THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

Cynthia Schoch
everything a wife should be
Nicholas Schoch and. Edward Schoch
two inspirational fellows
Gayle Eleanor
woman of love and poems
Darren Matthew McNally and Brian David McNally
wild men for wild times
Acknowledgments

MANY PEOPLE HAVE INFLUENCED AND ENCOURAGED ME OVER

THE YEARS. I was fortunate to attend George Washington
University (Washington, D.C.) as an undergraduate student and
Yale University as a graduate student; at both of these institutions
I was exposed to many fine faculty members, staff, and students
who helped shape my thinking and interests. Since 1984 I have
been a full-time faculty member at the College of General
Studies, Boston University. The administration, faculty, staff, and
students at the College have always been supportive of my
studies, and I continually find the interdisciplinary interactions
with my colleagues there refreshing and exhilarating. Dr.
Brendan Gilbane, Dean of the College, has always been
encouraging toward my endeavors, lending advice and support,
as did the late Dr. Charles P. Fogg, former chairman of the
Division of Science at the College of General Studies.

My research concerning the age of the Great Sphinx would not

have been possible without the help and cooperation of many
individuals and organizations. In particular, I thank Drs.
Mohamed I. Bakr, Ali Hassan, Zahi Hawass, Elsayed Hegazy,
and Abdul-Fattah El-Sabbahy (all of the former Egyptian
Antiquities Organization) for permission to pursue geological and
geophysical studies on the Giza Plateau. Ahmed Nour-el-Din was
extremely helpful during my March 1993 trip to Egypt, as was
Nehad Gamal. 1 thank Drs. Gaber Barakat, L. Abdel-Khalek, M.
M. El Aref, and Eglal Refai (all of the Faculty of Science, Cairo
Universify) for their interest, advice, and help. Dr. Thomas L.
Dobecki (formerly of McBride-Ratcliff and Associates, Houston)
provided invaluable assistance with the geophysical studies on
the Giza Plateau. The staff at Geosignal, Inc. (Houston),
contributed their talents in processing the high-resolution seismic
reflection data. Dr. Frank Ward of the American Embassy in
Cairo also helped me immensely, giving freely of his time and
expertise. Dr. Hanny M. El Zeini provided needed
encouragement early in the Sphinx project. I also extend thanks
to Drs. Lambert T. Dolphin (formerly of Stanford Research
Institute) and Mark Lehner (University of Chicago) for helpful
discussions, especially during the early stages of this project, and
to Drs. James J. Hurtak and Robert G. McKinney for helpful
advice and discussion more generally.

Dr. Robert Eddy (formerly of the College of Basic Studies,

renamed the College of General Studies in September 1992, of
Boston University) first introduced me to John Anthony West,
and it was as a result of discussions with West that I became
interested in the problem of the age of the Sphinx. Thus, West is
responsible for initiating this aspect of my research, and he and
Boris Said deserve credit for their hard work relative to the
logistics of the Sphinx project. In particular, Boris undertook
most of the hammer-slinging during the April 1991 seismic
studies (I will ignore, for the moment, his suggestion that the
Sphinx is nothing but a fancy hood ornament on a giant sports car
buried under the sand). Here I express my thanks to both West
and Said for their continuing help and encouragement.

It was through the generosity of Yasuo Watanabe (Japan

Medical Dynamic Marketing [MDM], Inc., Tokyo) that I was
able to visit Yona- guni Island and explore the Yonaguni
Monument on 23-24 September 1997. I sincerely thank him for
his hospitality and patronage. Graham Hancock was instrumental
in arranging the trip to Yonaguni, and he and his wife, Santha
Faiia, joined me there to dive on the monument. John Anthony
West accompanied me to Yonaguni, participated in the scuba
diving, and engaged me in many deep discussions (as he always
does) concerning the Yonaguni Monument and related matters.
Shun Daichi (Tokyo correspondent of New Perspectives
Quarterly) also joined us in diving, and provided me with various
reference materials on the Yonaguni Monument and help in
translating. Kihachiro Ar a take, who actually discovered the
Yonaguni Monument, was our guide for the dives, and dive
masters Hiroshi-Kubota and Yoshimi Matsumura provided us
with invaluable assistance, as did Megumi Kondo (MDM), Akiko
Ito (MDM), Ken Yamada (Ortho Development Corporation,
Utah), Dale Kimsey (Ortho), and Steve Hubbard (Ortho). Dr.
Michael Pill and Linda Moulton Howe provided me with copies
of references from the Japanese Super Mystery Magazine Mu.

I returned to Japan in late July and early August 1998 to further

study the Yonaguni Monument and related structures as a
member of the Team Atlantis multidisciplinary underwater
research team and documentary film project. I thank Michael
Arbuthnot for organizing this effort and inviting me to
participate. Boris Said, producer for Team Atlantis, once again
was immensely helpful in making sure that everything worked
out. The project would have been impossible without the
assistance of Iris DeMauro, who gave freely of her time and
energy throughout the expedition and allowed us to stay at her
family’s beach house in Okinawa during the latter half of the trip.
Matthew Sapero, webmaster for the Internet site
www.teamatlantis.com, engaged me in much stimulating
discussion during the trip and helped me with all things related to
computers (including the sending and receiving of E-mail and
files so that I could continue working on this book even while in
Japan). Dr. J. J. Hurtak and Dr. John T. Dorwin also participated
in this trip; sharing freely of their knowledge and opinions, they
gave me much food for thought. Also in Japan with the Team
Adantis 1998 expedition were Janet Arbuthnot, Christopher
 DeFelice, Sarah Kingston (who provided invaluable assistance to
me underwater), Peter McDougall, Vince Pace, D. J. Roller, and
Sandy Wright. I thank them all for their participation. In Japan
we were assisted by many people; in particular I would like to
single out Kihachiro Aratake (again, as in 1997, he was
invaluable in arranging the diving in Yonaguni), Atsushi Mori
(who helped us in many ways), and Chie Mikami of Ryukyu
Asahi Broadcasting Corporation (who helped us locate an
underwater site in the Chatan area of Okinawa). Finally, I extend
heartfelt thanks to Dr. Masaaki Kimura for his hospitality. Dr.
Kimura met with us numerous times during our stay and
explained in detail his ideas regarding the Yonaguni Monument
and similar structures. I greatly appreciate his years of research.

Innumerable other persons have taken an interest in my research

more generally, and have helped out in various ways.
Unfortunately, it would be virtually impossible to list everyone I
have had contact with concerning my research, but I would like to
acknowledge the help, support, and interest of a few more people
in particular, including: Alessandro Abdo, Sean Adair, Alicia
Alexander, Bodhi Annan, Millard Baublitz Jr., Robbin Beauchamp
(who carpooled with me to Boston University during the height of
the Sphinx controversy, and heard more than she probably cared to
about the Sphinx), Paul Bierman, David P. Billington Jr., Peter E.
Busher, Sita Chaney, John Cheshire, Molly Cheshire, Rita Corriel,
Bill and Carol Cote, Barbara Crane, Anh Crutcher, Nelson Dale,
Caroline Davies, William E. Davis, Kate Dickie, Lloyd Dickie,
Frank Domingo, Michael Eldredge, Dennis C. Forbes, Tim Friend,
Jean A. Garrison, Alison and Gilbert Gjersvik, Linda Goldstein,
Diane Graszik, Jim Green, Terence Guardino, Eileen P. Guriy,
Foxy Gwyne, Samuel Hammer, Khadija S. Hammond, Marta J.
Hersek, John Hipsley, Sandy and Chuck Houghton, Natalia
Ignatieff, Nicholas Ignatieff, Jorjana Kellaway, Michael G. Kort,
Devendra Lal, Mary Lomando, Nancy Long, Michael G. Mahon,
Michele Matthews, John E. Miller, Mohammed Nazmy, Richard
W. Noone (who pushed me hard to write this book and supplied me
with various useful leads and reference materials), T. C. Onstott,
Robert Oresick, Matthew A. Parfitt, Marshall Payn, Cheryl
Poppaw, Andris and Margaret Priede, Peyton E. Richter, Paul
William Roberts, Joseph Schor, Tamer Shawsky, Diana Shields, C.
Simonds, Lydia Smithers, David Solomon, Sally Sommers Smith,
Richard Speir, Samuel Stern, Gigi Van Deckter, Robert M. Watts,
Celesta West, Joanne Wright, and Stan Zippan. I apologize to
anyone I have inadvertently missed.

Finally, I must acknowledge the support that my immediate

family has provided as I have pursued my studies (which have
sometimes entailed my absence from home for weeks at a time).
My wife, Cynthia Pettit Schoch, and my two sons, Nicholas Robert
Schoch and Edward Robert Schoch, have always been there when
I needed them. Additionally, my parents, Milton and Alicia
Schoch; my sister, Marguerita C. Schoch; my late grandmother,
Adriana M. Goetz; and my parents-in- law, Robert and Anne Pettit,
have always been supportive of all my endeavors.

This book could not have been written without the talent, energy,
intelligence, and enthusiasm of my coauthor, Robert Aquinas
McNally. I could not have asked for a finer collaborator. I am
deeply indebted to him for all his help.

Robert and I also benefited from the excellent work of our two
fine literary agents, Sarah Jane Freymann and Judith Riven, who
combine a love of good books with a sharp sense of business. From
first idea to final production, this book benefited gready from the
good help of the people at Harmony Books: namely, Laura Wood,
Patricia Gift, Kristen Wolfe, Brian Belfiglio, Ari Gersen, and
David Wade Smith.

Of course, all matters of fact and interpretation expressed in this

book are solely my responsibility. If there are mistakes, they’re
mine.

Robert M. Schoch
College of General Studies
Boston University August
1998
A Personal Note

THIS BOOK REPRESENTS A PERSONAL INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY.

I WAS RAISED a uniformitarian, but through the course of my
research I have come to doubt the dogmatism that seems to be
central to so much of what currendy passes for science. Yet I
adamantly remain a scientist committed to the scientific
method. The purpose of this book is to question the dominant
paradigm and tentatively propose an alternative working
model. In no way am I, in turn, dogmatic about the
speculations presented in this book. Rather, I hope to
encourage the reader to think about, and question, some of the
larger issues and themes that face us. If the reader comes away
from this book simply looking at the world from a slightly
different angle, perhaps even with a slightly different
perspective, then I have accomplished the task I set for
myself.
 Contents

Introduction 1

1. The Changing of the Paradigm 9

2. A Shape with Lion Body

and the Head of a Man 33

3. Ancient Origin: Civilization's

Rescheduled Beginning 52
4. Looking for the Lost Cities 79

5. Fire and Water 128

6. Heaven's Rain of Rock and Ice 175

7. Learning from the Past, Looking

Toward the Future 220

Epilogue: An Update to the Redating of the

Sphinx, and Other Pertinent Matters 243

Sources 250

Index 263
 There have been, and will be again, many
destructions of mankind arising out of many causes;
the greatest of these have been brought about by the
agencies of fire and water. ...
PLATO, Timaeus
Introduction

IN MY IMAGINATION I COULD HEAR THE VOICE OF THE ROCK

cutting through the atmosphere to strike the Earth—the dra-
matic, terrifying scream that eyewitnesses of meteorite
impacts report. As space rocks go, this one was of fair to
middling size, about two-thirds of a mile across, weighing in
the substantial neighborhood of 2 billion tons, and moving at
more than 50,000 miles per hour. This substantial mass,
traveling at that incredible speed, slammed into dry land with
such unimaginable force that it vaporized on impact, releasing
energy equivalent to 50,000 to 100,000 megatons* of TNT—
far larger than the simultaneous detonation of the
contemporary world’s entire nuclear arsenal. Most likely, the
force blew out the atmosphere over the impact site, sending
an enormous, fiery plume of dust and debris well above the
atmosphere to darken the sun and dim the sky, possibly for
weeks or months, perhaps over much of the globe. All this
happened in an instant, and in that same instant, every living
organism within hundreds or even thousands of miles of the

*A megaton equals 1 million tons. Currently the explosive potential of the world arsenal of
nuclear weapons is estimated to equal 20,000 megatons of TNT.
collision site was killed outright.
Yet, as it will, life returned to this site of complete
devastation, now called the Haughton Astrobleme (or impact
crater, from roots meaning literally “star wound”) located on
Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic, some 900 miles
below the North Pole. The twelve-and-a-half-mile-wide crater
left by the impact filled with water to become a lake, and the
sediments of that ancient lake transformed the remains of the
plants and animals living in and around the water into fossils.
It was the fossils that brought me, a newly minted Yale
University geologist and paleontologist, to find out more
about the story they told.
The world those fossils described, the one that flourished
on the order of 20 million years ago, during the early Miocene
epoch, was strikingly different from today’s Arctic, which is
a vast, bleak, demanding landscape. Few mammals can
survive here other than the polar bear, Arctic fox, lemming,
caribou, and ringed seal, creatures well adapted to the deep
cold and sunless dark of the long northern winter. The low
temperatures and the seasonality of the light likewise limit the
plant community to a few low-growing species that hug the
ground as protection against freezing and wind damage. Yet,
remarkably, this severe world was once softer, even
luxuriant—and not very far in the past, by geological
Standards.
Twenty million years ago, during the period when the
asteroid struck, Devon Island was covered with a forest of
birch trees and conifers, a landscape similar to what one now
finds about 2,000 miles to the south, in Minnesota, Wisconsin,
and Maine. Now- extinct forms of rhinoceros and mouse deer
browsed among the trees; shrews and pika-like relatives of
modern rabbits darted through the shadows; and freshwater
fish swam the lakes and streams.
Even farther back, on the order of 45 to 65 million years
ago, during the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, the fossil
record shows Devon Island to have been still more profoundly
different. Back then, what is now the Arctic was a region of
swampy lowlands, slow-moving rivers, and towering forests
of dawn redwood, kadsura, and ancestral forms of hickory,
elm, birch, sycamore, and maple. Primitive fishes, crocodiles,
salamanders, newts, and turtles inhabited the rivers and
marshes, while the forests and meadows supported flying
lemurs, early primates, forerunners of today’s cats and dogs,
and ancestors of the rhinos, tapirs, and horses.
As I worked at collecting and cataloging the rich lode of
fossils my colleagues and I uncovered in the Haughton
Astrobleme, I imagined the terrible drama of the asteroid
striking Earth. I found myself wondering, too, about time and
change. I had finished my Ph.D. just the year before, and the
lessons of graduate school were still fresh in my mind. The
physical and biological world, I had been taught, changed
only very slowly. Evolution was a gradual process, requiring
great lengths of time for each step. Somehow, though, this
model didn’t fit well with what I was seeing all around me.
For one thing, there was nothing gradual about the collision
that had formed the Haughton Astrobleme, and for the
organisms throughout the surrounding region, the collision
was nothing less than the ultimate catastrophe. Likewise, slow
change didn’t account well for the profound shifts in this
patch of Earth over the past 65 million years, particularly dur-
ing the most recent 20 million years, which is hardly long at
all in geological terms. Obviously the Arctic was much
warmer then than now, but was it dark for four and a half
months? How did plants so similar to those now found in the
temperate zones survive the protracted darkness? Or could it
be that the land now in the Arctic lay then at a much lower
latitude and drifted north over the intervening millions of
years? Could the ancient Earth have turned on a different axis,
so that yesterday’s North Pole was somewhere else, and the
Arctic now wasn’t the Arctic then?

There was much more to my thinking than idle ivory-tower

speculation about the physical and biological nature of a now-
vanished Earth. If our planet had undergone major, even
sudden changes before humans appeared, then it was probably
subject to similar dramatic alterations within the span of our
species’s experience as well. And, since history is the
blueprint of the future, whatever happened then was likely to
occur yet again. What has been is the key to what will be. It’s
something we need to know.
Fortunately, my graduate school education provided a good
foundation for such thinking. Even though I learned the
prevailing uniformitarian model of slow, gradual change, the
field of geology in the 1970s and early 1980s was a hotbed
seething with radically new ideas. I was among the first
generation of scientists to go into geology following the plate
tectonics revolution of the 1960s, and the fast-changing field
welcomed revolutionary ways of thinking that could stand the
test of scientific scrutiny.
It was this intellectual ferment that first drew me to geology
while I was an undergraduate at George Washington
University. Originally interested more in physical
anthropology and human evolution, I found myself fascinated
by geology, not because everything was known, but because
so much was unknown. The professor in my introductory
class readily admitted that enormous gaps existed in our
knowledge of Earth and its processes, and that a great deal
remained to be discovered. On field trips, I watched experts
from the Smithsonian Institution and the United States
Geological Survey disagree openly about the significance of
the rock formations we were examining. This excited me. I
wasn’t looking for pat answers and explanations to be mem-
orized for the next examination. I wanted discovery, insight,
and knowledge. Geology offered them all.
I completed bachelor’s degrees in both anthropology and
geology, then set off for Yale and graduate school in geology.
Over the next four years I earned two master’s degrees and a
Ph.D., focusing on the study of fossil vertebrates and writing
my dissertation on an extinct order of mammals. I spent a year
working at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, the job I
held during my summer’s work inside the Haughton
Astrobleme. Soon after I returned, I began teaching at Boston
University’s
College of General Studies, where I am now a tenured
associate professor.

My Devon Island speculation on the connections between

time, catastrophe, and human history was piqued yet again in
late 1989, when a friend at Boston University introduced me
to John Anthony West. West is an independent Egyptologist
who makes his living by writing about ancient Egypt and
leading tours to the country and its monuments. Among
academic circles, West has a reputation as a maverick and a
gadfly. In talking with him, I soon discovered West to be
brilliant and many of his ideas predictably outrageous. Still,
one of his notions intrigued me. West was certain that the
Great Sphinx of Giza had been built thousands of years earlier
than the conventionally accepted date of circa 2500 B.C.
His position intrigued me for two reasons. One was the lure
of ancient history, which has interested me since childhood.
As a boy of twelve, I discovered a 1,600-year-old Roman coin
in a flea market, and the thrill of that find remains a memory
as fresh as today. The hours of library research I devoted to
dating the coin—it proved to come from the reign of the
Emperor Valens, in the late fourth century A.D.—instilled in
me a fascination with ancient civilizations, one that West
shared. The second reason was the chance to bring my
scientific training to bear on a significant historical question.
Geological methodology, I realized, could be used to evaluate
West’s hypothesis on the date of the Sphinx. This wasn’t
speculation. It was science, the testing of new ideas against
the exacting measure of fact.
By the following summer I was in Egypt with West,
researching the Sphinx. After two more trips to pursue various
studies of the monument and its surroundings, I was sure that
West’s intuition was correct. The data were absolutely
convincing: The oldest portions of the Sphinx date to at least
5000 B.C., and may well be even older.
Over the following months and years I published my
findings, presented them to scholarly meetings, and was even
interviewed on a few television programs. Yet, despite the
overwhelming preponderance of evidence, the conventional
Egyptological establishment rejected my older date for the
Sphinx. They had a reason, one much larger than simply a
vested academic interest in this single ancient monument. The
Sphinx is obviously the work of a civilization that was highly
advanced artistically and technically. Pushing the date of the
Sphinx back to a time when humans are conventionally
thought to have been primitive Stone Age villagers poses a
huge, troubling question. Who were these unknown people?
What became of them and their culture? And how does their
existence—and disappearance—alter our view of the course
of human history and the origins of civilization?
As I have followed the intellectual trails revealed by the
redating of the Sphinx, and talked for long hours with fellow
researchers working on parallel lines of inquiry, I have
become convinced that we are in the midst of a profound
scientific paradigm shift. The predominant notion that our
species inhabits a slowly changing, steady-state planet is
falling by the wayside. Instead, we are coming to see that the
history of Earth, of all living beings, and of human
civilizations is a series of stops and starts, in which equi-
librium comes to an abrupt end with a sudden, severe catastro-
phe like the asteroid that formed the Haughton Astrobleme
and the much larger object that initiated the extinction of the
dinosaurs. Extraterrestrial objects are only one potential
source of such changes, which include as well shifts in Earth’s
axis, movements of the continents, volcanic eruptions, and
earthquakes. A desire to bring all this information together for
the widest possible audience led me to join forces with
professional science writer Robert Aquinas McNally to
compose Voices of the Rocks.
Chapter 1 introduces the theories of uniformitarianism and
catastrophism and explores the substance and implication of
the paradigm shift now upon us. Chapter 2 follows one
particular thread in this paradigm shift, namely my own
geological research into the date of origin of the Great Sphinx
of Giza. Chapter 3 pursues further the question opened by the
redating of the Sphinx: Did human civilization begin sooner
than we think? The fascinating possibilities suggested by
popular tales of Atlantis and other lost cities and by my own
study of the Yonaguni Monument in the East China Sea form
the focus of chapter 4. Pole shifts, tectonic movements, and
other Earth-originated catastrophes are explored in chapter 5,
while collisions with extraterrestrial objects are detailed in
chapter 6. Finally, following the wisdom that what is past is
prologue, chapter 7 looks at new ways of planning the human
and planetary future, based on an equally new understanding
of Earth’s past, of human history, and of the links between the
living and nonliving worlds.

Entering the twenty-first century, we face global warming,

overpopulation, and chemical pollution, as well as potential
natural catastrophes like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and
collisions with near-Earth objects. Knowing what happened
in the past can prepare us for the future—and increase our
chances of surviving sudden environmental events. Only by
separating fiction from fact and understanding truth can we
face our future with clarity and shape it in wisdom. Such is
the task of Voices of the Rocks.
The Changing of the Paradigm

SCIENCE ISN’T WHAT YOUR HIGH-SCHOOL CHEMISTRY

TEACHER told you it is. Neither is it the old movie cliche of
men in white coats, disheveled Einsteinian hair, and wild eyes,
in a laboratory full of bubbling retorts and flashing electric
coils, performing earthshaking experiments that reveal some
long-hidden reality; nor is it a matter of blindly voyaging into
uncharted realms, like Captain Kirk and the starship
Enterprise, to discover something no one has ever seen before.
The truth is a good deal more subtle and interesting—and it is
critical to understanding the workings of our Earth, the
significance of the changes in scientific thinking we are now
undergoing, and the implications of that change for our future.

What Science Is, and How It Really Works

Science is no monolith. There isn’t a single science from
which all the various disciplines—e.g., biochemistry, physics,
astronomy, and zoology—derive. I have friends, for example,
who are devoting their research careers to the laboratory task
of characterizing groups of related proteins. This empirical,
highly specialized pursuit is definitely science, but it’s not
anything like what I do as a geologist and paleontologist who
is a generalist by choice. I find myself closer to the nineteenth-
century naturalists like Charles Darwin and Alexander von
Humboldt. These thinkers were drawn to collecting and
analyzing facts and making sense of them in a way that, by
allowing us to comprehend, experience, and appreciate the
order inherent in nature, provides an understanding at once
intellectually useful and esthetically satisfying. My work is
both empirical and philosophical.
Still, despite the obvious differences between Charles
Darwin, myself, and my protein chemist friends, all scientists
agree on certain points. It is these agreements that make
science an enterprise as distinct and definite as writing poetry,
designing a skyscraper, or deriving a mathematical proof.
All scientists share a fundamental agreement on the
primacy of natural law. Fundamentally, everything we
observe in the natural world depends on relationships between
matter and energy governed by the fundamental physical-
chemical forces and constants, such as gravity, relativity, and
thermodynamics, that make up natural law. Science doesn’t
allow for divine intervention or miracles as explanations for
natural phenomena. This doesn’t mean that scientists cannot
be spiritually inclined or religious— in fact, many are—but
divine intervention lies outside the bounds of scientific
analysis. Science requires its practitioners to be rigorous,
consistent, and logical in a natural world without supernatural
apparitions or divine interference.
 Likewise, all branches of science share a commitment to
testing their ideas against the real world. A proposed scientific
theory may boast a delightful elegance, but if it does not stand
up when tested against reality, then it has no value as science.
To me, this is the most important aspect of science: theoretical
explanations of natural phenomena that can be tested against
the real world. Without such testable explanations, we don’t
really know which facts to look for, yet it is the facts
themselves, whether derived from laboratory experiment or
from observations in the natural world, that ultimately
determine the worth and validity of the ideas. As we proceed
more ,deeply into this exploration of time, catastrophe, and
history, we shall see again and again how fact and explanation
are interwoven and in some ways mutually dependent.
A further aspect of scientific thinking, particularly near and
dear to my heart as a working scientist, is parsimony, also
known as Occam’s razor or the principle of economy. William
of Occam (also spelled Ockham), a fourteenth-century
scholastic philosopher, wrote, “Never is multiplicity to be
postulated without necessity,” and “It is vain to do with more
what can be done with fewer.” Occam’s devotion to simplicity
still holds. There’s no reason for a scientific explanation to be
more complicated than it has to be. If more than one solution
or explanation is posed to resolve a given problem, the
simplest explanation is the best.
Parsimony does not mean that an idea must adhere to scien-
tific status quo. The history of science is full of examples of
new, parsimonious explanations that ran counter to the
scientific orthodoxy of the day. The new look at the Earth
explored here is appealing in part because it offers a superior,
simpler explanation than the formerly accepted view.
Science stands out, too, for being progressive. We can’t say
that poetry or painting gets better over time. There is no clear
arc of improvement reaching from Dante to William Butler
Yeats or from Michelangelo to Andy Warhol. You or I may
prefer one poet or painter to another, but preference isn’t the
same thing as progress. Science, unlike art, does progress. We
know more now than we did five years ago, and our
knowledge is vastly larger today than it was five centuries in
the past.
This is not to say, however, that knowledge in general can’t
backslide or even be lost. During the European Dark Ages of
the early medieval period, practically the entire body of
learning and literature from classical Greece and Rome was
lost to the Western world and reintroduced through Arab
scholars centuries later.
Likewise, it appears that important knowledge from ancient
civilizations is only now being rediscovered, a point we will
develop in detail later. Still, it remains true that over the past
five hundred years science has built on itself. It has constantly
changed as new ideas have replaced old, outmoded notions
and we have moved toward better, more profound
explanations of nature.
Thinking in Paradigms
According to the conventional view, the one popular in high-
school chemistry classes, a scientific idea holds sway until a
large number of contradictory or unexplainable facts—
commonly called anomalies—arise to refute the old theory
and support a new, competing, and superior explanation. This
model is orderly, intellectual, and polite. It’s also wrong.
The actual process by which science progresses is best
explained in a remarkable book, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, by the historian Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn
distinguishes between two kinds of science: normal and
revolutionary. Normal science takes place within a
community of scientists who share a paradigm. A paradigm is
a consensus of belief that certain solutions resolve the central
problems of a particular field, be it biochemistry or astronomy.
Scientists hold to the paradigm not because they rigorously
examine and test it, but because they are committed to it,
usually through education, professional values, and agreement
among powerful institutions like foundations, universities,
government agencies, and research facilities. The paradigm is
right because everybody says it is right, and because it
explains the facts everyone agrees are the right facts to
explain. This assumption is so fundamental and unquestioned
that everything inside the prevailing paradigm has a way of
seeming natural and normal, while everything outside it—
particularly the anomalies—seem inconsequential or
irrelevant. Normal science is just what its name implies. It
looks as “normal” as sunrise in the east.
 Revolutionary science, by contrast, is the work of
researchers outside the paradigm, those who do not accept the
prevailing wisdom and focus instead on tjhe anomalies the
normal paradigm cannot explain. The revolutionaries offer up
a new, competing paradigm, one that makes the previous
anomalies the mainstay of their new scientific worldview.
What was inconsequential and irrelevant becomes central and
significant.

Since normal and revolutionary paradigms do not agree on

what is central and significant, the new paradigm cannot refute
the old, nor vice versa. Typically, the new paradigm succeeds
if it can explain more phenomena. Although competing
paradigms may explain different phenomena, one of them will
usually explain more of its own phenomena than the other—
and that makes it more appealing to scientists. Since the
explanation of more phenomena makes for more scientific
work, scientists tend to accept paradigms that give them more
to do as scientists. And, given the social importance and
economics of science, paradigms with social benefits are also
likely to receive increasing support over time.
Kuhn’s profoundly important analysis makes two points
that are significant in understanding how our conception of the
role of global catastrophe in Earth’s history is changing. First,
science makes progress by revolution rather than by
refutation. An overarching scientific idea retains its position
until the adherents of a competing idea push it aside,
something like a band of rebels demolishing an established
government and putting a new set of institutions in its place.
Second, science moves not in a splendid isolation propelled
by the energy of its own findings and ideas, but in relation to
the large sweep of history. New scientific values arise because
of changes in politics, economics, religion, and other aspects
of the human context in which science is practiced. As the
world changes, so do scientific paradigms.
When we set the current competition between a steady-state
Earth against a fits-and-starts planet into the background of
scientific thinking across history, we can see clearly how the
paradigms have changed over time. We can also appreciate
more thoroughly why the current debate is nothing less than
the triumph of revolutionary science and the emergence of a
new and sobering paradigm.

Calming the Dangerous Skies

The peoples of the ancient, preclassical world didn’t practice
what we think of as science. Still, they were careful observers
of the natural world who noted their observations in a variety
of surviving texts or passed them down in oral traditions that
were later recorded in such sources as the Hebrew scriptures
of the Old Testament, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Homeric
poems. If these ancient works are taken at face value, the skies
in those long-gone days were ominous indeed, and Earth was
a most perilous place, one subject to sudden celestial
destruction on a massive scale. Sodom and Gomorrah were
reduced to ashen rubble by a rain of fire sent, supposedly, to
punish those cities for their transgressions. Sky fire was
likewise the threat that Jonah carried to Nineveh, the great
Mesopotamian city, in his successful attempt to convert its
people to righteousness. The Greek gods and goddesses aiding
the combatants at Troy displayed themselves as terrible
lightning bolts and fast-traveling stars trailing sparks. And the
Babylonians believed that Earth had been washed clean in a
great flood announced and accompanied by terrifying events
in the heavens.
In the ancient worldview, such calamitous events were not
anomalies; they counted as central events of the paradigm.
The heavens were the scene of violent struggles that
determined the fate of Earth and humankind. The creation
myths of many of the ancient civilizations featured a primal
battle pitting a celestial force of evil against a celestial force
for good. For the Hebrews, the fight was between Yahweh and
Satan; for the Egyptians, between Horus and Seth; for the
Greeks, between Zeus and Typhon; for the Babylonians,
between Marduk and Tiamat; for the Syrians,
between Baal and Yam; and for the Scandinavians, between
Thor and Odin. The later story of Saint George slaying the
Dragon is a medieval reupholstering of the same basic mythic
theme.
Looking back, we moderns may appreciate the literary
quality of Gilgamesh or the Homeric epics, but we reject the
accuracy of their content. The ancients were, we seem to
believe, psychological primitives who lived in quaking fear of
the heavens. They were much like children who invent
monsters under the bed and in the closet, and keep themselves
awake at night, worrying about fangs and claws. Yet how can
we be sure of our intellectual and psychological superiority?
Could we, in so smug and easy a dismissal, be missing
something critically important?
 The British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier are
certain we are. In their persuasive The Cosmic Winter—a work
that will figure importantly later in this book as well—Clube
and Napier argue that the dangerous skies of the ancients
accurately represented the real world of the time, when Earth’s
orbit carried it through a meteor stream that often wreaked
sky-borne devastation on our planet. The ancient worldview
of the dangerous heavens was no infantile fantasy. Rather, it
constituted a paradigm based on observation of central
phenomena, one that used the available religious language of
gods and goddesses to explain events larger than human life
and well outside our control.
The later Greek paradigm, typified by the fourth-century
B.C. Athenian philosopher Aristode, differed strikingly from

the pre- classical worldview. Aristotle’s view of the heavens

was fixed and orderly. Earth occupied the center of a series of
concentric crystalline spheres to which the heavenly bodies
were attached and on which they turned—first the moon,
followed by Mercury and Venus, then the sun and Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn, finally the constellations of the Zodiac,
and beyond them the multitude of unnamed stars. The divine
aspect of the ancient paradigm persisted in the names attached
to the planets, which are called to this day after principal
divinities of the ancient world. In Aris-totle’s paradigm of the
cosmos, however, divinity was orderly and predictable,
without the omnipresent and arbitrary threat befalling the
Babylonians, Hebrews, and preclassical Greeks.
Typically this shift is explained as a movement from older,
magical thinking to a rational, observation-oriented
philosophical standpoint. It is as if the ancient world woke
itself up from a bad dream, took a hard look at reality, and in
its surprise announced, “The sky isn’t dangerous after all.
How silly and childlike of us to have thought so! Isn’t it about
time we got real?”
Clube and Napier argue that humans hadn’t gotten any
smarter over the intervening centuries. Instead, the known
cosmos had changed. With the passage of time, Earth’s orbit
moved out of the meteor stream and the devastations of old
were slowly lost to common memory. What had been chaos
now became orderly and peaceful. Thus the warring celestial
gods of Homer’s times gave way to the fixed crystalline
spheres of Aristotle’s precise, benign cosmology.
The Aristotelian paradigm set the tone for European science
over the next millennium and a half. Although Greek thought
was largely lost during the Dark Ages of the early medieval
period, it returned through the scholastic philosophers, who
became reacquainted with Aristotle through Arab thinkers.
The greatest scholastic of all, Thomas Aquinas—my
coauthor’s namesake—wedded the Aristotelian system of
fixed heavens with Christian theology. Now the full force and
majesty of the Church backed the paradigm of a predictable,
orderly Earth and sky.
Not that there weren’t anomalies, most notably comets. The
sudden appearance of a bright, tailed star that traveled across
the vault of the heavens and in time disappeared from view
made the cosmos look much less fixed than the Aristotelian-
Aquinian paradigm allowed. If the sky were set once and for
all, as the paradigm required, where could a comet have come
from, and how had it slipped inside the realm of crystalline
spheres? One explanation was that comets were phenomena
of the atmosphere, like clouds or lightning, and did not belong
to the heavens proper. Yet even when a large comet appeared
at the end of the sixteenth century and the great Danish
astronomer Tycho Brahe showed that this body passed far
beyond the riioon, well outside Earth’s atmosphere, many
important scientists continued to cling to the Aristotelian
paradigm despite Brahe’s evidence. Johannes Kepler, one of
the giants of astronomy, accepted that comets lay beyond the
atmosphere, but he concluded that they moved through the
solar system in straight lines and passed out again—strange
interlopers, to be sure, but not ones that upset the accepted
order of the sky. Even Galileo, that champion of intellectual
honesty who was placed under house arrest by the Inquisition
for championing Copernicus’s idea that the sun, not the Earth,
occupied the center of the solar system, dismissed comets as
mere optical illusions. To him, they were no more real than
mirages shimmering watery and wet in a bone-dry desert.
Isaac Newton developed his own updated version of the
Aristotelian-Aquinian model. He saw the solar system as the
work of a divine Creator who set the whole system in motion
like a great, unending clockwork and then let it run on its own.
With their unpredictable appearances and paths, comets didn’t
fit well in such a precise and eternal universe, which turned
like so many gear wheels in the same perpetual motion.
Newton steered around the issue as best he could: he hinted
that God might intervene to cast a comet at Earth as an act of
divine providence, but otherwise a collision between our
planet and a comet simply lay outside Newton’s system.
Not until well into the nineteenth century was it established
that space rocks had indeed struck Earth, and that a band of
asteroids orbited the sun between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
As it turned out, these discoveries somewhat reassured the
prevailing paradigm. Meteorites proved to be small objects,
nasty enough if they crashed into your house or barn, but
lacking the size to do more than very local damage. As for the
asteroids, they appeared to be too far away to pose any danger
to Earth. The further discovery that the sun melted many
comets into harmless clouds of dust added further to the
paradigmatic sense that the Earth was isolated from the
heavens, safe and secure in its fixity, essentially unchanged
and unchanging. It was an idea that persisted well into the
middle of the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin first
presented his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Some Things Change, Some Things Stay the Same

Yet another conventional story passed down by a great many
high-school—and even college—science teachers is that
Darwin and the forces of scientific reason went to battle
against armies of biblically inspired fundamentalists, who
believed in catastrophes as signs of God’s vengeful
punishment and lived in holy dread of the fire next time.
Darwin and his friends argued, the story continues, that only
long, slow processes of evolution by natural selection could
explain the appearance of new species and the fossil record of
past organisms long extinct. The conventional wisdom labels
this paradigm “uniformitarianism.” The other side supposedly
held that terrible catastrophes of the sort described in the Old
Testament, like the great flood of Genesis and the plagues of
Exodus, accounted for extinctions and that all species were
created—and wiped out—only by the action of a God who
repeatedly intervened in human and biological affairs. This
point of view, with or without divine intervention, is called
“catastrophism.” The truth of the matter, however, is a good
deal more complicated, and very much to the point of
understanding the current paradigm shift.
Well before Darwin and his contemporaries, observers of
nature were contemplating Earth as well as gazing at the stars
and wondering why the planet had the shape that it did—
plains and flats here, for example, tall mountains there. In
Christian medieval times, many of the features of the planet’s
surface were said to result from the flood that Noah escaped
in his ark filled with paired animals. Not everyone was quite
sure of this notion, including the quintessential Renaissance
man Leonardo da Vinci. Reflecting on the presence of fossil
shells high in the mountains, Leonardo wondered how they
had found their way to such altitudes. The flood, he was sure,
couldn’t have done it. ‘Things which are heavier than water
do not float high in the water,” he wrote, “and the aforesaid
things could not be at such heights unless they had been
carried there floating on the waves, and that is impossible....”
Leonardo suggested that the fossils might have formed when
earth or mud covered shelled organisms lying on a shore or
sea bottom. The mud later turned to rock, and the shore or sea
bottom was raised up.
In fact, Leonardo had it right, yet in his own time his
explanation seemed outlandish. Among all its many
catastrophes, the Bible contained no description of such
uplifting. Besides, it would take a great deal of time for mud
to petrify, and everyone knew Earth had been around for far
too little time for such events to have occurred. In addition,
Leonardo’s explanation meant that the fossil-bearing rocks
had to be younger than the rocks beneath them. According to
a biblical understanding of planetary history, that simply could
not be.
Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most
scholars and philosophers believed the Earth to be only a few
thousand years old. Ancient historical records other than the
Hebrew scripture went back to about 2000 B.c. Adding on the
chronologies in the first five books of the Old Testament
appeared to extend the time to about 4000 B.C., when God was
said to have made Earth in one day of the week of Creation.
Thus, all rocks had to be of the same age because they arose
at the same time. Leonardo’s explanation didn’t fit the
paradigm.
Help was on the way. In the seventeenth century, Nicolaus
Steno (also known as Niels Stenson, Nicoli Stenonis, and Nils
Steensen) founded the branch of geology known as
stratigraphy, which concerns itself with the arrangement of
rock strata. Steno recognized that all rocks are not of the same
age, and that a higher stratum can be considered younger than
the lower stratum on which it rests.
In the following century, James Hutton, considered the
father of modern geology in English-speaking countries, took
time and stratigraphy further. Trained as a physician, Hutton
never practiced, living instead as a gentleman farmer in
Scotland, a pursuit that taught him a great deal about soils and
erosion. By examining the weathering rates of rocks and the
lack of any significant changes in the Scottish coastline since
the time of the Romans, Hutton concluded that time was
infinitely long, much longer than the approximately 6,000
years of biblical literalist interpretation.
Hutton developed, as well, a model of Earth as a great recy-
cling machine. Solid rock, he wrote, weathers into soil, which
is then eroded by running water and carried into the oceans,
where it settles as sediments that consolidate over the eons
into rocks. In time the rocks are lifted above sea level, where
they are again exposed to rain, and the cycle begins again.
Hutton’s model of an ever-recycling Earth accounted for
Leonardo’s mountaintop fossils. It also created a kind of
eternal sameness. The cycles of erosion, sedimentation, and
uplift could be repeated again and again, but the Earth itself
remained more or less the same even as its materials cycled
from rock to soil to sediment to rock again.
Hutton carried sameness over into his methods of observing
natural processes, and for this reason he is often credited with
being the first uniformitarian—a term he himself never used.
Although, like Newton, a firm believer in a divine Creator,
Hutton rejected godly intervention or miracles as a cause of
geological phenomena: God had created Earth with an eye to
giving the human race a fit place to live, but since the original
Creation, He had let the planet go its own way. In rejecting
supernatural explanations, Hutton argued that the key to
understanding the processes Of the past is observing the
processes of the present, for they are one and the same. The
world now is the world then, and a uniformity of conditions
characterizes both what is and what was. Hutton took his
uniformitarianism to the extreme of believing that the same
species of organisms existed somewhere on Earth throughout
geological time. Hutton was certain that even in his own day
saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths were still to be
found, if only one knew where to look.
In France, meanwhile, Georges Cuvier took a view both
different and the same. He was similar to Hutton in that he
separated religion from science and relied less on received
dogma than on his own observations, specifically of the
geology of the Paris Basin. Those observations, though, gave
him a different view of Earth than Hutton’s slow recycling.
The Parisian rocks, in which the fossils of freshwater
organisms alternated with those of saltwater creatures, told
Cuvier that the sea had advanced and retreated several times.
Each such movement of oceanic water must have been
accompanied by a cataclysm, since the fossil plants and
animals before every sea-change differed from those after.
Practically everything was wiped out, then new species
emerged. And this process wasn’t necessarily as slow as
Hutton’s steady erosion and uplift. Mammoths and other large
vanished mammals discovered in a frozen, well-preserved
state told Cuvier that death had come upon them suddenly.
Cuvier was laying the foundation of a secular catastrophism,
one that had nothing to do with biblical deluges and other
divine interventions.
Leonce Elie de Beaumont, a pupil of Cuvier, put forward a
model to account for the evident catastrophes Cuvier
described. If Earth had begun in a molten state and gradually
cooled, the shrinking of the planet would cause sudden, large-
scale shifts in the crust that made themselves known as
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, extensive floods, and the
uplift of mountains. Given the scale and speed of these crustal
shifts and the cataclysms they launched, extinctions were
certain. Still, as our planet cooled
over time, the periodic disruptions would lessen in intensity,
leaving contemporary humans more secure than the vanished
species that came before—in some manner, still guaranteeing
the security of the original Aristotelian-Aquinian paradigm, at
least for those of us lucky enough to live in the present.

The Missing Links

Beaumont’s model was widely accepted among scholars and
naturalists on the Continent and in Britain in the early
nineteenth century. Yet his catastrophist idea was soon pushed
aside by a thoroughly uniformitarian paradigm that dismissed
cataclysm as a mechanism of any importance at all.
Fascinatingly, scientists of different persuasions looked at the
same body of facts and came away with utterly different,
mutually exclusive explanations.
Both uniformitarians and catastrophists did substantial geo-
logical fieldwork, and the data they gathered laid the basis for
constructing a history of Earth. The geological record was
divided into periods that were grouped into eras, with a change
in the fossil record indicating the boundary dividing one era
or period from the next. One of the most dramatic of these
boundaries came at the end of the Permian period. Another
marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and is now
associated with the extinction of the dinosaurs—animals then
little known to science. Such obvious evidence made it clear
to all geological fieldworkers that abrupt shifts in the fossil
records of plant and animal communities existed. The issue
was what to make of them.
Catastrophists, like Cuvier and Beaumont, considered the
sharp fossil breaks to be evidence of cataclysmic changes in
Earth itself, not the workings of a vengeful and interfering
God. To the catastrophists, such sharp changes were the
central facts scientists needed to explain. The uniformitarians
didn’t agree.
The most articulate and persuasive of them was Charles
Lyell, who expanded on Hutton’s work. Originally a trial
lawyer, Lyell used all of an attorney’s persuasive skills to win
the scientific world to his point of view.

Lyell believed deeply in a steady-state Earth, despite the

abundant geological evidence pointing to sudden fits and
starts. And he believed too, as did Hutton, that the history of
Earth’s surface could be explained in terms of the processes
currently operating and observable. Since earthquakes, tidal
waves, volcanic eruptions, and other cataclysmic events in the
contemporary era were all merely local events, Lyell held that
there was no reason to explain events by means of great
cataclysms no one had ever witnessed or recorded.
But what of the dramatic evidence offered by the Permian
and Cretaceous extinctions? Ah, Lyell argued, this isn’t what
you think it is; explaining extinctions as evidence of
catastrophe is overly simplistic. Were you more open to right
thinking, you would see that the real problem is an absence of
evidence for the gradual transition we all know must have
occurred. What with erosion and other gradual processes of
decay, the clues have weathered away. Sudden shifts are
illusions. Gradual change, with certain links of evidence
missing in the chain of transformation to give a false
impression of abruptness, is obviously the truth of the matter.
Remarkably, Lyell was a staunch creationist, a devout
Christian who believed God had made Earth and all its beings,
and who dismissed the evolutionary ideas then emerging in
European scientific circles. Remarkably, too, his
uniformitarian paradigm triumphed over secular
catastrophism, largely because he simply waved his
philosophical wand and made the telling geological evidence
of mass extinctions irrelevant.
Charles Darwin incorporated certain of Lyell’s ideas into
his classic On the Origin of Species. Lyell was uncomfortable
with Darwin’s evolutionary thinking, and the once-cordial
relationship between the two men cooled when Lyell realized
that Darwin considered humans as much the product of natural
selection as any other species—an idea that the more
traditionally religious Lyell would not accept. Yet Darwin,
like Lyell, believed strongly that rapid change was an illusion
and that the change of one species into another was glacially
slow, the result not of some sudden cataclysm, but of the
gradual accumulation of many small mutations and selections.
In the final chapter of the Origin, Darwin wrote, “As natural
selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive
favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden
modification; it can act only by very short and slow steps.”
Extinctions did occur; the evidence of species passing away
and new ones arising was undeniable. Still, it took a long,
patient while for such events to happen, all of them
explainable in terms of natural selection’s apparent slowness.
“The extinction of species and of whole groups of species,
which has played so conspicuous a part in the history of the
organic world, almost inevitably follows on the principle of
natural selection; for old forms will be supplanted by new and
improved forms,” Darwin wrote.
Certain that the process was slow and gradual rather than
abrupt and sudden, Darwin revisited Lyell’s argument about
absent clues. He noted that fossils can be destroyed by a great
many causes and concluded that “All these causes [for the
destruction of fossils] taken conjointly must have tended to
make the geological record extremely imperfect, and will to a
large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties,
connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life
by the finest graduated steps.”
In the century and a half since Darwin’s formulation of the
theory of evolution by natural selection, his ideas have been
revised and updated, yet key facets of the paradigm have
remained set. Lyell’s steady-state Earth slowly disappeared
from the scene, as geologists became increasingly aware of the
reality of ice ages and continental drift as global events. Still,
the shifts associated with these phenomena were thought to be
extremely slow, fitting therefore with the overarching
gradualism of Darwin’s natural selection theory.
Under pressure from the success of the uniformitarian para-
digm, the scientific catastrophism of Cuvier and Beaumont
faded away. Only a biblical catastrophism with a distinctly
medieval flavor remained. In Newton’s time, for example,
some scholars saw comet collisions as possible sources for
Greek myths like Phaethon’s ride in the fiery chariot, as well
as for biblical accounts of the flood of Noah, the plagues that
persuaded Egypt to let the Israelites go, and similar events.
Churchmen and philosophers of nature wondered in print
whether such events didn’t in fact prove the truth of biblical
prophecies, and showed, too, that God worked through the
skies to render His judgments on sinful humans. This kind of
thinking reappeared in the work of biblical catastrophists in
the nineteenth century. One of these was the German linguist
Johann Gottlieb Radlof, who argued that the Earth had been
struck by a comet fragment called Phaethon, and that another
piece of the same comet had become the planet Venus. The
most successful and notorious of the biblical catastrophists
was Immanuel Velikovsky, who resurrected some of Radlof s
ideas in the twentieth century. A psychoanalyst by profession,
Velikovsky argued, in his 1950 book Worlds in Collision, that
Earth had suffered an axis shift as a result of a close encounter
with a comet, and that the planet Venus had hurtled past Earth
in 1500 B.c.
Utterly lacking physical evidence for the catastrophes he
described, and basing his work on a selective analysis of end-
of- the-world mythologies, Velikovsky drew fierce attack
from academic scientists. In part, they were bothered by the
lack of any data, other than a literalist reading of ancient
mythologies, to support his position. Yet the fierceness of the
response showed how ingrained the uniformitarian paradigm
was, and how unwelcome dissenting views had become. Since
the time of Aristotle and his scholastic descendant Aquinas,
Western thinkers had largely held to the fundamental
paradigm of an Earth free of catastrophes, splendidly isolated
from the heavens, and subject only to the slowest of changes.
It would take a good deal more than Velikovsky to shake this
paradigm’s long-standing grip on the scientific mind.

