In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and Dan talk about coyotes and how they got their start in the wilds of Los Angeles. They also talk about the new book, "Coyote America" and how the coyote population has grown since the last time they spoke to a coyote. Joe also tells a story about how he almost got eaten by one of his own coyotes, and how he got a new pet dog named Johnny Cash, who is now dead. Joe also talks about how coyotes are smart, and what it's like to have a dog that can out run and outsmart them. And finally, they talk about chickens and brooding eggs, which is a new thing that's been around for a while, and why you should be worried about it. Thanks for listening and Happy New Year to all of you! Joe & Dan XOXO, - and to all the people who have ever been in a fight with a wild coyote, ever have you ever heard of one? Thank you so much for all the love and support you've shown so far, I hope you enjoy this episode, it's a good one! - Joe and I appreciate all of the love you've been showing us love, support, support and support, and stay safe out there! xoxo - Dan and I hope it's great! XO - Caitie, Caitie and Joe :D - Joe Rogans Podcast by Night, - Thank you for listening to this episode! Caitie ( ) , & Joe's Dad's Podcast by Day, Joe's Podcasts by Night xO . Thanks, Dan's Podcast, , and Joe's Experience by Night ( | ) - The Wild New World Podcast by Joe's PODCAST by Nightingale Podcast by Yeehaw, The Joe's Day, by Night & Night, All Day, All day, Allday, All Night, By Night, YEEhaw by Night! , All Day All Day I'll See You'll See Me, I'll Talk About It? , I'm Gonna See You, I'm With You, YEHAH! I'm SOOOOO SING, I'LL SEE YOU, I LOVE YOU, YEAH?
00:01:59.000And the problem was for like really super athletic guys, like we had some...
00:02:05.000Like real high-end athletes on the show occasionally, like amateur football players.
00:02:11.000Guys are just stacked and strong as hell.
00:02:13.000And a Malinois, no matter what, is still only 60, 70 pounds.
00:02:17.000And so we brought in these Regency Mastiffs because they wanted to figure out a dog that could do bite work but was way stronger.
00:02:24.000And this dog was like $1.60 and built like a brick shithouse.
00:02:29.000His dad, my dog's dad, was actually in the movie The Hulk.
00:02:33.000If you ever saw the movie The Hulk with Eric Bannon, when they turned the dogs into Hulk dogs, that was actually that dog.
00:02:41.000So my friend Joe, shout out to Joe, who raised these dogs.
00:02:44.000He raised them for intelligence and temperament, and he wouldn't let any dog breed that had any aggression towards other dogs, or any aggression towards people.
00:02:52.000So they were the best dogs and so this dog was hanging out with all these other dogs that were doing bite work and everything and he was just so chill just hanging out go how does this dog so chill and just like he goes he's just fucking smart he's smart he's well raised and well trained and loved so anyway I had his son And he was the fucking best.
00:03:12.000But he was in the yard during the day, and a coyote would come by the fence.
00:03:19.000And the fence was six feet high, like a wrought iron fence.
00:07:23.000So I wonder, because we don't have a way of measuring that with coyotes, I wonder how smart those motherfuckers are.
00:07:30.000Well, they are, I think, probably among the smartest of the wild animals, certainly in America.
00:07:39.000I mean, you know, one of the reasons we domesticated wolves and created dogs out of them is because, for one thing, we understood them.
00:07:48.000They live in the same kind of circumstances we do in social groups.
00:07:52.000They have to acculturate their pups just the way we have to do with kids.
00:07:57.000And so I think part of the explanation for why dogs are our oldest domesticate is because of their ability to understand us, to understand human language.
00:08:12.000I mean, this is one of the theories for early domestication of wolves is that there were some of them that were not only hyper-social and so amenable to being with humans, And hanging out with us, but also because there are some that were gifted word learners.
00:08:29.000We didn't have to learn their language.
00:08:33.000And I think that is probably an indication of, you know, coyotes are out of the canid family.
00:08:41.000All these creatures come out of the same family from 5.3 million years back.
00:08:47.000And I think coyotes in some respects may be the shrewdest and cleverest of all those groups because unlike wolves, they're not the big brawny dogs on the block.
00:08:56.000They're the ones who have to play this game of, man, I can't let this big burly wolf get me.
00:09:03.000I've got to figure out how to elude it.
00:09:05.000And that's responsible for a lot of their intelligence and cleverness is they co-evolved alongside wolves for so long they had to learn how to be the little guy who managed to survive by his wits.
00:09:18.000Yeah, and also one of the things that I learned from your book that's a good thing to bring up here is that they are not directly related to gray wolves, so they didn't interbreed with them.
00:09:49.000Yeah, the expansion started really out of two things, two things that took place in the early 20th century.
00:09:57.000One was the elimination of wolves in the East, which created an open niche for a mid-sized predator.
00:10:05.000And the other was this campaign that first the states and then the federal government began to launch against coyotes and wolves in the West.
00:10:16.000The government hunters were pretty successful in taking out wolves because wolves are so attuned to be pack animals that if you kill one wolf in a pack, you could use the scent from that wolf basically to catch,
00:10:32.000trap, kill every single wolf in the pack.
00:10:36.000But coyotes responded to that basically by going...
00:10:39.000You probably remember our conversation about this, Joe.
00:10:42.000Back in 2017, they would go into what's known as a fishing mode.
00:10:48.000Coyotes, like humans, are fish and fusion animals.
00:10:52.000And when they're in fusion, they can exist in a pack.
00:10:55.000When they're in fission, they break apart the packs.
00:10:58.000And in singles and pairs, they scatter.
00:11:01.000And that's what they do when they're pressured.
00:11:03.000They learned how to do this from wolves.
00:11:05.000And so when we started trying to take them out with poisons and gunning in the West, they went into this fishing mode and it caused them to start spreading across the country.
00:11:15.000And that started in the early 20th century.
00:11:18.000I mean, when I was growing up in Louisiana in the 1960s, coyotes were first beginning to appear in Louisiana, which is how I got fascinated with them.
00:11:46.000So they really were just a West Coast animal?
00:11:48.000Well, there's a couple of archaeological sites dating from the Pleistocene from 10,000 years ago that appear to show coyotes probably fairly randomly appearing in places like Virginia and Pennsylvania.
00:12:06.000But in the historical record that we have, they weren't on the East Coast until the middle of the 20th century.
00:12:14.000And they start showing up in northern New York and upstate New York by about the 1920s or so.
00:12:23.000And they start coming down south from that point until, I mean, finally they're reaching...
00:12:40.000And I talk about it in Wild New World, the whole wolf campaign in America.
00:12:47.000The two guys who put together this classic volume on wolves, the Wolves of North America, Stanley Young and E.A. Goldman, published this work in 1944. They're government hunters.
00:13:02.000And they argue that by 1944, there are no wolves left.
00:13:34.000Even with all those animals and all that public lands, I mean, the campaign against wolves has been that successful.
00:13:40.000So, yeah, by 1950 or so, there are no wolves in the East, and that opens up this niche for coyotes to come in and fill it.
00:13:49.000And one of the other things that I learned from you is that coyotes, when they do that roll call, when they scream out and howl, if one of them's missing, the females will make more pups.
00:14:01.000Yeah, they are able to, when they howl, one of the things they do with howls, I mean, they're communicating all kinds of things, but one of the things we're pretty certain they do with howls is to take a census of how many coyotes are in the area.
00:14:16.000Because, of course, howling is infectious, both for coyotes and wolves.
00:14:21.000Whenever they hear a howl, they'll respond to it.
00:14:23.000And if, during the spring mating period, if howling produces Fewer responses in a particular area, it can trigger something, not exactly sure, in coyotes that will have the effect of producing larger litters.
00:14:44.000And of course, with fewer other predators in an area, one of the things that happens is the food base is larger.
00:14:51.000So if you have a coyote pack has, say, seven pups, I think?
00:15:20.000Are producing this feedback that often causes them to have larger litters, to be more successful in raising their pups.
00:15:29.000And they will respond by rising to the level of the carrying capacity of the landscape in any case.
00:16:30.000I mean, that was, you know, they were there when L.A. was founded, and they basically never left.
00:16:36.000I mean, there are records back in the 20s and 30s of, you know, the local authorities sending people out to try to take out coyotes way back 100 years ago.
00:18:23.000Yeah, and I mean, that certainly is...
00:18:28.000You know, it's a trait common to the whole wolf story in America, too, because wolves learned all these kinds of techniques.
00:18:35.000I mean, I don't really have a record of a wolf using a tool like that, but they certainly learned and taught one another over many, many generations how to avoid traps, what to do when people were trying to poison them,
00:18:51.000and how to spit out bait if they smell strychnine in it.
00:18:55.000So that kind of thing is a fairly common response of animals that feel as if humans are after them.
00:19:06.000One of the things that I noticed when I rented a house in Encino for a while, and we had a problem with rats in the garage.
00:19:14.000And one of the things I noticed is rats had realized that if they get to the garbage in the garage, there's no coyotes and owls.
00:19:21.000So the only time I ever saw rats was in my own house.
00:19:52.000And that world is existing simultaneously with me, a fucking young kid who's on a sitcom, who's gonna drive his sports car into this studio in Hollywood.
00:20:07.000And at the same time, like, this cannibalism fight for survival is going on in my garage.
00:21:10.000He's like, hey, you big motherfucker, go break that thing.
00:21:13.000It's it they're they're amazing animals But you know fuck it sucks if they eat your cat it sucks I've had a bunch of friends and I've you know and family members that have and recently a very good friend of mine out here lost his dog It's you know,
00:21:31.000it sucks and you know a coyote just tore your fucking little buddy alive Well, I know it does.
