Page 210 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

involving the violent obliteration of more than forty million animals, were
not spread out evenly over the whole period; on the contrary, the vast
majority of the extinctions occurred in just two thousand years, between
11,000 BC and 9000 BC. To put this in perspective, during the previous
5
300,000 years only about twenty genera had disappeared.
6
The same pattern of late and massive extinctions was repeated across
Europe and Asia. Even far-off Australia was not exempt, losing perhaps
nineteen genera of large vertebrates, not all of them mammals, in a
relatively short period of time.
7

Alaska and Siberia: the sudden freeze

The northern regions of Alaska and Siberia appear to have been the worst
hit by the murderous upheavals between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago.
In a great swathe of death around the edge of the Arctic Circle the
remains of uncountable numbers of large animals have been found—
including many carcasses with the flesh still intact, and astonishing
quantities of perfectly preserved mammoth tusks. Indeed, in both
regions, mammoth carcasses have been thawed to feed to sled dogs and
mammoth steaks have featured on restaurant menus in Fairbanks. One
8
authority has commented, ‘Hundreds of thousands of individuals must
have been frozen immediately after death and remained frozen,
otherwise the meat and ivory would have spoiled ... Some powerful
general force was certainly at work to bring this catastrophe about.’
9
Dr Dale Guthrie of the Institute of Arctic Biology has made an
interesting point about the sheer variety of animals that flourished in
Alaska before the eleventh millennium BC:

When learning of this exotic mixture of sabre-tooth cats, camels, horses, rhinos,
asses, deer with gigantic antlers, lions, ferrets, and saiga, one cannot help
wondering about the world in which they lived. This great diversity of species, so
different from that encountered today, raises the most obvious question: is it not
likely that the rest of the environment was also different?
10
The Alaskan muck in which the remains are embedded is like a fine, dark-
grey sand. Frozen solid within this mass, in the words of Professor
Hibben of the University of New Mexico:

lie the twisted parts of animals and trees intermingled with lenses of ice and layers
of peat and mosses ... Bison, horses, wolves, bears, lions ... Whole herds of

5 Ibid., pp. 360-1; The Path of the Pole, p. 250.
6 Quaternary Extinctions, p. 360-1.
7 Ibid., p. 358.
8 Donald W. Patten, The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch: A Study in Scientific History,
Pacific Meridian Publishing Co., Seattle, 1966, p. 194.
The Path of the Pole, p. 258.
9
10 David M. Hopkins et al., The Palaeoecology of Beringia, Academic Press, New York,
1982, p. 309.

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