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PROMO - The Cerutti Mastodon Site - Pseudo Archaeology 102
1k Plays3 years ago
The Archaeology Podcast Network is taking a bit of a break for October, 2022. In the mean time, we’re introducing you to some of the other fantastic shows that we produce. Here’s an episode from The Pseudo-Archaeology Podcast about the Cerutti Mastodon site.The 130,000-year-old Cerutti Mastodon site in San Diego is a place where you can definitely find mastodons, but were people there at the same time? It sure doesn’t look like it.
Transcripts
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Recommendation
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hey, fans of the Life in Ruins podcast. As you heard last week, we are still taking a break for the month of October from releasing new episodes of shows.
Overview of Pseudo-Archaeology Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
However, we're introducing you to episodes of other shows that we think you'll like. And this next one is from the Pseudo-Archaeology Podcast, which has a long history on the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:21
Speaker
but was recently reignited by Dr. Andrew Kinkella and he's been doing a bunch of good episodes and he recently did one on the Ceruti, mashed it on site, something the hosts of this show have talked about several times. I figured we would give Andrew's take. He's pretty much in line, spoiler alert.
00:00:39
Speaker
as most academics are, but it's still a really good take. It's just Andrew and his ideas on the Ceruti Mastodon site. Also, he lives right near there, so he must know a lot more about it. All right, here's the pseudo-archaeology podcast. Check it out at arcpodnet.com. Scroll down the page and click on the pseudo-archaeology logo to see all of his episodes. They release every other week. Here's the show.
The Controversy of the Ceruti Mastodon Site
00:01:03
Speaker
You are now entering the pseudo-archaeology podcast, a show that uncovers what's fact, what's fake, and what's fun in the crazy world of pseudo-archaeology. Hello and welcome to the pseudo-archaeology podcast, episode 102. And I'm your host, Andrew Kinkela, tonight.
00:01:31
Speaker
We look at the Ceruti Mastodon site. Why are we looking at this site? That kind of is a site, but kind of isn't a site, but kind of is a site. Find out. So here we are at the Ceruti Mastodon site, and I have to tell you guys,
00:01:57
Speaker
I hate myself for doing this episode. I hate myself for doing this one. Why? Because on the show.
00:02:05
Speaker
We're so used to talking about real fraud. You know, the Eric Von Dinekins of the world, right? The thing, you know, shrouded to ruin. This one is different. This one takes a bit of a deeper dive and a deeper think because this example deals with real archaeologists and a real site.
00:02:33
Speaker
that ultimately got sucked up into the media machine and spit out the other side in a very disingenuous manner, I would say. And so what do I mean by this? You know, first, this one kind of fell on my lap for several different reasons. First, as I always tell you guys, I
00:02:59
Speaker
do these based on what kind of comes up on my phone, you know,
Debating Human Arrival Timelines in the Americas
00:03:04
Speaker
when I Google for archaeology to see what, see what the world is seeing on their phone and on their news apps. And this Rudy Mastodon site came up and then also on top of that, I saw some other
00:03:18
Speaker
really weak research that was using the sorority mastodon site as an example to bolster their weak research. So I was like, Oh, now I got to tackle this one. And then finally, we'll put the nail in the coffin for tonight is that my fellow podcasting friends over at life and ruins happened to do
00:03:43
Speaker
this Rudy Mastodon site a while ago and they were running an encore episode of it. So I will definitely put a link to that down in the show notes. But I listened to their show and man, that was a killer show that the life and ruins guys did. They were bold. They were factual. It was fantastic. And and after I saw that they did it, I'm like, hey, man, if they could do it, I'll do it because I needed to do it.
00:04:14
Speaker
The Cerruti Mastodon site was a mastodon. I know you're shocked. It was a mastodon that was found in San Diego County.
