Welcome to the very first episode of Maple History, a Canadian History Podcast.
I'm your host, Christina Austin, and my guest today is my husband, Simon.
Hi, everyone.
Today, we are going to begin at the beginning.
You may wonder why I'm starting at the dawn of time more or less, and it's a good question.
I think that it is really important to have an understanding, as best we can, of how inextricably entrenched indigenous people are in the land, that they have been here since forever in a day, so that when we get to the part of the story of European contact, we can feel what a collision of cultures that was.
So, where did it all start?
What we have been taught in high school, I'm sure you remember, Simon.
Oh, yeah.
Is the story of Beringia, which was that the area that connected North America to Siberia before the sea levels rose when the ice age ended.
This origin story isn't incorrect, but there's so much more known and even disputed today about how humans came to be on this continent.
A high school or elementary histories class could not cover all the history of North America from time immemorial.
We're basically taught that humans came over what was essentially Russia by the land bridge, killed all the mammoths, then poof, the people the Europeans met in the 15th century.
We're there.
Well, let's start at the beginning today, and we'll talk about how much more complicated and interesting the human story of Canada and North America really is.
I think it's fair to say that if you ask most adults, not even just an ex, how humans came to be in North America, you would get an answer that sounds like they came over from Siberia from a land bridge, and that's now the Bering Strait.
Does that sound about right?
It does. That's really all I remember.
Yeah.
Honestly.
Yeah.
All right.
All right. He long version of this theory.
Brindia was exposed around 70,000 years ago, because the ice age had locked up so much of earth's water.
I admit that I had an image in my mind of a relatively narrow passage when I learned of this all back in the day.
I don't know what, grade seven.
Something like that. It's hard to remember.
I know.
I said blur, but it was actually 600 miles wide with rivers, lakes, and a thriving ecosystem with plants and animals that could support people.
And it's own right rather than just a passageway to somewhere else.
People crossed over from Siberia into Brindia.
And after hanging out in Brindia for however long, an ice-free corridor opened up as the Cordilleron and Lauren tied glaciers began to thaw.
Those are some big words.
I know.
So anyways, those two glaciers, there was a gap.
So people made their race south.
As they moved down the population grew to a level that as they continued to hunt, their numbers led to the overkill of their prey.
So as far as this theory goes, humans scooted over the land bridge, went down through the ice-free corridor between two glaciers all the way down to South America while decimating several species of prey, all within a thousand years.
Pretty impressive feat for humanity.
If true.
I mean, we are really giving Earth a run for her money now with our species extinctions.
But I find this explanation of how humans came to populate North and South America to be not quite right.
And it is debated by current scholars.
That's what we learned and what kind of was the prevailing theory for all our adult life, I'd say, up until.
Hold on.
So they crossed the land bridge and killed all the mammals with a thousand years.
Did I hear you say that right?
Yeah.
Wow.
Not all the mammals, but all the big ones.
Well, yeah.
The big mega fauna or whatever they're called.
Yeah.
Wow.
That is impressive.
That's the theory.
Because there was a big extinction.
And so I'll get into that a little bit.
Because that's part of the debate.
All right.
So for a long time, the first people in North America were called Clovis people or Clovis culture by archaeologists.
This refers to the archaeological findings of spear points that were originally discovered in a little town in New Mexico called Clovis.
What they found there were all sorts of tools and a standout one was this point.
This is a fairly large spearhead that Charles Mann in his book 1491 said,
look like little goldfish crackers because of the distinct tail.
And I thought that was a helpful image.
Archaeologists used the methodology of their colleagues in Blackwater Draw, which is near Clovis,
that they had done a number of years before that to look for all sorts of other sites on the continent.
And the carbon dating and of all these other different sites after they found one Clovis,
wherever they were across North America, were between 13,500 and 12,900.
So that's quite a tight age range for these carbon dating.
So that was the, those dates in the archaeologist mine linked everything.
So these sites are all over and there is at least one in Alberta.
I say at least one because one I can't remember if there's more than one that they've already found,
and there could be more. They just haven't found yet.
So sea-vans-hains, a geologist turned archaeologist in the early 1960s,
believed that the Clovis culture arose just after the only time period in which migration from Siberia seemed to have been possible.
So that's kind of solidified the whole, what they call Clovis first,
is like these are the first people and that's, so that was the only possibility
because of his understanding of ice recorder and the sites that they found.
