Showing posts with label mammoth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mammoth. Show all posts

Friday, August 28, 2009

In Conan's Land


As I have made clear in my postings, the ice age polar ice cap needed to be centered on the pole as much as possible to minimize growing imbalance in the crust. We have already dealt with the real slipperiness of the crust itself and shown that this objection is no objection at all.

We have asserted that humanity chose to trigger a crustal movement about 12900 BP in order to position the crust in such a way as to induce the full effect of the Gulf Stream and usher in the Holocene. This was clearly a precisely targeted event induced by a Comet strike on the pole itself. It is literally too good to be true if it was not planned deliberately.

However, it appears that a similar crustal movement occurred coincident with the peak of the ice age at around 19,000 BP that was a natural outcome of the building imbalance of the crust and though a random event, it did begin the process of deglaciation itself, but not nearly so effectively as the 12,900 BP event which completed the job in a couple of millennia.

The best evidence for this occurring is simply the fact that the second event was planned at all. You would only try that if you knew it would work.

A little bit of Pleistocene geography now needs to be reconstructed. Firstly, the temperate zone was the home of our known Pleistocene menagerie of mammoths, bison, mega lions, huge bears and of course humanity. Because it was in the temperate belt a long growing season was available. However it was all dominated by glacial weather that kept temperature variation changing over several degrees making agriculture very difficult and unlikely.

In Eurasia, this zone was most of two thousand kilometers wide and several thousand kilometers long. It was well watered and replete with ample plant fodder to support the massive herds. There were also ample semi protected valleys in which humanity could commence pastoralism and perhaps even some garden plot agriculture. The human population was likely huge because of the ease of big game hunting.

Secondly, the Indian sub continent was positioned on the equator and had a climate similar to the Amazon, Indonesia and the Congo. Human populations would have been organized as hunter gatherers as common in these regions. Successful agriculture has only occurred on tropical soils with the advent of terra preta in the Amazon five thousand years ago and more recently with some application of modern capital intensive methods.

That made it unattractive to northern hunting cultures that could migrate easily from Central Asia.

We can also surmise from the forgoing that these populations had ample prewarning of the coming impact event of 12,900 BP and were able to properly shelter themselves from the atmospheric shock waves.

Pleistocene Central Asia in particular was thirty degrees in latitude further south and obviously a much moister environment that was rich in food and fodder for the Pleistocene menagerie. It was certainly well populated with human hunters to a density comparable to such societies in Africa. Thus we have a dominant Central Asian culture with a southern tropical perimeter not unlike the surrounds of the Congo and the Amazon. They had plausibly already domesticated cattle to stabilize their lifeway and liberate themselves from following the wild herds were all the predators were.

My point is that the Northern Pleistocene was far richer and dominant than we have ever imagined and once understood in that light the later emergence of derivative populations becomes understandable. This huge areal expanse interacted with a likely host of local tribal groupings on the perimeter that to day are still recognizable as Europeans, Aryans and Chinese with all gradations in between.

The claim in the Vedas that the Indian populations and culture arose from an influx from the ‘Arctic’ and environs then is clearly explained. That influx was ongoing long before the 12,900 BP event, but lacked the necessary large herds to support hunting unless they brought cattle with them. If they brought cattle herds then they would have established large populations early on just as we are doing so in the Amazon today.

The crustal shift northward changed all that into the present climate regime and effectively forced populations out of their old hunting grounds as they dried out. They would naturally have gone south to join their kinsmen.

We have always been assuming geographical association with specific characteristics. The littoral of central Asia was rich and well connected for the mixing of a wide range of characteristics to be able to accommodate all of this in a population that was notably brown skinned but also highly variable.

Thus we can make a first basic generalization about the pre agricultural human populations. There were two obvious lifeways. The one was centered in tropical conditions, of which a modern day example is Papua - New Guinea. Their lifeway engaged in local gardening and small game hunting and inter tribal predatory warfare.

The second dominant lifeway was the temperate big game hunting society with a plausible application of pastoralism. We have images of Conan confronting these monsters with a spear in hand. Somehow, that never happened. Stampeding such an animal over a cliff is much safer or crowding it into a sealable box canyon, or as in Africa, simply dig a really good pit fall. You still need the big spear, but you will not be endangering yourself.

