Steven Rinella contrasts Donald Trump’s legal battles—including Joe Rogan’s claim of a "Deep State" assassination attempt—with his own shift from physical to mental resilience, framing challenges as essential for human engagement. They dissect Chronic Wasting Disease’s spread (50% of bucks tested on Doug Marlette’s Wisconsin property) and its potential to redefine deer perception, while critiquing medical research institutions over COVID-19 and vaccine mandates. Rinella’s Hunting History explores survival mysteries like the Donner Party and shipwrecks (e.g., the Griffin’s lost beaver pelts), debunking myths with evidence—such as the Kelp Highway theory—and highlights ethical conflicts in repatriating ancient human remains, all to reveal how history’s harshest truths are often buried beneath stigma. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, I got a buddy, I don't want to say who it is, but he had sold his business and he told me, he goes, when I sell my business, I'm going to crawl into a deep, dark hole.
And later he's kind of back out and bought another business.
And I said, what about crawling into the deep, dark hole?
And he said, well, I did, but my wife was in there.
I remember years ago, three, four years ago, you told me that you wished you were, we were eating barbecue, and you told me you wished you were 10% less famous.
My wife, who's traveling with me right now, I observed this after we'd had dinner with you one time, and certain individuals, you included, would be that it's not just people that don't like you, right?
The good thing about that, though, is if someone tries to pretend you're something other than you are, if there's a smear campaign against you, people are like, no, I know that guy.
It's just people that get in those positions of power.
And if their whole life they've been fucked with and picked on or, you know, they've been marginalized and then all of a sudden they're in control, like, oh, now it's payback.
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I mean, it's like the, in fact, I would talk about that a little bit in some, you know, I've discussed that in, like, various conversations around when you watch, like, certain political fortunes rise as it becomes.
Well, that's how Jordan and I became friends in 2015. And then Jordan did my podcast and then Jordan became a famous guy for speaking out against this.
He's going through some sort of bizarre re-education process in Canada and he's going to publicize it because it's so ludicrous.
So they want to educate him on what he talks about on social media if he wants to keep his clinical license to practice as a psychotherapist.
But there will probably be a course correction now, which seems like just generally on free speech issues, there's a radical course correction right now.
Yeah, I mean, course correction doesn't always work.
Like, you know, we think it works because it works in America.
And it works in America because we have the First Amendment and we have the Second Amendment.
And those two things work together.
And if we didn't have those things, we would be genuinely fucked.
Because every government wants to eventually completely and totally control its population because it's way easier for them to make money.
And that's what they like to do.
They like to make money, they like to be in bed with the lobbyists and the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, and they like to fucking impose their will on people.
And if you can't express yourself and say, hey, this is fucked up, this is crazy, why am I doing this?
Like, these studies show that you're not correct.
Like, if you can't say all those things, which right now you can't do in Canada, it's not the same.
Like, their ability to express themselves on the internet has been severely limited.
It's real weird, man.
It's real weird and it's happening right- you could walk there.
If you wanted to, you could walk there.
And it's fucked.
It's like it's on the same patch of land as us and it's fucked.
It just shows you what can happen here if you don't have the right laws.
Because people like that fuckhead, Justin, They pretend...
I have a friend who has a podcast, a big podcast, and there's like fucking 13 people working for him.
People running around with clipboards.
I'm like, what do these people do?
Why do you have so many people working for you?
This is a freaky ride.
He's always got inter-office conflicts and people are getting fired because people are fighting with each other and people are fighting over promotions and trying to get to backstabbing each other.
I was like, I don't want to have anything to do with it in the future.
I don't.
I didn't want to.
I just felt sucked into it.
I'm like, we can't do this again.
We can't do it with these same people that fucked us for four years.
And then they're like, we're going to do it differently now.
Like, what's going on?
Did you see what's going on?
Obviously, you've seen what's going on in California.
But the governor gave this creepy fucking speech where he was talking about speculators coming in and talking about what to do with the land of all these homes that have been burnt down.
While it's still only 6% contained.
And he did this little dance.
Like, I've been talking with the governor of Hawaii about what to do.
Look at the little wiggle he does with his shoulders.
Speculator, watch this.
Look at this.
Look at this little wiggle.
It's excited about the possibilities of speculators coming in.
And he's saying, move forward.
We're going to move forward on that.
These people lost their homes.
A lot of those people don't even have fire insurance because the fire insurance pulled out of California.
I think like 69% of...
Fire insurance pulled out of California because they're like, this is too crazy.
You guys aren't doing jack shit to manage this.
You're not clearing the brush.
The amount of money they could have saved by just clearing brush, by filling the reservoir, that 11 million gallon reservoir was completely empty during the time of full fire season.
Why didn't you fix that?
It's all insanely mismanaged.
And then this guy is on...
Television, talking about...
Doing a dance.
Doing a dance in front of the burned-down home that people used to sleep in, where their children would sleep in.
So the other night, someone had taken out a clip where someone had taken out a chunk of an article in my friend's circle and had sent me a thing where Trump had called the Delta smelt like a basically useless fish.
And I was like, man, I feel like there needs to be like an article in the Constitution that the president cannot shit-talk smelt, you know?
But then I realized it was a different smelt, so I cooled off once I realized it was the Delta smelt, not our beloved Rainbow smelt.
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You know, I'm not real thrilled with this idea of, like, continuing to drill for oil in the Gulf and drill for oil everywhere and knowing that occasionally these things blow up and you have massive pollution.
You know, one of the kind of contradictions you encounter with stuff like this, and I've been a little bit involved in this the last few years, is I started going down to the Gulf of Mexico to spearfish on the oil rigs.
And so, the oil rigs are, imagine like a vertical coral reef, you know?
I don't want to call it, by no means I don't want to call the Gulf a desert, but I mean, you could, if you're away from the rigs, you could swim along the surface for miles, potentially.
Right?
If you're just swimming with a snorkel and mask, you can swim along the surface for miles and not encounter fish.
I mean, it's countering where you're seeing them in front of your face.
You know, you grow up with this idea, if you just have a passive understanding of all this stuff, you grow up with this idea that, like, oil exploration equals a diminishing of natural life, a diminishing of wildlife.
And you go in, and there there's this big debate where certain people want to pull the abandoned rigs out.
But you have fishermen who are like, they're here now, leave them.
And it's this very spirited debate, and different administrations will have different plans.
They had a program like Idle Iron, which was to pull them out.
There was a program called Rigs to Reefs, which is to tip them over so they're not navigational hazards.
The shrimpers don't like them because they cause navigational obstructions.
You can hang your gear up on them.
But all the rod and reel fishermen and all the spear fishermen want the rigs there.
So you wind up in a situation like that where it's this real complexity, and you can picture, you know, it puts people in a situation, and viewing it, it puts you in a situation where it's not that clean.
