Showing posts with label Younger Dryas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Younger Dryas. Show all posts

Monday, November 27, 2023

The Shigur Idol

 



The Shigur Idol was found in a Russian peat bog in the 1890s and is the world's oldest wooden statue, dated to around 9000 BC, making it roughly contemporary with Gobekli Tepe. The idol or totem originally stood over 17 feet high but is now shorter, 9.2 feet, thanks to pieces lost during the Red Terror.

What a remarkable relic of prehistory and as with Gobekli Tepe, proof that 9000 BC humans were rather more than bark scraping nut gatherers. Were they the successors of of a previous civilization, one that had been destroyed by cataclysm and flood? Possibly, and all you Younger Dryas experts can chime in.




In the meanwhile, behold the face of the idol and ask, what were they thinking? We don't know but I tell you this, it wasn't Christian.

Your Ante-Deluvian Pal,

LSP

Saturday, August 19, 2023

Now This Is Cool

 


Archeologists have discovered an 8 mile long, yes, 8 miles long, stretch of remarkably preserved prehistoric wall painting in Columbia. The ocher paintings depict the Amazon at the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,900 years ago, complete with now extinct Megafauna such as giant sloths and mastodons.

Reflect on this. At around the same time people were building large temple(?) complexes at Gobekli Tepe in latter day Turkey and depicting the Amazon per ocher as a savannah, something changed. Tepe was filled in, the Amazonian veldt turned to rain forest and the mastodons and their larger than life allies died off. What happened?



A cataclysm, the Younger Dryas event, which returned the earth to glacial conditions, perhaps caused by a meteor strike or a series of strikes as our planet made its circle through the Oort Cloud. Result? Earth shaking, extinction event catastrophe, quite possibly the flood of Genesis.

That in mind, look at the rock art of the prehistoric Columbians. Do you discern fields and palisades, perhaps towers? They were obviously more than cave men, if not possessed of our technics; now, imagine the catastrophe which overwhelmed their culture. Perhaps it took several hundred years, perhaps a thousand, perhaps one day alone, but catastrophe it was.



And they survived, remarkably. In Anatolia, South America, Egypt, Europe and on. The human race continued, not least as seafarers, and we see their relics in remarkably transcontinental megaliths. It seems these people favored building in massive stone. Perhaps the Giza Pyramids are their greatest achievement and witness.



We would do well to meditate on this. How much of what we call civilization would remain after a cataclysm or even a hurricane, much less a wildfire. Mind you, and in fairness, some hurricanes are more vicious than others.

Your Old Pal,

LSP

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Karahan Tepe

 



Everyone's familiar with Gobekli Tepe, the astonishingly ancient megalithic temple in Turkey originally excavated by Klaus Schmidt from 1995-2014. But we're less familiar with Karahan Tepe, 46 km south east of Gobekli Tepe and equally ancient, being some 11,500 years old, maybe older.

Both sites are remarkable for their extreme age, being built at the end end of the Younger Dryas and the dawning of the Holocene Age, at a time archeologists assumed humans were hunter gatherers and incapable of monumental architecture.




It's a fair assumption. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, what were humans doing beyond drawing pictograms on cave walls, gnawing bark, collecting roots, berries and, if they were lucky, driving the odd bison off a cliff. They were like, so the theory went, North American Indians or their equivalents in Africa.

Gobekli Tepe and now Karahan Tepe change all that. These prehistoric humans were well capable of monumental architecture and art, to say nothing of astronomy. They were clearly much more advanced than supposed. For that matter, were they, in fact, hunter gatherers who came together to build and then settled in one place with agriculture and civic life rising in the wake, or the other way around or both?




We don't know, but we do know this. The larger sculpted stones of the "T-Builders" at Gobleki Tepe weighed around 15 tons and these are the earliest, dating to approximately 9,500 BC, apparently the same holds true for Karahan Tepe. Later structures at both sites are smaller, with older construction being back-filled and replaced by lesser architecture. What does this suggest?

Shockingly, that the earlier builders were more advanced as a civilization than their descendants. They initiated the building and did so massively, later generations didn't. This implies a civilization in decline, for whatever reason, and begs the question, who were the original builders and what did they come from?




