Mesopotamian Climate Change (8,000 Years Ago)

Geo Times ^ | 2-15-2004

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!!

[blam]

Over here.

[blam]

Thanks, very good read. It looks like Devereux and Oppenheimer have an 'open-minded' view of the migrations.

Oppenheimer's take on things sounds similar to James Chatters (..of Kennewick Man fame), who thinks Kennewick Man was descended from a group that produced both the Asians and Europeans.
He thinks the Kennewick Man types made their way all along the west coast of north and south America, crossed over in Panama then made their way back north along the Gulf Coast and on up the east coast of the US. I'm anxious for a definition of 'European DNA' that is spoken of in the below linked article.

European DNA found In 7-8,000 Year Old Skeleton In Florida (Windover)

Also, Read the article 'Bye, bye Beringia' linked in the above thread.

[blam]

You will probably find this interesting also:

Iberia, Not Siberia

[Djarum]

Thanks!

[ASA Vet]

A US Government agency has published evidence that indicates humans
(if Alley can be considered as one,) and dinosours existed at the same time.

[Truth666]

"A period of immense cooling and drought "
How about an estimate ?

[qam1]

TRex went down due to the asteriod that hit the Yucatan, along with most larger animal life on this planet. That is in Bryson's book too.

I thought that silly hypothesis was debunked a long time ago and was only propagated by scientist who just want to take a trip to Cancun.

Did you see an Asteroid hit around here?

[SunkenCiv]

The current ice age cycle (at the risk of duplicating another's answer, as I've only read this far into the thread) is about 2 million years old. The currently held myth is that the icecap in Antarctica is 20 million years old (formerly held to be 30 million years old, as in the NY Times absurdity about the NORTH polar ice melting back in 1999 or so) but in fact the fossils of temperate species found a couple hundred miles from the south pole are less than 3 million years old.

In the spirit of Aristotle, who stated that rocks do not fall from the sky but are carried from elsewhere by the winds, one future Nobel laureate claimed that the fossils must have been carried there -- presumably from South America, across open ocean -- by the wind.

I guess we know what kind of wind that sort of idea really is. ;')

Here's a new title from an author that just can't seem to bring himself to reject the New Lysenkoism, which is global warming / greenhouse effect.

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian M. Fagan

[SunkenCiv]

Chinatown, 1000 B.C.
by Jocelyn Selim

Mike Xu, a linguist at Texas Christian University... has spent years analyzing jade, stone, and pottery relics from the Olmec, an ancient people that inhabited the American Southwest and Central America 3,000 years ago. He was struck by how closely the symbols on the artifacts resembled Chinese inscriptions from the Shang dynasty in China. "There are hundreds of these symbols that occur again and again, throughout the entire Olmec territory," Xu says. The Shang writings date from 1600 to 1100 b.c. Traces of the Olmec civilization abruptly appear during this span, around 1200 to 1100 B.C. Olmec and Shang artistic styles look much alike, and the two cultures followed related religious practices. For instance, both used cinnabar, a red pigment, to decorate ceremonial objects, and both put jade beads in the mouths of the dead to ward off evil. "The similarities are just too striking to be a coincidence," he says.

A tale of two cultures
by Charles Fenyvesi

The Smithsonian's Meggers says that Chen's analysis of the colors "makes sense. But his reading of the text is the clincher. Writing systems are too arbitrary and complex. They cannot be independently reinvented."

2,500 Years Before Columbus
by Patrick Huyghe

[W]hen the last Shang king was defeated and killed by rivals in 1122 B.C., his loyalists were forced to flee to the "East Ocean" or Pacific, notes Xu in his new book, Origin of the Olmec Civilization (University of Central Oklahoma Press, 1996)... Numerous notable Chinese scholars have confirmed Xu's readings of the Olmec inscriptions, including Han Ping Chen, a scholar of ancient Chinese from the Historical Research Institute at the China Social Science Academy. After examining 146 characters and symbols from the Olmec culture, Chen reported: "These symbols, if found or excavated in China (except rock art and carving), would certainly be regarded as prehistoric Chinese characters or symbols. Of 146 symbols, many are 100 percent identical to ancient Chinese characters. Some, I am afraid, can be easily recognized by Chinese first graders in elementary schools..." ...William Boltz of the University of Washington and Robert Bagley of Princeton dismissed as "rubbish" the notion that the characters could be Chinese. The criticism infuriates Xu -- and rightly so, we might add. "Most experts in Olmec studies do not have any idea about ancient Chinese writings and Asian cultures or tradition," says Xu, who was educated in both China and the United States. "How on Earth could they comment on top Chinese scholars reading Chinese as 'rubbish'?"

