For 10,000 years, from the end of the Pleistocene to the coming of Old Worlders to America, a diverse population of Native people lived in North America while somehow managing to preserve almost all its biological riches. In contrast to the period when the prior Paleolithic hunters dominated America and the West, this 10,000 year phase of American history featured only one human-caused extinction that science has so far discovered. Was this some strange accident of continental history? Or were their concrete reasons for why, and how, Native America achieved this kind of environmental success? Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube, Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Pandora, Amazon. MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of Native America's environmental success?
Native America existed for 10,000 years in a West marked by many prior extinctions, but somehow found it possible to preserve almost all the biological richness of the continent until the arrival of Europeans. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. brought to you by Velvet Buck. Still in barrel, Velvet Buck arrives this summer, just in time for the season that calls us home.
A portion of every bottle supports backcountry hunters and anglers to protect public lands, waters, and wildlife. Enjoy responsibly. Ravens and Coyotes America. I am walking the edge of a sharp-rimmed cliff in outback Montana before sunrise, moving through a twilight of grays and blacks and outlines.
Large, graceful birds, sandhill cranes, are fluting their strange, plasticine cries in the pastel sky overhead. but I'm focused on the lines of the topography in front of me, especially the way the mesa I'm walking narrows up ahead. Seeing that, my walking pace quickens. This is a historic piece of ground.
Starting some 2000 years in the past and continuing down to 200 years ago, it was the scene of frenzied, albeit sporadic human activity. Like most historic places, there is something maddeningly mute about the spot now. It's why we often stand and gawk numbly in such places, unable to connect to the events we're supposed to marvel over.
But this morning, I'm not going to be stymied by lack of imagination. I'm here with a purpose, my intent to experience at least some part of what a buffalo jump drive was all about. It was fully dark when I arrived here an hour earlier, parked my car at an interpretive sign, finished a cup of coffee, then slowly worked through the boulders to the top of this mesa.
While I walked eastward to the luxuriant grassland of a high meadow, the sky had gradually lightened. Now turning back towards the car and the cliff I'd climbed in the dark, I'm becoming caught up in what I tell myself are echoes of the place. Pointing myself down the narrowing mesa towards the far rim rock, I start to jog.
I'm running a track that men and other animals have run many times in the past. But in contrast to my lope beneath the fluting cranes, then there would have been the pounding thunder of sharp black hooves cutting through the grass and the alarmed grunting of animals, their huge forms wrapped in billowing clouds of dust that must have made for a ghostly stampede.
Now I hear only my footfalls and my breathing, but in the real thing the air would have been rent by the exultant shouts of the drivers urging on runners wearing the skins of wolves and red-coated bison calves leading the herd to its destiny. Their costuming a ruse to fool buffalo cows into thinking that wolves were selecting out defenseless young ones.
Listening to the rhythm of my feet, I wonder if the herd's noise wouldn't have been so overwhelming it would have morphed into silence, adding a surreal quality to the ghostliness. The whole affair would have commenced days earlier with a religious ceremony and careful maneuvering of a bison herd in that high meadow into position for a stampede.
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Chapter 2: How did ancient humans interact with wildlife?
Where I've begun my run is a half mile back from the cliff, and soon enough I cross to descending benches and realize I am on the point of no return in this bison jump. Get the animals here and have them running, and the downhill pitch steepens so quickly, there would be no way for the herd leaders either to stop or turn aside.
I'm running harder now, pulled faster by the angling slope, and I register that out in the valley, dawn color has arrived. Chrome yellow light cast by the rising sun is lighting the white cliffs on the far side of the river, a scene of great beauty. One last soothing sight of earth, perhaps, as the lip of the plunge is scarcely 120 feet away now.
Beyond that is windmilling motion and the silence of 40 feet of free space, then the jarring stop amongst the boulders. I slide to a stop a few feet from the cliff edge and stand panning for a few minutes, looking down on the slope below. By modern standards, the scene would not have been pretty. In 1797, the British trader Peter Fiddler described such a concluding set piece.
