Welcome to this curated educational transcript of the Joe Rogan Experience. In this session, we provide a deep-dive examination of the critical perspectives and historical dialogues presented in Episode #1975. Our mission is to offer a high-fidelity, searchable research resource for students of cultural history, emerging technology, and global discourse. This transcript has been specifically optimized for academic reference, linguistic study, and archival preservation regarding North American Environmental History, Wildlife Ecology, and the Cultural Legacy of the American West. Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan
Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by
night, all day. Yeehaw. How are you, Dan? Great
to see you. Great to see you too, Joe. Listen,
man, I know I've talked to you since I read Coyote
America, but God damn, that's a good book. It's
such a good book. So I'm very excited about this.
I'm sure this is going to be awesome, too. Wild
New World, the epic story of animals and people
in America. I've told so many people about coyotes
because of you, and I seem so smart. Well, I
appreciate that. It's such a crazy animal. You
know, one of the things that's interesting about
coyotes in our area is they don't howl. I think
they've learned. Oh, yeah. That's that's happening
in L .A. too. They've learned not to howl. Really?
Yeah. Interesting. Attracts attention to them.
Well, I used to hear it a lot where I lived.
I lived in Ventura County and we had real problems
with them. Like they killed all my chickens.
It was like they were everywhere. But also fucking
cool. You know, it's such a conflicted thing
because I hated them because they killed my chickens.
And they also honey -potted my dog into killing
my chickens. Did I tell you that story? No, you
didn't tell me that. Oh, boy. Listen to this.
This is how smart these motherfuckers are. I
had this dog, rest in peace. His name was Johnny
Cash. He was the best dog. I'll get sad. But...
Let me catch my breath here, because I really
loved that dog. No, I understand this. I just
lost a dog last May. this dog was just he was
just such a sweetheart but he was a big dog he
was a mastiff a regency mastiff his father was
actually on fear factor and his father was this
we we put people in these big bite suits and
they had to run and we did it with belgian malinois
and the problem was for like really super athletic
guys like we had some like uh real high -end
athletes on the show occasionally look like amateur
football players guys are just stacked and strong
as hell and a malinois no matter what it's still
only 60 70 pounds and so we brought in these
regency mastiffs because they wanted to figure
out a dog that could do bite work but was way
stronger and this dog was like a buck 60 and
built like a brick house His dad, my dog's dad,
was actually in the movie The Hulk. If you ever
saw the movie The Hulk with Eric Bannon, when
they turned the dogs into Hulk dogs, that was
actually that dog. So my friend Joe shout out
to Joe who raised these dogs he 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 So
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. But he was in the yard during
the day. And a coyote would come by the fence.
And the fence was six feet high, like a wrought
iron fence. He couldn't get over this fence.
He didn't even try to get over the fence. It
was a nice big yard. But the coyotes could get
over that fence like it didn't even exist. It
was wild to watch. I watched one with a chicken
in his mouth jump and put his feet at the top
of that fence and over like a Cirque du Soleil
acrobat. It was amazing. So we had this large...
coop where the chickens were that the coyotes
couldn't figure out a way to get into. And then
have you ever raised chickens before? My dad
raised chickens. They do a thing called brooding.
And what brooding is, chickens lay an egg, you
know, almost every day, but none of them are
going to become. chicks because there's no rooster
so these are unfertilized eggs but they don't
understand that so they decide every now and
again that this egg is going to become a chick
and they won't let anyone near it and they pluck
their feathers out and they just sit on this
egg and they they stop making eggs and they get
real weirded out. And the only way to cure them
of this is to put them in a smaller pen with
a post so that they have to hold onto the post
to stand. They can't sit and squat like over
an egg. So you put a post in there and put a
small coop next to the coop. It takes a little,
I forget how many days it takes, but they get
over it and then you can put them back in with
the regular hands. Well, that little coop, this
sneaky ass fucking coyote had figured out that
he could get my dog to destroy that little coop
because my dog was he was huge. And so somehow
or another, this coyote became friends with my
dog, just kept hanging around. And my dog's like,
oh, it's another dog, because he has a little
dog friend. Like, this is my other little dog
friend. Hey, what's up, buddy? What are you doing?
He's like, hey, you want to know where the chickens
are? And my pool guy fucked up and left one of
the gates open into where the chickens usually
are. And I was inside the house with my kids.
And my wife and we were playing some sort of
a game. I forget what game it was, but I saw
in the background a coyote run across the backyard
and hop the fence with the chicken in his mouth.
I'm like, motherfuckers. I thought maybe somebody
left the coop open or something happened. So
I run outside and there's Johnny standing over
this destroyed coop. that he was so proud that
he busted apart. The coyote tricked him into
smashing that coop, and then the coyote grabbed
the chicken and ran off with it. I wish I had
known about this story when I was writing. How
amazing is that? I would have put it in there.
How amazing is that? Like, there's no doubt in
my mind that that coyote tricked that dog into
doing that because that dog had never destroyed
that coop. And then afterwards, he realized he's
so strong, he can go right through the whole
coop. So he tore a hole in the mesh. The chicken
wire, he just tore it apart. He was so big. And
then he went in and killed nine of them. Your
dog killed nine of them? Yeah, he killed nine
of them. I had 22 of them at one point in time.
And he killed nine of them. In one, like, in
just as much time as it took for him to get out
there. He fucked up a couple other ones, too,
but they lived. He was just grabbing them and
shaking them and grabbing them and shaking them.
He was having a party. Unfortunately, he was
taught to do that by the fucking coyotes. Well,
I mean, this is an example of what one would
call animal culture. I make an argument for it
in Wild New World that this is something that
happens fairly commonly. Animals, just like us,
have culture and they teach one another things.
That sounds like a pretty good for instance of
it. Well, they're so clever. They're so clever.
And it's so interesting, our thoughts about intelligence.
Because just until recently, we've realized how
intelligent ravens and crows are. They can use
tools. They understand water displacement. So
if they can't drink out of something, they'll
drop rocks into it so the water level raises
so they can drink out of it. I mean, it's brilliant
stuff. So I wonder, because we don't have a way
of measuring that with coyotes, I wonder how
smart those motherfuckers are. Well, they are,
I think, probably among the smartest of the wild
animals, certainly in America. I mean, you know,
one of the reasons we domesticated wolves and
created dogs out of them is because, for one
thing, we understood them. They live in the same
kind of circumstances we do in social groups.
They have to acculturate their pups just the
way we have to do with kids. And 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.
I 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. We didn't have
to learn their language. They learned our language.
And I think that is probably an indication of,
you know, coyotes are out of the canid family.
All these creatures come out of the same family
from 5 .3 million years back. And 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. They're
the ones who have to play this game of, man,
I can't let this big burly wolf get me. I've
got to figure out how to elude it. And 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.
Yeah. 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.
That's right. They interbreeded with red wolves.
So when the gray wolves were around, the gray
wolves just slaughtered them. Yeah. And so they
had developed this ability to spread their territory.
Which is what, when humans started killing them,
now they're in every single city in the country.
And this is, when did that happen? It's relatively
recent, right? Yeah, the expansion started really
out of two things. Two things that took place
in the early 20th century. One was the elimination
of wolves in the east, which created an open
niche for a mid -sized predator. And the other
was... this campaign that first the states and
then the federal government began to launch against
coyotes and wolves in the West. The 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, trap, kill every single wolf in the
pack. But coyotes responded to that basically
by going, you probably remember our conversation
about this, Joe, back in 2017, they would go
into what's known. as a fishing mode. They are,
coyotes, like humans, are fish and fusion animals.
And when they're in fusion, they can exist in
a pack. When they're in fishing, they break apart
the packs, and in singles and pairs, they scatter.
And that's what they do when they're pressured.
They learned how to do this from wolves. And
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. And that started
in the early 20th century. I 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. First
beginning. Yeah, first beginning in the early
1960s. I started seeing them in about 1962 or
something, 61 or 2. Is there a historical record
of them ever being on the East Coast previously?
No, there is not. So they really were just a
West Coast animal? Well, 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. In the historical
record that we have, they weren't on the East
Coast until the middle of the 20th century. And
they start showing up in northern New York and
upstate New York by about the 1920s or so. And
they start coming down south from that point
until, I mean, they're finally they're reaching.
Manhattan, for example, in the 1990s. Had this,
had they already, had wolves already been extirpated
at this point? Yeah, wolves had been taken out.
I mean, the great, you know, and I talk about
it in Wild New World, the whole wolf campaign
in America, but the 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. And they argue that by 1944, there are
no wolves. at all left east of the Mississippi
River. Wow. They are all gone. There are wolves
down in Louisiana. In the deep south, there's
still some red wolves. There's 1 ,400 or so gray
wolves up in the Great Lakes country. But even
in the west, I mean, in their book in 1944, they
claim there are only six wolves remaining. in
the state of Wyoming. Wow. Even with all those
animals and all that public lands, I mean, the
campaign against wolves has been that successful.
So, 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. And 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. Yeah, 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.
Because, of course, howling is infectious, both
for coyotes and wolves. Whenever they hear a
howl, they'll respond to it. 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. And, of course,
with fewer other predators in an area, one of
the things that happens is it... the food base
is larger. So if you've got, if you have a coyote
pack as a, say seven pups, If there are fewer
coyotes that have been taken out by trapping
or poisoning or whatever, it's possible to get
more of the pups up to adulthood because there
are more food resources. So it's kind of a loop
that functions like that. The coyotes are certainly
playing a role in it. But, of course, our attempts
to take them out are producing this feedback
that. often causes them to have larger litters,
to be more successful in raising their pups.
They will respond by rising to the level of the
carrying capacity of the landscape in any case.
It's just amazing. And it's amazing how well
they adapt to Los Angeles. They're everywhere.
I remember the first time I saw one. It was 1994,
and they had these pre -furnished apartments.
I got one of those when I first moved to L .A.
It's the Oakwood Apartments. And it was in Burbank.
You're in the middle of everything. It's sort
of the Tonight Show films. I'm driving down the
street, and I see these two little wolves. I
was like, what the fuck is that? And I'm like,
oh, my God, it's coyotes. Oh, yeah. Because I
had heard, but I was like, what? You see coyotes.
Like, how often? You know, how often? Like, right
there, right away. Yeah, I mean, you know, Walt
Disney was doing films about coyotes in the Hollywood
Hills in the early 1960s. But coyotes had been
there all along. I mean, that was, you know,
they were there when L .A. was founded, and they
basically never left. I 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. So they've
always been there. When I would have talks with
friends, you know, that lived there that were
upset about coyotes, I'd say, but you know what's
great? When was the last time you saw a rat?
That's right. I mean, like L .A., the hills,
like where I used to live in Ventura County,
should be littered with rats. It should be everywhere.
There's garbage cans everywhere. Where's all
the rats? Yeah. They're all getting jacked by
coyotes and owls. Well, that's one of the great
things about coyotes being in the east. I mean,
you know, all the east coast cities have huge
problems with rats. They should let them loose
in New York City. Yeah. No kidding. But the rats.
