Message #167962

[Helios]

15,000 B.C. - Species Extinction - "... in different parts of the earth (for different reasons and at different times) the long epoch of glaciation witnessed several quite distinct episodes of extinction. In all areas, the vast majority of the many destroyed species were lost in the final seven thousand years from about 15,000 BC down to 8,000 BC.... In the New World, for example, more than seventy genera of large animals became extinct between 15,000 BC and 8,000 BC, including all North American members of seven families, and one complete order, the Proboscidea. These staggering losses, involving the violent obliteration of more than 40 million animals, were not spread out evenly over the whole period; on the contrary, the vast majority of the extinctions occured in just two thousand years, between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC. To put this in perspective, during the previous 300,000 years only about twenty genera had disappeared.
� �"The same pattern of late and massive extinctions was repeated across Europe and Asia. Even far-off Australia was not exempt, losing perhaps nineteen genera of large vertebrates, not all of them mammals, in a relatively short period of time.
� �"The northern regions of Alaska and Siberia appear to have been the worst hit by the murderous upheavals between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. In a great swathe of death around the edge of the Artic Circle the remains of uncountable numbers of large animals have been found - including many carcases with the flesh still intact, and astonishing quantities of perfectly preserved mammoth tusks. Indeed, in both regions, mammoth carcases have been thawed to feed to sled dogs and mammoth steaks have featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks. One authority has commented, 'Hundreds of thousands ofindividuals must have been frozen immediately after death and remained frozen, otherwise the meat and the ivory would have spoiled ... Some powerful general force was certainly at work to bring the catastrophe about.' " [Graham Hancock, Fingerprints Of The Gods, p. 212-213]