A landmark Book

[E.P. Grondine]

[...] but I feel that such an accurate folk story will likely be found to have a basis in fact, that's the development I meant.

(Italics mine)

Science isn't about feelings, hunches, rumors, legends, myths, etc. etc., Roy.

And WTF is "accurate" about a story if there's no evidence proving that accuracy?
Are you sure you didn't mean "detailed" (a.k.a. "embellished")?

RS, I agree completely with you about hard evidence. It will be wonderful when the YD comet impacts are proved beyond a shadow of a doubt geologically; in the meantime, there's still the hard archaeological evidence of quarry abandonment, end clovis, and the mega faunal record.

For example, I myself am still waiting for the US Geological Survey's cores from the Carolinas.
In the meantime, all that we have is archaeological data:
http://forum.palanth.com/index.php/topic,1276.0.html

BUT the problem that anyone is faced with coming up with an alternative hypothesis for what are dismissed as "myths".

You can dismiss all YD accounts as fossil myths if you fear the impact hazard enough to let it
affect your judgement. BUT if impacts did not occur and were witnessed, then why would people make up such extraordinary tales about "stars' falling, and go into such detailed accounts of their effects?

You should also keep in mind that impact studies are on the cutting edge of science. Even the KT impacts are still not thoroughly understood some 30 years on, as the recent work on Shiva shows very clearly. And the search for geological evidence at Tunguska still continues after a century.

Given the state of research on the YD impacts and the RC dating problems, you can imagine how hard it was to work with the smaller impacts.

[E.P. Grondine]

Well, if NASA won’t do it, maybe the Russians will.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_russia_asteroid_encounter


MOSCOW – Russia is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country's space agency said Wednesday.

In October, NASA lowered the odds that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 from a 1-in-45,000 as earlier thought to a 1-in-250,000 chance after researchers recalculated the asteroid's path. It said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.

Without mentioning NASA findings, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. "I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032," Perminov said.

Russia's old plan:

2001 An improved English translation of
THE RUSSIAN POSITION PAPER ON PLANETARY DEFENSE
by Anatoly V. Zaitsev
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc020701.html

[Cognito]

My complaint with the book, Cogs, was that it relied on folklore far too much and actual science far too little.

Hey Min, apologies for the tardy response, but I've been busy. From my standpoint, in picking up EP's book I was pleasantly surprised to read through so many oral accounts since, at least for me, those are more difficult to find than the myriad of scientific explanations for impacts, etc., currently in press.

In no way am I stating that folklore outweighs good science - that wasn't my point. When Charles Mann (1491) states that nearly 95% of the native population was wiped out by diseases during the first century of European occupation, I am looking for anything that will fill in the tapestry. For example, geneticists have documented five original Native American maternal mtDNA haplogroups with only two yDNA paternal haplogroups so far with non-complimetary places of origin in some cases. That imbalance leads me to believe that a significant amount of genetic history could be missing from our data pile.

To date, the conventional view of the ancient Americas appears woefully fragmented and incomplete - and any clue as to what really happened, oral tradition or otherwise, is welcome. So far, I am not buying into the view that Paleos arrived in North America 15-16kya when I have recovered nicely worked lithics from a site dated to a minimum age of 24kya. You have seen some of these, and they ain't just sharp rocks!

[Minimalist]

There has to be some balance, Cogs.

Otherwise you end up with the bible....a collection of stories.

[Digit]

Or conversly from that Min you have to give some credit to the possibilty that some Bible stories are based on actual events.
Before you jump all over me for that just think what politicians and Holywood can do to a factual account!

Roy.

[Minimalist]

Yes, of course....that must be why all the Egyptians were drowned in the flood but kept on building pyramids in spite of that!

[uniface]

If you're doing the best you can with what you have to go by, identifying and allowing for the distorting effect of your own assumptions (instead of insisting on them as the centerpiece of the result and the touchstone by which "validity" is established) you'll come a lot closer than you will the way you're going about it now.

