(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, crystallized rat urine provides scientists an unlikely view of our past.

This is really how we know what the past vegetation looked like.

(Tom) Our collaboration with the Poetry Center continues with Raquel Gutiérrez, “On the Crisis of Abandonment ”.

No one dreams of dying alone, but these are the dreams to seize upon and feast in defeat.

(Tom) Our story, Footprints From the Past wins in Edward R. Murrow Award for Feature Reporting.

White Sands has given me the opportunity to begin to look really deeply into origins of Native Americans and Native American histories.

(Tom) And a company in Tucson is helping to keep people in space safe from the elements.

One of the things we do is keep in astronauts at the right temperature, which means we have to collect the heat and reject the heat.

(Tom) Hello and welcome to another new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We continue our summer indoor series with a visit here to DeGrazia Gallery in the Sun.

This ten acre site was designed and built by one of the most famous artist ever to come out of the Southwest, Ted DeGrazia.

The gallery is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and while a significant portion is outside, there's still plenty to see indoors, including six different permanent collections of original artwork and a series of rotating exhibitions showcasing works from the over 15,000 pieces that are housed here.

Currently, you can see ‘DeGrazias Beggars, ‘Miners and Prospectors of the Old West, ‘On the Trail and ‘Abstract Paintings of Ted DeGrazia.

Now, DeGrazia included a lot of Southwestern landscapes in his paintings, but recent science indicates that all that vegetation may be newer to this area than once thought.

And that discovery comes from an unlikely source, packrat middens or crystalized rat urine, which holds a lot of secrets to this areas past.

Narrator - In these boxes are hundreds of time machines, and this time machines are powered by crystallized pack rat urine.

Camille - Pack rats are members of the genus Natoma, and there are several different species and they exhibit what you think of as stereotypical pack rat behavior.

They collect leaves and seeds and twigs from the landscape and they bring them back and they make a nest.

They urinate on their midden, their urine is very concentrated.

It crystallizes and forms a rock hard encasing that we referred to as amber rat.

It's that urine that really protects the fossils and preserves them for tens of thousands of years.

This is a 53,000 year old midden.

So this juniper seed is 53,000 years old.

This bear grass, 53,000 years.

All of this cactus vines, 53,000 years old.

Julio - I spent a lot of my career studying these curious and unorthodox deposits called Packrat Middens.

Packrat middens were not something that people knew, they could extract information about past environment secrets of the past until about 1960.

In 1960, these deposits were discovered by Phil Wells and Clive Jurgensen.

It was then that the Packrat Midden method was born.

Camile - So I came down here and started working with Julio, who was my my master's and my Ph.D. advisor.

He did literally write the book and we have continued to collaborate throughout the years.

The midden is a treasure trove of plant material, and so once we collect it in the field, we'll bring it back to the lab.

Julio - The first thing you've got to do is dissolve the urine and the urine is water soluble.

Drop them into a bucket of water and let them dissolve.

Some of them take a couple of weeks to dissolve.

Camille - Then we will wet wet seive, well dry it and we're left with all of the loose plant parts.

At that point we can take a look at it under a dissecting microscope.

So we can really see the variation in the plants, so we can identify things often as species and sometimes even subspecies, because of the exquisite preservation of the plant fossils within the middens.

Julio - And so we have in these deposits these snapshots of the vegetation at a particular time over the last 50,000 years.

Camille - This is really how we know, what the past vegetation looked like.

Julio - There's some excellent examples of sort of before and after midden research started.

Basically, we thought that the Sonoran Desert, with all these plants with very curious adaptations to aridity, think of a Saguaro, think of a Palo Verde with photosynthetic bark.

People thought that those were age old adaptations that had been there for tens of millions of years, basically since the Miocene people thought that it more or less, you know, look the way it does now.

We did that midden study that spanned the last 60,000 years, and in fact, we were finding junipers and pinon pine in those deposits in the Sonoran Desert.

You'd find that instead of having saguaros in Palo Verde and the things that you see here, you'd have woodlands.

Camille - There was a lot more moisture.

It was cooler, and it allowed these woodlands to move further down in elevation from where they are today.

