3632 Cooper Early Man

Nice ride. From the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, I'm Todd Craig, and today I'm at the Sam Noble Museum in Norman, Oklahoma, and I'm feeling well, quite honestly, a little inadequate compared to this life-sized mammoth.

Can you imagine driving sail on a family vacation across northwest Oklahoma and seeing one of these suckers on the landscape? Be pretty impressive, wouldn't it? And probably what impresses me even more as a hunter is thinking about ancient man's interaction with animals like this. Can you imagine trying to hunt one with simply just a spear and a stone point? Pretty impressive, huh? Well, today we're going to follow two scientists, Leibhament and Brian Carter, who have been doing a research project for now nearly 20 years in northwest Oklahoma, and trying to unravel this mystery between ancient man and wildlife by studying the landscape. And ironically, one of the sites they've been studying is where man currently still interacts with wildlife on the Cooper Wildlife Management Area. We're out here at the northwest Oklahoma, at the Cooper Wildlife Management Area, and along the Beaver River, where we've been investigating

over the past almost 20 years now, how man has adapted to changing conditions. And out here in northwest Oklahoma, we know over just the last couple of years that we can go from very wet rainy years to extreme droughts with this year being one of the drier ones. But this is not just a singular occurrence. This pattern repeats itself over and over and over again, and has, oh since about the last ice age, the last 20,000 years. And so we've always been interested in trying to see how prehistoric people's utilized Oklahoma, particularly this region, and how their adaptations change through time. Some of our earlier investigations along the river and its area has turned up some bison kill sites that date to between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago. These are some of the first

inhabitants of Oklahoma. They include members of the Clovis culture between about 10,800 and 11,500 years ago. And then the subsequent culture of the Folsom people between that 10,800 up to about 10,200 years ago. These people were hunting large bison animals that were about 20% larger than our modern animals. And using nothing more than a spear to kill them. And they did this all on foot. They didn't have horses. All of these kill events were done on foot. They'd discovered back during Clovis times that you could take a herd of animals and run them into a gully that came into the Beaver River channel and kill these animals while they were contained in these dead-end

gullies. The area out here is one of the prime areas that we've been looking at to understand not only how they killed took place, but a context or scenario of what the rest of the region looked like. And so we're not just looking at Buffalo kill sites, but we also want to know how the environment changed. And for this we have to look at clues in other areas. So right now part of our research is looking for places on the landscape that we can get information about the past. And in looking up and down the Beaver River over the last couple of years, we've identified several spots that we want to do more in depth research. And one of them is right here that we are at today. What drew our attention to this place was a couple of things. One is a very high

bank behind me that contains various layers of soils. And it is within these soils that we will get the information that we seek. We will find out about whatever bones from animals that are in there and identify those. We'll also find out about what plants were growing on the surface when each one of those soils formed by looking at the pollen that's contained in the soil. So all of this information we'll put together and try to recreate the environment and how it changed. This particular site has these different layers that date from over 14,000 years ago all the way up to historic times. Including right at the very surface here is where the old military trail that connected Fort Dodge to Fort Supply came across this area. With Fort Supply

just being a little bit back behind us. Now looking at this high bank was only part of what drew our attention. Other things included some bones that were eroding out. And these bones included some of these large bison. Here we have two ankle bones from the bison. These particular bones came from a layer that dated to somewhere around 12,000 years ago. And so this is before the extension event. So these guys would have been ones that would have still been around when mammoths and horse and camel were living out here. Below this in a level that dated over 14,000 years ago we have the teeth of a baby mammoth. This is one of the teeth from this very young baby mammoth. It's just isolated tooth. We don't have the rest of the mammoth. It's just been washed

in to this bank at around 14,000 years ago. To give you a perspective a mammoth is the size of African elephant. And we have people in Oklahoma 11,000 years ago that were hunting these very, very large critters. We hope to figure out how that environment was changing during the time period of when we had the mammoth to when we had this ancient bison still on the landscape. And then we will compare that to the environment that we've learned about in the past from sites also along the Beaver River that included the bison kill sites that are between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago. The importance of this time period is that it's at the end of what's known as the Pleistocene, which is the last ice age. And right after we had glaciers up in

