We met Dr. Ballard at the Cosmic Summit, and decided we'd love to have her on the podcast to discuss her work. She is a Geologist and Biogeographist, and a member of the Comet Research Group. She became interested in the YDIH and started drilling lake cores looking for evidence of biomass burning. She joins us this episode to discuss her background, her interest in the YDIH, and her related field and lab work, as well as some of her current interests and possible future projects.

You can find out more about her here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joanne-Ballard/research

Links to her thesis as discussed in the episode: A Lateglacial Paleofire Record for East-central Michigan https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_olink/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=ucin1250268463 Joanne Ballard PhD Dissertation, https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/3492/ Evidence of Late Quaternary Fires from Charcoal and Siliceous Aggregates in Lake Sediments in the Eastern U.S.A.

She also sent us a lot of interesting links to articles and papers after the episode, listed below: Sergei Leshchinskiy study on bony malformation of late Pleistocene mammoths of Siberia and Poland, acidification of the landscape https://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0081-new-theory-on-why-the-woolly-mammoth-became-extinct/?comm_order=best https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/616417

Did inbreeding doom the mammoths - fossils from the North Sea, Jelle Reumer https://www.science.org/content/article/did-inbreeding-doom-mammoth Pygmy mammoths of the Channel Island of California https://www.amazon.com/Pygmy-Mammoths-Channel-Islands-California/dp/0962475084 Other late occurring relict populations of mammoths occurred on Wrangei Island (Siberia), Pribolof Island, St Paul Island. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040618070946.htm#:~:text=Using%20accelerator%20mass%20spectrometer%20(AMS,after%20the%20last%20glacial%20maximum. Hartnagel and Bishop 1921. Online book, read about Mastodons, Mammoths and other Pleistocene mammals of New York state, buried in the peat. 161 pages. https://books.google.com/books?id=9rxRAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false Blue Babe, bison carcass 50,000 years old, Professor Dale Guthrie https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-bison-stew-blue-babe-alaska

A North American permafrost study. For reference regarding the shaken--not stirred cocktail of mammals/trees/sediments/ice. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/bor.12036