10,000 BC:
The Real Story
Twelve miles south of Lake Titicaca, the
ruins of the ancient of city of Tiahuanaco
speak in eloquent silence. Due to the alignments of the Kalasasaya, the city’s
massive observatory, the archeoastronomer, Rolf Müller, argued that the city
had been constructed in 15,000 BC. Its
massive stone docks are ringed with ocean fossils. The city was a seaport. It rests today, miles from any water, let
alone the sea, on an Andean plateau, at an elevation of 13,300 feet. Archeologists vaguely wonder how and why the
city, with its huge, 400 ton dressed stones, was built at this elevation. In inimitable archeological style, it was
once considered a ceremonial-only, “ritual city,” as if the primitive, but apparently
plenipotent peoples that populate the archeologists’ prehistory had the time,
energy and manpower to do this as a hobby.
Now the city is just not considered, for Tiahuanaco
mocks the academic community: Your
entire consensus on the prehistory of this planet is wrong.
The “end of the
Pleistocene” is placed at 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. It is a little understood feature of geological
understanding that virtually every mountain range on the planet rose “at the
end of the Pleistocene.” All the
mountains of the world belong to either of two great systems – the
Circum-Pacific or the Alpine-Himalayan.
When the great plate of the Indian subcontinent moved far enough north
to contact the Eurasian plate, the two compressed and folded, forming the
immensely high Himalayas, nowhere lower than
24,000 feet. The Kashmir
valley rose 6,000 feet simultaneously.
The process can be dated precisely – the valley contained Pleistocene
fossils, and the Himalayas were folded over
Pleistocene gravel beds. The Pir
Panjals, part of the western Himalayas, and the rugged, soaring Kailas rose at the same time. To the west, the African plate moved north as
well, up-folding the Alps, the Pyrenees and
the Atlas range. The highest Alpine
peaks reach 15,000 feet, and the uplift of the original 2,000 feet high north
Italian hills was another 13,000 feet.
There is little erosion on these peaks; they are recent creations. This uplift is also held to occur “at the
end of the Pleistocene.” The Hindu
Kush, the Altai range and the Karakorum range with its 26,000 foot, K2, also elevated dramatically “at the end of the
Pleistocene.” Around the Pacific basin,
the two great plates slid underneath each other. The Andes
elevated. Where the plates were less
thick, volcanic activity created the mountains like the Cascades in Oregon. At
points where the collision resulted in shortening the earth’s crust in
one of the plates, the Rockies arose in the
American West. A recent academic study
breathlessly announced the “surprising discovery” that the Andes
rose “quickly,” over the course of 3 million years, beginning only 7 million
years ago. For this theory, Tiahuanaco emits a sigh.
All these
processes were linked. They occurred at
the “end of the Pleistocene.” It is not
a risky deduction to assume that at the end of the Pleistocene, Tiahuanaco left its place by the sea forever,
accompanied by the rest of the Andes. It was not alone. Something vast took place at the end of the
Pleistocene, something that required enormous forces. What happened circa 10,000 BC?
Journey to
10,000 BC – Not a Good Destination
It is “Journey
to 10,000 BC” on the History Channel.
Several mammoths plod along in a scenario of western rock bluffs, sparse
vegetation and cold during a lessening of the Ice Age, while Clovis hunters in
fur skins – apparently the only level of civilization on Planet Archeology –
chip away at their spear points. To the
north is the massive Laurentide ice sheet covering much of North America and Europe to a depth of 2-4 kilometers (1.2 to 2.5
miles). It is just before the Younger
Dryas (the return in force of the ice) around 12,900 years ago, yes, at the
“end of the Pleistocene.” Though it is
clearly stated that the 20,000 lb creatures must munch 700 pounds of feed a
day, the archeologist-consultants are
apparently oblivious to the incongruity between this food requirement and the
picture of the climate they present.
