Last updated: May 8, 2026
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The Saint Mary River
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The Crown of the Continent During the Last Ice Age
Tracking down 600 generations of history. We venture out to the edge of the Ice Age to see how people lived and loved when this place was buried in glaciers.
- Date created:
- 10/08/2021
03 ICE AGE TRANSCRIPT
[low rumble begins]
Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is brought to you by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.
Boat Captain: [over a loudspeaker] All right. My special for your time. We're going to get boarding here very shortly.
Peri Sasnett: Glacier National Park as we know it wouldn't exist if it weren't for Ice Age glaciers.
Boat Captain: Well, please no bear spray, too. We do not want to have a spicy tour...
Peri: As a geologist whose mom is in town, I want to show off what the Ice Age left behind. And one of the best views of that happens to be from the middle of Lake McDonald.
Roz Gerstein: It looks like a flat bottomed boat, doesn't it?
Peri: [in the field] I'm not a nautical expert. Just guessing...
Roz: But -- we can ask our boat guide.
Peri: So we're going on a boat tour
[bell ringing]
Peri: I was excited to tell my mom all about the geology.
Peri: [in the field] This valley is carved out by glaciers. You'll see from the middle of the lake there's a big U-shape, which is how you know it was carved by a glacier.
Peri: But as an artist, she was a bit more focused on the scenic qualities.
Roz: Very sensual.
Peri: [in the field] Sure. That's how the artist sees it.
Peri: The boat we're on is called the DeSmet, and it's one of six historic boats that offer tours throughout the park.
Boat Captain: It was built in the year 1930, and it was built specifically for boat tours on Lake McDonald.
Peri: It may be an old boat, but it moves pretty quick.
Peri: [in the field] Do you get seasick?
Roz: I'm surprised actually, that I'm not seasick.
Peri: [in the field I was going to say, I remember one incident when you took me whale watching me as a child. [both laughing]
Roz: Yeah I didn't enjoy that ride too much
Peri: Within about 30 minutes, we reached the middle of the lake and the captain slowly turned the boat around to face mountains I've seen a lot, but never from this perspective.
Peri: [in the field] So you look behind you. What can you see?
Roz: That is spectacular. The change of the colors as it goes back from gray to deep blue to light blue to green is just wonderful.
[a slow hip hop beat with ambient music begins to play]
Peri: Over a thousand feet of ice once filled this valley. And while that ice is long gone, we have it to thank for this landscape that we all know and love. Ice Age glaciers carved our postcard worthy-scenery, and our roads and trails follow the paths they cleared. But while I spend a lot of time thinking about how this landscape came to be, I'd never really imagined what it would have been like to be here while this was happening. [music ends]For thousands of years, there wouldn't have been much land to walk on. Everything was covered in glaciers, but there was a world at the edge of that ice. [pensive music begins to play] Animals and people who lived just beyond. [Headwaters season 3 theme begins to play] What was this place like during the last Ice Age?
[Headwaters season 3 theme plays, with the strumming of a string instrument, a flute, and drumbeats]
Daniel Lombardi: There are no photographs of most people who have ever lived. So many people from history are invisible today. Like a melted glacier or a footprint in the mud. Some stories can only be inferred from the impressions they leave behind. Welcome to Headwaters, a show about how Glacier National Park is connected to everything else. I'm Daniel, and this is Season Three. It's about how this place became what it is today. Not a comprehensive history, but a collection of stories from the park's past. This episode is about the Ice Age, a time when this place was filled with thousands of feet of ice. It was a consequential time in the park's geologic history. But this episode is also about the search for life and understanding in a world we'll never see. And because the park was so covered in glaciers, we walked this story out to the edge of the ice and tracked down the history beyond the borders of the park. [hip hop beat plays briefly]
Daniel: [to Michael and Peri] So for starters, Michael, Peri-- help me out here. Can you describe what an ice age actually is?
Michael Faist: That is it a great question
Peri: Yeah so an ice age is just a particularly cold period in earth history. The most recent one was basically caused by wobbles in the Earth's orbit and in the Earth's axis that changed the angle of how the sun is hitting the planet.
Michael: Basically, we get less solar radiation. The result is that global average temperatures during the last ice age were around ten degrees Fahrenheit, colder than they are today, which doesn't sound like a ton. But this allowed glaciers and ice sheets to cover nearly all of Canada and a third of Montana, including the park.
Daniel: [to Michael and Peri] Okay, so when when was this? How long ago did this happen?
Peri: So there have been several ice ages, but the Pleistocene, which is the most recent, goes from about two and a half million years ago to about 12,000 years ago.
Daniel: [to Michael and Peri] Okay. So the Earth wasn't just a solid ball of ice for 2 million years. The ice is advancing and retreating.
Peri: Right. There's these glacial periods and then these warmer interglacial periods.
Michael: Yeah. So as we set out to try to understand what Glacier, what this place might have looked like during the Ice Age, we had to pick a specific point in time. So we zoomed in on one that Peri suggested called the Last Glacial Maximum.
Peri: Yeah. So that's basically the most recent point in time where those big ice sheets stopped growing and started shrinking. It's about 20,000 years ago, at least in this location. And at that point, there was so much water frozen on land that sea level was about 400 feet lower than it is today.
Michael: But to understand what happened next, let's zip on over to a tiny state park in Oregon.
Daniel: Oregon? Really?
Michael: Peri, if I had to ask you what the most abundant type of rock found in Glacier is, what would you say?
