Out of Eden, the Anthropocene, and the last Younger-Dryas extinction

To understand what follows, the reader should be familiar with my paper, “The Flooding of the Mediterranean Basin at the Younger-Dryas Boundary” and its findings. They include: (1) identifying geology’s historic and far-reaching ‘no Flood’ error; (2) identifying and analyzing the Younger-Dryas impact that delivered the worldwide Flood waters (i.e., the Younger-Dryas event and the worldwide Flood are synonymous); (3) establishing that the Mediterranean Sea flooded through the Strait of Gibraltar ~12,800 years before present; (4) recognizing that humans are not out of Africa – we are from landscapes now submerged under more than two miles of water; (5) recognizing that humans are ill-adapted to the post-Flood ecosystem and that continued survival necessitates environmental abuses. Also, as in my paper, I employ the term ‘IO’ to represent the large, comet-like impacting object that delivered the worldwide Flood.

Out of Eden

The nearly unimaginable volume of water delivered by the IO chased humans upward from landscapes that they had occupied for millions of years. It was an unrelenting pursuit that lasted several weeks, and it would nearly kill our species – the number of human survivors across the planet would number in the thousands. Survival trauma inspired commemoration in ubiquitous oral and written traditions. Some of the oral traditions, however embellished over time, found their way to the written. Examples include two biblical accounts, Noah’s ark, and the story of Adam and Eve.

Regarding Noah and the Flood, we should first note that the story pre-dates biblical times by roughly 10,000 years. If Noah was an actual person, then he probably operated his craft in the pre-Flood sea that existed in the western half of the Mediterranean Basin (see Fig. 6 in my paper). Med denizens would have observed the IO on its approach, felt the impact-induced earthquakes, and experienced nearly immediate changes to regional weather – persistent rains were among the monumental changes taking place across the planet. Thus, the reported forty days and nights of precipitation represent the period of time from immediately after the IO’s impact until its waters began flowing through the Strait of Gibraltar from the west. As the story evolved, rainfall would be attributed as the cause of the Flood.

The animals that Noah encountered, post-Deluge, would include a mixture of those that existed for tens of millions of years in formerly upland, pre-Flood domains, as well as species from formerly abyssal landscapes that survived upward, like us (related discussion here). Today, we encounter a subset of initially Flood-surviving species – as the post-Diluvian ecosystem emerged, some of them would become extinct because they could neither adapt nor migrate to suitable landscapes (e.g., wooly mammoths).

Noah’s craft is reported to have landed on Ararat, so candidate locations are post-Flood landforms either in or surrounding the Med. Ararat might have been the name of a pre-flood mountain that was sufficiently tall as to become a post-Flood Mediterranean island, like Sicily. Certainly, Noah’s Ararat is not a mountain in Turkey.

Like Noah and the ark, the legend of Adam and Eve is another Flood-survivor story – it has nothing to do with creation (unless one considers the post-Flood period as a ‘new Earth’). Pre-Flood humans, represented by the pair, were naked (better said: furless) because they were adapted to the pre-Flood, warmer abyssal ecosystem. The post-Flood Earth is much cooler, so Flood-surviving humans recognized that they were ill-adapted and that clothing would be necessary to survive; it is not that the pair recognized that they were naked after eating something.

The pair encounters the serpent, Satan, which happens to be among the many names by which the IO was known (among other names are Phaeton and Set). As detailed in my paper, the 2500 km (1500 mile) diameter IO was not a comet but rather the source object from which comets fragment. So, imagine its immense tail as it approached Earth – it would have been brightly illuminated, incredibly long and, well, serpentine. Thus, the snake is an allegory for the IO, and its effects were so planet-altering that humans found themselves ill-adapted: in the new, post-Flood ecosystem, we must work, toil, compete, cooperate, and acquire and transform resources – all to create survivable habitats. That is, Satan, the celestial IO, cast us out of Eden and caused an immediate change to our nature.

Although we will never know exactly what it was like in abyssal, pre-Flood Earth, our physical attributes lend some insight. Certainly, it was much warmer, which, as already stated, accounts for our furless appearance. (Our simian relatives evolved in ecosystems that were more than two miles above ours, which made them much cooler, thereby accounting for their fur.) We need fresh water, so we lived close to its sources; it is nearly certain that diverse cultures or clans shared a common fresh water source, e.g. the Ganges. The structure of our feet might indicate that we traversed sandy or soft domains. We walk upright, which implies that our ecosystems were lightly forested – being upright allowed us to see further. The atmosphere was thicker above our abyssal landscapes, and this caused the attenuation of UV and higher frequency sun light, especially in locations further from the tropics. This would account for reports that humans only recently began to see the color blue, as well as regionally dependent skin pigment variations and hair color diversity.

