The Ancient Ones: Mammoth Eaters in the Playground of Giants

This is Thomas Wayne Riley, and welcome to the American Southwest…

Before Founding Father, Statesman, Father of American Archaeology and Paleontology, a man I greatly admire, President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark off to the west in early 1803, he wrote to a French Naturalist, Georges Curvier, that part of the purpose of the expedition was to quote, procure us information of the Mammoth, and of the Megatherium, end quote. The Megatherium is now known as the Giant Ground Sloth. Earlier than that in 1797, Jefferson would state:

In the present interior of our continent there is surely space enough for elephants and lions, and for mammoths and megalonyxes.

The megalonyx is also what we would now call a giant ground sloth but what he thought at the time was a huge American Lion. It’s easy to see why he thought it was a lion when all he really had from excavations at the time were the sloth’s enormous claws. More than just the quaint and cute Giant Ground Sloths claws were becoming unearthed though and Jefferson believed and honestly hoped that he could find some of their owners still alive. But alas, he was 10,000 years or so too late. He represents only the most recent wave of newcomers to the new world who would go searching for giant Pleistocene, or Ice Age, beasts.

Jefferson had actually heard that Mammoths were indeed still alive from a man who had been captured by native Americans and enslaved. That man was then traded further and further into the interior where he eventually saw some Mammoth bones, most likely at Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. When he asked his native captors about where they came from he was told that they are from huge beasts which no longer live here but are still around up north and out west.

Over a hundred years later, an anthropologist named James Teit was working in the Pacific Northwest among the Kaska People of British Columbia when he wrote that he’d heard about a quote, very large kind of animal which roamed the country a long time ago. It was of huge size, in build like an elephant, had tusks and was hairy. These animals were seen not so very long ago, it is said, generally singly; but none have been seen now for several generations. Indians come across their bones occasionally. End quote.

After the Lewis and Clark expedition, Jefferson sent Clark to the very same Big Bone Lick Site where the white man had seen the bones that the Indians had known about and had shown him. Jefferson still believed that the big beasts were out there, even after Lewis and Clark had found none in the interior of the continent. For now though, he wanted Clark to collect as many bones as he could and after some time, he brought back 300 of them which Jefferson scattered across the floor of the White House. Steve Brusatte, who thankfully told me the correct pronunciation of his name on twitter, in his book The Rise and Reign of the Mammals lays out this historical picture:

As a break from matters of state, the president would dip into the bone room and connect the thighbones and shinbones and backbones into skeletons, like he was working on a huge puzzle. 

By 1823, Jefferson had given up in his search for living specimens and wrrote to John Adams that, quote, certain races of animals have become extinct. End quote.

And he wasn’t lying about certain species becoming extinct. In an article for American Forests Magazine titled The Trees that Miss the Mammoths, Whit Bronaugh says:

If not for the end-Pleistocene extinctions just 13,000 years ago, there would still be another 40 species of North American Megafauna. They would include five species of deer or moose, two llamas, a camel, three horses, four ground-sloths ranging from 400 pounds to 3 tons, a 600 pound armadillo, a 2,000 pound turtle-like glyptodont, two ox-like species, a 5 ton mastodon, a 6 ton woolly mammoth, and a 9-ton columbian mammoth. Did I mention the 400-pound beaver? Before you jump into your time machine for a true north American safari, be advised that there were also scimitar-cats, American lions, and sabertooth, each as big as or bigger than an African lion. There were three huge bears, including the 1,800 pound giant short faced bear, the largest mammalian predator that ever walked the earth.

Those animals and the people that interacted with them are the focus of this episode and I am very excited about this one. The idea for it began during research on my very first episode over the bison but increased when I visited the La Brea Tar pits with my wife last summer. The idea of the megafauna and the echoes and the faint traces they left behind with their enormous shadows intrigued me and the more I learned and saw pictures and read, the more excited and a little saddened I became. Only sad because I really do want to hop in my time machine and check out these guys, almost more than I would want to visit dinosaurs! The reason they intrigue me more is because unlike the dinosaurs, humans hung out with, killed, ate, and were killed and eaten by the Pleistocene Mammals that rumbled the earth beneath their feet not that long ago.

Originally this was going to just be a description of the animals and their surroundings but it quickly, like every episode and topic, grew to be much more and so much better. Craig Child’s book Atlas of a Lost World really drew the map for this one though. I had more fun reading his incredibly insightful and knowledgeable and explored book than I have had reading anything in a good while. At least a couple years, and I have read so many other great books for all of my episodes and just for pleasure. I opened Atlas of a Lost World in early June on a fishing, canoeing, and camping trip up north to the UP or Upper Peninsula of Michigan which sits above Wisconsin and south of Lake Superior on a cold and windy pre-summer day around a smoking campfire which kept the mosquitos somewhat at bay. But I wasn’t in the Sylvania Wilderness with a net draped over my hat and 3 layers on to keep warm while sitting on the dirt against exposed roots, no, I was 10,000 years removed. I was in the Ice Age as I read his book which truly transports you there. Where I sat that day and a half at camp and in a canoe on the water as my friends fished and portaged through half a mile of swampy mosquito infested air had been under heavy ice. 10,000 years ago my green quiet campsite looked nothing like it did with its tall trees and beautifully clear water. I turned page after page switching from the white sands of New Mexico to the white glaciers of Greenland to the white snowcapped mountains of Alaska and British Columbia. I couldn’t put the book down.

This episode isn’t a book review or synopsis of Child’s amazing work but it was heavily influenced by and will extensively quote from it. The wonderful book helped expand this episode to what turns out, it should have been about the whole time. While the mammals and monsters of the Pleistocene are fun and exciting, what makes the ice age a topic worth discussing and pondering over is actually the humans that endured and thrived during it. The humans that fought the animals and the elements. Our ancestors.

I hope I’m half as successful at transporting you to the wild and woolly ice age as Child’s book was for me. So without any further delay, let’s thaw this topic of the Pleistocene, it’s mammals, and the incredible humans who lived through it all.

In 1837, a Swiss zoologist named Jean Louis Rudolph Agassiz spoke the following passage during a meeting of the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences about the Ice Age:

The development of these huge ice sheets must have led to the destruction of all organic life at the earth's surface. Europe, previously covered with tropical vegetation and inhabited by herds of great elephants, enormous hippopotami, and gigantic carnivores, suddenly became buried under a vast expanse of ice covering plains, lakes, seas and plateaus alike. The silence of death followed. Springs dried up, streams ceased to flow, and sun rays rising over that frozen shore were met by the whistling of the northern winds and the rumbling of the crevasses as they opened across the surface of that huge ocean of ice.

Agassiz was talking about Europe and Asia, but the same was true in North America as well, where sometimes the ice was up to 10,000 feet thick, like in central Canada. To quote Brusatte about the glaciers that covered the land:

The Ice sheets were up to a mile thick, and they moved, flowing like molasses, expanding and contracting with the heartbeat of rising and falling temperatures. As they advanced, the glaciers scoured the land, ripping up rocks and dirt, filling in valley, sanding down hills.” He goes on to say, “these continental ice sheets were not smooth and featureless, like some perfect layer of frosting draped atop a cake. They were slashed with crevasses and hollowed by tunnels, where streams of liquid water glided as blood through veins. They were shattered by faults that rumbled like tectonic plates as the ice moved across uneven ground. And they were very, very dirty. The glacial front would have been a sloping, soupy mess of soft ice mixed with sand, gravel, and dust scraped off the land, a scaled-up version of the stuff pushed to the side of the road by a snowplow.

I love that description of the glaciers and especially of the front of them being like what a snowplow leaves behind. If you haven’t ever lived anywhere up north and experienced the grinding, scraping, screaming earth shaking passing of a snowplow, or scraper as I called them the 8 years I lived in Wisconsin, you may not get the reference. But the nasty grey and sometimes black mushy cold detritus that’s piled up against the driver’s side of your car or the sidewalk is filled with a lot more than just snow, which is exactly what the front of the glaciers would have been like.

In the past 2.7 million years there have been 17 complete glacial-interglacial cycles that have become known as the Pleistocene. When the glaciers were far south and were thick and they covered a good chunk of the land, the period is known as glacial. When they retreated and the earth got much warmer, the period is known as interglacial. During this 2.7 million years the earth became both much cooler, obviously, and much warmer than it is now with some of the interglacial warming periods taking less than a hundred years to warm up from max glaciation to temperatures even warmer than our own. That fact was one of the most surprising for me. I’ve heard my entire life that man was causing global warming but in recent geologic history, measured through the examination of ice cores in both the north and the south poles, the earth went from one extreme to the other in the blink of an eye. One of the interglacial periods is 20 years… There’s no denying that consequences of human action changes the landscape, as we will extensively see in this episode, but the guilt trip and fear mongering being laid upon our and our childrens backs may not be justified. But… I digress, and I do not want to go down that rabbit hole on this humble little historical podcast.

Another surprising fact though is that during the greatest advance of the glaciers, the earth as a whole and on average was only 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it is today. I would have expected it to be much colder than that although, between places like south Carolina and where I live in southern California and the edge of the glaciers themselves, the temperature would have been 18 to 28 degrees cooler than today. But the last glacial period, the one that peaked 26,000 years ago dropped the global average temperature 24 degrees Fahrenheit… It was a particularly harsh glacial maximum.

So the earth looked much different than it does today but what about my favorite place on the planet, the Colorado Plateau? It would have been covered with grasslands as well as sagebrush, birch, spruce, and shrubs growing along the creeks. It also would have been cooler and wetter with many of the basins I’ve hiked and driven through being filled with lakes. It would have looked quite different but still recognizable. Outside of the Colorado Plateau, in the Great Basin region, most of the 141 closed basins contained lakes. Death Valley in California contained a lake 90 miles long with a max depth of 600 feet. And in Utah, the largest of these lakes would have been Lake Bonneville with 20,000 square miles of surface water and reaching a depth of 1,115 feet.

To me, there’s two great theories that cover how the ice age with it’s cooler temperatures and vastly different climate and glaciers ever began in the first place and both have to do with mountains and tectonic plates. The first is that the rising mountains caused by the collision of tectonic plates, especially the Himalayas, andes, and rockies caused the atmosphere’s composition to change. I’ll quote Brusatte who delves into this process:

As mountains grow taller, they are inevitably mowed down by erosion. When rocks are eroded, they dissolve and react with carbon dioxide, forming new minerals, effectively locking up carbon dioxide and preventing it from warming the atmosphere. Taller mountains mean more erosion, and thus more carbon dioxide sequestered from the atmosphere, weakening the greenhouse effect and cooling the earth.

