogen isotope studies of their bones is Neanderthals were more carnivorous than wolves were. I mean, they were eating a higher percentage of meat diet than even gray wolves in Europe. Wow. So each one of these kind of innovations, ad -addles, of course, by extending the human arm, you're able to stand back 30, 40 yards from an animal and throw a dart and kill it. With bows, you're able to get back even farther.

1:26:56I mean, they rescue you from sort of doing hand -to -hand combat with an animal that can easily kill you or crush you. What were Neanderthals using for weapons? They were primarily using wooden spears. They didn't have flint points. They were using spears that with points that had been hardened in fires. Wow. Oldest arrow is here, like 72 ,000 years ago.

1:27:27That's insane. 72 to 60 ,000 years ago. Some of which poisons may have been used. Likely our heads were reported in 2020 by Fahin Cave in Sri Lanka, dated to 48 ,000 years ago. Wow. Bone arrow hunting in Sri Lankan site, likely focused on monkeys and smaller animals such as squirrels, remains of these creatures have found the same sediment as the bone points. All they used bone points. In 2022, arrowheads were reported from the grot, I didn't say that, Mandarin, Cave, and France, dating to around 54 ,000 years ago. Wow. Yeah, so you can get an idea of, and this is important to the whole story of the isolation of North America.

1:28:18Once people get there, and the glacial maximum recedes and the climate begins to warm enough to break apart the corridor that links Asia and North America, then North America is completely isolated, except for South, the South American connection through Panama is completely isolated from the rest of the world. It's isolated, not only from innovations like the use of bows and the old world, but, and this becomes, of course, a major part of the story when Europeans arrive with domesticated animals from which they for eight or nine or 10 ,000 years have been contracting spillover diseases, creating a European population has now been winnowed by things like measles and smallpox and plague and all kinds of diseases that had spread across Eurasia, but never got to isolated North and South America.

1:29:23And so, when Europeans arrive with domesticated animals and animal diseases, this, they confront a, on a American population of native people who have never been exposed to any of them. And that results in one of the great, possibly the greatest catastrophe in human history. It's the term that people have been using these days is the great dying. I mean, we think, by the time Europeans got here, and I don't want to, by the way, admit the fact I do a whole chapter called Ravens in Coyotes America that is about the 10 ,000 years after the Pleistocene, because native people are here for 10 ,000 years and managed to preserve almost all the biological diversity, at least what's left after the Pleistocene for 10 ,000 years.

1:30:16There's only one extinction that I was able to find during that time, a flightless sea duck became extinct in that 10 ,000 year period. But I mean, they managed to preserve almost all of North America's biodiversity across that time span. And then Europeans arrive with all these old world diseases. And in a blink of an eye, what had at one point been, and to be sure most of this population is in South America, 56 million people in the two Americas, something like 80 to 85 percent of that population is taken out in a few decades by old world diseases.

1:31:00Yeah, it's, as I said, it may be the greatest human catastrophe that's the speculation for what happened to the Mayans and the Aztecs and a lot of these amazing structures that they're now finding in the Amazon jungle. Oh yeah. Yeah, they were take, I mean, you know, some of these civilizations, like, you know, in North America, we had the great Chacoan civilization that was our version of the Mayan or Aztec, our toll -tech groups down in Central America. I mean, we had this great civilization in the American Southwest centered around water today, the Chacoan National Park ruins with a civilization that spread over probably 50 ,000 square miles and included hundreds of small hamlets and a central city, Chaco, that was sort of like the Vatican.

1:31:58I mean, there were priests who lived there most of the year, priests who through the history of Chacoan inherited generation after generation, their position. I mean, there's a fascinating archaeological site at Chacoan that shows 14 burials in one room. Nine of those burials span the entire history, the 300 year history of Chaco. Every one of those nine is related to one another through a female line, the mitochondrial line, and each of the nine present from the start of Chaco to the end of it from about 900 to about 1200 has a genetic abnormality, a sixth toe on one foot. Whoa. So these were the people who were regarded as the priests of the place.

1:33:00And so a couple of times a year, usually at the solstices, they would have these big celebrations and 40 ,000 people would flock into Chaco and observe the solstices and do ceremonies and no doubt engage in all sorts of epic nightlife too. But over time, over 300 years of time, drought and a local overuse of resources. And also, I mean, this is kind of the famous story of Chaco. What really sort of happened to Chaco is that the priests were promising all of their followers that they could make it rain in the desert because this was an agricultural agriculture had finally come to North America.

1:33:46And we reached a point when droughts began to strike and the priests couldn't make it rain. At which point, all their followers basically abandoned their religion. And the archaeologists who have gone in have sort of pointed out that so it kind of looks as if a disparity in lifestyle must have contributed because the priests and the priestly class, they were the ones that were getting to eat all the protein from the deer and the peasants. They lived longer. Their children got past the age of five much more easily. And so there is speculation about Chaco that the disparity in wealth followed by the inability of the priests to deliver and make it rain is what caused this civilization to collapse when the peasant class basically rose up and overthrew it.

1:34:57Wow. That's so fascinating because that seems like that just happens with humans. When humans get into position of power, they want to maintain it and tighten up the grips on everybody else. They want rules for them, but not for everyone else. They want to have different privileges. That's what we're dealing with this like literally right now. Well, sure. I mean, you know, it shouldn't surprise us. I guess it shouldn't surprise us. Human nature has been the same. Yeah. It's probably been the same for three million years. But it's just so fascinating when you see it manifesting in this ancient culture and the people wise up and go, you can't make it rain.

