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Pleistocene Megafauna and Overkill Hypothesis - Ep 138
3.2k Plays3 years ago
On this episode of A Life in Ruins Podcast, Carlton is off galivanting across Europe and you know what that means; chaos. Connor and David talk about megafauna, the overkill hypothesis and get real weird.
Transcripts For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/138
Literature Recommendations
- Population reconstructions for humans and megafauna suggest mixed causes for North American Pleistocene extinctions by Jack M. Broughton & Elic M. Weitzel (2018) in Nature Communications
- Overkill, glacial history, and the extinction of North America’s Ice Age megafauna by David J. Meltzer (2020) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
- Synchronous extinction of North America's Pleistocene mammals by J. Tyler Faith and Todd A. Surovell (2009) in in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
- Test of Martin’s overkill hypothesis using radiocarbon dates on extinct megafauna Todd A. Surovell, Spencer R. Pelton, Richard Anderson-Sprecher, and Adam D. Myers (2015) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Setup
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Episode 138 of the Light Pretty Woods Podcast. My name is David Ian Howe, and I am your host today. And my co-host, I guess we're both co-hosts, is here today. And that is Connor Cochran-Johnin.
Carlton's Absence and Paleo Sunday Humor
00:00:27
Speaker
And Carlton is not here today because he is flying back from Lisbon, Portugal, and he was in Italia before that. And oof, probably canceled. Anyway, it's okay, I grew up around Italians. Speak Italian, partly. Anyway, Carlton is not here, Connor, so you know what that means. Oh, yeah!
00:00:46
Speaker
It's Paleo Sunday, but it's Saturday recording this. Paleo Monday for you guys. All right, he's not here. He only likes pottery and indigenous stuff.
Prehistoric Animals of the Pleistocene
00:00:56
Speaker
We're here talking about mammoths, mastodons, saber-coothed cats, scimitar cats, giant beavers. What's up? Connor, do you want to bring us in some way?
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So we're specifically going to talk about the Pleistocene in North America, because that's what we're familiar with. That's where the cool stuff is. The rest of the world sucks at that time. And it doesn't matter. It still sucks. Yes. So in general, the Pleistocene, what is it? Like the last 50? The Pleistocene, it's like, I think it's like a million years.
00:01:29
Speaker
Yeah, so it's like the last million years. They're doing a bunch of weird stuff, a lot of climate things, a lot of heating and cooling of the entire world, atmosphere, and it presents itself differently in different environments. 2.5 mil, 211,000 years ago. Okay, yeah, so it's a huge, huge period of time. I think we're specifically more interested and going to focus on like the last little bit, like the last 50,000,
Human Spread and Climate Impact in the Pleistocene
00:01:55
Speaker
800,000. The terminal places seen.
00:01:57
Speaker
Ooh, wow. Sorry, I called it cut you off, gone. No, it's good. What is the terminal Pleistocene? What would you... That's just like the technical term I see for it. The dates, I call terminal Pleistocene like 15,000 years on. Cause like, and we'll get into that. Yeah. It's like the terminal terminal, like right as like the beginning and end of the last glacial maximum, right? Where things start getting wild.
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, we're humans are, you know, all over the place doing some stuff. Crazy. They're in Australia. They're in at least way North North America and they're in Africa, Europe. No humans ever made it to Iceland inhabit it. The Norse were the first to get there. So that is the only place that has not been colonized. Hit that button. Oh, yeah. They did colonize the local foxes or something like that, probably. But, you know, what can you do?
00:02:56
Speaker
New Zealand, Polynesia wasn't populated till like 3000 years ago to like, you know, 500 years ago, really in like most spots. So in Australia, it was like 41, right? That's when you see 50. Yeah. 50. Okay. That's when they, yeah.
Humans in Australia: Cultural vs. Evolutionary
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah. Rowan boats down from Indonesia, Papa Nagini possibly took a land bridge, but you know, you use that word and you're going to get all the hate.
00:03:20
Speaker
But yeah, possibly swimming boats. I think Stefan's a big proponent of that. Swimming boats. I went in boats. You put water in the boat and you swim in it, right? Yeah. It's like a Joe Rogan ice bath kind of situation. And they're like, yeah. Yeah. Trying to get their athletic greens.
00:03:42
Speaker
Anyway, possibly Homo erectus made it to Australia, but we definitely only see modern humans get there about 50,000 years ago. And a common question I get on the internet all the time is, are Australians modern humans? And I'm like, I'm just going to leave that one on on red.
00:03:57
Speaker
I mean, it's not clear, right? Well, if we want to say that humans reached their behavioral modernity 40,000 years ago in Europe, like with all the cave art and stuff like that, the people that made it to Australia 50,000 years ago wouldn't be, but with later populations of modern humans going in there, they would be completely replaced like they were everyone else.
00:04:19
Speaker
But I mean, I think 100,000 years on, we're like modern humans. It's just cultural spread more so than evolutionary spread, if that makes sense. Yeah. So you wouldn't see it in the bones or anything like that. You would see it in the material culture and that stuff more than anything.