Dead Dinosaurs, the Big Bang at Chicxulub, and

Catastrophism’s Resurrection
To give the scientific establishment of Velikovsky’s time its
due, the contemporary database lacked strong evidence of any
celestial or terrestrial process destructive enough to massively
disrupt our planet. Comets were considered gaseous rather
than solid, and therefore no potential danger to Earth until
1951, when F. L. Whipple proposed the “dirty snowball”
theory of cometary composition. Likewise, until the 1950s
most astronomers were confident that only a few meteors* of
a size capable of doing widespread damage had ever survived
their high-speed trip through the atmosphere and actually
struck Earth.

* Technically, a meteoroid is any particle of matter in space, ranging

from bits of dust to asteroids. A meteoroid that strikes Earth’s
atmosphere, becoming incandescent in the process, produces the
phenomenon known as a meteor, or shooting star. In common par-
lance, however, the term meteor is generally used to refer to both the
observed phenomena of shooting stars and to the solid meteoroid
objects. A meteorite is the portion of a meteor or meteoroid that
reaches Earth and collides with the surface.
 Although large, craterlike structures had been described, no
meteorites of more than middling dimensions were discovered
at these sites. The issue, it turned out, wasn’t an absence of
impacts, but the vaporizing explosion that largely destroyed
the space rock. Still, it is a long intellectual leap from the
theoretical possibility of Earth running into a big leftover from
a comet or a wandering asteroid and an overturning of the
uniformitarian paradigm for a new catastrophist view.
The major anomaly in the uniformitarian model was the
mass extinctions, particularly the Permian and the Cretaceous.
In 1962, Norman Newell gave an address as the retiring
president of the American Paleontological Association in
which he argued that the extinctions weren’t an illusion
produced by missing evidence in the geological record—a key
proposition of Lyell and Darwin’s gradualism. Nor, Newell
said, was it simply a matter of new species outcompeting
former forms, something like new and improved models
shouldering aside old fogies. If that were the case, fossils of
old and new species should be found mixed together. Rather,
the former groups of organisms completely disappeared, and
a significant delay ensued before new species arose to occupy
the vacated spaces. Still, Newell thought the process was quite
slow, taking on the order of 6 million years following each
mass extinction.
A few other scientists developed complementary
hypotheses that extinctions were sudden rather than slow, and
possibly the result of collisions between Earth and large
asteroids or comets. Though these ideas escaped the
vituperative response that met Velikovsky, they were still
ignored. Good solid evidence to support such ideas didn’t
exist, and they seemed too outlandish to pursue.
Then University of California geologist Walter Alvarez
asked his father, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis
Alvarez, to join him in investigating the Cretaceous
extinction, which occurred some 65 million years ago. This
was an enormous event that wiped out one in four of all animal
families then extant, including the dinosaurs, which had
flourished for the prior 150 million years. All the winged and
large marine reptiles also disappeared, seemingly in short
order, as did the ammonites, a large group of marine
cephalopods related to today’s octopi and squids. In many
geological sections, the boundary between the strata of the
Cretaceous is marked off from the subsequent strata of the
Tertiary by a thin layer of clay less than half an inch thick, the
so- called K-T boundary. Interested in any information about
the process of extinction that could be found in the K-T
boundary, the younger Alvarez wanted his physicist father to
help him study it in Gubbio, Italy, where the clay layer is
easily accessible.
The Alvarezes’ investigations revealed that the K-T
boundary clay in Gubbio was rich in iridium, a metal almost
completely absent on the Earth’s surface, but found in greater
abundance deeper within the planet. Subsequent studies of the
K-T boundary in Denmark and New Zealand uncovered the
same high concentration of iridium, ruling out the suggestion
that the iridium was unique to Gubbio. This meant there were
only two possible sources for the metal: either volcanic
activity, which would bring the element in molten form from
deep inside Earth; or an asteroid, which, since it would date
from the same period as Earth’s interior, would be similarly
rich in iridium. None of the K-T sites showed evidence of
volcanoes, leaving the asteroid model as the only workable
alternative. In 1980 the Alvarezes published a paper
hypothesizing that an asteroid on the order of six or seven
miles wide had slammed into Earth, resulting in a massive ex-
plosion and catastrophic climate change that wiped out the
dinosaurs.
Despite the extraordinary credentials of the paper’s authors,
the vast majority of scientists were at best skeptical. Beverley
Halstead, a British paleontologist, sought to tar the Alvarezes
with the same brush as Velikovsky, dismissing their idea as
theologically inspired: ‘The asteroid or giant meteor
explanation has the great popular appeal of high drama....
Such theories are clearly an advance on invoking the wrath of
a Deity but not very much.” Further fieldwork that identified
high iridium in K-T clays from over fifty sites showed the
Alvarezes were onto something. Many of the K-T clays also
contained materials, such as shocked quartz grains, that are
associated with meteor impacts.
A competing explanation for these data was offered:
massive volcano activity. During a time period that roughly
matches the K-T boundary, some 200,000 square miles in
what is now westcentral India—an area the size of
Washington and Oregon combined—was covered with lava
flows 6,500 feet deep. The total amount of volcanic material
in these flows, which are called the Deccan Traps, is estimated
to be more than a half-million times the volume of material
released by the Mount St. Helens eruption. Explosive volcanic
activity on a large scale has major environmental effects, such
as acid rain, reduced alkalinity of the oceans, change's in the
atmosphere around the globe, and depletion of the ozone layer,
all of which would have profoundly affected many kinds of
living beings, both plant and animal.
Still, explaining the extinction and the puzzling features of
the K-T boundary clay as a result of the Deccan Traps
vulcanism didn’t quite fit. The lavas of the Deccan Traps do
contain iridium, although at far too tiny a concentration to
explain the striking presence of this element in the K-T clay.
And there was a timing problem. The K-T clay represents a
period of from only one to several years. The Deccan Trap
lava flows began several million years before the K-T clay and
continued for several million years after. Curiously, however,
recent research shows that 70 percent of the flow was laid
down over a period of less than a million years, straddling the
narrow time of the K-T clay. Could there be a connection? Did
a major impact cause or accelerate the Deccan Traps?
Part of the answer came in 1990, when a large impact crater
of precisely the correct age was identified at Chicxulub in
what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The asteroid or
comet, which was several miles across and about the size of
Mount Everest—at least ten times as big as the space rock that
produced the Haughton Astrobleme—slammed down in
shallow water off the ancient coastline. The resulting
explosion was unimaginably massive, on the order of 10,000
times greater than the simultaneous detonations of all the
world’s current stockpile of nuclear weaponry. The effect was
equally devastating. The impact explosion gouged out a crater
over 110 miles wide and 20 miles deep, killing everything for
thousands of miles around. Earth rocked with powerful
earthquakes, and coastlines were inundated by towering
tsunamis. The huge volumes of dust raised into the upper
atmosphere by the explosion blocked sunlight for months,
years, perhaps decades, slowly killing off many of the land
plants and the animals that fed on them and starving the pred-
ators in turn. Over time and the turning of the eons, the Chicx-
ulub crater filled with sediment and eventually became part of
Yucatan.
The Chicxulub impact may have been only one of a cluster
of such collisions that occurred within a short period, an idea
we will explore further in chapter 6. By penetrating into the
mantle layer of Earth, the impacts could have contributed to
the volcanic processes that formed the Deccan Traps, and the
iridium found in the Indian lavas may also have arisen from
these collisions. It is also possible that by unfortunate
coincidence an asteroid hit Yucatan at just the time when
extensive volcanic activity was taking place in India, and that
the two processes, the one sudden and the other gradual,
together created complementary cataclysmic conditions
causing the mass extinction. Clearly, the interaction of the
Chicxulub impact with the extensive vulcanism of the Deccan
Traps still needs to be sorted out.
Yet one thing is sure: Only a catastrophist paradigm
accounts for the evidence. The discovery of the Chicxulub
crater and its association with the K-T boundary has upended
the uniformi- tarian paradigm and changed scientific thinking.
A new catastrophism is becoming an established fact of life
and Earth science.

Evolution and the Catastrophe Question

When we compare the catastrophist paradigm with the
scientific criteria discussed at the beginning of this chapter,
we can see how well this new model advances our thinking.
To begin with, catastrophism fits natural law. There’s nothing
divine about a comet hitting Earth or a massive outburst of
volcanic activity. The geological record as well as
astronomical observations, such as the collision of the comet
P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter (which will be discussed at
length in chapter 6), support these phenomena as ordinary and
expectable. Likewise, catastrophism is more parsimonious
than uniformitarianism. Lyell’s and Darwin’s argument about
missing links in the geological evidence is much more fanciful
than accepting the abruptness of boundaries on its face. And
catastrophism is progressive; it adds to our comprehension.
Catastrophism gives us a superior handle for understanding
more of the phenomena of the natural world. Evolution by
natural selection serves as a good example.

As we have seen, Darwin’s original model proposed a slow,

gradual accumulation of small changes that over time molded
a new species from an old. But as we have also seen, this
hypothesis didn’t fit very well with the fossil record, in which
some species suddenly vanished and, after a delay, new forms
appeared with equal suddenness. Even before the details of the
Chicxulub impact became clear, paleontologists like Niles
Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould were proposing a new model
of evolution that moved not slowly and gradually but in fits
and starts. This new theory is called “punctuated equilibrium,”
a term that conveys an image of steady states regularly
interrupted by periods of rapid, even radical, change—
something like long sentences broken by commas,
semicolons, and the occasional abrupt period.
Catastrophism dovetails beautifully with punctuated
equilibrium. In a steady-state world, all or nearly all of the
ecological niches are taken up by existing plants and animals.
If new species were to arise, the world would have little room
to accommodate them. In such a state, innovation is unusual;
things and beings tend to stay pretty much the same. Then
there comes a period of severe environmental stress—caused
perhaps by an asteroid impact, a change in planetary
temperature, or massive volcanic activity—that kills off a
large proportion of the existing organisms. Smaller gene pools
are more influenced by genetic change than larger ones, so that
change accelerates in the organisms that do survive. And, with
many ecological niches vacated by the cata-
clysm, these surviving, fast-changing organisms have new
spaces to move into—novel food sources to exploit,
unoccupied habitats to colonize. Obviously, creatures that are
genetically nimble and able to adapt quickly are the most
likely to succeed under the new conditions created by the
catastrophe.
The model of punctuated equilibrium requires periodic
catastrophes. The sources of those catastrophes make little
overall difference; only their destructiveness counts. Without
some major upset in the system, the steady state would
continue steadily on, changing only very slowly, if at all. The
result would be an inevitable stagnation in evolutionary
change. If that massive asteroid hadn’t slammed into
Chicxulub 65 million years ago, dinosaurs might still be the
largest land animals, mammals would be restricted to a few
small rodents and insectivores that dared to forage only at
night, and we humans would never have arisen. Catastrophe
primes the evolutionary pump; it provides the energy and the
opportunity that moves natural selection in new directions—
probably including, as it turns out, our own.
By showing how catastrophes prove “useful” to evolution,
catastrophism helps explain a great deal of paleontological
information that used to seem unexplainable. Yet in this
understanding there is a profoundly discomfiting note. We live
now in a world profoundly different from the one inhabited by
the last of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, yet the physical
and chemical constants that make up natural law remain the
same. The processes of the past and the present are one and
the same. What befell the dinosaurs could just as easily have
befallen us, not only in the far distant eons that set the stage
for our evolution as a species, but also in more recent times.
Clearly, such a catastrophe is theoretically possible, even
expected—but did it happen, when, and what effect might it
have had on our forebears?
A Shape with Lion Body and the
Head of a Man

WHEN WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS CONJURED THE IMAGE OF THE Great

Sphinx of Giza in his magnificent poem ‘The Second
Coming,” describing it as “A shape with lion body and the
head of a man / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” he was
harking back to this mythical creature’s ominous import in
classical antiquity. In that long-ago world, the sphinx was
linked inextricably to unanswerable questions, the
unstoppable passage of time, and the threat of destruction.
The most telling example is the Greek legend of Oedipus.
A particularly monstrous sphinx beset the city of Thebes,
devouring every passerby who could not solve its riddle:
“What creature goes on four feet in the morning, on two at
midday, on three in the evening?” Oedipus recognized the
answer: “A human being. In childhood, one crawls; in
adulthood, one walks boldly; in old age, one hobbles with cane
or staff.” That answer lifted the curse, and Thebes, in gratitude
to the unknown wanderer, made Oedipus king and married
him to the prior king’s widow. In this tale, however, no one
lived happily ever after, as Oedipus discovered that he had
unknowingly killed his own father and married his mother. In
the end, all were destroyed—Oedipus, his mother
and wife, and all his children—and the city of Thebes
devolved into a brutal civil war.
I, too, came to the Great Sphinx to answer a question, not
as a poet or an aspiring king, but as a scientist probing an issue
of time. What I found there opened my eyes to a new avenue
of scientific thought about human origins and the role of
catastrophe.

Asking the Unaskable

Even before I met John Anthony West, my own interest in
ancient history had taught me something about the Great
Sphinx of Giza. This immense statue—66 feet high and 240
feet long—rests in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, the only
survivor among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
Carved from limestone bedrock to resemble what Yeats
described, the lion-bodied, human-headed monument sits on
the edge of Egypt’s Giza Plateau, above the Nile River a few
miles west of Cairo on the edge of the Sahara, within the same
complex of ancient structures as the three classic pyramids of
the Old Kingdom’s Fourth Dynasty. Since the 1930s, most
Egyptologists have dated the construction of the Sphinx to the
reign of the Pharaoh Khafre (also known as Chephren), in
approximately 2500 B.C.
John Anthony West wasn’t so sure about that. Often
described as an “independent” Egyptologist—which is to say
a man without formal academic training or credentials in the
field—West has long been fascinated with ancient Egypt,
making his living by conducting tours to the country and
writing popular books on the subject. West came to me in
1989 through a mutual friend, Robert Eddy, a former professor
of rhetoric at Boston University, because he wanted the help
of a geologist in solving a puzzle about the Sphinx.
In the course of his research some years earlier, West had
come across the work of Rene Aor Schwaller de Lubicz. An
Alsatian philosopher and mathematician, Schwaller de Lubicz
conducted an extensive survey of the Temple of Luxor in
Egypt between 1937 and 1952, and uncovered geometrical
relationships within the structure that no one else had detected.
He concluded that much more was going on in ancient Egypt
than most conventional scholars were willing to admit, and he
argued that its civilization boasted a sophistication we
moderns do not understand. Although Schwaller de Lubicz’s
ideas were reviewed and supported by the orthodox
Egyptologist Alexandre Varille, the academic establishment
ignored his studies as unimportant, and dismissed them as
self-evidently wrong.

West, though, found much of value in Schwaller de Lubicz.

Among other things, he was intrigued by the observation that
the Great Sphinx showed a weathering pattern different from
the other structures at Giza. Schwaller de Lubicz suggested
that the difference might be due to water erosion rather than
wind- borne sand. This possibility caught the attention of
West, who had an intuitive feeling that the roots of Egyptian
civilization reached much farther back than 2500 B.c. The
climate in North Africa was vastly wetter in the millennia
preceding the Old Kingdom’s Fourth Dynasty than it was
during the Fourth Dynasty itself. Might the Sphinx have been
exposed to flooding during this particularly wet period? If that
proved to be the case, West realized, then the Great Sphinx
was constructed well before 2500 B.C.
West didn’t have the scientific training or tools to test his
idea with the rigor it deserved. He needed a geologist. That
was how he came to me.
As I listened to West outline his notion of the Sphinx’s age,
I was skeptical. After all, the evidence linking the Great
Sphinx to the reign of Khafre was circumstantial but
consistent. Of the three great pyramids, the one attributed to
Khafre sat closest to the Sphinx. Statues of Khafre found in
the nearby building called the Valley Temple added to the
association. So did a later, New Kingdom inscription on a
granite pillar, or stela, positioned between the paws of the
Sphinx, whose damaged hieroglyphics contained the first
syllable of Khafre’s name. Further, some scholars said they
saw the face of Khafre in the Sphinx’s blank and pitiless gaze.
I had no reason to believe the geological evidence would do
anything other than confirm the Egyptological consensus. I
told West I’d take a look, and probably disprove his notion, if
he could get me to Egypt.
West did just that the following summer, and at eight-thirty
in the morning of June 17, 1990, I was standing in front of the
Sphinx. While some people describe a powerful mystical
experience on encountering this monument, I was unmoved,
holding to a scientist’s cultivated dispassion. As I spent the
following days taking careful observations, however, I
developed a deep admiration for the Great Sphinx of Giza as
an ancient relic, a survivor from a long-lost world strikingly
different from ours, one able to speak now only in stone.

The Voices of the Ancient Rocks

I soon realized there might be something to West’s intuition
about the age of the Sphinx.
The statue sits not, as people often imagine, in majestic
repose upon the highest point of Giza, but in a hollow on its
eastern edge, so that only the head and the top of the back
project above the general elevation of the plateau. This
hollow, known as the Sphinx enclosure, is in actuality an
ancient quarry from which the ancient Egyptians carved away
the bedrock limestone to form the lion-bodied statue. The
nearby Valley and Sphinx temples were built with blocks of
this same limestone covered with granite facing-stones called
ashlars, which had been transported down the Nile from
Aswan.
The more I looked at the two temples built from the same
limestone as the Great Sphinx, the more I became convinced
that they were constructed in two steps, separated by
considerable time. The limestone blocks cut from the Sphinx
enclosure showed the uneven surface expected from long-term
weathering. The granite ashlars had actually been shaped to fit
these undulating surfaces. In some places, ancient Egyptian
masons had attempted to even out the weathered surface, but
they didn’t take off enough to leave a perfectly smooth wall.

Old Kingdom inscriptions cut into the granite ashlars date

these stones to the general time of Khafre—and this
apparently reliable fact raised a problem. It was unlikely that
the Egyptians had used weathered limestone to build the two
temples. If we make the reasonable assumption that the
builders began with smooth, unworn blocks, the original
limestone would have had to be exposed to the elements for a
long while before it revealed the pattern of wear evident under
the granite. This meant that the limestone predated the granite
by a considerable period, and that the temple had been built
not during the Fourth Dynasty but long before. Khafre or one
of the other Old Kingdom pharaohs had merely added the
granite to the original, weatherworn temples at a later date,
probably intending to refurbish or remodel these old
structures.
Of course, since the limestone blocks in the two temples
were cut in the course of carving the Sphinx, they and the
Sphinx had to be of the same age. And if the limestone blocks
were older than Khafre and the Old Kingdom, then so was the
Sphinx.
On this first trip to Egypt, I could do no more than play
world traveler and examine the temples, enclosures, pyramids,
and causeways of the Giza complex from the respectful
distance allowed to the many tourists who visit the site. Yet I
saw enough from even such a poor vantage point to convince
me that a much closer scientific investigation of the Sphinx
was warranted. Specifically, I needed to get into the Sphinx
enclosure and examine the statue itself.
When I returned to the United States, I drafted a lengthy
proposal to the Egyptian Antiquities Organization (EAO),
which then administered all such research, and requested
permission to perform geological studies of the rocks forming
the Sphinx and the temples. I promised to be “noninvasive”;
that is, I didn’t plan to take samples of the limestone. I also
wanted to look at the rocks under the surface by means of
seismic testing. The EAO granted permission.
In April 1991, West and I returned to Giza, bringing with
us Thomas L. Dobecki, a seismology expert then with a
consulting firm in Houston, who came along to help with the
technical aspects of the seismic study. We gathered data by
positioning a steel plate at predetermined points, then striking
the plate with a sledgehammer. This energy traveled as sound
waves through the surface gravel, sand, and uppermost rock
layers, then reflected off whatever was underneath. Special
microphones called geophones picked up the reflected sound
waves and transferred the information to a sophisticated
portable seismograph for storage on computer disks. Through
analysis of the volumes of data we collected, we could later
create a cross-section of the subsurface structures without in
any way damaging the Sphinx or its surroundings.
Dobecki, West, and I discussed our preliminary findings
with scientific colleagues at the University of Cairo, then we
returned to the United States to study the data more carefully.
In June I went back again to gather more data and verify the
information already gathered.
The more I studied the results, the more they confirmed
what I had suspected from the two-stage construction of the
Valley and Sphinx temples. Not all the structures of the Giza
Plateau were built during the Fourth Dynasty, as was generally
accepted. Some of them, including the Great Sphinx, had
already been around for a long, long time before Khafre
mounted Egypt’s throne.
The Marks of the Old Rains
One of the common methodologies of geology is analysis of
the modifications made to exposed rock surfaces by
weathering, erosion, and similar processes as a way of
determining relative ages. This approach proved key in
studying the Sphinx.

It was apparent to me that two very distinct weathering

processes had affected the Giza structures. In an arid environ-
ment like that of Egypt, where the wind blows steadily during
certain months of the year, wind-driven sand wears away
softer rock, leaving gaps between harder layers. This kind of
weathering was most prominent in the structures dated
unambiguously to early and middle Old Kingdom times, the
period stretching from 2600 to 2300 B.C.
The Sphinx showed some wind erosion, particularly on the
head and upper back, which sit above the ground level of the
plateau. However, the Sphinx also displayed obvious and
extensive wear from precipitation. Rock worn away by rain
has a rolling, undulating surface, often displaying distinct
vertical crevices. This kind of erosion is well developed and
prominent on the body of the Sphinx and within the Sphinx
enclosure, where the weathering reaches from over three feet
to more than six feet deep below the surface. Even though
certain of the Giza structures are built from the same kind of
limestone as the Sphinx, none of them show the same degree
of precipitation-induced weathering.
Interesting corroborative evidence come from the Saqqara
Plateau, located about ten miles from Giza. At Saqqara, a
number of fragile mudbrick tombs called mastabas are dated
indisputably to the First and Second dynasties, several
hundred years earlier than the Sphinx’s putative 2500 B.C.
origin. None of these tombs bears the marks of the kind of
rain-caused weathering seen on the Sphinx and the Sphinx
enclosure. In fact, the mastabas were preserved by being
buried in dry, windswept sand.
The Saqqara mastabas indicate that the climate has been
parched and dry in northern Egypt since circa 3000 B.C. If the
Sphinx had been built at this time, then, like the other Giza
and Saqqara structures known to have been built during this
period, it would show primarily wind erosion. The prominent
precipitation-induced erosion on the Sphinx indicates that it
must have been built when the climate was much wetter.
Egypt hasn’t always been the desert it was in Old Kingdom
times and remains today, with rainfall scarce and scant.
Research into climate history shows that beginning sometime
in the time span reaching from 10,000 to 8000 B.C.—the period
associated with the end of the most recent ice age—Egypt was
much wetter, with the contemporary desert a green savanna.
This moist climate, sometimes referred as the Nabtian Pluvial,
lasted until somewhere between 3000 B.c. and 2500 B.C., when
the arid conditions that still prevail set in.
It seemed apparent to me that the Sphinx had been carved
before the current desert climate was established and that the
extensive precipitation-induced weathering was due to the
heavy rains that fell long before the Old Kingdom, perhaps
even before Egypt’s First Dynasty in 3000 B.c. The seismic
data pushed the date back even farther.
The information Thomas Dobecki and I gathered showed
that the Sphinx enclosure is weathered unevenly. The north,
south, and east floors of the trench surrounding the east-facing
Sphinx are weathered to a depth of six to eight feet below the
level of the enclosure’s currently exposed surface. On the
monument’s western end, the Sphinx’s rump, the weathering
extends to only four feet. This finding surprised Dobecki and
me. Since all of the limestone exposed in the trench belongs
to the same stratum, we expected to find even weathering—
assuming, of course, that the enclosure was quarried at the
same time. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. The data could be
explained if the Sphinx had been carved in at least two stages,
with the rump being excavated later than the remainder of the
monument.
Now a likely picture emerged. When Khafre built the
second pyramid in circa 2500 B.C. and added the granite
ashlars to the Valley and Sphinx temples, he also finished
carving the rump down to its current level, even with the floor
of the enclosure, again refurbishing an already-existing
monument. Originally, I suspect, the Sphinx was intended to
appear like an organic part of the Giza Plateau, rising directly
out of the bedrock. A similar, though much later (New
Kingdom, Eighteenth Dynasty) example of this style is seen
in the Temple of Hatshepsut, at Deir el- Bahri (also known as
Deir el-Bahari) on the West Bank of Thebes, which is partly
carved from and built into the local cliff, and esthetically
integrated with its natural surroundings. In its first incarnation,
the Sphinx may have had a similar appearance of blending in
with its surroundings, at least when viewed from the rear.
Khafre changed that, by excavating down to a level equal to
the enclosure’s surface depth on the other three sides.
Khafre very possibly did other repair work to the Sphinx as
well. In a number of places where rain erosion had worn away
the original limestone, blocks of stone were hoisted into place
to fill the gaps. According to a number of Egyptologists, these
replacement stones show the masonry techniques of the Old
Kingdom. If the Sphinx was carved in the Old Kingdom, why
did it need such extensive repair so soon thereafter? Didn’t it
make more sense to see the Sphinx as a much older, already-
weathered structure incorporated into the Giza complex by the
pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty and repaired and refurbished
by them?
A number of researchers have noticed the precise
geometrical relationships between the pyramids and the
Sphinx. University of Chicago Egyptologist Mark Lehner
made the point that “considerable forethought went into the
location of the Sphinx in relation to the rest of the Khafre
complex.” He is right about the geometry, but I suspect he has
the time relationship and artistic intention backward. The
Khafre complex was built to merge with and complement the
Sphinx, not vice versa.
Still, dating the Sphinx to the period before Khafre left
unanswered a major question: Just how old is it? Again, the
seismic data suggest a workable answer.
It seems likely that the western end of the Sphinx enclosure
was completed at the time of Khafre and has therefore been
subject to less weathering than the previously exposed
surfaces at the sides and front of the structure. Since this side
and front weathering is 50 percent to 100 percent deeper, it is
reasonable to estimate that the excavation at those points is 50
to 100 percent older than the now 4,500-year-old work at the
Sphinx’s rump. This line of thinking dates the original
excavation of the Sphinx to somewhere on the order of 7000
to 5000 B.c., a figure that fits with the climatic history
revealed in the rain erosion patterns.
As earthshaking a calculation as this has proved to be to
conventional Egyptology, it is in fact a conservative estimate
that represents only a minimum age. The reason is that the
weathering may proceed nonlinearly. The rate of wear can
slow as time passes, because the older weathered material
overlies and protects the rock underneath. If this phenomenon
holds true for the Giza limestone, then the Sphinx may have
been carved even earlier than 7000 B.C.

Convention and Circumstance

We scientists are trained in a certain caution. Whenever we
come up with findings that fly in the face of current wisdom,
we check everything again and again before venturing out in
public with an announcement of “revolutionary” results. I was
well aware of the need to be as sure as I could be of the
accuracy of my data and hypotheses. And I was aware, too,
that as a geologist I was crossing academic boundaries into the
barony of Egyptology.
To avoid being seen as an upstart interloper, I carefully
examined the accepted arguments used to date the Sphinx to
Khafre’s reign in approximately 2500 B.c. I wanted to be very
sure I wasn’t missing something the acknowledged experts in
the field took for granted.
The standard attribution of the Sphinx to 2500 B.c. can be
traced to the research of Selim Hassan, who in 1949 published
findings from his fieldwork during the 1930s. Interestingly,
even Hassan said that his line of reasoning and the evidence
he marshaled were only circumstantial. He could not
demonstrate definitively that Khafre’s workers had carved the
Great Sphinx.
Before Hassan, Egyptologists debated the Great Sphinx’s
age back and forth. E. A. Wallis Budge, well known as the
translator of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, was of the
opinion that the Sphinx was older than Khafre. And Sir
Flinders Petrie, one of Egyptology’s founding patriarchs,
considered the structure predynastic, more ancient even than
the Old Kingdom.
Hassan—who maintained that Petrie changed his mind late
in his career—did correctly perceive that the Great Sphinx, the
Valley Temple, the Sphinx Temple, and the Khafre pyramid
belong to one overall ground plan. Therefore, he assumed that
all the structures had to be built at approximately the same
time. That is hardly the only explanation, however. The
Khafre pyramid complex could well have been designed to fit
in with a Sphinx that was already there.
Contemporary Egyptologists refer to three additional pieces
of evidence in dating the Great Sphinx. The first is a strikingly
beautiful statue of Khafre recovered from the Valley Temple
in 1860. The presence of this statue alone, however, is hardly
convincing evidence that Khafre was the builder of the temple.
He could just as easily have had the statue placed in an existing
temple, perhaps to appropriate its sacred energy for himself.
The second piece of evidence is the New Kingdom stela
erected between the paws of the Sphinx by Pharaoh Thutmose
IV (also known as Tuthmosis IV) in circa 1400 B.C., when the
monument was dug out of the sand that had buried it for much
of the time since the end of the Old Kingdom. First excavated
in the nineteenth century, the inscription on the stela was
reported to have included the first syllable of Khafre’s name.
Unfortunately, the portion of the inscription bearing this
hieroglyph has flaked away and can no longer be studied
firsthand. If the inscription did indeed mention Khafre by
name as the creator of the Sphinx, it is the only such ancient
inscription to do so—a curious omission among a people as
given to the cultivation of royal ego as the ancient Egyptians
were. And the hieroglyph in question may not have referred to
Khafre anyway. The symbol for the syllable khaf is found in a
number of Egyptian words besides the pharaoh’s name.
The third and final piece of evidence is the alleged
similarity between the face of the Sphinx and that of Khafre.
This is a relatively recent idea, and certainly the least
convincing argument of all. For one thing, the Sphinx’s face
has been badly damaged. Trying to determine what it once
looked like is as much a matter of conjecture and artistic
intuition as science. An example is Mark Lehner, who used a
computer program to reconstruct the appearance of the
undamaged Sphinx and felt that the face “came alive” when
he gave it Khafre’s features. In other words, when Lehner
made the Sphinx look the way he thought it should, then it
looked the way he thought it should. Such reasoning is, of
course, circular.
It also has no bearing on what my geological and seismic
findings revealed. From the first time I saw the Great Sphinx,
and particularly after I was allowed to inspect the head
firsthand and up close, I have been convinced that the
Sphinx’s current head isn’t the original. Relatively recent tool
and chisel marks, as well as the appearance of the stone itself,
indicate that the current head is a recarving from an original
(which may have represented an animal rather than a human).
This recarving hypothesis also helps explain the head’s
obviously small size in relation to the body, a disruption of
proportion unusual in Egyptian monuments and distincdy
unlike other extant statues of sphinxes. Such a recarving
would fit with the overall refurbishing and construction proj-
ect attributed to Khafre. It is very possible that his workmen
recarved the statue to look like him.
Or perhaps whoever reworked the head wanted it to look
like someone else entirely, a person or divinity whose identity
remains unknown. In October 1991, Frank Domingo, then a
senior forensic officer with the New York City Police
Department, traveled to Egypt to do what forensic officers
do—develop an image of the Sphinx’s face as if it were the
suspect in a crime. Domingo concluded that the faces of
Khafre and the Sphinx are different. Further, he was
convinced that the faces actually represent people of different
races, with Khafre’s face looking more white or European and
the Sphinx appearing African or Nubian. The Egyptians of the
Old Kingdom are thought to have arisen from an ancestral mix
of Europeans and Africans. If Domingo is right about the
Africanness of the Sphinx—and I think he is—the face would
indicate that even the recarved face dates back to a time well
before Khafre, when Africans predominated in Egypt.
It is clear that all the evidence attributing the Great Sphinx
of Giza to Khafre is circumstantial. Curiously, other
circumstantial evidence points, like the African face, toward
an earlier origin.
The so-called Inventory Stela (also known as the Stela of
Cheops’ Daughter), which dates from the seventh or sixth cen-
tury B.C. and which purports to be a copy of an Old Kingdom
text, states that the Great Sphinx was already in existence
during the reign of Khufu (Cheops), who preceded Khafre. In
fact, this stela credits Khufu with repairing the Sphinx after it
was struck by lightning—which is consistent with the obvious
repair work done on the monument and the Sphinx and Valley
temples. Modern Egyptologists generally treat the Inventory
Stela as a late- period fabrication of an Old Kingdom text, and
refuse to accept it as authentic.
Selim Hassan examined the literary references of the
ancients to the Great Sphinx in the period stretching from the
New Kingdom to Roman times, and found that all of them
considered the Sphinx older than the pyramids. Interestingly,
the oral traditions of some of the villagers who live around
Giza agree that the Sphinx is at least five thousand years older
than Khafre.
In short, there is circumstantial evidence on both sides,
some indicating that the Great Sphinx may date to the time of
Khafre, the rest indicating that it is older. The physical
evidence is the deciding factor: The Sphinx had already been
in place for at least 2,500 years when Khafre laid the first
block of his pyramid.
Setting the Firestorm
By October 1991, I felt confident enough about my research
to present it to the annual meeting of the Geological Society
of America. Geologists, I find, are a forthright and honest
bunch of scientists. I knew that if I had misinterpreted any of
the data, somebody would point out the error of my ways to
me. It greatly relieved me that no one found any flaws in the
work. Actually, a remarkable number of my colleagues found
the project so interesting that they asked to be included in the
research if I needed help.
Then the trouble started. The popular press, which attends
scientific meetings on the prowl for interesting news, picked
up on the story and put it out. To my great surprise, articles on
the Sphinx research soon appeared in The New York Times,
The Washington Post, The Independent of London, even USA
Today. A number of Egyptologists, archaeologists, and geo-
archaeologists took immediate, sometimes angry exception to
my hypothesis that the Sphinx was older than they thought.
The hoopla led to an invitation to debate the age of the
Sphinx under the aegis of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, in February 1992. It wasn’t much of
a debate, actually, but a series of short talks with no time for
discussion. Thomas Dobecki and I were on one side, and Mark
Lehner and the geologist K. Lal Gauri were on the other. The
press continued the story, reporting on the high drama of an
academic controversy fanned by Lehner’s tendency to indulge
in name-calling and insult.
As a scientist, though, I needed to pay close attention to
what the other side was saying. After all, there is always that
small worry lurking in the back of a scientist’s mind that
something critical may have been overlooked. I have gone
through all the countervailing arguments raised in the ongoing
controversy, to see whether any of them contains that critical
missing detail. So far, I haven’t found it.

Farouk El-Baz, who is director of Boston University’s

Center for Remote Sensing, maintains that the Great Sphinx is
in fact a yardang—that is, a natural, wind-shaped hill—which
Old Kingdom artists simply retouched to make it look the way
it does. Thus, he argues, the rain erosion I documented
happened to an exposed rock outcropping long before any
ancient Egyptian sculptor ever picked up a chisel to transform
a piece of nature into a work of art.
But El-Baz’s idea just doesn’t fly. The Sphinx lies below
the surface of the Giza Plateau, and the ancient Egyptians had
to dig a trench around it to expose the stone. Before that
excavation, the limestone was covered over by surface layers
of sand or soil. The weathering could have begun only after
the ancient Egyptians excavated the enclosure to carve the
statue. The head, it is true, may have been a yardang, but it has
been so heavily reworked that it’s now impossible to tell for
sure.
Frank J. Yurco, an Egyptologist at Chicago’s Field Museum
of Natural History, takes a different tack. He argues that the
body of the Sphinx contains much poorer limestone than the
other monuments at Giza. As a result, the Sphinx cannot be
compared with the other structures because, under the same
climatic conditions, the Sphinx would have weathered much
more severely. He says, too, that since the Sphinx is low-lying,
it was flooded repeatedly by the rising Nile. In other words,
water did damage the Sphinx, but the water came from the
river, not the rain-filled skies of the Nabtian Pluvial period.
Yurco’s ideas sound superficially plausible, but they don’t
stand up to scrutiny. He’s right about the low quality of the
limestone. Still, as far as we can tell, this same limestone was
used throughout much of the Giza complex, and can be
expected to weather at the same rate and in the same manner
over the same period. Because the limestone is relatively
homogeneous, more weathering indicates the passage of more
time, not nonexistent differences in the rock. As for flooding,
the Nile did indeed reach the Sphinx, at least on occasion. Yet
if inundation was the cause of the water-induced erosion, the
wear should be greater on the paws and lower body, when in
fact it is most pronounced on the much higher back. Damage
of that sort could have come from flooding only if the statue
was awash to its neck again and again in floods that would
have given Noah pause. How could that have happened when
the historical record says clearly that the Sphinx was buried in
sand for much of the period between 2500 B.c. and 1400 B.C.?
Additionally, Yurco’s argument doesn’t account for the
differences in weathering in the rocks of the Sphinx enclosure.
The entire floor of the enclosure lies at the same elevation, and
any flood large enough to wet part of it would wet all of it.
How, then, can it be that the east, north, and south sides are so
much more deeply weathered than the west?
Kathryn Bard and George Rapp Jr., both of Boston
University’s Archaeology Department, take a similar bad-
rock approach, arguing that the Sphinx isn’t a normal massive
limestone formation. They also make much of the fact that it
still rains in Egypt, which complicates the weathering picture.
Actually, there is no such thing as a “normal” limestone,
and the properties of Giza’s limestone are well studied. I took
that work into account in developing my hypothesis. And, of
course, as Bard and Rapp state, it still rains in Egypt. The
issue, however, is that these days it rains much less than it did
during the Nab- tian Pluvial of predynastic times. Only that
kind of long-gone, consistent, heavy rainfall accounts for the
Sphinx’s obvious precipitation-induced weathering and the
deep erosion in the surrounding enclosure.
One geologist suggested to me that the apparent deeper
weathering on the east, north, and south sides of the Sphinx
enclosure resulted not from earlier exposure to the elements,
but from the southeasterly dip in the rock strata of the
underlying formations. The differential weathering pattern,
however, doesn’t follow the dip of the strata. Instead, it
parallels the floor of the enclosure and actually cuts across the
dipping strata. Additionally, the weathering of the east, north,
and south sides is remarkably uniform despite the dipping
strata. It appears nearly certain that the wear resulted from
exposure of the rock by human activity, not from differences
in the subsurface strata.
K. Lal Gauri, a geologist at the University of Louisville, has
made much of the “rapid” weathering of exposed limestone.
He argues that stone of this sort weathers away much faster
than I have allowed for, and that my analysis mixes and
matches different strata of limestone. Gauri’s second
argument is simply wrong. My research was careful in
analyzing different weathering rates only in limestones of
identical strata. Geologically, I made sure to compare apples
with apples.
As for Gauri’s argument regarding rapid weathering, it con-
tains a peculiar irony: The conventional position holding for a
2500 B.C. origin of the Sphinx requires a much faster rate of
weathering, under conditions that normally do not cause lime-
stone to weather very quickly, than my hypothesis does. As I
pointed out earlier, the Sphinx had worn so severely that it
needed repair even in pharaonic times. It is plausible that the
Sphinx could have weathered from a freshly carved state to its
current condition in 4,500 years if it had never been repaired,
restored, or buried under a protective layer of sand. The
question is whether it could have become so severely
weathered in ancient times alone, before the first repairs were
made. Most Egyptologists are in agreement that this repair
effort took place no later than 1400 B.c., with a few arguing
for an earlier date of around 2200 or 2300 B.C. If they are right,
and if the Sphinx was first constructed in 2500 B.C., then it had
to weather severely in only 200 to 1,100 years, during a period
when it is known to have been buried in sand for much of the
time and when the climate was every bit as bone-dry and arid
as it is today—conditions that tend to preserve limestone, not
wash it away. This is indeed a much less likely model than a
Sphinx that was built between 7,000 and 9,000 years ago and
eroded during the heavier rains of that earlier era, long before
repair was required at least thousands of years later.
In the end, the physical evidence stands. Based on what we
now know, the Great Sphinx of Giza was constructed
somewhere between 7000 and 5000 B.C.

Upsetting the Apple Cart

The arguments advanced to support the 2500 B.C. dating of the
Sphinx and attribute it to Khafre are ad hoc ideas invented to
protect an established chronology. It is as if the Egyptologists
scratch their heads and say, “But we know the date’s got to be
2500 B.C. Surely Schoch is wrong. He simply has to be.”
Unwittingly, they are caught in the trap of defending their own
dogma rather than examining the evidence with the dispassion
it deserves.
Of course, as a geologist, I come to Egyptology as an
outsider. By and large, Egyptologists don’t use this kind of
scientific evidence; they rely instead on a mix of methods that
includes historiography, archaeology, anthropology,
philology, and literary analysis. Geological analysis is an alien
form of thinking, one that Egyptologists are likely to reject
because of their own lack of familiarity with it.
Yet lying even deeper under the terms of this debate is an
overriding assumption about the capacities and capabilities of
ancient peoples. Mark Lehner told the New York Times, “If the
Sphinx was built by an earlier culture, where is the evidence
of that civilization? Where are the pottery shards? People
during that time were hunters and gatherers. They didn’t build
cities.” Carol Redmont of the University of California,
Berkeley, made a similar statement to the Los Angeles Times:
“There’s just no way that could be true [that the oldest portion
of the Sphinx dates back to 5000 B.c. or earlier]....The people
of that region would not have had the technology, the
governing institutions, or even the will to build such a
structure thousands of years before Khafre’s reign. ...[It] flies
in the face of everything we know about ancient Egypt.”

Does it really? Or does it merely undermine our

assumptions? Were the people of long ago unlettered knuckle-
draggers who didn’t know what a sphinx was, much less how
to build such a massive example of one? Or have we, in the
assumed superiority of our own culture, arrogantly written off
an ancient, vanished people different from ourselves yet
sophisticated in ways we do not understand?
Ancient Origin: Civilization’s
Rescheduled Beginning

RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE IDEA OF EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS IS often laid

unfairly at the feet of Charles Darwin. In fact, the notion reaches
much farther back than the father of the theory of evolution by natural
selection. Admittedly, Darwin’s theory did lend itself to the idea that
as species change over time, they inevitably become better and better.
The concept of natural progress over the years, centuries, and
millennia was very much a feature of the European Enlightenment in
the eighteenth century, a hundred years before Darwin. Indeed, its
roots extend to an even earlier time, at least to the early centuries of
the Christian era. The old religions of the Greek and Roman classical
world saw history as recurring cycles of birth and decay. They
portrayed the passage of time as a circle: what goes around comes
around, again and again. Christianity straightened history into a line,
reaching from Moses to Jesus to Judgment Day in an inevitable and
divine progression.
Given that the scholarly and scientific cultures of the United States
and Europe are very much the products of both the Enlightenment
and the Christian worldview, the notion of necessary improvement
over time has subtly but indelibly influenced our paradigm of
civilization’s rise. The existing model of prehistory posits steady
progress step by step from the first group of Stone Age hunters trying
their hands at farming to the bustling urbanites of today’s Manhattan.
According to this model, during the so-called Paleolithic period
from modern humankind’s earliest origins until about 8000 B.C., we
lived by hunting wild game and foraging for roots, fruits, and other
plant foods, moving from place to place in the endless nomadic
pursuit of a full larder. Around 8000 B.C., particularly in the Fertile
Crescent of the Near East, some of these nomads settled into
permanent villages, sparking what has been called the Neolithic
revolution. Because they had learned how to sow and reap grain, and
had mastered the art of domesticating and raising sheep, goats, and
cattle for milk, meat, wool, and hides, these people no longer needed
to move with the seasons. As humans became increasingly adept at
farming and herding and fully exploited the opportunities offered by
this new settled economy of agriculture and herding, villages grew
into towns, towns into small cities. By circa 3500 B.C., the world’s
first true civilizations had arisen more or less simultaneously in
Mesopotamia and Egypt, ushering in the Bronze Age with its metal
weaponry, full-blown writing systems, and complex social, political,
and religious organizations.
My research on redating the Sphinx caused a stir not only because
it challenged the traditional chronology of orthodox Egyptology, but
also because it undercut this model of steady progress from
Paleolithic to Neolithic to Bronze Age. If the Great Sphinx of Giza
dates to the 7000-5000 B.C. period, it should be Neolithic. But what
uncivilized Neolithic folk—people who, according to the
conventional model, tended flocks and herds, defended themselves
with stone-tipped arrows and spears, farmed crudely on small plots,
and clothed their bodies in the uncured hides of animals—could have
carved so magnificent a sculpture in such colossal proportions? The
Sphinx is a triumph of artistic genius and of both organizational and
technical knowhow, qualities long assumed to be light-years ahead
of the capacity of the Neolithic Age and to have been unattainable
before the advent of the Bronze Age.
Yet the anomaly remains. And, as we shall soon see, it is only one
of the many pieces of a complex puzzle whose assembled picture
shows that a linear, progressive vision of the rise of civilization is an
illusion, and that our cultural roots reach back to a far earlier time
than we have previously thought possible.