Wisconsin and Canada, this is when we think some of the earliest cultures, earliest peoples, came into the lower parts of North America. So we are very interested in not only when people are arriving and particularly when they're coming to Oklahoma, but we also want to know what changes and what the environment was like when they got here. One of the first things that we see is they're showing up hunting mammoths and then the mammoths go extinct. What happened? What caused this to occur and how did it affect the people? We are completing a soil and geologic description on a segment of this hill slope. We started at the top and identified different layers according to their differences in color, particle size or what we call texture. We're identifying buried landscapes

by the dark layers. So the people at the top are describing that in detail. The people on the left of them are also have a segment of information or segment of the profile that's not observed in the main profile, but we want to include in it and the people at the bottom are trying to find out where we should end our observation. So we have three groups working, one on a kind of a side segment and then one on the main profile above and then people at the bottom trying to vary the color of the soil. So like different horizons have different color. You can look at that. Your darkers will indicate top soil, you'll have accumulation organics and if find the high wall, you can see there's been stable for a while. So it built up organics so you can see the darker color and then it's been buried with the lighter colors like sub soil now. And part of what we're

finding out is, you know, during the last ice age, Oklahoma was a grassland. It was a very lush prairie sort of grasslands somewhat similar to the tall grass prairies of eastern Oklahoma. And, you know, what would we give to have those sort of grasslands out here today? Well, to have those sort of grasslands that required a lot more moisture and a lot cooler temperatures. When we look then forward in time to the post-pliced to see that period when we're getting things warming up and warming up to just as hot as it is today, we see that the grasslands are immediately changing, but they're not changing to a very short plains sort of grassland. It stays as a mixed grass, but a lot more dense than what we have today. So even the first initial warm-up time

periods of 10 to 11,000 years ago are showing that this area out here was still part of the plains. It was still a grasslands. And this is significant for Oklahoma and for its earliest inhabitants, the Clovis people, because they would have had available any grazing animals that were adapted to grasslands. This included the large mammoth, and it also included these very large bison and teakless. So this profile is an aggregation of sediments with unique features in the soil profile. A dark layer of stability, meaning this used to be the land surface with plant roots growing in it, and in dark in this area. And so you might imagine this is a surface that people could have walked on. Here we have another smaller layer, so we have it buried by sediment,

another little stability period, and a dry period represented by this light color. Then we have particularly a segment that's red where the stream, a graded or put material above this soil, this buried soil, and you have the sequence at the top, which is another stability period, which is represented by today. So this is an aggregation of stream deposits with two dry periods represented in our past, and a period of stability where a rich soil is formed. And everyone I talk to out there, the ranchers, the farmers, they all want to know about when did junipers come in? When did the cedar come in? Well, based on their pollen, we've had cedars and junipers here as early ago as over 13,000 years before present,

and with some of the bigger spikes occurring about every thousand years to 2000 years, and then when we get into the more modern times, we can see there's a large spike approximately 3,000 years ago, 1,500 years ago, and then this is the amount of cedar and juniper out on the landscape today. So it's a fairly good size spike, but it's not the only time we've seen this amount of juniper. The other plants that are represented out here that are key to our understanding of the environment and that ranchers and farmers are interested in is this column here which represents the grasses. This is what the grassland pollen sample looks like today. This is a short grass prairie, but if you see as you go back in time, back 3,000 years ago, it has 10 times the amount of grasses on the landscape as it does today, but if we move back 10,000 years ago,

it even grows more than 20 times the amount of grasses today. So somewhere around 10,500 years ago, this area was a very lush grassland, and this graph is showing us what the carbon in the soil is doing. You hear a lot today about carbon sequestration, then we're going to look at how this works even in the past. If we go back 20,000 years ago to the height of the last ice age, the Wisconsin ice age, we can see that there's a very low amount of carbon in the soils of carbon isotopes in the soil, and this corresponds with the coolness of the last glacial maximum. This upper curve is representing what is happening in the ice sheets in Greenland. The lower one is showing the changes in the carbon out here in northwest Oklahoma. You can see these two graphs

have the same high peaks, the same low peaks. They mirror each other even though there are thousands of miles apart in their territory. There are some very key aspects to this, and one is it is very warm. This minus 16 peak in here represents a hot period. Down here minus 22 is a cold period, and today the modern peak would be right in here at about a minus 17.5, and so it's not quite as warm as it was in the past, at about 10,000 years ago, and 15,000 years ago, but we are seeing an upswing in heat, and so it's getting hotter and drier. This is what we also then saw with our grasses and our other plants. There are other trends in here that are important to note, and these are the main ones that I'm interested in as an archaeologist working on bison sites,

and one of these is right in through here, we start with it cold, and it warms up, and then it drops back down to nearly as cold as it was during the last ice age. This is when the mammoths went extinct, and it's right after this time that the bison that did not go extinct just flourished, and their herd sizes increased, and then not only did they increase there, as temperatures warmed up, the grasslands expanded, and the bison numbers increased, and people came in and were hunting bison, and this continues all the way through the modern era. As we move back to look at what was going on all the way with our pollen, we remember we had this big spike in grasses at 10,500. This is the exact same time when the bison numbers were exploding, and this is when we

