5 Altogether more than 50 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface were affected by impacts and airbursts of fragments of the Younger Dryas comet, some large, some smaller, but all devastating in their effects, extending from North America, right across the Atlantic Ocean and across Europe, with the final rain of fragments falling as far afield as the Middle East.
6 The combined effect of these multiple impacts, particularly the immense freshwater floods into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans that followed, set off the Younger Dryas cooling event, itself a cataclysm on a truly global scale that resulted in the extinction of huge numbers of animal species and pressed humanity very hard.
7 The human costs of the disaster might not have been confined to the complete destruction of hunter-gatherer cultures, such as the “Clovis” people of North America. The possibility must be considered that an advanced civilization, now lost to history, might also have been obliterated.
Spring is coming
What is particularly striking is that the very radical climate changes at both the onset and the termination of the Younger Dryas were global and were accomplished within the span of a human generation.42 Again the comet-impact hypothesis makes the best sense of this. The estimated combined explosive force of the impacts at ten million megatons would have lofted sufficient ejecta into the atmosphere 12,800 years ago to plunge the earth into a long, sustained twilight, akin to a nuclear winter—the “time of darkness” that so many ancient myths speak of—capable of reducing solar radiation for more than 1,000 years. The dramatic warming that began 11,600 years ago would then be explained by the final dissipation of the ejecta cloud coupled with an end to the system-wide inertia that had beset thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic.43
Another possibility, not necessarily mutually contradictory with any of the above mechanisms, is that 11,600 years ago the earth interacted again with the debris stream of the same fragmenting comet that had caused the Younger Dryas to start 12,800 years ago. On the second occasion, however, analysis suggests that the primary impacts were not on land or onto ice but into the world’s oceans, throwing up vast plumes of water vapor and creating a “greenhouse effect” that caused global warming rather than global cooling.44
According to renowned British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle:
The difference between a warm ocean and a cold one amounts to a 10-year supply of sunlight. Thus the warm conditions produced by a strong water vapor greenhouse must be maintained for at least a decade in order to produce the required transformation of the ocean, and this is just about the time for which water, suddenly thrown into the stratosphere, might be expected to persist there. The needed amount of water is so vast, 100 million million tons, that only one kind of causative event seems possible, the infall of a comet-sized object into a major ocean.45
More research certainly needs to be done to establish the exact mechanisms, in all their complexity, that brought about the sudden end of the Younger Dryas, but the effects on global climate are already well understood. The Greenland ice cores, those invaluable windows into the past, tell us that:
temperatures rose in less than a decade at the climate transition marking the end of the Younger Dryas cold interval and the beginning of the warmer Holocene epoch at 11,600 years before the present.46 In less than 20 years, the climate in the North Atlantic region turned into a milder and less stormy regime, as a consequence of a rapid retreat of sea-ice cover. A warming of 7 degrees centigrade was completed in about 50 years.47
In exactly the same interval, in the subalpine belt of Western Europe, tree species that had never been present before, including Laris, Pinus cembra and Betula, suddenly began to proliferate.48
In Northwestern Montana, in the USA, glacial ice in Marias Pass had receded upvalley from the canyon mouth and the Sun River Glacier had completely vanished by 11,200 years ago.49
A thousand other examples could be cited, but the message is the same everywhere—from Tasmania to the Andes, from Turkey to Japan, from North America to Australia, from Peru to Egypt, winter had ended and a great global spring had begun. “Such is the rebirth of the Cosmos,” as the Hermetic Texts proclaim. “It is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-inspiring restoration of all nature…”50
A rebirth?
A making again?
A restoration?
But of what? Who went before? What exactly was to be reborn?
We will consider these questions in the following chapters.
Part III
Sages
Chapter 7
The Fire Next Time
Three singularities occurred near the end of the last Ice Age, linked to the sudden onset and equally sudden termination of the mysterious epoch known as the Younger Dryas:
• Somewhere around 12,800 years ago, after more than two thousand years of uninterrupted global warming (and with a margin of error of plus or minus 150 years that is as close as the resolution of the data allows us to get to the actual moment), a flood of icy meltwater entered the North Atlantic so suddenly and in such quantities that it disrupted ocean circulation. The source of the flood was the North American ice cap. Since the previous two millennia had witnessed continuous sea-level rise, the resolution of the data means there is no way of knowing exactly how much coastal land was swallowed up by this singular event. With so much new water that had previously been locked in ice abruptly added, however, we may surmise that a dramatic and instantaneous rise in sea level did occur.1
• In the same geological instant that the meltwater flood was unleashed, global temperatures plummeted and the world’s climate underwent a reversal from that balmy two-thousand-year-long “summer” that had begun about 15,000 years ago (by 13,000 years ago, conditions are thought to have improved to such an extent that they were warmer and wetter than they are today) to a savage and icy global winter. Again the resolution of the data does not allow us to say exactly how soon after the meltwater flood the deep-freeze began but, as we saw in the previous chapter, there is much to suggest that this radical reversal of temperatures was achieved within the span of a single human generation. In that same span the ice sheets that had everywhere been melting and in retreat began remorselessly to re-advance and sea-level rise ceased.
