Steven Rinella

I'm talking the first Americans, Siberian immigrants.

They wiped out many species of wildlife.

People debate it, but to me, it's verging on settled science that humans had a huge...

were a huge contributing factor into extinction of mammoths, mastodons, short-faced bears, giant ground sloths, a host of things, like nine genera of animals.

kind of blinked out around the time humans arrived.

But then they had this huge period of, the historian Dan Flores calls it like native America.

They had this 10,000 year period, 10,000 years of hunting in America had, the ensuing 10,000 years of hunting in America had one extinction, a flightless bird on the Pacific coast.

People hit harmony.

Like people hit where we weren't driving shit to extinction for 10,000 years on this continent and then boom,

europeans show up in that story shifts right um to get into kind of like just give you a little bit about like the first hunter they'll if people that are like loosely familiar with american history will recognize the name daniel boone like no doubt i mean we're kind of in boone country right now you know um let's take a look at boone for a

at the time in england you weren't gonna hunt right the king owned the deer uh there was no sort of public hunting wildlife was jealously guarded by the elites hunting wasn't a thing boone's family comes here and all of a sudden like there's this rich wildlife resource out there and they pick up hunting like these are people that these are not hunters coming to america these are very much like non-hunter

the European colonists that come over are like not, they're not showing up as hunters.

They're getting here and they're learning from natives how to utilize these resources.

And Boone is this interesting figure, because he sits right at the beginning of colonial history, or he sits right at the beginning of the American experiment.

Like he, in the years prior to the American Revolution, Boone becomes a deerskin hunter.

During the colonial period, Boone is also an interloper.

He's a poacher in two ways.

Boone is going, he's living in these settlements.

First he lives in Pennsylvania, then he's down in the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina.

He's forbidden for two reasons from hunting where he hunts.