The second theory is that the connection of north and south America blocked the flow of water between the Pacific and the Atlantic which cooled the Atlantic as water was rerouted.

That may cover how the Pleistocene began almost three million years ago but what about the glacial-interglacial cycles of warming and cooling that happened throughout? Well, as usual, it’s probably a bunch of different reasons all put together. There’s the changing solar radiation amount, the roughly 40,000 year cycle known as the Milankovitch Cycles, the variable tilt of the earth’s axis, the interplanetary dust, and more! And those are just the external causes that have been theorized. The internal causes include changes to the composition of the atmosphere, changes in the placement of the continent’s, volcanism, and changes in seawater temperature due to de-glacial flooding.

Another theory, one that I did not read specifically but lived in real life along with most of you dear listeners is the polar vortex. When bursts of hot air hit those mountainous regions, especially the Himalayas, that air is thrust high into the atmosphere where it can break the circular motion of the polar vortex at the north pole and cause it to fling freezing temperatures and wind further south than it normally does. Imagine this happening multiple years in a row which allows for glaciers to build up and the earth to cool. One of the Polar Vortex I remember living through froze the entirety, or, like 99% of lake Michigan. I actually flew out of Chicago during that frigidly cold time and I recall looking out over the lake and it being completely white, even that far south. Another polar vortex made it too cold for my fairly new truck to start as it sat on a south Milwaukee street in below 30 degree windchills and under a bright sun that lit up the sparkly air itself which held tiny particles of frozen water that hovered in front of my stinging cold eyes.

Yale University geologist, Richard F Flint in 1957 wrote that quote, The Pleistocene has witnessed changes in physical aspects of the earth and in the distribution of animals and plants on the earth's surface such as not recorded in any earlier span of time of comparable length. End quote. While this may or may not be true, the last 3 million years have seen profound changes on this planet in regards to the climate and the creatures that inhabit it and many of those changes happening in just the last 10,000 years. But the ice age isn’t over… sure our new age is called the Holocene, but in reality, this is still the ice age, we’re still in it. There’s a strong possibility that even with all of the changes we’ve made to the environment, there will be a future glacial period. Maybe we’ve delayed it and maybe that’s a good thing… we’ll talk about later on how the last mini ice age may have formed our current world.

During the Ice Age, this is from Brusatte, no matter where you were, no matter how close you were to the glaciers, there were strange, stupendous, shaggy, and, most of all, supersize mammals. End quote.

The bigger, the better, it seemed in that cold world.

Before researching for this episode, one of the biggest, no pun intended, questions I had about the Pleistocene is why on earth were the critchers so big?! There’s probably two good answers for this. The first being the cold and the second being the stress of meeting us.

Bergman’s Rule states that bigger animals occupy colder climates while smaller animals occupy warmer climates and this is as true now as it was during the ice age. Larger animals or gigantism among mammals is associated with cold because a larger animal has less surface area relative to its body. Therefore, it loses proportionally less heat. Not to mention a larger animal breathes more slowly, their heart beats fewer times per minute, and their metabolic rate decreases which help in the colder weather of the glaciers. Size is also a great defense against the many natural predators that roamed the cold.

The other reason they were bigger, well, not why they got big in the first place but one of the reasons they were bigger then than they are now is because of stress. Under stress, mammal species tend to get smaller so maybe our invasion and hunting and consumption of the big beasts eventually led them to become smaller. Not just because of the stress of meeting humans but also because the evolutionary fitness of becoming smaller may have meant you survived. Like Elephants in Africa losing their tusks because the ones with bigger tusks get poached.

Regardless of the reason, the mammals of the ice age were huge and shaggy and woolly and sharp and toothy. Childs says this of the beasts:

Studies of damage to carnivore teeth and jaws from the La Brea Tar Pits near downtown Los Angeles have shown high-impact living among Pleistocene megafauna, the sabers of sabertooth cats snapped in two, skulls of predators fractured and healed from blunt trauma. From the oily, sticky pits, UCLA paleontologists Blaire Van Valkenburgh and Frit Hertel examined skeletal remains of dire wolves, American lions, and sabertooths, and concluded that these carnivores quote, utilized carcasses more fully and likely competed more intensely for food than present day large carnivores. End both quotes.

Ice Age north America, including the American Southwest, would have been a gnarly place with dangerous weather and dangerous animals.

The first of those dangerous animals probably came over 1.8 million years ago in what is called the Irvingtonian Land Mammal Age and they most likely came across that ever so famous bering land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska. Those first explorers were Saber toothed cats, jaguars, and the first proboscideans to enter the new world, the southern mammoth, which we call the Columbian Mammoth. Meanwhile, rhinos, horses, and camels crossed the other way into Asia. During the summer months, this massive quote unquote bridge would have been reasonably habitable with wildflowers and grasses growing in enough numbers to sustain the back and forth of these massive animals. And its important to understand that back and forth happened with the animals and probably the humans. The pacific ocean to the south kept it relatively cool and the Himalayas essentially blocked a lot of moisture that would have made this place much more difficult to survive in. The bridge itself was only possible because of how much water was locked into the inland glaciers of the northern hemisphere. The center of this land bridge would have been 500 miles from the nearest shoreline. In some places far away, on the eastern seaboard the coast extended as much as 190 miles east of the present shoreline into the Atlantic. That’s how much water was sucked up into the ice caps and glaciers.

Meanwhile from the south, sloths and armadillos and other mammals made their way up to the north American continent where they would continue to evolve, get bigger, and roam the land.

So about that Columbian Mammoth… his ancestor, the Mamathus trogontherii crossed the bering land bridge about 1.5 million years ago before spreading throughout the warm parts of the continent all the way down to modern day Honduras and Nicaragua and from the east to the west coast, including the American Southwest. It is also found in Alaska and Canada but for the most part, it stuck to the warmer regions. And because of that fact, the Columbian mammoth lacked the fur of the later to cross over Woolly Mammoth, who is also a distant cousin and whom I will talk about later. Columbian Mammoths would have actually been about as bald as modern day elephants. But they were one of the largest Proboscideans to have ever lived at 14 feet tall at the shoulder. They also had large greasy curved tusks that were up to 13 feet long protruding from its upper jaws. They may have survived until 7 thousand years ago if the mammoth petroglyph found on a desert varnish stained rock near Moab is genuine. But for the most part, they passed away with the rest of the megafauna somewhere around 10,000 years ago. That’s a trend you’ll see throughout this episode. That, 10,000 year mark.

Almost or equally as tall, although not quite as large, as the Columbian Mammoth was the Titanotylopus Nebraskensis or one giant freakin’ camel. As I mentioned with the horse and rhinos earlier, they evolved on this continent and then spread to the east where they eventually found some footing in the Asian deserts. This guy though, was 12 feet tall at the shoulders! And he weighed more than a ton, making him over twice the size of modern camels. As the author Ian M Lange who wrote Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre, a book with fantastic facts and illustrations puts it, quote, it is frightening to think how far this camel probably could spit. End quote. Unfortunately it seems humans wouldn’t have ran into this giant beast as it died out about 1 million years ago. Dying out may be the wrong term, because the Titanotylopus may have rather evolved into an abundant and widespread species known today as Yesterday’s Camel, aka the Western Camel, which humans definitely ran into. They looked a lot like today’s camel except, like everything back then, it was bigger.

Curiously, Llamas actually originated in North America before going down south. There were three different species of them in the American Southwest until the end of the ice age. And yes, obviously they were bigger than modern llamas.

Then there’s the animal that is definitely one of the top three animals when one thinks of the American southwest, that most quintessential mammal of the cowboy; the horse. They began as small forest browsers on this continent but eventually evolved into a species commonly called the American zebra before becoming the generally large grassland grazers and the creatures we’d recognize today. They too went westward to Asia. The most common species in the American Southwest was called the Western Horse or Equus Occidentalis with quite a few dug up in the La Brea Tar Pits. They’re about the size of a modern Arabian Horse but with a significantly heavier build. They too may have survived until 8,000 years ago but they share the same fate as most of the other megafauna of the ice age. And when I say megafauna, I’m referring to creatures over 100 pounds. It’s kind of a mystery why the western horse disappeared at all really, since they’ve done so well after reintroduction by the Spanish and Native Americans after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. But the reason for their and most of the others disappearance will hopefully become more clear by the end of this discussion.

To quote Childs, Anyone coming across the land bridge would have found the way ahead blocked. And also, At its greatest extent, during the last glacial maximum between twenty-four thousand and eighteen thousand years ago, the solid glacier, miles deep in places, stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean, with no way around it. About the size of Antarctica, its surface area was five million square miles.

That’s one massive white block of frigid winds and miserable cold that sat atop the North American continent, weighing and grinding it down. The Great Lakes, the 15,000 lakes of Wisconsin, the less than that lakes of Minnesota, and the innumerable lakes of Canada all owe their existence to the weight of the glaciers that pressed down into the crust before glacial melt filled them. That sheet of rocky ice was not like the bering land bridge and as soon as one crossed the bridge, they would have ran right smack into what seemed like an impenetrable wall. The next ice free spot of land was eighteen hundred miles away in the Dakotas with nothing in between the person staring into the abyss and a new habitable world except ice and wind. It would have seemed impossible to cross it, yet we know people did. The author Childs himself walked across glaciers in Greenland, Lake Superior in Wisconsin during a polar vortex, and the glaciers of Alaska. All miserable places to be sure, but places where one could survive if they knew what they were doing. Archaeologist Charles Holmes dug at sites in Alaska that are around 14,000 years old where he found that instead of wood, the people living on this side of the land bridge were burning Pleistocene bones, which would have been much more abundant. He told Childs that after going through a lot of kindling he could keep a megafauna bone fire burning at a steady 400 degrees Fahrenheit which is just as good if not better than a fire made of wood kindling. That would have been one of the many adaptations humans would have had to come up with to survive such a difficult crossing. But why’d they cross over at all?