Like, you're creating, I mean, they, you almost hate to say it, because you're supposed to, you know, you're supposed to be, you know, most people from the environmental movement are anti-oil exploration, but then you go and look and be like, they created, like, Accidentally created an unbelievable fishery.
He had some line that like, we used to have a crime problem, then we brought in cops.
But it's like my first, you're talking about political involvement.
My first time I ever approached anything remotely political was on the lake I grew up on.
We had an invasive seaweed, an invasive aquatic plant called Eurasian milfoil, and it grew in our lake, but it made unbelievable fish habitat.
And at the time, I was not hip enough to understand the deleterious effects of non-native vegetation.
I just knew that when you wanted to catch a fish, you went to the milfoil bed, because all the fish were hiding in the milfoil.
And they had this proposal to come in and kill all the milfoil in all the lakes.
And I went down, and I remember I was in high school.
I went down, and I remember I was the sole person there to represent the milfoil side of the argument.
And then they did it.
They went in and poisoned all the milfoil out of the lakes in hopes of bringing in native seaweeds would take hold.
But it absolutely transformed the lake.
And from a fishery perspective, not a perspective of native habitat, but from a pounds of fish perspective, the pounds of fish, like the biomass of fish declined by pulling out the weeds.
Of course.
On one hand, you look like, well, why would you mess up with this?
There's fish everywhere.
And some people would be like, well, it's not a native plant.
And we need to value native wildlife at the expense of what a high schooler would look at as like...
The other enormously destructive thing that they've done around the lakes where I grew up on is all that...
So much of that...
The lake life relies on what you call the littoral zone, the shoreline zone.
Most of these fish species, they like it to be dirty, meaning weeds, falling over trees.
It creates all kinds of habitat for little stuff to hide.
On these lakes where I grew up in Michigan, there's been a tendency over the years to put roundup on your shoreline and then haul in beach sand.
You just watch over the years.
Over the course of my lifetime, You just watch this, like, really, like, verdant, kind of, like, vibrant environment become increasingly like a swimming pool in a lot of those lakes, man.
I grew up with this guy, Ron Spring, and for a living, he was a commercial bait fisherman.
He would catch wigglers, minnows.
He'd dig crawlers, catch leeches, and he would supply bait and tackle shops with live bait.
And he had spring sporting goods where he sold his own live bait.
And he would even hire women to sow what's called a spawn sack, where he'd take little pieces of salmon eggs and sew them into a little mesh bag for steelhead bait.
He was just in the bait business, but also was a fishing fanatic and lived off fish his whole life.
So he was living off Great Lakes fish his whole life.
And the University of Montana started trying to track down old-timers who'd eaten, like, enormous quantities of Great Lakes fish to test them for heavy metals exposure, okay, and other toxic things in the environment.
And he'd lived his whole life, like me, with, like, complete defiance of health advisory suggestions about fish consumption.
And he goes down there, and he would go in every month or two for these little batteries of tests.
And one of the things they would do with him is they would tell him, they'd give him a grocery list.
And they'd be like, hey, you've got to go to the store and buy, like, bread, eggs, cheese, butter, whatever.
And then he'd wait a minute, and they'd say, what were you supposed to buy at the store?
You know, and he's telling me this story.
And he told me, I always laugh because he said, Steve.
I wouldn't have remembered that list if I never ate a piece of fish in my life.
The sentiment I have about it is a friend of mine who fishes flathead catfish, which have...
They accumulate a lot of bio...
Not biotoxins.
They accumulate a lot of heavy metals.
And he said, and we were talking about eating this stuff, and he said, if I can eat, if I can catch and eat so many big flatheads that it kills me, I win.
You know when you do, I don't want to get in over my waiters here, but I'd love to talk about CWD at length, but sometimes you can do a, if someone does medical research and they'll have a finding, there's a term for it.
Let's say you have a finding that's alarming, but you haven't done peer review yet.
But let's say I just all of a sudden made some discovery that had huge implications, and people would need to become immediately aware of what I might have found out.
There's a term for it where you would release these preliminary findings, even though it hasn't been held up to academic rigor, because it's of such importance.
A lot of times you don't get to skip that step, but in cases of medical, you get to skip a step and say, hey, hang tight.
We're not all the way there yet, but look, this is kind of alarming.
They had a case, and it all corroded, but these guys had a case where they were able to infect a rhesus monkey with CWD. But then it wasn't replicable, didn't hold up.
But when things like that happen, they tend to get a ton of media.
But then down the road, the media doesn't follow suit.
There's been cases where there was one not long ago where they were looking at people that had this rare form of dementia, and they found that of these people that had this rare form of dementia, a couple of them were deer hunters who lived in CWD areas.
So they come out with a, hey everybody, check this out.
But then it winds up being that when you do a statistical analysis on it, it was...
No different than anything else.
There was no reason that it wasn't like they scored higher, that deer hunters scored higher, or nothing.
Yeah, and so it's like a certain number of people eat dementia, a certain number of people eat venison, and statistically you're going to have some overlap if you survey enough people.
So even though they gave like a big heads up, it won't be a nothing there.
But yeah, CWD, it's a highly infectious.
It was first identified in Colorado on a research facility, not a game farm.
It was first identified on a cervid research facility in Colorado, I believe in the early 70s.
And then there's been a debate, like some people feel that it was always there and wasn't detected, right?
And that it wasn't like we found it the minute it came out.
It was just that it would perhaps had been there and then we discovered that it was always there.
But it does expand its range all the time, right?
Even in the last few years, we've had our first cases in Montana.
We keep every year we add, like, without fail, every year we find CWD in states where it didn't previously exist.
Or within states that have CWD, we find CWD in counties.
That didn't have it.
Oftentimes you can look and it makes sense because it flows, but now and then you get these weird jumps, right?
Where something jumps a big moat of inactivity and then all of a sudden you get like a new hot spot and you look and be like, well, how did, if it's an infectious disease and deer aren't flying in airplanes, how did it jump?
Some of the jumps, people tie it to transporting.
There's a theory that is well accepted in a lot of circles would be that Moving cervids, moving deer and elk to penned operations has facilitated the movement of CWD. What it used to mean to be, if someone was a CWD denier before, it would be that they denied that it was a thing.
Like, there is no disease called CWD. It's generally accepted now that there's a disease called CWD, but now the debate is sort of, does it matter or not?
Right?
Our mutual friend Doug Dern is like heavily involved in CWD, combating CWD, trying to get more money spent to understand CWD. And they look at, you're looking at, there's two risks with CWD. One risk is that ultimately it's going to lead to like destruction of deer herds.
Meaning if you get like, it's always fatal.
And if infection rates get to a certain point, we're going to lose deer.
If it's always fatal and you have infection rates of 50 or 60% and it takes a couple years to kill them, you're going to run out of big bucks because nothing can live long enough.
The other fear is that it jumps the barrier and becomes a human pathogen.
All the hunters I know, the question we always talk about is, would you eat CWD-positive meat?
You know?
unidentified
Right.
Even if it doesn't jump currently, would you take that risk?
