It's a shame that Younger Dryas x Humans is a fringe topic in some circles. I find the conversation regarding humans in this time to be very entertaining and somewhat fascinating. Particularly the fringe thesis that humans might have been more advanced then we thought roughly 10-15,000 years ago and that a cosmic/stellar event such as what is theorized to happen during the Younger Dryas set our species back thousands of years. The part I find most fascinating is the explanations of how many religions and stories from many different peoples around the world speak of "biblical" floods and untold destruction around the world at roughly the same time period. How the people who became known as the Egyptians may have inherited those pyramids from a more advanced civilization considering constructions that can be attributed to the Egyptians are usually of lower quality to the Great Pyramid, etc.
>Particularly the fringe thesis that humans might have been more advanced then we thought roughly 10-15,000 years ago
Gobekli Tepe has shown this to in fact be the case
>the Egyptians may have inherited those pyramids from a more advanced civilization considering constructions that can be attributed to the Egyptians are usually of lower quality to the Great Pyramid, etc.
The greatest evidence I've seen for this is the water erosion on the Sphinx. One of the main arguments against the Sphinx water erosion theory put forth by archaelogists was:
"there is no evidence whatsoever for a culture capable of building the Great Sphinx much before the traditionally accepted date (2500 bce)"
...which of course was also destroyed by the discovery of Gobekli Tepe
It's incredibly difficult to rigorously assess technology levels in antiquity once the pottery is ground to dust, erosion removes an writing, and the cites are overtaken by changing climates.
What we have of the neolithic period is mysterious granite objects and other hard stones. These granite pieces are hard to build, but we have no basis to assess whether they were carved with primitive tools over generations or quickly using greater application of labor and better tools. Due to the difficulty in dating granite, it's also unclear "who" made the object - this gets exceptionally pronounced when looking at artifacts in the Andes or northern europe.
IMHO the only way this changes is if we get better at marine archeology, detecting signs of civilization via environmental changes (e.g. terra preta in the Amazon) or improve climate modeling to look for places where civilization was but is no longer.
We can directly date the burial of granite objects with OSL. We can detect human populations with charcoal, pollen analysis, modern genetic studies, or directly with eDNA (among others).
But still that only tells us when those granite artifacts were last used. In some cases they might have been constructed much earlier, and then reused or modified by later civilizations.
Yes, which is why there's a whole network of independent lines of evidence that inform modern consensus. Our picture of the neolithic, while still incomplete, is complete enough that most of the speculation in this thread is pretty unlikely.
I think the pace of new discoveries in that time period over the last 10 years brings into question how accurate our consensus is. The consensus view is the best informed by current evidence, however we lack sufficient evidence to really pin down what humans were doing in most of the world. Given this lack of evidence, our default assumption is that they were doing what they had done before... which was probably living in nomadic tribes ... until suddenly Mesopotamia/Egypt.
So for context, I used to work on this professionally. I still keep up with the literature to a reasonable degree.
The major new tool we have is ancient DNA and the results we've gotten from it broadly rule out most of the 'expected' ways we'd see an advanced, ancient society.
As for that default, most archaeologists would not agree with what you've described. Everyone can point to cultures like the natufians as pre-YD societies that weren't fully nomadic and you can trace that stuff to through the Holocene and later 'civilizations' like Egypt and mesopotamia. Most archaeologists are also open to the idea that there was a tremendous amount of social and political diversity in the late pleistocene that isn't fully apparent in the material record, but this is more of a widespread hunch that doesn't yet have enough evidence to be called consensus.
These days when academics (regardless whether it's public health or archeology) talk about evidence, I tend to read "evidence" as "what we already know", and the whole narrative ends up being "we know what we already know, and we reject what we don't already know".
I mean, there's no way to un-see this way of reading "evidence" after realizing how much humanity has yet to learn, yet there's a class of people who's confident that they're really knowledgable about stuff.
OSL can read both younger and older than the true age, depending on the error sources. Modern labs will usually apply a correction to deal with underestimation as well.
The water erosion hypothesis is not supported by enough evidence.
A strong piece of counter evidence is that they have dated the temple near the Sphinx (built at the same time according to both pseudo- and real archeologists) and it corresponded perfectly to other estimates.