There were no pre-Flood cities because there was no need for the aggregation and distribution of resources – we were properly adapted, and suitable food was indigenous to our various habitats. Atlantis was not a city; rather, it was a region through which an abundant fresh water source flowed, and its canals were created to increase fresh water access to as many denizens of the clan as possible.

The Anthropocene

Out of Eden for nearly thirteen-thousand years, we continue our quest to survive as an ill-adapted species. Unfortunately, there are few places, if any, on post-Flood Earth that are Eden-like (where could we walk around naked while simultaneously supported by adequate food sources?). To survive, at least initially, required stamina and problem-solving skills. Acquiring suitable foods, combatting cold environs, building shelters, and accomplishing simple tasks such as walking would favor those inclined to discovery and innovation.

The myriad survival tasks would be difficult, if not impossible, for an individual – it would become readily apparent that our continued existence required group effort, or eusocial behaviors (yes, I communicated with EO Wilson prior to his recent death). Specialization in post-Flood survival-related skills would provide advantage to the clan; region-specific eusocial adaptations would lead to distinct cultures with associated, survival-related norms. Successful cultural norms, strategies, and implementations would foster larger populations which, in turn, would lead to greater demands for – and exploitation of – natural resources.

Some claim that we are in a new geologic era, the Anthropocene, wherein human activity is the dominant influence on the environment. In the context of the above discussion: the Anthropocene is the most recent (~12,800 years) post-Flood period during which humanity’s innate desire to survive, along with the demands our ill-adaptation inflict on the environment, has dominated the planet.

The Last of the Younger-Dryas Extinctions

The Flood changed the entire planet. In addition to the obvious inundation of formerly abyssal landscapes, the newly introduced waters initiated global weather patterns that would transform regional ecosystems. Inland seas would evaporate, former rainforests would dry up, burn, and become deserts, former steppes would become rainforests, etc., – all recognized Younger-Dryas effects. These irreversible, Flood-induced changes would cause many extinctions.

Though we will never know the flora and fauna lost in our ancestral, abyssal landscapes, we are nonetheless aware of many species that became extinct ~12,800 years before present in landscapes that we now occupy. For instance, in “Disappearance of Ice Age Megafauna and the Younger-Dryas Impact,” Firestone reports the loss of 82% of mammals weighing over 40kg in North America, 74% in South America, and 59% in Europe, 52% in Asia, and 16% in sub-Saharan Africa. Other publications reporting Younger-Dryas extinctions are readily available (e.g. here and here).

Despite the monumental changes to the planet, we coped and are now more than 600 generations into our post-Flood survival story. In a sense, we have more than ‘coped’ – we have succeeded: presently, there are roughly 8 billion of us, each ill-adapted and seeking suitable environments. (Not too long ago, it might have been said that we sought suitable environments so as to propagate the species; however, we have ‘progressed’ to a point where that is no longer necessarily true.) Our ability to adapt has led to the creation of personal Eden’s that provide shelter, warmth, and food – all supported by infrastructures that afford the transportation and distribution of necessary resources. These individual Eden’s exist within major clans (aka nation-states) that compete for survival-supporting natural resources, as well as what might be the optimal system for distributing them.

Some say that we have succeeded to such an extent that our present numbers exceed the planet’s carrying capacity for our species. Thus, our population must be reduced. If so, then the unique feature of the Anthropocene is that humans have become the primary threat to their continued survival.

How will our numbers be reduced, and who will enact it? And, even if our numbers were to be reduced to some agreed upon level, what would prevent a repeat of technology-supported exponential population growth that led to the present problem? The answers to these questions exist, and they are not pleasant (at least not to me).

I will finish with this: though we are sentient, we are wholly clueless about the nature of our survival problem due to the pervasive effects stemming from geology’s ‘no Flood’ error. Would a universal and correct understanding of who we are, where we are from, and what has happened to our planet somehow help? Probably not. So, the last of the Younger-Dryas extinctions will be us.