Well, the biologist Jim Heffelfinger, that'd be a very good guy for you to have on your show someday.
The biologist Jim Heffelfinger sent me a Thing where the guy that named it, the guy that coined the term, spelled out phonetically how it's supposed to be pronounced.
So then I was like, okay, I'm going to stick with Pryon now.
But picture that this gets out of hand and all of a sudden it's like, you can't move venison.
Across county lines.
I don't know.
No one's thrown this out there, but as they look at further and further restrictions, it's scary.
And so from a guy, I don't want to speak for Nugent, but from his idea of being overblown, his idea would be, like I said, I hate speaking for the guy.
It would be that...
Here we are making policy changes, making game management changes, making rule changes, adjusting what you can and can't do in the woods based off a thing that most people would be like, but we haven't proven there's a problem.
That would be his perspective on it.
My perspective is it's scary as shit, and as much as our government right now is trying to find a way to stop spending so much money, I support any money that can get spent on finding out if this can be a real problem or not.
I'll find other places to get the money, but I'd like to channel taxpayer dollars, billions of them, into making sure deer meat stays safe.
That's the other thing, is that we're all, like, me, everybody, because I guarantee I've eaten CWD-infected meat.
The other concern is we all got it.
We just don't know it yet because it takes 10 years.
But they've been tracking these dudes that went to a fire department fundraiser.
They had 100-some people that ate a bunch of CWD-infected meat at a fire department.
those people and they haven't got it but that's the other thing is this it was over a decade ago so that's the other thing is that we all got it like all these hunters you know i don't think this is true but some people are like all these hunters they don't know it yet but it could be that all of a sudden in 10 years they all start dropping like flies or get developed dementia oh i don't it's such a i really think that um i don't like to see any kind of wildlife disease right Of course.
I do believe if you look at prevalency rates and you look at the fact that it's always fatal, whether or not removing the human question to it, I do think that you will find that it'll become harder to produce big deer.
Just go and look at Boone and Crockett entries over time from all these counties.
So go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin, a famous giant whitetail producing place.
They get high rates of CWD prevalency.
If you put a line on CWD prevalency and you put a line on Boone and Crockett entries...
And you're able to track this over many years because we have all this data.
Does it correlate?
Does CWD prevalently drive down big bucks?
I'm sure some mathematician out there has started to try to look at if it's true, but a lot of people on the ground say that you do see population-level impact from CWD. And I'm guessing there's no way it doesn't affect participation, meaning that people that would like to hunt, And the whole promise of wild meat is, you know, you're getting, like, really healthy meat.
You're able to control the food chain.
But then all of a sudden you throw in this question of, like, well, but it could give you a prion disease, hypothetically.
That's going to dampen people's enthusiasm about deer.
And I'd hate to see we get to a point where when I look at a deer, I look at a deer with, like, great enthusiasm and love.
What happens when we look at deer and we look at them like a disease vector?
Yeah, like, picture down the road that, like, deer, which are this, like, universally loved, praised animal, this kind of, like, symbol of the American outdoorsman, becomes like a, yeah, that shit out of my yard.
I think that on Doug's place, I think that like last year, I don't know if they got all the results from this year, but I think last year they had close to 50% of bucks.
Yeah, I think that CWD goes back maybe about a decade in his area.
He's in Richland County.
Is he Richland County?
Yeah, Richland County, Wisconsin.
Somewhere in that ballpark.
And it's changed.
When you were at Doug's place, remember at Doug's place, these have this...
They used to have this slogan, like, nice buck next year, meaning, you know, let deer grow, let deer grow.
And Doug has really changed over the years.
He's changed his tune, and they really want to try to...
The idea, generally, with wildlife managers, is that by lowering...
You'll slow spread by lowering numbers.
Right?
That if you have, you know, 40 deer per square mile, you're going to have increased spread.
And if it was 20 deer per square mile, 30 deer per square mile, you might slow the spread.
But no one's demonstrated a lot of success in slowing the spread of CWD, so other hunters will look at it and be like, yeah, you're out there lowering deer numbers, and so there's half as many deer on the landscape, and CWD still spreads, right?
So you wind up with this question of how do you justify...
Trying to suppress deer numbers when you're not demonstrating a lot of success and slowing prevalency.
And the whole thing you're afraid of is lowering deer numbers, but you're lowering deer numbers.
Right?
But it's like a controlled, it's a controlled lowering to slow the spread.
But there hasn't been, no one has an area, to your point, you can't go to a county.
I don't think, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong by maybe one county, but I'm pretty positive I'm not wrong.
And this is generally absolutely true.
You can't go to a county that had infected deer that no longer has infected deer.
No one's gone into a population of deer and eradicated CWD. Wow.
It's very scary this idea of these fucking eggheads experimenting with diseases and making them more infectious for whatever reason without also developing a cure.
I guess the one justification you'd have is you'd be like, well by tinkering with it we'll better understand it and if it ever happens naturally we'd be able to combat it.
There was a famous buffalo hide hunter, and he had talked about, during the great slaughter of the buffalo, he had talked about now and then he'd commit himself to stop.
But instead he'd wake up in the morning and off in the distance.
And he's like, someone else is doing it.
So, I think that probably with the, you know, I'm no pathologist, but as long as someone's tinkering with that shit, everybody wants to tinker with that shit.
It's just one of those things where anything involving money.
Whenever there's an enormous amount of money involved and then there's a centralized control of information, like where there's people that have a distribution of information.
And then there's also the problem of exonerating people from any responsibility, which is what happened in the 1990s or was it the 80s?
Whenever they gave them because the vaccine manufacturers were saying, listen, we can't manufacture vaccines because too many people are getting injured by them.
And we're going to have so much liability that we're not going to be able to make manufacture vaccines anymore unless you give us immunity to prosecute it.
And so they gave it to them.
And then all of a sudden, you're getting 72 vaccines.
You're giving children hepatitis B. Hepatitis B for babies, which is just fucking crazy.
A sexually transmitted disease for babies.
Like, what are you doing?
Like, why are you doing that?
Well, you're doing it because you can.
And because the more vaccines you give kids, the more money you make.
And you're not responsible.
You don't have to pay off anything.
You don't get sued.
Which is just, you can't do that with these fucking corporations.
They're just too evil.
They're sociopaths.
They act like sociopaths.
They lie about studies.
They lie about side effects.
They minimize their responsibility.
And they profit immensely.
And they continue to do so as long as they're not punished.
So one of these dudes that pushed a person in front of a subway...
It must have been premeditated to some degree because hood and mask, right?
So you can't identify them on security footage.
And the dude that shot that healthcare insurance CEO masked.
But you don't think anything of it.
So this person was arguing in some capacity.
They were arguing that we need to move back to anti-masking rules.
To fight crime, which I, you know, I get the sentiment, but I also thought, like, if you had, at a time prior to the pandemic, if you had told me that there was restrictions on wearing a mask, you know, I would have thought, I would have been surprised about that.