Peri: Hmm? Argillite, I think. Yes. Yeah. It's found throughout the park. There are bright red and green colors that are pretty distinctive. And around here, it's in a rock formation called the Belt Supergroup.
Michael: Yeah. The Belt Supergroup is found all over the Northern Rockies, but it's not found in Oregon. And yet, perched on a hill above the Willamette Valley of Northwest Oregon is a boulder made of Belt Supergroup Argillite.
Daniel: So how did it get there?
Michael: Well, it weighs 90 tons and probably used to weigh about twice that or almost as much as a Boeing 747 before people chipped away pieces to take home with them. But the story of how it got there is the story of one of the greatest natural disasters to have ever occurred in North America. The story of Glacial Lake Missoula.
Justin Radford: [over the phone] Yeah, I think the Missoula floods are something that are nearly incomprehensible in today's society.
Michael: This is Justin Radford
Justin: I'm the program manager for Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail.
Michael: Justin is the first and only full time employee of the first and only National Geologic Trail in the Park Service.
Justin: The trail covers about 3400 road miles. It's a massive area, and there are people and educators and partners all along this route.
Michael: So those massive sheets of ice that Peri mentioned, which covered most of Canada and the northern part of the U.S.—well, the ice age is ending. Those are melting, which produces a lot of water. All that water needed to go somewhere. And if we use the ice here as an example, water melting from the Ice Age glacier in what's now Lake McDonald would have been headed for the Pacific, flowing through the Flathead Valley, then west through Idaho, Washington and Oregon before making it to the ocean.
Peri: But at the end of the ice age, water couldn't make it to the coast. It couldn't even get past Idaho, and was instead stopped near modern day Lake Pend Oreille.
Michael: Lake Pend Oreille is an amazing visitor experience, a great place to go and hang out. But if you picture it with 2000 feet of ice on top of it, well, it created a huge blockage there.
Peri: An arm of the continental ice sheet had created a dam blocking the only way out for water in northwest Montana, essentially plugging the bathtub drain that was the Clark Fork River.
Justin: And all the water backing up down behind them was just massive in scale. We're talking about something in the neighborhood of 600 cubic miles of water.
Michael: This ice dam was holding back the volume of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario combined, creating what was called Glacial Lake Missoula. Water backed up throughout northwest Montana and extended nearly 200 miles to the east. And it wasn't the only lake of its kind.
Peri: There were at least six others like it in Montana. But Glacial Lake Missoula was the largest one in the West, and you can still see signs of its presence across the state today, including its old shorelines.
Justin: And it just so happens that this lake was gigantic and goes all the way up the sides of the mountains there. And so you can see these big ridge line bumps.
Michael: [to Justin] Essentially like that was at one point was the lake shore.
Justin: Yes, exactly.
Peri: You can drive to these old lake shores, called strandlines, at the Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation and see them like bathtub rings on mountains around the city of Missoula.
Michael: These clues help us measure the depth of the lake. Just south of us, on the Flathead Reservation, it was over a thousand feet deep—you could've submerged the Eiffel Tower. The ice dam was even taller and it extended for at least ten miles. [dramatic, sparse electric guitar begins to play] But as more and more meltwater entered the lake, well....
Justin: At some point the water wins, and the ice just can't hold it back anymore.
[loud rumbling]
Michael: We're not totally sure how it happened. Might have been like trying to hold your hand over a fire hose, but the dam failed and this kicked off the ice age floods.
Justin: Over a period of maybe as quick as two days, all of this water has left this area and started moving its way into Washington.
Peri: Water began charging westward at a flow rate ten times that of all the world's rivers combined. The scale is almost incomprehensible.
Justin: And a wall of water traveling at 55, 65 miles an hour, at restrictions, a thousand feet high, scouring the landscape.
[electric guitar resumes playing]
Peri: And this violent, earth-shaping flood happened multiple times.
Justin: It didn't just do it once—it formed this lake maybe as many as 100 times, geologists think over a period of about 2500 years, maybe 3000 years.
Peri: After one flood forced its way through, the ice that formed the dam would reform, repeatedly plugging that drain, essentially, and starting the process all over again.
Michael: This landscape is now called the Channeled Scablands. Floodwaters taller than the Golden Gate Bridge, traveling at 50 miles an hour. Like a massive, violent bulldozer, the floods scoured away everything in their path, scraping away 50 cubic miles of earth, which is enough dirt that if you spread it out, it could cover the entire state of Texas in nearly a foot of dirt.
Peri: And not all of that material made it to the ocean. At some points, like in Oregon's Willamette Valley, the water slowed down and debris would settle out.
Justin: Well, that's what people say. Oh, well, that's why you have great wine, great vegetables and great growing that comes from the Willamette Valley because it's got all the deposits from the floods.
Michael: [to Justin] That's so funny. People complained about Montana wine not being great because of the weather conditions, but it's parts of Montana in the Willamette Valley that make it good.
Justin: Oh, definitely. Yeah.
Michael: Which brings us back to our boulder in Oregon, which was carried there in the floods, probably encased in glacial ice. Roughly two weeks after the floods began, all of the water would have made it to the ocean near present day Astoria, leaving behind a changed landscape.
Peri: Ultimately, though, the Ice Age was ending. And the dam that created Glacial Lake Missoula disappeared, ending the era of catastrophic floods.
Michael: These floods represent just how dramatically the world was changing. The world was warming up, and landscapes like Glacier were revealed as this icy blanket receded. But the story of these floods is not one we've understood for very long.