Climate Fluctuations and Species Survival
00:04:34
Speaker
Exactly and like Vinnie said like if you find Danny DeVito in Italy his skeleton and then you find Shaquille O'Neal in Africa or let's say like Yao Ming in China you're gonna think those are different species and like we're gonna lump them into different things and or split them into different things but They're all human so kind of doesn't fucking matter
00:04:59
Speaker
I'm on deem that and so in North America specifically like the last hundred thousand years it was just like a series of like getting cold like 120,000 years that's where like the the last interglacial period is where things are warm better your
00:05:16
Speaker
making wine somewhere I don't know there's usually some things like you could make wine in Alaska it's always like the really the joke I know it was just like I feel like I hear that a lot on like news articles like oh the climate will change you can you can like have grapes here or something it's like a marker which doesn't matter but I kind of always understood the Pleistocene as like
00:05:41
Speaker
especially towards the end of it, like a lot of like warming and cooling phases with the younger drives being a spectacularly warm period. But it's kind of like when you have the flu or COVID, you're like hot and then you're cold. So like you just take the blanket on and off. So like species couldn't adapt to that like rapid change in climate.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah. And then this occurs all through the last 500,000 years of the Pleistocene. You're doing this up and down. So you're probably having species die off periodically through all that or surviving if they have the right to set
Unique Prehistoric Animals of North America
00:06:14
Speaker
up for it. Well, you know, there might've been a bipedal primate that used fire that was
00:06:21
Speaker
Pretty good at killing things. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. We'll get to that. So in North America specifically, there's a lot of weird or weird to us animals that are there. And you mentioned a couple of them in the beginning. Do you have a favorite out of all those? Do you have like a megafauna boy?
00:06:43
Speaker
Maybe. I mean, I definitely have a clear favorite, but just to mention like the glipped a dot, like what an interesting little animal. It's like a dinosaur essentially, but like also a beaver. I think, I think it's like a big beaver type where it's a giant. If I'm not mistaken, a giant rodent. Yeah, I think that's right.
00:07:02
Speaker
Let's fact check that, but looks like one, just an armored beaver. I think those ones in Ice Age, you see those on the Ice Age. Yeah, they're like a family, and he's like, we're on the march!
00:07:21
Speaker
Oh, Armadillo. Doo-doo-dee. Cool. So, yeah, close enough. Giant Armadillo. Those are pretty cool. But like, if you think about too, like a megalotherium, like the giant sloths, like, could you imagine seeing mammoths, seeing bison, seeing wolves, seeing lions, seeing reindeer, camels, horses, your whole way, let's say, through the land bridge or, you know, swimming from Russia to Alaska, right? And then just somehow pop back on land.
00:07:51
Speaker
Yeah, you're going to see all those animals, but then you're going to get down further south to like, I believe, you know, the Southwest and the Southeast for sure. And there's this giant thing that's like real slow climbs trees and has giant claws that just shears trees. And it's like, probably like, that's probably the sound it made. And you'd be like, what is this thing? Let's shoot it. And that's what they did.
Human-Megafauna Interactions
00:08:16
Speaker
And we know that because of some special footprints in White Sands, not those special footprints, but the other footprints directed by Tarantino, where he was really in defeat and there's a human and sloth duking it out. Wow. That's wild. Yeah. Just, they're just like languid creatures, like very slow moving, like you would, like a sloth, but just like you just supersized it, right? Yeah. And it's like, just a sloth, I think only exists in what, Central America, South America now.
00:08:46
Speaker
I think so. So they're like just a very specialized creature, but yeah, you're just walking on a continent with all that, that crazy stuff. We can get it more into it, but I would say favorite ice age animal. I mean the dire wolf for sure, but it's kind of a cop out, but yeah. What do you do? Study dogs or something? Yeah. Sabretooth cats are cool, but I would say, yeah, like favorite megafauna is just mammoths. I find them fascinating. They're like,
00:09:12
Speaker
just elephants but hairy. I bet they probably worked the same way. They had the same intelligence or heard structures and stuff but probably a lot different in some ways because it was cold adapted more so than warm. What about you? I'm also a fan of the mammoth just because I think of the associations with humans that we have and I think that's
00:09:32
Speaker
It's always interesting to think about how Clovis people running around stabbing these big boys. If they did it, I think it'd be super interesting. If they did it, we could have a paleo Indian write a book called If I Did It.
Prehistoric Hunting Techniques and Challenges
00:10:02
Speaker
My favorite though is the short face bear. Come on. Oh damn, that's a good one.
00:10:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Just like this. I have to see how tall it is. I believe there's no evidence of people hunting those. Kept a wide berth. I think that's a good call. It was standing on its hind legs. It was eight to 10 feet tall. Walking on all fours. It was three to five feet tall. Six. It was like half a ton. Yeah. Wow. Leonardo DiCaprio should stay away. I got my boy.
00:10:44
Speaker
My favorite quote from that entire movie is, I mean, there's many I'd say, but it's when Tom Hardy's like, protect the belt. I just say that all the time when I have to pick something up.
00:11:00
Speaker
What were you saying? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The short-faced bear too, like that probably was like super aggressive with those long arms that it had, because it had longer arms than other bears, probably for, I'm assuming, predatory reasons? It wouldn't make it faster. No. Maybe climbing. Yeah, it could be climbing. It could be reaching certain things and trees or whatever. And they could, and there's some research out there that they could, that suggests that they could run between 25 to 28
00:11:30
Speaker
So it's staying corrected. I guess modern bears can run pretty fast when they're after something. So you have like a 10 foot tall, half a ton tank running after you. I think wide berth is a solid choice. Yeah. Would help if you had dogs to bark at it.
