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About the guest: Ben Potter, PhD is an archaeologist & Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. James Chatter, PhD is a retired archaeologist and paleontologist. They recently published a paper on the diet of the Clovis people of North America at the end of the last Ice Age.
Episode summary: Nick talks to Dr. Potter & Dr. Chatters about: the Clovis culture and initial human colonization of the Americas; human diet since the last Ice Age; ancient human diets; hunting of Mammoths and other large herbivores; Clovis technology & culture, including projectile weapons; and more.
Related episodes:
* M&M #160: Diet, Hunting, Culture and Evolution of Paleolithic Humans & Hunter Gatherers | Eugene Morin
* M&M #154: Evolution & Genetics of Human Diet, Metabolism, Disease Risk, Skin Color and Origins of Modern Europeans | Eske Willerslev
*This content is never meant to serve as medical advice
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* Episode transcript below.
Full AI-generated transcript below. Beware of typos & mistranslations!
Ben Potter 3:12
Sure, I'm Ben Potter. I'm a professor of anthropology up at University of Alaska Fairbanks, and my research mainly is in bridging archeology, but I'm very interested in the peopling of the Americas, and I've written on the archeology and the genetics relating to that.
James Chatters 3:29
And I'm Jim chatters. I'm an archeologist and paleontologist working out of the Seattle area in Washington. I'm also secondarily affiliated with McMaster University, where I serve on doctoral committees.
Nick Jikomes 3:46
And so you guys have, you know, we're going to talk about a recent paper, but also how that hooks into, I think, a more general and wide ranging body of work that that you guys are a part of, to do with, with human pre history. And I think much of what we'll talk about here is essentially the the human pre history of North America, how people got into North America, what they were doing when they were there, who they were, and all that stuff. The the new paper you talked about, focused in a lot on what people were eating in that time, which is a fascinating subject, and it connects into a lot of stuff that I cover on the podcast, including diet metabolism, what people eat, and what the metabolic consequences of that are. But the sample that you work with on this new paper is from something called a Clovis person, someone who lived during this Clovis period of history. Can one of you just give us a brief overview of what was a Clovis culture? What time period are we talking about here, and what are the sort of, just the broad strokes of what we know about those people. You
James Chatters 4:48
want to take that one? Ben,
Ben Potter 4:49
well, you go for it. Jim, you're more closely associated, oh, right
James Chatters 4:53
down here, south of the ice. Yeah, COVID is the first and really the. Only continent wide cultural manifestation that we see in the Americas, in North America, and it extends from the southern margin of the glacial ice so in parts of southern Canada all the way down to Northern Venezuela. It is characterized by a trianguloid, large triangulate, fluted spear points, that is for the haft and groove, large knives, bi facial knives, end scrapers with little spurs on the edges of them for grooving bone. And it's also found with, frequently found with large bone, ivory or antler or shafts. It's seen frequently in association with mammoth remains at kill sites. Mammoth bones are easy to see. People find them. They get excited because they're bigger than modern animals, and so mammoth kills are are frequently reported, and there are 14 of these known. But it's also found as scattered spear points throughout the eastern United States, and few small campsites have been found, very ephemeral campsites where people stayed for a very brief period of time, maybe a few weeks at most, before moving on.
So it's a highly mobile what appears to be hunting based culture between roughly, depend on who you ask, between 11,000 412,700 years ago,
Nick Jikomes 6:41
I see. So we're talking about 11 to 12,000 years ago, give or take. And these people were basically all over the Americas, a very large extent. And they shared sort of a common culture in terms of, like the tools and the artifacts and the lifestyle they seem to be leading.
James Chatters 6:56
Yes, very much the same sort of thing everywhere you see them. But they're between 12,000 713,400
Nick Jikomes 7:03
years, I see, and is a little bit older. Is it thought that these are likely to be, this was, like the first culture, the first peoples, to actually get into the Americas? Or is that debated? Or what's going
James Chatters 7:15
on? Matter of debate.
Ben Potter 7:17
Yeah, it's complicated. I think we'll have time here to nuance it. So that's great, because the media sometimes, you know, latches onto a number or a site. So when, when Jim mentioned, this is the first widespread cultural manifestation. This is what we'd expect to see for a colonizing, very rapid spread of people in a very short window of time, as Jim mentioned, and the toolkits are very homogeneous. They look the same wherever we find them. And that really does speak of a colonizing population, roughly 13 five, some people argue is, you know, later, like maybe 13 113, 1100, but certainly a narrow window. So the question then is, do these represent the the first Native Americans that are the ancestors that are entering the region. And here we have to sort of look at the genetics as well as the archeology. And from what we can tell, there's, there's three major branches of Native American ancestry. The first two, or two of them don't matter as much because they're in the Far North. So ancient beringians are the ones that I normally deal with up here in Beringia. And they never really got further south, and say, the Yukon Territory. So they remained in Beringia, north of the ice sheets. The northern Native American group, nna is what they're called. That's a metapopulation that seemed to remain in the northwest coast. So basically Puget Sound north into sort of a British Columbia coast and Alaska coast and those people, we don't really find them further south. These would be ancestors of algonquians, Dene, people like athabascans and Tlingit sailuk, like that. Of course, at the very end of the record, we see, you know, a later movement south of Navajo and Apache ancestors. But we clearly know they're coming from the north. So that leaves the main plate, or the main meta population, which we term South Native Americans or SNA and that's basically the ancestors of every Native American, sort of south of Canada, so all the rest of North America, Mesoamerica, and all of South America. And when we look at the individuals that are that are linked with this genetic group, the Anzac individual is, of course, the earliest. It's the very first one we have. And every other ancient remain we have, Spirit Cave, la gua Santa people in further South America, they're all part of sub lineages of this SNA group. So really, we're looking at the peopling of this SNA group, and genetically, sort of the diversification within that is somewhere between 14 eight and 12 eight. So 14,000 812,800 which does map on really nicely to when we see this Clovis phenomenon. And so then there's two questions, you know, do these represent the earliest peoples? I think, as as Jim mentioned, the. The there's not firm consensus. A lot of folks, I think many of our colleagues, agree that this is probably the case, but there's probably a smattering of earlier materials that are probably the direct ancestors. Genetically, we know that these early SNA groups are very small, so maybe a single founding population of maybe 200 individuals. You're not going to see that archeologically right away. It takes some time before they build up. So some of these sites, perhaps Monte Verde, perhaps paid Latin, you know, if these are connected, associated directly with secure dates, those could represent, you know, clovid, Santos certainly. And we really only find them at enough numbers, at around this 13,000 year period. And and then there's the other argument for maybe really early sites, like, you know, White Sands, footprints, the coopers ferry site. There's, there's a few sites that are out there that have been argued to be older than 15 or 16,000 I think definitely the jury is out on all of those don't seem to tap on genetically with what we understand. And I think White Sands might prove to be the most secure at this point, maybe 22,000 and that's the time period when, when we know Native American ancestors are still admixed in with other groups in Asia. But we don't know who those people are, if, if the dates are secure. So it's a complicated question, but COVID is really important in this debate,
Nick Jikomes 11:19
but, I think bird's eye view here, if I'm if I'm understanding correctly, no matter what the specific answer to the question of who are the very, very first people to get into the Americas. At some point, there were these people that had a certain culture that's referred to the Clovis culture. And you start to see that everywhere in the, you know, from northern North America all the way down into South America over a relatively short period of time, which implies that there was some kind of, at some point, some kind of fast radiation outwards such that they all retain the same culture, because they presumably inherited that from from a common ancestor. And so the Clovis people sort of spread very quickly throughout the Americas, starting at some point, perhaps they were the first people, and there were more ephemeral populations of their ancestors. There a little bit here, a little bit there, before that, perhaps other people were around. Maybe there's some debate on that. But at some point, this Clovis culture kind of spreads very quickly,
James Chatters 12:14
right? We have a there are really only a couple of possibilities here, given the widespread distribution of Clovis, one is there was nobody else there to begin with, so they are the first. Or if there was somebody there already, they had a completely different ecological niche. So it was possible for this expanding mammoth hunting Clovis population to enter their landscape, their their regions, without competing with them, and therefore capable of moving in without any impediment. Those are really the only viable two population, two possibilities there, and the latter would, as Ben was pointing out, require that we had some previously existing genetic population that no longer exists.
Nick Jikomes 13:11
So, I mean, it's a formal possibility, but what we don't lack, we lack that kind of evidence that would definitively show Right, right?
James Chatters 13:19
The possible. Archeological manifestations that could predate Clovis, or what we recognize as Clovis, are not very much older than Clovis, and they, in the case of say, like the Wally's beach site in southern Alberta, where there are horse and camel kills, definitely human killed animals with artifacts left behind with the bones. We don't find spear points with those, but those might just be the earliest Clovis populations. So some of these other ones, Ben mentioned Monteverdi. I don't think Monteverdi is a possibility. It's way too far south to have been part of this. If it isn't the rapidly expanding population like Clovis, it's not going to make it South America that fast if it's part of that same genetic group, what we see in South America instead is we see a culture that is clearly Clovis derived, called the fishtail complex. The spear points are like Clovis points only. They have a waste and those appear in South America. And as soon when they start appearing, you can see their numbers increasing in frequency as the number of species as the now extinct species decline. It's just a complete opposite directions they're going. So it's pretty clear that people are coming in as Clovis derived populations, probably after around 13,000 years ago. Yeah.
Nick Jikomes 15:00
And so is the idea here that these people walked over from Asia over what is today the it would be the land bridge that connects present day Russia to Alaska, and they came in through that route.
