Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Oldest Petroglyphs in North America







The postulate here of an extreme gamma ray burst is certainly interesting, but does not support the momentum transfer absorbed by the crust at the time and supported by masses of conforming geological evidence.  Yet this may well have happened during the longer time window that includes the Pleistocene Nonconformity and brings in evidentiary confusion.  We may have had two major events with the plasma event been dramatic and clearly survivable.  That we have linked petrography is compelling for ready survival.

What is important is that the pinch glyphs are accurately datable making coincidental glyphs likewise datable.  That is a nice leg up.

We do know that a solar burst can produce an EMP able to knock out our electronic infrastructure.  A gamma burst out of the galactic center will be far more damaging and we do not understand how damaging.  Yet to a high level it will be benign.

All this is a good argument for proper underground infrastructure to protect populations in such an event.

Discovery of Oldest Petroglyphs in North America Raises Some Interesting Questions

by Dan Eden for viewzone (© Aug. 2013)


Scientists announced the confident dating of the oldest known petroglyphs in North America. Petroglyphs are man made carvings in stone, usually forming a picture, pattern and often telling a story. They are very old.

Basing their calculations on the well documented geological history of the petroglyph site in Nevada, they realized that the site was only above the surface of an adjacent lake for a narrow (geologically speaking) span of time before the current era.

Petroglyphs are almost impossible to date. Carbon-14 methods require once-living material to analyze. Carved or chipped rock can only be directly dated by the highly inaccurate method of examining the patina.

Minerals inside the rock leach to the surface from exposure to rain and sunlight. Over eons of time this forms a hard crust (or "patina") which usually takes on a darker color than the rock underneath.

This "patina" is what interested the early petroglyph makers in selecting where to chip. As the patina is chipped away, the lighter rock underneath creates a dramatic contrast for drawing. The thickness of the patina depends not only on the age of the rock but also the environment. That is why it is considered inaccurate.

In this new discovery, the environment where the ancient petroglyphs are located was used to determine an age when they could have been created. The land was submerged under a lake except for two well documented spans of time in the past.

According to geologists, there were two windows of possibility. The petroglyph site was exposed to air between 14,800 and 13,200 years ago (12,800 and 11,200 BCE) and again between about 11,300 and 10,500 years ago (9,300 and 8,500 BCE).

[Above: Notice the wavy pattern on the left and compare this to some other sites below.]

You can check out the original discovery here: ScienceDirect.com

Could this be CLOVIS art?
Until this discovery, the oldest petroglyphs were in Oregon and dated to 6,500 years ago. This new date in Nevada pushes the record of human habitation back to about 12,000 BC and coincides with the Clovis culture.

Other archaeological sites containing less technical artifacts have since been discovered and date as far back as 20,000 years ago. But the Clovis culture seems to have been the most advanced paleo-Indian civilization.

The Clovis culture is a name given to the paleo-Indians who inhabited the Western part of North America about 13-thousand years ago. Their name is derived from the town in New Mexico where a the collection of unique arrowheads and cutting tools were found -- intact with organic material for carbon-14 dating.

The Clovis point is a remarkable tool and the "hi-tech" of the stone age. It was very strong and resisted cracking or chipping. It incorporated grooves for attachment and was apparently quite successful in the hunt.

But what is most remarkable about the Clovis point is that it was made exactly the same by many distant colonies and the method of construction seems to have been learned and taught over many generations. This kind of social organization suggests that the petroglyphs made by these people may be more than meaningless "doodles" or graffiti. We'll explore that in a minute.

For a long time archaeologists believed the Clovis civilization was the oldest inhabitant of the North American continent. But recent discoveries have pushed the earliest inhabitants, thought to have come from Asia, to thousands of years earlier.

If the petroglyphs at the Nevada site are not the art or writing of the Clovis culture, it is certainly from a civilization that preceded or co-existed with them.

Something familiar...

Examining the shapes and designs of these 13000+ year old petroglyphs immediately reminds me of similar petroglyphs photographed in Colorado on a Viewzone Expedition. If you look closely you will see many similarities.