Does that kind of make sense so far?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least in terms of like, they found the Clovis points,
they're all dated to the same range, all within kind of like this thousand year time span.
It's all lighting up. It seems pretty tidy.
Yeah. So that's, because what they found so far.
And other researchers built on this Clovis first theory and added on the overkill theory
as an answer to where all the spectacular creatures that Rome North America went.
The mastodon, the dire wolves didn't know we had those.
I thought that was just Game of Thrones.
Sabertooth cats, food fevers, giant sloths, armored rhinos,
and the list of place monsters goes on and on.
And they all went extinct a little over 10,000 years ago.
So it's quite a tight range.
I've never heard of armored rhinos.
I know. That's amazing.
I mean, that's a huge, like giant beavers. Sorry.
I'd heard of like the huge sloths.
Yeah. Cause aren't they? And like the movie Ice Age?
I think so. I remember seeing skulls of them and thinking they look like over skulls.
I think I'm going to have that from when I was a kid.
I don't know.
Maybe. I haven't seen those ones.
But anyhow.
Okay. So the main champion of the overkill theory was Paul Martin,
not the former liberal finance minister and PM,
but an archaeologist from Arizona who believed that the timeline of the ice
recorder opening the spread of Clovis culture tools and the extinction of many
Pleistocene animals is no coincidence.
The theory kind of goes is that there was a baby boom of epic proportions
as these hunters swept down the continent on a rampage of killing that took out
large animals.
This wasn't that popular of a theory among paleontologists who noted that
many plant species went extinct and other extinctions preceded the mammoths.
They believe that climate change is more likely a culprit than a population
explosion of hunters hell bent on taking out as many mammoths in mastodons as
possible.
So the overkill theory didn't seem that popular among scholars.
It seemed to have stuck in the zeitgeist of the general thinking of what
happened when humans came over.
This could have been because of the rising popularity of environmental
awareness in the late 1960s and 70s.
So it fit with the idea that this is what people do.
So logically it must have been what the indigenous people did when they came
over the land bridge.
Kill everything. Super predators.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, well, we're doing horrible things.
So they must have too.
This is definitely a theory that is debated among academics.
And there are reasonable points made for both sides.
It's certainly possible that hunters helped push extinction along, but it's
doubtful that they were the main cause.
Thankfully researchers didn't give up in much more plausible explanations
about how humans populated North America and South America have arisen in the
past two decades.
Okay.
So what really happened?
Well, at least the current theories.
With how many theories and new findings that are happening these days, it feels
like an age of discovery for paleo-archaeology, which that must be thrilling for
them.
I'm very happy for that.
It's like raw scalar must just be thrilled.
In one article I read, one scientist commented that there seems to be a
significant journal article in the field every four months or so.
Still.
This must be amazing.
I mean.
The first two popular theories is the Burundian standstill hypothesis.
This theory goes that the people of Siberia, I'm generalizing here,
migrated over to Burundia and then became trapped there by glaciers and spent
10 to 20,000 years.
Before the ice-free quarter opened up with the melting of the glaciers.
When the ice-free quarter, people migrated south and led to a genetic split between
the people that would become the Dene Athabaskan people and more southern
indigenous people.
So these, this would have included the Clovis people.
The other main theory that is becoming more and more popular in the last decade or so
is the use of a kelp highway.
The idea is that the world's, because the world's water was trapped in the
glaciers, the sea level was much lower upwards of 400 feet or 125 meters.
I should say 125 meters because it is a Canadian podcast.
During the last glacial maximum, which is an awesome term, so that's roughly 20,000
years ago.
That's like as far down as, that means that that's as far down as the glaciers got
before they retreated.
If that makes sense.
That's the, and then they always, they use acronyms in the archaeology.
It makes it really confusing.
As far south as they got?
Of course.
Yeah.
So the glaciers went down.
Yeah.
Like from the Arctic or wherever.
And then they, because they expanded.
Because they took thousands and thousands of years and then they stopped growing.
Yeah.
And then they started retreating.
And it's not like they, it's not like they were, they stopped and like, it's
probably, we're talking thousands of years before they retreated.
Oh yeah.
And that's why I followed the Canadian geographies all glaciated and all.