[Digit]

I don't recall that story Min. But like I pointed out, the spin machine is as old as man.
Owain Glyndwr is supposed to be sleeping under a Welsh hillside till the time he's needed. He was a real person, I doubt Nelson said 'kiss me Hardy' either.

Roy.

[E.P. Grondine]

Hi min -

Generally, among Native American peoples the way that they handled their histories was far different than the way the handled the other parts of their oral corpus. Those people who held the histories were carefully selected and then carefully trained. In the north and east, they had the use of pictographs or images in wampum belts, and those belts also held year counts.

In Central America the Maya had formal writing, other peoples detailed pictographs, and in South America they had quippu, though many of those records were destroyed by the Inca.

While the histories would be adapted, and suppressed or destroyed, and many history keepers died during the conquest, and some are accounts were/are poorly understood, when those histories accord with the archaeological and geological record then...what you have are proto-historical records.

It would have been nice to have had formal well read written records, and to have had them all collected all in one place, but that is not what was there. I gathered together what I could, and made it available all in one place. I do regret that the Ojibwe mediwiwin had not released their history before the book was done.

Originally, my book was simply going to be simply a collection of impact accounts, but then I realized that none of the sources I was quoting were easily available, and they were often dismissed as simply "folklore", particularly by those with no understanding of the peoples' cultures or languages.

Many others besides uniface think that it is a landmark book, and I am glad I managed to get it done before my stroke, as it would not be possible for me to do it now. Any one of the proto-histories given in the appendix make it worth the price, and you will usually have to pay as much for any one of them as you do for my entire book, if you can find them at all.

How the OT of the bible was composed and from what by who when is a set of entirely separate questions. Because primary contemporary well read documents survived in the Ancient Near East, perhaps I would simply have used those, and avoided the OT materials entirely for my impact catalogue of that area. Since my stroke, that is kind of a moot point.

In the Old World section I gave you the absolute chronology I had worked out from contemporary records, and another post with the OT materials compared to that.

[E.P. Grondine]

My complaint with the book, Cogs, was that it relied on folklore far too much and actual science far too little.

Hey Min, apologies for the tardy response, but I've been busy. From my standpoint, in picking up EP's book I was pleasantly surprised to read through so many oral accounts since, at least for me, those are more difficult to find than the myriad of scientific explanations for impacts, etc., currently in press.

Thank you for your kind words, Cognito. Those oral accounts were very difficult to find, and now you have the reliable ones all in one place, with the exception of the Ojibwe mediwin's history.

In no way am I stating that folklore outweighs good science - that wasn't my point. When Charles Mann (1491) states that nearly 95% of the native population was wiped out by diseases during the first century of European occupation, I am looking for anything that will fill in the tapestry.

Which is what I provided, and I am glad you have it now.

For example, geneticists have documented five original Native American maternal mtDNA haplogroups with only two yDNA paternal haplogroups so far with non-complimetary places of origin in some cases. That imbalance leads me to believe that a significant amount of genetic history could be missing from our data pile.

Unfortunately the ethnographic material on the Oconachee/Yuchi was not available at the time my book was done. How much of that DNA pool survived the impacts and the conquest is not known, but they were devastated enough so that the 6th mt DNA haplogroup has not been attested yet.

To date, the conventional view of the ancient Americas appears woefully fragmented and incomplete - and any clue as to what really happened, oral tradition or otherwise, is welcome.

I hope that the clues I gathered together and passed on have filled in some of those gaps.

So far, I am not buying into the view that Paleos arrived in North America 15-16kya when I have recovered nicely worked lithics from a site dated to a minimum age of 24kya. You have seen some of these, and they ain't just sharp rocks!

I have little doubt how that C mt DNA group also shows up at the very southern tip of South America - a crossing via Berringia ca. 45,000 BCE.

I have this feeling that min did not read the footnotes, and thus missed much of the hard data. I originally intended to place them at the bottom of each page, but after my stroke this proved impossible for me to accomplish.

min also has a great interest in the composition mechanism of the OT. In assembling "Man and Impact in the Americas", I was dealing with far different materials from an entirely different hemisphere, and several far different religions.

[Minimalist]

I’d hoped to avoid this but, c’est la vie.