Meanwhile, we see a fairly dumb mammoth has gotten stuck in the La Brea
tar pits, a low-IQ saber-toothed tiger leaping on top of the mammoth’s back,
and a intellectually challenged dire-wolf attempting the same, all contributing
to the inexhaustible pile of skeletons in these tar pools. These mammoths and
this Clovis civilization, along with the
saber-toothed tigers, dire-wolves, bear-sized beavers and seventy other species
disappeared with the beginning of the Younger Dryas. The narration first explores the comfortable,
gradualist hypothesis that the drainage route from the Laurentide sheet changed
from the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence,
causing a change in the Atlantic ocean
currents sufficient to cause a ten degree drop in world temperature and a great
re-expansion of the ice. A little
reluctantly, the alternative theory created by physicists/geologists Firestone,
West, and Warwick-Smith (The Cycles of
Cosmic Catastrophe) is then described.
Firestone et al posit the cause in
Geminga, a star that turned supernova 41,000 years ago. The event may have sent a mass of debris
hurtling through space at millions of miles an hour. This cosmic mass of
debris, ice chunks and fragments slammed into the planet at an angle, striking
primarily at what is now Hudson Bay. Flying on this slant-trajectory, ice-chunks
from the debris created the shallow, tear-shaped craters dotting the Carolinas
– the many thousands of “Carolina
bays.” Another massive chunk likely
gouged out the lower half of Lake Michigan. The debris carried a huge cloud of tiny iron
pellets travelling at thousands of miles an hour. The tops of the tusks of buried mammoths are
found peppered with tiny burns from these pellets embedded in the tusks. The mammoths and any creatures standing in
the open, in the path of this mass, were obliterated.
In their book,
Firestone et al discuss the near-certainty of tsunamis from this event, to
include eye-witness accounts from Indian legend. To them, the heat from the strike at Hudson bay –
the apex of the ice sheet – began
the end of the Ice Age. But their
account can only be a fraction of the story.
There are those mountains...
An
Historical Equation – the Parameters
There is an
equation to be solved, whether by one event or by several. Tiahuanaco
is the first parameter to be held in mind.
The second: it requires tremendous forces, applied globally, to lift world-mountains in a geological instant. The third is the menu of the mammoths. The fourth is a parameter and a problem: In
theory, the great Laurentide Ice Sheet began 125,000 years ago. As Hancock (Underworld) recounts brilliantly, three massive floods would occur,
pouring down the Mississippi
drainage basin. The first started roughly
at 14,000 BC – close enough to be the “end of the Pleistocene.” The next was
around 9,000 BC, and the last around 5,000 BC, effectively ending the Ice
Age. This sequence was caused by the
sudden collapse of ice dams restraining three huge Ice Age lakes, respectively,
the Ontario (over 700,000 cubic kilometers released at once), then the Agassiz,
and then the Ojibway. In total, these
and other floods raised the world ocean 120 meters. Hancock felt these floods buried several
civilizations unwisely parked on what was once dry land, near the sea. The great release of pressure from the ice at
these times undoubtedly caused tremendous stresses and compensations (isostacy)
in the earth’s jello-like crust, inducing great earthquakes. However, no one suggests these forces could
have raised the Himalayas. Nor would the form of these floods, massive
as they were, correspond to the violence and duration of the events described
with Noah.
The creation of
this massive ice sheet, supposedly 100,000 years earlier, required the swiping
of water from the world ocean to a depth of 165 meters. How can such a tremendous amount of ocean be
turned to water vapor, and then ice?
The fourth parameter then: to
begin an Ice Age, it takes a powerful source of heat. The heat is needed to evaporate water, the
water vapor to make a voluminous rain.
Then and only then does freezing cold become the next necessary
ingredient for ice.
The Ice Age was invented to explain the
presence of “erratics.” These massive
stones are found everywhere – one of 10,000 tons in New Hampshire, 13,500 tons
in Ohio, big and little erratics in the Sahara, Mongolia, Uruguay, Europe,
slammed into the Labrador hillsides.