00:04:27
Speaker
in 1992. And it was found as part of a CRM archaeology project. This is archaeology for hire. This is where an archaeologist goes out and works with construction workers and make sure they're not digging up Native American burial sites and so on, right? I think we get this
00:04:46
Speaker
But the archaeologists out there that day, they were widening a road and he saw a mastodon tusk sticking out of there. So that's really exciting and really amazing. That does happen, right? We do have all kinds of really cool megafauna in Southern California that come up from time to time. These are the creatures of the Ice Age.
00:05:09
Speaker
And it was ultimately going to be dated to 130,000 years old, which is very fair in terms of mastodons. And if you don't know what a mastodon is, it's like a woolly mammoth minus the woolly, right? This is a large elephant like creature from the ice age, from the Pleistocene. So,
00:05:34
Speaker
This story, though, didn't really break until 2017, when an article in Nature came out about the Sururi Mastodon site. Already, don't you have a couple of questions? Like, it was found in 1992. Why did it came out in 2017?
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, you know, and the hundred and thirty thousand years thing seems like nobody deal. Why? Why is King Kela worried about this? Well, when I first heard this story, I was like, what? When I saw the date of one hundred and thirty thousand. And then my next reaction was, oh,
Concluding Thoughts on the Ceruti Mastodon Site
00:06:14
Speaker
no. Here we go. Why am I so negative and worried?
00:06:21
Speaker
because the archaeologists who found the mastodon said that human beings butchered it. And when I first say that, you're like, big deal. Can Kelly human beings butchered mastodons? You know, and I'm sure they did it 130,000 years ago. Yes, but not in the new world. So this is what makes this so crazy, so wild.
00:06:47
Speaker
is that they're claiming human beings were there to butcher the mastodon 130,000 years ago, right? And that is wild because that would throw our whole timeline of the new world into total disarray because, you know, I would say that peopling of the new world, when human beings first got to North and South America,
00:07:16
Speaker
I think of it as the single hardest question to answer in all of archaeology. I'm not kidding you guys. It's the one I pick when people ask me what he thinks the hardest thing because the evidence is so difficult to deal with. It's relatively rare. It's very spread out. You're talking about timelines where when you have ice ages,
00:07:46
Speaker
the ice age itself sucked up water from the oceans. So coastlines were 300 feet below modern sea level. So you're going to have lots of sites that are underwater and have been for a long time. You know, how did the first people get here? When did the first people get here? Which route did they take? That stuff is super contentious and really difficult. It is so difficult. I've, you know, put a toe in those waters a little bit over the years and it's just,
00:08:14
Speaker
It's tough and i have respect for people who are trying to deal with it because it is just intrinsically difficult. So with all that said the current good science good data is gonna place people in the new world like the first humans to set foot.
00:08:36
Speaker
on the Americas, and it was most likely North America. Oh, let's say 16 and a half thousand years ago. Give or take.
00:08:45
Speaker
You know, if you say 15 and a half, that's not crazy. If you say 17 and a half, that's not crazy, but somewhere in there, right? That's when the evidence shows us that the first human beings got to the new world by crossing the Bering land bridge, most likely along the beaches, taking a very coastal route from the Bering land bridge, because again, it's going to be the ice age. So there's no water there. There's land.
00:09:13
Speaker
the shoreline is 300 feet below where it is now. So they just walk straight over from the tippy top of Russia over there across and into the new world. Now, 130,000 years ago is not even close to 17, right? It's plus what, 115,000. So it's wildly far away from the accepted knowledge and the accepted science. It's way out.
00:09:44
Speaker
And there have been other problems with dealing with this in the past too. You may have heard of the Clovis Mafia, which is the world's most unscary gang of nerdy archaeologists. Now, if you listen to pseudo archaeologists, they always bang on about the Clovis Mafia.
00:10:10
Speaker
as a great example of how archaeology is so blind. What the Clovis Mafia is, it was a group of scientists, I would say in the 70s, maybe into the 80s, that thought that Clovis artifacts and Clovis culture, this is just a name that goes, it goes with a certain type of spear point. And it's also used to say, oh, these people that are about, oh, 11,000 years old, 12,000 years old in that vicinity, you know, you know, it's so funny, I always forget
00:10:38
Speaker
exactly when Clovis is. Is it 11,000 years before present or 11,000 BC? Doesn't matter too much. I'll look it up later.