Because it seems like, how can you dictate to someone that you have, like, a little stagecoach robber bandana on your face?
You know what I mean?
It's like a weird thing.
It's like, can you really tell people that they can't wear a mask?
But this person's saying, you could.
We did.
And now you've granted criminals some level of anonymity that you can just kind of like, you're cool just to walk around totally obscured.
I remember you were having a conversation with J.D. Vance, and J.D. Vance made a comment about, just not a serious comment, but made a comment like, you know, dudes shouldn't wear skirts or some shit like that.
And you're like, they should totally be able to wear skirts.
Women get to wear them, why can't men?
It was all said with levity, but I was a little surprised.
I could picture you as well.
I could picture you as well really feeling like, how could you legislate?
They got over it quick, so they weren't nervous about COVID at all.
I go, this is just for other crazy people that are riddled with anxiety.
You put this on, they feel okay.
It's not going to be forever.
And we're going to look back on this, and we're all going to laugh.
Every now and then I'll go through my closet and I'll put a jacket on that I haven't worn forever and I reach into a pocket and I pull out a fucking stupid surgical mask.
I'll give the government $10,000 a year to make masks illegal.
Fuck you.
You guys are fucking crazy.
The whole thing was crazy.
It was really weird.
It was like a psychology experiment.
It was a good experiment to see how many people around you are bitches who would just fall in line the moment things got weird.
And it's a lot.
A lot of people just have no ability to tolerate any discomfort, any weirdness, any uncertainty, any anxiety.
They just immediately...
There's so many people out there.
That have always had parents, and then bosses, and then supervisors, and they were always like following rules, always following rules, and assuming somebody has your best interest in mind.
And they don't.
They don't.
It's just humans.
Just a bunch of humans out there and a bunch of people that don't want to take responsibility for this fuck up that they've created.
And they want to lie and distort things and gaslight the whole population.
And then somehow or another, these people that are doing that are allowed to spend hundreds of millions and billions of dollars on advertising.
On television.
And so now the television networks will never criticize them.
Because they get all this fucking...
You know, this is like the argument about advertising for pharmaceutical drugs.
You know, we're the only country other than New Zealand, in the whole world, that allows pharmaceutical drugs to advertise.
What frustrates me already is it's going to be impossible to explain it.
Like, now I can't.
It's very hard to explain the 9-11 terror attacks to my kids.
And I want to be, when they make, in 10 years, 20 years, whatever, when they make a docu-series on the COVID-19 pandemic and the social response and the government response, I really want to be in the room on the edit.
I want to be like, don't forget about, you know what I mean?
The telling of how it happened.
Like, I would like to go into a time machine and go forward and see how it is told later.
Yeah, and you're going to be like, that's totally not.
That's not the conversation.
That's not what that is.
You missed the point.
Do you notice that everything you read where you know a lot about it, let's say you read a piece of reporting and it's a reporting about the podcast industry, where it came from, how it's monetized.
Mostly what you're going to feel is that's not what that is.
That's incorrect.
Well, this form of amnesia is that you forget that.
So then later you're reading an article about a thing you don't know well.
But someone somewhere who knows the world well is reading it, and they're having the same feeling you have every time you read about something you know well, which is this person has no idea what they're talking about.
And you take things you're not aware of, and when you get the dope on them from someone, you're forgetting how fucked up everything is when you do know about it.
That with AI in these large language models is that AI will be able to distribute information objectively without that.
And that is the case in a lot of situations where they haven't been corrected yet.
Like, AI is subject to human influence, obviously.
I'm sure you're aware of the Google Gemini situation.
The Google Gemini situation is the best one because they said, you know, create images of Nazis.
And they had multicultural Nazis.
But if it has to analyze information about specific things just based on just what's actually available, oftentimes it will give you a very Accurate assessment that you wouldn't get from a newspaper because the newspaper would be more interested in adhering to whatever particular ideology they subscribe to.
So they would flavor things through an ideology and probably gaslight you a little bit about the other side's perspective.
The hope is that in the future, with large language models, and especially as they become more and more sophisticated, you're going to be able to get an accurate, objective assessment of things that doesn't have any human influence.
I did this little event last night at this place here in town called Arena Hall.
And the moderator of the event, it was like a Q&A or a chat.
And he was asking me, as a writer, as an author, what are your fears about AI? And I'm like, in the very short term, AI is coming for certain types of writing.
Certain types of writing are going to be made obsolete by AI. The reason I don't worry about it as of now, as a writer, is it's always going to be representative of input.
The input has to come in from people who are out digesting real experience.
It'll get faster.
The point I use is if you earlier alluded to the assassination on...
asked AI about details about it it doesn't exist right like the whole thing gets fed in so if you if you remain on some level of cutting edge about thought or cutting edge about analysis or cutting edge about what's going on in the world you'll have to start being more careful about being like that your work remains at the vanguard of feeding into the system of newness right yeah and that's gonna be like A big challenge.
Like a big challenge as a writer.
But I remember coming up as a writer too in the old days and being super scared of the internet in general.
Because it's like this thing I'm trying to hunt down.
I recently had a guy on my podcast whose name is Randy Brown.
And my brother Danny recommended him, too, because he's a fisheries biologist in Alaska.
So he came on the show, and what he did is in the 70s, he grew up in New Mexico and always wanted to live in the woods.
Just grew up camping in the mountains and stuff.
And in the 70s, he goes up to Alaska and just goes to live in the bush along the Yukon.
And then did it.
I mean, for 15 years.
For 15 years, he lived in the bush in Alaska, just building little cabins, and lived off the land.
I mean, like, wasn't buying groceries.
Like, lived off the land trap in Alaska.
He tells me this story, and I've been trying to put the word out about this.
He tells me a story where, I'll have to go check, I think it was in 78. In 1978, he's on the Yukon River, just downstream.
Downstream of the Yukon from Canada.
He's between Circle, Alaska, and Eagle, Alaska, on the Yukon.
And him and his friends are living their lives in all these, like, line cabins.
They got strung up and down the river, okay?
Two guys come down the river out of Canada.
So again, this is 1978. Two guys come down the river out of Canada on a homemade log raft.
This guy in Randy's circle, one of his buddies, he tells this whole story on the podcast, but one of his buddies has a cabin down on the river and these two guys pull in, in this homemade raft, they pull in for the night at this cabin.
One of these individuals identifies himself as John the Baptist.
Abandons this guy in 1978 who came out of Canada who identifies himself as John the Baptist.
John the Baptist becomes this incredible leech.
On these guys that are living in the bush, eating their food, using their stuff, taking their ammunition.
He lingers long enough that he can't really get out of that area because it frees up on the river.
And they keep telling him, you've got to go somewhere else.
And they say, you've got to leave here.
You can go stay at one of our other cabins.
Don't touch our shit.
He goes up to the other cabin.
When they eventually go up to the other cabin, he had taken a bunch of their stuff.