Something moved them there. The
theory of an ice sheet moving them slowly as it crept, initiated by Agassiz and influentially backed by the gradualist Lyell,
was eventually accepted. But pesky laws
of physics posed a problem – ice does not move by itself and it cannot move
uphill. To solve this, a vast and high
mountain range in the arctic north, from which the ice could flow, was
invented. The range has never been
found. Then, to account for continuing
discoveries of warm weather plants and fossils, inter-glacial periods began to
be posited – two, then three, then four…seven.
The forgotten and mythical mountains of the Arctic
popped up and down like a jack-in-the-box.
It is truly a
question whether the great Laurentide ice sheet actually existed before
the great event that raised Tiahuanaco. The
scenario we are about to view will propose that all the parameters can be
accounted for by one event. I paint it as only a beginning of the kind of
parametric-integration theory required.
It will hold that the Laurentide did not pre-exist the event. That the first of the great Laurentide floods
is thought to be around 14,000 BC seems problematic, for the scenario will
imply that this first flood actually came after
the “10,000 BC” (or so) event to be described, but our dating methodologies are
less than precise (see AR #70). The first flood date could be too early – and
mistaken. Something started the Ice Age;
something initiated the end of the Ice Age.
The “it” could be one and the same.
This initial lake-release event and its timing: a fifth parameter. That there are ruins of civilizations now
under the sea, there is great evidence – a sixth parameter. Does this imply a 100,000 year period
available to civilization on portions of dry land, made possible only by the ice sheet? Perhaps not.
Finally, a seventh parameter: something came through the solar system,
wreaking havoc, and not that long ago.
“And There
was War in Heaven…”
What entered the
solar system was more than a mass of supernova debris. Oxford
astronomer Victor Clube and his colleague William Napier argued that a giant
comet entered the system and began to fragment, causing ruin, “less than 20,000
years ago.” Brennan (The Atlantis Enigma) in a brilliant
treatment I am largely following, argues rather for the source in a supernova
in the constellation Vela, an event roughly 12,000 BC, only 45 light years
away. What came, he argued, was a
blazing fragment of an exploded star, perhaps 100 times the volume of
Earth. Brennan names it Vela-F. In its path was a solar system in much
different shape than it is now, a system with planets with upright axis and
orbits after Newton’s
own heart. The massive intruder began an assault, a warpath through the solar
system. First, perhaps, it encountered a
small planet in an orbit outside of Pluto today, smashing it to bits, leaving
the Kuiper belt in its wake. Then, encountering Neptune, it disrupted the two
moons, Triton and Nereid, leaving the strange orbits they possess today,
throwing a former Neptunian moon, Pluto, into its present position, and tilting
Neptune 29 degrees. But Neptune, with its massive field, at least managed to
redirect Vela-F, hurtling it towards an encounter with Uranus, speeding this
planet’s rotation and knocking it on its side, leaving its rotation in the same
plane as its orbit. Saturn was
next. Whether the encounter created
Saturn’s massive rings, with their many tiny bodies, is unclear, but its
rotation appears to have sped up, and the moon Phoebe put into a retro
orbit. Jupiter, the next in line, seems
unscathed, perhaps due to an orbital position at the moment located away from
the fray. Vela-F hurtled on.
Before it lay what is now the asteroid
belt. According to Ovenden’s refinement
of Bode’s law, a Saturn-sized gas giant with a mass 90 times that of Earth
should have occupied this orbit, and though the material volume of the 5000+
asteroids in the belt is not commensurate with this size, a gas giant may have
had little in terms of solid core. If
some form of planet was there at this time, there may have been an actual
collision, exploding the planet, hurtling a bombardment of debris towards its
neighbors, one being Mars. There is no
question that Mars was obliterated by a veritable shotgun blast of large, high
velocity bodies. Over 3,000 gouged 30
kilometer-minimum craters; there were myriad smaller hits. Olympus Mons, 27 kilometers (85,500 ft) above the Mars
plain, rises on the planet’s side opposite three of the largest impacts (630
km, 1000 km, 2000 km). A 4,500 mile
rift, the Valles Marineris, runs four times deeper, six times wider than the Grand Canyon (Hancock, The Mars Mystery). The crust
of the entire northern hemisphere, 3-4 kilometers in thickness, was ripped
off. But when and where?