00:21:37.000I mean, I will admit, I've never had anything like that happen with a dog, in part because I always have really big dogs.
00:21:45.000I have Alaskan Malamutes, which, you know, I mean, the dog I lost, as I mentioned, last year, last May, I mean, he was a 140-pound dog.
00:22:26.000I've lost cats a couple of times because I've always lived in the country.
00:22:32.000I mean, my whole adult life, I've bought places outside town and usually built places outside town and lived half an hour away from the city where I was working or where I had to commute to.
00:25:19.000I mean, there's a story in the little town near where I live in New Mexico of people sitting out on the front porch of the cafe bar one evening as a cat is walking the railing in front of them.
00:25:35.000And while seven or eight people are sitting there drinking beer and shooting the shit, and the cat is walking the railing, Just like that scene, suddenly out of nowhere, a great horned owl appears, bang, hits the cat, and they're all sitting there open-eyed watching this owl fly away with the cat squirming in its claws,
00:25:53.000disappearing into the tree cover down on the river.
00:25:59.000You know, you've been killing birds forever.
00:26:01.000If you're a cat outside, one thing that I found that I actually learned from our good friend Steven Ronella was the sheer numbers of animals that feral cats and wild cats, just outdoor cats, kill every year.
00:26:24.000And, you know, there are ornithologists who are great advocates for coyotes appearing on the scene and taking out cats that people—either feral cats that are living outside or cats that people just let go.
00:26:39.000Sort of roam so they can actually kill birds.
00:26:42.000A recent study by the Smithsonian Institute and the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats kill about 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals each year in the lower 48 states alone.
00:28:38.000And the next time you see one, just sort of make a projection in your head about how many cat collars may be lying at the base of the tree.
00:30:24.000And I realized that, I mean, I spend a lot of time raised with animals from being a little kid.
00:30:34.000In fact, I'll tell you a story in a minute, sort of how this Wild New World book came to be.
00:30:40.000It came out of the first animal companion I ever had and what happened to it.
00:30:45.000But this particular raven started hanging around where, I mean, in New Mexico and Southwest, we have a lot of rats and mice.
00:30:56.000And they'll, of course, what rats and mice do, which is the reason the East Coast cities have such a problem with rats, is that they're drawn to human inhabitations because we produce excess stuff for them to get into, food in particular.
00:31:09.000So, commonly, I'll have a rat zapper or two out and every two or three days I'll catch a mouse or a rat.
00:31:20.000And so I had this particular spot where I was taking these rats and mice out and dropping them And I noticed that a raven started flying up on a nearby tree and waiting for me to do this.
00:31:31.000And so after this happened four or five times, and I began to look at this raven, and I thought, the way that raven is lighting on the same spot, this is the same raven.
00:31:43.000It keeps coming back to this exact branch.
00:31:46.000So I started experimenting with what happens if I drop the rat out and just back up 10 feet.
00:31:54.000The raven would wait a minute or so and then fly down and pick up the rat.
00:31:58.000So then I started closing the distance into five feet and then three feet.
00:32:04.000This raven, over time, came to realize I was no threat.
00:32:11.000And so since that time, that started happening about six months ago, since that time, I've got this raven that basically...
00:32:19.000When my new puppy and I go out for walks in the canyon below the house outside Santa Fe, this raven actually flies along with us, lighting from one tree to another, waiting for me, hoping that I'm going to provide him with some sort of free meal.
00:32:38.000And what I've taken to doing when the dog is not paying attention or asleep And I don't have a mouse to give him.
00:32:46.000I'll pull four or five kibbles of dog food out, and I can put those things anywhere, and that raven will fly down and pick them up and walk around and talk to me and make these sounds that I actually haven't quite figured out.
00:33:21.000And that was one of John Lilly's things that he was working on with dolphins.
00:33:25.000And he was trying to use LSD to better communicate with dolphins.
00:33:29.000And he used sensory deprivation tanks.
00:33:33.000His idea was there's got to be some way to crack that code and to at least intuitively understand what these things are saying.
00:33:41.000And they even tried to get dolphins to speak human language because they could apparently understand what we were saying, but we couldn't understand what they were saying.
00:33:48.000So they were trying to get dolphins, but they just don't have lips.
00:33:57.000All those people that are studying orcas and dolphins, they've determined that there's dialects, that they sound different in different areas, but they have no idea what they're saying.
00:34:22.000But the truth is, all the recent science about animal culture and about animal consciousness is indicating something that I think we sort of, as early humans living amongst wild animals in Africa,
00:34:40.000in Europe, in Asia, and ultimately in the Americas, Understood is that these are creatures that share with us all the traits that we tend to think make us distinctively human.
00:34:55.000We think that the ability to talk, the ability to transmit culture is what makes us exceptional among all other creatures, and yet What we're discovering almost day by day from the scientific literature that's been focused on these things is that animals just like us have culture.
00:35:17.000As Charles Darwin said, it's just a matter of degree, not kind.
00:35:23.000They have all the same attributes and all the same abilities.
00:35:27.000They just don't have things like 8 billion other members of their species to be thinking up ideas and transmit to one another around the world through things like the internet or Twitter or,
00:35:46.000I mean, what we've done is we've been able to amplify all those abilities by How many of us there are and our ability to communicate with one another.
00:35:57.000I mean, there was a declaration on consciousness issued by a bunch of biologists in Europe in 2012 that argued that the higher species in particular, some of the ones that we've been talking about here,
00:36:13.000share the same level of cultural transmissibility Of the ability to communicate with one another, the ability to plot out strategies for new problems that they confront,
00:36:30.000just like the ravens we were talking about, or about the rat who used a tool to set off that trap.
00:36:38.000So all these kinds of things that we've thought for so long make us exceptional in the world.
00:36:45.000And this comes out of a long Western European tradition of thinking that we're exceptional, that we're the only creatures made in the image of God, the only ones with souls and all that.
00:36:56.000What we're discovering, of course, is that ancient people understood that humans were part of the mix.
00:37:04.000Charles Darwin gave us scientific evidence that this was true.
00:37:08.000And the more we study other creatures, the more we realize that All these animals that we've set aside as just things that we regard as expendable, as useful as commodities, domesticated possibilities,
00:37:26.000they actually have many of the same capabilities we do.
00:37:32.000So, I mean, it makes sense if you think about ravens.
00:37:36.000It makes sense if you think about their ability to use tools and their ability to displace water.
00:37:42.000And so if they can make noises, of course they would associate those noises with different things.
00:37:47.000Did you see any patterns when you put the food down?
00:37:52.000Did he make specific sounds when you put the food down?
00:37:55.000Well, what he began to do that probably caught my eye more than anything, when he would first We're good to go.
00:38:28.000When this raven, fairly clearly it seemed to me as I observed him, came to some kind of conscious conclusion that I was not a threat and that the sounds that I was making, my human voice and the inflections that I was making,
00:38:47.000were something that were not dangerous to him, then he started hanging around.
00:38:55.000So he would eat the food, eat the kibbles, or eat the mouse, and instead of flying away, he would waddle around on the ground four or five feet away from me or hop up on a limb.
00:39:08.000And this is when we were having these conversations I was referring to a minute ago where he would actually respond to my voice as I talked.
00:39:18.000And as I said, the raven is probably better at understanding what I'm saying than I am at understanding what What the raven is trying to convey to me, but he very clearly is expressing what I sort of intuit as a kind of comfort and,
00:39:37.000I mean, maybe even, you know, a thank you.
00:40:13.000He spots us going out the back door into the canyon and flies along from tree to tree and just kind of hangs out with us.
00:40:22.000I mean, it's a really remarkable—I've not ever had another animal do anything like this, but it probably means that I've not had an animal quite as smart as a mature raven to deal with.
00:40:33.000Do you miss him when you go on the road?
00:40:35.000Well, I'm talking about him, obviously.
00:40:48.000I've taken to putting a few kibbles in my pocket, you know, so that when Kiska, the new young puppy, goes to sleep, because, of course, as long as the puppy is awake, you know, he's watching the raven, too.
00:41:00.000I mean, this is kind of an ancient relationship between ravens and wolves, and I think I mean, I've hiked enough with my Alaskan Malamutes in the mountains in the west to notice how ravens circle around them in the same kind of approach that ravens do with wolves.
00:41:18.000They'll follow wolves because they know wolves very possibly signal a free meal.
00:41:36.000I've never had anything like it before.
00:41:38.000I mean, what a great way to test the intelligence of an animal like that.
00:41:41.000The fact that it's recognizing that you're a friend and then communicates with you, like a thank you, or at least some sort of a gesture of friendship.
00:41:49.000Yes, and I don't have to put the food in the same spot.
00:41:53.000I mean, I was starting out by, of course, putting everything in the exact same spot that I'd begun, but now I can sort of put it anywhere, and he's watching it, and he comes and gets his meal.
00:42:13.000I mean, and ravens kind of tend to all look alike.
00:42:15.000But this particular bird conveys his...
00:42:19.000He conveys his presence, his individual presence by, as I mentioned, lighting in exactly the same spot every time.
00:42:30.000So when he sees me come out of the house in the morning...
00:42:33.000He goes to a particular spot and lands.
00:42:36.000And, I mean, there are a lot of other ravens in the neighborhood, but I can always tell that it's this particular one because he goes and hits a signal to me.
00:42:57.000So you live in an area that probably has a lot of wildlife.
00:43:01.000I do live in an area that has a lot of wildlife, and much of my life I have.
00:43:05.000I lived 22 years in Montana, out in the foothills of a mountain range outside Missoula.