They'll take out your rats. I watched a rat trip
a mousetrap, a rat trap, today. Have you ever
seen this? Yes. Watch this. Jamie, you're the
best. How did you do this? Man, he was right
on top of it. You're the best. So look at this
rat. This rat goes. He realizes that's a trap.
There's a nice piece of cheese on it. So he brings
a stick, and he trips the fucking trap. I mean,
come on, man. How smart are those little motherfuckers?
That little tiny -ass brain. How smart is he?
He's using tools. He's using a tool. That's right.
I mean, that's incredible. I mean, it's really
incredible. And he knows what he's doing. He
didn't even freak out. Look, see how he reacted?
No, it didn't startle him at all. At all. Imagine
being a wild animal subject to predators, subject
to other territorial rats, and you're not even
freaked out by a giant spring snapping down on
a board. Yeah, that could break your neck. Easily.
That's supposed to kill you. He's got to know
probably. These things killed my friends. Yeah,
and I mean, that certainly is... It's a trait
common to... The whole wolf story in America,
too, because wolves learned all these kinds of
techniques. I 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 and how to
spit out bait if they smell strychnine in it.
So that kind of thing is a fairly common. response
of animals that feel as if humans are after them.
One 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. And 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. And so the only time I ever saw rats
was in my own house, was in my garage. And one
time the trap went off and I heard it. I was
in the kitchen and I opened the door and there's
a rat like the size of my forearm. I mean, it's
a huge rat. I was like, look at that sucker.
Jesus Christ. But it was late at night. I was
like, I'll clean this motherfucker up in the
morning. I'm going to bed. I went to bed. I got
up in the morning. There was nothing left but
the tail. They had eaten him. That's a hard,
hard world. And that world is existing simultaneously
with me, a fucking young kid who's on a sitcom,
who's going to drive a sports car into this studio
in Hollywood. And at the same time, like this
cannibalism fight for survival is going on in
my garage. But I don't even think. That it applies
to me. No, you don't. You know, I have an agent.
I have a manager I have to call. And a sports
car. Yeah, I have a sports car. I have a Toyota
Supra. But it was like watching that, seeing
that thing take place. It was very, I'll never
forget it. Because it made me realize, oh, you
coexist with brutality. You're just not completely
aware of it. This is real nature. It's happening
right here. You've just, everyone's numb themselves
to it, buildings and fast food. But this is happening
right where you are. And that's why coyotes are
so fascinating to me. I mean, even when I watched
that one kill my chicken and hop over the fence
with it, I was like, respect. I got to respect
this game. Well, you got to respect that kind
of athleticism for one thing. The athleticism,
but also the cleverness, figuring out how to
trick the big dog, because he couldn't break
the coop. He figured out, he's like, hey, you
big motherfucker, go break that thing. 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, it
sucks. And you know, a coyote just tore your
fucking little buddy alive. Well, I know it does.
I mean, I will admit I've never had anything
like that happen with a dog, in part because
I always have really big dogs. I have Alaskan
Malamutes, which, you know, I mean, the dog I
lost, as I mentioned last year, last May, I mean,
he was 140 -pound Alaskan Malamute. And so he
would sit on the front porch and a pack of coyotes
would trot through the yard in New Mexico. The
alpha male of the pack would turn and grimace
at him, show his teeth. But, you know, Cody,
which is my dog's name, would just sit there
on the porch and kind of smile. I mean, a coyote,
you know, even a good -sized coyote in New Mexico,
a good adult male, is barely going to weigh 35
pounds. So Cody outweighs him five times. I've
not had that experience. I've lost cats a couple
of times because I've always lived in the country.
I mean, my whole adult life, I've bought places
outside town and usually or built places outside
town and lived half an hour away from the city
where I was working or where I had to commute
to. So I always lived around wild animals of
all kinds. And I've lost cats two or three times,
at least one time for some reason I never found.
The cat just disappeared. But the other couple
of times I lost cats, what I concluded was that
it was actually great horned owls that got them.
And what I've often told people who've, you know,
related to me their stories about coyotes getting
their cats. or getting small dogs, is that one
of the questions I always ask is, did you find
your pet? Was it lying there? Because if it's
lying there, that's probably an indication that
it may have been a coyote. Coyotes often will
kill small dogs. Not because they want to eat
them, but because they regard them as intergill
predators that are invading their territory.
But if the dog or the cat completely disappears,
is gone, and you don't find it or you only find
it months later, that's usually a great horned
owl because they will pluck up a small dog or
a cat and they fly away with them to their roosting
spot. I mean, there are instances where great
horned owl roosts have yielded. 75 cat collars
with Kiki and, you know, Mousy and so forth on
the names on the collars. But the owls have just
snagged them and taken them off and eaten them.
And the owners never know what happened. And
a lot of people, because they're aware of coyotes
being on the scene, they will assume that it's
a coyote that's done it. That's fascinating.
75 collars. Yeah. I love owls. One of the wildest
videos that I ever saw was this night vision
video of a nest. And there's these hawks in the
nest. And you just see in the distance the eyes
of the owl as it swoops in and just snatches
a hawk out. But the ferocity. Watch this. The
way it hits this hawk. Are those baby hawks?
Bang. Oh, man. Look at that. And the other one's
like, what the fuck happened? Yeah, no kidding.
What the fuck? What the fuck happened? I mean,
play that again. Watch. I love the eyes. When
you see the eyes in the distance. Look at this.
Here it comes. Bang. Yeah. What an amazing predator,
right? That's what happens to a lot of cats.
Oh, I'd imagine. Yeah. I'd imagine. Yeah. I 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.
And 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, disappearing into
the tree cover down on the river. Imagine being
a cat. You've been killing birds forever. If
you're a cat outside, one thing that I found
that I actually learned from our good friend
Stephen Ronell was the sheer numbers of animals
that feral cats and wild cats, just outdoor cats,
kill. Every year. It's unbelievable. Yeah, it's
unbelievable. It's an animal holocaust. It is
billions of animals. It is. And, 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 sort
of roam so they can actually kill birds. Look
at this. A recent study by the Smithsonian Institute
in the U .S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimated
that domestic cats kill about 2 .4 billion birds.
12 .3 billion small mammals each year in the
lower 48 states alone. That is incredible. Yeah,
that's incredible. That's how ruthless those
little motherfuckers are. Those numbers are hard
to wrap your mind around. And so, I mean, it's
a, you know, it's an argument for people who
have cats. I mean, don't let your cat do this.
Yeah, don't let your cat do this or an owl's
going to get them. Yeah, that's right. I mean,
the owl problem, we see obviously owls eat birds.
The owl probably also thought of as the cat as
a predator, a fellow predator, but also prey.
Yeah, also prey. Yeah. Isn't it interesting how
there's certain animals that we have anthropomorphized
and put these weird characteristics to? And with
owls, they're like wise and they give advice.
They're like, give a hoot, don't pollute. Like
the owls tricking the candy people. How many
licks does it take to get to the center of a,
what is it, a licorice tootsie roll? A tootsie
roll pop. What's inside, a licorice? It takes
three. One, two, and then he crushes it. And
he's playing a game. They're clever. It's interesting
that we always think of them as being very wise.
Like owls in cartoons, they wear glasses. Which
is hilarious because they have the greatest vision
of all time. Like, why do they need glasses?
They have giant fucking eyes that see crystal
clear late at night. We give them glasses. No,
it gives them that studious intellectual look.
But a bizarre choice. And that stuck with us.
Like, if you ask most people about owls, they
think of them as, oh, the wise old owl. That's
a ruthless monster. A raptor that flies down
and just swoops shit up and flies away with it.
And it lives amongst people. They do indeed.
And, you know, 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. I saw one two nights ago. I saw
one swoop across the road. I was like, wow, they're
cool, man. They're so big. It's like it's kind
of stunning how big they are. You know, you think
of an owl as being a small bird, but you see
their wingspan and their body. That's a pretty
large. That's why it makes sense they could snatch
up a cat. Oh, yeah. Great Hornet Owls in particular.
I mean, they have like a three -and -a -half
-foot wingspan, three -and -a -half to four -foot
wingspan. I mean, they're really big. And they
sound cool. You know, when it's nighttime and
you're outside and you hear one bird, and you
know that that's a ruthless killer, a ruthless
all -seeing killer just perched up on things.
They're so good at killing things that you can
get a rubber one, and it keeps everybody away.
You know that? Oh, yeah, sure. I've done it.
Have you done it? Oh, yeah, I have done it. Isn't
that crazy? It works for a while. And then they
realize. Yeah, and then they realize it's fake.
But, yeah, it works for a while. How long does
it work for? Well, it depends on what you're
trying to alarm. I mean, some birds are quicker
than others. I mean, as you mentioned a few minutes
ago, a raven is not going to be tricked by something
like that for more than a day or so. A raven
will quickly get it. Some birds are not so fast
on the uptake. Raven will probably start shitting
on it. Oh, yeah. On purpose. Yeah. I actually
have a kind of a wild pet raven at the moment.
Really? Yeah, and have had since I lost my dog.
And I've just got a new dog. I just got a new
puppy here recently. But I had lost my dog. He
was sort of my constant companion. And I realized
that, I mean, I spend a lot of time raised with
animals from being a little kid. In fact, I'll
tell you a story in a minute, sort of how this
Wild New World book came to be. It came out of
the first animal companion I ever had and what
happened to it. But this particular raven started.
hanging around where, I mean, in New Mexico and
Southwest, we have a lot of rats and mice. And
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.
So commonly, I'll have a rat zapper or two out,
and every two or three days, I'll catch a mouse
or a rat. And 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. And 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 keeps coming
back to this exact branch. So I started experimenting
with what happens if I drop the rat out and just
back up 10 feet. The raven would wait a minute
or so and then fly down and pick up the rat.
So then I started closing the distance into five
feet and then three feet. This raven, over time,
came to realize I was no threat. I was providing
a free meal. And so since that time that started
happening about six months ago, since that time,
I've got this raven that basically when 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. And
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 is i'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
these sounds that i actually haven't quite figured
out i haven't understood i'm not as smart as
wolves were about human language i haven't figured
out raven language yet but this raven talks to
me. And so we have conversations. I have no idea
what he's saying, but he's very vocal and he's
very expressive. You know, that's an amazing
story. And that was one of John Lilly's things
that he was working on with dolphins. And he
was trying to use LSD to better communicate with
dolphins. And he used sensory deprivation tanks.
His idea was there's got to be some way to crack
that code and to at least intuitively understand
what these things are saying. And 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. So they were trying to get dolphins,
but they just don't have lips. They don't have
a tongue like ours. They can't make the same
noises. Their noises are so different. All 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. No idea,
which is amazing. No, but they are communicating
with one another. They can't communicate with
us. And the conclusion we draw from that, of
course, is that other animals, other creatures
in the world are not as intelligent as we are.
But 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, in 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.