The young men kill the crippled animals with arrows, bayonets tied up on the end of a pole, and etc. The hatchet is frequently used, and it is shocking to see the poor animals thus pent up without any way of escaping. However pod-like their behavior as classic herd animals, all these bison were individuals, of course, and that is the way they died.
Slanting sunlight, throwing morning shadows hundreds of feet long across the Madison Valley of Montana, lights my face. Over the mountains I see a jet glinting silver, a mobile diamond slicing through the blue, its motion fetching me back to my climb down to the car, back to my commitments. But before I start, I stand for a moment, thinking of the bison that died among the boulders below.
Humans drove buffalo off cliffs in America for 12,000 years. And despite knowing something about it, I find it a shock to be in this space where it happened, this close to how it worked. I visited Head Smashed End Jump in Alberta and absorbed archaeologist friends' accounts of Bonfire Shelter Jump in the gray limestone canyons of the Pecos River in Texas.
Hearing at the Visitor Center in Canada that Indians carefully utilized every part of the animals... Yet knowing that in Texas, the cliff at Bonfire Shelter is scorched hundreds of feet high from the spontaneous combustion of an enormous mangled heap of unutilized bison, native hunters drove off the rim above. Those two sides beg a big question.
Putting aside whatever fantasies of the past we have, what kind of relationship did humans and animals fashion over the hundred centuries of Native America that followed the Pleistocene? And if it was different, more ecologically benign or balanced than what came before and what came after, then why?
Clovisia the Beautiful ended with the demise of elephants and the majority of America's big animals. People were here, but most of the original animals were not. The haunting stories of losses must have lasted because having so many charismatic creatures disappear seems to have shifted human behavior.
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Chapter 3: What role did bison jumps play in Native American culture?
When 19th century ethnographers began to assemble a linguistic map of Native America, the conclusion anyone would draw is that over 10,000 years, there had been a tremendous movement of peoples around the continent. Athabascan speakers lived in interior Alaska and also way down in the southwest.
There were pools of Algonquin speakers in New England, in the Ohio Valley, and in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. All this was in contrast to Australia, for example, where Aboriginal populations have stayed in place for 50,000 years. The American story implies significant experimentation with different locales and ways of life.
Some of those human migrations may have been related to the reshuffling of American nature that took place in the echoes of the Pleistocene extinctions. The biology of the continent was reinventing itself. The vegetation was changing. Without ground sloths to disperse their seeds, the range of Joshua trees now began to contract. And without mammoths to curb them, honey mesquite began to spread.
There were so many missing animals that a remarkable number of ecological niches either were vacant or newly filling. The ecological rebirth was most dramatic in the western half of America. The loss of mammoths, giant bison, horses, camels, ground sloths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, scavenging birds, and a range of cat predators opened niches at every level.
In cases like wolves and bears, there were ready replacement species. With dire wolves now extinct, gray wolves and ancient American wolves emerged as the primary canid predators. But with 70% of America's grazers gone, niches for replacements were wide open. With almost no competition, a new, smaller bison supplanted horses, mammoths, and its huge bison ancestors.
Within a few centuries, this new dwarf bison grew into a biomass of animals that had almost no analog anywhere else on Earth. Biologists now believe modern bison are a classic example of anthropogenic selection, their size and rapid reproduction shaped by human predation.
Seals, sea otters, and sea lions excepted, along with the one-pronghorn species that survived to browse the forbs that camels once ate, most of the large animals west of the Mississippi were Asian immigrants. In some parts of the planet, the warmer climate that marked the end of the ice ages allowed hard-pressed humans to try out some new things.
But since humans had extensively settled America only 13,000 years ago rather than 45,000, North America didn't yet call for an agricultural revolution the way the old world did. America's human cultures segued to a stage where animals were still of primary importance, but plants were taking on a more significant role.
