“I believe it was a comet or small asteroid that came down at the end of the Younger Dryas Period, otherwise known as the last ice age, around 10,000 BCE. As you had edited in the paper which got you fired from your last job, you were probably right that some event around 9500 BCE to 10,000 BCE caused the Caspian and Black Seas to rise. My research suggests that, although rapidly melting glaciers might have been the cause, it is possible a more cataclysmic event happened in the Black Sea that washed away the civilizations all around its shores. Those pyramids in Crimea, they were likely well away from the current Black Sea shoreline. Something massive washed up and buried them in sand and mud.” Father Jean-Paul Sobiros, May 2021
The Last Ice Age
24,000 years ago, the northern hemisphere was encased in sheets of ice, deep glaciers. In North America, these sheets extended down through Canada to today’s Missouri and Ohio Rivers and Manhattan. In Europe, glacial ice covered much of the UK through Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, and the Northwestern parts of Russia. The seas were 130 meters lower than today. Likewise, the Black Sea was 100 meters lower and a land bridge had formed around where the Bosporus and the Dardanelle exist today. South of these glacial sheets of ice, artic desert or tundra spanned the lands.
As the Earth’s temperatures gradually rose, the great melt started somewhere between 18,000 and 17,000 years ago and only 12,500 years ago in Antarctica. Spring brought massive flows of ice melt across the tundra. Great devastating, disastrous floods swept through the civilizations inhabiting regions between the glaciers and the seas.
The Younger Dryas – A Sudden Drop in Worldwide Temperatures
12,900 years ago, suddenly, in geologic terms, the Earth’s temperatures dropped 6C (11F). This rapid warming of the earth was named after the Dryas octopetala flower, thrives in cooler climates and became common across Europe during these 800 year-long near-ice age periods. This abrupt change in temperature is linked to global disruption ecosystems forcing adaptations of mankind.
In the Levant, the Natufians settled in communities spanning from current day Northern Syria near the Tigris river down to the edges of the Sinai Peninsula. Prior to the Younger Dryas Period, they hunted gazelles and collected wild grains. And then during the Younger Dryas, they migrated. Later settlements showed evidence of domesticated cereal grains, the first signs of agriculture.
In the early 2000s, researchers have hypothesized that the cooling of the Younger Dryas decreased the availability of the wild cereal grains the Natufians relied upon forcing them to uproot their villages in search of new food supplies. Not all of them resorted back to their ancestors’ hunter-gatherer foraging ways as they innovated domestication and genetic selection of cereal grains. In recent years, other scientists have refuted this hypothesis.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
In the mid-2000s, a bolide impact hypothesis was put forth by Richard Firestone, et al. That is a comet either hit or had a mid-air burst above the North American glacial sheet covering the Great Lakes and the Laurentians. The resulting impact sent the world into an abrupt cold period and is linked to the extinction of 35 mammal species including the mammoth and the end of the Clovis culture in North America.
The proponents of this hypothesis cited extensive mats of organic remains covering North America dated to the onset of the Younger Dryas. As well, they document layers of charred carbon, nano-diamonds, iridium, platinum, and other mineralogic evidence consistent with an extra-terrestrial impact. One researcher documented impact spherules dated 12,800 years spread across North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East suggesting the impact sent hyper-charred debris nearly half way across the world.
Critiques of this hypothesis point to the absence of an impact site, no evidence of disruption of human populations, no evidence of synchronistic extinction of plant species nor massive wildfires that would have formed the black organic mat, and alternative reasons for the mineralogic evidences.
Other researchers have pointed to the formation of the Carolina Bays, long ovaloid depressions in the Earth, common across the Eastern US. Some have hypothesized the impact formed the deep indentations that formed the Great Lakes.
The Matriarch Matrix – A tale that started with the tail of the bird star
At the origins of tale told in this novel, the legend of the great falling star is passed down from pre-Neolithic generation to generation. The massive destruction of a previous civilization is alluded to as well as the changes in their society – none for the better. And a fragment of this great falling star alters one family forever all the way to their descendants in 2021.
“See the bird? The star at its tail? Always remember this star, and when you’re in danger, move away from it. Tell your children to watch it each night and flee if the star with the long tail returns, for the Reindeer People were born of that star. The next may bring worse to our kind.”
Parcza, 9600 BCE
Further Reading:
“Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling”, Firestone RB, West A, Kennett JP; et al. (October 2007), http://m.pnas.org/content/104/41/16016.full.pdf