#136 Dr. Devin Pettigrew - Archaeologist / Primitive Bison Experiment Ep.II
Dr. Devin Pettigrew - Archaeologist with a research interest in the tools and tactics of ancient hunting cultures worldwide. Devin received an M.A. at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 2015 and a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021. Devin’s research involves experimental replication and testing of ancient combat and hunting weapons, including the atlatl and dart, bow and arrow, and rabbit stick (boomerang). These experiments inform archaeologists about the ballistic potential of ancient projectile weapons, as well as the signatures they leave behind in the archaeological record. Devin also researches the ecology of ancient and contemporary hunting, including what leads to hunter success, and how ancient hunting practices can better inform us about conservation and wildlife management policies in the modern world. Tune in as Dr. Devin Pettigrew joins Bobby Marshall in studio to discuss primitive tools, atlatl bow, stone points, arrowheads, archaeology, anthropology, human history, stone tools, flint napping, hunting, bison and science experiments. Please subscribe or like us on social media platforms for updates on shows, events, and episode drops.
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Dr. Devin Pettigrew - Archaeologist / Primitive Bison Experiment Ep.II
Joining us in the studio is Dr. Devin Pettigrew. He is an archeologist who has spent vast amounts of time studying primitive tools, weapons, their effectiveness, construction methods, and so much more. Having the privilege to sit down with him for this episode, I learned a ton. This is a subject matter I am infatuated with. We did a deep dive from hundreds of thousands of years ago right up to the present day. He has conducted multiple experiments, reverse engineering, stone tools, primitive war, and hunting tactics. There is a lot of jam-packed into this episode. I encourage you to read its entirety. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
It is great to see you again. How's life?
Pretty good. I got a position at Sul Ross in Alpine, Texas. It is a tiny little town in Texas.
I'm sure it's a good thing, career-wise.
It is going to be a big change. It is great for me in terms of career because it is hard to get an academic position but a tiny little town in the desert down in Texas is a big change.
We have a mutual friend, Donny Dust. That is why you are sitting here. When we were spending some time together, which we are going to dive into heavily and what we were doing, he knows the area you are going to.
I was surprised because when I told Donny I was moving away to Texas, I thought he was going to be disappointed but he was like, “I love it down there.” He was super stoked. He has got some property done in the Big Bend area. He says he goes down there ten times a year. He does survival courses and shows people what native plants they can use, how they can survive in the desert, builds structures, how to find water, and how to hunt or find small animals down there. It is going to be great. We will probably continue to partner up on some things and he is going to come down there. I will have to make some trips back up to the mountains.
You are welcome here anytime. How long have you lived here?
It is our seventh year in 2023. I used to take vacations as a kid out in the mountains all the time and down around Lake City. Colorado is a second home to me.
We are getting a crazy lightning storm. This is a good test. We got some new cameras in the studio. We are going to see if they will last during the lightning. Hopefully, we don't get struck.
It is significant out there. We went backpacking. It was a huge storm then. It is crazy weather.
Did you guys get rained on the whole time?
Once we hit South Park, it was raining. The lightning and big storms all around from South Park all the way. We got down out of the mountains and hit the front range. It will be dry because it is the front range. It was late summer and it was pouring. It is the biggest storm ever with hail and lightning all around us. We were stuck out by Boulder. We had to pull off the side of the road for a minute.
I had to fly in from LA. I was hoping I didn't have to cancel. We barely made it. We were scheduled for a morning flight and that got canceled. It was due to the weather. We hopped in an Uber and went to Long Beach, me and my son. We were standing in line. Thank goodness for him. There was a flight going to Denver that they were boarding.
We were going to have to fly to the Springs and up to Denver. He was like, “Dad, why don't we get on that flight?” It didn't even cross my mind. I was in the zone. I was like, “Let's ask.” We did and took the last two seats on that or we were going to have to fly in the morning. I thought I was going to have to cancel with you. Cheers to us sitting here. Do you like that drink?
Yes, it is pretty good.
They are good for you too.
That is great. I need a little bit of caffeine.
Our time is a little bit limited. I don't want to keep you too long. You got a lot going on. You mentioned you are going down to Texas but to start with this, let's tell the readers a little bit about what you do because if I try to explain it, I'm sure I'm going to get 50% of it wrong. What we did is a part of your work or body of work.
I'm an archeologist. I do experimental archeology. That means you are trying to recreate ancient tools and figure out how to use them. When you use them, you break them, leave traces, and wear them, especially when they are made of stone. That is what you are seeing in the archeological record. When you are looking at the record, you are seeing projectile points that you don't know their use histories. What we are doing is creating replicas, using them, and tracking our use of them. We know their use histories and we can compare those back to the archeological record.
My main focus is hunting-related activities. These are hunting weapons, methods, and tactics in different areas and climates. Not only do I use experimental stuff for that but also ethnographic information. In other words, more recent histories of people that lived similar lifestyles hunted with the bow and arrow. My main focus is hunting and experimental work. I am trying to broaden and make connections with modern hunters because there is a lot of overlap. We are trying to understand what it is like and means to be human. To do that, we need to draw significantly from the past. That is why archeology is powerful.
It is intriguing to me. We talked about this at that experiment. I know we didn't have a whole lot of time, although we had an awesome evening after, where we got to sit around the campfire and have some freshly cooked bison. Another shout-out to Donnie. That is two already on here. I have been intrigued by that culture from a very young age.
The reason why is my grandfather was a stone hunter. He was an arrowhead hunter back in the day. We spent so much time around Colorado hunting for rocks. On every trip, we would find something and pick it up. That is frowned upon. A lot of the places we looked at are mostly private. We don't have access to them anymore. They have changed ownership.
If it is on public land, it is frowned upon because it is illegal. It is the same way for me because my dad collected arrowheads. He went out, looked for them, and picked them up. His dad did. That is what he did back then. That was a pastime. It was all over the country. It still is for a lot of people. When I was a teenager, I picked up a few points.
When you become an archeologist, you realize context is key. If you want to understand the past from artifacts, you have to know their context. That means their relationship to other artifacts is in place, specifically where in the ground they are found, the level, and the depth. Preferably within millimeters, the precise location on the Earth's surface and their relationship to features like hearths. That is how you build up a site when you collect all that information.
What we do when we go and pick up stuff is we tend to pluck certain classes of artifacts out of the archeological record. Those are what archeologists call diagnostics. They have a particular shape that you can trace in time. You can trace the evolution of different shapes of projectile points, for instance. When we go out, do surveys, and find points, as archeologists, we record, measure and photograph them. That can tell us we got a late archaic campsite here. We got some different things going on. We got a bunch of broken bases of points, flakes, and grinding stones. That gives us a good sense of how people are using the landscape.
When I, myself, probably you, or our parents go out and pick those things up, we create a biased record where those things are missing. When archeologists come through, they can't say, “In this big survey, this huge parcel got 10 late archaic sites and only 3 middle archaic sites.” We got four paleo sites. We start talking about how people are using the landscape through time. You lose that ability.
For most places, Colorado has some hidden gems where you have these preserved ancient landscapes but they are few and far between. They are hard to find because people go out and pick up artifacts. The thing that archeologists need to recognize is that the reason that people do that is because they are interested. That is important.
People go out and pick up artifacts. Archeologists need to recognize that the reason people do that is because they're interested, and that's really important because we want people to be.
I'm infatuated with the native primitive culture. I don't know that much about it but I dove deep into the history of when the Americas settled into tribes and faster populations a couple of thousand years ago to a few hundred years.
That is the time you are interested in.
I'm interested in it all. It is all fascinating to me. That is intriguing to me because we have the best record of it. That is where you can hear these stories. It is hard to tell what is true and what is not. That is why it is intriguing about what you do. It is fascinating that you have dedicated so much of your life and time to this. Is the origin of that from going out and finding some of these rocks with your dad?