There's like a thousands and thousands of lakes and we have the Canadian shield and all
that stuff.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I want to get back really quick too.
It's really hard to imagine 125 meters.
Like that is so deep.
Yeah.
And they even, when they're talking about when the glaciers retreat, they use terms like,
oh, well, and the land popped back up after the weight of the glacier.
But it's like, well, they didn't pop back up.
We're talking paleontology.
We're talking it popped back up over hundreds of years.
Yeah.
As the, as the earth kind of took a sigh of relief from that pressure.
So it's, it is hard to wrap your mind around it.
Yeah.
Like, like did you say that the water was 125 meters deeper?
Like lower.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
And then the pressure of the ice on the land, it would, yeah, would compress all the dirt
and all that sort of stuff.
Everything.
But also even like water tables and stuff would get like crushed.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
So that's, yeah.
So that's for the, for the last glacier maximum.
They always do LGM.
I had to learn all sorts of terms.
So this aspect gets very sciencey very fast.
So I'm just going to, because it's, this is like marine paleo archaeology.
So this is getting deep.
The sea levels were so low, a lot of, because the sea levels were so low, a lot of land was exposed, creating new islands,
ismases, boninsulas with relatively shallow areas where kelp could grow.
This gave a hospitable environment to sea life that could sustain sea mammals, crustaceans, etc.
and humans that could traverse down this fertile coastline without having to go inland to hunt big game.
Well, and even, they couldn't even go inland for a lot of this because it was ice.
Like there wasn't big game on all of this.
So they're kind of, the land was exposed and then kind of to the east would have been ice if that kind of gives you a visual.
Yeah.
No, it does.
And like, yeah, 125 meters, it would expose a tremendous amount of land.
Yeah.
So during this time, like Japan, they were connected.
The islands of Japan were all connected.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course they would be.
Oh, it's like, oh, right.
Okay.
So just all this kind of wrap your head around what earth looked like while there was humans there, kind of navigating all this.
Okay.
And so the large kelp forests helped to reduce the wave energy as well as it crashed into the shore,
which would have been immensely helpful for allowing the seafaring humans in skin boats that they were believed to have traveled in.
Sorry.
Tell me more about skin boats.
Yeah.
No, it's a super gross way to refer to the took boats that they must have used.
I think they could have come up with something much better than skin boat.
With all of our human creativity and language, they went with skin boat.
Do you mean, is it like what I'm thinking is human skin?
Please don't tell me it's.
No, no, we're hot.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, they hunted sea mammals.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, it does.
When I read it, as soon as I read skin boats, I got silence of the lambs.
I got silence of the lambs vibes.
It puts the lotioner against the hose.
So, all right.
Anyways, there are like the Inuit, they have better words for like boats made the pied.
They have the Umiak, which is a large boat.
Like, why not?
Why don't we go Umiak rather than skin boat?
That's makes more sense.
Okay.
Although we would have considered it nightmarishly difficult to travel in these boats, it was
like an easier way to travel than going through the ice recorder.
So, like, it wasn't, the ice recorder wouldn't have been this like delightful green passageway.
It would have had glaciers, raging rippers, mountains, and much more extreme weather conditions
than the coast.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course it would.
Would have been terrifying.
Yeah.
Like, I've hiked on glaciers and you have to be really, really careful.
There's huge crevasses and stuff like that that you can fall into if you don't know what
you're doing.
Yep.
So, they would have.
And it's very cool.
Yeah.
I mean, water would have been delicious, but whatever.
Okay.
So, there's research being done of coastal regions that show that areas that are currently under
water and have been for thousands and thousands of years had been dry land.
However, long ago, that could have supported humans and other mammals.
This is research that is beyond my understanding, but I assume it's the mix of geology, marine
studies, and marine archaeology.
It's got no zwittles.
But researchers are also taking into account indigenous oral histories and traditions and
using that information to help them with their research.
There are indigenous oral traditions that reference a time before trees cover the land
or to land where there is none now.
So the theory of the kelp Highway, which is, it's a much more logical theory to explain
the age of some of the earliest archaeological sites.
And one of them is bluefish caves in northern Yukon.
Paulette Steves, a professor at Algoma University, believes there is evidence that there were
humans there as long as 24,000 years BP.
That BP is a term they used before present.
Basically, this means before 1950.
Okay.
Yeah.
Either way, yeah.
24,000.
