EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,198 words- 0:00 – 1:11
Coyotes as neighbors: why they stopped howling and how they raid backyards
- NANarrator
(drumming music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Yeehaw, and we're up. How are you, Dan? Great to see you.
- NANarrator
Great to see you, too, Joe.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, listen, man. I know I've talked to you since, uh, I read Coyote America, but Goddamn, that's a good book. It's such a good book, so I'm very excited about this. I'm sure this is gonna be awesome too, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America. I've told so many people about coyotes because of you, and I seem so smart.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- NANarrator
Well, I appreciate that, then.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, it's such a crazy animal. You know, one of the things that's interesting about coyotes in, uh, our area is they don't howl. I think they've learned.
- NANarrator
Oh, yeah. That's, uh, that, that's happening in LA too. They've learned not to howl.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- NANarrator
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Interesting.
- NANarrator
Yeah. Attracts attention to them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I used to hear it a lot where I lived. I lived in Ventura County, and we had real problems with them. Like, they killed all my chickens. It was like, they were everywhere.
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
But also, fucking cool.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
You know? I, uh, it's such a conflicted thing 'cause I hated-
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- 1:11 – 6:37
The “honey-pot” coyote: tricking a mastiff into breaking the coop
- JRJoe Rogan
... them 'cause they killed my chickens. And, um, I, but, and they also honey-potted my dog into killing my chickens. Did I tell you that story?
- NANarrator
No, you didn't tell me that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, boy. Listen to this. This is how smart these motherfuckers are. I had this dog, I- i- rest in peace. His name was Johnny Cash. He was the best dog. I'll get sad. (sniffs) (exhales) But, uh, let me catch my breath here 'cause I really loved that dog.
- NANarrator
No, I understand this. I just lost a dog last May.
- JRJoe Rogan
(exhales) Uh, this dog was just, he was just such a sweetheart, but he was a big dog. He was a Mastiff, a Regency Mastiff. His father was actually on Fear Factor, and his father was this, we, we put people in these big bite suits and they had to run, and we did it with Belgian Malinois. And the problem was, for like, really super athletic l- guys, like, we had some, like, uh, real high-end athletes on the show. Uh, occasionally. We'd got, like, amateur football players. Guys who were just stacked and strong as hell. And a Malinois, no matter what, it's still only 60, 70 pounds. And so, we brought in these Regency Mastiffs 'cause they wanted to figure out a dog that could do bite work, but was way stronger. And this dog was like, a buck 60 and built like a brick shithouse.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
His dad, my dog's dad, was actually in the movie, The Hulk. If you ever saw the movie, The Hulk, with Eric Bana.
- NANarrator
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
When they turned the dogs into Hulk dogs. That was actually-
- NANarrator
That was actually- (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... that dog. So my friend, Joe, shout out to Joe, who raised these dogs. He raised them for intelligence and temperament, and he wouldn't let any dog breed that had any aggression towards other dogs or any aggression towards people. So, they were the best dogs. And so this dog was hanging out with all these other dogs that were doing bite work and everything, and he was just so chill. Just hanging out. I'd go, "How is this dog so chill and just like..." He goes, "He's just fucking smart." He's smart, and he's well-raised and well-trained and loved. So anyway, I had his son. (sniffs) And, uh, he was the fucking best. But he was in the yard during the day, w- um, and a coyote would come by the fence. And the fence was six feet high, like a wrought iron fence. He couldn't get over this fence. He didn't even try to get over the fence. It was a nice big yard. But the coyotes could get over that fence like it didn't even exist. It was wild to watch. I watched one with a chicken in his mouth jump and put his feet at the top of that fence and over like, like-
- NANarrator
And bounce off.
- JRJoe Rogan
... a Cirque du Soleil acrobat.
- NANarrator
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was amazing. So we had, um, this large coop where the chickens were that the coyotes couldn't figure out a way to get into. And then, have you ever raised chickens before?
- NANarrator
Uh, my dad raised chickens.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's, they do-
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... a thing called brooding. And what brooding is, um, i- chickens lay an egg, you know, almost every day. But none of them are gonna become chicks because there's no rooster. So th-
- NANarrator
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... these are unfertilized eggs. But they don't understand that. So they decide, every now and again, that this egg is gonna become a chick, and they won't let anyone near it, and they pluck their feathers out, and they just sit on this egg. And they, they stop making eggs, and they get real weirded out. And the only way to cure them of this is to put them in a smaller pen with a post so that they have to hold onto the post to stand. They can't sit and squat like, over an egg. So you put a post in there, put a small coop next to the coop. It takes a little, a few, I forget how many days it takes, but they get over it and then you can put them back in with the regular hens. Well, that little coop, this sneaky-ass fucking coyote had figured out that he could get my dog to destroy that little coop, 'cause my dog was, he was huge. And so, somehow or another, this coyote became friends with my dog, just kept hanging around. And my dog's like, "Oh, it's another dog," 'cause he has a little dog friend. Like, "This is my other little dog friend. Hey, what's up, buddy? What are you doing?" He's like, "Hey, you want to know where the chickens are?" And, uh, my pool guy fucked up and left one of the gates open into the, where the, the chickens usually are. And, uh, I was inside the house with my kids and w- and my wife, and we were playing some sort of a game. I forget what game it was. But I saw, in the background, a coyote run across the backyard and hop the fence with a chicken in his mouth. I'm like, "Motherfuckers." I thought maybe somebody left the coop open or something happened. So I run outside, and there's Johnny standing over this destroyed coop that he was so proud that he busted apart. The coyote tricked him into smashing that coop, and then the coyote grabbed the chicken and ran off with it.
- NANarrator
I wish I'd known about this story when I was writing (laughs) Coyote America.
- JRJoe Rogan
How amazing is that?