Let’s start with Chapter 8 of your book on the Great Atlantic Impact Mega Tsunami ca. 1050 BCE. I had marked that chapter when I read it because, frankly, that was where you lost me. You discuss Atlantis and the Exodus based on Thera and so on. Anyway, that’s why I started bending the corners of pages.

First of all, I ran the phrase “Great Atlantic Impact” through google and got six hits: One was to a discussion in this forum, one in another forum, 3 seem to have been written by you and 1 was a less than flattering review of the book. There is certainly nothing wrong with being the lone voice on something as long as you have evidence to back you up. I do not see that evidence for any impact (storm surges from hurricanes push water ashore, too) and there is certainly no firestorm of chatter about it on the web. On Page 157 you state that the Exodus can be dated to 1628 BC because of the eruption of Thera. Well, Thera blew up but it had precious little to do with any “Exodus”. This is not the time for a recap of Egyptian history but we have been down this road before.

But let’s not get too far from the subject of “footnotes.” The first footnote in Chapter 8 appears at the end of this sentence: When this world was almost lost in the waters, a frog predicted it. At your suggestion I consulted footnote #1 and found it to be a bibliographical reference to the 1929 publication which you had used to “adapt” it.

There are 18 other footnotes for chapter 8.

12 are bibliographical in that they relate to works that you presumably drew from, or at least consulted. One of these is to Ovid’s Metamorphosis...a book of Roman poetry.

2 refer to other chapters in the book
1 deals with Greek measurement
1 is an alternate reading of a word.
1 states that hallucinogenic drugs were used in the Americas
and 1 offers a couple of definitions and should probably be included in the first 12.

I also cannot help but point out that Charles Pellegrino allowed himself to be sucked into Simcha Jacobovici’s “The Exodus Decoded” when that charlatan tried to shoehorn the Exodus to 1500 BC...along with Thera’s eruption!

Nonetheless, there is not a lot of hard scientific evidence in the footnotes.

[E.P. Grondine]

I’d hoped to avoid this but, c’est la vie.

No, min, you were looking forward to it.

Let’s start with Chapter 8 of your book on the Great Atlantic Impact Mega Tsunami ca. 1050 BCE. I had marked that chapter when I read it because, frankly, that was where you lost me. You discuss Atlantis and the Exodus based on Thera and so on. Anyway, that’s why I started bending the corners of pages.

min, I expected that the OT sycnchronisms would stick in your craw. But impact events have global consequences; for example this mega-tsunami that hit the Americas also hit Spain/Portugal.

And the people on Malta disappear from the face of the Earth the same year as the Rio Cuarto impacts, 2,360 BCE.

Footnote 2 refers you to the Cambridge Conference archives, where there is loads of detailed discussion of both Ancient Near Eastern chronology and OT chronology.

First of all, I ran the phrase “Great Atlantic Impact” through google and got six hits: One was to a discussion in this forum, one in another forum, 3 seem to have been written by you and 1 was a less than flattering review of the book.

I believe that review was by Eric Stevens from New Zealand, and his interest in the archaeology of the Americas is nil, and it was a hard read for him; his comment was he was glad he had read it, but would not do so again. He just wanted the impact accounts, not the Native American history; but others, such as uniface, and many people with Native American heritage, want what is there.

It does take some people weeks to read through it, while others read it in 3 days, and then re-read it and keep it handy for reference. It depends upon your level of interest in the peoples in the Americas.

As far the the term "Great Atlantic Impact Mega-tsunami", at the time I referred to what are now known as the "YD Impacts" as the "Holocene Start Impacts".

There is certainly nothing wrong with being the lone voice on something as long as you have evidence to back you up. I do not see that evidence for any impact (storm surges from hurricanes push water ashore, too) and there is certainly no firestorm of chatter about it on the web.

Your analysis of the "Storm Stela of Ahmose" again.

Because of my stroke, I was unable to footnote the 20 feet of "marine sediments" found over the "Olmec" site of La Venta, mentioned inline in the text, nor to include a photograph showing them. For the sediment in North America, see the link here:
http://forum.palanth.com/index.php/topic,1276.0.html

Since my book, work has been done on the Spanish and Portugese mega-tsunami deposits.

