Joe Rogan Experience #1975 - Dan Flores

Joe Rogan talks with historian Dan Flores about his new book Wild New World, a 66-million-year history of animals and people in North America. They open on coyote cleverness, including a coyote that tricked Rogan's mastiff into smashing a chicken coop, and the way coyotes spread coast-to-coast after wolves were exterminated. Flores recounts his wild pet raven, the role of great horned owls and feral cats as predators, and the deep human prehistory of the continent from the Clovis and Folsom hunters to the Chaco civilization. The conversation covers the 'great dying' of Native peoples from Old World disease, the market hunting that wiped out bison and passenger pigeons, and competing theories (human overhunting vs. the Younger Dryas impact) for the Ice Age megafauna extinction.

• A coyote befriended Rogan's huge mastiff and tricked the dog into smashing a chicken coop, then slipped in and killed nine chickens.
  00:04:42
• Great horned owls snatch cats and small dogs and fly off with them; one owl roost yielded 75 named cat collars.
  00:23:40
• Flores describes a wild raven he befriended in New Mexico that now accompanies him and his puppy on canyon walks and 'talks' to him.
  00:31:28
• At a 13,000-year-old Arizona Clovis kill site, a mammoth cow was found eight miles away with eight Clovis points, having fought to defend her calves.
  01:01:43
• The 1908 Folsom, New Mexico site, found by cowboy Charles McJunkin, proved humans hunted extinct bison in America far earlier than scientists believed.
  01:05:19
• The 'great dying': Old World diseases killed roughly 80-85% of the Americas' 56 million native people within decades of European arrival.
  01:26:22
• The Chaco civilization collapsed when priests (an inbred hereditary line marked by a sixth toe) could no longer make it rain and the peasant class revolted.
  01:30:07
• Passenger pigeons, possibly 10 billion strong, were netted to extinction; the live decoy on a rocking 'stool' is the origin of the term 'stool pigeon.'
  01:54:14

• Urban coyotes in Los Angeles and elsewhere have learned not to howl because howling attracts human attention.
  00:00:34
• By 1944 there were no wolves left east of the Mississippi, and only six wolves remained in all of Wyoming.
  00:13:06
• A Smithsonian/US Fish and Wildlife study estimated domestic cats kill about 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion small mammals a year in the lower 48.
  00:26:50
• The fluted Clovis/Folsom spear point was a uniquely North American invention, not found in Europe or Siberia.
  01:11:38
• Wrangel Island mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago, then died out from genetic defects caused by inbreeding, with no human contact.
  01:17:21
• Nitrogen isotope studies show Neanderthals were more carnivorous than grey wolves, and they hunted with fire-hardened wooden spears.
  01:22:37
• Beaver pelts made John Jacob Astor the richest man in the world, and the first great American corporation was a fur-trading company.
  01:49:34
• Pronghorns can run 60+ mph because they evolved alongside now-extinct American cheetahs; no living predator can catch an adult.
  02:05:10
• A 'bone rush' is underway in New York's East River, where the museum dumped fossils a century ago; a step bison jawbone and mammoth tusk fragment have been recovered.
  02:18:46

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