The Olmec and the Shang
by Claire Liu
tr. by Robert Taylor

Last year, in a book entitled Origin of the Olmec Civilization, Professor Mike Xu, a Chinese who teaches in the foreign languages department at the University of Central Oklahoma, proposed a hypothesis which aroused a storm of controversy in archeological circles. In Xu's view, the first complex culture in Mesoamerica may have come into existence with the help of a group of Chinese who fled across the seas as refugees at the end of the Shang dynasty. The Olmec civilization arose around 1200 BC, which coincides with the time when King Wu of Zhou attacked and defeated King Zhou, the last Shang ruler, bringing his dynasty to a close.

America's earliest written language uncovered
Friday 6th December 2002

Carvings believed to be the earliest form of written language in the Americas have been found in Mexico. Symbols dating back to 650BC were found by archaeologists in the San Andreas region of Tabasco state, near the Gulf of Mexico. They were found on chips from a stone plaque and on a cylinder stone used for printing that were unearthed in a dig at the site of an ancient Olmec city near La Venta. The symbols are 350 years older than the oldest previously discovered American writings... The carvings were interpreted to mean "king" and "3 Ajaw", which researchers believe was the name of a ruler. The Olmec's system of carvings for dates and names was adopted by the Mayas, who then developed it into a highly sophisticated language over the next 1,000 years.

'Earliest writing' found in China
by Paul Rincon

Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists... They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia - in what is now Iraq - by more than 2,000 years. The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC... The archaeologists have identified 11 separate symbols inscribed on the tortoise shells. The shells were found buried with human remains in 24 Neolithic graves unearthed at Jiahu in Henan province, western China. The site has been radiocarbon dated to between 6,600 and 6,200 BC. The research was carried out by Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, and a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province... Dr Harbottle points to the persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shang period, when a complex writing system appears. He emphasised that he was not suggesting the Neolithic symbols had the same meanings as Shang characters they resembled... The shells come from graves where, in 1999, the researchers unearthed ancient bone flutes. These flutes are the earliest musical instruments known to date.

Origin of the Olmec civilization by H. Mike Xu

[blam]

Professor Mike Baillie has shown that a world wide catastrophic event ocurred in 1159BC (tree-rings). He believes this event caused the collapse of the Shang Dynasty.

[SunkenCiv]

The disappearance or arrival of the Moon is spoken of in at least two other ancient myths that come to mind. One is in the Welsh "Mabinogeon", an origin myth for the tides, which obviously implies a time before the Moon, but not necessarily. And the Greeks of ancient Attica claimed to have lived there since before the Moon was in the sky.

The Moon's past orbit has been reconstructed from nautiloid fossils. The major septa such species lay down today is tied to the lunar month (not the civil one, obviously). 420 million years ago the month was only 9 days long. At that time the Moon was less than half the distance from the Earth that it is now.

This means the Moon was not made from the Earth by a huge impact, because 420 million years is only one-tenth the age of the Earth, and most of the Earth-Moon distance would have had to have accumulated during those first 4 billion or so years.

Also, a fission scenario (either through impact, or through overspin a la Van Flandern) is the most complicated of all the models of lunar origin. It requires not only an impact, but one in which the lunar material remains within Earth's sphere of influence and forms a sphere (the lunar core is only 8 km off dead center). It is thus a fission model, a capture model, and an in situ formation model all in one.

Sooooo, the Moon formed somewhere else and was captured by the Earth, probably in a series of encounters as speculated by V.A. Firsoff circa 1960.

[SunkenCiv]

Bryson assumes that the polar climate has not changed, and assumes that the pole is located in the same place now as it was then. The digs at the Haughton crater (Canadian Arctic) established that the climate has changed several times, abruptly, and that it was temperate (similar to Maine) at least once long after the dinos.

[SunkenCiv]

File this under, 'how climate shaped history, and not the other way around'. ;') Glad to see another catastrophist here.

The 4200 year figure is in accord with the information in the earlier article, Disaster that struck the ancients and these other links date from before the discovery of the ancient impact crater in Iraq. I read it a few years ago, but you've also linked it here. There are further links on that BBC page to the stalactite/stalagmite studies that should be required reading for anyone concerned about so-called global warming.

How Climate Shaped History
by Kenneth Chang

In 2280 B.C., a civilization called the Akkadians absorbed Tell Leilan. A century later, the town had emptied out and remained unpopulated for three centuries. The entire Akkadian civilization collapsed and disappeared. "There is a depopulation, desertion of northern Mesopotamian region," says Harvey Weiss, professor of prehistorical archaeology at Yale University, who led excavations at Tell Leilan, "and Tell Leilan’s abandonment is simply typical of that process." Climate records show rainfall dried up in the Middle East around 2200 B.C., which would have deprived farmers of needed winter rains. In cores dug up in the Gulf of Oman to the south, sediments deposited during this time show very different minerals, indicating different wind patterns. Other archaeological sites show that cities to the south, surrounded by irrigated fields, swelled in population at the same time.