- NANarrator
I would've put it in there.
- JRJoe Rogan
How amazing is that? Like, there's no doubt in my mind that that coyote tricked that dog into doing that, 'cause that dog had never destroyed that coop.And then afterwards, he realized he's so strong, he can go right through the whole coop. So, he tore a hole in the mesh, the chicken wire? He just tore it apart, just... He- he was so big. And then he went in and killed nine of 'em, and we...
- DFDan Flores
Your dog killed nine of 'em?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, he killed nine of 'em.
- DFDan Flores
Oh, wow.
- JRJoe Rogan
I had a... I had 22 of 'em at one point in time, and he killed nine of them, in one, like... In... Just as long... Much time as it took for him to get out there. He fucked up a couple other ones too, but they lived. He was just grabbing 'em and shaking 'em and grabbing 'em and shaking... He was having a party. Unfortunately, he was taught to do that by the fucking coyotes.
- 6:37 – 9:34
Animal culture and canid intelligence: wolves, dogs, and coyotes as strategists
- DFDan Flores
Well, I mean, this- this is an example of what one would call animal culture. You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DFDan Flores
I mean (laughs) , I make an argument for it in, uh, in Wild New World, that this is something that happens fairly commonly. Animals, just like us, have culture, and they teach one another things. That sounds like a- a- a pretty good for-instance of it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, they're so clever. They're so clever. And it's so interesting, our thoughts about intelligence, because just until recently, we've realized how intelligence ravens... Uh, how intelligent ravens and crows are, about... They can use tools. They- they understand water displacement, so if they can't drink out of something, they'll drop rocks into it, so the water level raises so that they can drink out of it.
- DFDan Flores
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, it's brilliant stuff. So, I wonder, because we don't have a way of measuring that with coyotes, I wonder how smart those motherfuckers are?
- DFDan Flores
Well, they are, uh, I think, probably among the- the smartest of the wild animals, uh, certainly in America. I mean, you know, d- one of the reasons we domesticated wolves and- and created dogs out of 'em is because, for one thing, we understood them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DFDan Flores
They live in the same kind of circumstances we do, in social groups. They have to acculturate their pups, just the way that we have to do with kids. And so, I think, uh, part of the explanation for why dogs are our oldest domesticate is because of their ability to understand us, to understand human language. I mean, this is one of the theories for early domestication of wolves is that there were some of them that were not only hyper-social, and so amenable to, uh, to being with humans and hanging out with us, but also because there are some that were gifted word-learners. We didn't have to learn their language. They learned our language.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
And I think that is probably an indication of, you know... Coyotes are out of the canid family. All these creatures come out of the same family from 5.3 million years back. And I think coyotes, in some respects, may be the shrewdest and cleverest of all those groups because, unlike wolves, they're not the big brawny dogs on the block.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
They're the ones who have to play this game of, "Man, I can't let this big burly wolf get me. I've gotta figure out how to elude it," and that's- that's responsible for a lot of their intelligence and cleverness, is they co-evolved alongside wolves for so long, they had to learn how to be the little guy (laughs) who managed to survive by his wits.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And also, one of the things that I learned from your book that's a good thing to bring up here is that they are not directly related to gray wolves, so they didn't interbreed with 'em.
- DFDan Flores
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
They interbreeded with red wolves.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, that's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
So when the gray wolves were around, the gray wolves just slaughtered them.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- 9:34 – 15:37
How coyotes conquered America: wolf removal, government campaigns, and fission–fusion survival
- JRJoe Rogan
And so they had developed this ability to spread their territory, which is what... When humans started killing them, now they're in every single city in the country. And this is rel... Like, when did that happen? It's relatively recent, right?
- DFDan Flores
Yeah. The expansion, um, started really out of two- two things, two things that took place in the early 20th century. Uh, one was the elimination of wolves in the East, which created an open niche for a mid-sized predator, and the other was this campaign that, uh, first the states and then the federal government began to launch against- against coyotes and wolves in the West. And the government was... The government hunters were pretty successful in taking out wolves because wolves are so attuned to be pack animals that if you could kill one wolf in a pack, you could use the scent from that wolf, basically, to catch, trap, kill every single wolf in the pack. But coyotes responded to that, basically by going... You probably remember our conversation about this, Joe. Back in 2017, they would go into what's known as a fission mode. They are... Coyotes, like humans, are fission-fusion animals, and when they're in fusion, they can exist in a pack. When they're in fission, they break apart the packs, and in singles and pairs, they scatter. And that's what they do when they're pressured. They learned how to do this from wolves. And so when we started trying to take 'em out with poisons and gunning in the West, they went into this fission mode, and it caused them to start spreading across the country. And that started in the early 20th century. I mean, when I was growing up in Louisiana in the 1960s, coyotes were first beginning to appear, uh, in Louisiana, which is how I got fascinated with 'em.
- JRJoe Rogan
First beginning?
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, first beginning, in the, uh, the early 1960s. I started seeing them in about 1962 or something, '61 or '62.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is there a historical record of them ever being on the East Coast previously?
- DFDan Flores
No, there is not. Other than...
- JRJoe Rogan
So they really were just a West Coast animal?
- DFDan Flores
Well, there's a... There's an archeological... A couple of archeological sites dating from the Pleistocene, from 10,000 years ago, that appear to show coyotes, uh, pr- probably fairly randomly appearing in places like Virginia and Pennsylvania.But in the historical record that we have, they weren't on the East Coast until the middle of the 20th century, and they start showing up, uh, in Northern New York and Upstate New York by about the 1920s or so, and they start coming down, uh, south from that point until... I mean, they're finally... They're reaching Manhattan, for example, (laughs) in the 1990s.
- JRJoe Rogan
Had this... Had they already... Had wolves already been extirpated at this point?