These petroglyphs are located on cattle grazing land outside La Junta, Colorado. They are part of a large cache of petroglyphs that are unfortunately unprotected and subject to vandalism.

What do the petroglyphs mean?

A few years ago, Viewzone conducted several expeditions in Colorado to examine the possibility that some of these petroglyphs were actually records of phonetic sounds representing the language spoken by their creators.

Successful translations used an ancient dialect that preceded Hebrew and Arabic. Although much of the translated texts were mundane (describing locations of water and hunting) other texts described some kind of event which required shelter.

The phenomenon is not limited to Colorado or the Western states of America. "Plasma trees" have been recorded all over the globe from this same time period. Below is an example of a "tree" recorded in petorgyphs from Paraguay.

What happened 13,500 years ago?

A recent story on ScienceDaily read: Mass Extinction -- Why Did Half of N. America's Large Mammals Disappear 13.8 and 11.4 Thousand Years Ago?

Years of scientific debate over the extinction of ancient species in North America have yielded many theories. However, new findings from J. Tyler Faith, GW Ph.D. candidate in the hominid paleobiology doctoral program, and Todd Surovell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, reveal that a mass extinction occurred in a geological instant.

During the late Pleistocene, which ended around 12,700 years ago, North America lost over 50 percent of its large mammal species. These species include mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, among many others. In total, 35 different genera (groups of species) disappeared, all of different habitat preferences and feeding habits.

Whatever happened to cause the extinction did not span hundreds or thousands of years -- it was likely less than a decade. It was quick and struck without warning.

What kind of event could cause a mass extinction?

Pieces of the puzzle

Glazed donuts on the Moon

Let's begin back in the 1960s with the Apollo 11 manned landing on the moon. On one of their EVA's (extra-vehicular activities), the astronauts photographed and took samples from some small craters, about 20cm to 1.5 meters across. When they examined the floors of these craters they noticed what looked like glazed donuts. These were actually chunks of moon dirt that were coated by glass.

The glazed areas are clearly concentrated toward the top surfaces of protuberances, although they exist also on some sides. Points and edges appear to be strongly favored for the glazing process. In some cases, droplets appear to have run down an inclined surface for a few millimeters and congealed there. [1]

Hardly anyone in the general public was made aware of this discovery and, even if they were, thay could hardly have realized the significance.

But in 1969, an article in Science by T. Gold [1] proposed a theory of how they were made. Glass, as we know, is made from melting sand. It occurs natually near sources of high temperature, such as volcanos and meteor impacts. The atom bomb tests in New Mexico's White Sands area produced a small "lake" of glass at ground zero. So it was never a question about the lunar glass also having been created by something very hot.

The fact that the glaze was confined to small patches, 0.5 to 10mm, suggested to scientists that the surface had been zapped rather than slow-cooked. And the likely source of this zap was our Sun. Gold estimated that the solar luminosity would have had to increase by 100 times what it is normally, for a duration of from 10 to 100 seconds.

Also, because of the lack of debris or dirt covering this glass, it must have occurred within the last 30,000 years. This made Gold propose that the Sun -- our Sun -- does this every 10,000 years or more. He suggested that future research should look for a "trigger" event -- possibly a large comet or asteroid impacting the surface of the Sun. He estimated this would only have to be 100 km and weigh 3 x 1021 grams.

Decades passed and this theory didn't receive much attention. Then, as it often does, the theory got a fresh look by a genius, Dr. Paul LaViolette. He was not satisfied with the source of the glass being caused by a solar blast, mainly because the output would have had to be on the scale of a nova, not just a flare. He envisioned another possibility.

LaViolette envisioned a large solar flare or coronal mass ejection (CME) that would become magnetically entrapped in the Earth's magnetosphere [2]. The magnetosphere would then hold on to this fireball of radiation like a magnetic thermos bottle, allowing the Moon and Earth to be exposed for a duration of time long enough to really "flash bake" their surfaces.