It’s possible the people who first populated this continent were simply following the animals that were wandering the high frozen landscape themselves. Or they noticed birds coming from down south and realized that there’s a good chance that there’s fertile land that way. People did it, but it was difficult. Again from Childs:

From the flats of the Bering land bridge, the eye sees about a mile. Several hundred feet of elevation up a mountain or high hill can add thirty miles of visibility. You could have walked for weeks across the land bridge, through a mosaic of rivers and grasslands with hardly a rise in the ground, before you reached a small mountain range, isolated in the middle of it all. It was a cluster of gray volcanoes, standing like a beacon. No one would have known what lay ahead. The view from the flanks of these volcanoes would have revealed more of the same, no coast in sight, horizons continuing on as if constantly giving birth to themselves -mammoths, Pleistocene horses, and giant bears strung out as far as the eye could see. It must have seemed as if there were no end, the generosity of this planet unimaginable.

As the first people walked eastward and across the pacific they would have noticed the myriad of changes from the lack of woolly rhinos to the different beetles that creeped upon the earth. Archaeologists have found Siberian settlements as far back as 30,000 years which means the people saw the comings and goings of mammals through that corridor of cold land. And then for whatever reason, wether following herds or just for the thrill of the journey, the people headed into the new world.

And the thrill of the journey and the thirst for adventure really shouldn’t be dismissed. Archaeologist Nate Hamilton from the University of Southern Maine said, quote, adventure. It’s one thing archeologists don't credit enough. End quote. I had no idea until reading Atlas of a Lost World that our brains have crystals of the mineral magnetite inside the tissue! These crystals orient to the cardinal directions which means, as Childs says, quote, our brains are compasses. End quote. He goes on to say whether or not we use them or are even aware of them, is a personal issue. Human’s brains were bigger back then, that’s a real fact. Maybe the ancient ones were better at navigating and moving and exploring and pushing the boundaries than we are now and maybe they used that bigger brain to achieve the impossible. It is entirely likely that the first people to come over were simply somewhat crazy, like the many people who climb Everest or canoe across continents, or sail around the world, or walk across a mountain range or go to space! Or any of the other amazing, incredible, and beautiful things that make up the mosaic of human accomplishments and adventures. Or maybe that was life.

Ever since the first families or bands or tribes or groups left their homelands in Africa, they’d been moving continuously. And by homelands, I mean there are multiple African homelands that humans call the starting point. The cradle of civilization is quickly becoming the continent of civilization. Even the story of our start in Africa has gotten more colorful and complicated with more evidence being uncovered. I look forward to the day where our human story is that of a worldwide evolution instead of a continent one. Maybe the Navajo traditions are right… more on that later.

The accepted narrative is that humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago to populate the earth. From the archaeological record, Australia was populated as far back as… 73,000 years before present… 13,000 years before humans left Africa? Stay with me, it gets more confusing. Even older than that, archeologists have found reliably dated homo sapiens bones in Greece from over 200,000 years ago. A million years ago there are very close human ancestors in Siberia… How then, is the accepted narrative the one that says humans left Africa 60,000 years ago? The theory is that many early expeditions must have died out or became replaced by neanderthals or Denisovans, which are human cousins so closely related that we could mix with them. And by the way, every preconceived notion you have on neanderthals is probably wrong. They had art and language and culture just like us… But maybe the Neanderthal and Denisovans, another, smaller and more asian centric human cousin, replaced those early human migrations. Maybe that’s true, but what if some early humans walked out of Africa and across Asia and across the arctic and made it to the North American Continent immediately? Like the Australian’s ancestors who left Africa and didn’t stop walking until they reached the land down under.

There’s a cave in San Diego where Cerruti Mastodon bones have been found amongst rocks with a pattern of wear on them suggesting that the rocks may have been used as tools. And even more intriguing is the Mastodon bones themselves. They have been broken. They were smashed by those rock tools when the animals were very freshly killed, and their marrow has been sucked out. Those bones are 130,000 years old.

Similarly smashed and demarrowed mammoth bones have been found in the Old Crow Basin of the Yukon Territory in Canada dated at 40,000 years ago. The same kind of smashing and marrow sucking has been found in at least 10 sites in Kansas and Nebraska from around 26,000 years ago, when the glacier was at its maximum and most difficult to walk through.

Then there’s Snowmass, Colorado. As the expansion of a reservoir used for making snow was under way, an awesome discovery was made: the most productive high-elevation Pleistocene fossil site ever discovered. In just one year of excavations, by the year 2011, they’d pulled out 5,500 big bones and 30,000 smaller ones with everything from beavers and bisons, to mammoths and mastodons. There’s a whole lot more they left for future paleontologists as well so there’s a ton of ice age mammals in this place that was once a lake. How did so many big creatures all come to be at the bottom of this lake? Some of the fossils are tens of thousands of years apart so it’s seemingly a good place to die if you’re a mammal of any size but some of the fossils are curious.

In Michigan and other sites around the Great Lakes there is indisputable evidence that ancient peoples in the new world would store, or cache, meat from fresh kills under the cold water of ice age lakes. Doctor Daniel Fisher, director of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan even tried it out for himself in 1989. In a University of Michigan Water Reservoir near Hell, Michigan, Fisher anchored legs of lamb and venison to the bottom while burying other cuts in a nearby peat bog where they were left for two years and checked on periodically. Fisher later said, quote, the meat remained essentially fresh for most of the first winter. By spring, progressive discoloration had developed on the outside, but interior tissue looked and smelled reasonably fresh. End quote. After retrieving the meat from the pond and the bog in 1992, it was shown to have no significant pathogens and the bacterial counts were similar to those levels found in Fisher’s home freezer that he’d kept as the control group. To step up the experiment he then butchered with stone tools a deceased draft horse which he similarly anchored under the ice. Just like the legs of lamb and venison he said of the horse’s meat, quote, as long as ice remained on the pond, the meat stayed essentially fresh. By June the meat had developed a strong smell and sour taste but still retained considerable nutritive value. End quote. Obviously, sign me up for a slice of stone butchered horse meat aged 6 months in the bottom of a reservoir in Hell, Michigan, please. I’ve eaten horse, in Besançon, France. It was like sweet beef and it had a little runny egg on top. It was delicious. But I digress.

Sometimes, the anchors used for the ice age meat are stones. Big enough rocks to weigh down the chunk but not too big to where they’d be unable to be lifted. Bison have been found like this in Wyoming’s Agate Basin site. Mammoths have been found like this in Siberia. And now, if you believe the theories and the dates of the well preserved material around the ice age creatures from Snowmass, Mammoth have been found like this in Colorado. The date of storage… 45,000 years ago. 11 similarly shaped and sized and possibly worked on rocks were found intertwined with the bones at Snowmass on what would have been some nice cuts of Mammoth meats. The official narration by some of the paleontologists who worked the site and others who studied it is that those rocks came from up the river a ways on some ice chunk that melted directly over the deceased but not yet buried under the sediment mammoth haunches and then the rocks fell and landed perfectly like that, thank you very much. Except, some of the bones appear to have marks where some hungry human hunters would have cut off important tendons… the lines are just too uniform and planned. At least some argue that. Doctor Fisher was actually called to the Snowmass site to excavate and he came away believing that yes, the 45,000 year old meat was anchored just like he had anchored the horse in Michigan. Since I have no skin in the game, my mind is wide open and I’m very keen to believe the seemingly outlandish, but truthfully not really that outlandish, dates of human migration to the new world as long as the evidence is even somewhat reasonable. And personally, I find these bits of evidence reasonable. And speaking of the term the new world, it really seems to be getting older and older with each new discovery.

So Mammoths… The kings of the Ice age, the biggest baddest dudes out there. Well, no he wasn’t the biggest or the baddest but he certainly was very awesome and large and apparently tasty and he is probably the most famous of the ice age megafauna.

Woolly mammoths lived from Lisbon to New York with the land bridge near the middle in what has become known as the Mammoth Steppe. It was the single most expansive biome on earth at the time and one of the harshest. The average winter temperatures would have been -22° F. The Woolly Mammoths range doesn’t quite dip down into the American Southwest but it’s awfully close. They absolutely were in Montana and the Dakotas.

We know that the calf of a Woolly mammoth’s fur was strawberry blond since one, posthumously named Lyuba, was found preserved in Siberian permafrost. The adults though, appear to be more coppery and brown. Their fur consists of two distinct layers, with one being long coarse hairs, six times thicker than human hair and up to three feet long. The second layer, the inner layer, is shorter, softer, and thinner and used for insulation. Childs suggests that since the hide is too heavy and dirty, you wouldn’t wear it. Instead, there were plenty of other animals with easier hides to process all around them such as the bison, deer, and caribou.

The mammoths primarily ate grass as they roamed the entire landscape in herds, although the adult males may have wandered in solitude or possibly in dude only herds. They were smaller than the Columbian mammoth and actually the smallest, well no, they’re the second smallest of the Mammoths at around 9 or 10 feet at the shoulder, which is about the same as African elephants today but they were more powerfully built. That big ole thick coat allowed it to live in arctic regions and its tusks were long and curved at 8 to 14 feet long and were primarily used to clear the snow from the tundra grasses that it fed on. The long tusks were modified first incisors of the upper jaw that were curved outward and upward in a stylish curlicue as Brusatte put it. And like elephants, the Mammoths displayed handedness which means each individual mammoth would have preferred either the left or the right tusk. It’s possible to tell that because of the wear marks on the giant beasts tusks which would have been caused by pushing down trees or rooting up plants or maybe even fighting.

Some of the oldest human structures ever excavated, even older than Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, are from 15,000 years ago in Siberia where the inhabitants built 46,000 pound huts out of mammoth tusks, skulls, and rib bones. One such structure found in Ukraine was 16 feet wide with skulls placed in a semicircle to form the interior walls. Around that, ninety five mandibles with their chins down armed the outer and upper parts of the wall. And then leg bones were used in the front of the house. According to Lange, the roof probably consisted of a wood and bone frame covered with hides. There’s no way this was the first such one ever built either. This was probably a cultural tradition for many years before the one archaeologists have dated was built. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same type of structure was built in the americas by its first inhabitants with the same bones. Could these circular structures be the antecedent to the kiva or hogan? I think I’ll be covering that in the next episode but I honestly have no idea…

Besides bringing some preserved mammoths up from the frozen tundra, giving us a near perfect glimpse of how they looked, there are also ample cave drawings in Europe, especially France, which let us modern humans accurately know what a mammoth would have looked like.