He'd taken some of their furs and made his own clothes.
They boot him out and they tell him what you got to do is you got to go down to the river and go up or down, wait for a boat and go up or down.
But he comes up with this cockamamie plan where he's going to go to this area.
They're like, no way can you walk to that area.
He takes off into the woods.
Now, when he does, he steals this guy we had on the podcast, Randy Brown.
He steals Randy Brown's snowshoes and takes off.
Randy Brown gives chase.
It was a real bad snow year.
He tracked him for about five miles and just said, never mind, it's not worth it.
The next year, he takes a different route and goes into the headwaters of this river where this guy had taken off with his snowshoes, and he's canoeing down the river and sees his snowshoes hanging in a tree.
Okay?
And there's a little cabin there, a little line cabin they had out, and he goes in and here's the guy, stone dead, starved to death, in a sleeping bag.
To like, hey man, like if it comes down to it, don't hesitate to eat my body.
You know, which you should.
He gives you this book, Death in the Barren Ground.
It's about these guys in the 20s, these three dudes in the 20s that go up on this Thelon River, which flows into the Hudson Bay.
And they go up in the, they're kind of north of the tree line, but they're in a timbered grove.
And they go up there to trap for the winter, and their whole plan is to live off caribou, but the caribou never come through.
And the youngest one keeps this meticulous journal in this book.
He keeps this meticulous journal, and he documents with painstaking detail the two people he's with starving to death and himself eventually starving to death.
He lets off at a point.
It's unclear when he died.
He had the wherewithal to put the journal in the stove.
And to make a sign that said, look in the stove.
And when they found him a couple years later, they were able to find this journal.
But it got so bad that they're, like, crushing animal bone, which is a thing.
That's not going to talk about this Donner Party deal I was working on.
These guys are crushing animal bone and boiling it to get some kind of nutritive value out of crushed animal bone.
And they're eating animal hide.
Like, you scrape away the hair, and you can boil animal skins and eat them.
I've done that.
It just makes, like, a gelatin-y, kind of tasteless, like, leather noodle, basically.
And what he's documenting, as they're dying from this, is the horrible bowel obstruction.
And they're trying to make, like, in his journal, he's describing this, of trying to make these enema devices.
And even for a while on each other, trying to perform an operation on each other, because that bone fragment, they're boiling that bone fragment and drinking it, but that bone fragment in their bowel is reforming into bone plugs.
And even when they find these guys...
Years later, a guy from the Canadian Mounted Police is doing this very...
Basically a crime scene description of what went on in here.
And still laying there a couple years later is a plate full of solidified excrement.
So, you look and be like, oh, they're starving to death, starving to death, but when you starve to death, all this stuff is actually going on, and that had to have been fatal.
And we were working on, you know, Mo, who's been on the show, we've been working on this project, which I'm, you know, wanting to plug, but we did an episode on the Donner Party, who died up in the mountains in California, and the Donner Party, in addition to the cannibalism they're famous for, it was so crazy, because before I read that book, We're hearing all about that the members of the Donna Party were eating the crushed bone and eating the boiled hides.
Oh, and the other thing is all those hair follicles would form into dense balls that would, like, plug your rectum.
And he's just describing all this as they die.
It's horrible.
But that dude, Randy Brown, gave me that book because you could tell that in his mind, man, like, starving out.
Like, it stuck with him.
You know, and he's walking around handing out a book about starving to death in the Arctic, you know?
Because he'd do it well.
But that was like in that same thing, like Donner Party being like known for the cannibalism and all that, is all those people die and probably like a lot of the same thing.
But you know what's weird is about it, that someone pointed out to me later, I think John the Baptist, like John the Baptist from the Bible, I think John the Baptist starved to death.
Yeah, there's this dude, there's this kid, I might tell you about him, this French kid, Etienne Brulee, that the French brought over.
And, like, he's known as Etienne Brule, and the French brought him over during the colonial era and gave him to the tribes so he'd learn their language.
And eventually he gets crossways with the Huron Indians, and the Huron Indians killed him and allegedly ate him.
So everybody knows him as Etienne Brule, which is burnt, right?
So we did very early Meat Eaters together, and we've always kept in touch, and he went on and did all that crazy stuff with Bourdain and got heavily involved in that.
And then after Bourdain's death, there was this kind of, I don't know, man, almost like this exodus of talent, like all these people that worked on that great show.
And they went on to do other stuff, and then Mo and I got joined up on this, and we've worked on it.
Mo's a showrunner on it, and we've worked on it together.
And it's coming out January 28th, and it's a show on History Channel where we look at outdoor mysteries.
So I brought up, we did an episode on Donner Party.
And you might ask, well, what's the mystery about the Donner Party?
But it's kind of like, what happened...
Could it have gone differently?
Like, what mistakes were made?
And most of these mysteries that we do are things that I have that most people have some awareness around, right?
Like, you've at least heard of it.
And I think that people think about the Donner Party, for instance, just to take an example.
When they're making a joke about cannibalism, you'd be like, oh, the Donner Party.
You know what I mean?
Like, people don't realize what happened there.
And going to that place, I think I never realized about it.
There was 90 people that got stranded in the Sierra Nevada that winter, 1846 to 1847. A thing that you never, ever realize and that changes everything I've ever thought about, half of those, more than half of those were kids.
But they tried to make it across this path and they got frozen in in their boats and they were waiting in the spring for the ice to thaw and it never thawed.
And they got stuck there and they tried to walk out and make it to the ocean and they never made it.
In the Donner Party, they would, at times, in some of these cases, they had a little system where you would keep the carcasses separate so that people didn't have to eat their own kin, eat their own relatives.
They mostly ate people that died of natural causes, but at the time, there was no legal prohibition on killing Indians.
They had two Indian guides with them, and a guy murdered them.
They did, but also they just would, you know, try to intimidate Native American tribes, and, you know, they'd get them into the fur trade, but also there's, like, rogue people, and you're also, at that time, the French are duking it out with English had a big toehold up in Hudson Bay.
So you got the English there.
You got the Spanish to the south.
Just a ton of conflict.
And people still trying to duke it out over who's going to control the Great Lakes.
There's this argument that LaSalle's ship was flying under a French flag.
Whoever finds that ship, there's an argument that the French would be able to claim that ship.
So even if some dude, like some freelancer, was to find it and find those cannons and shit and finds this ship, there's an argument that the French could say, we'll take it from here, son.
We were going to do our last episode when we went and did the Donner Party.
What we were supposed to be doing is we were supposed to be hanging out with guys that are still this whole fleet of Spanish vessels that went down off the east coast of Florida.
So the Atlantic side of Florida.
We were going to go down with these guys that are still fighting over and finding all this stuff from all these sunken ships.
But then the hurricane passed right over it.
So we didn't get to go do that.
We didn't go do that show.
We did one about that wanted to become mostly a story that centered around in the 70s.
There's this aircraft that was carrying the Speaker of the House.