An Egypt Swept Clean

When most Egyptologists are presented with a hypothetical dating of
the Great Sphinx to the 7000-5000 B.C. period, they point
immediately to the lack of physical evidence indicating the presence
of a civilization capable of supporting such an effort. That statement
is true, as far as it goes. Very little archaeological evidence from the
end of the Paleolithic period to the beginning of the Bronze Age has
been unearthed in the Nile Valley and Delta. On the face of it, this
limited evidence could indicate that few humans inhabited these
regions during that period. Yet it must always be remembered that an
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Most of the archaeological material from the predynastic period of
Egypt comes not from the river’s cultivated floodplain but from
habitation sites and cemeteries, like the Giza Plateau, that lie at the
edge of the desert or along the southern edge of the Nile Delta and sit
at some elevation above the lower-lying flats. Very little
archaeological excavation work has been carried out in the delta itself
or in the valley, and for good reason: extreme difficulty. In the days
before the Nile was dammed, the river’s regular flooding deposited
an average of one millimeter of alluvial soil each year across the delta
and the rest of the river’s floodplain. Those deposits added up. In the
past 10,000 years, the span between the traditional beginning of the
Neolithic period
and today, the Nile Delta and Valley have been progressively buried
under eight meters, or a little more than twenty-six feet, of deposited
soil. Removing an overburden of that depth poses great technical
difficulty. As a rule, archaeologists like their ruins better exposed,
closer to the surface; it helps to know where to begin digging.
To complicate matters, the bed of the Nile in its lower reaches has
shifted over the millennia, so that what is riverbank now may have
been underwater at various times thousands of years in the past.
Additionally, much of what was inhabitable coastline in Egypt
several millennia ago now lies underwater. The retreat of the last ice
age launched not only the heavy rains of the Nabtian Pluvial, but also
raised sea levels profoundly and quickly. Beginning around 8000 B.C.,
the Mediterranean rose an estimated 200 or more feet, burying
beneath its waters any villages, cities, or religious sites used by the
dwellers on what used to be the coastline.
The two Neolithic settlements known from Lower Egypt in the
fifth millennium B.C. are less sophisticated than one would expect for
the period. These were the ragged camps of rough, tough people
eking out a hardscrabble existence on the edge of starvation, the kind
of place where physical survival rather than high culture was the first
order of business. How could such a backwater have been the source
of the civilization that built the pyramids?
Prehistorian Mary Settegast doubts this is the case. “It has never
seemed logical that the Nile Valley would be almost uninhabited
during a period when lands to the east and west of Egypt were
experiencing great advances in population and cultural
development,” she writes. “Moreover, the relative backwardness of
the two Neolithic settlements which then do appear in fifth-
millennium Northern Egypt (Faiyum and Merimde) is not what one
expects of the times, and several archaeologists now suspect that both
may actually have been marginal settlements, perhaps of Libyan
bedouin..., rather than true representatives of the cultural level of
fifth-millennium Lower Egypt.”
In fact, other evidence from ancient Egypt, though scant, adds to
the notion that the remnants of predynastic culture lies undiscovered
beneath the waters of the Mediterranean or the accumulated soil of
thousands of Nile floods. An intriguing example is the so-called
Libyan palette, a predynastic (circa 3100- 3000 B.C.) artwork on
display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The palette shows seven
structures that look like fortified cities located along the western edge
of the Nile Delta. If we take this palette as credible evidence—and
there is no reason not to—it clearly indicates the existence of cities
in predynastic times. However, no such cities have been uncovered.
Very possibly they lie buried under the shifting desert sands, the
accumulated Nile silt, or the invading waters of the Mediterranean.
On a cultural and technological level, a great deal has been going
on in Egypt for a very long while. As long ago as 33,000 years, the
inhabitants of Upper Egypt displayed the significant technical and
organizational skills needed to mine stone. P. M. Vermeersch and his
associates excavated a shafted, chambered flint mine that is
radiocarbon-dated to 31,000 B.c., making it the oldest such mine yet
discovered. Early Neolithic sites dating to the late seventh
millennium B.c. in Egypt’s Western Desert feature well-planned
villages complete with wells, habitations much more sophisticated
than the primitive fifth-millennium sites.
The most exciting pertinent discovery about predynastic Egypt is
very recent, announced only in March 1998. Several years ago, a
team led by Southern Methodist University anthropologist Fred
Wendorf located a complicated Neolithic ruin west of Abu Simbel in
the southern Sahara. The site lies on the edge of what used to be an
ancient lake, which began filling with water in about 9000 B.C. as a
result of the increased rainfall of the Nab- tian Pluvial, and remained
full until rainfall fell off after circa 3000 B.C. Nomadic catde-herding
peoples used the area to graze their animals on a seasonal basis from
circa 8000 B.C. until the lake dried up in approximately 2800 B.c.,
making the area no longer habitable. Using huge stones, or megaliths,
the nomads populating Nabta during the wet times built a stone circle,
a number of flat, tomblike structures, five lines of standing stones,
and villages with deeply dug, walk-in wells. A number of the tombs
were apparently shrines to cattle; one of them contained a fully
articulated bovine skeleton, and another held a rock sculpted to
resemble a cow. Apparently these unknown people used cattle in their
religious rites much as the nomadic, cattleherding Masai of East
Africa do today.
The most fascinating aspect of Nabta is less the cattle worship than
the circle and alignments of standing slabs. Follow-up work at the
site by Wendorf, University of Colorado astronomer J. McKim
Malville, Ali A. Mazar of the Egyptian Geological Survey, and
Romauld Schild of the Polish Academy of Sciences made use of
satellite surveys and showed that one of the lines runs exactly east to
west, altogether too perfectly to be a coincidence. The stone circle
contains four sets of stone slabs; two sets are aligned north to south,
and the second pair provides a line of sight to the horizon where the
summer solstice sun rose about 6,000 years ago.
Nabta could also have been used to mark the zenith sun. Since the
site lies just south of the Tropic of Cancer, the noon sun reaches its
highest point in the sky on two specific days, one three weeks before
the summer solstice and the other three weeks after. On those days,
upright objects like the standing stones of the circle and alignments
cast no shadows. The zenith sun has been a major event for many
tropical cultures for millennia, and the stone alignments allowed
Nabta’s inhabitants to time the event precisely.
 These long-ago people went to a great deal of trouble to achieve
this precision. Some of the slabs reach nine feet high, and they were
dragged to the site from a sandstone outcrop a mile or more away.
That effort took quarrying skill and enough
organization to assemble a team to cut and move the heavy, dan-
gerous slabs and put them in place.
Of course, astronomical alignments of this sort are known from
various other places in the world, the most famous being England’s
Stonehenge and similar sites in Brittany, Ireland, and other parts of
Europe. Nabta, however, is a full millennium older, dating to between
4500 and 4000 B.C., and it qualifies as the most ancient astronomical
alignment yet discovered. The people who built it possessed the
organizational and technical skill to erect such monuments, and they
made use of a highly detailed astronomical knowledge of the sun’s
movements.
The people of Nabta were not unique in their skill and knowledge.
When we move the circle of inquiry outside Egypt to the neighboring
lands of the Near East, pronounced sophistication announces itself
earlier and earlier. Consider the ancient city of Jericho, in what is
now the Israeli West Bank, lying about 200 miles east of the Nile
Delta. Dating back to circa 8300 B.C., Jericho boasted a massive stone
wall that was 6.5 feet thick and at least twenty feet tall. Outside this
wall, a ditch twenty-seven feet wide and nine feet.deep was cut into
the solid bedrock, probably to serve as a moat. Within the protection
of the wall, Jericho’s ancient inhabitants built a stone tower thirty feet
in diameter and at least thirty feet tall—that’s the height of the ruins
today; the original may have reached even higher—with a flight of
steps fashioned from huge stone slabs running up its center. Appar-
ently perceiving a threat from the outside and needing to protect
themselves, the people of Jericho had the organizational and
technical skill to create a defensive structure that compares favorably
to the feudal siege castles of medieval Europe built over 9,000 years
later.
Farther north, in the Anatolian region of what is now Turkey, lie
the ruins of the ancient city of Catal Huyuk, which are dated to the
seventh millennium B.C. Compared to Jericho, which is estimated to
have contained only several hundred residents, Qatal Huyuk was a
huge, bustling place, with 7,000 inhabitants living in an orderly
complex of mudbrick-and-timber houses and temples. Religious and
symbolic life was developed and rich, expressed in ornate wall
paintings and sculptures depicting bulls’ heads, female breasts, frogs,
and vultures, images thought to represent the forces of birth, death,
and regeneration.
Nabta, Jericho, and Qatal Huyuk all display evidence of people
able to organize themselves to accomplish complex tasks and pos-
sessed of impressive artistic, technical, and engineering knowledge.
And none of these sites is a prototype, the sort of first-time
experiment, half success and half failure, that betrays the hand of a
talented beginner with both great vision and rank inexperience. These
sites were the work of people who knew what they were doing
because they had been doing it for a long while, far longer than the
old model of the rise of civilization allows.

Pushing Time Back in the New World

The sophistication of the ancient Near Eastern sites, including the
Great Sphinx of Giza, shows that many of civilization’s elements
were in place for millennia before the accepted date of civilization’s
arrival, in 3500 B.C. The horizon of history needs to be rolled back to
a time thousands of years earlier than we have thought possible. And
this fact holds true not only for the Old World cradle of civilization,
but also for the New World of the Americas.
Until well into the mid-1990s, the prevailing model held that
humans first came to the New World from Asia by crossing a land
bridge over what is now the Bering Sea between Siberia and Alaska.
But for millennia, anyone who made it across the land bridge had
nowhere to go. About 20,000 years ago, at the outset of the most
recent ice age, two massive, thick ice sheets joined over what is now
Canada and the northern United States, foreclosing any possibility of
passage south. Then, some 7,000 years later, with the ice age
beginning to come to an end in circa 11,000 B.C., an ice-free corridor
opened between the glaciers, providing a southern route.
Anthropologists and archaeologists theorized that the first Americans
making their way across the land bridge at this time migrated south
as the ice retreated, giving a clear route into a land that to them was
a new opportunity. This hypothesis fit with the evidence of what was
thought to be the oldest discovered site of human occupation outside
Alaska, at Clovis, New Mexico. Clovis showed that humans in the
area were hunting and butchering mammoths during the centuries
between 9500 and 9000 B.C. That date worked well. It was more
recent than the oldest known sites in Alaska—after all, if the migrants
moved north to south, then northern sites had to be older than Clovis,
as indeed they proved to be—yet it allowed enough time for the new
arrivals to cover the considerable distance in between.
Various scholars made claims of discovering human habitations
older than Clovis, but again and again the claims were disproved.
From its discovery in the 1930s through the 1990s, Clovis remained
the benchmark for the presence of humankind in the New World.
Until, that is, the discovery of an ancient campsite at Monte Verde,
in southern Chile. Twenty years of research by a team of American
and Chilean scientists, led by the University of Kentucky’s Tom D.
Dillehay, have swept away the last skepticism among scholars and
shown that Monte Verde dates to 10,500 B.C., at least 1,000 years
before Clovis. Such a small change—after all, in prehistorical terms,
what’s a millennium more or less?—might seem to be no big deal,
yet it utterly upsets the former model. Monte Verde lies 10,000 miles
south of the Bering land bridge, separated from it by vast tracts of
mountain, plain, and jungle and climate zones ranging from arctic to
tropical. There is simply no possibility that Paleolithic hunters
crossing over the Bering Sea land bridge when the ice-free corridor
opened in circa 11,000 B.C. could have traveled such an immense
distance, either on foot or using small boats to come down the coast,
in a mere five hundred years. To have covered an expanse of this
order, the ancestors of Monte Verde’s inhabitants had to have entered
the New World before the ice sheets converged in circa 18,000 B.c.
Other research indicates that even this date is perhaps far too
recent. At the Monte Verde site, Dillehay’s group found charcoal in
a probable fire pit that was radiocarbon-dated to 31,000 B.C. Recent
discovery of a Paleoindian site in Brazil near the Amazon River that
is contemporary with Clovis but culturally distinct suggests a far
longer background of cultural change than the old model allows. And
Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California at
Berkeley, has calculated that development of the more than 140
languages spoken by the native peoples of the Americas would have
required at least 30,000 years—a date interestingly consistent with
the Monte Verde charcoal.
Whatever the exact date of humankind’s first entry into the
Americas, the New World isn’t as new as we thought. Humans have
been here much longer than we realized, and our history on these two
continents stretches back to an earlier time than we had considered
possible.

The Star Bulls

Of course, there is more to the redating of the Sphinx than a matter
of moving the horizon of history, in both Old and New worlds, farther
back into time. We also need to look for evidence that these
increasingly ancient peoples possessed the kind of sophisticated
knowledge we now assign to the realm of science. As we learn more
about the ancient peoples who lived before what we think of as the
dawn of civilization, we find again and again, as in Qatal Huyuk and
Jericho, that they were more skillful than we thought possible.
Another example, one that demonstrates a striking knowledge of
astronomy among Paleolithic humans, can be found in the south of
France.
The discovery of the cave of Lascaux in the Dordogne Valley in
1940 shattered any smugly modern feeling that these people of
17,000 years ago lacked esthetic sensibility or artistic skill. The vast,
multichambered cave was decorated with exquisite friezes of animals
and strange, shaman-like creatures, part human and part beast.
Modern painters studied the pictures to learn the insights of this long-
lost art, while archaeologists puzzled over the paintings’ meaning.
Obviously, Lascaux qualified as a religious site, but of what sort? The
scholarly consensus was that Lascaux served as a temple whose
paintings of animals ensured success in the hunt. This Sistine Chapel
of the Paleolithic depicted an ancient people’s happy hunting ground.

The most magnificent of the Lascaux friezes is the Hall of Bulls.

On the cave’s domed ceiling, huge bulls leap and prance, a herd of
stags swims a stream, bison shake their horned heads, and woolly
ponies, many of the mares heavy-bellied with unborn colts, trot on
delicate hooves. One of the creatures is particularly magical, a beast
that never existed. Sometimes it is called the Unicorn, a name that
doesn’t really fit. Two long, straight horns, not one, point from its
horselike head, while its bulging belly, which nearly touches the
ground, and humped upper back lack the grace usually attributed to
unicorns.
In circa 15,000 B.C., when the Hall of Bulls was painted, Lascaux
was in the grip of the last ice age and much colder than it is today.
The principal game animal hunted by the people living in Dordogne
Valley at that time was reindeer. This fact makes it difficult to
understand the Hall of Bulls as a magical happy hunting ground.
These people hunted reindeer. Why, then, did they put such effort
into painting bulls they did not kill, and creating some strangely
horned or antlered creature that no hunter had ever encountered or
sought?
A fascinating and cogent explanation has been offered by Frank
Edge, a community college and high school teacher of mathematics
and cosmology. The bulls provide not hunting magic, according to
Edge, but a map to the summer sky of 17,000 years ago.
The key to Edge’s understanding arises in a striking resemblance
between seven dots painted over the shoulder of one of the Lascaux
bulls and the star cluster known as the Pleiades. The face of this bull
also displays a series of facial dots that closely resemble the star
Aldebaran and the Hyades star field. The Pleiades, Aldebaran, and
the Hyades all fall within the constellation we moderns call Taurus—
that is, the Bull.
“So striking is the resemblance of this ice age bull to the traditional
picture of Taurus,” Edge writes, “that if the Lascaux bull had been
discovered in a medieval manuscript rather than on a cave ceiling,
the image would immediately have been recognized as Taurus.”
The Lascaux frieze wasn’t painted as a single original composition.
Stylistic differences and the pigments used indicate that the bulls, one
horse’s head, and the Unicorn were all composed in black-manganese
paints by a single hand or a small group of painters working in
collaboration. The red cows had already been painted on the cave
roof prior to that time, and the many- colored ponies were added
afterwards, fitted into the spaces left around the large black-
manganese animals.
 Beginning with the bull of the Taurus constellation, Edge turned
his attention to the other black-manganese paintings, looking for
celestial clues in these depictions. He found them. Bull after bull
provided keys to the prominent stars of the summer sky. Edge
determined, for example, that the Unicorn’s strange shape came from
combining the stars in the constellations we know as Scorpio, Libra,
and Sagittarius into one superconstellation. For example, the
Unicorn’s two horns match the two bright stars of Libra, the humped
back replicates the Antares arch in Scorpio, and the oddly sagging
belly corresponds to the curve in Scorpio’s tail.
When all the black-manganese figures in the hall are assembled
into a single composition, they provide a remarkably accurate picture
of the ring of the summer night sky of 15,000 B.C. Someone who stood
outside and marked the position of the
prominent stars and then stepped inside the cave would see the same
image re-created in the bulls and the horse’s head.
But why? For what reason would these ancient artists have gone to
such trouble to depict a particular night sky?
The answer, Edge suggests, is that it allowed them to fix precisely
the date of the summer solstice by observing the path of the moon.
During the summer—the season when the cave was in use, as
revealed by pollen samples found inside—the moon passed through
the star pictures drawn on the ceiling. Indeed, only in the very months
near the summer solstice did the moon travel through all of the star
clusters depicted by the bulls, Unicorn, and horse’s head.
‘The full moon prior and closest to the summer solstice would
stand, each year, shining from the region of sky between the faces of
the two opposing bulls...,” Edge writes. “The spring full moons, prior
to the solstice, would stand among the left-facing figures, while the
full moons following the solstice would stand among the right-facing
figures....Thus we see that with a knowledge of the moon phases
related to the star figures portrayed in the Hall of Bulls, a Lascaux
observer could predict the coming of the summer solstice and roughly
calculate the time before or after that event.”
In the pre-Christian religions of Europe, the summer solstice, or
Midsummer’s Night, was a key religious festival. Clearly the roots of
this observance reach far back, to the people of Lascaux and beyond.
No doubt, too, this knowledge had been in existence for some time,
for Lascaux, like Jericho or Gatal Huyuk, is no first-time effort.
Working from long experience, these ancient artist-astronomers
knew exacdy what they were up to.
Part of the beauty of the Lascaux system is its striking simplicity,
as Edge notes. Using the cave picture as a star map to fix the summer
solstice “required only the careful observation of the moon phases
with respect to the celestial animals of spring and summer. The
system could be taught to anyone and carried in memory without
writing.”
As intellectually powerful as this system is, it was already ancient
when the painters of Lascaux made use of it. According to the work
of Alexander Marshack, people in the Dordogne were observing the
phases of the moon at least 15,000 years before the paintings were
made—that’s 30,000 B.c. Marshack has also found evidence that
within five millennia after the Lascaux paintings, inhabitants of the
same area had developed a non-arithmetic calendar of the sun and
moon that allowed them to determine the time of the solstice
independent of the movement of the moon. Like Edge, Marshack is
convinced that we moderns underestimate the sophistication of
ancient people, who were in fact much more advanced culturally and
intellectually than we give them credit for. Lascaux provides
persuasive evidence of an ancient people who were artistically adept
and intellectually capable of ascertaining the recondite movements of
the celestial bodies.
 Another fascinating aspect of Edge’s work is the persistence of
celestial images over unexpectedly long reaches of time. Constel-
lations exist, of course, in the eye of the beholder, not in the sky itself;
it takes one trained to look for particular images in the starry sky to
find those very images. Evidence suggests that the three prominent
star groups we know as Leo, Taurus, and Scorpio received their
names by 4000 B.C. and were used as markers for the beginnings and
ends of seasons. Edge’s research shows that the image of the bull, the
constellation Taurus, is even older.
Edge concludes, “[T]he suggestion that any one celestial/
mythological image has been with us unchanged for 17,000 years
(nearly 1,000 generations) emphasizes the great importance of the
heavens in framing the mythology of the Western world, while also
offering an outstanding example of the power and endurance of at
least one oral mythological tradition.”
Alexander Marshack agrees. In his view, the people of the Upper
Paleolithic “had a level of observation and story use, which could,
when faced with the climate and ecological changes of the postglacial
period, help them in developing specialized
economies and mythologies in various areas and under specific local
conditions.”
By turning now to the mythological stories told about the starry
heavens since deepest antiquity, we can come to understand even
more about the intellectual sophistication of these long-ago people
and their striking powers of observation.

Precession’s Slow Turn

Ancient peoples not only knew the accurate positions of the stars in
the heavens on particular dates, but also understood that the pattern
of stars and constellations moved in a most subtle fashion because of
the phenomenon known as precession, which is caused by a slow
wobbling of Earth on its axis.
Our planet isn’t really round; it flattens at the poles and bulges at
the equator, so that a radius drawn from Earth’s center to the equator
is 13.5 miles longer than one drawn to either pole. This extra mass in
the middle makes Earth less a sphere than what is known technically
as an oblate spheroid. Additionally, Earth’s axis of rotation tips in
relation to the plane (also known as the ecliptic) of its orbit around
the sun. The sun and the moon and, to a much lesser extent, the other
planets, tug gravitationally on the greater mass of the tipped Earth’s
equatorial bulge and, because of this slightly imbalanced pull on the
planet, slowly move the axis of rotation. As a result, Earth spins not
like a wheel on an axle, round and round in the same plane, but with
the wobble of a top moving across a table or a floor.
This slow wobbling movement, known as precession, affects
astronomical events viewed from Earth. For example, the celestial
north and south poles are not fixed and permanent; instead, they shift
slowly in relation to the positions of the stars. Currently, as every Boy
Scout studying wilderness navigation learns, the celestial north pole
is marked by the star called Polaris (also known as Alpha Ursae
Minoris), at the tip of the constellation Ursa Minor. Polaris won’t
always be the North Star, however, nor has it always been. Because
of precession, the celestial pole traces a circular path through the
heavens, completing a full cycle approximately every 26,000 years.
In 12,000 B.c. the North Star was Vega. In 3000 B.C., during the
beginning centuries of dynastic Egypt, the North Star was Alpha
Draconis. At the height of ancient Greek civilization in the fifth and
sixth centuries B.C., it was Beta Ursae Minoris. Already the celestial
north pole is moving away from Polaris, and by about 14,000 A.D.,
Vega will again become the new North Star guiding night-hiking Boy
Scouts and completing this most recent round of the cycle of
precession.
 Precession affects the celestial equator as well as the poles, very
gradually moving the whole vault of the heavens in relation to the
eyes of an Earth-based observer. Over time, constellations rise at new
points on the eastern horizon and follow different paths across the
sky to set in the west. And it affects, too, the position of the sun
relative to the stars, a phenomenon that was particularly noted on the
important ritual days of spring and fall equinox, around March 20-21
and September 22-23, when the sun is positioned directly over the
equator. On the spring equinox in our era, the sun rises against the
constellation of Pisces. Three thousand years ago, it was rising in the
constellation Aries.
With its cycle of approximately 26,000 years, precession can
hardly be observed in the span of a single lifetime. Detecting this
long, subtle motion required long, careful observation of the stars and
recording of their positions over centuries. The honor for the
discovery of precession is conventionally credited to Hipparchus, a
brilliant Hellenistic mathematician and astronomer of the second
century B.C. Watching the sky one night, Hipparchus was surprised
to see a star where he was certain no star had appeared before. He
then carefully cataloged each of the 1,080 fixed stars he could see,
positioning them by celestial latitude and longitude, then compared
his sky chart with one made by an earlier Greek astronomer a little
over a century and a half before.
Calculating that all the stars had shifted position by approximately
two degrees in the intervening years, Hipparchus named the
phenomenon precession.
But did Hipparchus actually discover precession? He may have
drawn from Babylonian astronomical records, particularly those
compiled by Kidenas (in cuneiform, Kidinnu) in the fourth century
B.c., which had come to the attention of Greek scholars after the
conquest of the East by Alexander the Great. But there is tantalizing
and persuasive evidence that precession was known long before the
Babylonians, long before history.

Time’s Terrible Mill

Mythology shows that humankind in ancient times understood much
more about the celestial realm, including precession, than we realize.
This statement may seem surprising, for we moderns fail to take myth
seriously and thus miss the information it contains. Indeed, we use
the word myth as a synonym for “lie” or “falsehood,” revealing an
unfortunate ignorance of this marvelous store of beauty and wisdom.
Myth creates a frame of understanding largely alien to the modern
world’s mind-set. Let’s suppose that you or I want to describe the
blinding speed with which a particular athlete runs. In a technological
or scientific state of mind like that of our contemporary civilization,
we state this fact by providing a quantitative measurement for his
speed: “Athlete X runs the hundred-yard dash in 9.9 seconds.” A poet
invents a simile: “He runs like a deer.” The mythmaker goes further,
equating athlete with deer: “He is a deer.” Stricdy speaking, of
course, the mythic metaphor is false. The athlete’s not a deer, but a
man, a very fast man, a man so blazing that his speed gives him
something of the essential qualities of a deer, making the two beings
both impossibly and wonderfully the same. This is myth, a way of
making connections in our universe at a level deeper than the
superficially obvious.
In the ancient world, myth was highly valued, both for its effi-
ciency and its complexity. Mythic stories are vivid, colorful, and
laced with intrigue, strange beasts, sexual variety, blood, guts, hero-
feats, and more than enough soap-opera treason, infidelity, dalliance,
and conflict to make them easy to remember and exciting to tell. This
mnemonic aspect of mythology was critical in an ancient world that
lacked writing, where memory carried the burden of preserving all
knowledge. Scholarship has shown, for example, that both Homeric
poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, existed for centuries in oral form
before they were written down. Poets learned the tens of thousands
of lines in each epic by heart, then recited them from memory. Poetic
devices like the dactylic hexameter and repeated phrases such as “the
wine-dark sea” and “gray-eyed Athena” served not only esthetic
ends—they are part of the reason why these poems sound beautiful
and pleasing to the ear even today, 3,000 years after they were
composed—but they also eased the task of memory, making it
simpler for the poet to keep this huge body of mythological
knowledge straight. The Iliad lends itself much better to
memorization than does, say, On the Origin of Species, in large
measure because of its epic-poetic structure and diction. But, like the
Origin of Species, myths such as the Iliad were often freighted with
knowledge. They conveyed science, philosophy, or history in the
vivid tales used by the ancients rather than in the dispassionate
discourse preferred by a scientific civilization such as ours.
Just in the past two decades, mythology has reemerged as an
important area of study, inquiry, and even popular interest, largely as
a result of the writings of Joseph Campbell, who was strongly
influenced by the comparative-religion scholar Mircea Eliade and the
psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung. Campbell, Eli- ade, and Jung all
viewed myth as a detailed road map to the struggle of the individual
soul toward independence and transcendence. Seeing myth as
spiritual in the broadest sense, they largely ignored its role as a record
of human history or as a repos-
itory of knowledge about matters other than those pertaining to the
soul’s journey.
There have been dissenters to this point of view. A significant
example is Robert Graves, the English poet and writer. In several
brilliant books on Greek and Hebrew mythology, Graves highlighted
the historical themes behind many of the ancient stories, and in The
While Goddess, he depicted the Celtic mythology of Ireland and
Wales as a mode of transmitting secret Druidic information from
adept to initiate, generation to generation.
This second approach, one that looks at myth as a body of complex
knowledge designed to be passed on in a preliterate culture, was used
by Giorgio de Santillana, a philosopher and historian of science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Hertha von Dechend, a
historian of science at the J. W. Goethe-Univer- sitat Frankfurt, to
examine mythology’s astronomical aspects. Their work resulted in a
book titled Hamlei’s Mill, which, though occasionally pedantic and
often inaccessible to nonspecialists, is an eye-opener.
Joseph Campbell argued that a single, original mythic story, which
he called the monomyth, underlies all the various ethnic and national
versions of mythology and points to the beginnings of mythology at
a single place and time in the prehistory of humankind. Santillana and
Dechend agree. They argue that aspects of what we think of today as
separate mythologies— Greek, Hebrew, Teutonic, Icelandic,
Polynesian, Irish, and Native American, for example—are rooted in
a single source of astronomical knowledge originating in the Middle
East millennia ago, and that these stories show a clear understanding
of the preces- sional cycle dating to thousands of years before
Hipparchus.
Many mythologies open with the universe beginning in a perfect
harmony that breaks down, often because of human wrongdoing.
Dissension, disharmony, violence, and death enter the workings of
the world, which slowly disintegrates and decays. This basic story
appears in the one mythological system many Ameri-
cans are still familiar with, the Bible. According to the Old Testament
book of Genesis, the Garden of Eden was a place of abundance and
harmony until Adam and Eve sinned by helping themselves to the
fruit of a tree that God had forbidden them to sample. Everything
came apart, the Garden was lost, and in no time at all the world
witnessed its first murder, as the jealous Cain slew the dutiful Abel.
This theme of an original perfection lost to a world that descends into
increasing chaos can be found again and again in mythology, and
points to the existence of the monomyth.
Another common theme concerns the transition from one world
age to another, often amid cataclysm and catastrophe. Greek
mythology is filled with world-ending images of titans and giants
battling gods and goddesses, and the Norse stories are famed for their
visions of Gotterdammerung, the twilight of the former, fading gods.
Again, this kind of story is echoed in the Hebrew scriptures of the
Old Testament, particularly in the flood that swept away all living
things except Noah and his ark to cleanse the Earth for a new
beginning. It is the core, too, of the Greek Christian scriptures of the
New Testament, which proclaim a new age heralded by the birth of
Jesus.
“What actually comes to an end is a world, in the sense of a world-
age. The catastrophe cleans out the past, which is replaced by ‘a new
heaven and a new earth,’ and ruled by a ‘new’ Pole star,” Santillana
and Dechend say. In other words, precession is the cosmological key
to the historical shift from era to era.
Santillana and Dechend argue that the unknown philosophers of
antiquity were obsessed with time. On Earth, time destroyed all
things—people’s lives, cities, kingdoms, dreams, and ambitions.
Time and its endless mutability stood in contrast to eternity, a zone
of perfection without time or change: “The true seat of immortality
has always been denied to any aspect of ‘time, the moving likeness
of eternity,”’ Santillana and Dechend write. “For eternity excludes
motion.”
The ancients could find the eternity they longed for just by looking
up on a clear and cloudless night, where they beheld the stars fixed
in their places turning in perfect circles across heaven’s vault.
Santillana and Dechend quote Aristotle: “‘What is eternal...is
circular, and what is circular is eternal.’” Myth concerned this eternal
world. It created a new “Earth” in the sky, setting its tales within a
geography of the heavens.
Yet, as the ancients discovered, the eternal only seemed eternal.
Even the sky, they discovered, moved away from its ideal circularity
and perfect lack of change. Precession, according to Santillana and
Dechend, “was conceived as causing the rise and the cataclysmic fall
of ages of the world.” The ancients had noted that precession slowly
moved the horizon position of sunrise on the spring equinox from one
constellation to another. ‘The sun’s position among the constellations
at the vernal equinox was the counter that indicated the ‘hours’ of the
precessional cycle—very long hours indeed, the equinoctial sun
occupying each zodiacal constellation for about 2,200 years [actually
the number is closer to 2,150 years]. The constellation that rose in the
east just before the sun...marked the ‘place’ where the sun rested.”
This constellation in turn gave its name to the world age. In approxi-
mately 6500 B.c. the vernal equinoctial sun rose in the far eastern
portion of Gemini, making the following two millennia the age of
Gemini, as the equinoctial sun moved east to west against the stars of
this constellation. Next came Taurus (circa 4300 B.c.), then Aries
(circa 2150 B.C.), and finally Pisces (circa A.D. 1), where it will remain
for a while longer before giving way to Aquarius in a litde less than
two hundred years.
Yet again, the Bible shows evidence of this system. Moses led the
Hebrews out of Egypt after the vernal equinoctial sun had shifted
from Taurus into Aries. Coming down from Mount Sinai, the Old
Testament lawgiver is commonly depicted as two-horned, like Aries
the ram, while the disobedient Hebrews who remained stuck in the
old way worshiped the Golden Calf that symbolized
the age of Taurus. And Jesus of Nazareth, born as the processional
hour shifted from Aries to Pisces (Latin for “fish”), is still commonly
symbolized as a fish. Like Moses, Jesus is the herald of the new
world-age symbolized by the movement of the processional clock.
To the ancients, the truly important events in the universe occurred
not on Earth, but in the sky. ‘Thus, the revolving heavens gave the
key, the events of our globe receding into insignificance. Attention
was focused on the supernal presences, away from the phenomenal
chaos around us,” Santillana and Dechend argue.
‘The Precession,” they continue later, “took on an overpowering
significance. It became the vast impenetrable pattern of fate itself,
with one world-age succeeding another, as the invisible pointer of the
equinox slid along the signs, each age bringing with it the rise and
downfall of astral configurations and rulerships, with their earthly
consequences.” In the ancient world, astronomy was a source of high
anxiety.
The principal symbol for this notion of time grinding all before it
is the millstone. Traced in Norse mythology to the hero Amlodhi—
whom Shakespeare borrowed as the template for his tragic Hamlet,
who does more than his fair share of fretting over the nature of life,
death, and decay—the mill and the whirlpool it makes when buried
in the sea appear in central roles in mythology after mythology. In
the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus, who has returned to Ithaca and
is ready to take back possession of his home, has a vision of a mill
that will turn his enemies to dust. In the Old Testament book of
Judges, the blinded, humiliated Samson is harnessed to a millstone to
grind grain for his Philistine captors. And the central American god
Quetzalcoatl creates a new race of humans by grinding up the bones
of people killed in a great flood and adding divine blood to the grist.
As Santillana and Dechend show, mythology became a way of
recording the events of the heavens, tracking the movement of
precession and the grinding of time’s mill, and providing a
framework by which observers on Earth could determine what was
truly happening over their heads. And it was done in a world without
mathematics, without a writing system, without computers.
Santillana and Dechend are right in calling this core of ancient
mythology “an enormous intellectual achievement...in this
organization of heaven, in making the constellations and in tracing
the paths of the planets. Lofty and intricate theories grew to account
for the motions of the cosmos. One would wonder about this
obsessive concern with the stars and their motion, were it not the case
that those early thinkers thought they had located the gods which rule
the universe and with them also the destiny of the soul, down here
and after death.”
And how old is this system? In an aside, Santillana and Dechend
suggest the monomyth’s origin in about 4000 B.C., in the earliest days
of the first known Sumerian astronomers. That is, I suggest, far too
recent, by at least two millennia. The double ax, a symbol common
in Knossan Crete and associated by Santillana and Dechend with the
precession, is depicted on the walls of shrines in Gatal Huyuk that
date to circa 6500 B.C. Another painting from the same period at Qatal
Huyuk may be a mythological depiction of the movement of the
seven planets among the twelve signs of the zodiac, with the net of
heaven stretched between them. Likewise, Edge’s work on the Hall
of Bulls at Lascaux and the presence of many of the elements of
astronomical myth among New World peoples argue for a much
earlier date. So do the Great Sphinx of Giza and the three pyramids.

Return to Egypt
Why?—this is the question that hangs still over the Sphinx. Why did
the ancient Egyptians build these massive monuments? The level of
effort seems almost unimaginable, particularly for a people who, as
far as we know, had nothing but tools of copper, bronze, stone, and
wood. The Great Sphinx is the largest monu-
mental sculpture known from such an early date, yet it is dwarfed by
the later pyramids. The largest of the three, the one attributed to
Khufu (also known as Cheops), is mostly solid masonry comprising
two and a half million limestone blocks. At an estimated average
weight per block of 2.6 tons, the total weight exceeds 6 million tons.
The pyramid of Khafre (Chephren) is smaller, about 5.25 million
tons, and the one attributed to Menkaure (Mycerinus) is by far the
smallest of the three, representing only an approximate 600,000 tons.
And there is more to Giza than the three pyramids and the Great
Sphinx. The site contains a variety of causeways, temples, miniature
pyramids, boat burial pits, tombs, and other structures.
Giza represents a commitment of extraordinary resources of time,
energy, human labor, engineering skill, and artistic accomplishment
that becomes even more remarkable when compared with more
modern religious monuments. For example, Khufu’s pyramid is only
twenty-four feet higher than the dome of Saint Peter’s in the Vatican,
yet it covers thirteen acres, compared to Saint Peter’s mere four.
Were Khufu’s pyramid hollow, it could easily enclose Saint Peter’s,
with enough space left over that a rearranged Westminster Abbey
would fit inside as well.
The Egyptians were fascinated with death and the possibility of
life beyond the mortal moment, and this fascination is considered
central to Giza and the other ancient Egyptian temples and holy sites.
As a result, the pyramids have long been considered outsized tombs
constructed to give the pharaohs buried within them their very best
chance at immortality.
Various scholars have wondered, however, whether there isn’t
more to the pyramids than elaborate tombstones. In itself, this idea is
hardly revolutionary. The great medieval cathedrals of Europe were
the burial places of many a king, earl, duke, baron, bishop, and abbot,
yet these immense and impressive buildings can hardly be dismissed
as overdone graveyards for secular and ecclesiastical elites. In the
case of the cathedrals, we know better
what purposes these buildings served because the culture of medieval
Europe remains comprehensible to us. Egypt five millennia in the
past, though, is another matter altogether. The very alienness of that
distant and lost world makes it difficult for us to understand wholly
what the Egyptians were up to. If the pyramids served a purpose other
than burial marker, what was it?
Some interesting ideas on these issues have been offered by Robert
Bauval and Adrian Gilbert in The Orion Mystery, and by Graham
Hancock and Robert Bauval in The Message of the Sphinx. In many
ways, these books leave something to be desired. None of the authors
is a scientist, and all three are far too eager to inflate problems into
“mysteries” and puff interesting insights into revolutionary findings
that are nothing of the sort. In the end, too, they turn the Sphinx into
a kind of astronomical scavenger hunt, purportedly pointing to the
existence of a treasure trove of ancient records in a secret cavern
hidden deep under the Sphinx. In the course of our seismic work,
Thomas Dobecki and I did find some kind of void or chamber in the
deep rock under the Sphinx’s left paw, but I find it ridiculous to
conclude in advance that this area, which may be a natural geological
feature and not the result of human effort, contains a legacy of
wisdom passed down from some long-lost source, perhaps even
Atlantis. Still, these three authors have developed ideas that, while
far less definitive than they claim, may point to an earlier date of
origin for the Giza Necropolis than the orthodox view allows.
This same orthodoxy has held that Egypt’s religion centered on the
sun, particularly as manifested in the god Osiris, consort of the Earth
and moon goddess Isis. Bauval, Hancock, and Gilbert advance a
contrary argument. They maintain that in the ancient Egyptian
cosmology the night sky was the truly important element and that, as
in the monomyth investigated by Santillana and Dechend, the stars
above determined the fate of the world below. The curious ground
plan of Giza, with its seemingly misaligned pyramids, is a hologram
for the three stars forming the belt of the constellation Orion, which
was associated with Osiris. Even the Nile played a role, standing for
the Milky Way, which was thought in ancient times, according to
Santillana and Dechend, to be the resting place for souls awaiting
their next incarnation. Additionally, Giza turns into a kind of giant
clockwork marking the night sky of 10,500 B.C., an era when the star
of Isis—the one we know as Sirius, the Dog Star in Orion—would
rest precisely on the horizon. The causeways running from the
pyramids, according to Hancock and Bauval, mark the precise rising
point of the sun on the cross-quarter days between the solstice and
the equinox, in both summer and winter. As for the Sphinx, its
pitilessly blank gaze fixes eastward on the rising point of the
constellation Leo—fittingly, the Lion, the Sphinx’s own body
shape—on the winter-spring cross-quarter.
The precision to which Hancock, Bauval, and Gilbert lay claim is
indefensible. Computer simulations of the sky at the remove of
several millennia, connected to survey-type readings taken from very
old, very worn monuments, are markedly less exact than the three
authors would have us believe. Still, they are right in pointing up the
powerful astronomical associations of Giza, which make even more
sense when considered with the new finds at Nabta. In southern
Egypt, thousands of years before the beginning of pharaonic Egypt
in circa 3000 B.C., there lived a people fascinated by the heavens,
given to careful observation of the movement of the sun, adept at
moving large slabs of stone, and committed to the construction of
monumental structures—all the attributes of Giza. It might well be
that these vanished people are in fact among the ancestors of the
ancient Egyptians, and that they brought their finely tuned
astronomical sense to the cultural and religious mix that gave birth
first to the Sphinx and later to the pyramids.
Hancock, Bauval, and Gilbert are right, too, in showing how the
sky references at Giza point to a time well before the Old Kingdom
building dates of the Giza pyramids, as does the Great Sphinx itself.
This hypothesis does not mean that the pyramids as we know them
were built at this time, however. It is possible that the pyramids were
attempts to fix an original, unsullied sky—the heavens of the First
Times, as Hancock, Bauval, and Gilbert call them—a kind of celestial
Garden of Eden that existed before the slow decay of precession set
in. Temples and holy buildings, like Chartres cathedral and the Taj
Mahal, commonly serve the purpose of providing an earthly
experience of the ultimate reality of eternal paradise. The pyramids
are likely no different. And it is also possible that they were
constructed to incorporate earlier monuments of an age similar to the
Sphinx’s as a way of capturing their sacred energy, just as many of
the cathedrals and shrines of Europe, Chartres and Kildare among
them, were built atop older, pre-Christian holy places.

A New Look at the Old Stories

None of the evidence we have examined is absolutely definitive, yet
the trend of information is undeniable and convincing. The redating
of the Sphinx, the ancient astronomical alignments of Nabta, the
sophisticated ancient cities of Jericho and Gatal Huyuk, the tripling
of the duration of humankind’s presence in the Americas, the star
maps of Lascaux, and the knowledge of precession indicated in world
myth and in the Giza pyramids all point to a much earlier date for
civilization than we have believed possible.
 This understanding raises a new line of inquiry. Many societies
pass on myths—there’s that significant word again—about
remarkable cities of long ago, legendary places of fabled wisdom and
wealth that flourished in a distant bygone time and vanished. Is there
more to these tales than exotic entertainment? Are they in fact the
storied remnants of earlier civilizations, ones that disappeared,
perhaps in catastrophe, and took with them ancient ways of being we
should know more about?
 Looking for the Lost Cities

OUR INVESTIGATION INTO THE EVIDENCE FOR A LOST civilization begins not
with physical evidence like that presented by the Great Sphinx of
Giza, but with two of the most powerful minds in the history of
humankind—the ancient Athenians Socrates and Plato. The modern
search for the lost continent of Atlantis opens in the surviving literary
record of an extended philosophical conversation conducted by
Socrates and recorded by Plato over two millennia in the past.

Atlantis: The Original Lost Continent

As a gauge of interest in Atlantis, the Czech geologist Zdenek Kukal
undertook the formidable task of tabulating the mass of publications,
both academic and popular, covering the topic. By Kukal’s
reckoning, in the years between 1890 and 1980, almost 43,800 book
and periodical pages—enough to fill approximately 175 volumes the
size of this one—dealt with finding the lost continent. Interest in the
topic has hardly flagged in the intervening years between Kukal’s
count and today. As I began writing this chapter, I did a search of the
Internet and came up with over 200,000 World Wide Web pages that
drew on the name Adantis and the ongoing interest in this mystery.
Remarkably, this prodigious commentary is based on a very
small—and incomplete—literary record. Plato was the first to
mention Atlantis, specifically in two of his dialogues, both written
circa 360 B.C.: the Critias, which he never finished, and the Timaeus,
which deals with Atlantis almost in passing and devotes more of its
energy to a consideration of the ideal political state and the nature of
the universe. For a writer who was both prolific and loquacious, Plato
didn’t really have all that much to say about Atlantis, yet his small
literary foray into this story has given rise to a long, continuing, even
obsessive interest in identifying and locating the lost continent.
This interest is primarily a modern phenomenon. The literature of
the ancient world includes various other mentions of Atlantis, but all
of them derive directly or indirectly from Plato. For example,
Diodorus Siculus, a Roman historian of the first century B.C. who
lived in Sicily, relates in his massive forty-volume Historia
Bibliotheca that the Amazons defeated the Atlantians in war, then
joined with them to conquer the tribe of the Gorgons. Some writers
have taken Diodorus’s putative account as an independent
corroboration of Plato. It’s nothing of the kind. Diodorus lifted the
story from the Greek historian Herodotus (484?-425? B.C.) , and it
concerns not Atlantis, the lost island continent, but the warlike doings
of tribes who lived at the foot of North Africa’s Atlas mountain range.
As for Diodorus’s description of Atlantis as a beneficent and
wondrous island located in the great sea beyond the Pillars of
Heracles, it is clearly copied from Plato’s earlier account. In all
fairness to Diodorus, he was not a plagiarist. Borrowing from earlier
stories was a common and accepted practice in the ancient world, a
technique Plato himself, like other classical writers, used when it
suited his philosophical purposes.
The medieval period demonstrated little interest in Atlantis. The
Middle Ages centered more on religion than mythology, and
Plato was hardly read in an age dominated by Aquinas’s version of
Aristotie’s very different way of thinking.
Atlantis makes one of its few appearances in the period before the
nineteenth century on a map by the German Jesuit Athanasius
Kircher that dates to 1665. Kircher placed the continent in the North
Atlantic, between Europe and North America, and labeled the area as
“the site of Adantis, now beneath the sea, according to the beliefs of
the Egyptians and the description of Plato.”
It is only in modern umes, and particularly our own century, that
interest in Adantis has blossomed fully. Unfortunately, the whole
topic has become a melange of fantasy as well as fact, with various
sorts of fringe New Agers, occultists, true believers, and
pseudoscientists seizing upon Adantis as the lost repository of a
wisdom our ailing world desperately needs. The need for such
wisdom is self-evident. By contrast, the existence of Atlantis is a fact
that can be proved or disproved. Determining the truth of the matter
may be the first step toward discovering the wisdom we desperately
need.