Quick aside about these cave drawings in Europe: they’ve discovered that the reason there are so many overlapping layers of the animal painted on with some being different shades and different thickness of lines is because if you were to bring a flickering torch down to see the cave drawings, the animals themselves would have looked like they were moving. The light would have shown the bison, deer, and mammoths galloping or moving through the landscape. It would have been an early type of film before their eyes. It would have been beautiful… add to that the effect of the fire sucking the oxygen out of these places and you can get a little high feeling while watching the animals you would know so well dancing on the cave wall…

Back to the mammoth… They had a high domed head with a humped sloping back, a short tail, small ears, and a shorter trunk. All of these differences were probably to minimize heat loss and keep frostbite at bay. And Lange says that quote, furthermore, their blood protein hemoglobin was different than that of living elephants and more similar to musk ox blood. This composition allowed for the release of O2 at much lower temperatures into the blood. End quote. He also states that the weird domed head may have housed nutrient rich food tor the tough times that dominated the ice age world.

So who’s the smallest mammoth? That’d be the Pygmy Mammoth. Their scientific name’s kinda cool… Mammathus exilis. They weren’t necessarily exiled but they were separated from their big cousins for quite some time. I know I mentioned how the coast was much further out in many places than it is now but that really isn’t the case on the west coast, especially California, which has always been the butt end of Pangea… which says nothing about my new home state, I assure you. But California has always been the end of the continent as it is today. But just off the coast, visible from Venice beach, are the channel islands, which include Catalina Island… you know the one, with its infamous wine mixer… I’ve visited Catalina island and it is beautiful and beyond it there’s one more island before the end of the world disappears over the horizon. Despite its close proximity, neither it nor the many other Channel Islands were ever connected to the continent during the Pleistocene. Even at the glacial maximum. Yet still, there are mammoth fossils on the channel islands which means their ancestors, most likely the Columbian Mammoth, swam there. We know they can swim since, well, first of all they’re there but also, modern Elephants are rather good swimmers themselves. Then over the centuries and millennia, The mammoths did what most creatures on an island do and they grew smaller and cuter.

The self exiled pygmy mammoth of the California channel islands was only about the size of a large horse, but like a Clydesdale large horse and was especially adapted to island life. They ate less food and were more nimble over their steep and hilly habitat. They may have survived longer than their inland counterparts but the consensus is that they disappeared with everything else at the end of the Pleistocene.

I say they may have lived longer because on islands off of the Siberian coast and even in the Mediterranean they lived until as recently as 3,000 years ago. Very recent discoveries of them have been made on Wrangel Island in Russia and even the island of Sicily where some of them, fully grown… were 3 and a half feet tall with tusks and all.

Speaking of Europe! As if this episode hasn’t been controversial enough with my questioning of human’s effect on the warming of the climate, let’s talk about the Solutrean Culture in eastern North America during the ice age.

There are particular stone spear point artifacts that have been found all along the east coast of north America with most of the oldest being found in Florida. So far so good. But the oldest and most interesting of these points was actually found in the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay where it was dredged up along with the skeleton of a Mastodon. That skeleton has been dated at 23,000 years old. That makes this stone spear point, leaf shaped with a thinner bottom than the top, the oldest human artifact in the new world. Of course, if we’re not talking about the bone smashing marrow sucking stones… This spear point is made of stone quarried from far off Pennsylvania at a long used and very popular site for making stone tools. That means the stone tool is man made. Now either it was put into the ribs of the Mastodon when the animal was alive and the hunters left it on the now covered shoreline, or a later hunter dropped it off the side of a boat and it fell on top of the Mastodon much like they say those stones did on the mammoth at Snowmass… Okay, now the water’s getting rougher… but, uhh, let’s just dive in. This style of flattened point is found only in two places on earth: the eastern seaboard of the united states, and the western coast of Europe. Specifically France, Portugal, and Spain. We’re in it now…

At the time of the last glacial maximum, there was, much like Beringia, an ice bridge that spanned from the British Isles to New York. By this point, humans had been in Europe as far back as 180,000 years but definitely 30,000. Did these ancient Europeans, like their ancient Asian neighbors, continue walking and exploring and adventuring across an ocean until they made it to a new land?

A very important point though; at this time in human history, we would have all looked a lot more similar. When I say ancient europeans and ancient asians, you can’t picture two distinct peoples. There wouldn’t have been as many differences between humans as there are now. For example, us white people didn’t really exist until 8,000 years ago after the tumultuous end of the Pleistocene and the Younger Dryas had settled humans down and forced us to separate. As I’ll mention later, I really believe that at this time, human’s go to means of living was traveling. Life was one long exotic adventure to faraway places with human habitation scattered and few. Humans in Europe would have had competition with the Neanderthal, which, as far as we know, didn’t live in the new world so why not seek a place with less competition?

There’s a site in Delaware where Paleolithic, or stone age people, we’re talking 18,000 to 21,000 years ago, were making boats on the coast. Ice Age boats on the east coast of north America being built by people using tools made popular on the Iberian peninsula across the Atlantic… At this site there are hammers, anvils, and stones that would have all been used in the manufacture of these boats with some of the stones having evidence of being heated in a fire which would have helped to put pitch on the crafts to seal them up.

The Solutrean stone tool culture has thousands of representatives in the new world from Florida to Nova Scotia and from the east coast, all the way to the west. Much like how the later Clovis culture, more on that soon, but much like how Clovis spread rapidly throughout the continent, this seemingly European way of making spear points did as well. And actually… there’s some convincing theories that the Clovis Point and culture evolved from this European Solutrean one. And lest you think this is a fringe theory; the head of the Smithsonian’s Archaeology Division and Paleoindian Program is a champion of the Solutrean Tool from Europe theory. If you think about it, there’s just no reason to doubt any theory that explains how anything or anyone got to this continent we call home.

Is the fact that Solutrean or Solutrean Like Tools that have found themselves all over the American Continent a smoking gun of the original European colonials being from over 20,000 years ago instead of 1,000? And I mean 1,000 years ago because of course the Vikings were in the new world in the 10th century… 500 years before Columbus. The vikings sailed the icy waters to Newfoundland whereas the Solutrean peoples would have sailed the icy frozen northern Atlantic with its land bridge all the way down until the glaciers stopped and they found themselves in the deep south. Well duh, no, it is not the smoking gun which proves the claim but honestly, to argue against such a seemingly plausible historical narrative seems ludicrous. But I fully and whole heartedly believe that even IF the Solutreans arrived to the new world from Europe 20,000 years ago, they would have been met by even older and more Indigenous peoples.

Spaniard Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes was one of the first Europeans who ever saw a sloth in the wilderness of South America and he wrote this about them:

The sloth takes the whole day for fifty paces, is about as long as it is broad, and has four thin legs with long nails, which cannot support the body. I have never seen anything uglier or more useless than the sloth.

How incredibly insulting and wrong he was. But he was not alone. Later, a French and an English zoologist in the early 1800s complained of the magnificent creature that he was either incomplete or created by nature in jest!

I have fallen in love with the giant ground sloth. Even more so than the mammoth or the sabertooth which, don’t get me wrong, are incredibly fascinating. But unlike a giant beaver or armadillo or the scary cats or even the mammoths and mastodons which all have similar albeit smaller relatives today, there’s nothing around like the giant ground sloth. And the author Ian Lange is in agreement with me. Although I believe he was referring to the only remaining sloths in central and southern America. I personally love these extinct guys and every depiction of them makes me laugh at how silly they had to have been when they were alive. Although they are no longer alive, there is one you can hug right outside of the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits that I suggest everyone goes and sees for themselves. 

It seems the ground sloth’s ancestors came up from the south even before the Panamanian land bridge and the Great American Interchange began by either island hopping or riding on rafts of debris 3.5 million years ago, which yes, that seems to check out. I can picture one of them being too slow to escape the already drifting away drift log that carried them north. And then as the Ice age got under way, not wanting to be left out, they too grew in size.

There are three main ground sloths from the ice age you’ve got to know: The Jefferson, the Shasta, and the Harlan ground sloth. All three resided in the American Southwest and all three are memorable and lovable.

The first one, the Jefferson ground sloth was named after the man himself, Thomas Jefferson. Besides being an incredible thinker and philosophier, Jefferson has also been credited as the father of both modern archaeology and paleontology. Jefferson was given some bones from a friend who’d found them in a cave in West Virginia which kickstarted his excitement and education of the beast so much so that he presented them at America’s first scientific conference on vertebrate paleontology. Those bones also helped convince him to send Lewis and Clark, much like the Mammoth bones had. The Jefferson ground sloth lived in North America 150,000 years ago to 9,400 years ago and has been found all over the lower 48 and Alaska. He liked to eat leaves and twigs high up in the trees and had a large tail and feet with three toes that touched the ground to help him balance when he stretched his 10 foot long body high up in the limbs. Another defining characteristic was the way they walked on their front feet’s knuckles instead of the bottom of their feet. Kinda like a gorilla or Tarzan.

Shasta ground sloths were smaller than the other big sloths but they’ve left a huge impact on the fossil record. They’ve been found all over the Colorado Plateau but their territory goes as far north as Canada although they do not appear to be cold tolerant and preferred desert vegetation. They’ve been found with intact skeletons including their tendons and hair in caves of the four corners region. They were up to 9 feet tall and weighed up to 400 pounds. They too walked on their knuckles or possibly the sides of their front feet which had 6 inch claws. Their hair was a pale yellow color, which we can see since some’s been preserved in Southwestern caves. Even their coprolites or fossilized dung have been found, and they contained plants such as mormon tea, yuccas, and wild grapes.

Lastly, the huge Harlan ground sloth who also called the Colorado Plateau his home, stood at 12 feet tall to reach those high branches but could have been 20 feet in length. They also weighed as much as 3,500 pounds. The coolest thing about the Harlan ground sloth was his protective armor of nickel sized bony plates called dermal ossicles that laid beneath his thick fur, especially around the back of the neck. Think about how helpful that must have been against all those claws and teeth. He also had an enormous tail and big ole long claws which he may have used to dig for tubers and roots and for self defense when the bony plates weren’t cutting it. They seemingly grazed in herds but it’s hard to tell, paleontologists have yet to recover a complete skeleton but they’ve been able to make composite skeleton from the many individuals they have found. It became extinct about 11,000 ears ago.

But sometime before their extinction, on the outskirts of a huge lake where now only the shiny blinding sands of White Sands National Park lay, a giant ground sloth, around 10 to 15,000 years ago was chased and possibly hunted down, although only the chase is visible. The evidence laid beneath the sand for all these years but was recently discovered and reported on. I remember when the article came out because I love both the White Sands of New Mexico and the giant ground sloth. The fossilized footprints happen when the wet mud is compounded by the heavy near ton mammal and then covered by loose sediment and frozen in place. There are definitely footprints all over the planet of all sorts of animals it’s just a matter of luck discovering them. The author Craig Childs even found some Mammoth or Mastodon prints in White Sands himself, on the outskirts near the White Sands Missile Range.