Critics quickly denounced LaViolette's theory citing evidence of "cosmic dust" and rare elements in the lunar glass and concluding that the heat source was from a meteor impact. [3]

But LaViolette proposed that this cosmic dust was likely present on the surface of the Moon during the time it was melted into the glass. In fact, he proposed that the entire solar system was full of this cosmic dust at the time of this solar eruption.

He was vindicated when polar ice cores showed unusual cosmic dust deposits at srata marking the end of the last ice age [4]. This time period, about 11,950 BCE, approximates the current age of the Moon glass. So where did all this cosmic dust come from?

Like Earth, our entire solar system has its own atmosphere, called the heliopause. This "bubble" surrounds the Sun and planets as it travels through galactic space. Like our earth's magnetosphere, the movement of the heliopause creates a rounded "head" and a narrowing "tail." Actually, it's more egg shaped (see above).

Until recently, astronomers believed that our solar system was a region relatively free from cosmic dust. The cosmic dust and frozen material of space were kept outside this protective bubble.

This was confirmed when the IRAS and Ulysses spacecrafts showed infrared images of the solar system, surrounded by whispy clouds of cosmic dust that increase in density just beyond Saturn.

So if the cosmic dust is surrounding the heliopause, what would make it suddenly enter the heliopause and how would this coincide with huge solar flares? LaViolette envisioned something disrupting the heliopause from the outside, impacting it and drawing cosmic dust inside with it and energizing the Sun. The energy of such an impact would be immense. The most logical place to look for such enormous energy was the Milky Way Galaxy.

The smoking gun

Examining the shape of the cosmic dust clouds, the IRAS satellite team reported that the cloud was tilted relative to the solar system's ecliptic -- the narrow plane containing our planets. LaViolette realized that this odd alignment tracked back to the Galactic center. This was quickly verified by NASA's Ulysses spacecraft and New Zealand's AMOR space radar observatory. Whatever caused the last ice age to end, the Sun to flare up and caused the glass to form on the Moon, came from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The plot was getting more interesting.

Astronomers have known about intense radiation from space since the 1970s. Multiple bursts of powerful gamma rays were routinely detected and believed to originate from stars in the Milky Way. Assuming this energy originated locally, astronomers concluded this type of gamma ray burst was insignificant and harmless. Then, in December 1997, they had the technology and good luck to catch a strong gamma ray burst and track it. The source was not inside the Milky Way Galaxy. It was from a distant galaxy billions of light years away.

A review of other bursts showed that their assumptions had been wrong. All of the gamma ray bursts they were observing were from other galaxies far, far away. The amount of energy coming from objects so distant was a real shock. No one had ever imagined such powerful bursts could be generated by galactic centers. The thought of a burst coming from our own Milky Way galactic center was abysmal. A burst of the same intensity as the 1997 event, originating from inside the Milky Way, would deliver 100,000 time the lethal dose of radiation, killing every life form that was exposed. Could that really happen to us?

This question was answered on August 27th, 1998 when an unusual 5 minute gamma ray pulse was located just 20,000 light years away in the constellation of Aquila. This may sound like a huge distance, but to astronomers this is just "next door." The Milky Way Galaxy, for example, is just 100,000 light years from end to end.

The 1998 event was close enough and strong enough to ionize Earth's upper atmosphere, damage a couple of spacecraft and disrupt global communication. Since then astronomers place gamma ray bursts from the Glaxy's core at the top of the list of things we do not want to happen.

Before Aquila, scientists just feared exploding stars -- novas and supernovas. Now things are different. It's like living in a ghetto and fearing drive-by shootings and random bullets. Then one day you learn that there's a nuclear bomb down the street, waiting to explode.

Not in my galaxy!

Ironically, all of these facts are incorporated in LaViolette's "superwave" theory. He concludes that there are cyclical and frequent explosions from the Galaxy's core. These waves of radiation advance outward to the edges of the Galaxy, impacting everything and causing stars to erupt in their path. He believes this is what has happened many times to our own solar system -- the most recent superwave of radiation being 13,800 years ago (approximately 11,800 BCE). He envisions the shock wave -- or superwave -- dragging cosmic dust along with it as it enters the heliopause and energizes our Sun.