Plato on Atlantis
Originally educated as a dramatist, Plato (427-348 or 347 B.C.) left the
theater to become a disciple of Socrates (469-399 B.C.). This was a
radical, even dangerous move, since Socrates was later condemned
to death for corrupting the morals of the youth of Athens. Plato
remained faithful to his mentor, however, recording his memory of
the teachings of Socrates, who, like Jesus and Gautama Buddha, left
no written record. In this effort, Plato made profitable use of his
background in drama, writing not in the form of a philosophical
treatise, but in a fictionalized dialogue. Plato portrays Socrates as the
greatest seminar leader in the history of humankind, a wise and able
interlocutor who leads his students to examine their ideas and then
demonstrates to
them the accuracy or error of their thinking. Plato’s two accounts of
Atlantis occur in this literary setting.
Both the Timaeus and the Critias concern the same cast of char-
acters. The central figure is, of course, Socrates. Then there is
Timaeus, of whom no historical record exists and who may have been
Plato’s invention; Critias, who was Plato’s great-grandfather; and
finally Hermocrates, a statesman and soldier from the Greek colony
of Syracuse in Sicily, a city where Plato spent an important period of
his life.
The unfinished Critias is largely a recounting by Critias of an
ancient story remembered from his youth. Memory is a key issue in
the telling of this tale. Advised by Hermocrates to invoke the good
offices of Apollo and the Muses before he begins to speak and “show
forth the virtues of your [Athenian] citizens,” Critias asks as well for
the favor of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, to ensure that “I
can recollect and recite enough of what was said by the [Egyptian]
priests and brought hither by Solon.” Solon (638-559 B.C.) was a
lawgiver, poet, and traveler, something of an Athenian Thomas
Jefferson. By tracing the origin of the tale to Solon, Plato gives it
great prestige and authority.
Critias begins by saying that according to the story told by Solon,
9,000 years had passed since the great war pitting all those who lived
outside the Pillars of Heracles against those who lived inside it. The
kings of Atlantis commanded the outsiders; the insiders came under
Athenian leadership. In the end, a great earthquake sank the island
nation of Atlantis, which was larger than North Africa (which Critias,
like all Greeks, called Libya) and the Middle East (which to him was
Asia), and became a barrier to navigation.
Next, Critias tells about the inhabitants of ancient Athens, where
“military pursuits were then common to both men and women” and
which was ruled over by the god Hephaestus and the goddess Athena,
who gave the city her name. In those days the land was richer, deep
in soil, the mountains fully forested. All that changed in the many
deluges of the period, which were so severe that in but one night the
original Athenian acropolis was washed away, as was much of the
topsoil and many of the forests.
Atlantis fell within the portion of the world governed by Poseidon,
the trident-brandishing god of the sea and of horses. Atlantis, like
Athens, was a country well blessed. The center of the mountainous
island continent was taken up by a large and fertile plain, which
Poseidon turned into a paradise after he fell in love with a mortal
woman named Cleito and fathered the Adantian race through her.
Poseidon ringed the hill where Cleito dwelt with alternating circles
of sea and land so that the island and his mortal lover were safe from
invasion. In the plain he raised two springs of water, one hot and one
cold, and he blessed the soil with every kind of produce, so that the
Atlantians had food in both variety and abundance. As they
multiplied through the years, the children of Poseidon and Cleito
became a royal race “who were the inhabitants and rulers of divers
islands in the open seas; and also...they held sway in our direction
over the country within the Pillars as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia [a
region of Italy].” The Atlantians were unspeakably rich; “they had
such an amount of wealth as was never before possessed by kings and
potentates.” They used their great riches and the natural abundance
of the island, which supported every sort of animal, including
elephants, to build a great metropolis well furnished with temples and
shrines, roads and canals, fountains and pillars, citadels and
guardhouses. This was a religious people, whose liturgy centered in
part on wild bulls that were sacrificed within the temple of Poseidon
as a pledge of faithfulness to the ancient laws written in stone by the
god.
In time, though, this idyll came to an end. Slowly the divine aspect
of the Adantians faded away as Poseidon’s portion became more and
more diluted in each successive generation. Invariably the Atlantians
slipped off the path of virtue. According to Critias, “[W]hen...human
nature got the upper hand, they then, being
unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly,... and they appeared
glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice
and unrighteous power.” Zeus resolved to punish these degraded
people for their sins, and he called the gods and goddesses into
council to select an appropriate comeuppance.
And there, abruptly, the Critias ends.
The Timaeus opens with Socrates reminding the participants in the
dialogue of the topic of conversation begun the day before: the
perfect state. Timaeus and Socrates review the various attributes of a
well-run polity, creating a persuasively utopian image of justice,
rectitude, and virtue. At the invitation of the others, Critias tells
Socrates the story he has earlier shared with Timaeus and
Hermocrates, an ancient tale that Solon first heard from Egyptian
priests in the holy city of Sais and later passed on to Critias’s
grandfather, who told it to him. This tale, Critias maintains, concerns
“the greatest action the Athenians ever did, and which ought to have
been the most famous, but, through the lapse of time and the
destruction of the actors, it has not come down to us.” In Plato’s time,
as in our own, Atlantis was a lost story as well as a lost land.
According to what Critias heard indirectly from Solon, the
Athenians of Plato’s time were but a remnant of the city’s original
inhabitants, the few who survived the many terrible deluges that
marked the period of the war with the Atlantians. The Athenians did
not go to war for reasons of greed or expansion, as the Atlantians did.
They took up arms to meet the terrible threat of the Atlantians, who
invaded Europe and Asia without provocation. Based on their island
outside the Pillars of Heracles, which again Plato makes the size of
North Africa and the Middle East combined, the Adantians obtained
control of the Mediterranean as far as Egypt and Tyrrhenia and
prepared to deal a death-blow to the Athenians, who stood alone
against the threat, abandoned by erstwhile allies. Then came violent
earthquakes and floods, which destroyed all of Athens’s fighting men
by sucking them
into the earth and, both simultaneously and fortuitously, sank the
island of Atlantis. All this took but “a single day and night of
misfortune.”
Following his description, which occupies only a fraction of the
complete dialogue, Critias passes the baton to Timaeus, who opens a
discussion on the nature of creation. Atlantis is not the point of the
Timaeus. It is an example Plato cites to draft his philosophical
argument, an important point to which we shall return.

The Search for the Lost Continent

In the Critias, Plato has Socrates underscore the truth of the tradition
related by Critias, who asks the philosopher whether the story suits
the purpose of the group’s philosophical soiree. Socrates makes clear
that it does: “And what other [story], Critias, can we find that will be
better than this, which... has the very great advantage of being a fact
and not a fiction?” The many searchers for Atlantis have taken
Socrates—or, more accurately, Plato—at his word, basing their
explorations and hypotheses on the assumption that Atlantis is indeed
historical and not fictional.
So, where was Adantis? And what terrible and sudden catastrophe
caused it to sink beneath the sea and there be lost until Solon heard
about it from the Egyptian priests of Sais, 9,000 years later?
The hunt for a real, true, factual Atlantis has historical precedent
in the search for both Troy and Minoan Knossos. In the nineteenth
century, practically all classicists and ancient historians, who
practiced their disciplines well before the development of modern
archaeological methods, accepted as fact the concept that Homer had
invented the ten-year siege of Troy, whose final battles are told in the
Iliad. Still, Troy-hunting was something of a pastime among certain
Europeans with the right combination of leisure, money, and classical
training. One of them, an amateur student of ancient history named
Heinrich Schliemann, identified and excavated the mound along the
Turkish coast on which the citadel of Homer’s Troy had stood.
Announcing his discovery to the world in the late 1860s, Schliemann
went hunting for the other buried treasure of antiquity, Knossos. This
Cretan palace, built by the Minoans, boasted the famous Labyrinth
that enclosed a monstrous half-man, half-bull known as the Minotaur,
to which the Minoans required the sacrifice of fourteen Athenian
youths and maidens every nine years. The Labyrinth was said to have
been designed under duress by the Athenian Daedalus, who,
homesick for his native land, fashioned wings from wax and feathers
for himself and his son, Icarus, to fly back to Athens. Icarus flew too
close to the sun, which melted his wings and dropped him into the
sea as Daedalus watched helplessly. Later, the great Athenian hero
Theseus ended Minoan domination of Athens by piercing the maze
of the Labyrinth, slaying the Minotaur, and, with the aid of the
Minoan king’s daughter, making his way back out. Schliemann came
very close to finding Knossos, locating a likely site near the city of
Heraklion, but his death put an end to the search. Working
independently, Arthur Evans unearthed Knossos in the 1890s,
earning himself British knighthood for his achievement.

Is Atlantis a real location like second-millennium B.C. Troy and

Knossos, as Plato himself seems to assert, a factual locality of old
awaiting modern discovery? Or is it a philosophical fiction?
 Unfortunately, Plato offers the only literary record of Atlantis.
Although his description of the Atlantian city and its religious
practices is explicit and detailed, his geography leaves a great deal to
be desired. The account is at best ambiguous, at worst contradictory.
He speaks of a huge island situated outside the Pillars of Heracles and
boasting a climate tropical enough to support elephants. Beyond
Atlantis lay another, larger body of land that Plato calls the “opposite
continent.” Locating Atlantis would seem to be a simple issue of
sailing through the Pillars of Heracles and looking for the remains of
a sunken tropical island with a major landmass off its opposite shore.
There arises the first of many problems: Where are the Pillars of
Heracles?
This distinctive name, taken from the most powerful hero of Greek
mythology, was given to a number of ancient sites known in modern
times by quite different appellations. One of the most common is the
Strait of Gibraltar, which separates the Mediterranean Sea from the
Atlantic Ocean. If Plato meant Gibraltar, Atlantis would lie
somewhere around the Azores, the Canaries, or Madeira, with North
America filling the role of the opposite continent. The Greeks,
however, used the name Pillars of Heracles to mark other sites
besides Gibraltar, some outside the Mediterranean—namely, the
Canary Islands in the Atlantic and the Strait of Kerch dividing the
Black Sea from the Sea of Azov—and even more inside—
specifically, the Strait of Bonifaccio between Corsica and Sardinia,
the Strait of Messina between mainland Italy and Sicily, the Greek
Peloponnese, the mountainous coast of Tunisia, and the Nile Delta.
Obviously, moving the Pillars of Heracles inside the Mediterranean
poses an enormous problem, since the opposite continent could be
either Africa or Europe. Likewise, the name Atlas, the root from
which Atlantis is derived, was identified with a number of mountain
ranges, including the Atlas range of Morocco, the northern mountains
of the Arabian Peninsula, the Caucasus, and the Nubian highlands.
As a result of all this confusion over names, a long list of mutually
contradictory sites for Atlantis has been proposed in the voluminous
literature on the topic. There are at least nineteen possible locations
in Europe and North Africa: the southwestern Spanish coast (where
the ancient Phoenicians had a colony); the Atlas Mountains; the
central Sahara; the Lake of the Tritons in Tunisia; Corsica; Sardinia;
the Tyrrhenian Sea; Sicily; the Ionian Sea; the Aegean Sea; Thera
(Santorini); Crete; Rhodes; the Azov Sea; the Black Sea; the Levant
(Israel and Lebanon); Egypt; Troy (northwestern Turkey); and the
North Sea coast of Holland and Belgium. Some Atlantis enthusiasts
are convinced that the lost continent lies far outside the ancient world
of Europe and North Africa. They have proposed a long list of more
distant candidate locations, including Greenland, Iceland,
Scandinavia, eastern North America, Bermuda, the Azores, the
Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the
Yucatan Peninsula, the Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts
of South America, and the ancient kingdoms of Zimbabwe in
southern Africa or Ghana in west Africa. Adantis has also been
placed at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which
some people hold to be the site of the biblical Garden of Eden. The
Indonesian archipelago is currendy being advanced as a candidate,
and, as we shall explore further, Antarctica has become a popular
possibility, one backed by the work of a serious scholar.
Given the wide range of nominated localities, covering both
hemispheres and stretching nearly from pole to pole, there is more
than a litde confusion over Plato’s ambiguous directions. And, when
we look carefully at each candidate, we find they all come up lacking
in some major way. A few examples bear examination.
Ignatius Donnelly, who wrote the Atlantological “bible” of the
nineteenth century, proposed that the continent had sunk under the
swells of the Atlantic about midway between Europe and North
America. This possibility does seem to fit with Plato’s description of
a site outside the Pillars of Heracles, assuming the philosopher meant
Gibraltar, and between Europe and the opposite continent, assuming
he meant North America. The problem, though, is that the floor of
the North Adantic has been mapped in the century since Donnelly
wrote, and it is very clear that there is no submerged, continent-sized
landmass anywhere in all that world of water. Indeed, the Mid-
Adantic Ridge is actually rising, not slipping deeper into the sea.
A number of scholars, following the lead of the Greek archae-
ologist Spyridon Marinatos, have advanced a creative and interesting
argument that Adantis is in fact Minoan culture, and that the
devastating sinking of the island in a day and a night refers to the
explosion of the volcano on the island of Thera, not quite seventy
miles to the north of Crete. Again, certain details fit. The Minoans,
like the Atlantians, worshiped bulls. The walls of Knos- sos were
decorated with magnificent frescoes showing athletic young men and
women flinging their lithe bodies over the horns of bulls large enough
to make the bravest matador shiver in fear. Like Atlantis, Knossos
was extremely wealthy. A sea-trading people, the Minoans had the
resources to lavish themselves and their cities with the best of
everything, building a great palace that in some ways resembles the
description of the royal abode in the Critias. And Thera—which is
also known as Santorini, a corruption of Santa Irene, the name given
to it by Italian sailors when the island belonged to the medieval
Venetian empire—was actively volcanic in ancient times. Thera
itself, along with four smaller islands in its bay, once constituted a
large single volcano that collapsed into a massive caldera, or volcanic
crater. A cliff rising 1,100 sheer feet from the Thera harbor to the
village above serves as a dramatic reminder of the size and power of
the volcano that once hurled its smoke into the sky.
 One Atlantian hypothesis is that Thera detonated in a single
massive explosion, which sent a monstrous tidal wave, or tsunami,
hurtling toward Minoan Crete. Since the Thera caldera is about three
times the size of the crater left by the volcanic explosion of
Krakatoa—which occurred in 1883 and whose effects are well
documented—the assumption is that a tidal wave three times the size
of Krakatoa’s struck Crete. That means a wave more than 300 feet
high, which would have hit Crete within half an hour and rolled into
Egypt, the Levant, and the Syrian coastline three hours later, all with
devastating consequences. Knossos and the Minoans would have
been swept away in seconds, satisfying Plato’s Atlantian criterion of
quick destruction.
Several notable problems arise with the Knossos-as-Atlantis
hypothesis, however. The first is time. Plato is clear that the war
between Athens and Atlantis occurred 9,000 years before the
Egyptian priests passed the story on to Solon, which works out to
circa 9600 B.c. Some Atlantis enthusiasts have proposed that Plato
made a decimal error, and that he meant to write 900
instead of 9,000. If so, his dating, which would be 1500 B.C., would
fall fairly close to the radiocarbon date of 1410 B.c. ± 100 given to
the Thera eruption.
I find this explanation fanciful, however. The Greeks of Plato’s
time used a clumsy system of arithmetic notation that lacked a
symbol for zero. Plato couldn’t simply drop a space and inadver-
tendy turn 9,000 into 900.
Also, like other well-educated ancient Greeks, Plato was fully
aware of the Minoans. The civilization of the Greek mainland drew
heavily from Crete, and vice versa, as shown in the myth of
Daedalus’s involvement in designing the Labyrinth and the hero story
of Theseus. If Plato wanted to write about Knossos, why didn’t he
call it Knossos instead of inventing the name Adantis? Why would
he make Atlantis so much larger than Crete? And where did the
elephants come from?
Finally, geological evidence thoroughly weakens the tsunami
hypothesis. A detailed study of the volcanic ash deposits on Thera
indicates that the volcano didn’t detonate in one massive explosion
like Krakatoa or Mount St. Helens. It collapsed in slow stages that
threw huge amounts of sun-dimming ash into the air but produced no
detonation big enough to yield a 300-foot tidal wave. The city of
Akrodri on Thera physically survived the explosion, preserved, like
Pompeii, under a thick deposit of ash, yet lacking human remains.
How could it be that Akrotiri stood and its inhabitants apparendy
escaped the devastation, while Knossos drowned? In fact, the Minoan
civilization, though in decline, did continue for some time after the
Thera eruption, until it was eventually absorbed by the mainland
Greeks. Even though the Thera eruption may have made life on Crete
hard—causing earthquakes and torrential rains, as volcanic events
often do—it by no means marked the end of Knossos.
All in all, Knossos doesn’t qualify any better than the MidAtlantic
Ridge as an Atlantis candidate.

The Twilight Zone

One of the major difficulties in unraveling the Atlantis mystery is
separating fact from fiction. Atlantis has attracted tremendous
interest from those devoted to occult practices, an unwavering belief
in unidentified flying objects, the psychic readings of Edgar Cayce,
and similar faiths. My coauthor told me of the chiropractor he once
interviewed for a magazine article who told him that the separation
of mind and body, which wreaks such havoc on human health, owed
its origin to the dictatorial psychological-control methods of the
Atlantian ruling class.
“And how did you learn this?” Robert asked him.
 “It was channeled from the Atlantian elders,” he said. “This isn’t
the sort of thing you find written down anywhere.”
No, it isn’t. And unfortunately this kind of sloppy thinking is all
too common in much of the writing on Atlantis. An example I
encountered recendy comes from the theories proposed by Ary- sio
Nunes dos Santos, which places Atlantis in the South China Sea
among the many islands of Indonesia. Not only is this the location of
Atlantis, according to Santos, but it is also the site of “the Garden of
Eden, the Island of Avalon, the Garden of the Hesperides, the hideout
of the New Jerusalem, the true location of Troy and of Lanka, as well
as the Holy Land and Paradise that has been promised us all from the
dawn of time”—a heavy load of mythological weight to be borne by
a sunken island, even one the size of a continent. Santos develops his
argument with a series of remarkable identifications. Mount Atlas,
the main mountain of Atlantis (Plato never names it) is Krakatoa,
whose massive explosion—apparently 1883 was a repeat of an
earlier, primordial event—opened the Sunda Strait between Java and
Sumatra. All this makes sense, Santos says, when you realize that the
Greeks originated in the Indies and migrated into the Balkans, where
they superimposed their old geography on a new homeland.
Santos does get one thing right: At the time Plato gives for Atlantis,
much of the South China Sea would have been dry land,
covered over by a major rise in sea level at the end of the most recent
ice age—an event that is critical to what I find to be the best working
explanation of Atlantis. The rest of it just doesn’t work, not even
remotely. In truth, there is no evidence that the Greeks came from
Southeast Asia, an area whose language groupings are utterly
different from the Hellenic tongue, nor did they venture so far from
home. When Alexander the Great took his army into India, he wanted
to cross the subcontinent to see the ocean he, like other educated
Greeks, thought was the edge of the world. Indonesia lies, of course,
beyond this boundary, and Greek ignorance of this substantial part of
the globe speaks volumes about their origins—and the utter
unlikelihood of Adantis among the islands of Indonesia.
An even more striking example of fantastical, paradisiacal
thinking about the lost continent comes from the curious history of
the other lost continent—Lemuria, also known as Mu. Promoted by
people like twentieth-century authors James Churchward and Javier
Cabrera, Lemuria/Mu is said to be an Atlantian-sized continent
thousands of miles across with a population of many millions of
people that sank into the Pacific Ocean over ten thousand years ago.
Today all that remains of Lemuria are its mountain peaks, which poke
up out of the sea to form such islands as Hawaii, Fiji, and Tahiti.
According to the legend, Lemuria was a tropical paradise, a South
Pacific Garden of Eden whose inhabitants lived free of conflict and
disease in homes with transparent roofs, apparently unafraid of
baring all to their neighbors. Adept at extrasensory perception and
mental telepathy, the Lemurians were vegetarian, agricultural, and
completely organic, living in harmony with nature.
According to an account written by the Rosicrucian historian W.
S. Cerve, the Lemurians subjected couples who wished to marry to a
demanding compatibility test. The man and the woman had to
surrender all their possessions, including clothing, to a priest and
retreat naked into the forest, there to live away from human habitation
for twenty-eight days. During this time alone the couple had to build
their own shelter, fashion clothes and tools, and forage for food, all
without engaging in conflict or enmeshing each other in negative
thinking. Only if the couple could succeed at this daunting task were
they allowed to marry. Otherwise it was back to singlehood, ideally
with some new wisdom gained from the wilderness experience.
The legend holds that when Lemuria sank into the Pacific, not all
of its great wisdom was lost. Maps of the continent were preserved
in pre-Inca Peru, where they were discovered by Javier Cabrera. The
Lemurian elders and their wisdom remain available for consultation
through psychic channeling. And the survivors of Lemuria fanned out
over the face of the Earth to become the Tibetans, the Mayans, the
Native Americans, and the Eskimos, peoples who keep alive oral
traditions of great antiquity.
Yet there’s nothing truly old about the stories of Lemuria. This lost
continent is a modern invention, the remains of an abandoned
nineteenth-century scientific hypothesis turned into a popular and
mistaken belief.
In the 1860s and 1870s, a group of British biologists noticed
unexplainable geological similarities in India, southern Africa, South
America, and Australia. In these widely separated areas, certain strata
of the Permian age, dating back to 245-286 million years ago,
contained almost exactly the same kinds of sedimentary rocks and
included identical fossils of land plants and land animals. In the late
nineteenth century, long before the theory of continental movement
by means of plate tectonics (an idea we will explore in chapter 5),
geologists assumed the continents were immobile and fixed in place.
This left a quandary: How could land animals and plants have crossed
such immense stretches of open sea at some point in the distant past?
The answer: Land bridges once connected the contemporary conti-
nents, provided the plants and animals with passage, then later sank
into the sea.
Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a strong advocate of Darwin’s ideas, used
the land-bridge concept to explain the presence of lemurs—distinct,
early forms of primates—in Africa, India, Madagascar, and
Malaysia. This particular land bridge, he proposed, had remained
above water long enough for these animals to have spread from their
point of origin into regions now widely separated. Philip L. Scalter,
an English biologist, picked up on this association with lemurs to dub
the land bridge Lemuria.
As a scientific concept, Lemuria lost credibility when scientists
came to the modern understanding of continental movement by plate
tectonics and its effects on the distribution of plant and animal
species. Occultists picked up the concept, however, and used it to
their own ends. The most successful of these was Madame Blavatsky,
a prominent occultist and theosophist of the late nineteenth century.
Her Secret Doctrine (first published in 1888), which mixes science
and occult knowledge with the Rig Veda and other Hindu sources,
made Lemuria into a lost continent in the Indian Ocean populated by
apelike creatures that laid eggs and contained both sexes in their
bodies. Later writers like Annie Besant (Man’s Life in This and Other
Worlds and The Pedigree of Man, among other titles) and W. Scott-
Elliot (legends of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria) embellished on
Blavatsky. In these new tales of lost continents, Lemuria was home
to dinosaurs and bronze humanoids up to fifteen feet tall. Now, in its
most recent incarnation, Lemuria has moved from the Indian to the
Pacific Ocean.
Both Atlantis and Lemuria are prime examples of the workings of
what psychoanalysts call projection. In projection, an individual
takes some portion of his or her psychic self and attaches it to an
outside individual or institution. Projection is the process that allows
us to make enemies in warfare evil, and to paint them as deserving of
the violent death we are about to deliver. Likewise, projection can be
used to create a utopian picture of what we most desire, such as a
paradise built on wisdom, innocence, and childlike trust. It strikes me
as hardly accidental that Cerve’s
account of the marriage customs of the Lemurians is much like the
premarital practices Thomas More invented in Utopia. The point isn’t
that Cerve was copying; it is that his account of Lemuria and other
such stories constitute a utopian exercise, not history.
Antarctic Atlantis?
Amid all the fantasy, projection, and inaccurate fiction that has
attached to the topic of Atlantis, one serious idea deserves a rigorous
look. This is the concept that Atlantis was located in the Antarctic.
The theory originated in the scholarly work of Charles Hapgood,
which forms the foundation of the contemporary popular book When
the Sky Fell: In Search of Atlantis, by Rand and Rose Flem-Ath.
Antarctic Atlantis also appears as the concluding idea of Graham
Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost
Civilization, and it figured prominently in the television special “The
Mysterious Origins of Man,” narrated by Charlton Heston and
featuring Hancock’s ideas and on-camera presence.
Hancock, Hapgood, and the Flem-Aths base their theory on the
interpretation of a number of maps made in the late medieval period.
What these maps show—or do not show—is key to evaluating the
hypothesis that Antarctica is the site of a civilization now lost to us,
the one that Plato called Atlantis.
The most striking, and the best known, of the charts is the Piri Reis
map, which was discovered accidentally in 1929 by scholars working
in archives of the Ottoman empire stored in the Topkapi museum in
Constantinople. Dated to 1513 and signed by the Turkish captain Piri
Reis, the map claims to contain information about the New World
derived from the voyages of Christopher Columbus. An inscription
on the map, drawn on a gazelle-hide parchment, says, ‘The coasts and
islands on this map are taken from Colombo’s map.” The discovery
of the map, with informa-

tion so close in date to Columbus’s discovery of the New World,

caused a scholarly stir when it was announced.
The story of the map began in 1501, just nine years after
Columbus’s first voyage to America, when Kemal Reis, another
Ottoman captain and Piri Reis’s uncle, captured seven ships off the
Spanish coast. In those days, navigational information about the
newly discovered lands of the Indies and the Americas was extremely
valuable and carefully guarded. Kemal Reis interrogated the Spanish
crewmen in the hope of uncovering trade secrets, and he was pleased
to discover one sailor who had accompanied Columbus. Even better,
the sailor had in his possession a map said to have been drawn by
Columbus. Reis seized it and willed it to his nephew.
In 1511 the younger Reis set himself to the formidable task of
drawing a map of the world that included all the Spanish and Por-
tuguese discoveries and that was based on some twenty sources, one
of which was the map of the New World captured by Uncle Kemal.
Reis also used a number of maps purportedly dating to the fourth
century B.c.—the time of Alexander the Great—an Arab map of
India, and Portuguese maps of the Indian Ocean and China. Reducing
all the maps to a single scale, which in those days was a difficult
challenge, Reis spent three years assembling his chart, and presented
it as a gift to the Sultan Selim.
This proved to be a wise career move, at least in the short term.
Reis was promoted from captain to admiral, and he wrote a book that
provided a mariner’s guide to the islands and coasts of the
Mediterranean and advocated driving the Portuguese out of the Red
Sea and the Persian Gulf, where they threatened the Ottomans. Reis
got his chance to do just that in 1551, but he lost most of his fleet in
battle. Though an old man in his eighties, the disgraced Reis was
beheaded at the order of an unforgiving sultan.
After the initial stir of its discovery, the Piri Reis map lay largely
uninvestigated until Charles Hapgood, a Harvard-educated sci-
ence historian teaching at New Hampshire’s Keene State College,
gave his class the assignment of studying it in detail. That assignment
resulted ultimately in Hapgood’s classic book The Maps of the
Ancient Sea Kings.
 Hapgood came to the Piri Reis map not because he was interested
in ancient history, but because he had come to believe in a theory
holding that Earth’s crust can slip rapidly over the underlying mantle,
causing sudden shifts of geographical location and a complete, even
catastrophic, change of climate—an idea that will be examined in
detail in chapter 5. Hapgood was working on his crustal-shift theory
when he heard of a curious claim about the Piri Reis map made by
Captain Arlington H. Mallery, a U.S. Navy cartographer, engineer,
and ancient-map specialist. Mallery asserted that the old chart
showed the coastline of Antarctica and, even more dramatically, it
depicted that coast as free of ice cap and glacier.
Mallery’s idea very much intrigued Hapgood. Antarctica wasn’t
discovered until 1820, 307 years after Piri Reis completed his map.
How could the Turkish captain have included a landmass no one
knew existed? And why had he shown it without ice? For that matter,
how could he have known how it looked with the thick glaciers
removed? And if the map did depict Antarctica, why did Piri Reis
write on it, “There is no trace of cultivation in this country.
Everything is desolate, and big snakes are said to be there. For this
reason, the Portuguese did not land on these shores, which are said to
be very hot”? Big snakes? Hot? Antarctica?
Hapgood put his students to work on these ideas, and they turned
up several puzzles. For one, the map seemed to show the Andes along
the western portion of what is obviously South America, complete
with a creature that had a passing resemblance to a llama, an animal
found only in the Andes. Again, timing didn’t work. Magellan found
a way around South America in 1520, seven years after Piri Reis’s
map, and Pizarro first sighted
the Andes in 1527, fourteen years after. Hapgood developed an
explanation: One of Reis’s source maps, probably one of the charts
dating to the time of Alexander the Great, showed the Andes. If this
idea was true—and for Hapgood, the presence of the putative llama
clinched it—then someone had to have known about the Americas at
least 1,800 years before Columbus.
Hapgood’s students also identified what they said were the
Falkland Islands—undiscovered until 1592. And if those islands
were the Falklands, then the land to the south had to be the coast of
the Queen Maud Land region of Antarctica. Pursuing this line of
thought, Hapgood and his students concluded that the map did indeed
bear a striking resemblance to Queen Maud Land, and that the chart
was accurate within twenty miles.
Hapgood remained cautious, however. He was well aware that in
ancient and medieval times, many mariners and cartographers
believed in a large landmass lying in the distant, forbidding reaches
toward the South Pole. It was possible, therefore, that Piri Reis was
simply following this tradition and engaging in wishful geographical
thinking. And the map did have one big problem: It showed South
America and Antarctica as a continuous coastline, as if the two
continents abutted. In fact, there are over 600 miles of open ocean
between their closest points.
Working in the Library of Congress in 1959, Hapgood came across
another old map that wiped out all his doubts and confirmed his ideas.
The chart, drawn in 1531 by the French cartographer Oronteus
Finaeus (also known as Oronce Fine), showed a landmass startlingly
similar to Antarctica. While the Oronteus Finaeus map puts the
continent too close to the tip of South America and is oriented
incorrectly, many of the other features of Antarctica appear in the
right places, including an unnamed gulf hauntingly reminiscent of the
Ross Sea. Equally important, the Oronteus Finaeus map shows a
range of coastal mountains that now lies under the ice cap. This, too,
is an ice-free Antarctica, one that boasts rivers and inlets where now
only glaciers and
ice shelves are found. To Hapgood it appeared obvious that Oronteus
Finaeus, like Piri Reis, had access to ancient maps showing the
southernmost continent in the long-gone days before it was capped
by ice.
Hapgood also determined that these ancient mariners were
sophisticated navigators. The Piri Reis map displays a web of lines,
called rhumb lines, crisscrossing the Atlantic. Most scholars believe
that rhumb lines, found on other maps from the same period as well,
do not show latitude and longitude, but served as guides for laying a
course by compass and wind direction. Hapgood begged to differ.
Working with a mathematician from the prestigious Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Hapgood and his team developed a complex
mathematical argument to show that the rhumb lines actually
indicated longitude and latitude based on a projection with Cairo as
the center point. This was a remarkable conclusion, since longitude
couldn’t be calculated accurately until the development of spherical
trigonometry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, over
150 years after Piri Reis drew his map.
Hapgood also investigated a number of late medieval and early
Renaissance maps known as portulans or portolanos. The accuracy
of these charts, made by navigators with nothing but a compass,
struck Hapgood as too close to perfect to be accidental.
From all this research Hapgood drew a number of significant
conclusions. The Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus, and portolano maps
showed geographical features that remained “undiscovered” until
well after they were drawn, and they were surprisingly accurate. This
would indicate that a civilization unknown to us and dating back to a
time so ancient that Antarctica lacked an ice cap had mapped much
of the world with a sophistication that proved the existence of
advanced navigational aids and complex mathematics.
Hancock adds another candidate map to Hapgood’s list, one drawn
by the eighteenth-century French geographer Philippe
Buache to show the globe from the South Pole up, as of 1737.
Hancock claims this map is based on sources thousands of years older
than the Oronteus Finaeus chart, although he doesn’t say why he
believes this. He also maintains that the Buache chart, like the
Oronteus Finaeus map, provides an eerily accurate representation of
how Antarctica must have looked when the continent completely
lacked ice.
Drawing on Hapgood’s work, the Flem-Aths conclude that
Antarctica was more than simply known to the lost civilization
posited by Hapgood. It was actually based there. Antarctica and its
ancient residents are the lost place and people Plato called Atlantis
and the Adantians.
Like Hancock, the Flem-Aths add another key map, the previously
mentioned work of Athanasius Kircher. Superficially it would seem
that Kircher did little to support the Flem-Aths, since his map places
Atlantis in the North Atlantic, between Europe and North America.
Look deeper, the Flem-Aths argue. The Atlantis landmass has the
same appearance as an ice-free Antarctica if you reverse the usual
mapmaker’s convention and make south, not north, up. The Flem-
Aths argue that this indicates Kircher got his information from
ancient Egyptian sources, since in Egypt south, the direction from
which the Nile flows, was “up.”
The Flem-Aths hold that approximately 11,500 years ago, during
the time period Plato ascribes to the war between Atlantis and
Athens, Antarctica wasn’t where it is now. As a matter of fact, the
whole crust of the Earth wasn’t where it is now. In this prior incar-
nation of the Earth’s surface, the Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica
projected well into the temperate zone. This extension of the
Antarctic landmass would have been warm enough to support a
bustling civilization, while the rest of the continent was frozen and
iced over. Then, within a relatively short period of time, the entire
crust of the Earth slipped about 30 degrees, or approximately 2,000
miles—the distance between Minneapolis and Guatemala City—
moving like the skin of an orange sliding over
the sections beneath. This global crustal shift drew the Palmer
Peninsula well into the Antarctic deep freeze, changing the climate
in a cataclysmic direction. In the northern hemisphere, meanwhile,
the movement of the polar ice caps into warmer southern regions
initiated a rapid meltdown that raised sea level and slowly swamped
the Atlantian cities. This took longer than Plato’s single day and
night, but its effect was no less catastrophic, sinking Atlantis forever
beneath the waves.

Checking the Facts

The model advanced by Hapgood, the Flem-Aths, and Hancock
comprises a series of hypotheses, one resting upon another like the
stones of an arch. Supporting them all are three fundamental
questions: Was a significant portion of Antarctica ice-free in circa
9600 B.C.? If the ice were removed from the Antarctic, would the
continent assume the shape shown in the ancient maps? And are the
maps as startlingly accurate as these authors say they are?
The Antarctic ice cap is the largest on Earth, covering some 98
percent of the continent to depths of three miles and representing 90
percent of the planet’s total ice. The Antarctic ice cap is also Earth’s
oldest. The glaciation of Greenland dates back 7 million years.
Antarctica was probably glaciated, at least in part, as long ago as 35
million years.
But even old ice caps may not be stable at their edges. If the climate
changes toward more cold, an ice cap can expand its area by growing
at the margins. Likewise, if the temperature warms to the melting
point, it can retreat, shrinking back to expose previously covered
land.
A current academic debate concerns just what has happened to the
Antarctic ice cap in its 35-million-year existence. One group of
scientists, led by Peter Webb, an Ohio State University geologist, has
found evidence it considers indicative of a once- warmer climate,
particularly bits of wood identified as southern beech, as well as
beetle remains and tiny marine fossils left behind when the ice cap
melted and ocean water flooded Antarctica’s subglacial basins.
Another group of scientists disagrees with this interpretation.
Studying rock and ash samples from the same sedimentary layer that
Webb investigated, George Denton of the University of Maine and
David Marchant of Boston University found no evidence of any
wetting or erosion that would have resulted from a glacial meltdown.
Denton and Marchant argue that Webb’s temperate fossils were
deposited by the wind, and that Antarctica has been glaciated much
as it is now for at least 23 million years.
Even if Webb’s model is proved correct, however, it holds out
little hope for the hypothesis of Hapgood, Flem-Ath, and Hancock.
The temperate period Webb proposes occurred 3 million years ago,
not 11,500. As of this writing, there is no credible evidence that any
significant portion of Antarctica—certainly nothing the size of North
Africa and the Middle East combined—was ice-free in circa 9600 B.C.
Another significant issue affecting the appearance of an ice- free
Antarctica is the shape of the continent were the ice cap removed.
Hapgood and the Flem-Aths assume that the ice would come off like
the glass from a picture frame and in no way affect the image beneath.
It doesn’t work like that, however. The Antarctic ice cap is
unimaginably massive, totaling an estimated 6 to 7 million cubic
miles of ice and weighing in the vicinity of 30 million billion tons.
This extraordinary weight, which is grounded on bedrock or stacked
as ice rises on bedrock islands, pushes the continent down by
hundreds of yards. Were the ice to melt away, the continent would
bounce back—a geological process called isostatic rebound—raising
its surface up to 3,100 feet in the interior and as much as 160 feet
along the coast.
There’s more. Melting of the Antarctic ice cap would spill a huge
amount of water into the ocean and could raise sea level by an
estimated 200 to 260 feet. The sea-level rise, combined with
isostatic rebound, would produce an Antarctica markedly dissimilar
in continental shape than today’s landmass with the ice removed like
that imagined pane of portrait glass.
It is this very issue of continental shape that opens the accuracy of
the Oronteus Finaeus map to question. Hapgood himself admitted
that a major problem in interpreting the map is the absence of the
Palmer Peninsula, which trends out from the main Antarctic
landmass toward South America for nearly 500 miles and would
remain above the ocean surface even under the conditions of sea-
level rise and isostatic rebound. This feature is so prominent that it
would certainly appear on the most rudimentary chart, yet it is
missing from the Oronteus Finaeus map. Likewise, the map shows
the Wilkes Land portion of Antarctica as solid land, when in fact it
comprises two large subsea basins with only an archipelago of islands
rising above the surface of the frozen ocean. Were it ice-free, it would
be an island-dotted embayment, not a solid mass. Similarly, the
Amery Basin, which under ice-free conditions would be a 430-to-
490-mile-long bay running perpendicular to the Antarctica coast, is
missing. This kind of problem arises again and again. In other words,
much of what the Oronteus Finaeus map shows as solid land would,
in an unglaciated Antarctica, be underwater.
Oddly enough, the Oronteus Finaeus map may be a representation
that is partly accurate and partly hearsay. This raises a tantalizing
question about explorations of the southernmost continent that are
lost to history. But if Antarctica is the landmass this map shows, it is
the glaciated continent of modern time, not an ice-free version of the
same landmass.
Similar problems plague the Buache map. It is no more successful
than the Oronteus Finaeus at showing what Antarctica would look
like in the absence of its ice cap. Simply, it doesn’t show what
Graham Hancock claims it does.
The Piri Reis map poses a more difficult set of problems, in part
because of its age and style. How accurate is it? And does the
map provide any internal evidence that it draws from sources dating
to distant antiquity?
Actually, a number of significant details on the Piri Reis map have
more of a medieval or Renaissance flavor than an ancient one. For
example, the top of the map shows a large fish with two men sitting
on its back and an inscription telling a tale from the life of Saint
Brendan, the Irish mystic and seafarer who, legend reports, once said
Mass on the back of a whale he mistook for an island. The original
story, the Navigatio Sancli Brendani Abbatis, arose in Ireland before
the eleventh century and is clearly medieval. So are the many islands
scattered about Piri Reis’s Adantic Ocean. These hypothetical and
imaginary bits of land are common features in late medieval maps of
the vintage that Christopher Columbus used and Piri Reis likely
borrowed from.
The Piri Reis map’s version of the Caribbean shows further evi-
dence of medieval origin. Only the eastern tip of Cuba is shown, a
major omission, and Hispaniola, the island that contains today’s Haiti
and Dominican Republic, is oriented north-south rather than east-
west. The likely explanation for this is that Columbus was certain that
Hispaniola was really Japan, whose existence had been known since
the time of Marco Polo and which was one of the desired destinations
of the new route to Asia he was seeking. Columbus’s own maps, like
the one Kemal Reis had taken from the captured sailor, drew
Hispaniola as if it were Japan according to the conventional
representation of the time. Again, the origin of this part of the map is
contemporary with Piri Reis, not an unknown ancient source.
Portions of the map are strikingly accurate, such as the Iberian
Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and the coast of west Africa, and the
place names on these parts of the map are given in Turkish. The
Ottomans sailed into these waters, and Piri Reis knew them firsthand
or from accounts of his fellow naval officers. The coast of Brazil is
also very accurate, with the relationship between Africa and South
America much closer to reality than on Euro-
pean maps of the same time period. Place-names along the South
American coast, however, are Turkish transliterations of Italian and
Spanish, languages that arose from Latin only in the early medieval
period. Most likely, Piri Reis drew this portion of his chart from
accounts of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and other explorers,
not from ancient sources written in classical Greek, Latin, or other
“dead” languages.
Piri Reis wasn’t the first cartographer to place a mountain chain in
the place where the Andes later proved to be. One such map was
drawn by Nicolo de Caneiro between 1502 and 1504. It survives
today in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, strongly resembles the
Piri Reis map, and may have been one of the sources the Turkish
captain used. He may also have referred to a similar map by Johannes
de Stobnicza, who included his own charts in an edition of the Greek
astronomer Ptolemy published in 1512. Since Ptolemy lived in the
second century A.D., Reis may have mistaken Stobnicza’s map for an
“ancient” source.
And as for the creature Hapgood is certain can only be an Andean
llama, it boasts two horns. Llamas don’t have horns.
Ptolemy himself had referred to “a southern land” in his writing,
and many of the explorers heading into the southern hemisphere kept
an eye out for it. When Magellan sailed through the strait that now
bears his name, he spied Tierra del Fuego to the south and thought he
was looking at Ptolemy’s southern landmass. Blown far off course,
Amerigo Vespucci spotted land that may have been the Falkland
Islands or perhaps even Antarctica itself. Other ships in similar
situations reported similar sightings. As a result of all this, there was
some contemporary, not ancient, knowledge of a body of land to the
south of South America at the time when Piri Reis was drawing his
map.
It’s also possible that Piri Reis wasn’t trying to draw Antarctica at
all. One of the problems with the map, which Hapgood freely admits,
is that about 900 miles of South American coastline are missing.
Below the Rio Plata the coast turns to the east, and it is this east-
bearing section that Hapgood posited as the coast of Antarctica. Yet,
if the eastward coast is turned south instead, it represents a relatively
accurate depiction of the eastern South American seaboard from the
mouth of the Rio Plata to Tierra del Fuego. Three islands shown on
the map correspond well with the Falklands, and the tip of the
continent appears just about where it should. And making this coast
Patagonia rather than Antarctica explains Piri Reis’s inscription
about heat and big snakes.
In the end, the supposed mystery of the Piri Reis map could all boil
down to practicality and scarce resources. Coming to the bottom of
his valuable gazelle-hide parchment and running out of room to draw,
Reis could have turned his coastline east rather than south. Mariners
of the day hugged the coast whenever possible, and maps showing
coastal shape were every bit as useful as ones with an accurate north-
south orientation.
I continue to find Hapgood’s ideas fascinating and tantalizing, but
the evidence is less than cogent. The Piri Reis map contains no
information of indisputably ancient origin, and the supposed coast of
Antarctica could well be the lower reach of South America instead.

Yonaguni: The “Lost City” of Japan

In Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock argues in effect that
Atlantis may be only the tip of an iceberg. In his view, there is ample
evidence that a major civilization existed long before those first cities
arose in the Middle East at the end of the Neolithic. The Inca empire
and Machu Picchu, the mysterious lines on the Peruvian plain of
Nazca, the Bolivian ruin of Tiahuanaco, the great Mayan temple sites
like Uxmal and Chichen Itza, Teotihuacan in Mexico, Giza’s
pyramids and Great Sphinx: these and many more sites tell Hancock
that the Earth was once home to a major, highly sophisticated, and
technologically advanced civilization that spread far across the globe
before being suddenly destroyed by cataclysm.