Peri: Fast forward to just 100 years ago, and these same floods would become the subject of one of the greatest geologic controversies of its day, in part because the dominant theory of geology at the time was gradualism, that landscapes formed incredibly slowly over millions of years.
Justin: So many geologists believe that things happened gradually over time. There are some national parks out there that are great examples of this. And, you know, like at the Grand Canyon in that over millions of years story about it carving its way down and you have this sort of gradual recession through the layers.
Michael: But that didn't explain the landscape of eastern Washington.
Justin: These canyon walls were all vertical, and the streams and rivers that were running through them were teeny—small. Really no logical way that that river could have formed that kind of canyon.
Michael: What could explain it, thought a young geologist named J Harlen Bretz, was a massive flood.
Michael: [to Justin] And that wasn't the accepted explanation for why Eastern Washington looked the way it did. Like how...
Justin: No, no.
Michael: [to Justin] How was that hypothesis received?
Justin: Well, by the geologic community, not so well.
Michael: A lot of geology involves essentially resurrecting the past based on what's left behind, or in many cases, based on what's missing. And we knew at the time that this park was home to Ice Age glaciers because of our U-shaped valleys. But for geologists at the time, Bretz's flood hypothesis was a bridge too far. When Bretz first published his idea in 1923, he was widely ridiculed by his peers. One of his most vocal critics was William C. Alden, a guy I've actually heard of before, because he took some of the earliest photos of alpine glaciers here in the park. Alden was the chief of Pleistocene geology for the U.S. Geological Survey at the time, and he, like many others, couldn't imagine conditions that would send this much water across the Northwest. He declared the floods impossible, even though he himself had never been to the Scablands. But Bretz was right. In time, and with more evidence, the scientific community accepted the theory.
Peri: It only took several decades.
Michael: [laughing] Yeah, this wasn't until, you know, the 70s that we'd worked out that Glacial Lake Missoula was the source of more than one flood, and Bretz was awarded the Penrose medal, kind of geology's highest honor. But they never convinced everyone. Alden, Bretz's vocal opponent, denied the floods until his dying day.
[pensive music plays briefly]
Michael: [to Justin] We've kind of been looking to this story as a case study of how we interpret the unknown. I'm wondering, you know, what do you. Is there a lesson we can learn from the story of Ice Age floods, about trying to understand Earth history or human history where we don't quite have all the pieces?
Justin: Well, I, I think that, you know, when we bump into these kinds of moments where we're trying to understand the world, and we don't have good answers, we tend to fall back on what we know and we're hesitant to be willing to hear from others about what they might see out there.
[spare, thoughtful electronic music plays]
Peri: To me, Justin is describing a failure of imagination and of creativity, a struggle to picture a world that looks different than our own. We can see the empty space left behind. We know something was there, but it's hard to imagine what filled it.
[music ends]
Michael: The floods help us to understand the geologic history of the Ice Age, the physical world of ice and water, whose presence carved clues you can easily see today. What is much harder to find, though, is evidence of the living world from that time. Some of the best clues are found along the St Mary River, but not where it begins on the east side of our national park. We'll need to follow it as it flows north into Canada. The rest of the team was busy the day that I went, so I had to call in some backup.
Michael: [to Andrew] It's nice to have you back in the studio.
Andrew Smith: Thanks. Nice to be here.
Michael: I called Andrew, co-host of the first two seasons of Headwaters, who has a new job.
Andrew: I'm the new communications lead for the Glacier National Park Conservancy.
Michael: We hopped in the car and followed the river, driving north to Alberta and the present day Saint Mary Reservoir.
Andrew: [in the field] Now we're standing out on this sandy beach—it's not something you would really expect in southern Alberta. Yeah, it feels like we're in Hawaii or something.
Andrew: [in studio] The reservoir was huge. It kind of reminded me of standing on the shores of one of the Great Lakes. It went out to the horizon. It was definitely bigger than I was expecting.
Andrew: [in the field] Stretches out as far as you can see, basically, with the Rocky Mountains behind it.
Michael: We stopped at a place called Wally's Beach to meet with Shayne Tolman.
Shayne Tolman: I'm Shayne Tolman. I'm a local...
Michael: A now-retired schoolteacher who warned us it was going to be windy.
Andrew: [in the field] It was a lot windier over the other side of the dunes
Shayne: Yeah, kind of what I was thinking when I...
Andrew: [in the field] Could maybe move back
Michael: We walked away from the lake shore to try to hide from the wind. But we wanted to meet with Shayne to talk about something that he found in the reservoir when it wasn't full of water.
Shayne: Sometimes there's a big drawdown, so a lot of lake bed gets exposed.
Michael: But before we could really hear what he was saying, we were buzzed by a crop dusting plane.
Shayne: [loud buzzing overhead] Airplane flying over. Oh, my gosh he's spraying that field right there. Oh, that could be annoying. Can you block that kind of noise?
Michael: No, uh, we couldn't. And so we had to go hide in a picnic shelter. But anyways, the reason we wanted to talk to Shane was that back in 1994, he and his family visited when the water in the reservoir had been drawn down.
Andrew: And when they walked out into the wet mud and windblown sand, a landscape that's normally underwater, they found themselves walking backwards in time.
[electronic music begins to play, underscoring a sense of wonder]
Shayne: We had been out the previous day, that has blown a lot overnight and we came back the next day and right where we walked is this humongous skull. But it's an extinct bison skull.
Andrew: Bison antiquus, the extinct ancestors of modern bison, who just so happened to be one and a half times bigger than the bison you see in Yellowstone.