It's a combination, but it doesn't matter.
Walking thousands of years, it's fine.
So this is a somewhat controversial take because of stuff to do with ancient horsebone deposits
and stone flakes that some researchers research, it believes, could have accumulated through
natural deposits.
But you'll need to listen to a paleoarchaeology podcast to find out those details because
it's confusing when they start talking about stone flakes and deciding what age those
are.
My eyes glazed many times.
Totally fair.
So I don't even know what I read because they were talking about, listen, God love them.
They did good work, but it's not for me.
All right.
What's becoming less and less controversial as the evidence of very ancient people inhabiting
areas far more south grows is that humans have been here far longer than 12,000 years
ago.
The best known sites for evidence of how long humans have been in North America is the White
Sands National Park in New Mexico.
Scientists believe that 20,000 plus-year-old human footprints have been found.
So how does someone carbon test a footprint?
Basically, they don't.
They test the pollen samples found in the archaeological layers that the footprint has
found.
The first type of testing had a lot of criticism because it was a water plant pollen, and
a critic said that that type of pollen could have been contaminated by older pollen particles
because of the water that had been in.
That's a kind of a basic explanation.
So they tested conifer pollen samples using, oh, God, here we go, a mass spectrometer and
quartz grains using optically stimulated luminescence to determine where the footprints were from
23,000 years ago to 1,000 years ago.
Yeah.
And for love of God, don't ask me how to explain what optically stimulated luminescence is.
Do you know what that is?
I could probably take a guess.
I probably might have embarrassed myself if I tried to do that.
Well, let's just trust that the people that optically luminize the quartz understood it.
I've used a mass spectrometer back when I was in university, but I don't think I don't
think ever did any optical stimulation.
Of course.
To date anything?
Of course.
No.
Definitely isn't doing any dating.
All right.
So it's important to have evidence to backup theories when humans came to North America.
And Paulette Steeves put it well.
She wrote, new knowledge, open minds, technology and science are enriching what we know about
a human past on a global scale.
America is included.
So to have an understanding of why the scientific world spun its wheels for so long on the ideas
that humans couldn't have been in North America earlier than 12,000 years ago, we need a villain
to the story.
So to me, that villain is Alex, Alice Herlichka.
So he was the head of anthropology at the Smithsonian from 1903 to 1941 and the founder
of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
He had a stranglehold on the field and believed that indigenous people had only been in North
America for 3,000 years and was exceedingly pissy about anyone who dared suggest otherwise.
Wow.
Yeah.
Okay.
He would ruin people's careers.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
That guy.
Yeah.
All right.
So he was probably seething that the Folsom site, which is an archaeological site in New
Mexico discovered in 1927.
So this is before Clovis.
It's profound.
Was proven to be dated 11,000 to 10,000 years BP.
And then a couple of years later, the Clovis site was found and it was 13,000 years old.
He must have been spitting nails.
You know what?
You won't be surprised.
He was a big fan of eugenics too.
Oh, of course.
Yes.
He was on that team.
TV eugenics.
All right.
A lot of winners there.
Yeah.
Okay.
That date seemed to be about all he could tolerate and would ruin someone's career if
they had the audacity to suggest that any archaeological sites discovered show that
humans had been in North America before Clovis.
So stifling anyone's career who wanted to pursue lines of inquiry that would lead to
an older date as to when indigenous people into North America was a huge factor in why
Clovis first grew as the dominant theory because it wouldn't allow any others.
And then all these.
Was it a like it?
Was it a specific political agenda?
Or like it's just he just had this belief.
He's like, this is it.
This is good.
This is the answer.
And I have nothing else.
Well, he just couldn't fathom the idea that indigenous people were here for so long because
he just didn't think that well for the same reasons that people are on team eugenics.
Yeah.
Okay.
Was there horrible races?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those things get awfully simple when you start reading into it and you're like, oh, it's pretty
awful.
And then there would have been all sorts of scholars that studied archaeology that were
kind of tightly bound into this Clovis first leaf system.
And then they trained more scholars and then they trained scholar.
And so that just stuck.
But there's the good thing about scholarship is that people are curious and they keep looking.
And that's what they did.
So that dominated the archaeology field until the 90s.
And then there's a so-called paradigm buster site in Monteverde, Chile that was dated to
33,000 years BP.