Archaic is the term anthropologists and archaeologists have long used for humans living this way, by which they mean people existing as hunter-gatherers. So while the old world experimented with agriculture and domestication, in North America, the hunting-gathering lifestyle continued over vast spans of time and diverse geographies all the way into modern history.
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Chapter 4: How did climate changes affect Native American societies?
This was the depths of the last interglacial, the long slide out of the frozen Wisconsin Ice Age. Now the Earth's rotational wobble had the northern hemisphere slightly closer to the sun, and for almost 40 centuries, some parts of America cooked. The Altothermal, as it's called, came close to turning large parts of the continent into a true desert and a vacant one.
Many species of animals left for wetter settings. So did many human groups, like other animals shifting eastward and westward out of the interior west. The country where Clovis and Folsom people thrived nearly emptied of humans during the Altothermal. But once the altothermal subsided, generations of hunter-gatherer peoples returned to occupy the same landscapes for centuries.
That kind of close familiarity gave them bodies of handed-down ecological insights about how to live in particular places. The feedbacks they read from place-based living enable humans to come up with a striking epiphany, one allowing them to live well without using up their world.
The breakthrough, a key to success in Native America, sprang from the realization that there was no longer a wild new world empty of other people out there. Clovis-like expansion across a virtually uninhabited continent was over. Humans now had to learn to deliberately, carefully manage their own numbers to avoid overshooting local resources when times turned bad.
In a variable world, good times inevitably give way to bad times. That was an ancient lesson. Basing your numbers on the good times could set you up for disaster. How did these ancient Americans manage to pull off controlling their populations so they could live well on local resources? Birth spacing was one common strategy.
Breastfeeding suppresses ovulation during a mother's fertile years, preventing a rapid succession of pregnancies. Child mortality was high among ancient humans anyway. But most hunter-gatherers practiced forms of abortion to control their populations, and the evidence is that as an ecological strategy, it worked well.
But for the women who carried babies to term or close to it, infanticide in particular was a psychological burden. Ultimately, many hunter-gatherers sought to escape it. But the larger equation was relentless. The hunting-gathering economy was still the predator's economy, and predators of whatever kind were always few compared to prey.
Hunting and gathering required space to roam, habitats for birds and mammals. Living the good life meant you could not overburden the world with people. There was one possibility to increase human numbers, but it meant giving up much of humanity's ancient life and investing in an entirely new economy.
Around 5,000 years ago, an agricultural revolution similar to the one that swept the old world began to spread into North America from the South. The selection and domestication of wild plants emerged where human populations were densest and animal populations lowest, namely crowded Mesoamerica.
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Chapter 5: What were the key aspects of Native American religious beliefs?
Once the agricultural transformation took root, populations began to grow and sometimes centralized governing bodies, usually religious ones, organized towns into regional empires we know as Cahokia, Spiro Mounds, Pohokam, and the Chacoan Empire, which I talked about in our first podcast. All of these were very late experiments in the last thousand years of Native America.
But in vast regions of America, agriculture never replaced hunting and gathering. So wedded were Native people to the hunt that even as agricultural towns emerged, many of the farmers continued to hunt, at least seasonally. Some returned exclusively to hunting when circumstances allowed. What sort of human existence could be better?
All the evidence indicates that America's Native people lived immersed in art, stories, and observations designed around the grand theme of understanding themselves in a sometimes impenetrable world. The oldest named characters in North American history, in fact, are the deities who created the continent and its life and set in motion human life with all of its victories and tragedies.
Stories of these deities make up the continent's oldest literature. With few exceptions, ancient American gods were animals, although the stories describe some as anthropomorphic animals. In Western America, for example, the deity who acquired the universal epithet coyote stood upright on its legs and brandished human hands, but had the fur, sharp nose, erect ears, and the tail of a coyote.
The deities who made it into modern English as coyote, raven, spider-man, skeleton-man, master rabbit, all shared a basic human nature with their followers. Our vices, our lusts, and our jealousies, our selfishness, and our narcissism resided in America's ancient gods, there to witness, and there for good reason.
