The Younger Dryas - Cause and Significance
Some possible topics - explanation below if you think this is interesting:
1. The Younger Dryas event - catastrophic impact or some other cause - accidental or influenced?
2. If an impact event: the location of the primary crater or craters arising from this event.
3. Human societies before, during and immediately after this event.
4. Human interactions with Cenozoic wildlife.
5. The fate of the last living mammoth.
6. The origin of the festival of the dead in Mexico. The origin of Halloween in the Occident.
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A rather wordy explanation of my interest in the above. I am an interested bystander and not a schooled participant in any part of this controversy.
I keenly follow Farsight's investigations into human origins and the role of ET engagement/interference in our origins and our destiny. I am also interested in other alternative approaches to getting our story straight by researchers in other fields who have become deeply frustrated at academic dogmas that block new insights and exploration.
There is a now a persuasive body of scientific evidence that a large comet fragment collided with the Earth 12,800 years ago as Earth was leaving the last ice age and that this violent impact plunged the planet into a renewed short sharp 'nuclear winter' type crisis of about 1,000 years duration before the planet rapidly changed to its present general state of climate. This dramatic period called the Younger Dryas by geologists is not in dispute but the event or the series of events that caused it is. It is only fair to mention here that yet another theory relates to violent solar activity at that time.
The mainstream, that dogmatically resists 'catastrophism', insists that melting ice must have caused a change in thermal circulation and generated the YD event as a normal possible consequence of a retreating ice age. The official view of the YD event is undeveloped and appearing obsolete but there is nevertheless great resistance to exploration of the impact theory and the material evidence for this theory.
In connection with this there is also a body of controversial archaeological research that promotes the idea that many of our enigmatic megalithic sites date from a great worldwide civilisation that was thriving up to the point of the catastrophe 12,800 years ago. The new theory argues that because modern humans have a prior history of at least around 300,000 years the claim that humans did not progress past the hunter-gatherer mode of existence until about 6,000 years ago makes no sense.
Instead the theory claims that the humans remaining after the Younger Dryas event had been 'bombed' back into a stone age existence and had to set about recreating civilisation almost from scratch while making use of any remnants of the old order and knowledge that remained to them; sometimes even building in a cruder style on top of the remaining megalithic sites where they were available.
Megalithic sites all over the world show extreme sophistication and often interlocking stonework at the base of later more primitive building styles. See anomalies like the 1,200 ton megaliths in Baalbek that clearly and inexplicably predate the Greek and Roman structures built on top of them.
The extreme Younger Dryas event seems also to be the probable cause of the extinction of the Cenozoic megafauna, things like: sabre toothed tigers, mammoths, mastodons and all manner of amazing and huge wildlife that our ancestors shared the planet with. The mainstream view here is that these creatures were hunted into extinction by our technologically puny stone age ancestors and suffered habitat and food loss due to climate disturbance brought about by the end of the last ice age.
The Asteroid Research Group promoting the impact theory are scientists who may be incidentally interested in the anthropological theories but whose work is focused on interpreting ice cores and impact evidence in deposits and geographical features. Speculatively some from this group propose the Autumn Taurid debris stream as the best candidate for having delivered the lethal payload.
One of the researchers playfully wondered if this particular ancient and deadly Taurid shower lives on in our cultural consciousness in the worldwide phenomenon of festivals of the dead, Halloween and so on that take place in October and November.
I do realise these topics are a bit off the current focus of Farsight published material. I would advise anyone interested in these ideas to research this 'hot topic' which is finally impacting debates in mainstream publications like Nature. But most of all I would love for people to look at Cenozoic wildlife. Our ancestors lived alongside an incredible collection of animals of mind blowing size and yet we hardly hear anything about them (in Flintstones veritas?) and all this was going on just 13,000 years ago - wonderful!
Finally I want to make the case that this topic does have some significance for the Farsight project in that it embraces yet another challenge to the nineteenth century European view of the world that puts white northern Europeans at the pinnacle of the human project - from stone age through Greece and Rome to Caucasian space age, the perfect endpoint of evolution. Supremacist ideology has had too much influence in shaping the direction and permissible conclusions of human research into all areas of knowledge. The decadent influence of fading empires is even now a dead weight holding us all back