This wasn't the only place where archaeologists were working before the 90s in search of pre-Clovis
sites.
The Monteverde site seemed to have squashed any doubts that had been lingering among Clovis
first supporters.
So that basically that theory is kind of dead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like they probably also came across the street.
That's exactly it.
It's not.
There wasn't just one, like it wasn't just like a one wave of immigration.
Yeah.
It's too simple a way to think about it, right?
Yeah.
Like of course there were multiples.
Like of course it was ongoing.
Yeah.
Like constant, just constant.
And then like, you know, they, people would group up and then they'd split apart because
they're hunter-gatherers.
They, they group split.
That group would group and split, grow and split.
And then they would move down or move east or west or wherever looking for more food.
Yeah.
Research have added onto the coastal migration theory, which is the Calpiway theory, by suggesting
how they made the shift from foraging and hunting in the rich kelp beds on the coast
to moving inland.
So in a relatively recent article in the Journal of Northwest Anthropology, two researchers,
Dale Croes and Vic Coacheira, sort of, I said, your name on, even included a fun little
story of how they imagined these people traveled inland by finding the Chihalas River after
spending generations living off the kelp beds.
So that's kind of, my geography is not great, but I think it was like when I looked up on
the maps like Oregon around there.
Okay.
That's what that is.
They thought for generations they lived off of the kelp beds.
So they're just like lived in boats, essentially were boat people.
Or like there would be like cliffs and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah.
And like little islands and yeah, like that, you know, have little, okay.
Yeah.
The businesses, whenever they are, I forget what they are, their geography is a long time ago.
Yeah.
So they were, they'd be in the boats.
We'll call them Oomiex.
So we don't group each other out.
And then they'd be on the little islands or they were on the cliffs and maybe like they
kind of be coastal people more or less.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
And that's how like the, the bluefish caves up in Yukon, like that's why they were
on the coast.
Oh, gotcha.
Okay.
That makes sense.
All right.
So they, so they, these guys, they were, they, they took a little dip into creative writing
and they created a whole like family and about what they imagined these people were
doing and going in the boats and there's a little thing about a child and the, like
splashing and playing with things.
And anyways, they were happy for them to have such fun.
But my favorite part of their story was when they wrote about how they imagined they would
find these large barn coals that went eaten raw.
They'd get buzzed.
Because that's what humans do.
I'm like, hell yeah.
We've got this massive liver.
We're going to get messed up.
Yeah.
Cause they, like they cook them, but then they, I guess they chomp on them and like,
whoo.
Is that real?
Yeah.
Apparently.
They didn't make it up.
That's amazing.
Like they made up the story part, but not the, like they're using their real research, you
know what I mean?
They're what they know about the coastal area.
So they're apparently there, there are now where there were, there was it sometimes
raw barnacles you could eat to get messed up.
Yeah.
Just a little buzz.
Yeah.
Just a little.
Take the edge off of living in the skin boat.
They said they do not have any archaeological evidence to back up the Chihalas River hypothesis
and sort of him saying that river wrong to any West Coast Americans.
But who knows what they can learn in the future.
So this is definitely kind of in the mainstream of theorizing that they're going with the
current academic view of a combination of the coastal migration theory and the ice recorder
theory for how humans made their way inland and south and then east on the continent.
And as the glaciers retreat it.
So Paulette Steves believes that it is possible that humans came to North America before the
ice age happened.
And that's an interesting idea too.
She talks about how there was a time before the Cordilleron and Lauren Tyglesia is expanded
to meet up where it was possible for humans to have traveled to North America.
And I mean, who knows?
The travel with all this is finding evidence for something so long ago that would have
been covered over by glaciers.
They ebbed and flowed over millennia.
OK.
That's all those kind of the mainstream theories.
And then there is another theory that people came up with that it really got people's
hackles up and it's the solutrean hypothesis.
And it was even the subject of an episode of a CBC's The Nature of Things.
And it was fairly controversial as controversial as an episode on Stone Age archaeology can
be.
It may have been so controversial that since I watched it back on the gem app, it has since
been removed and can only now be seen on YouTube.
Or they were just clearing space on the app.
I don't know.
But if you're interested, it's called Ice Bridge.
So the basic gist of the solutrean hypothesis that's proposed by Bruce Bradley and Dennis
Stanford is that people living in the areas that are now France and Spain called the
solutrean's traveled across the Atlantic during the last glade maximum to North America.