00:10:49
Speaker
And through the wonders of modern technology, you guys, I just looked it up. I pause the recording and looked it up, deal with that. And Clovis is indeed, this is why I get it messed up. It's about 13,000 years ago, about 11,000 BC, right? Give or take a little bit, depending on the carbon 14 dates and the error and this kind of thing. But so my point there is that the Clovis Mafia said that
00:11:19
Speaker
There was no humans before that. And they kind of had that hard date at 13000 years ago, give or take, you know, 13 and a half to give you that. And they would shout down other academics who would even say, oh, maybe it's maybe it's 14 and a half, you know. And and obviously that was overbearing and silly and overcooked nerds are never fun. But.
00:11:45
Speaker
Pseudo-archaeologists always blow this way out of proportion. I'll tell you this, guys. I was in college in the 90s, and we were joking about the Clovis Mafia then. Right? And by we, I don't mean just the students, the professors too. They'd be like, ah, yeah, you know the Clovis Mafia thing. But...
00:12:00
Speaker
But pseudo archaeologists will keep that up and they'll be like, oh, you know, the Clovis mafia. It's like, dude, nobody's even given a damn about that for like 30 years. We know it was silly. And so now we've dated many, many sites that you would call pre Clovis.
00:12:17
Speaker
You know, there are, there are real dates of 13,000, five, 14,000 stuff in the low 14s. You know, you'll, you'll get that kind of stuff. Once you're tiptoeing up to 15 though, it gets pretty, pretty sparse out there. So.
00:12:32
Speaker
That's the world that the Saruti Mastodon site is going to come into when they publish their stuff in 2017. Again, so we know nature, the magazine nature is super, super well respected. So this isn't just a fly by night secondary thing. This is a big deal.
00:12:49
Speaker
So we really need to look at their evidence very closely now. OK, you're saying that this site's one hundred and thirty thousand years old. Hey, are the dates decent? OK, you're saying there's evidence of human beings here. OK, what are the artifacts look like? What what data do you have? And we're going to have to parse this out very, very carefully.
00:13:12
Speaker
Now, when we come back, a more focused history on the sorority mastodon site and why it's become such a pain in my ass. We'll be right back.
00:13:25
Speaker
Hey, this is Chris Webster just jumping in for a minute between segments to remind you that we have a membership program. It's arcpodnet.com forward slash members for more information. It's basically $7.99 a month, but you get a 25% discount if you get it for the year. And what you get for that is you get episodes early.
00:13:43
Speaker
You get them ad-free if you want that. I actually had somebody in our member group say they actually prefer to listen to it with ads because they're useful things. I appreciate that. But anyway, if you join our membership program, again, you're supporting archeological education and outreach. You're keeping the lights on over here. Nobody does this as a full-time job. We're all basically volunteers, but there are costs associated too.
00:14:06
Speaker
having this much content and this much volume of megabytes and audio going out to your ears for free every single week and usually several if not up to five episodes a week sometimes. Again, arcpodnet.com forward slash members and thanks for listening to this promo episode on your normal feed. Now back to the show.
00:14:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the pseudo-archaeology podcast, episode 102. And we've been talking about the Cerruti Mastodon site. And in this bit here, I wanna take a bit deeper dive into what the Nature article says. Richard Cerruti, the person who originally found it and kind of pushed this. And my take on some of this. So if you look at the Nature article,
00:14:57
Speaker
from 2017, it's very serious, as you would think. This is a well, well respected publication. And there's quotes in there. If you didn't know any better, you would think that this site was absolutely 100 percent unequivocally human because they have quotes in there like, you know, the site was radiometrically dated. The artifacts found include hammerstones and vills.
