Beth Shapiro

So it's probably not that they came over like that.

We find bison and horses and mammoths.

Mostly bison.

I think, well, I have a friend who works on domestication of pigs and they've published a bunch of different papers that are always contradicting each other.

He gave a hilarious talk at a meeting I was at last week about how he keeps saying something different as a way of, you know, keeping to publish more papers.

He was just being nice about how he's open to changing his mind with new data, which I think is a valued trait in a scientist.

But yeah, so Southeast Asia or around Asia, I think is the origin or at least the domestication.

And normally things are domesticated around where they were.

I mean, this is the way evolution works, right?

You know, something has a particular suite of traits.

Were they the most delicious pigs?

There were North American camels that were here during the ice ages.

That's Erwin.

So this is a guy who worked for, I guess, what became the USDA.

But he was in charge of apples.

But he was really dedicated to trying to solve this meat problem.

And he saw importing African animals and animals from other places as the real solution to this.

We used to have so many cool animals here that all went extinct at the end of the Ice Age.

So why not?

I mean, we had mammoths.