Converting the meat into strips for drying and producing pemmican was surely the principle method of using all such meat. Most of it was tough and needing prolonged stewing otherwise. Obviously a single mammoth would provide many thousands of pounds of fresh meat which could be dried and preserved in fat after pulverizing to produce thousands of individual daily rations. It is realistic to expect a single mammoth to provide a year’s rations for a single hunting band totaling up to twenty members. Pretty good return on a month’s effort.

That also explains the general economy of the plains Indians who maintained buffalo jumps. Once the preserved meat was in place, all other hunting was a pleasant pastime.

Thus we find that the post 12,900 BP world became difficult for the northern populations at the same time that the southern perimeter dried out and became more amenable to the lifeways of pastoralists. Of course they migrated bringing a more productive lifeway with them.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

13000 Year Old Soot

Having this story make scientific America is certainly welcome. The theory was first published about four years ago and sank like a stone. I have commented a great deal on its importance providing a radical interpretation that I expect few to accept anytime soon.

The comment that the black mat varies in age and has different geological sources is odd. The soot layer is convincingly unique, unless someone is able to show me multiple layers over eons. That argues for a unique causation and additional argues for a critical review of the methods for determining age which we already know is fickle.

An island has less capacity to withstand a shock, while a few human enclaves can repopulate vast tracts in a couple of centuries. Please recall our present population is derived from a fairly modest influx of new settlers. If the resources are there, then a healthy mother can produce several children in a decade and as many more for a total of two decades. Thus a surviving population can increase seven fold in two decades and obviously almost fifty fold in four decades and possibly three hundred fold in a person’s lifetime. Such rapid decline and recovery is so brief as to go unremarked in the geological record.

I would like to see the soot layer mapped and also dated in as many locales as possible so as to use it to act as a dating standard. Just as we know that Hekla blew in 1159 BCE, it is plausible to almost know an exact date for this event. This report tells us that the layer is on a California island. Thus it is now clear that the event affected all of North America.

It has been observed that Tunguska delivered soot into the local environment and a local forest fire is hardly able to create a unique signature. Either heat or shock flash carbonized the local vegetation and this I am skeptical about or the carbon was simply delivered and produced a cloud on passage through the atmosphere.

This last option works best in describing what happened 13,000 years ago. The impact mass came as a comet and impacted on the ice cap with a centre of mass close to the pole itself. It began its targeted orbit a very long ways out and was fairly intact. As it came into close orbit about the sun it broke up somewhat and like all such objects, produced a swarm of carbon rich objects.

These objects exploded in the atmosphere and provided blankets of the observed soot. The continental shock wave was sufficient to kill off animals easily. This model has the advantage of not needing to burn off anything.
This makes it even more survivable. In the meantime the crust cut lose and the present orientation came about.

July 20, 2009

Did a Comet Cause a North American Die-Off around 13,000 Years Ago?

Tiny hexagonal diamonds suggest a massive impact during the late Pleistocene that could have wiped out the Clovis people, mastodons and other continental inhabitants--but the geologic evidence falls short for some skeptics

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-a-comet-cause-die-off&sc=DD_20090721


Researchers have found shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds on one of California's Channel Islands, which they say is the strongest evidence yet that a comet exploded in the atmosphere above North America, causing widespread extinctions there around 12,900 years ago. Skeptics, however, say the debate is far from over.

In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including
mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a "black mat" of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an airburst. The controversial theory also gibes with the 1908 Tunguska atmospheric detonation (also thought to be from a comet or meteorite) that leveled trees in Siberia, and it echoes the extraterrestrial impact widely believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Today, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same team reports on shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds, known only from meteorite and other impact events, in a soot layer from Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island in California. The canyon is famous for containing the
earliest human remains in North America, dating back to 13,000 years, and the soot layer coincides with the disappearance of the pygmy mammoth from the island. In a documentary shown earlier this year on the Public Broadcasting Service's NOVA science show, the team also claimed that they discovered similar diamonds from the Greenland Ice Sheet dating to the same period.

