Ep. 931: Eating Rotten Mammoths

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. This is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely bugbed and in my case underwear list. You can't predict anything. Raw to you by first light. When I'm hunting I need gear that won't quit. First light build, no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com, that's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Alright man, we're here to talk about my all time favorite subject. The subject that has enthralled me since I learned that it was a subject. Ice Age Hunters, Clovis, Folsom, the first Americans, this subject, and my two favorite guys to talk about this subject are here. Dr. David Meltzer, who's the Henderson Morrison Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He's been on the show before, a couple times. And Dr. Matt and Aaron, Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University, who has also joined us on the show before, and before we get into the main thing, let me say this. One would think that when talking about stuff from 15,000, 14,000, 13,000, 12,000 years ago, that it wouldn't change, that the understanding would be static at this point. But this remains, and what's so enthralling about it, is it remains a kind of dynamic subject. New ideas, new findings, it changes. It's crazy that something that's that old that our understanding of something that old could evolve, but it's like a, it's a great intellectual exercise. Before we get into what your latest series, your latest understandings of who these people were, what they did, how they lived, what they killed it didn't kill, help me get, help me understand what I'm holding up right here. I'm holding up a club. Like what I would, what I'm holding up a club is point this, what, nine and a half inches long. Yeah. Easily, yeah. I thought, and I thought it was a novelty item, like when you're a little kid and you buy those giant chocolate bars or giant erasers, do you know what I mean, like tourist shops. But this is a mold, this is a, a cast of a real thing, yeah, well, it's a real thing. But how do we know it wasn't 12,000 years ago, somebody wanted to make a giant chocolate bar. Yeah. As a novelty. That's what I'm wondering about. We don't know. We don't know. And unfortunately, the context of that find is not sufficient for us to really be able to tell. It's incredible specimen. Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. It's the closest point on steroids. I have a, you know, those people who do the archaeological drawings, he drew me a real life size one, but he drew me the wrong point because this would have been a much bigger, this would have been a much bigger. Look at the other ones that met and brought. Well, that's right. Yeah. So you, this would be for, I got to be, not everybody's watching this on video. Okay. Yeah. One of you guys tell what we're looking at. Met and go. Yeah. Well, I'm looking at a Clovis point. What do I, what do I mean when I say I'm looking at Clovis point? It's a giant lance weapon tip and we don't know what weapons they were using. But the one you're holding, like you say, is about 9, 10 inches. It's got a concave base. It's got straight parallel sides. And the Clovis point has these channels on both faces and those are called flutes. And think about those to visualize it. Think about World War One bayonets, right? A groove. There you go. Up each face. See a blood groove on a bill. Yeah, blood groove. A groove, yes. And that was a hypothesis actually for the function of flutes for a long time was that you stick your animal and blood shoots out those grooves and the issue though is if you're attaching that to some sort of spear, right, you're going to have lashings maybe or some sort of adhesive. And so like, it's not a good, it's not a good, yeah, exactly, not a good groove for blood letting. Um, there's been other hypotheses for why people fluted, um, but I don't think it's, I don't know why. No one has a, oh, why? Because the way they have to it on there. Definitely. Well, yeah, no, I don't know that. I don't know. Well, no, you're right, Steve. In the sense that that is a function, but was that the purpose was that the intended purpose of it? We don't know. Right? Because a lot of people have made arguments about, well, you know, you're just showing off because putting a flute in and, and Metin knows this more than anybody, really, because he's a master flint in that for, um, that's, that's the point at which it's most vulnerable to breakage, right? When you're making one of those points, when you're driving one of those flutes, uh, flakes off because what Metin, they're two millimeters. Yeah. Well, I'll point out under Metin's, uh, instruction, I fluted one and show the many old people. I mean, he kind of like, he pretty much set it up for me, you know, like, but I, I fluted one. You know what? And that's not easy, but he had, he had done all the prepping and set me up. It's practice shots and everything. So yes, uh, the flute, one more, I want to get back to these different sizes and stuff. But when you pressure test these for strength, that's a detriment, right? The flutes, no, actually, like the signature flute is not a structural detriment. No. In fact, it's an advantage. I published a paper 10 years ago on this where what we showed was that fluted points actually can, they act like a shock absorber. So in the same way that a car when it crashes into something in front and crumbles, protecting the people inside, you know, the base of a cloveist point because it's thinner because of the flutes upon impact, it reduces the compression stress on the point and actually reduces the amount of breakage. Oh, is that right? Oh, now that's a structural property of that shape with the flutes. With the flutes. Now, we don't know if that's why they made the flutes, you know, but when you have flutes on a point, you get that property. You don't have to understand the sort of mechanics of it and the engineering properties of it. But you understand that, well, you know what, if you flute that thing and it's thinner at the base, the points will be less damaged during use, right? Just like a baseball player, you know, in center field, you know, there's a high fly ball coming toward them, they're not calculating parabolas, right? And how it's going to come down at them, they're just running for the ball because they sort of intuitively understand that. Yeah, got it. You also brought the other end of the other end, which is, so here I'm holding a cloveist point that's engine eight, maybe, maybe, yeah. They come even smaller. Yes. And this brings up this, this, I guess, adds to the mystery is you're so that these, these people, I think you tell people in, can you remind folks in whatever way it makes sense in terms of BC or blank years ago, when were these things being manufactured in, in, in, what is not the United States, about 13,000, 13,000 years ago, yeah, that you could have one of these that's nine inches, nine and a half inches. You could have one of these. It's an inch, both fluted, but they're exactly right. They're so married to the style. Well, that's like the shape and the fluting that you would think, do you know what I'm saying? It's just that they're like, no, I don't care about how long it is, I just need it to look like this. Yeah, but I think this is an interesting point you bring up because roughly they're the same shape, right? They're both Lancelot, they have concave bases, parallel sides, but that's a very general way to look at the shape, right? Okay. And so I think you could say in the same way that there's a lot of variation in the human species, right? And Danny DeVito and Shaquille O'Neal, but they're all human. Yeah. There's a lot of variation in clovus. I see. And so yeah, they have the general anatomical similarities, but there's still a lot of variation within that. Got it. Not unexpected, of course, because these groups are out on a landscape, they're moving, they're out on that landscape for the better part of what, 700 years, and they're in all corners of North America. And you're going to have what we've called sort of cultural drift, right, is that somebody's making something and they're not making it quite like dad made it or mom made it, right? No reason why mom couldn't have made those. And so you've got variants that will just accrue over time. And so while you can generally argue, okay, we've got clovus points in the Pacific Northwest, which kind of look like clovus points in the Northeast. So yeah, in a general sense, they're all very, very similar, like Metins metaphor. But there's enough variation that we're seeing in all likelihood sort of time and space slipping by. And with that changes in the styles in which people are making things simply because they're not making clones, right? Yep, got it. They're human artisans who are producing these kinds of things and there's inevitably going to be variation. And I think another contribution to that variation, right, their stylistic drift. But we just completed a 10 year project funded by the National Science Foundation, where we looked at, we basically did a clovus point Olympics, and we tested small ones and big ones and thin ones and wide ones to see whether or not they all functioned the same way. And they don't. And so another reason why we may be getting lots of a variation in Clovis is because this particular Clovis point is for Butchery. This one is for hunting. This one is maybe even for digging. Well, not necessarily for those things, but better at. Better at. Yes, that's exactly right. Oh, yeah. I mean, from your, when you're looking at it now, yes, without understanding, you know, what it was originally crafted for. But when you look at now, like, well, let's just try to take a guess. Like, what would it be good for? Yes, that's exactly what their experiments, what Metin and his team's experiments showed was that some of them had really great penetrating power, right? And it wasn't necessarily that big hunker that you've got right there. It was the smaller ones, right? You know, we always sort of think about big mammoth. You need a big point. Yeah, right? No, not necessarily. I'm the subject of what we want to talk about today. Add to this, but I'll just say I'll say this and you can add to it if you feel this wrong. The primary questions that animate conversations around Clovis. The primary questions would be there's this big long running burning one, which is, did humans manage to drive woolly mammoths and mastodons to extinction? Were they really able to come in and kill these things off? Or if it wasn't that, was it some degree of they contributed to the die off of mammoths and mastodons? Right. And other big megafauna, right? And the reason that argument has teeth is it kind of opens up this idea of it becomes a debate about how destructive is the human species and how long has the human species been destructive, right? A lot of, there's this kind of, there's almost a moral element to it. If you could look and be like, man, 13,000 years ago, humans were driving animals to extinction through hunting. And it, I don't know, that can be weaponized in some way or can you be used to rationalize certain behaviors or it's just interesting, right? So that debate animates discussion of clovus. It's like it's kind of like part of why we talk about clovus today. Another, I would say the other major thing from my view, the animates the discussion of clovus is who were the first Americans, right? Was this a group of people that showed up in what is now the, the lower 48 or Alaska and the lower 48? Did they show up where they had this common culture, a common language? They knew each other, they knew each other. And they showed up and then they sort of proliferated as the people. And then eventually this people through distance and time kind of formed these other unique cultures. Or the, or conversely, disparate people showed up here and they coalesced into this, this unified culture. And for 700 years kind of became like Americans, you know, in some way. Do you agree with that, or is there any I'm missing? Where do we start? I mean, in terms of like the big, like the big animating, the reason that keeps it relevant. Okay, absolutely agree. Okay. Okay. And I can say that certainly the weaponization aspect, when you look at when overkill, the notion that people came in and wiped out all of these different animals. And the current tally is 38 different genera. Okay. So everything from mammoth and mastodon, giant ground sloth, various, you know, peccaries, tapers, horses, camels, etc. That really, that really hits its stride in the 1960s. And it's tied to the environmental movement. You've got Rachel Carson, Silent Spring gets published. Everybody's reading all the Leopold, all of these things that people are getting concerned about the environment. And this was a good, this was a good homily. This was a good lesson. Look what we did before. Let's not do it again. Okay. Now the problem is, I don't think people did that before, right? There's lots of reasons to protect the environment. What people did 13,000 years ago or not, isn't one of them. Got it, Bill. So I agree. It's sort of been part of the discussion. And in fact, it's been part of the discussion since the 1850s when people first noticed the bones of these giant animals and said, what happened to them? And one of the very early hypotheses was, were they killed off by Indian arrows? Oh, so someone spoke of that in the 1800s. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Charles Liel on his visit to the United States, the second visit to the United States, published in 1849, talks about it because people were wondering, where are they now? Because they knew enough about the geology to know that these animals had been around relatively recently, at least in geological time. Right? I mean, they were found in your surface deposits. And the bones seemed in pretty good condition. They weren't fossilized, mineralized. So yeah, no, it's been a, it's been a long standing question. I had no idea that someone threw that out there at that time. Oh, yeah. But they dismissed it. Okay. Because it made no sense to them because they knew that, um, you know, the ability, because at that point, I think it's fair to say people hadn't killed off all the passenger pigeons. People hadn't actually caused the extinction of animals prior to that. So they probably had a hard time perceiving the ability as we do now, given the technologies that we have, how easy it would be to drive an animal to extinction. Yeah. Someone should visit that dude in his grave. And be like, listen, I know that you got dismissed outright in 1850, but has you waited a century? You would, yeah, you would have gotten more traction. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You'd have tapped into the zeitgeist if you waited 120 years. Yeah. And it is, um, it is an interesting thing because it does tie into the notion that, um, this sort of romantic notion of these big game hunters, you know, they come across the land bridge. They blasted down into North America and they look out across a landscape with these aircraft carriers of the animal kingdom. Mm-hmm. And mind you, some of the animals that went extinct only weighed 20 pounds. They're lumped in there with megafauna and I've never gotten that. I've never understood that. But okay. So bunnies are megafauna. Yeah. No, I got it. I'm guilty of that. I'm guilty of being like, yeah, all the big animals, all the big animals went away. Yeah. Except for mousse and caribou and bison and all the other big animals that didn't go away. Yeah, I understand. I understand. And we are trying to understand that as a package, right? These people come across presumably, they're related. They must have been successful at colonizing landscapes like the bearing land bridge. And then they spread out. But one of the things that we've learned from the genetic record is that this is a fairly, mind you, we have limited, ancient DNA from this time period, right? So we have limited information about who these people are specifically. But one of the things that we do know is that we have early on very, very different cultural patterns among very closely related biological populations. So the cultures will change and they will change fairly rapidly. So we've got people who are very closely related to clovus living in the great basin who have a fundamentally different material culture, who we haven't found any evidence that they're out killing big game because well, if you're in the great basin, western or North America, there's not a whole lot of mammoth or mastodon wandering around out there. Okay. Right. Yeah. So the cultural patterns are not necessarily in sync with the, what we understand at least at the moment to be the biological patterns. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Regarding the second question you brought up, right? Did they, were they here and coalesced or and became the first Americans? The clovus point has never been found outside of the Americas, North America. Right. And so, so by definition, it is it's an American is an American invention, which means there had to be has not has not been found in South America. No. And it's not been found in Europe or in Asia. Yeah. Right. So if the clovus point was invented in North America, just just just just for just to help people a little bit on geography, you mean if I'm overknown Alaska and I go, whatever the hell it is, 70 80 miles and I hit then I hit Asia. Yeah. Right. And I look up and down the beach. I'm like a final clovus point. We have not found any clovus points in in Northeast Asia. Okay. Which means it was invented in North America, which means there had to be people here to invent it. Yeah. Right. So by logic alone, right, there had to have been groups pre clovus on the landscape somewhere to have come up with that first American invention. Are there good rock solid like indisputable clovus points in Alaska. There are no, my answer is I'm waiting to hear is there are there are fluted points. Thank you in Alaska. But they are later in time. And they come from when Clovis folks and related Clovis groups went from south to north through the ice free corridor back into Alaska. But there's never been a Clovis point of Clovis age found in Alaska. The dates and you can actually quite literally track them in a time transgressive manner going up the ice free corridor. Is that right? Absolutely. No, because you've got- Does that stuff like the Mesa site itself is fluted but that's much younger than Clovis? No, Mesa is not fluted. No, sorry. There's there's other sites Hutu site, Bedwell site. What's the Ted Gables? Banana or- Yeah, there's fluted points up there. And they date- let me think about this probably 500 years later. Yeah in the 12. Okay. And they're in the 12s. And in fact there's fluted points in that corridor region that are also dating in the 12s rather than at 13. And so it almost looks like the corridor. Let's just to back up for a second, right? You've got these two massive ice sheets that during the Pleistocene are bumping into each other basically down the spine of the Rockies. Okay. Okay. At the end of the ice age they pull back, they retreat. And they do this around 14,000, 14 and a half thousand. Initially it's just this vast mud flat, right? Meltwater everywhere. There's not a whole lot of things growing there, living there. I bet it places like that in Alaska. There you go, right? But this place is 1500 kilometers long and there's nothing growing. You're not going to go down that corridor. Okay. You're going to have to wait for the plants to colonize the animals to then follow, right? That doesn't happen until around 13, maybe slightly later, maybe slightly earlier. But not early enough, Clovis is already down here by then. Okay. But then later as these groups are expanding in North America, some of them make their way back up that corridor. Because by then you've got bison, it's grassland. Now what happens around 10,000 years ago, maybe 11, is that you've got boreal forest moving in. And once the boreal forest move in, that corridor is shut down, right? You're not going to be going up and down that thing anymore. So it really looks as though people came in. It's just because it's not like super productive grassland. I mean, what are you going to get in a boreal forest? It's just less draw. Yeah. Absolutely. But when you have bison up and down that corridor, and in fact, you brought up Mesa, that's a really good case to bring up because it looks like these groups are following tracking bison up and down this corridor. And what you see at Mesa looks an awful lot like what you've got on the northern high plains at 10,000, 10,000, and 1/2,000, 11,000 years ago. Okay. So we can make the connections, but the connections are not from the north down to the south. They're from the south back up to the north. It's the craziest thing. Yeah. I was first introduced to that idea. And I think it was the word, was the word backdrift or something? Was that a word? Okay. Absolutely. Backwash. Yeah. Hey, everyone. Big huge announcement. Me either live, the Christmas tour is kicking off again this year for the Christmas season of 2026. This time we're hitting the Midwest. Me either live, the Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities. 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So who, right now, if you, I don't know, what's the fashionable idea right now of like, and I don't mean to, I don't mean to make it trivializing, but like the idea right now, if you had to make a guess, no one's holding to this, but you had to make a guess like, I'm a who, who, who for like, who and when and how, who first step foot in what is today, however you want to put it, like, Washington State, Idaho Panhandle, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, like, where do the first human step and what is now the lower 48? Who, who, who, who, who's name, what was he doing? Name rank serial number. Yeah. Like when, right. If you had to guess, and I'm setting this up, I know you're like, you have to take this seriously, you spend your life publishing on this, you have a reputation at stake, but just casually, it's going to be, it's going to die right here in your studio. Just casually like, yeah, no, tell me a thing that wouldn't surprise you. I know you guys hate conversations like this, but tell me it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Look, I think that there is compelling evidence, right? We're going to do this evidence base, not faith based. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think there's compelling evidence that people were here 15,000 years ago, plus or minus. Okay. Okay. I wouldn't be surprised if they were here earlier. Getting them here earlier is complicated just because of the geology and because of the routes that would have been available. Okay. Okay. We just mentioned that the this interior corridor was not going to be available until around 13. So people were here at 15. They had to come some other route. Okay. The coast was open. Ice had pulled back from the Pacific margin by 17, 16 and a half. So that's a route that you can take into the Americas and be here by 15. Good. We know from the genetic record that we have that ancestral Native Americans split off from Northeast Asian populations sometime around 25. I would not be surprised if people were here at 25,000, right? Like that wouldn't shock you. No. No. I mean, it would just make us have to think, well, how did they get here? Who were they? And how did they relate to everybody that we have after 15? Got it. Right. And look, if people if people were here at 30, we'd have to give that a rethink as well. Okay. Does that mean that the genetic evidence we have is just insufficient to tell us when these ancestral Native American populations first emerged. Does that mean that these groups that were here earlier were not related to ancestral Native Americans as we know them that were here at 12. Yeah. Right. You always have to follow the evidence. And you know, you can sort of set up parameters of the problem and say, but you always have to sort of add the caveat as we understand it today, based on the evidence that we have today. This is the thing that has greater prior probability. This is the thing that has less. Some years ago, about 10 actually, there was a paper published that suggested people were here 130,000 years ago. That one is really hard. That sort of makes sense. Like that gets even more complicated. Well, yeah, because then you're not really talking about, you know, modern homo sapiens. And so we just don't see any evidence archaeologically or genetically to suggest that those folks were here. Yeah. Because we don't even see them in parts of Asia by then. Got it. Yeah. How seriously can you take this is some stuff we've discussed in the past, but how seriously can you take any idea that it wasn't Siberians? None. There's no. They came from Asia. But the viewers at home that are not watching on TV, I'm shaking my head. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so when people bring up that, you know, this idea that the Europeans came or Pacific Islanders out of the South came or whatever, it's just that you feel the evidence is still strong or overwhelming that these are like, these are Siberians. Oh, there's no feel about it. The idea that Stone Age people cross the Atlantic. Okay. I think is one of the most falsified hypotheses in paleoondinarchialogy. I mean, it isn't supported genetically, archeologically, chronologically, oceanographers didn't show it, didn't work. I have published several papers and so have you on that idea that maybe the first stonage Americans came from Europe and it no matter how you slice it, it doesn't work. Yeah. I mean, if they came here, they suffered complete and total genetic amnesia, cultural amnesia. I mean, they forgot everything that they were doing in Europe and they forgot to bring their DNA with them because all of the DNA that we have, both ancient and modern in the Americas, is Native American. Can you look at this question globally of pioneering populations and humans? Do you ever see New Zealand or Australia or wherever? Do you ever see where a population gets somewhere but it doesn't work out and they don't thrive. They blink out for whatever reason and then thousands of years go by and it gets reheat or do humans usually have a way of when they get somewhere? It works. See, that's a really tough question because in the old world, Europe, Asia, Africa, it can be difficult if you don't have bones to know whether you're dealing with homo sapiens or homo erectus or hyalbergensis or neanderthalensis. There's all these other hominins, denisovins that are running around and so and they're oftentimes using the same stone tool technology, right? So you don't know if you're dealing with a homo sapiens site who's making some sort of discoid core or neanderthal. This is one reason why to understand the mechanics of prehistoric colonization, North America is so valuable, right? And I think there's some regions in particular like the Great Lakes and New England that are really great because you had glaciers covering the Great Lakes. And so when the glaciers recede and we get the various clean slate, it's a demographic blank slate. I got you. And so that's why it's really great to study colonization processes there. That's an interesting point, man, like it doesn't have what makes Africa so complicated. Yeah, yes. Got it. But failed migrations is what you're asking about and back like not just failed my great, but failed pioneering events. Oh, no, that's yeah, no, I actually argued that many years ago in a paper, just on sort of first principles, the idea that absolutely every movement into a landscape was successful, which is not to say that a movement was successful, but groups within that could have disappeared for a want of an ability to cope with an environmental disaster, right? One can only assume, even though it would be extremely difficult to test, one can only assume that groups that are moving out of Africa a hundred thousand years ago and moving out across the globe, some of them must have not made it. Yeah. Now, one of the things that's been most interesting coming out of the genetic record is that we have what are referred to as ghost populations showing up in ancient genomes. These are signatures of DNA that are unrelated to any modern population. So clearly there were other groups with whom ancestral Native Americans interacted with what became of them, right? And were they possibly, and we don't know this, but here's one possible case, were they here when Native Americans showed up and there was interaction between them and for all intents and purposes, they disappeared as a population, right? This gets back to your question earlier. This is why this question about the people is so dynamic and is constantly, you know, right there on the front burners of us trying to figure out because the more we learn, the more complicated the story is, you know, when I started, which was a while ago, it was very simple, right? Mammoth hunters. They come into Alaska, they go down the ice recorder or they start killing everybody that spread all over. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a nice story, but there was no nuance to it. And what we've been learning over the years, and this is actually one of the reasons why, you know, we just published this piece on scavenging, was that we wanted to sort of critique the stereotypes. We wanted to sort of explore variation and nuance, and are there alternative explanations for data that we've just kind of, in a very common sense, weigh interpreted over the years. Yeah. Let's get into your, let's get into your new paper. Segway. Yeah. Tell me, which everyone you want us to do it, like tell me to, give me the gist of the new paper you have about, about scavenging. So pretend you're a scientist, okay? Got it. And I'll do that all. Yeah. That's great. I play a scientist on TV, but I'm not one. And you have a very simple question. Okay. How many baseball hats of the home team are in the stadium on game day? Okay. And you have a hypothesis, right? There's going to be more green hats, because that's the color of the home team than red hats, which is the away team. Okay. And I think that because it's the home team. It's home team, right? And their fans live around it. Exactly. Right. I don't want to test it. So you hire some dude to, that's to be a dude, I'll bet. Well, it's got, well, only dudes are dumb enough to go count, right? So you hire some dude to go to the stadium on game day. And he counts all of the hats, okay? Comes back to you. And he's like, all right, scientist Steve, Dr. Steve, there were 15,000 green hats. There was 10,000 red hats, right? You've got your data. You're like, supports my hypothesis. Great. Right? So I, and then you learn that the guy you hired to count all of the hats is red, green color blind. You hired me for the job. It was a bad move. Right. Bad move. So how do you know what the answer is? You don't. And so what our paper shows is that archaeologists are currently, I don't know where you're going, but I love the analogy so far. What our paper shows is that archaeologists are colorblind to hunting versus scavenging and the interpretation of those two things in the sites we dig up. We can't tell the difference. It's, it's the term is equal finality. Okay. And that multiple processes can result in the same product. They can result in artifacts being found with bones. They can result in artifacts that got snapped, found with bones. And we were talking this morning on the way over to the studio, the experiment that we did with you guys. Yeah. And what, four years ago now, which was just, just refresh people, we yeah. These guys were conducting experiment where we were using stone tools to butcher a freshly killed bison carcass and then they took great interest in how do the tools break? How do the tools dull? Where do the tools wind up when you lost them or broke them like what did it look like meaning. So then you have not a collection of tools from having killed the animal. You had a collection of tools from having butchered the end. I'm also just thinking of the famous efficiency part of that experiment. And Dr. Michelle Bevers meet per minute, you know, meet per minute measure. Okay. Just, which is published in the scientific literature. Yeah. So what, what we found in that, one of the things people have said and I'm guilty, right? I'm not going to paint anybody else with this brush. I'm included here. You know, you look at these, these busted points and you say, oh, well, that must be n shock as a consequence of impact. Yep. Well, what we discovered was in the points that you guys were using, some of them snapped just like things that I've interpreted as n shock from use and impact. Yep. Right? Like a bit of shoulder blade and broke. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those are the kinds of things that make you pause and you realize you can't automatically assume that just because you have these things with the mammoth, that therefore, these were the items that we used to kill it. Okay. Red, green color blindness that that met and is talking about that we have and it's important to stress this fact, we're not saying every site with a mammoth was a result of scavenging. We've never said that. What we're trying to do is think harder about how we can discern what the process was that caused that product, right? And this is a problem in which because there are multiple processes, you run into that issue of equifinality because you can just as easily explain these things as a consequence of scavenging as you could hunting. Yeah. to know is there a way to get the right answer? an unequivocal, demonstrable diagnostic test for one or the other. There isn't even a diagnostic test for scavenging. I went into this paper thinking, "Oh, well, we can tell scavenging because we have some instances of Clovis points that were used," or actually, I'm sorry, "Ivery shafts that were used to pry apart mammoth feet," and I'm thinking, "Well, that has to be scavenging because rigor mortis had set in." The animal was already dead, but then, in the course of doing this research, one of the things that we learned was that rigor mortis under certain circumstances can kick in pretty quickly. That animal might actually have been very recently killed by that hunter who then wanted to pry apart the feet. What do you mean by pry apart the feet? Get into the joints there to break apart the portions of the foot to get it foot-ped out. I thought I was a picture that you meant, like, move his legs apart, but you mean, like, literally, like, break the feet apart. Exactly. I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Every time you think, "Okay, well, this is clearly a signature of hunting or clearly a signature of scavenging," then you think a little harder about it and you realize, "Well, geez. The only instance that we came up with in this paper is that if you see a beached whale from 200,000 years ago, long before people had marine technology, long before they went out and boats and could harpoon things, and it's been butchered on the beach, that's scavenging because they're not going to get in a whale, right? But see, when I said that I had a thing that was going to trip you guys up, and it was going to blow your mind and make a question. I'm still waiting for it. It has to do with whales. Oh, but I'll wait. No, I'm going to wait a minute to bring it up. No, I'll bring them down. Go ahead. Don't leave saying it, Steve. I was with some whale hunters in none of it. Oh, very cool. Okay. Okay. And we were talking a lot about, I mean, they used contemporary weaponry now, but we were talking a lot about what their ancestors, how their ancestors, hundred whales. And I was thinking about you guys because I feel and maybe you can correct me on this. I feel that somewhere in your head, it's a little bit like you feel that it's a little bit outlandish or a little bit your skeptical that humans could have killed these things. Oh, no, mechanically, or maybe you have no skepticism about this. But I was like, but how would how would someone view? I mean, but like, so if it's not in your head, I think it's in some people's heads. Like really, you're going to take a spear