The technique they used is called thermoluminescence dating and is incredibly interesting in itself.
There are numerous arguments, but basically other forms of erosion might do it, there’s some evidence of heavy rainfall later than previously thought, and even rainfall consistent with recent history might well be enough anyway given the poor quality of the limestone.
>The dream stele in front of the sphinx directly states that it was restored by egypt (specifically dug out)
>We don't know who built the Giza complex, but we do know who built ON TO the Giza complex. The pop-science clickbait titles that discuss "THE DAILY LIVES OF PHAROAH'S PYRAMID BUILDERS" are bullshit, to be blunt. This is right up there with the old "the giza pyramids were tombs FOR DA KING AND DA QUEEN!" line, which can be easily disproven by examining the sterile empty interior of the Giza complex and comparing it to ANY OF THE OTHER PYRAMIDS THAT HAD FUNERARY ARTIFACTS PRESENT. Anyone who supports these narratives while slandering the measured scientific work of Robert Shoch and Randall Carlson is misinformed.
>The nature of the Sphinx itself has been knowingly lied about. The presence of entrances into the sphinx, however small, was denied and slandered by Hawass and crew until multiple forms of visual evidence in modern day (1980-2015) show people ENTERING the sphinx, one of which shows Hawass himself performing the feat, others (in the form of videos) usually contain comments that the video is being recorded under threat of security apprehension and criminal charges. This fits with the pattern of research permits on controversial topics being denied almost instantaneously.
>The mainstream narrative peddled by Zahi Hawass is riddled with blatant fabrications and controversy. Hawass appears to be nearing discrediting himself with his childish refusal to advance his own field. Whether or not this comes down to religious fundamentalism (ie not letting information out that contradicts Hawass' beliefs) or sheer pride, there are more than enough videos of Hawass reacting with door slamming and screaming rage when questioned about inconsistencies in his narrative. Is this appropriate behavior for a world class academic, a leading figure of his field, and someone who is supposed to be the foremost authority on one of the most mysterious civilizations of antiquity? Regardless, it is apparent that the narrative pushed by Hawass that reduces Egypt to a 4000 year old civilization with no deeper connections to any other ancient lineages or sciences is closer to being as unscientific as theories that claim the giza pyramids were time machines!
It's worth noting that the Hiwara labyrinth has been discovered in a recoverable, but endangered state, and Hawass has done everything he can to silence any investigation and suppress the results of the recent ground scan. If you are unfamiliar with the labyrinth, please take the time to look up this incredible piece of legendary megalithic architecture, specifically how it was considered THE wonder of Egypt in extremely greater prominence than the Giza complex to the old dynasty Egyptian people. From what I've seen from the ground scan, this thing is another structure akin to Gobekli Tepe: sprawling stone walls, coalescing with themselves in irregular patterns, with a nearly impossible to discern purpose or use. Given that the ancient Egyptians had a mindnumbing reverence for theological history (consider that the same deities in Egypt were worshiped for nearly 4000 years straight with only one break in the Amarna era), could it be that the labyrinth was exalted by the ancient egyptians for being a structure as ancient to themselves as they are to ourselves (ie 12,800bc or so), a structure that survived the most recent changing of ages/cataclysm? The accepted narrative was that the labyrinth was quarried by the Romans, and any digging would only reveal a smooth stone slab where it once stood. We now know that this slab is, in fact, THE ROOF of the structure. The condition of the soil/sand that encloses the labyrinth is extemely acidic, and we are at risk of losing this structure from stubborn pride. For the most part, the only restoration effort needed to preserve this structure would be to dig it out, but alas...
At the end of the last ice age, around this time, sea levels rose 120 meters. The areas around the Persian gulf, Mediterranean, Red Sea, Nile Delta, etc may have been settled by humans at the time. If they had any civilization or agriculture near the coast in these areas, it's now buried under the water. The black sea was possibly flooded by the Mediterranean in an epic deluge about 5600BCE.
I think even without the younger dryas impact, it's possible that early civilization got a reset at this time. When you factor in that the impact would have caused widespread and sustained crop failure, you could easily imagine early agrarian civilization reverting to nomadic hunter gatherers.That's my hunch, but there's little to no evidence supporting this at present.
