We move now to a new film by Ken Burns.

It's called The American Buffalo and is now available to watch here on Vegas PBS and on Passport.

The two part series takes viewers through 10,000 years of North American history while tracing the animal's evolution, its significance to indigenous people, its near extinction, and efforts to save the magnificent mammals.

According to the National Park Service in the early 1800s.

Between 30,000,060 million American bison roamed most of North America.

And it's believed bison once existed in Nevada as well.

That is according to dawn and done.

Nevada State Parks Interpretive Ranger.

She joins us now from Cathedral Gorge State Park in Pennock in Nevada.

Dawn, thank you for joining Nevada Week.

Thank you for having me.

So can we first establish the difference between bison and buffalo?

Yes.

Well, American buffalo has become kind of a normal creature, right?

Everybody thinks of that an actual thing.

But it's really the difference between bison and buffalo are they're in the same family, but they're complete different species.

So what we really have in America are bison, whereas buffalo live in places like Africa and Asia.

Got it.

Okay.

So for the purpose of this interview, we're going to say bison, because that's what is correct, even though the film is American Buffalo.

How do we know that there were bison once in Nevada?

Well, we actually have the evidence right here at Capital Gorge when in the 1970s, a young man found a whole bunch of bones here in the park and he took them home with them.

And it was to him that he didn't know what they were in About 20 years later, when he decided when he grew up, he decided that he needed to find out what they were.

So he took a man to be identified.

And as that happened, they said, well, wait a minute, where did you find this thing?

Because they knew that it was old and they had to go back to where it came from.

Well, when he said that he found it here, the result of that ended up being in the 1990s, the Desert Research Institute came out here to do a dig because as this buffalo head behind me or bison head actually was found.

And then they I did it it was found to be over 900 years old.

So we know for sure that right here in Cathedral Gorge State Park, there were bison roaming around here anywhere from 400 to 1000 years ago.

And.

Whoa.

And go ahead.

What do we know about these bison?

I mean, it wasn't just one random bison that ran away from some herd.

Yeah, right.

No, the actual bison were dry wood.

Desert Research Institute did their dig in the 1990s.

What they ended up finding was just layers of bones because the way Cathedral Gorge is designed is what happened was floods would come in and bring depositional material into what was a lake.

Well, when that lake drained away, the bison were able to be here and to roam around and they figure what happened was they would go into these little slot canyons that we have here to get out of the rain, and then there would be a mud of a big mudslide and they would be trapped in there.

So they were able to actually identify through hide that was left on the body and contents in the stomach.

They could identify what they were eating.

They could identify how old they were because of the organic substances.

And they could identify that they were mostly female and then youth.

So they were mommas with their babies.

Because what happens when the males, after they made the males go in their own herd and the mommas stay with the babies.

So that was that's what's been found here in the park.

And then there was a separate dig that you told me about on the phone, and that was in the caves of Lincoln County when was that and what was discovered?

Yeah.

So back in the 1970s, a number of researchers from you and I are from University of Nevada, Reno actually were down here in Lincoln County looking through a number of the caves.

These archeologists were looking for evidence of Native Americans.

And when who was here, what they were eating, what they were doing, all of the cultural part of it.

And there were a number of caves that they looked at that are right around here and one within, you know, 20 miles as the crow flies from Cathedral Gorge.

And in that particular cave, they dug down so many layers.

They dug down like 29 layers, which is huge.

Well, once they got down there, 29 layers is like 7000 years ago.

Wow.

So 7000 years.

What they found at that layer was they found a mortality down there.

And that's a grinding basically a grinding stone.

So you can grind different kinds flour, ground grind up flour and stuff like that.

So but they also found bison bones.

So we know that bison were in Lincoln County and in this area up to 7000 years ago, you may not see that on those maps that show where bison have roamed in North America, but they were here in Nevada.

Don and Don, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

Oh, well, thank you for having me.

You have a great day.

You too.