Ben Potter 15:15
Yeah. So there's certainly debate as to routes, and our paper doesn't speak to either route. That doesn't really matter. The point is, at some point, whether they came through an ice Creek corridor or whether they came along the coast, eventually they got to the America south of the ice sheet, and that's where our story takes over and relevance to sort of the peopling part of this is that our our data now, for the first time, we have direct evidence of what they were, what their economy was like before. We just had indirect evidence. And we can talk about that. This fits into pretty elegant models for the the nature of this life, nature of this adaptation that allowed people, modern humans, to expand into these very far northern regions make it to Beringia across the land bridge. East, West is not a problem. It's the North that becomes an issue. How do you, you know, take mid latitude adapted peoples and then have them survive in the far north, which is much more difficult, and then they took this strategy, which included prop city and hunting through Alaska, and then we see them, you know, in this Clovis population. So it does allow us to begin to explore and explicate the nature of this adaptation, how they became so successful. Because this was a very successful adaptation, a very successful colonization event, which led to all of the Native Americans, the many millions that have had successful heritages, sort of just through through the millennia,
Nick Jikomes 16:41
and so remind us to in terms of the big timeline here is this time period that we're talking about? Is this still considered the Ice Age, or is this the tail end of the ice age? And how far? How far is the ice going across this period? This is, this
James Chatters 16:57
is the tail end of the Ice Age. The deglaciation begins about 16,000 years ago and increases in its in its speed of of melt, and the glaciers are pretty much gone throughout all but the northern parts of Canada, Northeastern Kuwait, and by around 12,000 years ago, majority ice is gone, so it's a fairly rapid melt off. And the argument has been there are two ice masses. One is the continental ice and the is the other is the Cordilleran ice. So one is coming off the Canadian Shield and the other off the western mountains. And as one moves east and the other West, they coalesce in what is now Alberta up into the Yukon. And the question is, When did those two ice masses separate enough that human populations could pass down between them, and those who suggest that people entered the Americas by way of the Pacific coast, for which, by the way, there is thus far no actual evidence that they either pass through the Pacific coast, because they don't think the ice between these two glaciers had separated enough for populations to move down between so when did the ice free corridor open up enough that people could enter which the big question, and Ben probably has a better handle on what the current thinking on that is, what the most Recent dates are on that,
Ben Potter 18:40
yeah, yeah. So that that's there's still debate. It hasn't been resolved. You know, the early estimates are something along the line to 15,000 this would be passable. And we have plants. We have sand dunes that are activated, certainly impossible if it's under ice or under per glacial lake. Others have argued that it's more restrictive. Maybe it's 12, 612, 1600, or so. So obviously, this is a really important debate, because Clovis, we see generating roughly around 13,000 a little bit before. I think most models would be fine with Clovis going through the ice free corridor, even the skeptics. But the issue is, what about these early sites? And you can see the issue. It depends on which early site you think is their association. Those that think that they're not that good, there's no problem. Those that think, wow, the 16,000 year old site is a legitimate then there's the issue of the quarter might not be passable yet. So it's all tied to the scattering of and I'll just have to say, very different sites with very different levels of evidence. None of them link with each other, and none of them link with later people. There's always going to be debate. They're not really, they're not unequivocal. And so that's, that's, ultimately, it doesn't matter for our purposes, because this is a successful, you know, and it took a successful. Expansion with Clovis clearly genetically linked with later peoples, with all later peoples. So it makes this, the research that we just published, important at a number of different levels. To look at this library, aeroglacial hunting of large mammals, like a fauna, very near ice. This is what we clearly see in in Siberia. We clearly see it in Beringia, and now we see it in Montana, or what was, you know, ancient Montana, almost 13,000 years ago. In fact, you can see it all the
James Chatters 20:31
way east into Europe, going back into the gravettian. I mean, it's, it goes back into the close to 30,000 or over 30,000 years ago that people had begun hunting in paraglition environments and killing them. So it's not a, not a recent phenomenon.
Nick Jikomes 20:48
Yeah, I was actually going to ask this. Ask this next. So you know, by the time you get Clovis and the paper that we're going to talk about, the predecessors of these people, the people that were already in Eurasia and other parts of the world. So it sounds like there's already evidence that they were engaged in hunting large animals and doing that type of thing in glacial or periclacial environments. Yeah, there's
Ben Potter 21:11
really exciting research. My I've been involved with a team up here at University of Alaska Fairbanks, led by Matt wooler, where we're really trying to look at a mammoth ecology, particularly stable isotope ecology and sort of mobility with the sort of strontium and oxygen and other kinds of elemental analysis. It's really interesting. So we published, just earlier this year on there was an earlier male mammoth in the later female mammoth, where we're taking sections along the tusk and looking at their life history. Where are they moving on the landscape? And some of the things that we found is that they're very, very mobile, managing to pretty much move across eastern Beringia, number one, number two. There are certain areas that they like. So there's certain habitat that seem mammoth, friendly. And really interestingly, those are the areas that we see the most occupation, these early pre Clovis occupations that are that are clearly in secure context, sites like one point dating the 14,000 or 14,000 years ago. We actually have three mammoths that were found at that site, including that's where this one female died. And so we're really getting a good picture of how people can adapt to these paraglition conditions, in what we term the Arctic step, or the mammoth step, where you have tundra like plant, you have step like plant into this very productive grassland ecosystem found in East northeast Asia, Siberia. It's found in Beringia, and it is found in the northern Great Plains, where we've worked on the tantric one individual. So this is an adaptation that is geared towards late glacial, relatively homogeneous sort of landscapes, prior to this onset of the policy and warming. So it's an interesting and very successful adaptation I see.
Nick Jikomes 22:57
So basically sounds like using isotopes, and maybe we'll get into some of the method, methodological, details a little later. But basically, there were mammoths all over the place. In certain parts of the world, they were mobile. They moved around a lot, maybe not unlike present day animals of different kinds. They probably migrated from one place to another according to what was going on from one season to the next. And it sounds like a lot of the evidence in sort of the pre Clovis world, you guys and other people find, you find ephemeral human encampments, meaning it looked like people were at places for certain parts of the year or for little bits of time, and it really what you were just saying. It sounds like they're following around animals that move around from one season to the
James Chatters 23:38
next. Right, the sites that we see that we see that are associated with that are Clovis, the campsites that are Clovis are retain very high patterning. Okay, people are there briefly. They're doing a few things within that space, and they're not occupying it long enough to change what they're doing within within any of the parts of that space. And so your record is very, very it's a very, very clean stamp of behavior. It's left behind so that that tells you the people were only there briefly and only once had they returned repeatedly to that same locality. You'd either see a sort of a will be referred to as a palimpsest of different occupation events breaking up the discrete patterning that you see from that first episode of occupation. You either see that or you'd have stratified sequences where you where you have the same kind of camp there repeatedly as sedimentary processes, cover up the previous camp. You're still seeing people coming back over and over again. Clovis. We don't see that in in western Clovis, particularly, we don't see that any camp we see was occupied once, once only, and never returned to again. And so what these fit is an idea that was put out by you. Bob Kelly and Larry Todd 40 years ago, and that is that Clovis people were moving from kill to kill. So the population would stay at the previous kill location, the non mobile members of society, the children, the caregiving women, the old people, would stay behind at the last kill and continue to live off what's left of it and maybe forage around the landscape a little bit while they're waiting for the able bodied folks out there hunting mammoth, then come back and say, okay, or more elk or bison, or whatever they were going after and come back and say, Okay, we've got another one. And so pick up and leave and go to that next spot, never come back. That's the pattern we see with Clovis. It fits. It the pattern that we've been seeing since they put out that idea has continued to reinforce that interpretation.
Ben Potter 25:59
We should talk about the implications of this. There's broader implications beyond just simply, that's interesting about the past. So when we study hunter gatherer human ecology, you know this is as a species. This is 99.9% of our time on the planet has been as members of small hunter gatherer groups. And in the recent past, we have ethnographic information we can actually visit and look at the history, you know, look at what they actually do on the landscape now, and we can, sort of, we can model the success of that behavior. But when we look at maybe foreigners or collectors, different kinds of models we have now, there's nothing in the in the recent past that matches the expectations that we see these early peoples. And so when and Kelly and Todd modeled this, when they thought about this way back when they invented a new type, a traveler, a new kind of human ecological model that doesn't really map anything that we've got today, obviously it had profound impacts on how we populated the planet. And so this is the importance of that particular model. It relied on megafauna specialization. It relied on mapping onto the animals. You understood their ecology. You could enter new areas. You could break biotic barriers. If you did something that would be akin to more modern foraging ecology. You're limited to a certain area. You're really, really good at getting everything you can you're mapping on to that place. You can't transfer that knowledge to a new place very easily, so it's a very different way of light that we're trying to uncover. Yeah, yes.
James Chatters 27:30
As animals expand their range, they typically do what's called Habitat tracking. They they move with the kind of habitat as their habitat expands as a consequence of climate change. In this case, the habitat is the animals themselves. So they're, they're they're following animals that they understand, moving into a new landscape they may not know with an ecosystem they're not familiar with, but the animal that they're seeking is still familiar to them, so they don't have a big learning curve as they move into that new ecosystem. So that's what allowed them to move across the continent into all sorts of different ecosystems, because they were found their their habitat itself
Nick Jikomes 28:15
was mobile. Yeah, yeah. The habitat is is the animals that they're following, yeah, their
James Chatters 28:20
niche was a mobile niche. I guess have niche is a better word to use, or in this case, for ecological purposes, it was moving, and they simply followed it.
Nick Jikomes 28:29
Yeah. And I suppose, if this is all true, and it sounds like it probably is, another implication is like, when you think about, for example, all of the Native American populations that we might talk about in history that ended up arising in North America. If what you're saying is true, Ben, what you mentioned, if they are descended from this type of person, it means that when we think about their diet, when we think about how they emerge and evolve, we actually can't look to other hunter gatherer populations that are more recent, you know, in other parts, in other parts of the world, as a, you know, as a as a map to to what might be as a map for, for how these people used to live and who they're descended from. This is sounds like a relatively new culture that arose that allowed people to eat mobile and follow around these types of animals. It
James Chatters 29:21
was kind of like an old culture.