More about this in a later episode, but the deities not only explained to listeners why North America was the kind of world it was, they taught lessons, often uncomfortable or funny ones, about human behavior and motives. They were gods, creators, also thieves, liars, and lechers, classic professors of human nature.
Coyote, who emerges from the stories as a kind of whirlwind biophysical force with an enormous appetite for pleasure and sensuality, was one of the most widely known gods out of ancient America, an avatar for humans in the world. And we'll devote much of an episode to him and his stories. Like Raven, he is the on-the-scene conductor of a master plan set in motion by an aloof first cause.
This more knowable, approachable God was common in Native America. And if there are mysteries in the world you've wondered about, let Raven's adventures explain them. Raven was yet another merged animal-human deity who told the Tlingits, "'I was born before this world was known.'" Uttering his monosyllabic gah, Raven proceeds to shape each animal in a slightly different way and to name them all.
Whale, seal, eagle, bear, caribou, beaver, salmon, sea otter, land otter, wolf. The birds he paints in bright colors because he wants them to be pretty. There is one worrisome thread that runs through Raven and coyote stories, though. In early times, the Inuit explained, Raven becomes concerned that humans are becoming too numerous.
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Chapter 6: How did agriculture transform Native American populations?
Because if they do not, human overpopulation will result in the destruction of all the animals and even of Earth itself. In the early 1930s, a historian of religion named Joseph Epps Brown became fascinated by native religions.
He interviewed traditional Lakota elders, including the legendary black elk, and ultimately set down the ideas that made up part of hunter-gatherer knowledge about America's animals. Brown's informants perceived the essential nature of animal species as much through dreams and visions as through native science. Bears rule the underground, as bison did the surface and eagles the air.
Certain animals illustrated particular traits useful to the human animal. Members of a wolf clan sought to invoke the wolf's cooperative skills in hunting and killing. If a young man on a vision quest heard a bull elk bugle for cows in the crisp air of autumn, he might then regard the elk as a totem whose potent sexuality he could internalize.
These elders also recalled a connection involving energy flow between creatures. These were connections neither 18th century Linnaean science or 21st century genetic science would ever think to link together. What the Lakotas called umi, or yum, was whirlwind power, the unrestrained residue of the energy of the four winds.
They remembered whirlwind power as much sought in part because possessing it made one difficult to attack and battle. But only a small number of special animals, spiders, also moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk, and bison, possessed the whirlwind secret. As for bison, seasonal winds coming from the north or south seemed part of their mystery, bringing them or taking them away.
A south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon. But they could entirely disappear, which led to a widespread belief in Native America that bison had their origins underground, and sometimes they returned there.
As had been true of our first hunting ancestors in Africa, true of the Neanderthals, true of the Clovis people, native ceremonial lives centered on an ancient human desire to control nature. But they did so primarily as part of a religious philosophy, not a scientific one.
Managing animals based on population modeling, carrying capacity of landscapes, or selective sustainable harvest, as modern ecologists and biologists do, would have been incomprehensible because native cause-effect explanations for why things happened relied on completely different premises.
The religions through which Native people understood animals were, however, superb at apprehending the kinship between animals and humans. Crucial in Native America was knowledge about how to influence animals in a realm usually defined as supernatural, an essential part of religion.
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Chapter 7: Why was there a balance between hunting and gathering in Native America?
Rosalind's own Blackfeet people possessed what she calls a powerful worldview that suggests the Blackfeet desire to manipulate animals and nature is a deep-seated human impulse available through the assistance of supernatural allies. The degree of power one possessed to call on those allies determined how much you could make happen.
Human beings could become vectors of power from these supernatural realms if a sacred being sought them out, or through a vision quest or other effort to find a sympathetic animal ally, or even by purchasing power from someone who already had it.