Since Benny took the Cambridge Conference over to AGW scepticism, the work on impact mega-tsunami has gone unreported. I can say that Dr. Dallas Abbott is a big fan of it, though.

On Page 157 you state that the Exodus can be dated to 1628 BC because of the eruption of Thera.

Improving the footnoting of Chapter 8 was when my stroke hit. I can't remember in the tree ring dates were in then, or if it was simply ice core dates.

The "plagues" of Exodus probably refer to the discharge of a caustic lake into the Nile due to seismic activity along that rift: the well documented earthquake that preceded the eruption of Thera in 1628 BCE.

Well, Thera blew up but it had precious little to do with any “Exodus”.

In your opinion.

This is not the time for a recap of Egyptian history but we have been down this road before.

Yes, we have been down this OT chronology road before, and others have as well.
Commented on on pages 156-157, and you fit right in those two pages.

Footnote 12 refers to contemporary Near Eastern written records in the Cambridge Conference. See: 1998-2002
On the Joshua impact event
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc032098.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc032598.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc033098.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc012102.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc021202.html

How that material got incorporated into the OT is now for others to work out. In other words, if was not the written history of the ancient Israelites, then its a question of whose history they adopted, where, when, and by who.

But let’s not get too far from the subject of “footnotes.” The first footnote in Chapter 8 appears at the end of this sentence: When this world was almost lost in the waters, a frog predicted it. At your suggestion I consulted footnote #1 and found it to be a bibliographical reference to the 1929 publication which you had used to “adapt” it.

The 1929 citation was for Swanton's recording of an Alabama flood myth, and yes, the Alabama appear to have used bufotonin from frogs as a hallucinogen for divination. This explains some excavated pipes and iconography.

There are 18 other footnotes for chapter 8.

12 are bibliographical in that they relate to works that you presumably drew from, or at least consulted. One of these is to Ovid’s Metamorphosis...a book of Roman poetry.

Ovid refers to an appearance of Comet Encke in the same year as the eruption of Thera,
1628 BCE. Amazing how celestial mechanics and the ice core and tree ring data agree.

2 refer to other chapters in the book

and information not generally or easily available elsewhere

1 deals with Greek measurement
1 is an alternate reading of a word.
1 states that hallucinogenic drugs were used in the Americas
and 1 offers a couple of definitions and should probably be included in the first 12.

You've left out the citations to the Mayan written accounts entirely, and that is not fair, min.

I also cannot help but point out that Charles Pellegrino allowed himself to be sucked into Simcha Jacobovici’s “The Exodus Decoded” when that charlatan tried to shoehorn the Exodus to 1500 BC...along with Thera’s eruption!

Nonetheless, there is not a lot of hard scientific evidence in the footnotes.

The chronology of the Ancient Near East, from contemporary written records, that I assembled prior to my stroke, is given over in the Old World section here, along with another post on OT parallels.

[Leona Conner]

I was thinking of getting the book until I read this thread. I have read all of Immanuel Velikosvsky's books and this one sounds like a rewrite of "Worlds in Collision" and "Earth in Upheavel". The sad thing is the so called "serious" scientists are still calling him a crack-pot.

[E.P. Grondine]

I was thinking of getting the book until I read this thread. I have read all of Immanuel Velikosvsky's books and this one sounds like a rewrite of "Worlds in Collision" and "Earth in Upheavel". The sad thing is the so called "serious" scientists are still calling him a crack-pot.

I think that uniface will be happy to tell you that "Man and Impact in the Americas" is definitely NOT a rewrite of anything by Velikovsky.

If you want that, look elsewhere; I don't want to disappoint you.

Velikovsky was a plagiarist, who combined astoundingly bad astro-physics with astoundingly bad "history", all of which he lifted from others without acknowledgment. Leroy Ellenberger, who knew V. personally, will be more than happy to tell you all about him if you're interested in his "works". Or simply google "Johann Radloff".

[Minimalist]

I’d hoped to avoid this but, c’est la vie.