1:35:31Yeah. And then they eventually get sick of giving these people all their deer. Yeah. Are there images of this particular site that Jamie could find we could see what it looks like? Yeah. If you just punch up Chaco Canyon Historic National Park, you'll find the major side, and I've got of course photographs of all this in the book, but the major side is called Pueblo Bonito, B -O -N -I -T -O. And so how long did their civilization thrive for? For about 300 years. Just like us. Yeah. Just like us. Yeah. Just like us. With a cycle. With a disparity of wealth that produced. Unless you have a authoritarian dictatorship, you can get people to do whatever the fuck you want and you keep thinking going.

1:36:19So that's Pueblo Bonito. And so you'll notice this, the caption there, did women control the bloodline, which speaks to what I was just telling you a minute ago, out of those burials in this central room, in this structure, they all, nine of the 14 buried there were all related to a single woman who was at Chaco at the founding of this civilization. Wow. Now, is there an artist rendering or representation of what it must have looked at that? That looks incredible. Yeah, there is. The National Park Service, I know, has done one on some of their brochures of what it looked like originally. See if you can find anything like that, Jamie, an artist rendering of what it looked like.

1:37:06That's wild stuff. And so what years was this again? Basically 900 to 1200. Wow. Look at that. Yeah. That's incredible. They built 400 miles of roads, by the way. And they built their roads straight arrow across the landscape. I mean, they didn't swerve around maces or buttes. So yeah, this would have been what Pueblo Benito looked like. And as you see, AD 1100. Oh, they have that one tree. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. When they first settled the area, it was covered in a pinion, juniper vegetation. But almost all those trees disappeared over the life of Chaco because these people were farming the classic Mexican cultivar complex corn beans a squash, all of which require fires to prepare.

1:38:14And so when you have a food dish that requires you to build a fire to prepare it, and you're in an area with a limit to resource of possible of possible wood, over time, a civilization of that size almost completely obliterated all the surrounding all the seasons. No. And stone axes. Yeah. Sure. I mean, it's yet another example of human nature that's always been in place. And you know, we tend to be so self centered or living in our own heads that we think all these things, this just applies to us. Right. But these kind of things, living for status, you know, acting in a way that separates you from the lowly peasants of the world.

1:39:02I mean, this is ancient. And we have always figured out ways to do it, ways to distinguish ourselves. And those kinds of things have often led to, you know, serious problems in human history. Yeah, it's just so fascinating to see that this has always been the case. And people have always been very short -sighted in terms of allocation of resources and preservation of resources. We always have. And we have another instinct too. We tend to, whenever things start growing short of things, we always blame somebody else. This is the classic way of bad spirits, enemies. Yeah, enemies, some other group.

1:39:41Right. Yeah. I mean, you know, in sub -sacrifice European history. And so I will say what we've been talking about. It's primarily the first three chapters of this book. And the last seven chapters, plus the epilogue is all about the period from the time Europeans arrive up to the present, up to really last year. But I mean, all these same things play out in the story. I mean, Europeans, unlike Native people, I mean, and I make an argument for why Native people, I think, preserve that biodiversity for so long. I mean, despite examples like Chaco, you still have virtually all the animals, all the birds, all the reptiles that had survived the plies to seeing 10 ,000 years of human occupation later.

1:40:33They're all still here when Europeans get here. And I think, I mean, I explain it several ways, one of which is the population of North America, North of the Rio Grande River never rises about 5 million. These people understand that you've got to keep your population in check or you will use up the world. And so they consciously do it. How do they consciously do that? Do we know? Well, they do it primarily by various techniques of holding birth rates down. And one way of doing it is birth spacing. You nurse children, say, for till they're five or six years old. And as long as women are nursing, they don't go through another chance to get pregnant.

1:41:19So that space is births out. And the other thing they do is, frankly, they engage in abortion. I mean, they very actively decide, in some instances, that we don't have the resources to support this infant. Do we know how they did that? Well, they did it by various herbal means. And they also sometimes engage, for, I mean, this is pretty draconian, but they sometimes engaged in killing infants after they were born. In fantasize, I mean, it wasn't hugely common. And I'll say this also about in fantasize, after a woman would carry a baby to a term, and then have it killed, it created the impulse that probably helped lead to the development of agriculture.

1:42:17I mean, agriculture is the next great economy and innovation in the way humans live. And what it enables you to do, I mean, one of the things that seems to prompt it is that you've lowered the possible animal life around you to the degree that you can't really keep going as hunters and gatherers. So you have to come up with something else. And in North America, native people do this several thousand years. They go to agriculture several thousand years later than Europe does. I mean, Europe has been continuously occupied for 55, 60 ,000 years. So they've been reduced earlier by eight or nine or 10 ,000 years ago and have to go to agriculture and domestication.

1:43:06In North America, we don't really do it until about four, five thousand years ago. And in what is now the United States, only really about 1500, 2000 years ago, do you have the first evidence of going to agriculture? But people are anxious to come up with a new economy that doesn't require you to be so dracconian about population suppression. So they just thought of any new baby as a threat to the food source. Well, some new babies, not everyone. Yeah, but some new babies had a number. They had a number. They're very clear to them. And they had really short feedback loops and they understood their local ecology is really well.

1:43:46And one of the things you knew is that you couldn't base your population on the best years you experienced. You had to base your population usually on the worst years. Because if you went for the best years, whenever the worst ones came along, you were going to end up really hit hard. Starving to death was a real possibility. A real possibility. So you're cautious and you base what you think the carrying capacity of your resource base is on the worst years you're going to face. And this is speculation. Is this educated guess? How do we know this? Well, it's beyond speculation. I mean, we know this is a principle of sort of a hundred gather life ways around the world, even still among some hundred gatherers that exist today.