But the evidence does not convince everyone. "I don't think much of this whole story," says geochemist
Christian Koeberl of the University of Vienna in Austria, "Diamonds of any sort are not uniquely characteristic of impact events." He says that the major lines of evidence are still missing, including the presence of shocked minerals, including breccias and tektites as well as an impact crater. "At least three other groups searched for similar evidence in the same or similar samples and found none," he adds.

Briggs Buchanan, an archaeologist from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, disputes the notion that humans declined following the purported impact. "We have shown that in California, specifically, that there [was] no severe decline in the resident population." He adds that other researchers have shown that the black mat varies in age across the continent and appears to have a variety of geologic origins.

What does the research team have to say about their doubters? "I'm so skeptical about the skeptics," says marine geologist
James Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara. "We work in a different paradigm where different materials result from different kinds of impacts."

Monday, July 7, 2008

Exploding Asteroid Hypothesis Strengthens

Ohio Diamonds linked to Arctic Diamond Fields

We observe that there is a straight line between this Ohio site described in the attached article, the Arctic diamonds fields and the impact craters in the Carolinas. We can reasonably assume that the primary impact took place on the diamond fields and obviously penetrating the ice and causing a great amount of debris to be hurled into the Ohio Valley. Additional parts of the asteroid obviously impacted in the Carolinas. Little of the evidence for this extreme event is terribly obvious today, but now that we know that it is likely to be there and also to be very extensive, we can start looking.

It seems very unlikely that any argument for glacial transport can hold up as an alternative.

I would like to see a more extensive search for the 12900 horizon and the related charcoal. The extraordinary burn off surely succeeded in leaving an uncommon charcoal zone throughout the eastern USA and the event obviously sent a shock wave that likely killed of the majority of the mega fauna both in North America and also Siberia. Survivors needed to be in the lee of a natural obstruction and then they had to survive the heat wave also.

The initial explosions likely took place over Siberia culminating with the primary impact in the ice shielded diamond field area. Other parts of the incoming object likely exploded over the Carolinas as they neared the surface. It is worth observing that the Mammoth evidence in Siberia strongly supported just such an abrupt extinction and has been commented on decades ago by others. Animals died with food in their mouths.

This impact event was almost ideally placed to promote a shift of the crust thirty degrees south, taking the northern ice cap centered in Hudson Bay out of the polar region. Had I ordered it up to do exactly this job, I hardly could have done better. So all you enthusiasts for divine intervention now have something to chew on. This put the Caribbean into the tropics and turned the Gulf Stream into a powered up deicing machine.

When I laid out the arguments for the Pleistocene Nonconformity, I was hardly going to argue for a silver bullet. I tried to work around something far uglier. And now we have a silver bullet that also damaged the one continent that was clearly both barely populated and home to the saber toothed tiger. It needed to wipe out the mega fauna to make it as hospitable as it is today.

I do not like amazing coincidences. This has the signature of a planned human Terraforming project. Otherwise, it is simply too good to be true. And to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, when all other explanations are eliminated, one must consider the unthinkable. Humanity had the time on Earth to do this in spades. They certainly had several convenient tropical homelands to develop an advanced civilization in.

And once the resources and knowledge existed, it was a simple step to execute this crustal shift program. The crust may even have shifted in the past to demonstrate the feasibility. All that was needed was the knowledge to be able to send a large mass into the appropriate orbit. And then to get everyone well out of the way. That means that our predecessors became space faring and have spent the last twelve thousand years elsewhere, but obviously not too far away if the UFO phenomenon means anything at all. In fact this provides us with a very believable and satisfying UFO paradigm to work with.

We can assume that these hypothetical humans have genetically modified themselves to prosper in space and may not be in any rush to live here. And they have allowed the recovering earth to be an interesting experiment in natural human development.

I have sketched out an unusual paradigm for us to contemplate. It is vastly more real and possible to me than is can ever be to you. It resolves a whole range of unspoken questions that have been hanging over our heads and studiously ignored. Like what was modern man doing for fifty thousand years before the abrupt end of the ice age? Particularly in view of what we have done in the 12,900 years since.

Exploding Asteroid Theory Strengthened by New Evidence Located in Ohio, Indiana

Was the course of life on the planet altered 12,900 years ago by a giant comet exploding over Canada? New evidence found by UC Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ken Tankersley and colleagues suggests the answer is affirmative.