Julio - the Sonoran Desert, you know, it's basically a recent development, recent meaning in the last 10,000 years or so, Camille - I was having lunch with an old friend from grad school yesterday and she was talking about trying to eradicate the pack rats from her property because of course they do cause some destruction to their lawn furniture and stuff like that.

Right.

But it's that behavior that leaves us with really this wonderful archive of the past.

I work with pee, I work with poo.

Right.

But they tell us so much.

It's really this treasure.

(Tom) As you just learn, many of the Sonoran Desert plants we know and love may be newer to this area than once thought.

Well, next in our ongoing Desert Plant series, we introduce you to a Tucson native, the Golden Fleece, which is a low lying shrub that can flower year round.

(Alex) Hi.

My name's Alex Arnold.

I'm a horticulturist here at the Desert Museum.

As you can see, I have this nice soft bed of yellow flowers in front of me.

This is one of my favorite ground covers that we grow here at the museum.

It's called Golden Fleece or thymophylla Pentachaeta.

It's in the Aster family, and it provides your landscape with a really nice, low growing, almost mat like form.

It is really nice because it blooms pretty much all year round and requires little to no maintenance or upkeep whatsoever.

So you can plant this around the sides of your pathways, for example, in a gravel hardscape and it will self seed fill out.

And if you give it a little additional water, it will bloom almost the entire year.

I don't know if this plant has any medicinal or culinary uses.

That being said, it's a scientific name sounds almost culinary.

It's called thymophylla Pentachaeta.

Thymophylla means leaves that are like thyme, like the herb thyme.

Because if you look at the leaves, they look a lot like a thyme leaf.

They don't taste like thyme or necessarily smell like thyme, but if you crush them up, they have a really, really nice, lovely, fragrant scent and you can also kind of smell it after rains and things like that.

This plant is native to right here in Tucson.

Its range extends all the way into Texas, through New Mexico and then a bit south of us.

So we're sort of on the middle western side of its range.

This plant attracts a number of insects, many different pollinators.

It also is a very attractive for its seeds to a number of birds, especially finches and verdans for example, can be found eating the mature seeds regularly.

This plant is kind of perfect for anybody who has a low maintenance kind of hardscape type of backyard that they want to add additional color to that they want to invite more pollinators to.

As you can see here, its growing in full sun right on the gravel.

These do get a bit of additional irrigation, although it can handle little to no irrigation.

With irrigation, though it will bloom pretty much throughout the year.

(Tom) Now we bring you something a little different for our show.

All summer, Arizona Illustrated is teaming up with the Poetry Center to bring you a series of poems written by local poets and then visualized by our team of producers.

Here, writer Raquel Gutiérrez, whose recent series of essays Brown Neon, was on New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 list reads from her poem, “On the Crisis of Abandonment ”.

(Raquel) Well, it's the middle of my life now.

And just about every day I mistake Aviation Parkway for the ocean and the buzz of bustling vehicles eschewing speed limits unbothered with the fact of death in the foreground of this infrastructural monster.

Every day in the middle of my life now, I expect the javelina to becoming halo of mushroom fuzz, and greet its decomposition hastened by the summer heat of an unfathomable season.

I yield to my own promise of decomposition as alluring to forge a new life someday, somehow, and for someone else in the elsewhere.

Your life wasn't for nothing.

That it made a difference to the funny thing we call kin.

A large husk that once hurled into a void it wasn't concerned with anyway, for some, make a pretty good life in the rubble of other people's trash.

A peccary in the muck of concrete an oil slick of monsoon garbage or slippage where the 18 wheeler impressed upon with the force to twist its barrel chested ness to the shoulder of the frontage road.

No one dreams of dying alone, but these are the dreams to seize upon and feast in defeat.

If you did it right, you are remembered for the reputation you lost defending against the new grain of patrimony, the sublimated rages, the busted neon sign throbs in diminished power differentials.

You are remembered for being stingy with your time, demanding promissory notes for the granular pains.

In the factory you thought improved upon the last factory.

Where to mine a mild mercy as the hum of the parkway wanes in your folded ear, dear javelina.

You don't see what's coming but feel the fear flooding.

Chronos is a cortisol of phlegm to a punctured lung.

Consider my decomposing body on the side of the parkway and lay a bouquet of pink flowers at the snout of my cathedral.