1:44:33They still employ those kind of techniques. But they're always looking for the opportunity to escape that. And for people in Europe 10 ,000 years ago and for people in North America, you know, between five and two thousand years ago, the opportunity to escape it somewhat was agriculture because that produced, if you specialized in a few food crops. And by the way, one of the differences in agriculture and the neolithic revolution in the old world and the Americas is in the old world, obviously much of it depends on domesticating animals. The animals that are left after the end of the plight to see in Europe, horses, camels, goats, sheep, hogs, cows, wild orcs are almost all domesticated.

1:45:30I mean, in some cases, in the case of wild horses, it's probably what saved them is that they got domesticated. In North America, though, there were almost no domestications. Wild turkeys were domesticated. Some groups domesticated ducks. But there weren't any mammals. Nobody domesticated bison or big horn sheep or prong horns. And one of the things that does when Europeans arrive is that, I mean, Europeans come out of this ancient 8 ,000 year old herding culture. They've been herding religious tradition, ultimately the Judeo -Christian tradition, which is probably based on earlier things, to be sure.

1:46:23That is basically a herders religion, where what that religion teaches you is that not only are humans exceptional, but it teaches you that predators are the enemy. Any animal that prays on your sheep or your goats has to be eliminated. Meanwhile, in North America, where you don't have domestications of animals, predators are regarded as these prized, sacred creatures who keep the world functioning the way it's supposed to function. And people look for a predator as a totem animal in a vision quest. Are they name their clan, the Wolf clan, or the Panther clan? So it produces a world when the two groups come together.

1:47:23Here are these native people who still have the ancient human idea that we are part of everything around us. Other animals are just like us. They have societies. They can actually intermarry with us. I mean, many native ceremonies, and I describe several of them in the book, or about whenever you confront the idea of animals are becoming scarce, you do ceremonies that are designed to not only make the animals reappear for you, but the way you do that is to convince them that you still regard them as kin. You're still willing to do a ceremony where you go through a kind of a faux series of marriages between humans and bison.

1:48:15And so this kind of, we're all part of a kinship web. I mean, it's what Charles Darwin finally provides the scientific evidence for. And on the origin of species, 1859, we're out of the same evolutionary stream. Europeans have, meanwhile, old worlders have come up with a completely different idea. This hurting religion they have is that posits that, well, I'll tell you the story that sort of launched me writing this book. This is a kind of a good way to say this, I guess. My oldest memory is from when I was four years old. I mean, psychologists say a lot of us, our oldest memory is from the age of four.

1:49:00This is the only one I really remember from the age of four. And I think the reason I remember is because it's sort of laden in emotional content. So it's really engraved in my system. And here's what happened. When I was four years old, I had the first little animal companion I ever had. And it was a little chicken, a little, you know, a few weeks old chickens, still yellow. And I'm not very imaginative as four year old, so I name it Chicky. And so Chicky and I, my first great friend and buddy, spend our time dashing through my parents' house in Louisiana in a game of chase. And I'm chasing Chicky underneath the sewing machine, underneath the couch, and underneath the dining table.

1:49:48And one day, you know, as a little clumsy four year old, I miscalculate and I step on my little chicken and I kill it. So I'm four years old. I'm confronting mortality and loss for the first time. My mom and I go out in the backyard. And I mean, we're both crying and we bury Chicky. And as we're standing there, and I've, you know, shovel dirt over Chicky and sobbing away the whole time. And I turn to my mother. And I say, so mom, this sort of one last plead, mom, I get to have Chicky again in heaven, don't I? And my mother who is this good Southern Methodist and has absorbed the Western world view and its entirety.

1:50:40And who's also kind of known all her life for giving you the unpainted version of things. Anyway, even if you're four years old, I guess she looks down at me and although she's crying and feels compassion for me, she says she's got to tell me the truth. Why no, honey? You're made in the image of God and you have an everlasting soul. So when you die, you get to go to heaven. Chicky is just an animal. Chicky's don't get to do anything like that. So I'm afraid Chicky is just dead. So it was my instruction in the European world view. Other creatures are something completely different. Bear in the Judeo -Christian tradition.

1:51:31Other animals are made for our use. They're made as Genesis puts it unto your hand. Are they delivered? You can basically do anything you want with them. And with this idea of humans as exceptional and everything else out there as just sort of for utility purposes to make the lives of humans better. I mean, we arrive in North America with this idea, very different from what native people with their kinship notions have, and also with burgeoning capitalism, the beginnings of the global market economy. And with so many native people dying, North America is undergoing this huge ecological release of wildlife.

1:52:31It's the origin of our virgin America stories where North America is just teeming with everything under the sun. And we look on animals then as just being like gold, trees, grass, whatever we want to exploit, we turn them into commodities. And it's sort of the explanation for the global North American fur trade, beavers as an object of pursuit, white tail deer as an object of pursuit for leather. We should tell people that beaver were so in pursuit that at one time the richest man in the world was a beaver failure. Yes. The richest man in the world sold beaver pelts. John Jacob Astor, yeah. And the first great American corporation was a fur trading corporation to exploit the beaver populations of North America.