and kill a mammoth. But then I'll stick it like behalm that we know, like as a matter of fact, that humans were using stone tip, bone tip stuff and killing huge whales. Absolutely. But I think that and I don't mean to put words in your mouth. And you're already you're shaking your head like you don't have a problem with them killing it. But I think that there is a sense from some people like, how could they have walked up with a spear and kill the mammoth? I'm like, I don't know how they do how they kill whales. So I've given talks over the years where I've had hundreds in the audience. And I've talked about killing mammoths where you've got a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it. And I've seen a lot of shaking heads where people are saying, no way am I doing that to a six ton animal. Thank you very much. It would seem like it would seem insane, but it would seem insane. No, but people did. Yeah. I don't think there's any question that people were hunting animals of all sizes, right? And the question is how often? What was the frequency? To what degree was it a critical element of their diet? Was that the only thing they were doing on the landscape? I mean, this is the thing that we're sort of trying to get around is the the sort of singular model, the stereotype, the stereotype. You know, we want to understand the complexity of people's lives, their hunting strategies, their foraging strategies, which facultative scavenging. And this is what this paper is all about. The idea that if there's a a four ton animal dead on the landscape, why would you not take advantage of it? Yeah. Sure. Right? And were you able to look? Because when I was looking at the work that you did, you addressed this, best want to tee it up, to be in my head just as a guy today that wanders around out in the woods a fair bit and in a lot of places, I it's just like there aren't it would be exceptionally rare, exceptionally rare to stumble across a salvageable untouched fresh carcass. It happens. It happened twice. Like when the lake I grew up on, I can think of two cases. A deer swam up went to Bob Starritz yard and snapped its neck on Bob Starritz fence. Yarn for Bob Starritz. Well, another one came through and got hung up and a warrant that came through and got hung up on chat out, singer's fence. Oh, Bob and chat, man. So sure. And we scavenged those carcasses. But it's just not it's it's it's so exceptional that I can tell you about these things that happen when I was I'm now 52. I can tell you about these things that happened when I was a teenager as being outliers and they involve fences, human-made fences. But it's just like you can't it's not reliable. Okay. From my view, it's not reliable to wake up in the morning and be like, kids, me and mom are going to walk until we find a fresh dead thing and then we're going to butcher it and bring it on home. Okay. I'll let Matt and respond to that. But then I want to talk to you about reliability. Okay. Go, Matt. So I have a admission to make and it's that you are actually the inspiration for this paper. Oh, great. And it's because because of my view on April 21st, 2025, episode 693. You said, when you're out wandering around the mountains, oh god, you actually have the entire quote or out wandering around the woods, you do not often encounter fresh dead stuff. If you wanted me to produce a dead thing, I would be much quicker at producing a dead thing by killing it than I would wandering around. I'll say about that. So I've always laughed at the idea that they were just finding carcasses lying around. Right. And I heard that quote and it just got me thinking, right? It got me thinking about scavenging. It got me thinking about scavenging during the Lake Plycicine when it was a very different environment. A lot more animals. A lot more animals. Sure. Very different animals. And it got me thinking about our modern experience versus how and why we interpret the things we the way we do over the centuries of the clovus archaeological record. Good, right? Where you had thousands and thousands of people who were spending every day of their lives outside. I mean, how often are you out in the field? Not like that. Exactly. Where am I at right now? And you're out there for a week at a time, two weeks at a time in a circumscribed area. But if you're spending your entire life out there, and let's just say a life expectancy of 45 plus or minus. Okay. We don't know. But that's generally the sort of estimation. That's thousands and thousands and thousands of person hours out on that landscape on a landscape that has a hell a lot more game on it than the landscape does today. And it's got elephants out there. And elephants on that landscape are going to last for a long time. Right. It's not like a mouse dies. And you've got to get there and scavenge it really quickly. Even if stuff's working on it, they're going to be working on it a long time. Absolutely. And sometimes they can't work on it. Because in winter months, and this is, we learned so much about carrying ecology and scavenging in the broader biological world. In the winter months, some carcasses just are not accessible because they freeze. Which is something humans don't have to worry about because we've got stone tools and fire. I think the other thing to keep in mind too. Right. But yeah, you found that example in Dale Guthrie's book. Yes. There's a the case of blue babe, sort of freeze-dried bison. Yeah. There's a carnacial tooth from, is it a lion panthera in the hide? And Guthrie's interpretation, I think it's a reasonable one, is that that cat was basically trying to get into the carcass and it was frozen. It snapped the tooth off. Oh, I pictured and breaking it. I don't know. I didn't know that theory. I know about this, but I always thought that he that it was suspected or that he broke it off and fighting with the thing. Oh, that's entirely possible too. But broke it off trying to get a frozen thing ripped apart. Yeah. It would be more likely that it would break. It's been more frozen. Yeah. Exactly. Go ahead. Well, I was going to say you you had two examples where you found carcasses, right? No, I got a lot. Well, okay. It's a lot. But I'm saying there's unique enough that I remember them. Yeah, fair enough. But imagine you 10,000 years, right? You're the clover's population. I want to clarify my point, but I want you to go, but I want to clear from my point. Yes, but not reliably. Okay. Let me let's talk about it, but not take it away. I'm not going to interrupt. I want to clarify. For sure. Yeah, I know. It happens, but I would never plan on. No, no, no, no. That's the whole point of facultative scavenging. You can't plan. You don't, you don't plan on it. No, just like you don't plan on hunting, right? Well, you go out looking at hunting. You're out there looking for animals. Are you going to see him all the time, all the time? Okay. Look, nobody is saying that folks depended on scavenging. What we're saying is like all other animals, all other predators in the animal kingdom, they all scavenge. Yeah, herbivore scavenge. Oh, God. Dear hippos, giraffes, chimps, will scavenge. Okay. Yeah. So why would we assume that humans are any different, right? We're not arguing that don't make the assumption that humans were solely scavengers, in which case it would be an unreliable strategy without question. If they're facultative scavengers, if they come across something, then the question is, what's the cost benefit? Is it worth tracking where you haven't seen any big animals for quite a while? I mean, goodness knows you've been on unsuccessful hunts before. Have you not? Yeah, plenty. Yeah. So if you're on an unsuccessful hunt, and it's been quite a while since you killed anything, and there's a dead elephant laying there, are you going to pass it up? No. Exactly. Hey, everyone, big huge announcement. We've got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and Fargo. Join myself, Yannis Poutellis, Clay New, Combrant Reeves, and Randall Williams. For a night of laughs, trivia, free prizes, news, and opinions from across the world's of hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation, and wild foods. I got my buddy, bubbly Doug, making the appearance in Madison. Go to themeater.com/tour and sign up to get early access to pre-sale tickets right now and secure your spot. So don't wait. Go to themeater.com/tour to get your pre-sale tickets now. And when you look at the 15 sites where we have good association between Clovis artifacts and, and probosidians. You dig in on this for a minute? Yes. This number. Yeah. This is where we've got Clovis points and maybe flakes or scrapers in a secure context with elephant bones, such that it's reasonable to assume that those artifacts were involved in the dismemberment in some way of that animal. Were the killing of that animal? Were the killing of that animal, right? Yeah. I never knew this number until fairly recently. There's like a number. Yeah. It's like, there's 15. Well, there's actually almost a hundred sites in which people have claimed, but of those the most secure ones where the artifacts and the bones enter the geological record at the same end still put it that way. Yeah. That we feel that yeah, okay. These things interacted in some manner and the question is how well was the nature? Did they did they kill the animal then dismember it? Did they come upon a carcass and then dismember it? Did they shoot at it and the animal wondered off and died? Right? There's lots of different possibilities. And so what we're trying to do is disentangle all of these possibilities. So you've got these 15 sites and they're likely spread across the 700 years of clovus. When you think about that, like per decade or per century, that's not a lot of sites per year, right? So let's say hypothetically, seven of those sites are scavenging, right? That's not a lot of scavenging that's going on in terms of the sites that we found. And that's not a lot of hunting of mammoths that's going on either, right? Yeah. So I think the issue is that we can't take our personal experiences in the modern day of not finding carcasses or anything and try to impose that on the path because there's a different timescale, right? Perhaps it's a foreign country. Yes. One of my third favorite quote. Yeah. Yeah. And when you look at scavenging, even today, it's very limited in modern day 100 groups, 100 gathered groups are co-author Jim O'Connell working with the Hodza. Oh, okay. Yeah, this is what I wanted you to talk about this from because you guys discussed this. Yeah. No, in fact, the the best thing about this paper that that certainly I enjoyed the most was working with O'Connell who has spent a lot of time with hunter-gatherers working with John Speth who knows more about sort of the ethno-historic record, you know, the records from the 1500s and 1600s before all the changes that take place. And what was going on then and with Breonna Pobinar who has spent a lot of time looking at the earliest archaeological records, you know, we sort of brought together this group of people with very, very different perspectives. What O'Connell brought to the table was, yeah, the Hodza, if they are given the opportunity to scavenge, they will. He said they, if they see vultures circling in the distance, they'll go check it out. They've gotten very good at confronting lions. And we've got instances of Hodza, small groups of Hodza, even just a couple people driving off prides of lion. Just with a couple shots. Yeah. And what he said was about 14% of the meat that they got during the time that he was tracking with them came from scavenged animals. Is that right? Yeah. So we're not saying it was the major component of the diet. Nobody would, right? Because to your point, it's not reliable. It's part of the groove. It's like it's part of what happens. You know, there, there, there is, and Metin did a huge amount of work on sort of tracking the biological side of this. But one of the things that comes out of that discussion is that it's really a continuum between hunting and scavenging. And sort of where you are in that continuum depends on availability and opportunity and so on and so forth. There's even some suggestion that T-Rexes were scavengers. Yeah. I don't know how heck you would prove that. Go ahead. I have, do you remember the writer, if you're here, the writer, Jack Hitt? Yeah. Well, absolutely hilarious. Jack Hitt wrote a piece about Jack Hitt wrote this big piece about this big dinosaur guy in town. He was on the show in time. Okay. Jack Hitt was writing about that stuff. Okay. And he was expressing like skepticism of anyone that would go into a field where the experts are mostly 13-year-olds. So I have kids young enough, where they all go through the dinosaur phase and that's so having had kids that went through a dinosaur, their dinosaur phase in recent years where that came from was someone started looking at by the skull structure of a T-Rex. What must have been like an incredible old factory capability. And so why would they need to smell so good was the idea. They have all these chambers and whatnot for smell. So being like, they weren't a site predator, perhaps. They were wandering around, being like, you know, 10 miles away, there's some rotten thing. That's kind of what pushed that idea was that they seemed to have like an incredible old factory structure. Yeah. I would be skeptical that T-Rex was only scavengers because what we learned from the biological. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. No. Oh, no. But that's when everyone got all hip to that. And it's like, it's a thing that happens. You got to realize this is a thing that happens is it winds up being. Yeah. And with all due respect, like some of your work is like this way too. It winds up being it upsets a narrative that like T-Rex must have just wandered around ripping shit to shreds and killing everything in its path. And then someone's like, I don't. Why do you think. Why do we think that? Yeah. And then everybody's got to go, yeah, I don't know why I thought that. I just like, because the cartoons and stuff, I don't know. I just. I don't know why I thought that. And they're like, well, he's really good at smelling. Maybe he's really good at smelling rotten stuff. And that was his group. And it like. And it starts a conversation. So the same way we talked about is like this image, and I always held it of these big dudes wandering landscape, whack, and mammoths left it, right? I don't know. Why do I think that? I don't know why. It's competitive. It's seductive. Yeah, it is. It's appealing. It's romantic. It's, you know, hey, these guys made it all the way over here from Siberia. They must have been tough dudes. Killer man was left and right. One for breakfast, one for lunch. Yeah. We can't tell the difference, though, with any one archaeological site. I mean, we went through every single potential criteria, broken Clovis points. impact scars on the Clovis points. These things called emulates, which are microscopic linear impact traces, which are thought to occur when, uh, projectile enters, uh, in an animal, right? And you get these little microscopic lines on the point. You get those same lines from hitting a bush. We've done experiments, right? Or hitting grass. If you just throw and miss, it's the same thing, right? So of our 15 sites, both of us suspect, at least some of those were hunted. Right? Some of those mammoths that those 15 sites were hunted. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them, I think, were probably scavenged. Right? We don't know, but we can't tell. So we don't know if it's all 15 were hunted and zero were scavenged, all 15 were scavenged, zero were hunted. You're, and you had to have contemplated the middle ground, which is probably come across when it's all messed up for whatever reason, and you go over there and kill it real quick. Well, one of the things that came out of the animal literature was that, um, wildlife biologists can sometimes have a hard time telling whether something was, was hunted or scavenged and who scavenged it. Right? And that's just a couple days later. Yeah. You know, if it's out there in the rain, uh, in the snow, if it's really high heat, um, you know, you just, you just can't tell unless you got a wildlife camera that caught it in the act. And we don't have wildlife cameras that caught people in the act doing after a mammoth. Can you, can you help tie this work? Tie this discussion about where they, like, were they, they're perhaps killing it, perhaps killing some, perhaps scavenging some. Your curiosity about this has to be fed by this bigger question, right? Your curiosity about this is, is, is spawned from your interest, you know, you're motivated by this big discussion of how probable is it that humans killed all this stuff? Like, can, can you connect these like, do you, do you view this discussion as totally outside of that? Or do you think it informs the discussion that the, that the, that the place to see an extinctions were driven by humans? I think for me, what this research shows is that we cannot use archaeology to test that question of overkill. Got it. So a couple of things for me, uh, one of the things is I'm really interested in how people adapt to landscapes. Okay. And I want to know about how they respond to the environmental and ecological challenges of surviving on that landscape, how are they successful on that landscape? What is the impact of the environment and the climate of that landscape on their adaptations? What is the impact of their adaptive strategies on the resources on that landscape? So for me, it's not so much the, the specific question of extinctions, though I'll get to that in a moment, it's really the larger question, what was it like to come into what was either an empty continent or a continent that was at the very best, lightly populated, where there hadn't been much of a human footprint or human impact up to that point. What are folks doing on that landscape and how do they do it and how did they figure it all out? Yeah. Right? Because one of the things that's really clear is that by around 11,000 years ago, you've got people in very different parts of North America developing adaptive strategies, incorporating lots of different resources in their diet. I think that's happening earlier as well, but that's a sidebar. So they clearly had figured stuff out. So I want to know about that process and I want to know how it unfolded and what the, the impacts in both directions of the environment on the people and the people in the environment. Extinctions is one piece of that, obviously, right? And the problem that I have with overkill in addition to what mentioned, meant and just mentioned, is that it's also the end of the Pleistocene. So all sorts of things are happening at the end of the Pleistocene. And so the question becomes an even larger echosinality issue, right? If the Pleistocene is coming to an end, how can you say it was just humans until you've factored out and precluded the possibility of all the changes that are taking place at the end of the ice age as the earth emerges from the grip of 20,000 years of cold, right? That can't not have had an impact on all of these different animals. But the thing that makes it a really interesting and challenging question in which is why I think I don't want to just stop it saying, oh, it was humans or not humans. I want to find out how do you kill off mammoth and horses and camels on the great grasslands of North America, mastodons in the forest, giant beavers in swamps, glipedodons in Florida, animals with very different ecological tolerances, ecological thresholds, very different adaptations. It's too easy an answer to say that humans killed them all because we don't have any evidence that humans killed, you know, 36 of the 38 or, you know, right? So that becomes, for me, the more interesting intellectual challenge that we have to address. And so yeah, if humans were responsible for killing the last mammoth standing fine, does that mean there are cause of the extinctions? I don't think so because everything that we're seeing in the environmental record and in the ancient DNA record is that they've already started to swirl around the drain long before humans showed up. So if you want to cause, it's not going to be the last mammoth that was killed by a hunter. It's going to be processes that were set in place thousands of years earlier. And that becomes a question of how do we understand that in terms of what's happening at the end of the Pleistocene at the end of the ice age, climatically and environmentally and ecologically? This question is a little out of order I should ask earlier. All those animals you just named. So go through that list again, the big stuff that vanished or hit me with four or five big things that vanished. M.S. M.S. Mastodon, Gompathare, Camel, Horse, Irrematherium, Nostrotherium, Milodon, Glossotherium, how many do you want? That's plenty because it demonstrates this point that I want to dig in for a minute. We have 15 sites. We have 15 sites where we have, Probesidians, human tools with mammoth and mastodon mixed in with Probesidians, mixed in with elephants. But we don't have those with giant beavers. We don't have those with ground sloths. We don't have them with astronoligus, the extinct bunny. We don't have them with, you know, the little tiny antelope that disappeared. So here we are. Wait, wait, wait, Steve. One more thing. Please. Yeah, go ahead. We don't have them with the spruce tree that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. Okay. I don't know about that spruce tree. Yeah. Absolutely. And Paul Martin bless his heart. Wonderful guy. He was the guy that was really behind the overkill stuff. He was a terrific guy. He tried to explain why humans might have caused the extinction of the spruce tree. Really? Yes. He did. It's in his 2005 book. Kids running around machete. He's whacking away. I don't know. No, it was setting fires out of season. Okay. Got it. Yeah. All right. I'll let you finish. Sorry. Sorry. I don't have a point. It's just it's kind of a question. Be like. If. Let me ask a sub. I got a sub question. Is there. Do we have any mammoths or mastodons that have a projectile point jammed into it? And does that even happen when you test it? We don't know. We don't know. Yeah. So in Europe and in Asia, we actually have stone points embedded in bone. Okay. Um, we do not have a single clobus point embedded in any publicity in bone in North America. And because of all the stuff you do, I'm sure you have gone around with fresh. Bone. Javin points and do it. Oh, it happens. I mean, is it, is it hard to do? Is it hard to pull off? Uh, I mean, I've never stabbed an animal with clobus points. Um, I mean, just like cattle bones or something. Oh, uh, yeah. I don't know. Maybe you should. I don't know. Yeah. Shoot some, shoot some like. Well, George Frizzan did. Oh, yeah. He got clobus point embedded in bone. Yeah, he did. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's what I was curious. And in the old world, there's several archaeological examples, though that occurring, which is very strong evidence that that particular animal was hunting, which I think is where you were going with that. And that's a good point. I just, that was like a sub question because it kind of informs us. It'd be the, I don't, I don't even have this form to my head yet, but we have these sites that they've killed elephants and I'm, I'm just trying to make a word that lumps mammoths and clombian mammoths and all that kind of stuff, mastodons, they've killed elephants. So, but we don't have sites where they killed giant ground sloths. We don't have sites where they've killed saber tooth cats. So I would look and I'd say, well they had if I'm assuming that the humans killed all this big stuff off I would be like, well, man, it sure seems like they had a preference Mammoth were the ones to get Because that when we like we don't have this other stuff So they're going out and they've been like, no, I'm gonna look for a mammoth and get it if it's scavenging Why don't we have scavenged if it's just opportunistic scavenging where Where are all the scavenged giant ground sloths? Where are the scavenged giant beavers? Yeah, so go ahead Well, there's there's two issues there, right? the first is Tefonomy and and how well certain animals survive on the landscape after they you know die and mammoth bones are thick They just have a great they often also are found near watering holes Okay, it can be gently buried so you'll have a greater chance of finding mammoth bones and any other of those things Okay, and just because they're bison, which we'll talk about. Yeah, yeah Also to like they were probably hunting bunnies and all those other things, right just because we don't have the sights, right? So I think the other thing I can see like like rabbit bone. Yeah What it just gets crunched up by stuff and eat yeah, and so it's really important to separate out The the question of hunting and what they hunted Versus did they cause the extinction of these animals, right? I wouldn't be surprised if they hunted that bunnies, right, but there's no evidence that they cause the extinction of those things I would add to I mean you raised an interesting question, right? If they were scavenging, why aren't we seeing scavenged Arrimatheriums giant sloths, right? We're not entirely sure that all of these animals were even around when these folks We got you, okay? That's a great point, man. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you probably can't you probably can't make a perfect timeline Well, no, we can't and in fact when you actually look at the The last they're called last appearance dates, which is the last radio carbon date that we have on an animal. Okay Of the 38 different genera about 20 of them 2018 I don't don't hold me to the specific number are gone by 20,000 years ago Oh Right, so yeah, I mean, it's a fair point to say Why weren't they scavenging the other things? Why were they scavenging mammoth? Well mammoth and mastodon actually survived up until around 10,000 years ago and in fact mastodons were living in the Great Lakes area when fulsome people were killing bison Not on the high plains, okay? So is that right? Oh, yeah, oh, absolutely and so what that is telling us is that You know if you are going to scavenge that's the big hunk of meat that's laying on the landscape for you We know that they were there. We don't know about the other Three dozen genera, okay, but also They're going after bison. They're hunting bison at this time So we know that they are in fact hunting and it's really interesting in a number of Clovis sites The targets are not necessarily mammoth. There are bison in some of these Clovis sites. Got it The other thing we learned in this research is that elephants Last much longer on the landscape after they die Then lots of other animals. Mm-hmm. So just the pure chance of Humans coming across an elephant carcass would be higher than a bunny or a caribou I mean just because of how huge it is how huge is and and there are documented cases of elephants lasting seven months on the landscape Um, and then they get scavenged right after that point. So yeah, and you know what your question makes me think too I don't think we've systematically gone through All of these sort of early Kills of beer or bison and sort of did the same kind of vetting of those as we've done all mammoth kills and were mammoth scavenging events Yeah, that'd be interesting when you look at all this stuff. Do you see more definitive kill What kind of stuff going I mean that's what I would think but you know what we haven't sort of turned our sort of critical eye on that Although the more we do comparisons between clovus and post-clovus hunter-gatherer groups archeologically The more similarities we tend to find You know, we used to think that fluting was a paleo-indian behavior Mm-hmm. And then we excavated goods and rock shelter in Oklahoma where We dug two meters down. We found fluted by faces. We thought oh my goodness This is one of the first clovus rock shelters ever found. Right. We were so excited. We were so excited We get radio carbon dates. We get radio carbon dates from two meters down where we're finding the fluted by face Right, the radio carbon dates come back 4,500 BP and we're like all those must be wrong You know charcoal can move between layers and rock shelters So we do optimal stimulated luminescence or OSL dating right of that same layer Uh, the dates come back 4,500 BP. All those must be wrong. Sand grains can move, right? It was the third field season we've been sweating and getting bit by ticks and all this or stuff very unpleasant We find notched archaic projectile points that we know from other sites date to 4,500 BP made on the same exact stone raw material as our fluted by faces and we had to So come to the evidence at that point for making like two kinds. No, what they were doing was they were its convergent evolution They were basically they had independently come up with this fluting technique and on the way to making their notched points They were fluting their by faces and then the but the fluting was erased in the final stage We didn't know fluting occur. I didn't know fluting occurred in in post clovus periods But there's very little sort of back and forth. I think we're not as much between paleo Indian and post paleo Indian Archaeological sites, which is largely because of what you were talking about earlier Steve, which is that this has been so much of the attention has been focused on clovus and Look, we're just as guilty as everybody else. Awesome, right? It is really pretty awesome and it's what gets all the archeological attention, but we haven't sort of systematically evaluated all the other things that came later in the same way And that partially has to do with the fact that we find so little clovus That we pour over every flake scar and every small chip and everything in later time periods where you've got sites that are acres and millions of artifacts They just don't sort of analyze things as closely as often as I think I think that's fair to say. Yeah, yeah, and because And getting back to the whole extinction issue, right? There's more writing on it 13,000 years ago in terms of the possible role of humans in the demise of all these animals. You know, right? So the There's there's It's a greater question to answer and so that's why the focus Hey, everyone. Big huge announcement Me either live the Christmas tour is kicking off again this year for the Christmas season of 20 26 this time we're hitting the Midwest Me either live the Christmas tour kicks off in December across six Midwestern cities We've got Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Madison, Demoin, Minneapolis and Fargo Join myself. Yannis Putellis Claynew can Brent Reeves and Randall Williams for a night of laughs trivia free prizes news and opinions from across the worlds of hunting fishing wildlife Conservation and wild foods also were already stacking up some great special guests I got my buddy bubbly Doug making the appearance in Madison go to the meat or calm slash tour and Sign up to get early access to pre-sale tickets right now and secure your spot Tickets will be available to the public on Friday. So don't wait. Go to the meateater.com slash tour to get your pre-sale tickets now You know on the question of Big stuff is easier to scavenger. I mean just it's big. Yeah, so it takes a long time to go away. Are you familiar with ville jolm or Stephenson? He's an Arctic explorer He spent a lot of time cutting across like early 1900s. He was up in on the Arctic coast of Alaska He went into the high the the high Arctic Victoria Island and stuff He made a lot of first contacts with people. They they knew about white people but hadn't encountered him He's got a couple books about his his wanderings At one point they're hurting for food and they find a whale This is a northern Alaska. They find a whale and he talks about they had to boil it and boil it the tongue They had to boil it and boil it and boil it to desalinate it enough to be able to eat it and he later they later run into In his time he used it like his one of his books is my life with the Askimo. He used the word Askimo They run into some Askimo who said I can't remember how many days it's it's multiple That's been there for years Well, so then it was still like here's this guy's scavenging a whale that people like, oh no, I can't remember. It was two years, whatever. They're like, "Oh, that thing's been there forever." And they're still eating on it. Well, and this is where I think working with and learning from John Speth was incredible. Because for years, he has systematically searched and read through the ethno-historic literature on hunter-gatherers, not the post-World War II literature, but everything basically pre-World War II. And while scavenging is incredibly rare, post-World War II, pre-World War II, he finds it everywhere, hunter-gatherers groups around the world from Argentina to Alaska to Asia all over. They're scavenging everything. And in fact, oftentimes they prefer the putrid meat to fresh meat. God, yeah. He gives the example of just to sort of put this in some sort of local context. He talks about Mandan and Hadatsa groups in the early, sort of 1600, 1700s, Bison that would wander out onto the ice, break up. They'd fall in ground. They float down stream. And Mandan and Hadatsa groups would just pull them out. They'd be pretty bloated at that point. I've written about this. It was part of the seasonal plan. Part of the seasonal plan was it shit. There you go. There you go. And you were wondering about reliability of scavenging. But there you go. Wow. Yeah, you're right. That contradicts it. Yeah. No. And it didn't. Somebody was asked, well, what about the smell? And John has this great quote in the paper. Native American said, we don't eat the smell. When I was just hanging out, though, I was just hanging out with Inuit folks. And they still they still eat a lot of what they call fermented walrus. Right. In other things. And in talking to him about it, it's it's it wasn't that someone once upon a time I'm guessing here. But it wasn't that someone once upon a time said, I could really go for something fermented. What it probably was, you kill a bunch of walrus because there's walrus around. You can use some of it. You can't use all of it. And you dig down and get into the permafrost and bury some and cover it up with rocks. So polar bears don't get it. Yeah. And then when you're really hard up, you go. And it's like, it's a little rank. But I'm not going to starve to death over this. And so you eat it. Your children eat it. Their children need it. And eventually becomes it's just a thing that is acceptable. And it's like, but it's birth. Like the birth of the idea was trying to store stuff over. Right. And so you can imagine that that people's tolerances for these things. Stank or fermentation or rot or whatever probably grow into taste. Probably grow into a thing that you don't mind. That it's normal. And you like it. Right. It's custom in culture. Yeah. Especially when it's been done for two million years. Sure. I mean, like when you've got little homo habilis, they're not going out and hunting rhinos and hippo, right? There's a three foot tall hominin that barely can make stone flakes. So they are scavenging. And they know one question whether homo habilis was scavenging, right? So I think and you had a quote this morning that scavenging when hunting gets added with homo erectus, scavenging doesn't go away. And I think the ethno historic literature shows that to be the case. Yeah. No credit to Mary Steiner who's worked a lot on Neanderthal sites. And Mary pointed out because Neanderthal, there's no question these guys were hunting. They were serious dudes. And what she said is it's unfortunate that we haven't really thought about Neanderthal's scavenging because that is in a sense a form of gathering. You've got hunting and you've got a gathering. And if you think about scavenged meat, it's low cost. It's low risk. It's nutritious. And if you don't know where you're going or what you might find up ahead of you, it's right there in front. Yeah. And why would you pass it up? Because again, you're not going to have those sort of food taboos. I mean, when we think about scavenged stuff, right? You're