This big sloth though, was meandering about, it’s footprints quite evident when something all of a sudden spooked it! It’s possible to tell this because it reared up on its hind legs multiple times and changed directions. The researches have called these “flailing circles” and they say the big guy coulda been doing this in defense. In defense of what though? Well, humans of course! Human footprints have been found nearby and some of these human footprints are even inside the sloth’s very own. Humans had to have been leaping with his giant gait to land within his steps. Some footprints have even been found to be tip toeing very near the big guy. I’m not sure this is evidence they were hunting him but they were definitely bravely following him. Maybe even playing with him? All this leads me to believe the giant ground sloths, like their cousins who’ve survived all this time, were slothful, slow, magnificent and definitely created in jest. Then again, with those huge 6 inch claws and long arms, they had to have been a threat to ancient humans.

The first people would have been walking into a brawl, whether they got here as far back as 130,000 years ago or just 15,000.

I freakin’ love that quote from Childs… but what if the easiest and safest and most plausible way to get to the North and South American Continents wasn’t by walking on land… but by sea?

Here’s Childs again:

In 1997, archaeologists and marine ecologists presented the Kelp Highway Hypothesis. The coast, they said, had actually been highly productive during the Ice Age. Kelp is a large seaweed in the order laminariales that grows in towering columns anchored to the sea floor, suspended by gas-filled bladders. Waving through the water, it creates its own ecosystem, from isopods to otters and orcas, one that continues up the rivers and onto the land, where brown bears fish for salmon and scavenge seal and walrus carcasses. Citing glacial retreat and pollen, the report concluded, quote, By about 16,000 years ago, the North Pacific Coast offered a linear migration route, essentially unobstructed and entirely at sea level, from northeast Asia into the Americas. End both quotes.

So from Japan to the southern tip of Baja California, crabs, oysters, fish, and much larger prey would have been available the entirety of the coast of the bering land bridge. I’ve already talked about how the climate at that time wouldn’t have been as cold as the rest of the north American continent but even further south on boats, possibly made out of whale or walrus carcasses, it would have been even warmer and food even more plentiful. More from Childs, quote, At Ice Age coastal sites in California, Peru, and Chile, people ate mastodon, salmon, seaweed, deer, and sea lion. They weren't maritime specialists, unlike most coastal dwellers from the last several thousand years. They inhaled the coast as they went, whatever land or sea offered. Every degree down the face of the globe brought something new. End quote.

Basically, these people using boats to take their family into the unknown weren’t like the Polynesian or other sea faring peoples, they were land people using whatever method they could to safely and easily transport themselves further into the new world. Unfortunately for archaeologists and researchers, most of the sites and places they left behind on the coast are underwater and mostly lost. But not all of the evidence.

On the Channel Islands off of California where those pygmy Mammoths lived, there’s enough evidence to safely say those little cute mammoths were hunted by early humans who used stone age points of a Pacific Rim stemmed tradition. So whoever hunted them brought with them a tool culture from the other side of the ocean. There were also manatee like mammals known as Stellar’s Sea Cow that grew up to 30 feet long that would have no doubt been utilized as a hearty meal. They lived in that kelp forest that lined the entirety of the route that people would have taken instead of crossing that barren frozen and nasty wasteland that took over the continent from the Yukon to Montana.

When I was in college, this theory was beginning to be whispered about in archaeology and anthropology classes. I had some professors who embraced it as reasonable and probable and I had others who dismissed it but as usual, I soaked it up and bought it. Why not, I thought? Well now, I believe it probably wasn’t an avenue used but the MAIN and MOST viable avenue used by humans whose thirst for adventure brought them all the way here. From both sides of the Eurasian continent!

In Child’s book he mentions an Alaska man who one day decided he wanted to canoe from his far northern home all the way to the southern tip of the earth to Tierra del Fuego in Chile. He didn’t make it all the way though because at one point near Patagonia, he came across a landscape that looked exactly like his Alaskan home so he stopped there and called it an adventure. It only took him two years to do it. But more interestingly than that, the place he happened to stop at in Chile, is one of the oldest meeting places in the new world. Somehow, right on the heels of humans entering the new world, this far off and far southern spot became home to peoples fresh from far away. The site houses some of the first evidence for human occupation in the new world and is called Monte Verde. It’s just up the river from the coast where the Alaskan Kanaan Bausler stopped on his journey. Kanaan didn’t know it, but he had probably felt and acted exactly like ancient humans who’d sailed to southern Alaska before just… continuing on until they saw it’s southern mirror. “This is home,” they must have thought. And then some probably got back in their boats and headed north again to tell everyone what they’d discovered which would have spurned even more adventurers, or the same ones returning yet again. Monte Verde was a continual meeting place for thousands or tens of thousands of years and the spear points recovered are like the ones used on the Channel Islands, Beringia, and the Pacific Rim. Childs says, as if drawn by the emptiness, these people went as far as they could.

Let’s take a creature break:

While many bears lived on the North American continent during the ice age, including the three survivors: Grizzly, Black, and Polar Bears, one of those Pleistocene ursine was seemingly the most terrifying and worthy of discussing… Actually, I’ve been face to… well, not face since he stands at 12 feet tall but, I’ve been up close and personal with this guy at the La Brea Tar Pits and I would not have wanted to meet a living Short Faced Bear.

The Arctodus simus or, short faced bear was the largest Pleistocene land carnivore and possibly the largest land mammal carnivore to have ever lived and he was absolutely a carnivore extraordinaire. Although, it appears recent evidence suggests they were more omnivorous than previously thought. They probably ate whatever resource was available but still stuck with what they loved most. And that was meat. They began to be prevalent around 800,000 years ago in the new world and would have been a formidable foe for newly arriving humans. They dwarfed the modern day grizzly at 12 feet tall when they stood and weighed more than two thousand pounds although their skulls, while still massive, are more cat than bear shaped, hence the short faced name. Beyond their huge size and claws and meat eating teeth were their freakishly elongated arms, which were perfect for wrapping around an ice age horse, ox, or baby mammoth. They kinda remind me of those weird Sun Bears from southeast Asia. You should look them up, but I’ll put a pic up on the site. Actually, I haven’t said this yet but pictures of all of these creatures’ bones will be up on the site including a link to an amazing artist who recreates them.

But as scary as they were, The short faced bear may have been more scavenger than pure hunter. Their skeletal structure just doesn’t support bringing down large dangerous game. A human on the other hand? They coulda backhanded us into unconsciousness before tearing pieces of us off in small strips.

Dire Wolves, distant cousins to the big bears, and our modern day gray wolves, also roamed the Pleistocene arena from about 500,000 years ago until their end with all the other toothy, tusked, and clawed giants. Although they probably survived in small haggard groups until 8,000 years ago. The Dire Wolves would have communicated to each other while chasing their prey over long distances with their specialized speed limbs before snatching up their meal with their jaws which were the most powerful of any canine. They also had much larger and stronger teeth to handle the ice age prey with than grey wolves. Also, their necks were longer and stronger and they weighed about 130 pounds at fully grown. Although they did have a smaller brain than their modern cousins the grey wolf, which they actually would have been neighbors to at the time. When they were plentiful, dire wolves would have roamed in packs of 2 to 15 in a territory of 100 to 260 square miles. They and the modern gray wolf may have descended from the now extinct Johnson’s coyote which was even larger than them and had strong serrated teeth for big bone munching. They lived until about 1.5 million years ago so no human laid eyes on them in the new world.

If you want to see Dire Wolves, head to the La Brea Tar Pits where not only are there recreations of them hunting prey but there’s a wall filled with hundreds of their skulls. Thousands of the blackened, toothy craniums have been pulled from the pits. It seems the tar was a popular place to snack on a dying animal until the scavenger also found himself stuck.

The first people that arrived to the north American continent, those that came before 15,000 years ago didn’t bring their dogs, at least, not that we know of. But those that came later than that date, definitely brought their canines. The oldest dog fossils come from Florida with newer ones, from about 11,000 years ago, being discovered at the bottom of the western hemisphere in Chile. Dogs would have been important as sentries, hunters, and just like today, loyal companions… or as archaeologist Stuart Fiedel puts it, “man’s best friend, Mammoth’s worst enemy.” And these pups are descended from Asian… not American or European wolves. So those who crossed the bridge or sailed their boats along the coast of Beringia around 15,000 years ago brought their domesticated pets with them.

From Childs, quote, A domestic dog found buried at a Siberian site had a piece of mammoth bone inserted into its mouth, perhaps a scrap from the hunt, an offering to a trusted companion on the way to the far side of the world. End quote. So clearly, dogs aided in the hunt of mammoths… mammoth’s worst enemy indeed. But it seems odd that the oldest dogs in north America were found in Florida… unless of course the ancient native Americans that crossed at around that time didn’t stay put. Much like those that got in boats and sailed even further south, the people that were on this continent may have gotten here and just kept on exploring. Maybe they summered in the north and wintered in the south. Maybe they headed west or east depending on what stone or animal they wanted to hunt or use. Maybe they were always on the prowl. Probably they were always moving… always hunting. Then something new arrived again.

Florida’s curious for another reason; as I mentioned earlier it’s where a lot of Solutrean Stone Points have been found. But those are dated to around 20,000 years ago. Fast forward 7,000 years to when the later Beringians were coming over with their dogs and something remarkable, much like the Solutrean Points, appears. Enter the aforementioned Clovis Culture.
From Childs: The Clovis tool culture spread “like a cult” in just two hundred years it went from coast to coast and the users seemed to prefer only the biggest of game ie: mammoth.

The name Clovis comes from Clovis, New Mexico, a place I’ve been to and stayed a night in in a musty motel where I sipped whiskey and watched a thunderstorm rumble eastward towards the Texas Panhandle. Clovis contained the first Ice Age Kill site identified in North America. But of course, Clovis culture and points have been found almost everywhere in the US. As Childs points out, and what I was oblivious too before researching, is that the Clovis Points should have been named after a town in Florida or Maryland where there are much higher and older concentrations of them. 90% of Clovis points have been recorded east of the Mississippi, especially in the southeast of Florida and Georgia! I wish I had known that growing up! I would have scoured the hillsides around my childhood home for them. I had always assumed, like I was taught, I suppose, that the Clovis culture came down the glaciers and coast with the ancestral native Americans who spread it throughout the land instead of the people stumbling upon them or another culture using them that already lived here, in the east before sweeping backwards towards Alaska in less than two hundred years.