Interpreting portions of the sprawling 8-mile-long ‘canvas’ discovered in the Amazon rainforest

In a previous post, I discussed the immense mural found in the Colombian Amazon, as well as an interaction that I had with the researchers who discovered it. In this post, I will interpret some of the mural contents from the perspective that there was a worldwide flood and that ensuing ecosystem changes made survival difficult for most animals, especially so for those that inhabited the former abyss.

I will concentrate on a portion of one of the images found in many articles reporting the discovery of the mural. A few comments before doing so: (1) Some of the articles mention that the Amazon was transforming from savannah to rain forest at the time the mural was created. This is correct; the introduction of the worldwide flood waters 12,800+/- years before present – essentially the same time as the mural’s creation – induced planet-wide climate changes and, therefore, local environmental changes. (2) Some articles claim that humans hunted some species to extinction. This is incorrect: all known extinctions at this time (e.g., the Younger-Dryas extinctions) were caused by changed environments.

In this analysis, I assume that time moves upward, that triangular waves represent water, and that rectangles represent landforms. Here is a portion of the mural found in many of the articles reporting the mural’s discovery.

In the blue oval, below, is a region of pre-Flood Earth with which the mural’s author(s) was(were) familiar. To the left is a large land mass (square with dots aligned in an X pattern). Perhaps the dots inside the square represent trees, or maybe the interior pattern is meant to convey the shape of mountains. This region was separated from other landforms by a ridge (vertical lines enclosing cross hatches). In the center of the oval were two major inhabited areas that included water, animals such as deer, and humans. I am not sure what the square waves (on the right) represent, though I suspect it could be an uninhabitable region because humans lived outside it (below and to its right).

The next oval captures the Flood’s effects. Note that the introduction of the water has covered the ridges, one of the square landforms that was between them, and most of the uninhabitable regions (square waves). Note that the animals are headed toward the central square! They were flushed out of their natural domains by the water, and they headed toward survival on dry land.

By the way, this explanation accounts for the diversity of creatures found in the Galapagos Islands – non-indigenous species survived upward and those that could adapt are now found mixed in with indigenous species.

In the next image, the arrows capture the time evolution of the two land masses that remain exposed after the Flood. If the dots inside the square represent trees, then it demonstrates the transformation of the region associated with the yellow arrows from steppe to rainforest.

In the uppermost oval we observe that a subset of the animals from the central oval is leaving the region. This might represent the extinction of some species. In addition, the outward migration reflects that some surviving species could not adapt to the region’s Flood-induced ecosystem changes. (Note that the four-legged creature with large ears found in all three ovals survives the ordeal. Could it be a flying squirrel or a bat?)

Hand prints in another image are found above the triangular wave. The meaning: I am human, I survived the Flood, and I wanted you to know.

Also, it appears that pre-Flood vegetation (plant leaves below the triangular wave and to the right of the hand) differs from the vegetation that survivors encountered afterward, depicted to the right of the hand prints. It would be fascinating to understand the human pre-Flood diet and how it differs from what we now consume….

Does the mural depict the IO’s appearance and debris trail on Earth approach?

In my paper (and book), I refer to the celestial object that delivered the Flood as the IO (impacting object). It was very large, about 1500 miles in diameter, and it was made up primarily of loosely compacted ice chunks. It was loosely packed due to very small gravitational accelerations (relative to Earth) induced by its solid core that attracted ice and other debris in the Oort Cloud where it formed. The IO would have been visible for many years prior to its impact, and, along its way, the Sun’s gravitational acceleration and other forces would cause the IO to shed some chunks that we now call comets. Its sun-illuminated approach would have made a lasting impression….

The IO’s path led to its capture by Earth’s gravity, as well as its ensuing impact in what is now the Southern Ocean. Back-propagating the IO’s core impact trough reveals that its pre-impact approach path overflew North America, Central America, and South America. Schematics of the approach path are shown, below. The first is a side view showing that the IO was highest over North America during approach, which would account for the continent-wide spread in its debris field (from off the Monterey, CA, coast to the Carolina Bays).

The second depicts the IO’s core overflight “shadow” just prior to impact.

On its approach, the IO would shed a long tail of debris that created impact craters in North America, South America, and South Africa. Examples of impact craters are shown below:

Carolina Bays (North America):

California coast (North America):

Colombia (South America):

Argentina (South America):

South Africa:

The fragile IO split in two just before impact, and this accounts for the gap in the impact crescent.