00:43:11.000I was teaching at the University of Montana.
00:43:15.000I lived with all the grand animals that still remain from the historic period in the West in that spot.
00:43:25.000I was there when we reintroduced wolves to Montana and Idaho in 1995. About three or four years, there was a wolf pack on the slopes right above the house and they began having litters.
00:43:43.000Grizzly bears would appear sporadically Their main range was just to the north of where I was, but they were steadily attempting to repopulate the Bitterroot Valley.
00:43:58.000And so about every two years there would be a grizzly in the area.
00:45:10.000It's really interesting when you see a master caller at work Because the elk hunting that I've done, most of it has been ambush, like sneak up on them.
00:45:32.000They're so good at getting the elk pissed off that the elk, against their better judgment, will come, what the fuck is going on over there?
00:45:41.000Yeah, well, they're issuing a challenge, you know?
00:45:44.000And at the time when elk are bugling, I mean, what they're bugling for are cows.
00:45:49.000And so, yeah, if they sense there's a challenge from another bull, then they're coming to vie for access to the females, and that's how they get lured in.
00:46:07.000And so in a heavily pressured elk area, sometimes there's elk around you and you don't even know where they are because you don't hear anything.
00:46:13.000One of the best ways to locate elk in the morning, you listen, you hear bugles.
00:46:18.000Well, I have not hunted elk, and I mean, I grew up in Louisiana, a rural kid growing up in the South, and went to high school.
00:46:33.000In fact, I went to high school with the Duck Dynasty guys.
00:46:37.000I played football with the Duck Dynasty guys.
00:47:35.000And what I did was I went off to college and other places and ended up, you know, getting a Ph.D. and getting university jobs and going to live in places like Montana.
00:48:20.000I traveled all over the country telling jokes.
00:48:22.000And you get a way better sense of what the country's actually like than if you only live in these cultural elite cities like Los Angeles.
00:48:31.000And in Los Angeles, the idea that a show about a bunch of fucking duck hunters who have a dynasty from duck calls, how is that going to be popular?
00:49:12.000Well, I will say that those guys, Phil and Cy both, they were not only really accomplished duck hunters, and I never duck hunted with them, but I did go dove hunting with them one time.
00:49:25.000And of course, they didn't, you know, it was on private property for which they had no permission.
00:49:29.000And halfway through the dove hunt, we had maybe shot...
00:49:32.00010 or 15 rounds, and here comes the landowner in a pickup truck driving about 60 miles an hour across rutted fields after us.
00:49:40.000And so my memory of going hunting with the Robertson boys is running through the Red River Valley trying to get away from an irate landowner.
00:49:52.000They were really funny as hell back in those days.
00:49:55.000And it kind of didn't surprise me when they were able to translate that into that show.
00:50:03.000Because, I mean, we all thought that they were – and they told so many stories – I mean, the South, of course, is a storytelling part of the United States.
00:50:12.000And those guys told so many stories that we used to just number them.
00:50:17.000And whenever they would start on a story, we would just say, okay, it's number 112, guys.
00:50:22.000And so everybody would start laughing because we all knew what 112 was.
00:51:03.000I mean, I'll say, you know, Coyote America and American Serengeti...
00:51:12.000It kind of set me up to be able to take a step back, farther back, to look at the bigger story of animals in America.
00:51:23.000I mean, I'd focus very specifically on coyotes in the one book and wrote about the animals, all these grand animals of the Great Plains, this part of North America that Once, up until about 120 years ago, was our version of the Serengeti.
00:51:39.000And somehow, while East Africa and Southern Africa managed to get these great game parks preserving their large charismatic animals here in the United States, we ended up privatizing all the Great Plains, turning it into farms and ranches, and losing our ability to do that,
00:51:56.000at least until the present day, where we're trying to accomplish something like returning the American Serengeti.
00:52:04.000But those two books kind of set me up for stepping back and looking at the really big picture of this.
00:52:13.000And so I was inspired, I'll admit, by Yuval Harari's Sapiens, his big history of humans across time.
00:52:23.000So what I was compelled to do with Wild New World was to write a book that was a big history of North America and the relationship that people and animals have had in North America,
00:52:45.000I mean, the book actually starts with the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact.
00:52:50.000That's the Asteroid that took out the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals.
00:52:55.000The reason I started there is because that's the moment at which North America starts acquiring its bestiary, its creatures.
00:53:05.000In the aftermath of the dinosaur age, both through continental evolution in North America and through acquiring animals from other parts of the world as they cross the land bridges and enter North America,
00:53:21.000In that, those millions of years after the Chicxulub impact, Chicxulub, by the way, is the name of the little Mayan village on the north coast of the Yucatan near where that asteroid hit 66 million years ago.
00:53:36.000In the aftermath of it, that's how we acquire our creatures.
00:53:41.000That's how we acquire mammoths and mastodons and saber-toothed cats and buffalo and pronghorns and camels and horses.
00:53:54.000I mean, it happens through continental evolution, as I said, and also through this migration from other parts of the world.
00:54:03.000But what I try to create with that and try to set up with that is this bestiary of creatures that when humans finally get here—and I mean, after all, North and South America are the last places on Earth humans find, except for a few islands in the Pacific that we get to later— The last grand continents on Earth that humans get to are North and South America,
00:54:26.000by which time we have had, well, if you date us back even to Neanderthals, which goes back about 800,000 to a million years, and you assume that we and Neanderthals are obviously close enough to one another that we can hybridize.
00:55:27.000So if you date the human story even back, and I started our story as wild animals in Africa, and I bring us in one of the early chapters, in the first chapter really, up to the point where we're leaving Africa,
00:55:46.000going into Europe, going into Asia, And, of course, that process, again, if you start with Neanderthals, it goes back 800,000 years out of Africa into the rest of the world.
00:55:57.000But the Neanderthals never get to the Americas.
00:56:05.000We emerged about 315,000 years ago in Africa, and when we spread out of Africa and replaced Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in Asia and finally get to Siberia about 45,000 years ago,
00:56:22.000as soon as there's a possibility for getting Farther east, in other words, into North America, we take advantage of it.
00:56:31.000And, I mean, as I argue in this book, the reason we do this, this is kind of one of the reasons why all of us love to find spots where...
00:56:50.000That compulsion I think is really ancient and it's what drew us out of Africa to other parts of the world to start with.
00:56:58.000And what we're looking for are animals that have never encountered us before.
00:57:05.000Because they're naive about humans as predators.
00:57:10.000So this compulsion to travel, finally to get to the great plum of the Americas as the last great spot we get to on Earth, drives us to the point where,
00:57:26.000I don't know if you caught the news out of White Sands National Park about three or four years ago, About the footprints that were discovered there, 23,000 years old.
00:57:41.000I mean, that's at the height of the glacial maximum, man.
00:57:44.000That's when the ice is at its greatest extent.
00:57:48.000And somehow people have gotten out of Asia, we think probably along the coastlines.
00:57:56.000Into what is now the United States and the place that always seemed to draw them is the country south of the Rocky Mountains in what is New Mexico and Arizona.
00:58:06.000And these people managed to get 23,000 years ago into what is now New Mexico and left 79 footprints that have been carbon dated based on seeds that their feet crushed as they walked along the marshy shore of this lake.
00:58:24.000So we know that people probably coming down the coastlines, maybe in some kind of craft, managed to get here as long ago as 23,000 years.
00:58:35.000But what really, of course, propels the great human migration into America is when the ice sheets finally open at about 16,000 years ago, as the glacial maximum begins to recede, there's an ice-free corridor that opens from Alaska down into Alberta and Montana.
00:58:53.000And at that point you get this massive migration, probably not massive to start with, maybe not very many people at all, but they encounter a wild new world, a world that is populated by some creatures they recognize,
00:59:10.000many ground sloths and so forth, humans have never seen before.
00:59:14.000And so we enter this American paradise of animals Some 16,000 years ago in large numbers of humans and spread within about three centuries all the way to the tip of South America.
00:59:32.000It's kind of one of the great colonization stories in world history.
00:59:46.000Were they using a combination of these things?
00:59:49.000They were definitely using—so the first successful group that sort of spreads coast to coast, I mean, our first American culture that spreads from the Pacific to the Atlantic as a consistent culture of people,
01:00:04.000and I titled this particular chapter in the book Clovisia the Beautiful— Because they establish a world that lasts longer than the United States has lasted so far.
01:00:17.000Their America the Beautiful, Clovisia the Beautiful, lasts well over 300 years.
01:00:26.000Using spears, but they have come up with a great new technology, which is the fluted point.
01:00:34.000They figured out a way, and fluted points aren't found in earlier times, even in Siberia, so this was a purely American invention.
01:00:42.000They figured out a way to take flint points and flute the base on either side so that you can solidly And very securely attach a spear to them, and they'll remain in place without flipping off or breaking off.
01:00:56.000So the fluted point is one of their great technological inventions.
01:01:02.000But the other thing that they bring to the game, Joe, is...
01:01:09.000They come out of a tradition of at least 40,000 generations of hunting big animals.
01:01:18.000I mean they know how to do this at literally a professional level.
01:01:29.000I mean, one of the stories I tell in this early chapter, Clovisia the Beautiful, which is the second chapter of the book, is of an episode that takes place in southern Arizona, what's now southern Arizona, about 13,000 years ago,
01:01:44.000when a group of Clovis hunters surround a herd of mammoths.
01:01:51.000And in this herd is a bull, a herd bull, a herd cow, and 13 calves and adolescents.
01:01:59.000There are three archaeological sites associated with this particular episode.
