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Why this Ice Age Bone Needle is so Important. - Ep 09
676 Plays16 days ago
In this episode of Ethnocynology, David highlights a recent paper published about a bone needle he helped excavate in the summer of 2022.
While David wasn’t an author on the paper, he was there when it was excavated, recorded the moment, and recently conducted interviews with the two leading authors of the paper.
David discusses how he read a comment on his post about the needle that made him stop to think about how important such a small item could be to people on the ice age plains.
David discusses how to read an academic paper, while conducting interviews with the researchers into the podcast.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ethnocynology/09
Links:
- Early Paleoindian use of canids, felids, and hares for bone needle production at the La Prele site, Wyoming, USA
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 9
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:14
Speaker
This is episode 9 of Ethnocynology. I'm your host, David Ian Howe, and today we're going to talk about some really cool science stuff.
Discovery of the Oldest Bone Needle
00:00:22
Speaker
So a couple of years ago, in the summer of 2022, I was doing excavations at the Laprelle Mammis site in Wyoming. I won't go into specifics where it is, but we found digging there what at the time was the oldest bone needle found in the contiguous United States. Hey Siri, text Spencer Pelton, is the bone needle at Laprelle still the oldest? Uh, and the bone needle might sound, okay, like it's not like pottery, it's not like a mummy, it's not, you know, if you're thinking of archaeology, why is a bone needle, you know, that important? Uh, a bone needle!
00:00:53
Speaker
is in fact one of the most important things you can find at a site especially for a Paleolithic or Paleo-Indian or just any kind of Stone Age site especially in a higher latitude like that in a cold place like Wyoming and I had posted a video of us finding the bone needle on Instagram with one of those like viral sounds of like finding something cool but the listeners were just you know someone pulled a bone needle out of the ground holding it with their hand and everyone's kind of gathering around looking at it uh in like awe and amazement because it's so small but so cool and i posted that to instagram and a friend of mine who i met through instagram that's followed me for years named camille commented something that really stuck with me to this day and according to this comment it was 130 weeks ago but she says
00:01:35
Speaker
I just find it amazing how something so small was so integral to everyday life and survival. Now Camille often posts things that are, you know, great comments and just great commentary on stuff and starts discussions. ah But this one stuck with me for the simple reason of what she's pointing out,
Why Bone Needles Matter
00:01:53
Speaker
right? that And yeah, it's not a mummy, it's not pottery, it's not a Roman mosaic, and even for Paleolithic stuff, it's not a mammoth tusk, and it's certainly not like a a perfectly preserved Clovis point or something fascinating to look at. but You know, in in that sense, in the weaponry sense, but a tool like that. i Remember, weapons are tools, and our ah the the way humans survive is making tools. And the way to survive in the Ice Age, especially in Wyoming, where it is
00:02:19
Speaker
being cold I've been to negative eighteen before there once you get past zero it's all funny because it just and it goes into the negatives it's all the same to me because you can't be outside for too long your breath freezes to your mustache or your beard if you're done of a beard I you know maybe your lips freeze more But, you know, i my mouth will freeze just for seconds of being out in the and the cold when your breath comes out. And back then, it was even colder because it was the ice age and these people had to survive this environment. And Wyoming is so windy. It's insanely windy. I had a Jeep Wrangler and it's such a boxy car and it would get blown around on the highway like when I was driving. So imagine mammoth hunting in the ice age out there on the plains. You'd need to have very warm structures. You would need to have very warm clothing. And again, as Camille pointed out, something so small is so integral to life back then. And I would have to agree. And actually a paper recently came out on that bone needle itself because it's actually a fascinating tool that we found.
00:03:20
Speaker
Text from Spencer Pelton. Bree Durring might have an older one. Not sure how old that component is. Okay, either way, it's old. One of the oldest. Anyway, the people that I worked with at that site, a good friend of mine, Spencer Pelton, the state archaeologist, McKenna Latinski, a PhD student at Wyoming, and several other authors who were my professors and people I've worked with, just wrote a paper in plus one called... And then what was the title of the paper?
Insights from the Bone Needle Paper
00:03:48
Speaker
We get it right the title of paper is like For the listeners they had to look it up ah That's why we're laughing And this is called early paleoinden use of canids felids and hairs for bone needle production at the lapel mammocyte Wyoming, USA So in this video, I'm going to talk about how to read a scientific paper, talk about the bone needle, talk about bone needle production, and then also interview two of the researchers who I did in-person interviews with at the University of Wyoming who wrote the paper, i'll show you some excavation footage, and then also just kind of explain again why this is such a significant thing. And it's not like the biggest
00:04:29
Speaker
Groundbreaking fine, you know, but and you'll all point out why this is important as we go, you know Like and it will start to make sense So whatever you're here listening for if you're interested in archaeology interested in dogs or whatever dogs are mentioned in this study and Also, it is an important study So we're gonna dive in and for those of you who have watched me for years talk about this stuff and talk about dogs have archaeology talk about Clovis This is something that I am like Deep in. Like, I love this. This is the coolest part of history to me, and we know so little about it, but also so much at the same time. So, stick with me, this'll be cool. Before we go any further, I'm going to get the boring part out of the way, because I have to talk about this first. But the first thing you do, when you see an academic paper, sometimes they're dense, sometimes they're seven pages, sometimes they're like 70. It just depends on, you know, what article or what journal it's in. This one is, luckily, 14 pages and several of those being references. The first thing you should do when you read an academic paper is read the abstract. Then you can read the conclusion. I often then read the methods of materials and I look at the results. um There's several methods of which, especially when you're in school and you're handed a million papers to read a week, ah you need to get good at reading them fast and skimming them. If you're a teacher and you're upset with me saying that, you know, you did it too, so you fucking you though. ah But here's the deal.