Like Hapgood’s theory, Hancock’s is an intriguing idea, one that

bears keeping in mind as we look at the mysteries of the past. When,
not long after my work on the Sphinx, I received an opportunity to
explore one of the most recently discovered sites pointing to the
possible existence of this vanished and unknown civilization, I
jumped at the chance to have a scientific look at it myself.
Yonaguni is the last island of the Ryukyu chain, which curves from
Japan south and west toward China in the East China Sea. Part of
Japan, as is its larger and better known neighbor, Okinawa, Yonaguni
is the home of Kihachiro Aratake, a scuba-diving instructor and
guide, and the head of the Yonaguni-cho Tourism Association. In
1987 Aratake was exploring the southeast coast of the island in a
search for interesting new dive sites to offer his clients when he
happened across something under the ocean’s surface that took his
breath away. Below him the submarine cliff appeared to be cut in a
series of immense geometric terraces, their surfaces broad and flat,
separated by sheer vertical stone risers. It looked, for all the world,
like a reviewing stand for giant sea gods. Aratake felt sure he had
discovered a structure fashioned by human hands.
By 1990, word of the Yonaguni Monument had come to the
attention of Masaaki Kimura, a marine seismologist at the University
of the Ryukyus in Okinawa. Interested in lost civilizations, Kimura
dived at Yonaguni repeatedly over the next seven years, often
bringing his students along. Kimura’s team assembled a large,
meticulous portfolio of drawings, maps, and models, not only of
Aratake’s discovery on Yonaguni, but also of other sites on the same
island as well as others of the Ryukyus. Kimura himself became
convinced that the Yonaguni formation, or monument, had been
fashioned by human hands.
Japanese television and newspapers picked up on Kimura’s ideas
and gave them considerable coverage, a fact that brought the
professor a great deal of ridicule from his academic col- leagues. Yet,
despite the hoopla in Japan, news of Yonaguni didn’t leak out to
Europe and North America until 1995 and
1996. So much for the global village.
I got wind of Yonaguni through John Anthony West, who himself
heard about it from Shun Daichi, a translator who has worked with
both West and Graham Hancock. Hancock, whose books have been
runaway best-sellers in Japan, was very much intrigued by the
Yonaguni Monument. News of his interest made its way to Yasuo
Watanabe, an admirer of Hancock’s work and a wealthy
businessman. In 1997 Watanabe invited Hancock and his wife,
Santha Faiia, to Yonaguni to have a look. Hancock and Faiia made
several dives to the monument, whose regularity convinced them it
was indeed the work of humans. Hancock, however, is no geologist,
and he suggested to Watanabe that he bring John Anthony West and
me over for a closer examination.
 At first glance, Watanabe’s invitation caught me off guard. I’m not
keen on water, even less on diving in the open ocean, yet the chance
of inspecting what could be a ruin of an antiquity equivalent to the
Sphinx’s intrigued me no end. Potentially, a great deal was at stake
in Yonaguni. If it was a human-made structure, then it was reasonable
to assume that it had been built when the site wasn’t underwater.
Based on well-established studies of rises in the East China Sea
during and after the last ice age, the Yonaguni Monument was likely
above sea level as recently as 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, or in the
6000-8000 B.C. range. Proof that Yonaguni is the result of human
effort would mean that it is at least 8,000 years old and clear evidence
of an early, perhaps unknown civilization. This possibility proved so
intriguing that I sucked in my breath, responded with gratitude to
Watanabe’s generous offer, signed up for scuba lessons, and set off
for Japan in September
1997.
Watanabe was a most beneficent patron. He brought not only John
Anthony West and me to Yonaguni, but also Graham Hancock and
Santha Faiia. On Yonaguni we were joined by Shun
Daichi, several of Watanabe’s American business associates,
Kihachiro Aratake, dive masters Yoshimi Matsumura and Hiroshi-
Kubota, and a four-person English documentary crew filming TV
specials for Hancock’s forthcoming book. Watanabe even lent us his
own chef and, more a fisherman than a diver, kept us well fed with a
steady supply of sushi from the snapper and tuna he hooked.
Diving off Yonaguni proved a challenge. The current was strong,
the surge powerful, but with Yoshimi Matsumura as my personal
diving partner and “assistant,” I was in good hands. Probably I should
have been more nervous than I was; sometimes naivete falsely
bolsters self-confidence. I have to admit, however, I kept looking
over my shoulder for hammerhead sharks. These large predators are
known to school off the island—a behavior that occurs in few other
places in the world. Even though I was assured hammerheads usually
leave humans alone, I imagined they might be interested in snatching
an occasional scuba diver— like me—as hot lunch. Still, despite the
difficulty and a constant low level of shark-dread, I was stunned by
my first sight of the monument.
Superficially the monument has the appearance of a platform or
part of a step pyramid, something like the ancient Temple of the Sun
near Trujillo in northern Peru. The top of the monument lies sixteen
feet under the surface, the bottom at an approximate depth of eighty
feet. Extending over 160 feet in an east-west direction and more than
sixty-five feet north to south, the asymmetrical monument has
uneven stone steps, ranging in height from a foot and a half to several
feet, on its southern face. It looks like a great staircase up which only
a giant could stride. The surfaces have a regular smooth surface, like
dressed stone.
In all, I made six dives on the Yonaguni Monument. Despite my
initial shock, the closer I looked at the monument, the less convinced
I was that Kimura was right about the structure’s human aspect.
Much of the regularity of the surface was due not
to a tooled smoothness of the rock but to a thick, even coating of
algae, corals, sponges, and similar organisms. In a number of spots I
scraped the coating away, both to determine what kind of stone lay
beneath and to look for tool scars or quarry marks. I found none. Even
more telling, I couldn’t find any evidence that Yonaguni consisted of
separate pieces of stone. Stone blocks carved, set in place, and
arranged in an order would clearly indicate a human-made structure.
Rather, the monument is essentially a single piece of solid, “living”
bedrock that is less precise than it appears at first. The horizontal
terraces aren’t really horizontal, and the steps are not cut at precisely
90 degrees. A long channel about two feet wide, which looks as if it
had been excised by some giant stone-cutting tool, proves to have a
ragged, unworked bottom and to disappear into the bedrock as two
parallel natural fault lines.
Still, Yonaguni posed a problem. If the monument was the result
of a natural process, this natural process was unlike any I had seen
before. What could it be?
Taking rock samples from the monument and inspecting the local
geology gave me a tentative answer. The monument is composed
predominantly of very fine sandstones and mudstones of the type we
geologists call the Lower Miocene Yaeyama Group. Rocks of this
type contain numerous, well-defined, parallel bedding planes that
allow easy separation of the layers, and they are crisscrossed by many
joints and fractures running parallel to one another and vertical to the
bedding planes. Yaeyama Group sandstones lie exposed along the
southeast and northeast coasts of Yonaguni Island, and I went there
to see how they weather under current conditions above water. The
more I looked at the highly regular yet completely natural weathering
of these sandstones, the more I became convinced that the steplike
and terracelike features of the underwater monument resulted from
natural processes working on the stone, not from the activity of
humans long ago. With its both vertical and horizontal fractures
and joints, the stone was like a huge, many-tiered wedding cake cut
into pieces and ready to serve. Subjected to thousands of years of
surf, tides, typhoons, and storms, the rock had broken off in great
square and rectangular chunks that left the visual impression of steps,
plazas, and platforms.
Even though he was clearly more disappointed than I was, John
Anthony West agreed. As a geologist, I was excited to have
uncovered a new and unique geomorphology. West was on the track
of a smoking gun pointing at the lost global civilization, and he had
come up empty. As scientists working from the evidence, though, we
could make no other deduction.
In late July and early August of 1998, I had the opportunity to
return to Yonaguni under the auspices of Team Atlantis, a multi-
disciplinary underwater research group organized by Michael
Arbuthnot. Studying the Yonaguni Monument for a second time, I
remained convinced that the structure is primarily a result of natural
processes.
Possibly the choice between natural and human-made isn’t simply
either/or. Yonaguni Island contains a number of old tombs whose
exact age is uncertain, but that are clearly very old. Curiously, the
architecture of the tombs is much like that of the monument. It is
possible that humans were imitating the monument in designing the
tombs, and it is equally possible that the monument was itself
somehow modified by human hands. That is, the ancient inhabitants
of the island may have partially reshaped or enhanced a natural
structure to give it the form they wished, either as a structure on its
own or as the foundation of a timber, mud, or stone building that has
since been destroyed. It is also possible that the monument served as
a quarry from which blocks were cut, following the natural bedding,
joint, and fracture planes of the rock, then removed to construct
buildings that are now long gone. Since it is located along the coast,
the Yonaguni Monument may even have served as some kind of
natural boat dock for an early seafaring people. As Dr. Kimura
showed me, ancient stone tools beautifully crafted from igneous rock
have been found on Yonaguni. Significantly, Yonaguni has no
naturally exposed igneous rocks, so the tools, or at least the raw
materials from which they were made, must have been imported from
neighboring islands where such rock is found. The tools could have
been used to modify or reshape the natural stone structures now found
underwater off the coast of Yonaguni. The concept of a human-
enhanced natural structure fits well with East Asian esthetics, such as
the feng shui of China and the Zen- inspired rock gardens of Japan.
A complex interaction between natural and human-made forms that
influenced human art and architecture 8,000 years ago is highly
possible.
Other evidence points as well to some kind of human working on
the local stone on Yonaguni. Scattered over the island are apparently
very ancient (age unknown), obviously human-carved stone
“vessels.” The vessels have no obvious use I could determine, and
when I asked island natives about them, all I got were polite shrugs
and blank stares. Fashioned from local rock and apparendy neither
carved nor transported to the island any time in the past 500 years,
the vessels remain something of a mystery, as do the Yonaguni
Monument and other underwater structures reported in the Okinawa
area. At a minimum, the tombs, the ancient igneous-rock tools, and
the vessels tell us that humans have been living and working stone on
Yonaguni for a long time.
But if there is a human element to the Yonaguni Monument, why
did these people of long ago want to mark this spot? Today the Tropic
of Cancer, the northern boundary of the tropics, lies at 23° 27' north
latitude. The Tropic of Cancer moves slowly on a 41,000-year cycle,
for reasons we will discuss in chapter 5. Ten thousand years ago, in
circa 8000 B.C., the Tropic of Cancer was in a different location, at
about 24° 15' north latitude, which is close to Yonaguni’s position at
24° 27' north latitude. Locating the exact position of the tropic is
easy—all it takes is an exactly vertical stick or pole; a plumb line
with a weight works nicely. The ancients, I suspect, knew where the
tropic was, and they knew that, like precession, its position moved
slowly. Since Yonaguni is close to the most northerly position the
tropic reaches in its lengthy cycle, the island may well have been the
site of an astronomically aligned shrine that, like Nabta in southern
Egypt, Stonehenge in England, or Brugh na Boinne in Ireland, repli-
cates a celestial point on Earth and anchors our world in the eternal.
A possible parallel comes from ancient Egypt. The religious site
of Philae, dedicated to the temple of the great goddess Isis, is located
at 24° 1' north latitude, the position of the Tropic of Cancer 7,000
years ago, in circa 5000 B.C. The current buildings on the site date to
Roman and Hellenistic times, but it is likely that they were erected
on the ruins of much earlier structures. The Egyptian name for Philae
means “Island in the Time of Re,” a phrase that John Anthony West
says indicates remote antiquity. Might the Egyptians, like the ancient
people of Yonaguni, have built a monument to flag the position of
the tropic?
In its way, Yonaguni, though not the smoking gun that West
wanted, deepens the mystery. It adds, too, to the picture of an ancient
people more sophisticated, more adept, and—yes— more civilized
than convention has led us to believe.

The Martian Possibility

Some of the people interested in a lost civilization of long ago have
ventured further than the last continent to be discovered or the edges
of Earth’s oceans. They have taken their hunt into space.
One school of thought, popularized in a number of books with only
the most tentative scientific credentials, holds that civilization arose
on Earth not as an indigenous event but as the result of contact with
ancient astronauts. These space travelers ventured forth from their
home planet at some point in the remote past to bring us the wonders
of their own civilized and technological way of life. The best known
of these writers is Erich von Daniken, whose numerous books have
sold in the millions of copies and have been transformed into any
number of sensationalist television specials with the air of a National
Enquirer feature story and even less supporting evidence. Daniken
has, for example, his own explanation of Hapgood’s maps of a
supposedly ice-free Antarctica as the result of contact with the
continent not by ship but by space capsule. Likewise, the famed
Nazca lines of Peru, which make sense only when viewed from
above, are supposed proof of repeated overflight by space travelers
of old.
A less televised example is Zecharia Sitchin, who makes the case
that all of humanity was created by a group of aliens who visited this
planet between roughly 450,000 B.C. and 13,000 B.C., a considerable
reach of time. These space-traveling visitors genetically engineered
the human race by combining their own DNA with that of early
hominids in order to create workers for the mining enterprises they
were founding on Earth (apparently, colonialism has existed in
planetary worlds other than our own). Thus, just as the book of
Genesis says, we humans were fashioned in the gods’ own image.
Sitchin proposes that the ancient Babylonian festival called the
procession of Marduk commemorates the flight path the ancient
astronauts followed in their journey through the solar system to a
landing site on Earth.
In truth, I find this kind of thinking complete pseudoscientific
blather. For one thing, it is fundamentally arrogant. Writers like
Daniken and Sitchin trade on the notion that the development of
civilization must be linear and that ancient people were clearly much
more stupid than we are. Thus any sophistication, whether
technological or philosophical, evident in the old ways must have
been the gift of an outsider, since ancient people were too backward
to have come up with it on their own. The truth, I suspect, is quite the
opposite: Ancient people were much more sophisticated than we let
ourselves believe.
The other obvious problem with the Daniken-Sitchin approach is
the obvious lack of evidence for a civilization on another planet,
whether in this solar system or another. That was why, when I first
heard that some people were claiming to have seen evidence of ruined
artificial structures on Mars in photographs taken by the Viking
probe, I dismissed them as Daniken- Sitchin babble. Then, as a
scientist should, I looked at the data for myself—and I wasn’t so sure.
The so-called Face on Mars was discovered by astronomer Tobias
Owen on a photo frame of an area some thirty-four miles by thirty-
one miles, taken at around 40° north latitude on the Martian surface,
an area known as Cydonia. This same frame, snapped by the Viking
Mars probe in 1976 from an altitude of 1,000 miles with poor
resolution, shows other structures whose arrangement and
appearance don’t fit what we usually think of as natural landforms.
Vincent DiPietro, also an astronomer, discovered another image of
the Face on yet another photo frame snapped by Viking. This
photograph, taken thirty-five Martian days later than the first one and
with different lighting, provided a comparative perspective and made
measurement of the shape possible. The Face, which in the photos
does indeed look something like a human face wearing a headdress
or helmet, turned out to be about 1.6 miles long from head to chin,
1.2 miles wide, and about 1,200 feet high. Adding to the unnatural
look of the Face were apparent lines that some observers took to be
teeth in the mouth, presumed crossed lines above the eyes, and
supposed lateral stripes on the headdress that bore at least a passing
resemblance to the one worn by ancient Egyptian pharaohs.
Another interesting feature of the Cydonia region is the D&M (for
DiPietro and his associate Gregory Molenaar) Pyramid, located about
ten miles from the Face and aligned almost perfectly north-south
along Mars’s axis, much as the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) is
aligned. A number of other seemingly artificial features in the same
region have also been identified and named. There is the Fort, which
has two distinctive straight edges; the City, an arrangement of
massive structures interspersed with smaller pyramids; the NK
Pyramid, about twenty-five miles from the Face and on the same
latitude as the D&M Pyramid; and the Bowl, which is approached by
a long ramp reminiscent of the stairways on Mayan and Aztec
pyramids. Given that all these features are found in one relatively
confined area adds to the enigma. Can it be by chance that so many
seemingly artificial shapes are found so close together? Doesn’t this
fact alone speak to the presence of a guiding, intelligent hand?
At first I dismissed the idea of a ruined civilization on Mars as
science fiction, the kind of thing that would come from an H. G.
Wells or a Jules Verne. Then Mark Carlotto, a scientist who has done
considerable serious work on the Martian images, let me examine a
copy of them firsthand. Seeing is believing, and I found the photos
surprising. The D&M pyramid showed what geologists call slump
features on one side—the shape left when a muddy hillside, for
example, slips away—but the regularity of the shape was most
unusual for a natural landform. Even though I was not convinced that
the Cydonia shapes were anything other than natural, there wasn’t a
good explanation for how and why they looked the way they did.
Reluctantly I admitted to myself that the possibility of artificial
structures on Mars deserved serious scientific scrutiny and
investigation.
My reluctance arose from extreme skepticism about evidence for
extraterrestrial intelligence. UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and,
for that matter, lost ancient civilizations have tended to act as
magnets for various true believers who concoct elaborate theories of
official conspiracy and occult connections across the millennia. The
Cydonia mystery has certainly fit the pattern. The Internet has hosted
any number of Web sites that propose a secret geometric relationship
between the Cydonia structures and the Giza plateau, accuse NASA
of conspiring to obscure the “truth,” and even claim that ancient
Egyptian cult practices are
being secretly and purposefully used in the United States space
program. Such nonsense gets in the way of the rigorous, dispas-
sionate scientific work needed to get to the truth of the matter.
If Cydonia was the result of work by intelligent beings and
included a human face and other Earthlike structures, two basic
explanations were available. The first was largely a rewrite of
Sitchin’s astronauts-of-old idea—namely, that a civilization had
arisen on Mars and come to Earth, perhaps with unkind intentions,
and altered the history of our planet, possibly by importing
technology. This notion I found hard to swallow, for the very good
reasons I have already oudined. There was, however, a second basic
explanation. According to this hypothesis, life arose first on Mars.
Being farther from the sun, Mars cooled faster after the formation of
the solar system and may have offered conditions favorable to the
evolution of living things sooner than did Earth. Then, through some
unknown agency or mechanism, living cells were transported from
Mars to Earth, essentially seeding our planet. Perhaps the
transmission went the other way, with life arising first on Earth and
being transported to Mars. Thus life on the two planets shares a
common origin, yet over the eons has followed evolutionary paths
that were separate but in some ways convergent.
This second idea has a distinguished pedigree. One of the giants of
chemistry, Svante August Arrhenius, who won the Nobel Prize in
1903, speculated that life on Earth arose originally on some other
planet or planets and later spread here, as it did to other localities in
the universe. This idea, sometimes called panspermia or the
cosmozoic theory, has been discussed in various scholarly circles, but
scientific evidence for the model has been lacking.
Or at least it was until 1996, when a NASA scientific team led by
David McKay published a paper in the prestigious journal Science
arguing that a meteorite found in Antarctica and generally considered
to have come from Mars contained compelling evi-
dence of microbial life on the Red Planet. The meteorite, technically
named ALH84001, is a coarse-grained igneous rock that weighs a
little over four pounds, is 4.5 billion years old, and was fractured and
penetrated by water between about 4 and 3.6 billion years ago.
Approximately 16 million years in the past, the rock is thought to
have been ejected off the Martian surface as the result of an impact.
It eventually made its way to Earth, where it fell as a meteorite
approximately 13,000 years ago. In their studies of the meteorite,
McKay and his colleagues found tantalizing evidence of the presence
of life in carbonate minerals deposited in cracks in the Martian rock
about 3.6 billion years ago. Some of the evidence was chemical, some
of it shapes that suggested microscopic fossils of very small bacterial
organisms. Although no one finding was itself definitive, the data
taken as a whole led the NASA team to “conclude that they are
evidence for primitive life on Mars.”
This single sentence in the published paper caused an immense
scientific stir and fired up the media. Any number of researchers
attacked the findings as impossible, generally saying that the fossils
were too small to be the remnants of living forms and that the
chemical evidence resulted from biological contamination on Earth,
not from life on Mars. Yet none of the objections fully undercuts the
hypothesis, and new findings tend to support it. Further work by the
NASA team shows that ALH84001 contains an abundance of
hexagonal magnetite crystals that have a form produced by bacteria
in anaerobic, or oxygen-free, environments and that match crystals
found in Earth microbes in terms of size, shape, chemistry, and lack
of defects. Again, the evidence is not definitive. Yet, as of this writ-
ing, the hypothesis that simple organisms similar to bacteria existed
on Mars 3.6 billion years in the past is still alive and kicking.
 Obviously, it is a long way from a bacterium to the Pyramid of
Khufu (Cheops), yet the very suggestion that life could exist on
Mars added an extra edge to interest in the Face on Mars and the other
forms. Apparently yielding to pressure to provide additional data on
Cydonia, and rising to accusations that the agency had been
suppressing information about Martian cities and altering its
photographs of the planet to cover up the evidence, NASA dispatched
the Mars Global Surveyor to fly over the controversial area and take
a new series of photos. These images, snapped in 1998 at ten times
the resolution of the original Viking photographs and under different
conditions of light and shadow, stripped away much of the Cydonia
mystery. Now the Face looked less like a face than a weathered
landform. As physicist John Brandenburg put it, “At first blush, the
reaction is ‘Gee, it doesn’t look dramatic like the other pictures.’”
The initial Viking photos were taken in the Martian afternoon,
when the low angle of sunlight lengthens and deepens shadows. The
light also entered from the side, further distorting the Face. Imagine
looking at yourself in the mirror in a darkened bathroom with a
flashlight pointing toward your cheek. This was the perspective of
the Viking images, with one side in light and the other in shadow.
And since Viking wasn’t directly over the Face, the pictures were
taken at an angle through a cloudy atmosphere that blurred many
details. By contrast, the Mars Global Surveyor photos were taken
during the Martian morning with straight-on light. These conditions
turned the Face into something more like a hill composed of different
strata of rock that have weathered unevenly.
The more I have looked at these new images, the more I am
convinced that they are quite interesting but entirely natural features.
Arguing that they are artificial is a stretch, one simply not supported
by the evidence we have. Based on what we now know, the Face and
the other Cydonia structures are natural features formed by
geological processes under Martian conditions, which differ from
those on Earth and produce shapes of an appearance other than what
we are used to.
Mars may indeed have once harbored life, and it may still. The
recent discovery of colonies of bacteria in lakes of solid ice near the
South Pole shows that microbial organisms could possibly exist
under the frozen conditions found on Mars or the moons of Jupiter.
This avenue of investigation should be pursued. Yet there is no
reason to believe that the Atlantians arrived from Mars, in Plato’s
time or in any earlier era.

Bringing Atlantis Back to Earth

If Atlantis isn’t located on Thera, the Antarctic, Yonaguni, or Mars,
then just where is it? The answer, I suspect, is both prosaic and
fascinating, literary and historical—or, more properly, prehistorical.
It deepens, too, our understanding of the sophistication of ancient
peoples.
It begins in understanding what Plato, the sole ancient source for
Adantis, was up to. To begin with, Plato was a philosopher, not a
historian. He was interested in understanding the root nature of
reality, not in providing a detailed and objective account of events in
the distant past. In fact, the classical Greeks didn’t conceive of history
as we do. The very notion of recording history came into being only
in fifth-century B.c. Athens with Herodotus, who died about the time
Plato was born, and Thucydides, who died while Plato was still a
young man. Before them, history was as much myth as fact, and it
was recorded in the same poetic form as mythology. Even Herodotus
and Thucydides, who chose prose over poetry as their mode of
expression, picked up rumors and passed them on without much
analysis, seeing their role as one of instruction and entertainment as
much as one of weighing the facts. A good story remained a good
story, a tale that deserved to be told and listened to. The pleasure and
insight it gave mattered as much as its veracity.
Plato drew from this literary context. His dialogues are written in
the form of a play, itself a form of fiction that allows considerable
liberty with fact. They are not autobiographical; Plato does not
participate in the dialogues. Rather, he writes in a third- person
narrative about events set decades earlier, working much as a modern
historical novelist would. And even within the Critias and the
Timaeus, Plato takes pains to show how tenuous is the line of descent
by which the story came to him. Supposedly the tale of Atlantis was
heard from Egyptian priests by Solon, the great sixthcentury
Athenian lawgiver who, after his retirement from public life, went to
Egypt to study. Solon, according to Plato, wanted to turn the story of
the war between Atlantis and Athens into an epic, an artistic creation
of the same sort as the Iliad. Never completing the poem, which has
not survived (if indeed it existed), Solon told the story to Dropides,
who later told it to his son Critias, who, as an old man of nearly
ninety, repeated it to his grandson Critias, then a boy of only ten, the
one whose name attaches to Plato’s dialogue. By the time Plato, who
is Critias’s great grandson, received the story, it had crossed seven
generations, often from the very old to the very young. There is good
reason why Critias invokes the aid of the goddess of memory when
he begins his tale. It would be no small wonder if details or even
major events had not somehow slipped away or been altered in the
story’s migration from mouth to mouth across so much time.

Yet Plato has Socrates make the point that the story of Atlantis
“has the very great advantage of being a fact and not a fiction.” Surely
philosophers as insightful as Socrates and Plato understood the tricks
memory can play with the mind over time, and the changes that make
their way into stories told from generation to generation. What
possibly can Plato mean by “fact” in this context?
 I suspect that Plato was looking for the deeper level of philo-
sophical fact he was always seeking. In Plato’s view of the universe,
objective data such as numbers and dates meant little. They were
simply, in his famous metaphor, the shadows on the wall of the cave.
What mattered to Plato was the light streaming in from outside. All
his philosophical work was an investigation into its source.
One of Plato’s abiding concerns was the nature of the perfect state.
He believed strongly that the ideal political entity should be
organized in a manner that corresponded to the universal forms
underlying all reality. This interest led Plato to write the Republic and
the Laws, both of which are concerned solely with just and right
politics, and to spend some years in Syracuse as a tutor to that Greek
city’s ruler and an adviser in the pursuit of the perfect state. The
Timaeus and the Critias belong to this theme in Plato’s work. In both
of them, Atlantis is discussed only as an example serving Plato’s
general concern with ideal political order. This connection is so
strong that the renowned classicist Francis Cornford argued that
together the Timaeus, the Critias, and the Laws amount to an
unfinished trilogy on politics.
Yet, however freely Plato interpreted his poetic license in telling
the story of Atlantis, there is an undeniable historicity in the two
dialogues. Details of the tale have their roots in history well known
in Plato’s time. The bull worship of the Atlantians, for example, is
similar to what we know about the worship and rites of the Minoans.
Less than fifteen years before Plato wrote his two dialogues, the
Peloponnesian cities of Bura and Helike were leveled by an
earthquake and the latter sank into the Gulf of Corinth, a catastrophic
event that may have given the philosopher an idea or two about how
to destroy Atlantis. The staggering size of the Atlantian army sounds
strikingly similar to Thucydides’ overblown accounting of the
Persian horde Xerxes massed against the Greeks. And the
steadfastness of the Athenians against the Atlantian threat is much
like the Athenians’ willingness to stand, sometimes alone, against the
encroaching and aggressive Persian empire that wanted to turn their
independent land into just one more conquered province.
Plato’s story of Adantis is something of a mix-and-match. Some
details he has likely invented, others borrowed from various his-
torical events. As a result, there may well be a core of historical truth
underlying Plato’s brief accounts, one that teaches us something we
didn’t know about our past and that gives further insight into the
effects of natural catastrophe on history.
Mary Settegast, in Plato Prehistorian, makes an argument I find
both plausible and persuasive. She shows that in its broad outlines,
Plato’s story tells about a terrible war that rocked the Mediterranean
world and displaced whole populations, including the first Athenians.
And serving as a backdrop to this terrible war was a dramatic change
in climate.
In Plato’s telling, the god-fathered Atlantian race of 9,000 years
before, or circa 9600 B.c., that wrote laws, tamed and raced horses,
and controlled the land inside the Pillars of Heracles as far as Egypt
and Italy began to lust for power and decided to attack the peoples of
Europe and Asia. This description, Settegast argues, fits the
Magdalenian culture, the same one that gave rise to the magnificent
paintings of Lascaux and other cave sites in western Europe. A
strikingly wealthy Paleolithic culture with a developed sense of
artistic expression, the Magdalenians also apparently tamed horses—
making them, as far as we know, the first Europeans to do so—and
may have had a basic system of writing, attributes that Plato ascribes
to the Atlantians. In its heyday the Magdalenian culture reached
across most of western Europe as far as Italy. By 9600 B.C., Plato’s
date for the war between Atlantis and Athens, the Magdalenian
culture was showing signs of decay. In its western reaches in
particular, the Magdalenians were making more weapons than art, a
sign that ambition and desire for power were replacing the esthetic
pursuits of former days. Again, this fits Plato’s description of an
Atlantian people in decline.
Apparently the Magdalenians were acting on these new desires. In
circa 9600 B.C., peoples of uncertain origin who were adept at both
art and technology began settling what is now Israel, Palestine,
Lebanon, and western Syria. Certain artifacts from these ancient
sites, which are called Natufian, show a connection with early
cultures in the Balkans. Cemetery sites to the north, in the Ukraine,
and to the south, along the Nile, demonstrate considerable violence;
many of the skeletons carry flint arrow- and spearheads planted deep
within the bones, evidence that the dead were victims of war.
Palestine, however, was peaceful, a haven from the conflict to the
north and the south. It could well be that the Natufians, with ties to
southeastern Europe, were refugees from the Adantian/Magdalenian
armed advance, perhaps the proto-Greeks who Plato said organized
themselves against the threat from the west.
About a millennium later, in circa 8500 B.c., northern Europe and
the Levant are littered with arrowheads and other signs of all-out war.
This is the time period of Jericho’s fortified wall and batdement
tower, built to meet some external threat. And cave paintings from
this period depict scenes of battle: massed warrior hordes, victims
pierced by multiple arrows, combatants dancing in victory over the
slain. The war ran its course over approximately five centuries, with
the victor and the vanquished losing their identities as such over time.
Yet the cult of the warrior remained long after the hostilities ended.
In much of the Middle East, including Catal Huyuk, weapons were
crafted with extraordinary care despite the absence of organized
fighting and used at ceremonial sites. Perhaps these daggers,
arrowheads, and spear points commemorated the great war of the
ninth millennium B.c., even as Homer’s Iliad memorialized the
Trojan War centuries after the event.
Memory of the war against Atlantis could also be the source of the
mythological story of Zeus’s battle against the monster Typhon, a
tale generally considered to have originated in the Middle East. In the
tale Typhon attacks Zeus, who finally defeats him with sickle and
thunderbolt. Many of the events in the myth as told by Apollodorus
occur at geographical locations that are the very places where battles
of the war of the ninth millennium B.C. raged. And the particular
weapons Zeus used—the sickle and the thunderbolt, actually a type
of polished stone ax— appear in abundance in these same areas.
Key aspects of this series of archaeological events fit Plato’s out-
line. The western Mediterranean was pitted against the eastern, even
as the Atlantians outside the Pillars of Heracles massed against the
Athenians and their European and Asian allies. In Plato’s telling,
Africa was not attacked by the Atlantians. And in fact, even as
hostilities raged in Europe and the Near East, Africa west of the Nile
Delta was occupied by a different culture and free of war. The
Magdalenian association with horses also fits, since the Atlantians
were said to be descendants of Poseidon, god of horses, and they bred
and raced the animals.
There is even a catastrophe, though on a time scale far longer than
Plato’s single day and night of destruction. As we have already
discussed in relation to the ancient cultures of the Nile, the melting
of glaciers and ice caps at the end of the last ice age raised sea level
dramatically, with the Mediterranean rising two hundred or more feet
beginning in the ninth millennium B.C. The swelling waters swamped
many coastal settlements, displaced whole villages and perhaps even
cities, and created a tide of homeless refugees seeking new places to
live. The changing climate of these years resulted, too, in vastly
increased rainfall. Archaeological evidence from the Middle East
indicates that in about 7500 B.C., extraordinarily heavy rains resulted
in widespread, catastrophic flooding throughout the region—perhaps
the deluges that Plato says washed away the Athenian acropolis and
stripped soil and forests from the Greek mountains. Such events may
also have contributed to the war and its devastating aftermath brought
on by Atlantian ambition, as the have-nots set upon the haves, and
those with a lust for power exploited the weakness of their uprooted
neighbors.
The tale that comes from Settegast’s reconstruction of the
archaeological evidence lacks the sudden drama of Plato’s pic- ture
of a civilization destroyed in a single day and night of misfortune and
thereafter lost to history. It does, though, convey evidence showing
that the peoples of ancient Europe and the Middle East, like the
culture that carved the Great Sphinx of Giza in predynastic Egypt,
were accomplished and sophisticated.
The war of the ninth millennium B.C., which pitted the western
Mediterranean against the eastern, was as extensive and terrible in its
day as the Hundred Years’ War followed by the Reformation, or
either of the two world wars of this century. Engaging in hostilities
of such an extent requires great organizational and social skill.
Armies, in Neolithic times as in our own age, must be trained, armed,
transported from place to place, and supported by a logistical
network. These people of long ago were engaging in major military
endeavors long before the rise of anything we think of as a military
kingdom or an empire. That fact says a great deal about their abilities.
Further evidence of the highly organized nature of the Mag-
dalenians in particular comes from the striking homogeneity of that
culture’s art. Although tribal peoples in our own and recent times
create art that varies from one tribe to another and from place to place,
Magdalenian art was remarkably consistent throughout the whole of
southwestern Europe. Whenever the style of the art changed, it
changed across the whole culture.
There is more going on here than one artist copying his or her
neighbor. It is rather as if some single source of authority were
prescribing how art was to be done and promulgating these rules to
all Magdalenian artists—something like the pope in the Vatican
communicating points of the faith to local dioceses across the world.
“Wherever it [the central point of control] may have been located,
this was, following Plato, the home base of the Atlantic governors,
from whom the art of Europe as far as Tyrrhe- nia was receiving its
uniform direction and style,” Settegast writes. Artistic uniformity,
like the massive size of the ninth-millennium war, adds further to the
impression of a large, well-organized people spread over an extensive
area, yet able to act in an organized, unified, and coordinated manner.
The aftermath of the war, the rise in sea level, and the cataclysmic
floods created a mixing of cultures that resulted in the striking
brilliance of Qatal Huyuk. In its day, £atal Huyuk was like the
imperial Rome of the Caesars, a cosmopolitan center that attracted
all of the religious traditions, cultures, and peoples of the time.
Human remains in the city’s ruins show that the inhabitants
represented European and Middle Eastern physical types, and its wall
paintings depict black-skinned dancers who must be Africans. The
ritual life of Qatal Huyuk likewise mixed elements that came from
the Aegean, Persia, and Egypt. In addition, the city’s cult represented
a major step forward from the religious practices of earlier times.
Formerly, people made offerings to the gods and goddesses as a way
of guaranteeing good harvests and healthy livestock. Going beyond
this simple quid pro quo, the people of Gatal Huyuk practiced a
mystery religion based on a search for freedom for the human soul
through transformation and metamorphosis, an idea that appeared in
classical Greece in the Eleusian mysteries and flowered later in
Mithraism, Orphism, and Christianity. As with military organization
and artistic uniformity, the advanced religion of Gatal Huyuk
provides further evidence of the sophistication of these ancient
Neolithic societies.
This, then, was Adantis—a great, terrible, and long-past war
exacerbated by natural catastrophe and involving peoples of striking
skill and sophistication. Its history serves to remind us, as Plato said,
that “There have been, and will be again, many destructions of
mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest of these have been
brought about by the agencies of fire and water....”
 Fire and Water

PAUSE A MOMENT TO CONSIDER AGAIN PLATO’S WORDS: “THERE have been...

many destructions of mankind...; the greatest of these have been
brought about by the agencies of fire and water....” The ancient
philosopher had a point. Again and again in human history, flame and
flood have visited widespread destruction on civilization.
As an example of the role of fire, we can journey 3,200 years into
the past. And for a sense of the power of water to change history, we
can turn to the mythological tradition and the stunningly dramatic
geological testimony of eastern Washington’s water- scarred
landscape. Then we must ask ourselves how such events come to
pass.

The Bronze Age’s Fiery Finish

Troy, whose destruction at the hands of vengeful Greeks Homer
described in intimately gory detail in the Iliad and the Odyssey, was
in fact but one of scores of cities and palaces razed at the end of the
Bronze Age, circa 1200 B.C. Indeed, two successive Troys, Troy VIh
and Troy Vila in archaeologist’s shorthand, were destroyed at the site
known today as Hissarlik. The survivors of the first destruction
moved back into the ruined city, which had been burned to the
ground, and rebuilt it, only to see it leveled by fierce flames yet again.
The same fate befell practically every significant community in the
eastern Mediterranean outside Egypt and Mesopotamia between
approximately 1200 B.C. and 1175 B.C. NO important Bronze Age site
in Anatolia, within modern Turkey, escaped destruction; all were
burned. Cyprus’s three principal cities were consumed by flames,
possibly twice, like Troy. Ugarit, in what is now western Syria, was
burned to the ground and never again occupied. The destruction
descended heavily on Palestine and what became known as Israel in
the Iron Age, particularly close to the coast. None of the palaces of
Late Helladic Greece—such as Mycenae, the regal seat of
Agamemnon, the mythic Greek king who led the fleet of a thousand
ships to Troy and was slain by his wife and her lover on his return—
survived long into the twelfth century B.c. It is hard to find any
important sites in the affected regions, except in the interior of the
southern Levant, that were spared destruction at least once. Even
smaller communities that escaped burning were abandoned
inexplicably, their residents fleeing to someplace new, someplace
they must have hoped would be a safe haven against the storms of
death and destruction raging all around them.
The cultural and political effects of the Bronze Age catastrophe
changed the course of human history in the region. The palace-
centered culture of Myceanean Greece, which Homer lauded in the
Iliad and the Odyssey, was lost except to the memory of poets. The
Hittite empire, which had brought peace and prosperity to Anatolia,
collapsed. The Levant recovered more quickly, but it was centuries
before the same level of urban civilization was again reached. And
Egypt, though it escaped the flames, was attacked by wave upon
wave of armed refugees and so weakened by these struggles that the
New Kingdom soon came to an end. Taken in sum, the cataclysm
marking the end of the Bronze Age was the greatest disaster in
ancient history, an event more destructive, though less well known,
than the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Still, for all the physical evidence of this rapid and widespread
catastrophe, its exact cause remains uncertain. There are scattered
signs and stories of war, not the least of them being Homer’s epic
work. Yet there is no evidence of external invasion, as there is for the
war between the Atlantians and the Athenian- led peoples of the
eastern Mediterranean, or of extended hostilities between the
principal peoples of the region, such as the Greeks and the Hittites.
And if the devastation resulted from a war waged to steal wealth from
others, why was the destruction so complete? It makes no sense for
invaders to burn to the ground the very cities they wished to possess
and occupy as their own.
This is an anomaly: a widespread, sudden, fierce destruction
without apparent cause or obvious explanation. And, like any good
geologist, I begin my search for a cause in the workings of planet
Earth.

Mountains of Fire
As volcanoes sometimes do, Vesuvius gave the residents of Pompeii
a warning. On August 24, A.D. 79, the formerly quiet volcano literally
blew its top. Ash and pumice gravel exploded in a tall mushroom-
cloud column towering over 60,000 feet into the atmosphere, then
fell to the ground. The pumice and ash posed little direct threat to
human life, but the weight of the accumulating debris, which piled
up over eight feet in places, collapsed roofs and rendered houses
dangerous and uninhabitable. Forced out of their homes, most of
Pompeii’s 20,000 residents fled, leaving behind about 2,000 people
who chose to stay. Next morning the volcano erupted again, sending
what is known as a pyroclastic flow—a fast-moving, ground-hugging
avalanche of extremely hot ash and gas—into Pompeii. The
Pompeiians who had stayed behind died within seconds or minutes,
their desiccated corpses buried in fine ash and awaiting discovery by
modern archaeologists.

The eruption that buried and preserved Pompeii was not par-
ticularly big, devastating, or unusual, by either modern or ancient
standards. The most destructive volcanic eruption in this century
occurred on May 8, 1902, on the West Indian island of Martinique.
A pyroclastic flow surging down the slopes of Mont Pelee burned the
town of St. Pierre to cinders and left 29,000 dead. And the nineteenth
century saw two huge volcanic eruptions in what is now Indonesia.
Tambora, which erupted in 1815, was the larger of the two, yet since
it happened in a remote part of the world, its effects were little
documented. Krakatoa is the better known, largely because its
explosion, in August 1883, came after the invention of the telegraph,
which allowed news of the blast to be sent rapidly around the world.
Almost the entire island of Krakatoa detonated in one massive
eruption that is estimated to have been fifty times greater than the
atomic blast over Hiroshima. The explosion was so loud that it
awakened sleepers in their beds in Australia, and it was heard as far
off as Madagascar, about 2,200 miles away. Relatively few people
were killed by the explosion itself, because the area was thinly
populated. But the blast caused tidal waves, or tsunamis, that reached
up to 130 feet in height. Almost 200 villages along the coasts of Java
and Sumatra were swept away, and some 36,000 people were killed.
Volcanoes can also kill and devastate if part of the mountain falls
away during an eruption, forming a thundering river of mud and
debris the consistency of concrete, moving at fifty miles an hour.
Called a lahar, such a flow from the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in
Colombia buried the community of Armero at the foot of the
mountain under thirty feet of mud and killed 23,000 people in 1985.
A much larger lahar swept from Mount Rainier, outside Seatde, to
Puget Sound 5,600 years ago. Today about 100,000 people live on
what was the path of that mudflow, in the shadow of the volcano
considered the most dangerous in the United States.
All by themselves, however, volcanoes are no more destructive
than earthquakes or tsunamis, which can level cities and exact an
enormous toll on life and limb, but whose effects are primarily local.
Volcanoes are distinct in that they can have powerful deleterious
effects over regions of the Earth far, far away from the eruption.
Krakatoa is a good example. When the volcano exploded, it sent a
gargantuan column of ash into the atmosphere that turned the area
around the volcano night-black for over twenty-four hours and rose
to an estimated altitude of fifty miles. From there it spread in the
windstreams of the high atmosphere, streaking sunsets with vivid
colors and turning skies murky. Within a year the ash made its way
from the southern hemisphere into the northern. Because the ash layer
reflected sunlight back into space, the weather in the affected regions
cooled—a smaller- scale version of the nuclear winter scenario.
Following the Krakatoa eruption, temperatures were abnormally cool
for five years. After Tambora erupted, the summer of 1816 was so
unusually cold that crops in New England failed because of killer
frosts striking repeatedly in the middle of summer. The next two
years were only a little warmer.
The summer of 1601 was equally nonexistent. In February and
March 1600, Volcan Huaynaputina in the Peruvian Andes erupted.
According to research by Shanaka da Silva of Indiana State
University and Gregory A. Zielinski of the University of New
Hampshire, the eruption voided at least six cubic miles of molten
rock and blanketed southern Peru and portions of Bolivia and Chile—
about 180,000 square miles—with volcanic ash. About one thousand
people died, and it took over 150 years for the economy of the area
to recover fully.
Complementary research by Keith R. Briffa and his colleagues at
the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, studied the cool-
summer effect by examining wood density in tree rings. During warm
summers, growing trees lay down denser wood, making
ring density a good marker for summertime temperatures— denser
annual rings in warmer years, less dense in cooler ones. Studying ring
density data from across the northern hemisphere, Briffa found that
the summer of 1601 stood out like the proverbial sore thumb,
surpassing even the Tambora summers of 1815-17 for unseasonable
coolness. The Huaynaputina eruption was probably at least partly
responsible, although additional undocumented eruptions in North
America may have also played a role.
Geological history reveals other, even larger eruptions that likely
had profound climatic effects. The Yellowstone caldera in northwest
Wyoming marks an enormous volcanic event of approximately
600,000 years ago. The quantity of pumice and ash lofted into the
atmosphere was six times that of Tambora, fifty times Krakatoa’s.
Currendy we have no accurate measure of the chilling this massive
eruption caused, but it must have been profound.
Clearly volcanoes can cause local catastrophes with widespread
regional effects on climate. Still, in terms of finding the culprit behind
the fiery destruction at the end of the Bronze Age, they are an
unlikely, even impossible, candidate. There simply is no evidence for
significant volcanic activity in the Mediterranean region at the right
time. The Thera eruption at 1410 BC ± 100, discussed in chapter 4 in
regard to Adantis, happened too early, and it was too small to account
for all of the devastadon occurring around 1200 B.C. Whatever
brought the Bronze Age to its end, it wasn’t a volcano.

The Moving Earth

But could it have been an earthquake? The eminent excavator C. F.
A. Schaeffer first suggested that a devastating series of earthquakes
was the Bronze Age culprit, and his idea has been championed by
several archaeologists since then. Certainly, the idea bears looking at.
The eastern Mediterranean is seismically active, and major
earthquakes are known to have affected the area in both recent and
ancient times. During the great batde of Joshua against Jericho, for
example, which occurred about two hundred years after the end of
the Bronze Age, it may well have been an earthquake that brought
the walls tumbling down.

The problem with the earthquake explanation is that it doesn’t fit

the data well. As Robert Drews points out in The End of the Bronze
Age, earthquakes often damaged ancient cities, but in the absence of
other factors, like a simultaneous armed attack, they very rarely
completely destroyed them. One of the few exceptions occurred in
373 B.C. when a devastating earthquake hit the Gulf of Corinth in
Greece. The city of Bura was leveled, and the city of Helike sank
under the waters of the widened gulf—an event that, as we saw in
chapter 4, may have given Plato ideas about the end of Atlantis.
Generally, however, when earthquakes struck ancient cities, the
survivors would rebuild their homes rather than abandon them, as
happened at the end of the Bronze Age. In some ancient cities, it
seems, earthquakes became a regular part of life. Constantinople
(formerly known as Byzantium, and now the modern Istanbul), for
instance, apparently experienced a major earthquake on average once
or twice a century in ancient and Byzantine times, and tremors much
more often. Still, the city survived and flourished.
Furthermore, earthquakes in ancient times were not associated
with devastating fires, like the blaze that turned San Francisco into a
smoking ruin in 1906. The raging fires that often accompany modern
earthquakes are due to broken gas pipes, snapped electrical cables,
and so forth. Of course, ancient cities lacked gas and electricity. An
overturned lamp might cause a small fire that could destroy a single
building, but even that appears to have been an unusual occurrence.
Most ancient cities were built principally of masonry, with the result
that small, localized fires did not easily spread over great distances.
A study of several hundred earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean
region between 600 B.C. and A.D. 600 showed that not a single one was
responsible for a citywide fire. Yet it is this very sort of major
conflagration, repeated again and again, that typifies the end of the
Bronze Age.
Clearly earthquakes, like volcanoes, did not finish off Troy or any
of the other great Bronze Age cities.

The Ubiquitous Tradition of the Flood

The Iliad and the Odyssey tell not only of Troy’s last days and the
war’s terrible aftermath, but also of a fateful contest between strong
men. On the Greek side there stand Odysseus, a warrior skilled in all
manner of contending, a strategist sneaky enough to develop the idea
of breaching Troy’s walls in a wooden horse; Agamemnon the
general and his brother Menelaus, who wishes to avenge the theft of
his wife, Helen; Ajax, a warrior with more brawn than brain; and
Achilles, the most brilliant fighter of all, the one whose wounded
pride nearly leads to the destruction of the Greeks. The Trojans were
led by Priam, their king, and Priam’s son Hector, famed as a tamer of
horses and a warrior to match mighty Achilles.
The two Homeric epics also tell the story of a fierce conflict among
the gods. Achilles himself was part divine and part human, the son of
the mortal Peleus and the immortal sea nymph Thetis. The gods and
goddesses of Olympus chose sides: Zeus, Apollo, and Artemis
supporting the Trojans; Poseidon, Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, and Athena
backing the Greeks. Indeed, without Athena, Odysseus would never
have survived his ten-year journey home to Ithaca, or found the
strength to reclaim his palace from the suitors eager to marry his wife,
Penelope, and take control of his wealth.
The mythic element in the Homeric poems makes an important
point about the Trojan War and about the wider destruction that
formed a backdrop for this particular drama. The catastrophe of the
Bronze Age was not simply the work of human warriors caught up in
a lust for adventure, riches, and the spoils of war. It was also the
playground of gods and goddesses, those forces in the world that
stand far above the merely human and that often govern fate
according to their will and whim.
The same interplay arises in another, and much older, mythic event
of widespread destruction. Practically everyone knows the biblical
story of the great flood told in the Old Testament book of Genesis.
Not long after God created humankind, he became angry at the evil
doings of men and women and resolved to cleanse the Earth of all
life in a deluge. God chose, however, to spare Noah from the general
destruction because of his piety and goodness. God instructed Noah
to build a huge floating box, or ark (from a Latin word meaning
“chest”), and to fill it with his family and the male and female of
every species of animal. No sooner had Noah finished his carpentry
than God loosed torrents of water upon the world, drowning
everything that breathed and floating Noah’s ark on the great wet
blanket that covered the face of the world. Months passed before the
waters drained away enough for Noah and his ark to strike dry land,
supposedly on Mount Ararat in modern Armenia, and offer sacrifice
to God, who promised never again to destroy the world by flood.