Shayne: And the horns on are incredible. Just like that.
Michael: Shayne showed us a side by side comparison, and Bison antiquus's horns are absolutely enormous. Looks more like a Texas Longhorns.
Shayne: It does, doesn't it? Yeah. They're really impressive animals.
Michael: And for Shayne, this discovery touched on a lifelong fascination.
Shayne: My dad was a science teacher, so he actually had fossils in the lab. And they were just so captivating to me, to see that their little eyes are fossilized. And here they are staring back at you. It's kind of this—time gets erased as you encounter these things, and that's always stayed with me.
Michael: Shortly after Shayne stumbled into this bison skull and quite a few other things that we will get to in a moment, he started getting phone calls from the University of Calgary. They had heard about his discoveries and sent Dr. Len Hills down to meet with him.
Shayne: First thing I said to him was, “I would like to study this stuff, how can I be involved?” And he says, “well, you could enroll as a student at the University of Calgary and I'll be your supervisor.” Great, let's do it. I enrolled in the Master's program and became one of four principal investigators of the Wally's Beach site
Andrew: As Shane and his colleagues started to study Wally's Beach, they began to reconstruct what it would have looked like.
Shayne: It was not the river that we see that's cut down to where it is now in these river valleys. It was a slow, meandering river.
Michael: In the banks of this ancient winding river, they found pollen and roots which can help us understand the Ice Age ecosystem.
Shayne: We had spruce tree groves growing out here all over the prairies, as well as aspen groves. Then you had sedges and grasses that were growing in between. There was abundant plant life.
Michael: And of course they found more evidence of animals that lived alongside bison antiquus.
Shayne: We get out there, here's this skull and there's some actually some vertebrae laying there as well. And Len picks this skull up and he's turning it over. He says, “this is musk oxen.” And I'm just like, "musk oxen??" and I didn't even know they were part of this extinct suite of animals that died off at the end of the Ice Age, he says yes, it's musk oxen.
Andrew: They found a ton of extinct species, an ancestor of modern caribou, North American horses, even camels.
Michael: The camel discovery in particular, blew my mind. We think of camels as being these desert loving animals today, but the family of Camelids and the family of horses both evolved in the Americas around 50 million years ago before migrating to Eurasia. The camels that lived here were called camelops.
Andrew: And Shayne found a tooth about as long as my index finger and that tooth was serrated.
Shayne: Well, there are no animals alive today that have serrated teeth. And so I knew immediately we had a saber-toothed cat. In fact, that's not just a saber-toothed cat, it's called a scimitar cat.
Michael: So already you're getting a picture of the wildlife who were living at the edge of the Rockies, at the edge of Glacier National Park during the Ice Age.
Andrew: And it's a much different cast of characters than the grizzly bears, mountain goats and deer that we all know and love today.
Michael: But for Shayne, it wasn't bones that helped to bring Wally's Beach to life.
Shayne: And I can't even describe what I saw. It's just it's almost emotional because here's this big imprint, little smaller than garbage can...
Michael: He found footprints, left by woolly mammoths.
[sparse music begins to play softly]
Shayne: And there's another one and there's another one. Here's all of these cracks that went out from the in this spider web, out from the tracks. You could see how it stepped in the mud and it oozed up around its toes. And it's just like, okay, here's the best set of mammoth tracks on the planet. Bar none. I mean, there's only, like, four sets anyway. So it really hit us just how incredible this was.
Michael: Unlike fossils, which capture animals after they die, these footprints are a snapshot of their lives.
Shayne: Living, breathing, mammoth. Not the bones. The dead part. You're looking at living behavior. And that's so cool.
Michael: With each stride, they traveled on average eight and a half feet, and the weight of each step can reveal if it was left by a male or a female, a child or adult. And the way these six ton mammals walked can even reveal if they were injured.
Shayne: Take the cross section and you get to see the weight distribution from this angle. This animal on its I think it was just left hind foot was limping. You can see that the deformation on this side of track is less than on the other side of track. So it means that there was some injury or something.
Michael: [to Shayne] And how old is that track?
Shayne: That track would be about 13,000 years old.
Michael: And it's not just mammoth tracks, either.
Shayne: Here's the mammoth tracks. But not just Mammoth. Here's a camel trackway going through the middle of these crossing over. And here's some more horse tracks over here. And what we're looking at probably looking very much like the Serengeti, because you had all those animals intermingling and here they are moving in these vast herds and individuals that we have tens of thousands of tracks that we have observed at Wally's Beach.
Michael: It is rare for ancient footprints like these to survive. You not only need wet mud for the footprints to form, but then a strong wind to blow sand and sediment on top, filling them in and sealing them away for thousands of years.
Andrew: But today, the same winds that once preserved these footprints are now destroying them. The same wind that pushed us into a picnic shelter has blown tracks away overnight. Carried away grain by grain—a memory lost forever.
Michael: And because of where they sit in the reservoir, there's nothing you can really do to save them at this point. If they're not claimed by the wind, once they're exposed, they'll be destroyed by water when the reservoir is filled back in. All that's left is to try to document them. And efforts have ranged from photographs and measurements to teams of local students and a thousand pounds of plaster casts. [pensive music begins to play] But however fleeting they may be, this glimpse of these animals alive, living alongside one another, not in the halls of a natural history museum, but drinking from the river that I see now in the distance—you can't help but picture it. And for Shayne, imagine yourself there, following in their footsteps.