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, wolves had been taken out. I mean, the, the great, uh... You know, and I talk about it in Wild New World, the whole wolf campaign in America, but the two guys who put together this classic volume, uh, on wolves, The Wolves of North America, um, Stanley Young and E.A. Goldman published this work in 1944. They're government hunters, um, and they argued that by 1944, there are no wolves at all left east of the Mississippi River.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
They are all gone. There are wolves down in Louisiana. Uh, in the Deep South, there are still some red wolves. There's 1,400 or so gray wolves up in the Great Lakes country. But even in the west, I mean, in, in their book in 1944, they claim there are only six wolves remaining in the state of Wyoming.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
Even with all those animals and all that public lands, I mean, the campaign against wolves has been thus successful. So yeah, by, by 1950 or so, there are no wolves in the east, and that opens up this niche for coyotes to come in and fill it.
- JRJoe Rogan
And one of the other things that I learned from you is that coyotes, when they do that roll call, when they scream out and howl, if one of them's missing, the females will make more pups.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, they are able to. When they, when they howl, one of the things they do with howls... I mean, they're communicating all kinds of things, but one of the things we're pretty certain they do with howls is to take a census of how many coyotes are in the area. Because, of course, howling is infectious, both for coyotes and wolves. Whenever they hear a howl, they'll respond to it. And if... During the spring mating period, uh, uh, if howling produces fewer responses in a particular area, it can trigger something, not exactly sure, uh, in coyotes that will have the effect of producing larger litters. And of course, with fewer, fewer other predators in an area, one of the things that happens is it... The food base is larger. So if you've got... If you have a coyote pack as a, say, seven pups, if there are fewer coyotes that have been taken out by trapping or poisoning or whatever, it's possible to get more of the pups up to adulthood because there are more food resources. So it's kind of a loop that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DFDan Flores
... functions like that. The coyotes are certainly playing a role, uh, in it, uh, but of course, our attempts to take them out are producing this feedback that often causes them to have larger litters, to be more successful in raising their, their pups, and they will respond by rising to the level of the carrying capacity of the landscape in any case.
- 15:37 – 21:36
Urban ecology: coyotes in Los Angeles, rat control, and prey–predator blind spots
- JRJoe Rogan
ju- it's just amazing, and it's amazing how well they adapt to Los Angeles.
- DFDan Flores
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
They're everywhere.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I remember the first time I saw one, it was 1994, and I was, uh... They had these, uh, pre-furnished apartments that I... I got one of those when I first moved to LA. It's the Oakwood Apartments, and, uh, it was in Burbank. I mean, you're in the middle of everything, sort of The Tonight Show films. I'm driving down the street, and I see these two little wolves.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I was like, "What the fuck is that?"
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I'm like, "Oh my God, it's coyotes."
- DFDan Flores
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause I had heard, but I was like, "What?"
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You see coyotes, like, how often? You know, how often?
- DFDan Flores
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, right there, right away.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, I mean, you know, Walt Disney, uh, was doing films about coyotes in the Hollywood Hills in the early 1960s.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- DFDan Flores
But coyotes had been there all along. I mean, that was, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
That was the territory.
- DFDan Flores
... they were there when LA was founded-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
... and they basically never left. I mean, there are records back in the '20s and '30s of, you know, the local authorities sending people out to, uh, to try to take out coyotes way back 100 years ago. So they've always been there.
- JRJoe Rogan
When I would, uh, have talks with friends, you know, that lived there that, that were upset about coyotes, I'd say, "But you know what's great? When was the last time you saw a rat?"
- DFDan Flores
(laughs) That's right. No kidding.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, like, LA, the Hills, like where I used to live in Ventura County, should be littered with rats. They should be everywhere. There's garbage cans everywhere. Where's all the rats?
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They're all getting jacked by coyotes and owls.
- DFDan Flores
Well, that's one of the great things about coyotes being in the east.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
I mean, you know, the whole... All the East Coast cities have huge problems with rats, New York City in particular.
- 21:36 – 30:05
Owls vs. cats: great horned owl predation and the myth of the “wise old owl”
- DFDan Flores
Well, I, I know it does. I mean, I, I will admit, I've never had anything like that happen with a dog, in part because I always have really big dogs. I have Alaskan Malamutes-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DFDan Flores
... which, you know, I mean, my, the dog I lost, uh, as I mentioned, last year, last May, I mean, he was 140 pounds, Alaskan Malamute, and so he would sit on the front porch and a pack of coyotes would trot through the yard in New Mexico, and the alpha male of the pack would turn and grimace at him, uh, show his teeth, but, uh, you know, Cody, which is my dog's name, would just sit there on the porch and kind of smile. I mean, and a coyote, you know, even a good-sized coyote in New Mexico, a good, uh, adult male is barely going to weigh 35 pounds, so Cody outweighs him five times. So, I've not had that experience. I've lost cats a couple of times, 'cause I've always lived in the country. I mean, my whole adult life, I've bought places outside town, and usually, uh, or built places outside town and lived, uh, half an hour away from the city where I was working or where I had to commute to, so I always lived around, uh, wild animals of all kinds. And I've lost cats two or three times. At least one time, for some reason, I, I never found. Uh, the cat just disappeared. But the other couple of times I lost cats, uh, what I concluded was that it was actually great horned owls that got them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DFDan Flores
And what I've often, uh, told people who've, you know, related to me their stories about coyotes getting their cats, uh, or getting small dogs, is that, uh, one of the questions I always ask is, "Did you find your pet? Was it lying there?" Because if it's lying there, that's probably an indication that it may have been a coyote. Coyotes often, uh, will kill small dogs, not because they want to eat them, but because they regard them as inter-guild predators that are invading their territory.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DFDan Flores
But if the dog or the cat completely disappears, is gone, and you don't find it or you only find it months later, that's usually a great horned owl, because they will pluck up a small dog or a cat and they fly away with them to their roosting spot. I mean, there are instances where great horned owl roosts have yielded 75 cat collars with-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DFDan Flores
... Kiki and, you know, Mousey-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, my God.