Yes, they were hugely fascinated with this stuff, both my parents. That is what drove me to develop a fascination with the past and become an archeologist inevitably. Dad was also big into hunting. That is the origin of it.
It was for mine too because I grew up in a family of bow hunters. We do have a minuscule amount of native blood that is held in high regard in the family. It was that connection to ancient culture and some of your history, whether it was our tribe or not, that we were finding the arrowheads. Some of these points I have sitting on the table that Donny's knap for me are beautiful works of art. I have never found anything like this. I have found a lot of small bird points. To find something of obsidian or something like that and have this obsidian spear point here, or would you call that a spear point?
I would call this a dart point. You got a couple of dart points here. Most of the “arrowheads” that people find or talk about in the Americas are dart points at little dart points. Some of these are big. They are not so big that you couldn't use them on a dart because darts come in a huge range of sizes. You might be more likely to use something almost palm-sized as a lancehead or as a knife.
For the work of art, what goes into knapping this? This started from around rock. The way that Donny does, I highly encourage you to go follow him on Instagram or TikTok. He has a lot of his construction methods and him making some of these points. Also, the fine-tuning of it and even sharpening it. Some of these were used in the bison experiment. They have been re-sharpened from what they were originally like. That thing was pristine when we brought it up to the experiment. You can see where it has been re-sharpened a little bit.
It still has a nice edge.
Those were the two connections and what the culture did. It was after the 1960s. There was a high regard for living naturally and living off the land. There still is. That is why we are seeing some influx or resurgence in hunting. It is a cool connection. Being intrigued by that culture, I'm ecstatic to have you here.
This is the stuff. With that interest and connection with the natural world, I don't necessarily think that there is a good clear dichotomy between culture and nature. That's a fundamental part of the Western perspective and European perspective that we have here in North America but there is something to it. We are living very different lives than people did in the past. People experience the natural world more intensely than we do.
We're living very different lives than people did in the past, and they definitely experienced the natural world much more intensely than we do.
There is a huge disconnection between age and why you are maybe seeing a resurgence in it. It is the disconnection with food in general. If you look back at these cultures, staying alive was number one. Food was probably number two. Those go hand in hand. Protecting your tribe was the main concern. It wasn't like, “I got to pay my mortgage.” We have all these different distractions to the point where we are fortunate. We were talking a few hundred years ago. We were still hunter-gatherers on a large level. Even though you could commercially go to some market or rancher and trade something but it was still a provider for yourself.
There were no real hunter-gatherers left there back in the day. There are markets. People are generally practicing at least some small-scale farming. They are generally more sedentary, even if you go deep in the Amazon and find people with a few notable exceptions but it is hard to find good analogs for that life. What you are saying is not that long ago, our mental health was a little better. I tend to think that might be the case.
I would agree with that because the main reason that I'm a hunter is for my mental health. That 2 weeks or even if it is 1 week or 4 days that I get to take in September is a hard reset because there are no distractions. People know they can't reach me. I carry one of those garments in reach in case of a major emergency or somebody needs to get hold of me at home.
I'm not showing that number to everybody. I'm not giving access to everybody to do that. It is a huge mental reset where I'm being left alone for 4 or 5 days by myself or only having small human interactions. You are trying to be quiet or maybe it is at night at camp. You are dog-tired if you are hunting.
Some people call it hunting, and they are sitting at camp and drinking beer all day. My version is a little bit different. I like to be in the backcountry, have a base camp, be spiked out, be that far back, = spend some nights out there under the stars, immerse in the elk and the animals, and be around that. That is what it is for me.
Sometimes I have done that solo. Having that time to reflect and disconnect, I come back a much better person. Sometimes it has helped me figure out personal problems I might be having in life. I love and cherish it so much. It is not even about killing an animal. It is more about being in nature, observing, and catching a glimpse of a predator-prey situation, even if it is a hawk or a squirrel.
Taking part in that predator-prey relationship is a fundamental aspect for me. It blows my mind that some people think that humans shouldn't be predators. That is what that perspective boils down to. You think that humans shouldn't be allowed to be predators.
We owe it to our ancestors for them being predators and for us being here.
Not only that but given the last 10,000 years of North American prehistory, we owe it to the environment to be predators. With those predator-prey relationships, humans have probably been the number one predator of white-tailed deer. I can't say that without a doubt but for a long time. We use technology to prey on animals. That is how our species is. That is how we evolved.
We use technology to prey on animals. That's just how our species is. That's how we evolved.
Many years ago, this would have been technology.
That is projectile technology, bow and arrow, and rifle. This is how we prey on animals. There is nothing changed about that. It is the tools have changed a little bit.
That is a great segue to go into one of my next questions. I don't study it and am not immersed in it so you are going to have to dumb it down a lot for me and probably some of my readers. I don't know how long ago but I know that the first technology in hunting, rather than catching something with your bare hands, like some small game, the next step would maybe be a blunt object like throwing a rock or advancing to clubs. Where is the timeline in the advancement of tools up to the last few centuries years ago?
By throwing rocks, you can't identify. Somebody picks up a natural rock and they are trying to kill a rabbit. You are not going to see that in the archeological record unless, in certain cases, you might have an old campsite. We have a pile of nice hand-sized rocks that are like baseball size and the right weight. That might be an exception. There have been a few instances of that. For the most part, you are not going to find that. If people are fashioning simple boomerangs and hunting boomerangs to throw at animals, those are made of wood. You are not going to see that. There are few instances where that thing is going to be preserved for long at all.
Have they ever found anything?
The first thing that comes to mind and the best example is what looked like javelins from about 350,000 years ago. They were found in a coal mine in Germany. They were buried in the coal. It was originally interpreted as a natural cul-de-sac between ridges in this marshy landscape that was off and on, like a field and a marsh. The idea is that people drove or herd of horses back into this area and killed them with javelins. They are spruce branches or saplings that have been cut down into a point at one end. They are nicely tapered. They are well-balanced like a javelin should be.
It was every kid's first whittled stick.
Once you progress beyond the kid version to a teenager version or late teen version, it is a nice whittled stick. It was well-balanced. They are found with some stone tools and remains of horses and a few other remains of animals. They were using the site for off and on. That is the best example. It was over 300,000 years ago and well preserved.
Mostly what we find are objects made of stone because the stone is not going to rot away. You have, in the old world, Europe and Africa, these simple flake points that are triangular. They might be retouched a little bit. They are carefully chipping the edge a little bit in some cases to re-sharpen them or shape them a little bit.
We are finding those that have impact damages on them. When stone is brittle, that is how we can shape it because it fractures in a controllable way that we can learn how it fractures. When it hits a hard object, it breaks. It tends to break in more or less predictable ways. We call those impact fractures or impact damage. We are finding those with impact damage and they date back about half a million years. The idea is that those were used to tip javelins. They were using not the wood-pointed ones but actual ones with a blade.
I'm trying to do the math here. There are many different theories out there. I don't know what I'm reading into.
Our species go back almost 200,000 years. It is not quite that but it depends and is difficult because there is a lot going on with hominin evolution. At one time, there were a bunch of different hominin species on the landscape at the same time. It is hard to say that these people weren't humans at that point.
We didn't think humans were developed that much.
Is homo heidelbergensis a person? These people were similar to us in a lot of ways.
I have seen some videos of chimpanzees using sticks to hunt and take smaller primates.
In some cases, they sharpen sticks and spears with their teeth. They use tons of different tools. As we continue to study chimpanzees, we realize more that they use tools that you would never find in the archeological record for one. That is even hard if you are tracking a group of chimps. You may even walk across them and not even see that those tools are there but they carefully fashion leaves into little twigs to get ants.
I have seen them use a straw before.
They use group hunting methods. Usually, the males get together. They drive and push the monkeys past these key hunters that are waiting in ambush. They use some crazy tactics and tools. It is not hard to imagine when you watch them closely. This is where the earliest stone tools come from.
