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News: USA showered by a watery comet ~11,000 years ago, ending the Golden Age of man in America
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050926/mammoth_02.html
 
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Graham Hancock's The Magicians of the Gods

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Monument of Monsters
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« on: December 22, 2015, 02:00:25 am »

He didn't dig very deeply into what "scientists thought."  Nor did he do anything other than look at an idea and then work it into his books and then weaves around anecdotes and ideas as though they are fact.

* HugeExplodingComet is unconfirmed (nanodiamonds can come from other sources.)
* In order for the HugeExplodingComet to have caused extinctions, it would have had to be a Species-Specific HugeExplodingComet that killed all members of a species while leaving others the same size and in the same region and econiche alive.  Example: short-faced bear goes extinct, but grizzly bears continue just fine.  It kills all the mammoths (over a 7,000 year time period) but leaves African and Asian elephants alive.  Kills the dire wolf while leaving the wolf, grizzly, cougar, and a host of other similar predators alive. (etc, etc.)
* By the time of the HugeExplodingComet, humans had reached and were living in almost every corner of the world
* If there HAD been a high tech civilization that hugged the coasts (unlikely) they would still have had to (for example) make and use roads from one part of the continent to the other (unless they were too dumb to know that it's easier to walk straight from Michigan to California than to take the water route and canoe/swim/float all the way around South America and back up to the Hudson River and the Great Lakes.  We can trace the Silk Road on Google Earth and find long vanished villages via satellite.  Where's the evidence of these roads?

And have you ever thought seriously about the idea of a "global amnesia"?  How does a hypothetical meteor (or several) going KABOOM over 1/8th of the planet cause Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and India to develop "amnesia" when most of the world couldn't see or hear the presumed explosion?
*** Humans have seen huge icewalls crack and fail, huge volcanoes explode, Northern Lights, meteors and meteorites (all throughout the year), eclipses, at least one recorded supernova -- and civilizations didn't collapse of develop wholesale amnesia. 
*** Why didn't the Tunguska event or the Krakatoa volcano exploding cause the world to develop amnesia?
*** People who have amnesia don't forget how to cook, how to drive cars, how to hammer nails, etc, etc.  What kind of amnesia would make them forget basic things like construction?
*** Why aren't there signs of this civilization rising?  Stone age hunters and gatherers don't just fall out of their caves one day and start building electric cars. 


And how about that Stone Age?  If everyone reading this thread were tossed onto a deserted area all at once, would they re-invent flint arrowheads as weapons or would they start out with something easy and contemporary like bo staffs and nunchucks and slingshots?   

And that's before we start looking at the very bad "this artifact sorta looks like THAT artifact (made 2,000 years later and 3,000 miles away) if you hold the artifact THIS way and sort of squint lots." comparisons.

I don't want to take up too much time for folks but this basic response can be built upon.
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Monument of Monsters
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« Reply #1 on: December 22, 2015, 02:01:38 am »

Here is a review of said book by Jason Colavito

http://www.jasoncola...ml#.Vm9gBr_-X_d

Notable quote from the review:

Quote
Speaking as someone who found Fingerprints of the Gods to be entertaining and engaging, even when it was wrong, I can say that Magicians of the Gods is not a good book by either the standards of entertainment or science. It is Hancock at his worst: angry, petulant, and slipshod. Hancock assumes readers have already read and remembered all of his previous books going back decades, and his new book fails to stand on its own either as an argument or as a piece of literature. It is an update and an appendix masquerading as a revelation. This much is evident from the amount of material Hancock asks readers to return to Fingerprints to consult, and the number of references—bad, secondary ones—he copies wholesale from the earlier book, or cites directly to himself in that book.

A much shorter review

https://www.kirkusre...ns-of-the-gods/

Quote
So how did those Babylonians and Incas and proto-Hittites build their massive structures of monolith and marble? Well, setting aside the possibility that some long-inundated, advanced civilization supplied the know-how, the answer is one that any engineer would endorse: through a lot of hard work, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of time. Hancock prefers more miraculous answers, full of conjecture (“the Ancient Egyptians might have reached not only the Americas, but also Indonesia and Australia”) and spectacularly shameless but highly entertaining pseudoscience.
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Dresden
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« Reply #2 on: December 22, 2015, 02:05:32 am »

Just ordered it. Can't wait!
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Dresden
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« Reply #3 on: December 22, 2015, 02:10:21 am »

He didn't dig very deeply into what "scientists thought."  Nor did he do anything other than look at an idea and then work it into his books and then weaves around anecdotes and ideas as though they are fact.
Quote
* HugeExplodingComet is unconfirmed (nanodiamonds can come from other sources.)

Core samples from the lake in Northern Russia (the one that took 2 years to drill down to depth) as well as core samples from a few other places that all coincide with the date of the suspected meteor impact. Also, lots of great evidence to support the location of the impact.

Quote
* In order for the HugeExplodingComet to have caused extinctions, it would have had to be a Species-Specific HugeExplodingComet that killed all members of a species while leaving others the same size and in the same region and econiche alive.  Example: short-faced bear goes extinct, but grizzly bears continue just fine.  It kills all the mammoths (over a 7,000 year time period) but leaves African and Asian elephants alive.  Kills the dire wolf while leaving the wolf, grizzly, cougar, and a host of other similar predators alive. (etc, etc.)

A comet killed the dinosaurs but crocodiles survived. Some creatures exist in small pockets until the environment is just right. For example, there are more white tail deer in America today than when Columbus landed - agriculture and hunting of buffalo and other big game gave the white tails the break they needed. I can't explain why some species thrive after disaster and other die off but I'm sure you get the point.

Quote
* By the time of the HugeExplodingComet, humans had reached and were living in almost every corner of the world

Given how long humans like us have been around (200,000 yrs?) I see a lot of time for us to spread and develop. Or did we sit around and just eat bugs for 170,000 yrs until we felt motivated?