Do you remember...
Is it Nina?
No.
Hey, Jamie, I hate to be treating you like a research assistant here.
Cokie Roberts.
You know the journalist Cokie Roberts from NPR and shit?
Oh, it does, but then you get into the huge number of all these missing aircraft and, like, all that search centered around this glacier that it would have been swallowed by a glacier.
And we went to this other site where this military transport plane years ago did go down in a glacier, and the glacier swallowed it, and I think it was, I don't know, 20-some years later, that glacier started to spit that plane out at the toe of the glacier.
Like, it carried it, I don't know, what it is, 13 miles under the ice and then started to spit out human remains and plane parts.
Every spring, the military goes to the foot of that glacier.
Every spring, they go there.
Or, sorry, every summer.
They go to the top of that glacier, and they're still identifying human remains that are moving out of that thing miles away from where that plane burrowed into that glacier.
And on top of that glacier, we had got there after that.
We flew over it in a helicopter.
They don't want you landing there.
But on top of that glacier is all this orange paint.
Orange paint spots.
They weren't working there anymore, but you can tell they were in there marking everything that you could see coming out of that as that glacier recedes.
So this other glacier where most of that search focused, for that Begich Boggs flight, focused on this one glacier.
But if you do the math on that glacier...
Had it gone into that glacier, where they had spent a ton of time looking into a crevasse in that glacier, had it gone into that glacier, the glacier would have spit it out by now.
Because you can kind of track how much a glacier moves every year.
So now the idea that it was in that glacier has been kind of put to rest.
It was actually more peaceful there because you know how much all that cold air from that ice generates so much wind?
We land this helicopter there.
And the wind's howling, and I don't know much about aviation.
I mean, I use it a lot, but the wind's so bad, I was asking the guy, at what point do you risk that your helicopter's gonna blow off the glacier?
And a couple minutes later, he's a very experienced pilot, but a couple minutes later, he winds up tethering down his helicopter, because he's like, now you're like, fuck it with my head.
So he tethers down his helicopter on these ice screws, you know, to make sure the helicopter doesn't slide and go down into a crevasse.
And then you, you know, I was with a very experienced ice climber, but harness up and pick your way down.
But anyways, it's like so loud, and you hear a lot of the, you know, the noise of all that ice moving, because it's moving all those rocks and everything.
It just pulverizes stuff, as you see with that aircraft.
But when you drop down in that, When you drop down on that crevasse and go down that sucker, it gets, like, unbelievably calm.
So you're down there, you can hear water running everywhere.
You can hear rivers underneath you, inside that.
But you're roped up, you know?
But even the rope you're on, you're just screwing screws into the ice.
And then, at a certain air temperature, right, like, the screw conducts heat, you know?
So at a certain air temperature...
If you drive that screw in and that screw is pushing heat, it'll melt the ice around the threads.
So you'll actually drill these big holes into the glacier like a V. Picture you're coming in like a V and the two upper parts of the V are like 30 inches apart.
And you drill at a 45 degree angle until those holes meet.
Because if you put that screw in there, at a certain temperature, the threads of the screw are moving like solar heat and atmospheric heat down the threads and can melt the thread out.
So you're just, you're tied in on a little like, yeah, you're like tied.
Comes to the U.S. He's trying to figure out a way to make his way in America.
And in New York, he meets a guy in the fur business, like a furrier.
And the guy says, a lot of money being made in furs.
And that was, like, that was the commodity.
For North America.
When you look at all the English powers coming or all the European powers coming to establish colonies, you know, it's known like the Spanish come in and they get like all that Aztec gold, all that Incan gold.
Other European powers were like jealous about the wealth Spain was pulling out and mineral wealth and they always thought that in our area up in what's now the continent like US, you know, eventually gold did come out but they were sort of like primarily like we need our own gold fields.
But what emerged was fur.
Fur was our thing.
Fur was the thing of value.
So Aster became a fur trader and helped launch these fur trapping expeditions and became involved in what we now call the mountain man area.
When you hear the term mountain men, The Mountain Man era.
In my sort of other job outside of doing my History Channel show, we do audio originals.
We did one on the deerskin trade called The Long Hunters.
It was about Daniel Boone, 1770s in the deerskin trade.
Right now...
We're coming out with one called Meat Eaters of American History, The Mountain Men, and it covers that like John Jacob Astor era of the beaver trade.
And what all those dudes, so when you hear about Jim Bridger, John Coulter, Jed Smith, what they were producing, they were producing a material that would be used to make felt hats.
I do know, because I looked at it the other day, but I forgot what it is.
They're very recovered across a big part of their range.
But nowhere near what it was at the time.
The whole continent was shaped by beavers.
They manipulate their landscape more than anything besides humans.
But people had always whittled away at them.
You know?
Like, earlier I mentioned Daniel Boone, like, his primary job was a deerskin, he was in the deerskin trade, and what they were using for back then.
You know when you see really old pictures of, like, kings and shit, and they got those kind of white pants on?
It's probably a buckskin pant, right?
So our whole term with, like, when we say a buck, something's worth a buck, that's about the equivalent value of a deerskin.
So, you know, that's where that term came from.
Those guys, at the same time, they would hunt deerskins in the summer, because they wanted them real thin.
And then they would switch and they would hunt beaver pelts in the winter for wool felt, to create wool felt.
But we kind of gradually extirpated, like wiped out beaver numbers.
And then when you get to 1804 and the Lewis and Clark expedition, Lewis and Clark push into the interior, into the northern Rockies and around the headwaters of the Missouri.
And when they come back to St. Louis, like one of the things they report on is like, holy shit.
Like, we found that the last great stronghold of the beaver is in the Rockies.
And that's what pushed this whole Mountain Man era.
So when you watch the Revenant, like Hugh Glass, you know, get mauled by the Grizzly, those guys were all, like, their thing was they were beaver trappers.
And earlier I mentioned the English up around Hudson Bay.
So you're familiar with this thing called the Hudson Bay Company?
The Hudson Bay Company and the English always had this model of the fur trade where they would build posts and then incentivize Indians to hunt fur or trap fur.
They didn't trap.
The English weren't themselves trappers.
The English were traders.
And they would incentivize tribes to go trap and bring them the furs.
In the Rockies, that didn't work.
They couldn't get these nomadic...
Equestrian bison hunters with the program.
They thought it was, by and large, the sentiment was, it's beneath us.
We're not going to give up our whole life away.
Everything we need comes from the buffalo.
We live in big family groups.
We follow the herds.
I'm not going to go trap beaver for you.
It's of no interest to me.
So then they're like, well, shit, how are we going to get the beaver?
And so they start hiring dudes.
They start hiring orphans and people that...
That were under indentured servitude and ran away, whatever.
They hired these big groups of Americans out of the colonies, the former colonies, because at the time of the United States, they hired these guys and say, you're going to go out and live for years at a time in the Rockies and trap beaver, and here's where to meet us on such and such date every year.