We 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. As
Charles Darwin said, it's just a matter of...
degree, not kind. They have all the same attributes
and all the same abilities. They 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, 5 ,000 years
ago, written languages. I 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. So many other
creatures. I 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, share 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, just like the... the ravens we
were talking about or about the rat who used
a tool to set off that trap. So all these kinds
of things that we've thought for so long make
us exceptional in the world. And 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. What we're discovering, of
course, is that Ancient people understood that
humans were part of the mix. Charles Darwin gave
us scientific evidence that this was true. And
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.
They actually have many of the same capabilities
we do. So, I mean, it makes sense if you think
about Ravens. It makes sense if you think about
their ability to use tools and their ability
to displace water. They're obviously thinking.
And so if they can make noises, of course they
would associate those noises with different things.
Did you see any patterns when he would, like
when you put the food down, did he make specific
sounds when you put the food down? Well, what
he began to do that probably caught my eye more
than anything. When he would first come down,
he would take the food and fly off immediately,
especially when I was closing the distance between
us. When I was getting to the point where I was
only three or four feet away from where I would
put down a mouse or a rat or four or five kibbles
of dog food, he would come down and grab the
food. And once he would, say, go through all
six kibbles that I'd put down, he would immediately
fly off. 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 were
something that were not dangerous to him. Then
he started hanging around. So 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. And 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. And as I said, the raven is probably
better at understanding what I'm saying than
I am at understanding what the raven is trying
to convey to me. But he very clearly is expressing
what I sort of... to it as a kind of comfort
and, I mean, maybe even, you know, a thank you.
Thanks for, you know. Friendship. Thanks for
the friendship. Thanks for all the fish. Thanks
for the food. He's actually somehow come to realize
that I'm completely trustworthy and so he can
hang out. And it's not too long after. He began
to do that, that he started accompanying me on
walks as I would walk around the place and go
for hikes. And now doing it with this 16 week
old puppy that I have, the raven comes along.
I mean, he 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. I mean, it's
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. Do you miss him
when you go on the road? Well, I'm talking about
him, obviously. I would imagine I would miss
that. Oh, yeah. I would imagine I would want
to go back in the woods and bring him some dog
food and hang out with him. Oh, man, no kidding.
That's so cool. Yeah. That is so cool. I'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. Right. I mean, this is a 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. They'll
follow wolves because they know wolves very possibly
signal a free meal. So the The puppy is watching
the raven. He's very aware of the raven. But
as soon as he goes to sleep, I'll pull my kibbles
out, drop them out for the raven to get. That's
awesome. That's such a cool relationship. It's
been very fun. I've never had anything like it
before. I mean, that's what a great way to test
the intelligence of an animal like that. The
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. A gesture of friendship.
Yes. And I don't have to put the food in the
same spot. I 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 and he comes and
gets his meal. That's pretty cool. How long do
ravens live? They live to about 12, 13, 14 years
old. And I have no idea how old this raven is.
You know, there's no way of telling. I mean,
and ravens kind of tend to all look alike. But
this particular bird conveys his... he conveys
his presence, his individual presence, by, as
I mentioned, lighting in exactly the same spot
every time. So when he sees me come out of the
house in the morning, he goes to a particular
spot and lands. And, 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. It's me. He
goes to a particular spot to land. wait to see
what I've got for him on a particular day. That's
awesome. What a great story. That's so cool.
So you live in an area that probably has a lot
of wildlife. I do live in an area that has a
lot of wildlife. And I, you know, much of my
life I have, man, I lived 22 years in Montana,
out in the foothills of a mountain range outside
Missoula. I was teaching at the University of
Montana. Certainly had, I mean, I lived with
all the grand animals that still remain from
the historic period in the West in that spot.
I mean, we had, I was there when we reintroduced
wolves to Montana and Idaho in 1995. And within
about three or four years, there was a wolf pack
on the slopes right above the house. They began
having litters, so we began having wolves there.
Grizzly 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. And so about every two
years, there would be a grizzly in the area.
I had black bears fairly commonly. Lions, of
course. Never saw a lion, but I saw a prince.
And tons of elk. deer and all that sort of thing.
And in New Mexico, not so many where I live.
I don't live in the foothills of a mountain range.
I live out in the Pinyon Juniper country, about
10 miles from the southern Rockies. And in that
zone, you have a few mule deer. There are pronghorn
antelope in the open prairies not too far away.
But the primary animals that I see all the time,
which is why. Back seven or eight years ago,
I wrote a book about them, and one of the reasons
was it's coyotes. I mean, I'm sort of constantly
living with coyotes. Elk have such a distinct
language in the way they talk to each other that
there's elk calling championships. I'm sure you're
aware of these. Oh, yeah. Jason Phelps, who's
a guy that is well -known in the elk hunting
world, has developed these amazing elk calls
to mimic them. He knows how to get them upset.
He knows how to challenge them. It'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. And I like
that. I like the stalking and trying to get close
and playing the wind. But there's a lot of guys
that... They'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?
And whack, and they get hit. Yeah, well, they're
issuing a challenge. And at the time when elk
are bugling, I mean, what they're bugling for
are cows. And so, yeah, if they sense there's
a challenge from another bull, then they're coming
to. to vie for access to the females. And that's
how they get lured in. They also learn too. So
when there's heavy pressure areas, they learn
that a lot of these calls are bullshit. And so
they learn to shut up. And 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. One of the best ways to
locate elk in the morning, you listen and you
hear bugles. Well, 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. In
fact, I went to high school with the Duck Dynasty
guys. I played football with the Duck Dynasty
guys. That's awesome. Yeah, the older guy, Phil.
was the quarterback of the high school football
team. And there was one guy in between us, a
guy named Johnny Prudhomme, was the next quarterback
after Phil. But I succeeded Johnny Prudhomme
as the quarterback of the high school team. And
I even wore Phil's number, number 10 in high
school. Wow. And I played the younger Robertson,
Cy. He and I played when I was a freshman and
he was a sophomore. We played in the backfield.
Or I was a sophomore. He was a junior. We played
in the backfield football team. So I went to
high school with... Those kind of guys and grew
up in that kind of world and, you know, and hunted
and fished. And I mean, but our paths, I guess,
kind of separated at one point. They stayed in
Louisiana. Cy went off to Vietnam and returned.
And 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. So our worlds
kind of diverged. Do you still keep in touch
with those guys? No, I don't. I haven't kept
in touch with them. And I don't know if they're
you know, I'm certainly aware of them because
I've watched their their show some. But I don't
know if they are aware of anything that I've
done. I haven't tried to get in touch with them
or anything. I loved. the success of that show
because i knew that there was people because
you know i did stand -up comedy for you know
30 years so i was always on the road i was always
traveling to the south i was traveling to the
north we traveled all over the country telling
jokes And you get a way better sense of what
the country is actually like than if you only
live in these cultural elite cities like Los
Angeles. And 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? And then it was huge. It was huge.
It was gigantic. And people loved it. People
in these what they would call the flyover states,
the disrespectfully most of the country. They
would call the flyover states. That's why I love
a show like that that succeeds, because those
people had no idea. They were like, what the
hell is going on? Like, what is, you know, I
want to watch all the stuff that I want to watch.
How do these people even like this? What world
do they live in? Well, I will say that those
guys, Phil and Cy both, they were. uh not only
really accomplished duck hunters and i i never
duck hunted with them but i did go dove hunting
with them one time um and of course they didn't
It was on private property for which they had
no permission. And halfway through the dove hunt,
we had maybe shot 10 or 15 rounds. And here comes
the landowner in a pickup truck driving about
60 miles an hour across rutted fields after us.
And 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. But
those guys were funny. They were really funny
as hell back in those days. And it kind of didn't
surprise me when they were able to translate
that into that show, because, I mean, we all
thought that they were and they told so many
stories. I mean, the South, of course, is storytelling
part of the part of the United States. Those
guys told so many stories that we used to just
number them. And whenever they would start on
a story, we would just say, OK, it's number 112,
guys. And so everybody would start laughing because
we all knew what 112 was. That's hilarious. Didn't
even have to listen to the story. It's number
112. Oh, my God. That's hilarious. Well, maybe
we can. Reunite you guys. Maybe this podcast
will reunite you guys. Yeah, maybe so. It might.
So this book, this new book that you've written,
Wild New World, the epic story of animals and
people in America. When did you start this? Well,
it's kind of my pandemic vacation book. That's
why I asked. A lot of people, Joey Diaz wrote
this during the pandemic. Yeah, I wrote it during
the pandemic. I mean, I'll say, you know. Coyote
America and American Serengeti 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.
I 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.
And somehow, while East Africa and Southern Africa
managed to get these great game parks preserving
their large charismatic animals, here in the
United States, we ended up privatizing all the
Great Plains, turning it into farms and ranches,
and losing our ability to do that, at least until
the present day, where we're trying to. to accomplish
something like returning the American Serengeti.
But those two books kind of set me up for stepping
back and looking at the really big picture of
this. And so I was inspired, I'll admit, by Yuval
Harari's Sapiens, his big history of humans across
time. So what I was compelled to do with Wild
New World was to, To write a book that was a
big history of North America and the relationship
that people and animals have had in North America,
starting from, I mean, the book actually starts
with the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact. That's
the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs and
ushered in the age of mammals. The reason I started
there is because. That's the moment at which
North America starts acquiring its bestiary,
its creatures. In 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, in 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. But in
the aftermath of it, that's how we acquire our
creatures. That's how we acquire mammoths and
mastodons and saber -toothed cats and buffalo
and pronghorns and camels and horses. It happens
through continental evolution, as I said, and
also through this migration from other parts
of the world. But 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,
by which time we have had, well, if you date
us back even to Neanderthals, which goes back
about 800 ,000 to a million years, and you assume
that we and Neanderthals are obviously close
enough to one another that we can hybridize.
I mean, have you done 23andMe? Yeah, I got a
lot of it. Yeah, so do I. And my wife has even
more. And I think all of us that are from particularly
sort of Northwestern European backgrounds have
ended up with a lot of Neanderthal, you know,
for some people as much as 2 .5 % of their genes.
Yeah. And it produces, you know, it makes you
different than you would be otherwise. I supposedly,
according to 23andMe, I have less hair on my
back than I would if I didn't have Neanderthal
genes. I'm a little taller because of Neanderthal
genes. All kinds of things like that. So 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, going into Europe, going into
Asia. And of course, that process Again, if you
start with Neanderthals, it goes back 800 ,000
years out of Africa and to the rest of the world.
But the Neanderthals never get to the Americas.
But when modern humans, we 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, as soon as there's a
possibility for getting farther east, in other
words, into North America, we take advantage
of it. And, I mean, as I argue in this book,
the reason we do this, this is kind of one of
the reasons why all of us love to find spots
where... It's a beautiful morning. I'm out here
on this mountain. There's not another soul in
sight. It's just me and the world. That compulsion,
I think, is really ancient. And it's what drew
us out of Africa to other parts of the world
to start with. And what we're looking for are
animals that have never encountered us before
because they're naive about humans as predators.
