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Just the Boyz: Clovis Organized Crime Syndicate (allegedly) - Ep 53
546 Plays5 years ago
The hosts discuss four hypotheses for the arrival of humans into the New World: Beringian Land Bridge, Coastal Highway, Solutrean, and Oceanic. They discuss the early Paleoindian site complexes such as Folsom and Clovis in which David (allegedly) reveals the existence of the Clovis Organized Crime Syndicate.
A large part of the episode centers around "pre-Clovis" sites and whether they would belong to the Coastal Highway or Solutrean hypotheses. According to Carlton, the Solutreans crossed the Atlantic to get that sweet, sweet Old Bay seasoning. #OldBayAllDay
We wrap up the show with a discussion about which hypotheses each host believes explains the archaeological record best.
Recommended Literature:
- David J. Meltzer 2010: First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America
- Dennis. J. Stanford, Bruce A. Bradley & Michael Collins 2013: Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America's Clovis Culture
- Tom. D Dillehay 1997: Monte Verde: a Late Pleistocene settlement in Chile, Vol.2, The Archaeological Context and Interpretation
- Jon M. Erlandson et al. 2007: The Kelp Highway Hypothesis: Marine Ecology, the Coastal Migration Theory, and the Peopling of the Americas
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
- Website: www.alifeinruins.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 53
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
The Pre-Clovis and Clovis Debate
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to episode 53 of A Life and Ruins podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living our life in ruins. I'm your host, Carlton Gover, and I am joined by my co-hosts, David Ian Howe and Connor John.
Homo Sapiens: A Neanderthal Perspective
00:00:25
Speaker
Today, in just the boys episode, we are going to be tackling
00:00:29
Speaker
the pre-Clovis and Clovis debate or explanations for the initial occupation of the Americas by Homo sapiens sapiens. So we have a list of... Emphasis on Homo sapiens sapiens, by the way. Yes.
00:00:48
Speaker
Emphasis, emphasis, nothing, nothing else. No sorority, no settlers of sorority here. Are you guys finally agreeing on it's homo sapiens sapiens? Cause you guys were, there was beef.
00:01:00
Speaker
It's always been homo sapiens sapiens, but the debate was, is it homo sapiens neanderthalensis or homo neanderthalensis?
University of Wyoming Influences
00:01:06
Speaker
And we all know if you are a homo sapiens sapiens with a fully functioning evolved brain, you know it is homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Only someone with neanderthal DNA would call it homo neanderthalensis and not homo sapiens. 2.2% you. Point proven. Point proven.
00:01:33
Speaker
So really we're going to talk about Pretty Clovis and Clovis here in the North American, I guess South American too, archaeological record.
Global Projectile Points and Human Antiquity
00:01:40
Speaker
The three of us all got our masters at University of Wyoming, a rather prolific paleo-Indian department, hunter-gatherer department, I would say. Wouldn't you guys agree?
00:01:52
Speaker
very much so, very, very heavy in that, you know, we have some of the big players in the game, you know, Todd Suraville, Bob Kelly, who were, you know, interested in this time period. And there's also like a ton of archaeology sites, Paleo-Indian sites in Wyoming that are actually studied at the University of Wyoming. So it's, we were exposed to this stuff very early on in our graduate career and it's kind of,
00:02:17
Speaker
I don't know if it's shaped your guys's view on this stuff, but it's certainly brought to light on a bunch of issues. Yeah. And don't forget the late, great George Frison, as well as, you know, Dr. Dr. Kornfeld and Dr. Larson who do the Hell Gap, which has, that was like a Cody complex, right? Do they have a Clovis component? I know I work there, but I know it goes deep. I just don't know how deep. I don't think it, there's a Clovis point from Hell Gap, right? Uh, it's paleoindian. I don't know. Definitely.
00:02:47
Speaker
Hang on guys, it's, um, hello. Oh, what's up national geographic? Oh, it's homo sapiens and intercolonces. I thought thank you national geographic for calling me and telling me this in the middle of the podcast.
George McJunkin and Folsom Points
00:03:02
Speaker
I love you, too. Bye. I was about to get so mad. Okay. Okay. Anyways, thank you. Thank you for that, David. Thank National Geographic. Yeah, I'm sure that was them.
00:03:19
Speaker
This whole topic about man's antiquity in the United States stems from the Enlightenment period, right? And particularly in the 1800s, there were
00:03:37
Speaker
some projectile points found in, it was like a French river, right? With some Pleistocene animals. A French river? Yeah. So the whole conversation about the antiquity of man globally. Oh, oh, oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like, I forget what river it was in France, but this whole debate got kicked off by them finding a bunch of projectile points in extinct megafauna from Europe.
00:04:01
Speaker
And for a long time, the question of how long man has been in the Americas was pondered because they hadn't found anything like that.
Clovis Points: Evolution and Significance
00:04:10
Speaker
But that all changed, didn't it, boys? Yeah, it did. One can say. So the important site in this is the Folsom site in Folsom, New Mexico, which I hear is not the greatest town, but it's worth visiting.
00:04:26
Speaker
at some point, if you're down there. And it was also discovered. I'm not completely clear. It was also completely clear exactly how it went. But George McJunkins, who was a he was a freed slave, right, was eventually one of the first founders of what we know as like the first Folsom point in embedded in a Pleistocene megafauna.
00:04:49
Speaker
So it's, it's, it's kind of a cool story and it really, you know, he, he did some important stuff for the field, but I think that's, that's, that's all I got on it. Any, any other details that I'm missing? Was there someone before him that found projectile points with a mammoth that confirmed the
Formative Years of Archeology
00:05:06
Speaker
antiquity first? And then he was the first one to say that they, they lived with. No, cause that's right. George McJohn was the one that confirmed that people were here during the ice age. Yeah. Maybe I didn't think it was a French thing. Yeah. Okay.