Ben Potter 29:22
Yeah, it's complicated. So part of this deals with sort of modern humans. We're all talking about modern, anatomically modern humans, with just the same brains and same social complexity that we have today. So that is more like this is the ancient model that allowed for relatively small populations with very high mobility, large territory sizes. That was what was dominant in the past. The last I see what's interesting and what's, you know, sort of the big anthropological questions today are, how do we shift from that to, like, beginning to domesticate plants and animals? Yeah, that's really interesting. Same, because you need to know what happened before to understand the context of that very new kind of tradition. And we see this independently emerge in various places in the Americas. So it's very, very exciting to understand that baseline, that that that persisted for such a long time around the globe, and then these Holocene shifts, and it does tie into climate change. So when we look at sort of expectations of this global warming that we experience now, and by the way, it's much more pronounced in northern in the higher latitudes, they appear in the Arctic, and understanding the last major time that we saw a major warming event was this period we're talking about. And for timing, the expansion of Clovis and SNA groups occurred during the bowling ally red period. So this was a warmer interstate period within the Ice Age. And at the end of it, at the end of Clovis, we see a sharp turn to more colder, arid conditions called the Younger Dryas that your readers might or listeners might be familiar with. And at the end of Younger Dryas, that's that last gasp, and you get the expanding, warming, moisture conditions of the Holocene. So what's interesting is not just sort of this expansion in its warm period, but in the end of Clovis, basically, Clovis populations begin to adapt to more local conditions right at the onset of this Younger Dryas. So there's definitely a climate signal happening for the success of this group in ways that we're still trying to disentangle. Now,
James Chatters 31:28
yes, it's possible. It's coincidence, simple coincidence, that the mega fauna that human beings were dependent on were becoming so depleted that they needed to focus on more local ecosystem at the same time as the Younger Dryas occurred. These are these are coincident that the extinctions of mega fauna are occurring just before the onset of the Younger Dryas. That's where the dates tend to be coming. Coming out these days is not too much under not too much less than 13,000 years ago is when we see this kind of cliff of mega Fauci populations dropping off. So around 12,007 to 12,800 we we see the beginning of the the Younger Dryas and so. And at the beginning Younger Dryas, at the end of Clovis is when we start seeing the local populations develop their own ways of life. In the northeast, you have the caribou hunters. In the Great Plains, you have the bison hunters. But in the southeastern United States and in the late country of the West, you got people who are becoming more generalized hunter gatherers that are using a lot more plant materials and things like that. So each region has its own Clovis descendant population doing something that adapts to the local environment.
Nick Jikomes 32:52
And before we like get to this period, and again, we look back at the predecessors of the Clovis culture, how long do we think people were hunting mammoths and living these very mobile lives doing a lot of hunting? Is that, like, 10s of 1000s of years of human pre history that we're talking about?
Ben Potter 33:12
Yeah, so in the in the old world, you know, in Eurasia, there's lots of evidence of chromosidian hunting. It's not necessarily specialization like that's all that they did. But it was a wide suite of megafauna that clearly could be exploited by and were exploited by modern humans, and also Neanderthals. Mentioned them. This is a very, very, you know, very long term adaptation to mega Fauci hunting in northerly areas. And this, of course, is long before we've got evidence of domestication or use, widespread use of plants, that sort of thing, so broadly when we talk about, you know, a Paleolithic, you know, the old stone age, this is one of those adaptations that we're really speaking about, is this focus on what we what we would term, ecologically, the highest ranked animals on the landscape. In terms of your diet, you're going to choose the animals that give the most return for the energy that you're putting out. So this will be measured like in kilocalories, for instance. And when those animals are abundant enough, and your human population is low enough, carrying capacity is such that you can, you can basically, you know, those animals, effectively, that's the animals you should be choosing, and that's what we see. What's what we see evidence. So I can say for our paper as a segue, this wasn't necessarily surprising to us working on it, because we work on sites that have these animal remains in those sites, and mega Fauci predominate. But there are naysayers, you know, there are people that argue, well, maybe the big bones survive and small bones don't. So maybe it's just taphonomy, like maybe they were foragers, or they looked at modern ecosystems. Well, really, humans couldn't, couldn't live in the Great Basin, for instance, and just just live on Mega Fauci they must have been incorporating lots of smaller game, fish, birds, you know, small mammals, things. Like that. So there the the arguments were always secondary, right? We had indirect even arguments about, you know, spare points couldn't possibly penetrate, you know, a mammoth hide, of course, you know, relying on wooly mammoth, as opposed to Columbia mammoth, which were more likely the target. And then other researchers a year later, saying, Here's tons of ballistic evidence. And, you know, other kinds of data that showed that that, in fact, was an effective weapon against privacy. And you had this sort of debate, but from my perspective, it's the multiple lines of evidence that are the strongest. And we had multiple lines of evidence pointing to this, but we didn't have that direct data, and this is what our article provided.
Nick Jikomes 35:40
So it sounds like, you know, at a high level, at least, there's probably 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of years of human evolutionary history, especially at more northern latitudes, where human beings were doing a lot of harvesting of ecologically high ranked animals. So you know, large animals are probably competing with or even, potentially even stealing from Apex, apex predators and eating a lot of animal products, especially at those more northern latitudes right
James Chatters 36:10
there's, there's
Ben Potter 36:11
some, there's some debate in Beringia, and that's there that I work in
Nick Jikomes 36:16
and remind us what, what, exactly, what area is that? Precisely? Yeah,
Ben Potter 36:19
Beringia. Beringia encompasses that area right now, includes Alaska. It includes Yukon Territory, basically the areas not covered by glaciers. Further south. It includes the Bering Strait, which is now underwater, and also the easternmost point of Russia, so Chukotka, Kamchatka, that region and broadly between the vertical again, mountains the POLYMATH River in Asia, and in the McKinsey River in North America. That's Beringia. So it's effectively its own subcontinent. The land bridge. People say, you know, it's a kind of a bad term. You think you might fall off the bridge. It's actually 1000 miles north and south. It's a land mass that connects our part of the world with Asia, Alaska, and so like with Swan point, for instance, where we have three individuals of mam, including baby mammoth ribs, which clearly are not caverns. They're hunted and brought to the site. We also have waterfowl. We also have evidence of other kinds of resources that were being employed in the Far North. A recent paper, we've identified Sam and fishing happening around 13,000 basically Lotus times. So Bridge is a little bit different. You know, they're certainly utilizing a wide range, along with the the mega fauna. The question is always, to what extent you can say a lot, yeah, that's not effective. We would like percentages. And that's one of the things that that Jim and I and our team, you know, brought out of this particular papers, we can put numbers on things, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 37:46
yeah. So I guess what you're implying there is, you know, there's, there's been a lot of debate over the years in terms of, okay, well, just so, I mean, chimpanzees will hunt and kill things when they can find them. The question is, how often can they do this? So obviously, people were eating meat to some extent. They were probably eating berries whenever they could find them, to some extent, etc, etc, etc. The questions have really been like, Okay, were these earlier humans? Were they essentially hyper carnivores that were specializing in meat eating? Were they still largely omnivorous, even if they were eating quite a bit of meat, you know, and so on and so forth? That's that's sort of some of the context here. A
James Chatters 38:16
lot of it has to do with the habitat you're living in, in the people who are living in the tropics, where there's a lot of fruit available, even as Homo sapiens are likely taking advantage of that abundance. When you move up into the mammoth steppe, which stretched from Europe all the way to the northern Great Plains in North America, you don't have a lot of plant materials that are edible for you, right? Unless you're going to be trying to exploit tiny little grass seeds, which makes very, very little sense for a mobile population to be trying to do. Your main food supply is going and the majority of the biomass that is edible for you at any one time is going to be mega Fauci. If you're not explaining the mega fauna, you're not going to be eating very much.
Nick Jikomes 39:07
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is, I mean, it seems pretty common sensical to me. I mean that. I think what you were saying earlier speaks to that you're just saying, if you if the further north you go, if you just look at where the calories are located in the environment, you're gonna have a really hard time efficiently extracting those calories from your environment unless you are doing quite a bit of hunting of mega fauna. As you as you go further north, right?
James Chatters 39:28
We don't, we don't eat sagebrush, and we don't eat grass, and that's mostly what was in there. And we don't eat wet birch and baby spruces and things like that, which is makes up the rest of the steps. So if you're not focused on that fauna, then you're not going to be having much
Ben Potter 39:48
food supply when it's hard to interrupt. One of the elements that make the story so compelling, I think, to a number of media and the public in general, is there's lots of other elements that this ties into. You about method just, how do we do archeology? How can we tell what ancient people what their economies were like? And for instance, there's a debate that was just published last year about Association, like, how, what's the relationship between kill sites we'd expect to see relative to exploitation of animals and their abundance on the environment. And there were two sides that really argued from the same data, different conclusions. There's not enough kill sites to show mega funnel specialization. Oh, there are enough kill sites, even more than we expect to see, to show this association of mega Fauci so this tells you that that we're an evolving field, that you know this data can really provide evidence that can be helpful for archeologists everywhere to be thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of evidence and each type of evidence, and that we should be careful with our models and a little bit more sort of tied to empirical reality when we can
Nick Jikomes 40:58
so if we get into the recent paper, so the title of it, which people can look up, I'll link to it and everything. It's mammoth, featured heavily in western Clovis diet. So the punch line is right there in the title. Let's, let's really unpack this for people. So when we talk about the Western Clovis diet before this paper came out, what was the, what was sort of the thinking, or the debate of what could be true in terms of what these people were eating? Well, the argument
James Chatters 41:23
was between, were closed people, mega Fauci specialists? Were they hunting specialists, or were they generalized foragers, meaning eating whatever's in the landscape and not, not being mammal focused. And it's been a rather, rather hot debate going on, and people will point to the fact that, well, there are half a dozen rabbits in this site, along with a mammoth, and therefore people were eating more rabbits than they were mammoth. It's gone to that level and not taking into account the fact that a mammoth is a whole lot bigger than a bunny. But
Nick Jikomes 42:08
I suppose there's, I suppose there's that argument.
James Chatters 42:10
Well, part of the argument had to do with were the earliest peoples into the Americas likely to have a major impact on populations of mega fauna? Were they, in part responsible, or largely responsible for the extinction of those megafauna so rapidly at the end of the Pleistocene? And there's
Ben Potter 42:30
a lot of conflation that way. There's a lot of conflation too, between the question of work Globus mega Fauci specialists, and were they responsible for the overkill of 30 plus genera of taxa. Of course, those are different questions, right? So some might point to, hey, here's 12 taxes that never appear in Clovis records. So therefore it's nothing but climate change. Humans have no role. So a lot of the debate really were different kinds of questions at different scales, but it is instructive to think about the debate. They use the same data so often, you'll see the same tables of these materials arguing for fundamentally different conclusions. It's quite entertaining to sort of from the brinjen record looking south and examining this debate. Yeah. I mean,
Nick Jikomes 43:18
it's inherently harder for people like you guys, because you're studying deep history, and, you know, right, the records are very sparse. There's only so many bones you can find. And we're talking about stuff that happened a long, long time ago. I think it's worth mentioning, even to listeners, that you know this type of phenomenon happens in modern day bench science. You have the same exact data set, and you get, you know, these people from these lab say one thing, these people from this other lab say the other lab say the other thing, they're looking at the exact same data set. So oftentimes it's easy to overlook, especially when we pick up on topics that get picked up by the media. You know, you can have, you can have two different people looking at the same exact data set, and they're both experts, and they come to completely different conclusion conclusions.