It could be that the way the country has grown from east to west has influenced the findings. The more development and digging there is, the higher the chance at finding something under the ground. The first non native people in what is now the US to find old fossils were slaves digging canals or ditches or foundations for buildings along the east coast 300 years ago. Construction is much more prevalent among the 13 original colonies. Also the presence of sinkholes and swamps in Florida, Georgia, and the lowlands of the Carolinas are great places to preserve artifacts, bones, and pieces of culture. So, it is possible that Clovis went eastward but… Clovis points aren’t in Siberia… yet the antecedent Solutrean Points ARE… in Europe, and the east coast… I believe it entirely possible that those Iberian Peninsula Europeans came over and flourished before going west where they greeted the incoming waves of newer Americans.

Regardless of where the Clovis Culture and its point came from, starting around 13,000 years ago, it spread extremely rapidly, becoming an instant American cult classic. And they were some of the largest tools in the world at that time. The long stone spear point is interesting for many reasons but its fluting is what sets it apart. It’s known as fluting because it resembles the fluting of Greek columns and on both sides, right down the middle, a channel has been knocked or knapped into the projectile. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. It could have affected the weight, the ability to attach it to a wooden spear shaft. It could have allowed blood to pour out of an animal after it was struck by the projectile. Or maybe it was purely aesthetic. Archaeologists have found some Clovis points that were ridiculously large, too large even to be used as a weapon. We’re talking two feet long. Childs quotes Bruce Bradley, an American lithics expert teaching Stone Age technologies at the university of Exeter in the UK who called the ridiculous Clovis Points symbolic and beyond function. He also says quote, They're out there showing off, it becomes part of the symbolic aspect of their culture. End quote. They being the Clovis peoples. In a 13,400 year old site called El Fin del Mundo in Mexico, amongst some big ole butchered ice age mammals laid a completely intact fluted and fully transparent quartz Clovis Point.

Sometimes, the stones used to make these Clovis Points were gathered from hundreds of miles away, occasionally, thousands. And sometimes it seems they were chosen for their color or pattern or beauty. These gorgeous stone Clovis Points can be some of the hardest stone to work with which means they were choosing them for aesthetics, not functionality. Childs says, quote, If you are going to kill, do it beautifully, powerfully. Choose the right stone. End quote.

Clovis Culture and Clovis Points signify a definite turning point in how these ancient American people hunted and lived. Or at least that’s the archaeological and paleontological record they’ve left. Hunting has always been important to humans because we have to eat and meat is a fantastic source of the nutrients we need to survive. But sometimes, the hunt is a means in and of itself. The hunt can become a way of life. A culture. A cult.

Childs again: An Ice Age hunt must have been musky gore, dogs ripping at the air, projectiles sailing, their shafts wobbling in flight before a tapered point sank into flesh or bone, an atlatl able to deliver a Clovis point at 76 miles per hour.

At a site in Russia, a spearpoint, not Clovis, but a spearpoint nonetheless has been found in the rib cage of a well preserved mammoth. At its particular depth, which would have pierced all of those layers of meat and fur, the spearpoint is estimated to have been thrown from… 15. feet. away. That’s within pointy curved striking distance. Otherwise known as, death. I’ve seen a video on the internet, unfortunately, of a man too close to an elephant. At which point the elephant got mad and flung that man in the air some distance before he landed in a manner to where he won’t be bothering any elephants anymore. The elephant in the video had no tusks at all.

Eleven thousand years ago at the Dent Mammoth site where the South Platte River and the Front Range intersect in Colorado, a group of Clovis hunters ambushed a herd of columbian mammoths and slaughtered, including little ones, a total of thirteen huge lumbering beasts. It appears the carnage lasted only minutes, meaning the art of the kill had been mastered by this point. And the hunt may have been the whole point of it all. Small game, which use considerably less energy to acquire yet provide the same amount of nutrients were found all around and in abundance. The Clovis Culture, more so than their predecessors, took the hunting and eating of mammoths to another level, hence: The Mammoth Eaters.

Hunts would have been remembered as important moments by the band or tribe or group of people who engaged in it, much like it is for today’s hunters. I met a friend recently in Denver who was able to go hunt a Bison in Idaho, and yes, I’m jealous, but he said of the hunt that afterwards, he couldn’t help but shed a tear at the loss of such a large animal. I myself have hunted, for birds only but every kill of the bird, and then the cutting out of that bird’s meat is exhilarating. Childs mentions the arctic peoples in Alaska who hunt bowhead whales from small boats to this day even though there’s plenty of smaller game to nourish them on the land. That game of squirrels and rabbits can be three times more efficient as a source of calories. After the dangerous hunt and kill, the whalers drag the carcasses up onto shore where they are left to become a permanent fixtures of the villages and towns. Picnics are had on the bleached bones. Stories are told of the hunt. A quote from Childs, Back in the ice age, the whales walked on land, armed with tusks and horns, each footfall shaking the ground. End quote. Legends are made with legendary characters. Both human and animal. The names of the brave hunter and fallen are not forgotten. What if it was the same with the Mammoth eaters? Maybe it was more about their culture… or in layman’s terms, more about being a people. If you think of it like that, the Clovis culture does indeed seem like more of a cult.

I know I quote Childs a lot but honestly, y’all should still read his book. I’m trying to leave out some of my notes and quotes so I don’t give the whole dang thing away. My next episode will actually quote a different book of his a good bit as well so I apologize. But here’s another memorable passage from Atlas of a Lost World:

Fourteen mammoth and mastodon kill sites have been documented in North America, most of them associated with Clovis toolkits and projectiles. The number may seem low, but it represents only those where human agency is irrefutable -not just scavenged… but attacked with weapons. Countless more must remain undocumented.

I would say countless is the wrong word, because stars that we can see are countless. I’d say more like the sands upon the shore countless. Clovis sites of killing and butchering and consuming of large Pleistocene Mammals can lay under up to, well, no… more than, 27 feet under the surface. In the last 10,000 years, layers of dirt, soil, dust, mud, weather, human occupation, and debris, have covered these irrefutable archaeological areas right out in the open. There are monstrous floods happening right now as I speak in Yellowstone that are no doubt uncovering tons of evidence of fossils and human occupation and I look forward to the work and subsequent reports of findings that will hopefully begin as soon as it’s safe.

The second biggest star of the ice age, after the woolly mammoth, has got to be Smilodon fatalis. AKA, the sabertooth cat. It may be a foot shorter than the African Lion, its closest relative, but it weighed twice as much and had 7 inches of exposed front canines giving it its signature look. With its stocky build and heavy weight, it had to have been an ambush predator, waiting in the bushes or up some tree or behind a boulder for the perfect moment to strike a baby mammoth, giant ground sloth, bison, or maybe the slower moving human at the back of the hunting party. Paleontologists have found fossils of dire wolves, glyptodonts, and other saber tooth’s with holes in their heads consistent with the massive saber tooth’s teeths. But lest you think you’re safe as long as you can outrun your buddy, we know they hunted in packs because of the large number of retrieved individual’s skeletons with life threatening but healed wounds. Animals that get hurt like that, don't survive unless they have help. They’re found from southern Canada to Peru and from Florida to California where 2,500 individuals have been excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits alone.

Even though you see a lot of them depicted as attacking the necks of their prey, which they no doubt did because of the many cats we’ve found with broken teeth, it appears more likely that they used those massive canines to stab, slice, and tear through their prey’s underbelly. Remember Doctor Grant’s explanation of a raptor in the first and only good Jurassic Park movie? Kinda like that. They must have attacked the neck though, after all, the Harlan Ground Sloth didn’t have those bony plates for nothing.

Then there’s the American Lion which, in reality, is probably more closely related to a jaguar than a lion. Despite it weighing over 850 pounds it’s estimated that they could run at top speeds of 30 miles per hour… and to top it off, it had the largest brain relative to its size than any lion ever. I’m not sure which one is more horrifying, the sabertooth or the American lion…

Oh but there’s more! Homotherium or the Scimitar cat also lurked the continent where it ran in short bursts of 40 mph, as is evident by its large nasal openings and slender front limbs. It would then, after running down its prey, cut it open with its non retractable claws and its 4 inch long slender, curved, and serrated, upper fangs. They were highly successful killers with one cave in Texas housing the remains of between three and four HUNDRED juvenile mammoths alongside the remains of a family of Scimitar cats that were somehow buried alive.

Lange has this to say:

The idea that babies of large herbivores were a favorite food of scimitar cats also gains support from the fact that elsewhere in the world, different Homotherium species preyed not only on baby mammoths but also on juvenile mastodons and rhinos. Following an attack and the slashing of vulnerable throat arteries, the young animal would bleed to death. Then the cat would drag it back to the den for a family feast.

And a terrifying quote from Childs:

While Smilodon had to be careful with its sabers, which were prone to breaking, Homotherium could be more liberal with its assault, jaws opening 90 degrees for large bites, teeth positioned to peel back slabs of flesh. A Homotherium kill would have been more violent than an attack by sabertooth or American lions, involved more kicking and screaming, flesh pulled off in steak-sized hunks. I can understand why the first people here might have climbed into sinkholes, or at least lingered around them and left artifacts and detritus. They needed protection at their backs, shelter they could jump into, spearpoints aimed up at the circle of sky.

Of course there were also American Cheetahs with their remains being found in abundance in the Southwest but their brains are smaller than their African relatives. This suggests they may have originated over here and walked westwardly where they fared better. Curiously, they may have died out 20 instead of 10,000 years ago so fewer humans would have fallen prey to them.

Life in Ice Age America wasn’t for the faint of heart. It would have been cold, dangerous, difficult, and exhilarating. There’s a cave called On Your Knees Cave on the Northwestern Coast of the continent where the remains of a human have been discovered with bite marks decorating the bone. They could have been scavenger marks, a fortuitous find for a big animal who then dragged the human into the cave. Or it could have been the work of a lucky predator on an unlucky ancestor.

Hunting these enormous woolly, toothy, and clawed animals would have required skill, communication, and bravery. And then the processing of the kill when it was still fresh would have required further coordination between individuals or groups. These bands of people would have had hunters, herbalists, healers, and shamans. One of the oldest cultural artifacts in the new world, used by the super ancients in Africa, is ochre, which was used in rituals from Siberia to South America. Clovis points are still found to be caked in Ochre. Graves are opened up with the body of the dead, usually young, covered in the red dust of Ochre. Stories, traditions, and ceremonies would have been brought over, merged together with newer ones from their neighbors, or created out of whole cloth.