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah, so McJunkin was a freedman, cowboy, working property outside of Folsom, New Mexico, and out of an eroding arroyo, he noticed that there were some bones that looked a little way too big to be cow bones. We checked them out, turned out to be an extinct species of Pleistocene bison, and he contacted archaeologists, I think from Denver,
00:05:41
Speaker
the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, I believe, because that Folsom point is at the history Colorado, the state historic museum. And they came down and there's that really famous photograph of a Folsom point in C2 in between these two bison ribs. And that was like, okay, there's the evidence that man's been here. And then later on outside of Clovis, New Mexico, that's where they found the Clovis point and which was older, older than Folsom.
00:06:09
Speaker
And just, uh, just to give it a time period. So this is like, this is in 1908 when they, when he first discovers this. So early, early 20th century, I can't do math. Yeah. Like before World War I. Yeah. So this is like super early on in archeology. And we as a discipline in America, I don't even think we were a discipline in reality.
00:06:34
Speaker
Very much antiquarian still. Yeah. So not a professional field quite bad, right?
Debating the Clovis-First Theory
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah. We had like history and I believe we had like archeology, but it was like you went to Greece and Rome and did all that crap, you know, and you were at Harvard and you were like,
00:06:53
Speaker
And like, that's what archeology was until then. Then like, you know, literally found by a cowboy. And then the rest of the time it was like, let's go pitch a tent in the middle of the woods and just dig some holes in the ground and find some rocks. And then that's kind of what we're doing now. Change the game. Yeah. 100%. Totally changed the game. And with that Blackwater draw in New Mexico is somewhere in there as well. It is a place. It is. I don't know.
00:07:21
Speaker
It's like, it's basically the Texas border. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, maybe that's the, that's the actual site it was at. And it's, it's outside of Folsom. New Mexico and the locality is called. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff there. Yeah. Yeah. We might, if we get hate mail, so be it. But, um, and Clovis is about like 13,000 years ago. That's how, that's the timeframe for Clovis like 13, five, 13, two, something like that. Yeah.
00:07:50
Speaker
Yeah. That's constantly being like changed and modified challenge and challenge article that was like Clovis was only around for 250 years. Like, I don't know about that. Yeah. Uh, so I got 1300 to 11, sorry, 13,000 to 11,000 BP and Clovis was found at blackwater. That's where Clovis was found. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. That makes sense.
00:08:15
Speaker
Right. We know what we're talking about. Exactly. We have degrees. And from this, there stems this theory, this idea that the Clovis people were the first people in America's and they come into America in these
00:08:33
Speaker
this small little time period where there's an ice-free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets and Cordilleran and Alaska, that kind of area. And this is kind of the accepted theory, starting from there on out.
Ice-Free Corridor Theory
00:08:53
Speaker
Yeah. And the big question is like, okay, if there's people here in the ice age, how'd they get here? And that was kind of like the big debate for a long time. And especially those early sites, Clovis Folsom, those are all in like New Mexico, right? We're not finding these early sites early on in the beginning of the 20th century.
00:09:12
Speaker
on the west coast, on the east coast, and as Connor was talking about, this ice-free corridor, because around, from the Beringian shoreline, which is the landmass that connected eastern Siberia with Alaska, that was rather substantial. It extended, I believe, from the current coast of Siberia out upwards of 400 miles,
00:09:35
Speaker
completely connected, but the problem was for a long time that Pleistocene ice sheet before the, and if I'm on, if you're watching the video, I'm using my hands, before the Laurentide and Cordillerian separated, I mean, you're talking about Game of Thrones ice wall height of glaciers. Like they're upwards of a mile high. You're not climbing them. And if you do, there's nothing up there. I should have thrown you from the top of the wall, boy. Exactly.
00:10:05
Speaker
Do you guys know who first thought about the land bridge theory? Actually, I don't. Jose de Acosta. He was a Franciscan monk or a friar, I think, in New Spain or Spanish missionary. And yeah, he was like looking at a map and everyone was like, you know, how do these people get here? Like where are all these Mayans coming from? Where are all these Aztecs coming from? And he looked at the map and he was like, oh, see Alaska and Russia, they're pretty close. You know, I mean, it wasn't Alaska at the time, but like,
00:10:34
Speaker
Maybe they just walked or floated across that little gap there, and that's kind of where it came from. Interesting. Yeah, and it's possible to cross it. I think there was a recent paper, we should have that person on, that showed there were Italian glass beads in Inuit communities in Alaska prior to European colonization in the South because they had traveled along the Silk Road and got to Inuit communities in Eastern Russia, and they were trading them with their relatives across the strait.
00:11:03
Speaker
Really? Yeah, dude, it's nuts. It's pretty sick. So it's possible. We got the evidence. That's what we got. So, yeah, this ice-free corridor, the ice-free corridor didn't open up. And here's the distinction we got to make. When does it open up and when is it livable?
Critiquing Clovis-First: Alternative Routes
00:11:19
Speaker
Because even after there's no ice there, there's nothing else. It probably looks like a lot like Hoth, right? There's nothing in there except for some giant grizzly bears.
00:11:32
Speaker
hiding around. And as it's melting, there's just water and it's just like this muddy, disgusting mess. Like how do you actually traverse in between two glaciers that are actively melting? So it looks on the sides, it's like tontons and in the sun.
00:11:48
Speaker
I guess in the winter, it's like Hoth and there's Tauntauns and Wampas and all that stuff. And then, you know, in the summer when things start to melt, it's just disgusting. I don't know if you've ever been. And it's still cold. It's still just cold and miserable. Well, the idea, though, is right that they were following like herd animals and like following bison and horses and mammoth and all that.
00:12:13
Speaker
into the corridor. So if you're an efficient big game hunter like you were in Siberia coming across here, if you got a mammoth, you got a nice dry, you know, hut to build.