Shayne: I hope this doesn't sound too corny, but here's how I kind of pictured it. [music builds slowly] I stared at the footprints disappearing into the swirling sand to the east, and time blew away with the wind. I had a vision. It didn't take much to imagine the giant lumbering away through the mud, disappearing into the sand cloud from what was likely a watering hole. [rumbling sound, evoking a woolly mammoth] And close, so close I could hear the swooshing suck of mammoth foot in paleo-mud; see his breath dissipate against the cold ashen sky of early winter. Taste this pungent odor in the roof of my mouth. [drumbeat builds in speed] Rising above the din of the crushing palms of his feet is the sound of choke-cherry-stained tusks, battered and broken, clanking against the low growth brush as it swings its massive woolly head side to side. Its tangled auburn fur, blowing eastward. The trudging mountain knows I'm there. But what am I to he? Nothing.
[drumbeat ends; music continues to play softly]
Michael: Not long after a mammoth left these footprints in the mud, their species went extinct in North America. So did Camelops, the North American horse, and helmeted musk oxen. And while these footprints paint a vivid portrait of these animals in life, they also reveal a species in decline.
Shayne: Very clearly, something's missing. And its infants, the newborn, the young. Why aren't we seeing their tracks? You know? Well, maybe they're light, but we're seeing lighter animals also. We're seeing their tracks, the horses and stuff like that.
Michael: The Saint Mary's mammoth herd had far fewer juveniles than you'd expect in a healthy population. And one possible explanation was the warming climate. The Missoula floods were only one symptom of the dramatic changes occurring at the end of the Pleistocene. As temperatures warmed, ice sheets shifted north and the environment shifted too. New plants moved into the grasslands that these grazing animals had relied upon.
Andrew: But the last discovery we'll share from Wally's Beach hints at another factor—a discovery made by one of Shayne's students, a fourth grader named Travis.
Shayne: Picked up a piece that they thought might be an artifact. And then the next day, Travis brought it to me. Well I about fell out of my chair. It's a Clovis point.
Michael: Clovis points are sharp stones used for hunting by ancient human cultures. And these Clovis points held a clue which revealed exactly what they were used for.
Shayne: Horse protein residue. Those horses had been butchered, and that was a North American first.
Michael: Wally’s preserves a record of ice age animals and humans and produced the first archeological evidence of these humans hunting horses, later finds revealed they also hunted camels. When I first started working as a ranger at Glacier, the story of Wally's Beach grabbed me. I put Ice Age horses and mammoths in a campground talk that I've given for the last six years. And in my program, this has always been where the story ends. Camels were here. People were too. But actually visiting Wally's Beach, hearing from Shane about the work he and his colleagues and his students have put into understanding and preserving this history—it made me wonder. What was life like for the people that once stood here? What was it like to be human? 13,000 years ago.
[drumbeat plays briefly to mark a transition]
Daniel: All right, let me recap. Right in our backyard, well, Glacier's backyard, Wally's Beach has a record of Ice Age wildlife.
Michael: Yeah, a pretty extensive one at that.
Daniel: These are animals that they're really different than what we have here today.
Michael: Mm hmm.
Daniel: But they also have discovered evidence of ice age humans.
Michael: Yeah. And a lot of this evidence at Wally's Beach is in the form of something called lithics.
Daniel: Lithics.
Michael: You've probably heard of that before.
Daniel: Yeah. Lithics are stone tools that are, like, made by people.
Michael: Exactly. That includes the projectile points that were used to hunt horses at Wally's Beach, but they've also found thousands of different points and other tools.
Daniel: Shayne used the term “Clovis point,” which, if I remember right, that's one of the very oldest kinds of lithics in North America.
Michael: Yeah. So the term Clovis comes from projectile points found outside of Clovis, New Mexico. They're a distinct type of lithic that have been identified all over North America and date back well beyond 10,000 years ago. So they are artifacts from one of the oldest and most widespread cultures that we know about in North America.
Daniel: So beyond their tools, beyond these lithics, do we know much about Clovis people, what their lives were like?
Michael: I mean, the short answer is no, we don't know much.
[electronic beat plays briefly]
Shane Doyle: The topic of Pleistocene era people is always going to be a mystery for the foreseeable future. We have to assume that life was pretty challenging because of the geographic, ecological aspects of that era.
Michael: This is Shane Doyle.
Shane: Yes, my name is Dr. Shane Doyle. I'm a member of the Apsáalooke Nation. I'm a educational and cultural consultant. I live in Bozeman, Montana, and I hail from Crow Agency.
Daniel: Another Shane—two Shanes in one episode.
Michael: [laughing] Yes, but I called Shane Doyle because he has studied and worked to understand these Ice Age cultures.
Shane: Lithics, the points that they used, are really the best evidence that we have. We don't have a lot of human materials to understand that time period outside of the hunting and other tools that these folks made.
Michael: Some of the only materials durable enough to survive these last 10,000 years or more are stones and bones. So even as scientists develop new and better technologies, like ground penetrating radar and aerial imagery, we're still limited by what little is left.
Shane: I don't think we have a lot of data that we can really turn to that will really provide us with a more comprehensive picture of what life was like for Pleistocene era native people. So I think we kind of have to use our imagination.
Michael: This is where we get back to the conundrum we found with the Missoula floods, the limitations of imagination. I talked with retired Forest Service archeologist Carl Davis, and he pointed out that the presence of stone tools and absence of anything else has affected our understanding of these cultures by focusing on the masculine aspects of ancient life.