The Greeks told a similar story, detailed by Apollodorus and

borrowed for retelling by the Roman poet Ovid. Like the tale of
Noah, the Greek myth concerns the fate of humankind in the early
days soon after the original creation. Zeus was angered by the
impious sons of Lycaon, who sacrificed boys to the gods and who
tried to deceive Zeus into eating their flesh. Zeus decided to remove
all humans from Earth as well as Lycaon’s blasphemous brood, and
to this end he prepared a great, world-cleansing flood. Warned by his
father, the Titan Prometheus, about the coming of the waters, the king
Deucalion constructed a huge floating box and went aboard with his
queen, Pyrrha, just as Zeus unleashed the flood. After the waters
crested and subsided, Deucalion landed on a mountain—some say it
was Parnassus; others claim it was Aetna in Sicily, Athos in northern
Greece, or Othrys in Thessaly—and sacrificed to Zeus.
The stories of Noah and Deucalion share a great many similarities
in both general oudine and specific detail. The gods share similar
motivation, and the mortals escape through a divine
warning that tells them to build a big floating box. To determine
whether the flood had really ended, Noah released a series of birds
from the ark. When the dove returned with an olive branch in its
mouth, he knew the worst was over. Deucalion was likewise
reassured about the end of the cataclysm by a returning dove. Given
these and the many other commonalities between the two myths, it is
more than likely that the Noah story or a similar tale made its way
from the Middle East to Greece, where it was revised to fit local gods
and geography.
Yet the myth of Noah’s flood hardly originated with the Hebrews.
The scriptures for the early books of the Old Testament were
recorded in their current form in the fifth century B.c., when the
temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt after the return of the Hebrew people
from captivity in Babylon. A much older Mesopotamian source, the
Epic of Gilgamesh, recounts a flood story unmistakably similar to the
Noah and Deucalion tales.
Gilgamesh, the part-human, part-god king of the city of Uruk,
suffered inconsolable grief following the death of his beloved friend,
Enkidu. Resolving to unravel the secret of life and death, Gilgamesh
made his way through many dangers and obstacles to find
Utnapishtim, a mortal man who had earned the gift of immortal life.
In a story within the story, Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh of the world-
destroying flood he had survived many centuries earlier. Again the
cause was divine anger, in this case from the god Enlil, who was tired
of having his heavenly sleep disturbed by the ceaseless clamorings of
humans below. Warned of the coming catastrophe by another god,
Ea, Utnapishtim built yet another floating box and filled it with living
creatures in breeding pairs. Again the flood waters came, again they
receded, again the hero learned of the return of dry land through the
behavior of a bird, and again he sacrificed to the gods. Contrite over
his destructive anger, Enlil bestowed eternal life upon Utnapishtim
and his wife.
The final version of the Gilgamesh story dates to the seventh
century B.c., yet its sources are considerably older. Most scholars
believe the poem was originally written down by no later than the
early centuries of the second millennium B.C. It certainly existed in
oral form before that, and perhaps even in written form, which pushes
its date of composition back into the third millennium, between 3000
and 2000 B.C. And if the epic commemorates a real event, the
catastrophe that inspired the poem must have happened sometime
before 2000 B.C.
Remarkably, this particular flood tale, which arose in
Mesopotamia and then traveled to Israel and Greece, is only one of
an extraordinarily large number of mythic flood stories. Among the
Greeks, for example, the story of the deluge from which Deucalion
was spared was not unique. Greek mythology recounts other floods
of equal devastation. In the Critias, Plato tells of the deluge that
swept away the Athenian acropolis: “For the fact is that a single night
of excessive rain washed away the earth and laid bare the rock; at the
same time there were earthquakes, and then occurred the
extraordinary inundation, which was the third before the great
destruction of Deucalion.” If Plato is to be believed, apocalyptic
floods were a regular horror in pre- classical Greece.
As we have seen in our discussion of Atlantis, archaeological
evidence from the Near East points to catastrophic flooding in the
region in circa 7500 B.C. Bill Ryan and Walt Pitman of New York’s
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have argued that another great
flood occurred in the eastern Mediterranean in about 5000 B.C. At that
time the Black Sea was smaller than it is today, and composed of
fresh water, making it more lake than sea. A huge plug of silt
separated it from the Mediterranean. Then, as the Mediterranean’s
sea level rose in the aftermath of the last ice age, salt water forced its
way through, first as a trickle, then in a cascade with the force of two
hundred Niagaras and a roar that could be heard for sixty miles in
every direction. Within a few months, over 35,000 square miles of
land were flooded,
destroying farming villages on the shores of the former lake and
possibly giving rise to stories that made their way to Mesopotamia
and the poets who composed Gilgamesh.
If these ancient floods were the only such cataclysms of prehis-
torical times, we would expect flood stories to originate in the Near
East and the eastern Mediterranean alone. Yet flood stories from
traditions other than the Gilgamesh-Noah-Deucalion lineage appear
literally all over the world. Accounts of floods so massively
destructive that they threatened all living things are found in
indigenous cultures throughout Europe, the Middle East, Persia and
the Indian subcontinent, Tibet and Mongolia, China and East Asia,
the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagoes, Australia and the
Pacific islands, and North, Central, and South America. Flood stories
number in the hundreds and span an extraordinary range not only of
the globe but also of cultures, physical environments, climates,
religious traditions, and language groups.
Such a welter of myths provides a body of fascinating if intangible
evidence. Were there only a few such stories, we could dismiss them
as exaggeration or imagination. Yet this global diversity of traditions,
all of them telling of floods that threatened the very existence of our
species, points to some terrible, long- past event or events lost to
direct memory, yet preserved in the ancient form of storytelling.
There are two basic possibilities. Either an overwhelming flood
devastated the Earth long, long ago, before humankind fanned out
over the planet and carried the story of the destruction with it. Or
sudden, terrible, seemingly world-destroying floods were a regular
feature of human life, at least in prehistoric times.

The Great Floods of North America

Further evidence of the prehistoric reality of huge floods comes from
our own continent. As the last ice age was ending and sea level was
rising, portions of North America were swept by floods that, like the
rush of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, would have certainly
looked like the end of the world to anyone who witnessed them.
Based on evidence taken from sediments in the Gulf of Mexico, C.
Emiliani and his scientific colleagues argued that about 11,600 years
ago a great rush of fresh water flooded down the Mississippi Valley
from the Great Lakes region into the gulf. The water came from
extremely rapid melting of the retreating glaciers in what is now the
American upper Midwest and southern Canada. According to
Emiliani, the flood was so great that sea level around the world rose
by a foot or more a year—an astonishing one hundred feet in a mere
century at that rate—which “could be an explanation for the deluge
stories common to many Eurasian, Australasian, and American
traditions.” And, of course, the date of Emiliani’s flood corresponds
almost too perfecdy with Plato’s date of 9600 B.c. for the destruction
of Atlantis.
Emiliani’s work has drawn considerable fire from other geologists,
notably Herbert Wright. Wright argues that the data don’t support the
suddenness Emiliani proposes. A great deal of fresh water did enter
the Gulf of Mexico, but over a much longer period of time that
stretched between 18,000 and 11,500 years ago. And, Wright says,
geological evidence on the size of the North American glaciers, and
especially the volume of water in the ice that melted during the
millennia in question, indicates that the total amount of water added
to the oceans from this particular meltdown may have amounted to
only two feet over the whole 6,500 years, not a foot a year.
In evaluating these competing ideas, I am struck by Emiliani’s
overprecision and Wright’s clear bias toward a uniformitarian
explanation. Emiliani’s scenario is questionable at best, but he may
be correct in some general way, if not in the specifics. In fact, when
we investigate ice ages later in this chapter, we will discuss a sudden
warming trend that occurred at just about the time Emiliani
hypothesized.
The great North American flood that is not subject to question
by scientists and scholars occurred in what is now the Pacific
Northwest, approximately 15,000 years ago. At the time, a huge
inland sea called Lake Missoula, which had backed up behind an
immense glacial dam in northern Idaho, extended far into western
Montana and contained more water than present-day Lake Erie and
Lake Ontario combined. When the dam collapsed, 500 cubic miles of
water rushed out, beginning as a wave of water and ice 2,000 feet
high, surging westward toward the Pacific at an estimated sixty miles
per hour, and flowing at a rate ten times greater than all the rivers of
Earth combined. Stop and think about that for a moment. If you put
together the planet’s rivers—the Amazon, the Congo, the
Mississippi, the Plate, the Ganges, the Mekong, the Nile, the Saint
Lawrence, the Danube, the Don, the Volga, and all the rest—and
consider how much water they discharge in an hour, you would still
have only one-tenth the per- hour quantity of water that poured out
of Lake Missoula during the two days of the catastrophe. In its fierce
rush, the flood carved canyons, scooped out enormous plunge pools
below waterfalls that would have made Niagara look like a child’s
plaything, forced rivers such as the Snake and the Willamette to flow
backward, cut the spectacular cliffs of the Columbia Gorge, and
stripped away 200 feet of soil in parts of eastern Washington, leaving
only bare basalt. The flood may have happened again and again,
possibly dozens of times, as the glacial dam re-formed, held the
waters back, then collapsed once more.
As the evidence from Monte Verde shows, the Americas were
inhabited by humans when Lake Missoula flooded. An event so
calamitous would surely make its way into mythology and story. And
if such a flood occurred on this continent, others may well have
occurred elsewhere in the world.

The Coming—and the Going—of the Ice

The ancient floods we have described—the torrential rains of circa
7500 B.C. in the Middle East, the Black Sea flood, Lake Mis- soula’s
high-speed rush to the Pacific, and Emiliani’s questionable scenario
of a sudden freshwater surge into the Gulf of Mexico—all share a
common element: the retreat of heavy glaciers at the end of the most
recent ice age. To understand more about the capacity of water to
wreak devastation, we need to look at the climatic processes leading
to the advance and retreat of ice caps.

To begin with, weather and climate aren’t the same thing. To

understand the difference, consider climate what we expect and
weather what we get. To characterize climate, scientists look at
averages of weather over time in terms of measures like inches of
snowfall and rain, number of cloudy versus sunny days, wind speed,
maximum and minimum temperatures, and similar data. Usually a
very wet year, for example, is balanced out by a very dry year, so that
climate tends to balance out around some relatively constant point.
Yet climate can vary over time, sometimes abruptly and fiercely.
Geological history shows that over the past several million years
there have been a number of periods, each lasting tens of thousands
of years, when the climate over the entire Earth was much colder than
it is now and when extensive glaciers covered significant portions of
the northern hemisphere. During the past 750,000 years alone, major
glaciers have extended from the polar region southward into the
United States and Canada at least eight times. The ice fields reached
their greatest size about 20,000 years ago, penetrating as far south as
Ohio and Indiana and reaching depths of up to two miles. Then,
starting approximately 14,000 years ago, the ice fields began to melt
and retreat, uncovering the land that had lain beneath them and
altering the topography and biology of the continent. Glacial melt
filled immense basins gouged out by the ice, creating the Great
Lakes, Lake Winnipeg, Great Bear Lake, and Great Slave Lake, as
well as the tens of thousands of smaller bodies of water in the conti-
nent’s center. The wet forested zone between the Rockies and the
Cascades dried up, forming today’s Great Basin deserts. The
extensive waterways in that region vanished or shrank, leaving the
Great Salt Lake—which once was 1,200 feet deeper than it is now,
and as big as Lake Michigan—a shadow of its former self. Cold-
loving spruce trees retreated a thousand miles north with the glaciers,
and a number of animal species that had once been common during
the glacial period, such as mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-
toothed tigers, disappeared.
Although the ice has yet to return, by no means has the climate
been constant since the end of the glacial retreat in circa 5000 B.C.
For example, between A.D. 800 and 1200, the northern hemisphere
warmed so much that wine grapes were cultivated in Norway, and
Vikings pioneered farming villages on Greenland. In the 1400s the
climate turned so cold that the Greenland settlers could no longer
grow crops and had to abandon the island to the Inuit. The climate
remained cold until the 1800s, forming what is sometimes referred to
as the Little Ice Age. A dramatically beautiful reminder of this four-
hundred-year period of glaciation can be seen in California’s
Desolation Valley Wilderness Area, southwest of Lake Tahoe. The
wilderness area is named for a sparkling gray-granite valley scoured
out by a glacier that lasted well into the nineteenth century. Only in
the past few decades have a few hardy whitebark pines moved onto
the granite the glacier scraped clean, leaving a landscape as stark as
the moon’s and as stunning as a Taoist silk painting.
Apparently climate moves in both very long-term cycles and
shorter-term changes. A number of theories have been proposed to
account for both types of climatic behavior. For example, short-term
climate changes, like the Little Ice Age, have been attributed to
sunspots. Sunspots are essentially storms or flare- ups of the surface
of the sun that occur with some predictable periodicity on cycles
lasting eleven and twenty-two years. There also appears to be a
longer-term cycle in which sunspot activity drops to a minimum
approximately every 2,500 years. The Litde Ice Age does appear to
correspond to the last period of low sunspot activity. The problem
with this model is that it provides no clear mechanism connecting
sunspot activity with the Earth’s climate. Simply, what do sunspots
have to do with climate? Increased sunspot activity might send more
solar energy to the Earth’s surface, but it is uncertain if this is the
case, or whether the increase would significantly affect the climate.
We just don’t know whether there is any connection other than
coincidence.
Plate tectonics, a theory of continental movement we will explore
later in this chapter, has also been put forward as a model to explain
the ice ages. Shifts in relative position between continents and ocean
basins can drastically affect climate. But plate tectonics works very
slowly, over millions of years, and it can hardly account for an event
like the melting of the most recent ice age over a mere seven-
thousand-year period. Very likely the continents have to be arranged
in a particular pattern for an ice age to occur, but all by itself the
model doesn’t identify the cause of encroaching glaciation or its
subsequent retreat.
Volcanoes have also been put forward as an ice age cause. As
Krakatoa, Tambora, and Huaynaputina show, volcanic eruptions can
put enough dust into the upper atmosphere to substantially cool the
planet for three to five years. Yet three to five years do not make an
ice age, nor are there good data to prove a convincing correlation
between extensive volcanic activity and growing glaciers. Volcanoes
may well contribute to glaciation, but it appears unlikely that they
can initiate an ice age all by themselves.
To better understand the genesis of ice ages, we have to take a step
back and remind ourselves of something basic: Earth is not all alone
in the universe. The best explanation for warming and cooling trends
in climate comes from understanding the subtle mechanics of our
planet’s orbit around the sun.
In terms of energy flow, the Earth’s surface is an open system. It
constancy receives energy from the sun and constancy returns this
energy to space. Approximately 30 percent of the solar energy that
hits the upper atmosphere is reflected back immedi-
ately, and another 20 percent is absorbed by water vapor in the air,
leaving only 50 percent to reach the surface of the planet. Most of
this 50 percent goes into evaporating surface water and thus reenters
the atmosphere, from which it eventually radiates back into space as
heat. This cycling of energy, from the sun to the surface of Earth and
back into space, is the machine that drives weather and makes
climate.
Obviously, if less energy is coming into the system or if more is
radiated back, then Earth cools. Glaciers can form. And, equally
obviously, if more energy reaches the surface or if less of it returns
to space, the planet warms. Then any glaciers in existence can retreat
or even disappear.
As far back as the nineteenth century, various scientists wondered
whether Earth’s orbital path around the sun and changes in the pattern
of energy striking the surface of the planet had anything to do with
the beginnings and the ends of ice ages. The mathematician Milutin
Milankovitch elaborated and popularized this idea in the 1920s,
developing a theory that most scientists of the time dismissed as
wrongheaded. Data gathered since the 1970s, however, have shown
that Milankovitch pretty well understood the process.
Milankovitch maintained that ice ages come and go through the
complex interaction of three separate orbital cycles, all of them
happening simultaneously. The first of these is called eccentricity.
That is, Earth’s orbit around the sun follows the path not of a circle,
but an ellipse—which means the orbit is slightly oval. What’s more,
the ellipse slowly gets longer, then gets shorter again, varying about
2 percent approximately every 100,000 years. When Earth is farther
away from the sun in its larger orbit, it receives less energy and cools,
while it receives more and warms when it is closer.
The second cycle Milankovitch identified involves the tilt of
Earth’s axis. The axis on which our planet rotates isn’t perpendicular
to the plane of the orbit. Rather it is tilted, currently by
approximately 23.5 degrees. This tilt, known technically as obliquity,
varies between 21.6 and 24.5 degrees over a 41,000-year cycle. In the
low latitudes closer to the equator, tilt affects climate minimally. But
at high latitudes, particularly near the poles, the influence of tilt is
profound. When Earth reaches maximum obliquity of 24.5 degrees,
the winter dark extends farther south, into lower latitudes, and the
cold is deeper. And when the obliquity moves toward the minimum
of 21.6 degrees, the winter dark is confined to higher latitudes and
the season itself is warmer.
Obliquity interacts with the third of Milankovitch’s cycles, the one
we have seen before: precession. This slow wobble of the Earth’s axis
affects the seasonal balance of radiation because it changes the timing
of the points in the annual orbital cycle at which Earth is farthest from
and closest to the sun. The timing shift moves on a cycle of about
22,000 years. Between them, tilt and precession can alter the amount
of solar radiation in high latitudes by some 15 percent.
The strongest validation of Milankovitch’s ideas has come from
deep cores drilled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps. A cap
forms when snow accumulates over tens of thousands of years,
compresses under its own weight, and turns into ice, which contains
physical, chemical, and even biological evidence of what was
happening on the planet at the time the snow fell. The ice cores can,
for example, inform us about Earth’s general temperature through the
millennia, and even provide samples of ancient atmosphere.
Thorough study of ice cores, combined with analyses of deep- sea
sediments, indicates that temperatures on Earth were warm about
103,000, 82,000, 60,000, 35,000, and 10,000 years ago. These data
fairly closely fit Milankovitch’s precessional cycle of approximately
22,000 years and the tilt cycle of 41,000 years.
Were one a uniformitarian, such findings would offer philosophical
comfort. In geological terms, of course, 20,000 years is little more
than the slow blink of an eye, but from the perspective of human life
span and civilization, it amounts to a long, long while. However, the
Greenland ice data also show a number of events that don’t fit
Milankovitch’s slow cycle. Rather, these changes are both rapid and
unpredictable.
A particularly striking revelation from the Greenland ice cores is
a series of what are called interstadial events. During these events,
each of which lasted from a few hundred to a few thousand years,
Greenland warmed quickly, then cooled, first slowly, then very fast.
Apparently the change affected much more than just Greenland.
During the interstadial events, the methane concentration in the
ancient atmosphere increased markedly. Methane comes primarily
from bacteria inhabiting oxygen-scarce environments, such as bogs
and swamps. Apparently, when the climate warmed at the beginning
of the interstadial events, tropical wetlands expanded, probably
because of increased rainfall and a global warming trend. The
warming trend reached as far as the South Pole. Recent research has
shown that two of the sudden warming episodes revealed in the
Greenland ice cores are mirrored as well in the ice of the Ross Sea
area of Antarctica.
Interstadial events are hardly uncommon. In the period between
100,000 and 20,000 years ago, about two dozen of them occurred.
And there was nothing reassuringly slow about them. In mere
decades, the temperature warmed 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit,
snowfall doubled, and an up to tenfold increase in dust trapped in the
ice indicates stronger and stronger winds.
A recent study of an interstadial event beginning approximately
11,700 years ago shows how startlingly sudden these changes can be.
The entire transition took about 1,500 years and represented a
substantial warming of approximately 27 degrees Fahrenheit—a
massive increase. Remarkably, the ice-core data suggest that half of
the temperature change, in the neighborhood of 14 degrees
Fahrenheit, occurred in less than fifteen years centering around
approximately 9645 B.C. That’s a bigger temperature increase, and
faster, than the scariest doomsday seenario about global warming in
the twenty-first century. Yet it happened well before humans were
burning fossil fuels by the millions of tons and adding greenhouse
gases to the atmosphere at unprecedented speed.
Two points about this finding are worth emphasizing. The first is
that against the uniformitarian backdrop provided by the
Milankovitch cycles, something much faster is also happening. The
second is the stunning lineup in time between the sudden warming of
9645 B.c., Emiliani’s scenario of a massive freshwater flood pouring
into the Gulf of Mexico, and the date Plato ascribed to the sinking of
Atlantis. Whatever the accuracy of specific details, this curious
coincidence points to the effect sudden climatic changes can have—
and no doubt have had—on civilization.
 The Giza Plateau, outside modern-day Cairo, Egypt. The Great Pyramid of
Khufu (Cheops) lies on the right, and the Pyramid of Khafre (Chephren) is
behind it to the left.

Looking north toward the Great Sphinx, which lies in the center of this view.
The Valley Temple sits in front of the Sphinx and obscures the Sphinx Temple,
also to the front of the Sphinx. The Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) is in the
background, along with the suburbs of Cairo—Egypt’s ancient and modern faces.
 A side view of the east-facing Sphinx, seen from the north.

In front of the Sphinx lie the ruins of the Sphinx Temple; behind it, the
Pyramid of Khafre (Chephren).
 Time has been hard on the Sphinx. The rolling weathering pattern on the body
came from heavy rainfall pouring over the monument in ancient times. Weather
damage on the paw and the lower body has been repaired with limestone blocks.
John Anthony West, left, and the author in front of the Great Sphinx.
 Deep, rolling, rounded, and precipitation-induced weathering with distinct
vertical crevices is particularly prominent in the Sphinx enclosure. John Anthony
West faces the camera, with Jorjana Kellaway partially hidden behind him.
Seismology expert Thomas L. Dobecki works below.
 This perspective provides an additional view of the heavy weathering inside
the Sphinx enclosure. Obviously caused by water, this pattern was probably left
by the heavy rains of the Nabtian Pluvial, which began as early as 10,000 B.c.
and lasted as late as 2500 B.C.

Wind leaves a very different pattern of erosion than does water, as can be seen
in this view of Old Kingdom tombs at Giza. Wind-driven sand scours out the
softer portions of the rock and leaves the harder material behind.
 Another example of weathering, caused by wind-driven sand.

The original limestone blocks of the Valley Temple were exposed to the same
heavy rains as the Sphinx and, like it, reveal precipitation-induced weathering.
 The entrance to the Valley Temple shows how granite ashlars, probably
fashioned during the time of Khafre (Chephren) around 2500 B.C., were carved
to fit the older, underlying limestone blocks contemporary with the Sphinx—part
of the evidence that the Sphinx dates to well before the period of the pharaoh
conventionally considered its builder.
The author with the stela of Thutmose IV.
Above left: The rump of the Sphinx shows evidence of repairs both modern and
ancient.
 The stela of Thutmose IV (also known as Tuthmosis IV), a New Kingdom
pharaoh of circa 1400 B.C., sits between the paws of the Great Sphinx. The
inscription originally contained one hieroglyph, now flaked off the stone and lost,
that has been taken by Egyptologists to be part of Khafre’s name and accepted as
evidence that the Old Kingdom pharaoh built the Sphinx.
 The lack of heavy precipitation-weathering of these mudbrick mastabas, which date to
2800 B.c. on the Saqqara Plateau is further evidence that the Sphinx’s weathering pattern
argues for an older date of origin. The structure in the back¬ground is the Step Pyramid
of Djoser (Zoser), which was built circa 2650-2600 B.c.

Waves wash ashore on Yonaguni and form a rectangular stone block by

natural erosional processes. The pattern of vertical joints and fractures common
to this group of stones appears clearly in the rocks on the right.
 The south side of the Yonaguni Monument. At first glance, the struc¬ture
suggests one of the great monu¬ments of the ancient world, complete with
platforms and giant stairs, and seems as if it must have been the work of human
hands.
Dale Kimsey, left, and the author examine the Yonaguni Monument firsthand.
 One of the fascinating tombs of uncertain age found on Yonaguni. Carved out
of solid bedrock with an unmistakable resemblance to the Yonaguni Monument,
this tomb measures approximately eighteen feet from base to top.
Further views of the south side of the Yonaguni Monument.
The Planetary Onion
The Milankovitch model tells us something, but not enough.
Obviously some additional model is needed to explain those
seemingly unexplainable interstadial events, with their striking
abruptness and potentially disastrous consequences. To evaluate the
ideas and theories that have been proposed, we need first to consider
how our planet is assembled and what makes it tick.
If you had a knife big enough to cut a slice through Earth, you
would see that the planet is formed of concentric rings, something
like the layers of an onion. The outermost layer is the gaseous
envelope of the atmosphere, which, although it extends out into space
in rarefied form for hundreds of miles, is by far thickest in the twelve
miles closest to the surface of the planet.
The uppermost layer of the solid Earth is the crust. Remove all the
water from the surface, and you would observe the crust’s two basic
terranes*: ocean basins averaging about three miles in depth below
sea level and floored with basaltic rocks, and continents and
continental islands, which on average rise a few hundred yards above
sea level and are founded on granitic types of rocks. The crust under
the oceans is thin, averaging only about three miles thick, while the
continental crust generally varies in thickness from about twelve to
thirty-seven miles. There are differences, too, in the chemical
composition of the crust under continents and oceans. The seabed
crust comprises about 50 percent silicon dioxide (which you probably
know as quartz), and contains larger amounts of iron, magnesium,
and calcium than the continental crust, which is about 60 percent
silicon dioxide.

*In geology, a terrane is an area or surface over which a particular kind of rock is
prevalent
 Below the crust, extending approximately another 1,800 miles, is
the mantle. The mande has an average composition of about 45
percent silicon dioxide and 38 percent magnesium oxide, with the
remainder of its bulk composed of various iron, aluminum, and
calcium compounds. The mantle is divided into several zones or
layers with different physical and chemical properties. The
uppermost layer, lying immediately below the crust, is relatively
rigid. This layer is thinner than thirty miles under some ocean basins,
but under older continental areas it can be over 120 miles thick.
Together this uppermost layer of the mantle and the crust attached to
it is known as the lithosphere, which means “rocky shell” in Greek
and refers both to its rigidity and to the ordinary rock of the crust that
constitutes its upper surface.
Under the lithosphere lies the relatively weak and soft
asthenosphere (literally, weak or glassy sphere). Below the asthen-
osphere the mande becomes more rigid again.
Beneath the mande lies the core, which, like the mande, has layers.
The outer core, extending from a depth of about 1,800 to 3,200 miles,
consists of a liquid that is an alloy of mosdy iron with some nickel.
The inner core, extending from the edge of the outer core to Earth’s
center (about 3,960 miles deep), is composed of a solid iron-nickel
alloy.
If we take the metaphor of the Earth-onion further and launch it
into space to orbit the sun, we would notice that all the layers spin
together in the daily rotation about the axis. Being closer to
the axis, the inner layers spin more slowly than the outer, but in the
course of any given period of time, each layer would make the same
number of revolutions. This is not true for Earth, however.
Recent work by seismologists Xiaodong Song and Paul Richards
of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York,
suggests that the inner core of the planet rotates faster than the rest of
the planet. According to their research, which rests on changes over
time in shock waves caused by earthquakes bouncing off Earth’s
interior, the inner core turns about one degree farther than the planet
as a whole each year. In approximately 360 years, the inner core,
rotating on its own, would make one more complete revolution than
all the layers outside it. The faster rotation of the inner core may
explain Earth’s magnetism, a still poorly understood phenomenon
that Albert Einstein once declared one of the great unsolved problems
of modern physics.
According to a computer model developed by Gary Glatzmaier and
Paul Roberts, the inner core is solid iron spinning in an electrically
conducting liquid outer core. The result is a kind of dynamo that
produces an electrical charge that in turn maintains a magnetic field.
Glatzmaier and Roberts, working independently from Song and
Richards, also posit an inner core that rotates separately from the rest
of the planetary layers at about the same rate of one degree more per
year. If the speed of rotation should change, the magnetic field would
shift with it—a possible explanation for why Earth’s magnetic poles
swap position every few hundred thousand years or so.

Continents on the Move

The interior of Earth is an intensely hot place of seething and
churning, where rocks slide and move around one another, even melt
into liquid. At breaks and cracks in the crust, molten rock erupts onto
the surface, adding to the crust. In other areas ancient rock is dragged
back toward the center of the planet, to be reheated, melted, and
rejuvenated. The vast majority of

Earth’s surface is relatively young rock. In comparison, its close

neighbors—the moon, Mercury, Mars, and, as far as we can tell,
Venus—have been largely inactive for billions of years, and the rock
that covers their surfaces is correspondingly ancient. Earth is
younger, and it is still on the move. That makes all the difference in
how our planet works, a fact we have begun to appreciate only in this
century.
As we discussed in regard to the nonexistent continent of Lemuria,
scientists of the nineteenth and earlier centuries assumed that the
major continental landmasses were fixed in place. Land bridges
might arise to connect continents from time to time, but the
continents themselves remained resolutely where they always had
been.
Still, as practically every observant elementary schoolchild has
noted from looking at a world map or a globe, the shapes of the
continents seem to fit together nicely, something like the pieces of a
global jigsaw puzzle. The east coasts of North and South America
slip neatly into the west coasts of Europe and Africa. This basic
observation, combined with a wealth of other data— such as
similarities between the animal species of Europe and North
America—led the German scientist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) to
propose, in about 1912, that the continents had once been joined
together and since had slowly drifted apart.
For decades the concept of continental drift was taken with little
seriousness by most geologists, especially in the United States.
Essentially the scenario seemed impossible: How could huge con-
tinents float or drift apart from each other? Wegener offered no
explanation for the drift; he said only that it happened. Without a
mechanism to explain it, the theory fell short.
However, a variation of Wegener’s theory known as plate tec-
tonics has transformed geology since the 1960s and today is accepted
by virtually all earth scientists. Plate tectonics forms the unifying
theory for most of the geological structures observed on the surface
of the planet. Plate tectonics not only moves conti-
nents, but also raises mountains, creates new sea floor, destroys and
recycles old sea floor, and causes volcanoes and earthquakes. It is
plate tectonics that distinguishes our living planet from the dead
planets of Mercury, Venus, and Mars.
Earth’s lithosphere is divided into about eight major plates and
numerous smaller ones, all of which are continuously moving. Where
they meet, they slip past each other or collide. Sometimes they pull
apart, opening a gap through which the liquid mande wells up from
underneath. Essentially the continents are carried on the tops of the
plates, like children at play riding piggyback on their fathers. The
continents are less drifting than going along for the ride as the
lithospheric plates they are attached to move. The plates do not travel
very fast from a human perspective, typically from less than an inch
to twelve inches a year, but this is fast enough to have caused very
major changes over the past few hundred million years.
Exactly what causes the plates to move has been a topic of heated
debate and discussion for some time. Today most scientists believe
that convection currents in the molten mantle propel the lithospheric
plates on their slow but inevitable paths. As you can easily observe
in a fresh cup of coffee or a pot of cooking soup, hot liquid rises to
the surface, flows along the surface for some distance, and cools at
the surface. The cooler liquid sinks below the surface, only to be
heated up and start the cycle once again. This movement of liquid
from hot to cool to hot again forms a convection cell. It is believed
that giant convection cells driven by heat flowing continuously out
of the center of Earth exist in the liquid mande. As they cycle, the
flowing mantle pulls the overlying, rigid lithospheric plates along.
The movement of two lithospheric plates away from each other
leaves a gap in the solid crust. Initially the rock in this area may
collapse, and form what is called a rift valley, but as the plates move
apart, hot molten rock wells up to fill the void. This material
originates from the mande and forms new oceanic crust; the
process is often referred to as sea-floor spreading. The classic exam-
ple of two plates moving apart from each other is the MidAtlantic
Ridge, which runs roughly north-south through the Atlantic Ocean.
In some places two lithospheric plates may converge or collide. As
they push into each other, one of several things can happen. If the
colliding edges of the two plates both bear oceanic crust, either plate
may be forced, or subducted, under the other plate. A deep trench
forms on the surface where the plates warp downward. As the
subducted plate moves down into the hot mantle, it melts, and the
lighter rock components rise to the surface, forming volcanoes. New
continental crustal material, formed from the recycled oceanic crust,
collects behind the trench. The northern and western edges of the
Pacific Ocean, sometimes known as the Ring of Fire, are lined with
convergent plate boundaries and, as a result, with a multitude of
volcanoes.
If the leading edge of one colliding plate contains continental crust
and the leading edge of the other plate contains oceanic crust, then
the plate with oceanic crust will always be subducted under the plate-
bearing continental crust. This occurs because the oceanic crust,
which is composed of basalt, is thinner but denser than the
continental crust, which is principally granite. Essentially,
continental crust weighs so little compared to basaltic crust and
mantle material that it cannot sink or be subducted to any significant
depth. Instead, it “floats” on top. An example of this type of
subduction is seen along the western coast of South America.
If the leading edges of two colliding lithospheric plates both
contain continents, neither can be subducted because they are both so
relatively light. Instead, the continents crash into one another,
crumple, and deform, often raising imposing mountain ranges. The
lofty Himalayas are the result of two continental landmasses crashing
into one another. Eventually the plates will lock together and motion
between them will stop.
Finally, two plates may slide past one another; their edges grind
and slip along what are commonly termed transform faults. This is
the least dramatic type of plate motion because it does not usually
involve either volcanoes or mountain building. Still, it can be literally
earthshaking, as the residents of California are periodically reminded.
That state’s many transform faults mark the northward sliding of the
Pacific plate against the North American plate. The rocks on the
surface do not flow past one another slowly and smoothly. Rather,
they hang up like gears without grease, building pressure that is
released suddenly in the sharp jerks and jumps of earthquakes.
The scientific beauty and elegance of plate tectonics is that it
explains so much of the scientific data that geologists once found
fundamentally unexplainable. It provides, for example, an excellent
way of understanding the interlocking fit of continents, the geological
function and geographical concentration of volcanoes, the
geophysics of earthquake zones, and similarities in the animal forms
on distant continents (such as moose and brown bears in Europe and
North America, monkeys in Africa and South America).
The other advantage of plate tectonics is that it fits into the
generally uniformitarian frame of mind most earth and life scientists
bring to their work. Plate tectonics says that the physical world is
changing, but only very slowly. After all, even at a blistering plate-
tectonic rate of twelve inches a year, it would take over five millennia
for a continent to move a mile, over 5.25 million years for it to cover
1,000 miles. The theory provides a congenial variety of philosophical
comfort, offering a model of apparent and general similarity altered
only by gradual, incremental change lacking drama, abruptness, or
suddenness.
Which is precisely the problem. Plate tectonics delivers an
excellent theory for understanding a great deal about our planet, but
it cannot explain sudden, rapid, even catastrophic changes, like that
sudden warming of the climate revealed in the Green-
land ice cores from circa 9645 B.C. Plate tectonics has nothing to say
about such a quick alteration in surface conditions on Earth. It is an
excellent theory for what it explains, yet it falls short of accounting
for it all. Other ideas are needed.

Hapgood: Pole Shift

Some of those ideas come from Charles Hapgood, whose work on
the Piri Reis map was discussed in chapter 4. Hapgood was drawn to
the study of ancient charts because of his interest in the possibility of
relatively sudden large-scale movements in Earth’s surface. He
published a book on the topic, called Earth’s Shifting Crust, in 1958,
even before his book on ancient maps appeared. As the plate tectonics
revolution of the 1960s reshaped geology, Hapgood stayed abreast of
the new ideas and eventually revised his original book under a
different title, The Path of the Pole.
Hapgood deserves credit on at least two grounds. For one, he was
always a serious scholar, a man of remarkable intellectual integrity.
Though trained as a historian rather than as a scientist, he came to his
work with dispassion and discipline, sifting the facts as he saw them
in the search for a workable explanation. His second accomplishment
was rescuing the idea of pole shifting from earlier writers like
Immanuel Velikovsky and Hugh Auchin- closs Brown, who were
more visionaries in touch with their private muses than scientists on
the trail of an hypothesis. Brown, for example, argued that the entire
planet suddenly shifted its axis of rotation, an argument he based on
both the existence of frozen mammoths in Siberia, the biblical story
of the flood, and the geological age of Niagara Falls. Similarly,
Velikovsky used his own reading of mythology to argue that in the
middle of the second millennium B.C., Jupiter had catapulted a piece
of itself into space. The close passage of this chunk of planetary
material, which would later settle down and become Venus,
unleashed unspeakable cataclysms on Earth, including a shift in the
axis of rotation. Hapgood freed the idea of polar shifting from such
blather and, as we shall see, may have set geological thinking into a
new and productive pathway.
As we all know, Earth spins or rotates, and the period of its rotation
is the way we define the day. If, while you are carving Earth open to
examine its layers, you draw a pencil line to mark the axis on which
the planet spins, the line would emerge through the planet’s surface
at the north and south poles. In essence, the spin axis remains fixed
in place over the short term relative to the plane of Earth’s orbit
around the sun and other astronomical markers, while the rest of the
planet spins about it. Hapgood argued that the poles marking this
fixity haven’t always been where they are now.
According to Hapgood, the lithosphere of Earth has slipped over
the inner layers and moved the poles at least 200 times in the past 600
million years. In just the past 80,000 years, the poles have moved
substantially no less than three times. At the beginning of that period,
the North Pole stood in what is now the Yukon Territory of Canada.
From there it shifted eastward, reaching the Greenland Sea at
approximately 73 degrees north latitude and 10 degrees east
longitude, then slipped back to the west, reaching Hudson Bay at 60
degrees north latitude and 83 degrees west longitude by 50,000 years
ago. It remained there until about 17,000 or 18,000 years in the past,
when it moved at a rate of approximately 1,000 feet a year toward its
present position, well north of Hudson Bay, above the many islands
of the Canadian High Arctic. This movement was complete, Hapgood
says, by about 12,000 years ago, or circa 10,000 B.C. On average, each
pole shift has covered a distance of about 30 degrees of latitude, or
2,000 miles, approximately one-third of the distance from the equator
to the pole, and it has taken several thousand years to reach
completion.
Hapgood based his analysis in part on what is called paleomag-
netism. When volcanic rocks cool from their molten state, they
preserve an imprint of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time they were
formed. The magnetic pole isn’t exactly the same as the geographical
pole defined by the spin axis, but the two are close
enough that we can use a compass to find north. Like a compass, the
weak fossil magnetism remaining in volcanic rocks points to ancient
north. Additionally, the angle of the magnetism in the rock indicates
the latitude at which it was formed. It lies flat to the horizon at the
equator, but dips straight down at the pole, assuming intermediate
angles at points in between. Thus the magnetism in ancient volcanic
rocks in a given location can provide data on whether the pole was
located in the same place when they cooled as it is now, and whether
the rocks have remained at the same latitude or been on the move
since their formation.
In Hapgood’s view, the paleomagnetic data make sense only if one
theorizes that periodically the entire crust of the planet slips over the
mantle. The planet continues to rotate as it always has, but after the
crust slips, different land is situated at or near the poles than
beforehand. The effects can be both catastrophic and creative, as
formerly arctic landmasses move closer to the tropics and once-
tropical realms are borne north into temperate and even arctic
regions. As Hapgood sees it, the frozen mammoths of Siberia show
just how profound an effect such a shift can have on living beings—
including, presumably, the humans who have been spreading out over
Earth’s surface during the last three substantial pole shifts.
Despite Hapgood’s resolutely meticulous mode of work, little of
the data he cites has stood the test of time. Take the frozen mammoths
as an example, a bit of evidence that has been trumpeted in a number
of places, including the Charlton Heston- narrated TV documentary
The Mysterious Origins of Man. As the oft-repeated story goes,
numerous mammoths have been found in Siberia in such a perfectly
preserved state that they must have been flash-frozen. In some cases,
the story continues, the thawed meat was fresh enough to eat, and the
stomachs of the animals contained undigested flowers, clear evidence
that they died in the summer and that their deaths lasted only seconds
at most.
Give this story any scrutiny, however, and it doesn’t hold up.
The number of mammoths found frozen is but a few, and the meat,
although edible, was nothing you’d try to eat unless you were a
vulture. In some of the mammoths, the meat had begun to putrefy
even before it froze, indicating that death came well before freezing.
As for flowers among the stomach contents, recently ingested plants
are so fundamentally tough that they often survive the decay of an
animal after death. Rather than invoking crustal slippage or pole
shifts to explain the few known frozen mammoths, it is more
reasonable to look for other explanations. The animals may have been
caught in blizzards, drowned in an icy stream or lake, smothered in a
landslide or avalanche, or trapped after a stumble into a glacial
crevasse.
More to the geological point of Hapgood’s argument, however, are
the paleomagnetic data cited to prove the shifting path of the poles.
In the decades since The Path of the Pole was published, new and
better data have been gathered that undercut Hapgood’s argument.
The poles may well have shifted, but nowhere near as far nor as often
as Hapgood argues.
Finally, the most glaring omission in Hapgood’s argument is his
inability to come up with a mechanism for crustal shifting. He
describes what happens, but he can’t say why. He himself saw the
problem and spelled it out. “It is necessary to admit, in the first place,
that at the present time there is no satisfactory explanation of the
modus operandi of displacements in the lithosphere,” Hapgood
wrote.
Yet, as we shall see, Hapgood may have been on the right track.
He used bad data and poor science, and he certainly got the details
wrong. Still, his work likely pointed in the right direction.

Noone: The Dangerous Planets

Hapgood’s ideas have made their way into the writing of a number
of other authors, including Rand and Rose Flem-Ath, whose work on
Atlantis appeared in chapter 4, and Richard W. Noone, who wrote
the successful 5/5/2000: Ice: The Ultimate Disaster.
Noone’s work is of interest for two reasons. Unlike Hapgood, who
sees crustal shifts as requiring thousands of years—which is much
faster than plate tectonics—Noone maintains they can happen
practically overnight, with predictably disastrous consequences.
And, again unlike Hapgood, Noone offers a theoretical mechanism
to explain just how Earth’s surface can undergo such rapid and
profound change.
Like Hapgood, Noone is not a scientist—when he’s not writing,
he runs a nonhazardous chemical business—but rather an amateur
who brings to his work an extraordinary enthusiasm for ancient
civilization and a powerful interest in scenarios of catastrophe.
Sometimes these proclivities collide, producing a book whose subject
matter careens from the Egyptian pyramids to the torture of Knights
Templar in fourteenth-century France to the toothpaste-like
consistency of rock under polar glaciers.
Still, the basic thrust of Noone’s argument deserves attention. It
begins with the evidence that Earth was once home to a widespread,
highly sophisticated civilization whose remnants we see in the Mayan
and Aztec ruins, the pyramids of Giza, and the esoteric beliefs of the
Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. This old world was destroyed
abruptly in a sudden, massive movement of the crust that utterly
altered Earth’s climate and caused catastrophic earthquakes,
tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, all of them on a scale we cannot
imagine. The “ice” in Noone’s title refers to his theory that under the
right circumstances the north polar ice cap can slip and slide from its
present position, hurrying southward like a great solid tidal wave,
destroying everything in its path.
Noone argues that this kind of catastrophe, which has happened
before, will happen again soon, on May 5, 2000. The effects will be
devastating. The polar ice caps will lurch toward the equator with a
sudden terrible roar. The moving ice will raise a tidal wave in the
North Atlantic that will crash into New York at a height of 300 feet.
On that fateful day, bid good-bye to Broadway.
Noone is willing to be so specific about the date of this immi-
nent destruction because he maintains he understands the mechanism
that drives Hapgood’s crustal shifts. On the day of his prediction,
twenty-four hours after the appearance of a new moon, the planets
Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn will line up. The gravitational
pull of this unusual planetary arrangement will tug so fiercely on
Earth’s crust that a shift in the surface layer, and most prominently
the polar ice, is practically sure to result.
On first examination, Noone’s idea sounds interesting as well as
terrifying. As we have understood ever since the time of Isaac
Newton, gravity is a powerful universal force, one that can reach
across tremendous distances of space to affect the behavior of
astronomical bodies. Even better, Noone’s idea is one that can be
examined logically to determine its scientific worth.
And that’s where it falters seriously. To begin with, the planetary
alignment of May 5, 2000, isn’t really all that much of a line. The
planets will be loosely gathered at the time, but they will be on the
far side of the sun from Earth. In the same general direction, yes, but
not lined up, and with the vastly greater—and normal—gravitational
pull of the sun between them and Earth.
Also, although planetary alignments of this sort are unusual, they
are hardly rare. Using a planetarium software called Voyager II,
Brian Monson of the Physics Department at the University of Tulsa
calculated that in the past thousand years there have been ten
planetary alignments, happening on average once a century. One
occurred as recently as 1982, a year during which, as we all know,
the world did not end. On September 2, 1861, the planets were
grouped much more closely than they will be on May 5, 2000, and,
again as we all know, the world did not end.
Nor is it likely to do so soon. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. During
that long period, planetary alignments at the rate of one every
hundred years have happened approximately 45 million times.
Several dozen of those alignments have occurred since humans
learned to write and were studying the skies with great intensity
(remember the sky bulls of Lascaux, in circa 15,000
B.c.). Had a sudden disaster fallen at the same time as a planetary
alignment, surely somebody would have noticed and recorded it.
In fact, nothing about the physics of gravity should lead anyone to
lose sleep over a planetary alignment. The fact is that the other
planets, aligned or unaligned, have little gravitational effect on Earth.
One planet can have two types of gravitational effect on another
planet. One is simple gravity, that business of the apple falling from
the tree onto Newton’s ever-thinking head. Simple gravity describes
another planet’s pull on Earth, in the same way Earth pulled on the
apple that hit Newton. The second type of gravitational effect is tidal
force, a more complicated phenomenon that effectively works like a
stretching force on our planet. This stretching on the world’s oceans
gives us tides.
 If gravity were strong enough, it could pull Earth out of its current
orbit and into some new and certainly disastrous path. A tidal force
of sufficient strength could stretch the planet until it tore in half, with
equally calamitous consequences. But don’t worry. Neither simple
gravity nor tidal force, even in the case of a planetary alignment, is
anywhere near powerful enough to do harm to Earth.
Our safety comes from basic physics. Two factors affect gravity:
the mass of the other object and its distance. Basically, the more
massive and closer something is, the greater the gravitational pull it
exerts. Gravity increases linearly with mass—that is, an object twice
as massive as another has twice the gravitational attraction—but it
decreases with the square of the distance. Assume that an object of a
certain mass is a certain distance away. Now you move the object
twice the distance away. Since gravitation declines by the square of
the object’s distance, its pull falls not to half of what it was but to
one-fourth . Move it ten times farther away, and the
gravitational pull decreases to one one- hundredth of its former value
. Obviously, gravitation falls very fast with distance.
Tidal force is much like gravity, except that its force falls off with
the cube of the distance. Move that object of a certain mass twice as
far away, and its tidal effect drops to one-eighth . At ten
times the distance it falls to one one-thousandth .
Distance has an even more profound limiting effect on tidal force
than on gravity.
If we know the mass and the distance of an object, calculating its
gravitational influence and tidal pull on Earth is straightforward. The
moon is the hands-down winner among all the planetary bodies.
Although it is only one-eightieth the mass of Earth, it is so close that
it exerts the largest gravitational and tidal effects on our planet. The
nearest planet, Venus, is about two-thirds as massive as Earth, and
about sixty-five times more massive than the moon, but it is 150 times
farther away than the moon even at its closest approach. What with
squaring the distance for gravitation and cubing it for tides, Venus’s
gravitational effect is 0.006 that of the moon and its tidal effects only
0.00005 as large. Even giant Jupiter, which is more than 300 times as
massive as Earth, has just 1 percent as much gravitational effect and
0.0006 percent as great a tidal influence as the moon.
Add all the planets together, and, even at their closest approach to
Earth, they exert less than 2 percent of the moon’s gravitational pull.
As for total planetary tidal pull, it’s a mere 0.0058 percent that of the
moon’s, even at closest approach.
These numbers will drop even further during the planetary
alignment of May 5, 2000. The reason, again, is distance. Earth will
be on one side of the sun, while the grouped planets will be on the
opposite side. That arrangement adds some 185 million miles to the
distances between Earth and each of the other planets and relegates
their gravitational and tidal influences to insignificance. For example,
on May 5, 2000, Venus’s tidal influence will be only one five-
hundredth what it is at closest approach to our planet.
Let’s assume that Noone merely has the date wrong. What if, at
some other point in the future, all the planets lined up at their closest
approach to Earth. Would the 2 percent increase in gravitational
influence that would result from this alignment have a major effect
on our planet?
The answer is no. In fact, Earth is subject to much greater grav-
itational variation all the time, without harm. The moon’s orbit is an
ellipse, not a circle. At its closest approach (perigee) the moon is
slightly over 26,000 miles nearer Earth than at its farthest orbital
point (apogee). Given the powerful effect of distance on gravitation,
the moon’s orbital variation varies its pull on Earth by approximately
25 percent between closest and farthest points. This means that every
two weeks Earth is subjected to a gravitational fluctuation over ten
times greater than the pull exerted by all the planets lined up at their
closest point to us. And nothing catastrophic happens.
Simply put, the planetary alignment of May 5, 2000, bodes neither
ill nor portent. Still, if one looks past Noone’s need for a sudden,
dramatic event, he is making a valid point: A shift in Earth’s axis
would have a profound effect on the planet.