00:12:23
Speaker
And you know, if you make skin tents and things like that and you can make your way down the corridor and you got plenty of food to eat. But like the question like you guys are asking is like, you know, how livable is that? Cause you still gotta find water. You still gotta find some other stuff to subside on the besides just meat though. They could have just been eating meat. I don't know. It's a lot to consider, but I mean, it just makes sense though, right? You're following herd animals. This corridor opens up. They're looking for the food. They're going to go South.
00:12:50
Speaker
You just follow them. I don't know why people are like, it's just stupid idea. It's like, no, it's pretty logical model now. Well, and then kind of like future, like, uh, research has shown that that the opening occurred right before Clovis people really show up in America. So it's not like.
00:13:11
Speaker
They're just like, oh, of course it's empty in this point. And then people should have known that there's like actual evidence suggesting that the ice-free corridor started to open, melt right before the Clovis folks really show up in America. So it's hard to argue against that as coincidence in reality. Yeah. And there's been like Paul analysis, because even if it's open, right, you know, as Dave was talking about, that corridor is several thousand miles long.
00:13:41
Speaker
And in order to follow the big game, they need to eat something, which is a lot of grass. So there's like pollen research that's been done, pollen residue, pollen samples. So even though it was open, it took a while for the grasses to resettle to allow the big game animals to eat. But that still happens prior to Clovis populations showing up in the interior of the US, right? Because we're still talking about sites
00:14:06
Speaker
on the southwest Great Plains, really nothing on the west coast, and we'll get into this in the later segment. The sites that we do have on the east coast, we're going to talk about those, such as Meadowcraft, Cactus Hill, and Topper. This idea of Clovis people being related to the ice-free corridor, I think largely checks out. You guys would agree.
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah.
Salutrian Hypothesis and Its Implications
00:14:31
Speaker
It's just the only reason it doesn't check out is because people are looking for every little cherry picked argument to say that it doesn't check out. And like, I'll see people on Reddit or like social media be like, is it the bearing land theory outdated and like incorrect? And it's like, it's not that it's incorrect.
00:14:46
Speaker
It's just that there are also other pathways people could come that wasn't just the corridor. They could have come down in boats too. That doesn't make the other one incorrect, which just tells me that you don't want it to be correct. And like drives me up the wall. Well, I think, and, but I think initially when it's this Clovis first theory is coming out there.
00:15:07
Speaker
The proponents of like, it's only Clovis first and there's nothing else. And then there's this like, and this is informal and it's what people call it. There's just like Clovis mafia that goes around and kind of promotes it and doesn't really accept anything besides
00:15:23
Speaker
you know, this kind of theory. But I don't know if that's still today or I think there's this more of an acceptance that there could be possible multiple migrations into America's the Americas in reality. We don't prefer Clovis Mafia or I should say they don't prefer Clovis organized crime family. So yeah, don't it's not mafia. All right.
00:15:52
Speaker
Excellent. And so these other hypotheses real quick, and then you had David jump on in, like these other, so we have ice-free corridor and the other ones that we're going to talk about in this episode, you have a Salutrian maritime route or coastal highway, also kelp highway. And there's also this like oceanic one, Polynesian colonization. And we'll get into those like later in this episode. David.
00:16:15
Speaker
I was going to say, if you're curious to know what we're talking about and you want to get a picture of it, the best way to describe this is, honestly, the movie Ice Age, the beginning of it as the credits roll, all those big herd animals are leaving presumably Europe going into the Americas or vice versa, and they're all migrating somewhere because the weather's changing. And then the people in the
00:16:37
Speaker
The humans in the story are like Pleistocene hunters, which I think are presumed to be indigenous Americans or Siberian. It's just, you know, the way they look and the tools that they use. But I always thought that was like awesome. And like, it kind of goes off that theory, but those animals that are walking in are definitely North American animals walking through the corridor. And I thought that was a really cool touch in the movie.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah. And as, and as animals are walking in, there's animals walking out like horses are peace. Yeah. They're from, they're from North America, but they go the opposite way and to, and to Europe. So there's, there's, you know, camels, there's an exchange. There's a highway camels antelope. Right. Cause like pronghorn in the U S are related to gazelles in Africa. Pronghorn's closest living relative is the giraffe actually.
00:17:25
Speaker
Well, I was wrong. And on that note, we will be back. Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, that's why they got those little things on their head. Like giraffes had those little like antenna looking things. It's just a giant long neck pronghorn. I'll never see that. Well, on that note, we'll be right back with our conversation about Clovis and pre Clovis here in segment two of episode 53.
00:17:51
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 53 of Life in Ruins podcast. We are here chatting about pre-Clovis, Clovis, Clovis organized syndicates, as you will see. So we, we kind of introduced the allegedly, allegedly nothing proven. We talked about these two other theories, at least mentioned them in the previous segment, the, the Salutrian hypothesis.
00:18:16
Speaker
the maritime hypothesis and then also the Polynesian kind of hypothesis. So after Clovis is discovered and there's not a lot of pre-Clovis stuff that really is proven after those discoveries and then you kind of get these series of sites that are discovered that have dates
00:18:36
Speaker
that might push the boundaries of Clovis stuff. And on the Salutrian side, kind of this East Coast idea you have, you know, Meadowcroft.
00:18:48
Speaker
Topper, Galt, Cactus Hill. And the theory behind all these like kind of Paleo-Indian, this, the Salutrian hypothesis is that these points, projectile points in France really match or are similarly napped to what is discovered at Meadowcroft, Topper and things like that.
