The Pleistocene Extinction

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Paleontologists the world over know that something catastrophic happened to the large mammals roaming the world during the Pleistocene Epoch. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, toxodons, sabre-toothed tigers, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths, and many other large Pleistocene animals are simply no longer with us. In fact, well over 200 species of animals (involving millions of individuals) totally disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene some 10,000-12,000 years ago in what is known to Paleontologists as the Pleistocene Extinction (Click for table).

Moreover, there is evidence of large geological changes which took place, such as massive volcanism, numerous earthquakes, tidal waves, to say nothing of the glacial melting which raised sea-levels several hundred feet worldwide. It's beginning to look like the Pleistocene Epoch didn't tippy-toe out silently, but rather ended with a large roar. Geologists and Paleontologists have an innate distaste for catastrophism, and that's understandable. Catastrophists, who in the beginning were identifying every strata of sediment with a worldwide flood, layer upon layer, almost totally discredited the field of geology--and uniformitarianism pulled the science out of the fire. But now, scientists in both fields are gradually realizing that both catastrophism and uniformitarianism (or gradualism) are at work in nature, and that everything can't be explained using one or the other alone (Gould, 1975). One of the indicators of the end of the Pleistocene 12,000 years ago is the huge numbers of frozen carcasses in both hemispheres: Canada and Alaska in the western, and Northern Russian and Siberia in the eastern.

Back in middle 1940s Dr. Frank C. Hibben, Prof. of Archeology at the University of New Mexico mounted an expedition to Alaska to look for human remains. The remains he found were not human, but what he found was anything but evidence of gradualism or uniformitarianism. Instead he found miles of muck filled with the remains of mammoth, mastodon, several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears and lions. Just north of Fairbanks, Hibbens and his associates watched as bulldozers pushed the half-melted muck into sluice boxes for the extraction of gold. Animal tusks and bones rolled up in front of the blades "like shavings before a giant plane". The carcasses were found in all attitudes of death, most of them "pulled apart by some unexplainable prehistoric catastrophic disturbance" (Hibben, 1946).

The evidence of the violence of nature combined with the stench of rotting carcasses was staggering. The ice fields containing these remains stretched for hundred of miles in every direction (Hibben, 1946). Trees and animals, layers of peat and mosses, twisted and mangled together like some giant mixer had jumbled them some 10,000 years ago, and then froze them into a solid mass (Sanderson, 1960). The evidence immediately suggests an enormous tidal wave which raged over the land, tumbling animals and vegetation within its mass, which was then quick-frozen. But the extinction is not limited to the Arctic.

Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in north America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, admitting that in all honesty no one knows the answer. He also admits that this is only a part of the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time (Simpson, 1961). The horse is merely the tip of the iceberg: giant tortoises living in the Caribbean Sea, the giant sloth, the sabre-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. They weren't wiped out because Alaska and Siberia were experiencing an Ice Age. "Unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question," say leading Paleontologists (Martin & Guilday, 1967).

Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the end of the Pleistocene. Massive piles of mastodon and sabre-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida (Valentine, 1969), while mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venesuala quick-frozen among the mountain glaciers (Berlitz, 1969). All died at about the same time, roughly 12,000 years ago.

The picture in Siberia and northern Europe is no different. Just north of Siberia whole islands are formed of the bones of Pleistocene animals swept northward from the continent into the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean. It has been estimated that some ten million animals lay buried along the rivers of northern Siberia. Thousands of tusks formed a massive ivory trade for the master carvers of China, all from the remains of the frozen mammoths and mastodons of Siberia. The famous Beresovka mammoth first drew attention to the preserving properties of being quick-frozen when buttercups were found in its mouth. This was no gradual event--it had to be sudden!

And the event was worldwide. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct about the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska and the bison of Siberia ended simultaneously. The same is true of the Asian elephants and the American camels. The cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres. If the coming of glacial conditions was gradual, it would not have cause the extinctions, because the various animals could have simply migrated to where conditions were better. What is seen here is total surprise, and uncontrolled violence (Leonard, 1979).