All evidence at this time points that agriculture based city states were challenging to boot into a "proper civilization". If you raised taxes, your citizens would just leave since the area you could control was quite small. And then you get new diseases that suddenly could spread dense in urban population - wars - all that good stuff.
Based on the book, maintaining a city state over more than few generations, before the knowledge how to keep it going has been learned, is really, really really hard.
This is not to counter the suggestion that there could have been cities at e.g. coasts tens of thousands of years ago, but the fact that they seem to be so frail in the beginning points out that it's not also improbable that first "higher civilizations" were indeed the ones we know of.
Those are good points. I misspoke with the word civilization, I'm thinking more like primitive agricultural towns. I don't think agriculture suddenly happened after the ice age. I think it's more likely the events at the end of the ice age buried the evidence of earlier agricultural activity. Again, I don't know of anything that might suggest that was really the case. But it wouldn't surprise me if we find that one day.
I’m sure it was difficult but I wouldn’t put it in the category of improbable given that cities were reinvented many times around the globe in hugely varying climates and cultures.
I’m also not convinced that people would leave a city for a subsistence life in the country en masse. There are several factors working against that like lack of knowledge and skills needed, the good cleared land already being inhabited, and moving too far would put you in a region where you don’t speak the same dialect and would be seen as an interloper by the local people.
The fun thing is these early city states were _really tiny_.
Apparently distance wise at least it wasn't very hard to escape from the grasp of earliest cities and the place where you went - a days walk away - likely was not that different - "Assuming draft animals and carts on a flat alluvial plain, the reach of the earliest states for grain requisitions is unlikely to have extended much beyond a radius of roughly forty-eight kilometers"
Of course leaving ones home is probably a burden if you've used to sedentary life.
At the time it was very common to flee the city to escape debts that would put you into effective slavery.
The origin of the Jubilee was an occasion when all personal debts were forgiven and people could come out of hiding. These would happen every 10 to 20 years, and were necessary to keep the cities populated enough to function.
Actual currency would not be invented until thousands of years later, so money was all about ledger entries recording assets and debts.
The English Queen's recent Jubilee was weak sauce.
It's turned into a very fun and interesting side project for me.
In particular, the Atlantis story in Plato's Timaeus is historically written off as intentional myth, despite the literal claims to the opposite in the text. If taken as a historical account, it tells of an unprecedented impact, conflagration and deluge within a millennium of the YDIE.
"Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals... For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was [preeminent]."
The following story tells of a large land in the middle of the Atlantic that sank after the conflagration and deluge. The invasion of the Sea Peoples from the direction of the Atlantic, and the establishment of cities by the remnants of these times. These would used to seem preposterous, before the discovery of the by-far oldest megalithic site at Göbekli Tepe 9500-8000BCE, the same dates given for the founding of Athens and Sais in Timaeus.
> The invasion of the Sea Peoples from the direction of the Atlantic, and the establishment of cities by the remnants of these times.
The Sea Peoples (at least, those involved in the ravaging of the Hittites and the Egyptians) appear to have come from the vicinity of the Aegean Sea, although the Mycenaean collapse would suggest that they do not originate there. (At the same time, there's no actual written documentary evidence of Mycenaean collapse; that it was caused by the invasion of the Sea Peoples is informed by archaeological evidence of a discontinuity in material culture that happens at about the same time the Egyptians and Hittites are reeling from the Sea Peoples. It's actually consistent with the evidence that displaced Mycenaean peoples are the Sea Peoples as recorded in Egyptian stelae. There is 0 evidence that the Sea Peoples came from the Atlantic or anywhere other than the Eastern Mediterranean.
It's also worth remembering that the Younger Dryas occurred c. 10,000 BC, while the invasion of the Sea Peoples happens c. 1,200 BC. That is, the Sea Peoples happened closer in time to the present than it did to the Younger Dryas.
> If taken as a historical account, it tells of an unprecedented impact, conflagration and deluge within a millennium of the YDIE.