Archaeologists' most precise determinations at present suggest that the Clovis culture endured from around 13,500 to 13,000 calendar years ago, or about 11,500 to 11,000 BCE. This roughly coincides with the cosmic dust found in ice cores.

Ice core samples support this view. Evidence of the effects from cosmic dust show at ice core strata corresponding to the years 11,880 to 11,785 BCE*, or around 13,800 years ago. This evidence, along with the Moon glass, the presence of cosmic dust and the abrupt and atypical end of the last ice age -- all point to an intimate relationship between extreme solar activity and gama radiation from the Milky Way Galaxy's center. [* These dates have been updated following more precise research from Dr. LaViolette.]

So... what did Clovis see and record in their petroglyphs?

What Clovis saw:

Plasma columns and Z-pinches in the sky!

We are all familiar with the sparks that flash brightly when we discharge electrical current. Lightening is an extreme example of this. Extremely high energy, called plasma, has been shown to form unique shapes when it is made to discharge -- especially around a sphere. That's what some scientists believe happened to Earth about the same time as the Clovis civilization was flourishing.

The northern lights are an example of how "sparks" of plasma can form luminous, electrically charged sheets or "tubes" at the Earth's poles. The aurora, as it is called, occurs when mild energy from our Sun is trapped and dissipated by the Earth's magnetic poles. An even higher energy source would create a uniquely shaped discharge that would be visible in the sky in daytime and persists for years.

Extremely high energy -- the type that would have caused the Moon glass and zapped the Earth -- creates an elaborate discharge. Physicists call it a z-pinch formation.

The z-pinch has been extensively researched by a group headed by Anthony L. Peratt with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM and is described in his paper, Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity Part II: Directionality and Source[5]. In this paper, Dr. Peratt illustrates the shape and characteristics of this high energy discharge on the Earth and shows thousands of petroglyph sites all over the globe where this z-pinch was observed and recorded in ancient carvings.

The term z-pinch originates from experiments where physicists made extremely high current to flow through thin wires that were arranged vertically in a tubular formation. They noticed that the energy quickly vaporized the wires, but the magnetic field generated by these paths remained and contained (or "pinched") the stream of energy, collapsing the streams of energy toward the center of the tube-like configuration -- called the z-axis. When the streams of energy converge, they form unique shapes that persist and can be observed as Birkeland elements, named for their discoverer.


[Above (left): Virtual image of the intense auroral plasma column as viewed at an angle of inclination, not to scale. Above (right): Conceptual view of the Birkeland sheath filaments surrounding Earth (28 close pairs). The relativistic electron flow is downwards toward Antarctica. The current bundle above Antarctica twists in counter-clockwise rotation. By convention, the Birkeland currents and ion flow is upwards toward the Arctic. Not yet completely resolved is a bend in the upper filament sheath that allows the upper plasmoids and column to be seen at northern latitudes.]

If the Earth was zapped by high energy radiation, either from the Sun or the Galactic core, the planet would be surrounded with distinct lines of energy, converging at the North and South pole. These bands would continue to extend well out from the planet's poles and into space and would be visible from almost every point on Earth -- each with its own unique perspective.

Laboratory experiments whith a metal sphere, representing Earth, show the "chalice" shape created by high energy paths [above]. Oddly, repeated experiments show a preference for 56 "rays" or distinct bands of energy. This same number is often depicted in the ancient petroglyphs!

[Above (left): Northern hemisphere petroglyphs from the Columbia River Basin, 45.65ºN, 121.95ºW. Right: Oblique view into the auroral plasma column from these coordinates. Above (right): Nasca, Peru vase, date unknown (14.24ºS, 75.58ºW). Note the similarity to the northern hemisphere petroglyphs.]