Causes And Effects Of The 2350 BC Middle East Anomaly
by Marie-Agnès Courty

Test on various late third millennium BC archaeological deposit and contemporaneous provides evidence for the regional occurrence in northern Syria of a layer with an uncommon petrographic assemblage, dated at ca. 2350 BC (transition between late Early Dynastic and Early Akkad)... All these particles are only present in this specific layer and are finely mixed with mud-brick debris or with a burnt surface horizon in the contemporaneous soils. In occupation sequences, the layer displays an uncommon dense packing of sand-sized, very porous aggregates that suggests disintegration of the mud-brick construction by an air blast. In the virgin soil, the burnt horizon contains black soot and graphite, and appears to have been instantaneously fossilised by a rapid and uncommon colluvial wash... The restricted occurrence... suggests that the massive tephra accumulation can no longer be considered as a typical fallout derived from the dispersion of material from a terrestrial volcanic explosion... The theory of the Akkad empire collapse has, however, lost its basis.

Meteor clue to end of Middle East civilisations
by Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent

"Studies of satellite images of southern Iraq have revealed a two-mile-wide circular depression which scientists say bears all the hallmarks of an impact crater. If confirmed, it would point to the Middle East being struck by a meteor with the violence equivalent to hundreds of nuclear bombs.

"The catastrophic effect of these could explain the mystery of why so many early cultures went into sudden decline around 2300 BC. They include the demise of the Akkad culture of central Iraq, with its mysterious semi-mythological emperor Sargon; the end of the fifth dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom, following the building of the Great Pyramids and the sudden disappearance of hundreds of early settlements in the Holy Land."

To put the impact into some perspective, the Barringer or Meteor Crater in AZ is about 3/4 mile across; this more recent crater would be the result of an impact more than four times greater.

Comets Tied To Fall Of Empires
by Robert S. Boyd
(1999)

At least five times during the last 6,000 years, about 3200 BC, 2300 BC, 1628 BC, 1159 BC, and between 530 and 540 AD, major environmental calamities undermined civilizations worldwide. Some researchers say these disasters appear to be linked to collisions with comets or fragments of comets like the one that broke apart and smashed into Jupiter five years ago this summer.

The civilization-shattering events of the historic era "must have been near-misses, because if we had been hit by a full-blown comet in the past 10,000 years or so, we wouldn't be here today," said Mike Baillie, a British archaeologist who studies tree rings.

Uh, no. Not near-misses. Not all objects in space are the same size.

[Light Speed]

Enjoyed Your reply SC : )

Cruising around the net googling moon /mythology came accross a NASA/JPL comment.
Seems there is several NEA streams which NASA/JPL regressed via computer modelling and discovered a point of origen.
Their conclusion...some of the NEA's out there in several streams are probable remnants of a moon torn apart by some mechansim.
they also forwarded the possibility that the Earth has had other moons..

NASA recently admiting..well tenatively : ).that Mars orbital config has changed in the past.

Velikovsky discovered reams of info on cultural calandric mods...same culture modding its calendar from 360 to 365..world wide..and paralell aspect as China and Mesopotamia both did the calendar re cal same period.
Velikovsky may get a mild nod of conscent from those who at least tenatively accept orbital divergence that results in the calendric account.
but then..Velikovsky discovered earth year calendar in the high 280'290's.

[SunkenCiv]

Enjoyed Your reply SC : )

I'm sorry, I'd missed yours until now. It's a pleasure to find another interested in the V-man.

[SunkenCiv]

Ping. When did the huge fresh water lakes in North America collapse?

Looks like neither Farmfriend or Rightwhale answered, but someone else may have. If so, I do apologize.

Channeled Scablands Theory
Spokane Outdoors

J. Harlan Bretz... proposed a flood in which the sudden release of a volume of water much larger than that which now flows through the area produced the very large scale erosion. This would require the formation of a dam which would hold back the normal rainfall and snowmelt for many years, and then suddenly break, releasing this water over a period of days of weeks. Such a dam could be made by a glacier. If it blocked a stream valley, water would rise behind it. If it failed, it would do so catastrophically since as it began to break up, blocks of ice would float away, so the dam would fail from the bottom up. This would provide the large volumes of water needed to explain erosional features such as Dry Falls and explain why these features don't conform to the more common characteristics of stream erosion (V-shaped valleys, streams follow valleys). Since the flood(s) appeared to originate in the Spokane area, he termed them the Spokane floods.

I got a good laugh out of this -- "The accepted model in geology was and is Uniformitarianism." But even worse was a letter some years ago to Science News in which the writer (a professor, which is kinda sad) dumped all over the Chicxulub impact (or possibly just the Alvarez model, in case it was longer ago than 1990), claiming that, other than this flood event, no catastrophic events have ever taken place on Earth.

[blam]

"People as separated as the Japanese Ainu and Basques may share common Mediterranean roots and have become separated as a result of the post-ice age climate change.

The Relationship Between The Basque And The Ainu

I believe it was the Ainu who migrated back to Europe.

[blam]

I have an answer, looks like it was between 8,000-7,500BC.