00:19:10
Speaker
Yeah, but those points, so that's interesting. I wouldn't say match for sure. Let's get that out of here. Yeah, let's put an asterisk on that one. Yeah. Like, you know, the Clovis sites are known as Clovis sites because you find Clovis points and a lot of times butchered animals flakes and you find people start finding what they call pre Clovis, but there's no diagnostic points. There's no really butchered animals. They just look like shatter, which we, we talk about in the Sruity episode and then
00:19:40
Speaker
You start getting sites like Meadowcroft, Cactus Hill, and Topper. And I think those are like 60s, 70s. Those are being excavated. And this ties into what Connor talked about Salutrian, which is really promoted by Dennis Stanford, who got his master's at the University of Wyoming. Bruce Bradley, I don't know where he got his degrees from. Somewhere else that was like legit, like a prestigious place. Yeah. He's a cool guy. I like him a lot.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, they're nice people.
Meadowcroft and Topper Site Challenges
00:20:09
Speaker
Well, and you know, rest in peace, Dennis Stanford, and they work for the Smithsonian. And they have this idea that slootering points and Clovis are really similar. But if you actually look at a Clovis point, which is fluted and has those little like, like ear lobes at the bottom,
00:20:25
Speaker
Ears? Ears, yeah. They got ears on them, and they're fluted. But you look at a salutian point, not only are they from a completely different part of Europe, not really northern France, there's a separation in time. Salutian points, what, 20,000 years, 30,000 years? You don't get Clovis until 12,000 years ago in the Americas. They're not fluted. They don't have those ears. They don't look really similar, and the salutian points appear to be really decorative. So there really isn't a match.
00:20:54
Speaker
Salutrian, if you want a good example of that, the movie Alpha, that's salutrian culture. They make salutrian points there. And there's also this thing where the salutrian technology that they find in Europe disappears.
00:21:10
Speaker
around like 17,000 years ago. It really just kind of goes away. So it's a little circumstantial and how they're approaching it. It's kind of like what Cumberland is to Clovis. It's like a regionally distinct area. What do you call it?
00:21:31
Speaker
Salutrian is just a form of Gravedian. It's like the bigger Gravedian cultural complex of Europe at that time. And then Salutrian are like the people that distinctly lived in France and made those points that way. But like, yes, it just kind of fades out of, you know, popularity or whatever. The theory being that they like got up and left and they kind of skirted along the ice sheets.
00:21:58
Speaker
and hunted some mammals. Allegedly. So they hunted sea mammals and kind of skirted along this allegedly.
00:22:13
Speaker
allegedly. They floated on the ice sheet across from France to Delaware by hunting seals and laying on the ice sheet at night, making a camp out of their boats turned upside down with oil fires on the inside. Love the idea. The execution is much to be desired, guys. Like, let me see you do it. And then we'll talk about droves of people leaving France coming to Delaware to use some Old Bay on their mammoths.
00:22:44
Speaker
All day, all day, baby. I love all day. Come at me, guys. It's an absurd idea, Bruce. I love the idea of comparing the technologies, right? You got those barbed points you find in Japan that also correlate with the ones that are in the Channel Islands in California, which might support the Kailh Pyway hypothesis. But you know, that one makes a little more sense.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah, there's some coast. There's land. This one is like, they're purely surviving on ice and it's like, all right, okay. But like you get sites like Meadowcroft and I'm familiar with Meadowcroft. It was excavated by...
00:23:24
Speaker
At the time, he was working at the University of Pittsburgh, and the guy that got me into archaeology, Dr. David Clark, who's a professor in anthropology at Catholic, he was his grad student. Apparently, the story is, like, out of audio, just busted in the lab and was like, got a site, let's go dig it, and that's how David Clark got involved. And he brought us out to Meadowcroft, and there's a couple things about Meadowcroft, fellas. It's never been published.
00:23:50
Speaker
So this was done like in the seventies out of audios. He's just never published on it. He's sitting on that material. It's in coal country. It's in, you know, it's in Pennsylvania. So like they're dating charcoal. That's interesting. But the thing with Meadowcroft is if you look at it, the way that the rock has collapsed, it does kind of, it'd be really hard to get,
00:24:17
Speaker
charcoal, you know, it's, it looks like Tetris almost to get that level, but he's never published on every time they redate the material, it gets younger and younger. So we really can't talk much about Metacrop. And once again, there's no, nothing diagnosable, the diagnostic. So there aren't points. There's just some interesting looking shatter, which could be naturally formed, right? But Metacrop, I think now stands, they claim 19,000 years ago,
00:24:45
Speaker
So 1700 or 17,000 BCE. They have a really gorgeous interpretive center though. Like you go to their website. The site is really cool. Yeah. They have an historic village. They have atlatl days. Like it's like they have a woodland village up there. It's like really cool to visit, to be honest. And they also have some like frontier day stuff,
Underwater Archeology: Paige Ladson Site
00:25:04
Speaker
like 1770s. Like it's a really cool, like the rock shelter itself is cool. Like it's a cool looking place. Yeah.
00:25:09
Speaker
I've never been. I've just seen a virtual tour online and they do have a really good virtual tour. If you just Google Metacrop rock shelter, that's a cool looking thing. But it gets brought into that whole salutary argument. Yeah. And that was, I think that was one of the first ones to really, to be discovered and kind of grouped in there from what I kind of generally remember. But then there's other sites like David's pretty familiar with topper.
00:25:34
Speaker
I am. You've been there. I've been there. Dug a few holes there. Trying some swamp water. Some swamp water, yeah. Some swamp water. Had some great times there. My formative years of archaeology, hanging out, maybe falling low with archaeology.
00:25:50
Speaker
Is there 50,000-year-old flakes down there in the Pleistocene Terrace? Who's to say? Is there an overwhelming amount of Clovis artifacts on the Clovis level at 13,000 to 11,000 years old, scattering the entire site in its entirety? I can say yes, there are. Have I personally stuck an auger down the middle of the bottom of the Clovis Fuller down another meter and pulled something out and not found anything in it? I can say.
