Interview: Veteran Paleontologist Ernie Lundelius

But then things changed for me rather drastically. The first year I was in Chicago, I met an Australian who was somewhat older than I, and he was like me; he had done a double major of zoology and biology. He told me, ‘Ya know, when you finish your degree you should come out to Australia.’ He was from Western Australia. He said ‘I know some fossil localities out there that you need to look at.’ So I kept in contact with him--in those days by mail. I got a Fulbright, and in the meantime, I had acquired a wife, so we went to Australia and spent a year there. A wonderful year.

R: Was that in the 60s?

E: 1954-55. Boy, that was and still is an empty continent. So we spent a year there, then I came back to Caltech. I came home to Texas to visit and was talking again to Jack and some others, and they said, ‘well look, we lost a guy, and we are looking for somebody in the area that you work in. So tell us what you've been doing.’ So I told them what various things I was doing and they made me an offer of assistant professor, and I took it since there wasn't anything else available! (Chuckles)

R: When they offered you that job, were you able to jump right into it, or did you have to have additional training?

E: No I jumped right in it. With the courses I was asked to teach, one was a freshman geology which was no problem. And let's see… for a while I taught the basic Paleo course too. But I don't remember when I started. But some years later Bill Turnbull at the Chicago Field Museum, who was a good friend, asked me to go back to Australia, but we had another project to do. But then we got money to go back... but by that time Julie and I had two little kids!

R: It sounds like your responsibilities increased tenfold!

E: Oh yeah! (Chuckles)

R: But then somehow you made it back to Austin.

E: After another year in Australia I returned here and have been here ever since. On that second trip to Australia, my daughter Jennifer was about five and my son Rolf was three. We spent a weekend camping by one of the caves and she spent her time reading because she was just learning to read, but Rolph spent his time throwing rocks! We put her in a school there and after about three days she picked up the Australian accent. After we got home we put her back in school here and after about three days, she lost the accent! (Laughs)

R: I was just talking with a friend of mine, David Calame, maybe you know him?

E: I think I remember the name.

R: He dug for many years at the Montell Rockshelter (Uvalde County) after you guys left.

E: Oh yeah.

R: He said he thinks you might be the last one still around who was there at the beginning.

E: That's probably true. I never actually did any work out there, but I did look at all of the bones that came out of there.

R: What do you remember from that site?

E: Not very much! (Laughs) One thing I did do after I came back from Australia was start to look at the deposits from caves. They are usually well preserved.

There are a lot of caves on the Edwards Plateau. There was a lot of material, some of which was earlier collected. There's a cave in Bexar County, the Friesenhahn Cave, that's been known for a long time. And a funny story about this was- I think the first publication on that was from the early 1900s- and then there was E. H. Sellards, arrived in Texas sometime in the 1920s, I think. And he was interested in early man in North America. And he went and talked to old man Friesenhahn, who owned the ranch that it was on, about going back in there--and the old man wouldn't let him on. And the old man's explanation was that those bones been there so long that he didn't think it was right to disturb them. And that was that until the old guy died, then his sons were running the ranch. And this was after the Second World War, and they went back, and Glenn Evans… well, Glenn is one of the more knowledgeable people around here, they went down there, and he came back saying there were a bunch of concrete castings in there. And then we went, “Ohhhh. Now we know why the old man didn't want him in there.” He had a still in that cave and it was during prohibition! Glenn told me nah, it was just a water trough that had gone bad (Laughs). I’ll take Glenn's word for it.

R: My friend that I was talking about, David, he wanted me to mention to you that they found a Paleo point with charcoal samples there long after you guys had left that pushed the occupation of the Montell cave to 11,000 years. The point type is called Milnesand, which is similar to a Plainview point type.

E: Yeah. I vaguely remember that. I didn't want to intrude on the other people who were working on that though.

R: David was telling me another funny story. Some years ago they found an old test hole at Montell, and there were some goat bones in there. He brought them to you at the lab, not knowing what they were, thinking they were prehistoric. You looked at them and determined that they were modern goat bones. Somebody had eaten one of Vic Rogers' goats and tossed the bones in the test hole there.

E: (Laughs) I don't remember that but I probably would've done that!

R: What did they find there that they called you in to look at?

E: Well, all of those shelters, if you go back five or six thousand years, you begin to pick up small animals that don't live there today because the planet has changed. And that was a thing that got me interested because I found this to be true in caves in Australia. It's true in nearly every one of those caves. You might find a couple of species of shrews, couple of species of rodents that don't live here today, but they moved to the north and the east where the climates are cooler and summers and winters are not quite so extreme.

The other thing you find is that if you go back beyond about ten or twelve thousand years, you begin to get the bones of extinct animals, like fragments of mammoths and some of the big cats. Friesenhahn, for example, had the remains of three big cats. One is a sabertooth, the other is an odd cat that had canines about like this (gestures with fingers to show size) like knives, and it's got relatively long legs for a cat. And if you look at the claws on most big cats, they look like great big hooks. These are not; so that animal was operating in a very different way than other big cats. Then there's the remains of a standard lion, a big guy that stands about that tall (gestures with hands). You don't wanna mess with them!

But that raises an interesting question, which has not been answered... there’s a lady at Vanderbilt, [Larissa DeSantis], she’s done a lot of work on the isotopic remains of bones, and you get a lot of good information from that. She looked at the carbon isotopes in this weird cat from Friesenhahn and the concentration of the C-13, and that suggested that it was preying on animals that were eating grass, because grass has a different synthetic pathway than bushes and so-forth, with so-called C-4. Now, we suspected that was the case, because there’s a lot of young mammoth bones at Friesenhahn. It was one more confirmation that maybe that’s what they were preying on. If we could do that, we would get more information than we ever dreamed we’d get otherwise.

R: Do you think there are any pristine caves left in Texas that haven't been found?

E: Probably. But there's a lot to be done on the caves we know. We could do more on Freisenhahn.  There's another cave in Kerr county which is Hall's Cave. The first real expedition of it was done by a student of mine. It's on the Hall Ranch, and this guy that owned it at the time was really helpful and cooperative. So we were able to do a couple of things to help him out off and on. Rick Toomey dug that cave, and that was gonna be his dissertation. He and I talked about it, and we were up there, and he said "I propose to dig this down 5 cm at a time and sift everything." Well, that's a hell of a lot of work! (Laughs)

R: Painstaking!

E: But he did it. Down to two-plus meters and got faunals all the way down, and there was a minor change in the ratio of the small animals... at I think about five or six thousand years in the case of a climatic change at that time, and then it comes back. And this matches with data from other sources of a climatic change at the same time. So it was really beautiful stuff. Now we have a large number of radiocarbon dates all the way down- I don't remember all the numbers now though. But Rick wrote this great big two-volume dissertation, but it was never published. I haven't heard from him in a while but he has a job in Kentucky in some academic department. I think Rick set the standards that other people have sort of followed. And it would be great if somebody could go back to Hall's cave and take a good, hard look and see if they can get anything with DNA out of it.