00:05:40
Speaker
You want to read the abstract, you want to read the conclusion, and then you want to read. You can read the introduction too, but you want to see the figures and the results that are in it. So you can get a good picture of what it is. Then you can, you're really intrigued, read the whole article. That's for people that are just, you know, enthusiasts, not actually archaeologists. If you're reading this for school, definitely read the whole paper. But we're going to dive right into the abstract and I'm going to read this. I got to put my glasses on for this because I'm getting old. Okay. Abstract.
Material Analysis of Bone Needles
00:06:04
Speaker
We report the first identifications of species and element used to produce paleolithic bone needles. Archaeologists have used the tailored fur fringed garments of high altitude.
00:06:13
Speaker
Re-report the first identifications of species and element used to produce Paleolithic bone needles. Archaeologists have used tailored fur-fringed garments of high-latitude foragers as modern analogues for the clothes of Paleolithic foragers. Arguing that the appearance of bone needles and fur-bearer remains in archaeological sites circa 40,000 years before the present,
00:06:31
Speaker
his indirect evidence for the advent of tailored garments at this time. I'll translate this all at the end. These garments partially enabled modern human dispersal to northern latitudes and eventually enabled colonization of the Americas circa 14,500 years before the present. Despite the importance of bone needles into explaining global modern human dispersal, archaeologists have never identified the materials used to produce them, thus limiting the understanding of this important cultural innovation. We use zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry.
00:06:58
Speaker
zooms, and micro CT scanning to establish that bone needles at the circa 12,900 years before the present laprel mammocyte, Wyoming, were produced from the bones of canids, felids, and hairs. We propose that these bones were used by early paleoindian foragers at laprel because they were scaled correctly for bone needle production and readily available within the campsite, having remained affixed to pelts sewn into complex garments.
00:07:21
Speaker
Combined with a review of comparable evidence from other North American Paleoindian sites, our results suggest that North American early Paleoindians had direct access to fur-bearing predators, likely from trapping, and represent some of the most detailed evidence yet discovered for Paleoindian garments.
00:07:36
Speaker
So to translate that abstract into English, stone and bone largely preserves. Everything else is gone. It rots away. It's gone. It's eaten. It's soaked. It's disintegrated. It's gone. Clothing specifically. So we don't know exactly what their clothing looked like. I'm sure it was awesome.
00:07:52
Speaker
But if you can kind of picture something similar to like an Inuit parka, that's probably what they are wearing, or some kind of frock, ah something similar, we'll get into that later. I'll have Dr. Pelton get into the specifics of that later. And what the end of the abstract is saying, and like the point of the paper here, which I'll summarize in the beginning, but we can go into depth, is that like who we'd normally think bison and and mammoth bone is what made the needles, but actually, since that's what they were hunting and processing at the camp,
00:08:16
Speaker
But actually, according to this evidence, since they were using smaller predators like coyotes and foxes to make the tools, which, and we know the modern day, foxes give great furs and pellets and stuff like that too, so they're also doing this too. We don't have a lot of fox pelts that have reserved from this pirate period, I don't think any, so it's kind of cool. To put it extremely simply, this study is about a bone needle found at the Clovis site. They analyzed what the bone needle was made of.
00:08:40
Speaker
And it not only changed the opinion of, oh, it was probably a mammoth or bison that they were using, but it also opened up a a wider diet breath, but it also opens up the window to a lot more other animals were being hunted at this time and used for their furs, apparently. And why that's interesting, which, again, we'll get into this, ah you can't really tell with really small bones, when they're really small fragments and their needles and things like that. And fox bones and stuff like that don't preserve too well, you know, they're crushed and stuff. And when you have fragments of bones, you can't really tell the difference without you know, comparing those fragments to other fox bone fragments. It's just hard. But now there's a new method of testing these things with like pure science, which is called zoo archaeology by mass spectrometry, and we will get into that. That's the abstract. The next part of the paper would be the introduction, and then you have background research and methods and
Exploring the Laprelle Mammoth Site
00:09:27
Speaker
materials.
00:09:27
Speaker
And then later on, you'll have ah your results, and then you'll have your discussion and conclusion. This one's a lot shorter of a paper, which makes it easier to use as a ah teaching aid. But for you listening to the podcast, not reading the paper yourself right now, what we're going to do is talk about the background research, how they set this up, and then how they tested that needle to find out what it was. And then we're going to go into the discussion and conclusion, ah interviewing the different researchers on like what their thoughts and like what what discussion this paper brought up. And it's pretty fascinating. so Part 2. We'll be right back. The next part of the paper is the introduction. The introduction in this paper essentially gives the background information on the LaPrel site. Now, I made a video on the Warren Mammoth site, which was a... I think it's episode 3, and that was just a mammoth that was found in Wyoming ass-up in a stream. It just was dead. It had nothing to do with people. We did the excavation to see if it was hunted by people. Nothing.
00:10:22
Speaker
But the other site that I've worked on, which I haven't made a full video on because there's like three videos I could make with this because it's a multi-year excavation, is the Laprell Mammoth site, the one we're talking about. And I can throw up so much footage. I can give you a background information on this too, but I'm just going to let Dr. Pelton talk about it because he is the state archaeologist and has worked on the site for years. so I'm Spencer Pelton, the Wyoming State Archaeologist, member of the Office of the Wyoming State Archaeologist, which is part of state parks and cultural resources here in Wyoming.