- DFDan Flores
... and so forth on the names on the collars. But the owls have just snagged them and taken them off and eaten them. And the owners never know what happened. And a lot of people, because they're aware of coyotes being on the scene, they will, they will assume that it's a coyote that's done it.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's fascinating. 75 collars.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow, I love owls. One of the, the wildest videos that I ever saw was this night vision video of a nest, and there's these hawks in the nest. And you just see in the distance, the eyes of the owl as it swoops in and just snatches a hawk out. But the ferocity, watch this, the way it hits this hawk. So that's, uh, are those baby hawks? Bang.
- DFDan Flores
Oh, man.
- JRJoe Rogan
Look at that. And the other one's like, "What the fuck happened?"
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, no kidding.
- JRJoe Rogan
What the fuck happened?
- DFDan Flores
What the fuck happened?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) I mean, play that again. Watch, I, I love the eyes, when you see the eyes in the distance. Look at this.
- DFDan Flores
Here, here it comes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Bang.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah. Yeah, well-
- JRJoe Rogan
What an amazing predator, right?
- DFDan Flores
That's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sees at night.
- DFDan Flores
... that's what happens to, to a lot of cats.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, I'd imagine.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 30:05 – 50:42
Ravens, dolphins, and consciousness: what “animal minds” can do
- DFDan Flores
Yeah. I actually have a, a kind of a, a wild pet raven at the moment. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- DFDan Flores
Yeah. And have had since I, since I lost my dog, and I've just gotten a new dog. I just got a new puppy here recently. Uh, but...I, uh, had lost my dog. He was sort of my constant companion, uh, and, um ... And I realized that, I mean, I spend a lot of time. I've, uh, raised with animals from a little, being a little kid. Um, in fact, I'll, I'll, I'll tell you a story in a minute, sort of how this Wild and the World book came to be. It has r- uh, came out of the first animal companion I ever, ever had and what happened to it. But, um, th- this particular raven started a- hanging around where, I mean, I ... In New Mexico in the Southwest, we have a lot of rats and mice. Uh, and they'll, of course, what rats and mice do, which is the reason the East Coast cities have such a problem with rats, is that they're drawn to human inhabitations because we produce excess stuff for them to get into, food in particular. So, commonly I'll have a, uh, a rat zapper or two out, and every two or three days, I'll catch a mouse or a, or a rat. And so, I had this particular spot where I was taking these rats and mice out and, and dropping them, and I noticed that a raven started flying up on a nearby tree and waiting for me to do this. And so, after this happened four or five times, and I began to look at this raven, and I thought, "The way that raven is lighting on the same spot, this is the same raven. Keeps coming back to this exact branch." So, I started experimenting with what happens if I drop the rat out and just back up 10 feet. The raven would wait a minute or so and then fly down and pick up the rat. So, then I started closing the distance into five feet, and then three feet. This raven, over time, came to realize I was no threat, I was providing a free meal. And so, since that time, that started happening about six months ago. Since that time, I've got this raven that basically, when my new puppy and I go out for walks in the canyon below the house, uh, outside Santa Fe, this raven actually flies along with us, lighting from one tree to another-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
... waiting for me, hoping that I'm going to provide him with some sort of free meal. And what I've taken to doing when the dog is not paying attention or asleep and I don't have a mouse to give him, is I'll pull four or five kibbles of dog food out, and I can put those things anywhere, and that raven will fly down and pick 'em up-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
... and walk around and talk to me and make these, these sounds that I actually haven't quite figured out. I haven't understood. I'm not as smart as wolves were about human language. I haven't figured out raven language yet. But this raven talks to me. And so we have conversations. Uh, I have no idea what he's saying, but he's very vocal and he's very expressive.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know, that was ... That's amazing story. And, uh, th- that was one of John Lilly's things that he was working on with dolphins. And he was trying to use LSD to better communicate with dolphins, and he used sensory deprivation tanks and, you know, it's ... His idea was there's gotta be some way to crack that code and to at least intuitively understand what these things are saying. And they even tried to get dolphins to speak human language.
- DFDan Flores
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause they could apparently understand what we were saying-
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... but we couldn't understand what they were saying.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, they were trying to get dolphin, but they just don't have lips. They don't have a tongue like ours. Just, like, they can't make the same noises. Their noises are so different, but ...
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
All those people that are studying orcas and dolphins, they've determined that there's dialects, that they sound different in different areas, but they have no idea what they're saying. No idea, which is amazing.