• Around 11,600 years ago, again with a margin of error of 150 years in either direction imposed by the data—but again apparently within a single generation—the freeze suddenly ended, global temperatures soared, and the remnant ice caps collapsed, shedding their residual water burden into the world’s oceans which rose dramatically to close to today’s level.
Our ancestors passed through these tumultuous changes and it is inconceivable that they would not have remarked upon them or sought to speak about their experiences to one another. Their stories and eyewitness accounts, would, in turn, have become part of revered oral traditions and as such would have been passed down from generation to generation until they became hoary with age. As the reader will recall from Chapter Three, certain Native American “myths” do, absolutely, seem to speak of events at the end of the last Ice Age. The terrible floods that scoured and ravaged the land are described in detail. But of even greater interest are the traditions of the “star with the long wide tail” that “came down here once, thousands of years ago,” that “burned up everything” and that “made a different world” in which “the weather was colder than before.”
These traditions appear to memorialize the devastating effects of the comet impact that we can now date conclusively, within the understood margins of error, to around 12,800 years ago. We’ve seen how scientists Richard Firestone, Allen West, Jim Kennett and others believe the comet broke into multiple fragments, perhaps eight of which—some with diameters approaching two kilometers—hit the North American ice cap generating huge amounts of heat and instantly transforming great masses of ice into the floods of meltwater that disrupted oceanic circulation and played a key role in bringing on the deep freeze of the Younger Dryas. The rea
der will also recall that other fragments of the giant comet are thought to have hit the Northern European ice cap and to have gone on to rain down on even more distant lands as far away as the Middle East. Thus, though the epicenter was in North America, it is not surprising that the Younger Dryas was a global event that affected peoples and cultures all around the world.
What is surprising is the remarkable consistency with which traditions from every part of the globe speak not only of cataclysmic events but also of very specific warnings given to certain selected “wise” or “good” or “pure” humans in advance of the impending cataclysm. We saw several examples of such warnings in the Native American traditions reviewed in Chapter Three, but if we travel oceans and continents away from the epicenter of the impacts we find similar accounts of warnings preserved in the Middle East at the farthest extent to which the effects of the comet have so far been documented. Note this does not mean that the “strewnfield” of comet debris is confined to the 50 million square kilometers presently recognized. It simply means that samples of sediment from other regions have thus far not been assayed for nanodiamonds, magnetic and glassy spherules, melt-glass, platinum and other tell-tale proxies of impact.
Figure 23
Up to the limit of research so far done, however, the site farthest from North America that has produced firm evidence of the presence and effects of the Younger Dryas comet is an archaeological mound, or tell, called Abu Hureyra in Syria which was excavated in 1974 just before completion of the Taqba Dam on the Euphrates River caused it to disappear forever beneath the advancing waters of Lake Assad. Sediment samples from the archaeological trenching of Abu Hureyra were removed and preserved before the site was flooded and it was the Younger Dryas Boundary layer of one of these samples (from Trench E, and dated to 12,800 years ago) that Firestone, West, Kennett and their team assayed in 2012. As we saw in Chapter Five, they found nanodiamonds, abundant cosmic impact spherules and melt-glass that could only have formed at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees Celsius suggesting that the site was “near the center of a high-energy air-burst/impact.”2
Abu Hureyra cannot be subjected to further direct archaeological investigation since it now lies under Lake Assad, but Firestone, Kennett and West believe the effects of the comet on “that settlement and its inhabitants would have been severe.”3 Of note is the fact that the site lies close both to southeastern Turkey, where Göbekli Tepe is situated, and to the modern state of Iran—formerly Persia—where traditions of great antiquity have been preserved in the scriptures of Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic religion of ancient Persia.
“The fatal winters are going to fall…”
Exactly how old Zoroastrianism is has not yet been satisfactorily established by scholars, since even the lifetime of its prophet Zarathustra (more usually known as Zoroaster) is uncertain. Indeed, as Columbia University’s authoritative Encyclopedia Iranica admits: “Controversy over Zarathustra’s date has been an embarrassment of long standing to Zoroastrian studies.”4
The Greek historians were among the first to address themselves to the matter. Plutarch, for example, tells us that Zoroaster “lived 5,000 years before the Trojan War”5 (itself a matter of uncertain historicity but generally put at around 1300 BC, thus 5,000 plus 1,300 = 6300 BC). A similar chronology is given by Diogenes Laertius who relates that Zoroaster lived “6,000 years before Xerxes’ Greek campaign”6 (i.e. around 6480 BC). More recent scholars have proposed dates as far apart as 1750 BC and “258 years before Alexander”7 (i.e. around 588 BC). Whatever the truth of the matter, it is agreed that Zoroaster himself borrowed from much earlier traditions and that Zoroastrianism, therefore, like many other religions, has roots that extend very far back into prehistory.