00:10:52
Speaker
Can you give me a little quick background of Laprelle? I've talked about it enough on the channel, but just so people are familiar. Yup. Laprelle is, as of right now, the oldest archaeological site in Wyoming occupied by early Paleo-Indians. We have diagnostic artifacts from both the Clovis and Folsom archaeological cultures. Initially, it was a Clovis mammoth kill, a juvenile mammoth associated with a small assemblage of artifacts.
00:11:22
Speaker
So when we started excavating the site in 2014, we didn't know that it was a mammoth kill. We knew it was after 2014. And then since then, the site's just kind of gradually expanded and expanded and expanded. And so now the site is very much an early paleoindian campsite with a mammoth kill in it.
00:11:42
Speaker
And around that mammoth kill, there's a bunch of really dense concentrations of artifacts that we argue represent the floors of houses that were occupied almost 13,000 years ago. Probably where people camped for say like two weeks to a month or something like that. A nice little clean snapshot in time of life in Wyoming almost 13,000 years ago during the early paleo-indian period.
00:12:08
Speaker
And I don't have a huge large scale production and animation team that can animate what this site looked like. I would love to do that one day. That's actually like what I'm working towards is to be able to do that something in my life to be able to do that. Anyway, I'm going to have Spencer kind of paint more of a picture of what the site looks
Ancient Clothing Needs and Thermoregulation
00:12:23
Speaker
like. And I'll use some illustrations here too. And for people unfamiliar, would this campsite or around the mammoth kind of look like your cliche or quintessential you know, paleolithic camp. That's what it looks like to me. You know, every one of these little clusters has kind of a different character to it. Some of them are just scatters of flakes around probably a hearth. Another one of them has a really dense scatter of red ochre on the floor of the house. It looks like maybe people are processing hide or doing something with red ochre.
00:12:53
Speaker
A couple of the other areas are just really dense concentrations of flaking debris and scrapers and stone tools, very much like heavily occupied houses where people were conducting a lot of activities. But yeah, it would have been kind of a bustling paleolithic campsite with basically every activity you'd expect to find in those campsites occurring, flood-napping and high processing and yeah building weaponry and repairing clothes, for certain.
00:13:22
Speaker
Among the many things I love about Spencer, being one of my you know best friends, he is an insanely intelligent dude. What he did for his dissertation was several things, one of which included going to Mongolia, living with reindeer herders to understand how people keep warm and regulate space as nomadic people in the winter versus summer. It's really fascinating stuff. Anyway, I'm going to let him talk.
00:13:43
Speaker
My dissertation was on thermal regulation and it was really because I felt like it was a huge missing piece of this human behavioral, ecological puzzle that archaeologists talk about a lot. Archaeologists talked a lot about food, the decisions people make to to obtain food, which animals do they kill, how do they process those animals.
00:14:06
Speaker
And that's really been kind of the the focal point of human behavioral ecology studies for a long time. But what I wanted to study in my dissertation was not just how you get calories in your body, but how you keep them in your body once they're there. Really what that comes down to is thermoregulation. We lose a lot of calories just... through shivering and trying to thermoregulate our bodies in the absence of clothing. And clothing is really our way of mitigating against that. So I saw it as a big kind of missing piece of the puzzle of the human behavioral ecology past. So I looked at that question in a couple of different ways. One was through the Folsom archaeological record, the early paleo-Indian archaeological record of the
00:14:51
Speaker
Plains and Rocky Mountains, looking at that record to determine if these tools that we think should be associated with thermoregulation are found in greater frequencies and cold climates than in warm climates across the entire range of the Folsom territory, if you want to call it that. Also did a little bit of ethnographic work in Mongolia just to observe how people make and repair clothing in a modern context in a mobile pastoralist.
00:15:20
Speaker
And it really hadn't changed that much. i mean People are still using inscrapers and they're still using perforators and needles and animal hides and all the same things that people were using 13,000, 40,000 years ago to make clothing. So I came away from those two projects with some pretty well-defined ideas of what thermoregulation should look like in the archaeological record.
00:15:43
Speaker
Two of those things were needles. You have to have needles to sew complex garments. There's really no other way around it. The other thing is the presence of fur-bearing animals or what I call in my dissertation warm skin species because it's not just fur, right?
00:16:00
Speaker
And some Arctic regions, people also use the skins of birds to make really warm weather garments, like eider ducks. But you can skin you don't just pluck the feathers out and like stuff them in a pillow, right? You skin the bird and actually sew that skin into things like parka hoods and around the sleeves of parkas. So one expectation of my research was that we should find the remains of these sorts of animals in any paleolithic context where people are making these fitted, tailored parka sort of garments in in ah in their cultures. Something that Spencer hasn't mentioned that I'll throw in here. Part of his ah comps for his PhD was to literally sew a garment using a bow needle and hides to just get, you know, understand it more. Because if you're going to do a PhD on this kind of thing, you should probably know how to do it. Interesting way to do a comp, ah also among many other questions and hours of writing papers and things like that.