It's tempting to imagine an architectural people, and all that goes with it, somehow surviving the Younger Dryas glacial period and emerging in diminished form in what we now call Turkey as the climate mercifully warmed.

But again, we don't know, and with apologies to Graham Hancock, there's precious little evidence. That said, wouldn't it be strange if humanity, whose origins keep getting pushed back into the mists of prehistory, weren't able in hundreds and thousands of years to move beyond rock chucking and grubbing for roots to something better? An antedeluvian megalithic civilization of which little if anything remains, except their heirs in Anatolia around 11,500 BC.




Well, that's as maybe. Perhaps there's a parable in Gobekli Tepe and its twin at Karahan. Viz. They devolved.

Antedeluvia Forever,

LSP

Tuesday, February 19, 2019

No Shoot



Like all good plans, this one was simple. Walk the dog to the Pick 'n Steal, get some coffee, say Morning Prayer, take care of immediate business and then go for a shoot.


Flooding

What an excellent plan, right? And practical too, involving zeroing in a  triad of deadly assault rifles, 5.56 and 7.62. Make sure the blasters were still working, sort of thing, and then relax off with a bit of plinking against targets of opportunity; soda cans, steel plates, shotgun shells, kettles, cell phones, whatever.


Typical Clovis Points

But no. It started to rain, thunder rolled and crashed across the sky and a vengeful, biting wind cut across the Compound like the harbinger of a new Ice Age. I tell you, it's like the Younger Dryas extinction event here in the Central Zone.


Look, a Dog on a Rug

So no shoot and that's fine by Blue Somnolent but frustrating for me. Still, it's not all bad, check out this uplifting new infovideo from Carpe Doncton.

 


What excellent art!

Gun rights,

LSP

Friday, August 17, 2018

The Adamites?



Around 7000 years before Christ (BC) we're told that mankind, which had been living a jolly hunter-gather sort of life, suddenly domesticated wheat, became farmers and settled down. Nuts, berries and the odd Mastodon steak, so delicious, didn't cut it for them anymore. No, they wanted to farm.

With that, the whole edifice of civilization began, Pyramids, temples, Emperors, armies, philosophers, the FBI, lying, venal, slick, aggressive mainstream media, all of what we know today as civilization came into being. Thanks to wheat at 7000 BC.




Then a German archeologist discovered Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a temple complex of monumental masonry that dates back to 10,000 BC or 12,000 years before now. 

There they were, the Flintsones, scavenging about for roots, bark, the occasionally unfortunate saber tooth tiger and, as a side hobby, building huge stone temples with sophisticated lithic art. And then, waiting some three thousand years to start farming.




Something doesn't seem right with this picture but there it is. An obviously civilized, stonebuilding, aesthetically skilled culture putting up temples(?) when they should have been foraging about for nuts and wondering why their uncured animal skin clothes smelled so bad. And then, three millennia later, getting it together to grow wheat.

Weird, right? Some speculate that a comet or fragments of one, smashed into or burst above the North American ice sheet around 13,000 years ago, causing massive flooding and an influx of cold, glacial water into the Atlantic. Hence the Younger Dryas cooling and mega fauna extinctions.




Long story short, it would have been a cataclysmic event, characterized by huge flooding, a rise in sea level, die-off level conflagration and global cooling. 

This, some believe, was the Deluge and from it emerged rare survivors from an Ice Age civilization who started afresh, with the seeds, literally, of a previous world. They did so in places such as Gobekli Tepe.

But then, just as civilization began to flourish again, the earth passed through the orbital train of cometary debris from the previous disaster, shutting down sites like Gobekli Tepe, notoriously backfilled around 9,500 BC for no apparent reason. Were they attempting to save their temples from the coming catastrophe?




Who knows, but thanks to intrepid Germans, we can see the mute testimony of their culture today and wonder at the tenacity of the people, the Adamites?, who made it through earthquake, fire and flood to domesticate wheat and build the pyramids.

The rest, of course, is history.

Your Friend,

LSP