00:15:28
Speaker
and cobbles. And you also find spiral fractured bone that could only have been broken while fresh.
00:15:42
Speaker
And then as you look at all this stuff and read along at the very end, the findings confirm an otherwise unknown kind of homo that populated the world 130,000 years ago. So you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of something that happened to me.
00:16:12
Speaker
And you're like, Oh, no, Kinkela, is this one of your stories that's 20 years old? No, it's a story of mine that's only 18 years old. Okay. I was on this CRM project in a really out there area of Palmdale, which is inland from Southern California.
00:16:32
Speaker
right from the coast. And I was working on this, this area doing CRM work, they were going to build a new housing development. And it was up to me and a couple other archaeologists to watch the construction and look out for artifacts.
00:16:49
Speaker
And this was a place that was worth looking like it would have been a place where ancient people could have lived. So the possibility of finding artifacts was real. And I will tell you guys that we ultimately did find real artifacts and real archaeological sites months and months into the project. I want to say like six months in or whatever. But.
00:17:11
Speaker
Three months in or so, we were finding nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And that's okay in archaeology. But you know what it does? It makes you start thinking things are there when they're not. Because the human brain just does it to stop you from going crazy, to make you think you're doing something worthwhile. You know, like, oh, I must have found something right here. And it's like, well, you didn't. You know that rock?
00:17:39
Speaker
Two thousand years ago, ancient peoples used it as a rock as they walked by, you know. So this kind of came to a head. I am going to give myself a gold star yet again and tell you guys that I'm pretty good at this. I'm pretty good at not seeing something that isn't there. Right. I'm I'm good at keeping kind of a cool head. But other people aren't.
00:18:05
Speaker
And so a couple months in, we're finding nothing, we're finding nothing. One of the other archaeologists on the project was like, hey, did you see that quartz outcrop? Right, quartz, just this regular stone. I'm like, yeah. He's like, oh, that's cultural, meaning human beings used to have used it. And I'm like, I don't know, man, it just looks like a crappy quartz outcrop. You know, this outcrop of that white translucent quartz stone.
00:18:32
Speaker
which was used for practically nothing in the past because it's not very good. It's not very good toolstone. It's not very good. It is true that sometimes you'll see quartz crystals used as kind of an ambulance or jewelry or this kind of thing. But I've seen this once. Really tiny little arrowheads made out of it because they had nothing else because it was an area that had completely crap stone.
00:18:57
Speaker
But anyway, I'm looking at this quartz outcrop and I'm like, there's that little voice inside my head that's like, this is nothing. You know, and the other archaeologist is like, no, no, look at it, look at it. Look, you know, people came up here, they broke the stone up. Are you telling me that these broken stones weren't done by people?
00:19:14
Speaker
And I'm looking close and I'm like, yeah, that's what I'm telling you. You know, because these stones broke off naturally. And so what you have is you have this outcrop, like, again, just picture a large stone, broken up stones coming out of the side of a hill. And underneath it, there's broken bits that have naturally spalled off because it gets cold, it gets warm, the seasons change and the stone naturally cleaves off.
00:19:45
Speaker
And I'm like, dude, this is natural. No, no, no, no, no. No, this is a sight. This is a sight. And I'm like, no, it's not. But things got so overcooked that this guy would not stop that finally one day I was like, okay, I'll record it. So I spent a day, I went up to the ancient quartz outcrop
00:20:15
Speaker
And I drew it. I took a photo and I spent, you know, a couple hours like doing a good drawing, like a good plan view drawing of the outcrop and where all the broken bits are. And I filled out, you know, uh, where it is precisely and took GPS points and I treated it like a real archeological site, even though I knew it wasn't. It was just to like stop the madness, you know? So yes,
00:20:42
Speaker
If you look up the paperwork of that area, there is a quartz outcrop listed. Now, it didn't really make any difference, ultimately, because we did find real stuff down the way, you know, so I don't feel bad. We didn't record a fake archaeological site, but it was just this sort of toss off thing.