1:53:25How wild is that? Yeah. So this is the story then that starts on foling. And you know, and it's amplified by the fact that all these Europeans who have come over, especially the ones from England and France, they've gone through centuries of the feudal economy where these lords of the manner and kings control access not just to landscapes but to animals. So I mean, it's the origin of the Robin Hood story. Robin Hood is a deer poacher who represents the peasant population that the King's forest and the sheriff of Nottingham as the game warden won't let him at. So suddenly, this population of people who has been resentful about the fact that they can't hunt, that they can't enjoy the bounty of the forest in Europe arrive in North America.

1:54:23And even though the native people try to convince Europeans the deer or like our cattle, you have to understand they belong to us. Europeans of course don't acknowledge that. And suddenly here are all these animals, all this wildlife. I mean, in super abundance and nobody is telling you that you can't go after it. And then there's market homing. And then there's and so yeah. And so a lot of them, I mean, this is how rural and lower class people basically rise to the middle class as you exploit animal populations and sell them. And that gets you into the currency economy. It's so fortunate that they figured this out somewhere early in the 20th century and started instituting wildlife conservation and, you know, reintroducing animals and things on those lines.

1:55:19It's just, well, yeah. And of course, I track the story all the way through and I won't elaborate on how it goes. I will say that there have been a couple of reviews on like good reads and Amazon of this book where people say, well, this is an anti -hunting book, I mean, which is kind of, you know, it caused me a certain amount of sugar in because of how I grew up. I'm I mean, I stopped hunting in my 20s, but when I was in Montana, at least three times in the last decade I was there, I would buy on deer license and shoot a mule deer out in the pasture in order to stock my freezer with Venison.

1:56:03And in some ways, I mean, I look at this book as this is probably the most comprehensive story of the human relationship with animals, which obviously involves hunting that anybody has told at least about North America. You can't re -reviews. Because there's always going to be someone that has a ridiculous take on things. Then you have to argue that ridiculous take because it doesn't make any sense to you. And then you're wasting time on some fool's ideas. Yeah, you're wasting time. And you know, what a lot of people do is if they already think what you're saying, I mean, you get five star reviews.

1:56:34If you say something that is not part of their, the package that they bring to the game. Right. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Yeah, that, the anti -hunting notion is an interesting one. I mean, it's just reality. The reality of North America to say that that's anti -hunting, that's ridiculous. That's just reality. It's just the market hunting thing is well documented, I mean, particularly in regards to the buffalo. When you see bison skull stacked on top of each other, anybody that doesn't think that that looks absolutely hideous and horrific. Like how did they get so far gone that they thought that was okay?

1:57:09Yeah. I mean, at the same time, that was happening. I mean, we were taking out, I mean, this is one of the ones that stuns me. Passage your pigeons. The most numerous bird, not just in North America, but in the world. We think there may have been 10 billion of them at one point, had been in North America for 15 million years. Those birds couldn't survive 400 years of our presence. It's amazing. Once we arrive, they can't last, I mean, they actually, they only last about 300 years after we arrived. How did they kill so many of them before they had firearms? Well, passenger pigeons, I mean, it was very much like the industrial hunt for bison.

1:57:50I mean, you had to use firearms, obviously, for that. But for passenger pigeons, the commercial hunt, the market hunt was basically done with nets. You spread nets across the forest and they were spring loaded and were released. And what they would do is they use live passenger pigeon decoys that were placed on the end of a pedestal that rock back and forth. They were called stools. And so the passenger pigeon decoy was referred to as a stool pigeon. Wow. And so that's where that comes from. What did that look like? Can you see if you can find an image of what that looked like? So, you know, we get stool pigeon from, you know, the gangster movies about the 19, 20s, 19, 30s.

1:58:44And what they're referring to is stool pigeon is basically a trader. The stool pigeon rats you out. Wow. And so this was all market hunting as well. The past year pigeon. Yeah, it was market. I mean, people don't think of pigeons as being a food source, but that is really what they were. Yeah. So this this pigeon is secured in place somehow. Yeah. So it is it's fader attached to the stool. Wow. And yeah. And the live ones, the live birds that you did this with when you rocked the stool back and forth, it would flap its wings if it's as if it were landing. And that would then bring down. Wow. They would spring load the nets and capture them all.

1:59:30And they wiped out the entire population that way. That's incredible. And one of the reasons they wiped the population out was because, I mean, in the last in the last hunts, which were taking place in the upper Midwest in Wisconsin, in particular, I mean, they went after them while they were on their nests. So why were they surprised? I mean, the whole idea is as when the last past year pigeon died, for example, in 1914, famous story it dies in the Cincinnati Zoo, Martha, it's called after Martha Washington. Martha dies in 1914. Okay. So that's the beginning of World War One, the Great War, to be sure lots of newspapers were focused on other things.

2:00:18But I could hardly find any newspapers in America that wrote an obituary about the last past year pigeon, what had been the most enumerous bird, the most charismatic bird and the emblem bird, our symbol of avian America, I could find one newspaper that wrote an obituary. Wow. And that newspaper said, you know, we guess we should feel bad about the loss of the past year pigeons. But on the other hand, maybe it's a good thing that they're not going to be like grasshoppers and stick around with us. So that was kind of the extent. Anyway, I use a lot of this as essentially argue that, you know, I mean, I do this theme of first contact a lot.

2:01:12And I mentioned the first contact between humans and animals that they had never seen. Talk about first contact in the book between Europeans and native people. And the whole idea of first contact theory is that the only way you can really relate to something brand new that you've never seen is through what's already in your head. You already have some notions, and that's how you understand the new. And then after you've had some familiarity with it, you can develop new notions. But one of the themes I do in the book is essentially continental first contact. And what I'm arguing with it is that what we bring out of the old world to America is the conviction that we're going to recreate North America, the United States, in the image, or as clones of England, France, Germany.