00:26:19
Speaker
There's not an in it, but in this one spot where there's this giant pit excavation, it's a beautiful looking excavation with the big like built, you know, like ceiling on it and everything kind of like hell gap has. They think that there are 50,000 year old bend breaks down in there and a dissertation came out and proved that it's probably just.
00:26:38
Speaker
you know, ice can shatter things just as easily in half like that. There's 50,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago. And to put that into perspective, people only got to Australia 40,000 years ago. So they would have had to have booked it from all the way to like bypass that, gone all the way up through Siberia or wherever, you know, down the coast or whatever, all the way to the Georgia, South Carolina border. I don't think that's the thing. If you're on a mission, man, come on.
00:27:07
Speaker
If you're on a mission, but you would have had to have been walking through Iran and been like, you know what? Really, really want to book it to Allendale, South Carolina. Let's just go. And made it the whole way. Made boats, a strategic plan, rolled down the map, blitzkrieged it to South Carolina. Really, guys?
00:27:30
Speaker
I don't think so. Allegedly. It's about the old bay. They, they created. They want those blue crabs, man. They were there for a blue crab bake. I love Al. He's a great man. Al Goodyear, but he, he's the one who runs topper. Um, he's retired now. Top is kind of retired itself, but I don't think that it is a 50,000 year old site. I think 13 to 11. And I think 11 is the date we usually get.
00:28:00
Speaker
11 or 10, I can't recall, but I've personally picked out a Clovis point there myself. It was broken in half and it was fluted. And I can tell that person who did that was like, and threw it, but yeah, the rest of it there, I don't think so. It was Dean. And guys, if you're listening, uh, go back to that one episode where we talked about Dean, it's just Ralph Wiggum and the archeological record. But also I don't mean to say that like, I'm claiming authority that like,
00:28:28
Speaker
I know what's best for this site. Like, I've literally, like I'm saying, put an auger through, I think two units I did, or I did one myself, saw another one go through all the way down to the bottom, past the closed level, and every 10 inches down or however a bucket of an auger is, is like, what, 10, 12 inches? I think it's 10 inches. 10 centimeters. There you go. Nothing. Nothing. I remember being like, void, and we just like rode on the metlet.
00:28:53
Speaker
Nothing down there. The rest of it could maybe from the river because it is on the river that, you know, rivers are known to flood and move stuff around. But anyway, that's my soapbox on that. Let's move on to Cactus Hill. I don't know nothing about it. I don't know much about it either. I think Crabo worked there. He worked at Paisley Caves. I know that, but I think he did do something at Cactus Hill, though, or knows about it. Maybe. All right, let's give Cactus Hill. Let's go to Paige Ladson.
00:29:21
Speaker
Well, there but like kind of connected with that is that like you guys know about the like the Chesapeake Mastodon. That's the one that was the salutrean thing, right? Yeah, that's the one where they dredged a mastodon out of the Chesapeake looking for blue crabs, I imagine. And pulled out like a mastodon skull and there was like an undiagnostic knife found with it.
00:29:43
Speaker
And then they dated the mastons like 22,000 years. And there's like this geologist hit up Stanford and like, oh, look, yes, it matches with Meadowcroft, Cactus Hill, and Topper. You know, this proves it. And it's like, no fam. I don't like, I don't know much about like underwater archeology, but like, or that whole process. But it's at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. And I don't know how close that knife was found in situ. When you're sucking it in a dredge machine, like you're literally pulling out of a vacuum and then shooting it into like a bin.
00:30:13
Speaker
Like pumping stuff from the ground through a tube into a bin to collect it and sift the water out. There's no context. I wonder what the carbon nitrogen ratios are, right? Like the isotope ratios, because if it's been under underwater for so long, there has to be some funny business going on with the isotopes. So I'd be like really curious to see if they've redated it today, if it would pass under modern like chronometric standards. That's above my pay grade. I don't know. Yeah. And if anyone does that, let us know.
00:30:44
Speaker
And for all those who also very much enjoy Old Bay, please send us a review. Sponsored by Old Bay. I think, and kind of going on with this underwater archeology thing, Paige Ladson is an underwater archeology site, which has dates to 14, 14, five. It's in, it's in Florida.
00:31:08
Speaker
right off of Florida, Florida. It's in a, yeah, it's in a sinkhole and some river, the Big Bend region wherever that is. And I think I would love to have Jesse Halligan on the show to, to talk about this. I know her and Shane are really good friends and I, you know, because this is, this is being studied right now. And this might be something that kind of bears fruit eventually. I mean, they seems like their dates are solid and how it fits into everything.
00:31:38
Speaker
I don't think we can write off page lads in right now because it's still actively being studied and we'll see what happens.
Monte Verde: A Pre-Clovis Confirmation
00:31:45
Speaker
But I think the bigger problem with this salutrian hypothesis is really what people are using it to say.
00:31:55
Speaker
What ultimately coming out of this, the solution hypothesis is this idea that Europeans were the first people to colonize America. And there are some racial connotations and issues with current Native Americans and things like that, that people have really taken to another, almost into like a white supremacy kind of thing, that Europeans are the only people, you know,
00:32:23
Speaker
We're here in America first. So all native. Yeah. Yeah. Allegedly. And here's the thing, though. People 20,000 years ago in Europe, they weren't what were what at all. So theory theory ousted next.
00:32:43
Speaker
I wish it was that simple, though. I wish it was that simple, though. But it's just it's taken. So it's like this great idea, like, OK, maybe there's this connection between Europe and America and maybe people came here early. But it's just taken this whole racial connotation thing that.