So this compulsion. to travel, finally to get
to the great plum of the Americas as the last
great spot we get to on Earth, drives us to the
point where, I don't know if you caught the news
out of White Sands National Park about three
or four years ago, about the footprints that
were discovered there, 23 ,000 years old. I mean,
that's at the height of the glacial maximum,
man. That's when the ice is at its greatest extent.
And somehow people have gotten out of Asia, we
think probably along the coastlines, into what
is now the United States. And the place that
always seemed to draw them is the country south
of the Rocky Mountains in what is New Mexico
and Arizona. 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. So we know
that people probably coming down the coastlines,
maybe in some kind of craft, managed to get here
as long ago as 23 ,000 years. But 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. And at that point, you get this massive
migration, probably not massive to start with,
maybe not very many people at all, but they encounter
a wild new world. a world that is populated by
some creatures they recognize, many ground sloths
and so forth, humans have never seen before.
And so we enter this American paradise of animals
some 16 ,000 years ago in large numbers of humans
and spread within about three centuries all the
way to the tip of South America. It's kind of
one of the great... colonization stories in world
history. That's amazing. Now, at this point in
time, what weapons do we think that they were
using to hunt with? Were they using atlatls?
Were they using spears? Were they using, well,
a combination of these things? They were definitely
using, so the first successful group that sort
of spreads coast to coast, I mean, our first
American culture that spreads from the Pacific
to the Atlantic as a consistent culture of people.
And I titled this particular chapter in the book,
Clovisia the Beautiful, because they establish
a world that lasts longer than the United States
has lasted so far. They're America the Beautiful.
Clovisia the Beautiful lasts well over 300 years.
And they're probably using spears, but they have
come up with a great new technology, which is
the fluted point. They figured out a way, and
fluted points aren't found in earlier times,
even in Siberia, so this was a purely American
invention. They figured out a way to take flint
points and flute the 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. So the fluted point
is one of their They're great technological inventions.
But the other thing that they bring to the game,
Joe, is they come out of a tradition of at least
40 ,000 generations of hunting big animals. I
mean, they know how to do this at literally a
professional level. They are extremely good at
it. I mean, one of the stories I tell in this
early chapter, Clovisia the Beautiful, which
is the second chapter of the book, is of an episode
that takes place in southern Arizona, what's
now southern Arizona, about 13 ,000 years ago,
when a group of Clovis hunters surround a herd
of mammoths. And in this herd is a bull, a herd
bull, a herd cow, and 13 calves and adolescents.
There are three archaeological sites associated
with this particular episode. In 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. East of there,
in two different locations, the herd bull...
was found. He had run about three or four miles.
He had two Clovis points in him, and he finally
bled out and died. But they found the cow about
eight miles away. She had eight Clovis points
in her before she died, indicating to the archaeologists
who've studied these sites that the cow, in classic
elephant fashion, had fought to defend those
calves and those adolescents. She had put up
a huge fight to try to defend them, and ultimately
she hadn't been successful. They had all been
killed. She runs away and finally dies with eight
Clovis points in her. Wow. But that's one episode
out of, I mean, we have no idea how many. There
are something like 78 Clovis sites around North
America. I mean, we don't actually, know when
the transition to get to your question happened
to add addles. But when the Clovis period is
over, it's basically when the mammoths are done.
I mean, these people seem to have been fairly
specialized as big game hunters. I mean, they
killed other animals, but they really went after
mammoths a lot. But they were succeeded by a
group known as the Folsom people, and the Folsom
people used ad adults. I mean, I opened the book
with the discovery of the first Folsom site.
It'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. 1908, Folsom people. Yeah,
we'll come back. We'll be right back. And we're
back. So 1908, they discover Folsom sites. Yeah,
the first Folsom site. And 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 Wild New World. The rest
of it is about subsequent history down to the
present. But the Folsom discovery is really kind
of important in the whole American history story,
because up until this point, you know, and this
is the kind of thing that, you know, the Europeans
are really good at, of course. They they sort
of cast dispersions on America because their
argument was, you know, America is really marginal
to world history. I mean, you guys, we've had
we know that we had people. interacting with
cave bears and mammoths, and we have an ancient
history going back to Greece and Rome. And you
Americans, you kind of just, you know, you don't
have much going on at all. And so what the Folsom
site did was to give America an ancient... 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. And what
happened with the Folsom story is that 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, this 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. And 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. And when he leans out of his saddle
and looks down into this cut, what he sees are
bones of a gigantic size that he's never seen
before. I mean, this is a guy who, he had been
on the buffalo hunting planes back in the 1870s,
so he had seen buffalo butchered. He knew what
bones from big animals look like, but these were
giant bones. And so this guy, McJunkin, started
trying to called attention to the site. He never
was able to do so and get any archaeologists
out or paleontologists out to look at it. He
dies in 1922, but about four years after his
death, this museum curator from Denver, a guy
named Jesse Figgins, comes down and brings a
crew down. And what Figgins is interested in,
he's sort of an amateur guy himself. He's just
interested in some fancy big bones for his museum
up in Denver. But his crew starts digging into
this site, and they began uncovering these giant
bison, what they're finding is a site of bison
antiquus, these giant bison that became extinct
about 10 ,000 years ago, the ones that the Folsom
people had particularly specialized in hunting.
And as they're excavating this site in the first
summer, they come across just sort of lying in
the debris a couple of points like they've never
seen before, which are three or four inches long
and have these thin flutes on either side at
the base. There's one right there. Yeah, there's
one right there, the Folsom Point. So what Figgins'
guys realize is that the hurdle, for convincing
the world, the scientific hurdle for convincing
the world that humans had been present in America.
At the time, everybody thought Indians had only
been in America for maybe a couple of thousand
years before Europeans got here. But 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. And the next
summer, I mean, it happened to be a summer when
the Smithsonian had just published an article
by some fancy archaeologist saying, you know,
North America has no antiquity in its history.
Indians have only been here for at most 2 ,000
years, probably less than that. And 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.
And at that point, they stop digging. They call
on all the famous archaeologists in the United
States. A guy named Alfred Kidder was the most
famous archaeologist in America at the time,
and he comes, takes a look, and proclaims this
one of the greatest discoveries in American history.
So they don't have radiocarbon dating yet, and
nobody knows how old this is. All they know is
that that particular bison species has been extinct
for quite a while. Figgins says this site is
400 ,000 years old. But when we finally do get
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. And so suddenly...
That discovery in the early 20th century, in
the 1920s, gives America a kind of an antiquity
that it had never had before. And within a decade,
we discover the Clovis site, which is out on
the Texas -New Mexico border. And the Clovis
site is of these elephant hunters who are actually
even older than the Folsom people. And this pushes
when they're finally radiocarbon dated, that
site pushes the dates back to the 13 ,000 year
range. So what these discoveries in the 20s and
30s are finally indicating that contrary to what
most Americans of the 20th century think, America
is a brand new place. History dates to the time
Europeans got here in the 1600s. You know, Indian
people have only been here a couple thousand
years. Suddenly we realize America is this really
vastly old place. And that sets up the subsequent
story that I mean, I try to what I try to do.
I mean, I was an English major as an undergraduate,
so I'm kind of drawn to narrative storytelling,
telling a lot of stories. And when you write
a book with. about 66 million years of history,
obviously had a lot of opportunity to tell stories
because there are a lot of stories in a span
of time like that. When 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? No, this was an American invention. What
did they use in Europe? They were just using...
Blade points sometimes with the ears at the bottom.
The ears. Yeah, the ears. So you have a triangular
point and it has two ears coming out and you
attach, you use the ears as a place to attach
the rawhide. And so this was metal? No, not metal.
What were they using? Flint. They were using
flint as well. So when they were making these
points, they were just doing it in a different
way. They were doing it in a different way. So
they'd figured out the same sort of technology,
kind of, attaching a stick, but they had different
methods that seemed to just be human ingenuity.
Yeah. When did they figure that out? Well, they
certainly figured it out by what's called the
Solutrean culture, which is a sort of a contemporary
with Clovis. They're hunting big animals. They're
hunting mammoths and rhinos and things like that
in Europe. So that's in the 16 ,000, 17 ,000
year range. Yeah. So this this fluted idea is
a distinctive North American invention. Is there
any difference in the quality of the type of
the stone that was accessible to people in North
America versus Europe? Well, I mean, both places
had outcrops of flint and flint and obsidian
were the two two types of stone you went for.
But North America had some really great. flint
and obsidian outcrops and one of the things that's
really pretty fascinating about these Clovis
people about Clovisia the beautiful and it's
and they were all over America by the way there
are more of their points discovered in the southeast
and in New England than there are in many places
in the west so this is not just a western phenomenon
this just happens to be where we discovered them
first But they were all over America. But they
went for they seem to be making pilgrimages to
four or five locations that had the absolute
best, sharpest, hardest flint in America. And
they would go back to those spots again and again
and again. Kind of had a in their minds, a mental
geography of where these locations were. Wow.
Yeah. So they one of the. great things about
the whole Clovis period, to a little lesser extent
Folsom, is that there are these spectacular blades
that they did. And sometimes they would do blades
that were like eight or nine or 10 inches long.
And there are some of them, caches of some of
these blades of that size that indicate they
were never used. They basically were kind of
ceremonial objects. I mean, I kind of argue in
the book, I mean, it's pretty much speculation
because we don't really know a huge amount about
these people. But one of the things I I argue
is that they unlike in Western Europe, they didn't
leave us grand cave art of these animals that
they were hunting. It's almost as if their tools
were their art and it was 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 just to have a ceremonial objects. Wow.
So it's a I mean, it's a really fascinating story.
I mean, we've known about the Clovis people,
obviously, for a long time. We've been trying
to figure out, of course, other explanations
for what happened to the animals of the Pleistocene
because we lost a lot of them during the Pleistocene.
And people have proposed all sorts of other theories.
But one of the strange things about this story,
I mean, I tried to do a book that's based on
all the latest science I could find and all the
best. people who are doing archaeology and paleontology
and genomic science. I mean, that's one of the
possibilities these days. We have genomic science
that's able to tell us things now that we've
never known, even over the last 15 or 20 years.
And one of the fascinating things about it is
that it's almost like climate change. We've tried
to come up with every other possible explanation
to let ourselves off the hook. for climate change.
But it almost looks like this is an old attribute
of human self -interest and human nature. We
tend to not want to blame ourselves for very
much at all. We tend to look for other excuses
for things. And none of the other suggestions
about what might have happened, other than humans
probably entered a continent with animals that
were completely naive about us. And in the time
that it took them to smarten up and confront
us, we were able to scatter them enough that
what we kind of think now is that we may have.
gotten like populations of mammoths so separated
from one another that they couldn't exchange
their genes. And they may have succumbed to,
I don't know if you've probably heard of what
happened to the mammoths on Wrangell Island.