00:16:55
Speaker
So with that research in mind, here's Spencer's take on why a bow needle is important and like why this is such a cool find. I think a really simple answer is that they're extraordinarily rare globally. Even in the old world, you know we have 30,000 years of Paleolithic archaeology in the old world spanning three continents basically. You can count on your fingers and toes how many sites have produced these bone needles. They're extremely rare, both because they're very fragile, but also because the recovery techniques that archaeologists typically use don't aren't fine-grained enough to recover these things on a consistent basis.
00:17:32
Speaker
You really have to be screening all your sediments through 16th inch window mesh basically to find these things unless you're super lucky you're digging really slow and happen to find one in place. So there's that. It's just exciting to find rare stuff. Also, in addition to that, I think from a behavioral standpoint, there's no second-guessing what a bone needle was for, really. It was for sewing. And we know that not all cultures sewed. And so it gives you a really direct line of evidence for a very specific behavior in the archaeological record that you really don't get with many other artifact types. yeah Maybe projectile points. But even then, people argue projectile points. Oh, were they actually used to kill things or were they knives or an inscraper? Well, they actually used to scrape things. or the
00:18:21
Speaker
Were they making wooden bowls or something? you know There's always a little ambiguity to stone tool types. There's not with bone needles. And so finding that is just a great material correlate for a very specific behavior. and And I think specific enough that we can say that they weren't used just to make any garment. They were used to make these very complex.
00:18:42
Speaker
tailored garments with fringe and very intricate seams sewn into them. not Not like your typical kind of like frock or like ah like the the sorts of loose fitting garments that you find among ethnographic cultures on the plains in the historic record. yeah And then I asked Spencer what the oldest bone needle in the world is. It's about 35,000 to 40,000 years old. So about the time Homo sapiens were... Bone needles are uniquely modern human.
00:19:11
Speaker
Would you say that's ah a solid reason we were able to commonize Europe? I think it's a big part of the reason. I think it's a big part of the reason why modern humans were able to, for instance, inhabit ecological niches that Neanderthals were not. Because if you're bound to a thermoregulatory environment like a cave during the winter months,
00:19:32
Speaker
There's really no way you can expand your range way out onto like the plains of Siberia because yeah you wouldn't have anywhere to retreat to right when things got tough. And so modern humans, if they're equipped with this technology with bone needles and as a proxy for these complex garments, they they were certainly able to occupy distinct ecological niches and in Eurasia and at a greater duration of the foraging season than their archaic ancestors.
00:20:00
Speaker
And the introduction here talks about this, where essentially the way you have to survive back then is you can't just like throw hide over top of it. You have to fine tailor that to keep that microclimate on your body. You have to keep that heat as trapped into you as possible to stay alive. ah So I'll have him elaborate. I guess to start off with, you have to make these garments if you want to survive the Ice Age conditions of Wyoming. There's really no way around it.
00:20:28
Speaker
If people were not making these garments, they wouldn't have been living here. they're just We don't have the physiological capacity to deal with temperatures like that. One alternative would be to basically hibernate during the winter, hole up in a cave, remain inert under blankets, basically starving until the spring comes around. But obviously modern humans weren't doing that. Neanderthals might have done that.
00:20:50
Speaker
They might have gone through periods of sort of pseudo hibernation or at least torpor during the the winter when they experienced a lot of dietary stress. Modern humans did not. It's very obvious from, in in my view, that modern humans were out foraging, hunting.
00:21:07
Speaker
doing the things that hunter-gatherers do basically all year round in the most extreme weather conditions that you can imagine. In that regard, it's an extremely important tool because there's no there's nothing else that you could use to make these sorts of garments other than a bow needle. There's other sorts of perforators, right? There's like stone perforators and there's awls.
00:21:26
Speaker
But if you want to get a really tightly spaced water and wind resistant seam, you have to have a needle that passes all the way through that seam so that you can thread that really fine piece of sinew all the way through it and keep doing that. Whereas with an awl, you know, you're producing a hole that big, a needle you're producing a hole that's well no more than two millimeters big.
00:21:48
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, it is it's a very small kind of mundane aspect of a toolkit, but it's extremely important, as important as any other tool in the Paleolithic toolkit of people in Wyoming at that time.
Adaptation to Ice Age Climates
00:22:01
Speaker
I didn't know the Neanderthal thing. Can you elaborate on that real quick? Yeah, I can. I haven't kept up with this literature as much, but there's this classic pattern in Neanderthal, long bones, especially where you get Harris lines in the and bone growth, where it looks like there's regular periods of dietary stress throughout the adolescent period of Neanderthal development. And when you find those in modern populations, it means that people were starving on an annual basis, and basically their growth was inhibited because of that. And the studies that I understand, the studies of Neanderthal long bones that have been done, a lot of juvenile and Neanderthals have evidence of annual starvation.
00:22:46
Speaker
Since then, there's been some studies of Neanderthal, the structure of Neanderthal cancellous bone. This seems to indicate... Actually, I don't think it's Neanderthals. It's a an ancestor bone, like 900,000-year-old, the common species, archaic common species from Spain. It suggests that they have some characteristics of basically hibernating animals, where Some of these archaic common species, we I don't think we could think about them as hibernators in the sense of like a groundhog, but they were certainly experiencing annual periods of torpor where their metabolic rate probably dropped. They probably were on the verge of starvation the entire time.
00:23:29
Speaker
ah So in my mind, that was how archaic hominins coped with ice age conditions of Eurasia. They didn't produce these complex garments. They probably had some form of garments like loose drape garments.