James Chatters 43:57
What we did in this case was, there is in the archeological record of of North America, only one individual directly associated with Clovis artifacts. And so we had only one person who was demonstrably Clovis. We have two others that are in the same age range, but no artifacts associated, and so we can't say whether or not Clovis is there was their cultural identity. That one individual was a 18 month old child found in Wilson, Montana, known as the Anzick boy, and he had died around 12,800 years ago, based on direct radio carbon dating of his bones. And at the time they ran the radiocarbon dates, the folks at Oxford also published a whole table of the stable isotope measurements that had been taken from the same bone protein that the date came from. But in a. Decade, nothing had been done with that. And so two of our colleagues, Julie and and Stu said, hey, maybe we could do a dietary analysis of this. And they they came to to me and to Ben about that. And Ben had recently done a been involved in a study on that from the upward Sun river children that he had excavated up there in Alaska. So we took that and went to find the animals of the ecosystem and get enough data on stable isotope composition of the proteins in those animals to be able to conduct the analysis. Now, the sort of the core of this is two of the major elements that are found in proteins, carbon and nitrogen, have two stable isotopes. Each carbon has carbon 13 and 12. Nitrogen has carbon or nitrogen 15 and nitrogen 14. And in growing plants and in ecosystems, the plants have different groupings of plants have different proportions of these two isotopes in their tissues, and when animals eat those, they incorporate those differences and modify them slightly per trophic level. So there's a decrease or an increase in the concentration of nitrogen 15 and carbon 13 with each trophic step. So as you go from first order consumers, the plant eaters, you get a single trophic shift. You go the second order consumers, the the eaters of the plant eaters, and you get another trophic step because of the differences in both their their ecological niches and their digestive systems. Yeah, these different animals have end up with different proportions of carbon and nitrogen isotopes in their tissues, and we can take the pattern that we see among different species of animals, compare that to an individual or a species in question, and try and find out what its most likely diet was among the possible sources. Okay,
Nick Jikomes 47:27
so, so if we imagine ourselves back in this time period, just like today, there's all sorts of different animals. They occupy different ecological niches. Some of them are plant eaters. Some of them eat the plant eaters. Some of them might even eat the things that eat, the plant eaters and so on and so forth, depending on what an animal is eating, depending on how it's living in the environment, based on how it is, you know what it's consuming and how its digestive system is, is adapted to extract the nutrients from those food types. You get a different signature of isotopes of different kinds in those individuals. And so when you guys dig up and find remains from humans, mammoths, all sorts of other creatures. You can look at the pattern of isotopes present in that individual, and that will have a correspondence in terms of what that animal was eating. Was it a hyper carnivore? Was it an omnivore? Was it a plant eater, and so forth? Yes,
James Chatters 48:16
yeah, we could find out which of the animals in the ecosystem was the most were the most likely in its diet, in in their relative proportions. But there's
Ben Potter 48:26
a couple, a couple of ways we did this, and it's, it's really intuitive, if you, if you see an x, y graph for this kind of research, you'll see carbon on the bottom, and see nitrogen on the side, and you're looking at dots. You're looking at at points that represent individual animals that have been sampled for these for these variables, and the cluster, which is what we want like to see, the horse are all clustering down here with really low nitrogen. Mammoth have much higher nitrogen. They're really separate. So imagine these different cluster combinations on the map, and then you plug your here's your individual, in this case, the diet of cancer one's mother. We're looking at maternal diet. Get into it a little bit, and it actually very intuitively in two dimensional space. The closer the.is to these other animals, the more likely they're incorporated into that tissue. The second way we looked at this is through Bayesian modeling, where you're actually running statistical analyzes to actually get a proportion of mean and a standard deviation around what proportion of diet is being contributed by this taxon versus the other taxon. That's where we got the 35 to 40% of the protein diet is coming from Mammoth, specifically, higher than any of the other any of the other mega fauna, and also that small mammals collectively only contributed 4% or less of the overall diet, and it's a court stands in stark contrast to this model of Clovis as generalized forager. The third way we did this was we looked at the secondary consumer, so the carnivores and omnivores. Here, we're looking at where does the overall tissue of. The Maternal, you know, the insect one's mother. How does she lay out relative to these other animals that we understand their ecology? And interestingly, she was closest to homotherium, which is scimitar cat, was at Saber Tooth cat variety that we know was a juvenile mammoth specialist. So there's an independent line that says she's more like that than, say, a bear, yeah, or a wolf, which is, you know, more omnivorous and then, you know, using smaller prey.
Nick Jikomes 50:30
Okay, so, so basically, to summarize all that, you can use radio isotope methodologies. You're looking at carbon and nitrogen isotope, not radio stabilized stoves. Okay, so you're looking at stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, and these things have a systematic relationship to an animal's ecology, what it's eating and the type of life it lives. You have samples from the past in this general place, in this general time, including this one human sample that will that we'll dig into, but a bunch of other animals, Saber Tooth, tigers, mammoths, small animals, a bunch of stuff. And you can sort of plot this stable isotope data out, and you get nice, clean clustering, or there's an orderly relationship between where the what the animal is eating, the type of life it led, and where it falls on this map. And so then you can put the human sample on that and just ask, okay, does it look more like a saber tooth? Saber Tooth cat? Does it look more like a mammoth? Does it look more like this, that or the other animal? And that's gonna that's gonna tell you something about what the human diet was. And the punch line that you just gave us was, when you do that type of analysis using these stable isotopes, the diet of this close individual appears to be a lot like something like a saber tooth cap, as opposed to something more omnivorous, like a bear or some other type of creature, right?
James Chatters 51:46
And it's definitely not an omnivore, in that an omnivore would would appear because it eats plants and animals in more or less equal proportions, like a bear, a black bear, it would appear between the hyper carnivores like lions and Saber Tooth cats and the plant eaters like horses and bison animal and what happened with the ansick child's mother is the anti child. Mother ended up next to that hyper carnivore, similar cat, nowhere near where a bear would be. And
Nick Jikomes 52:23
we know not a
James Chatters 52:25
generalized forager,
Nick Jikomes 52:26
yeah. So not only is it, is it landing in the part of the graph where all the other carnivore data points are, but I think you guys mentioned that the the saber tooth cat the closest point to the human sample, we know independently that this animal was specialized for mammoth consumption in particular, right?
Ben Potter 52:41
Yeah, the morphology of the the dentition is the key, and also the isotope signature, it maps on directly to Mammoth. But I want to back up a little bit that's we look at that as an additional line of evidence. Where do they map out with other secondary consumers? The most important, of course, is where does the diet plot out relative to the suites of animals that are in the area in the time period of question. And that, of course, is the key issue. We can generate percentages for, again, heavy mammoth diet. There's a lot of elk, which is interesting. We don't see a lot of elk at the time, but that's because elk is is coming into that region, along with Clovis individuals from the North. It's a Virginia animal, and we see them coming at roughly the same time. And we actually have, we have elk antler at the Anzac site itself, so that great independent confirmation that elk was a major component of the diet as well as was bison and probably little camel, but mostly bison as well. So basically mammoth first service, or elk and bison, and then horse was at a much lower level.
Nick Jikomes 53:47
But they're killing they're killing big herbivores, and they're trying to get the most bang for their buck. So naturally, the Mammoth is probably the most bang for their buck,
James Chatters 53:55
definitely the most bang for their buck. Yes, you could have the whole family, probably several families, if we take our indication, from the laprel mammoth kill down in southern Wyoming, where they had three separate little camps around this one kill. So you could, you could feed your entire community for, you know, a month, two months, whatever on that one animal. So it's a lot of food, as long as you keep spoiling and it's
Ben Potter 54:25
not just the protein, it's the fat. So you know hunter gatherers, that's one of their key nutrients that need to be getting enough fat in their diet, super high energy, rich resorts. And of course, these are not going to be coming from plants, that be coming from animals, and particularly big animals. So, and I also want to stress that we're not saying they didn't eat plants. So they definitely ate plants. We have berries and this sort of thing. But as Jim mentioned, it's just not equivalent. It's not like something where it's a lot of plants. Yeah, be typical for a generalist forager to be incorporated into their diet. Yeah, they're
Nick Jikomes 54:58
not. They're not they. There's no evidence that. They were eating what a modern person would intuitively call a balanced diet. They were probably eating a little bit of whatever they could, but they were indexing very, very, very high on the meat and the fat from these large bodied, herbivorous mammals.
James Chatters 55:13
They were eating a keto diet, yeah, yeah. Diet in the modern dietary terminology, yeah.
Nick Jikomes 55:19
So most of their energy was coming from fat rather than carbohydrate. Presumably,
James Chatters 55:24
carbohydrates from fats and from protein. Only. Your body can break down protein and turn it into energy as well. Yeah. In fact, that's what a good analog with your own body. If you run out of food, you're starting to feed you on your own tissues.
Ben Potter 55:41
Yeah, a good analog is when we, you know, the question, one of the sort of the people on the other side would say is, oh, we don't really see a lot of foragers, you know, just eating meat. And of course, the answer is, of course, we do. We don't have to go very far for more ice. It in Alaska, Inuit peoples and paleo Inuit peoples will regularly utilize majorly meat diets, either caribou or seal whaling walrus. That's the major component, and plants make up a much lower portion of the diet up here. So we certainly see plenty of evidence in the recent past of this kind of a diet. Of course, the animals are totally different, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 56:18
yeah. And of course, presumably people would have, would have eaten things, you know, season, like, if berries are there for part of the season, you can, you know, presumably your scale, you're going to pluck some when they're there. But the main food supply really did seem to be these big animals. And it is similar to what we see in more recent populations. It sounds like, like, for example, the Inuit, they, you know, they're, they're eating what's available season to season. But most of what's available, most of the time are animals of their kinds. Yeah, people.