2:02:02Because that's all we know. It's all we know. And these are places, of course, that in the previous several hundred years before colonization in North America had wiped out all their big animals. I mean, all you've got left in England has any wolves since the 1400s. They got partridges. And so people come to North America. And immediately the idea is whatever is really wild, we really need to get rid of it. Passengers pigeons, bison, grizzly bears, wolves, those are not the earmarks of a civilized society. England doesn't have those kinds of things. And so I mean, it kind of takes the heroes of this book, I think, are probably the ecologists of the 20th century who began to realize, so North America is really old.

2:02:59It's had all these animals for a really long time. And all these ideas out of Europe, actually, they're not based on science. They're based on just old folk traditions out of this herding kind of culture. So we've got a chance to do something new here. And we've created this vast public land system in North America. So we actually are able to get to have all these big charismatic animals. If we just wake up in time, I mean, it's Aldo Leopold really who sort of is the advocate for this more than anybody else by the middle of the 20th century. He's arguing that we need to do an American thing. Not just try to make the United States into some version of England, because as Henry David Thoreau had famously said back in the middle of 19th century, he was reading the accounts of the first Europeans to get to Massachusetts, seeing all these creatures and huge abundance.

2:04:02200 years later, 1857, he's sitting there in his study and realizing, I don't get to see any of this really. And he writes this incredible passage in his journal in March of 1857, where he says, I realize it's like going to a symphony and midway through the first movement, it suddenly occurs to me, wow, there are no strings. There are no, wow, there are no woodwinds. There's no percussion. That's all gone. And then he goes further and he says, it's like looking up at the stars at night and realizing that some demigod has come before you and plucked all the best of the constellations out of the sky.

2:04:53And you're not getting to see the full night sky. And he says, you know, I realize somebody has come along and emasculated America before I could live in it quickly. And then he has this great line. And I use it as the title of one of the chapters in here. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. He says, I want to know the full thing. I don't want to think that somebody has come before me and selfishly robbed me of all these experiences. It's just so bizarre that human beings repeat the same patterns over and over and over again. And with the invention of firearms, they were able to do it so effectively.

2:05:45And with those traps that they use for the stool pigeons, use it so effectively that they could completely change the landscape in a relatively short amount of time. And a short amount of time, you know, and I mean, it takes until, so this year, 2023 is the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. I mean, and this was kind of the Hail Mary. Now, to be sure, back at the beginning of the 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt is present, I mean, we come up with the game laws for most of the states, which are all aimed, of course, at what we're trying to preserve are the things that people want to hunt.

2:06:25And we have the idea that we're going to get rid of all the predators and we're going to substitute human sport hunters for predation. This is how we're going to, because one of the things they're confronting in the early 20th century is what's called as they remove predators from various regions. They, the ungulate populations, deer and elk and mues start going through eruptions. They start, their population starts just booming. And then they'll eat all the forage and die. Elder Leopold studied this and said before 1900, he could find mentions of only two eruptions like this that had happened in America.

2:07:05After 1900 and we started the Predator War, he found 42 of them. So the idea was we're going to use human hunters as the substitute for the predators that were taking out. And of course, that enabled us to preserve a lot of, a lot of animals that people want to hunt, elk and deer and, and prong horns and so forth, even though we've gotten prong horns from 35 million down to 5 ,000 by this point. They're the most ancient of the North American animals, yeah, and they're distinctively North American too. Yeah, it's so weird, such a strange animal. Strange, and you see them in due comparison to everything else.

2:07:45But are they an actual antelope? What are they? Well, they're, they're an antelope goat. Antelope capriday is the, the family name, uh, which had to be created for them. And actually, it looks like maybe they're closest relatives or giraffes. Whoa, they kind of look like giraffes. Yeah, they're, they're, their legs in particular. Their eyes too. Yeah, and the great big eyes that are mounted on the sides of the head. Yeah, look at that guy. Yeah, what a cool animal that is. Yeah, and they, you know, one of the great things about them too is that, uh, okay, so they can run the females in particular, can run 60, 65 miles an hour, which puzzled biologists for a while because the only predators they have possibly are wolves and coyotes, neither of which can run over about 42 or 43 miles an hour.

2:08:39So the question for a while was, so why the speed overkill until we began to realize these guys developed their ability to run back during the Pleistocene when they were being pursued by American Cheetahs. And they still, the females still select for the fastest males to breed with in order to preserve this high speed. So the result is, promhorns only have predators when they're fawns. They don't have predators as adults because nothing that's alive now can catch them at one time a cheetah could catch them. But nothing can catch them now. And since they are preyed on only as fawns, the one of the adaptations that, that promhorns have made to predation is they have two fawns.

2:09:32You have two fawns, a spare and an air with the idea that the spare is likely to be taken out as a fawn, but at least you're going to preserve your, your genetic line with, is it mostly coyotes? What gets them? Primarily coyotes. Coyotes are able to find them. I mean, we don't have enough wolves out in the Prairie Country anymore to have any impact on promhorns, but coyotes certainly look for the fawns. Yeah, there's some in California still and they used to have a larger population up until, I think, 20 or 30 years ago. And then the coyotes started taking them out with such regularity that they're reduced to just a very small number now.