Carl Davis: And archeologists, who were primarily male for many, many years, you know, that's what they really got into. And women and children kind of got left in the dust. Because the evidence of women's activities, this wonderful perishable industry of all kinds of things, there's no evidence. We certainly can assume they're wearing, you know, carefully crafted, tightly sewn clothes and stuff. But we don't have any evidence whatsoever. So we don't really know what they look like, what they ate, what language they spoke.
Michael: And our understanding of these communities has been shaped by more than just projectile points.
Carl: You know, I think in North American archeology, there has been some bias about sort of giving legitimacy to the capability of these first people, these Indigenous peoples. It may be colonialism, it may be imperialism, it might be a little bit of racism. But I think we have a hard time maybe giving credit where credit is due.
Shane: That's where anthropology begins to fall short when we go all the way back to those ancient times. It's reflected in artwork that we often see represented from people of that day and age. The clothing that they wear is shaggy and their hair is unkempt and they're kind of usually slouched or like hunched over. They resonate with this very uncouth—something that modern man would look upon as undeveloped. And I reject that. I don't think that's, you know, a very good indication of who these people were. I don't think that they didn't comb their hair. I don't think that they didn't care about the kind of clothes that they wore. You know, I think that they always cared about that. Of course they did. Why wouldn't they? I mean, even Sigmund Freud would agree with that. I just think that it's a shame that we portray them as being, you know, dirty…savages, honestly. People in the modern era tend to think of ourselves as being so special. You have all this information that cavemen or ancient people didn't have. And, you know, [laughs] well, I think on a daily basis reflect on those ancient people and how they must have felt the same way about their lives as we do about ours. You know, obviously, they didn't have nearly the kind of technology that we do. But think about how they must have been comparing their lives to other species—animals that didn't have the ability to talk or sing or dance or laugh or cry out of inspiration or joy. I mean, the emotional realm and spiritual, ceremonial aspects of ancient life must have made those people feel like they were on the edge of tomorrow.
Michael: And as we talk about these cultures, wonder about their daily lives, try to imagine how they treated one another, what they valued, and who they loved, Shane emphasized that there is a lot more to these people than we will ever find buried in the ground.
Shane: And I think that that's another thing that anthropologists often forget about, is that the trade culture was more than just material trade. You know, these, these people wanted to learn about one another. They want to hear their stories. They want to know about their ceremonies. They want to know about their knowledge. That was the real trade culture. The material came along with it.
[pensive music begins to play softly]
Michael: In the end, it might just be the social world that we thought had disappeared that can help us better understand this time, after all.
Shane: I developed a course on Montana Plains Indians. During the process of creating that course, I looked at the different star stories of the tribes here in Montana, and it was clear to me that they shared common stories, and stories were very, very important. But when you consider that, you know, we have at least half a dozen language families represented here in Montana, completely different languages. And so we're talking about languages where they don't even share a common sound. So how could it be, then, that these different speaking people would have the exact same star stories down to the minutiae, just the smallest details of people's names, and the things that they did, and how those things are reflected in the sky and on the ground and the same stars and the same geographic features. I mean, all those things, to me, show that these folks must have been in communication and deep communication with one another.
Michael: Different cultures with different languages, living in different places, who still found a way to communicate. And it wasn't just star stories that they were sharing. It was technology—where and how to harvest teepee poles, how to stitch hides together and harvest wild plants.
Shane: They were so determined to share with each other their knowledge and the best of their communities that they created a language independently of themselves that, you know, Plains Sign Language exists really in and unto itself.
Michael: Plains Sign Language was the original American Sign Language, born out of trade between communities across the Great Plains.
Shane: You know, the Plains Sign Language, I don't think probably dates all the way back to the Pleistocene era. But I do believe that the passage of the Clovis technology, from community to community across the continent, all those communications in all of those different trade networks, that that's where the seed of that was planted.
Michael: These insights from oral traditions can help us to imagine the cultures of these ancient communities—curious, kind and cooperative pioneers living here despite its hostile and icy climate. And as Peri found, oral history can also preserve a record of specific moments in time.
[music finishes playing]
Peri: I wanted to talk to Sally Thompson, an anthropologist whose work with tribes throughout the Northwest found that Indigenous communities have preserved memories of the Ice Age.
Sally Thompson: One of the task force members was telling me a story once of his clan's migration, and I said, "you know, wow, really, it sounds like you're taking me back to the late Pleistocene." And he said, "Well, I think I am." So he, he thought for a while, and then he said, "we sing it. It's a chant. We repeat it the same way, the same time of year in a ceremonial way. It's like your Silent Night. You wouldn't change the words." He said "Some of those words are so old, we don't understand them anymore."
Peri: [to Sally] Wow.
Sally: So that really was life changing for me. And I started paying attention in a very different way.
Peri: I know Sally from her book People Before the Park, which she wrote with the Blackfeet and Kootenai tribes, sharing their traditional culture and lifeways here in northwest Montana.
Sally: Well, my name's Sally Thompson. And really what we're talking about today, I'd like to say I'm a student, not an expert.
Peri: [to Sally] I love that.
Sally: I'm a student of what, what native people have to teach us.
Peri: One thing she's learned is that oral traditions hold records of Ice Age floods. The phenomena that geologists squabbled about for decades? Some cultures have remembered them for thousands of years.
Sally: Imagine the time when immense sheets of ice are extending down from Canada all across northern North America. You know, to imagine it's not just filling the valleys. It's filling—it's overlapping all but the very tallest peaks. Mm hmm. Yeah. So picture you're standing on top of one of those peaks. And, you know, all you can see to the north and the east is ice.