00:23:42
Speaker
But instead of out being out foraging on the landscape during the winter, wearing these things to to guard themselves against these cold temperatures, they probably just hold up in caves and huddled with their kin, tried to keep as warm as they could, try to keep from starving. And then once the spring came around, they could kind of reemerge and start foraging again. Next, we move on to methods and materials. We'll be right back.
Advanced Analysis Techniques
00:24:07
Speaker
So methods and materials, the methods and materials section is going to go into a lot more detail about zooms and how they did this actual study on the bone itself. Now I'll let McKenna nerd out on this because she's like a genius at this, but I do want to just so paint a picture for you here. In the old days, I would take a dog, if I wanted to find, when you're at an archaeological site, you find like a bunch of shattered bones all over the place. Sometimes you're lucky and you find big ones and you can compare them. Usually you're like, oh, that's a deer. Like you can tell, that's a bison, clearly. ah But when you have a bunch of pieces mashed and smashed over time with you know sediment and water hitting them and people trampling them they're fragments and it's really hard to tell those fragments unless you have a very diagnostic piece of it like a femoral head or something to tell exactly what it is and then can you tell if it's left or right if it's male or female yeah
00:24:52
Speaker
It's hard, ah but what you would do then is, let's say I found a couple of canine teeth. I would take those canine teeth and then go to what's called a comparative collection, and I would look at the comparative collection to find dog, fox, wolf, you know maybe even look at bears, just a a juxtaposition, just in case, ah because you know predator teeth do kind of all look similar.
00:25:13
Speaker
and you're looking at it and I would like take that and look at coyote and look at dog and look at wolf and then you're like okay it's not coyote but I have you know let's say it's ah it's a dog I think it's a dog then I look at a wolf and I look at a domestic dog and again they're the same species so it could just be a very big dog that looks like a wolf or it could be a kind of a small wolf that looks like a dog hard to tell uh that's a very easy example because you have a diagnostic you know tooth but if you just have a fragment or let's say something that was
00:25:51
Speaker
times 44,000 grinded down from a fragment into a needle. McKenna is a literal genius at this stuff and it's a new kind of science. I'll have her explain it here, ah but this is like cutting edge stuff right here and i I'll have her talk about it. Sure. Yeah. My name is McKenna Latinski and I'm a second year PhD student here at the University of Wyoming. First things first, I asked McKenna, you know, what's your understanding of this paper? How would you explain it to somebody?
00:26:17
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. So um this paper focuses on the bow needles from the lapel mammocyte and specifically identifying what animals these tools are created out of. And I asked McKenna, you know, what was your role in this research?
00:26:31
Speaker
My role in this research was undertaking zookeology by mass spectrometry on the bone needles, which allows for us to identify the needles where osteological markers aren't present. So basically it involves extracting collagen from these bones, resulting in like individual peptide signatures, which then we can analyze to compare and contrast to known animals, which allows for us to ID these animals.
00:27:00
Speaker
This is like where science is going. Yeah, so this specific technique, zooms is the acronym, is really helpful when you're right. These assemblages are very fragmentary, meaning we have no way to identify what animals these bones come from. um But it can also be helpful in the case of bone tools because these are created in such a way where these markers, these parts of the bones that allow us to identify them aren't there.
00:27:30
Speaker
And then again I asked McKenna, what is the process of zooms? So the process of zooms in very simplistic terms is you have this piece of bone and you extract collagen, which is an organic component of bone.
00:27:45
Speaker
um from the specimen. Then we basically denature or untangle the triple helix structure of the collagen. Then we chop it up into little bits using an enzyme. And then we run that sample through an instrument known as a mass spectrometer, which results in a series of peaks on a screen. And basically those peaks represent the little bits of collagen that we chopped up.
00:28:14
Speaker
And by looking at those peaks and the relative position of them, we can compare the unknown set of peaks to multiple sets of known peaks from animals, and then we can identify them.
00:28:30
Speaker
So, if that doesn't make sense, the way Zooms works is you put it through step one, step two, step three, step four, and you science the shit out of it with like, and it tells you, basically, you break the bone down into bone goo, you use this solution, at least it extracts this stuff, you put it in there, and then you stick that, and if you remember the episode of SpongeBob where Plankton is trying to get the recipe for the Krabby Patty, and he has that machine, he's taking the Krabby Patty, dropping it into the thing, because it wants to tell him exactly what the ingredients are,
00:28:56
Speaker
He ends up falling into this as, you know, 1% evil, 99% hot gas, or something like that. 99% evil, 1% hot gas, I forget what it is. That's the closest, zooms is the closest thing we have to that right now, and either way it's gonna be destructive. This zoom is a lot less destructive than I thought it would be.
00:29:13
Speaker
But if you have a very tiny thing like that, you know, it's gonna have a chunk cut out of it or part of it missing. It's not easy to find a bone fragment, pick it up and go, oh, this is mammoth. Like, that's <unk>s difficult. If it's huge, yeah, it's a mammoth. But if it's just a fragment, yeah you know, what could it be? So, um especially when you get down in the smaller and smaller taxa, ah like foxes and hares, like this paper talks about, it's incredibly hard. So this is the closest thing we have to, like,
00:29:37
Speaker
scanning a barcode on it and being like, oh, rabbit. I stated in the beginning of the abstract in the introduction, uh, they weren't sure what these, you know, bones were going to be made of. So I asked me after you did this process, uh, were you surprised to see what you found?