Strain: Small Shift, Big Effect

Just how big that effect would be has been described in meticulous
detail by Mac B. Strain, in his book The Earth’s Shifting Axis. A
professional civil engineer now retired from the National Mapping
Division of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, Strain traces out
the remarkable changes in Earth’s surface that would be caused by
even a small, slow shift in the axis. Here we are talking about an
actual shift in Earth’s spin axis that involves the movement of the
entire mass of the Earth—not just the outer crust or shifting relative
to the vast inner mass of Earth as posited by Wegener, Hapgood, or
plate tectonic theory.
As we saw in chapter 3, Earth may be a perfecdy round sphere in
a schoolroom globe, but in fact it is an oblate spheroid, thicker at the
equator than at the poles. The planet’s spin creates a centrifugal force
that lifts the faster-spinning equator away from the slower-spinning
higher latitudes. Thus a radius drawn from the center of Earth is 13.5
miles longer at the equator than at either pole. The resulting planetary
shape is what we geologists call the geoid, which represents the shape
of Earth as defined by sea level.

The geoid’s bulging shape has a profound effect on altitude. If the

wrinkled bump on the surface of Earth that represents the Himalayan
area surrounding Mount Everest, which lies at approximately 28
degrees north latitude and protrudes 29,028 feet above sea level, were
moved south to the equator, the peak would be only 13,434 feet tall—
a good weekend climb, but nothing to have challenged the likes of
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first men to reach the
summit of the world’s highest mountain. Why the change in altitude?
The geoid surface at the equator is over fifteen thousand feet farther
from the center of Earth than it is at 28 degrees north latitude. As a
result, the Mount Everest bump that stands out so tall at 28 degrees
north latitude is much diminished in relative height when it moves to
the equator. Given the same treatment, Mount Denali in Alaska
would lie a remarkable 35,958 feet below sea level. The shift works
the other way as well. If the Challenger Deep in the deep- sea Mariana
Trench—the lowest point on the crust at 35,810 feet below sea level,
located at approximately 15 degrees north latitude—were at the pole,
it would lie 31,946 feet above sea level. Because it is a depression,
the Deep would still be under water, but it would take the form of a
lake, not an ocean.
The most dramatic change in Earth’s surface caused by a shift in
the axis is the moving boundary between ocean and dry land. Assume
for a moment that, all other things being equal, the axis shifts a full
90 degrees. Assume, too, that the solid portion of Earth remains rigid
and does not change shape. This shift places the new poles on what
is now the equator, and moves the former poles to the new equator.
Because of the centrifugal force of the Earth’s spin and the combined
gravitational and tidal pull of the moon and the sun, ocean waters
pour over the old poles to a depth of 13.5 miles, while the seas drain
away from the portions of the former equator now at the poles,
elevating the area an equivalent 13.5 miles, shallowing the ocean and
even creating dry land in some places.
In reality, however, Earth is not rigid, but somewhat plastic and
malleable. The solid Earth would deform as the axis shifted, yet
dramatic changes—nearly impossible to predict in their particulars—
would certainly result in the event of a large-scale axis shift.
Yet, according to Strain’s calculations, even a much smaller shift
has a marked effect on the distribution of land and sea across the
surface of the globe. If the axis shifted only one degree from its north
polar current position of 90° north latitude to 89° north latitude and
70° west longitude—a move of about seventy miles—the change in
the geoid would raise sea level in some areas and drain it in others.
The effect would be most pronounced along the 70° west and 110°
east longitude lines at the midway points between the poles and the
equator—namely 45° north latitude for the northern hemisphere and
45° south latitude for the southern. Some spots would gain more than
1,200 feet, mirroring an equivalent loss in others.
A look at the new shape of the northern hemisphere under the
conditions of such a scenario gives us a sense of how much the
configuration of land and sea could change with only a one- degree
axis shift to 89° north latitude and 70° west longitude. The United
States, except for Alaska west of 160° west longitude—the
approximate position of Wainwright on the Arctic Ocean and Port
Moller on the Alaskan Peninsula separating the Bering Sea from the
Pacific Ocean—lose sea level as the ocean drains away to give the
geoid its new shape. The Pacific Coast looks pretty much the same
as it does now, because the continental shelf is so narrow, but
Canada’s shallow Inland Passage, Puget Sound, and San Francisco
Bay empty. Lower California becomes twice as wide as it is now, and
Central America widens, owing to the exposed continental shelves
on both east and west coasts. The shorelines of Honduras and
Nicaragua, for example, extend 100 to 200 miles east of their current
locations, and the Yucatan Peninsula reaches an additional 140 miles
north. You’ll have to travel a similar extra distance to reach the
waters of the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and Louisiana. Florida more
than doubles in width and extends as solid land through what are now
the separate islands of the Florida Keys. The east coast from Florida
to New Jersey moves out into the Atlantic some seventy miles. A new
section of land about the size of the current state of Pennsylvania rises
up off Cape Cod as the ocean spills off what used to be the Georges
Banks. An even larger section of land is appended to Nova Scotia
though the exposure of the Sable Island Bank, and the draining of the
Grand Banks moves the Newfoundland shoreline 300 miles east.
Most of Hudson Bay also drains away, and many of the islands of the
Canadian High Arctic are joined to the mainland by new land bridges.
Powerful changes occur, as well, in the center of the country. Lake
Michigan, which is almost thirty feet higher at Chicago and swamps
much of that lively windy city, does again what it did in the last ice
age. It flows not north through Lake Huron and the other Great Lakes
to the Saint Lawrence River and ultimately the Atlantic, but south
into the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers toward the Gulf
of Mexico.
Like North America, most of Western Europe loses water. The
North Atlantic islands gain size, so much so that Britain and Ireland
connect to the continent. Now you can drive from Dublin or London
to Paris without taking a ferry or using the Chunnel.
By contrast, the geoid’s reshaping in Eastern Europe and Asia
causes massive flooding. Istanbul lies 232 feet lower than it does
now, putting it under water and turning the narrow channel of the
Bosporus into a wide reach of the Mediterranean. The Black Sea
expands and may well connect with the Caspian Sea, perhaps even
the Aral Sea, extending the Mediterranean system deep into
Central Asia. The flooding hits a maximum along the 110° east
longitudinal meridian, where seawater floods the lower reaches of the
Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, Yellow, and Amur rivers. Coastal
cities like Karachi, Bombay, Singapore, Rangoon, and Shanghai
disappear, and extensive reaches of low-lying land, including the
whole of Bangladesh and many of the best ricegrowing regions of
southern Asia, slip under the waves. In the far north, low-lying tundra
and taiga, such as the West Siberian Plain, are likewise swamped out
by the invading Kara, Laptev, and East Siberian seas. In the North
Pacific, much of the western end of the Aleutian island chain shrinks
or disappears. The Bering Strait grows larger, allowing warmer
Pacific currents to flow northward and fundamentally altering the
patterns of weather generated in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort
seas.
Of course, this entire scenario is fictional, an imagined set of
consequences flowing from a hypothetical event. It is based, too, on
a number of assumptions concerning the rigidity of the Earth’s solid
surface, and the behavior of the mantle and lithosphere in reaction to
the new centrifugal forces acting upon them if the axis shifted. These
assumptions may not be realistic, but nobody knows for certain what
the consequences of an axis shift would be.
Strain’s calculations raise important questions. Has such a shift
ever occurred? If it has, what effect did it have?

Kirschvink: True Polar Wander and the Biological Big Bang

The flip side of a massive extinction like the Permian or the Cre-
taceous is an explosion of new life-forms. Once in a while in the
geological history of Earth this has happened, with a suddenness and
a creativity to take away breath and inspire awe. The record of the
largest such explosion resides in a Canadian rock formation known
as the Burgess Shale.
Located in British Columbia, the Burgess Shale is particularly
important because it contains the fossils of many soft-bodied
creatures from over 500 million years ago, during the period known
as the Cambrian. Soft-bodied animals, unlike those with bones and
shells, leave fossils only under rare and unusual circumstances, and
the Burgess Shale provides an extraordinary and precious look at a
remarkable biological event.

At the start of the Cambrian period, most life-forms were single-

celled. The few multicelled animals then in existence left no more
fossil evidence than trails, burrows, and a few body impressions that
are hard to connect with any contemporary species. Then, in a
remarkable 10-million-year period stretching from approximately
540 to 530 million years ago, the ancestral forms of virtually all
modern groups of animals appeared, including the first chordates, the
group that gave rise to vertebrates and eventually to us humans.
This amazing burst of life is commonly called the Cambrian
explosion, and is sometimes referred to as “the biological Big Bang.”
Without the extraordinary events of the Cambrian period, you and I
might never have come into existence to share this book.
Equally remarkable, the diversity of species arising in the Cam-
brian was stunning. The creatures found in the Burgess Shale exceed
in anatomical variation the whole range of invertebrate animals
inhabiting present-day Earth. Today, for example, we know of about
1 million species of Arthropoda, a phylum that includes such animals
as insects, crustaceans, spiders and mites, centipedes and millipedes,
and horseshoe crabs. The Burgess Shale reveals fossils from all of
these groups, plus a number of other apparent arthropods that are
distinct types of animals with body plans unknown today. In the case
of arthropods, the Cambrian world boasted more diversity than ours
does.
Usually we think of evolution as starting with one animal or plant
form and producing new forms from it, like small branches radiating
from the trunk of a tree. The Cambrian explosion shows the opposite.
An almost unimaginable burst of creativity led to an enormous
diversity of life-forms that was then winnowed and narrowed over
the eons to produce the species we have now.
Fully understanding how this process occurred could fundamentally
alter the way we view evolution.
The Cambrian explosion raises another important question: Why?
Before that explosive 10 million years, life was doing just fine as it
was. What change happened to prompt a burst of evolutionary fervor
the likes of which Earth has never seen again?
A fascinating hypothesis to explain the Cambrian explosion has
been proposed by California Institute of Technology geologist Joseph
L. Kirschvink and his colleagues Robert L. Ripperdan of the
University of Puerto Rico and David A. Evans, also of Cal Tech.
Kirschvink proposes that the entire crust and mantle slipped a full 90
degrees over the core during the Cambrian, forced landmasses into
new relationships, and fundamentally altered the conditions for life
on Earth. The poles stayed where they had been. Everything else
changed.
Like Hapgood’s work, the Kirschvink model is based on paleo-
magnetic data, which now are much more reliable than when
Hapgood studied them. Combining the paleomagnetic information
with other data that allow the dating of rocks gave Kirschvink and his
colleagues the ability to track the movements of continents over
hundreds of millions of years.
The research began in Australia, which apparently made some
remarkable movements during the Cambrian explosion. At the time,
Australia was part of a larger landmass called Gondwana, which also
included South America, Africa, and India. From 600 million to 540
million years ago, Australia remained in place at the equator. Then it
began to move, as did the whole of Gondwana, starting
approximately 535 million years in the past. Over the next 15 million
years or so, Australia remained at the equator, but swung
counterclockwise in a half-circle, completing a 90- degree turn.
Gondwana made the same twisting movement, so that its landmass,
which had been divided more or less equally between the northern
and southern hemispheres, lay now almost entirely in the southern
hemisphere.
To validate this motion and check the data, Kirschvink com-
pared the Australian geomagnetic data with reliably dated rocks from
North America. When Australia and Gondwana began moving
counterclockwise, North America lay close to the South Pole as a
separate landmass divided from Gondwana by the long-gone Iapetus
Ocean. As the twist occurred, North America moved north until it
came to rest on the equator. What had been a polar territory was now
tropical.
This didn’t happen overnight. Rather, the process took about 15
million years. Still, such a huge global swing means that the
continents traveled several feet a year, a rate many times faster than
the movement of plate tectonics. Kirschvink sees it as a different
process, one called “true polar wander.” For at least the past fifty
years, geophysicists have thought such motion was theoretically
possible. If Kirschvink is right, it has actually happened.
Unlike plate tectonics, which is driven by convection currents in
the mande, true polar wander comes from imbalances in the planet’s
distribution of mass in the crust and mantle. During true polar
wander, the entire solid part of Earth moves together as one mass
over the liquid core. Earth maintains its original spin axis, but the
landmasses are rearranged in relation to it.
The physics of this process can be modeled by gluing lead weights
to opposite points on a basketball. If you set the ball on a slick gym
floor with the weights at its midline—in planetary terms, the
equator—and spin it, it will turn round and round with the weights
remaining on the equator. Spin the ball on the weight— with one
heavy point at one pole and the other heavy point at the other pole—
and the ball will follow a path that in time moves the weights to the
equator. As the laws of physics require, the ball has aligned its
maximum moment of inertia—represented by the weights—with its
spin axis as marked by the poles.
Fundamentally the same thing happened to Earth during the
Cambrian period. The difference is that, rather than the whole ball
shifting, Earth’s surface layers moved with respect to the core. The
spin axis remained where it was; the landmasses sorted
themselves out in a new pattern to bring the maximum moment of
inertia into alignment.
The imbalance arose, according to Kirschvink and his colleagues,
about 550 million years ago, as violent earthquakes tore continents
apart, pushed them together again, and raised huge volcanic areas at
the continental seams. Some large and as yet unknown event brought
bits of many continents together as a large section of sea floor sank
and a new volcanic range rose near the South Pole. This new slab of
rock in the polar position, with most of the planet’s continents
crowded together in one imbalanced landmass, was enough to trigger
true polar wander.
Data on ocean currents tend to support Kirschvink’s model. With
the landmasses on the move, circulation in the seas was constantly
upended. Every change in oceanic currents released carbon deposits
buried in the deep waters of the seas, causing an upswing in dissolved
carbon. At least a dozen such swings occurred during the Cambrian
period, an anomaly that has long troubled scientists. True polar
wander explains it.
Some astronomical evidence points to true polar wander on
planetary bodies other than Earth. On the Martian equator is a
gigantic volcano known as Tharsis. The largest known planetary-
surface gravity anomaly in the solar system, Tharsis is very dense and
massive, and therefore exerts a stronger gravitational pull than the
rock that surrounds it. Tharsis may have formed in its present
position, but more likely it arose elsewhere on the planet, and then,
because of its extraordinary mass, moved via true polar wander, like
the weight on the spinning basketball, to its current location. An
opposite effect is thought to have occurred on the asteroid Vesta.
Struck by some fast-moving space object that left a massive crater,
the asteroid reoriented so that the impact crater, which has less mass,
ended up at the south pole.
Of course, all by itself, true polar wander didn’t cause the Cam-
brian explosion. Rather, it created both new demands on animal
forms and novel opportunities for them. The massive changes
resulting from all this shifting and moving would have divided
existing communities of species into smaller, more inbred assem-
blies, conditions that amplify genetic differences and accelerate
evolutionary changes. And since the change kept going on over those
15 million years, every new adaptation was presented with a
continuing series of new challenges and even more opportunities for
evolutionary development. True polar wander created the special
conditions that set the stage for the Cambrian explosion.

The Impact Possibility

There’s no reason to believe that true polar wander has occurred only
once in Earth’s history, in the Cambrian period. Nor is there reason
to believe that the rapid appearance of a volcanic range near one of
the poles is the only possible cause. The asteroid Vesta, after all, is
thought to have shifted owing to the mass imbalance caused by
cratering from a collision with some other piece of space rock or ice.
Indeed, some brilliant theoretical work indicates that the impact of a
comet or asteroid with Earth could, under the right conditions, lead
to a shift in the poles. This hypothesis is distinct from Kirschvink’s
model, which has the Earth’s solid layers moving around over the
liquid core through millions of years, while the spin axis remains the
same. Instead, in a true shift of the axis, like the one modeled by
Strain, the whole planet changes position and assumes a new spin
axis in much less time.
The argument, proposed by the Italian mathematician Flavio
Barbiero, is an attempt to explain the sudden warming of the climate
11,600 years ago, as seen in the Greenland ice cores. Building on the
work of Charles Hapgood, Barbiero believes that the poles shifted
rapidly, changing positions far more quickly than the thousands of
years Hapgood proposed.
The key to understanding Earth’s behavior in the event of a major
impact, Barbiero argues, is realizing that the planet acts like a giant
gyroscope. If a toy gyroscope is struck with a disturbing torque, its
spin axis shifts, even if only for an instant. The same thing could
happen to Earth, which is not solid, like a child’s plaything, but
semifluid, with oceans outside and a liquid core inside the rigid
lithosphere. The centrifugal force of Earth’s rotation affects each of
these layers and deforms or displaces them, as we have seen in
Strain’s analysis of what a pole shift can do. It is possible, according
to Barbiero, that Earth could be struck by an object with a torque
large enough to overcome the force creating the current axis of
rotation and establish a new axis—with, of course, a simultaneous
shift in the position of the poles. Since so much of Earth is covered
with a layer of oceanic water, this water shifts toward the new equator
with enough force to deform and reshape the planet’s mantle. Once
the mantle’s shape changes, the new axis of rotation becomes
established, perhaps in a matter of minutes, hours, or days.
According to Barbiero’s calculations, a rocky asteroid 1,100 yards
across—not very large by the standards of our solar system—striking
at the right angle and in the same direction as the gravitational pull
of the sun and moon, would be more than large enough to cause such
a shift. The effects of the collision would be devastating, but the
aftermath of the pole shift would overshadow the short-term effects
of the impact explosion. As the poles shifted, some parts of the crust
would move up, others down, releasing huge earthquakes and
volcanic flows. Winds of hurricane force mixed with torrential rain
would sweep the continents. Water would avalanche into plains and
valleys, and sea level would fluctuate both wildly and widely,
perhaps in the form of a tide several hundred feet high moving around
the globe. The planet’s core would be affected by turbulence,
particularly at its boundary with the mande, possibly shifting the
magnetic field and even reversing the magnetic poles.
The long-term effect on climate would depend largely on the
orientation of the new axis of rotation relative to the ecliptic. Right
now, this stands at about 23.5 degrees, and the planet’s tilt is the
reason why the temperate zones have seasons. If the axis of rotation
moved so that it stood nearly perpendicular to the ecliptic, say at an
angle of 5 degrees or less, the seasons would vary little and vegetation
could grow all year long, providing a steady supply of food to plant-
eating animals and to the carnivores that feed on the grazers and
browsers. With the poles always bitterly cold, ice would accumulate
into massive glaciers and sea level would drop. Tropical species
could move north, and northerly species could move south, producing
a mix of species found nowhere today. Barbiero maintains that this
was precisely the situation up until the end of the last ice age, when
mammoths, rhinoceroses, and lions, whose modern descendants are
found only in the tropics, cavorted on the same grasslands as reindeer,
bison, and bears, species that flourish in today’s temperate and boreal
zones. Then something happened, the poles shifted, and the old world
came to an end.

Turning to the Stars

Barbiero’s model is frankly speculative, a hypothesis based on
certain physical laws that creatively examines a series of what-ifs and
develops a scenario arresting in its drama. It may be entirely wrong.
Yet even if it is, it forces us to do something important: to look
outside Earth for the causes of events on our planet.
Geology, the discipline in which 1 make my professional home,
has this way of looking down. When something happens on Earth,
we want to explain it by means of Earth-only events: continental drift,
volcanic activity, plate tectonics, earthquakes, and now even true
polar wander. Yet in all this catalog of Earth’s simultaneously
creative and destructive forces, we have yet to find one that accounts
for the sudden catastrophe at the end of the Bronze Age, the point at
which we began. Can it be that something else is going on here? Can
it be that we must turn our attention where Barbiero points us—to the
heavens?
Heaven’s Rain of Rock and Ice

MANY OF THE ANCIENT HEBREW MYTHS RETOLD IN THE OLD Testament

depict the sky as menacing and dangerous, the terrifying source from
which God’s burning wrath descends to punish the sinful inhabitants
of Earth. Consider the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Angered by the
multitudinous crimes of the two cities’ citizens, God resolved to
destroy them, with the singular exception of Lot, the only righteous
man living there. As the sun rose on the appointed day of destruction,
two angels hurried Lot and his family out of town, just in the nick of
time. Barely had Lot made it into the nearby small town of Zoar
when, according to chapter 19 of the book of Genesis, “Yahweh
rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire....He overthrew
these towns and the whole plain, with all the inhabitants of the towns,
and everything that grew there.” Abraham, the great patriarch of the
Hebrew people, went to have a look at the destruction for himself.
“Looking toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and across all the plain, he
saw the smoke rising from the land, like smoke from a furnace.”
Word about this kind of thing got around, even in the days before
telegraph, telephone, and the Internet. When Jonah the prophet—
with a little help from the famous whale—made his way to Nineveh
in Mesopotamia, a city so great that walking across it took three days’
time, he told its citizens that God was planning to destroy them for
their wickedness. This threat was so credible that the Ninevites
immediately did penance to atone for their sins, and God chose to
spare them the promised fate of destruction descending from the
heavens.
Sometimes the Hebrews took fire in the skies as a sign of prophecy.
Ezekiel, a prophet to the Hebrews during their captivity in Babylon
in the sixth century B.C., first felt the presence of God in celestial
flame. “I looked,” the opening of the book of Ezekiel says. “A stormy
wind blew from the north, a great cloud with light around it, a fire
from which flashes of lightning darted, and in the center a sheen like
bronze at the heart of the fire.” Among other wonders in the light,
Ezekiel saw a throne, and “high up on this throne was a being that
looked like a man. I saw him shine like bronze, and close to and all
around him from what seemed his loins upward was what looked like
fire; and from what seemed like his loins downward I saw what
looked like fire, and a light all around like a bow in the clouds on
rainy days.”

Fear and Power in the Sky

The Hebrews were hardly alone in their attitude toward the heavens.
Many ancient peoples looked up with a reverence that mixed awe at
the sky’s power with fear of the terrible destruction it could deliver.
Ovid, the classical Roman poet born in the later years of the first
century B.C., provides the most detailed and dramatic version of the
myth of Phaethon. The son of the sun god Apollo and a mortal
woman, Phaethon requested of his father the right to drive the chariot
of the sun in its daily passage across the vault of the sky. Enjoined by
an oath to grant whatever wish his son requested, Apollo could not
say no. Yet he warned Phaethon of the difficult road through the sky,
the headstrong willfulness of the horses pulling the chariot, the
dangers posed by the celestial beasts of the zodiac. Still, Phaethon
demanded his wish, only to discover very soon that his divine father
had had a point. Unable to control the horses and frightened by the
terrible beasts of the sky, Phaethon dropped the reins. Loosed from
their restraints, the horses lurched out of their usual course and pulled
the chariot close to Earth’s surface. In seconds, mountains caught
fire, prairies dried and cracked, forests and croplands burst into
flame, cities and their peoples perished in the blast of heat. All the
snow and ice melted off the highest peaks, even lofty Olympus, and
the rivers, from the least mountain streams to the mighty Nile, boiled
into steam and disappeared, leaving only dust and sand where
moments before water had flowed. Unable to bear any more, Earth
herself cried out in pain and agony. To save the goddess-planet, the
god Jove hurled a thunderbolt at Phaethon and the chariot, smashing
it into a shower of burning pieces. Dead Phaethon himself fell to
Earth ablaze, appearing to those below like a star plummeting from
heaven.
A similar story comes from the opposite side of the world, namely
Central America. The Annals of Quauhtitlan recount that the world-
age known as the Sun of Air, or Ehcatonatiuh, was marked by a
furious wind that knocked down buildings, pulled trees up by their
roots, and moved boulders across the surface of the land as easily as
a breeze sailing leaves over a pond. During this age, the great god
Quetzalcoatl arose to teach humans the ways of virtue and the arts of
living. When his ideas failed to take hold, he departed toward the
east, where he encountered the sun and was burned up. From his
ashes rose birds of shining plumage, and his heart ascended into the
sky as the Morning Star. Thus began the age known as the Sun of
Fire, so named because it was predicted that, like Quetzalcoatl
himself, it would end by fire.
The great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, paints the sky danger as
a horrific bird with one eye, one wing, and one leg that hov-
ered in the night sky, screamed, and vomited blood. When this
terrible fowl appeared, dust came down upon the Earth in a thick
choking blanket, and rough winds blew unceasingly. Fireballs
crashed into the land with great hissing sounds, and a deep darkness
descended, so that travelers had to light their way with torches even
at high noon. The mountains resounded with explosions that tipped
peaks and hillsides into the flatlands.
The text of the Mahabharata tells us what time of the year these
events happened and provides something of a clue to the type of
phenomenon that was associated with stories like Sodom and
Gomorrah, Phaethon, and Quetzalcoatl. The terrible bird made its
appearance during the Indian month of Karttika, which covers the last
half of October and the first half of November. This period, which
stretches from about October 15 to November 15, is considered a
time of great portent and even danger in many cultures the world
over. The ancient Celts, for example, made November 1 a one-day
month called Samhain that marked the beginning of the new year—a
seemingly odd choice, given that the date has no solar importance.
On this day the spirits of the underworld flooded up out of their
subterranean darkness onto the surface of the Earth, where they
sometimes grabbed unsuspecting mortals and pulled them down to
death in the nether regions. To avoid this fate, people dressed up like
ghosts, goblins, and other monsters so the underworld spirits couldn’t
tell the living from the dead, a custom we preserve today in
Halloween costuming. Likewise, Mexicans build elaborate altars to
departed relatives for the November 1 celebration known as the Day
of the Dead, and the Roman Catholic Church marks October 31 as
the Feast of All Souls and November 1 as that of All Saints. Mortality
fills the religious air in this brief, foreboding season.
The Mahabharata provides even more information as to why this
period is so thick with thoughts of death and dying. The terrible bird
affected the constellation we know as the Pleiades. During the
October 15-November 15 period in question, the meteor
shower known as the Taurid stream arises from the portion of the sky
near the Pleiades constellation. In Hindu mythology, the catastrophes
brought about by the horrible fowl had something to do with the
Taurid’s wild display of shooting stars.
This association of meteors with destruction from the skies is
heightened by the powerful religious power accorded to the remnants
of cosmic visitation. Egyptian tombs have been found to contain
meteorites. Among the various treasures of the burial chamber of
Pharaoh Tutankhamen was a dagger fashioned from meteoritic iron.
When a meteorite fell to Earth in Phrygia, a region of the Middle
East, in 2000 B.C., it was worshiped there for years, then later
transported to Rome, where, according to the Roman historian Livy,
it was venerated for another five centuries. To this day, Tibetan
shamans and lamas prize the special power of tektites, natural glass
beads formed from sediments in the extreme heat of a meteor impact.
The Hopewell Native American culture in what is now Ohio and
neighboring parts of the eastern United States made ceremonial tools
from iron-rich meteorites, while the Indians of the Chihuahua desert
of Mexico built special shrines for meteorites, one of which weighed
over 700 pounds and was wrapped in the mummy cloth used for
human burials. An even larger black meteorite has lain for centuries
at the center of the shrine known as the Kaaba, a perfectly rectangular
stone hut now housed inside the Great Mosque of Mecca. When
Islam’s founder, Mohammed, came to Mecca to claim the Kaaba for
his one true God, the pagan idols fled, running away on stone legs.
Only the black rock, reputed to have been a gift from the archangel
Gabriel to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, remained. Even today it
occupies the heart of Muslim worship.
 Comets, those other bright travelers through the night skies, were
likewise greeted with a sense of awe and fear that often spilled over
into the realm of the divine. In seventh-century A.D. China, Li Ch’un
Feng wrote, “Comets are vile stars. Every time they appear,...
something happens to wipe out the old and estab-
lish the new.” The Crusades were launched in part because the
appearance of comets in the skies told the faithful that the time had
come to do something about Muslim occupation of the holy places in
Palestine. Even in the modern period, comets have been considered
portentous and dangerous. Seeing the great comet of 1680—later
named after Edmund Halley, who calculated its orbit and predicted it
would return in 1758—the theologian Christopher Ness warned that
God had sent this cosmic visitor as a heavenly sign that drought and
war were soon to follow.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the scientific
Western world dismissed such beliefs as childish nonsense of no
more significance than Chicken Little running about in nervous
despair, shouting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” The
heavens, we knew, were orderly in their movements, with each
astronomical body holding to its appointed orbit, much as Aristotle
portrayed his universe of crystalline spheres. In the sky, things simply
didn’t bump into each other.
During the nineteenth century, many scientists began to accept,
albeit reluctantly, that meteorites originated somewhere outside
Earth. The high nickel content of metallic meteorites differed
markedly from the rocks in the areas where they were found and
argued for origin somewhere else, beyond our planet. Additionally, a
shower of more than 2,000 small meteorites in France in 1803 was
investigated by the pioneering astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace,
who declared the rockfall extraterrestrial. Still, such events were seen
as little more than curiosities. Until well into the twentieth century,
most scientists explained away the obvious craters on the moon as
volcanic in origin, not as the result of collisions with objects from
space.
Uniformitarianism added to this sense of security. After all, if
things are now as they have always been, and if the only meteorites
to have survived their collision with Earth are small bits of rock
indeed, then there is no reason to believe that astronomical objects
pose any danger to our planet. Even as scientists came to
accept that meteors had hit the moon and left massive scars, they
explained that these events had occurred a long, long time ago,
millions if not billions of years in the past. In the safe, settled world
of the present, the last threat humans needed to worry about were
those errant bits of space-traveling rock, metal, and ice we call
asteroids and comets.

The Slow Dawning of Awareness

Looking back, we can be overly harsh about earlier scientists’ too-
easy dismissal of the danger posed by the skies. Unlike the moon and
Mars, which have largely inactive surfaces and show the visible
marks of meteors that have plowed into them, Earth’s active surface
covers over the evidence of impact relatively quickly. As a result, it
wasn’t until 1957 that scientists even agreed that Earth had a bona
fide impact crater. The agreement capped years of sometimes
acrimonious debate that ended when geology graduate student
Eugene Shoemaker argued convincingly that Arizona’s Barringer
Crater (now also known as Meteor Crater), which is over 1,100 yards
wide and almost 200 yards deep, had been formed during a collision
with an asteroid about 125 feet in diameter. Even though the crater
was only some 50,000 years old—practically yesterday in geological
terms—erosion and other natural processes combined with the
absence of a large surviving meteorite, had made identification of the
structure as a crater problematical. Shoemaker argued that the
crater’s pattern of broken rock, iron fragments, and tektites were the
footprint of an asteroid impact. Reluctantly science agreed. Space
rock had indeed struck Earth hard enough to leave a substantial scar.
With the acceptance of Shoemaker’s meteoritic explanation for the
Barringer Crater, more impact sites were identified. A classic
example is the ring crater over sixty miles across near Man- icouagan,
Quebec, which has now been flooded by lakes from two hydroelectric
dams. Aerial photography showed that the ring might be a crater, and
views from orbiting spacecraft confirmed its status as the scar left by
an impact approximately 214 million years ago. Yet another very old
crater forms the round depression that holds the small city of
Nordlingen in Bavaria.

In the past forty years, approximately 150 impact craters, from

small to large, have been identified, and the number grows by about
three or four almost every year. There is simply no doubt that this
number represents only the smallest tip of a very large iceberg. Since
crater features weather away, many of the surviving craters are
located on the geological features known as shields and cratons,
which represent the oldest stable nuclear masses of the continents.
The Canadian shield contains twenty-five impact craters, and another
nineteen and seven are located in Australia and the Ukraine
respectively. Craters on newer continental material have weathered
so severely that they are exceedingly difficult to identify. Also,
relatively little crater-searching has been carried out in South
America, Asia, and Africa; these continents could harbor a great
many more impact scars. The floors of the oceans, which cover three-
quarters of Earth’s surface, are still incompletely mapped and also
may contain undiscovered craters. In fact, it wasn’t until 1987 that
the first ocean-floor crater, a structure more than twenty-five miles
wide and estimated to be 50 million years old, was identified in the
North Atlantic, approximately. 125 miles southeast of the Nova
Scotia coastline.
A good example of the difficulty involved in recognizing impact
craters after millions of years of geological change comes from
Chesapeake Bay. A scientific team headed by Wylie Poag has
identified the site where, some 35 million years ago, a large space
object hit about 130 miles southeast of where Washington, D.C., now
lies. Called a bolide—that is, an object of uncertain composition
(perhaps the rock or metal of an asteroid, perhaps the less dense ice,
dust, and hydrocarbon tar of a comet) that was somewhere between
two-thirds of a mile and seven miles in diameter, traveled faster than
a speeding bullet (44,500 to 156,000 miles per hour), and detonated
on impact—this object carved a crater twice the size of the state of
Rhode Island and nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon. Thirty-five
million years later, the crater is impossible to recognize visually
because it lies from 950 to 1,600 feet below Chesapeake Bay, its
surrounding shoreline, and the continental shelf extending out into
the Atlantic. In 1983, Poag and his coworkers aboard the
oceanographic ship Glomar Challenger collected core samples along
the coast of New Jersey that contained the kind of debris, particularly
tektites, that indicates a bolide impact. Three years later, cores drilled
on land in southeastern Virginia found an immense bed of rock rubble
that was actually older than the rocks on which it lay. Apparently the
rubble had been dug up and thrown through the air by the bolide’s
explosion. Fossils in the rubble indicated that it was of the same
geological age as the New Jersey tektites. The final and confirming
piece of evidence didn’t come until 1993, when seismic surveys of
deep geological structures by two oil companies seeking out likely
drilling sites revealed a large ring crater centered on Cape Charles, a
town on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
If an ancient crater of this size located in an area as heavily
populated as the mid-Atlantic seaboard takes a good ten years of
scientific work to recognize, you can imagine how many more blast
scars may lie still undetected and unknown, in both settled and
remote regions. We know that, like the moon and Mars, Earth was
subject to intense meteor bombardment in our planet’s early days.
The two oldest known terrestrial craters are Vredefort in South
Africa, which is over eighty-five miles wide and 2 billion years old,
and Sudbury in Canada, which dates back 1.85 billion years. It is very
likely that Earth, which has been around for 4.5 billion years, has
even older impact scars, but either they have been completely erased
by natural processes or we don’t yet have the skill to recognize them
for what they are.
Not that the cratering process has stopped. As of this writing, the
most recent known impact crater, which measures 165 feet across,
was dug out near the city of San Luis in western Honduras on
November 22, 1996.
The total amount of material that falls out of space toward
Earth and survives its trip through the atmosphere is staggeringly
large. Most of it lands as dust, some as good-sized rocks, and about
every 100 million years a massive object strikes our planet. Taking
all these sources into account over time, the astronomer Duncan Steel
estimates that an average of 200,000 tons of material falls from
interplanetary space annually.
This number seems impossibly large, mainly because many
meteors come down in isolated regions where the evidence is quickly
obliterated. For example, a giant fireball was observed along more
than one thousand miles of the Greenland coast on December 9, 1997.
The meteor, which burned bright enough to turn night into day more
than sixty miles from its path, struck the Greenland ice cap and
exploded violently. According to estimates made from seismic data
recorded at Cardiff University in Wales, the meteor probably
measured between fifty and one hundred yards across, was traveling
at about 7,600 miles per hour, and detonated with a force equal to a
fifteen-megaton nuclear device. The actual impact site has yet to be
found, even though its position was plotted from navigational
observations before the impact. The meteor, or what remained of it,
probably melted into the ice, which quickly re-formed over it in the
deep winter cold and was soon obscured by heavy snow that fell in
the hours following the fireball’s descent. Similarly, no crater from a
fireball and a subsequent explosion in the Australian outback in May
1993 has yet been located.

Reality Check
When the Alvarezes and their colleagues first proposed in 1980 that
the impact of a large asteroid led to the extinction of the dinosaurs,
many scientists had trouble accepting the notion as realistic. Two
facts bothered them. On the one hand, the few truly large craters on
Earth, like Vredefort and Sudbury, were very old, dating back to an
era when even the most stringent uni- formitarian would agree that
conditions were quite different from what they are now. As for more
modern impacts, none of them was anywhere near large enough to
cause even regional catastrophe, much less global extinction. It just
didn’t seem possible that in our time a space object with planet-
destroying dimensions could slam into Earth. It was all too much like
Velikovsky, Blavatsky, Churchward, and those other writers with
more imagination than science behind them.

Then the universe served up a cold, hard lesson in possibility. Its

name was Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Named for its discoverers—Eugene Shoemaker, who earlier in his
career provided the definitive argument regarding Barringer Crater;
his wife, Carolyn; and David Levy—P/Shoemaker-Levy 9* was the
ninth comet the three-scientist team discovered. They first found it in
March 1993 while working at Palomar Mountain Observatory in
California. Subsequent observations from Palomar and other
observatories revealed that the comet was in orbit around Jupiter and
that it had made a very close approach to the planet about a year
earlier. Gravitational forces during this close approach had torn the
large comet into a number of fragments, of which six were relatively
large (up to about a mile and a quarter in diameter) and a dozen
medium-sized, along with a massive array of bits and pieces ranging
in size from large boulders to motes of dust. The data also revealed
that P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. For
the first time in the history of science, observers had predicted the
impact of an astronomical body with a planet and could watch the
event happen.

*The Pin the name stands for “periodic.” Before its capture by Jupiter, the comet had
revolved around the sun in an orbit, or period, rather than simply passing through the
solar system as an interloper.

The impact came over a period of seven days in July 1994.

Prac¬tically every astronomer and major observatory on Earth, as
well as the Hubbell Space Telescope, watched intently as the
frag¬ments entered the Jovian atmosphere one after another at speeds
in excess of 130,000 miles per hour. Heating up into streaking
meteors, the large fragments exploded into vast fireballs of
immensely hot gas. The gas and debris from each explosion flushed
back out the tunnel cleared by the fragment’s passage, then expanded,
rose, and cooled, forming a large plume. With further cooling, the
plume of gas and debris fell back toward the surface of the planet,
like the splash of a pebble collapsing into a puddle, heating the
atmosphere and producing intense emissions of thermal energy. The
biggest show was made by Fragment G, which exploded with a force
estimated at 1 million megatons of TNT—about fifty times the
nuclear arsenal of Earth. The plume from the fireball rose almost two
thousand miles above the upper limit ofjupiter’s atmosphere. Dark
scars the size of the Earth remained in the usually salmon- and sand-
colored atmosphere for weeks afterward, and were visible even in
small backyard telescopes.
In its spectacular plummet toward the surface of Jupiter,
P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 drove home a number of important points. It
demonstrated, for example, that a comet approaching a planet can
come apart and strike as a shower of fragments rather than as a single
large fireball—a phenomenon that, as we shall see, is very important
in understanding the effects of impacting comets on human
civilization. It demonstrated another phenomenon scientists had long
suspected was true: Comets may explode in the atmosphere before
impact, something like a nuclear weapon in air burst. And it showed
that, even in contemporary times, a comet could indeed collide with
a planet with enough force to cause global extinctions.
With P/Shoemaker-Levy 9, uniformitarianism took another step
backward. Earth’s neighborhood in the galaxy started looking a lot
rougher and tougher.

Tunguska: Impact in Real Time

P/Shoemaker-Levy gave us a look at the effects of a planetary col-
lision with a large comet, but because of the distance from Earth to
Jupiter, we don’t know many of the details of the impact’s effects. In
the early years of this century, our own planet had a run-in with a
much smaller explosive object, a collision that scientists have now
had the time to study firsthand.
This event happened in the early morning hours of June 30, 1908.
An immense fireball crossed the dawn-reddening sky over Siberia
with a roar that could be heard 600 miles away, then exploded with
the estimated force of between 500 and 2,000 Hiroshima bombs in a
remote region of forests and swamps. A reindeer herder named
Vasiliy Dzhenkoul camping close to the edge of the blast site
somehow survived, but his 600 to 700 head of reindeer and his
herding dogs were incinerated. Even sixty miles away, in the small
trading-post town of Vanavara, the blast made a powerful impression.
An eyewitness said, ‘The sky split apart and a great fire appeared. It
became so hot that one couldn’t stand it. There was a deafening
explosion.... [My friend] was blown across the ground a distance of
three sazhens [about twenty feet]. As the hot wind passed by, the
ground and the huts trembled. Sod was shaken loose from our
ceilings and glass was splintered out of the window frames.”
The blast, which occurred close to the Tunguska River, colored
sunrises and sunsets over Russia, Scandinavia, and much of Western
Europe for the next several weeks. Even The New York Times, in
faraway North America, reported the observation of remarkable
lights in the sky on the two nights following the explosion and noted
that the display was similar to lights seen after the Krakatoa
detonation. In Siberia and East Asia, dust cast twenty- five to over
forty miles high in the atmosphere by the blast illuminated the entire
visible sky; even at night the heavens glowed like daylight. Mount
Wilson Observatory in California and the Smithsonian’s
Astrophysical Observatory reported a marked decrease in the
atmosphere’s transparency, apparendy as a result of the dust load.
The blast also had fascinating geological effects. It affected
seismographs at least as far away as St. Petersburg, some 2,500 miles
distant. And the Irkutsk Observatory, about 560 miles away from the
blast site, reported storms of disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field,
a phenomenon that has since been recorded during nuclear tests in
the atmosphere.
Still, apart from a few reindeer herders and trappers in central
Siberia, no one actually saw what had happened. Ignorant of the
actual event, scientists attributed the bright atmospheric lights to
solar outbursts causing electrical disturbances in the atmosphere. The
seismic data were said to be the mark of an earthquake.
The Tungus people, or Evenks, who are native to the Tunguska
region, knew better. Certain that angry gods had delivered a pun-
ishment, the tribe’s shaman-chief declared the blast site an enchanted
region no one was allowed to enter. This prohibition, as well as
Tungus stories about a vast area of burned and flattened trees, alerted
Leonid Kulik, a Russian scientist who had collected meteorite
fragments all over Siberia. He wondered what really had happened at
Tunguska. Suspecting that a meteor had hit Earth, Kulik resolved to
have a look for himself, no matter what the shaman said.
It took him nineteen years to get to Tunguska. Given the turmoil
of the First World War, the October Revolution, and civil war in the
early years of the Soviet state, it was 1927 before Kulik launched an
expedition. Just getting to Tunguska was formidable. Lying in a
region of bogs inhabited by daunting hordes of summer mosquitoes,
Tunguska could be reached only by blazing a cross-country trail
through some sixty miles of forests, streams, rivers, and swamps.
What Kulik saw when he got there was stunning. Before him lay a
vast panorama of charred, felled trees that seemed to have burst into
flames all at once on that June morning in 1908. There was no
obvious crater, yet the blast had an apparent epicenter a little over
thirty-five miles across.
Kulik made four more trips to Tunguska, methodically recording
the details of the blast site. He mapped the area of fallen trees, which
covered a region about half the size of the state of Rhode Island.
Inside the blast’s epicenter he discovered a number of neatly shaped
oval areas he presumed to be minor craters that had filled in over
time. Suspecting that the main meteorite lay hidden in a massive
swampy area at the center of the blast site, he dragged the swamp and
conducted magnetic probes over both the bogs and the oval craters.
Remarkably, he found not so much as a fraction of an ounce of the
meteoritic iron that would have unmistakably identified the object.
Still, Kulik felt certain an extraterrestrial object was responsible for
the blast.
The Second World War stopped further work at Tunguska, and
Kulik himself died in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. Following the
war, an engineer and Red Army officer named Alexander Kazantsev
wrote a short story suggesting that Tunguska’s odd pattern—a
flattened, incinerated forest without a crater—indicated a nuclear
blast in the air. Since no nuclear weapons were available on Earth in
1908, the only explanation for the Tunguska site, according to
Kazantsev, was the crash of an errant alien space vehicle carrying a
nuclear power plant. Kazantsev’s story kept recirculating, and in
1958 it was reprinted in a popular book titled Guest from Space.
Gennady Plekhanov, then director of the Scientific Research Institute
in the Siberian city of Tomsk, wondered if there was anything to
Kazantsev’s theory. Even after fifty years, a nuclear blast would
leave elevated radiation levels at the explosion site. Plekhanov
decided to take a closer look at Tunguska, and he led expeditions
there in 1959 and 1960—the first scientific presence in the area since
Kulik’s last foray before World War II.
Plekhanov and his colleagues scanned for elevated radiation
levels. They didn’t find them. They searched for meteorite fragments.
Like Kulik, they didn’t find them, either. Still, despite the absence of
conclusive findings, Plekhanov’s meticulous fieldwork
met with a warm reception among his fellow scientists when he
presented an account of the research at Moscow’s prestigious
Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy.
A tradition began. Every summer Russian scientists braved the
swamps and mosquitoes to reach Tunguska and collect more
information. Since 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, non-
Russians have also been allowed in the area, which had previously
been closed to foreigners because of proximity to the high-security
cities of Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk. The result, after all these years of
work, is a richly detailed look at the most recent large-impact site on
Earth.
For example, Wilhelm Fast, a Tomsk State University mathe-
matician working at Tunguska since 1960, has assembled an
exquisitely precise map of the 850 square miles of fallen, burned
trees. Working from the map, other scientists have calculated that the
blast occurred at an altitude of three to five miles with a force of ten
to twenty megatons of TNT, while the object was traveling from east
to west.
The identity of the object remains a perplexing mystery. The
absence of any unusual radiation indicates that it wasn’t a space
vehicle, even though that theory was actively promoted by Sakura, a
Japanese UFO group headed by Kozo Kowai. Curiously, however,
the blast did have biological results. Tree growth accelerated close to
the epicenter of the blast, and remains accelerated. Biological
mutations have increased, not only at the blast site but also along the
path of the object over the Tunguska River region. Changes have
affected the Rh blood factor of the local Evenks, genetic traits in
certain ant species, and the seeds and needle clusters of at least one
type of pine. The cause of these mutations remains unknown.
Since the Tunguska object wasn’t a spaceship, it must have been
either a comet or an asteroid. Even though comets are often described
as dirty iceballs, we’re not completely sure what they’re composed
of. They appear to be made up of approxi-
mately equal parts of ice, gravel or clay, and heavy hydrocarbons
with the consistency of tar or asphalt. Asteroids are usually car-
bonaceous (something like cosmic charcoal), rocky, or metallic
(primarily iron), depending on where they formed in the asteroid belt
that lies between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids are denser than comets,
but they travel at much slower speeds.
To date, no research data indicate definitively whether the
Tunguska bolide was an asteroid or a comet. For example, a team of
Italian scientists led by Menotti Galli of the University of Bologna
has studied chemical evidence in trees that survived the blast. First,
the Italian team looked at tree rings for the carbon-14 that would
signal the thermonuclear explosion of hydrogen fusing into helium
within a comet. They didn’t find any. Next, they studied small
particles captured within the resin of the trees. The gold, copper, and
nickel levels in some of the particles were markedly higher than the
levels of the same elements in the surrounding soil. This meant the
particles had probably come from the bolide, not from dust kicked up
off the ground by the blast. And the metallic particles’ smooth texture
and round shape indicate that they were heated to extreme
temperatures, probably in the heart of the bolide blast. Thus the
Italian data point toward an asteroid with a metallic component.
So does a computer simulation developed by three American
scientists, Christopher Chyba, Paul Thomas, and Kevin Zahnle. The
point of their simulation was to use the laws of physics to develop a
description of a bolide that matched the physical data from Tunguska.
Research to date has shown that small meteors, under ten feet in
diameter, burn up in the atmosphere, while big ones, over 300 feet
across, survive to hit Earth’s surface. Midsized objects behave
differendy, according to the computer simulation. As the bolide
rushes through the air, the intense atmospheric pressure on the front
end deforms it like pancake batter spreading across a griddle. At the
same time, almost no pressure is exerted on the
bolide’s back end. This difference in forces tears the bolide into
pieces, then the pieces, which are subjected to the same force dif-
ferential, are likewise torn apart. Within seconds, the bolide frag-
ments explosively into a cloud of debris.
The computer showed that a midsized comet, with its lesser
density, would detonate fourteen miles or higher over the surface, far
too high to fit the Tunguska profile. Similarly, a carbonaceous meteor
would explode at nine miles, about four to six miles too high. Unless
it reached a speed of twenty-five miles per second, which is rarely if
ever seen in nature, an iron-rich meteorite would survive its passage
through the atmosphere and strike the Earth, leaving a meteorite—a
piece of evidence noticeably absent from Tunguska. But a stony
bolide 200 feet wide and falling at a speed of 36,000 miles per hour
at a 45-degree angle fit the model. It would explode in the right
altitude range, and its blast wave would raise enough dust into the
upper atmosphere to cause brilliant sunsets and dawns and light up
the nights.
A second model, developed by Jack Hills and Patrick Goda at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, points to the same kind of a meteor.
This simulation shows that about 90 percent of the bolide would have
burned away, leaving little more than fine gravel to hit the Earth. As
a result, no single meteorite of any size remains to be discovered.
A third computer model, however, muddies the waters and shows
how difficult it can be to determine exactly what the Tunguska object
was. Evans Lyne and Richard Fought of the University of Tennessee
and Michael Tauber of Stanford University questioned a key
assumption in the simulation done by the Chyba group. The
assumption was that the air in front of the bolide reached 45,000
degrees Fahrenheit and that this immense heat was transferred
directly to the bolide and burned most of it up. Lyne and his
coworkers argued that heat radiated into the surrounding air as well
as into the bolide, which reached a high temperature, but much less
than 45,000 degrees. As a result, more of the bolide survived to reach
closer to Earth before it exploded. In this model, a stony asteroid
would explode much closer than three to five miles over the planet’s
surface, while a carbonaceous meteorite would explode at the right
height. So would a comet coming in at an angle much steeper than 45
degrees.
Many of the Russian researchers working on Tunguska hold to a
comet as the explanation. They point to the date as important
evidence. Earth crosses the Taurid stream, which resulted from the
breakup of a comet, twice a year, once from April to June and then
again from October to December. The Tunguska event occurred on
June 30 during the Taurid passage. And then there’s the absence of
even small fragments. Years of dragging the swamps have produced
not a single piece of rock of indisputably meteoritic origin. And
samples of peat taken from the Tunguska bogs and dated to 1908
contain a large number of chemical isotopes that may represent
cometary material that fell to Earth when the plume from the blast
cooled and collapsed back to the planet’s surface. These isotopes may
also have originated on Earth, however, so the picture remains less
than clear.
In the end, the debate of comet versus asteroid may be a sterile
argument. The point is that an extraterrestrial body of uncertain
density detonated violently over Tunguska.
Had that blast occurred somewhere other than a remote region with
few human inhabitants, the story might have been quite different.
Suppose the bolide had streaked through the sky over Paris or New
York City or Tokyo. A blast only about one one- thousandth the size
of Tunguska killed approximately 140,000 people in Hiroshima, a
city that was home to a population of 320,000 to 330,000 people. It
seems that a much larger, Tunguska-like blast over a major
metropolitan center could kill hundreds of thousands of people,
perhaps even millions, and shatter that city’s infrastructure. By no
means would it be a global
catastrophe. To the people in the impact zone, however, that day
would seem like the world’s last.