In the Zoroastrian scriptures known as the Zend Avesta certain verses in particular are recognized as drawing on these very ancient oral traditions.8 The verses speak of a primordial father figure called Yima, the first man, the first king and the founder of civilization and appear in the opening section of the Zend Avesta known as the Vendidad. There we read how the god Ahura Mazda created the first land, “Airyana Vaejo, by the good river Daitya,”9 as a paradise on earth and how “the fair Yima, the great shepherd … was the first mortal” with whom Ahura Mazda chose to converse, instructing him to become a preacher.10 Yima refused, at which the god set him a different task:
Since thou wantest not to be the preacher and the bearer of my law, then make my world thrive, make my world increase; undertake thou to nourish, to rule and to watch over my world.11
To this Yima agreed at which the god presented him with a golden ring and a poniard—a long, tapered thrusting knife—inlaid with gold. Significantly, for we will see in Chapter Seventeen there are close parallels to this story as far away as the Andes mountains of South America, Yima then:
pressed the earth with the golden ring and bored it with the poniard.12
By this act, we learn he “made the earth grow larger by one third than it was before,” a feat that over the course of thousands of years he repeated twice more—in the process eventually doubling the land area available for “the flocks and herds with men and dogs and birds,” who gathered unto him “at his will and wish, as many as he wished.”13
Anatomically modern humans like ourselves have existed, so far as we know, for a little less than two hundred thousand years (the earliest anatomically modern human skeleton acknowledged by science is from Ethiopia and dates to 196,000 years ago).14 Within this time-span there has been only one period when those parts of the earth that are useful to humans increased dramatically in size and that was during the last Ice Age between 100,000 and 11,600 years ago. Indeed, previously submerged lands totaling 27 million square kilometers—equivalent to the area of Europe and China added together—were exposed by lowered sea-levels at the last glacial maximum 21,000 years ago. While it is probably far-fetched to suppose that it is this very real increase of useful land—of which a great part was still above water at the beginning of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago—that is referred to in the Yima story, or that it has anything to do with the golden age that Yima’s benign rule supposedly achieved in Airyana Vaejo,15 it is interesting to note what happened next.
After another immense span of time, we read, Yima was summoned to “a meeting place by the good river Daitya” where the god Ahura Mazda appeared to him bearing an ominous warning of sudden and catastrophic climate change:
O fair Yima, upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, that shall bring the fierce, foul frost; upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall that shall make snowflakes fall thick, even on the highest tops of mountains …
Therefore make thee a Vara [a hypogeum, or underground enclosure] long as a riding ground on every side of the square, and thither bring the seeds of sheep and oxen, of men, of dogs, of birds, and of red blazing fires … Thither thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women of the greatest, best and finest kinds on this earth; thither shalt thou bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, of the greatest, best and finest kinds on this earth. Thither shalt thou bring the seeds of every kind of tree, of the greatest, best and finest kinds on this earth; thither shalt thou bring the seeds of every kind of fruit, the fullest of food and sweetest of odor. All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the Vara. There shall be no humpbacked, none bulged forward there; no impotent, no lunatic … no leprous.16
So … you get the idea? This underground hideaway was to serve as a refuge from a terrible winter that was about to seize Airyana Vaejo—a winter at the onset of which, as the Bundahish, another Zoroastrian text, informs us:
the evil spirit … sprang like a snake out of the sky down to the earth … He rushed in at noon, and thereby the sky was as shattered and frightened by him as a sheep by a wolf. He came onto the water which was arranged below the earth, and then the middle of this earth was pierced and entered by him … He rush
ed out upon the whole creation and he made the world quite as injured and dark at midday as though it were dark night.17
Studying these accounts I couldn’t help but be reminded of the two millennia of warm, fine weather, which must indeed have seemed like a golden age, before the sudden lethal onset of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago. The Zoroastrian texts would not be far wrong in describing it as a “fierce, foul frost” and as “a fatal winter.” The “evil spirit” to whom this affliction is attributed is Angra Mainyu, the agent of darkness, destruction, wickedness and chaos, who stands in opposition to and seeks to undermine and undo all the good works of Ahura Mazda—for Zoroastrianism is a profoundly dualistic religion in which human beings, and the choices we make for good or evil, are seen as the objects of an eternal competition, or contest, between the opposed forces of darkness and light.
And in this contest the darkness sometimes wins. Thus the Vendidad reminds us that although Airyana Vaejo was “the first of the good lands and countries” created by Ahura Mazda, it could not resist the evil one:
Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created by his witchcraft the serpent in the river, and winter, a work of the demons … [Now] there are ten winter months there, two summer months, and these are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, cold for the trees. Winter falls there, with the worst of its plagues.18
Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization Page 13