More likely, Timeaus describes the destruction of Santorini, c.1600BC (we can't trust Plato's dating, just that it occurred in the distant past). Plato's "Pillars of Heracles" would have been describing a place other than Gibraltar, (the earliest reference of which is 600BC in Peisander's Heracleia (fixing the number of Hercules labors at twelve), yet the Greeks were unaware of the Atlantic Ocean until the voyages of Pytheas ~330BC, during Plato's lifetime, suggesting another location for the Pillars). The destruction of Santorini also neatly explains the Ten Plagues of Egypt described in Exodus.
Yeah, but if you discard the time and the place from stories you can make them fit anywhere.
I doubt the Greeks were so ignorant of history that they'd mistake the meaning of 9000 years for 1000 years (Solon was ~5-600BC). We had no trouble maintaining their histories using similar practices since, over 2500 years, and we would hardly mistake that for say 250 years.
But the Greeks were surely aware of the Atlantic Ocean and meant the same Straight as we mean by Gibraltar[1]. The Timaeus calls it "Ἀτλαντικοῦ πελάγους"[2] or Atlantic Sea, and the Phoenicians[1.1] were well settled West of the Straight much earlier than your literary reference:
"The new [Phoenician] chronology suggests an Atlantic exploration period, during the tenth century B.C., followed by later ninth century colonization. Gades (Cadiz) was founded west of the Strait."[3][4]
How would you explain the presence of landmasses corresponding to the Atlantis myth that can be found in the Azores plateau? Additionally, the legend itself was recovered from Egypt, so whether or not the Greeks had knowledge of the Atlantic would have no bearing on if the Egyptians (or, more importantly, the people who were their progenitors) had this knowledge.
> How would you explain the presence of landmasses corresponding to the Atlantis myth that can be found in the Azores plateau?
Simply, they do not correspond. The Azores were discovered in the 14th Century, and there is no archeological evidence of any settlement or even an ancient advanced civilization prior to the Portuguese settlers. Also, there is no evidence in the Azores of any ancient catastrophe.
The mistake is in assuming that in 300BC, Gibraltar was known as the Pillars of Heracles. Except that it wasn't. Another place, very close to Greece, was known as the Pillars of Heracles. Stop looking in the Atlantic.
And please look at a satellite image of Thera/Santorini and compare to Plato's description (ignoring his obviously ridiculous continent-sized scales). After the catastrophe, Santorini looks like the description of Atlantis before the catastrophe.
Following the broad strokes, a catastrophe destroyed a civilization, which could and most likely describes the Minoan civilization that was destroyed in a catastrophe, namely, the destruction of Santorini.
There are many dozens of theorised locations for Atlantis, tye Azores is only one and not a particularly compelling one over any of the others IMHO.
The Egyptians at that period and before were far, far worse sailors and navigators than the Greeks, or pretty much anyone else. I really wouldn’t trust anything they would say about distant geography or navigation.
An Egyptian expedition sailed all the way around Africa, starting at the Red Sea and returning via the South Atlantic, taking three years. They reported the sun on their right as they rounded the Cape, which was taken as proof of fabrication, to the ancients.
Egyptians achieved a great many impressive things, over millennia, the overwhelming majority of which we have little or no record of.
I am corrected. ISTR the expedition was funded or instigated by a pharaoh, but could be hallucinating.
A whole mess of authentic Egyptian hieroglyphs were found carved in rock faces in Australia, a few decades back. They were recently examined and translated by an expert in ancient Egyptian language. They turn out to describe the disastrous end of a big expedition a bit over 2000 years ago. Some of the symbols used entered dictionaries only a few years ago, so they are unquestionably authentic.
A follow-on hypothesis to the YD impact hypothesis is Atlantis existing exactly where Plato's Timaeus describes. West of the Pillars of Heracles in the middle of the Atlantic. That describes the Azores. If the YDB hypothesis is correct and immense amounts of ice were removed quickly the spheroid of Earth would change shape dramatically. The previously ice covered areas rebound up and areas that were squeezed out subside. Couple isostatic rebound with immense amounts of meltwater and it is possible that the Azores plateau was above sea level despite now being under 2000 meters of water.
Of course there isnt much evidence to support this hypothesis and it is dependent on the YDB impact hypothesis being correct. But, I found the possibility to be intriguing.
I demonstrated the idea of isostatic rebound to my kids by squeezing a balloon describing my hands as the ice pressing on the land. The bulges between my hands are areas not covered by ice. When my hands are removed the bulges disappear as previously covered areas bounce back up and squeezed out areas drop down.