- DFDan Flores
No, but they, they are, uh, communicating with one another.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- DFDan Flores
They can't communicate with us. And the conclusion we draw from that, of course, is that other animals, other creatures in the world are not as intelligent as we are. But the truth is, uh, all the recent science about animal culture and about animal consciousness is indicating something that I think we sort of, uh, as early humans living amongst wild animals in Africa and Europe and Asia and ultimately in the Americas understood, is that these are creatures that share with us all the traits that we tend to think make us distinctively human. We think that the ability to talk, the ability to transmit culture is what makes us exceptional among all other creatures. And yet, what we're discovering almost day by day, uh, from the scientific literature that's been focused on these things, is that animals, just like us, have culture. As Charles Darwin said, "It's just a matter of degree, not kind." They have all the same attributes and all the same abilities. They just don't have things like eight billion other members of their species to be thinking up ideas and transmit to one another around the world-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
... through things like the internet or, or Twitter or, 5,000 years ago, written languages. I mean, what we've done is we've been able to amplify all those abilities by how many of us there are and our ability to communicate with one another. But so many other creatures ... I mean, there was a, a declaration on consciousness issued by a, a bunch of, uh, of, uh, biologists, uh, in Europe in 2012 that argued that the higher species in particular, some of the ones that we've been talking about here, share the same level of cultural, uh, transmissibility, of the ability to communicate with one another, uh, the ability to...... plot out strategies for new problems that they confront, just like the, the ravens we were talking about, or about the rat who used a tool to-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DFDan Flores
... to set off that trap. So all these kinds of things that we've thought for so long make us exceptional in the world, and this comes out of a long Western European tradition of thinking that we're exceptional, that we're the only creatures made in the image of God, the only ones with souls and all that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- DFDan Flores
What we're discovering, of course, is that ancient people understood (laughs) that humans were part of the mix. Charles Darwin gave us scientific evidence that this was true, and the more we study other creatures, the more we realize that all these animals that we've set aside as just things that we regard as expendable, as useful as commodities, domesticated possibilities, they actually have many of the same capabilities we do.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so ... I, I mean, it makes sense if you think about ravens. If y- it makes sense if you think about their ability to use tools and their ability to displace water. They're obviously thinking, and so if they can make noises, of course they would, uh, associate those noises with different things.
- DFDan Flores
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did, did you see any patterns, the, when he would ... like, when you put the food down, did he make specific sounds when you put the food down?
- DFDan Flores
Well, what he began to do that probably caught my eye more than anything, um, when he would first come down, he would take the food and fly off immediately, especially when I was closing the distance between us. When I was getting to the point where I was only three or four feet away from where I would put down a, a mouse or a rat, or, uh, four or five kibbles of dog food, he would come down and grab the food and, and once he would, say, go through all six kibbles that I'd put down, he would immediately fly off. But then at some point, when, uh, uh, this raven fairly clearly, it seemed to me as I observed him, came to some kind of conscious conclusion that I was not a threat and that the sounds that I was making, my, my human voice and the inflections that I was making were something that, uh, were not dangerous to him, then he started hanging around. So he would eat the food, eat the kibbles, or, or eat the mouse, and instead of flying away, he would waddle around on the ground four or five feet away from me-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- 50:42 – 59:38
Why Dan wrote *Wild New World*: a “big history” from Chicxulub to humans in the Americas
- JRJoe Rogan
So this book, this new book that you've written, uh, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America, um, when did you s- when did you start this?
- DFDan Flores
Well, it's kind of my pandemic vacation book.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. That's what I asked.
- DFDan Flores
I mean- Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
A lot of people... Joey Diaz wrote this during the pandemic as well.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, yeah, I wrote it during the pandemic. I mean, I'll say, you know, uh, Coyote America and, uh, American Serengeti kind of set me up to be able to, to take a step back, farther back, to look at the bigger story of animals in America. I mean, I'd focused very specifically on coyotes, uh, in the one book, and wrote about the animals, all these grand animals of the Great Plains, this part of North America that once, up until about 120 years ago, was our version of the Serengeti. And somehow while, uh, East Africa and Southern Africa managed to get these great game parks preserving their large, charismatic animals, here in the United States, we ended up privatizing all the Great Plains, turning it into farms and ranches and losing our ability to do that, un- at least until the present day, when we're, where we're trying to, uh, to accomplish something like returning the American Serengeti. But those two books kinda set me up for, for stepping back and looking at a, at the really big picture of this. And so I was inspired, I'll admit, by, um, Yuval Harari's Sapiens.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DFDan Flores
You know, his big history of humans across time. So what I, uh, what I was compelled to do with Wild New World was to, to write a book that was a big history of North America and the relationship that people and animals have had in North America starting from... I mean, the book actually starts with the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact, that's the asteroid that, that took out the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals. The reason I start it there is because that's the moment at which North America starts acquiring its bestiary, its, its creatures. In the aftermath of the dinosaur age, both through continental evolution in North America and through acquiring animals from other parts of the world as they crossed the land bridges and enter North America, in that, those millions of years after the Chicxulub impact... Chicxulub, by the way, is the name of the little Mayan village on the north coast of the Yucatan near where that asteroid hit 66 million years ago. But in the aftermath of it, that's how we acquire our creatures. That's how we acquire mammoths and mastodons and saber-toothed cats and buffalo and pronghorns and camels and horses. I mean, it happens through continental evolution, as I said, and also through this migration from other parts of the world. But what I, I try to create with that and try to set up with that is this bestiary of creatures that when humans finally get here... And I mean, after all, North and South America are the last places on Earth humans find, except for a few islands in the Pacific that we get to later.... um, the last grand continents on earth that humans get to are North and South America, by which time we have had ... Well, if you date us back even to Neanderthals, which goes back about 800,000 to a million years, and you assume that we and Neanderthals are obviously close enough to one another that we can hybridize. I mean, I don't ... Have you done-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
... 23andMe?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I got a lot of it.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, so do I.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
You know? And my wife has even more. And I think all of us that are from particularly sort of northwestern European backgrounds have ended up with a lot of Neanderthal, uh, you know, for some people, as much as 2.5% of their genes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Phew. (laughs)
- DFDan Flores
Yeah. So, and it produces, you know ... It, it makes you different than you would be otherwise.
- JRJoe Rogan
For sure.