01:02:04.000In one site, the most westerly, all 13 calves and adolescents archaeologists found dead in one spot, each with a single Clovis point in its body.
01:02:20.000East of there, in two different locations, the herd bull was found.
01:02:28.000He had two Clovis points in him, and he finally bled out and died.
01:02:33.000But they found the cow about eight miles away.
01:02:37.000She had eight Clovis points In her before she died, indicating to the archaeologists who've studied these sites that the cow, in classic elephant fashion, had fought to defend those calves and those adolescents.
01:02:55.000She had put up a huge fight to try to defend them, and ultimately she hadn't been successful.
01:03:07.000But that's one episode out of, I mean, we have no idea how many.
01:03:13.000There are something like 78 Clovis sites around North America.
01:03:18.000I mean, we don't actually know when the transition to get to your question happened to Adadles, but when the Clovis period is over, It's basically when the mammoths are done.
01:03:34.000I mean, these people seem to have been fairly specialized as big game hunters.
01:03:39.000I mean, they killed other animals, but they really went after mammoths a lot.
01:03:42.000But they were succeeded by a group known as the Folsom people, and the Folsom people used ad adults.
01:03:49.000I mean, I opened the book with the discovery of the first Folsom site.
01:03:54.000It's in Folsom, New Mexico, discovered In the year 1908. Can we pause this for a second because I have to pee and this is too fascinating for me to hold this in.
01:04:12.000And I mean, so, you know, and I don't want to spend too much time on this because this is all basically just the first couple of chapters of The Wild New World.
01:04:20.000The rest of it is about subsequent history down to the present.
01:04:24.000But the Folsom discovery is really kind of important in the whole American history story because up until this point, you know, and this is the kind of thing that, you know, the Europeans are really good at,
01:04:42.000They sort of cast dispersions on America because their argument was, you know, America is really marginal to world history.
01:04:50.000I mean, you guys, we know that we had people interacting with cave bears and mammoths, and we have an ancient history going back to Greece and Rome.
01:04:59.000And you Americans, you kind of just, you know, you don't have much going on at all.
01:05:09.000Was to give America an ancient history, a history that made us a major part of this world story that I was kind of alluding to when I was describing people finally discovering the Americas as the last grand continents on Earth.
01:05:28.000And what happened with the Folsom story is that there was a There was a flash flood on a river called the Dry Cimarron River in August of 1908. And in the aftermath of that flash flood,
01:05:44.000this African-American cowboy named Charles McJunkin is out riding fence for one of the local ranchers, seeing what he's going to have to repair.
01:05:55.000And as he's riding along, his horse suddenly pitches up and its hooves slide in the mud Right to the edge of this freshly cut, about 30 foot chasm in the slope that he's riding.
01:06:11.000And when he leans out of his saddle and looks down into this cut...
01:06:16.000What he sees are bones of a gigantic size that he's never seen before.
01:06:22.000I mean, this is a guy who, he had been on the buffalo hunting planes back in the 1870s, so he had seen buffalo butchered.
01:06:30.000He knew what bones from big animals looked like, but these were giant bones.
01:06:35.000And so this guy McJunkin started trying to call attention to this site.
01:06:41.000He never was able to do so and get any archaeologists out or paleontologists out to look at it.
01:06:47.000He dies in 1922, but about four years after his death, This museum curator from Denver, a guy named Jesse Figgins, comes down and brings a crew down.
01:06:59.000And what Figgins is interested in, he's sort of an amateur guy himself.
01:07:03.000He's just interested in some fancy big bones for his museum up in Denver.
01:07:09.000But his crew starts digging into this site.
01:07:14.000And they began uncovering these giant bison.
01:07:18.000What they're finding is a site of bison antiquists, these giant bison that became extinct about 10,000 years ago, the ones that the Folsom people had particularly specialized in hunting.
01:07:29.000And as they're excavating this site in the first summer, They come across, just sort of lying in the debris, a couple of points like they've never seen before, which are three or four inches long and have these thin flutes on either side at the base.
01:07:56.000So what Figgins' guys realize is that the hurdle for convincing the world, the scientific hurdle for convincing the world, that humans had been present in America.
01:08:11.000At the time, everybody thought Indians had only been in America for maybe a couple of thousand years before Europeans got here.
01:08:19.000But the hurdle was finding an extinct animal out of the Pleistocene Indicating that it had been killed by human technology while the animal was still alive.
01:08:34.000And the next summer, I mean, it happened to be a summer when the Smithsonian had just published an article by some fancy archaeologist saying, you know, North America has no antiquity in its history.
01:08:49.000Indians have only been here for at most 2,000 years, probably less than that.
01:08:53.000And within about two months of that article coming out, this crew finds the scapula of one of these bison they're excavating with one of these Clovis points embedded three-quarters of the way into the bone.
01:09:12.000They call on all the famous archaeologists in the United States.
01:09:17.000A guy named Alfred Kidder was the most famous archaeologist in America at the time.
01:09:21.000And he comes, takes a look, and proclaims this, one of the greatest discoveries in American history.
01:09:30.000So they don't have radiocarbon dating yet, and nobody knows how old this is.
01:09:34.000All they know is that that particular bison species has been extinct for quite a while.
01:09:40.000Figgins says this site is 400,000 years old.
01:09:46.000But when we finally do get radiocarbon dating about two decades later, it looks as if a band of Folsom hunters using adattles, using spear throwers, had killed 32 bison antiquus in what had once been a box canyon on the southern plains 12,450 years ago.
01:10:09.000And so suddenly That discovery in the early 20th century in the 1920s gives America a kind of an antiquity that it had never had before.
01:10:20.000And within a decade, we discover the Clovis site, which is out on the Texas-New Mexico border.
01:10:28.000And the Clovis site is of these elephant hunters who are actually even older than the Folsom people.
01:10:34.000And this pushes, when they're finally radiocarbon dated, that site pushes the dates back to the 13,000 year range.
01:10:44.000So what these discoveries in the 20s and 30s are finally indicating that, contrary to what most Americans of the 20th century think, America is a brand new place.
01:10:55.000History dates to the time Europeans got here in the 1600s.
01:11:01.000You know, Indian people have only been here a couple thousand years.
01:11:05.000Suddenly we realize America is this really vastly old place.
01:11:09.000And that sets up the subsequent story that, I mean, I try to, what I try to do, I mean, I was an English major as an undergraduate, so I'm kind of drawn to narrative storytelling.
01:11:23.000And when you write a book with about 66 million years of history, you obviously have a lot of opportunity to tell stories because there are a lot of stories in a span of time like that.
01:11:33.000When you say that the Clovis points and the Folsom points with the fluted part of it so you could attach a stick to it, there's no people in Europe that figured this out?
01:12:15.000So when they were making these points, they were just doing it in a different way.
01:12:19.000They were doing it in a different way.
01:12:21.000So they'd figured out the same sort of technology, kind of, attaching a stick, but they had different methods that seemed to just be human ingenuity.
01:14:06.000In their minds, a mental geography of where these locations were.
01:14:12.000One of the great things about the whole Clovis period, to a little lesser extent Folsom, is that there are these spectacular blades that they did.
01:14:25.000And sometimes they would do blades that were like 8 or 9 or 10 inches long.
01:14:30.000And there are some of them, caches of some of these blades of that size, that indicate they were never used.
01:14:36.000They basically were kind of ceremonial objects.
01:14:41.000I mean, I kind of argue in the book, I mean, it's pretty much speculation because we don't really know a huge amount about these people.
01:14:49.000But one of the things I argue is that, unlike in Western Europe, they didn't leave us grand cave art of these animals that they were hunting.
01:15:01.000It's almost as if their tools were their art, and their tools kind of represented this ultimate technology The sublime technology that they would actually create in some form in blaze that they never really used to hunt,
01:15:35.000I mean, we've known about the Clovis people, obviously, for a long time.
01:15:39.000We've been trying to figure out, of course, other explanations for what happened to the animals of the Pleistocene because we lost a lot of them during the Pleistocene, and people have proposed all sorts of other theories.
01:15:52.000But one of the strange things about this story, I mean, I tried to do a book that's based on all the latest science I could find and all the best People who are doing archaeology and paleontology and genomic science.
01:16:06.000I mean, that's one of the possibilities these days.
01:16:08.000We have genomic science that's able to tell us things now that we've never known, even over the last 15 or 20 years.
01:16:16.000And one of the fascinating things about it is that it's almost like climate change.
01:16:24.000We've tried to come up with every other possible explanation To let ourselves off the hook for climate change.
01:16:32.000But it almost looks like this is an old attribute of human self-interest and human nature.
01:16:40.000We tend to not want to blame ourselves for very much at all.
01:16:45.000We tend to look for other excuses for things.
01:16:47.000And none of the other suggestions about what might have happened other than Humans probably entered a continent with animals that were completely naive about us.
01:16:59.000And in the time that it took them to smarten up and confront us, we were able to scatter them enough that what we kind of think now is that we may have gotten like populations of mammoths so separated from one another that they couldn't exchange their genes.
01:17:22.000I don't know if you've probably heard of what happened to the mammoths on Wrangell Island.
01:17:26.000There was a group of mammoths out on an island in the sea off the coast of Alaska that were caught by rising waters in the Bering Sea and were isolated and survived down to about 4,000 years ago.
01:17:43.000But even though humans never found them, even though the climate changed...
01:17:48.000The animals were fine until they finally reached a point where they had a small enough genetic diversity that as they interbred with one another over and over again, mistakes began to build into their genome to the point where they finally became unable to reproduce.
01:18:08.000And 4,000 years ago, without any other effect being present, they died out.