> West of the Pillars of Heracles in the middle of the Atlantic.
The fatal mistake here is that in ancient Greece, the Pillars of Heracles was definitely not Gibraltar, and Egyptians would not have employed Greek myths. The Greeks had no knowledge of Gibraltar nor the Atlantic Ocean until decades after Plato wrote Timaeus. It was only centuries later that Gibraltar became known by that moniker. Plato was talking about another location in the Aegean, close to Greece, that his readers would have been familiar with, unlike Gibraltar.
Excellent point. Please note that the Egyptians referred to the objects in the solar system as egg shaped. This sybolism survives in the memphis-misraim masonic rites, but they are considered clandestine and independent from mainstream masonry, reader beware.
Sorry, yes, I don't mean the invasions during the Bronze Age[1].
I have wondered though if the generic name for them suggests a general origin of the remnants of the Atlantic civilizations that were perhaps destroyed from the YDIE
I think some people get hung up on the word "advanced". They jump to assumptions about fringe theories about Atlantis or flying saucers or whatever. But in this context, "advanced" just means a slightly higher level of masonry and some metal tools, perhaps comparable to what we now consider the Bronze Age in Eurasia. It's entirely plausible that such a civilization could be entirely wiped out, leaving few artifacts that could last >10K years.
The most likely place for such evidence is the sea floor off India and Pakistan, and the bottom of the Persian Gulf (which archaeologists must be careful to call the "Arabian Gulf", in e.g. YT vids of recent work on the area.)
The Harappan cities are overwhelmingly more sophisticated than would be consistent with their being the first of anything. The oldest Harappan cities were exhaustively planned before construction started, with central sewers fed from every house, all carefully graded to maintain reliable flow.
The Harappans must have had writing, but on stuff that crumbled to dust thousands of years ago.
A million square miles of what is now sea floor from Korea to Viet Nam, and south to Java, was rich river-drained bottom land until 20000 years ago, filling in until 8000 years ago. People had lived there for at least 20000 years before the sea began rising.
Also, Australia was connected to New Guinea, and again people had lived there for as long. There are still precise oral records of conflicts and resolutions as the water forced people uphill to where other people already lived.
There is a very large construction on Java, Gunung Padang, that had been thought to be a natural hill, but it has turned out was built at least 20000 years ago. (Some think a natural hill must be inside, but we really have no idea.)
It's only a fringe topic because people are uncomfortable with the idea that a recurring disaster cycle could exist, and at least a dozen papers every year are published that amount to "yeah, we looked in this location nobody has looked before, and we saw evidence of the cycle here, too".
The comet theory seems to be gaining some traction as the research is done and more data becomes available. A few years ago it certainly seemed fringe-y. Good on them for doing the science.
Entertaining and fascinating are the right words to use for the human civ stuff you mentioned - they are fun stories to think about. But right now I don’t buy it. Maybe they’ll end up being correct, but those folks need to get out in the field, gather data, do the research, and put it up for peer review if they’re really serious about overturning the current framework of the development of human civilization. I see lots of blog posts, internet talks, and amateur books published—less so serious research being published and discussed.
If you want to play in the science sandbox and be taken seriously by the other scientists, you don’t get to ask for “evidence of absence”. We haven't done science that way for four hundred years.
If you have an issue with that, that’s fine, go start your own community of researchers with your own principles and methods. See how much you discover. But you don’t complain about not being taken seriously by the people that think your approach is deeply flawed.
AIUI, IIRC, Khafre left a stele leaning against the Sphinx boasting of repair work he did on it. That seems wholly incompatible with making it.
In general, we can almost always only establish a younger bound on age of any stone construction. Sky's the limit for how old something might be.
Giza is absolutely perforated with tunnels, most carefully not inspected. Hawass used to insist ground penetrating radar was bunk, and would not look at results, never mind commission any.
There is far more unknown about Egyptian prehistory than is known. Whoever built things there was very, very smart. They really did achieve things that seem to us impossible to people with their resources. We can anyway be certain they did not do it all with copper chisels.
