Angels and Aliens and Asteroids, oh my!
Are you not entertained?
The road to this sub-stack was a tortuous one. I started out investigating Geomagnetism, which led me to Climate Change, which led me to the End of the last Ice Age, which led me to a tour of the Turkish Taş Tepeler sites that were built halfway through the Laurentide ice sheets’ melting, which was where I met a psychologist/archeologist who encouraged me to write a sub-stack (true story!) Many exceptional events occurred around the end of the last ice age:
A 120 m sea-level rise between 20,000-7,000 years ago.
15 °C and 10 °C temperature increases in central Greenland and Antarctica resp.
A volcanically active Mount St. Helens during the "Cougar Stage" (28,000–18,000 years ago), and the "Swift Creek Stage" (13,000–10,500 years ago)
Solar cosmic ray intensity was 50 times higher than present around 16,000 years ago, declining to 15 times higher by 12,000 years ago
The Lake Missoula Floods: over 40 catastrophic floods that occurred in the Northwestern USA between 20,000 - 14,000 years ago; The Lake Bonneville megaflood 17,400 years ago
An abrupt doubling of atmospheric radiocarbon concentration around 12,840 years ago, that is around the start of the Younger Dryas.
Abnormally low geomagnetic field strengths around 28,000-20,000, 16,000-10,000 years ago.
The Quaternary megafaunal Extinction that mainly occurred in North and South America, where it killed off almost 80% of the large to medium-sized mammals, and that peaked during the Younger Dryas.
Göbekli Tepe, a large, Neolithic temple complex in southwest Asia that was founded around 11,500 years ago (end of the Younger Dryas), and that was abandoned and purposely buried roughly 10,000 years ago.
All of these observations and their interdependencies will be discussed and explained in the next 20-odd posts.
Consider these pictures. Suppose I tell you in my best James Earl Jones voice, while wearing my lab coat and nerd specs:
a) Is an extraterrestrial bullet; note the undeniably alien-crafted tip
b) Solid gold angel poop
c) This photo was taken about 200 m away from the Neolithic Karahan Tepe site, and clearly shows man-made bowls used to sacrifice food scraps to vultures
d) An asteroid impact crater, evidently used by alien spacecraft to enter hollow Earth
How many of these explanations could you (or would you want to) prove to be “false”? How many “true” explanations could you provide? Would you be able to convincingly defend these explanations to a devoted woo-woo fan? Well-trained geologists should be able to do all three, though we occasionally find it hard to recall all the facts and theories learned in the classroom while recovering from the previous night’s depravities. It’s clear that a scientific expert needs to be consulted when explanations sounds fishy or lame:
a) A 100% natural quartz crystal (but half-credit if you thought dilithium crystal).
b) A 100% natural marcasite (orthorhombic FeS2) nodule.
c) Are very likely river-eroded potholes. 100% natural, although they later might have been further sculpted and used by the Karahan Tepe inhabitants.
d) Is a mostly man-made sinkhole likely caused by sewer fluids eroding the unconsolidated (volcanic ash & limestone) sediments underlying Guatemala City
While the latter explanations are scientifically truer, the former explanations are objectively more entertaining, unless you know them to be false, in which case they become irritating lies. Entertainers often state explanations as fact (clearly, undeniably, evidently, certainly), that is without weasel words. In this case the entertainer (me) does not want his audience (you) to start critically thinking about alternative explanations, as a “Hey, wait a minute ...” thought would spoil the fun. The scientific explanations used the Scientific Method (post 3) to generate explanations that merge definitions (crystal, quartz, marcasite, nodule, pothole, sinkhole), with weasel words (likely, probably) and interpretations. The weasel words usually cause an audience to ponder (did it?) whether they truly believe the explanation, that is trust the scientist (me), which is why I added the Youtube clips in order to trigger an “oh, yeah!”: seeing is believing.
So where’s the harm in letting me have some fun with angels, aliens and asteroids? There’s a fine line between deluded fun, for example the intellectually-challenged wasting their own time trying to catch a lucky leprechaun, and fraudulent, unscientific narratives that gain traction, waste everybody’s time & money and cause societal harm, for example people losing sleep over alien invasions or asteroid impacts, pensioners investing in angel poop, etc. Journalists and scientists inevitably must walk the line between making their work as entertaining as possible, while sticking to facts and evidence-based conclusions. That entertainers sometimes cross a line was clear from post 2, where the History Channel’s Great Flood took the scenic route from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Another example is when Jeremy Clarkson’s scathing – yet funny – review of Tesla’s "brown rice eco-cars" that are “as much use as a bag of muddy spinach” resulted in Tesla filing a libel lawsuit in 2007. But even Clarkson’s Top Gear co-hosts don’t take him seriously: Clarkson’s performance as an opinionated blowhard gearhead is a large part of his and Top Gear’s popularity. The courts ruled in Clarkson’s favour, as they found no malicious intent in his comments, though he clearly embellished the truth to get some laughs, and Tesla clearly thought he had crossed a line.