01:18:15.000Do we have biological remains or skeletal remains of Clovis people and people from that time period?
01:18:27.000There's actually a Clovis burial site in Montana of two infants, a young child and an infant.
01:18:39.000And they were buried with ceremonial Clovis points, several inches long, covered in sacred, what we think was sacred red ochre.
01:18:51.000And that particular site in 2014 The local native people in Montana is near Bozeman, and the local native people and archaeologists went out to the Shields River,
01:19:08.000the nearby Shields River, and after studying these young skeletons, they reburied them in the Shields River, so they returned them to the earth in 2014. So they reburied them in the same site where they found them?
01:19:28.000That's interesting that they chose to do that.
01:19:30.000Because I could understand why they would think to respect the bodies and bury them, but I could also understand, like, for science, like, what an incredible discovery.
01:19:39.000Yeah, well, they did do science on them.
01:19:44.000Was there no physical tissue, no marrow or anything?
01:19:48.000Not that I'm aware, you know, and I could be wrong about that, but I don't think so.
01:19:52.000Do they have an understanding of where these people might have come from originally?
01:19:58.000They seem to have come, and again, because we do have some sites, I mean the Clovis people ended up all the way down into South America, and we do have genomic evidence from some of the sites that have preserved enough DNA. To make educated guesses about this,
01:20:18.000that their origin was probably the Lake Baikal region in Siberia, and that they probably, when the ice sheets opened, they probably came down in two different migrations.
01:20:32.000A kind of a northern Native American and a southern Native American migration, they're often called, even though both groups ended up with genetic markers as far south as Colombia and Brazil and places like that.
01:20:47.000But, yeah, so we've got enough genetic material that we are able to do that kind of thing.
01:20:53.000I don't think that burial site in Montana yielded any, but there were other sites that did.
01:20:59.000When did archery make its way to North America?
01:21:03.000Well, that was the next great, obviously, the next great innovation.
01:21:08.000And the reason these innovations were important, by the way, And to answer your question, it was about 2,000 years ago, and it seemed to come from the late arrival of Inuit people, the ancestors of, you know, folks who are sometimes called Eskimo.
01:21:23.000The Inuit people seemed to either adapt or bring archery with them when they got to North America, and the idea for that then diffused, spread through all of North America within about 500 or 600 years.
01:21:37.000So we know that archery absolutely existed 2,000 years ago in Africa and in some other places.
01:21:43.000When did archery first, when did they believe archery was first invented?
01:21:52.000So just 2,000 years of archery, which is incredible.
01:21:56.000You know, and what it meant was each one of these developments, particularly ad adults, And archery and bows meant that you didn't have to do what Neanderthals had done, which is engage in sort of hand-to-hand combat with large,
01:22:17.000strong, and sometimes really resilient creatures like wild horses or mammoths at close range.
01:22:26.000I mean, some of these Neanderthal sites, for example, I mean, the guys were just beaten to hell, man.
01:22:36.000I mean, they had their cheeks caved in.
01:22:39.000They had broken, I mean, thigh bones broken.
01:22:43.000They had amputated arms, all kinds of really severe injuries from taking on animals.
01:22:52.000But Neanderthals, one of the things we know from nitrogen isotope studies of their bones is Neanderthals were more carnivorous than wolves were.
01:23:02.000I mean, they were eating a higher percentage of meat diet than even gray wolves in Europe.
01:23:10.000So each one of these kind of innovations, adults of course, by extending the human arm, you're able to stand back 30, 40 yards from an animal and throw a dart and kill it.
01:23:22.000With bows, you're able to get back even farther.
01:23:25.000I mean, they rescue you from sort of doing hand-to-hand combat with an animal that can easily kill you or crush you.
01:23:33.000What were Neanderthals using for weapons?
01:23:35.000They were primarily using wooden spears.
01:24:29.000In 2022, arrowheads were reported from the Grotte, how do you say that, Mandarin Cave in France, dating to around 54,000 years ago.
01:24:40.000Yeah, so you can get an idea of, and this is important to this whole story, of the isolation of North America once people get there.
01:24:49.000And the glacial maximum recedes and the climate begins to warm enough to break apart the corridor that links Asia and North America.
01:25:02.000Then North America is completely isolated, except for the South American connection through Panama.
01:25:08.000It's completely isolated from the rest of the world.
01:25:11.000It's isolated not only from innovations like We're good to go.
01:25:36.000Creating a European population that of course has now been winnowed by things like measles and smallpox and plague and all kinds of diseases that had spread across Eurasia but never got to isolate in North and South America.
01:25:53.000And so when Europeans arrived with domesticated animals and animal diseases We're good to go.
01:26:30.000That is about the 10,000 years after the Pleistocene.
01:26:34.000Because native people are here for 10,000 years and managed to preserve almost all the biological diversity, at least what's left after the Pleistocene, for 10,000 years.
01:26:46.000There's only one extinction that I was able to find during that time.
01:26:50.000A flightless sea duck became extinct in that 10,000 year period.
01:26:55.000But I mean, they managed to preserve almost all of North America's biodiversity across that time span, and then Europeans arrive with all these old world diseases, and in a blink of an eye, what had at one point been,
01:27:11.000and to be sure most of this population is in South America, 56 million people in the two Americas, Something like 80 to 85% of that population is taken out in a few decades by old world diseases.
01:27:30.000Yeah, it's, as I said, it may be the greatest human catastrophe in history.
01:27:36.000That's the speculation for what happened to the Mayans and the Aztecs and a lot of these amazing structures that they're now finding in the Amazon jungle.
01:27:45.000Yeah, they were taking, I mean, you know, some of these civilizations, like, you know, in North America, we had the great Chacoan civilization.
01:27:54.000That was our version of the Mayan or Aztec or Toltec groups down in Central America.
01:28:05.000I mean, we had this great civilization in the American Southwest centered around what are today the Chacoan National Park ruins with a civilization that spread over probably 50,000 square miles and included Hundreds of small hamlets in a central city,
01:28:24.000Chaco, that was sort of like the Vatican.
01:28:27.000I mean, there were priests who lived there most of the year.
01:28:31.000Priests who, through the history of Chaco, inherited generation after generation their position.
01:28:38.000I mean, there's a fascinating archaeological site at Chaco that shows 14 burials in one room Nine of those burials span the entire history,
01:28:56.000Every one of those nine is related to one another through a female line, the mitochondrial line.
01:29:07.000And each of the nine, present from the start of Chaco to the end of it, from about 900 to about 1200, It has a genetic abnormality, a sixth toe on one foot.
01:29:24.000So these were the people who were regarded as the priests of the place.
01:29:30.000And so a couple of times a year, usually at the solstices, they would have these big celebrations and 40,000 people would flock into Chaco.
01:29:40.000And observe the solstices and do ceremonies and no doubt engage in all sorts of epic nightlife too.
01:29:47.000But over time, over 300 years of time, drought and a local overuse of resources.
01:29:56.000And also, I mean, this is kind of the famous story of Chaco.
01:30:01.000What really sort of happened to Chaco is that the priests were promising all of their followers that they could make it rain in the desert because this was an agricultural—agriculture had finally come to North America.
01:30:16.000And we reached a point when droughts began to strike and the priests couldn't make it rain, at which point all their followers basically abandoned their religion.
01:30:31.000And the archaeologists who have gone in have sort of pointed out that so it kind of looks as if a disparity in lifestyle must have contributed because the priests...
01:30:45.000And the priestly class, they were the ones that were getting to eat all the protein from the deer and the antelope.
01:30:52.000As a result, their skeletons are three or four inches taller than all the peasants.
01:31:02.000Their children got past the age of five much more easily.
01:31:07.000And so there is speculation about Chaco that the disparity in wealth Followed by the inability of the priests to deliver and make it rain is what caused this civilization to collapse when the peasant class basically rose up and overthrew it.
01:31:28.000Wow, that's so fascinating because that seems like that just happens with humans.
01:31:32.000When humans get into a position of power, they want to maintain it and tighten up the grips on everybody else.
01:31:38.000They want rules for them, but not for everyone else.
01:31:41.000They want to have different privileges.
01:31:44.000We're dealing with this literally right now.
01:32:12.000If you just punch up Chaco Canyon Historic National Park, you'll find the major site, and I've got, of course, photographs of all this in the book, but the major site is called Pueblo Bonito, B-O-N-I-T-O. And so how long did their civilization thrive for?
01:33:01.000The central room in this structure, they all—nine of the fourteen buried there were all related to a single woman who was at Chaco at the founding of this civilization.
01:34:19.000When they first settled the area, it was covered in a pinyon juniper vegetation.
01:34:27.000But almost all those trees disappeared over the life of Chaco because these people were farming the classic Mexican cultivar complex, corn, beans, and squash, all of which require fires to prepare and And so,
01:34:44.000when you have a food dish that requires you to build a fire to prepare it, and you're in an area with a limited resource of possible wood, over time, a civilization of that size almost completely obliterated all the surrounding vegetation.
01:35:07.000I mean, it's yet another example of human nature that's always been in place.
01:35:12.000And, you know, we tend to be so self-centered or living in our own heads that we think all these things, this just applies to us.
01:35:21.000But these kind of things, living for status, you know, acting in a way that separates you from the lowly peasants of the world, I mean, this is ancient.
01:35:33.000And We have always figured out ways to do it, ways to distinguish ourselves, and those kinds of things have often led to, you know, serious problems in human history.
01:35:44.000Yeah, it's just so fascinating to see that this has always been the case, and people have always been very short-sighted in terms of allocation of resources and preservation of resources.
01:35:57.000We always have, and we have another instinct, too.