Peri: When I hear this, I picture Glacier and the Flathead Valley full of ice and water from Glacial Lake Missoula. But this describes the ice margin all along the northern edge of the US. Sally interviewed people from tribes all up and down the Columbia River, whose drainage system covers most of Washington, Idaho and northwest Montana. One of these tribes is the Kootenai.
Sally: The Kootenai people are unique. They're not related to anyone, anywhere. It may be because of where they were in these cataclysmic times, that they were the only ones who survived.
Peri: [to Sally] Mm hmm.
Sally: So most people have relatives, but the Kootenais are considered by anthropologists or linguists to be an isolate. Isolated people. The only ones. And this is their story. [low rumble] Was it like before tsunami where sensitive people think something's changing or you hear this incredible sound and somehow, you know, to run up. Perhaps you've experienced, you know, some flooding before you, you know, you need to go up and you just keep running. And somehow some people manage to survive that. Then you see people have run to the top of Rattlesnake Mountain on the Columbia and and try and picture what happened. [music begins to play] I interviewed a Coeur d'Alene elder one time, Felix Arripa, told me. After he thought it through in his own language, that the way his grandparents had told him the story, then he explained to me that the words they used were something like, "everything changed, even the landscape."
Peri: This is a record of a human experience with these floods. Someone witnessed them, walked through the world they left behind and shared that story with their community. Yet, despite knowing that, it's still difficult to place yourself in their shoes—to see their point of view rather than our own.
Michael: Even with everything we've learned, it is really hard to place yourself in a world that you'll never see. All of these stories have helped me to picture it. Herds of camels and mammoths sharing Montana with people who, in the face of a dramatically changing world, are learning from one another and passing on memories that will connect them to today. But I find myself imagining it almost like a painting. Something that I can see but that I can't touch. What would it take to bring this history to life? To be able to imagine myself there, like Shayne Tolman did with the mammoth tracks. When I posed this question to Shane Doyle, he turned my attention to May of 1968 in rural Montana, when two construction workers began digging rocks out of a hillside.
Shane: And so they were digging into a cliff side to get some like flat sandstone rocks out of the cliff. And when they dug into the cliff, it was covered with this red dust that we call red ochre. Red ochre is a really sacred material.
Michael: Past the red ochre, they found lithics. And beyond that, human remains. [low, eerie beat plays] They were digging in a grave. Found on the property of Helen and Dr. Mel Anzick. These human remains turned out to belong to a child between one and three years old. And while the haphazard digging at the site made it difficult to completely reconstruct the burial, it was determined that the child had been buried nearly 13,000 years ago.
Shane: And he was probably no more than three years old when he died, was buried with a treasure trove of antiquities. Over 118 priceless Clovis artifacts. Pretty much every tool that has ever been identified in any other Clovis site was found at that burial. These were valuable, treasured items that were rare and that were hard to produce. And they buried them with the child. This child had no social standing that we could measure or compare in any other culture at any other point in history. You know, even today, children are the most vulnerable people in society. You know, they receive the least honor. They receive the least attention. They receive the least amount of resources devoted to them. If you look at what that burial spoke to, it spoke to what that community valued. You know, why would they put all of those items in there for a child who had never hunted? He was not a priest. He was not a ceremonial leader. He was not a warrior. He never produced any economic value. He was—he was really, just as children are today, but they present a resource that you have to provide for. Part of your family that you have to attend to constantly.
Michael: The U.S. has a law that establishes the legal rights for tribes to repatriate or reclaim human remains uncovered in cases like this. But it wasn't passed until 1990.
Shane: This is before NAGPRA, Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act. So all the materials that—since they were found on private land, they were just taken by Mel and the two construction workers. The human remains, Mel gave those to his daughter. But at the time, they were taken by a scientist, an archeologist, who took them down to his lab in Arizona.
Michael: The remains stay in Arizona for about 30 years until eventually they returned to Sarah Anzick, the granddaughter of Mel and Helen.
Shane: Once Sarah got them, turns out she was a molecular biologist. She had an interest in studying the remains to see if she could find out who this person was, who this child was. And, you know, she said before that she just knew that this child had a story to tell, and that it was an important story and that she wanted to help the child tell that story.
Michael: So she reached out to a lab in Denmark and they set out to sequence the child's genome in an effort to understand its DNA and uncover who the child is related to.
Shane: The head guy over there, the scientist of the lab, his name is Eske Willerslev. And he and his team took on the study, and it took them three years to complete the genomic sequencing of this ancient remains. But when they did finally get the complete genome, they were able to compare it to other populations around the world. And it's pretty clear that that he was one of the very first Native Americans on the continent.
Michael: At the same time this discovery was starting to ripple out into the scientific community, the Anzick child was also at the center of an effort to repatriate the remains, to place them back where they were buried 13,000 years ago, which is how Shane got involved.
Michael: [to Shane] I don't expect there's really like a roadmap for how to conduct a repatriation. Maybe there is, I don't know. So how did you decide how to actually perform the reburial, and what did it look like on the day?