James Chatters 56:43
So the Great Plains live that way too, and they were getting a majority of their food supply from bison, from bison fat and bison meat. They they would pound it, you know, dry it and pound it with berries. But the quantity of berries they were able to to extract from their environments probably nowhere near sufficient for to be a majority of their diet.
Nick Jikomes 57:04
Yeah. And I had, I had a gentleman named Eugene Morin, I think, on some months ago, on the podcast, and we were talking about, you know, Paleolithic diets and things like that. And one thing he really emphasized that is that in a lot of these populations, like the Inuit, yes, they're eating the meat, they're eating the protein, but they really, really prize the fat on the animal, in a way that we often can appreciate today, like, if I go to a restaurant with with my family, a lot of people will cut the fat off, off their steak. But he's basically said no, no, no, no in these settings back then, they wanted all of that fat. They really prized it.
Ben Potter 57:41
Yeah, eating steak, if you're in steak, you know, the more, the higher the fat content, the tastier it's going to be. That's part of human evolution. You know, we really require that in the past, and we sought out all sorts of ways to get that.
James Chatters 57:54
Yeah, yeah. I Ben works in Alaska. He knows what, how much fat you want when you're working outdoors in Alaska. I spent one season up in the Aleutian Islands where it never stops raining and the wind never stops blowing, and it doesn't get above 50 degrees most days, and we would practically fight over the foods with the most fat in them. So it's a big deal when you're needing to work with that. But, but you work with, you look at the keto diet that people go on, and they're keeping carbohydrates out of the diet. They're shifting to metabolizing fat, and they're seeking, in some cases, to metabolize their own fat, but their diet is predominantly protein and fat, and they do fine on that.
Nick Jikomes 58:42
Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the things I've learned recurrently in different ways on the podcast, talking to all sorts of different people, is that our body is very capable of switching between ketosis and glucose metabolism were essentially built before it, so to speak, there's a lot of evidence now that ketone bodies like BHB have various benefits. And basically the general inference that I make, and I think a lot of other people make, is that at least intermittently, peoples of the past were probably very commonly going into and potentially even staying in ketosis for extended periods of time. And so our body is in some sense adapted to it
James Chatters 59:20
right, right. Clearly, we're capable of shifting between the two. I think that probably the the glucose metabolism basis might be a much more recent development in as a consequence of agriculture. Presumably, yeah, yes, post agriculture, where many of us aren't capable of digesting a lot of the materials that come out of grains, for example, particularly glucose or gluten, not glucose, gluten, gluten. Thank you. Gluten intolerant folks and lactose intolerant folks, I mean, there are people who aren't capable of digesting. The materials that are not commonly in our diets today. So why would we expect that our ancestors, who didn't had yet, not yet involved the capability of using those nutrients, weren't fundamentally different from ourselves in terms of their dietary needs? I want to
Nick Jikomes 1:00:19
ask you a little bit more about the individual you studied. So where exactly was the sample taken from? And I think you mentioned that this was a child, a small child, 18 month old. But when you're plotting the data, you're talking about the mother of the child, can you speak to that a little bit?
James Chatters 1:00:35
Well, yeah, the mother the child was 18 months old. So based on what we know about hunter gatherer behavior, hunter gatherers are usually nursing their children at least partially until they're three and a half to four years old. So and that's been found to be true among not only modern hunter gatherers, but also ancient hunter gatherer populations. It's not until you get into the Neolithic that you start seeing much younger weaning times agricultural populations. So what we're reading actually is, in large part, the mother's body in looking at the child's
Nick Jikomes 1:01:21
stability, folks, because the child's food in the former president, not
James Chatters 1:01:26
not his food supply, we're eating we're looking at her food supply. Got it and given his age, we calculated that he was about 1/3 auxiliary foods and two thirds mama and computed on that basis. And what it showed was that and six mom was heavy, heavily, heavy into the mammoth.
Nick Jikomes 1:01:56
Yeah, so far and away. Mammoth was number one, and then sort of the secondary, the second and third ranked things were other large bodied mammals that you mentioned. So things like a bison and elk, I think you said, yeah,
Ben Potter 1:02:07
so 96 96% of the diet, protein diet was mega fauna in some form or another. So I mean that that by any stretch, is a mega Fauci specialist. And I think that's definitively demonstrated by this study, secondary one sort of varied surface is always high, so elk is always the second highest among the different models we did, which makes sense if we have multiple elk antler, four shafts that were found directly with the burial, and then bison was next. This matches broadly the fauna record where bison were really common elements in these, in these sort of these campsites, and horse was was lower than the other ones. Horse was roughly 10% or so, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:02:54
and so, so, I guess one so, so. So, on the one hand, your data is quite definitive in the sense that it's not very it's not very subtle. It's not like the data point was like in the middle and you can kind of a hammer. Yeah, it was pretty clearly the diet looked like a saber tooth cat. It wasn't, it wasn't even like a bear. On the other hand, we're talking about one sample here. So how, how would you, how would people argue about that?
James Chatters 1:03:19
Well, it's important to take into account that when you take a random sample of a single member of any population, the probability is that that will be a normal individual, not a member of an extreme This is the only individual we have. Consequently, it's the only data point we're going to get, least unless we find a lot more people and in modern sensibilities about ancient skeletons change. So it's the one we have. But I don't want to emphasize like I can't emphasize enough that you expect a single individual to be representative, not to be outside the norm.
Nick Jikomes 1:04:07
And back then, the variance person to person was presumably much less, just because much
James Chatters 1:04:11
less you would expect it to be much less. And considering the fact that that Clovis looks the same everywhere you see it, and that when you find food bone in Clovis sites, mammoth dominates. Yeah. So it all is in this secondary we don't see elk very much because elk are not really widespread in the environment yet. At that time, they're just, they're still just moving it, and they're just coming into the country along with the people.
Nick Jikomes 1:04:35
That strikes me as informative in itself, because if elk are not that common there yet And yet, they show up as a highly ranked food here. That means that they were really focusing on them, because they weren't just randomly sampling from whatever was available.
James Chatters 1:04:49
Well, they were getting them in, in their neighborhood. They were elk was available in the fact that they that was one of the strongest things about that finding was we had elk show up. As a secondary food supply in each of the tests we ran, and the elk handlers were with the child, those pieces that set of evidence is like matching the similar cat in its in its quality of in its meaning, in the impact. Yeah. That when you when you look at Clovis in general, the behavior is that of a highly mobile predator. You know, when we look at the the sources of stone tool materials, you often find stone tools that come from sources hundreds of miles away. And we're not expecting that those tools are being used over years of time, and probably being used more likely, you know, one to two years or a month before you have to change out and get new ones.
Nick Jikomes 1:05:55
Yeah, yeah. So not only have you not only have specialization to eat animals like this, but people are moving around a lot, so they are on the opposite of sedentary,
James Chatters 1:06:05
exactly, exactly they're not sedentary. So that high mobility is you take that high mobility and you look at the range of mobility of the mammoths that that the team Ben's been working with has been looking at in Alaska. And not only that, did they seem to move seasonally from place to place over large distances. Sometimes they just shift completely and move to another landscape a long distance away. So if you have an animal that behaves that way, it's easy to see a pop human population that's been been sort of migrating along with the mammoths, simply taking that great big leap and and going off into a new landscape. Everything about the record seems to say the same thing. I
Ben Potter 1:06:48
really, I really want to hit on that, because I think that's the the there hasn't it's been a very positive response to the article within the community. Think the only issue that I've seen raised is it's a sample size of one, you know? Yeah, it seems to support our contention. But I want to look at it a couple different ways. One, this is the first test. This is the first direct test of these two ideas. These are the two competing ideas, yeah, and unequivocally, rigorously, clearly, it came down on the side of the Clovis as a megafauna specialist. It could have been
Nick Jikomes 1:07:20
the other way, yeah, or somewhere, anywhere in the middle, right? Or it could have been like a
Ben Potter 1:07:25
much middle, yeah. So the fact that it came down so strongly with multiple lines of evidence, as we said, this is clear. This is rigorous and confirmed. The other issue, how far can we push this? Well, clearly, I mean, Jim highlighted some of these issues, but it aired sort of dialing down, looking at the details, but we understand hunter gatherers share food. This is one thing that we certainly understand about about hunter gatherer ecology, is that you're constantly sharing food. So the idea that this person would be an anomaly of, you know, something on the extreme, you know, beyond the fact that it's randomly pulled from this population, that's very unusual. Unlikely to be the case. Number one, the second issue that mentioned this homogeneous culture. This is a Lifeway that's very much connected and tracked with moving with large mammal herds. And this is not just one site. This is many, many sites. This is dozens and dozens of sites where we see this relationship. And then the faux remains, really is the key, the fact that, when they're preserved, this is, this is, you know, proboscidians have the largest M and I, the minimum number of individuals we can track from these sites on the order of, like in the 90s. This is a large amount of of meat in a proportion. When you look at edible biomass, it dwarfs any of the other sort of elements in their diet, even if they were eating rabbit quite a bit. So this is really we feel we can make rigorous inferences beyond this individual to Western Clovis as a whole.
Nick Jikomes 1:08:52
And I guess too, this also sort of this makes it very natural to intuitively reinterpret things that were fuzzier in the past. So, so for example, you've got all these Clovis sites that have been discovered over the years, and you find things like mammoth bones and rabbit bones, this, that you know, this, that, and the other artifact. And it sounds like people have argued over the years. Okay, yeah, maybe you find a lot of mammoth bones, but maybe they weren't killing a mammoth. Maybe they just liked their bones and collected them for some other reason. Maybe they were eating a lot of other stuff, but the bones didn't preserve or whatever. But now that you guys have this direct evidence from this isotope analysis, the fact that you find these mammoth bones so often at these Clovis sites, that means the interpretation really is like, no, they were. They were eating them. Clearly, yeah,
James Chatters 1:09:38
definitely. And also, if you take into account that the anzicks Mom, we're not just reading her diet the day before she nursed the child. This is not a one off. Here you're looking at she is. Utilizing her stored tissues to feed the child. Yeah, using a part stored tissues, and she's using, in part, the food she's consuming day to day, and and that protein is building up has built up in her over many months to years, and she's transferring it to the child, where it's building up over many months. And so we're not looking at a one off diet or a single event diet or a big feast. We're looking at the diet over a long span of time.