There was a group of mammoths out on an island
in the sea off the coast of Alaska. that were
caught by rising waters in the Bering Sea and
were isolated and survived down to about 4 ,000
years ago. But even though humans never found
them, even though the climate changed, the animals
were fine until they finally reached a point
where they had a small enough genetic diversity
that as they 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. And 4 ,000 years
ago, without any other effect being present,
they died out. Do we have biological remains
or skeletal remains of Clovis people and people
from that time period? Yeah, we do. There's actually
a Clovis burial site in Montana. of two infants,
a young child and an infant. And they were buried
with ceremonial Clovis points, several inches
long, covered in sacred, what we think was sacred
red ochre. And 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, the 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?
Near the same site. Yeah, they were found on
the banks of the Shields River. Why now? That's
interesting that they chose to do that. Because
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.
Yeah, well, they did. Do science on them. Was
there genetic material? There was not. No physical
tissue? No. No marrow or anything? Not that I'm
aware, you know, and I could be wrong about that,
but I don't think so. Do they have an understanding
of where these people might have come from originally?
They seem to have come, yeah, and again, because
we do have some sites. I mean, the 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, that 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.
a kind of a northern Native American and a southern
Native American migration, they're often called,
even though both groups ended up with genetic
markers as far south as Colombia and Brazil and
places like that. But, yeah, so we've got enough
genetic material that we are able to do that
kind of thing. I don't think that burial site
in Montana yielded any, but there were other
sites that did. When did archery? make its way
to North America. Well, that was the next great,
obviously the next great innovation. And the
reason these innovations were important, by the
way, and to answer your question, it was about
2 ,000 years ago, and it seemed to come from...
The late arrival of Inuit people, the ancestors
of folks who are sometimes called Eskimo, the
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. So we know that archery absolutely existed
2 ,000 years ago in Africa and in some other
places. When did archery first... When did they
believe archery was first invented? Let's find
that out. That's interesting. Yeah. So just 2
,000 years of archery, which is incredible. You
know, and what it meant was each one of these
developments, particularly add addles 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. with large, strong, and sometimes
really resilient creatures like wild horses or
mammoths at close range. I mean, some of these
Neanderthal sites, for example, I mean, the guys
were just beaten to hell, man. I mean, they had
their cheeks caved in. They had broken, I mean,
thigh bones broken. They had amputated arms,
all kinds of really severe injuries from taking
on animals. But Neanderthals, one of the things
we know from nitrogen isotope studies of their
bones is Neanderthals were more carnivorous than
wolves were. I mean, they were eating a higher
percentage of meat diet than even gray wolves
in Europe were. So each one of these kind of
innovations, addles, of course, by extending
the human arm, you're able to stand back 30,
40 yards from an animal and throw a dart and
kill it. With bows, you're able to get back even
farther. I mean, they rescue you from sort of
doing hand -to -hand combat with an animal that
can easily kill you or crush you. What were Neanderthals
using for weapons? They were primarily using
wooden spears. They didn't have flint points.
They were using spears with points that had been
hardened in fires. Wow. The oldest arrow is here,
like 70 ,000. 72 ,000 years ago. The oldest bow
is only like 8 ,000, so they didn't find a bow.
Wow. That's insane. 72 ,000 to 60 ,000 years
ago. Yeah. Some of which poisons may have been
used. Likely arrowheads were reported in 2020
by Faheen Cave in Sri Lanka, dated to 48 ,000
years ago. Wow. Bow and arrow hunting in Sri
Lankan site likely focused on monkeys and smaller
animals such as squirrels. Remains of these creatures
have found the same sediment as the bone points.
Oh, they used bone points. Yeah. In 2022, arrowheads
were reported from the Grot. How do you say that?
Mandarin cave in France dating to around 54 ,000
years ago. Wow. Yeah, 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. And the glacial maximum recedes and
the climate begins to warm enough to break apart
the corridor that links Asia and North America.
Then North America is completely isolated, except
for the South American connection through Panama,
is completely isolated from the rest of the world.
It's isolated not only from innovations like
the use of bows and the old world, but, and this
becomes, of course, a major part of the story
when Europeans arrive, with domesticated animals.
from which they, for 8 ,000 or 9 ,000 or 10 ,000
years, have been contracting spillover diseases,
creating 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 isolated North and South America. When Europeans
arrive with domesticated animals and animal diseases,
they confront an American population of native
people who have never been exposed to any of
them. And that results in one of the great, possibly
the greatest catastrophe in human history. It's
the term that people have been using these days
is the great dying. I mean, we think. By the
time Europeans got here, and I don't want to,
by the way, admit the fact I do a whole chapter
called Ravens and Coyotes America that is about
the 10 ,000 years after the Pleistocene. Because
native people are here for 10 ,000 years. And
managed to preserve almost all the biological
diversity, at least what's left after the Pleistocene,
for 10 ,000 years. There's only one extinction
that I was able to find during that time. A flightless
sea duck became extinct in that 10 ,000 year
period. I mean, they managed to preserve almost
all of North America's biodiversity across that
time span. And then Europeans arrive with all
these old world diseases. And in a blink of an
eye, what had at one point been, and to be sure,
most of this population is in South America,
56 million people in the two Americas, something
like 80 to 85 percent of that population is taken
out. And a few decades by old world diseases.
Wow. Yeah, it's, as I said, it may be the greatest
human catastrophe in history. That's the speculation
for what happened to the Mayans and the Aztecs
and a lot of these amazing structures that they're
now finding in the Amazon jungle. Oh, yeah. Yeah,
they were taking, I mean, you know, some of these
civilizations, like, you know, in North America,
we had the great Chacoan civilization. That was
our version of the Mayan or Aztec or Toltec groups
down in Central America. I mean, we had this
great civilization in the American Southwest
centered around what are today the Chaco and
National Park ruins. with a civilization that
spread over probably 50 ,000 square miles and
included hundreds of small hamlets and a central
city, Chaco, that was sort of like the Vatican.
I mean, there were priests who lived there most
of the year, priests who, through the history
of Chaco, inherited generation after generation
their position. I mean, there's a... fascinating
archaeological site at Chaco that shows 14 burials
in one room. Nine of those burials span the entire
history, the 300 -year history of Chaco. Every
one of those nine is related to one another through
a female line, the mitochondrial line, and each
of the nine present from the start of Chaco to
the end of it, from about 900 to about 1200,
has a genetic abnormality, a sixth toe on one
foot. Whoa. So these were the people who were
regarded as the priests of the place. And so
a couple of times a year, usually at the solstices,
they would have these big celebrations and 40
,000 people would flock into. Chaco and observe
the solstices and do ceremonies and, you know,
no doubt engage in all sorts of epic nightlife,
too. But over time, over 300 years of time, drought
and a local overuse of resources. And also, I
mean, this is kind of the famous story of Chaco.
What really sort of happened to Chaco is that
the priests were promising all of their followers.
that they could make it rain in the desert because
this was an agricultural, agriculture had finally
come to North America. And we reached a point
when droughts began to strike and the priests
couldn't make it rain, at which point all their
followers basically abandoned their religion.
And the archaeologists who have gone in have
sort of pointed out that, so it kind of looks
as if A disparity in lifestyle must have contributed
because the priests and the priestly class, they
were the ones that were getting to eat all the
protein from the deer and the antelope. As a
result, they were their skeletons are three or
four inches taller than all the peasants. They
lived longer. Their children. got past the age
of five much more easily. And so there is speculation
about Chaco that the disparity in wealth followed
by the inability of the priests to deliver and
make it rain is what caused this civilization
to collapse when the peasant class basically
rose up and overthrew it. Wow. That's so fascinating
because that seems like that just happens with
humans. When humans get into a position of power,
they want to maintain it and tighten up the grips
on everybody else. They want rules for them,
but not for everyone else. They want to have
different privileges. We're dealing with this
like literally right now. Well, sure. I mean,
you know, it shouldn't surprise us, I guess.
It shouldn't surprise us. Human nature has been
the same. Yeah. It's probably been the same for
three million years. But it's just so fascinating
when you see it. manifesting in this ancient
culture and the people wise up and go, you can't
make it rain. Yeah. And then they eventually
get sick of giving these people all their deer.
Yeah. Are there images of this particular site
that Jamie could find? We could see what it looks
like? Yeah. If you just punch up Chaco Canyon
Historic National Park, you'll find the major
site. And I've got, of course, photographs of
all this in the book. But the major site is called
Pueblo Benito. B -O -N -I -T -O. And so how long
did their civilization thrive for? For about
300 years. Just like us. Yeah, just like us.
It's a cycle. With a disparity of wealth that
produced. Unless you have authoritarian dictatorship.
Yeah, here you go. You can get people to do whatever
the fuck you want and you keep things going.
So that's Pueblo Benito. And so you'll notice
this. The caption there, did women control the
bloodline, which speaks to what I was just telling
you a minute ago. Out of those burials in this
central room in this structure, they all, nine
of the 14 buried there were all related to a
single woman who was at Chaco at the founding
of this civilization. Now, is there an artist's
rendering or representation of what it must have?
Look at that. That looks incredible. Yeah, there
is. The National Park Service, I know, has done
one on some of their brochures of what it looked
like originally. See if you can find anything
like that, Jamie, an artist's rendering of what
it looked like. That's wild stuff. And so what
years was this again? Basically 900 to... To
1 ,200. Wow. Look at that. Yeah. That's incredible.
They built 400 miles of roads, by the way. And
they built their roads straight arrow across
the landscape. I mean, they didn't swerve around
mesas or buttes. So, yeah, this would have been
what Pueblo Benito looked like in, as you see,
AD 1100. I like how they have that one tree.
Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. When they first settled
the area, it was covered in a pinyon juniper
vegetation. But almost all those trees disappeared
over the life of Chaco because these people were
farming the classic Mexican cultivar complex,
corn, beans, and squash, all of which require
fires to prepare. And so when you have a food
dish that requires you to build a fire to prepare
it and you're in an area with a limited resource
of possible wood, over time, a civilization of
that size almost completely obliterated all the
surrounding vegetation. Oh, no. The stone axes.
Yeah, sure. I mean, it's yet another example
of human nature that's always been in place.
And, you know, we tend to be so self -centered
or living in our own heads that we think all
these things, this just applies to us. Right.
But these kind of things, living for status,
you know, acting in a way that separates you
from the lowly peasants of the world. I mean,
this is ancient. We have always figured out ways
to do it, ways to distinguish ourselves, and
those kinds of things have often led to serious
problems in human history. Yeah, it's just so
fascinating to see that this has always been
the case. People have always been very short
-sighted in terms of allocation of resources
and preservation of resources. We always have,
and we have another instinct, too. We tend to,
whenever things start growing short of things,
we always blame somebody else. This is the classic
way. Bad spirits. Yeah. Enemies. Yeah, enemies.