Date: 7/2/2008


By: Carey Hoffman

Geological evidence found in Ohio and Indiana in recent weeks is strengthening the case to attribute what happened 12,900 years ago in North America -- when the end of the last Ice Age unexpectedly turned into a phase of extinction for animals and humans – to a cataclysmic comet or asteroid explosion over top of Canada.

A comet/asteroid theory advanced by Arizona-based geophysicist Allen West in the past two years says that an object from space exploded just above the earth’s surface at that time over modern-day Canada, sparking a massive shock wave and heat-generating event that set large parts of the northern hemisphere ablaze, setting the stage for the extinctions.

Ken Tankersley

Now University of Cincinnati Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ken Tankersley, working in conjunction with Allen West and Indiana Geological Society Research Scientist Nelson R. Schaffer, has verified evidence from sites in Ohio and Indiana – including, locally, Hamilton and Clermont counties in Ohio and Brown County in Indiana – that offers the strongest support yet for the exploding comet/asteroid theory.

Samples of diamonds, gold and silver that have been found in the region have been conclusively sourced through X-ray diffractometry in the lab of UC Professor of Geology Warren Huff back to the diamond fields region of Canada.

The only plausible scenario available now for explaining their presence this far south is the kind of cataclysmic explosive event described by West’s theory. "We believe this is the strongest evidence yet indicating a comet impact in that time period," says Tankersley.

Ironically, Tankersley had gone into the field with West believing he might be able to disprove West’s theory.

Tankersley was familiar through years of work in this area with the diamonds, gold and silver deposits, which at one point could be found in such abundance in this region that the Hopewell Indians who lived here about 2,000 years ago engaged in trade in these items.

Prevailing thought said that these deposits, which are found at a soil depth consistent with the time frame of the comet/asteroid event, had been brought south from the Great Lakes region by glaciers.

"My smoking gun to disprove (West) was going to be the gold, silver and diamonds," Tankersley says. "But what I didn’t know at that point was a conclusion he had reached that he had not yet made public – that the likely point of impact for the comet wasn’t just anywhere over Canada, but located over Canada’s diamond-bearing fields. Instead of becoming the basis for rejecting his hypothesis, these items became the very best evidence to support it."

Additional sourcing work is being done at the sites looking for iridium, micro-meteorites and nano-diamonds that bear the markers of the diamond-field region, which also should have been blasted by the impact into this region. Ken Tankersley in the field Ken Tankersley seen working in the field in a cave in this publicity photo from the National Geographic Channel.

Much of the work is being done in Sheriden Cave in north-central Ohio’s Wyandot County, a rich repository of material dating back to the Ice Age.

Tankersley first came into contact with West and Schaffer when they were invited guests for interdisciplinary colloquia presented by UC’s Department of Geology this spring.

West presented on his theory that a large comet or asteroid, believed to be more than a mile in diameter, exploded just above the earth at a time when the last Ice Age appeared to be drawing to a close.

The timing attached to this theory of about 12,900 years ago is consistent with the known disappearances in North America of the wooly mammoth population and the first distinct human society to inhabit the continent, known as the Clovis civilization. At that time, climatic history suggests the Ice Age should have been drawing to a close, but a rapid change known as the Younger Dryas event, instead ushered in another 1,300 years of glacial conditions. A cataclysmic explosion consistent with West’s theory would have the potential to create the kind of atmospheric turmoil necessary to produce such conditions.

"The kind of evidence we are finding does suggest that climate change at the end of the last Ice Age was the result of a catastrophic event," Tankersley says.

Currently, Tankersley can be seen in a new documentary airing on the National Geographic channel. The film "Asteroids" is part of that network’s "Naked Science" series.

The new discoveries made working with West and Schaffer will be incorporated into two more specials that Tankersley is currently involved with – one for the PBS series "Nova" and a second for the History Channel that will be filming Tankersley and his UC students in the field this summer. Another documentary, this one being produced by the Discovery Channel and the British public television network Channel 4, will also be following Tankersley and his students later this summer.

As more data continues to be compiled, Tankersley, West and Schaffer will be publishing about this newest twist in the search to explain the history of our planet and its climate.