Identical perspectives of the IO impact site in the Southern Ocean include: (top) bathymetry image with a superimposed diameter that measure 1500 miles (2500 km); and (bottom) a magnetic anomaly overlay. Note the parallel central scrapes, scoured by the IO’s solid core, that are perpendicular to the blue diameter segment (top) and corroborated by a red band (bottom). To the northwest of the impact site is South Africa (upper left), and to its south (below) is Antarctica.

The IO split was also recorded in a South African cave painting, shown below and described here.

Why all this? Because the mural tells the story of what survivors encountered, and it is nearly certain that they witnessed the debris that rained down as the IO flew overhead. As such, I strongly suspect that somewhere in the mural is a depiction of the debris storm.

Two final comments:

It would be interesting to know if anyone was “in charge” of the mural, as well as how many years it captures.

The Flood completely changed the Earth, it created a horrific scenario for inhabitants, and survivors wanted to tell their story. The Amazon mural is another commemoration of the event.

The Sacred Ganges

Background: the Ganges river system

A recent paper reports the discovery of ancient wood chips in a sediment sample obtained from the Bay of Bengal. The authors conclude that “woody debris can survive thousands of kilometers of transport in rivers and in turbidites, to be deposited in the fan.” (Lee et al, 2019)

The notion that millions-year old wood could be found at various depths in the sediment column (meaning that the deposits occurred many years apart) – at the exact same location, more than a thousand miles from shore and more than two miles below present sea level – should cause the authors, reviewers, and any scientist to question the matter. For, what is the probability that trees would float to the exact same spot, thousands of miles from the present coastline, sink more than two miles, and then become quickly covered in sediment so as to survive for millions of years? How did the sediments get there? Where did the sediments originate? What mechanism transported the tree-preserving sediments through the Bay’s essentially stagnant water?

All rhetorical questions because the idea that the trees became submerged thousands of miles from shore is as absurd as thinking that Monterey Canyon was created by subsurface flows. The paper’s claim is yet another example of geologists fitting observations to their erroneous “no Flood, ever” paradigm. It is fantasy masquerading as science. The ridiculous findings prompted me to investigate the matter.

The drill region from which the paper’s cores were obtained is shown on the Google Earth image, below (left, centered vic 7.91°N, 85.854°E). There we observe a former river bed with its oxbows, found nearly 4000 m below sea level and 1600 km south of where the Ganges River presently drains into the Bay of Bengal. The map to its right is a portion of the post-Flood Ganges drainage (centered vic 26.732°N, 82.252°E and rotated 90^o clockwise from north for comparison). Each displayed region measures roughly 30 km by 50 km and is viewed from a height of approximately 90 km. (Google Earth, 2020)

The ship that obtained the cores also mapped about 1500 km of the bay’s floor over an extensive track oriented mainly north-to-south. Its path can be observed on Google Earth; segments are identified by orange parallel lines in upcoming maps. Several portions of the ship track reveal oxbows of the pre-Flood Ganges.

The next map is a screenshot of the Ganges system draining into the Bay, as well as where it once flowed down the continental shelf (top center). The light blue/aqua coloring denotes the extent of the post-Flood sediment deposit in the bay (sediments do not transport through essentially stagnant water!). Gravity brought the pre-Flood Ganges waters from the higher plain, down the continental shelf, and then into the formerly subaerial abyss. We can identify its oxbows in parts of the yellow oval.

The region in the yellow oval is shown in following two maps, one with superimposed icons depicting the ship track sounding region with orange lines and yellow arrows that identify pre-Flood Ganges meanders. [Note: depth, and lat, lon locations for map centers are shown in the lower right of the Google Earth screen captures in each of the following maps.]

We follow the ship track southward in the next several images, and we discover more meanders and oxbows.

The ship track ends near the following map center where we observe the oxbows from which the paper’s cores were obtained (left side of first image, above).

Note that the depth of the oxbows decreases as we moved from north to south (-8323 ft, -9177 ft, -10527 ft, and -12364 ft). This should not surprise us – the pre-Flood Ganges waters followed the path of least resistance while accelerating due to gravity.

A bit further south, another ship track sounding with an east-west orientation reveals other river systems, identified again by the yellow arrows. Note that the riverbeds have essentially north-south orientations. (I believe that the Ganges is the system furthest east.)

Based on the riverbeds found in the ship track soundings in the above maps, we can piece together that the Ganges flowed from its mountain source region, through presently subaerial landscapes, down the shelf, and then through thousands of abyssal kilometers. The estimated pre-Flood Ganges River path is depicted by the red line on the next map.