2:10:12Yeah, they, there's another spotter too where coyotes have had an impact on them, but I mean, this adaptation of two fawns is evidently very old and obviously it's allowed them to survive. One of the more fascinating things that I learned from you also is the subject of bison and the enormous populations of bison that were witnessed at one point in history and that it coincided with the European spread of diseases. Yeah, and the spread of bison out of the great plains. Yeah, the bison story, and I obviously I tell it in several places, sort of the advent of the bison story early and well -known world, and then the sort of, you know, the day new maw in a later chapter, but the modern bison is actually a dwarfed animal compared to the bison of the plies to seeing that succeeded those earlier larger forms about 8 ,000 years ago and very likely became dwarfed because of anthropogenic selection, human, human hunting pressure because only wolves and humans really are effective predators of bison.

2:11:39And what you get by becoming smaller is a quicker emergence as fertile. So bison that are smaller can have calves at an earlier age when the cows are two years old or three years old, they can begin having calves. The gestation period is not as long for smaller animals and so you're able to, in other words, these are advantages for reproduction. And this new bison 8 ,000 years ago essentially inherits the grazing niche on the American Great Plains that had formerly been occupied by all kinds of creatures that are now gone, including things like mammoths that are grazers just like modern African elephants are.

2:12:32And so as a result of inheriting a grazing niche now depopulated with no horses to compete with, with no mammoths to compete with, they become this huge mass. I mean, this is why bison multiply into the millions on the Great Plains. And in fact, they probably become so numerous like passenger pigeons, this is one of the arguments for why passenger pigeons survived so long, they're so numerous that they saturate the predator possibilities. Predators just can't take enough of them to ever actually reduce their numbers. And so what happens, I mean, native people hunt bison for, modern bison for 8 ,000 years, that's the longest economic life way in North American history.

2:13:25But just about the time that Europeans are arriving and very likely contributed to by the arrival of Europeans in the disease epidemics that wipe out so many native people. Bison populations began to expand out of the Great Plains west of the Rocky Mountains. I mean, they get all the way to places like Oregon, Arizona, and east of the Great Plains when they get to places like Georgia and Florida and Virginia and West Virginia and possibly even Western Pennsylvania. And the argument about this is when Europeans arrive and out of a hemispheric population, or I should rephrase that, out of North America and South America having a native population as high as maybe 56, 57 million people, most of which in Deeter from Mexico, South into South America, or agriculture as per well.

2:14:32So many people like that taken out, which is more than 10 % of the global population when the Great Dying happens. People who have been cutting down forests and building fires and using fires as their primary method of heating and cooking and everything else, when that ends the recent idea advanced is that that enables a reduction of carbon in the atmosphere, formally put into the atmosphere by all these burning fires of all these millions of people. And when that happens, it produces an effect called a little ice age. And the little ice age, which lasts for about 300 years, from about 1450, 1550 or so, somewhere in that range around 1500 to 1800 or maybe 1830 or so, produces cooler moisture weather in the northern hemisphere and that grows more grass and that expands the bison population over a lot of North America.

2:15:43So when Europeans get here, as a consequence of all these factors, nobody really understands. I mean, nobody knows anything about disease, transmission, nobody suspects that your breath can kill people. I mean, there's an early European who I quote in the book who says, boy, we just experienced the strangest thing. We went ashore for a couple of weeks. And when we came back on board our ship, word came that every village, every Indian village that we went to within two, three days of us being there, almost all the people in the village fell sick and they're dying. And it seems to have happened only where we went.

2:16:28No where else is reporting this, but I mean, so it happens like that. I mean, just almost instantaneously, they don't understand why it's happening. The European idea is, well, God has he's killing them to enable us to settle the place. And they certainly don't understand the what's causing, you know, the little ice age. But what they're reaping the benefit of is this explosion of animals that even brings buffalo all the way almost to the east coast. Wow. Yeah, it's another one of these amazing stories that I mean, we've only been figuring this kind of stuff out, you know, for the last 20 or 30 years.

2:17:10Some of it even more recently than that. It's got to be so rewarding as a person who studies that, though, that this information is being discovered in new revelations and new understanding. Yeah, it's really fun, you know, I mean, I had a tremendous amount of fun doing this book, you know, I mean, I was, there were parts of it that certainly surprised me, you know, I kind of knew this story. I mean, what I was trying to do is to tell in one book this whole North American story of humans and people in under 400 pages. I mean, I managed to do it at just 398 pages. So thick. Yeah, it's 398. So it's got a lot of information in it.

2:17:50But, I mean, it isn't an audio version too. So when can you do it? No, I didn't do it. The press I was with, WWNorton retained the rights to the audio book. I mean, with Coyote America, my agency, my literary agency retained the rights and I got to select who read it for the audio book. But in this case, Norton retained the rights and I had no say. You would be so good. Yeah, well, I've offered myself a couple times. Nobody's ever taken me up on it. Why are they so dumb about that kind of stuff? They did that with Rinella as well with this book, The American Bison. I know. And Stephen would be a fantastic reader.

2:18:31Well, he did read it. He eventually gained the rights to it. He went to the right to read it and it's amazing. Yeah, well, maybe maybe at some point I can get the rights to do it. But I've offered myself more than once and I never had anybody take me up on it. They have their stable of people. They might use, you know, but they're silly. Like, especially a guy like you who's been on this podcast a couple of times, you have such a great voice and such a passion for this stuff that's so so tangible when you talk about it. I'd love to be able to do it. Well, hopefully the guy did a great job. One of the things that I'd be a mess if I didn't talk to you about is I want to get you together with Randall Carlson because Randall Carlson is a big proponent of the younger driest impact for it being a leading factor in the extinction of North American animals.