Voodoo. Some other group. Right. Yeah. I mean,
you know. Witchcraft. In subsequent European
history, and so I will say what we've been talking
about is primarily of the first three chapters
of this book, and the last seven chapters, plus
the epilogue, is all about the period from the
time Europeans arrive up to the present, up to
really last year. But, I mean, all these same
things play out in the story. I mean, Europeans,
unlike Native people, I mean, and I make an argument
for why Native people, I think, preserve that
biodiversity for so long. I mean, despite examples
like Chaco, you still have virtually all the
animals, all the birds, all the reptiles that
had survived the Pleistocene 10 ,000 years of
human occupation later. They're all still here
when Europeans get here. And I think, I mean,
I explain it several ways. one of which is the
population of North America north of the Rio
Grande River, never rises above 5 million. These
people understand that you've got to keep your
population in check or you will use up the world.
And so they consciously do it. How do they consciously
do that? Do we know? Well, they do it primarily
by various techniques of holding birth rates
down. And they one way of doing it is birth spacing.
You nurse children, say, for till they're five
or six years old. And as long as women are nursing,
they don't go through another chance to get pregnant.
So that spaces births out. And the other thing
they do is, frankly, they engage in abortion.
I mean, they very actively decide in some instances
that we. We don't have the resources to support
this infant. Do we know how they did that? Well,
they did it by various herbal means. And they
also sometimes engaged from, you know, this is
pretty draconian, but they sometimes engaged
in killing infants after they were born. Infanticide
is, I mean, it wasn't hugely common. And I'll
say this also about infanticide. After 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. I mean, agriculture
is the next great economy and innovation in the
way humans live. And what it enables you to do.
I mean, one of the things that seems to prompt
it is that you've lowered the possible animal
life around you to the degree that you can't
really keep going as hunters and gatherers. So
you have to come up with something else. And
in North America, Native people do this several
thousand years. They go to agriculture several
thousand years later than Europe does. I mean,
Europe has been continuously occupied for 55
,000, 60 ,000 years. So 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.
In North America, we don't really do it until
about 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 years ago. And in what
is now the United States, only really about 1
,500, 2 ,000 years ago do you have the first
evidence of going to agriculture. But people
are anxious to come up with a new economy that
doesn't require you to be so draconian about
population suppression. So they just thought
of any new baby as a threat to the food source?
Well, some new babies, not everyone. Yeah, but
some new babies. They just had a number. They
had a number. They're very clear. I mean, they
had really short feedback loops and they understood
their local ecologies really well. And one of
the things you knew is that you couldn't base
your population on the best years you experienced.
You had to base your population usually on the
worst years, because if you went for the best
years. Whenever the worst ones came along, you
were going to end up really hit hard. Starving
to death was a real possibility. A real possibility.
So you're cautious and you base what you think
the carrying capacity of your resource base is
on the worst years you're going to face. And
this is speculation? Is this educated guess?
Like, how do we know this? Well, it's... Beyond
speculation. I mean, we know this is a principle
of sort of hunter -gatherer lifeways around the
world, even still among some hunter -gatherers
that exist today. They still employ those kind
of techniques? They still employ those kind of
techniques. But they're always looking for the
opportunity to escape that. And for people in
Europe 10 ,000 years ago and for people in North
America, you know, between five and... 2 ,000
years ago, the opportunity to escape it somewhat
was agriculture because that produced, if you
specialized in a few food crops, and by the way,
one of the differences in agriculture in the
Neolithic Revolution in the old world and the
Americas is, in the old world, obviously, much
of it depends on domesticating animals. The animals
that are left after the end of the Pleistocene
in Europe, horses, camels, goats, sheep, hogs,
cows, wild oryx, are almost all domesticated.
I mean, in some cases, in the case of wild horses,
it's probably what saved them is that they got
domesticated. In North America, though, there
were almost no domestications. Wild turkeys were
domesticated. Some groups domesticated ducks.
But there weren't any. mammals. Nobody domesticated
bison or bighorn sheep or pronghorns. And one
of the things that does when Europeans arrive
is that, I mean, Europeans come out of this ancient
8 ,000 -year -old herding culture. They've been
herding goats and sheep, and they've developed
a religious tradition. 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, but
it teaches you that predators are the enemy.
Any animal that preys on your sheep or your goats
has to be eliminated. Meanwhile, in North America,
where you don't have domestications of animals,
predators are regarded as these prized, sacred
creatures who keep the world functioning the
way it's supposed to function. And people look
for a predator as a totem animal in a vision
quest. Or they name their clan the Wolf Clan
or the Panther Clan. So it produces a whirl when
the two groups come together. Here are these
native people who still have the ancient human
idea that we are part of everything around us.
Other animals are just like us. They have societies.
can actually intermarry with us. I 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, But the way you
do that is to convince them that you still regard
them as kin. You're still willing to, you're
going to do a ceremony where you go through a
kind of a faux series of marriages between humans
and bison. Wow. And so this kind of, we're all
part of a kinship web. I mean, it's what Charles
Darwin finally provides the scientific evidence
for. And on the origin of species in 1859, we're
out of the same evolutionary stream. Europeans
have, meanwhile, old -worlders have come up with
a completely different idea. This herding religion
they have posits that, well, I'll tell you the
story that sort of launched me writing this book.
This is kind of a good way to say this, I guess.
My oldest memory is from when I was four years
old. psychologists say a lot of us, our oldest
memory is from the age of four. This is the only
one I really remember from the age of four. And
I think the reason I remember is because it's,
you know, sort of laden in emotional content.
So it's really engraved in my system. And here's
what happened. When I was four years old, I had
the first little animal companion I ever had.
And it was a little chicken, a little, you know,
few weeks old chicken, still yellow. And, you
know, I'm not very imaginative as a four -year
-old, so I name it Chicky. And so Chicky and
I, my first great friend and buddy. spend our
time dashing through my parents' house in Louisiana
in a game of chase. And I'm chasing Chickie underneath
the sewing machine, underneath the couch, and
underneath the dining table. And one day, you
know, as a little clumsy four -year -old, I miscalculate
and I step on my little chicken and I kill it.
So I'm four years old. I'm confronting mortality
and loss for the first time. My mom and I go
out in the backyard, and, I mean, we're both
crying, and we bury Chickie. And 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, I 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, even
if you're four years old, I guess. She looks
down at me and although she's crying and feels
compassion for me, she says, she's got to tell
me the truth. Why no, honey? You're made in the
image of God and you have an everlasting soul.
So when you die, you get to go to heaven. Chickie
is just an animal. Chickies don't get to do anything
like that. So I'm afraid Chickie is just dead.
So it was my instruction in the European worldview.
Other creatures are something completely different.
There in the Judeo -Christian tradition, other
animals are made for our use. They're made, as
Genesis puts it, unto your hand are they delivered.
You can basically do anything you want with them.
And with this idea of humans as exceptional and
everything else out there, as just sort of for
utility purposes to make the lives of humans
better. I mean, we arrive in North America with
this idea, very different from what native people
with their kinship notions have, and also with
burgeoning capitalism, the beginnings of the
global market economy, and with... So many Native
people dying. North America is undergoing this
huge ecological release of wildlife. It's the
origin of our Virgin America stories where North
America is just teeming with everything under
the sun. And we look on animals then as just
being like gold, trees, grass, whatever we want
to exploit. We turn them into commodities. And
it's sort of the explanation for the global North
American fur trade. Beavers as an object of pursuit.
White -tailed deer as an object of pursuit for
leather. We should tell people that beaver were
so in pursuit that at one time the richest man
in the world was a beaver furrier. Yes. The richest
man in the world sold beaver pelts. John Jacob
Astor, yeah. And the first great American corporation
was a fur trading corporation to exploit the
beaver populations of North America. How wild
is that? Yeah. So this is the story then that
starts unfolding. And it's amplified by the fact
that all these Europeans who have come over,
especially the ones from England and France.
They've gone through centuries of the feudal
economy where these lords of the manor and kings
control access not just to landscapes but to
animals. So, I mean, it's the origin of the Robin
Hood story. Robin Hood is a deer poacher who
represents the peasant population that the king's
forest and the sheriff of Nottingham as the game
warden won't let him at. 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. And even though the native people try
to convince Europeans the deer are like our cattle,
you have to understand, they belong to us. Europeans,
of course, don't acknowledge that. And suddenly,
here are all these animals, all this wildlife.
I mean, in super abundance. And nobody is telling
you that you can't go after it. And then there's
market hunting. And then there's. And so, yeah.
And so a lot of them. I mean, this is how rural
and lower class people basically rise to the
middle class as you exploit animal populations
and sell them. And that gets you into the currency
economy. It's so fortunate. that they figured
this out somewhere early in the 20th century
and started instituting wildlife conservation
and reintroducing animals and things along those
lines. Well, yeah, and of course I track the
story all the way through, and I won't elaborate
on it. on how it goes. I 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. I mean, which
is kind of, you know, it caused me a certain
amount of chagrin because of how I grew up. I
mean, I grew up hunting. I mean, I stopped hunting
in my 20s, but when I was in Montana, at least
three times in the last... a 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 And in some ways, I mean, I look
at this book as this is probably the most comprehensive
story of the human relationship with animals,
which obviously involves hunting, that anybody
has told, at least about North America. You can't
read reviews. Because there's always going to
be someone that has a ridiculous take on things.
Then you have to argue that ridiculous take because
it doesn't make any sense to you. And then you're
wasting time on some fool's ideas. Yeah, you're
wasting time. You know, what a lot of people
do is if they... Already think what you're saying.
I mean, you get five star reviews. If you say
something that is not part of the package that
they bring to the game. Right. Yeah, of course.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, that the anti -hunting
notion is an interesting one. I mean, it's just
reality, the reality of North America to say
that that's anti -hunting. That's ridiculous.
That's just reality. It's just the market hunting
thing is well documented, particularly in regards
to the buffalo. When 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? Yeah. I mean, and at the
same time that was happening, I mean, we were
taking out, I mean, this is one of the ones that
stuns me. Passenger pigeons, the most numerous
bird, not just in North America, but in the world,
we think there may have been 10 billion of them
at one point, had been in North America for 15
million years. Those birds couldn't survive 400
years of our presence. That's amazing. Once we
arrive, they can't last. I mean, actually, they
only last about 300 years after we arrive. How
did they kill so many of them before they had
firearms? Well, passenger pigeons, I mean, it
was very much like the industrial hunt for bison.
I mean, you had to use firearms, obviously, for
that. But for passenger pigeons, the... The commercial
hunt, the market hunt, was basically done with
nets. You spread nets across the forest, and
they were spring -loaded and were released. And
what they would do is they used live passenger
pigeon decoys that were placed on the end of
a pedestal that rocked back and forth. They were
called stools. And so the passenger pigeon decoy
was referred to as a stool pigeon. Wow. So that's
where that comes from. That's where it comes
from. What did that look like? Can you see if
you can find an image of what that looked like?
So, you know, we get stool pigeon from, you know,
the gangster movies about the 1920s, 1930s. And
what they're referring to is stool pigeon is
basically a traitor. The stool pigeon rats you
out. Wow. And so this was all market hunting
as well, the pasture pigeon. Yeah, it was market.
I mean, people don't think of pigeons as being
a food source, but that is really what they were.