00:11:50
Speaker
We don't know. Brown bears can get up to 35 miles per hour. So it's just like a big. It's a fast boy. Yeah. Super fast boy. Oh, megafauna cave hyena for sure. Uh, that's not. Okay. Cave hyenas are cool cause they had longer legs. There were probably more coarser than they were scavengers and just like populated all those caves that you would have walked in. It was been like,
00:12:14
Speaker
And you'd be like, uh-oh, not this one. Not this one. Yeah. And they like all the sounds they make and stuff like the, the laughing and the cackling and stuff and that like hissing sound they make, but like twice as big. So like deeper kind of scary and like amplified in a cave. Yeah. Insane. It would be pretty nuts to hear. Yeah. I'm also going to throw out that the American or horse, I think it was cool that we had horses in North America that were not
00:12:44
Speaker
Spanish brought. Shout out to our boys, the horse. Our boys. Keeping people moving, 3,000 BC. That's a good boy. That's a good... Oh, yeah. You're a good boy. Yeah. I thought you were doing the revenant again. But also, yeah, like in France, they're driving them off of cliffs and stuff, eating the shit out of them. Must have tasted pretty good. Or I guess it was they were easy enough to scare off the cliff, I guess, maybe.
00:13:11
Speaker
Is that why they got all their glue too? Who was telling us that? Somebody was. I'm just joking. I was just making a bad horse joke. I guess it was Will. So he mentioned something about the horse glue, but maybe it was something different. Maybe that was in person. Maybe it was. Yeah. Shout out to Will Taylor studies this stuff. Yeah. Will's our boy.
00:13:33
Speaker
Yeah, so Placian horses. Oh, I posted a TikTok yesterday and it was like an amalgamation or a slideshow of the paintings that Tori does for me. And I put little captions to them and it got like 300,000 views like within a day. I was like, damn. But all these people were like, number seven is inaccurate. There were no horses in North America, otherwise great post. And I'm like, dude.
00:13:55
Speaker
And a bunch of people went in and corrected them for me, but I still had to – that was probably the most frequent thing I got. And I was like, no. Horses evolved in North America. They then left along with camels and when the ice – oh, excuse me. When the sea corridor that they swam through froze up.
00:14:14
Speaker
they couldn't make it back across so they got stuck and then llamas being like all the way cold adapted up in the highlands came back down and they're like guys all the camels are gone and the horses so but yeah they came from here and that's why like the blm horse problem is such a thing because like
00:14:34
Speaker
We want our European and Asian and Middle Eastern cattle to graze the lands out here, but like it was actually ruminated by horses and bison for millions of years. And now cows. I didn't even think about that. That's why those populations do so well. Yeah. Cause, and the problem is too, they, uh, shout out Dalen Grindel. I think she told me this, but they, uh,
00:14:59
Speaker
like horses eat the food like the plant that they're the foliage that they're eating at the root and pull it all the way out and that's there before everything gets barren but the cows eat just the grass so like it'll keep the grass pretty green
00:15:13
Speaker
and like fertile so it can go again, but horses pull the whole thing out. So when you have, if it was just horses going out there, like living and existing, and I guess Bison did their own thing, it didn't, I guess it was a balance, right? With Bison and horses doing that. But like now with cows needing all that grass out there to feed the beef industry, horses just get shot at helicopters. That's wild. Yeah, it is pretty wild.
00:15:38
Speaker
I think it's goats do the same thing, right? They rip from the root and completely clear stuff out. What a weird animal, dude. God or Charles Darwin's ghost was just like, let me just stick some horns on a mini little cow thing and give it cross eyes and it's going to chew sideways and go like,
00:16:01
Speaker
He could have done that. And then we're going to allow it to like... Is God a they? On the next episode of Life and Ruins podcast, we figure out if God is a they. And at this point, we're going to take a little break and we'll be right back. Is everyone who prayed to God as a he or she not in heaven because they're canceled? Tune in next week.
00:16:26
Speaker
You know what time it is. You're back. Episode 138. Paleo Mondays. Paleo Mondays. Hopefully it'll solve your case of the Mondays. I don't know.
Humorous Office Anecdote
00:16:36
Speaker
It'll probably just bore you because we're ridiculous. We ended up the last segment talking about goats. And I wanted to tell like a little story. So my office, I got a new job. I'm working with the state of Wyoming. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Congrats. Thanks, man. But they have this obsession with goats.
00:16:54
Speaker
within the office. There's like an office culture obsessed with goats. Like there's, yeah, I have Damien who was on the podcast. My supervisor bought me a goat mug and they also do a goat calendar.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's key. Oh, it's good. It gets weirder. They have a goat calendar every year. And there's a, there's a whole, at the beginning of the month, everyone guests, like no one looks at the calendar, um, and actually cheats or anything. Every beginning of the month, you guess how many goats are in the goats are in the classic goat guests. Yeah. Yeah. How many goats and then, and how many trees? Cause it's all goats and trees is the calendar.
