Hey y’all, I know it’s been a long time since my last episode but I promise I am working hard on the continuation of the series I began with the Pleistocene mammoth eaters episode back in June. Before I started that episode I had wanted to do one on the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 that took place across the southwest and northern Mexico but I had recently visited so many museums and paleontological sites that I just had to talk about the now extinct megafauna. For whatever reason, the big beasts were weighing heavy on my mind. But when I began the research, the story became entangled with the first people’s of the americas.. and then I read Childs’ Atlas of a lost world and that cemented the projection of the episode for me. And before I knew it, I had an entire series on my hands. A series that began with the Pleistocene and the big mammals and the mammoth eaters and ends with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The story of the native Americans would be the focus of the series and it all fell into place so extremely easily. Obviously, that’s a massive undertaking that would be better suited for a Mike Duncan history of Rome style podcast but I couldn’t be more excited to be tackling it with the few… or many at this point… humble hours I’ll be talking about it.

There’s a lot of great literature and articles and podcasts and information out there that I’ve been pouring through and over and around like a flash flood stream through a boulder filled red canyon. It seems like every time I start a book that book quotes from some other book and I’ve got to get my hands on that book and on and on and down the spiral rabbit hole I go like the people who I’ll be discussing soon. That spiral will be a big theme.

I eventually made a map to break the coming episodes up into certain topics and time periods and peoples but the more I reed and make notes and gather quotes, the more I have no idea how I’m going to structure it all but I’m really excited to get it out. I’m four books down with some archaeological podcasts under my belt and my own stories and adventures to draw on and I promise it’ll be worth it.

After the Archaic, and basketmaker, and pueblo 1 and 2s and other oddly named cultural periods of people in the southwest I’ll talk about those always fascinating and intriguing Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloan peoples that so many from Mulder to the History Channel get wrong. I’ll finish the series of preEuropean conquest Native Americans with the extremely important Pueblo Revolt of 1680… After that I’m thinking… outlaws and gunfighters? I don’t know, stay tuned, there’s a whole lot of ground to cover before we get to the mustache wearing antiheroes. A whole lot of extremely interesting history that I am dying to spit out way too fast into the microphone for y’all.

Before I sign off though, I’d like to revisit something from the previous episode. I thought about starting the next one with this discussion but it wouldn’t be right so I figured an update on the podcast and a dive into this would be a good reminder that I’m still here for y’all, my dear listeners. You’ll have had to have listened to the previous episode for this to make any sense…

130,000 years ago is a long time. It’s long enough to give you such a crick in the neck… In the last episode I suggested that there’s evidence of man being in the Americas 130,000 years ago and that those men and women had come from Asia and had begun a tradition known as the bone smashing marrow sucking culture (my term) with the only evidence of this tradition being spirally fractured mastodon bones and round stones with which they did the bone smashing to get at that sweet sweet marrow. That extremely ancient site is known as the Cerutti Mastadon site and it was found during a road expansion project near an ancient creek bed in San Diego.

Since the previous episode I’ve done a little more research because that truly fascinated me. Could humans really have been here that long?! Even longer than our current evidence shows humans being in Europe? Where humans even in Asia at the time to have been able to come over here? The argument I used is that the people sprinted over without stopping. There’s great internal evidence in Indigenous humans that inhabit the Americas to support this theory of a more adventurous people and I am very inclined to believe it. Childs supports that theory with great genetic evidence. But is the Cerutti Mastodon site in fact evidence for truly ancient people’s being here?

Some native American archaeologists, such as Paulette Steeves has argued that this is indeed the case as many native stories and oral traditions say. The Dine, or Navajo people believe they came up from the earth like corn meaning they’ve always been here. Although, they also believe that, well, I’ll let Childs tell you, quote, When they first reached this world, known as the Fourth World, they found it covered in water and occupied by monsters. They had to unleash heroes to kill the monsters. In my mind, this means Ice Age lakes and floods when the land was ruled by megafauna, and the heroes came with spears made of rock or bone. End quote. Other native American traditions,, especially the pueblo peoples, of whom I will talk about extensively in the next few episodes, but some pueblo people say that they emerged from the underworld at a location to the north and then traveled south to their current locations in the four corners. The stories tell of a dark and wet world with high walled canyons that they came out of and traveled until they made it to the bright and warm canyon world of the southwest. That sounds a lot like the far northern hemisphere with its lack of daylight and wet and cold end of ice age climate and territory that they would  have travelled out of on foot through the ice free corridor until they made it to the southwest. So while Paulette Steeves argues that some traditions believe they came from the earth and have always been in the region, other’s suggest differently.

Archaeologist, Doctor Jesse Tune says that at Cerutti, there’s really a big, quote, lack of anything recognizable as an artifact, end quote. He’s seen it and he’s not convinced. I listened to other archaeogisits who have seen and held the stones claimed to be the bone smashing stones and they weren’t convinced that these were human made tools either. Yes, it is true that the bones really were smashed but that could have happened naturally. The bones have been there for 130,000 years after all. We know elephants return to the gravesite of the dead, what if mastodons practiced the same cultural touchstones and trampled the bones themselves. Also, they were in a creek bed with once flowing water where they could have tumbled and been churned and crushed and splintered against rocks and tree trunks…

Doctor Tune makes a really good point when he says that everywhere humans went after they left Africa, they left stone tools. With this bone smashing site there really isn’t evidence of tools… unless you count the bone smashing rocks themselves and there just isn’t any matching pattern anywhere on earth to suggest that it’s a tool… unless you count the few others around north America where the same evidence exists… like the site in the Yukon Territory… But that site is 40,000 years old. Then there’s the 10 others on the great plains in Nebraska and Kansas which have been dated to 20,000 years ago give or take. That means there wasn’t a single bit of technological evolution for 110,000 years for the bone smashing marrow sucking culture?! That seems unlikely. Highly unlikely.

Paulette Steeves’ research is more about, quote unquote, decolonizing historical narratives about Indigenous people and the settlement of the Americas. That means she wants to take the storytelling of her people’s past away from the colonizing European whites. Which, yes, I am all for more Indigenous Americans getting involved in archaeology and history and anthropology but there are some real consequences to suggesting native people have been here for 130,000 years.

I love the idea and the excitement of it being an early site but if it is a site from that long ago there’s a possibility that the bone smashing marrow sucking culture aren’t even human… but instead some sort of hominid. And if that’s the case you don’t want to argue that native Americans descended from these bone smashing marrow sucking hominids because… well… that would mean whoever did descend from them aren’t actually human… but instead a cousin like the neanderthal or denosovin. So it’s a tricky site with tricky ramifications. I think further evidence and research and discussions are going to come along and will be important and informative and most of all, exciting. But I think it’s crucial to have an open mind.

I don’t have a title for the upcoming episodes that begin after the ice had begun to melt but for now I think I’m going to go with Ancient Ones. See y’all again in the Southwest soon.