It makes a lot of sense from what we have discovered and has a species that we can physically watch, even to the point where we are watching some evolution in front of us.
The cool thing about chimpanzees is if you go back about eight million years, there is a divergence. They are more similar to our last common ancestor at that divergence or split. They are similar to what hominins ended up splitting off from hominins that walk on two legs. Chimpanzees haven't changed as much as hominins have.
They are useful in that perspective because if you are studying the past in any way, anything you are doing when you are looking at the past. If you are looking at ancient people, biology, plant species, animal species, through time, or even processes occurring on the earth's landscape, you are using modern analogs typically.
Chimpanzees haven't changed as much as we have or as much as hominins have, so they're useful from that perspective if you're studying the past in any way.
We know that rocks get worn in water because we watch them. It happens all the time over time. If that was happening many million years ago, it would help us understand the geology and what we are finding in some of the strata. You can take that to an extreme. How mountains are formed? All that we use modern processes. When we are thinking about early people, how people lived, how they evolved, and how they changed their time, that is what we are thinking from those kinds of analogs like chimpanzees.
I was bringing it back to the weapon evolution. We went from blunt objects to the first pieces of sharpened or shaped stone.
It was not quite. They are continuing to try and push this back. Four million years ago, you start seeing stone tools. The latest date, don't quote me on this but it is something like 3.8 million or 3.7 million years ago. It may be a little bit beyond four million years. People are trying to push this back and the record isn't perfect.
Across Africa, people were living different lives and species hunting and using tools in different ways. We only have a little window of that in places where the strata are exposed and preserved because the strata tend to get deeply buried. How are you going to find an environment where people are moving around and living in small camps?
It is unless there is an excavation or major erosion.
Even several hundred yards or below the surface, it needs to be exposed. In Western Africa, you have the Rift Valley. That is where the Strata is well exposed and preserved. You can walk the landscape and find fossils. Occasionally, you find stone tools. That is how they are trying to reconstruct those ancient environments. What was going on in the Westside of Africa? We don't know. That is important. We are typically dealing with an incomplete look at the past.
At what point in the timeline? This is where I get a little bit confused. My general assumption is that the atlatl would be before the bow because the bow is still such an effective weapon. Being on this research project with you, I have found out how effective an atlatl is watching some of those high-speed camera reels. It's an incredible weapon I'm intrigued by.
In history, when you picture somebody from a primitive culture, you are thinking of the Native American, full headdress, bow and arrow, and maybe a spear but there is never an atlatl depicted in Hollywood or some of these films like Dancing with Wolves. Not to bring it back to that but this is where I'm getting my influence from, and the majority of the United States and around the world.
A lot of the depictions in Hollywood are later. You are looking at native cultures during the 1800s or 1700s but even that is rare. It is hard to find a good movie. I can't think of one.
It is hard. It ruined it for me a little bit.
Archaic hunter-gatherers living in the Americas are unfortunate because I'm sure you could make a sweet story based on that. If you went back that far, you would see predominantly the atlatl and dart are the main hunting weapon that’s going to pierce an animal and cause hemorrhaging. That is how it brings down animals.
The atlatl and dart were used when people originally came to North America 14,000 years ago but maybe even earlier. They had this weapon with them. It continued to be used around 2,000 years ago. The bow and arrow are becoming more prominent. It has replaced atlatl in a lot of places but it doesn't come in. People don't drop what they are doing. The main reason we know that is when the conquistadors arrived in Mexico, the Aztecs, and all of the neighboring groups, this was their main weapon of warfare. They were using it against each other. They were also using it for hunting.
Early European explorations into North America, even the Spanish and de Soto’s expedition, were attacked by people with atlatls at the mouth of the Mississippi. We have possible descriptions of them in the Northeast but what early Europeans tend to say is that they are using a bow and arrow or a dart. I was like, “What do you mean by a dart?” At that time, in Europe, it was popular to use these hand-thrown small fletched javelins that they call darts.
It is almost like you throw at a pub. It is a little bit larger.
It was a small javelin. They were hunting with them and using them for sport. When they first saw these things in the Americas, it wasn't like, “They are using darts.” That is what they are writing about. They are talking about it in the Baja Peninsula. It was the Spanish that was attacked by people with atlatl and darts there. They talked about it on the Northwest Coast. The cultures we are using the atlatl for warfare
This makes sense for hunting sea life like whales and seals.
It is big time in the Arctic for hunting sea mammals.
It is almost very similar to some spearfishing methods.
These work great for spearfishing. You can look up your regulations but in a lot of states, certainly in Missouri, I have fished with this.
Can you hunt with these? You, of all people, would know. It is state-regulated because you have to meet certain IVOs to take animals in the state of Colorado. There are also a ton of invasive species out there where I know that you can go. In Alaska, the guys have hunted grizzlies with spears. I would never, ever think about doing that.
That is not my idea of fun.
It sounds like a little bit of the line of playing with death. It is too far off the spectrum for me but I get it. That is the whole reason I said yes to going up to this bison experiment. Donny was like, “We are going to field dress and bone out a bison. You are doing nothing but stone tools. I was like, “I'm in.”
Can you hunt? It depends on the state. You have to look closely at the regulations. In most states, it is not allowed. If you have invasives like hogs, generally, they don't care what you hunt those animals with and when you hunt them. It is non-regulated. They want them gone. For the most part, you can't. I know not in Colorado because I went to a meeting of the Board of Commissioners and asked them to legalize it. I was surprised when some of them were like, “This is cool.” They are into it. It was a hard no, which is what I was expecting.
As long as I have known Donny and I'm getting to know you, there is a community of people that know what an atlatl is. For the vast majority of the general public, before I had Donny in here, I had no idea. He had to explain it to me. If somebody hasn't gone back and read one of those episodes, can you explain the construction and method behind what an atlatl is? I'm sure that there are some people reading who are like, “What are they talking about?” Everybody understands the concept of a bow and arrow. It is similar. We have seen a lot of depicted pictures of it.
I brought an atlatl that I want to give you. This is for you to have fun with and for your studio. I got a couple of darts here too.
I wanted to throw one so bad when we were up there but I didn't want to ask for anything. I'm a guy that doesn't ask for anything. This means a lot to me, Devin. This is so cool.
This is the dart.
Did you make this?
This one is similar to the Aztecs. It is like a Mesoamerican.
I'm going to give this back to you so you can explain. How long is this?
That one is about 6 feet long.
It is a foreshaft too. I want to get into all that because that was something I learned in the experiment that I had no idea. It makes so much sense Thank you so much. This is awesome. Can I throw these?
Yes, that is what these are for. These are darts I made a while ago. I made this one but students have been using these. I picked them out because they are well-constructed and they seem to fly well. I didn't want to waste them.
That is nice. I don't expect anything like this. Thank you.
This one is a Mesoamerican design. It has a peg through the handle here. It is about 2 feet long, give or take. At the far end of it, it has a little hook. The little hook or spur fits into a small indention in the back of the dart. The way you hold this one with a peg is with an index finger hooked over one peg and the thumb pressed against the other. The reason we know that is that some Mesoamerican artists depicted the grip clearly in the depictions of their gods holding these weapons.
It fits in there like that and you hold it with the dart. What you are trying to do with your grip here is you are providing enough backward pressure to keep the knock of the dart up against the spur because you don't want it to slip off like that. You will drop it. You want it to keep up to be fitted up against the spur until you start throwing. You release it and launch it with the atlatl. The dart is flexible.
What was amazing to me was how much those things moved in the slow-motion camp. It is unbelievable.
They are quite flexible. The reason for that is that they compensate for the arcing motion of your throw. As you start to throw, you are stepping in. I should start by saying you are in your ready position. The dart is up. You got it up by your head and you are aiming it at the target.