- DFDan Flores
I, supposedly, according to 23andMe, I have less b- uh, hair on my back (laughs) than I would if I didn't have Neanderthal genes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
I'm a little taller because of Neanderthal genes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
All kinds of things like that. So, so if you date the human story even back ... And I started, I start our story as wild animals in Africa, and I bring us in, uh, one of the early chapters, in the first chapter really, up to the point where we're leaving Africa, going into Europe, going into Asia, and of course, that process, uh, again, if you start with Neanderthals, it goes back 800,000 years out of Africa into the rest of the world. But the Neanderthals never get to, uh, to the Americas. But when modern humans ... We emerge about 315,000 years ago in Africa, and when we spread out of Africa and replace Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in Asia, and finally get to Siberia about 45,000 years ago, as soon as there's a possibility for getting farther east, in other words into North America, we take advantage of it. And I mean, as I argue in this book, the reason we do this, this is kinda one of the reasons why all of us love to find spots where it's a beautiful morning, I'm out here on this mountain, I don't, there's not another soul in sight. It's just me and the world. That compulsion, I think, is really ancient, and it's what drew us out of Africa to other parts of the world to start with.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mmm.
- DFDan Flores
And what we're looking for are animals that have never encountered us before.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- DFDan Flores
Because they're naive about humans as predators. So this compulsion to travel finally to get to the great plum of the Americas as the last great spot we get to on earth drives us to the point where ... I don't know if you, uh, caught the news out of White Sands National Park about three or four years ago about the footprints that were discovered there, 23,000 years old.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DFDan Flores
I mean, that's at the height of the glacial maximum, man. That's when the ice is at its greatest extent, and somehow people have gotten f- out of Asia, we think probably along the coastlines, into what is now the United States, and the place that always seemed to draw them is the country south of the Rocky Mountains in what is New Mexico and Arizona. And these people managed to get, 23,000 years ago, into what is now New Mexico and left 79 footprints that have been carbon dated based on seeds that their feet crushed as they walked along the marshy shore of this lake. So we know that people probably coming down the coastlines, maybe in some kinda craft, managed to get here as long ago as 23,000 years.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
But what really, of course, propels the great human migration, uh, into America is when the ice sheets finally open at about 16,000 years ago as the glacial maximum begins to recede. There's an ice-free corridor that opens from Alaska down into Alberta and Montana, and at that point, you get this, this massive migration. Probably not massive to start with, maybe not very many people at all, but they encounter a wild new world, a world that is populated by some creatures they recognize, many, ground sloths and so forth, humans have never seen before, and so we enter this American paradise of animals, uh, some 16,000 years ago and, and large numbers of, of humans, and spread within about three centuries all the way to the tip of South America. It's kind of one of the great colonization stories in, uh, in world history.
- 59:38 – 1:03:59
Clovis big-game hunters: fluted points, mammoth kills, and rapid migration
- JRJoe Rogan
That's amazing. Now at this point in time, what weapons do we think that they were using to hunt with? Were they using atlatls? Were they using spears? Were they using-
- DFDan Flores
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
... a combination of these things?
- DFDan Flores
They were definitely using ... Uh, so the first successful group that sort of spreads coast to coast, I mean, our first American culture that spreads from the Pacific to the Atlantic as a, as a consistent culture of people, uh, and I title this particular chapter in the book Clovisia the Beautiful, because they establish a world that lasts longer than the United States has lasted so far. They're America the Beautiful, uh, Clovisia the Beautiful lasts well over 300 years.And they're probably using spears, but they have come up with a great, uh, uh, new technology which is the fluted point. They figured out a way, and fluted points aren't found in earlier times, even in Siberia, so this was a purely American invention. They figured out a way to take flint points and flute the base on either side so that you can solidly, uh, and very securely attach a spear to them, and they'll remain in place without flipping off or breaking off. So the fluted point is one of their, their great, uh, technological inventions. But the other thing that they bring to the game, Joe, is (laughs) they come out of a tradition of at least 40,000 generations of hunting big animals. I mean, they know how to do this at literally a professional level. They are extremely good at it. I mean, one of the stories I tell in, in, uh, this early chapter, Clovisia The Beautiful, which is the second chapter of the book, is of an episode that takes place in southern Arizona, what's now southern Arizona, about 13,000 years ago when a group of Clovis hunters surround, um, a herd of mammoths. And in this herd is a bull, a herd bull, a herd cow, and 13 calves and adolescents. There are three archaeological sites associated with this particular episode. In one site, the most westerly, all 13 calves and adolescents, archaeologists found dead in one spot, each with a single Clovis point in its body.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
East of there in two different locations, the herd bull was found. He had run about three or four miles. He had two Clovis points in him, and he finally bled out and died. But they found the cow about eight miles away. She had eight Clovis points in her before she died, indicating to the archaeologists who've studied these sites that the cow, in classic elephant fashion, had fought to defend those calves and those adolescents.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DFDan Flores
She had put up a huge fight to try to defend them, and ultimately, she hadn't been successful. They had all been killed. She runs away and finally dies with eight Clovis points in her.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
But that's, uh, one episode out of, I mean, we have no idea how many. There are something like 78 Clovis sites, uh, around North America. Um, I mean, we don't actually know when the transition, to get to your question, happened to at-adults, but when the Clovis period is over, it's basically when the mammoths are done. I mean, these people seem to have been fairly specialized as, as big game hunters. I mean, they killed other animals, but they really went after mammoths a lot. But they were succeeded by a group known as the Folsom people, and the Folsom people used at-adults. I mean, I open the book with the discovery of the f- the first Folsom site. It's in Folsom, New Mexico, discovered, uh, in the year 1908.
- 1:03:59 – 1:21:00
Folsom discovery and America’s deep antiquity (plus the pee break)
- JRJoe Rogan
Can we pause this for a second 'cause I have to pee, and this is too-
- DFDan Flores
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... fascinating for me to hold this in.
- DFDan Flores
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
1908, Folsom people.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, we'll come back.
- JRJoe Rogan
We'll be right back.
- DFDan Flores
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
And we're back. So in 1908, they discover Folsom sites?