Geologists are once more becoming divided on the issue of catastrophism. A few are breaking away from their hard stand of the past, and are at looking at the problem with more of an open mind. Mr. Harold P. Lippman seems to be objective when he admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks encased in the Siberian permafrost present an "insuperable difficulty" to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, "even if they died in winter" (Lippman, 1962). Especially when many of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly.

Certain misguided workers have vainly suggested that man was the cause of all this death and destruction. In the first place, the remains of the animals out number the remains of man a million to one. There is no way the populations of man could have killed this many animals. Some Pleistocene bone sites obviously represent the efforts of Big Game Hunters: fire was sometimes used to drive a herd of animals over a cliff or into a bog to be slaughtered for food. In these instances, the hand of man is rather obvious. Prof. N. K. Vereschagin of the then Soviet Union states bluntly: "The accumulation of mammoth bones and carcasses of mammoth, rhinoceros, and bison found in frozen ground in Indigirka, Lolyma, and Novosibirsk bear no traces of hunting of primitive man" (Vereschagin, 1967).

Charles Darwin, the famous naturalist, was shocked by the extinction of species at the close of the Pleistocene. He writes: "The extinction of species has been involved in the most gratuitous mystery . . . no one can have marvelled more than I have at the extinction of species" (Darwin, 1859). He declared that for whole species to be destroyed in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, in the mountain ranges of Peru, and in North America up to the Bering Straits, one must "shake the entire framework of the globe".

Watching them cut the huge block of muck filled ice containing the mammoth remains on the recent "Discovery" TV special helped me realize: if a woolly mammoth standing out in the grasslands of central Asia were to suddenly die, for whatever reason, his body would simply rot and the scavangers would pick the bones clean. The only way for this to have happened would be for the mammoth to either fall in a lake or pond and drown or be swept into this mass of vegetation, insects and mud by a massive wave of water. Under which of these two scenarios would such an animal be quick-frozen? His hair and skin were still intact--even the food in his stomach!

Even the Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form, states: "Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of the animals and their full stomachs . . . the animals were robust and healthy when they died" (Farrand, 1961). Neither in his article nor in his letters of rebuttal does Farrand ever face the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of the Pleistocene.

Some geologists may be softening their traditional stand against axial tilts and other rotational variations which could be the cause of world catastrophies. Dr. J. R. Heirtzler of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory observed that there has been "a revival of a 30-year-old theory that the glacial ages were caused by changes in the tilt of the earth's axis . . . there is clear evidence that large earthquakes occur at about the same time as certain changes in the earth's rotational motion." He goes on to say: "Whatever the mechanism of these changes, it is not hard to believe that similar changes in the earth's axial motion in times past could have caused major earthquake and mountain-building activity (see my Archeology page: Tiahuanacu) and could even have caused the magnetic field to flip" (Heirtzler, 1968). It has also been found that the end of the Pleistocene was attended by rampant volcanic activity (Hibben, 1946).

More recently Prof. Stephen Jay Gould, professor of geology at Harvard University, after studying the geological and paleontological record intensively, has championed the cause for open-minded consideration of catastrophism and uniformitarianism. He concludes that both concepts are represented equally in the geological record (Gould, 1977). Prof. Hibben appears to sum up the situation in a single statement: "The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive" (Hibben, 1946).

So it seems we have the end of the Ice Age, the Pleistocene extinction, the end of the Upper Paleolithic (Magdalenian, Perigordian and all others), and the close of the "reign of the gods" in Manetho, all on roughly the same date - 10,000 B.C. It appears to me that the evidence, when all of it is taken into full consideration, points to a worldwide catastrophe, from whatever cause, which occurred at the close of the Pleistocene Epoch (roughly 10,000 B.C.) And this is about the date Plato gives for the sinking of Atlantis.