00:17:35
Speaker
So there's like a whole culture around that. Like, so I, I, I won the first time, I guess three goats and one tree ended up being like eight goats and three trees or something like that. It's super weird, but I'm, we're, we're goat people now, Charlie live and die with a goat. You were talking about too, like their who's and stuff. And like, like, if you watch goats, like scale walls and stuff, like in the middle East, like it is crazy. And it's just like that.
00:18:04
Speaker
solid example of natural selection because like our adaptation because they have to hide from all those predators that can come from any direction. So they just like vertically scale walls and to get food too. But yeah, I think it was in planet earth where they have that like scene where that is it the snow leopard or is chasing goats and they're like on vertical shelves. That's what I'm thinking of. Yeah, I don't know. Snow leopard is some cat. Yeah. Yeah. That's it's insane. Like they're
00:18:34
Speaker
but they'll know to scream at you like, they're like these freak animals. But that's, I guess, kind of getting into what I'd like to talk about too, is like you have, especially in North America, this continent and Australia as a solid example, you have all these animals that are perfectly adapted to their stable environment.
Extinction of Australian Megafauna
00:18:50
Speaker
And I just shouldn't say stable, like it does, climate does fluctuate pretty hard over the millennia, but like,
00:18:56
Speaker
relatively good time. And then like about 20 to 10,000 years ago, like that climate starts like going haywire and things just start dying off. So like in Australia too, like there's like marsupial cats, giant predators and stuff, and they are perfectly adapted to those environments as well. Cause Australia is like a wild ecosystem. And then about 40,000 years ago, all those megafauna in Australia,
00:19:22
Speaker
kind of start to disappear. And giant kangaroos and stuff go extinct. But it's interesting because 10,000 years before that, these apes with fire show up and they're like, huh, look at all this meat. I don't know. It's just weird, you know? And like in Siberia, when people show up there too, animals die and like,
00:19:51
Speaker
When people show up in North America, animals die. And when they show in South America, they die. Not only that, when they show up in Madagascar, the animals die. And when they show up in New Zealand, they start clubbing all those birds to death. Was that climate? Did humans come in there with their CO2 emissions from their gas fossil fuel cars and destroy the environment? Probably.
00:20:18
Speaker
Did they bash the animals over the head? More likely. Yeah. Changes everywhere. But like when humans get there, it's a pretty, you know, as Todd put it, like if there's a bunch of murders in a town where this one person's going, it's probably that person just saying.
00:20:36
Speaker
to give some context and to actually do some real science, which we rarely do. I'm the Alex Jones of archaeology. I'll be honest with you. So in North America specifically, 37 mammalian genera, including over 70% of its megafauna, were lost
00:20:55
Speaker
toward the end of the Pleistocene. That's a lot. Yeah. Does it mention the Prudmosti site in the Czech Republic? No. Because there's a site in the Czech Republic called the Prudmosti site, Connor, where there are evidence of possible dogs, but they're like maybe just wolves, but they buried one with a mammoth bone in its mouth.
Early Human-Dog Interactions
00:21:16
Speaker
So they were probably like proto dogs hanging around the camp.
00:21:19
Speaker
And why would they be hanging around the camp, Connor? Because at this one site, which was occupied continuously for like a thousand years, 700 mammoths, actually a thousand mammoths, I believe, according to the paper, were killed there. And I wonder why the dogs were hanging out eating all this mammoth buns. But 700 mammoths? Do you have any such certificate?
00:21:48
Speaker
I mean, if it quacks like a duck, a megafauna duck, mega duck. Yeah. I mean, if you lose 700 mammoths, like your population can't like feasibly recover from that. It's like a mammoth a year. Yeah. Yeah. Like they're slow birthing too. They're not like real rapid species. 16 months, 14 months. Yeah. Yeah. That's a long period of time. Like you don't repopulate quickly.
00:22:17
Speaker
Let me type this in. My search history today is going to be weird. Elephant. Do you want to read it to the crowd? Yeah. 18 to 22 months. African bush elephant, 22 months. So more than a year. Yeah. That's almost two years. Yeah. Of just being hormonal and pregnant. Yeah. But anyway, so I believe in my coding class, we learned like one of the example problems was like,
00:22:45
Speaker
of how to code was this many mammoths existed in Wyoming at this time, possibly. And if it takes 22 months to gestate a mammoth and there's people hunting a mammoth every year, but there's multiple groups of people doing it, how quickly are the mammoths gonna die in Wyoming? It's a pretty fast amount of years. It's quick, but that's not to say
00:23:11
Speaker
that, according to that one study, Clovis points could not have killed Proposidians. But with one throw, not even from Donny Dust or Devin Atlatl, man, Devin Atlatl Pettigrew himself, my throw, my first throw, perfectly penetrated what was said it couldn't in that one paper. So it's just odd to me. Is it almost like people have an agenda where they're like, is it? Hmm.
00:23:40
Speaker
Interesting. When Obama was in office, all of the megafauna died. But when Trump was in office, none did. Coincidence? I'm Tucker Carlson. Does my white bow tie maybe look like a white supremacist? Yes. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, it's just like it's one of those
00:24:10
Speaker
Sorry, I want a whole Tucker Carlson impersonation tangent. What were you going to say?
Overkill Hypothesis
00:24:15
Speaker
There's a paper out by Tyler Faith and Todd Saraville published in 2009 that really says that this event of these extinction events really occurred in a small period of time.