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, the first Folsom site, and I mean, so, you know, and I don't want to spend too much time on this because this is all of the, basically just the first couple chapters of the, of Wild New World. Uh, the rest of it is about subsequent history down to the present, but, but, the Folsom discovery is really kind of important in, uh, the whole American history story because up until this point, you know, and this is the kind of thing that, you know, the Europeans are really good at, of course. They, uh, they sort of cast dispersions on America because their argument was, you know, America is really marginal to world history. I mean, you guys, we've had, we know that we had people, uh, interacting with cave bears and mammoths and, you know, and we have an ancient history going back to Greece and Rome. And, and you Americans, you kind of just, you know, you don't have much going on at all. And so what the Folsom site did was to give America an ancient history, a history that made us a major part of this world story that I was kind of alluding to when I was describing people finally discovering the Americas as the last grand continents on earth. And what that, what happened with the Folsom story is that there was a, um, there was a flash flood on a river called the Dry Cimarron River in August of 1908, and in the aftermath of that flash flood, this African American cowboy, uh, named Charles McJunkin is out riding fence for one of the local ranchers seeing what he's gonna have to repair, and as he's riding along, his horse suddenly pitches up and its hooves slide in the mud right to the edge of this freshly cut about 30-foot chasm in the slope that he's riding. And when he leans out of his saddle and looks down into this, this cut, what he sees are bones of a gigantic size that he's never seen before. I mean, this is a guy who m-He had been on the buffalo-hunting plains back in the 1870s, so he had seen buffalo butchered. He knew what bones from big animals looked like. But these were giant bones. And so, this guy, McJunkin, started trying to call attention to this site. He never was able to do so and get any archaeologists out, or paleontologists out to look at it. Uh, he dies in 1922, but about four years after his death, uh, this museum curator from Denver, a guy named Jesse Figgins, comes down and brings a crew down. And, and what Figgins is interested in, he's sort of an amateur guy himself, he's just interested in some fancy, big bones for his museum up in Denver. But his crew starts digging into this site and they began uncovering these giant bison. What they're finding is a site of bison antiquus, these giant bison that became extinct about 10,000 years ago, the ones that the Folsom people had particularly specialized in hunting. And as they're excavating this site, in the first summer, they come across, just sort of lying in the debris, a couple of points like they've never seen before, which are three or four inches long and have these thin flutes on either side at the base.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's one right there.
- DFDan Flores
There's, yeah, there's one right there. The Folsom point. So, what Figgins' guys realize is that the hurdle for convincing the world, the scientific hurdle for convincing the world that humans had been present in America, at the time, everybody thought Indians had only been in America for maybe a couple of thousand years before Europeans got here. But the hurdle was finding an extinct animal out of the Pleistocene indicating that it had been killed by human technology while the animal was still alive. And the next summer, I mean, it happened to be a summer when the Smithsonian had just published (laughs) an article by some fancy archaeologist saying, uh, you know, uh, "North America has no antiquity in its history. Indians have only been here for, at most, 2000 years, probably less than that." And within about two months of that article coming out, this crew finds the scapula of one of these bison they're excavating with one of these Clovis points embedded three quarters of the way into the bone. And at that point, they stop digging. They call on all the famous archaeologists in the United States. Uh, a guy named Alfred Kidder was the most famous archaeologist in America at the time, and he comes, takes a look, and proclaims this one of the greatest discoveries in American history. So they don't have radiocarbon dating yet, and nobody knows how old this is. All they know is that that particular bison species has been extinct for quite a while. Figgins says, "This site is 400,000 years old." But when we finally do get radiocarbon dating about two decades later, it looks as if a band of Folsom hunters using atadals, using spear throwers, had killed 32 bison antiquus in what had once been a box canyon on the southern plains 12,450 years ago. And so suddenly, that discovery in the early 20th century, in the 1920s, gives America a kind of an antiquity that it had never had before. And within a decade, we discover the Clovis site, which is out on the Texas-New Mexico border. And the Clovis site is of these elephant hunters who are actually even older than the Folsom people. And this pushes, when they're finally radiocarbon dated, that site pushes, uh, the dates back to the 13,000-year range. So, what these discoveries in the '20s and '30s are finally indicating that contrary to what most Americans of the 20th century think, America's a brand new place, history dates to the time Europeans got here in the 1600s. Uh, you know, Indian people have only been here a couple thousand years. Suddenly, we realize America is this really vastly old place, and that sets up the subsequent story that, I mean, I try to... What I try to do, I mean, I was an English major as an undergraduate, so I'm kind of drawn to narrative storytelling. Uh, telling a lot of stories, and when you write a book with about 66 million years of history, obviously, had a lot of opportunity to tell stories 'cause there are a lot of stories in a span of time like that.
- JRJoe Rogan
What, when you say that the Clovis points and the Folsom points with the, the fluted, uh, part of it where, so you could attach a stick to it-
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... there's no people in Europe that figured this out?
- DFDan Flores
No, this was a, an American invention. Uh, there-
- JRJoe Rogan
What did they use in Europe?
- DFDan Flores
They were just using, uh, blade points, sometimes with, uh, with the ears at the bottom, so that-
- JRJoe Rogan
The ears?
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, the ears. So you have a, a triangular point and it has two ears coming out, and you attach, you use the ears as a place to attach the rawhide.
- JRJoe Rogan
And so this was metal?
- DFDan Flores
No, not metal.
- JRJoe Rogan
What were they using?
- DFDan Flores
Flint.
- JRJoe Rogan
They were using flint as well.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, so when they were making these points, they were just doing it in a different way.
- DFDan Flores
They were doing it in a different way.
- JRJoe Rogan
So they'd figured out the same sort of technology, kind of-
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- 1:21:00 – 1:27:35
Weapons, isolation, and the Great Dying: bows arrive late and diseases arrive catastrophically
- JRJoe Rogan
When did archery make its way to North America?