We have actual documents with good dates describing work done on facing stones on one of the pyramids. But I don't think we have any way to know if it was original construction or repair work. Egyptians were always very proud of their restoration work, often to the point of chiseling out the builder's cartouche and carving their own in its place.
But the very oldest stonework had no identifying marks at all, and there must have been a serious taboo about tagging any Giza pyramid. They loved tagging everything else. So most things are identified with whoever tagged it last. This is often obviously absurd, as when the tagging is crude hackwork on an exquisite sculpture. There is absolutely no embarrassment about this, evident.
I haven't heard this claim about the Pyramids, but there's a debate about the Sphinx.
IIUC the original dating from Egyptologists relied on a comparative chronology with the known dynasties and their symbolism. This was called into doubt by a geologist[1] who noted that the erosion on the sides of the Sphinx excavation pit would have needed much longer to form, esp given that Egypt has been dry for the past 10k years.
So perhaps there is a reevaluation of the origin of the Pyramids as well?
We have the capability to directly date the stones to determine when these structures were laid down. That's been done for most of the major Egyptian sites and the results agree with traditional archeological analysis.
Not sure I see this in the wiki page[1]. Citations appreciated!
This seems to be the case for the nearby temples, which are traditionally associated with the Sphinx, but not of the Sphinx itself. The temples were laid down with stone probably quarried from the trenches near the Sphinx. And yes, they've been dated to 2k+ BCE.
But that's where Schoch and Lehner disagree. Schoch says that the stone of the Sphinx is significantly older (noting that it was encased in similar stone to the temples).
What seems to be most significant is that Lehner doesn't treat it as solved from the dating of the stone, but relies on the lack of a sufficiently advanced civilization to explain the much earlier date, and this was enlightened with the discovery of Göbekli.
This is noted elsewhere in sibling comments as well and seems to be where the debate stopped.
It's mentioned as luminescence dating on the wiki page.
Honestly, I'm not sure why gobekli tepe gets brought up so much. It's thousands of miles away, in a completely different cultural area, and it's not even the earliest site with similar construction in its area.
We do not have that ability. We can only ever establish a lower bound on age, and sometimes relative sequence. It is quite easy to confound measurements such that they indicate a younger than actual age, but not older.
Menkaure's pyramid and the Valley Temple come out 500 years older than official numbers, by a nominal reading.
What is most peculiar is that the oldest pyramids are of the best quality. They are still standing, while the younger pyramids are now just a pile of rubble. It is like technological progress regressed in Egypt.
The first pyramids also resemble piles of rubble. You can in fact visit and see both the rise and fall of their pyramid building skills, as well as the lineage from older non-pyramid burial sites.
Shortly after the great pyramids were built, Egypt underwent a time of political turmoil, with evidence pointing to some combination of invasion and civil war.
The next iteration of pyramid building was a “make Egypt great again” political statement, but without the skills. You can see this loss and gain in the quality of art and paints, in addition to the architecture.
Soon after that though, pyramid building was again abandoned as big loud pyramids failed to accomplish one of their goals - the protection of the Royal mummy and its property. It was just too much of a target for grave robbers, often being emptied out by the very workers who built it. This resulted in a transition to much more subtle, hidden tombs. One of which was undiscovered until the 20th century - king tut’s. (The rest were also found and robbed.)
> The first pyramids also resemble piles of rubble
The fringe theory is that the great Giza pyramid is much older. Those that are assumed to be the first pyramids, may actually be the first of the "make Egypt great again" period thousands of years later
We do not in fact know the order pyramids were built in. Maybe the crude rubble was first efforts, or maybe it was inept copies.
What we do know is that the very best quality stone dishware, tens of thousands of pieces, was piled up haphazardly under what is supposed to be one of the oldest pre-Giza pyramids. Nothing known to be from dynastic times ever came close.
Dating of the pyramids is based off of things left around the pyramids and one mention of Khufu. If the pyramids are much older there is not much that would be left from the original builders to date after millenia of environmental exposure and human habitation in the area.
In short, the 4,500 year old date is based on very, very thin evidence, and much other evidence of longer timeline is simply ignored because "it's not possible".