00:21:02
Speaker
But I'm not gonna double down and say, oh yes, proof that humans were here thousands of years ago. It's not, it's just a quartz outcrop, you know? And yeah, there were humans down the way. There is a 2% chance that one of those humans came up and took one glancing blow off it to get one piece of quartz because he wanted a cool necklace. That's possible, but it's not probable. Know what I'm saying?
00:21:31
Speaker
So the sorority mastodon site reminds me a lot of that. I think it was kind of groupthink where they just, they made themselves believe this was a thing and it wasn't. You're standing out there at the side of the road for days and weeks and months, you see nothing, nothing, nothing. And then you see this mastodon, you're like, oh my God. And then you look closer and you start to try and make something out of nothing. Those quotes I gave you guys before about the artifacts, hammerstones, anvils and cobbles.
00:22:01
Speaker
Let me translate. Rocks. You guys get that? If this was really a butchering site for a mastodon, it would just look different. You know that the little hair on my back of my neck that I was talking about before when I looked at the quartz outcrop and I was like, no, it's the same thing with this. I look at it and it's just.
00:22:25
Speaker
No, and I wish them the best. I wish it was true. It sounds awesome. I wish it was evidence for one hundred and thirty thousand year old occupation by humans, but it's not. You know, it's you have to go back to one of some of those old truisms like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is an extraordinary claim. They do not have extraordinary evidence.
00:22:49
Speaker
And I think a lot of this goes down to the head of Richard Cerruti, who originally found it. Now, Richard Cerruti, he's passed away now. He just died like three years ago or so. But he is one of those old archeology guys, been out there for a long time. And I think he just let it get the best of himself. I read his obituary and I thought it was really telling.
00:23:18
Speaker
First, early on in the first paragraph of it, it talks about the Surruti Mastodon site as the most contentious discovery in North American archaeology. And just as an aside, the only thing making it contentious is the overhyped media coverage. It's not contentious for people like me. For people like me,
00:23:39
Speaker
It's a really awesome mastodon site. We can't lose track of that. This happens so often on this podcast, right, you guys? Whether it's shrouded terrain, you know what I mean. Like, it's cool. It's just being misrepresented. A mastodon is cool anyway. You cut it. I know. I'll be here all week.
00:24:00
Speaker
So as I read through it, first, there's a photo of him in his kind of Indiana Jones hat holding a pic. You know, that's the photo they choose. He's indoors with his hat on. And I mean, we all do it a little bit. We all play the part a little bit. But, you know, he talks about.
00:24:19
Speaker
wanting to be an archaeologist forever, that he once had 45 buckets of chip stones in his house. And that, even to me, I'm like, what? 45 buckets? That's a lot. And he says things like, you know, the local area is blanketed with artifacts. We just don't recognize them.
00:24:42
Speaker
That's a little true. You know, it is true that there is all kinds of interesting, real evidence of people who've been here for thousands of years, but not 130,000 years. And every broken rock you see was not broken by a person. So I can feel it when I read through his obituary, you know, this person who's
00:25:05
Speaker
done this for a long time and has done it so long that they're seeing what's not there because they want it too bad. They're letting their feelings get the best of them. Remember, you guys, archaeology is data, not feelings. And this has gone way down the feelings rabbit hole, you know, because we want it and it plays to our wants. How often on this podcast have we have we talked about this, right? You know, it could be.
00:25:34
Speaker
You know, it could be 130,000 years old. Yeah, it could also not be 130,000 years old. There's cherry picking of data here. You know, we're only looking at the best bits to try and make us look good. We're not being honest and looking at the parts where it's like, dude, this does not look reasonable. You know, it's.
00:25:57
Speaker
There's a doubling down on high technology in some of this, too. This is a common thing that people do when they have something that is not supported. Well, they'll be like, but we've made 3D models of it. We've expanded our dating methods. We've done replication of the artifacts. It's like, yes, I see you've put a ton of work in this. It doesn't change anything. It's still nothing.