Berlitz, Charles, "The Mystery of Atlantis," New York, 1969. Farrand, William R., "Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology," Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17, 1961. Heirtzler, J. R., "Sea-floor spreading," Scientific American, Vol. 219, No. 6, December 1968. Gould, Stephen Jay, "Catastrophies and Steady State Earth," Natural History, Vol. LXXXIV, No. 2, February 1975. Gould, Stephen Jay, "Evolution's Erratic Pace," Natural History, Vol. LXXXVII, No. 5, May 1977. Hibben, Frank, "The Lost Americans," Thomas & Crowell Co., New York, 1946. Leonard, R. Cedric, Appendix A in "A Geological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge," Special Paper No. 1, Cowen Publ., Bethany, 1979. Lippman, Harold E., "Frozen Mammoths," Physical Geology, New York, 1969. Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., "Bestiary for Pleistocene Biologists," Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967. Sanderson, Ivan T., "Riddle of the Frozen Giants," Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, January 16, 1960. Simpson, George G., "Horses," New York, 1961. Vereshchagin, N. K., "Primitive Hunters and Pleistocene Extinction in the Soviet Union," Pleistocene Extinction (P. S. Martin & H. E. Wright, J., editors), New Haven, 1967.

That's what happens when you shift the north pole from Hudson Bay to where it is now.

What did GWB know about this and when did he know it?

Who / what was the intell source on this? Sounds to me like this administration has misled me!

LVM

Very nice, but the article is over 20 years old. No serious scholar today believes in complete uniformitarianism.

Stephen Jay Goulds theory of "Punctuated Equilibrium" has completely displaced it.

This article is so out of date that the daring young Dr. Gould cited for his early articles, has since become one of the most famous Natural Scientists of all time, and has died of old age.

So9

seems to me the most important question would be: how does one ascertain the frequency of such catastrophes? It's nice to know it's happened before but that wont do us any good if it suddenly happens again next tuesday, y'know?

Nevertheless, I liked the way he focused on the 'bone-islands' of Northern Siberia. That was the one compelling data-point in Velikovsky's 'Worlds in Collision'.

Something sure as H*ll happened all of a sudden!

You failed to take the next logical step.

You must demand that George W Bush return the north pole to the Hudson river, where it belongs. The environment destroying Republicans and their Big Business allies must restore the previous state of nature.

Wow, this is fun. I'm going to become a liberal. Life is so much easier.

seems to me the most important question would be: how does one ascertain the frequency of such catastrophes?

Wrong.

The most important question is, how much harder did this impact Pleistocene women and minorities?

The question is: "What would kill all the 6 foot beavers, and leave all the 2 foot beavers?

Once you have an answer that fits both, then you have the answer to what happened.

Do a google on "Hugh Auchincloss Brown"

Ok, I did.

955 returns on the search.

I spent 23 seconds (my limit - same limit I use for e-mail, by the way) scanning the first two links.

The first link said he was known as a bit of a crack pot.

Next clue?

LVM

15 posted on 07/25/2003 8:19:09 PM PDT by U S Army EOD (Served in Vietnam and Korea and still fighting America's enemies on the home front)

16 posted on 07/25/2003 8:20:08 PM PDT by U S Army EOD (Served in Vietnam and Korea and still fighting America's enemies on the home front)

A man was born in 1880. He earned his PHD in astronomy. But he was always interested in geology. By looking at maps and fossil evidence, he came up with a theory, and published it.

He was widely and loudly denounced by his critics as a crackpot. He died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930, his theory totally denied by modern science.

Then, about 1950, they started mapping the ocean floor and discovered the mid-atlantic ridge. They finally had to accept his theory, but instead of calling it "Continental Drift", they called it "Plate Tectonics"

The most astounding and revealing theory of Geology ever discovered was invented by an astronomer, Alfred Wegener, and never accepted in his lifetime.

LOL - no wonder I never wrote a successful grant request! I guess this means we have to now require the folks digging out the various frozen flora and fauna to keep track of all related gender issues as well? :-)

Gender issues? Shhhhh. Be careful even mentioning gender. The liberal thought police will take you away for writing the word, much less speaking it.

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