And then there’s the rapidly changing climate during the melting of the glaciers and ice and the warming of the planet. Remember, we’re still in the ice age now and while we may think the earth’s changes are happening too fast and the consequences will be too costly for us as a species, it’s nothing compared to the world the ancients found themselves in as the Pleistocene melted way.

Flood stories are an important part of cultures around the world from Noah’s flood to Gilgamesh’s flood in Sumerian culture to the myriad of Native American Flood traditions. It isn’t surprising when you learn of what was going on as the ice melted around the world. Some floods burst out of lakes in the northern states and in Canada, sending floods a hundred miles wide down the Mississippi. People would have watched as the Bahamas, Florida, and Gulf of Mexico disappeared by yards and meters every year. Glacial Lake Missoula in present day Montana broke and refroze and broke again multiple times and each time must have been an earth shaking catastrophe. I imagine every spring people would have emptied out of valleys in fear of what they knew may happen from passed down stories of apocalyptic death. When the ice dam holding black Glacial Lake Missoula broke, it emptied to quote Lange, up to 27 million cubic yards per second, or ten times the combined flow of all the world's present rivers. At that rate, the lake emptied in just over four days. End quote. And it could have happened dozens of times over a couple thousand years.

To sum up the changing landscape and climate, here’s an amazing extended quote from Childs:

While sixteen thousand to fourteen thousand years ago had been ideal for human arrival - plenty of water, the cold slipping away, permafrost leaving the ground, grasslands rich in megafauna - Clovis arose when the good became too much. Ice dams were bursting, shorelines disappearing. Thirteen thousand years ago, a glacier dam broke in Montana and took out half of Washington State and some of Oregon and Idaho (that’s the Glacial Lake Missoula I just talked about). Ebullient masses of mud and glacial silt carried off bloated mammoth carcasses and archipelagos of drowned horses, everything inundated but the highest buttes and mountains. One waterfall was three and a half miles wide, water plunging four hundred feet into a cavity carved suddenly from the earth. Large portions of landscape were erased, giant gravel bars laid across the Pacific Northwest, sculpted into ripples twenty feet tall. Both Clovis and stemmed artifacts have been found in the area, meaning that this flood would have been witnessed by human beings. If anyone survived it, they must have sought shelter, perhaps atop a basalt-capped butte in the middle of the flood, the rock shuddering underfoot as everything turned into crashing debris as far as the eye could see. It wasn't just floods. In Central Mexico, volcanoes were erupting, encasing mammoths and human artifacts in superheated igneous ash flows, giant corpses cooked and tumbled all over each other. A controversial comet impact may be in the mix, too, with glass spherules sprayed around the Northern Hemisphere, molten silica found spattered against plant and animal remains. One hypothesis is that this atmospheric impact, which struck over North America but spread worldwide, changed the planet's climate for the next thousand years. Images in a carved stone pillar at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey show a catastrophic and long-remembered event, a swarm of fragments falling from the sky, possibly changing the planet's rotational axis. Star patterns recorded at the site pinpoint the event to around thirteen thousand years ago.

As if Earth weren't taking enough of a cosmic smack, some stellar event left a blast of high-energy photons and possibly lethal UV radiation in marine cores and tree rings about 12,830 years ago- either a core-collapse supernova nearby in the galaxy, an immense solar flare from our Own sun, or remnants of a bolide impact to the atmosphere. These events, together with thousands of years of epic flooding, dramatic sea-level rise, and the swift decline of charismatic megafauna, would have caught people's attention.

Caught people’s attention is an understatement. But mother nature wasn’t done throwing ancient humans all over the earth a curveball. The next set of global changes, in my opinion and in the opinion of others who are far more qualified than me to make such declarations, began the modern era of humans as we know it. The changes in human behavior and the consequences of those changes over the next thousand years during what is now known as the Younger Dryas are still being dealt with today and will be for as long as we are alive as a species. Barring some nuclear winter… The Younger Dryas is responsible for this podcast and every other modern thing.

In Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death, he successfully, if you ask me, argues that life was infinitely better before large institutions, mass agriculture, wars, diseases, and worst of them all, governments. If you survived infancy, you no doubt lived a long and beautiful life in a small family or tribal setting that wandered the land freely and peacefully. If one had a disagreement or was bored with their surroundings they could simply vote with their feet.

That arrangement survived until the modern era in many places around the world but during the Pleistocene it would have been the only way of life people knew. Yes, the sabertooths, bears, wolves, mastodons, and every other enormous lumbering beast would have been deadly and dangerous but at least you didn’t get fired from your job in a cubicle littered with Macdo wrappers as you worried about heart disease and rising gas prices.

The Younger Dryas changed all of that. It forced the forever expanding, exploring, adventurous, and free humans to retreat back to warmer climates after thousands of years of getting used to abundance and a slowly warming world. It forced them to do in large scale what they’d only been doing on the periphery for millennia. It forced humans, lest they starve, to plant which forced them to settle, which if you follow the dominos, leads to taxes and human rights violations from empires much larger than Mammoths.

The Younger Dryas is named after a flower and it began 12,800 years ago after so much cold freshwater flooded out into the oceans, especially into the Atlantic Ocean, that it pushed the saltwater down beneath the new cold water. This cold freshwater on top then froze which disrupted the gulf stream and turned the earth cold once again for a thousand years. It essentially restarted the Ice Age. The most likely cause was the bursting of a lake in Canada about 10 times that of Lake Superior which flowed rapidly into the Atlantic. During this period, the gulf stream was pulling icebergs down to Florida, a sight no one alive at the time would have recognized.

The younger Dryas ended the Clovis technology as people, cold again, became physically separated which probably forced diversions in technology, cultures, and languages. The number of people was also probably increasing as more were coming over after the bounty of a warming climate. And all of these people would be directly responsible for the event known to us as the Near Time Extinction.

But first let’s talk about the elephant in the room… well… not quite elephant… more like the archaic elephant cousin, in the room. The American Mastadon arrived to the new world some 15 million years ago, long before the columbian and the woolly mammoth. The word Mastadon actually means breast tooth and I do not know why, I’ve seen their teeth and… no. They’re shorter, stockier, longer, and more heavily muscled than their cousins and they evolved differently shaped skulls, tusks, and teeth. Instead of the sharply curved tusks of the snow clearing mammoths, theirs evolved more straight, but still curving upward, and they jut out from the upper jaw instead of the lower. They’re about the same size as Asian Elephants are today and they’re thought to have lived in herds. They had a leafy diet that also included bark, shrubby plants, mosses, and course grasses. They were very widespread throughout the ice age and many specimens from everywhere have been found. 

I visited two specimens in California at the Western Science Center in Hemet. One of them’s named Stevie and with 60% of his bones recovered, he’s the most complete in the region. The other one’s named Max and he’s the largest Mastodon found in the west at 11 feet high at the shoulder. That makes him 3 feet taller than the average mastodon and on par with his bigger cousins.

From recovered broken and splintered tusks and skulls, paleontologists know that mastodon on mastodon violence existed with some fights probably ending in death. Childs says quote, Tusks are splintered and bones are broken in places indicative of conflicts that could have been fights to the death, bodies crashing into each other, tusks piercing hide and muscle, trees toppling in their path. End quote. That would have been gnarly to see. But violence from other mastodons wasn’t the only thing to fear as humans also preyed upon the big beasts. Lange says, quote, Some sites such as one in western Washington state, contain mastodon bones that have healed from arrow point wounds, demonstrating that some animals escaped death at the hands of early hunters. End quote.

They too fell prey to what has become known as the Near Time Extinction except they may have outlived their cousins, well at least the ones not on islands.

The largest and most specialized armadillo ever, the extinct northern pampathere, were 6 feet long and 3 feet tall. They would have weighed as much as a black bear at 600 pounds and as Lange says, quote, With such dimensions, this beauty would be a real road hazard today. End quote. I lived 11 years in Oklahoma and I saw quite a few of their evolved cousins, the common nine banded armadillo and I always thought they were the strangest little guys. Their name comes from the Spanish who thought the critures resembled “a little man in armor”. But be warned, it’s probably not wise to eat any Armadillo roadkill as they are known to carry leprosy.

The Pleistocene Giant Beaver was about the same size as the ice age armadillo but a little longer at 9 feet long and a little lighter at 450 pounds. Their incisors were up to 6 inches long meaning they probably built some massive dams no doubt altering many a landscapes. This awesome dude hasn’t been found in the Southwest…. Yet. But their remains are in western Nebraska spreading eastward and northward from there.

Then there’s the strange and awesome Glyptodont that I mentioned earlier with the sabertooths. They were the tanks of the Mammal world and probably looked kinda like a dinosaur. They had a shell with at least 1,800 polygonal plates and a massive dangerous and swaying tail that may have been used as a deadly swinging weapon. Their remains have been discovered in the southwestern areas of Arizona and Texas although they’ve also been found in Florida and South Carolina. The biggest of the glyptos, glyptotherium arizonae, was 10 feet long and almost 5 feet tall and weighed about a ton.

The last large creature to roam ice age America that went extinct that I’ll be mentioning was a rather late comer to the continent. He’s my favorite and the one and only, bison! For a real in-depth look at the bison you’ll have to check out my very first episode on them titled Buffalo Kingdom that covers 140,000 years of their history including the ice age. The only thing I’ll mention about them here is that Bison Latifrons were awesome with enormously long horns that could measure seven feet from tip to tip, their body was 15 feet long, and they stood 8 feet tall at the hump. They disappeared 20,000 years ago unfortunately… or fortunately probably. Although they’d no doubt be some good eats. Again, they’re covered in my first episode. Bison Latifrons smaller cousin, of which our modern day bison evolved from is known as Bison Antiquus. Obviously, they too were larger than modern day bison. In reality, bison and humans were some of the last to cross over… at least in large enough numbers to make a difference. And what a difference both made.