Nick Jikomes 1:10:29
Yeah, it's essentially showing you her average diet over some extended period of her
James Chatters 1:10:32
life, right, right?
Ben Potter 1:10:34
And the tissues, the tissues from the child, also formed over 18 months. So this gives us a much, much bigger window and a more accurate window into diet than any one site could.
Nick Jikomes 1:10:48
And so, so the Clovis does this mean? So let's just assume that this result is solid and it generalizes, you know, I buy the arguments that you guys are making, even though it's one sample. This is probably representative of the Clovis peoples in this general region at this time. Does this mean that, that when we think about Native Americans, everyone who came after this period in North America, you know, from the Iroquois to the Comanche to, you know, you name it, everything I learned about in grade school are these people, the the the descendants of the Clovis people, and does that mean that they're descended from this type of dietary culture?
James Chatters 1:11:27
Yes, yeah.
Ben Potter 1:11:30
So the genetics is, is complicated. We don't have a ton of samples, and there's some regions where we don't have decent sample coverage, but broadly, it becomes complicated. It's simple and complicated at the same time. The simple thing is this, SNA is that clade that rapidly spread throughout the Americas and is directly ancestral, except for those in the Far North. That being said, there's sub lineages that we can track. And the geneticists have looked at the anzic child, is one of those sub lineages. There's other sub lineages sort of much later in time, like maybe 10,000 years ago, that we see pop up in different regions. Of course, the issue is, you know, how did those sub lineages relate to each other? That's from our perspective, not that that much of an interest. The interest is that it was the single population that spread, and Clovis is the earliest member of that group. But I think yeah, as definitively as we can be in sort of paleo science, we can say that, yeah, they're descended from these early, these early hunter gatherers and around 13,000 14,000 years ago that are coming in with this kind of an adaptation. But because one, it's so successful of a adaptation and two, it led to very different sort of responses as people moved to different regions, as the climate, as animals became extinct. Really fascinating sort of process that occurred.
James Chatters 1:12:53
Yeah, Athabascan. Athabascan and Algonquian populations come from the northern, northern North American clade, and they're not necessarily associated with Clovis as a as a spirit culture. Culture descended through Clovis. So they may not descend from Clovis culture directly, but they probably also descend from populations that lived this way at some point in their history, and in Beringia.
Nick Jikomes 1:13:24
Did you guys see that movie, that Martin Scorsese movie, killers of the flower moon?
Ben Potter 1:13:31
I know about it, but I haven't, yeah, I
Nick Jikomes 1:13:33
mean, this is, I'm just, this is just popping in my head. I saw it when it came out in theaters. But, you know, part of the, you know, it's a historical movie about a certain time period after Europeans arrived, interacting with certain Native American populations. And one of the little motifs in in the movie that I picked up on was that you had these very high rates of diabetes in Native American populations that were basically eating the food that the Europeans had brought over and stuff, and I wonder if there's some, I wonder if there's some tie in to like, to this stuff. So So like, if you have if, if modern day Native Americans were descended from this population, and there's a long history there of eating what would essentially have been an animal based ketogenic diet, you might expect that those populations would have an especially tough time on a post agricultural diet that's high in bread and other things. I wonder if there's a connection there.
James Chatters 1:14:27
Well, the populations that lived on corn would have had a lot of glucose in there, in their diets, lot of simple starches in their diets, and may not be so profoundly affected by the modern day diet, but the populations that did not have that there's, there's certainly an argument that they're more more paleo kinds of diet might say in. In modern dietary terms, would not have so much of that simple carbohydrate in them, and therefore they're vulnerable to the consequences of a simple carbohydrate diet.
Nick Jikomes 1:15:13
Yeah, yeah. And there's, I guess, the general thing that just applies to anyone, anywhere, right? Like, if you like, when you look at, you know, some people have trouble with gluten and wheat products. Some people are lactose intolerant, like you mentioned. Different people have these different sensitivities different types of foods. And I wonder if it just it has to do with the evolutionary history of your your more direct descendants. So like, for example, I've never had problem with bread and grains, but I also know that I can trace my lineage through to the first Neolithic farmer. So, you know, there's probably a lot in my background of of people that were used to eating those types of foods for a long time.
Ben Potter 1:15:47
Yeah, if there's any genetic component that that's going to be then, you know, faced through your ancestry and experience and evolution, for sure,
James Chatters 1:15:57
there's a strong selective force when your population is is trying to live off grains for gluten tolerance, if you're going to be a what we what would probably be known as in the in the old days, as a sickly child, they're probably sickly because they're incapable of digesting some of the major parts of the food supply, whether it be gluten or or lactose in the milk, and when, when people have studied the distribution of the genes that that provide lactose tolerance, those genes originate in areas like Northern Europe, where people Were herding cattle for a major part of their diet,
Nick Jikomes 1:16:42
yeah, yeah, yeah, quite quickly, I believe, right.
James Chatters 1:16:47
And in other parts of the world, East Asia, a lot of the population is glucose intolerant. And folks in Mongolia, they don't drink milk directly from Macau. They they ferment it first make you make things like yogurt or cheese before you eat it, because that makes it tolerable for you.
Nick Jikomes 1:17:12
Yeah, yeah. And I guess in many ways, like based on what we've talked about, at least for some people in the world, you know, the ketogenic diet has sort of become, has seen this resurgence recently, and it's become, you know, one of, one of the diets people are really excited about for different reasons, but in some sense, some people out there, at least, are maybe, in a sense, going back to their own ancestral diet when, when they think about something like a ketogenic diet?
James Chatters 1:17:36
Yeah, definitely. My wife has actually been trying that out and is encouraging me to but she finds she thinks more clearly and has more energy at the end of the day, which sounds good to me so
Nick Jikomes 1:17:52
and I want to ask you too a little bit about it's been implied through through much of our discussion So so far. But what is the evidence exactly that the Clovis peoples were actively hunting the mammoths, as opposed to, say, scavenging them?
Ben Potter 1:18:08
Yeah, so I can say a couple of points on this one. You know, we haven't talked about sort of working with modern native groups and understanding their heritage and and I always was struck. And this came up in conversations with with our colleagues, saying, Doyle and sky Gillam, you know in the Montana area that it's does a disservice to their heritage, for for people, archeologists to opine that perhaps they didn't have the skills to take down some of these large, mega fauna, and nothing could be further from the truth. We have tons of evidence for very effective distance killed weapons like the spear throw, the atlatl and the Dart technology we have. You know, one site in particular comes to mind, lugovskoya site in Siberia, where you have a mammoth vertebrae with a hole in it and a microbe still stuck in it. You don't get more smoking gun than that. You know, we know that they're selecting from other mega Fauci work that I've done, for instance, in the far north, they're selecting adult mammals with adult bison and elk, for instance, with the most fat reserves, so they're not going after animals that indicate that they could barely do it. Or, for Pete's sake, the scavenging argument may be suitable for like talking about Homo habilis, you know, 2 million years ago in Africa, but not for modern humans. A modern human can and did take the largest prey that were available in the highest rank. And, yeah, I think, yeah, the folks that would that have argued that there have been a few of those. I think one argument I remember is, you know, it maybe killed one mammoth and then talked about it the rest of their lives, or something like that. That really does a disservice to sort of, the history and the heritage. And the capabilities of these ancient peoples that were so much like you and I today. That's my take on that.
James Chatters 1:20:06
Well, the evidence is in many of the kill sites. Most of the kill sites, you not only have the skeleton of the animal, you also have projectile points, spear points that were lost in that mass of goo that was the decomposing leftovers of the kill. You're not going to have that if all you're doing is cutting up a dead animal, because the knife is always in your hand, right, right? You're not going to be losing it. These are point the points that remain with the carcass are ones that are that are literally lost among the the skin and the awful and and the huge bones that you, you know, into parts of the meat that you weren't able to get to before it spoiled, for example, so you're just not going to see it. Plus studies that have been done on the breakage patterns of the spear points and the RE sharpening patterns of the spear points are consistent with them being broken in use as a projectile, not as a knife.
Nick Jikomes 1:21:12
So they're using extensive use of projectile weapons. Was this, spears, bows and arrows, all the above, not
James Chatters 1:21:19
bows and arrows, just just Spears thrown with an athletic with a spear thrower, which adds a lever to your arm. So your arm is one lever here, two levers here. You add another extension like that, and you've got much, much more. You can multiply your force significantly. And you've got the heavy four shafts on these Spears made out of bone or antler or ivory and the heavy stone spear point on the end. These were not small weapons. These are heavy, heavy equipment that had a lot of kinetic energy when they struck. And they're
Ben Potter 1:21:51
really only suitable for, as we look in the ethnographic record, suitable for a taking down big game. And you know the there's just a lot of independent lines of evidence that point to this. I don't think the scavenging idea it was has been taken seriously for decades. Now. There might be a few proponents, but, but broadly, you know, the question always was, what percent of the diet was? It just every once in a while, and I think that's where you know 40% you're not getting from scavenging a few few animals. You're getting that from selected, targeted, specific specialization
Nick Jikomes 1:22:27
and and so this study was, was this Clovis sample, and the Clovis culture eventually gave rise to all of the Native Americans in North America. So if we sort of go back and we go across, we cross back over to Eurasia in this time period. Do we think that this type of hunting culture and this type of essentially carnivorous diet was also common at the northern latitudes in Eurasia, and then that was part of what gave rise to present day Europeans?