The ice-core and dendrochron records make it clear that the YD began with a precipitous temp drop, followed in 1200 years by a precipitous temp climb. Any alternative hypotheses have to explain those changes, well-established worldwide, simultaneous Pt and Ir deposits, two well-established gigantic meltwater pulses, and hundreds of well-established megafaunal extinctions, all falling among a period of deglaciation with a fuzzy timeline. For starters.
It's a tall order, and recent and ongoing discoveries have made it less-and-less fringey. Fascinating to watch the the responses and what they tell us about 'well-established' orthodoxy.
I find a much simpler explanation to the common meme of biblical floods in religions.
Which is that people tend to build their settlements on or around rivers.
The same geography that makes an area suitable for trade, transport, fishing and agriculture will have catastrophic floods every few years/decades. Look at where every city of note is, and note how many of them are either on the coasts, or on rivers.
I wouldn’t think a regularly occurring flood would be recorded as a once in history event that wipes out almost all of mankind. The Egyptians featured regular flooding of the Nile in their myths but didn’t picture them as apocalyptic.
According to Randall Carlson, "civilization ending climate catastrophies" such as the Younger Dryas extinction event have been ocurring at a tempo of about 1 every ~10,000 years, for at least the last 160,000 years.
So it would seem were about 2000 years overdue for the next one.
That's like saying you are due for boxcars. An average rate tells you nothing about when it will happen.
We are also late for the earthquake that will wipe out civilization in the Pacific NW USA/Canada. Estimates are two years to restore electric power. Last one was 1700. The tsunami was noted in Japan.
Well, I'm just going to add the edge case of close-to-scifi speculation, could it just be that all the evidence of the YD is just from some orbital bombardment? What could have taken to a proto-civilization, let's say, 20.000 years ago, to go from building piramids to build rockets and nuclear weapons, then just nuke everything from low orbit.
Then the survivors restarted from almost nothing (building most of the crappy - but suspiciosly similar to very modern architecture - stone based stuff we keep finding), remember, not every person in an advacent civilization knows how to produce advanced technology. i.e. we have TSMC at hand, but I suspect there are other similar examples.
How would they have destroyed civilizations without a trace (not even iron/steel being left) without eradicating most animal and plant species at the same time?
All the choicest real estate of the time is under water now.
30+ genera of North American large animals were wiped out. Horses, camels, hippos, dire wolves, mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, sabertooths, giant beavers. The whole continent burned. There were extinctions in South America and Africa, too.
Seems to me this could be the root of the Viking legends of Valhalla, the eternal hunting grounds, because at the time it existed it had to be one fucking fertile marshland.
If it were nukes, we would know. This thing released way way way more energy than all of our nukes, on all sides, going off at once. But without radioactives, and with lots and lots of platinum.
If you want to blame somebody, you have to figure steering a comet in.
>A giant, ≥100-km-diameter comet entered an Earth-crossing orbit in the inner solar system and began a cascade of disintegrations (Napier 2010). Nu-
merous cometary fragments from the debris stream entered Earth’s atmosphere ∼12,800 y ago and detonated above and/or collided with land, ice sheets, and oceans across at least four continents in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
This is a "string of pearls" scenario that we saw with Shoemaker-Levy 9. Regardless of where the impacts are, it would be a very bad day. Impacting millions of cubic miles of ice would release unimaginable amounts of water and spread ice ejecta across the landscape.
This is widely considered a crank conspiracy theory, not even something that would qualify as controversial. There are many people that have debunked this, and this wikipedia section is a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
That's not how science works. The theory has been debated, not debunked. Calling a debated theory regarding an event of uncertain origin a "crank conspiracy theory" is anti-scientific and just plain silly
That is exactly how science works. The have presented a hypothesis that has not stood up to scrutiny and doesn't fit the evidence. Instead of looking for new hypothesis and they resubmit the same one with modified evidence each time. They are invested in the outcome, not they data, and they are as far from the spirit of science as people can be. The core proponents of YDIH are scammers going on the Joe Rogan Experience to trick the gullible and make more money.
They were off on their comet impact crater age by 57,990,000 years. Thinking a crater was 10,000 years old when it's actually 57,000,000 year old is so fantastically incorrect that it should immediately disqualify the persons proposing it from further part in the discussion. Even if you remove the people from the discussion, no part of the theory stands up to scrutiny aside from a warming trend that's better fit by other less dramatic root causes.