00:26:25
Speaker
You know what I mean? I've seen this several times throughout my career, you guys, where people want something so bad. I've done this. We can all fall down this dark path easily. Like I didn't trust my carbon 14 dates once.
00:26:39
Speaker
I wrote about this in my textbook. I thought for sure the area I was digging was a thousand years old. And it kept coming back as 300 years old. And I was like, these dates must be wrong. No, the dates were right. I was wrong. You know, and it's okay, but we get so wrapped. The Surruti Mastodon is a classic example of this. Those artifacts in quotes are not artifacts.
00:27:05
Speaker
You know, and and the scientists working on this, again, I feel for them. I'm not here to say they're like unprofessional or something. I'm not. I'm just here to say that they've. They're trapped in this rabbit hole, man, and it's time to start clawing your way out. You know, I've seen quotes from them or people who support them. And this is in San Diego. Again, a lot of this stuff is, I believe, the San Diego Natural History Museum. You'll see quotes like. They're demanding unequivocal proof.
00:27:35
Speaker
That's what the scientists are saying about the rest of the scientific community. And we're like, yeah, we're demanding unequivocal proof because you're saying 130,000. You know, if you were bumping it up a tick to 17,000 instead of 16. All right. I might give you a little more leash on that one.
00:27:56
Speaker
You know, but come on, man. And again, the stone, the stone tools in quotes, they just don't look right. You know, they're too basic. The stone itself itself sucks. Think about the quartz example.
00:28:14
Speaker
Even people have 130,000 years ago. Let's go with it. Let's say they've been here for 130,000 years. They're going to use good toolstone, but that's not what you see there. You see this really junky low end stuff. Could it have been used? Yeah, but could it have not been used? Yeah. When we come back,
00:28:38
Speaker
what to do with
00:28:58
Speaker
go over to arcpodnet.com and click on the logo for that show right on the front page. Also, don't forget about our membership program, arcpodnet.com forward slash members. I just was listening to a podcast about podcasting the other day and somebody who's been podcasting forever said they have over a million downloads per episode and only less than 0.01% of their listeners actually subscribed to their show in any sort of way or give them any sort of
00:29:27
Speaker
membership donation. I was like, that's actually accurate. But our numbers are a little bit higher than that because I think people like supporting what we're doing over here, knowing that this is not a business by any means. It is a podcast and it just has operating costs and we like you to help support that. So anyway, arcpodnet.com forward slash members. All right, back to the show and don't forget to subscribe to it if you like it. Hello and welcome back to the pseudo archaeology podcast.
00:29:56
Speaker
Episode 102, the serruti mastodon site. So what to do with this, you guys? This is a tough one. Because when we're looking at more classically pseudo archaeology stuff, it's easy, we can go like, dude, you just throw that out. You don't believe it. It's false. This is a much more nuanced situation, because
00:30:24
Speaker
Again, at the top of this, I said I hate myself for doing this podcast and I still kind of do because I want you guys to know that I don't. I don't hold ill will or disrespect for people, the people involved in this project. I don't hold ill will or disrespect for Richard Cerruti. I know people like him, you know, and they.
00:30:44
Speaker
They only want what's best for the archaeological record. They're out there. They're dedicated people. So I'm not here to like point and laugh, you know, at Richard Cerruti, like I would point at laugh at like Eric Von Dineken. You know, there's a different there's a difference here. And again, the other researchers who worked on that, these are real archaeologists who are trying to split the difference. Now, is there a two percent chance that the Cerruti Mastodon site is real?
00:31:13
Speaker
Sure, I'll give them two percent. Sure. But there's 98 percent that it's not, you know. And so if if I had my druthers, I would just first say, hey, let's stop the madness. Like, let's stop pushing the Saruti Mastodon site as a human involved site.
