Moderators: MichelleH, Minimalist, JPeters
Your comment seems to support hyper-diffusion, as do a lot of new discoveries. These Paleo-Peeps seemed to be making their way around the globe, with relative ease.Trade routes across Eurasia (the Silk Road) can easily explain the flow of ideas back and forth. Less obvious are Native American flood myths which seem to maintain the same general idea in spite of being cut off from Eurasia by two oceans.
A significant alluvial event occurred here in central Texas, according Collin's, et al., around 12,000-13,000 B.P. (14,000-15,200 B.P. Calibrated), about a millenium prior to Clovis. The event was significant enough to move downstream, and incorporate, with roughly equal distribution, within the smaller gravel and boulder matrix, very heavy boulders, in the 200-300 pound range. The flooding I see these days seems very strong, but I've yet to see any of these current floods even budge the larger boulders. I really can't imagine the ferocity of the flooding that mixed these huge boulders within the gravel matrix, up to 8-10 feet above the limestone creekbed, on which the gravel/ boulder stratum caps...For a guy who has been known to climb out on a limb or two yourself, Charlie, let me join you.
I think what it means is that the basic story is true. In a court of law if you get five witnesses saying the same thing it is going to have quite an effect on a jury...this is 600 witnesses.
What do they say? Leaving out the religious mumbo-jumbo we get:
a- Mankind was numerous,
b- There was a flood or some other inundation,
c- Mankind was significantly reduced in numbers,
d- There was some kind of warning given but too late to save more than a handful.
e- Afterwards, contact between far-flung groups was lost and society re-emerged in isolation.
Hancock suggests the end of the last ice age and the melt down. It's a theory worthy of study but I'm not sure if it would have been catastrophic enough. Perhaps a meteor or comet strike in the ocean with tsunamis? I've seen models which suggest that a hit in the Southern Pacific would generate world wide tsunamis,
Firestone, R., A. West, and
S. Warwick-Smith, 2006, THE CYCLE OF COSMIC CATASTROPHES: FLOOD, FIRE, AND FAMINE IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION, Bear Company, Rochester,Vermont, 392 pp, ISBN 10:1-59143-061-5.
...But I didn't know about the supernova's effects then, which
included rapid meltdown of northern ice sheets and massive
northern-hemisphere flooding 16,000 years ago ( p. 18 ). Evidence for
that event might be the gravel cap....
Or I'M right and the Goddess Chalchihuitlicue was responsible for the deluge which caused all but two of the world's people to be turned into fish.
Extensive catastrophic Ice Age floods some 43 to 13 thousand years ago in south-central Siberia have been discovered recently. These ‘super-floods’ are similar in size to the Missoula floods which swept across the northern states of the USA at about the same time. The Missoula floods were about 6km wide and 150m deep with flow speeds of 25 metres per second. They discharged around 20 million cubic metres of water at peak flow. The Altai floods were about the same discharge but were up to 400m deep!! A small domestic refrigerator has a capacity of around 1 cubic metre and so if you had been sitting on a mountain top as the flood went by you have to imagine about 20 million fridges passing by you EVERY second!!! That gives an idea of THE SIZE OF THESE FLOODS very effectively. Archaeological evidence shows that in the latter part of the Ice Age there were people living in the area who might have witnessed the floods or indeed could have been killed by the massive flood waves. These floods produced giant gravel ripples and giant flood bars in the landscape on a scale similar to that associated with the draining of glacial Lake Missoula in North America around the same time.
Climatologists confirm that, not only was the Egyptian climate as arid and bone-dry in 2500 BC, but the last time Egypt experienced a rainy period capable of producing such weathering effects was the Neolithic Subpluvial, between 5000 and 7000 BC.