What are you using to aim? Are you looking down like you would an arrow?
It becomes instinctive. Like shooting a bow, you stop thinking about it.
It is like subconscious aiming.
When you are shooting a slingshot, you are not looking at the slingshot. You are looking at what you want to hit. It is the same with this but you got it up. You are pointing and looking at the targets that you want to hit. I got it in my right hand because I'm right-handed. I will step forward a little bit with my left foot and make a full arcing throw. The atlatl ends up down at my side. It is like when you throw a baseball, you don't stop in midair like that. You make a full throwing motion and let your hands.
This brings up a great point. This is why sports originated. Throwing a football is the same thing. We have evolved to be able to throw things and not so much climb.
Our upper body is made for throwing and doing a lot of other things but certainly much more so than other animals. We have good physiology for throwing and throwing accurately. That is the goal. You have it up. You are aiming at the target, and you step forward. It is a smooth cast straight at the target.
The upper body is made for throwing and doing a lot of other things, but certainly much more so than other animals. We have very good physiology for throwing and throwing accurately.
I was shocked. This is a good point for us to dive right into the experiment. Donny and I talked in depth about it but it was two guys sitting there butchering your data. I was shocked at how much of an extension of the arm, how fast the darts would fly, and how much penetration they had but even more, how accurate you guys were with them. You would call out a certain spot on the body of the bison and try to hit that in certain spots to get some different impacts and Swayze, as Donny calls them, to get some point breaks. That was incredible. I had such a good time. Let's talk about the experiments you have run for six experiments for your dissertation.
For my dissertation, I drew from four carcass experiments and I did a fifth one. This last one was the sixth one. There have been three bison experiments.
I got to be part of the last one.
It is a big burly bull with all of his winter coats still on him. He was a substantial target, it turned out. We were getting some kill shots. I started down this path when I was in doing my bachelor's program at the University of Arkansas. I was working on the archeological survey. I wanted to do this specific experiment. I wanted a bison and I ended up with a day-old cow but it was useful. I learned and improved quite a bit doing that. I did one on a hog and a couple on goats. I have done three bison. The idea is to capture a whole bunch of data at one time with this experiment. It is what we call a naturalistic experiment.
It is reverse engineering.
A lot of it was reverse engineering. We are trying to understand how these weapons were made, what works, what doesn't, and how effective they were all at once. We want to see ballistics, impact damages, and halves that work where the point is half to the foreshafts, halves that work halves that fail. We want to capture all that at once.
It is naturalistic in the sense that this is how people were using this weapon. It is more analogous to how people were using this weapon than if you were to go into a lab and do a controlled experiment in a lab where you are trying to control for certain aspects and study one particular variable. That ends up producing an artificial environment.
I don't want to change the subject. I'm going to let you keep going but we had talked about the reason why you were doing it on animal carcasses. Number one was it is the closest thing you could get to a megafauna creature, a bison but for you to throw it into the ballistic gel or something is different. A human is soft. That ballistic gel is set up to replicate human mass. Even then, it doesn't do a great job because it depends on organs. There are all kinds of different variables.
Humans and every other critter you are going to launch a projectile into are heterogeneous structures that have lots of stuff going on. You have bone and muscle tissue interconnected with the bone, and skin overlying that you might have hair and organ tissues. Ballistics gelatin is specifically designed to show similar penetration as into porcine muscle tissue for firearms. It was never tested properly for this weapon or atlatl and dart or bow and arrow.
There was a group in the late ‘90s that tested it with different arrows and crossbow bolts. They found remarkably different penetration. A sharp broadhead would penetrate less deeply into ballistics gelatin than through a pig carcass and a field point, even if it is dull. It would do the opposite. It would penetrate deeper through the gel. It was less drag because what the gel was capturing was a drag. You have a bigger surface. You put a sharp point on there. It creates more drag and friction in the gel. It is slowing down more quickly than the field point. It doesn't work at all for this weapon.
We have some people that don't think hunting is ethical at all.
They don't think humans should be predators.
Those were some of the most common questions that came up during that. I didn't have a great answer for him. Here it is.
Ballistics gelatin doesn't work at all for this type of weapon. Even if you're testing firearms, it doesn't capture a lot of what a bullet is going to encounter in a body. When ballisticians are testing firearms, they are not relying on ballistic gelatin. They are using wounds and deceased animals or actual wounds in people like wound trauma, victims, crime scenes, or battlefield trauma. They are looking at data from that. They are comparing it with ballistics gel.
There are a few articles saying, “There are problems. If you derive results from ballistics gelatin, it is not a good way to go into an operating room if you have a gunshot wound because it doesn't tell you everything about how a bullet is going to behave in a body.” Even they are not relying on the media that you would use in a more controlled experiment like in a lab.
There are many variables. If you hit a rib, we saw it firsthand. It either stops, deflects, or fragments.
A lot is going to happen in a body but we are using naturalistic experiments. I'm not saying it is not useful to do like a laboratory-controlled experiment. We want to compare the results from both. What we are doing in this instance is these carcass experiments where we can see how points are behaving when they are penetrating skin into muscle tissue into organs underneath. We are seeing what happens when they hit bone, ribs, and humerus. How do they penetrate and break? We are capturing all that at once.
What we are doing with the high-speed cameras, the important one, capturing the impact from the side, looking at the velocity coming in. We have markings on the shafts. They are set in a certain distance apart. You have a scale in the video. You calibrate the video to that scale and frame rate. You can track a mark and calculate the velocity. As the dart penetrates, you continue tracking that point and capture deceleration.
That is how you calculate the speed and deceleration.
The types of forces they experience. Skin arguably is the most reive soft tissue on the body. The first thing it is got to do is defeat skin. It is got to cut through the skin to get into the body cavity. What I have been doing is similar to what forensics investigators do when they are studying knife stab wounds or knife attacks.
Can we talk about what you told me? Wasn't there some scientist that conducted an experiment on cadavers with a knife?
There have been a few experiments on cadavers.
It blew my mind a little bit.
They are using people that have donated their bodies to science. They are trying to understand how knife attacks work on people, how they can guard against them for police, and how they can interpret crime scenes. If you show up at a crime scene and you have the murder weapon right there, it helps to know how that weapon performed. Did it require 60 newtons of force to penetrate clothing and into the skin or only 20? That is valuable information when it comes to trying to interpret a crime scene.
That is what they are doing. To understand the performance of different knives used in criminal attacks, they are generally isolating skin. If you are going to do a more controlled study in that sense, you can take something like a skin simulant or skin that has been excised from the body and measure penetrating force through it with a controlled setup like an Instron tester or something that is going to push that knife in and give you a good force read back.
I was doing something similar where I took the point at which the projectile point cut through the skin and isolated the force for that. It gives you a sense of how the points behave or how efficacious the different projectile points are. Generally, as you track the projectile point, you will see a straight line where it is traveling 25 meters per second. That is about 60 miles an hour. They hit the skin and it drops. There is a fast dive in the velocity. It tapers out and declines as it penetrates the body cavity. It will decline again at the end when it hits the skin on the opposite side of the torso. You can isolate those points and get a clear sense of how the different projectile points are performing or behaving.
One of the things I thought that was intriguing during this is, 1) Your guys' accuracy and, 2) How many points you tested that day. What was the number? It was over 100.
We have tested 40 or 50.
It seemed a lot. It was from 8:00 in the morning until 1:00 in the afternoon. We didn't stop. I thought it was cool to take it a step further. You could disseminate where pieces flaked off or broke. You dyed the actual heads with a certain ink.
It was methyl violet dye. It has been used in the medical industry a little bit. It is a purple dye. You dip the point in there and it dies the whole point purple in your clothing, skin, and everything else if you get it on there but it washes out. That means that when the points break, you can see where they are breaking.