00:24:27
Speaker
So it's like between 12,000 and 10,000 radio carbon years before present is like very Tight window does that close? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which you think I mean it is pretty to be fair There is a lot of drastic climate change occurring on a scale that isn't really really isn't seen. Yeah anywhere else It might have occurred in the place seen previous times, but this is like a pretty wild unstable period so
00:24:56
Speaker
So there is probably a little bit of that that is affecting the population size.
00:25:02
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think that was my paper in our, our arc theory class with Nicole Wagsback, a shout out that like her put it this way, meteor aside, like climate was already destroying these populations, like shifting and going like that, right? Then humans coming in there at that time as another thing in the mix just didn't help. Cause it like those populations were already declining and then humans came in and just
00:25:29
Speaker
You know, got the final, final kill on them because climate does kill things all over. Oh yeah. But so do humans. Yeah. Well, I mean, and especially like cold adopted, like they're surviving and thriving in probably one of the coldest periods in the Pleistocene. And then you go to this like rapid, rapid change. Like you, you probably just die. You overheat, you, um, you lose your food source. There's just, there's a lot of stuff that could be done because of that.
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah. And if you think about it too, like the animals that are, let's say mammoths or horses or something that are used to foraging in whatever environment they were, if that's getting warmer, they got to push further north to exist where they do, just keep that same climate. So smaller animals, let's say like, for example, way more rabbits are coming up. They're eating for their foliage. And like, you're just getting not rabbits, but
00:26:23
Speaker
things that are better adapted to that area will now start pushing into that area. And those bigger ones that don't gestate as fast, like don't breed like rabbits are going to die off. And that's just like kind of basic science, you know? The mutations there aren't present because it's not as quickly mutating of a population. The change doesn't really occur as quickly because it's those potential for mutations aren't isn't there.
00:26:49
Speaker
And yeah, exactly. And not to say humans were killing or not killing dire wolves. I don't know of any examples of it, but.
00:26:58
Speaker
like the dire wolf was very adapted to lowlands and plains and it was taken out bison and like big things like that however it couldn't adapt to changing climates and wolves live kind of everywhere and the wolves that existed on the plains that had to compete with them obviously weren't doing as great as the dire wolves but the wolves that lived up in higher alpine areas and you know what kind of were wolves are reduced to today were totally fine because like
00:27:27
Speaker
they were adapted to that area already and could survive it. So that's a solid example of climate or just the loss of other species causing an extinction. But was that extinction or those extinctions of species caused by a trophic cascade of people coming here too at the same time? I can't argue against it.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really, really, and the more you see and the more we find about that period, I think we're going to continue to see evidence of scavenging, maybe hunting, you know, all those things. I think it is going to continue to come out that these are
00:28:03
Speaker
I mean, if you have access to that and are able to hunt those megafauna, why wouldn't you? I mean, that's, that's, that's, it's just, you know, it makes sense adaptation wise. And I'm still of the idea that like we might not have been hunting all of these mammoths, like physically chasing and hunting them.
00:28:22
Speaker
But they probably got a lot of them are near rivers and like elephants especially baby elephants get stuck a lot in those rivers and can't get pulled out like in the mud. So like we could probably just walk by hear it crying and then pop it and like that's like laprilo is a solid example of like that's totally a possibility because we found the point that had a man with blood on it, but like
00:28:44
Speaker
Was it just, you know, cooperative hunting, like a Jason Bourne, or was it like, I guess, what's his name? Cameron Haynes. Oh my God. It's Joe Rogan. Um, and then, uh, he was like, athletic greens or was it just stuck in the ground and they took it out of his misery and then used multiple years of occupation of skinning its hides and
00:29:11
Speaker
using every bit of it to uh you know they were they didn't kill it it was just dead okay difficult question what what kills a mammoth that's an animal what would you say that like a megafaun animal that could kill a mammoth it had to be do you think it had to be like some sort of pack animal
00:29:31
Speaker
Like, I don't know if a short-faced bear is gonna bring down a mammoth. Maybe a baby, because there are lions that kill baby elephants in Africa all the time. It's also a super sad video, too. Like, I was just like, oh, that thing knows it's dying. Yeah. Like, other animals probably are just like, what's happening? This hurts. But elephants are like, fuck. I don't have my will. I want to see the last season of Game of Thrones. Don't give anything to David.
00:30:02
Speaker
Brutal, brutal stuff. But yeah, either have to have been pack animal or pack hunters like wolves or lions. If anything, they probably hunted only the babies. Like nothing's going after a bull elephant.
00:30:16
Speaker
Did you have an answer? No, I thought that was my question. I don't see bears going after, I mean, do bears, I guess the question is, do bears go after bison? I did see a video of people getting married either in Montana or Alaska, or maybe somewhere in Canada. Pull it up, Jamie. Pull it up, Jamie. Of they're like reading their vows at the altar, then you just hear like, and it was just like a moose getting dragged out of the water.
00:30:45
Speaker
uh being like just eaten alive by a bear and like the whole weddings right there look beautiful but like
00:30:52
Speaker
literally 40 feet away across this lake or maybe 40 meters away, there's just a bear like tearing and like that people are scarred for life. Oh, my God. And like so. And I was thinking the whole time, like, oh, it sucks for the wedding. It's your fault for getting married. But also the the like a bear just took out a moose moose are like arguably scarier than bears to me because they're so powerful. So like if a bear can take out a moose, definitely a baby mammoth.