I forget the wild boar inside myself.

The smell of sweetness in the afterlife is it another Zoom meeting.

Will I die by some less impressive machine of the blue halo, the screen screaming for another mode of lymphatic reaction desperately fathomed.

When I mistake Aviation Parkway for the ocean, it's a temporary sensory deprivation of forgetting.

I live next to a freeway wall.

Goat head burrs and births the need for virality that ensured a livelihood.

We go through each other's trash in this neighborhood and wonder about the last thing left unsaid.

What if I said the name of a color three times?

Would the image of forgiveness forgo the olive branch?

These images don't sustain me anymore, and for that I worry and wait for the sun to come and guide me back to the marked grave to see what other creatures have come along to feed on the fungus of your body.

(Tom) Please stay tuned to Arizona Illustrated in the coming weeks to see more of these poems and we'll be showing the entire series of poems on the big screen in conjunction with the Poetry Center at the Loft Cinema Tuesday, July 18th, 5 p.m..

This event is free.

It's open to the public and we hope to see you there.

Only about a five hour drive from Tucson is White Sands National Park.

It's a windswept landscape of sand dunes and otherworldly geology.

Now researchers working there, including scientists from the University of Arizona, recently uncovered human footprints dating back 23,000 years ago.

Well, this story recently won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for feature reporting.

So congratulations to producer Brian Nelson and videographers John DeSoto and Gage Judd.

I really, really enjoy working in the southwest and working in the white sands area in particular has been quite a remarkable experience for a variety of reasons.

Just traveling out there, it's a beautiful area.

Crossing the dunes to me always remind me of a sea of whipped cream, and particularly in the mornings you could see the mountains off to the to the West, lit up by the morning sun and the white dunes.

It's a real, it's a pleasure.

It's quite an honor to be allowed to to work out there.

Ever since I can remember, I've always had an interest in the past in some way shape or form, and my particular interest is the archeology, the archeological record of the earliest people in the Americas, but also the geologic context.

And we'd already been doing some work right in the area that that turned out to be this archeological site.

And so when the tracks were discovered, that was some of the first evidence of the age and context of these tracks.

Yeah, Vance, I think the tracks are probably in this area here.

Yeah, I think you're right, the stratigraphy is almost identical.

The tracks were found in stream deposits, this this area.

Most of the area was an old lake but on the on the east side of the basin, there were freshwater streams coming in off the mountain.

Every time the stream would flood, it would bury some tracks and then the people would come back later and make some more tracks.

And then there would be another flood cycle.

So a couple of there were a couple of ways of approaching this one was to document the tracks that were already exposed, mapping them in considerable detail, excavating them.

What you tend to see is a discoloration because the the sediment filling the track well will often be a slightly different color.

Seeing the footprints, it was the most amazing thing I think I have ever seen in my life.

Putting together the idea that people had been there 6 to 8,000 years earlier than had been documented previously.

And this isn't just a stray tool, a broken piece of rock, something that might be questionable.

This is actual people's footprints and footprints from mammoths, giant ground sloths.

Saber tooth cats, direwolves, human beings were there when all of these humongous animals were walking this landscape.

My moment of connection was when I was able to put my barefoot next to one of the footprints.

And with permission, then I put my foot on the footprint itself, which fit pretty well.

So about a woman's size eight shoe or a 39 or 38 in European size?

An interesting thing about this, in my experience in archeology, is that what you're dealing with are literally moments in time.

If you think about how long it takes to make a trackway, say across my office a couple of seconds so you can look at these tracks and you know, you're looking at where somebody literally just walked across the landscape 23,000 years ago in the space of a couple of seconds, and it's it's it's quite remarkable when we first saw those.

The peopling of the Americas is the last great migration in human history.

The dating that we have right now suggests that these footprints span time from about 23,000 years ago to about 21,000 years ago, and that's 10,000 years older than the oldest well-documented occupation human occupation of North America, the Clovis people named after a site well-known site near Clovis, New Mexico.

So it's it's a huge leap in many ways, a leap in time, a leap of imagination that we have people living in the Americas 10,000 years earlier than Clovis.

It causes archeologists to stop and think about what has been the primary paradigm.