00:31:40
Speaker
Let's enjoy the mastodon part of it. Mastodons are cool, right? 130,000-year-old mastodon. You don't think a bunch of seven-year-olds wanna see that at the San Diego Natural History Museum? I do. Right, it's awesome. We can talk about the ice age and these different creatures here, but let's just not add the human component to it. It's okay. And they could go gently into that good night. You know, just don't,
00:32:09
Speaker
talk about it in that manner anymore, just kind of angle it more towards the awesome parts that you did find. Now, notice throughout this, I haven't blasted them for their dates or anything, because dating methods have gotten really, really good. So I don't doubt that the mastodon itself is 130,000 years old. It's just I doubt that any humans were there whatsoever, because it really looks like they weren't. So let's just take a group exhale
00:32:41
Speaker
just a little group hug and just be like, Hey man, you called this one wrong. It's okay. We learned as we went through it, you know? Oh yeah. I see. Yeah. These cobbles. Yeah. These hammerstones. Yeah. Well, you know, they can also be naturally formed in this manner. You know, let's just be relaxed about it, right? I'm not here to be like, Oh,
00:33:06
Speaker
Look at them with their surrudy mastodon and their cobbles. Archaeology is a small enough world, man. We got to stick together, you know? But the reason why I took this up in the first place, not only was because it kind of oddly fell into my lap, the guys at the Life in Ruins podcast did it. I also worry, though, that
00:33:36
Speaker
We might be doing a bit of a disservice to the public if we don't call this one out because I really have seen this being used for nefarious purposes. And what I mean is every pseudo-archaeologist out there has picked this up because it's super easy to use this to bash archaeology.
00:33:58
Speaker
And how it's done is, oh, look at those archaeologists over there. They don't believe this 130,000 years ago, and it's one of them. And they don't believe their own people. They can't get anything straight. And you see, these guys are trying to tell the truth with their 130,000 years. I've always said there have been people here forever. I've always said there have been people here for millions of years. And here's our first bit of real evidence that I'm right. You see?
00:34:25
Speaker
That's what's hurting us. So it's it's hurtful to the discipline to keep this in a serious manner. Now, I know the media does not help because they're going to regurgitate this one forever. You know, oh, what about the hundred and thirty thousand years? So it's a it's a bummer. It's a bummer that it can be used to refute solid science. You know,
00:34:49
Speaker
So it allows fringe groups to take more of a hold than they otherwise would have, which none of us want. Unless you're the host of the pseudo archaeology podcast and you need new material. I mean that, you know, things that you make lemonade, you know, make a little lemonade for you.
00:35:15
Speaker
So again, where to go with this? I think you have it there, you know, to treat it with a kind, yet firm, a trust, but verify eye and add it into the history of Southern California in the Pleistocene, but not
00:35:37
Speaker
with people in it, you know, I always root for these early sites, you know, you guys. But and again, I feel for them because it is a difficult world. We really do demand unequivocal proof, you know, because we have to we need to see that for something that wild. Like if it was real, I don't need a human remains. Realize that I don't need human bones.
00:36:04
Speaker
Not at all, but I need an obvious tool made by a person. And that is not hard to see. Like, if you're an archeologist, this is another thing that happens. If you haven't found anything forever, and you're starting to think a little weird, and you're starting to see stuff that isn't really there, when you finally do find something real, you snap out of it instantaneously. Like, oh, yeah, okay, this is what reality looks like. You know, this happens.
00:36:32
Speaker
And it and it and it sets you back on the right path. Oh, good. OK, I found a real stone tool made out of obsidian. It's obviously flaked. And this is a 100 percent artifact. That's what I want to see from a place like the Ceruti Mastodon site. And you guys, I just don't see it. So I wish them well, but.
00:36:55
Speaker
let's be sure to not use the Saruti Mastodon site when we talk about the peopling of the new world. And so with that, I guess all you can really say is the court's outcrop that I recorded in 2004 has never gotten the respect it deserves and they'll see. They'll see when I'm proven right.
00:37:24
Speaker
I'll talk to you guys next time.
00:37:51
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.