00:31:22
Speaker
So you muted it by the trunk? Well, if you if you say that the short face bear is taller, that probably size probably works. I think you can do it.
00:31:32
Speaker
Well, this was an interesting segment of this podcast. Sorry, I went off the rails a little bit there, but we will come back in segment three with some science. Maybe. We're back. We're back. I'm going to let Connor lead the discussion here because I went. There's a lot of cuts in that last segment. I went off the rails. Cut that, cut that, cut that, cut that. So yeah, we're going to let Connor talk.
00:31:59
Speaker
I just wanted to mention that the kind of the first proponent of this, so this theory of humans killing off all the megafauna is called the overkill hypothesis. I think it was originally proposed by Paul Martin back in 1973 in science. We just want to mention. That's a journal.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah. Some days. Yeah. Yeah. But just that's, that's kind of this whole discussion is the overkill hypothesis or the climate hypothesis there. And then there's kind of the middle iteration of it, which is both climate and overkill, which I think that's like everyone, but Todd Cerewell falls into the middle. Yeah. And I should add, uh, may me interrupt immediately interrupting the septicon very Hobo 19 is
00:32:48
Speaker
Snooki Goldberg. I need to add that like where we were at Wyoming, there were a few professors who are pretty strong about overkill. So like I have my biases, Connor also does. But like when you think of it, there's only a few schools that actually study this and like most of them kind of agree. So like
00:33:09
Speaker
like it's biases, but also like we've learned about this a lot in school. So, and some people might find saying climate and overkill are combo or like both did it, which is what I'm ever prone to though. But other people that we know might just be like, no, it's only one. So. Yeah. But I mean, that kind of follows a similar debate or I mean, I think a lot of people in that time period, it's a little campy.
00:33:37
Speaker
and the paleo stuff, but yeah. Allegedly. Allegedly. And I mean, the other thing too is the meteor and that gets the buzzword. Hancock talks about it. He's got his new show and like the meteor, grahamcock hashtag is like, I mean, rightfully so. It's a cool theory. Like if an impact came in and destroyed everything, like that's awesome. But it's also like,
00:34:04
Speaker
He's pigeonholing it into one thing. Like it, like one thing caused it and it's an easy thing to blame it on much like the dinosaurs. It's like, Oh, of course it killed everything. But like it only killed everything in North America, according to him. Like the rest of the world, like it's, I guess just not like, doesn't matter. It's the whole world, but
00:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's other I think it's like a larger thing. But yeah, so the last period that where things get wild is the Younger Dryas is what we're
Meteor Impact Hypothesis
00:34:31
Speaker
calling it. And then this is the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, which is that a bunch of meteors went all nuclear and caused this this change that we're seeing this annex extinction. It's heavily debated. I mean, it's there's there's no punches pulled in this debate.
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah and like he specifically says like it's at this time at the end of the younger dry ice or during the younger dry ice but like again things in Australia die way before those meteors were hitting. A lot of things die in Australia. There were some meteors there on the ground with feet so and spears but um
00:35:12
Speaker
I guess boomer rattles, but not to distract, but I guess what I'm saying is if the impact hypothesis is true, cool, right? I'm fine with that. Like I don't think there's enough sufficient evidence for me to say so yet. However, it could be a climate or a combination of the meteor climate and humans. Like why can't that be a thing where a lot of people are just in the camp of, nope, it's just a meteor. Like humans didn't do anything. And I'm like, why would you say that?
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, that that's that's the camp I cannot participate in. And that really it really does overlap with like pseudoscience and pseudo archaeology. It really that's the most I guess those comments. Yeah. Those are the I think that's the the greatest proponent and greatest density of pseudo scientists and pseudo archaeologists are in that camp of boom, sky, climate change. And I don't I just can't the evidence doesn't support that.
00:36:09
Speaker
Like there obviously are meteors, like all the stuff that they are finding is real. And they have like good evidence for it. I mean, all the stuff that the guy, who's the topper guy? All good. Yeah. All good years. He's finding the evidence of those meteors.
00:36:25
Speaker
this is
00:36:43
Speaker
I mean, I'm not to bash Hancock again, but like not, not even bashing him. I'm just saying like he says, Oh look, all of these meteors hit right at this time. And like, you can see it in the soil, but he also admits that like meters been hitting the earth, like through all the soil, like at the other times, it just conveniently fits into that one.
00:36:59
Speaker
Is there any concentration? Yeah, but like they're still hitting it in places like meteor. Did I just go back? Just Joe Biden. Come on, man. The better build back better plan. What was I saying?
00:37:21
Speaker
It's just a convenient- I truly feel for the moon. Yeah, meteors have been hitting our planet for forever. Every single day there might be concentrations, like it's likely killed the dinosaurs. I think where you were going is that- Yes, that's what I was going to say. Like it likely killed the dinosaurs or caused the climate change and all that stuff that's associated with it. So that's a very real thing.
00:37:47
Speaker
micro crystals and huge meteors don't really, we know where that meteor hit. I just don't think they're- The big one in Greenland. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like they're not equivalent to what they're- Oh, the dinosaur womb is in the Yucatan. Sorry.