Ben Potter 1:23:00
So we actually do know quite a bit in the past, probably five years, probably more in the past five years we've learned, particularly from the arc of genetic data, than we learned all previous times. For instance, this ancient North Eurasian population, we understand the moltab, where you may be familiar with Yana Alfonso. There's a number of individuals for this group that contributed about 30 to 40% of the genome into the Native American so we know they're Admixing with them in southern Siberia. So these guys were hanging out around Lake Baikal area or so. And we know genetically they're linked with with early forfeitures in Europe, so early it's connecting Eurasian populations. So we know these people are related to each other. The question, of course, is, you know each individual group, you're going to need to look at the data like we're looking at it. So fauna remains are the main way people understand and model sort of ecology, and the overall subsistence economy. And mega fauna have been large contributors to a lot of these. So ordination people's very earliest modern humans, sort of expanding into into Europe. Have this we can look at, say, you know, early East Asians in northern China, Japan. You know, they're, they're, they're sitting on paleoxidon, which is another variant of an extinct probe city. And the question is, I don't from the Siberian data, I don't think we can say that they're only focused on mammoth. And I would say that that the Clovis seem much more focused on mammoth, like as a portion of the diet, than we see in in Northeast Asia, where, I mean, there's fully Rhino, there's horse, there's, you know, there's moose, there's a variety of mega Fauci, including mammoth. So I wouldn't say it depends on the site that you look at. So you can have sites like Barry oak, which seem to have, it's almost like an elephant graveyard. There's lots of mammoth. And then, of course, the issue is, to what extent are these natural, you know, death assemblages versus, you know, killed. But in the base go back and forth. I think there's an argument that's pretty strong that at least one of these individuals were were actively hunted by, you know, jikos or other Northeast Asian cultures, but not to the extent that we see with close so that's what makes it interesting. With Clovis, this is a a more refined, a more more limited specialization, even though they're going after bison and elk and other animals, it seems more broad up in the north, even with Swan point, where we have mammoth, we also have horse and a little bit later on, bison and elk are the dominant mega Fauci species that are in these diets in the far north, even when there were still mammoth around. So there's variation, and the Clovis variant is, is now we can explicate
James Chatters 1:25:46
Clovis. Folks probably took giant ground sloths and and other mega fauna as well. We just don't have any. We weren't able to find a record of giant ground sloth for the right time period. The the giant ground sloth would be the harlems ground sloth, a grass seeding ground sloth up in that part of Montana. We just don't have a record of that for that for that time period, so we couldn't check it. But should they encounter that animal? They're not likely to just leave it stand there. Yeah, it's a big food package that can't run. Yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:26:22
yeah, that makes sense. And you know, we're talking about what these people ate. But of course, there was lots of other predators around at this time that would have liked to eat those animals as well, that humans would have essentially been competing with. Can you just give us some kind of sense for you know, as the Globus culture is spreading, and as some of these species fall prey to us and start to go extinct, and the climate is changing. What did that landscape? What did that Fauci landscape look like? What kinds of animals were around and what is sort of the pattern of extinction that we see as this human culture is spreading,
James Chatters 1:26:54
the extinction pretty much takes place. There's a study going on right now that I've I've, I've gotten word of, and I can't really share the what their findings are so far, wouldn't be fair to them. But what we're seeing overall is that the extinctions are all taking place at around the same time. And remind me, where is that exactly that they're taking place around the time of Clovis. You know, from from the last animals that have been dated or the youngest animals have been dated, range from the early end of Clovis to the end of Clovis. So sometime in that Clovis span is, is when most of these animals wink out, as far as we can tell from the dates that we have. The youngest Dire Wolf, I know, is when we we dated in Texas. That's just shy of 13,000 years old. So mammoth, if you think of mammoth, like African elephants, it's a keystone species. Yeah, it actually modifies the environment it exists in, extensively creating niches for other kinds of animals. And so you take mammoth out of the system, you're going to have a significant impact on everything else, not just the animals that prey on mammoths, but the others that rely on it for the disturbances it creates to produce their food supply. Yeah. So they're going to be secondary impacts. So we're going to have primary impacts of the humans killing the animals directly, and secondary impacts of the the trickle down effects of removing Keystone animals.
Ben Potter 1:28:37
And to address your question about the carnivores. I don't think with modern human behaviors, there's really not a competition, like, if there's, you know, like, like, in no way would we expect the carnivores to drive off humans if they just killed a mammoth, for instance. Yeah, so, but you can, it's more about what they would be doing. It would be more about what they're doing to the population in other areas. Yeah. And what we can say broadly with the pattern of extinction is the carnivores are more delicate. There's fewer of them relative to herbivores, and some of it drop out early on in the record. So there is climate change effects broadly in the north. For instance, you know, the Lions go pretty quickly, even before humans are into the into the region cheetah for instance, cheetahs also drop out pretty early. So this is American variant, some that persist, as as Jim mentioned, you know, dire wolf last for a bit of courts. You know, gray wolf continue. You know, versus, you know, bear continues. But a lot of the cats go away early. So more specialized ones,
James Chatters 1:29:38
the lions still there.
Ben Potter 1:29:39
Lions still there. But
James Chatters 1:29:41
our lion that we used in our study was was actually Clovis era. So right, but a
Ben Potter 1:29:46
number of the lions aren't. So yeah, so we it is shifting, and we don't want to imply that humans are the 100% direct pros.
Nick Jikomes 1:29:53
Things are shifting by the time all of this stuff is taking place, but then humans are presumably a pretty big factor. Our
Ben Potter 1:30:00
point is that if you've already got animals under stress, if you already have habitat reduction because of vegetation shifts at the end of the last ice age, they become more susceptible to hunting pressure, particularly if there already is that specialization. I think that's one of the key takeaways. Is that for those arguing that it was only climate these data really stand in stark contradiction to that kind of a model, and that we should be thinking more of humans playing a larger role in that. But ultimately, one of the things to consider is the human population was successful. They were able to successfully adapt to the changes that they found at the end of the last ice age and flourish, yeah,
Nick Jikomes 1:30:41
disappear after the last mammoth was gone. Oh, yeah,
Ben Potter 1:30:44
absolutely not, yeah. And another
James Chatters 1:30:49
thing to consider there too is that. And I forgot what it was,
Nick Jikomes 1:30:59
but you know it's, I mean, it sounds like. So the climate is already shifting, and then humans are this additional factor where, okay, now you've got the mammoth population and other large herbivore populations, they start to dwindle, which will have secondary impacts on other animals that are probably under a lot of ecological pressure already. And then, of course, this is happening over an extended span of time. And so as humans are in the area longer and longer as they keep moving around and stuff over time, naturally, they're going to pick up on all of the other stuff in the environment that they can utilize, and eventually that just evolves into all of the other Native American populations that are specialized as foragers and other things.
James Chatters 1:31:35
Right as they begin to settle into environments and not be moving around so frequently, they're going to experiment more with the local flora and fauna and learn how to use them effectively. But the point I was going to make that slipped my mind there is that we have multiple interglacials during the Pleistocene, multiple events. In fact, the last interglacial had a bigger temperature change than the present one has had until human beings have been fouling with it, with the fossil fuels, and yet none of those general and extinct, or at least we didn't have cascading, collapsing systems that we have in the post Wisconsin, given that the humans were probably the final straw in a Yeah, a very unstable system.
Ben Potter 1:32:35
But here we want to also be conscious of our individual sample, that you know that much work needs to be done. And you mentioned ground slot, I'd also make a pitch for mastodon. I mean, there are other parts of North America we don't, we don't have Mastodon in this region where Anzac was was located, but we expect that would be another provid city, and that potentially could have been targeted in conflict there to further south. So this, I think what we're trying to say is, even though this is a single individual, there's lots of implications that can be derived from, from this research. And we're we're lucky in the sense that a lot has been written, a lot has been modeled with, with Clovis hypothesized as a mega Fauci that really our data tie in with and makes those models much more plausible and more more consistent with the evidence. The other models much more inconsistent,
James Chatters 1:33:31
and the the other animals too. If you think about mastodons and goth ears, which, in the case of the goth ears, we know that mount but club as folks were killing them, because there's a site what are those exactly with your kills, gonthos, another elephant, another small one, quite a bit, about eight feet at the at the shoulder, rather than 12 to 13 feet at the shoulder. And studies of mastodons and godfathers that have been done so far, not an extensive one on goth ears, but I have data of my own on on my studies down in Mexico show that these animals also moved over wide ranges. So like mammoth they they were a wide ranging species. And so if, if the human beings were emphasizing proboscidians in their hunting tactics. They're going to be likewise drawn into new ecosystems in areas that have those other in eastern North America and down south of the border into Mexico and Central America.
Ben Potter 1:34:38
That's great that you mentioned that, Jim, I think the other element is it's not just diet. The fact that this is megafauna specialized diet plays into lots of different other angles about the the capacity for human forgers at the end of black ice age, how they colonize the America so rapidly. It does tie into a lot of other. Ends of interesting questions, that for four years, diet is the key. You know, you start with, what is your How do you orient your entire culture around getting enough food? And in this case, you know, plentiful, super abundant food really plays into all other aspects of your life.
Nick Jikomes 1:35:17
And you know, I think there may be hints of this and some of the things that you mentioned. But you know, if this type of lifestyle, focused on this type of diet, was was so key for these people, are there any other artifacts that we have, any other findings, things that they that we find with the human remains, tools they're making, ornamentation that they're putting together that indicates that, you know, following these animals around and utilizing them was part of their culture. Did they? Were they, you know, were they wearing antlers? Were they using parts of the animal for their clothing? Was it like incorporated into any of their cultural belief systems that we might have some indication of?