00:33:00
Speaker
I don't know, Carlton, how do you, I assume it would, that wasn't his intent, right? Yeah. Like, you know, that's not what like Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley aren't saying here. Like, you know, what power like we got here from France. Like that's not, they're, they're just trying to look at human migrations. They're not talking about race or skin color. And like, as David said, there's people living in, is this Mesolithic Europe? Uh, paleolithic still.
00:33:24
Speaker
paleolithic 20,000 years ago. They're not white. We haven't had the, you know, Indo thing happen yet, that expansion. So go ahead, let them champ. Europeans got to America first, but show them what the picture, get a Tory Mazza to draw it up. Show them what people look like. Then they'll be like, what? Oh,
00:33:46
Speaker
Natives got here first. We should have, we should have a Tory drop a piece of them entering the Chesapeake, be these like brown Europeans with salutary points and old Bay seasoning and their other hand, like at the shore, that's praying to a blue, blue crab. But like, you know, the dangerous thing about it is if you go, I don't suggest you go to this site, take it for me, the official white pride worldwide website,
00:34:12
Speaker
says, you'll be on a watch list. It says move over first nations. You have it wrong. The very latest DNA research has now proven conclusively that DNA and it's probably found in Europe, got to the great lakes at least 15,000 years ago, possibly earlier, several thousand years before Indians made across the bank, straight whites were the first Americans after all. And they talk about salutary. And however, none of that DNA research that they talk about is valid and the solution of course is highly problematic. And even if it was,
00:34:42
Speaker
They're not white. Control F for Jews on that side. Let me see what they got to say about me. And on that note, we're going to end the segment. We'll catch you in segment three, where we're talking episode 53, pre Clovis, Clovis, and we'll catch you in the next segment.
00:34:59
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 53 of A Life from His Podcast. This is segment three. We are talking about Clovis, pre-Clovis, everything surrounding that. You've been hearing some top tier journalism, if you don't mind me saying myself. Yeah. So let's get onto the rest. Absolutely. So Salutrine outright, you guys can take this to the bank and cash dish and we'll 100% support you. Salutrine is not
00:35:27
Speaker
not legit. There's no DNA evidence that supports it. The material evidence doesn't support it. The sites themselves are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse kind of stuff. They're fun to read, but that's about it. You can email me if you disagree, and I don't care.
00:35:44
Speaker
Yep. However, continuing on this like Clovis is established. We know Clovis is established. We have the material remains and there were still people looking for like pre Clovis. They have like the Galt site in Deborah Friedkin out in Texas. Once again, no diagnostic materials. It's just a bunch of wonky looking flakes. Is it legit? Probably not. Now is a organization that excavated them, they're like,
00:36:10
Speaker
First Americans organization, I think they are. Their whole goal is to find the earliest stuff. Center for the Study of the First Americans in Texas. Yeah. Are they biased? Maybe. I don't know. I don't know those people. If you do, reach out. We'd love to have you on the show.
00:36:24
Speaker
I know some A&M people, they're good people. Yeah, I bet. I like all archaeologists. I just don't agree with professionally. Others, I don't agree with ethically or morally, but that's a different day. When I went out to A&M to visit for my PhD, they were like, you're from Wyoming? And I was like, yeah. They were like, I thought there was this beef between Wyoming and A&M.
00:36:48
Speaker
I didn't know there was beef and they're like, oh, there's definitely beef. You're the first Wyoming person to be here. And I was like, looked around and I was like, I don't give a shit. And they're like, oh, okay. This is relevant. The first winter I was back from Wyoming, back in Northern Virginia, I was on Tinder as one does. When you're outside of Laramie and you actually have a Tinder pool above five. And I matched with one of Ian Hodder's graduate students.
00:37:17
Speaker
Yeah. And we were bestie back and forth, like, yeah, we're both on Yale. Just like, yeah, my advisor's Ian Hunter. And I was like, oh, my advisor's Bob Kelly. It's like Robert Kelly from the University of Wyoming. I was like, yeah. She's like, oh. She reported you? Yeah, I'm busy. And then like, just cut the match. I texted Craig. I was like, you want to get this, man? Yeah. And so I don't know about that. But
00:37:41
Speaker
I think one of the more interesting pre-clovis sites, it's a solid stratigraphic site that has dates,
00:38:01
Speaker
I'm not sure what the initial, the highest level dates are, but it goes from back to apparently 33,000 years before present. I think it's in Chile. It's in the bottom of South America.
00:38:21
Speaker
So it's kind of this interesting sight in that it appears to be very old and is also very far from where we know humans originally came from. And this isn't allegedly, you know, from Asia.
00:38:37
Speaker
down into the Americas. We can talk about this more. The 33,000-year stuff isn't diagnostic, but the diagnostic stuff, the wooden tent pegs, the mastodon hide, the stone tools, which are diagnostic, the El Yobo projectile points, those all come from around 14,800-year-old.
00:38:59
Speaker
occupation. Like that's the one that people stick with, not the 33,000 year one. And that's well dated. Are they actually tent stakes though? Think about it though. Cause you have post, whatever they are, you have all of these old pre Clovis and Clovis sites where there's no organics.
00:39:19
Speaker
No organics ever found. And it's just like chipstone points and like some shatter.
The Kelp Highway Hypothesis
00:39:25
Speaker
And then this place is like, we got seaweed and we have tent stakes. And Old Bay. And like, I don't know about that, man. I think the site, it's cool, right? And they got that little medicine bundle, but like, is it a medicine bundle?
00:39:42
Speaker
Who's to say? I didn't know there was a medicine bottle, but no, the Mastodon hide though, the process Mastodon hide, I'll take 10 pegs because even Clovis sites have.
00:39:53
Speaker
you know, radio carbon dated post holes. I think it's legit. I mean, that whole thing goes with that, that kelp highway, coastal migration. And the reason why we don't find sites even in between like the sea, the sea levels rose 120 meters at the end of the Pleistocene. So all the early sites, even on the East West coast, you know, they're underwater now, but this Monteverde site is, I don't think it's a cave, but it's in higher elevation.