00:38:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Which one in Greenland? Greenland's the one that Hancock's talking about. Yeah. Okay. But they're not equivalent. I mean, and meteors hit it all the time. It's just, it's not a, it's not a solid argument based in the facts and the science.
00:38:19
Speaker
Yeah. And like he's saying that the major event of that was during the younger drives, which is 11,000 years ago, I think. Right. Is it my right there? Yeah. Yeah. But like cave hyenas, as I was talking about the other day on Instagram, they died out 15,000 years ago in Siberia, coincidentally, when humans and dogs are there. But anyway, they died out long before.
00:38:40
Speaker
the meteors hit. So things were already dying and people don't see it that way, especially because it's projected to them and spewed at them that it was a meteor in the thing. But like the hot topic back in the day was this overkill thing. And this was the same thing where people are like, I don't think so because like, how could humans possibly kill everything? And then people get the idea of like they were hunting every last one. And it's like, no.
00:39:02
Speaker
He killed the bull elephant, the herd's gonna disband, you know? Well, the reality of the past and of what we study is that everything is fucking messy.
00:39:12
Speaker
Like, yeah, this, like, this, the graham cock, like one, one theory equals this and explains all stuff just doesn't work because humans are messy. The climate is messy. The earth is wild. It's on like weird cycles that change through time. Like it's none of this stuff is easily. Yeah, it's great. It's just, it's random chaos. Like there's not, we, we look for simple answers.
00:39:37
Speaker
But I never feel like that is an adequate story that we're telling or an adequate representation of the past because it's complicated. That's the reality of it. There's a lot of context to it that needs to be explained. And that's what leads me to believe it's the right answer is that it's a mix of everything because it's hard to explain. People want one answer that's just the be all end all.
00:40:02
Speaker
If you wanted one answer, I'd say it's humans. But in addition to the other things, because that's the only factor that's changed. Meteor has been hitting the planet for years. Climate's been changing for years.
00:40:15
Speaker
I'm not going to do it again. But humans appear. But I know I'm sounding biased here, but I guess what I'm trying to get to is you can't sit down and explain to people who aren't interested in archaeology or Pleistocene zoology the entire history of like, oh, well, there's climate, there's humans, there's this, there's the meteor. Meteor just makes sense. And I get that. So that's what leads me to believe the right answer is it's all of it because it's hard to explain.
00:40:42
Speaker
Yeah, well, as with you, and I think we ended last time we were talking about this as like a science communicator, you have a minute or two to explain all this on a TikTok video. How do you do that? What's the... Because you want to give context and you want to give people
00:41:02
Speaker
different sides like it's the graham cock is definitely um exploiting that with his one theory he solves everything specifically today i like got one that was saying like you're
00:41:17
Speaker
spewing misinformation, talk about the land bridge theory.
Conveying Complex Science in Brief Formats
00:41:20
Speaker
And I didn't mention the land bridge. I just showed a map of people and dogs walking from Siberia to the Americas, which like, yes, that's specifically showing Virginia to the Americas, but it's also just showing a visual example of people coming from one place to another, whether they were in boats or flying. Doesn't really matter. And I only have a minute to explain it. So like, I can't possibly get everything. Yeah. Fast forward your voice like 10 times.
00:41:51
Speaker
I'm a huge proponent of humans and Neanderthals being the same species. We're all just mutant Homo erectus, but Homo erecti. However, people are most familiar with Neanderthal. In my post today, I said humans meeting Neanderthals and trading. But I'm not going to say Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens and Neanderthal
00:42:09
Speaker
meeting and trading wolf belts. It's just too much to tie up on a little tiny thing. You can't reference, this is my opinion, people think differently in that little period. Right. When it's opposed to the humans and dogs around the world. It's just not relevant.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah. And people are like, they're different species or they're like, and it just creates engagement, which is nice. Yeah. Also don't piss off people that are really into Egypt because, Oh, do you want some engagement? Anyway, I'm gonna let you speak. No, I just think it's, um,
00:42:39
Speaker
And I think that's part of this podcast and part of what we are doing as part of this is to give this context to understand because this is what we learned. We learned grad school that things aren't easy and simple and there's people involved and people get pissy and have opinions. And it's just we hope to present this information in a way that is
00:43:04
Speaker
It's going to always be biased, but less biased and more nuanced than you would get just kind of like a science paper or a science article or something like that. We want to deconstruct those things because it's important.
00:43:23
Speaker
And it's not as easy as saying like we scientifically know your heart is in this part of your chest, you know, like it's not, it doesn't work like that. We're like pretty sure your nervous system is this electrical impulse thing and like electrical conduit through your body.
00:43:37
Speaker
That's easy.
Limitations of Archaeological Data
00:43:38
Speaker
This stuff is hard and very subjective. And the fun thing is like, we only have what? 3% of the world dug up. So like, there's, I mean, not even that. So there's just a million answers and everything's dead and you don't have a time machine to see it. So.
