This is John Batcher, conversation with Dr. Dan Flores for his new book,

Wild New World, the epic story of Animals and People in America.

The last 10,000 years have seen prosperity and growth and then reversal when mankind came to North America.

In between time though, the grasslands of the American West were a niche that opened up because the mastodons retreated.

And who came in place?

Giant bison, but they were replaced by a much smaller bison that numbered in the millions.

The professor here explains what happens when food source opens up and what we colonists met in the West, but the product of 10,000 years of

grassland.

Professor Dan Flores, while New World, more of this later.

The possibility of grazing on immense grasslands that once had been home to mammoths and other grazing creatures,

what tends to happen in response

and what happened in North America 10,000 years ago

is that an animal that is left like the bison is going to expand into that niche that's been

abandoned by other creatures. And this is when we see the huge population explosion of the

American bison into the millions that we think of in our last four or five hundred years of history.

And it's a smaller animal than the bison

that had preceded it and the pliescedine

and are now extinct. In fact, it's an animal that probably is shaped by the

presence of human hunting and predation. So it has anthropogenic origins even in its natural history.

And in that 10,000 year period after the Pleistocene is over from 10,000 years ago down to the time when old

worlders began arriving in America. This is kind of marvelous period of a vastly long time when native people, most of them in the beginning of

this 10,000 years,

...