Unexpected Findings in Bone Needle Study
00:29:51
Speaker
I was expecting the needles to be made out of either bison or some related ungulate. I wasn't expecting the needles to be made out of the mammoth that exists there just because mammoths are ginormous and that would not make sense. um But I was expecting, um there's a specific bone in the bison foot called a metacarpal or a metatarsal. And it's a really long kind of straight bone. And to me that made an excellent Excellent choice for a needle. Yeah, that's kind of like the cliche cartoonish looking bone you see. Yeah, like and like dogs eat cartoons and stuff. Yeah, it's a weird um And I was confused about this so I had to have her clarify Did they do the zooms specifically on that bone needle itself or other bones around the site and not destroy the bone needle? But um, here's her answering that
00:30:44
Speaker
Yes, so I was doing zooms on the needles themselves. um So two of the needles we actually brought over to the University of Manchester. So my colleague Sarah Lahn and I worked closely with Michael Buckley, who's actually the inventor of this technology and he helped us to extract the collagen um in a way where we don't destroy the morphology of the needles and then the remaining needles we did run here at the University of Wyoming. And then I asked, you know, is it destructive to do this to a bone needle?
00:31:20
Speaker
Well, it kind of depends. yeah So um those two needles that we brought over to the University of Manchester, we did successfully extract the collagen without destroying the actual shape of the needles. But when we tried to perform those same techniques here, we were unsuccessful. So then we went ahead and we did destroy small parts of the needle. Sure.
00:31:47
Speaker
Gotta break eggs and make an omelet, I guess. Yeah, it's unfortunate. But I'm working on it for my dissertation, so spend better, sort of. Now we're going to move on to results. Results is the section of the paper where you've done your methods and materials, and here's the method in which you're going to do the research, or the experiment, or the literature review. And then the results are what you got from that, literally the results. So were you surprised, I already asked that, to find that it was Fox and Kat?
00:32:16
Speaker
I was very surprised to find that it was fox and cat and dog. um Well, some sort of fox. is It's just mind blowing to me. Now that McKenna found out that it was actually fox, coyote bone or hair bone that was, you know, using these tools, I asked Spencer, why? Why why wouldn't it be mammoth? Why wouldn't it be, you know, bison? Well, the the reason these results are so exciting to me was I had these two expectations of what we should find when people are making these garments, and it was bone needles and the bones of fur-bearing animals. And in our results, which show that these bone needles are made out of the bones of fur-bearing animals, we had kind of a convergence of those two lines of evidence in the same artifact. To be clear, I i don't think we we made this clear in the paper, but it hasn't necessarily been made clear in the popular coverage of it.
00:33:09
Speaker
There are not bones of these animals in the site and that we've identified and other than in the needles. So we don't have a fox skull or a cat vertebra. We do have a couple hair bones, but not many. So it wasn't really even on our radar as a type of animal to find and in this site. I think the reason why they ended up in this site and why they were turned into bone needles is because when you skin these fur-bearing animals,
00:33:37
Speaker
You typically leave the foot bones in place within the fur because once you get down to the foot bones of a canid or a felid, they're really tiny kind of intricate little spacings in between them. So you can't really get the the hide off of them. So what you typically do is you skin them down to the legs and then you lop off the feet. So I think that's how those bones ended up in this site in the first place is that people were trapping these animals, skinning them for their hides specifically.
00:34:04
Speaker
bringing those hides back to camp, and then using these really conveniently sized foot bones that are still clinging to these furs to make the bone needles out of. So they could just remove the foot bone in size down the length of that bone, maybe in a couple places, remove a splinter from it, abrade it down, and then you got the bone needle.
00:34:27
Speaker
If you're working with ah a mammoth or a bison bone, which is or a bison has kind of been the conventionally assumed material these were made out of because bison bone just dominates sites of this age, it would have taken a lot more work. I mean, these are really thick. The cortical bone on a bison is half a centimeter thicker, so you've got to basically shave that in half to get down to the size of the needle that you need.
00:34:51
Speaker
So that's what I think happened. Basically, people were trapping these fur-bearing animals so that they could sew those furs into clothing. By the nature of how you skin those animals, you ended up with these perfect little bone needle preforms in the feet. You take them out, incise them, turn and turn them into a needle, and then you basically use the bones of that animal to sew its own skin into a parka.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess I was talking to Spencer, they were trapping, a few things, they were trapping those animals and things like that. Can you speak to that, you know, as from what you studied and researched? Sure, yeah. So it was very surprising that these needles were made out of fox and felids, as well as jackrabbit, because to me, these are completely unrelated to the faunal assemblage itself at the site.
00:35:42
Speaker
This is a question that I'm postulating in my own dissertation research. So I'm trying to analyze holes in needles more broadly across Wyoming to see if they are following similar patterns or if they are reflecting these funnel assemblages. But the fact that they aren't reflecting them at Laprelle is pretty astonishing.
00:36:02
Speaker
Cause again, we think of Clovis people as these like mammoth hunting, either with a spear or an atlatl or maybe a bow, uh, you know, mammoth hunting, bison hunting people, or at least paleoindians in general, not just Clovis. Ice Age hunters is how I picture them. I don't really stop to think like, oh yeah, they were probably trapping small game on the side too, uh, either for a sport or in this case, as Spencer points out, like it's really easy first to trap and use and it like gives you more fur.
