John Reeves on the Alaska Boneyard, Bones in the East River and His Fight With the AMNH (Joe Rogan Experience #2080)

High-Level Overview

John Reeves, the Fairbanks gold miner whose property has yielded hundreds of thousands of Ice Age bones, returns to the Joe Rogan Experience for the last episode of 2023. A year after he claimed on the show that the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) had dumped about 50 tons of fossils from his company's land into New York's East River in the 1940s, divers have now found bones there, including what appears to be a steppe bison jawbone. John updates Joe on new finds at "the Boneyard," including bones that were clearly sawed and turned out to be only about 190 years old, lays out his political strategy for getting the museum's Alaskan collection returned, and shares his theories about how woolly mammoths and humans coexisted.

The tone is jovial, profane and full of storytelling, with John playing the stubborn, plain-talking miner and Joe enthusiastically backing his cause. The conversation swings between fossil finds and museum politics, then wanders into cosmic speculation, lost civilizations, cloning and old-fashioned tall tales before returning to the Boneyard.

The Discussion Explores:

• Confirmation that fossils really were dumped in the East River, and the museum's continued silence
• A 2.1-acre site producing mammoth tusks, bison, lions, dire wolves and more, with an 80-foot-deep burnt layer
• Sawed bones found by a state trooper's daughters that carbon dated to about 190 years old
• John's plan to recover the AMNH collection through the Alaska legislature and Congress
• His theory that Ice Age humans lived alongside mammoths rather than hunting them to extinction
• The Younger Dryas impact theory, sea level rise and possible advanced lost civilizations
• Denisovans, mammoth cloning, the Shroud of Turin and museum plunder of artifacts and human remains
• Gifts of mammoth ivory jewelry, pipes and pistol grips made from broken tusks

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

The East River Bones and a Silent Museum

Joe opens by congratulating John on being "proved correct." After their previous conversation, a diver known on Instagram as Dirty Water Don went looking in the East River and found several bones, including mammoth ivory, a leg bone and a jawbone John believes is from a steppe bison. John says one of the authors of the report he read on the show told him roughly 50 tons were dumped, the equivalent of a boxcar, and that other groups, including a research vessel, are now searching too. Within two days of the earlier podcast, he says, the AMNH issued a press release denying the report existed, even though one of its own employees co-wrote it.

John explains that under a 1920s-era agreement between the museum, the University of Alaska and his company's predecessor, Fairbanks Exploration, the AMNH was only supposed to take bones of scientific value, research every one, and report annually. He says none of that happened. When he bought the company, the University of Alaska's curator traveled with him to New York, where he was shown a basement full of crates holding hundreds of mammoth tusks that have not been studied in a hundred years. On a later trip to screen the documentary Boneyard Alaska at the Explorers Club, he says museum officials made him and his family stand in the rain for four hours and never met with them. He says senior staff told witnesses they will not return the bones because they think he will sell them, which he calls absurd given the museum holds far more than he does.

What the Boneyard Is Producing

John corrects an earlier claim: the site is not five acres but 2.1, according to his surveyor. It lies in a long, narrow gulch where, over more than 40 years, his company ran up to 200 water cannons ("giants") that thaw and wash away permafrost muck to reach gold-bearing gravel, revealing bones. He estimates they have recovered around 300,000 bones. This year they moved operations back downstream to where they started 15 or 16 years ago and immediately found more tusks and remains, including a mummified, still-frozen animal that looks like an Arctic ground squirrel, which he donated to the university museum.

He lists animals experts said never lived there but that he has found: dire wolves, a saber-toothed cat (which he says was sent to the AMNH and another stolen by a British Museum employee), badgers and elk. He also has what paleontologist Dick Mol identified as among the best American lion skulls ever found, and says he turned down an $85,000 offer for it because they do not sell important bones. The oldest sample he has dated was mammoth ivory at about 40,000 years old, with another at 22,000, suggesting multiple events. He also shows a photo of burnt gravel lying on burnt bedrock 80 feet below the surface, which he describes with the caption that "something came in hot." John keeps a half-intact mammoth brain and some of his own DNA in permafrost tunnels, joking that if his family ever wants to bring "the old man back," he is ready.

The Spitzer Bones: A 190-Year-Old Mystery

One of the strangest finds came from a visit by Eric Spitzer, the head state trooper in Fairbanks, who stopped by after hearing John on Joe's podcast. John invited him to bring his kids, and over two weekends his young daughters found a pallet of bone fragments, a mammoth tusk and about 15 bones that had clearly been sawed, now nicknamed the Spitzer finds. John thought they might be ancient and hoped they would prove early tool use, but carbon dating came back at about 190 years, plus or minus 200. A local hunter thinks the one he brought is a moose leg bone.

Joe and John speculate about who could have cut bones there around the 1800s, a century before Fairbanks was founded in 1902, when Russia controlled Alaska. Ideas range from extracting marrow to holding embers or even shots of vodka. Joe says the date makes the mystery more interesting, not less, since there is almost no recorded history of that area from that time. John gives Joe one of the bones for the studio lobby, and Joe notes that it still has the notch John cut out for dating.