00:43:54
Speaker
What's your estimate of like what is actually preserved over time? So like we have 3% of the land dug up and of that 3% maybe say like 5% of the archaeological remains that are created are preserved or the bones. Like all that stuff wastes away and gets destroyed. Like how much do you think
00:44:20
Speaker
the archaeology represents the totalness of human culture. Not even a percent. Yeah. Like historical archaeology? Sure. Like we know we're almost there. There's like, you can see the human made like stucco structures and like stone structures and things like, yeah, you can see it. But like,
00:44:41
Speaker
understanding the languages and the cultures and the clothing and the painting and the, you know, stories that existed in coastal South Carolina 6,000 years ago. No idea. All we see is the rocks. So does that mean they had Jetsons cars flying around space? Like Graham Hancock suggests, or he just says, I realized this the other day too. He doesn't, he really doesn't say that stuff. He says there was probably an advanced civilization, but like advanced to him means like,
00:45:10
Speaker
kind of like the Iroquois or something like that. Like people that live in a complex civilization or complex society use stone tools and stuff like that, right? But like people interpret that to mean like they had flying cars and things. Like I've noticed like the Atlantean thing. So anyway, I think he gets taken out of context a lot, even by us, but sorry, I distracted from your question. No, I mean, I just think we just have, we have such a limited sample. We probably have a 0.0001%
00:45:35
Speaker
Like we don't have all the stone tools, we don't have all the rocks, we don't even have the stuff that preserves. And like you're saying, the entirety of human culture is oral tradition or there's so many facets of it that we only really get a 0.001% guess of that. So we're doing all right. Fuck all y'all who say we aren't real scientists, we're doing all right, okay? We don't have enough data, we're just working for it, okay?
00:46:02
Speaker
Yup. And science like changes too. Like that's good science. Like it, like, doesn't need to change. I know the three of us plus Shane and Jesse are pretty resistant to change when it comes to people in the Americas, but you know, what can you do? Uh, but I mean, like I explained this on a podcast the other day too. Like we have dug up quite a bit of North America and like all over North America, we're pretty,
00:46:27
Speaker
You know, it's pretty ubiquitous that there's stone tools and there's hunting camps. There's a deer bones that they were eating these kinds of scrapers. So they're making food or making hides, making tools around the country. So like, say there's, I mean, there's more than 17,000 sites in the country. Let's say there's like.
00:46:46
Speaker
17 million archeological sites in the country. There are three that are weird in the news like that. And like, that doesn't mean we don't let, you know, it's just like, we have a pretty solid statistically significant example of what history was. Yeah. The sample size of those doesn't, the outlier, they're outliers. That's what they are. That's the reality is that like statistically they're outliers within our, our larger understanding of the archeological record. So they should be treated like that. Like it's an errant piece of data.
00:47:15
Speaker
Who were the papers we were talking about? Like, you want to list those for the people? Yeah, so reading stuff I'll start with, and these will all be linked in the show notes. There's an article I'd brought in in Whitesill that's population reconstructions for human megafauna.
00:47:32
Speaker
in nature, and that's in 2018. So that's one of the ones we were talking about. David Meltzer dropped one in 2020 about overkill glacial history, extinction of North America's Ice Age fauna.
00:47:49
Speaker
The one we were talking about about the short period of time that a lot of the megafauna disappear is Faith and Servile 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, so that's good. What else did we? And then there's also Servile, Pelton, Sprecher, and Myers 2015, which is a test of Martin's overkill hypothesis using radiocarbon dates on extinct megafauna. So those will all be in the show notes.
00:48:18
Speaker
please go check them out. A lot of these are open access and we'll have links to the open access versions. Yeah. And we appreciate your guys' emails, especially after last episode. We do read them. So thank you for the constructive criticisms and the compliments. We really appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. And Carlton will be back or he's already back today. I think he just flew into JFK. So we should be back to our normal programming and next week.
00:48:45
Speaker
Be sure to follow our Instagram page. I think you guys still use the Twitter. I refuse to use Twitter. We got a Facebook page and yeah, be sure to rate and read the podcast. It really helped us out. We got swag. If you're against megafauna, get the swag, man. I think Carlton was offering something about stickers the other day. I'm not, I'm not supposed to make those promises anywhere.
00:49:06
Speaker
Yeah, I thought that was you and you were just like throwing one at the bus and I was like cackling. On his Instagram story? Yeah, I was on the Life in Ruins podcast Instagram story. So I thought you were just like, if you see Carlton and hug him and you know, give him a wet willy, we'll send you a sticker. Carlton's desire to be loved. We all have it. We love you Carlton. We do too.
00:49:31
Speaker
And I'll post a post. Maybe I'll do a joint one between our page and mine about Overkill. And if you guys have any opinions or something like that, throw it on our Instagram. Like, let us know in the comments. This should be out Monday, the 8th, 9th, the 8th, Monday, the 9th. Never forget January 9th. Something happened that day. Oh, I'm thinking of January 6th. Never mind. And with that, we are out.
00:50:09
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer.
00:50:24
Speaker
Connor, we forgot to do our joke. Yeah, I didn't stop the recording, so we're good. Wow, that was my lead-in for you to do it. It wasn't very good. I know, it was terrible. Why can't Michael Jackson play chess? Topical. I don't know. Because he's dead.
00:50:52
Speaker
I wonder what killed him. Was it climate or was it his doctor messing with his meds? Was it human? I don't know. The kid was a mess. And I'm not know we're out.
00:51:21
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.