00:40:22
Speaker
It's inland, it's not on the coast, but it's closer to the coast than, you know, toppers. It's on a bay, you know. But this was like the first possibly confirmed pre-clovis, yeah. This one had diagnostics. Yeah, there's stone tools in that seaweed, stuff like that, and cordage as well. So it's not just seaweed and, you know, post holes or whatever.
00:40:46
Speaker
You know, so there's a, there's a little bit more containers with red tops. Dude, the old baked tin can is like, I'm just saying, I can't believe this is like, this is the old, you know, that old day. I know.
00:41:04
Speaker
I think it's a cool idea. And I think, yes, the Kelp Highway hypothesis, which we should talk about here, it does lead me to believe that that is a possibility, but I just know there's a lot of criticism to it that's like valid. And there's also criticism that's like against that criticism that like is also valid. So I don't personally know. It's just such a one off site all the way down there. That's like,
00:41:28
Speaker
has these organics, but like, do they? But the El Yobo Point at Monteverde looks awfully similar to the Bone projectile point found in the Madison Mastodon Kill in, what is it, Washington State. And that's 13,800 years ago, also along the West Coast.
00:41:46
Speaker
and it's all the same projectile point typology is being found all across early sites that are all dating to around 14,000 and above 13,500 on the West Coast. J-O-B-O. And they're all found on the West Coast, and they're all diagnostic. Now that people are looking there, that pool of people that are pre-Clovis is getting much larger. I think the last debates that were in Albuquerque,
00:42:13
Speaker
I think I feel pretty sure Bob Kelly was present. I didn't see it, but I know the pool of Clovis first is getting smaller, much smaller. Yeah.
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah. But then, and not at Wyoming though. No, no, no, no. Well, and the El Yobo points are kind of like generally like grouped into this like Western STEM, right? Which is supposed to be like this early non Clovis, uh, projectile point technology that occurs on the coast at Harper's Ferry. I think.
00:42:44
Speaker
I could be wrong, but some of the Channel Islands stuff I think has similar sort of projectile points. And I think the dating is obviously the problem, but there is a stone tool technology that's a little bit different that occurs in kind of this Oregon, Washington, California area, Nevada maybe too. Alaska as well. That looks a little different. David's rolling his eyes, but yeah.
00:43:10
Speaker
I think I like, I lean towards Monteverde being real, but I am not fully convinced. If that makes sense. Like I'm open to it. Okay. I just like, I'd have to hold the tent stakes in my hand. I'd be like, okay, these are 10 steak. You know, I don't, I don't know. It just seems it is a cool site. Would that be an intense experience?
00:43:38
Speaker
intense yeah
00:43:45
Speaker
We got to talk about the Kelp Highway. So the Kelp Highway hypothesis by John Arlinson, 2007, I believe is the year, I could be wrong there, 2005, 2007. And this is the idea that instead of coming through the corridor, maybe they did come to the corridor as well later, that people were coming down through boats along the coast. And if you do the paleoacology, there is an extended Kelp forest that literally reaches from Northern Japan
00:44:14
Speaker
all the way up through the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, going up through there to the Aleutian Islands, which is that big, like, you know, island chain south of Alaska, and then all the way down the Pacific towards mid Mexico, you have a kelp forest. So this would have been the similar environment for people to eat the same foods, the same animals are going to live there, just, you know, varying in climates. So mostly seals,
00:44:36
Speaker
fish, kelp, got all your nutrients. Uh, and there's also similar points that it's not confirmed, but they look very similar in Japan and they look very similar in channel islands in California. Now, do they look similar because they were the same people? Probably not, but they have a similar function, probably something to do with hunting seals and you want something that's barbed to keep a hold of the seal when you're pulling it, you know?
00:45:01
Speaker
so i think that's a valid we can't say it's not valid you know because like people clearly were probably coming in boats but yeah that's how people got to australia right like yeah we're not talking about like polynesian the huge rafts
00:45:16
Speaker
boat, like the vessels they had. You can easily have a small boat, and you can follow the coast. Unlike Salutran, where you're following ice, the coast still exists. Those ice sheets are not covering the West Coast completely. They allow for a little pocket of land that you can travel. But the big thing is, if you look at
00:45:39
Speaker
the distribution of the glaciers in North America and the mountain ranges, there's like a separation between where the people on the coast could go. And like, if you're, as David said, on the kelp highway, you have, it's highly diverse in food materials. Like you can have a very caloric dense diet, like even up to historic times, Tlingit, Inuit people on the west coast, like they could fish all day and be fine. They didn't have to farm.
00:46:09
Speaker
Like you don't, why would you leave that? And it also explains how you get from, you know, like Manus to Monteverde really quickly. Cause you could just follow the coast and just camp every night on the shore, you know? So it makes sense from like logistically, right? Like in terms of you, this is possible. Yeah.
00:46:33
Speaker
I think as we go further in archaeology as we research more on the coast, I think we're going to find more sites that are going to be underwater maybe that are going to date to this period and possibly confirm this stuff.
00:46:50
Speaker
Yeah, like you said, it's it's the most legit. And we had I think David was there at the University of Wyoming. We had John Erlinson come talk and kind of give his outline for it. And I, you know, and even Todd Servile, who's pretty much, you know, the Clovis organized crime syndicate. I don't think he's the top boss, but he's, you know, allegedly, allegedly. Sorry. Allegedly. He's a Don. He's a Don. No, he's just he's allegedly a Don.
00:47:20
Speaker
No, I think, yeah, he invited. I'm just looking milk lawyer, paper boy, whatever they call him. I'm the place management. Yeah. No, I think, but I think even Todd, you know, I think it's an, it's a, it's a super compelling argument. I don't think Todd was convinced ultimately, but it's, it's, it's a really solid argument and very possible. Yeah. And I don't think there has to be like one migration, right? You're probably talking about multiples. I don't think there's pre Clovis.