You caught some of it on your high-speed camera, which was amazing to go back and watch. Donny shared some of your footage the last time he was with us. One of them was a Swayze break or a point break where it shattered against the hide. It was impressive. It hit some bone or something behind the hide.
It was useful to look at the high-speed camera because you could see clouds of dust coming off that thing. That wool air was thick.
It is coming out of the winter range.
We had points that we were cutting through and penetrating fine. We had points that were bouncing off. Some of them were hitting bone and they were failing catastrophically. The point was breaking the halves. We are becoming obliterated under those high-velocity impacts with the heavy darts that hunting was throwing. You had some dramatic breaks but some of them were bouncing. They were failing to penetrate.
There were many different points and construction methods. I was catching little bits of it because I was along for the ride. Can we dial it back here a little bit and talk about what goes into one of these experiments? I was blown away. It wasn't what I expected. When Donnie called me, I thought I was walking into a group of archeologists from CU Boulder.
It wasn't what I expected in my head. I figured it was a few points and the butchering process but I was shocked at how much craftsmanship was sitting there on that table, time, and effort by you and foreshafts. I want to get into some of the construction methods here in a minute but a good start into it is, what does it take to put one of these together? There is so much time leading up to it. I was shocked you asked me to run. I was like, “Do you know who you are asking to run this thing?”
You figured it out and we got some good data from it. I got that as soon as I started my PhD program but I did not have that camera for previous experiments. To get a bison is like, “How do you get one?” That is why my first experiment was on a cow wing ranch in Eagles Wing Ranch.
It is such cool people that own that spot too.
It is a gorgeous ranch. It is so scenic.
I want to bring up a good point. We are going to dive right back into that. I'm sorry, I will divert you left and right here but I thought the rancher, Jim, was cool when the bison expired. It was a moment where we were all gathered around appreciative of what the bison was. I don't want to say sacrificed for but what was going on that day? I’m grateful for his life and having a carcass to conduct these experiments on.
It is such a beautiful setting. This was an aspen backdrop. The mountain has almost 270-degree angles around you. We are in this valley up near the medicine boat. It is an incredible spot. I thought it was well done. It was how I would want something to expire. If my body was going to science, it is how I want it to go.
They are respectful of their animals. They love their animals there. That was a big concern. With the first one we did, he made a point afterward to say, “I appreciated that you guys were respectful because we put a lot of work into these animals. We like our bison.” Getting a bison is a huge challenge. You have to have money. You need a grant, a donor, or something like that to get one.
All of the stone points are knapped by me. I'm not that great a knapper. We collected those from different knappers that donated them. In this last one, it was Donny that reached out to a bunch of people and asked for donations. Donny also made several of the points. A huge shout-out to the flint knappers. They put a lot of work into that.
It is Incredible. It is over 50 points and has different construction maps.
I halved most of them to foreshafts. I carefully match those up with the dart main shafts and arrows because we are testing some arrows.
To dial it back a little bit and go into more of the construction of the points and stuff, did you send them some dimensions, blueprints, or something like, “I need something that I can half well that has to feel the flute?”
We asked for some of those. A skilled flint knapper, all you have to do is say, “I want a Clovis point.” They know what you are talking about. You are like, “I want a Dalton point. Can you make me a late archaic corner notch point?” They know what you are talking about because they have studied the archeological record and artifacts. A big part of what is driving their desire to flint knap is that fascination like we were talking about, the archeological record. You will find flint knappers that mostly make modern and more artistic types of things but they generally can make some archeological examples. All we have to do is ask for donations.
Some of this was different types of stone. We had obsidian and slate. I don't know. I will let you go into that. There was some Georgetown stone.
There were some different cherts. It is silica that has been turned into a dense knappable material. Obsidian and basalt are volcanic rocks.
All these rocks start with a sharp edge on them. Donny got some flakes here that he has given me. I found myself in the butchering process. I started with some serrated stuff. It worked great but a flake with a razor-sharp edge on it seemed to be a lot more effective for me.
When they break, they make a razor-sharp edge. I find that flakes like this are perfect for cutting through the skin. Once you get through the skin, I want a knife and a handle.
A half would be something like this. It is half stone, blade, and wood or handle. You received all the points. Did you have to connect them to all foreshafts?
I have to, all of them. It is a tremendous amount of work.
How long did that take you?
I had some sleepless nights. I’m trying to get all those points ready for the last one. Ideally, I would spend a couple of months doing that to get to a point where I got 70 of them for a bison because you want more than you need. We want to be able to use them all until it is time to butcher. People make them from whatever stone they like to make to flint knap and send them to us. I do a lot of work photographing, weighing, and measuring them.
The photographs are incredible on the dissertation. That is awesome to see all the points lined up at different angles. It was cool.
Once I have them, I photo them for photogrammetry. You spin it and take a bunch of pictures. You can create a 3D model of it and do a lot of stuff with the 3D model. All of that has to be done. It has a huge amount of prep work to build up running one of these.
Let's get into the foreshaft since we are still on the construction method. This was something I was in shock. I'm thinking 70 arrowheads and 70 darts. That is my 70 arrows and 70 arrowheads. That is always my conception. We can go down a bit of a rabbit hole here. We will have to come back to this. We got to remember what we were talking about in your experiment and the process. We will tailor it off here at the end.
The foreshaft opened a whole new world of how smart and innovative these people were that I didn't give them credit for because I'm thinking as a kid out there picking up stuff, you are picking up various sizes. I would imagine being a bow hunter myself and growing up being a bow hunter. I use different-grained broadheads for different species. Sometimes you have a blunt tip for certain things like that. Total arrow weight is a big thing.
Let's stick to foreshafts and I will ask my next question. I'm going to try not to forget it. I thought, and this opened my eyes, that this is how you can be effective. Maybe you are going out to hunt bison. You won't find any bison and you have passed a bunch of deer but you are set up to hunt bison. You could take down a deer or a bison but maybe you don't want to. This made a universal toolkit for multiple foreshafts to fit into one main shaft.
That is one idea. Where this stuff is best preserved is in drier climates. Wood is going to preserve better in a drier climate and under a rock shelter. In the Southwestern US, we got preserved atlatl and darts. What I have given you is made of cane. This one is an actual river cane, Arundinaria gigantea, from the Southeastern United States. They were using this stuff for atlatl, darts, and arrows.
Wood is going to preserve better in a drier climate under a rock shelter. In the southwest and southwestern US, we've got preserved atlatl darts.
It is very straight.
It is nice and strong. This other one is Tonkin Cane. In the Southwest, they were using willow and predominantly coyote willow or sandbar willow. They are wrapping the socket of the main shaft and drilling out the main shaft for 2 inches or 1 and 3/4 inches. They are fitting in foreshafts and find all the different foreshafts. You got some that are longer and shorter. Some are blunt for a small game. The whole thing is there. It is a beautifully made, well-crafted toolkit hunting kit.
There is some real engineering behind it.
Most of the time, we don't realize that because all refining is the projectile points. People don't even stop to think, “That looked different to them because it was halved.” Their end goal was not the unhalved point. Basal morphology is how you attach the point.
Donny brought us a piece of pine pitch glue here that he has made up. This stuff is fascinating to me because I would have never thought of that. I figured that they were taking sinew and wrapping it around to attach an arrow to a foreshaft.
In some cases, they were using straight sinew. Most of the time, at least with some glue or mastic. Hide glue works well but hide glue isn't necessarily easy to make, either. The stuff that Donny makes is good. There is some real chemistry that goes into making that. You need to get the proportions right. You want to control the heat right. You are mixing in different materials, like some finely ground-up charcoal, to make a good pitch.
There is moose poop in his too.
I did elk for the last one, elk, deer, or rabbit.
That is rock-hard.
The pitch is a resin that comes straight out of a pine tree. It is more brittle. You are trying to give it some structure. That is the purpose of it. You are trying to make it a little harder by adding charcoal to it. Getting those mixtures right is important. We don't know that we have isolated, particularly how ancient people were making pitches. They may have had a stronger mixture. There are some skill and knowledge that goes into crafting and using these weapons.