[emotional music begins to play]
Shane: There yeah, no, there is no roadmap for repatriation. There are procedures that have been developed over years in certain circumstances that fit the bill. But this one was kind of different because it was so old. And we have to assume the child was—he was related to all of modern people today. That's a lot of people to try and bring into the process. I kind of took that task on to reach out to native communities, let them know what we were doing and ask them if they wanted to participate. You know, it took a long time. We had to have a lot of meetings. There were a lot of different folks involved, not just the tribal communities here in Montana, but also the Montana burial board; Sarah Anzick, you know, she still maintained possession of the bones right up until the moment they were placed in the ground; scientists, they still had materials from the Anzick child in their lab. The reburial was supposed to be comprehensive, and so they had to agree to put all of what they had of the boy in the lab into the ground. You know, there were disagreements over where to rebury the boy, over how to rebury him. Some people believed we should just rebury him with like a rawhide pouch, you know, put him in the ground so he could go back to Mother Earth. There were also suggestions to bury him at the Montana Historical Society out on the public lawn so that people would be dissuaded from trying to dig him up and steal him. I mean, you name it, there was a whole gamut of suggestions and ideas about how to rebury him and where to rebury him. And finally, at the end, we just decided to put him back as close to where he was as possible and put him in a nice small little casket. And, you know, it was just a beautiful day. It was a beautiful ceremony. [wistful, emotional music begins to play softly] And like I said, we all felt good about it. Here's the thing that I thought about a lot. We were there that day, not just to show respect to that boy, but we were there to show respect to ourselves. When we respect others, we respect ourselves. And when we do that in a community, in a gesture where we all come together in a ceremonial way, that's a very powerful healing experience.
Michael: [to Shane] Do you think that the Anzick site, Pleistocene people, and you know, this deep time can teach us about ourselves or even the future?
Shane: Well, I think we can learn a lot from those ancient people about strength, about resilience, about love, about what really matters in this life. I guess one theme that we see today in Hollywood is the post-apocalyptic world. We think when all the chips are down that we'll turn on each other. When I think of those ancient people, I'm inspired. I just think, you know, they loved each other. And from everything that we can tell, they respected each other. I'm sure there were instances where that wasn't always true. But the Anzick grave and the show of love that was displayed for that child makes me believe that that wasn't just an isolated case. That this was part of their worldview. You know, they believed in treasuring their relationships. And in a way, that's what it was when we buried him that day.
Michael: To me, this story pulls your focus away from everything that separates us from Ice Age people—the ice sheets, scimitar cats, and more than 10,000 years—and shows instead our shared humanity. And to Shane, it illustrates what's possible when scientists and native communities work together.
Shane: I think we'll be able to tell the stories that right now we still can't really wrap our heads around because we'll be able to wrap our hearts around what it means to be a human, and we'll be able to take that understanding and place it into these ancient time periods. And that will be able to inform and provide us with a better picture of why these people laughed, what they laughed about, you know, what they cried about, who they loved. [haunting violin music begins to play] It's pretty hard to not understand what the ancient burial represents. If you're a parent and your greatest fear is to lose a child, then you understand that this is what these people did. That message is pretty clear. 12,600 years later, you can still relate to the—to the anguish that they must have felt. How unfair, how cruel, how impossibly difficult the loss that they suffered was. And the only way to heal from that is to just give the last full measure. That's a message that is crystal clear to me. There's, there's nothing about that that I don't understand.
Michael: It's true that sites like Anzick are extraordinarily rare. But the kindness that we can see there must have been common. In every laugh shared around the campfire, which echoed across newly ice free valleys, and in a piece of hard won camel, shared as a meal with a loved one. Or in the simple joy of standing by a river and squishing the mud between your toes, right beside a set of fresh mammoth tracks.
[music continues to play under the credits]
Daniel: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park. With support from our partner, the Glacier National Park Conservancy. This season of Headwaters was made by me, Daniel Lombardi, Peri Sasnett, Michael Faist and Gaby Eseverri. We could not have made Season Three without Lacy Kowalski or Melissa Sladek and Sierra Mandelko, Brent Rowley, Darren Lewis, the Glacier National Park Archives, and the Montana Historical Society. Special thanks this episode to Shayne Tolman for driving to meet us—
Michael: And sharing your bug spray!
Daniel: Shane Doyle, Carl Davis, Roz Gerstein…
Peri: Thanks, Mom!
Daniel: Sally Thompson, Justin Radford, Andrew Smith, Vic Baker, and Ethan, our captain from the Glacier Park Boat Company. Thanks for listening.
[music finishes, and a drumbeat begins]
Lacy: Next time on Headwaters.
Michael: We use art to find new perspectives on one of American history's most momentous yet misremembered events.
Caiti Campbell: You know, Lewis and Clark was just a story that I did not remember from school.
Germaine White: When Daniel called and I thought, “Oh, my gosh, really? I don't know if you want a tribal voice talking about Lewis and Clark.” You know, I just thought, they're revered by so many.
Michael: That's next time on Headwaters.
[music finishes playing]
Michael: [to Andrew] So Headwaters was made possible through the Conservancy. Right? Yes. But you also fund a lot of other projects. What are some examples of that?
Andrew: Yeah. One I wanted to tell you about today is our wilderness condition monitoring work. We have this really cool project happening right now to outfit a lot of the park's Wilderness Rangers with tablets so that they can make live reports on the condition of the wilderness while they're out and about.
Michael: [to Andrew] They used to be on paper reports that got lost and never found their way to the same place.
Andrew: They would show up wet and crumpled [both laughing] and all sorts of different things would be written on them. So now everybody's got the same form. It comes all into one database and we can learn about threats to wilderness so fast and respond to them so that nothing happens to our, our beautiful wilderness here.
Michael: [to Andrew] Well, that's awesome. Well, I guess if you want to learn about that project and more that the Conservancy funds, check out their website, and thanks.
Andrew: Yeah. Visit us at Glacier.org