A Political Plan to Bring the Bones Home

John says everyone encourages him to sue, and he has a good track record protecting his property rights, but he believes the museum could simply outspend him in litigation. Instead he is working with Alaska state senator Click Bishop, who sits on the finance and resources committees, to have the State of Alaska demand the bones' return, followed by the state's congressional delegation. He wants the museum's leaders to testify under oath about what they took. His argument is that the museum lacks the stratigraphic data showing where each bone came from, while he has it: "It's like a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle I only got 20 pieces." He believes "the secrets to the extinction event are in those bones," and that modern tools could reveal what each animal ate, how far it traveled and how long it lived.

He says he already spent about a million dollars building a research facility in Alaska for the returned collection. He also tells darker history: the museum's collecting in Alaska was led by Childs Frick, son of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, whose crackdown on steelworkers led to the deadly 1892 Homestead strike. A railroad field hand Frick hired to collect fossils later received an honorary doctorate, and John says he also dug up infants from the permafrost on St. Lawrence Island and shipped them to New York in jars. Joe pulls up a recent AMNH letter acknowledging human remains in its storage and a story about 5,000 artifacts seized from a private collector in Indiana. John says younger scientists who privately agree with him cannot go public without risking their careers.

Did Humans Live Alongside Mammoths?

John pushes back on the idea, which Joe calls the main alternative to the Younger Dryas impact theory, that humans hunted mammoths to extinction. Having seen spear tips, he doubts a thrown spear could pierce thick fur and hide to reach a woolly mammoth's vital organs, and notes that mammoths had 10- to 12-foot tusks and would not stand still. He also points out that Ice Age people were few, that killing a caribou is far more practical than taking on 2,500 pounds of mammoth meat that would spoil, and that the treeless steppe had little wood for spears. His theory is that people may have partially domesticated mammoths, perhaps collecting their wool, much as musk oxen protect their young in ways that could allow coexistence. He does acknowledge finding a spear tip lodged in a mammoth hip bone, and Joe mentions the atlatl, a spear thrower that could have killed young mammoths or bison.

Both favor an impact or catastrophic event instead. John notes that sea levels rose about 400 feet worldwide, meaning the coast near Jacksonville was once 85 miles farther east, and that 65% of North American megafauna went extinct around the same time. Joe explains that animals like the pronghorn are so fast because an American cheetah once hunted them, and that the giant short-faced bear may have kept people from crossing the Bering land bridge.

Lost Civilizations and Cosmic Speculation

The conversation drifts into Joe's favorite speculative territory. He raises Robert Schoch's argument that water erosion on the Sphinx implies it is thousands of years older than conventionally believed, the precision of the Great Pyramid's roughly 2.3 million stones, apparent diamond-drill core marks, and the underwater Yonaguni structure off Japan, which Graham Hancock has dived and believes is man-made. He suggests civilizations 30,000 or 40,000 years ago may have been advanced in directions we have not explored, and that people dismiss ancient king lists as myth because it conflicts with their life's work.

They also look at a 2019 reconstruction of a Denisovan girl built from DNA in a pinky bone found in a Siberian cave, noting that this extinct human lineage interbred with Neanderthals and modern humans between roughly 30,000 and 80,000 years ago. Joe riffs on supermassive black holes possibly leading to other universes, the resemblance between neurons and the cosmic web, and whether the universe could be part of a larger being. John offers his own musing that thought is faster than light. They discuss a Dallas company aiming to bring back woolly mammoths, with John suspecting it is really about cloning humans, and read that radiocarbon dating places the Shroud of Turin between 1260 and 1390.

Politics, Greed and Gold

The pair share frustration at institutions and government. John argues the more than $100 billion sent to Ukraine could have built a gas line from Alaska's North Slope, a water line to Northern California and helped Maui. As a businessman, he jokes that a divided Congress is good because while politicians are busy fighting each other, they leave businesses like his alone. Joe discusses Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, in which the retired Marine general described himself as a muscle man for big business, and John notes that gold is up about 12% since their last conversation and that Costco has started selling gold bars. John jokes about his tendency to embellish ("I'm a gold miner after all"), recalling Mark Twain's line about a miner being a liar standing next to a hole in the ground, and closes with an old riddle about a missing dollar to make a point about presentation.

Ivory Craft and a Growing Following

John brings gifts made from broken tusks, which he says are the only pieces used for craft since important bones are not sold: mammoth ivory pendants with gold from his daughter Elora, a pipe carved from a walrus oosik, full-size mammoth ivory 1911 pistol grips from a craftsman, ball markers, guitar picks and raw ivory shards with sandpaper for Joe's kids. Joe mentions his pool cue with a mammoth ivory joint made by Eric Crisp of Sugar Tree Cues. John says his Instagram, @theboneyardalaska, grew from about 40,000 followers to 370,000 after his first appearance, and he hopes that audience can pressure legislators. Joe invites him back as the last guest of 2024 and promises to visit the Boneyard with Randall Carlson, as long as John does not make him play pool on his restored 1885 Brunswick tables first.

Conclusion

John Reeves's return visit mixes vindication, frustration and fascination. The East River finds back up his story about dumped fossils, while his tiny 2.1-acre site keeps producing a staggering record of Ice Age life, from mammoths and American lions to a burnt layer that hints at a catastrophic event. His mysterious 190-year-old sawed bones show how little is known about even recent history in the region. At the heart of the episode is his crusade to get the AMNH's Alaskan collection back to Alaska, with its location data, so scientists can finally study it, pursued through politics rather than lawsuits. Joe frames it as a rare chance to learn what caused the megafauna extinction, and a test of whether major institutions will cooperate in an age when information can no longer be controlled.

This is a summary of "#2080 - John Reeves" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.