The Ganges water would eventually drain into a pre-Flood sea. It is circled in black on the map, below, and the approximate path it followed is depicted in red. (The pre-flood Earth map comes from my paper, “The Flooding of the Mediterranean Basin at the Younger-Dryas Boundary,” that addresses the worldwide flood and geology’s historic “no flood, ever” error.)

We should note that this formerly subaerial river system explains why we find millions-year old tree remnants submerged in various sediment layers thousands of miles off the present shoreline: the trees were carried by the Ganges, then buried and preserved by the river’s sediments over the millions of years prior to the region becoming submerged by the worldwide flood.

Sacred Ganges

For tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, the Ganges provided life-supporting water to humans occupying pre-Flood abyssal regions beneath what is now the Bay of Bengal. It is very likely that humans from the region shared a common culture. No doubt, some ventured to upland Ganges plains that would have necessitated some sort of clothing for warmth, perhaps the origin of khadi clothing. (Note: the adiabatic lapse rate would have the pre-Flood upland region about 35^oC cooler than abyssal landscapes.)

The Flood’s survivors either made their way up the continental shelf, or they occupied the upland plains (that remain subaerial) when the Flood-delivering impact occurred. There, the Ganges would continue to provide requisite water. Portions of pre-Flood culture would have survived as well, which would account for the river’s reputation.

I suspect that Flood legends exist in Indian historical traditions. As such, this essay should be of interest to those responsible for maintaining them.

Bibliography

Google Earth: left, centered vicinity 7.91°N, 85.854°E; right, vicinity 26.732°N, 82.252°E. Google Earth, earth.google.com/web/.

M. Jaye, The Flooding of the Mediterranean basin at the Younger-Dryas boundary. Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, 19(1), 71-83 (2019).

H. Lee, V. Galy, X. Feng, C. Ponton, A. Galy, C. France-Lanord, S.J. Feakins, Sustained wood burial in the Bengal Fan over the last 19My. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, 22518-22525 (2019).

Sprawling 8-mile-long ‘canvas’ of ice age beasts discovered hidden in Amazon rainforest

Ice age canvas painted 12,600 years ago discovered hidden in Amazon rainforest

A report detailing the discovery of an 8-mile long mural appears in “Colonisation and early peopling of the Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene: New evidence from La Serranía La Lindosa,” available here. According to the paper, indigenous people likely started painting the images at Serranía La Lindosa, on the northern edge of the Colombian Amazon, about 12,600 years before present.

The thousands of paintings include handprints, geometric designs, and a wide array of animals, from the small (deer, tapir, alligators, bats, monkeys, turtles, serpents, porcupines) to the large (camelids, horses, and three-toed hoofed mammals with trunks). Other figures depict humans, hunting scenes, and images of people interacting with plants, trees, and savannah creatures.

According to one of the paper’s authors, at the time the paintings were created, the Amazon was transforming from a patchwork landscape of savannas, thorny scrub, and forests into today’s leafy tropical rainforest. He added that many of South America’s large animals went extinct during this period, likely through a combination of human hunting and climate change.

“These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land, and how they hunted, farmed, and fished,” study co-researcher José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, said in the statement. “It is likely art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.”

A few comments on the report:

The transformation of the Amazon from savannah to rain forest is wholly due to the planet-wide climate change induced by the worldwide flood waters.

The extinctions were caused by the animals’ changed environments, not human hunting.

The images caused me to wonder: what would inspire ancients to create such an extensive memorialization? So, I contacted the authors of the paper with the following email:

“I came across your paper due to the appearance of findings in recent news reports (e.g. here).

That you date the images to 12,600 years before present caught my attention. It is consistent with the ubiquitous nano-diamond layer formed by a cosmic impact at the Younger-Dryas boundary (approximately 12,800 years before present). I discuss the matter in my recent paper, The Flooding of the Mediterranean Basin at the Younger-Dryas Boundary, available here.

Your discovery prompts an important question: what would inspire the ancients to memorialize some event in an 8-mile long mural? The answer: survival after the Flood (discussed here).

I hope that you will keep this in mind as you go about deciphering the images. For instance, could the triangular waves represent the Flood’s waters? Could the block-shaped waves represent the ice that accompanied the newly introduced, planet-changing waters?

Regards,

Michael Jaye, PhD”