There's some real skill and knowledge that goes into crafting and using weapons.
This is the earliest form of engineering at this point. We even got into it a little bit, the connection between the foreshaft and the main shaft on how to make for strength. One thing that blew me away in the experiment was this thing would get hurled or thrown into the bison. At that point, you could pull the whole dart out. The foreshaft would stay in the main shaft, even with all that force pulling it out. A few foreshafts are disconnected from the main shaft. That is unbelievable.
I spent a lot of time on this last one. I’m carefully fitting the foreshafts. In some cases, they weren't necessarily using foreshafts. In the Yukon, they are finding darts that are not foreshaft. They are made of multiple components. They are composite but they use a different connection where you have two beveled ends beveled in opposite directions. When you put the bevels together, you have one solid shaft. They are gluing and wrapping those. They are not like removable foreshafts. The points are connected right to the end of the main shaft.
If you want a foreshaft for an experiment, you can remove the foreshaft, replace it with a new point, and keep using the main shaft. That helps because it cuts down the amount of work you have to do to make the main shafts. A single thrower that is using 1 or 2 main shafts gets a feel for them and is more effective than if they are switching out main shafts all the time. It is good to do that in the experiment but you have this wrapping area that can create more drag. You want the foreshaft to have a nice smooth transition of the main shaft. When they hit a bow with a lot of force, the foreshaft will get jammed back into the main shaft, and the bindings can even break.
It splits the main shaft. I don't think we had one main shaft split on that last one.
No, because what I did this time was I used a separate socket of cane and a wood component that went up inside the socket. The foreshafts were fitted. There was a snug down in there but they butted up against that plug down in the socket.
It is not a splitting motion. It is a solid connection.
We could still switch out and use a bunch of different points with a single main shaft.
Even going down a further rabbit hole here, warrior culture is always in the back of my mind. These people weren't walking around. They were victims of predation or war. Have you dug into any of these being used for combat? Have you done any studies on that? I would think that this would be a fast way for you to retrieve a dart and put another point on it if it is broken, whether construction methods or versing war time or peace time, because things are made at a much more rapid pace with less attention to detail during wartime.
Mesoamerican weapons, the ones that have survived and been passed down to us, are well made. The weapons can be highly functional but not necessarily look pretty. They were crafting good weapons. They were using a cane in Mesoamerica. According to historical sources, they were using foreshafts because a cane is hollow. If you want to attach a point to the end here, it can be beneficial to have a wooden foreshaft to halve it. That also gives it some more weight up front.
The Mesoamerican weapons that have survived and been passed down to us are very well made. The weapons can be highly functional, but not necessarily look super pretty.
Anybody that is an archery hunter will understand that.
They are still making them this way for combat rolls but they are not being used under the same constraints. If you are hunting bison out on the plains and you are walking for weeks, you probably don't want to carry around twenty darts with you. You can carry 3 main shafts and 24 shafts.
It is effective with your kit. What do we think the primitive kit was at that? I guess it depends on the air.
It depends on what environment they are living in and hunting. Are you living in the Great Basin, mountains, plains, or the East? Are you more sedentary or mobile? All that factored into the weapons kit.
If you think about all the different variables we have, there are so many mediums to hunt from, nuances to it, and traditions. You still have traditional bow hunters. If you could hunt without laterals in a certain spot, I'm sure there are guys that go out and would love the opportunity to do that. You said some of the stuff had been recovered in Africa. We know that it has been in North America. Some have been found in the Arctic. How much is this technology you think shared across? Is that something that you guys are looking at?
Is it an independent invention? Is it shared? Is it diffusion?
I think of modern warfare and you want to keep the technology away from your enemy. You don't want to share the stealth bomber with somebody else if you have created it. It is to stay one step ahead. At the same time, it also spurs the evolution of weaponry up to the modern day.
Warfare can certainly drive technological advances that you may not see in hunting.
I'm all over the place. I apologize but I'm like a kid in a candy store.
The timeline is interesting. When did the bow and atlatl come in? We know javelin stays back 500,000 years or older. The earliest evidence of the bow and arrow is about 70,000 years ago in Africa. They are finding these stone points that are extremely similar to 70,000 to much later points, even the Egyptians used this point type, and you find well-made arrows with these points in the tombs of pharaohs. The earliest evidence of the atlatl is about 20,000 years ago. That is in Europe.
Does that make the bow before the atlatl?
That would. The problem is we don't know necessarily from looking at stone points whether they were fitted to a spear or an atlatl dart. There are even some giant arrows out there. Ashby did a study of Papua New Guinea hunters who are using these big rebar points that are as big as javelin points. It is hard to tell from the stone point.
The earliest atlatl all come from actual components of the atlatl themselves that are found in caves. A lot of them have been found in France. Potentially, the bow and arrow were earlier. There are suggestions that people in Europe were using these atlatls early on and they were also using the bow. These weapons co-occur. To bring it back around hunting, you can use a weapon like this effectively if the way you are hunting is you are driving big game out on the plains and arroyos, and you are getting up on top of them and throwing big darts.
We view hunting as one arrow, one bullet, one kill type of thing. We have cliff-jump situations that came into play later on. We have tactics of even poisoning animals, whatever was the fastest means to getting a meal.
Anybody who hunts knows that it is not easy in the slightest. It is extremely challenging. You have to have tactics that work to get you close. If you are using a traditional bow or an atlatl and dart, you got to be close. Most of the shots, I imagine, in the past were taken within 15 yards with both technologies.
Anyone who hunts knows that it's not easy in the slightest; it's extremely challenging. You have to have tactics that work to get you close to the animal.
Is that why you did most of your shots at 20 meters for this experiment?
It was 12 meters. That is about 15 yards. That is a typical hunting distance. It is easy to get darts on target on a bison at that range, get good consistent results, and maximize our time. This weapon wouldn't be surprising if we looked back at the ecological record and realized, “The bow and arrow are earlier than we thought in North America.” It didn't replace this weapon rapidly because you have things like tradition.
The first concept that pops into my head is one replaces the other.
Most people think that way, especially in our modern societies. Most modern societies, not just Western societies, are technology-obsessed. We expect technological determinism to be a thing of the past. Technology drives human behavior. It determines human behavior. That is not necessarily the case. People can choose different technologies. There are cases when simpler technologies, cheaper, easier-to-manufacture technologies are more useful to us.
I will give you a good example of that on the archery side. I go up to a 3D archery course. It is an amazing spot. Shout-out to American Bowmen. The president, I go up and shoot with occasionally. Scott and Andrich are amazing guys. They are traditional archers. I shoot a compound. He can knock arrows faster and get on target than I can with my compound because there are many sequences where I'm adjusting a site, looking through a peep, and attaching a release where he shoots and go. He can run through the course probably twice as fast as I could, in theory.
Traditional bows are still useful.
There is a large community of guys and that is what they do. They shoot and hunt traditionally.
When somebody comes at you with a weapon and his intent is to kill you, to bring it back to weapon technology for combat, that could drive weapon evolution. A good exception is Mesoamerica. They were big armies and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the battlefield. With a lot of military strategy and the elite warriors, this was their projectile weapon. They were also fielding slings, like David and Goliath slings, and bows and arrows but they were using this weapon quite a bit.
I forgot that timeline from blunt objects because you could use a sling to throw a stone well.
Slings came along but it is hard to identify that weapon in the archeological record. That is not surprising because, in medieval times, people were still using javelins in Europe.
I'm sure it is great for armor-piercing stuff. One of the things I was shocked at was how much it moved. I didn't put it in perspective until I saw how much damage it was doing to a bison. You are watching it at high speed. The broadheads I shoot, the arrow tips, if you are not an archery person, that I shoot for hunting are three-bladed, fixed-blade, razor-sharp with a machine, they blow through the bone. At the speed and the length of my arrow and my arrow weight, it is designed that way to hunt elk and go through a rib bone. I don't know that it would go through a shoulder bone. Luckily, I have never had to find out.