Hoaglund and Bara
(A New Model of Mars) argue for
Mars being (for millions of years) in a tidal lock with another Mars-size
planet occupying the belt, a planet which also ultimately exploded and
shotgun-sprayed Mars. Patten and Windsor
(The Mars-Earth Wars) argue that
Mars, historically in an eccentric orbit crossing Earth’s, neared a 1,600 mile
diameter planet in the belt named Astra (or Astrea), a heavenly body known to
the ancients, which/who eventually left the solar system in disgust over the
evil of men. Astra, drawn within Mars’s
Roche limit, the point where the gravitational force disintegrates an object,
literally exploded in the face of Mars, “less than 17,000 years ago.”
In its odd
orbit, after the events described here, the chariot of Mars, though too small
to do major damage to the much larger Earth, apparently tormented Earth (and
Venus) for thousands of years, passing periodically as close as 30,000 miles
and causing calamities. Its blazing volcanoes, red lava flows, and two racing
moons (the “steeds”), Phobos (fear) and Deimos (dread) – now invisible save by
modern telescope – were then awesomely visible to, and hated by, the
ancients. Its “war” with Venus was
described in the Illiad (Troy,
AR
#47). Whatever the mechanics of the
massive damage Mars once sustained, the blazing Vela-F continued towards its
meeting with Earth.
Life on
Earth in the “Ice Age”
At the time, the
earth had a near vertical axis. It had
and needed, I believe, no moon. The Proselenes of Greece, noted Aristotle,
claimed to exist before the moon. So did the Arcadians and other peoples. The
Earth’s rotation was slower. Due to
these conditions the world climate was balmy, nearly tropical, with virtually
no seasons. There was no Ice Age, no
Laurentide ice sheet. Some of the water of the world’s oceans may have been
held in the atmosphere as water vapor.
The oceans may have been a little lower, allowing Hancock’s
now-submerged cultures. The planet sustained vast forests of massive trees and
lush vegetation, and huge populations of large animals – mammoths, mastodons,
giant sloths, giant beavers. In this
clime, 20,000 lb mammoths could easily order 700 pounds of food from the daily
menu. In fact, the massive “fur coats”
of the mammoths are now being reinterpreted as cooling devices. The odd fact that the art of the cave walls
invariably depicts people with little in the way of clothing falls into place.
The garden of
earth may not have been as perfect as it once was. Perhaps there was once an even greater
concentration of oxygen. Why were there once
dragonflies with two foot wingspans? Why enormous brontosaurs with nostrils
scarcely enough to support a horse? This
is yet another “parameter.” These
questions beg answers. But at this time,
the dinosaurs had already been (mostly?) extinguished, perhaps by the
asteroid(s) of the K/T boundary event, though not nearly so long ago as the
orthodox consensus, with its shaky dating methods, believes. But as a cataclysmic event, this and others
earlier did not have the effect on the axis or compare to what was about to
come.
Tiahuanaco did not represent the only civilization at the
time. There was a global
civilization. The evidence is ubiquitous
– the water-worn Sphinx, the underwater structures in the Pacific, the cities
of the Brazilian jungle – there is no need to detail this here. Its existence was about to be so thoroughly
obliterated by the forces to come that archeologists have managed to ignore the
remnants. Suffice it to say, the
spectacular trail and cosmic battles of Vela-F did not go unnoticed or
unrecorded. Revelations, is one
example: “A wonder in heaven…A woman clothed with the sun (the star) and the
moon under feet (with perhaps the moon in tow) …” Rather than a prediction, it is a recording,
the ancient record of the events encompassing the end of a world civilization
with its trade and commerce – the “great
city,” “destroyed in one day,” for which “the merchants of the earth shall weep
and mourn”– revamped in Christian style.