not going to buy a package of ground beef in the grocery store that's kind of turned brown. Yeah. Right? You won't touch that. Well, I do have one story. And how'd you go after you ate it? Yeah. So, you know, for them, it, it, yeah, these folks are subsistence hunters and gathers. And subsistence, I think, has a pretty wide bandwidth. Sure. Much wider than our experiences, certainly. And much more opportunities than our experiences as well. You guys both know of at least my cons, the, and I've worked in the Arctic with them for one season. I, again, serious person, follow the facts, do your research. And then like I'm doing with you at times, I'm like, but, but, you know, if you had to guess, anyways, I was up with him in the Arctic. And I'm, and I'm pressuring him about what would be the coolest thing to find. Right. What do you hope you find? What would be the coolest thing you find? And he indulged me. And he said, I sometimes imagine, he's explained me, I sometimes imagine that I'm flying along in my helicopter. And they're out of the ground as a fucking hand. And he's like, and it's just that a landslide, like a landslide, like an encampment. And then it freezes. Right. And he goes and under that landslide, melting out of this ice, it's just everything. Yeah. It's everything. It's the dogs, the clothes. Yeah. That it's, it's like, you know, it's on Pompeii. Right. Right. It's like Pompeii in Mount Vesuvius where there's a dude like, or, you know, there's a person literally doing a thing. They're like, they're in their fetal position. So he said, yeah, that would be cool. Well, what, like, what? It doesn't need to be that fanciful. But like, what could we find? And I put this question to another anthropologist one time. And I'm like, the guy, there's got to be so much stuff out there. He's like, I don't know, look at how many roads we've already built. How many foundations have we've already dug? Um, this individual saying, I'm not optimistic that we're going to find all kinds of new, amazing stuff. Yeah. Well, like, but what, what would be an exciting thing that's, that's somewhat probable that would stir the conversation around the first Americans up. First, let me talk about Mike's dream. Okay. Mike's fantasy. Again, I pushed him on this. No, no, that's fine. Um, regrettably it's coming true because the climate change. Oh, yeah. Ice fields are melting. And there's a whole sort of subdiscipline that's emerging now where people are going to these areas where glacial ice is disappearing and they're finding stuff. So far, no hand sticking out. Which actually would pretty hard to see from a helicopter. Um, but, you know, Mike needs to stick around a little while a little while longer and it's true. Yeah, because it holds us hiding under all that ice. Yeah. Um, look, my, my sense would be what I would like to see. Right. And this is actually something that we're working on now is getting far more, um, ancient environmental DNA on landscapes and on animals because leaving aside. I'm an archaeologist, but let's just leave aside all the archaeological stuff. Partly for reasons that met and said, we're not going to be able to answer this question with archaeological data. What we really need to find, what we really need to develop is a knowledge base and data. Um, let me pause for a moment and give a bit of an explanation. If you go to a lake and you get a sediment core out of that lake. Okay. And you thin slice it like a salami. Okay. And you take just a little square centimeter of dirt out of that. You can recover all of the plants and animals that were on that landscape at that moment in time. Okay. Uh, if, if they were, if the animals were taken a leak, if they were dropping a turd, if they were shedding, I mean, you moving across, you could find your DNA all over this room. Sure. Okay. What that does for us, if we really want to understand environmental change, species changes over time, we can't just look at what is a mammoth doing. We've got to look at what the environment around that mammoth. is doing and how that's changing. And so for me, and again, this is something that we're working on, is we need to develop, you know, it's kind of mundane. It's not as exciting as seeing a hand sticking out. It can't be the hand, man. No, no, I'm conceiting ground. I defer to Mike on all of this and other questions. But what we need to do is develop that knowledge because then we'll be able to say, look, these animals are starting to swirl down the drain at this point in time and here's the reason why we're seeing their vegetation changing. We're seeing that biological community evolving over time because of this ultimate driver, which is the climate that's changing at the end of the place to scene. So that's what I want to find is find those sites and we've got several of them going right now working with my colleagues at the Center for Geogenetics and Copenhagen, where we're actually looking at a number of these localities that are terminal place to scene, where we're looking at the presence of the plants and the animals that are out on that landscape, just trying to get so that we can answer that question. So much as I would love to be able to say, if I found this one thing, it could solve all of the questions that we've been asking. There isn't going to be one thing. This is not like, what's that movie with Billy Crystal? One thing. Where they go off to a dude ranch. Oh, city slickers. City slickers, right? And Jack, there's not going to be one thing. It's going to be a lot of work on a lot of different things. Yeah. Do you have one thing? I do. Oh, thank goodness. Okay. And I think it's because for several years now, we've done all these experiments. And we'll do one experiment. We get a result. We'll do a very different experiment. We get the same result. Like again, we're finding the more experiments we do, the more equifinality there is. Okay. So what we're learning is how much we can't know about the Stone Age. And that sucks. Right? I didn't go into archaeology and the Stone Age to learn about all the things I can't actually know about. Right? Yeah, that's a bummer. It's a bummer. Right? No one does that. I found out you can't find anything out. Yeah. And really, we're in a lot of ways, I think looking at maybe the extent of some archaeological interpretation. So for me, I would take the single clovis point embedded in a mammoth bone. That would be awesome. Right? But I'll tell you what's going to happen. Right? If someone finds a clovis point embedded in a mammoth bone, they're going to say overkill, we killed all the mammoths done. Right? That proves all these other 15 sites were definitely kills. And I'll tear my hair out because I'm like, no, like we suspected they hunted. This is confirmation, right? Strong evidence. And now that's really all I'm looking for is some strong evidence because I think they hunted these things. But it would be, yeah, that's true. It would be nice to have an unequivocal case. It would be great. But I'll tell you the reaction. I see what you're saying, because if you had it, if you find the one where the shoulder blade has the thing sticking into it, then all the other pieces laying around, all the other broken points laying around and stuff, it would kind of inform your understanding of what you're seeing elsewhere. Well, that would see. And this is where it would override it, but it would like you'd inform it in some way. Now, but see, this is where you can't take a single case and then justify all the equivocal cases. That's just it's illogical. And it's not good science. It would show that, yeah, it would be great confirmation of this thing that we suspect is happening. Do you know that when I was first interviewed the historian Dan Florey, as many, many years ago, took me to the Blackwater draw site, like the Clovis type thing. Clovis, New Mexico. It was closed. We always laughed about this. It was closed. We jumped fence and went looked around. I've done that a long time ago. I then started reading about it in my head. I'm sure I've told you the story in my head. I've read somewhere how it sits in my head that I read how at one point in time, a school bus driver that had taken local school kids to see the Blackwater draw site found a mammoth skull with a projectile point embedded in the eye socket and took it. I then later had people go find that for me. I cannot find it. How would I have made that up? Like, I can't find where I read it. Yeah. Was it a dream? Yes. But like, by all, I've looked. I've looked. Was it a pamphlet? It's not findable. It's not findable digitally. Yeah. Like, I don't know, but I swear that I went and told people that. I'm like, hey, do you know that a bus driver one time took some kids out here and found a mammoth skull, the projectile point stuck in and dragged it home? And I would tell people this. And at some point, someone called me out and I'm like, can you point this out to me? What are you talking about? And I'm like, yeah, I'll go find it. I can't find it. Well, I dreamed it. You dreamed it because I'm well, think about it. You know, how big a mammoth skull is. I don't know, but how would I have made that up? I don't, um, memory place. The bus driver? Yeah. Yeah. Were the kids on the bus? Yeah. Did they help carry the skull? This is a call to this is a call to listeners. This is a call to listeners. Ah, if you can help me out and find whatever the L or you are that bus driver. Yeah. And in another life, I was the bus driver. No, not you. Maybe the bus drivers listening right now. If your grandpa was a bus driver and when you every time you walk into like his old barn or the skull in there, the piece of stone sticking out of the eye socket, can you please send me a photo? You know, I because I don't know. It was my cousin's hand. But but I read it somewhere and I like it's embarrassing. I was like, I can't remember who challenged me on it, but I was embarrassed to be like, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. One gets these things in one's memory. And then over the years, the memory gets embellished in ways subconscious. But a bus driver. Yeah. Well, that's just a nice detail. Yeah. Um, I will tell you, um, I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time in and around that locality. Yeah, we heard your story. No, I've heard other rumors. But that's not one of them. And I think it's an apocryphal at this point. It's an apocryphal story. It probably traces back to me. Yeah. You're you're actually patient zero on that particular epidemic. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So what, uh, tell me what you guys are working on now. Like what's next? In this world, in this world, in the ice age world. So I've been working the last few years on a site that's at 10,000 feet. Oh, and you can talk about this in the Rockies. Yeah, tell people about this site. So this is a site that was originally excavated by the Smithsonian in the 1990s, uh, and, you know, really interesting work that they did there. And just out of curiosity, I know I've, when I've been on in the show before, we've talked about our work at the mountaineer site. Oh, that's what I thought you were getting into is the gunnison. Oh, yeah. No, this is a different one. Okay. I'm sorry. Oh, go ahead. Yep. Sorry. So just to, for those who didn't hear the previous podcast, and I can't quote a chapter in verse of which podcast it was, is met and put of your quote. Yeah, the mountaineer site. The mountaineer site in Gunnison, right? We had a winter village, a Folsom age winter village. So this other site was up and over the continental divide, uh, from mountaineer about, oh, I think 80 kilometers. So, okay. Okay. And there's a couple of substantial mountain passes between this other site and mountaineer, one at about 11,000 feet in the other, at about 11, five and like, like highways cutting through them or there are now. Okay. Yeah, uh, slum gullion pass and spring creek pass. Okay. For those of you that have a Colorado atlas in front of you. And we were just, I don't know, on a busman's holiday, uh, visiting this site, uh, back in, I don't know, six, eight years ago. Yeah. And it had been interpreted by the Smithsonian. And I think reasonably enough that, uh, it was kind of a way station, because here at 10,000 feet at the end of the I say, it is a Folsom age site I should add. Here at 10,000 feet at the end of the I sage, you're not going to be hanging around. Uh, mountaineer, we had reasons to think they were hanging around in the winter. Well, for one thing, it's only at 8,000 feet. So it's a lot lower. It was probably a good place to spend the winter for a variety of reasons that we've talked about before. Yeah, yeah, the, the hell, the, the hell game. Absolutely. Well in the winter and made an animals would get in there and it hard for them to, they're hard for them to get out of the winter in there. Yep. Yep. And people were sitting up on top of this mesa, a thousand feet above the valley floor where actually it's warmer than on the valley floor and the basin floor because cold air sinks, right? So we had a good sort of case for that. Anyway, uh, so the Smithsonian had done this work back in the 90s. And about four years ago, the collection came back to the Forest Service out in western Colorado, and we got to looking at them at the collections. Again, just, you know, out of curiosity. And we were just dumbstruck to see some of the projectile points were made out of stone that came, we are convinced from the Gunnison Basin. And then it occurred to us, oh, well, maybe these folks were on their way over to Mountaineer. Okay. Because we know when you look at the distribution of these Folsom sites in the Rockies and out on the plains, they tend to have circuits, right? So we did a bunch of work at the original Folsom site, you know, back in the 1990s. And these folks are kind of tracking up and down the edge of the Rockies. They're mostly out on the plains. You know, they're going from the Panhandle of Texas up into Eastern Colorado, stopping at the Folsom site, moving around. In the Rockies, they're sort of within the Rockies itself, right? The Rocky Mountains themselves. So we got to wondering, is there a connection between the folks that we know were in the Gunnison Basin and the folks that were on the other side of these two high mountain passes? Yeah. So we spent three years excavating out there. It's called the Black Mountain site. And what we found was indeed, they were there, but only briefly. They may have been there on a couple of separate occasions. So this really was kind of a waypoint. One of the local folks that put us up in the summers, they have a sort of a dude ranch out there. A shout-out to Fremont's Ranch. It's a wonderful place to stay. And Greg Pearson, who's the kind of runs and guides out of Fremont's, said, oh yeah, that's a spike camp. That's what he calls it. Oh, really? Yeah. Do you must use the term as well? Yeah. Yeah. So he said, yeah, that kind of looks what I would call a spike camp, where you're kind of there. You're checking your weaponry to make sure it's all good. They were making some points. They were discarding some other ones, but you don't see the kind of tools that you find in a residential locality where people spend a long time. Yeah. Sure. Right. So not a lot of scrapers. We had some engraving tools. I just spent most of last year doing the analysis of all the stone tools from the site. And it's mostly just little tiny flakes, because they were just making sure everything, all their gear was in good shape. Because if you think about it, you're there at the end of the place to scene, and you're at 10,000 feet, you're going to have to go up and over a mountain pass. It's 11. And then you have to go up and over another one at 11.5. And then you drop down into the drainage that will take you into the Gunnison basin. Yeah. You don't want to start that trek at five o'clock in the afternoon. Right. So you hunker down at this nice little way station. You get yourself ready. And then the next morning, you do your thing. Yeah. One of the really is a bone at that site. Not a darn thing. Really? Not a darn thing. And I'll tell you, I was out there a year ago last spring with my colleague, Eski Wilders Liv, who basically invented environmental DNA. Because we had taken some samples from there in 2023 to see if there was anything in the DNA that we could identify that would tell us what the plants and animals were. Because there is no bone preserved. And didn't see a darn thing. And Eski, we were passing through on our way to Santa Fe, kind of a circuitous route on the way to Santa Fe from Denver, because he wanted to see the site to try and figure out, well, there has to be why isn't the DNA preserved. This is an ideal setting. And it has to do with some technical stuff about single stranded versus double stranded DNA, which we won't go into. But we took a bunch more samples in 2025. And I was just in Copenhagen for a month, working on some other projects, ancient DNA related stuff. And I talked to the person who's doing the analysis of the environmental DNA from this site. And one of the things that struck me, and this is all very preliminary data, is that she's seeing a lot of plants in the DNA, but no woody plants, no trees. And one of the things that had always been sort of in the back of my mind was, okay, this is a great place for a way station because you would have been in the trees before you get up and over the tree line and have to cross these high elevation passes. Because then you'd have wood for fuel. But we weren't finding any trees in the DNA. Just a lot of flowers. Right? Flowers are not going to keep you warm. So they were up in the alpine now. Yes. And so now this is all very, very, very preliminary. I'll tell you what, they were doing their hunting sheep. Big horns. You're done. You have to do anything else. Thank goodness. I don't know what they do with the bones. You better look over to the right of the left. I love it if we found some sheep DNA, but there's absolutely no animal DNA. Oh, man. Yeah. So what they're doing now, this was the initial run through doing what's called shotgun sequencing, where you're not necessarily looking for specific plants. And so I've asked them, can you go back and do what's called captured DNA, where you're using as bait tree species to see if you grab chunks of DNA out of the swirl, if you will, that are trees. Because that's the only way that you'll be able to be sure that there's either trees there or not trees there. Got it. So hopefully we'll have that answer in a few months. So yeah, that's what's been, I've been working on on the archaeological side of things. Wouldn't it be great if that DNA stuff was so good that you could just be like the people that were here are there. You know what? Someday I've thought about that, Steve. I've absolutely. That's my hand sticking out of the ground, right? Is the ability to say that would be, you know, in theory, it's absolutely possible to a degree. There's preservation limitations. So, you know, getting a full genome out of a sediment sample is a challenge. You could probably get whether they were, they shared, you know, uniparental mitochondrial DNA-wide chromosome markers, but that wouldn't necessarily tell you whether it's not saying people, it just tells you whether at some point back in the past, they have a shared maternal ancestor instead. Yeah. So yeah, that's what I've been doing. And what, what was what we expect next to you? A couple of things. Actually, thanks to some of the meat eater listeners of this podcast. You know, a couple of years ago, we published a Clovis point and a Folsom point that Matthew Wendell, who's a listener and a fan, sent to us. And he said, hey, can you analyze these? We did. We found all sorts of stuff we learned. We published that in the scientific literature. That's happened again now. Ben Galt in New England found a Clovis point or a fluted point from Nantucket Island. And he said, hey, like, I'm interested. Can you learn about anything? And so he sent it to us and we're doing all the analyses now. And so yeah, I mean, thanks to the meat eater podcast listeners, like we're doing real research on Clovis and fluted points and we're learning all sorts of stuff. So that's awesome. So if anyone out there wants to send us more artifacts, we won't keep them. We'll send them back to you. But we can do all sorts of awesome geometric morphometrics and microware analysis and learn every Clovis point we learn something, right? Yeah. So we do that sort of thing quite a bit. The big thing next for me is I'm going to Kenya in January. I'm really interested in the origin of all technology over 3 million years ago. And we published a new hypothesis last year or about a year and a half ago on on how that origin of technology with stone tools occurred. And it all has to do with butchering and cutting carcasses up with naturally sharp rocks. And there's a site that dates about 2.9, 2.8 million years ago. Yeah, where we think we may have some naturally sharp rocks in association with a carcass. Oh, really? Yeah. And so we're going to go in and check those out and we'll see. So someone or something was like, hey, it's got sharp edge on it. I'm going to beat snob out of this. And why this is really important, right? Is that the practice of cutting came before stone tools, right? But if you look at the scientific literature, everyone thinks that the origin of stone technology was some sort of eureka moment, like in 2000, space Odyssey, where someone like is like, you know what? I need to cut something. Bam, I'm going to, you know, go ahead and do that. And I've got my knife, right? But there's no reason to suspect that's the trajectory that things took. And really, the only reason to make stone tools is if the behavior of cutting was already in place. And so I think that the exploitation of carcasses and meat potentially goes back much farther than we currently have, maybe even back to a creature called artipithecus. It's like 4.4 million years old. I could be wrong, I probably am, but we're going to investigate. So how long we spent over there? This first trip to Kenya 'cause I've been to Africa for other times. This one will be about 10 days and then we'll go for longer stints in the near future. - Got it. - Yeah, so it should be good. - Yeah. Well guys, thanks for coming out of the show, man. - Thanks for having us. - Always enjoyable. - Yeah. - I gotta tell people a quick thing. I was gonna bring it up earlier when I bring it up now. - The, and you guys are welcome to come. We've been talking about how our Christmas tour tickets, where I've been trying to explain the complexity of pre-sale and sale. It is officially pre-sale, which means they're on sale. I'll spare you the distinction between pre-sale and sale. Tickets are on sale for the Christmas tour. Monday, December 14th, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tuesday, December 15th, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wednesday, December 16th, Madison, Wisconsin. Thursday, December 17th, Des Moines, Iowa. Friday, December 18th, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Saturday, December 19th, Fargo, North Dakota. Get your tickets now. Nate, what's the ticket address, man? - Go to the meeteta.com. - Just go to the meeteta.com, look up the Christmas tour. The Christmas tour is where you go to get your laughs at Christmas, and if you got someone in your life who's a fan, a listener of the show or whatever, give them a couple of these bad boys and as an early gift in a Christmas card, they are gonna be grateful. All right, guys, thanks for coming on. You have a stand. You can come on anytime you want, you know. Listen, if we ever just walk in here and you guys are sitting here, we're gonna record. Anytime you want to come on, you can keep us posted. - For sure, and I think we always have ideas. So other collaborations in the future, all sorts of tests. - Yeah, we're supposed to be cutting up some ostriches or something like that. - Oh, don't worry. (laughing) - All right, thanks again. Again, Dr. David Meltzer and Dr. Metan Aaron, thanks for coming. - Thanks for coming. - Thank you. - Thank you very much. (upbeat music) - This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.