Yeah. So this pigeon is secured in place somehow?
Yeah. So it is? Its feet are attached to the
stool. Wow. And the live ones, the live birds
that you did this with, when you rocked. the
stool back and forth it would flap its wings
if it's as if it were landing and that would
then bring down wow they would spring load the
nets and capture them all yeah and they wiped
out the entire population that way that's incredible
and one of the reasons they wiped the population
out was because i mean in the last in the last
hunts which were taking place in the upper midwest
in wisconsin uh in particular I mean, they went
after them while they were on their nests. So
why were they surprised? I mean, the whole idea
is, when the last passenger pigeon died, for
example, in 1914, a famous story, it dies in
the Cincinnati Zoo, Martha, it's called, after
Martha Washington. Martha dies in 1914. Okay,
so that's the beginning of World War I, the Great
War. To be sure, lots of newspapers were focused
on other things. But I could hardly find any
newspapers in America that 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, I could find one newspaper that wrote
an obituary. Wow. And that newspaper said, you
know, we guess we should feel bad about the loss
of the pasture pigeons, but on the other hand,
maybe it's a good thing that they're not going
to be like grasshoppers and stick around with
us. So that was kind of the extent. Anyway, I
use a lot of this to essentially argue that,
you know, I mean, I do this theme of first contact
a lot. And I mentioned the first contact between
humans and animals that they had never seen.
Talk about first contact in the book between
Europeans and native people. And the whole idea
of first contact theory is that the only way
you can really relate to something brand new
that you've never seen is through what's already
in your head. You already have some notions,
and that's how you understand the new. And then
after you've had some familiarity with it, you
can develop new notions. But one of the themes
I do in the book is essentially continental first
contact. And what I'm arguing with it is that
what we bring out of the old world to America
is the conviction that we're going to recreate
North America, the United States, in the image.
or as clones of England, France, Germany. Because
that's all we know. That's all we know. And these
are places, of course, that in the previous several
hundred years before colonization in North America
had wiped out all their big animals. I mean,
all you've got left in England hasn't had any
wolves since the 1400s. They got partridges.
And so people come to North America and immediately
the idea is whatever is really wild, We really
need to get rid of it. Passenger pigeons, bison,
grizzly bears, wolves, those are not the earmarks
of a civilized society. England doesn't have
those kinds of things. And so, I mean, it kind
of takes the heroes of this book, I think, are
probably the ecologists of the 20th century who
began to realize, so North America is really
old. It's had all these animals for a really
long time. And all these ideas out of Europe,
actually, they're not based on science. They're
based on just old folk traditions out of this
herding kind of culture. So we've got a chance
to do something new here. And we've created this
vast public land system in North America. So
we actually are able to get to have. all these
big charismatic animals. If we just wake up in
time, I mean, it's Aldo Leopold, really, who
sort of is the advocate for this more than anybody
else by the middle of the 20th century. He's
arguing that we need to do an American thing,
not just try to make the United States into some
version of England, because as Henry David Thoreau
had famously said back in the middle of the 19th
century, He was reading the accounts of the first
Europeans to get to Massachusetts, seeing all
these creatures in huge abundance. 200 years
later, 1857, he's sitting there in his study
and realizing, I don't get to see any of this,
really. And he writes this incredible passage
in his journal in March of 1857 where he says,
I realize it's like going to a symphony. And
midway through the first movement, it suddenly
occurs to me, wow, there are no strings. There
are no, wow, there are no woodwinds. There's
no percussion. That's all gone. And then he goes
further and he says, it's like looking up at
the stars at night and realizing that some demigod
has come before you and plucked all the best
of the constellations out of the sky. And you're
not getting to see. The full night sky. And he
says, you know, I realize somebody has come along
and emasculated America before I could live in
it. Quickly. And then he has this great line,
and I use it as the title of one of the chapters
in here. I wish to know an entire heaven and
an entire earth, he says. I want to know the
full thing. I don't want to think that somebody
has come before me and selfishly robbed me of
all these experiences. It's just so bizarre that
human beings repeat these same patterns over
and over and over again. And with the invention
of firearms, they were able to do it so effectively.
And with those traps they use for the stool pigeons,
use it so effectively. Yeah. That they could
completely change the landscape in a relatively
short amount of time. In a short amount of time,
you know, and I mean, it takes until. So this
year, 2023, is the 50th anniversary of the Endangered
Species Act of 1973. I mean. This was kind of
the Hail Mary. Now, 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. And we have
the idea that we're going to get rid of all the
predators and we're going to substitute human
sport hunters for predation. This is how we're
going to... Because one of the things they're
confronting in the early 20th century is what's
called, as they remove predators from various
regions, the ungulate populations, deer and elk
and moose, start going through eruptions. Their
population starts just booming. And then they'll...
eat all the forage and die. Elder Leopold studied
this and said before 1900, he could find mentions
of only two eruptions like this that had happened
in America. After 1900 and we started the predator
war, he found 42 of them. So the idea was we're
going to use human hunters as the substitute
for the predators that 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, even though
we've gotten pronghorns from 35 million down
to 5 ,000 by this point. They're the most ancient
of the North American animals, right? Yeah, and
they're distinctively North American too. It's
so weird. Such a strange animal. Strange and
beautiful. When you see them in comparison to
everything else. Are they an actual antelope?
What are they? Well, they're… Antelope goat.
Antelope capridae is the family name, which had
to be created for them. And actually, it looks
like maybe their closest relatives are giraffes.
Whoa, they kind of look like giraffes. Yeah,
their legs in particular. Their eyes, too. Yeah,
and the great big eyes that are mounted on the
sides of the head. Yeah, look at that guy. What
a cool animal that is. Yeah, and, 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, neither of which
can run over about 42 or 43 miles an hour. So
the question for a while was, so why the speed
overkill? Until we began to realize. These guys
developed their ability to run back during the
Pleistocene when they were being pursued by American
cheetahs. And they still, the females still select
for the fastest males to breed with in order
to preserve this high speed. So the result is
pronghorns only have predators when they're fawns.
They don't have predators as adults because nothing
that's alive now can catch them. At one time,
a cheetah could catch them, but nothing can catch
them now. And since they are preyed on only as
fawns, one of the adaptations that pronghorns
have made to predation is they have two fawns.
You have two fawns, a spare and an heir, with
the idea that the spare is likely to be taken
out as a fawn. But at least you're going to preserve
your genetic line. Is it mostly coyotes? What
gets them? Primarily coyotes. Coyotes are able
to find them. I mean, we don't have enough wolves
out in the prairie country anymore to have any
impact on pronghorns. But coyotes certainly look
for the fawns. Yeah, there's some in California
still, and they used to have a larger population
up until, I think, 20 or 30 years ago. And then
the coyotes started taking them out with such
regularity that they're reduced to just a very
small number now. Yeah, 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. One of the fascinating things
that I learned from you also is the subject of
bison and the enormous populations of bison that
were witnessed at one point in history and that
it coincided with the European spread of diseases.
Yeah, and the spread of bison out of the Great
Plains. Yeah, the bison story, and, you know,
I obviously, I tell it in several places, sort
of the advent of the bison story early in Wild
New World and then the... the sort of, you know,
the denouement in a later chapter. But 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, human hunting pressure. Because only
wolves and humans really are effective predators
of bison. And what you get by becoming smaller
is a quicker emergence as fertile. Bison that
are smaller can have calves at an earlier age.
When the cows are two years old or three years
old, they can begin having calves. The gestation
period is not as long for smaller animals. In
other words, these are advantages for reproduction.
And this new bison 8 ,000 years ago essentially
inherits the grazing niche on the American Great
Plains. 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. And so as a result of
inheriting a grazing niche now depopulated with
no horses to compete with, with no mammoths to
compete with, they... they become this huge mass.
I mean, this is why bison multiply into the millions
on the Great Plains. And in fact, they probably
become so numerous, like passenger pigeons. This
is one of the arguments for why passenger pigeons
survive so long. They're so numerous that they
saturate the predator possibilities. Predators
just can't take enough of them to ever actually
reduce their numbers. So what happens, I mean,
native people hunt bison for, modern bison for
8 ,000 years. That's the longest economic life
way in North American history. But just about
the time that Europeans are arriving and very
likely contributed to by the arrival of Europeans
in the disease epidemics that wipe out so many
native people. bison populations began to expand
out of the Great Plains west of the Rocky Mountains.
I mean, they get all the way to places like Oregon,
Arizona, and east of the Great Plains when they
get to places like Georgia and Florida and Virginia
and West Virginia and possibly even western Pennsylvania.
And the argument about this is when Europeans
arrive, And out of a hemispheric population,
or I should rephrase that, out of North America
and South America having a native population
as high as maybe 56, 57 million people, most
of which 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. People who have been cutting down
forests and building fires and using fires as
their primary method of heating and cooking and
everything else. When that ends, the recent idea
advanced is that that enables a... reduction
of carbon in the atmosphere, formerly put into
the atmosphere by all these burning fires of
all these millions of people. And when that happens,
it produces an effect called the Little Ice Age.
And the Little Ice Age, which lasts for about
300 years, from about 1450, 1550 or so, somewhere
in that range, around 1500 to 1800 or maybe 1830
or so. produces cooler, moister weather in the
northern hemisphere, and that grows more grass,
and that expands the bison population over a
lot of North America. So when Europeans get here,
you know, as a consequence of all these factors,
nobody really understands. I mean, nobody knows
anything about disease transmission. Nobody suspects
that your breath can kill people. I mean, there's
an early European who I quote in the book who
says, boy, we just experienced the strangest
thing. We went ashore for a couple of weeks.
And when we came back on board our ship, word
came that every village, every Indian village
that we went to, within two or three days of
us being there, almost all the people in the
village fell sick and they're dying. It seems
to have happened only where we went. Nowhere
else is reporting this. But I mean, so it happens
like that. I mean, just almost instantaneously.
They don't understand why it's happening. The
European idea is, well, God has he's killing
them to enable us to settle the place. And they
certainly don't understand what's causing, you
know, the little ice age. But what they're reaping
the benefit of is. This explosion of animals
that even brings buffalo all the way almost to
the East Coast. Wow. Yeah, it's another one of
these amazing stories that, I mean, we've only
been figuring this kind of stuff out, you know,
for the last 20 or 30 years. Some of it even
more recently than that. It's got to be so rewarding
as a person who studies that, though, that this
information is being discovered in new revelations
and new understanding. Yeah, it's really fun.
You know, I mean, I had a tremendous amount of
fun doing this book. You know, I mean, I was.
There were parts of it that certainly surprised
me. You know, I mean, I kind of knew this story.
I mean, what I was trying to do was to tell in
one book this whole North American story of humans
and people in under 400 pages. I mean, I managed
to do it. It's 398 pages. It's a thickie. Yeah,
it's 398. So it's got a lot of information in
it. I mean, it is in an audio version, too. Do
you do it? No, I didn't do it. Damn it. Yeah,
the press I was with, W .W. Norton, retained
the rights to the audio book. I mean, with Coyote
America, my agency, my literary agency, retained
the rights, and I got to select who read it for
the audio book. But in this case, Norton retained
the rights, and I had no say. You would be so
good at it. Yeah, well, I've offered myself a
couple of times. Nobody's ever taken me up on
it. Why are they so dumb about that kind of stuff?
