How Rogan podcast started ‘bone rush’ for mammoth tusks

Guest on show that has an estimated audience of 11M says thousands of priceless remains lie on NYC river floor

NEW YORK — The surveying vessel Red Rogers made its way up the East River on a recent Saturday, stopping at a precise location off the Manhattan shoreline. Two guests on board — a fossil collector and a treasure hunter with large audiences on social media — tugged on scuba gear and dropped overboard into the frigid waters.

On this day, they were drawn to their spot, near East 65th Street, not by scientific data or the boat’s keen instruments, but by a massively popular podcast: The Joe Rogan Experience. In a recent interview on that show, which has an estimated audience of 11 million listeners per episode on Spotify, a guest from Alaska presented an explosive discovery: There are tens of thousands of priceless woolly mammoth tusks lying on the river floor.

“I’m going to start a bone rush,” the guest, John Reeves, a fossil collector and gold miner, announced.

“A bone rush?” Rogan asked.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “We’ll see if anybody out there’s got a sense of adventure.”

The answer came quickly. The podcast episode, which aired Dec. 30, was an instant sensation. Without hesitation, several teams of men and women from around the country drove, flew and floated to New York City for a chance at finding a many-thousands-year-old artifact that could be worth at least six figures.

The divers attracted a virtual flotilla of news crews, photographers, livestreamers on social media, curious dog-walkers, joggers and moms with strollers who paused on the river’s chilly bank for a closer look. On this particular Saturday, Jan. 7, a drone hovered over the Red Rogers, as if peering over a diver’s neoprene shoulder for a closer look.

But an examination of the evidence Reeves relied upon to make his sensational claim on the podcast raised questions about just how many bones might be involved in this bone rush.

Reeves described it as “a boxcar load,” or about “50 tons” of bones and tusks that had been shipped to the American Museum of Natural History around 1940 but were instead dumped because, in his telling, the museum was not interested in them.

The tale of the power of what is arguably the world’s most popular podcast and the unquestioning acceptance of its sensational content begins eons ago, when mammoths and other so-called megafauna roamed the earth. Fast forward to the end of the 19th century and the gold rush that swept Alaska, which led to the discovery of countless bones, fossils, intact skeletons and even mummified prehistoric remains preserved in permafrost.

Around 1917, Childs Frick, a son of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick and a trustee at the American Museum of Natural History, began excavating prehistoric remains in several locations, including Alaska. It was hard work done quickly — the gold miners were impatient to see the bones removed so they could continue digging.

Young men in college seeking a job and adventure on the frontier arrived to help. One of them was Richard H. Osborne, who worked on what became known as the “bone wagon” in Alaska in the early 1940s.

Osborne found the work fascinating and went on to careers in paleontology and genetics. Around 2000 or so, looking back on his life at age 80, Osborne wrote a paper he hoped to turn into a book someday about his adventures collecting bones in Alaska, its scientific aspirations evident in its unwieldy title: “Early Man in Eastern Beringia: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Artifacts and Associated Fauna Recovered from the Fairbanks Mining District, Alaska.”

He never wrote the book, and the paper was never published. Osborne died in 2005, a few years after it was written. But nearly two decades later, a stray thought in the manuscript about an early 1940s shipment that never made it to the museum would take on a remarkable new life that he could not have imagined.

“Mistakes made in the field as to acceptable condition of the bones shipped to New York City,” the report reads. These mistakes, the paper suggests, somehow led to specimens being dumped in the East River off the East River Drive at 65th Street.