Earth
versus Star
As the star remnant
approached, its gravitational force took hold.
The earth’s lithospheric shell began to fracture. The Great Rift Valley of Africa, up to 100
miles wide, extends 3,000 miles from Mozambique
to Syria. The great tectonic plates began to move and
buckle. The mountain ranges were thrust
to enormous heights. Volcanoes erupted globally, rivers of lava flowed,
millions of tons of hot ash began to encircle and darken the planet. The inevitable effect on earth’s rotation
spawned violent, global winds. Simultaneously,
with the great heat of the star, the world’s oceans were boiling, evaporating,
and the result: a massive, seemingly unending rain, driven by hurricane force
winds. Given the darkening of the
planet, this fell as snow in the northern regions. This was the beginning of the Flood, but only
the beginning. With the plate
subduction and mountain raising, rivers changed course, seas began to
empty. As the 1,500 mile Tien Shan
range rose, the great Han Hai sea, 2,000 miles long by 700 miles wide, once in
human memory occupying the Gobi basin, emptied
in one enormous outpouring.
As the star
moved closer, trailing an array of captured bodies and debris, even splinters
of itself (the “crown of twelve stars”), a massive bombardment of projectiles
ensued. The record of these strikes is
in fact found in craters now being discovered (many via satellite) all over the
earth, not just the Carolina Bays. The
earth’s axis swung through 30 degrees, from 7 degrees in one direction to 23
degrees in the other, carrying wonderfully temperate regions with masses of
animals towards the pole. But the most
remarkable effect was yet to come.
Given the (newly
acquired) tilt of the earth’s axis, the star is likely to have passed over the
northern regions of the planet. Due to
its gravitational field, the entire world ocean began to flow north.
As this attraction peaked, there formed an immense, standing wave. The Hebrew Haggadah describes “waters piled
up to the height of 1,600 miles,” and visible “to all the nations of the
earth.” As the star moved on, the field
lessened and the great standing wave broke, crashing down through the north in
an unimaginable volume of water. I noted
(AR #70) how Navaho and Choctaw
legends describe a time of great darkness, followed by a light appearing in the
north, herds of frantic animals rushing south, and scouts returning with the
terrifying report that a mountain of water was rushing towards them. When the people emerged from their mountain
top cave, there was water as far as the eye could see. Perhaps the Grand Canyon
is simply another great rift, but it also looks suspiciously like a very large
and deep version of the Scablands of Eastern Washington, themselves formed soon
after this event by the bursting of an ice dam holding back Ice Age Lake
Missoula.
Epilogue
Eventually, these
waters would drain, interspersed with the great periodic floods from the
melting ice sheet. After centuries,
agriculture would begin again – always starting, appropriately, at higher
altitudes – the first levels to drain.
Huge herds of mammoths would be found quick-frozen in the once very
temperate north. An island near Siberia would
be found, appearing to be entirely composed of mammoths, cemented in a frozen
mass. Caves would be found in Sicily,
Crete, Malta, England, Austria, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lebanon,
Russia, China, Australia, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada, Brazil, and other
locations all over the planet with intermingled masses of fragmented skeletons
of animals – hippos, rhinos, horses, sloths, mammoths, deer, bison, lions,
humans, even whales and sharks – crushed and transported by the rushing waves
and slammed by chance into any openings in the water’s path. The La Brea tar pits would confuse
archeologists for years with the strange stupidity of the animals deposited
in-mass there. And a moon whose origin,
method of capture, anomalous density, and rotational properties yet cannot be
explained, would hang in the sky in precisely the correct position over the
once-garden planet, gently modulating tides and stabilizing earth’s axis.
The survivors
faced a cruel existence. The volcanic
ash blocked the sunlight. Large areas of
the north had become a frozen mass of water – a glass-like sea of ice. The lava and fire of volcanoes still glowed:
“And I saw as it
were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the
victory…stand on the sea of glass…” (Rev. 15: 2).
The Ice Age had
begun. And Tiahaunaco mourned for the
sea.