Quote
* If there HAD been a high tech civilization that hugged the coasts (unlikely) they would still have had to (for example) make and use roads from one part of the continent to the other (unless they were too dumb to know that it's easier to walk straight from Michigan to California than to take the water route and canoe/swim/float all the way around South America and back up to the Hudson River and the Great Lakes.  We can trace the Silk Road on Google Earth and find long vanished villages via satellite.  Where's the evidence of these roads?

Is it unlikely that a civilization reached a high level of tech or that they would have hugged the coast? I'm assuming you meant the former. As for roads, how prominent would they be after thousands of years of without use and while the planet is going through extreme warming and cooling periods? Probably not recognizable, depending on what that part of the Earth they were carved.

Quote
And have you ever thought seriously about the idea of a "global amnesia"?  How does a hypothetical meteor (or several) going KABOOM over 1/8th of the planet cause Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and India to develop "amnesia" when most of the world couldn't see or hear the presumed explosion?

I think you're misinterpreting what Hancock means when he says "global amnesia". The "amnesia" isn't literal memory loss caused by an explosion, it's a reference to a general loss of knowledge about humanity before the meteor impact. We are a "species with amnesia" because we only "remember" the last 4000 years. According to Graham, we're missing a massive chunk of the human story.

Quote
*** Why aren't there signs of this civilization rising?  Stone age hunters and gatherers don't just fall out of their caves one day and start building electric cars.

If everything they did was built along the coast (as it would be for any ancient culture,) and the sea level rose several hundred feet (meteor struck in Northern Canada causes flash melting of the ice caps and the two-mile high ice sheet that had developed over NA,) everything would be swept out to sea, buried under mud and silt, pulverized by pressure or simply disintegrate. Imagine if this same scenario played out over California - could you to Silicon Valley and pull out pieces of a hard drive when the water finally settled?

Quote
*** People who have amnesia don't forget how to cook, how to drive cars, how to hammer nails, etc, etc.  What kind of amnesia would make them forget basic things like construction?

I explained the amnesia thing above. As for "forgetting", I think the problem is with numbers. Very few people would or could have survived such a cataclysmic event. Of those that did, they would have knowledge of their civilization but to what extent? Were the survivors architects and scholars? Or were they bakers and stone workers? You know how to drive a car and use a computer, but could you build one? Could you teach some one else how to build one? You could tell them stories about "the internet", but the best you'll get out of it is a book of your stories told through the lens of some nomad wearing animal skins. Graham believes that these advanced old worlde survivors eventually settled with hunter gatherers and became the mysterious "bringers of knowledge". When humanity was forced to "restart", I reckon most people were pretty useless. Especially if that society had existed for a long time. In any city, how many people have real-world skills that would be beneficial in a survival scenario? Not many. Long running societies make soft people. Anyways, the scholar god Thoth was supposed to have appeared in the Mediterranean and brought language and Science to the early Egyptians, essentially kick-starting the greatest and most advanced civilization of the ancient world. Was Thoth actually a god? I doubt it. But when talking about him in the context of Graham's book..

"The Egyptians credited him as the author of all works of science, religion, philosophy, and magic. The Greeks further declared him the inventor of astronomy, astrology, the science of numbers, mathematics, geometry, land surveying, medicine, botany, theology, civilized government, the alphabet, reading, writing, and oratory. They further claimed he was the true author of every work of every branch of knowledge, human and divine."

Thoth is one of a handful of similar characters credited with civilizing humanity, Oannes being another (who curiously appears on both sides of ocean, always depicted with the head of a fish and carrying a handbag). In short, I don't expect to see computers or cell phones being recreated any time soon after a massive global disaster. There will be a few knowledgeable survivors but mostly wandering groups of clueless accountants, rediscovering fire making and farming.

I think Graham was just ahead of his time. Finally, the Science is starting to catch up.


http://www.scientifi...2900-years-ago/

"The dust refuses to settle on a debate about whether asteroid impacts caused one of Earth’s most famous cold snaps 12,900 years ago.
The latest evidence in the contentious discussion comes in the form of pieces of bedrock from Quebec, Canada, that seem to have been blasted out as far as Pennsylvania. “I’d say there’s evidence of an impact happening, for sure,” says Mukul Sharma, an isotope geochemist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and co-author of a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Between 11,600 and 12,900 years ago, the planet’s climate changed rapidly: in northern climes such as Greenland, temperatures dropped by several degrees in less than a century. No one knows what caused the deep freeze, known as the Younger Dryas."

http://www.space.com/14793-comet-earth-impact-younger-dryas.html (2012)

"New evidence supports the idea that a huge space rock collided with our planet about 13,000 years ago and broke up in Earth's atmosphere, a new study suggests.
This impact would have been powerful enough to melt the ground, and could have killed off many large mammals and humans. It may even have set off a period of unusual cold called the Younger Dryas that began at that time, researchers say."

http://www.dailymail...d-mammoths.html

"Professor James Kennett, a geologist at the University of California Santa Barbara who led the work, said: 'this suggests a causal connection between the impact event and the Younger Dryas cooling.
'We tested this to determine if the dates for the layer in all of these sites are in the same window and statistically whether they come from the same event.
'Our analysis shows with 95 percent probability that the dates are consistent with a single cosmic impact event."
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Dresden
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« Reply #4 on: December 22, 2015, 02:12:05 am »

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurentide_Ice_Sheet

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-found-for-planet-cooling-asteroid-12900-years-ago/

http://www.space.com/14793-comet-earth-impact-younger-dryas.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3181425/Asteroid-impact-triggered-sudden-cooling-Earth-12-800-years-ago-killed-mammoths.html
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