They use the ice itself to travel by almost island hopping on ice flows and using skin
boats in between to travel and use as shelter.
So according to Bradley and Stanford, they hunted sea mammals such as the Great Hawk
along the way.
That's the next dink bird because it was a nice happy little bird and we just killed
it.
Anyhow, sad story.
So they argue that the solutrean people are the origins of the Clovis people and they
went east to west populating North America on their way once they landed on the east coast
of North America.
They say that the people that came down the ice recorder came later and acknowledge that
this goes against the goes counter to the current slowly view.
Their evidence for this is some stone tools that are very similar to those of the solutreans
that are found in Europe that were found in Chesapeake Bay as well as some other rather
complicated DNA evidence from some engine is remains.
This is an extremely simplified version of what their evidence is.
If you want a deep dive, there's a whole book.
But don't.
Don't.
No.
Thankfully, because this is such a toxic and controversial topic in the field, there
are several articles that really lay into it.
It feels like this got a lot of academics good and pissed off and I love reading angry
academics go after each other.
So restrained, but I can't help to imagine the mutterings and cursing they were doing
when they were reading what they considered be dead wrong or straight bullshit.
So the strongest argument against a solutrean hypothesis is that the dates Bradley and Stanford
give for some of the artifacts artifacts that they found predate the European solutrean
people.
So Michael O'Brien, who's one of the authors of, there's many authors on this article,
but Michael O'Brien was a lead, wrote in their article called on sin ice problems with
Stanford Bradley's proposed solutrean colonization of North America.
So I quote, if we are to believe that the technological similarities Stanford and Bradley
observed between the middle Atlantic and Iberia are historically related, we are forced to
conclude from their own data that they appeared first in North America and then were transferred
to Europe.
Yeah.
They went back and forth.
Yeah, they were, I'm on Mr. O'Brien's side here.
Yeah.
So centered in Bradley believe that the evidence they found, which was a spear point that looked
similar to solutrean's spear points was over 20,000 years old.
The solutrean people lived between approximately 21,000 to 17,000 years ago.
So that's their side.
And Jennifer Raff, a geneticist, was one of the scientists that appeared on the documentary
and she was there to argue against the hypothesis.
She did it very gently in the documentary, but in her, she wrote an article for The Guardian
after the show aired that really broke down further.
Her case of why the show and theory are so problematic.
So first off, there's no evidence of boat use by the solutreans.
Oh, doesn't mean that they did.
Sorry.
I said, Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
I mean, it doesn't mean that there wasn't, they didn't use boats because they would have
rotted away for so long ago, but you can't prove a negative.
Yeah, fair.
I guess the same could go for the Cal pi way theory because they don't have boats either.
Yeah.
But secondly, the stone tools and the use of overshot flaking to make them that is found
on both continents could have been developed by two completely unrelated people.
Yeah.
So this was brought up in the show itself, but they like, and I think that's pretty solid
evidence that they just could have, I mean, like there's only so many ways you can make
spear points with stone.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's only so much.
There's been parallel development of very complex things, like inventions in modern
times.
And so like, and then like very, very complex stuff.
So yeah, I'm not surprised that you could have like calculus.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So German guy and, um, uh, what ever his name is Newton.
Yeah, limits and new different techniques.
But yes.
Yeah.
So the most controversial piece of evidence that Raph goes into more detail in her article
because she's a geneticist in the show, um, they go on a long segment, segment talking
about specific genetic genetic markers, uh, saying that this half the group X is evidence
of a European connection.
I will not go into great detail of this because I don't understand it in her, which was in
the Guardian.
So it was for like a lay audience.
She writes that they tested some pre-contact indigenous remains of wind up people and found
this genetic marker.
She points out that there has not been any genetic sequencing of solutrean people.
And she cautioned against trying to use the half a group X as a defining marker for these
solutrean people when the European gene pool was only formed about 8,000 years ago.
Huh.
Okay.
And there are many different versions of this marker.
And the oldest remains of an indigenous person found, uh, in North America is called, he's
called the ancient one.
He's also known as the Kennewick man.
And there's no European ancestry ancestry in his DNA, which has been fully sequenced.
I mean, it's also like, it's one of those things where could it have happened?
Like could they have come over?