You don't want to hit a shoulder.
You are looking to shoot them in the thoracic cavity, the main cavity where their breathing and blood-pumping organs are. I think about that and that is razor sharp. It goes through and creates a good hole. Typically, you find an animal by its blood trail if you are spotted in a stock type of hunting or one animal at a time. I didn't put in perspective how much these would penetrate but I started thinking about the motion. Donny even brought this up to me. When this goes in, and as much as that dart moves, it is penetrating but it still has all this motion where it is cutting and virocirating whatever is in there.
A lot of times, on a bison, they are not punching all the way through. We can tell they are hitting the opposite side of the thorax.
It might be more effective, is what I'm getting at. It’s inside their cutting. If they are running off, it is doing the same thing.
The big thing is it is coming and stopping there on the opposite side. It is straight inside the thoracic cavity. They are running. It is moving around and cutting.
Especially, as long as these darts are, because if something started to run off, you have all this cantilever. You can see how much the cantilever moves.
This point is fun because it explodes. It is a complete failure. From this type of data, we are seeing not only information about how they perform when they penetrate but also what is not working. That is helping us reverse engineer the weapon. We are also learning while we are doing this.
Those cameras are incredible. What camera was that? We can give him a shout-out for this.
This is a Chronos 1.4 by Kron Tech.
Anytime you need some help, I'm ready.
I hope we can do this again on another bison at Eagle's Wing.
This came up during the campfire but maybe I was too many tequilas deep at that point. What do you think about them trying to clone woolly mammoths? We briefly touched on that. I don't know if that is being done.
People are working on it. We don't know why woolly mammoths died out. A lot of megafaunas died out at the end of the Pleistocene. It is a big question. It is a fascinating topic.
Is that some of what you are trying to answer, like the effectiveness of these tools?
We are using this data a little bit to look back at how effective they might be because you can take all the statistical analysis of shots, play with it a little bit and say, “What average penetration would we get if they were experiencing a lot more force to cut through skin and trying to get through a burly hide of a mammoth? How deep might they penetrate with other variables involved?”
We are interested in looking at how effective the weapons were. That doesn't necessarily tell us if people were hunting animals to extinction. We don't know that. We don’t know how these animals were responding to environmental change. We suspect that for many of the species. The changing environment was a huge factor. It may have been a one-two punch where the environment was changing, and a new predator came onto the landscape, started exploiting these struggling smaller populations, and that was enough.
Once they disappear from the archeological record, that indicates that they were still around for 1,000 or longer because the last instance you see something in the archeological record or the Paleontological record isn't necessarily the last time it was on the landscape. It usually represents the last time it was populated or enough to leave a trace. How many of the elk you have hunted? Do you think 10,000 years from now, you would be able to find, excavate and say, “A human hunted this animal?”
The last instance you see something in the Paleontological record isn't necessarily the last time it was on the landscape. It usually represents the last time it was populated.
I have gone back a week later and haven't found a carcass. There are other predators, especially around here. We have bears that will sit there and wait for us to drag a deer off to get on what is left of it.
Big animals, back in the Pleistocene, you had huge scavengers with strong jaws that could bust apart those heavy bones.
They eat the bone marrow out of it. It gets eviscerated and it is gone. You have all the smaller rodents that will use the bone and they eat it. It is a circle of life. It is impressive.
Something has to die. You have to have a good indication that it was hunted. It has to be preserved. It has to be buried in the right soil that is going to preserve bone. If you go to the Eastern part of the country, the soil is not friendly to the bone. You will rarely find anything made of bone. The archeological and Paleontological records are not perfect by any means. We are capturing a little window.
Paleontological records are not perfect by any means. We're just capturing a little window.
We have a significant number of mammoth kills in the United States. The number is fourteen that even skeptics agree on. For a period towards the end of the Pleistocene, until these animals disappeared, we only got 80 total specimens. It is a significant number that we know were hunted. Nevertheless, we can't say, “People were hunting these animals to extinction.” It is a challenging topic. Bringing back mammoths seems irresponsible.
It seems like Jurassic Park to me. It was like, “What is next? Are we bringing back the short-face bear or saber-tooth tigers?”
What we should do is focus on preserving the climate and the wildlife that we have instead of bringing back new species.
Please don't send it to the ballot box. Let scientists, biologists, and archeologists figure this stuff out for us. We pay tax dollars to a lot of these people to figure out these problems. That is a personal ground. I don't even want to waste our time on that.
It is out of our hands because it will happen in China or Russia.
Diving back into the experiment, we have gone through construction. What is the next step? We got into the butchering process. It was documented by photos. Is that part of the study?
We do the whole thing. We are throwing a bunch of different darts, building up a sample of shots, and butchering. We are documenting what tools we used. This time the bones, I took it to a taxidermist in Broomfield, who is working on the bone artworks taxidermy. They are cleaning up the skeleton.
We took every ounce of meat off of that. You could take from the neck and ribs.
All went in coolers and are delicious.
It is unbelievable. You didn't get any of it?
I'm moving to Texas.
I feel bad. I should have brought made some steaks for you for lunch.
I had bison. It is great. For the bones, we are going to look at the skeletal lesion and evidence of impact trauma. We are capturing where each point hit its orientation, what happened, and what forces or kinetic energy were occurring in that penetration event. What happens when the point hits the bone? What happens to the point and bone?
We want to clean up the bone and look at those impact damages. We want to look for butchering marks from stone tools and what that looks like if you butcher a whole bison because we disarticulated this animal. What is it going to look like in comparison to bison that are found archeologically? We don't know how those animals were butchered.
When we were in the butchering process and got down to the end, we found a slate point that was still lodged into one of the ribs. Is that going to stay in the rib?
That one fell out, unfortunately, in transport. I lost it. I have no idea.
We should have taped it in there.
I wasn't paying attention.
That was a long day.
I’m exhausted by that point. We slid the rib cage in with that point down. One of Donny's arrow points punched right through a rib and snapped off at the base. That one is lodged in a rib. It is still there. There might be a couple of others. When the bones get cleaned up, those will be in there. The taxidermist has told me already that there are a couple of projectile points. I can't remember what he said but there were some points in them.
Is he doing it with beetles?
He is using slow maceration, like hot water. It might qualify as maceration. I'm not sure if that is technically correct. Maceration is when you are putting in warm water. There are a lot of bacteria. It gets nasty. The bacteria is taken off all the soft tissues. In this case, it is a slow, low boil is what he is doing to remove the soft tissues. There are various ways you can get this soft tissue.
Are you going to put the whole skeleton back together? Will it be piece by piece so you can do more studies on it?
It goes into a comparative collection. It is what we are going to use it for. I'm taking it down with me to Sul Ross in Texas. We are going to use it for our comparative collection. When we find a bone in the archeological record, a lot of times, you are finding individual pieces of bone and you don't know what it is. You want a comparative sample of a mule deer, pronghorn, bison, or bunch of different animals that you can go and look at the specific structure of the bones and the morphology and say, “This is a bison vertebra.” It works for a comparative collection and looking at butchering marks and skeletal lesions. It is multipurpose.
Bison Experiment: When we find bone in the archeological record, a lot of times we're just finding individual pieces of bone and don't know what they are. You want a comparative sample of a bunch of different animals, like a mule deer, a pronghorn, or a bison.
That is awesome because every part of this bison was used. Even those were gone by the time we were leaving. There were some birds circling.
Donny took the hide.
It is going to continue to get used. I feel fortunate that you are letting me be a part of it. I appreciate it. We are coming up on time here. I want to be respectful of your time but I have a few more questions if you can hang out for a bit. I’m going through this and reading some of the dissertations. Basketmaker references, what does that mean? You guys had mentioned it a couple of times when we were out there and I didn't put it together.