Climate change is a favorite topic for Tankersley. "The ultimate importance of this kind of work is showing that we can’t control everything," he says. "Our planet has been hit by asteroids many times throughout its history, and when that happens, it does produce climate change."

Monday, May 5, 2008

Pleistocene Event Horizon

I have had a better chance to review the data provided by the paper I posted last Thursday on the evidence for a meteor blast approximately 12,900 years ago. It is extraordinarily compelling. As my readers know from my previous postings, the presence of charcoal is not a natural event, even though common sense suggests that it should be. The temperatures required to reduce carbon based material to elemental carbon is very high and typically well in excess of the natural ignition temperature of carbon in the presence of oxygen. That is why forest fires fail to cover the ground with a thick layer of carbon rather than ash.

So when the geological record shows a layer of carbon over an entire continent, that means that an extreme heat event took place in such a way as to also minimize the effect of available oxygen. This really means no more than that the volatiles produced burned away from the carbon which is what one could expect from an external continental heat event.

Not surprisingly the extinction of the mega fauna and Clovis culture clearly coincides with this particular event horizon. We can expect to find that this also coincides with the abrupt extinction event that also overwhelmed Siberia wiping out the mammoths apparently there in a single day. The carbon dating ranges between 12.7 through 13.5 which is well within the expected scatter for a geographically distributed event taking place over twelve and a half thousand years ago. We are actually almost at a time range in which any resolution is breaking down and we must be extremely wary of any single data point.

What has been shown is that just like the dinosaur event horizon, the post event strata have no mega fauna or Clovis artifacts. The distribution of the charcoal horizon is so far all of North America east of the mountains and south of the ice sheet. It also includes a locale in Belgium were the surrounding area was still I think largely locked in ice also.

Imagining a thermonuclear blast centered on the western Arctic and traveling in the southeast direction is an excellent analogy. The battering of the Carolinas with ice chunks creating the impact bays rounds out the story. The heat blast would have swept the continent and likely dissipated only on traveling over open water. If the impact was in the mile thick ice then the crater may have lacked a scaring event on the underlying rock. I rather imagine that there is a lot more evidence to be found in the form of ice generated impact events.

What we have just described is a sharp tangential blow to the polar icecap and crustal area. This was enough to get the crust moving and a lot less than otherwise required which has been recognized by other commentators to be problematic as to survivability. Once the crust was moving, the polar center of mass shifted to the current configuration thirty degrees off the original axis, which is just about were you would expect it to end up.

This placed the northern ice cap firmly into the northern temperate wind belt commencing the melting process and the immediate temperature drop for the global climate since called the Younger Dryas. This melting took place over the next twelve hundred years. During this time the Gulf Stream was established and the Scandinavian ice sheet destroyed. A monster onshore sea was created against the melting ice waiting to break out into the Atlantic. Its collapse sped the final collapse of the remainder of the polar icecap.

It is possible that the sure knowledge of the pending collapse of great onshore sea was culturally remembered giving rise to the legend of the flood. Through all this the sea level rose three hundred feet, flooding the continental shelf for the first time. But once complete, the Younger Dryas abruptly ended and the world has settled down into the most stable climate seen the emergence of the Panama Isthmus. This is natural since the Gulf Stream now dumps enough heat directly into the polar region to make sure of it.

It was a great global catastrophe but also the harbinger and creator of the Northern Temperate Zone that we have relied on for the past ten thousand years. We now have the critical evidence to support my original hypothesis of a Pleistocene event. That the event was clearly an amazingly well directed meteor strike was more than I for one was prepared to anticipate. That it hit as it did saved most of humanity and life on earth in general while releasing the crust to settle in a very advantageous location.

And that children, is a problem. We have several incredibly unlikely coincidences. That alone opens the door to whether our ancestors or someone else planned this event as a direct act of terraforming. I could only speculate on what was possible, but never a precisely targeted silver bullet that got the job done with no waste. It is a bit too good to be true.

The apparent recent emergence of the planet Venus is also another act of very convenient world building or at least the preparation for such. This is controversial of course, but the evidence to date supports just that proposition and certainly does not rule it out. Read Pleistocene Nonconformity.

If we had proper space propulsion tomorrow, we could immediately start to terraform Venus with little difficulty. We just need to move comet junk out of the Kuiper Belt and bombard Venus.