01:35:59.000We tend to, whenever things start, we start growing short of things, we always blame somebody else.
01:36:13.000In subsequent European history, and so I will say, what we've been talking about is primarily the first three chapters of this book, and the last seven chapters, plus the epilogue, is all about the period from the time Europeans arrive up to the present, up to really last year.
01:36:31.000But, I mean, all these same things play out in the story.
01:36:39.000I mean, Europeans, unlike Native people—I mean, and I make an argument for why Native people, I think, preserve that biodiversity for so long, I mean, despite examples like Chaco— You still have virtually all the animals,
01:36:56.000all the birds, all the reptiles that had survived the Pleistocene.
01:37:00.00010,000 years of human occupation later, they're all still here when Europeans get here.
01:37:05.000And I think, I mean, I explain it several ways, one of which is the population of North America north of the Rio Grande River.
01:38:08.000Well, they did it by various herbal means.
01:38:12.000And they also sometimes engaged from, you know, this is pretty draconian, but they sometimes engaged in killing infants after they were born.
01:38:24.000Infanticide is, I mean, it wasn't hugely common.
01:38:27.000And I'll say this also about infanticide.
01:38:30.000After a woman would carry a baby to term and then have it killed, it created the impulse that probably helped lead to the development of agriculture.
01:38:46.000I mean, agriculture is the next great economy and innovation in the way humans live.
01:38:53.000And What it enables you to do, I mean, one of the things that seems to prompt it is that you've lowered the possible animal life around you to the degree that you can't really keep going as hunters and gatherers.
01:39:12.000So you have to come up with something else.
01:39:14.000And in North America, Native people do this several thousand years.
01:39:18.000They go to agriculture several thousand years later than Europe does.
01:39:22.000I mean, Europe has been continuously occupied for 55,000, 60,000 years.
01:39:27.000So they reach a point where the animal populations have been reduced earlier by 8,000 or 9,000 or 10,000 years ago and have to go to agriculture and domestication.
01:39:36.000In North America, we don't really do it until about 4,000 or 5,000 years ago.
01:39:45.0001500, 2000 years ago, do you have the first evidence of going to agriculture?
01:39:50.000But people are anxious to come up with a new economy.
01:39:56.000That doesn't require you to be so draconian about population suppression.
01:40:01.000So they just thought of any new baby as a threat to the food source?
01:40:54.000I mean, we know this is a principle of sort of hunter-gatherer life ways around the world, even still among some hunter-gatherers that exist today.
01:41:03.000They still employ those kind of techniques?
01:41:04.000They still employ those kind of techniques.
01:41:08.000But they're always looking for the opportunity to escape that.
01:41:14.000And for people in Europe 10,000 years ago, and for people in North America, you know, between 5 and 2,000 years ago, the opportunity to escape it somewhat was agriculture, because that produced,
01:41:29.000if you specialize in a few food crops, And by the way, one of the differences in agriculture and the Neolithic Revolution in the Old World and in the Americas is, in the Old World, obviously, much of it depends on domesticating animals.
01:41:45.000The animals that are left after the end of the Pleistocene in Europe, horses, camels, goats, sheep, hogs, cows, wild oryx, are almost all domesticated.
01:42:00.000I mean, in some cases, in the case of wild horses, it's probably what saved them is that they got domesticated.
01:42:06.000In North America, though, there were almost no domestications.
01:42:41.000And they've developed a religious tradition that Ultimately, the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is probably based on earlier things, to be sure, that is basically a herder's religion, where what that religion teaches you is that not only are humans exceptional,
01:43:03.000but it teaches you that predators are the enemy.
01:43:10.000Any animal that preys on your sheep or your goats has to be eliminated.
01:43:17.000Meanwhile, in North America, where you don't have domestications of animals, predators are regarded as these prized, sacred creatures who keep the world functioning the way it's supposed to function.
01:43:32.000And people look for a predator as a totem animal in a vision quest, or they name their clan the wolf clan or the panther clan.
01:43:46.000So it produces a whirl when the two groups come together.
01:43:52.000Here are these native people who still have the ancient human idea that we are part of everything around us.
01:44:13.000I mean, many Native ceremonies, and I describe several of them in the book, are about whenever you confront the idea of animals are becoming scarce, You do ceremonies that are designed to not only make the animals reappear for you,
01:44:30.000but the way you do that is to convince them that you still regard them as kin.
01:44:35.000You're still willing to do a ceremony where you go through a kind of a faux series of marriages between humans and bison.
01:44:45.000And so this kind of, we're all part of a kinship web.
01:44:51.000I mean, it's what Charles Darwin finally provides the scientific evidence for.
01:44:57.000And, you know, on the origin of species in 1859, we're out of the same evolutionary stream.
01:45:03.000Europeans have, meanwhile, old worlders have come up with a completely different idea.
01:45:08.000This herding religion they have is that, posits that, Well, I'll tell you the story that sort of launched me writing this book.
01:45:17.000This is kind of a good way to say this, I guess.
01:45:23.000This is from when I was four years old.
01:45:26.000Psychologists say a lot of us, our oldest memory is from the age of four.
01:45:29.000This is the only one I really remember from the age of four.
01:45:32.000And I think the reason I remember is because it's, you know, sort of laden in emotional content.
01:45:44.000When I was four years old, I had the first little animal companion I ever had, and it was a little chicken, a little, you know, few weeks old chicken, still yellow.
01:45:55.000And, you know, I'm not very imaginative as a four-year-old, so I name it Chickie.
01:46:00.000And so Chickie and I, my first great friend and buddy, spend our time dashing through My parents' house in Louisiana in a game of chase, and I'm chasing chicky underneath the sewing machine,
01:46:16.000underneath the couch, and underneath the dining table.
01:46:18.000And one day, you know, as a little clumsy four-year-old, I miscalculate, and I step on my little chicken, and I kill it.
01:46:28.000I'm confronting mortality and loss for the first time.
01:46:33.000My mom and I go out in the backyard, and I mean, we're both crying, and we bury Chickie.
01:46:38.000And as we're standing there, and I've, you know, shoveled dirt over Chickie and sobbing away the whole time, and I turn to my mother, and I say, so, Mom, just sort of one last plead, Mom,
01:46:54.000I get to have Chickie again in heaven, don't I? And my mother, who is this good Southern Methodist And has absorbed the Western worldview in its entirety, and who's also kind of known all her life for giving you the unpainted version of things anyway,
01:47:15.000even if you're four years old, I guess.
01:47:17.000She looks down at me, and although she's crying and feels compassion for me, she says, she's got to tell me the truth.
01:48:13.000You can basically do anything you want with them.
01:48:19.000And with this idea of humans as exceptional and everything else out there as just sort of for utility purposes to make the lives of humans better, I mean,
01:48:35.000we arrive in North America with this idea, very different from what Native people with their kinship notions have, and also with Burgeoning capitalism, the beginnings of the global market economy.
01:48:50.000And with so many Native people dying, North America is undergoing this huge ecological release of wildlife.
01:49:01.000It's the origin of our Virgin America stories, where North America is just teeming with everything under the sun.
01:49:09.000And we look on animals then as just being like gold, trees, grass, whatever we want to exploit, we turn them into commodities.
01:49:20.000And it's sort of the explanation for the global North American fur trade, beavers as an object of pursuit.
01:49:30.000White-tailed deer as an object of pursuit for leather.
01:49:34.000We should tell people that beaver were so in pursuit that at one time the richest man in the world was a beaver furrier.
01:49:57.000So this is the story then that starts unfolding.
01:50:02.000And it's amplified by the fact that all these Europeans who have come over, especially the ones from England and France, They've gone through centuries of the feudal economy where these lords of the manor and kings control access not just to landscapes but to animals.
01:50:25.000So, I mean, it's the origin of the Robin Hood story.
01:50:29.000Robin Hood is a deer poacher who represents the peasant population that the king's forest and the sheriff of Nottingham as the game warden won't let him at.
01:50:40.000So, suddenly, this population of people who have been resentful about the fact that they can't hunt, that they can't enjoy the bounty of the forests in Europe, arrive in North America.
01:50:54.000And even though the native people try to convince Europeans, the deer are like our cattle, you have to understand, they belong to us.
01:51:02.000Europeans, of course, don't acknowledge that.
01:51:04.000And suddenly, here are all these animals, all this wildlife.
01:51:18.000And so a lot of them, I mean, this is how rural and lower class people basically rise to the middle class, is you exploit animal populations and sell them, and that gets you into the currency economy.
01:51:33.000It's so fortunate that they figured this out somewhere early in the 20th century and started instituting wildlife conservation and reintroducing animals and things along those lines.
01:51:50.000Well, yeah, and of course I track the story all the way through, and I won't, you know, elaborate on how it goes.
01:51:58.000I will say that, you know, there have been a couple of reviews on, like, Goodreads and Amazon of this book where people say, well, this is an anti-hunting book.
01:52:18.000I mean, I stopped hunting in my 20s, but when I was in Montana, at least three times in the last decade I was there, I would buy a deer license and shoot a mule deer out in the pasture in order to stock my freezer with venison.
01:52:33.000And in some ways, I mean, I look at this book as this is probably the most comprehensive story of the human relationship with animals, which obviously involves hunting, that Anybody has told at least about North America.
01:53:22.000It's just the market hunting thing is well documented, particularly in regards to the buffalo.
01:53:28.000When you see bison skulls stacked on top of each other, anybody that doesn't think that that looks absolutely hideous and horrific, like, how did they get so far gone that they thought that was okay?
01:53:39.000I mean, at the same time that was happening, I mean, we were taking out—I mean, this is one of the ones that stuns me.