00:47:50
Speaker
East of the Rockies, like fundamentally, I think Clovis people came through the ice-free corridor. And I think there is a component that's along the coast that just happens to arrive there quicker. And they're probably coming from two different people. You're talking about, if you look at the map of Siberia, people going through the ice-free corridor are coming from Northern Siberia where, and the people coming from the maritime route, they're along the coast of China, like as David said, Japan and the East China Sea. So there are probably two groups of people
00:48:19
Speaker
coming in different ways. You have the fishermen and then you have, um, primarily terrestrial hunters. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's what it is. And like my, my big piece that I always tell people when they ask me on ethno and stuff is like, do you think Clovis first? And I'm like, well,
00:48:38
Speaker
I am Clovis first in the sense that I am in an organized crime, I'm just kidding, but I'm Clovis first in the sense that Clovis is the first widespread ubiquitous culture across the continent, no doubt. They use the same tools, they make their tools the same way, they live the same way, migrate the same way and hunt food the same way. However, that does not mean that there weren't a few people coming into boats
00:49:03
Speaker
couple hundred to maybe a thousand, maybe thousands of years before. But that doesn't mean, and I won't say this again, that wasn't in droves. That was like a few small people, like what they were saying were coming across the ice corridor or the ice sheets from France. No, I think it's way more likely that small people were coming
00:49:23
Speaker
Not little people, like little statute people, like little amounts of people were coming through. We're coming down the coast. And even the Clovis people, right? We're not talking about thousands, like even population estimates for Clovis are in the hundreds and lower thousands. You know, we're not talking about hundreds of thousand people coming to the people that colonized North and South America. You're talking about like a few thousand. So even if it was like a couple dozen on the West Coast or maybe a couple hundred,
00:49:53
Speaker
There's reasons why when there is huge court cases on human remains like Kennewick Manor, the ancient one, they show relationships to the Ainu and the West Coast. If you look at West Coast peoples, they have higher genetic affinity to East Asian populations, and some of the other ones have more Siberian. Would you look at that?
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:50:12
Speaker
Exactly, right?
00:50:13
Speaker
Holy Joe, look at that. That's crazy. Throughout time and space across the globe, people are people. They begat with other people and you have mixed ancestry regardless, but there's no European or there's definitely no Indo-European coming in. All the genetics points to Siberian or East Asian.
00:50:34
Speaker
So, Salutrien's out, and I think we didn't even touch about it, but a tiny little smidgen. Maybe a couple people got lost on their way out of Australia, ended up in South America. Not like a colonization effect, but maybe got lost. There's a little bit. I'd highly recommend you guys looking that out because it's really minute. It's a new paper that came out too, yeah, but it's always been pushed around and
00:50:57
Speaker
They got to Easter Island. They also could have gotten a little further to, you know, the coast. And I think there is some evidence of like chicken bones being somewhere where I think that's been disproven, uh, in South America. I can't remember. It's going to be a small, it's going to be a small amount fam for me. Yeah. They're not like.
00:51:15
Speaker
There's not our matas coming across the Kelp Highway or from Polynesia. It's just like, I just don't think humans were organized in that way. Or we're doing that stuff. Go with the genetic flow. And the genetic flow points to East Asian, Northern Siberian peoples. And would you look at that? Don't indigenous Americans and Siberian peoples look pretty similar.
00:51:40
Speaker
Whoa. Especially Inuit people. I mean, they're the closest to those Asian populations. Like you said, they're trading with each other. They're trading like. Trading lots of things. Yeah, but.
00:51:53
Speaker
And if you look at the oral traditions, right? Something that I find fascinating, like Pawnee's, we don't, and Rickra's and Wichita's, we don't have a coastal migration route. We have essentially an ice-free corridor situation, talking about mountains of ice and this land of dark. Whereas other tribes do talk about a coastal. They followed the coast.
00:52:14
Speaker
So as the tribes, they have oral traditions about these things and that, you know, I think, I think, yeah, I think it's a good place, good place to end it. That, you know, that's, that's where we're at. You know, coasts, it's definitely West coast. East coast is out categorically. Yeah. No East coast. There is no organized crime syndicate to be heard of. You don't know anything about it. It's the first one. But if you're curious, please contact Robert L Kelly at the university of Wyoming.
00:52:45
Speaker
Allegedly, I played the fifth. We are in debutage waste management. The first rule of the Clovis Mafia is that you don't talk about the Clovis Mafia. Don't talk about it. You just don't talk about it.
00:53:05
Speaker
Yeah, you know, we're really excited. We've got some pretty good feedback about these Just the Boys topics. We plan on talking with more topics like this, covering different archaeological components where it's just us and our goofiness. Guys, a lot of you have been reaching out to me on Ethno, actually, telling me that you enjoy the podcast and stuff. Awesome. I love that. If you do listen to it and you haven't reached out to me, do let me know. But also, if you guys could...
00:53:28
Speaker
follow and like the podcast Instagram and also hit us up on there. That really helps us out. Then we know how many people are, you know, listening to us and like what they like. And it just really helps. So don't, don't be shy. Like hit me up. Yeah. Hit us up on the Instagram, email us. Yeah. And if you have ideas for future segments or guests, please email us. Like we have a running list of people that we should interview like, uh, yeah. And, and right.
00:53:53
Speaker
rate the podcast and provide us with feedback on whichever podcasting platform you're using to listen to our show. So on that note, we are out. 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.
00:54:22
Speaker
And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So gents, why did the invisible man turn down a job offer? I don't know, Connor. He couldn't see himself doing it. God damn it. I'm out. Yep. Thank you.
00:54:56
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, in the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. 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.