These simulations from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory show the unique shapes that the plasma filaments make as they encircle the earth. Here are the Nevada petroglyphs again for comparison.

Recent archiving of global petroglyphs has demonstrated that these shapes were correctly recorded in rock carvings by humans who witnessed this event!

[Above (left): White-striped pictographs at Iga Warta Cultural Tourism Centre, North Flinders Range (30.59ºS, 138.94ºE). Shown is Cliff Coulthard, Australian Department of Environment and Planning in Aboriginal Heritage, an authority on pictograph painting techniques having analyzed such works as the Magdalenian cave art in France. Above (right): Lightning Brothers, Ingaladdi, Victoria River, Wardaman country of the Northern Territory (15ºS, 130ºE). New dating techniques of this red inorganic-pigmented pictograph image were done using a plasma-chemical extraction method and correspond to the era of the z-pinch.]

When researchers went to various petroglyph sites that contained the z-pinch artifacts they carefully plotted the GPS location and noted if the ancient artist had a clear view of the Southern horizon. Almost all of the sites had this view. The number and extent of these global petroglyph sites clearly demonstrate the purpose of this art. Also, depending on the latitude, depictions of the z-pinch corresponded to the exact perspective that would have been expected.
  
 Some examples of z-pinch petroglyphs are shown here. We highly recommend reading the complete article. We especially thank team member, John McGovern, for bringing this important work to our attention.

We close the story with a picture [above] of the "sun" as recorded at the 13,000+ year old Nevada site.

What does it all mean?

The new discovery validates the age of a certain style of petroglyph. It has surprised many archaeologists who believed them to be thousands of years younger. The estimated carving took place around 11,700 BCE, or 13,700 years ago. This coincides with the Clovis culture in Western North America.

Ice core data and lunar soil samples point to a large ejection of solar material (possibly a Coronal Mass Ejection) mixed with cosmic dust which hit Earth around 11,700 BCE. The impact of this huge discharge around our planet would have created unique shapes of glowing plasma, visible to the inhabitants for many years.

The time coincides with mass extinctions of mammals and so it is assumed that the event was not benign and that human survival was put to the test.

Experiments with plasma discharges in laboratories indicates that these unique shapes are recorded accurately in the 11,700 BCE patroglyphs in Nevada, Colorado and elsewhere.

There is ample evidence to support the theory from hundreds of petroglyph sites around the globe. Each site records the plasma event according to the unique angle of observation.

A system of phonetic sound symbols (an alphabet) has been associated with these older petroglyphs and reasonably successful translations, using an archaic form of proto-Canaanite, describe the need to take shelter, a "painful" vertical light and "poison" from the sky. These repeating symbols seem to indicate that a language and crude writing system existed at that time.

Certainly, more research and interest is needed.
References
[1] Gold, T. "Apollo II Observations of a Remarkable Glazing Phenomenon on the Lunar Surface." Science 165 (1969):1345.
[2] Excerpt from Paul LaViolette's 1983 Ph.D. dissertation, "Galactic Explosions, Cosmic Dust Invasions, and Climate Change."
[3] Morgan, Laul, Ganapathy, and Anders (1971 Morgan, J. W., Laul, J. C., Ganapathy, R., and Anders, E. "Glazed Lunar Rocks: Origin by Impact." Science 172(1971):556
[4] Zook, H. A., Hartung, J. B., and Storzer, D. "Solar Flare Activity: Evidence for Large Scale Changes in the Past." Icarus 32(1977):106
[5]Anthony L. Peratt, Fellow, IEEE, John McGovern, Alfred H. Qoyawayma, Life Member, IEEE, Marinus Anthony Van der Sluijs, and Mathias G. Peratt, Member, IEEE, "Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity Part II: Directionality and Source," IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 35, NO. 4, August 2007.
[6] Markus Landgraf, Max Plank Institute.
[7] www.viewzone.com/comanche2.html -also- www.viewzone.com/firsttongue.yemen.html -also- www.viewzone.com/oklahoma11.html


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