I mean, maybe.
Sure.
But I mean, it's also one of those things where it's like, are they like, yeah, like
were they the first?
Yeah, they're not the genesis of humanity on North America, which is one of maybe.
The solutrean theory is that they are the genesis of it.
So you can't.
And there's the ones in Chile that you said that were 30,000 years old.
What are the people doing?
What the footprint people doing?
So where'd they come from?
Unless, as you said, they went backwards.
They went the other way.
It's just also entirely possible.
Yeah.
Would that be something that indigenous North Americans colonized Europe?
I'm not proposing that as a real theory.
I am.
I'm proposing that.
You heard it here first.
Yeah.
So why did I even bring this theory up?
Because it's more or less been debunked.
As it really riled me up to see that this theory got so much airtime on a pretty mainstream
media of CBC.
And I agree with many of the scholars who dunked on it because it is irresponsible.
White supremacists really love this theory because it feeds into their belief that white
people deserve the whole continent of North America.
And by ancient Europeans, we're here first.
And they continue, they can continue to dismiss the indigenous people that say they have always
been here.
But the Bradley and they don't, they're just saying that, well, if white supremacists
think that, then that's their problem.
But that's just irresponsible.
Like you're proposing this theory and you're, I just, I know that scientists.
I think that you also deserve to get dumped on it.
If there's flaws on it, then you deserve to absolutely to get trounced by people that
know a lot better than you.
And the show itself was, actually I'll get into that in a sec.
All right.
Yeah.
So the, on the, on that episode of nature of things, CBC on CBC, there was a strange desperation
in the show that made me think it was filmed by the same people that do the history channel
show, the Curse of Oak Island.
They had tension building music.
They had kind of this fake discovery moment with like, whoa, like uplifting music.
Whoa, wow.
And they even had, they were doing a dig on like a sand on, like right on the coast in
Chesapeake area to look for more evidence.
But they were doing it like on a sand cliff with scaffolding.
And like, why did you just do a more inland traditional kind of like those pit things
that they dig?
Like what do they call them?
Yeah.
I know what you're talking about.
I just, I don't, I don't know what they're called.
Anyways, like an archeological trench.
Like why did, why did you have to do scaffolding on a sand cliff?
And then the thing collapsed.
Of course.
Yeah.
Made of sand.
Anyhow.
Yeah.
And they had someone walking along the beach and they found a point and like, well, from
the small amount, the relatively small amount that I've read about archeology, archeology
is that you need to have the stratification to see where in time that peace was from.
Just because you found it on the coast, it doesn't meet from that time.
Because it's just true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You just, you just found it random rock.
Like it might as well be.
It could have just been a broken rock.
Yeah.
Like in a weird way, like sure, like they have ways to test and like to look at the evidence
and compare like the people who are experts on stone tool making, they really know what
they're talking about and they can spot it a mile away.
Sure.
Not like a lay person who like looks at something that looks like an arrowhead and it's just
a rock.
Like a trained eye can tell.
I feel like if you're going to date it, like or as described to something very specific,
especially if it's a new theory, you've really got to like cross all the, cross all the
teas and taut all the eyes.
Yeah.
Like the people that found the footprints.
Yeah.
And you know, they had, they got criticism.
All right.
We'll go back and we'll find like that's a fair point.
That type of water based plant.
Sure.
That carbon in that could have come from ancient water and it could have been a more recent
plant.
So, anyhow.
So yeah.
So that was a, it was a good, a good show to watch just to see kind of what's going
on.
But it's kind of like it goes like the, like the fellas doing the Jaha'litz river imaginings.
It's, it's kind of the far extreme of that.
It was like, sure, they're going with the current series and kind of building upon it
to see how people could have moved inland from coastal living.
And that's what they, that's their hypothesis, their theory that they don't have evidence
for yet.
Whereas these other guys are saying, no, this is the way.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's contrast.
I felt it was important to start this podcast with an understanding just how long indigenous
people have lived and what is now Canada and the United States since the two are inextricably
linked in history and current events.
The next episode will give us an understanding of how deep the kitchens were between the
many nations of North America.
And that's all I've got for today.
All right.
That was exciting.
That was, that was good stuff.
Yeah.
So we've got the next episode will probably be in two weeks.
Well, and my sister-in-law will be the guest.
Nice.
I'm looking forward to it.