2:19:16Yeah, what do you think about that? Have you looked into it? Yeah, I have. And so, I mean, here's my deal, you know, I mean, I'm a historian. As I said, an English major really and kind of an environmental writer, a writer about this stuff. So I'm not an archaeologist or a paleontologist. I mean, my approach to doing this kind of stuff, doing archaeology and paleontology is I go to the, what I consider to be the best people in other folks, consider the best people out there. You know, Ross McFee from the American Museum of Natural History, Donald Grayson, certainly Paul Martin, you know, who is the, he's kind of the Einstein of all this.

2:20:00And what I always look for, the people who are publishing in the peer review journals, who are doing work that like Paul Martin's, Paul Martin is like Einstein. I mean, his work has survived for decades because nobody has been able to shoot it down. I mean, he's that sort of bulletproof in his arguments. So I'm relying on all of those guys, the people who are spending all their time, you know, using science -based research to study this. And what they, when I look at their work, Ross McFee, for example, about the younger driest period, which is for your listeners, that's a period at about 11 ,512 ,000 years ago, when there was a sudden, really cold pulse in North America that, that amounted to essentially kind of a climate change.

2:20:59It didn't last a very long time, but it certainly was a change from what was happened, what had happened before and after. And there is a corollary argument called the Fireball hypothesis that came from an article that was in Science magazine in about 2005 or 2006 that argued that sort of in the tradition of the Chick -S -S -A -Lub asteroid, there may have been a comment or possibly an asteroid or a meteorite that struck, that set off the younger driest period, and that also resulted in kind of a scorched earth, at least in sort of the northern climbs in Alaska. I mean, I know you've had on the John Reeves guy, the Bollyard Alaska.

2:21:51God, how amazing is his place? Yeah, 5 .5. Oh, absolutely. It's less. It's less. Less than 5 acres. Two acres. And then there's another site that's... Have you been there? No, I have not, but I really desperately want to. John's a fascinating guy. The fact that he has complete control over this is so interesting. And I can tell you some more stuff off the air. But he's just, I mean, you know what's going on in the East River right now. Are you aware of this? No, I don't know. There's a bone rush in the East River because he talked about in the early 1900s, the museum in New York City had so much property from his or so many artifacts, so much so many mammoth tusks and so many stepbison jawbones and things that they dumped them in the East River.

2:22:38And he... I've never heard of this. He found the exact location. He told people where it is and they've already started discovering things. They discovered a stepbison jawbone and then they recently discovered a fragment of a mammoth tusk. So there's these guys, dirty water dawn and that's the piece of the mammoth tusks they found. See if you can find also the bison skull. The bison skull was maybe even more compelling, but in the area where this guy told them to look, they've started to find things. He's got so much on his property. It's so incredible. I think it's a little further up, Jamie.

2:23:14These look older. So these are bison priscous, huh? Yeah, bison jawbone. Should be like right here. Is that it right there? No, I mean, I'm saying it should be like right here. It's not. Well, you can find it if you just google it, bison jawbone. What year, what are you looking at? How far away is this April? When was he here? So this is probably... Okay, these are pretty recent photos. This is... We're still in March, I think, was when they discovered it, if I remember correctly. So this is the one you did with John, huh? Yes. This is... And they look at that. They found cats and things and cave bears that they didn't think were native to that area.

2:23:53They didn't even think they were in that area. So they're making these significant discoveries in this piece of property that he has, that really kind of changes the... There it is, right there. Right below that, that's the piece. That's the piece where he's pulling it out of the water. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's not amazing. And then right below that, you can see the actual piece itself. We can see it's 10 inches. Really amazing stuff. A chunk of a jawbone of a stepbison that they found in the East River. And there's a lot more out there, apparently. But, you know, you're dealing with them with 100 years of it sitting there.

2:24:29But just the fact that they could still find some pieces that is really encouraging. I mean, that's a 100 years of silt, a moving river. Who knows how much pollution and garbage, but they're finding things, which is pretty damn cool. Well, it's exciting to do it. I mean, I found it one point when I was living on the Great Plains, back in the 1980s. I found a bison skull eroding out of a stream bank. And I have no idea how old it was, but it was of a calf. It was a fairly small skull, but the horned corers were there. And yeah, it was very exciting to find something like that. One of the things that John has found, one of the things that's very extraordinary, is it seemed like these animals all died together.

2:25:12And there's a very distinct layer of scorched earth that Cohen's never saying that. Yeah, I remember saying that. The Younger Drys impact theory, what's fascinating about it, it's not one event. It's multiple events that take place over thousands of years. And there's a lot of physical evidence of it. A radium in particular, which is common in space and rare on Earth. And also nanodiments. These impact diamonds, these microdiments, that get created upon impact of these, these, whether it's comets or asteroids, whatever it is, they think that there was multiple ones of these. This also coincides with the time period, in which, you know, if you, we apparently pass through this every, I think it's every June and every November.

2:25:53Is that correct? This asteroid, this, this shower that we see, this meteor shower. And that also coincides with the Tunguska explosion, which they believe is an asteroid that blew up right above the surface of the Siberian forest. And to this day is like flattened, like this enormous area. The photographs are extraordinary. Of the post -impact discovery of the site. And, you know, for a long time, they're trying to figure out when. But this coincides exactly when Earth passes through this, this meteor shower, which is really, really interesting stuff. And I think the two of you together might be able to, like, if you have a conversation, it would be very fascinating.