>Thinking a crater was 10,000 years old when it's actually 57,000,000 year old is so fantastically incorrect that it should immediately disqualify the persons proposing it from further part in the discussion.
That's not how science works.
If scientists make hypothesis based on prelimary evidence which turns out later to be erroneous based on new evidence, that does not banish them from science. What a silly anti-scientific notion that is.
You're playing the same ideological game that the critics of heliocentrism, antisceptics, vaccinology, plate tectonics, the Alvarez hypothesis, etc. all played.
Real science is based on humility and doubt, not arrogance and gate keeping.
>1: No, real science is based on evidence and falsification
Doubt is intrinsic to falsification you silly goose!
>2: I find your gatekeeping statement about science not being about gatekeeping interesting.
Indeed that may seem linguistically ironic at first, until you study the history and how the most ground breaking science has always been persecuted by gatekeepers.
Like a finger pointing at the moon, if you get hung up on the finger, you'll miss the moon.
The biggest piece of evidence of the impact hypothesis is the YBD black mat with impact proxies in it. Mega-fauna and clovis culture below the black mat and...none of it above.
As far as I know the only way to get a black mat layer with impact proxies is with an impact. For the Chicxulub impact the black mat with impact proxies was the clincher that settled the hypothesis that an asteroid wiped out the dinos.
"Research published in 2012 has shown that the so-called "black mats" are easily explained by typical earth processes in wetland environments.[e][96] The study of black mats, that are common in prehistorical wetland deposits which represent shallow marshlands, that were from 6000 to 40,000 years ago in the southwestern USA and Atacama Desert in Chile, showed elevated concentrations of iridium and magnetic sediments, magnetic spherules and titanomagnetite grains. It was suggested that because these markers are found within or at the base of black mats, irrespective of age or location, they probably arise from processes common to wetland systems and not as a result of catastrophic bolide impacts"
As for, "For the Chicxulub impact the black mat with impact proxies was the clincher that settled the hypothesis that an asteroid wiped out the dinos." the black mats in YDIH are completely distinct from the global KT boundary, not comparable. And the shocked quartz, crater rim, gravity anomaly, expected spherulite distribution around the world, and myriad other pieces of evidence at the Chicxulub site that lined up with the KT bound based on multiple time estimation techniques (as well as much, much better fit with observed extinction patterns in existing biota).
The incontrovertible evidence is worldwide platinum concentration spikes, coupled with soot from continent-spanning conflagrations, without corresponding sulfur fluctuations. Read the linked paper. It is solid. The people calling it cranky have been caught doing all kinds of shenanigans, such as calling melt glass spherules "pollen" without ever looking at any with an electron microscope, and sampling cores at the wrong places, carefully straddling the actual date.
Scientists can be as petty as any pol. The Wikipedia page is "curated" by one of those, a retired historian with no background in geology.
I don't think this is a crank theory, it was put forward by real scientists, not random members of the general public. It looks to me like the consensus leans heavily towards it not being correct but it's not a crazy idea.
I'm getting the sense that this has maybe become politicized for some reason? Why?
I would firmly disagree with you. I think you are falling for an argument to moderation. You can look at most fringe theories in history and find nominal scientists that support it. Scientists are people, too, and are subject to all sorts of human mental weaknesses. This is a crank theory because it starts with a conclusion and has been trying to fit the evidence to it, and for a long time. Read this linked paper - really scrutinize the data, the charts, and the conclusions. There are simpler explanations that fit the data better, and the impact data is really dubious. I am not reacting to the point that some people wish there was a technically advanced pre-Clovis culture that was submerged (aka, Atlantis without admitting it is Atlantis). I am looking at the ice core data in this paper, the extinction records, and the time scales involved. They do not add up.
When is 'starts with a conclusion and has been trying to fit the evidence to it' a bad thing? A lot of physics discoveries started with a hypothesis, then scientists tried to set up experiments to look for empirical data to confirm the hypothesis.
If that's your only objection to these theories, maybe you're starting with your own conclusion yourself.
Well, you seem like you’ve researched this more closely than I have. I really haven’t dug in at all except for the Wikipedia page. I’m comfortable admitting that I know less about this than you do.