So go to this valley.
Right?
Go to Jackson Hole, or go to Daniel, Wyoming, or Bear Valley, wherever, and we'll meet you in June.
And you bring all the shit you caught, and we'll give you some more equipment.
And that was the Mountain Man era.
All that stuff, when they caught those beavers, there's no need, they didn't want the meat, they could eat the meat, but there's no value in the meat.
The hide, they don't even want the leather from the hide.
That was thrown away.
They don't want the main guard hairs.
So if you look at a pelt, You got these silky long guard hairs and then there's an underwool underneath it.
But there was so much conning and scamming of people taking shit that wasn't beaver wool and trying to pass it off as beaver wool.
You had to ship the whole hide to Europe.
So they could confirm that it was in fact a beaver hide at which they would hire people to pick the guard hair off, shave that underwool off, throw the guard hair away, throw the leather away, take that underwool and turn it into a felt to make a hat.
If there's a time where you could go back in history and just observe, like they could put you in like a fucking bulletproof bubble and just like, no one knows you're there.
There used to be an idea that's existed for much of my life about the peopling of the Americas.
And sometime, maybe around 15,000 years ago, there was so much of the Earth's water was tied up in glaciers Asia and Alaska were connected by a chunk of ground the size of Texas.
The Bering Land Bridge.
When people hear the Bering Land Bridge, you kind of picture this little like, it's like Moses crossing the part of the Red Sea.
You could have lived and died on the, you know, generations were probably born and died on the Bering Land Bridge with no idea that it was a bridge.
Like I said, it was a chunk of ground the size of Texas.
That much water was tied up in glaciers.
People crossed.
They almost certainly weren't saying like, hey, Bob, let's go to Alaska.
But they were doing their thing.
They were hunting and moving and they crossed.
And then because of all that ice, once they moved into what's now Alaska, the theory held that they were trapped there by glacial ice.
And eventually there was this thing called the Ice-Free Corridor opened up around like it would have spilled out around Edmonton, Alberta.
And the idea was the first people.
To lay eyes on the continental U.S. When that corridor opened up, when that little gap through the glaciers opened up, the first Americans spilled out onto the American Great Plains, killing mammoths with spears.
As all this new information has emerged, the dates don't line up anymore.
So we did a hunting history episode about this very question of...
How and when and who were the first people to enter the continent, right?
And now, that was called the Ice-Free Corridor hypothesis, but it's been made more and more untenable by finding these super old sites.
For a while, the oldest site we knew about in the New World was a site called Monteverde down in Chile.
So if people came in at the Bering Land Bridge, why is the oldest known site of human occupation all the way down in Chile?
And now currently the oldest site is on the Columbia River drainage near a place called Pittsburgh Landing.
There's a really old site there.
And it winds up being that it doesn't line up with the idea of people entering this ice-free corridor.
Because, like, when did the corridor, when was it open?
When was it possible to pass through?
But now you have all these older dates.
And then people are even starting to question the validity of the idea of, like, that this corridor opened when they thought it did.
So now the fashionable idea, it seems rock solid.
We filmed much of the episode up at our fish shack.
There's this theory now called the Kelp Highway, that you had this pretty stable environment all along the Pacific Coast, and it was defined by kelp beds.
Enormously rich in fish resources, enormously rich in shellfish, right?
And that the first Americans were a seafaring people.
And all that shit about what glaciers are melted and not melted and when this and that corridor and land bridges open was a moot point because these were people that just came down the coast.
And they knew how to survive in that marine, that kelp marine environment.
And they went south and went south and went south and things remained remarkably similar and with like great speed, with great speed all the way down the coast.
So all of a sudden there's people in Chile.
Wow.
Instead of this idea that people came into the Great Plains and then spread to the coasts, it's that people came down that route.
And, you know, that really old site, the currently oldest, the currently oldest, like, ironclad, absolutely accepted, academic consensus accepted site is that Snake River site.
Or on the Columbia drainage.
That they came down the coast and then the continent was populated by people who just followed these major rivers, these salmon runs and stuff.
Coastal fishing people migrated up these rivers following fish and then turned into, over time, became these mammoth hunters.
These interior grassland hunters.
But their genesis was in these seafaring people.
And as people came down, they kind of filled in.
So you go to the Tlingit or the Haida that live along the Alaskan coast now.
That's their ancestors, right?
They were perhaps people living that way, and those places were the first people to enter the continent.
So my time machine would be whatever the hell day that was.
The human diaspora is like anatomically, like the sort of widely accepted scientific explanation is that anatomically and behaviorally modern humans, there was many waves of hominids coming out of Africa, but sometime around 70,000 years ago.
Our current human ancestors came out.
They came into a Europe that was populated by Neanderthals, perhaps other hominids.
They kind of won, right?
And then spread around the world.
And the last continent outside of Antarctica, which was never, you know, the last continent to be occupied by humans outside of Antarctica, which arguably was never occupied by humans, would have been South America, was the last stop.
But man, there's this theory called the Salutrian hypothesis, which is that Northern Europeans came over 10 plus thousand years ago.
There's always these different ideas that someone from somewhere else blew in on a raft.
There's always this thing, but what I'm talking about is a sort of like, again, the kind of like academically accepted idea, the sort of mainstream.
The idea remains, and it's supported by genetic, linguistic, everything, is that humans came out of the Americans, our Native Americans came out of Siberia through a Siberian pathway, probably in waves.
If you refer to now like Northern Coastal Peoples, Eskimo, Inuits.
They were a later wave.
They were different than what became the Athabascans to the south.
It was like a later wave.
So there could have been repeated waves of people coming.
But I've always been interested in the first wave.
See if you can find the overhead of it, Jamie, because when you look at the overhead, you're like, Jesus Christ, this looks like people put this there.
Yeah, well, there is some people that think it's man-made, and there's some people that think it's natural, but it's leaning much more towards man-made.
It's crazy because they're flat and straight and they look fairly uniform and they look like they're cut into position.
And there's also a bunch of these, you know, where they would grind things.
There's these...
Posts that sit out that look like they're carved outside that are similar to a lot of stuff they find in South America, Machu Picchu and stuff like that.
It's very, very weird stuff.
Well, because if that was made by people who and when and how Yep, yeah, my god I've I'm going natural, but we'll do a future episode on that question.
I think natural, too, until you look at some of them.
Some of those images, go back to some of those images, Jamie.
He's always been involved in this debate about where these Clovis hunters and these Ice Age Americans, to what degree were they really these northern wild men killing mammoths with spears and shit, right?
And people have tried to, over the years, sort of emasculate these Ice Age hunters.
Being like, oh, they probably weren't really killing all these mammoths.
They probably found them and scavenged them.
And explaining away, David hate me saying this, but explaining away evidence that they were slaying mammoths.
And also explaining away the theory that they killed all the mammoths.
Right?
And they were eating a much more varied diet and using plant resources.