They did that with Rinella as well, with his
book, The American Bison. I know, and Stephen
would be a fantastic reader. Well, he did read
it. He eventually gained the rights to it. Oh,
he did get the rights to it? And then he went
and read it, and it's amazing. Yeah. Well, maybe
at some point I can get the rights to do it,
but I've offered myself. More than once, and
I never had anybody take me up on it. They have
their stable of people they want to use. They're
silly, especially a guy like you who's been on
this podcast a couple of times. You have such
a great voice and such a passion for this stuff
that's so tangible. When you talk about it. Well,
I'd love to be able to do it. Well, hopefully
the guy did a great job. One of the things that
I'd be 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.
What do you think about that? Have you looked
into it? Yeah, I have. And so, I mean, here's
my deal. I mean, I'm a historian. as I said,
an English major, really, and kind of an environmental
writer, a writer about this stuff. So I'm not
an archaeologist or a paleontologist. I mean,
my approach to doing this kind of stuff, doing
archaeology and paleontology, is I go to what
I consider to be the best people and other folks
consider the best people out there. You know,
Ross McPhee from the American Museum of Natural
History, Donald Grayson, certainly Paul Martin,
you know, who is the... He's kind of the Einstein
of all this. And 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. I mean, his work
has survived for decades because nobody has been
able to. shoot it down. I mean, he's that sort
of bulletproof in his arguments. So I'm relying
on all of those guys, the people who are spending
all their time, you know, using science -based
research to study this. And what they, when I
look at their work, Ross 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, but it certainly was a
change from what had happened before and after.
And there is a corollary argument called the
fireball hypothesis. that came from an article
that was in Science Magazine in about 2005 or
2006 that argued that sort of in the tradition
of the Chicxulub asteroid, there may have been
a comet or possibly an asteroid or a meteorite
that struck, that set off the Younger Dryas period
and that also resulted in kind of a scorched
earth, at least in sort of the northern climes
in Alaska. I mean, I know you've had on the John
Reeves guy, the Boneyard Alaska. How amazing
is his place? Yeah. Don't you want to go there?
Absolutely. Don't you want to go there? It's
less. Less than five acres? Two acres. And then
there's another site that's - Have you been there?
No, I have not, but I really desperately want
to. John's a fascinating guy. Yeah. I mean, the
fact that he has complete control over this is
so interesting. Yeah, yeah. And I could tell
you some more stuff off the air. Yeah, okay.
But he's just, I mean, you know what's going
on in the East River right now. Are you aware
of this? I don't know. There's a bone rush in
the East River because he talked about in the
early 1900s, the museum in New York City had
so much property from his or so many artifacts,
so many mammoth tusks and so many step bison
jawbones and things that they dumped them in
the East River. And he found the exact location.
He told people where it is, and they've already
started discovering things. They've discovered
a step bison jawbone, and they recently discovered
a fragment of a mammoth tusk. So there's these
guys, Dirty Water Don, and that's a piece of
the mammoth tusk they found. See if you can find
also the bison skull. The bison skull was maybe
even more compelling. In the area where this
guy told them to look, they've started to find
things. He's got so much on his property. It's
so incredible. I think it's a little further
up, Jamie. These look older. So a bison priscus,
huh? Yeah, bison jawbone. Is that it right there?
That's it right there? It should be right here.
It's not. Well, you can find it if you just Google
it. Bison, what year? What were you looking at?
How far away is this? April. When was he here?
So this is probably, okay, these are pretty recent
photos. We're still in. March, I think, was when
they discovered it, if I remember correctly.
So this is the one you did with John, huh? Yes.
And look at that. They found cats and things
and cave bears that they didn't think were native
to that area. They didn't even think they were
in that area. So they're making these significant
discoveries in this piece of property that he
has that really kind of changes. There it is,
right there. Right below that, that's the piece.
That's the piece where he's pulling it out of
the water. Oh, boy. Yeah, isn't that amazing?
And then right below that, you can see the actual
piece itself. We can see it's 10 inches. Really
amazing stuff. A chunk of a jawbone of a steppe
bison that they found in the East River. In the
East River. And there's a lot more out there,
apparently. But, you know, you're dealing with
almost 100 years of it sitting there. But just
the fact that they could still find some pieces
is really encouraging. I mean, that's 100 years
of silt, a moving river, who knows how much pollution
and garbage. But they're finding things, which
is pretty damn cool. Well, it's exciting to do
it. I mean, I found at one point. When I was
living on the Great Plains back in the 1980s,
I found a bison skull eroding out of a stream
bank. And I have no idea how old it was, but
it was of a calf. It was a fairly small skull,
but the horn cores were... there and yeah it
was very exciting to find something like that
one of the things that john has found one of
the things that's very extraordinary is it seemed
like these animals all died together and there's
a very distinct layer of scorched earth I remember
seeing that. The Younger Dryas impact theory,
what's fascinating about it, it's not one event.
It's multiple events that take place over thousands
of years, and there's a lot of physical evidence
of it. Iridium in particular, which is common
in space and rare on Earth, and also nanodiamonds,
these impact diamonds, these microdiamonds 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. This 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. Is
that correct? this asteroid, this shower that
we see, this meteor shower. And that also coincides
with the Tunguska explosion, which they believe
is an asteroid that blew up right above the surface
of the Siberian forest and to this day is like
flattened, like this enormous area. The photographs
are extraordinary of the post -impact discovery
of the site. And for 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. And
I think the two of you together might be able
to, if you have a conversation, it would be very
fascinating. He's incredibly impressive, this
guy. And I know he's heterodox in his sort of
ideas, but... brilliantly researched. I mean,
and has had debates with scientists over this.
Even on my podcast, they were talking about this
evidence, and they put it together with Graham
Hancock's work. And Graham Hancock, who has Ancient
Apocalypse, right? Ancient Apocalypse on Netflix,
which is basically all about that. It's all about
the evidence of 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 they can carbon date to that time period
where we thought at one point in time they were
just hunters and gatherers now we know they were
they were capable of very sophisticated stone
work in turkey and there's only to this day i
think less than 10 of them has been uncovered
they use lidar and they found more of them the
surrounding hills but he believes that this coincides
with these meteor impacts and that there was
probably a huge disruption of human civilization
and a restart of it. And it coincides with the
end of the ice age. And there's some really fascinating
erosion data and data of massive amounts of water
that happened very quickly. And he believes what
happened was something hit the actual ice cap
that was over North America. This guy's very
well researched in this. It's a really fascinating
conversation, I think, with the two of you together.
And I would love to have if you're interested
in that. Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly intrigued
by it. I 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 McPhees of the world think
of it. I would like to see that too, but I do
think that people do preserve their initial notions,
especially if they've been teaching that and
writing books on that and they've proclaimed
that to be the exact history of how things went
down. I would like just to see you have a conversation
with this guy because, again, he's very impressive.
His ability to describe these things and his
recall of the information is second to none.
Well, what I would say to the younger Dryas so
far and certainly the Fireball article published
back in 2005 or 2006. had some currency for quite
a number of years. Obviously, 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, and
they weren't really citing it anymore. And I
think the reason was basically this. The argument
goes as a kind of a test for something that could
cause a major extinction is, okay, so the Younger
Dryas produced a cold pulse, to be sure. But
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. His argument is massive devastation. His
argument is instant flooding, the creation of
the Great Lakes almost instantaneously. It's
a wild argument. It's a wild conversation. So
here are the other two arguments then. The other
two arguments are if you have an extinction like
the five that we've had before. I mean, I argue
that, you know, we're all talking about the sixth
extinction when we're in. My argument, sort of
following an article that was published in the
National Academy of Sciences in 2018, is that
the sixth extinction that we think of today has
actually, unlike all the previous five, the fifth
one being Chicxulub, the sixth one has actually
been happening in slow motion for 30 ,000 years.
It's not just started. It's happening, as the
people in the National Academy of Sciences piece
put it, when 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 in what they called
in this 2018 article. almost a worst case scenario,
cost us like two and a half billion years of
specially evolved genetics. So the reason I have
been following that argument, and that's kind
of the one I do, is that when the younger, driest
thing comes up, what people point out is that
in all the extinctions before the Pleistocene
one, those extinctions took out everything. They
took out life in the oceans. They took out small
creatures. They took out amphibians, reptiles,
birds. But the Pleistocene seemed to just be
mammals and often just big mammals. And so there's
this sort of logical attempt to try to come up
with what would explain an extinction scenario
that doesn't take out things in the ocean, that
doesn't take out little creatures. but just focuses
on big mammals, which is why sort of the consensus
is going towards this human spread. Dan, I don't
think they're mutually exclusive. I think you
probably have both things working in conjunction.
And I think the good explanation for why it only
kills things that are on Earth and not in the
ocean is that it impacts the ice shell. It impacts
these ice sheets and causes this almost instantaneous
melting of the ice caps in a catastrophic way.
And not everything is affected by it. Only the
things that get impacted by the water and get
impacted by this melting of the caps. I don't
know enough about it to have this conversation
with you, but I'm blown away by this guy, Randall
Carlson, and his descriptions of it and his understanding
of it. I just think it would be an amazing thing
to get together with you. There's no doubt human
beings had a massive effect on it, and I think
that all these things you're pointing out are
really fascinating. pretty tragic, too, that
human beings did. I mean, the one thing that's
interesting is the gestation period of these
mammoths, right? Like, they had to carry their,
because they were so big, you alluded to this
when you were talking about the bison. So, if
you wiped out a clan of them, you're making a
significant impact. It's not like... Like rabbits
or like coyotes. No, that's exactly right. Right.
Biologists call those K species, which have these
really long gestation periods. So they would
make them more vulnerable to human predation.
Yeah. And they also were ignorant to us until
we came here. They were ignorant to us. They
evolved for who knows how many years before we
got here. Yeah. Well, one of the things I have
always loved about you and your podcast is your
wonderful openness to... Everybody. I mean, it's
I think it's one of the explanations for why,
you know, the Joe Rogan experience is such a
global hit, man. I mean, you come across as.
Tell me your shit, and I bet I'm going to love
it. Well, with your case, it's easy. Your shit
is amazing. And one of the big successes is the
fact that people like you are willing to come
on. So I really appreciate that. Oh, hell, man.
I love it. It was really entertaining. I can't
wait to listen to this one again. It was so good.
There's so much information. And I can't wait.
Even though somebody else is reading this book,
I'll get it on audio anyway. But it's a wild
new world, epic story of animals and people in
America. Dan Flores. And I can't recommend it.
enough his other book Coyote America that I've
read and then there's the American Serengeti
Dan you're the man I appreciate you very much
let's do this again we'll do it with Randall
thank you very much bye everybody