Showing posts with label megafauna. Show all posts
Showing posts with label megafauna. Show all posts

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, June 16, 2022

Bears

 



It's all about bears these days. Their remote ancestors lived in the Eocene, around 50 million years ago and were small doglike creatures. They have a canine look today, though they're notoriously large.




They're tall too, modern bears can stand up to 11 feet high, and for all their size are fast when they want to be, brown bears being fully capable of running at a ferocious 35 mph. No kidding, fast.
 



And they're smart as well as tall, fast and deadly. Experts count our ursine friends as the most intelligent land animals in North America. Annoyingly clever number theorists say they're ahead of the game.




Math aside, don't you think bears have a strangely megafauna, prehistoric appearance? Part dog, part something else and, when standing upright, an almost human aspect. Bears are also adorable, as long as they're not tearing you apart limb from limb.

Make of this short nature parable what you will.

Buy low sell high,

LSP