The idea that Clovis were the first people here in North America.

As both an American Indian and an archeologist, what I've been doing over most of my career has been acting as a liaison between the two schools and really trying to bring more American Indian issues, concerns and voices into the practice of archeology and to the interpretation of the archeological record.

Whether or not this will impact American Indian ideas about the history on the continent, it remains to be seen.

Scientifically, this is further proof that the time depth, the deep time of American Indian occupation of North America is there.

This area where the footprints, where the tracks were found The discovery was made due to wind erosion.

So between the time they first exposed until they're pretty much gone, it's just a few years.

So this is this is a whole nother issue out there is how to preserve them, how to interpret them.

We know that there are more discoveries to be found.

Every time we look, we find something new.

I went into archeology to try to understand about people to try to understand about who they were, about where they came from.

And looking at these footprints Wander off into the distance took me to that place in a way that no other discovery has ever made.

White sands has given me the opportunity to begin to look really deeply into origins of Native Americans and Native American histories.

The idea that we've added another 8000 years to that deep history is it makes me smile and think about it.

This is going to be one of those stories that people will be continuing to discuss.

Hopefully, my name, the names of my fellow researchers, all of us involved in white sands will continue to be a part of the footnote of history.

(Tom) CO2, water and an insulating atmosphere have helped to make the Earth habitable for about 4 billion years.

So for humans to venture into inhospitable atmospheres like deep space or extreme heat, they need dependable life support systems.

Paragon Space Development Corporation, based in Tucson, Arizona, specializes in just that.

[Grant] Paragon is a company that does life support in extreme environments.

So anywhere where the environment is trying to kill you, we keep it from killing you.

[Thats one small step for man one giant leap for mankind.]

[Grant] Space is the ultimate extreme environment.

So we do a lot of space life support underwater in deep mines, mine rescue systems, contaminated water diving and pretty much anywhere the environment is very hostile.

And we have to protect you for the environment for indefinite periods of time.

Paragon has about 160 and 170 employees or so.

Most of our contracts right now are with NASA or derived from NASA.

So going through a prime contractor to provide an element of a spacecraft being built, we work with all the commercial companies.

Paragon helped Elon start SpaceX Way back in the 2003 range.

[Three, two, one.

And liftoff of the Falcon 9] But the commercial world is really coming up, too.

So theyre private entities that are wanting to build spacecraft, wanting to build spacesuits.

And so we're working with almost every single one of those two, in fact, every single human space vehicle built in the United States today uses an element of Paragon or the architecture itself was designed by Paragon.

When you walk through our machine shop shop, you see we have some pretty large machines because one of the things we do is keep an astronaut at the right temperature, which means we have to collect the heat and reject the heat.

So we do large radiators.

So we have two of the largest machines in Tucson, but we have to machine a lot of parts.

Ultimately, life support is a little bit interesting.

We have a lot of humming boxes, but those humming boxes take a lot of assembly and design, of course, and then making sure we test them correctly.

[Robert] We are tasked with stressing our different components to the breaking points to the limits.

We never understand what the limits are.

That's what we do in tests.

We try to meet those specifications and limit tests.

We do a lot of multi-discipline multi characterization test.

We do everything from fluids, gases and basically environmental changes.

So in this chamber we are able to replicate a lower pressure environment similar to a capsule of a spacecraft.

We're able to test different filter systems in a lower pressure environment.

At the same time, we're able to introduce certain levels of contaminants at a certain rate and see what the output of the filter is for testing purposes.

[Grant] A spacesuit is a mini spacecraft, so it has to do all the pressure control, all of the air, providing oxygen, scrubbing out the chemicals we put out when we breathe, keeping everybody at the right temperature.

So it's a very complex, a very high tech mini spacecraft that people are walking around in.

There is going to be so much that we get from space as a human species.

And it's really the answer to having unlimited capability.

It's almost unimaginable.

Just be out seeing the moon and knowing that you have a vehicle circling the moon, that you've got parts on.

Is is a really special feeling that you don't get very many other places that we can utilize in order to take humanity to the next level.

And who knows, you, your kids, your grandkids may be living off earth in a paragon life support system of course.

(Tom) Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated on Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.