No, min, you were looking forward to it.

You're wrong, E.P. I really do not enjoy seeming to beat up on a stroke victim.

Let’s start with Chapter 8 of your book on the Great Atlantic Impact Mega Tsunami ca. 1050 BCE. I had marked that chapter when I read it because, frankly, that was where you lost me. You discuss Atlantis and the Exodus based on Thera and so on. Anyway, that’s why I started bending the corners of pages.

min, I expected that the OT sycnchronisms would stick in your craw. But impact events have global consequences; for example this mega-tsunami that hit the Americas also hit Spain/Portugal.

And the people on Malta disappear from the face of the Earth the same year as the Rio Cuarto impacts, 2,360 BCE.

Footnote 2 refers you to the Cambridge Conference archives, where there is loads of detailed discussion of both Ancient Near Eastern chronology and OT chronology.

But I do not have access to the Cambridge Conference Archives which is a little like introducing hearsay evidence in court. I can't cross-examine the witness. And rather than provide "hard scientific information" all you did was write a very polite bibliography of your sources. If you wanted to insert that evidence into the narrative I'm sure you could have found a way. My impression is that you were happiest recounting the fables.

First of all, I ran the phrase “Great Atlantic Impact” through google and got six hits: One was to a discussion in this forum, one in another forum, 3 seem to have been written by you and 1 was a less than flattering review of the book.

I believe that review was by Eric Stevens from New Zealand, and his interest in the archaeology of the Americas is nil, and it was a hard read for him; his comment was he was glad he had read it, but would not do so again. He just wanted the impact accounts, not the Native American history; but others, such as uniface, and many people with Native American heritage, want what is there.

No, it was Doug Weller who was an occasional participant here some time back.

It does take some people weeks to read through it, while others read it in 3 days, and then re-read it and keep it handy for reference. It depends upon your level of interest in the peoples in the Americas.

As far the the term "Great Atlantic Impact Mega-tsunami", at the time I referred to what are now known as the "YD Impacts" as the "Holocene Start Impacts".

Well....I looked that up too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_I ... king_Group

The group states that their hypothesis is likely to be controversial: "I wouldn't expect 99.9 per cent of (the scientific community) to agree with us"[1] Their work is controversial because it contradicts much of what is understood about impacts and tsunamis.

So far, they seem to be right about that.

There is certainly nothing wrong with being the lone voice on something as long as you have evidence to back you up. I do not see that evidence for any impact (storm surges from hurricanes push water ashore, too) and there is certainly no firestorm of chatter about it on the web.

Your analysis of the "Storm Stela of Ahmose" again.

All one needs to do is read it. Are you really asking to be equated with Simcha Jacobovici?"

Because of my stroke, I was unable to footnote the 20 feet of "marine sediments" found over the "Olmec" site of La Venta, mentioned inline in the text, nor to include a photograph showing them. For the sediment in North America, see the link here:
http://forum.palanth.com/index.php/topic,1276.0.html

I followed that link. It's a post you wrote on another forum.

Since my book, work has been done on the Spanish and Portugese mega-tsunami deposits.

Since Benny took the Cambridge Conference over to AGW scepticism, the work on impact mega-tsunami has gone unreported. I can say that Dr. Dallas Abbott is a big fan of it, though.

On Page 157 you state that the Exodus can be dated to 1628 BC because of the eruption of Thera.

Improving the footnoting of Chapter 8 was when my stroke hit. I can't remember in the tree ring dates were in then, or if it was simply ice core dates.

It is not the date of Thera which is the problem. It is the simple fact that two hundred years of archaeological work in Egypt has not shown a scintilla of evidence that there was an Exodus nor that there was ever a population of Hebrew "Slaves" to do the Exodizing...to coin a phrase. The closest anyone can get is the Hyksos who were Semitic RULERS of the 15th Dynasty and who were chased out of Egypt by the aforementioned Ahmose I c 1550. What followed was 4 centuries of Egyptian domination of Canaan and the tel Amarna library indicates that there were no Hebrews, Israelites or Jews located in Canaan at that time. I agree that the triple methods of c14, dendrochronology, and ice cores all point to Thera's explosion c 1628 BC. It is the assumption that this event "must" have been involved in the fictional Exodus which frankly, burns my ass. No. It "must" not have been. It is unlikely that it even "might" have been. As you pointed out in another post, Archaeology is what we do here.