have fulsome culture move into Oklahoma, and these folks were doing these large bison kills, and so we see our time of extinction when the mammoths and horse and other large animals went extinct, is represented right here, and then as the grass is expanded, and the bison numbers expanded, and people came in to hunt these bison. So this is why it's important for us to get an idea of what the past environment is looked like, and then bring in the animals and the people onto this landscape, and see how these changes correlate through time, and it provides us a much broader picture and an understanding of the adaptability of people in Oklahoma. If you've always been intrigued with fly fishing, but we're too intimidated to give it a try,

we've got the perfect opportunity for you. Play into attend the Illinois River Fly Fishing School, February 24th and 25th at 10 Killer State Park. The two-day school will cover such things as equipment, casting, flies, and on-stream instruction by one of the country's premier fishing instructors, Mark Patton. Enrolled today by calling 405-340-1992, and tell them outdoor Oklahoma sent you. As associate editor of Outdoor Oklahoma Magazine, one of my favorite times of the year is when we begin accepting entries for the annual Reader Photography Showcase. I'm always amazed and impressed with all the great photos our readers send in. It's actually pretty tough to pick the best ones that will be featured in the special issue. Scenics and wildlife are great, but we also encourage our readers to send in as many images as possible of people enjoying the outdoors in Oklahoma. Submitting a photo is easy. The only requirements are that your photographs be taken with a digital camera, being sharp focus and at least 300 DPI. The deadline is March 31st. So give it a try and

send in a submission this year. As you may even see your own photo published in this year's annual Reader Photography Showcase. The conservation order light goose season this year is February 13th through March 30th. Light geese are destroying their tundra habitat in the breeding grounds, and not only destroying the grounds for other migratory birds as the light geese, also other Arctic wildlife. Since we're trying to reduce the numbers of our light geese, the regulations are quite a bit more liberal than what our regular regulations are, which include electronic calls, unplug guns, 30 minutes hunting after sunset, and no bag limits or possession limits. You need a hunting license, you need a state and federal water fowl stamp, you need your hip permit, and you also need federally approved nontoxic shot.

Each year it may vary what kind of population, the snow geese we get during this time. Weather regulates, they may fly over, but we do see quite a few numbers and population in the eastern part of the state compared to the western part of the state. A good tip maybe is to more decoys the better. If you do plan to participate in the conservation order light goose season, one thing you need to do is register with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife, either send us a letter or you can register online at wildlifedepartment.com. You know if you're an experienced hunter, I'm sure you've learned a lot about the game species you hunt, whether it's elk up in the high country or Bob White quails down in the southern lowland. But there are more than a few veteran hunters I've met who aren't that familiar with the other side of punters, the role that hunters quite in conserving America's natural resources. Over a hundred years ago it was punters who first saw

the news and then laid the groundwork for wildlife and habitat conservation efforts that have restored to abundance, many native species, the white tail deer and wild turkey as well as many non-gain species. Today hunters continue as the major contributors to wildlife conservation, providing more than a billion dollars annually to conservation effort. As a hunter you should be aware of the contributions you make to conservation and take great pride in what you have helped to accomplish. Did you know that you can get the Wildlife Departments latest up to the minute news updates through Twitter, signing up is free and easy. You're watching Outdoor Oklahoma. You can always check out more news of the week at wildlifedepartment.com. You know the Sam Noble Museum here in Norman is a fantastic way for

we as modern man to be able to feel that connection back to the ancient world. Now with Gentra Garth in here at the museum tell me a little more about what visitors can expect here. Sure well right now we're in the hall of natural wonders with the mixed grass prairies behind us of central Oklahoma and you can explore the different diverse landscapes of Oklahoma here in the natural wonders hall. We also have dinosaurs, we've got world-class art, we have traveling exhibits and we have a hall of the people of Oklahoma which includes Native American history from 15,000 years ago to present and that even includes the Cooper School. Well of course that's named after the Cooper's Wildlife Management Area where our scientists were studying today. You know, Gent, this is a fantastic place to come. When can visitors come? When is it open? Sure it's open seven days a week. We're closed on Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day and New Year's Day and you can find out more on www.SamNobleMuseum.org. Great, thanks a lot for having us.

Thank you. And thank you for joining us as well. We'll see you right here next time on Outdoor of Oklahoma.