00:36:29
Speaker
the trapping aspect of this. We know modern humans were able to trap stuff from a really early time just because we we end up with like rabbits and paleolithic sites and in Eurasia. Really the best way to trap a rabbit or to to kill a rabbit is to trap it unless you're doing it in like a big game drive situation. But trapping has never really been a big point of discussion in the early Paleo Indian literature of North and South America. we've We have all these giant mammoth and bison kill sites and they really dominate this record. And so a lot of the discussions about paleoindian faunal use has been centered around those big charismatic fauna. And I think no doubt that comprised the vast majority of paleoindian diets was these big animals. But incorporating this whole other notion of trapping introduces kind of an entire other aspect to their hunting and like animal attainment system. It also suggests that people
00:37:27
Speaker
didn't just kill animals for food. They also killed some animals specifically for their furs and basically material to make clothing out of. I think that's one important point of the study is that just because you find you know, a rabbit bone or a fox bone in a paleoindian site doesn't necessarily mean those things are being targeted as part of like this subsistence practice. It could be targeted specifically for thermoregulation. No, these people were like highly mobile chasing big megafauna across the landscape. How
00:38:05
Speaker
I wouldn't have thought that they would take the time to trap and do all these other things. Can you like speak to that a little more? I guess that's how I'm thinking about it. I haven't given it a ton of thought, but you can imagine a model where, yeah, you are ah a highly mobile helio that they come together, kind of chasing them and some bison around. But once you achieve that goal,
00:38:27
Speaker
You can kind of sit on top of that kill for a while as you're processing hides and processing meat living off of that kill. And so what do you do during that time? Well, a lot of people are invested in these tasks, processing hide and and meat and stuff, but then you have this whole other segment of society that's just hanging out like children, teenagers.
00:38:47
Speaker
i kind of I kind of view this whole trapping component of the economy as probably being conducted by those sorts of members of the society, where maybe you're not physically capable enough to ah to embark on like a really strenuous bison or mammoth hunt or something like that. But you are capable of running a trap line, maybe leaving camp, going on kind of a little circuit, setting up traps around it, and then your job every day or a couple times a day is to go around and check those traps. yeah And ah it really rounds out kind of the Paleo-Indian life way in a really interesting way in my mind.
00:39:24
Speaker
Now, a question I had for both of them, which, you know, is kind of talked about in the paper, but it's left to your interpretation. When we think of, you know, big game hunters like Clovis and Folsom hunting mammoth and bison, we kind of pictured that they're just hunting the mammoth and the bison. So I was wondering, you know, do you think it's more that they were just generalists and they anything they could come across and we're only seeing the big mammoths because that's what remains kind of thing. um There's more to that. I'm simplifying it, but here's her answer to that.
00:39:49
Speaker
Whether or not people are selecting animals for opportunistic reasons is something that I'm trying to dive more into. um I think there's a lot of different variables that go into why people select certain animals for tool production.
Symbolic and Practical Aspects of Tool Production
00:40:05
Speaker
um One is they are readily available on the landscape um and people hunt them either for fur bearing purposes, ah food purposes, et cetera. and they just use the remaining bones to craft these tools. Another reason might be the mechanics of the bone itself.
00:40:24
Speaker
So whether or not people can use these tools for longer periods of time due to bone structure influences or how long it takes to produce the end result tool, um depending on the element that they use. um So the specific parts of the animal. And another reason might be pure symbolic or ritualistic purposes. And I didn't even think about that. So I have her elaborate.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yeah, so can I give a good example? Okay, so a really good example that I'm finding in the ethnographic record, this particular group of people selected cougar skin to produce their clothing and their quivers for, um and this was specifically for hunting magic, they claim. So people purposefully selected this animal, not for thermoregulation capacity, but but because these animals are magical to these hunters.
00:41:19
Speaker
Sure, but it's kind of like sacred-y. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. So, I don't know if that's what's happening at Laprelle. I don't know if people selected these canids, felids, and jackrabbits because they thought they were magical, per se, but it's something I'm thinking about in my broader research.
00:41:38
Speaker
I'm going to read the conclusion. Put my glasses on. The conclusion.
Summary of Findings and Personal Reflections
00:41:42
Speaker
Our study is the first to identify the species and likely elements from which paleoindians produced eyed bone needles. Bone needle production techniques have until this point been largely theoretical based on incised bone objects argued to represent the bone needle preforms and experimental needle production. We were able to clarify some aspects of bone needle production techniques through the combined use of zooms and micro CT scanning from the first applications of both these technologies to the study of Paleoindian bone needles, but not beads. Okay. Oh, that's right. There were beads there, too. Beads are cool. Our results are strong evidence for tailored garment production using bone needles and fur-bearing animal pelts. Such garments might have looked comparable to those of the Inuit, like I said, called it, who sewed fur-bearing pelts into the fringes of parkas, whose base material was typically comprised of ungulate hide, probably caribou, and moose, and used them for hats and mittens.
00:42:32
Speaker
The cold conditions of the North American Younger Dryas and northerly latitudes likely inspired a greater reliance on such garments, and the sparse early paleo-Indian archaeological records suggest the relative abundance of bone needles and fur bearers in Younger Dryas age sites relative to periods before and after.
00:42:46
Speaker
Finally, our results have some relevance to the debate surrounding early Paleo-Indian subsistence. The presence of fur-bearers in the early Paleo-Indian sites has been argued to support the existence of a broad-spectrum subsistence base characterized on generalists rather than specialist diets.
00:43:00
Speaker
so and benjali they're going on anything they can find rather than one thing only mammoth and bison i e Our results are a good reminder that foragers use animal products for a wide range of purposes other than subsistence.