What about the Ryan et al. article on the Black Sea Deluge itself (post 2)? The authors present significant evidence that a catastrophe actually happened. But were they unconsciously biased towards telling a more entertaining and compelling story? Marine Geology presumably would not have been as interested in a water is wet, the pope is Catholic, and the Mediterranean trickled into the Black Sea via the Bosporus article. The Black Sea Deluge article benefits from the entertainment value of a geological philosophy known as Catastrophism, whereby violent, cataclysmic events cause huge geological upheavals. Many early geologists were Catastrophists, who scoured the geologic record for evidence confirming biblical events, such as Noah’s Flood. As more was learned Catastrophism gave way to Uniformitarianism, the philosophy whereby the present is the key to the past: slow processes that can be observed today such as erosion, debris flow deposition, etc. are interpreted to be responsible for Earth’s geological features. There’s also a hard-to-classify grey zone (uniformitarian catastrophes?) of recorded catastrophic events (tsunamis, volcanoes, meteor strikes, etc.) whose more extreme and cataclysmic versions (e.g. supervolcanoes) very likely occurred throughout the Earth’s history. Catastrophism has made a recent comeback due to the large body of evidence that the Chicxulub meteorite was likely responsible for the Cretaceous–Paleogene (dinosaur) extinction event. However, uniformitarian explanations are generally preferable, as they do not require highly-speculative, low-probability events to explain something that can better explained by higher probability, common events. Uniformitarian events are however unavoidably less entertaining in the “watching grass grow/water trickle, Boring!” sense.
Recently, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH) has also made a bit of a comeback. The YDIH proposes that the climate cooling during Younger Dryas - and many of the other events mentioned up top - occurred due to catastrophic comet impacts. This popular revival is mainly due to the stories told by Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The three entertainers attribute most of the events of the end of last ice age (top) to catastrophic comet strikes. End of the Ice Age? Comet. Sea level rise? Comet. Start of Younger Dryas? Comet. End of Younger Dryas? Comet. Disappearance of Atlantis? Comet. 40 megafloods? Comet, comet, comet. End of the Roman Empire? Comet. I made that last one up.
Hancock’s main bête noire is that most archeologists consider him a pseudoscientist, and therefore do not support his hypothesis that technologically advanced pre-historic civilisations suffered a catastrophic reset (Great Reset) during the end of the last ice age. At present he has uncovered no hard evidence of such civilisations: his Ancient Apocalypse Netflix series only mentions one (currently unexcavated) pre-historic monument, Gunung Padang, that has been reliably dated to before his proposed Younger Dryas catastrophe. But suppose we charitably assign a 2/3 chance he’s on to something, that is we judge that he is “likely” correct in his Great Reset premise. He additionally claims [1]: “It seems certain, now, that the cause of this worldwide [Younger Dryas] catastrophe was a large comet that fragmented into thousands of pieces as it entered the upper atmosphere.” This (YDIH) hypothesis however is still very controversial among scientists[2,3], and even among other “fringe” scientists [4]. Assigning it an “as likely as not” probability of 50% (and not Hancock’s 100%) leads to an overall probability of 1/3 (post 3) that Hancock’s Netflix series is fully presenting scientific truths, and a 2/3 probability that either one or both his main premises are wrong. In other words, by slapping together two controversial conjectures into an entertaining and compelling – yet low probability - Netflix story Hancock has produced something mainstream audiences find highly entertaining, yet mainstream science objectively must label “unlikely”. Rather than enhancing his credibility with mainstream archeology and science, the addition of a specific catastrophe - the YDIH - has made it worse. And even if both premises - YDIH and Great Reset - are true, he still needs to demonstrate that one caused the other. For example, ash from the 13,500 BP Glacier Peak eruptions overlies all Western US megaflood deposits [5], strongly indicating the megafloods preceded any Younger Dryas comet impact by at least 700 years.
The search for evidence of technologically advanced pre-historic civilisations can and should therefore continue in parallel to the search for evidence of the YDIH, though a blindness to YDIH alternatives might lead Hancock to look in the wrong places. For example, human civilisation’s last great reset was arguably the collapse of the West Roman Empire in Western Europe. It’s odd that many countries such as Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, etc. are all very proud of the time they were occupied by a foreign power. The reason is of course most recognise the technological benefits of Roman occupation:
The Western Roman Empire imploded mainly due to its societal collapse and the invasion of the Goths, two fairly “uniformitarian” catastrophes. This reset effectively launched the Dark Ages and set science back two millennia: 16th century Renaissance scholars still considered Aristotle (384–322 BC) as their main scientific authority. All of this demonstrating that civilisations doesn’t always need extraterrestrial help to self-destruct.
The following posts examine whether the Younger Dryas Comet made as big an impact on the Earth as it did on the 3 entertainers, and investigate the likelihood of any Great Reset of an advanced pre-historic civilisation.
References:
[1] Collins, A., 2014, Göbekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods: The Temple of the Watchers and the Discovery of Eden.
[2] Sweatman, M., 2021, The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence. Earth-Science Reviews, 218, 103677, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103677.
[3] Holliday V.T. et al. ,2023, Comprehensive refutation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH). Earth-Science Reviews, 104502, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2023.104502
[4] Schoch, R., 2021, Forgotten Civilization: The Role of Solar Outbursts in Our Past and Future. Inner Traditions, 2nd ed., 560 pp. ISBN: 978-1644112922
[5] O’Connor, Jim E. et al., 2020, The Missoula and Bonneville floods—A review of ice-age megafloods in the Columbia River basin. Earth-Science Reviews 208: 103181.