Page 215 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

prior to that date had witnessed climatic and geological turbulence on a
scale that was almost unimaginable. Lurching from cataclysm to disaster
and from misfortune to calamity, the few scattered tribes of surviving
humans must have led lives of constant terror and confusion: there would
have been periods of quiescence, when they might have hoped that the
worst was over. While the melting of the giant glaciers continued,
however, these episodes of tranquillity would have been punctuated
again and again by violent floods. Moreover, sections of the earth’s crust
hitherto pressed down into the asthenosphere by billions of tons of ice
would have been liberated by the thaw and begun to rise again,
sometimes rapidly, causing devastating earthquakes and filling the air
with terrible noise.
Some times were much worse than others. The bulk of the animal
extinctions took place between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC when there were
violent and unexplained fluctuations of climate. (In the words of
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geologist John Imbrie, ‘a climatic revolution took place around 11,000
years ago.’ ) There were also greatly increased rates of sedimentation
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36
and an abrupt temperature increase of 6-10 degrees Centigrade in the
surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Another turbulent episode, again accompanied by mass extinctions,
took place between 15,000 BC and 13,000 BC. We saw in the previous
chapter that the Tazewell Advance brought the ice sheets to their
maximum extent around 17,000 years ago and that a dramatic and
prolonged thaw then ensued, completely deglaciating millions of square
miles of North America and Europe in less than two thousand years.
There were some anomalies: all of western Alaska, the Yukon territory
in Canada, and most of Siberia including the New Siberian Islands (now
among the coldest parts of the world), remained unglaciated until the Ice
Age was near its end. They acquired their present climate only about

35 Ibid., p. 137. A major change from glacial to post-glacial conditions occurred about
11,000 years ago. This temperature change was ‘sharp and abrupt’ (Polar Wandering
and Continental Drift, Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, Special
Publication No. 10, Tulsa, 1953, p. 159). Dramatic climate change around 12,000 years
ago is also reported in C.C. Langway and B. Lyle Hansen, The Frozen Future: A Prophetic
Report from Antarctica, Quadrangle, New York, 1973, p. 202. See also Ice Ages, pp.
129, 142; see also Quaternary Extinctions, p. 357: ‘The last 100,000 years of glacial
expansion, as recorded by oxygen-isotope ratios in deep-sea cores from the Atlantic and
the Equatorial Pacific, terminated ABRUPTLY around 12,000 years ago. A very rapid ice
melt caused a rapid rise in sea level... Detailed land fossils show a major movement of
plant and animal species at the time, especially into formerly glaciated terrain. American
megafaunal extinctions occurred during a time of rapid climatic change as seen in fossil
pollen and small animal records.’
36 Ice Ages, p. 129.
37 Path of the Pole, p. 137.
‘The relative change is shown by the change in the relative abundance of cold and
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warm water planktonic foraminfera, and the absolute change is given by oxygen isotope
ratio determinations on the fauna.’ Polar Wandering, p. 96.

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