- DFDan Flores
Well, that was the next great, obviously the next great innovation. And the reason these innovations were important, by the way, uh, and to answer your question, it was about 2,000 years ago, and it seemed to come from the late arrival of Inuit people, the ancestors of, you know, folks who we, or sometimes called Eskimo. The Inuit people seem to either adapt or bring archery with them when they got to North America. And the idea for that then diffused, spread through, uh, all of North America within about five or 600 years.
- JRJoe Rogan
So we know that archery absolutely existed 2,000 years ago in Africa-
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and some other places. Where, when did archery first, when, when did they believe archery was first invented? Let's find that out. That's interesting.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So just 2,000 years of archery.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is incredible.
- DFDan Flores
You know, and, and what it meant was each one of these developments, particularly atadals and archery and, and bows, meant that you didn't have to do what Neanderthals had done, which is engage in sort of hand-to-hand combat with large, strong, and sometimes, uh, really resilient creatures like wild horses-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DFDan Flores
... or mammoths at close range. I mean, some of these Neanderthal sites, for example, I mean, the guys were just beaten to hell, man.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
I mean, they had their cheeks caved in. They had broken, I mean, thigh bones broken. They had amputated arms, all kinds of really severe injuries from taking on animals. But Neanderthals, one of the things we know from, uh, nitrogen isotope studies of their bones is Neanderthals were more carnivorous than wolves were. I mean, they were eating a higher percentage of meat diet than even gray wolves in Europe were.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
So each one of these kind of innovations, atadals, of course, by extending the human arm, you're able to stand back 30, 40 yards from an animal and throw a, a dart and kill it. With bows, you're able to get back even farther. I mean, they rescue you from-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DFDan Flores
... sort of doing hand-to-hand combat with an animal that can easily kill you or crush you.
- JRJoe Rogan
What were Neanderthals using for weapons?
- DFDan Flores
They were primarily using, uh, wooden spears.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DFDan Flores
They didn't have flint points. They were using, uh, spears that, with points that had been hardened in fires.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. Uh, oldest arrow is here. Yeah. Like, 70,000. 72,000 years ago. What? Wow. But the oldest bow is only like 8,000, so they didn't find a bow- Wow. ... for a while. That's insane. 72 to 60,000 years ago.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Some of which poisons may have been used. Likely arrowheads, uh, were reported in 2020 by Fa Hien Cave in Sri Lanka dated to 48,000 years ago. Wow. Bow and arrow hunting in Sri Lankan site likely focused on monkeys and smaller animals, such as squirrels. Remains of these creatures were found in the same sediment as the bone points. Oh, they used bone points.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
In 2022, arrowheads were reported from the Grotte, how do you say that? Mandrin Cave in France, dating to around 54,000 years ago.
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, so you can get an idea of, and this is important to the whole s- this whole story, of the isolation of North America once sh- people get there and the glacial maximum recedes, and the climate begins to warm enough to break apart the corridor that links Asia and North America. Then North America is completely isolated except for South- the South American connection through Panama. It's completely isolated from the rest of the world. It's isolated not only from innovations like the use of bows in the Old World but, and this becomes, of course, a major part of the story when Europeans arrive with domesticated animals from which they, for 8,000 or 9,000 or 10,000 years, have been contracting spillover diseases, creating a European population that, of course, has now been winnowed by things like measles and smallpox and plague and all kinds of diseases that had spread across Eurasia but never got to isolated North and South America. And so when Europeans arrive with domesticated animals and animal diseases, they confront a- an- um, an American population of native people who have never been exposed to any of them and that results in one of the great, possibly the greatest catastrophe in human history. It's, uh, the term that people have been using these days is The Great Dying. I mean, we think by the time Europeans got here, and I don't wanna, by the way, admit the fact I do a whole chapter called Ravens and Coyotes America that is about the 10,000 years after the Pleistocene because native people are here for 10,000 years and managed to preserve almost all the biological diversity, at least what's left after the Pleistocene for 10,000 years. There's only one extinction that I was able to find during that time. A flightless sea duck became extinct in that 10,000-year period but, I mean, they managed to preserve almost all of North America's biodiversity across that time span, and then Europeans arrive with all these Old World diseases and in a blink of an eye what had at one point been, and to be sure most of this population is in South America, 56 million people in the two Americas, something like 80 to 85% of that population is taken out in a few decades by Old World diseases.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. (exhales)
- DFDan Flores
Yeah, it's- it's- uh, it's as I said, it may be the greatest human catastrophe in history.
- 1:27:35 – 1:36:13
Chaco Canyon: North American “Vatican,” drought collapse, and inequality as an ancient pattern
- JRJoe Rogan
And that's the speculation for what happened to the Mayans and the Aztecs and a lot of these amazing structures that they're now finding in the Amazon jungle.
- DFDan Flores
Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were take... I mean, you know, some of these civilizations like, you know, in North America we had the great Chacoan civilization that was our version of, uh, the Mayan or Aztec or Toltec, uh, groups, uh, down in Central America. I mean, we had this great civilization in the American Southwest centered around what are today the, uh, Chacoan National Park Ruins with a civilization that spread over probably 50,000 square miles and included hundreds of small hamlets and a central city, Chaco, that was sort of like the Vatican. I mean, there were priests who lived there most of the year, priests who through the history of Chaco inherited generation after generation their position. Uh, I mean, there's a f- (laughs) fascinating archaeological site at Chaco that shows 14 burials in one room, nine of those burials span the entire history, the 300- y- year history of Chaco. Every one of those nine is related to one another through a female line, the mitochondrial line and each of the nine present from the start of Chaco to the end of it from about 900 to about 1200 has a genetic abnormality, a sixth toe on one foot.
Episode duration: 2:31:21
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode yGH6cHufJbo
