Page 209 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 27

The Face of the Earth was Darkened
and a Black Rain Began to Fall

Terrible forces were unleashed on all living creatures during the last Ice
Age. We may deduce how these afflicted humanity from the firm evidence
of their consequences for other large species. Often this evidence looks
puzzling. As Charles Darwin observed after visiting South America:

No one I think can have marvelled more at the extinction of species than I have
done. When I found in La Plata [Argentina] the tooth of a horse embedded with the
remains of Mastodon, Megatherium, Toxodon, and other extinct monsters, which
all co-existed at a very late geological period, I was filled with astonishment; for
seeing that the horse, since its introduction by the Spaniards in South America,
has run wild over the whole country and has increased its numbers at an
unparalleled rate, I asked myself what could have so recently exterminated the
former horse under conditions of life apparently so favourable?
1
The answer, of course, was the Ice Age. That was what exterminated the
former horses of the Americas, and a number of other previously
successful mammals. Nor were extinctions limited to the New World. On
the contrary, in different parts of the earth (for different reasons and at
different times) the long epoch of glaciation witnessed several quite
distinct episodes of extinction. In all areas, the vast majority of the many
destroyed species were lost in the final seven thousand years from about
15,000 BC down to 8000 BC.
2
At this stage of our investigation is it not necessary to establish the
specific nature of the climatic, seismic and geological events linked to the
various advances and retreats of the ice sheets which killed off the
animals. We might reasonably guess that tidal waves, earthquakes,
gigantic windstorms and the sudden onset and remission of glacial
conditions played their parts. But more important—whatever the actual
agencies involved—is the stark empirical reality that mass extinctions of
animals did take place as a result of the turmoil of the last Ice Age.
This turmoil, as Darwin concluded in his Journal, must have shaken ‘the
entire framework of the globe’. In the New World, for example, more
3
than seventy genera of large mammals became extinct between 15,000
BC and 8000 BC, including all North American members of seven families,
and one complete order, the Proboscidea. These staggering losses,
4

1 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Penguin, London, 1985, p. 322.
2 Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 360-1, 394.
3 Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of
Countries Visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World; entry for 9 January
1834.
4 Quaternary Extinctions, pp. 360-1, 394.

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