The "plagues" of Exodus probably refer to the discharge of a caustic lake into the Nile due to seismic activity along that rift: the well documented earthquake that preceded the eruption of Thera in 1628 BCE.

See above.

Well, Thera blew up but it had precious little to do with any “Exodus”.

In your opinion.

I am far from alone. Try reading Redford and/or Finkelstein who date the story to the 7th century BC or Phillip Davies who dates it to post-exilic times.

This is not the time for a recap of Egyptian history but we have been down this road before.

Yes, we have been down this OT chronology road before, and others have as well.
Commented on on pages 156-157, and you fit right in those two pages.

Footnote 12 refers to contemporary Near Eastern written records in the Cambridge Conference. See: 1998-2002
On the Joshua impact event
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc032098.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc032598.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc033098.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc012102.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/cc021202.html

How that material got incorporated into the OT is now for others to work out. In other words, if was not the written history of the ancient Israelites, then its a question of whose history they adopted, where, when, and by who.

See above

But let’s not get too far from the subject of “footnotes.” The first footnote in Chapter 8 appears at the end of this sentence: When this world was almost lost in the waters, a frog predicted it. At your suggestion I consulted footnote #1 and found it to be a bibliographical reference to the 1929 publication which you had used to “adapt” it.

The 1929 citation was for Swanton's recording of an Alabama flood myth, and yes, the Alabama appear to have used bufotonin from frogs as a hallucinogen for divination. This explains some excavated pipes and iconography.

But is that the hard scientific evidence you previously mentioned? That, and the other 12 bibliographical references are certainly proper etiquette. You should identify your sources and you did. But you did not make any attempt to extract any scientific data that they may have cited....if any.

There are 18 other footnotes for chapter 8.

12 are bibliographical in that they relate to works that you presumably drew from, or at least consulted. One of these is to Ovid’s Metamorphosis...a book of Roman poetry.

Ovid refers to an appearance of Comet Encke in the same year as the eruption of Thera,
1628 BCE. Amazing how celestial mechanics and the ice core and tree ring data agree.

P. Ovidius Naso was born in 43 BC and died in c 17 AD. He thus lived 1600 years after the event which is roughly the difference between us and Alaric the Goth. As for Encke?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Encke

Comet Encke is the shortest period comet known. It returns every three years. How many times can it hit us?

2 refer to other chapters in the book

and information not generally or easily available elsewhere

1 deals with Greek measurement
1 is an alternate reading of a word.
1 states that hallucinogenic drugs were used in the Americas
and 1 offers a couple of definitions and should probably be included in the first 12.

You've left out the citations to the Mayan written accounts entirely, and that is not fair, min.

Incorrect, E.P. You have a total of 19 footnotes and I accounted for all of them. But 12 are bibliographical references and do not impart "hard science" in and of themselves.

I also cannot help but point out that Charles Pellegrino allowed himself to be sucked into Simcha Jacobovici’s “The Exodus Decoded” when that charlatan tried to shoehorn the Exodus to 1500 BC...along with Thera’s eruption!

Nonetheless, there is not a lot of hard scientific evidence in the footnotes.

The chronology of the Ancient Near East, from contemporary written records, that I assembled prior to my stroke, is given over in the Old World section here, along with another post on OT parallels.

And I quite agree that barring some ARCHAEOLOGICAL evidence to support them we do not need to go down that road again.

I am just curious about one thing. Firestone is trying to make his impact case on the basis of magnetic microspheres, magnetic grains, iridium, nickel, charcoal, polycyclic hydrocarbons, carbon spherules, ET helium, glass-like carbon, and nanodiamonds. Should not some of this sort of evidence be present for the impacts you assert? If there is such evidence why did you disregard it in favor of fables? If there is not how can you hope to impress the scientific community?