James Chatters 1:35:55
Well, certainly the the foreshafts, the spear for shafts that we find associated with Clovis are typically made out of either mammoth bone or ivory, or, in the case of Anzick, elk antler. So they're they're incorporating these animals into their technology, of course, that can be done off of dead animals and shed antlers. But, when you combine that with the evidence for diet and the evidence of direct kills and things like that, it would strongly suggest that these are animals that are animals that they're taking directly. And
Ben Potter 1:36:35
there's you mentioned, ideology and belief systems that's so difficult to derive from these very ancient populations. However, we do have some information on this. So it's interesting. My connection with with upwards on river and then the work that we did collectively at Anzick, those are two very early burials of children at the late plexit scene period. And in both hunting weapons are the items that were were placed with these burials at upward sun. We have two infants. We have a six week old and then a late stage neonate that were buried with ochre, just like Anzick and with hunting weapons. In our case, they were they were big antler. They were also elk antler, four shafts with attached bifacial projectile rings, you know, big enough, certainly for big game. And of all the elements they could contribute in this sort of significant ritual oriented fashion, they chose the hunting weapons of the biggest animals. Yeah, I think that's relevant for both that could have they were other other things they were doing that meant enough to them to be placing them in sort of sacrificial context, so they couldn't use those anymore, right? Right? These are items that were ready to be used, and they sacrificed them in the context of these burials, suggesting that their ideology probably had a strong component towards the importance and significance of these mega Fauci
James Chatters 1:38:01
Yeah, and in, in the case of Anzick, it was a 100 tools, including nine antler four shafts, a tremendous amount of of product that you're, that you're, as has been said, sacrificing with this child that you're burying, it's something very important that you're giving
Nick Jikomes 1:38:23
up. And when I think about, you know, I'm trying to piece together different parts of the evolutionary timeline here, when was when was like, for example, corn domesticated in the Americas, and how long ago was that? How much time ago was that, relative to how much time people would have been engaged in this type of diet and lifestyle.
James Chatters 1:38:43
The corn is kind of an open question. There have long been claims that it was domesticated in teluca Valley in upland Mexico, over 7000 years ago. More recent arguments suggest it was not quite that early. I'm not completely current with with what thinking is on that, but several 1000 years ago, 1000 years? Yeah, 4000 years is more likely. You don't see the impact of it on, well, stable isotope composition of human bones in that region until much, much later than 7000 years. So 4000 as cultures start developing basically, and
Nick Jikomes 1:39:25
it takes some time to ramp up and spread and become more and more significant. Yeah. So probably for 10s of 1000s of years, people were eating a lot of Mammoth and similar things. Well, several 1000 years, some of them were engaged in farming in
James Chatters 1:39:39
in North America, South of the glacial ice, people who only had access to mammoths for a few 100 years. Oh, okay, no more than 700 years. It's that current dating.
Ben Potter 1:39:49
Yeah, you're thinking like, I think he's thinking broadly about Eurasia. And yeah, adding Eurasia in, that's
James Chatters 1:39:55
another story. Yeah. Time, yeah. I
Ben Potter 1:39:59
think. It's into, yeah, as you say, evolutionary sort of history. And there we have to be careful with sort of pre modern humans like Homo erectus, for instance, yeah, they tend to be in the same low latitude sort of area where you can kind of transfer knowledge east, west and from from, for instance, the Android call DNA data. It does suggest that these weren't very large populations, they were susceptible to lineage extinctions, for instance, and inbreeding, things like that. So so early modern it's hard to even compute and contrast with modern humans. But what we can say with modern humans is, as Jim said, as you go further north, your resource opportunities are more limited, particularly on the plant side, yeah, so you have less on the one hand, you have less plant. You have less biomass, fewer fewer animals. You go further north. And this ecosystems become simpler, but also they become more seasonal. So it becomes you really need to gear your your life ways to seasonal over abundances and movement. And one of the things that sort of focus on big game can do is you can kind of avoid that, you know, if you're following the animals on their seasonal movements, right, then you don't necessarily have to shift and, okay, now I need to focus on, I don't know, sheep as they come down in the in the winter, or on, you know, salmon that might be abundant in a very limited amount of time, and we don't really see those kind of adaptations until much later in the in the later stages of the high state in the early Holocene. I guess you're, you're to answer your question that way. There is a close relationship. This is a sort of an established understood sort of life way. The question is, in the details, which species were important, and if you got a snapshot here or there, they might give you different snap dots of what might happen that weekend, you know, 14,000 years ago at this site. But it's really rare to get this quality of data. So upward sun, we've got it at Anzick, we have we have it now. And the previous, many previous studies looking at isotopes are kind of maybe misleading, because you a lot of people just focus on whatever natural you know animal populations might be there now, because that's low hanging fruit, you can just go out and get their isotope data right. What we did with antic is really carefully try to curate the the animal from that period, from that region, because isotope ecologies are going to are going to shift, baselines are going to shift through time. We know that. So some of these earlier studies, like, for instance, the con individual in Alaska, 10,000 years old, the argument, oh, this is marine mammal. They're coastal adapted. There's a very strong component. And of course, this could be just salmon fishing, which is not, you know, you can, you can fish with salmon, you know, quite far deep inland. Doesn't mean that you're going after sea mammals. And that's an example of maybe quickly, quickly dumping to a conclusion based on modern data, and you really need to look at the ancient ecosystem, which is much harder to do. You need a lot more data.
Nick Jikomes 1:43:09
What? What sort of next for understanding of the Clovis peoples and what was going on at this time? Are you guys digging up new fossil samples? Are there new ancient genome sequences coming out. What's on the horizon here?
James Chatters 1:43:25
Well, we're not seeing new ancient genomes coming out. There tends to be a lot of political constraint on on that possibility. These days, even some of the genomes that have been extracted have not been published for over political concerns. I wouldn't expect too much of that coming out of the English speaking North America, perhaps out of South America, if we can get individuals who are well enough preserved that the protein remains and the DNA remains. But right now I'm working on a an individual from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico who is of Clovis age, and trying to explore her diet by means other than stable isotopes, because her protein is gone, it's the tropics and the bacteria that consume the protein fairly readily in the tropics. So we don't have any protein available there, but we do have growth patterns in her bones that are hinting at a similar diet, as we see with with the ancient child. And one of my motivations for working with the ancient child was to help with the interpretation of this other individual.
Ben Potter 1:44:54
And for for me, the research that we're actively engaged in my research group here in Alaska. Is we're really we have a lot of sites, a lot of well stratified sites with a lot of good preservation. And so we've been developing models to look at the exact nature of climate change over the last 20,000 years, looking at what's happening in the biotic community, the mammal community, and then when humans come into the mix. What are the what are the effects of human hunting pressure, and the relationship, that complex interrelationship between climate change, vegetation shifts and what humans are bringing to the mix, and the changing strategies of humans through time, in a way to try to get at sort of push pull factors, which, you know, we want to understand. Why did humans come into the Americas at the time that they did? Why not earlier? They certainly we have the presence of the Yana individual, 33,000 years ago, and about as far north as you can get in Asia. So why didn't they? Why didn't they come across then there's all sorts of questions about timing and adaptive strategies that were engaged in actively in the far north, and it bears directly on sort of the Clovis phenomenon.
James Chatters 1:46:08
Now, 33,000 was an inner stadial. So
Ben Potter 1:46:12
that's my I'm running with that model at this point to be connected with later groups that are in the Baikal area. It just happens to be the earliest dated one, so I expect it sort of contracted. But if there were, if there are people at White Sands, 22,000 years ago, I suspect that it may have something to do with that ancient north or Asian population. And as such, we know when they're Admixing with Native Americans, and it's much, much later in time.
Nick Jikomes 1:46:42
And so just remind me of a couple details here. So by the time the Clovis culture is really spreading in the Americas, had people already made it from Eurasia all the way into Western Europe, or what was sort of the extent of human occupation on that part of the world,
James Chatters 1:46:58
people are into Western Europe by around 43,000, years ago, okay,
Nick Jikomes 1:47:02
and that's roughly disappear and stuff like that.
James Chatters 1:47:06
Yeah. The Neanderthals appear just about the time. We see widespread Homo sapiens sapiens in in Europe. The spread across the southern part of Eurasia takes place earlier, somewhere on the between sometime during 50 to 60,000 years ago or so, they're moving across the south, and then they expand into the Arctic or sub Arctic regions about the same time they're moving in other sub Arctic regions, by the same time they're moving into Europe,
Nick Jikomes 1:47:39
Yeah, it makes sense that they're sort of spreading into these colder, more hospitable regions later, because it's just, it's just harder to live and move there. Yeah. And
Ben Potter 1:47:48
also altitude, and it's also altitude, like the Tibetan Plateau, we also don't see humans sort of going higher in elevation until later in time. And some of it could be population pressure, you know, things like that, better technologies, but it's the same kind of an idea. Higher latitudes and higher altitudes all have less they it's not so much they have less resources, but they do have overall less biomass. It's harder to get at if we're evolved and well adapted for mid latitude environments, temperate environments. Is there
Nick Jikomes 1:48:20
anything you guys want to reiterate that we talked about, or anything you want to just sort of see again, given, given how much ground we covered? Well,
James Chatters 1:48:27
just to emphasize that, that our finding may be of a single individual, but it is supported by all other lines of evidence that we see about Clovis itself, that they were a wide ranging population that moved very frequently from place to place, that they're typically associated with large mammal remains, that artifacts are that mammoth does tend to dominate those animal assemblages. So that what we're finding with this actual single episode of direct evidence about the diet of the Globus people is supported by all those other lines of evidence. It is, it is corroborated by them, rather than the other way around.
Nick Jikomes 1:49:18
Yeah, yeah,
Ben Potter 1:49:21
I think for me, but we touched, we covered a lot in good detail, in good depth. I appreciate the you know, very good questions for us. I think just, you know, maybe re emphasizing sort of the collaborative nature of what we've done early on, we sought out. We talked with Sarah hanzic, the landowner, the person responsible for a lot of the earlier work or allowing a lot of the earlier work? We wanted to reach out, and we did reach out to to indigenous peoples in the region to foster a very positive relationship. Like, you know, what's the interest? How are you is there any, are there any concerns with the work that we're doing? I think the. Fact that that we're able to do this without more destructive analysis of the of the remains which have been reburied Since 2014 was a major point that people were happy with. And of course, and this matches, parallels what I found up in the Far North. Indigenous peoples, of course, want to understand their heritage and diet is one thing that brings the Ancient Ones and modern peoples together. You know, the subsistence issues are a paramount interest to a lot of Native Americans today. And if we can contribute in some way to understanding the antiquity of some of these life ways and how, for instance, the fact that you know that people in that region for millennia, have gone after the biggest animals that are on the landscape. And of course, they can effectively do that, and they did do that. That's been a great, a great experience for me and us broadly on this project, is that we're doing this ethically. We're going through this in a way that can be, you know, beneficial to everybody involved.
Nick Jikomes 1:51:02
All right, Professor. Ben Potter, Jim chatters, thank you very much for your time. This is fascinating work.
James Chatters 1:51:08
Thank you. Been fun.
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