01:53:45.000Passenger pigeons, the most numerous bird, not just in North America, but in the world—we think there may have been 10 billion of them at one point—had been in North America for 15 million years.
01:53:59.000Those birds couldn't survive 400 years of our presence.
01:55:44.000The live birds that you did this with, when you rocked the stool back and forth, it would flap its wings as if it were landing, and that would then bring down these pigeon flops.
01:56:04.000And one of the reasons they wiped the population out was because, I mean, in the last hunts, which were taking place in the upper Midwest, in Wisconsin in particular, I mean, they went after them while they were on their nests.
01:56:26.000I mean, the whole idea is, when the last passenger pigeon died, for example, in 1914, you know, a famous story, it dies in the Cincinnati Zoo, Martha, it's called, after Martha Washington.
01:56:39.000Martha dies in 1914. Okay, so that's the beginning of World War I, the Great War.
01:56:44.000To be sure, lots of newspapers were focused on other things.
01:56:48.000But I could hardly find any newspapers in America.
01:56:52.000That wrote an obituary about the last passenger pigeon, what had been the most numerous bird, the most charismatic bird, and the emblem bird, our symbol of avian America.
01:57:06.000I could find one newspaper that wrote an obituary.
01:57:34.000Anyway, I use a lot of this to essentially argue that, you know, I mean, I do this theme of first contact a lot.
01:57:42.000And I mentioned the first contact between humans and animals that they had never seen.
01:57:46.000Talk about first contact in the book between Europeans and native people.
01:57:50.000And the whole idea of first contact theory is that the only way you can really relate to something brand new that you've never seen is through what's already in your head.
01:58:00.000You already have some notions, and that's how you understand the new.
01:58:05.000And then after you've had some familiarity with it, you can develop new notions.
01:58:09.000But one of the themes I do in the book is essentially continental first contact.
01:58:15.000And what I'm arguing with it is that what we bring out of the old world to America is the conviction that we're going to recreate North America, the United States, in the image Or as clones of England,
01:58:34.000And these are places, of course, that in the previous several hundred years before colonization in North America had wiped out all their big animals.
01:58:42.000I mean, all you've got left in England hasn't had any wolves since the 1400s.
01:59:07.000Wolves, those are not the earmarks of a civilized society.
01:59:13.000England doesn't have those kinds of things.
01:59:16.000And so, I mean, it kind of takes the heroes of this book, I think are probably the ecologists of the 20th century, who began to realize, so North America is really old.
01:59:29.000It's had all these animals for a really long time.
01:59:33.000And all these ideas out of Europe, actually, they're not based on science.
01:59:38.000They're based on just old folk traditions out of this herding kind of culture.
01:59:44.000So we've got a chance to do something new here, and we've created this vast public land system in North America.
01:59:53.000So we actually are able to get to have All these big charismatic animals.
02:00:03.000I mean, it's Aldo Leopold, really, who sort of is the advocate for this more than anybody else by the middle of the 20th century.
02:00:10.000He's arguing that we need to do an American thing, not just try to make the United States into some version of England, because, as Henry David Thoreau had famously said back in the middle of the 19th century, He was reading the accounts of the first Europeans to get to Massachusetts,
02:00:28.000seeing all these creatures in huge abundance.
02:00:32.000200 years later, 1857, he's sitting there in his study and realizing, I don't get to see any of this, really.
02:00:42.000And he writes this incredible passage in his journal in March of 1857 where he says, I realize it's like going to a symphony And midway through the first movement,
02:00:58.000it suddenly occurs to me, wow, there are no strings.
02:01:09.000And then he goes further and he says, it's like looking up at the stars at night and realizing that some demigod has come before you and plucked all the best of the constellations out of the sky, and you're not getting to see the full night sky.
02:01:26.000And he says, you know, I realize somebody has come along and emasculated America before I could live in it.
02:01:53.000I don't want to think that somebody has come before me and selfishly robbed me of all these experiences.
02:02:02.000It's just so bizarre that human beings repeat these same patterns over and over and over again.
02:02:09.000And with the invention of firearms, they were able to do it so effectively.
02:02:14.000And with those traps that they use for the stool pigeons, use it so effectively that they could completely change the landscape in a relatively short amount of time.
02:02:25.000In a short amount of time, you know, and I mean, it takes until...
02:02:29.000So this year, 2023, is the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. I mean, this was kind of the Hail Mary.
02:02:40.000Now, to be sure, back at the beginning of the 20th century when Teddy Roosevelt was president, I mean, we come up with the game laws for most of the states, which are all aimed, of course, at what we're trying to preserve are the things that people want to hunt.
02:02:55.000And we have the idea that we're going to get rid of all the predators and we're going to substitute human sport hunters for predation.
02:03:25.000Elder Leopold studied this and said before 1900 he could find mentions of only two eruptions like this that had happened in America.
02:03:35.000After 1900 and we started the Predator War, he found 42 of them.
02:03:42.000So the idea was we're going to use human hunters As the substitute for the predators that we're taking out, and of course that enabled us to preserve a lot of animals that people want to hunt, elk and deer and pronghorns and so forth,
02:03:59.000even though we've gotten pronghorns from 35 million down to 5,000 by this point.
02:04:04.000They're the most ancient of the North American animals, right?
02:04:07.000Yeah, and they're distinctively North American, too.
02:04:46.000Yeah, you know, one of the great things about them too is that, okay, so they can run, the females in particular, can run 60, 65 miles an hour, which puzzled biologists for a while because the only predators they have possibly are wolves and coyotes,
02:05:05.000neither of which can run over about 42 or 43 miles an hour.
02:05:09.000So the question for a while was, so why the speed overkill?
02:05:14.000Until we began to realize these guys developed their ability to run back during the Pleistocene when they were being pursued by American cheetahs.
02:05:23.000And they still, the females, still select for the fastest males to breed with in order to preserve this high speed.
02:05:36.000So the result is pronghorns only have predators when they're fawns.
02:05:43.000They don't have predators as adults because nothing that's alive now can catch them.
02:05:48.000At one time a cheetah could catch them, but nothing can catch them now.
02:05:51.000And since they are preyed on only as fawns, one of the adaptations that prongorns have made to predation is they have two fawns.
02:06:20.000I mean, we don't have enough wolves out in the prairie country anymore to have any impact on pronghorns, but coyotes certainly look for the fawns.
02:06:29.000Yeah, there's some in California still, and they used to have a larger population up until, I think, 20 or 30 years ago.
02:06:35.000And then the coyotes started taking them out with such regularity that they're reduced to just a very small number now.
02:06:42.000Yeah, there's another spot or two where coyotes have had an impact on them, but I mean this adaptation of two fawns is evidently very old and obviously it's allowed them to survive.
02:06:54.000One of the more fascinating things that I learned from you also is the subject of bison and the enormous populations of bison that were witnessed at one point in history and that it coincided with the European spread of diseases.
02:07:12.000Yeah, and the spread of bison out of the Great Plains.
02:07:16.000Yeah, the bison story, and I obviously tell it in several places, sort of the advent of the bison story early in Well New World, and then the sort of, you know, the denouement in a later chapter.
02:07:32.000But The modern bison is actually a dwarfed animal compared to the bison of the Pleistocene that succeeded those earlier larger forms about 8,000 years ago and very likely became dwarfed because of anthropogenic selection,
02:07:58.000human hunting pressure, because Only wolves and humans really are effective predators of bison.
02:08:09.000And what you get by becoming smaller is a quicker emergence as fertile.
02:08:22.000So bison that are smaller can have calves at an earlier age.
02:08:27.000When the cows are two years old or three years old, they can begin having calves.
02:08:32.000The gestation period is not as long for smaller animals, and so you're able to...
02:08:38.000In other words, these are advantages for reproduction.
02:08:41.000And this new bison 8,000 years ago essentially inherits the grazing niche on the American Great Plains.
02:08:49.000That had formerly been occupied by all kinds of creatures that are now gone, including things like mammoths that are grazers just like modern African elephants are.
02:09:02.000And so as a result of inheriting a grazing niche now depopulated with no horses to compete with, with no mammoths to compete with, they become this huge mass.
02:09:18.000I mean, this is why bison multiply into the millions on the Great Plains.
02:09:23.000And in fact, they probably become so numerous, like passenger pigeons.
02:09:27.000This is one of the arguments for why passenger pigeons survive so long.
02:09:30.000They're so numerous that they saturate the predator possibilities.
02:09:37.000Predators just can't take enough of them to ever actually reduce their numbers.
02:09:42.000And so what happens, I mean, Native people hunt modern bison for 8,000 years.
02:09:50.000That's the longest economic life way in North American history.
02:09:55.000But just about the time that Europeans are arriving, and very likely contributed to by the arrival of Europeans in the disease epidemics that wipe out so many Native people, Bison populations began to expand out of the Great Plains west of the Rocky Mountains.
02:10:14.000I mean, they get all the way to places like Oregon, Arizona, and east of the Great Plains when they get to places like Georgia and Florida and Virginia and West Virginia and possibly even western Pennsylvania.
02:10:32.000And the argument about this is When Europeans arrive and out of a hemispheric population, or I should rephrase that, out of North America and South America having a native population as high as maybe 56,
02:10:53.00057 million people, most of which indeed are from Mexico south into South America where agriculture has prevailed, so many people like that taken out, which is More than 10% of the global population when the great dying happens.
02:11:12.000People who have been cutting down forests and building fires and using fires as their primary method of heating and cooking and everything else.
02:11:20.000When that ends, the recent idea advanced is that that enables a Reduction of carbon in the atmosphere, formerly put into the atmosphere by all these burning fires of all these millions of people.