I got a website that I haven't updated in a long time called Basketmaker Atlatl and Dart. It does have some good information on there. Basketmaker is an archeological phrase. It is an old term. It was introduced in 1919 to refer to an archeological horizon in the North American Southwest where people are making basketry but not pottery yet. These are early archaic to late archaic people. It ended around 1,500 years ago. I don't think I have that exactly right. Southwestern archeologists are going to be wagging a finger at me.
We can Google something. I don't know if that would help. It is probably misinformation.
It might be under general on my website history. Basketmakers is an archeological term for cultures that called themselves something different. They used the type of atlatl I was talking about earlier from the Southwest with willow main shafts and different foreshafts fitted in. They are mostly about the size of the darts I have given you here, especially the little bit lighter ones. The big game they were hunting with them was mostly desert big horns, although they may have hunted some bison and elk. Their atlatl looked a little bit different than this. They were board-like. They had a groove running up them and finger loops.
There were many different variables in that.
There is a tremendous amount of variation, particularly in the atlatl and the grip and how they are gripping them.
Why are these experiments so important to you and the community of people that want to know more, whether it is a scientist, archeologist, or anthropologist?
In terms of hunting, it is an extremely important human activity. I hope it remains an important human activity. It is something that we need to continue. In a lot of ways, it is practical. We need it because you are not going to introduce some of the main predators back into the Northeast. That is not going to work. There is a deep history of it. Unlocking that history is important. We don't just want to know how they hunt. What weapons did they use? How innovative were their weapons? How effective? What kinds of tactics did they use? As we look into that deeply, we realize these people were smart and innovative.
Unlocking history is really important. We don't want to just know how people hunted, but what kind of weapons did they use, how innovative were their weapons, how effective were they, and what kinds of tactics did they use?
I learned a lot being out there with you. I encourage people. If they have any fascination with primitive culture, hunting, or Paleolithic engineering, read your dissertation. It is broken down well. It was incredible to be a part of it firsthand. Thank you for inviting me. I love to do it again. Are you the only one doing this reverse-engineering type of archeology? Have there been other studies? Is it a group of you that are doing this?
This builds on a body of research. It has been going on for quite a while with some prominent archeologists that have been trying to rebuild these weapons, reverse engineer them, and testament in similar ways, although they haven't used the kinds of instruments that are available to us and to understand how they break and perform.
It goes back to the ’80s and ‘90s. It was starting to pick up this type of research. I'm seeing a little bit of a disturbing trend where people are relying on controlled experiments and are not cross-referencing them with more naturalistic kinds of experiments. They are going directly from a controlled experiment to interpretation which you can do to an extent.
There are archeologists that are doing that.
There is a lot of projectile research out there.
I have seen some influencers or celebrity hunters do some. They have their opinions on it without having any archeological background to back it up.
There are some exceptions. Donny knows a lot about the stuff. He reached out to me about a lot of it. A lot of people doing this out of fascination are also researching this on their own. There are some knowledgeable people out there. I want to say something that is a little bit off-topic here. We shouldn't feel bad if we go hunting elk with a compound bow or a rifle. Don't feel bad that you are not using something like this because the world has changed dramatically.
There’s one thing I have been researching and haven't published on this yet but it is obvious. If you are a hunter, you know that the animals you hunt respond to how they are being hunted. They are not passive prey. They have anti-predator behaviors. There is quite a body of research on this in wildlife management. You can't increase hunter numbers and expect a corresponding decline in wildlife if you are trying to control the wildlife population because the animals respond.
If you're a hunter, you know that the animals you hunt respond to how they're being hunted. They're not passive prey. They actually have anti-predator behaviors.
They are smart.
They are responding to predator densities big time. They are going to become more wary. They are going to be more nocturnal. They are even going to vacate an area.
Calling is a big one that I have noticed. During their mating season, they are not calling as much as they are. When I was a kid, that was the mystique behind me being out there. I love hearing a bugle. It sounds like you are in Jurassic Park.
It is hard to find one bugling in Colorado.
It is, especially in an over-the-counter tag unit, good luck.
Long story short, human populations are a lot higher and pre-hunting is harder. Don't feel bad about using an effective projectile weapon because that is our history. That is how she brings down animals.
Don't feel bad about using an effective projectile weapon, because that's our history. That’s what we humans do.
Even as a rifle hunter, bow hunting has gotten popular. We brought this up in the last episode. I had Tom Clum in from Rocky Mountain Specialty Gear. He's awesome. He is a level four US archery coach. He got his stuff together. They have the best traditional bow shop in the country but he brought up that same point. He was like, “Don't feel inferior if you are hunting with a compound.”
It comes down to efficacy. Whatever you're going to have the most success and feel the most confident, the last thing you want to do is be out there. Nothing feels worse than wounding an animal. Be confident in your tools. I'm sure that these primitive engineers would appreciate the same concept. It is efficiency. That's why you see the evolution in these.
It's a tightrope walk between being ethical and still hunting. There was some crazy movie back in the ‘90s that I watched and disturbed me as a child.
Hollywood does not depict hunting well.
No, but this was an assassination where this guy was using the sniper rifle that was controlled by a computer.
Was it one of the Die Hards? Was it the one where it was in the van?
No, it was a different one. He was trying to assassinate the President of the United States. There were some disturbing scenes in that but I always think back to that. We can make that and have a 100% instant kill rate with that but would you be hunting anymore?
That is not hunting but it is at the end of the day. I have an uncle that lives up in Northern Montana in the backcountry all of September. Hunting is his life. He called into game and fish because there were guys pushing herds of elk with drones. It's easy to get a drone and launch it. That's a new tactic. It is effective, I would imagine if you have a camera on that thing. It is illegal. Don't get any bright ideas.
I have no intention. I love rifle lining but even there, you have to spend the time to develop the comfort level and the skill to be efficacious.
I shoot my bow so much that I am more accurate with my bow at 40 yards than I would be with a handgun, which is bad.
I believe it. Those compounds are precise.
We're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Devin, I appreciate your time. I wish you the best of luck going down to Texas but I hope we can do this again. I enjoyed having you in. Before you jump off here, what's coming up next for you? I know that you are going down to Texas. You need some time to get settled. Are there some more experiments along the horizon? I know you are on Instagram.
It is @Ar.Atlatl on Instagram.
Give Devin a follow if you want to see some of this data and awesome photos.
We got the Basketmaker website. I'll spend some time updating once I get down there and give some information about the kinds of experiments we're doing. For all the people who have flint knapped and donated points, at some point, it is going to take me a while but I love to get out a report showing how all these different points are performing and break that down because we have variations in the material types, the shapes, how sharp they are and how they're performing. It's useful for flint knappers and archeologists.
What is the new position down in Texas? Can you talk about that?
It's a visiting professor position.
Congratulations. That's awesome.
They have a strong wildlife management program down there. They're interested in my interest in building a connection between ancient, modern hunting and focus on hunting. Hunting is big in Texas. That's what the future holds.
I hope you had a good time. I love to have you back anytime. You're welcome anytime. Thank you, everybody, for reading. Go check out the dissertation on this experiment we talked mostly about. It is available on your website.
This is the research article that came out on my dissertation, Terminal Ballistics of Stone Tipped Atlatl, Darts, and Arrows. That one is open access.
I found this through a link on your Instagram.
We got one out on problematic targets like ballistic gelatin.
Devin, thank you so much. I appreciate you. This is incredible. I'm going to go try this out. Thank you for the gift.
Important Links
Dr. Devin Pettigrew - LinkedIn
Instagram - Donny Dust
TikTok - Donny Dust
Episode with Donny Dust - Past Episode
Tom Clum - Past Episode
@Ar.Atlatl - Instagram