00:43:13
Speaker
and that the mere presence of animal bones in an archaeological site need not be indicative of diet. So, to put that whole paper, you know, into perspective with all the data and stuff here, which I can throw up the tables, I can throw up all that, we can talk, you can go back and watch the interviews again. They found a bone needle, figured maybe it was bison or mammoth, they did very fancy science on it to find out that actually, you know, it wasn't, it was fox, coyote, and hare, and other small animals.
00:43:39
Speaker
And then that kind of gives us a better idea of, okay, they weren't just hunting mammoth and bison. They were actually hunting a lot of other animals in the landscape and not just hunting them for food. They were either using them for, you know, ritual purpose to use those hides for, you know, maybe someone just wants to wear a wolf pellet over their head. I would. But also, as Spencer pointed out, foxes and small animals like that are easier to manipulate and then tan and like use their bone utility later on in their smaller. You don't have to grind it down already from a huge ass bison bone down to a fox bone.
00:44:07
Speaker
And like he said, you're just pulling the fur right over it and stuff. So it is interesting because we do, in the hindsight, think of, you know, mammoth hunters as just big, you know, dudes on ah the plains hunting, or either poking them with a spear, throwing an atlatl, maybe you're doing fire traps or something elaborate. But they're also, hey, while that's going out and they're tanning the bison hide, other people are going out, maybe kids, women or other men going out and, you know, trapping foxes and things like that because they need those extra furs and extra bone tools, too. And why not? Because, you know, then Clark gets to have a, you know, fox pellet with him.
00:44:38
Speaker
So yeah, that's how you read an academic paper. I know I kind of like breeze through that but um, that's I'll put the paper I'll link it here in the um in the description if you want to read it and follow along yourself, but There's no need for me to like read the whole thing and tell you how to do it What you need to do is read the abstract and then you want to read the introduction and then you want to read the figures because the figures show you You know what's going on in the paper and the science of it after the figures you read the conclusion and then if you really want to check the data you can you just trust them on the data or you know if you have an issue with the data then you go into the data tables and you're like that doesn't add up there um so anyway this paper means a lot to me and I wasn't on it by any means but I was there when they dug this needle up and it means a lot to me because
00:45:20
Speaker
ah You know, they let me come out to these sites and I can you know dig and film and do whatever the hell I want usually Which is nice, you know within reason and I get to you know Film all this stuff out there to to be able to use it in videos when I'm teaching you this kind of stuff here But anyway, this one means a lot to me because I filmed that moment where we found that bone needle and I was like, oh this would be cool and it went viral on tiktok it went viral on Instagram because it was just a cool and it was the viral sound at the time I forget the song I want to say it was M83 or something. but um And you know Camille commented that, being like, it did and that's the point of like why I do this. I want to show...
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, like mosaics are sexy and yeah, like people buried in ash at Pompeii is like fucking metal but like the bone needle here is so and you saw how hard it was for Donnie to make that it took forever and you gotta like use that and then especially when it's freezing in the ice age and you're sitting by the fire and like my fingers get all fucked up when I'm cold and I'm trying to like sew and stuff. It's very difficult. So like yeah Camille's right is a very important piece of like, you know, it's so integral to life in the past and like this paper kind of You know, it doesn't exactly shine like in how important the bone needle is but it's also the research but sometimes here's here's all right here's where I'm going with that You know the doing this research and doing a paper on this kind of stuff and and putting time into the research you do find things you didn't expect and that's the point of science and they didn't expect it being a fox or a hair or whatever
00:46:41
Speaker
So it does add to our picture of Paleo-Indians in the past being more generalists than they were specialists, which is pretty damn
Community Engagement and Merchandise
00:46:49
Speaker
cool. And I did learn from Donny, who's my caveman guy and like my wilderness expert dude, who I have on speed dial, which is fun. Whenever I'm, hey man, how do I hit this rock better? And he'll literally send me a video.
00:47:00
Speaker
He'll tell me too, like when you're out in the wilderness trying to survive, like a fish trap gives you passive calories. Like you can go hunting all day looking for something, but if you don't have that fish trap when you get back and you didn't get that deer, you're not going to have food. So you might as well leave those passive calories there doing that. So these people, uh, you know, back in the day, if they didn't hunt the mammoth that day or, you know, it was been three weeks without meat or something like that. They do have other options of hunting, uh, either fox hairs and things like that. But not only that, or they, like it says in the paper, maybe they're not subsisting on this, but they're using it for their tool utility. Because everyone used every, none of the used every part of the animal back then, but you know what I'm trying to say, like.
00:47:38
Speaker
The natural world around you is what you had to make tools out of. And humans, our adaptation is to make tools to survive and adapt to our environments. And ah this site at Laprelle is one of the coolest examples of humans adapting to their environment. I've ever had the pleasure to dig at, but also learn about, um that's why I went to school here, so.
00:47:56
Speaker
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00:48:14
Speaker
You can get my merchandise on my website, which is davidandhow.com slash store. And, um, yeah. See you next week. Thank you to the APN and follow any other podcast you'd like to listen to archaeology-wise on the archaeology podcast. Now, you can get to archpodnet.com. Thank you.
00:48:30
Speaker
The Archaeology Podcast Network is 10 years old this year. Our executive producer is Ashley Airy. Our social media coordinator is Matilda Sebrecht. And our chief editor is Rachel Rodin. The Archaeology Podcast Network was co-founded by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in 2014 and is part of CulturoMedia and DigTech LLC. 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.