Childs says, quote, The accumulation of evidence suggests that the first migrants into the Americas came along multiple routes and at different times before, during, and after the height of the Ice Age. It was not a single, small colonizing population, but many separate arrivals. End quote. The oldest known rock art is from 14,800 years ago in Nevada. Below a layer of ash in a place known as Paisley Caves in Riley, Oregon, human artifacts have been found with the firm date of 15,800 years old. More White Sands footprints show that humans were in the Southwest for at least 20,000 years. Genetic evidence from Alaska of a small child, a boy, shows that he was here 25,000 years ago. And in the Old Crow Basin of the Yukon Territory, a horse jaw was worked on 27,000 years ago when it was a fresh kill. The people who worked on it removed the tongue so it wasn’t a bone that was worked on later. People were here a lot longer than we were all collectively taught in grade school and they left their mark on the land and in the record. Each new group arriving would have been met by a group that was already here. Possibly for thousands of years. The Navajo say they came from the ground in the new world, that they’ve always been here. Maybe they were? I was taught that the Navajo were fairly late to the game and that they arrived in the southwest at about the same time, or shortly before the Spanish did. Yet there’s an Athabaskan Language, like they speak that arrived to Siberia AFTER the Navajo were in the southwest.

I think populations would have been small and scattered with hundreds of miles between two friendly groups and I believe they walked. They traveled extensively throughout this hemisphere to wherever they wanted whenever it suited them. I believe they would meet back up as well. Just like their Siberian relatives who would meet at Pleistocene gathering places repeatedly. Gobekli Tepe and Stonehenge might be repeated gathering sites. Or the people of the Monte Verde site in South America. There’s a place known as the Gault Site in Texas where butchered mammoth, horse, bison parts and more have been excavated. The site shows layers of activity for over 15,000 years. People in this hemisphere traveled and returned over and over again to that same Texas Spring to hunt and trade and party and feast.

Here’s another long and fantastic quote from Childs: As Lauriane Bourgeon's 2017 study of Bluefish Caves noted, "The archaeozoological evidence, together with the small size of the lithic assemblages, suggests that human occupation was probably sporadic and brief. They may have come from entirely different geographies, Pacific Rim travelers encountering Beringians, coastal people who came up from the Japanese Archipelago meeting inland dwellers speaking a different language. They could have separated so long ago in the wilderness of Beringia that they'd forgotten the other people existed, noting only by tools or mannerisms that they either shared some ancient ancestry, or they did not. Conversation would have been carried out through gestures and food. If they were enemies, they would not have known.

And yet another great quote from Childs to sum up the human migration I’ve been talking about:

Sites appear more quickly than they should if the people had moved and populated the way that modern hunter gatherers do. Instead they filled spaces like fast water, either by coast or inland. Todd Suroveli, an archaeologist specializing in the Paleo-Indian period at the University of Wyoming's Frison Institute, wrote in 2000, quote, It is quite possible that the Americas were populated very rapidly by highly mobile hunter-gatherers. End quote. Whether they still carried an atavistic wanderlust from breaking out of Africa long ago, or they reproduced in unusually high numbers, and then he says: the first people moved at a swift clip. End all quotes.

I believe for thousands of years, maybe even tens of thousands of years, humans roamed this continent while hunting and living off of the land in what can only be described as a garden of eden. Sure a garden with a whole bunch of thorns, teeth, claws, and deadly beasts, but a garden for those who could cut it, nonetheless. Maybe the people who crushed bones for the marrow came to this part of the world and attempted to survive with what little technology they possessed and were either led slowly to extinction or they became part of the first peoples of America who greeted later arrivals. Or maybe the butcher sites of 40,000 years ago were the first people who slowly and bravely explored further and further south until they became who we know as native Americans. Or maybe boats filled with families and tribes hopped from both sides of the pond over tens of thousands of years taking advantage of what lay ahead of them. Or maybe the final surge of ancestral native Americans rushed through the newly opened ice corridor that allowed them to flood the continent. They were adapted to the cold of the younger dryas and they proceeded to populate what we know of as native America. Or maybe… well, no, not maybe. I have no financial backers to appease or hypothesis to prove or scientific paper to be published so I’m going to suggest to y’all that every one of these scenarios is true and gospel and probably happened. With every passing year and archaeological site discovered and layer of human debris uncovered, and with every brave soul who comes along with new ideas, the picture will slowly become more complete and I have no doubt that a multiple wave of immigration theory will become the predominant theory. And with that theory must follow the acceptance that ancient humans, no matter the continent, were the main drivers of the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs.

When people showed up to a place, the animals disappeared. When they took their time to show up to a place the animals survived for longer, like those elephants on the greek island of Tilos until 4,000 years ago… when people showed up. The Blitzkrieg theory, named after the German words for lightning war, states that the new human technology, the hunger for the meat, the culture of the kill, and the thirst for large mammal hunts themselves rapidly, like a thunderbolt, decimated the numbers of large megafauna throughout not only north America but every other continent where cold ice age climates existed besides Africa.

It’s estimated that 85% of Australias land dwelling species weighing over 100 pounds went extinct 46,000 years ago at exactly the same time the first aboriginal peoples arrived. And to further support that ancient native Americans caused the massive extinction is Hawaii, New Zealand, and Madagascar where some of the last area of considerable size were inhabited by humans and in which massive extinctions of bird populations disappeared shortly after humans arrived. In New Zealand, 10 foot tall Ostrich cousins that weighed 1,000 pounds, the Moa died 300 years ago, or 600 years after the Maori came to the island. Lange says quote, Scientists who statistically examined the extinction of South American mammals at the end of Pleistocene time found that size was the only factor correlatable with probability of extinction. It made no difference whether the animals were marsupials or placentals. End quote.

It’s possible, like in Australia that the dogs we brought with us helped extinguish the other mammals here as well. Not just the dogs but the microbes and diseases too. We know bison brought over tuberculosis which may have spread to other large mammals although the evidence isn’t rock solid. None of the evidence is for any of this, really.

The near extinction of the Bison only a few hundred years after europeans arrived to the north American continent is evidence enough for how quickly it can happen. It didn’t start out as an attempted genocide of the beast, but rather they slowly lost habitat until the end when it indeed was a race to destroy them. Wolves and grizzlies on this continent also faced near extinction within a few hundred years of europeans arrival. Or what about the Carolina Parakeet! The dodo bird! The Thylacine in Tasmania!

Killing only 2% of the population each year would theoretically destroy a species within a few centuries according to some models so it didn’t have to be a race at all. Tusk ring studies have produced evidence that even at the end of their time on earth, the giant mammals ate well and gave birth at normal and optimal levels so the changing climate and the destruction of their territory to floods of bursting dams and rising sea levels or fires from ancient hunters or falling space debris can’t really be blamed with the current evidence we have. But the most compelling evidence to me of human’s involvement is the simple fact that over the entirety of the Pleistocene the earth got both hotter than it is now and colder than the last glaciation yet the animals thrived. Humans may not have thrived until towards the end, but the giant mammals that had ruled the earth since the end of the dinosaurs sure did. Lange puts it perfectly:

The difference between this post-glacial time and the previous interglacial times is that humankind, since about 30,000 years ago, had adapted to living in northern climates. People developed group hunting skills at the very time climate-induced changes in habitat were stressing the large animals.

Some of those large mammals did survive though. Besides the three big bears I mentioned earlier, the black, the grizz, and the polar bear, Mountains Goats, Bighorn Sheep, Caribou, Moose, Elk, and Pronghorns also survived. Although all of them would have been larger and would have had even bigger horns or antlers during that epoch. Deer aren’t actually native to North America but migrated here around 5 million years ago. Whereas Pronghorns are a uniquely North American group of animals with about a dozen different species living here during the last 2 million years. Today, only one species of Pronghorn survives. Of course, there’s the bison. And last but certainly not least, a bigger version of today’s jaguar existed during the ice age but its evolutionary offspring did survive with some still being spotted in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

These extinctions took its toll on the land too. The ground itself would have begun to change with the disappearance of the large mammals. Some plants had evolved such specialized seeds that it became difficult for them to propagate once their main source of spreading were gone. Mammoths were the best way the Osage Orange Tree moved its seeds. The mammoth would eat the giant fruit and leave the intact seed elsewhere in its poop. That way the new fruit could grow away from the tree which produced it. The Osage Orange Tree had a much larger range than it does today, or at least did before people helped with the planting. Another example is one of my favorite trees on the planet, the Joshua Tree! It’s range is small and it’s a particularly picky plant when it comes to growing and the Shasta Ground Sloth helped it to increase its range. The entire continent would have looked much different than it does now and the people living at the time would have been seeing the first glimpses of the changes that came after the elimination of the big mammals.

With the warming of the climate again and the opening up of an easier path through the glacier in Canada, more people flooded into the lands. The Standstill Hypothesis states that these people most likely crossed the bearing land bridge, ran into the wall of ice, decided to stay put for oh, 8,000 years or so and then when the glacier melted in front of them and the land bridge melted behind them, they decided to enter the North American Continent proper. With their arrival, the lifestyle of small bands and free roaming was over. People still met up over great distances but over time and with the addition of more new people constantly, that would begin to disappear.

Clovis too, had gone extinct, being replaced by the Folsom Point which is more associated with Bison than the ground shakers. The Folsom Culture lasted a couple thousand years, maybe. Then by around 10,000 years ago after the Younger Dryas and the end of the ice age, at least 10 distinct human groups can be identified through their differing stone tool and weapons traditions and that number would only increase as time marched on.

With the glaciers went the Mammoths and the mastodons and the giant ground sloths and with them the quintessential ice age predators became merely legends over time. The world was a different place and with each passing year, the myth of the ice age mammals would have grown. But the cult of the mammoth eaters was over. And the playground of Giants had melted away.

I hope y’all enjoyed this episode, I had a great time reading, researching, making art to accompany it, writing it, and to be honest, I’ve been living in the Ice Age since I started it. It’ll be good to thaw out a little but I miss the old world. The world I never got to experience… Next time you hear from me I’ll fast forward a little to see how the ancients became the natives as we explore pre-Columbian, pre-1200s collapse, and the pre-history of the Anasazi and the American Indians. Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

The Rise & Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte

Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre; Second Edition by Ian M Lange

Rancho La Brea: A Record of Pleistocene Life in California by Chester Stock

First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America by David J. Meltzer

The Trees that Miss the Mammoths By Whit Bronaugh

The Snowmastodon Project: Mammoths and mastodons lived the high life in Colorado by Mary Caperton Morton

University of Michigan: Underwater storage techniques used by early North American hunters preserve meat for at least six months; May 3, 1995

Ancient human-sloth hunt hinted at in 15,000-year-old footprints by Sid Perkins for Science Magazine

Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Los Angeles Museum of Natural History

La Brea Tar Pits & Museum

Western Science Center of Hemet, California