2:26:37He's incredibly impressive this guy. And I know he's heterodox and is sort of ideas, but brilliantly researched. Has had debates with scientists over this. Even on my podcast, they were talking about this evidence. And they put it together with Graham Hancock's work. And Graham Hancock, who has ancient apocalypse, right? Ancient apocalypse on Netflix, which is basically all about that. It's all about the evidence of the sophisticated cultures that existed 11 ,000, 12 ,000 years ago. That we really didn't know were around until they started discovering gobeckly tepe and all these things. They can carbon date to that time period.

2:27:18Where we thought at one point in time, they were just hunters and gatherers. Now, we know they were capable of very sophisticated stonework in Turkey. And there's only to this day, I think, less than 10 % of them has been uncovered. They use light R and they found more of them, the surrounding hills. But he believes that this coincides with these meteor impacts and that there was probably a huge disruption of human civilization and a restart of it. And it coincides with the end of the ice age and there's some really fascinating erosion data and data of massive amounts of water that happened very quickly.

2:27:55And he believes what happened was something hit the actual ice cap that was over North America. This guy is very well researched in this. It's a really fascinating conversation, I think, with the two of you together. And I would love to have, if you're interested in that. Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly intrigued by it. And I always like to see people whenever they have some, you know, some dramatic new argument are claimed for something that has other explanations come up with something like a scientific article that you submit to a peer -reviewed journal. Let's see what the rosmic fees of the world think of it.

2:28:31I would like to see that too, but I do think that people do preserve their initial notions, especially if they've been teaching that and writing books on that and they've proclaimed that to be the exact history of how things went down. I would like just to see you have a conversation with this guy. Because again, he's very impressive. His ability to describe these things and his recall of the information is second to none. Well, what I would say to the younger dryists so far and certainly the Fireball article, you know, published back in 2005 or 2006, had some currency for quite a number of years.

2:29:09I obviously, when I was working on these initial chapters or particularly on that Clovisio, the beautiful chapter for a while in the world, I mean, I looked at what scientific literature I could find in the journals. And they weren't really citing it anymore. And I think the reason was basically this. The argument goes as a kind of a test for something that could cause a major extinction is, okay, so the younger dryists produced a cul pulse to be sure. But it's going to be difficult to argue that these animals are going to expire in a cul pulse when they survive the glacial maximum. That's not as hard as a year ago.

2:29:52His argument is massive devastation. His argument is instant flooding, the creation of the Great Lakes almost instantaneously. It's a wild argument. Well, the wild conversation. So here are the other two arguments then. The other two arguments are, if you have an extinction, like the five that we've had before, and I mean, I argue that, you know, we're all talking about the sixth extinction when we're in. My argument, sort of following an article that was published in the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, is that the sixth extinction that we think of today has actually, unlike all the previous five, the fifth one being chick -s -s -loop.

2:30:32The sixth one has actually been happening in slow motion for 30 ,000 years. It's not just started. It's happening as the people in the National Academy of Sciences piece put it. When human spread out of Africa, took out more than 300 mammal species as they spread across the earth over the subsequent several thousand years, and cost us in what they called in this 2018 article, almost a worst case scenario. Cost us like two and a half billion years of specially evolved genetics. So the reason I have been following that argument, and that's kind of the one I do, is that when the younger driest thing comes up, what people point out is that in all the extinctions before the Plycissine one, those extinctions took out everything.

2:31:28They took out life in the oceans. They took out small creatures. They took out amphibians, reptiles, birds, but the Plycissine seemed to just be mammals, and often just big mammals. And so there's this sort of logical attempt to try to come up with what would explain an extinction scenario that doesn't take out things in the ocean, that doesn't take out little creatures, but just focuses on big mammals, which is why sort of the consensus is going towards this human spread. Then I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think you probably have both things working in conjunction, and I think the good explanation for why it only kills things that are on earth and not in the ocean is that it impacts the ice shell, it impacts these ice sheets, and causes this almost instantaneous melting of the ice caps in a catastrophic way, and not everything is affected by it, only the things that get impacted by the water and get impacted by this melting of the caps.

2:32:35I don't know enough about it to have this conversation with you, but I'm blown away by this guy, Randall Carlson, and his descriptions of it and his understanding of it. I just think it would be an amazing thing to get together with you. There's no doubt human beings had a massive effect on it, and I think that all these things that you're pointing out are really fascinating, and pretty tragic too that human beings did. I mean, one thing that's interesting is the gestation period of these mammoths, right? They had to carry their, because they were so big, you know, that it's too fierce. They were talking about the bison.

2:33:05So if you wiped out a clan of them, you're making a significant impact. It's not like rabbits or like coyotes. No, it's exactly right. Biologists call those case species, which have these really long gestation periods. So they would have made them more vulnerable to human predation. And they also were ignorant to us until we came here. They were all for, who knows how many years before we got here. Yeah. Well, one of the things I have always loved about you and your podcast is your wonderful openness. To people, everybody. I mean, I think it's one of the explanations for why, you know, the Joe Rogan experience is such a global hit, man.

2:33:51I mean, you come across as telling me you're shit and I'm bad, I'm gonna love it. Well, with your case, it's easy. Your shit is amazing. And one of the big successes is the fact that people like you are willing to come on. So I really appreciate that. And it was really entertaining. I can't wait to listen to this one again. It was so good. There's so much information. And I can't wait even though somebody else is reading this book, I'll get it on audio anyway. But it's a wild new world, epic story of animals and people in America, Dan Flores. And I can't recommend enough his other book, Coyote America that I've read.

2:34:27And then there's the American Serengeti. Dan, you're the man. I appreciate you very much. I tell you you're the man. Let's do this again. We'll do it with Randall and we'll have some. All right, thank you very much. Goodbye, everybody.