Another intriguing look at native religious traditions with respect to animals comes from the work of an anthropologist who lived with the Athabascan-speaking Koyukon peoples of Alaska. The Koyukans preserve an ideology with powerful echoes of how life in the 10 millennia span of Native America must have worked.
Keen observational naturalists with a highly refined knowledge of animal behavior, the Koyukans traced their link with animals back to what they called distant time, when animals were human and spoke human languages. The deity animal was ever watching Raven. Raven rarely missed anything and was always alert to violations of taboos about how to treat animals and respect them.
Many Raven stories were about the bad luck that befell people who transgressed against the animal world. Animals were critical to a major life force, luck, that could make or break a person's life. Luck was an award from ever watching Raven as a result of correct behavior towards animals. And the most correct behavior of all was treating them as kin.
10,000 years ago, the entire human population of planet Earth numbered only about 4 million. Across all the Americas, humans then likely made up only a quarter of that number. North America probably had barely 500,000 people then, fewer than a single large city in our time. Agriculture changed that.
But because big parts of the continent were unsuited to farming, and because farming was a new development, America wasn't entirely remade by agriculture the way Europe or Asia were. By 500 years ago, the best guess is that America north of Mexico had grown its population to just under 4 million people.
4 million people spread across a landscape that in the 21st century supports 400 million seems explanation enough for why humans and wild animals coexisted well for so long in Native America. That might be an argument that for hunting and gathering and subsistence farming economies, 4 million people was just about the carrying capacity of the American landscape. The effects accumulated though.
Across the final 1500 years of Native America before Old Worlders arrived, a cumulative total of 150 to 200 million people lived out their lives north of Mexico. America was no howling wilderness. It was a long-inhabited, lived-in world. Humans are biological, after all, and no species gets a free ride in nature.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can modern societies learn from Native American ecological practices?
Elk remains in many continental archaeological sites are so scarce that some scientists suggest that elk numbers must have been suppressed, and the almost certain cause was human hunting. There was also at least one human-caused wildlife extinction in Native America.
As humans spread around the world, flightless birds were always particularly vulnerable, and the Pacific coasts of California and Oregon, along with the Channel Islands, held one, a flightless sea duck in the genus Chindyte.
In the past decade, researchers dating the remains of these goose-sized ducks from six coastal sites concluded that humans began killing them 10,000 years ago, just as the Pleistocene gave way to Native America.
Wiping them out was hardly the three-century blitzkriegs that took out mammoths, or later, passenger pigeons or bison, but by 2400 years ago, people had hunted Pacific flightless sea ducks to extinction. Judging from the stories people preserved of their cultural heroes, the most common environmental overreach, though, was what the Inuit Raven story feared.
Overhunting brought on by growing human numbers. Coyotes and Ravens America existed for 75 times longer than the United States has so far. So it shouldn't be a surprise that a history reaching beyond human memory would provoke a religious awe from its human inhabitants. Native America's cultural heroes taught that the key to the animal-human relationship was kinship. Animals were people.
They had families and societies, opinions and cultural memories. Like people, they also possessed something essential to them, a breath or a spirit that survived death. Respect came from honoring that humans and animals were kin and acknowledging that we and they could move between one another's cultures because we sprang from the same source.
This became the key when, because of some human hubris that violated the arrangement, the animals retaliated by withdrawing from humans' presence. Pleading with bison, elk, deer to return and rebalance the world thus became a focus of some of the grand ceremonies native peoples developed in North America.
When old worlders arrived in America 500 years ago, Central and South America held more than 50 million people. But in what is now the United States and Canada, hunting and gathering culture still prevailed across vast stretches, and here the human population had not yet reached 5 million.
Even with human numbers seemingly so slight, 500 generations of humans had physically transformed North America. To the native peoples, the continent was occupied, settled, its birds and reptiles and mammals all intimately known and considered kin. Even with fewer than 5 million inhabitants, parts of America held large enough numbers of people that wild animals weren't always abundant.
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