02:11:41.000And when that happens, it produces an effect called the Little Ice Age.
02:11:46.000And the Little Ice Age, which lasts for about 300 years, from about 1450, 1550 or so, somewhere in that range, around 1500 to 1800 or maybe 1830 or so, produces cooler,
02:12:03.000moister weather in the northern hemisphere, and that grows more grass, and that expands the bison population over a lot of North America.
02:12:17.000Consequence of all these factors, nobody really understands.
02:12:20.000I mean, nobody knows anything about disease transmission.
02:12:23.000Nobody suspects that your breath can kill people.
02:12:28.000I mean, there's an early European who I quote in the book who...
02:12:33.000Boy, we just experienced the strangest thing.
02:12:36.000We went ashore for a couple of weeks, and when we came back on board our ship, word came that every village, every Indian village that we went to, within two or three days of us being there, almost all the people in the village fell sick,
02:13:30.000Yeah, it's another one of these amazing stories that, I mean, we've only been figuring this kind of stuff out, you know, for the last 20 or 30 years.
02:13:40.000Some of it even more recently than that.
02:13:43.000It's got to be so rewarding as a person who studies that, though, that this information is being discovered in new revelations and new understanding.
02:15:30.000Well, hopefully the guy did a great job.
02:15:32.000One of the things that I'd be amiss if I didn't talk to you about is I want to get you together with Randall Carlson, because Randall Carlson is a big proponent of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory being a leading factor in the extinction of North American animals.
02:15:53.000I mean, I'm a historian, as I said, an English major, really, and kind of an environmental writer, a writer about this stuff.
02:16:04.000So I'm not an archaeologist or a paleontologist.
02:16:06.000I mean, my approach to doing this kind of stuff, doing archaeology and paleontology, is I go to what I consider to be the best people and other folks consider the best people out there.
02:16:17.000Ross McPhee from the American Museum of Natural History, Donald Grayson, certainly Paul Martin, who is kind of the Einstein of all this.
02:16:30.000And what I always look for are the people who are publishing in the peer-reviewed journals, who are doing work that, like Paul Martin's, Paul Martin is like Einstein.
02:16:44.000I mean, his work has survived for decades because nobody has been able to shoot it down.
02:16:51.000I mean, he's that sort of bulletproof in his arguments.
02:16:55.000So I'm relying on all of those guys, the people who are spending all their time using science-based research to study this.
02:17:04.000And what they, when I look at their work, Ross McPhee, for example, about the Younger Dryas period, which is, for your listeners, that's a period at about 11,500, 12,000 years ago when there was a sudden really cold pulse in North America that amounted to essentially kind of a climate change It didn't last a very long time,
02:17:31.000but it certainly was a change from what had happened before and after.
02:17:36.000And there is a corollary argument called the fireball hypothesis that came from an article that was in Science Magazine in about 2005 or 2006 that argued that sort of in the tradition of the Chicxulub asteroid,
02:18:48.000There's a bone rush in the East River because he talked about in the early 1900s, the museum in New York City had so much property from his or so many artifacts, so many mammoth tusks and so many step bison jawbones and things that they dumped them in the East River.
02:20:47.000A chunk of a jawbone of a steppe bison that they found in the East River.
02:20:52.000And there's a lot more out there, apparently.
02:20:54.000But, you know, you're dealing with almost 100 years of it sitting there.
02:20:59.000But just the fact that they could still find some pieces is really encouraging.
02:21:02.000I mean, that's a hundred years of silt, a moving river, who knows how much pollution and garbage, but they're finding things, which is pretty damn cool.
02:21:13.000I mean, I found at one point, when I was living on the Great Plains back in the 1980s, I found a A bison skull eroding out of a stream bank.
02:21:24.000And I have no idea how old it was, but it was of a calf.
02:21:28.000It was a fairly small skull, but the horn cores were there.
02:21:32.000And yeah, it was very exciting to find something like that.
02:21:36.000One of the things that John has found, one of the things that's very extraordinary, is it seemed like these animals all died together, and there's a very distinct layer of scorched earth that coincides with that.
02:21:49.000The Younger Dryas impact theory, what's fascinating about it, it's just not one event.
02:21:53.000It's multiple events that take place over thousands of years, and there's a lot of physical evidence of it.
02:21:59.000Iridium in particular, which is common in space and rare on Earth, And also nano-diamonds, these impact diamonds, these micro-diamonds that get created upon impact of these, whether it's comets or asteroids, whatever it is, they think that there was multiple ones of these.
02:22:14.000This also coincides with the time period In which, you know, we apparently pass through this every, I think it's every June and every November.
02:22:51.000For a long time, they're trying to figure out when, but this coincides exactly when Earth passes through this meteor shower, which is really, really interesting stuff.
02:23:01.000I think the two of you together might be able to, if you have a conversation, it would be very fascinating.
02:23:29.000Angel Apocalypse on Netflix, which is basically all about that.
02:23:34.000It's all about the evidence of these sophisticated cultures that existed 11,000, 12,000 years ago that we really didn't know were around until they started discovering Gobekli Tepe and all these things that they can carbon date to that time period.
02:23:48.000Where we thought at one point in time they were just hunters and gatherers.
02:23:51.000Now they were capable of very sophisticated stonework in Turkey.
02:23:56.000And there's only, to this day, I think less than 10% of them has been uncovered.
02:24:00.000They use LIDAR and they found more of them in the surrounding hills.
02:24:04.000But he believes that this coincides with these meteor impacts and that there was probably a huge disruption of human civilization and a restart of it.
02:24:15.000And it coincides with the end of the Ice Age and there's some really fascinating erosion data and data of massive amounts of water that happened very quickly.
02:24:25.000And he believes what happened was something hit the actual ice cap that was over North America.
02:24:30.000This guy's very well-researched in this.
02:24:32.000It's a really fascinating conversation, I think, with the two of you together, and I would love to have it if you're interested in that.
02:24:38.000Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly intrigued by it.
02:24:41.000I always like to see people, whenever they have some, you know, some dramatic new argument or claim for something that has other explanations, Come up with something like a scientific article that you submit to a peer-reviewed journal and see what the Ross McPhee's of the world think of it.
02:25:02.000I would like to see that too, but I do think that people do preserve their initial notions, especially if they've been teaching that and writing books on that and they've proclaimed that to be the exact history of how things went down.
02:25:14.000I would like just to see you have a conversation with this guy because, again, he's very impressive.
02:25:20.000His ability to describe these things and his recall of the information is second to none.
02:25:27.000Well, what I would say to the Younger Dryas so far, and certainly the Fireball article published back in 2005 or 2006, had some currency for quite a number of years.
02:25:40.000Obviously, when I was working on these initial chapters, or particularly on that Clovisia, the beautiful chapter for Wild New World, I mean, I looked at what scientific literature I could find in the journals.
02:25:51.000And they weren't really citing it anymore.
02:25:55.000And I think the reason was basically this.
02:25:58.000The argument goes as a kind of a test for something that could cause a major extinction is, okay, so the Younger Dryas produced a cold pulse.
02:26:12.000But it's going to be difficult to argue that these animals are going to expire in a cold pulse when they survive the glacial maximum 8,000 years ago.
02:26:32.000So here are the other two arguments then.
02:26:34.000The other two arguments are if you have an extinction like the five that we've had before.
02:26:41.000I mean, I argue that, you know, we're all talking about the sixth extinction when we're in.
02:26:46.000My argument, sort of following an article that was published in the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, is that the sixth extinction that we think of today has actually, unlike all the previous five, the fifth one being Chicxulub,
02:27:02.000The sixth one has actually been happening in slow motion for 30,000 years.
02:27:10.000It's happening, as the people in the National Academy of Sciences piece put it, when humans spread out of Africa Took out more than 300 mammal species as they spread across the earth over the subsequent several thousand years and cost us,
02:27:28.000in what they called in this 2018 article, almost a worst-case scenario, cost us like two and a half billion years of specially evolved genetics.
02:27:39.000So the reason I have been following that argument, and that's kind of the one I do, is that when the younger, driest thing comes up, what people point out is that in all the extinctions before the Pleistocene one,
02:27:55.000those extinctions took out everything.
02:28:03.000They took out amphibians, reptiles, birds.
02:28:05.000But the Pleistocene seems to just be mammals and often just big mammals.
02:28:13.000And so there's this sort of logical attempt to try to come up with what would explain an extinction scenario that doesn't take out things in the ocean, that doesn't take out little creatures.
02:28:28.000But just focuses on big mammals, which is why sort of the consensus is going towards this human spread.
02:28:59.000Only the things that get impacted by the water and get impacted by this melting of the caps.
02:29:05.000I don't know enough about it to have this conversation with you, but I'm blown away by this guy, Randall Carlson, and his descriptions of it and his understanding of it.
02:29:13.000And I just think it would be an amazing thing to get together with you.
02:29:16.000There's no doubt human beings had a massive effect on it.
02:29:20.000And I think that all these things you're pointing out are really fascinating and pretty tragic, too, that human beings did.
02:29:26.000I mean, one of the things that's interesting is the gestation period of these mammoths, right?
02:29:31.000Like, they had to carry their—because they were so big— Yeah.
02:29:35.000So if you wiped out a clan of them, you're making a significant impact.
02:29:41.000It's not like rabbits or like coyotes.
02:30:45.000And I can't wait, even though somebody else is reading this book, I'll get it on audio anyway, but it's a wild new world, epic story of animals and people in America, Dan Flores, and I can't recommend enough his other book, Coyote America, that I've read, and then there's the American Serengeti.