And they were kind of like a kinder, gentler Ice Age hunter.
So it's funny that out of this, as this debate is always waged on, it'd be like this accusation that in creating our idea of these Ice Age hunters, you create the kind you wish was there.
Right?
So a dude like me is going to be like, yeah, man, mammoth hunters.
Right, right.
And some other dude would be like, oh, no.
Berry pickers.
Yeah, berry pickers, right?
They were gentle.
But they finally just did all this work, and lo and behold, he was young, but he was drinking mother's milk.
Which backs up this idea that those big-ass points...
Those big-ass points they made were, like, being used.
I participated in this study.
Me and some of the guys I work with participated in this study with Meltzer, this guy named Metten Aaron, who runs an experimental archaeology lab at Kent State University.
And they gave us all these stone tools.
And we had a dead bison laying there.
And we were supposed to just spend the day butchering the bison with stone flakes and also with Clovis points.
So we were supposed to butcher half with Clovis points.
And butcher half with stone blades.
They just wanted people who were expert butchers to do it.
You don't really know how anybody did anything, but just to see.
Because the problem they have in looking at the archaeological record is the only thing left is bone and stone.
Everything else is gone.
So when you find a mammoth ribcage eroding out of a riverbank, and lo and behold, there's a projectile point laying there, we had always said, oh, someone stabbed it with that point and killed it.
But do you really know that?
You'll see a mark on a rib, and you're like, oh, see, they shot it in the rib, and that's why it's got a scratch on its rib.
Well, do you really know that?
We just assume.
So we did this project to butcher this whole thing, a fresh dead bison, all the stone points, and then they went and cleaned all the bones.
This guy John Hayes from Hayes Tax Energy Studio did this way to treat the bones and clean them where you're not messing up the bones at all.
So now you have a set of bones that you know what happened to them.
And you have a set of stone tools that you know they were used for.
And the idea is that you're creating something to compare.
There's this famous Folsom site out of New Mexico.
Where all these bison skulls, these Ice Age bison skulls, they look different.
Like that skull you got out in your studio.
Big horn, you know, longer horned animal.
They all got these cut marks on the bone right here.
Inside the jaw mark.
Inside the jaw.
And people have been like, oh, it must have been from extracting the tongue.
And I even thought that.
I went to SMU and looked at those skulls and held those bones in my hand.
And I'm like, oh look, they were probably getting the tongues out and made all those cut marks inside the jawbone.
But what's funny, in going and extracting the tongue with stone tools, I didn't do shit what would have left any kind of mark like that.
And again, you don't know how they did what they did, but it creates an interesting data set so that when you do look at cut marks on bones, you can start putting together.
What might have caused it?
What he wants to work on next is they want to do an ostrich.
When I extracted the tongue with the stone, I extracted the tongue with stolen tools and I didn't have any need to go anywhere near that thing like that.
I don't know, but it just goes to show you look at stuff, you find a projectile point with a ribcage, and you're like, They stabbed it.
filled up the North and South America, like a sort of motivational driver for that really quick spread would be that, let's say you pop out in the Great Plains and the animals have never seen a person, right?
A mammoth has never seen a person.
You just walk up and kill it.
And you do that for a couple months in some valley and then everything gets like, oh shit, it's one of them things and runs away.
Well, they're getting closer to knowing now, because now they can do crazy shit.
Like, they can go into...
Pond sediments.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, stuff's shedding.
You know, you're shedding cells all the time.
At some point, you'll go down 10 feet into some pond and pull a little bit of sediment out and lay that sediment out and do some analysis and be like, oh, there's skin cells from six mammoths, a short-faced bear, right?
And when you go on an archaeological dig, you know, they're always, they just...
They just dig a fraction.
There's a knowledge now.
There's a knowledge now that tomorrow we're going to know a bunch of shit we don't know.
So if we got a hundred squares, we'll just dig one now.
And the impulse used to be just to come in and destroy the whole site, right?
And wash everything away with hoses and just look for big bones and big stone points.
And you'd come away with thinking that they used big stone points to kill big bones because you just washed into the ditch.
All of that micro evidence, all of those small bones, all of the plant pollen, you just washed everything away because you kind of knew what you were looking for.
So we probably make the same mistake now.
So when you go to a dig, they just go like, we'll just check this little square and then leave.
You know, this is protocol now, knowing that in 10 years, 100 years, whatever.
Someone's gonna have a way better way.
They'll stick some little stick down there, and we'll tell them everything you need to know, you know?
And there's archaeologists working on what happened at the Lost Roanoke Colony, and the minute you bring up, like, human remain conversations, people, it's just like...
I recently met a guy that does, he's Puebloan, so he's from one of the Pueblos in New Mexico, and his whole focus is on, he does repatriation for his Pueblo, like, you know, people not familiar with the Pueblo would be like, basically, you know, it's...
Akin to a tribe, right?
He works on repatriation for his tribe.
Mostly focuses on remains.
Getting back the remains of his ancestors from all these museums and stuff.
They want them back.
And I had said to him in this conversation, I'd said, hey, why can't there be a deal to be struck where you just say to the museum, okay, you keep one gram of that bone.
For your work.
Keep a gram of the bone and give the rest back to us.
He said that would never be acceptable to us.
It'd be like the same way if someone went and dug your...
Someone dug your grandpa's bones out of a graveyard and later you're like, hey, give me my grandpa back.
What complicates a lot of that human remains stuff, too, especially with stuff that he's talking about, that stuff he has is as old as it did, is there's a little bit of a question, like, the groups that are there now, peoples that are there now, were the peoples that were there before.
You know, because people move all the time, right?
You just look at, like, how the Comanche moved.
Look how the Sioux were in the upper Midwest and areas of Minnesota and wound up, you know, coming westward and all this movement.
So when you have bones, there's always a question of, well, typically it goes like this.
It's like, who was currently on the land?
But when you're talking about bones that are 10, 11, 12,000 years old, there's like a little bit of a, in my mind, there's a little bit of a question of like, well, who do you, how do you know that that person's direct descendants aren't in New Mexico?
With the Pueblos, it is people that have had occupation on these places for hundreds of years, and people just came in and hauled their ancestors out to stick them in museums.
I was at a museum with my kids over Christmas break.
I was at a museum in Chicago.
And we go into this exhibit and all the walls, all the displays are papered.
So you can't see.
And there was a sign that just said, like, we're in a repatriation issue.
So they blocked it all.
Wow.
I don't even know what was behind the paper.
Whatever the display was, they're in a custody battle over their display and blocked it for view.
And years ago, I went to Salta to look at those children of the corn.
You ever hear about those children, those Incan children?
They left on that mountaintop and they kind of freeze-dried.
They have three of these children they found, but whatever the deal they made with the Incan, the contemporary Incan peoples, the deal they made is they'll only display one at a time.
And when I went, it was the child that had been struck by lightning after the fact.
You know, you just walk up and it's in a case, but you're looking at someone's baby, you know?