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The MeatEater Podcast

Ep. 196: A Sea of Bones

The MeatEater Podcast

MeatEater

Sports, Wilderness

4.937.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2019

⏱️ 113 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Lawrence C. Todd and Janis Putelis.

Topics discussed: kill sites; the meaning of an artifact; taphonomy: the study of death; possum that took up residence inside of a dead buck; big-assed tongues; Larry's "it's not my problem, I'm retired" ethos; humans as the most invasive species; catch and release archaeology; high elevation corridors; the argument against Steve’s argument that people should leave wilderness alone; a child-like curiosity; and more.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless severely bugged bitten in my case

0:14.8

underwear list.

0:15.8

You can't predict anything.

0:20.4

Presented by ONX Hunt creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for

0:25.1

hunters download the hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play store nor you stand with ONX.

0:32.1

All right, super special guest Larry Todd Larry tell everybody what you do.

0:39.4

Well I'm trained as an anthropologist archaeologist but actually what I do more than that is something

0:44.8

called taffonomy which is the study of what happens to dead things so my real passion

0:52.3

when I started archaeology was looking at bison kill sites and to study a bison kill site

0:58.0

you can't just look at the patterns you see when you excavate it and say well people

1:01.4

did this and people did that and people did the other you've got to look at what the

1:05.6

carnivores did after the people left the site and what the decay of the bones did to dispersal

1:11.6

things and what the rate of deposition does to what bones are preserved and looking at

1:16.4

all those sorts of things that happen after the death of an animal until it enters the laboratory

1:22.3

is the field of taffonomy.

1:23.3

When you say kill sites mean places where ancient people killed large groups of animals

1:31.3

I specialized mostly in big bison kill sites but I also did a couple mammoth sites and

1:38.0

did sites where people suspected that horses had been killed and a variety of sorts of

1:42.2

things.

1:43.2

I was sort of a taffonomist for hire.

1:45.6

Can you break down the word taffonomy?

1:47.9

It's from the Greek and taff is death andonomy is study of.

...

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