10,000 BC:
The Real Story
The Place that Mocks Science - Tracking the Real Story of the Events of 10,000 B.C.
Stephen E. Robbins, PhD
Center for Advanced Product Engineering
Metavante Corporation
10850 West Park Place
Milwaukee, WI 53224
3/15/2008
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.
http://www.stephenerobbins.com/Other/BC10k.htm