Hard Knocks and Splashdowns

Whether an asteroid or a comet, the Tunguska bolide was hardly an
oversized space object. Indeed, among the meteors and comets that
pass randomly or periodically through Earth’s cosmic neighborhood,
the Tunguska bolide was at best only a garden-variety object.
Thousands of comets and asteroids of much larger dimensions come
close enough to Earth to pose a threat of collision. What would
happen if one of them hit?
For the sake of example, let’s look at the hypothesized effects of
an impact with a good-sized rocky asteroid—one a little over six
miles in diameter that collides with Earth at a speed exceeding 55,000
miles per hour. Practically the entire mass of the meteor would
survive passage through the atmosphere and strike the surface of the
planet, where it would release energy in the range of 1 billion
megatons—about fifty thousand times the combined nuclear arsenals
of Earth.
The atmospheric effects of the impact would affect an entire
hemisphere within minutes. Assuming that 10 percent of the energy
of the impact went into the blast wave, wind velocity at
approximately 1,250 miles from the epicenter would hit close to
1,500 miles per hour, about a dozen times faster than the most
powerful hurricane or typhoon, and last for nearly half an hour.
Nothing short of a mountain could stand up to such a tempest. Nor
could it bear the heat. At the same distance from the blast center, the
air temperature would increase by more than 850 degrees Fahrenheit,
incinerating buildings, houses, croplands, and forests, melting
roadways and bridges, crisping human bodies to crematory ash. Of
course, the blast wave would lose energy over time and distance, but
even a long way from the explosion’s center, the effects would be
profound. At a range of approximately 6,200 miles, the wind velocity
would exceed sixty miles per

hour, last for fourteen hours, and heat the air by over 50 degrees
Fahrenheit. Death would be widespread; few could escape.
The blast would also affect the chemical makeup of the atmo-
sphere. In the tremendous heat and pressure of the explosion,
atmospheric chemical reactions would lead to the production of
poisons, like cyanogen. They would also produce large amounts of
nitric oxide, which would soon strip away most or all of the upper-
atmosphere ozone that protects the planet from ultraviolet light.
Organisms that did survive the blast could soon perish from poisoned
air or radiation bombardment.
The other planetary effects of a billion-megaton impact depend on
whether the object hits continent or deep ocean. In the case of a
continental collision, the force of the strike would set off a seismic
wave in the crust that would trigger a worldwide earthquake more
fearsome than any living human has experienced. The force would
be great enough to affect at least the upper mantle, setting off
volcanic eruptions, moving the continental plate, and possibly
causing a sudden magnetic reversal—in which case any compasses
surviving the holocaust would point south rather than north. If Flavio
Barbiero’s hypothesis is correct, the planet’s spin axis might also
move, with the oceans pouring out of some areas and suddenly
flooding others, as Strain’s calculations suggest.
Most of the energy of the continental impact would be used up in
vaporizing the object itself and the land at the site of the collision.
The result would be a massive dust plume, estimated at 100 times the
mass of the object, totaling hundreds or even thousands of cubic
miles and reaching into the upper atmosphere. From there it would
spread around the globe over the next two or three months. In about
six months, clearing would begin, but the atmosphere would still
contain significant amounts of dust for about three years.
Few living things would be around to see the skies return to
normal. The heavy burden of dust in the upper atmosphere
would act like a thick insulating curtain, keeping out the sun’s needed
energy. Day would seem like night, and night would be as dark as
you can imagine—no stars, no moon. Without sunlight, land plants
and marine microorganisms that depend on photosynthesis to survive
would die out. The plant-eating organisms and plankton feeders
would begin to starve, too, and as they died out, a fatal famine would
affect the predators. All the while, the temperature of the planet
beneath its veil of stratospheric dust would plummet. Summer would
be as cold as winter, and winter colder yet.
An impact point in the deep ocean would have quite different
effects. Even in the deepest ocean trenches, the object would carry
through the water and strike the ocean floor. The earthquake resulting
from the collision would probably be less severe than the one arising
from a continental impact, because the crust in the ocean floor is
thinner and therefore less strong. A crater would form, on the order
of five miles deep and twenty miles across. Meanwhile, the immense
volume of water displaced by the impact would rise in a towering
column, then fall back, forming a system of tsunamis that decline
over distance, then rise up again when they reach the shallow water
of the continental shelves. It is likely that waves up to several hundred
feet high would strike the continents, sweeping cities before them and
flooding vast areas of now-dry land. The entire globe would be
affected. The destruction would be less as the distance increased, but
it would still be profound.
The impact’s effects would not end when the tsunamis finally
subsided and the oceans drained back to their new levels. The impact
would probably have broken the thin oceanic floor, releasing the hot
magma of the mantle, possibly in a violent explosion, perhaps in a
slow, sustained venting. Either way, a large amount of sea water
would evaporate in the heat and escape into the atmosphere as
torrential rain clouds, which
would be carried around the globe. A flood, again of global pro-
portions, would be the likely result.
With an oceanic impact, there is no atmospheric dusting to chill
the planet. Rather, the release of heat from the mantle and the added
evaporation of the ocean turns the climate wet and warm.

Impacts and Ice Ages

The standard explanation of the advance and retreat of continental
glaciers by the Milankovitch cycles has a major problem: It doesn’t
work fast enough. Small, gradualist changes in the orbital parameters
of Earth simply can’t account for events like the sudden 14 degrees
Fahrenheit increase in temperature around 9645 B.C. shown in the
Greenland ice cores. Something else must have been involved.
It may have been an oceanic impact, if a suggestive but hypo-
thetical model developed by Emilio Spedicato, a mathematician at
Italy’s University of Bergamo, proves valid. As Spedicato argues, a
continental impact can initiate a glacial period, while an oceanic
impact can bring it to an end.
The heavy atmospheric dust veil caused by a continental impact
not only shields the sun’s light; it also creates a greenhouse effect,
blocking the release of Earth’s heat into space. Over time, the planet’s
surface temperature would tend to equalize, even as it declined
overall. Since most of the surface heat is found in the oceans, the
lower-latitude oceans would cool while the higher-latitude oceans
would warm. This heat-exchange process would cause numerous
violent storms, which would also arise from rapid atmospheric
cooling over the continents in the face of much slower temperature
changes over the oceans. Constant heavy rains would fill depressions
in the continental interiors— precisely what happened during the last
ice age, when Lake Missoula was formed; the Great Salt Lake, Lake
Chad in the Sahara, and the Caspian Sea are remnants of these once-
extensive continental lakes. At higher latitudes, the storms would
deposit snow and ice in a pattern dictated by wind flow. Again, this
is what happened in the last ice age. Moisture from the Pacific Ocean
was carried eastward across North America, where heavy glaciers
formed from the Midwestern area northward. The western shores of
the Pacific at the same latitudes, namely eastern Siberia, northern
China, and Korea, were relatively free of ice. Similarly, North
Atlantic storms prompted glaciation in almost all of northern and
central Europe and western Siberia. Central Siberia endured less
glaciation because storms were largely spent when they reached that
far inland.
By the time the dust veil fell back to Earth within about three years,
a new pattern would have been established: glaciers in the higher
latitudes, a colder overall ocean temperature with lower sea level, and
reduced evaporation. An ice age would have begun. It would be likely
to last, too, owing to the reflection of sunlight off the increased areas
of ice and snow and to continued atmospheric dusting from volcanic
activity or perhaps even more impacts. An atmospheric phenomenon
called diamond powder—droplets of supercooled water in the upper
atmosphere— might also result. Diamond powder, currently found
only over the poles, reflects sunlight back into space and lowers
atmospheric and surface temperatures, adding to the ice-age effect.
An oceanic impact could bring an ice age to an equally sudden end.
Tsunamis would wash over much of the continental surface,
including the ice-covered regions. Contact with salt water, with its
lower freezing point, would initiate glacial melting, in the same way
that salt sprinkled on a frozen sidewalk turns ice to water. Warm rains
from the water evaporated in the impact and in the subsequent magma
flow would speed this melting. Diamond powder in the upper
atmosphere would likely melt and fall as rain. With the increased
penetration of sunlight and the now-smaller glaciers reflecting less
energy back into space, the climate would warm and the glaciers
would continue to retreat. The ice age’s end would be just a matter of
time.
While Spedicato has argued this scenario only hypothetically,
two scientists—Alexander Tollmann, of the University of Vienna,
and the Russian geologist E. P. Izokh—propose that an impact in
circa 10,000 B.c. is the best explanation for the sudden end of the
most recent ice age. Among the evidence both scientists cite is the
large number of tektites dating to that time period. Tollmann relies,
too, on myths of the great flood, like the biblical tale of Noah, and on
a sudden increase in carbon-14 found in fossilized trees dating back
to the time period in question. The carbon-14 could have been
produced when an impact explosion depleted ozone in the upper
atmosphere and exposed the surface of the planet to higher-than-
normal radiation. Tollmann is also willing to give the great flood,
which he considers one of the results of the ice age’s end by impact,
a precise date: 9600 B.C., a fascinating (and probably not accidental)
coincidence with Plato’s time for the sinking of Atlantis.

Rogue Elephants and Savage Swanns: Coherent Catastrophism

According to Spedicato, a one-billion-megaton impact explosion
would carve a crater on the order of sixty miles wide. There are at
least five structures on Earth with these dimensions: Chesapeake Bay
in the United States, Vredefort in South Africa, Chic- xulub in
Mexico’s Yucatan, Popigai in Siberia, and Sudbury in Canada.
Clearly, our planet has been struck by space objects of this size more
than a few times, very likely with the catastrophic results the Italian
mathematician outlines. Yet this focus on outsize objects could be
something of an illusion, a misplaced energy that distracts us from
the real pattern in our planet’s history and the actual threat in our
future.
Fixation on outsize objects, however, is slowly becoming the
standard paradigm. Until the widespread acceptance of Chicxu- lub
as an explanation of the K-T extinction and the eyewitness
experience of watching P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 strike Jupiter, scientists
thought Earth immune from astronomical collision. Now that notion
is changing, but not all that completely. The new idea is that Earth is
struck regularly by relatively small meteorites,
which pose little if any threat, and only very rarely by a large comet
or asteroid. In this standard paradigm, big objects are like rogue
elephants or lone wolves—unusual and unpredictable dangers that
come out of nowhere, yet pass away once and for all as soon as they
are dealt with.
This standard paradigm underlies 1998’s two popular summer
popcorn movies about impacts. In Armageddon, Earth is threatened
by a massive asteroid knocked out of its usually safe orbit between
Mars and Jupiter by the close passage of a comet. In Deep Impact,
the danger comes from a newly discovered comet whose orbit
intersects Earth’s. Although the details of the scripts vary, the
resolution of the conflict is the same: dispatch into space a brave team
that destroys the fast-descending object with strategically placed
nuclear weapons. In both cases as well, self-sacrifice of the heroes
saves Earth from destruction. With the asteroid or comet put away,
Earth can return to its happy ways. The scenario is something like all
those old Westerns where, often at the cost of his own life, the good
guy destroys the bad guy who has been terrorizing the good
townsfolk and a new era of peace and prosperity dawns.
This notion of random, unique threats makes for good Hollywood.
After all, no screenwriter wants a threat that keeps on coming—
unless, of course, a sequel is in the works. But is the once-in-a-blue-
moon, rogue-elephant view of astronomical impact good science?
Objects that can come close enough to Earth to pose a threat—and
which are sometimes referred to generically as nearEarth objects
(NEOs)—are of two varieties. First are the asteroids. Most asteroids,
which are the remnants of a planet that didn’t make it to maturity in
the early days of the solar system’s formation, lie in a belt between
Mars and Jupiter. As long as they stay there, asteroids obviously pose
no threat to Earth. But the asteroid belt is a fast-moving crowd scene,
with asteroids repeatedly banging into one another. When these
collisions occur
under certain physical conditions and in particular zones of the
asteroid belt, material ejected in the collisions can enter new orbits
that cross Earth’s path. In addition, astronomers are discovering a
growing number of asteroids, called Apollo asteroids, that orbit the
sun in paths outside the asteroid belt, which could bring them into a
collision path with Earth.
Fortunately, the vast majority of asteroids are not all that large.
Although a few are hundreds of miles across, most are much smaller,
typically less than two miles in diameter, with many no bigger than a
pickup truck. Still, such asteroid fragments can lead to dramatic and
potentially dangerous incidents, like the meteorite that struck near
San Luis, Honduras, in 1996. If it had hit Earth ten hours later, it
might have plunged into downtown Manila or Bangkok and killed
tens of thousands of people. Luckily, the only loss was the acres of
coffee plants that burned in the blast.
The second variety of NEO is comets. Although individual comets
have been known and recognized for centuries, only since the 1950s
have astronomers determined that a large cloud of comets orbits the
sun in the frozen reaches on the far side of the planet Pluto. It is
estimated that there are at least as many comets in this distant band,
called the Oort cloud, as stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Comets vary
markedly in size, with their nuclei estimated to range between two-
thirds of a mile and more than 185 miles in diameter. Their orbital
period around the sun varies, too. So-called long-period comets take
more than 200 years to make one journey around the sun, with some
lasting in the neighborhood of 3 to 6 million years. Short-period
comets orbit once every 200 years or less.
Until well into the 1970s, astronomers believed that the Oort cloud
was stable. It did appear that about every million years a star would
pass near enough to churn the orbits of some of the comets, sending
most into interstellar space and an occasional one toward the inner
solar system. However, these incidents were too weak to disrupt the
bulk of the comet cloud. Then, in the late
1970s, astronomers uncovered the existence of cold, dark, very
massive nebulae called molecular clouds whose presence makes the
Oort cloud unstable and potentially dangerous.
Building on this finding, Victor Clube and Bill Napier, British
astronomers who pursue their research at the Armagh Observatory in
Northern Ireland, have developed a theory called coherent
catastrophism. That is, unlike the rogue-elephant theory of global
danger posed by unusual and unpredictable NEOs, coherent
catastrophism maintains that predictable astrophysical events
regularly send swarms of objects into the inner solar system and place
Earth in harm’s way.
Two basic mechanisms underlie Clube and Napier’s ideas. The
first concerns the solar system’s passage through the Milky Way
galaxy, the small corner of the universe we call home.
When the solar system passes through a molecular cloud, it is
subjected to powerful gravitational forces. These affect the sun itself
and the planets little, owing to their large mass, but the much smaller
comets in the Oort cloud are buffeted and knocked about in a manner
that can wholly shift and redirect their orbits. In addition, the sun and
its planetary system travel around the Milky Way in a path that
periodically takes it into areas affected by tidal forces from the
galaxy’s spiral arms and the galactic disk itself. These two events—
the predictable, periodic passage through stronger tidal fields in the
galaxy and the unpredictable encounter with molecular clouds—send
comets into new orbits that can direct them out of the Oort cloud.
Some of them head far into space, on a collision course with nothing.
Others plummet into the inner solar system and possibly close by—
perhaps even into—Earth’s path.
The second primary mechanism of Clube and Napier’s model is
the behavior of the comet once it enters the inner solar system. Like
P/Shoemaker-Levy 9, large comets tend to break up, with each
smaller fragment developing the characteristic head (or coma) and
tail of an individual comet. Ancient accounts, indud-
ing a report by Diodorus Siculus and the records of both Western and
Chinese astronomers, report the breakup of comets. The first
absolutely reliable recording of such an occurrence, and one whose
events illustrate the threats comets can pose, concerned the comet
Biela, which was named in 1826. Biela had an orbit of seven years’
duration that passed within a mere 20,000 miles of Earth’s orbit; each
November 27, Earth came closest to Biela’s orbit. On one of Biela’s
return appearances in late 1845 and early 1846, the comet was
observed to split. A faint piece broke off the main comet and rapidly
grew brighter. When the comet returned in 1852, the two pieces were
1.5 million miles apart. Then, in 1865, when Biela and its companion
should have reappeared, they were nowhere to be seen. On November
27 of that year, Earth ran into a meteor swarm that lit the sky,
according to one observer, “like a cascade of fireworks.” An
estimated 160,000 shooting stars streaked through the sky during the
six hours the display lasted. Called the Andromedid shower, the
meteors returned for another spectacular show on November 27,
1885. The Andromedid shower still exists, although now it is largely
spent and the fragments have been distributed over the entire orbit of
the former comet. Neither Biela nor its companion was ever seen
again.
Comet fragmentation apparently results primarily from internal
forces within the comet’s coma. Gravitational pull from the sun can
fragment a comet, much as Jupiter fragmented P/Shoemaker-Levy 9,
but since breakup has been observed at many points along cometary
orbits, not just close to the sun, other pressures must also be at work.
Perhaps thermal forces crack the comet’s gravel and ice and fracture
it. Or perhaps it runs into other space debris and breaks into pieces in
the collision.
It also appears that as comets orbit through the inner solar system
they do not simply evaporate away into gas—which, of course, poses
no danger to Earth. When Halley’s Comet made its most recent
passage through the inner solar system, it was inter-
cepted by a number of spacecraft that gave us our first close-up look
at a comet. The escaping gas that formed the tail came from only a
few jets on the surface, which had the solid black look of a large
cinder. As even more of the gas escapes, the comet will eventually
take on the appearance of a soot-colored asteroid. In fact, at least
some of the Apollo asteroids, which orbit in the solar system outside
the asteroid belt, may be the spent remnants of comet cores.
Clube and Napier hypothesize that when a comet from the Oort
cloud enters the inner solar System and assumes a new short-period
orbit, it fragments again and again, forming a long, wide stream of
debris. After perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 years, the comet has turned
into an asteroid of substantial size. This fragile inner core is gradually
sliced, carved, and whittled into various bits and pieces, both through
internal forces and collisions with smaller objects. Throughout its life
span in the inner solar system, the comet creates a large, ever-
growing, ever-widening stream of fragments.
The results of a planetary body’s passage through such a stream
were observed on the moon in late June 1975, thanks to the aid of
seismometers on the satellite’s surface. As the moon encountered the
Taurid meteor stream, its surface was struck with as many one-ton
space rocks in five days as it had been in the prior five years. Nothing
equivalent was seen on Earth because the meteors came in on the
daytime side of the planet and burned up invisibly in the atmosphere.
Had the stream encountered Earth at night, the show of shooting stars
would have given us some idea of the Andromedid spectacle of 1865.
Because short-period comets keep fragmenting and fragmenting as
they orbit the sun, they eventually turn into a band of dust that spreads
out over the entire orbital path. Most likely, comets pose the greatest
danger early on in this fragmentation process, when the stream is
relatively narrow and the comet pieces larger rather than smaller.
Should Earth pass through such a young
stream, it would be struck with showers of fragments, some of them
big enough to do serious damage. Even fragments of a size too small
to cause more than local disaster, striking in clusters of impacts
across the face of the globe, could lead to serious cumulative
destruction. And the comet’s dust infused into the upper atmosphere
and added to the debris injected into those same regions by impact
would add to the planetary cooling effect of continental collisions.
Meteor streams resulting from a comet’s slow fragmentation have
yet another ominous characteristic: Year after year, Earth passes
through them. Some years, of course, the planet may dodge the bullet,
or more accurately the meteor. But in other years, swarms of space
rock, ice, and tar could come speeding through the atmosphere
toward the surface of the planet.
Clube and Napier note that the Taurid meteor stream, Comet
Encke, and several large asteroids all follow orbits that appear
related. In addition, this orbital pattern follows a broad tube of dust
and debris that Earth enters in April and from which it emerges in
late June, and then reenters in October and escapes again in
December. As Clube and Napier see it, all these objects, from Encke
to the smallest Taurid meteors, came from the fragmentation of a very
large comet over a period of perhaps 20,000 years. Backtracking
from current data gives us some idea of what the original comet was
like and what path it may have followed. Given the mass of comet,
asteroids, meteor streams, and debris, the object must have been more
than sixty miles across in its early days. Also, Comet Encke and the
large asteroid called Olijato had nearly identical orbits some 9,500
years ago. Very possibly the comet, or one of its large fragments,
underwent a massive disintegration at that time, with Encke and
Olijato representing two of the largest surviving remnants of that
particular fragmentation. There may have been others. From 3500 to
3000 B.C., Olijato had repeated close encounters with Earth. Any
sibling objects traveling on the same path might well have struck the
planet during the same period. And the Tunguska object, with its date
of June 30, right at the time when Earth was exiting the edge of the
Tau- rid stream, may well have been the most recent of these large
fragments to hit the planet.
According to Clube and Napier, it takes comets some 3 to 5 million
years to tumble from the Oort cloud into the solar system. During this
period of time a giant comet trapped in an Earthcrossing orbit creates
a large swarm of asteroids. The giant comets recur in Earth-crossing
orbits at intervals of about 100,000 years, and our planet’s encounters
with the asteroid stream of the comet peaks roughly every
millennium. Depending on the stream’s orbit, the danger to Earth
would be greatest at one or two times of the year for a few hundred
years. Some years nothing would happen; in others the bombardment
over hours or days would be intense. Intermittent periods of cairn
between the bombardments would last perhaps 1,000 years, when the
cycle could begin again.
Clube and Napier suggest that we are currently in the tail end of
such a 3-to-5-million-year episode, when comets have been passing
through the inner solar system. But current conditions— Earth’s
positioning near the galactic plane of the Milky Way, our closeness
to one of the galaxy’s spiral arms, and recent passage through
molecular clouds—could well initiate a new flow of comets from the
Oort cloud into orbits that bring them close to Earth. The future,
Clube and Napier predict, does not bode well.

Craters and Smoking Guns

One of the primary scientific benefits of Clube and Napier’s model
is that it provides a mechanism for explaining the how, when, why,
and what of impacts. When the Alvarezes and their colleagues first
proposed a collision with a comet or asteroid as the cause of the
extinction of the dinosaurs, the seeming randomness of such a
collision made the idea suspect in the eyes of many scientists. In a
manner of speaking, they were hypothesizing the astronomical
equivalent of a piano falling on your head while you’re walking along
Fifth Avenue. There you are, just minding your own business, when
this half-ton mass of mahogany and ivory plummets out of the sky
and squashes you into the pavement. Scary, for sure, but without
knowing why the piano happened to show up in the same place you
did, basically unpredictable. Scientists have trouble with this kind of
scenario. We prefer models that deliver the ability to predict and
analyze. In science, even chaos has its theory.
 Clube and Napier added something to the impact model for the K-
T extinction by providing the missing theoretical background. Their
hypothesis of cometary flux into the solar system as the result of
galactic tides and run-ins with molecular clouds is plausible.
Of course, science requires evidence as well as elegance for
hypotheses. Which raises the issue: Are there any data to support
Clube and Napier’s notion of clustered impacts resulting from comet
fragmentation as the cause of disaster?
The K-T extinction is just one of five major extinctions, and it was
by no means the biggest. That one happened at the boundary between
the Permian and the Triassic periods, about 245 million years ago. In
relatively few years, life in the seas came almost entirely to an end.
Something on the order of 90 to 96 percent of all marine species were
wiped out. The ax fell on creatures at every level of evolutionary
complexity: all the trilobites, 500 species of plankton, most of the
sponges and echinoderms (starfishes, sea urchins, and their relatives),
and hundreds upon hundreds of species of corals. Ten million years
passed before coral reefs, those colorful and highly productive
submarine structures of tropical seas, made their reappearance. The
extinction of land-based animals was equivalently catastrophic.
Approximately 80 percent of all the amphibian and reptile families
then extant disappeared.
Like the K-T boundary, the Permian-Triassic transition layer
contains far more than the normal terrestrial amount of iridium. To
date, no large crater on the order of Chicxulub has been found that
corresponds to the Permian extinction. Could it be that a swarm of
smaller fragments hit over a period of hours, days, weeks—even
years or decades—clogged the seas with debris, and filled the
atmosphere with a chilling veil of comet dust?
Interestingly, two chains of craters contemporaneous with other
major extinctions have recently been identified. One, announced by
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1996 and
located in the central African country of Chad, was revealed by radar
images taken during the missions of the space shuttle Endeavor in
1994. Focused on a known impact site named Aorounga in northern
Chad, the images showed two other nearby structures that also appear
to be craters. Dating to 360 million years ago, the craters may well
have resulted from the fragmentation of an asteroid or comet that
struck Earth in pieces. At the time of the impacts, Earth underwent a
mass extinction during what is known as the Devonian-
Carboniferous boundary. Like the K-T boundary, the one marking
the Devonian-Carboniferous transition contains an unusually
excessive amount of iridium.
‘The impacts in Chad weren’t big enough to cause the extinction,”
said Adriana Ocampo, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory geologist, at the
time of the announcement, “but they may have contributed to it.
Could these impacts be part of a larger event? Were they, perhaps,
part of comet showers that could have added to the extinction?”
The second chain, identified only in 1998, dates to approximately
214 million years ago, around the time of the Triassic- Jurassic
boundary, an extinction every bit as catastrophic as the K-T event.
The research, conducted by David Rowley of the University of
Chicago, John Spray of the University of New Brunswick (Canada),
and Simon Kelley of The Open University (United Kingdom),
showed an unsuspected connection between five
craters spread across two continents. At the time when the craters
were formed, North America and Europe were in much different
positions than they are now. When the researchers moved the
continents back to their ancient geographical locations, the rela-
tionship among the craters was striking. Three of the five craters—
Rochechouart in France, and Manicouagan and St. Martin in
Canada—lay on the same latitude of 22.8 degrees, forming a chain
now some 3,100 miles long. The other two craters lined up on
identical declination paths with two of the craters in the first chain:
Obolon in Ukraine with Rochechouart, and Red Wing in Minnesota
with St. Martin. The chance that the craters could be randomly
aligned this way is near zero, according to the three scientists’
analysis.
All in all, the craters’ arrangement suggests a comet that broke into
at least five fragments and hit Earth in two groups of two, followed
by a single piece: Rochechouart and Obolon, St. Martin and Red
Wing, then Manicouagan, at more than sixty miles in diameter the
largest of the bunch, coming down all alone. Possibly there were
more than five fragments. At the time of the impact, Earth at those
latitudes was mostly ocean, so other pieces may have fallen into the
sea.
At least one other iridium layer is known, positioned at the
boundary between the Ordovician and the Silurian layers. As yet, no
corresponding crater has been found. But since the boundary lies 440
million years ago, erosion and other geological processes would
make recognition of an impact structure this old very difficult.

Nemesis: The Death Star Alternative

Clube and Napier posit that the two forces driving the influx of
comets into the solar system are contact with molecular clouds and
galactic tides. Another model for explaining how it is that comets
come hurtling into Earth’s way has been offered by

Richard Muller, a physicist at the Lawrence-Berkeley Laboratory on

the University of California campus.
Fascinated by dinosaurs since childhood, Muller was intrigued by
the impact theory being developed by his colleagues at Berkeley in
the late 1970s and 1980s, but he was involved in other research
projects at the time, particularly in high-energy physics. Then he
came across a scientific paper by David Raup and J. John Sepkoski
Jr., of the University of Chicago, which argued that the mass
extinctions have occurred approximately every 26 million years in
the fossil record. This notion intrigued Muller because it meant that
the K-T extinction the Alvarez team was studying was not random
and unique, but part of a periodic pattern. A pattern, though, meant a
mechanism—and what could that be? Which predictable, repeated
astronomical event could send a stream of comets into the solar
system every 26 million years or so?
After trying and discarding hypothesis after hypothesis, Muller
had what he describes as a “eureka” moment during a conversation
with orbit dynamics expert Piet Hut. The sun, Muller realized, could
have a twin, most likely the type of star known as a red dwarf. The
twin orbits the sun in a path that jitters slightly because of the
gravitational influence of other passing stars. About every 26 to 30
million years, the twin star comes close enough to the Oort cloud to
send a shower of comets into the solar system and set off another
mass extinction. Muller named the twin star Nemesis, after the Greek
goddess who brought down the rich, powerful, and proud.
Since then, Muller has been conducting a painstaking star-bystar
search for Nemesis. According to Muller’s model, Nemesis follows
an elliptical orbit that brings it a little less than one light- year away
from Earth at its closest point, almost three light-years away at its
farthest. While virtually all the red dwarf stars in our galactic
neighborhood have been identified—there are about 3,000 of them—
few have had their distances measured. Muller is
looking for the one that lies where he predicts it must, between
approximately one and three light-years away.
Muller’s hypothesis is interesting, and he himself is a fascinating
man, full of energy and enthusiasm for the wild frontier of
astrophysics he is exploring. His model, though, is open to question
on two grounds.
One is the 26-to30-million-year periodicity that Raup and Sep-
koski have proposed. Many other paleontologists disagree with their
conclusion, which is based on complicated statistical analysis of the
sort only specialists can fully appreciate. Extinctions have been
repeated, the other scholars argue, but not with the specific
periodicity Raup and Sepkoski maintain. A pattern more variable
than the 26-to-30-million-year periodicity argues against the
existence of a twin star.
The other issue, one addressed by Clube and Napier, has to do with
the supposed distance between the sun and Nemesis. Twin stars, or
binaries, as they are also known, are quite common in the galaxy.
Among binary stars of the same age as the sun, the distance between
the twins averages around 5,000 astronomical units (an astronomical
unit is the distance from sun to Earth, or approximately 93 million
miles). According to Muller’s model, Nemesis lies an average
distance of 90,000 astronomical units from the sun, and at its farthest
orbital point is 180,000 astronomical units away. In other words,
Muller is proposing a system that has not yet been observed within
the known universe.
None of this analysis, like the still incompletely understood
geological record of impacts on Earth, resolves the debate once and
for all. Still, when I look at what we now know, I find Clube and
Napier’s case persuasive. And when their model is used to explain a
variety of seemingly inexplicable events in human history, it
becomes even more convincing.

A Twisted Moon and Chaos in the Pacific

Clube and Napier themselves rely on another body of evidence,

one we have turned to again and again: mythology and folklore.

Practically every mythological tradition recounts stories of terrible
cataclysm, often marking the shift from one world-age to another.
Zeus battles Typhon; the gods of Olympus take on the Titans; floods
wash away all save Noah, Deucalion, and Utnapish- tim; fire and
brimstone descend upon Sodom and Gomorrah; God casts Satan
from heaven, launching the “dubious battle” John Milton depicts in
Paradise Lost; Valkyries and Furies fly over the surface of the Earth
and threaten horrible death to evildoers; the hero Marduk takes on the
fearsome ocean monster Tiamat and creates a new universe from her
torn body. Again and again, order battles chaos, with the fate of
humankind and the world itself often at stake.
As Santillana and Dechend show in Hamlet's Mill, myth reveals
considerable evidence that ancient stories were used to mark pre-
cession and the passage from one world age to another. Yet pre-
cession is a slow phenomenon, not one that of itself would inspire the
fear obvious in the many mythological battles of order and chaos
against a background of destruction and cataclysm. Were ancient
people so anxiety-ridden and nightmare-beset that the glacial
movement of the stars gave them the shakes? Or did their memory
include celestial catastrophes as terrible as the ones described in their
stories, disasters they later associated with the slow, inevitable
movement of the heavens?
It happened that on the night of June 25 in A.D. 1178, several monks
of Canterbury in England were watching the horned moon as it
became visible after sunset. Suddenly the upper horn of the moon
split in two, with a torch of flame rising at the point of the split. The
body of the moon wavered and writhed “like a wounded snake,” in
the words of the monk Gervase, who chronicled the event. A dozen
times the same phenomenon of flame and writhing occurred, until the
entire moon took on a black appearance.
In medieval times, visions were considered as real as the ordi-
nary events of everyday reality. Against such a cultural backdrop it
is easy to dismiss Gervase’s account as the further imaginings of the
overly religious.
The meteorite expert J. B. Hartung wasn’t so sure. He argued that
the monks had seen some kind of astronomical body collide with the
moon. The torch of flame shooting up was either a cloud of
incandescent gas from the blast, or sunlight reflected in the dust rising
from the crater. The blackening of the moon’s surface was also the
result of dust, which was carried over the lunar surface in the short-
lived atmosphere created by gases released in the explosion. Any
crater, Hartung argued, would be at least seven miles across, have
bright rays of ejected material extending out for seventy miles, and
be located within a specific area right at the edge of the moon or just
over into the dark side.
One crater, discovered well after Hartung’s prediction by one of
the early lunar missions photographing the moon’s back side, fits the
bill. Named Giordano Bruno, for a sixteenth-century heretic burned
at the stake for his theological views on astronomy and his impolitic
manner in broadcasting them, the crater is thirteen miles in diameter
and has a system of brilliant rays reaching out for several hundred
miles. It lies in the lunar region where Hartung said it must, and the
brightness of its rays indicates that Giordano Bruno is a very new
structure.
Further evidence about Giordano Bruno’s recent origin comes
from the work of the lunar astronomers O. Callame and J. D. Mul-
holland. The moon does spin on its axis, but the period of spin
matches the period of its orbit around Earth, so that we always look
at the same lunar face. Callame and Mulholland calculated that a
collision with an object large enough to excavate Giordano Bruno—
on the order of 100,000 megatons—would cause the moon to wobble
several yards on its axis over a period of about three years. Laser-
ranging data collected at the McDonald Observatory at the University
of Texas since the early 1970s show that the moon does indeed
wobble about fifty feet on its axis every three years. Since this kind
of motion slowly dies out over about 20,000 years, the wobble can
be explained only by a recent major impact.
The date of the 1178 lunar impact—June 25—is close to the
Tunguska dale of June 30. There’s more behind this close identity
than mere coincidence. The end of June comes at the time when Earth
is crossing out of the Taurid meteor stream, and the year 1178 came
during a century when the Taurid stream rose to a peak.
During that century, large comets made repeated frightening
appearances in the skies over Europe. When one of these huge comets
appeared during a meeting of bishops, the prelates decided that God
was threatening humankind with destruc tion for its sins, and resolved
to mount the First Crusade in order to win divine favor. Similarly,
Chinese astronomers in the same period noted a sharp increase in
comets and fireballs around A.o. 1150, when the number of these
celestial objects leapt to ten times the normal background number.
If a major object hit the moon during the late twelfth century, and
if this period was marked by an obvious increase in the number of
comets flying by Earth, it would seem likely that some of these space
objects collided with our planet. Clearly there was no extinction-level
event like Chicxulub. Still, a cluster of impacts on the order of the
Tunguska bolide could have had powerful consequences for human
civilization.
Emilio Spedicato argues that the historical record for the Pacific
Basin in the late twelfth century shows a pattern of inexplicable
chaos. For example, the Maoris of New Zealand disagree with the
Western idea that the island’s moa birds disappeared because of
overhunting. According to their legends, Fire fell from the sky
several centuries ago and burned up the forests where the birds lived.
There is physical evidence to support the Maoris’ contention. A series
of recent shallow impact structures called the Tapanui Craters have
been found on the South Island and dated to about 800 years ago, or
circa A.D. 1200. Geological samples show layers of soot dated to the
same period as the craters and provide evidence of extensive fires of
the sort the Maori stories describe.
During the same time, Polynesia was swept by waves of migration.
Apparently whole peoples pulled up stakes and moved on to new
locations, in some cases conquering and then absorbing the groups
who already lived there. Royal lines were disrupted, new gods
replaced old, customs changed, and novel religious practices arose.
All these events happened suddenly and without apparent
explanation in the twelfth century.
South America also underwent rapid change. Mochicas, Chimtts,
and the other great cities along that continent’s Pacific coast had built
a remarkable civilization. Among other accomplishments, these
people created a complex system of irrigation canals and erected
huge pyramids of compacted soil. The largest of the pyramids, called
Tucume and located near the modern Peruvian town of Lambayeque,
was only a little over 200 feet high, but it contained one-third more
volume than the Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) al Giza. Phen, during
the twelfth century, the coastal civilizations suddenly collapsed, the
cities turned into ghost towns, and the survivors did not return.
Rather, a new civilization, the one we know as the Inca empire, arose
in the high Andes and built a remarkable system of roads that ran
from Colombia to Chile. It could be that the coastal civilizations col-
lapsed because of tsunamis resulting from comet impacts, and that
the survivors took themselves and their construction skills to the high
mountains, where they sought refuge well above the level of even the
angriest sea.
In an uphill movement similar to the one in South America, the
people who would later be known as the Aztecs also migrated, again
without apparent explanation. They moved from a location on the
Pacific coast of Mexico known as Aztian, probably near the modern
city of Mazatlan, to the high-altitude, mountain-enclosed
valley where Mexico City now lies. According to recent historical
studies, this migration occurred in the middle of the twelfth century.
Like the Incas, the Aztecs may have moved in order to avoid
tsunamis. And their custom of human sacrifice could have been a way
of warding off the ill will of the gods, which they saw as responsible
for the terrible catastrophe that had earlier befallen them.
In northern China, the second half of the twelfth century witnessed
the beginning of the end for the corrupt Song dynasty under pressure
from the invadingjuchen tribes from Manchuria. Weather conditions
at the time were unusually severe. In A.D. 1194 the Yellow River
flooded so catastrophically that it almost completely destroyed the
northern Song capital of Kaifeng. The river itself shifted its outlet to
the sea, moving from a location to the north of the Shandong
Peninsula to one hundreds of miles south.
Deeper inside Asia, all was turmoil. According to an account by
Khubilai Khan, his grandfather Genghis Khan, as an adolescent, saw
a sign in the sky—very possibly a comet—in the late 1170s or early
1180s and took it as a portent signaling his own rise to power. Led
by Genghis Khan, Mongol horsemen swept out of their high, dry
plateau and conquered all of Central Asia, Persia, Afghanistan, and a
portion of India, carving a path of death and destruction rarely
equaled in human history. Typically the Mongol invasion is
explained as the result of the extraordinary ambition of Genghis Khan
and his desire to avenge a long list of wrongs done to himself, his
family, and his people. Yet some evidence suggests that the Mongols,
who inhabited a land that is harsh at the best of times, had been
pushed to the brink by a serious deterioration of the climate. The
Persian chronicler Al Juvaini noted that in A.D. 1260, apples could
again be grown in Mongolia, a feat that had been impossible for the
prior two generations. This report points to winters in Mongolia so
severe that ordinary agriculture had become impossible, forcing the
Mongols to expand outward or starve. The folk tales of the Yakut
people, who live farther north in eastern Siberia, tell of an evil star
with a tail that means storm and frost even in summer. This tale could
well be the record of a cosmic winter effect caused by the impact of
a number of bolides in the region, perhaps even the same series of
events that put the Mongols on their horses and sent them West in
search of warmer, more fertile lands.
Mongolia is also thought to have been the site where the Black
Death, which killed about one-third of the population of Europe in
the middle of the fourteenth century A.D., arose. The causative agent
of the plague, Pasteurella pestis, followed the caravan routes out of
Asia and made its way with traders into the ports of the
Mediterranean. In an indirect way, the Black Death may have owed
its origin to the ecological disruption affecting Mongolia a century
and a half earlier.
None of this evidence is definitive. Still, it points to the possibility
that meteor swarms could have come down in and around the Pacific
during the twelfth century, causing tsunamis and upsetting weather
patterns so completely that whole civilizations collapsed or moved.

To the Bronze Age and Before

The widespread, seemingly inexplicable chaos marking the late
twelfth century A.D. in the Pacific is hardly a unique event. The end
of the Bronze Age in circa 1200 B.C. is another. And approximately
one millennium earlier, an equivalendy widespread collapse of
civilizations affected the Middle East, South Asia, and the Far East.
In a period spanning five centuries from 2500 to 2000 B.C., several
major civilizations met a sudden, unexplained demise: Early Bronze
Age societies in Israel, Anatolia, and Greece; the Old Kingdom in
Egypt; the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia; the Himland
civilization in Afghanistan; and the Indus Valley civilization in
Pakistan. Much like the collapse marking the end of the Bronze Age,
a dark age followed. Take Egypt as an example. The few pyramids
built during the Middle Kingdom, which rose from the remains of the
Old Kingdom, are but pale shadows of the monuments at Giza. Their
engineering is sloppy, the workmanship poor, the art hackneyed.
Egyptian culture had suffered a mighty setback, almost as if it had
been the victim of a frontal lobotomy. Whatever events caused Egypt
such damage, they were mighty indeed.

Glube and Napier maintain that during a period when a large comet
is breaking up in an Earth-crossing orbit, meteor swarms are likely to
peak at approximately millennial intervals. If we start with the twelfth
century A.D. and the serpent writhing on the moon and go back a
thousand years, we find ourselves in the second century A.D. The
Roman Empire was beginning to crack and crumble, and religious
enthusiasm was sweeping the Mediterranean as waves of true
believers, some of them Christians, prophesied the fast-approaching
end of the world. Events become even more dramatic a little over a
millennium earlier, close to the sudden collapse of the Bronze Age
throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Leap back yet one more
millennium and a bit more, and civilization is again collapsing from
the eastern Mediterranean coast all the way to China. Clearly, there
is something to the roughly millennial interval Clube and Napier pro-
pose.
As yet, no large crater dating to 1200 B.C. or thereabouts has been
discovered in the eastern Mediterranean. The Bronze Age, though,
could have collapsed not from one big knockout blow, but from a
series of celestial left jabs to the jaw. Suppose that for a period of
several decades, many Junes and many Novembers were marked by
fireballs of the Taurid stream streaking out of the skies toward Earth.
Some of them would have detonated in the atmosphere, creating
shock waves of intense energy and heat, the kind that could have
swept away a stone-walled city and burned its rubble to cinders.
Others would have landed in the sea, raising fearsome tsunamis that
could obliterate coastal settlements and cities. And yet others would
have struck the surface.
It wouldn’t take a direct hit to destroy a city. Hot material ejected
from the blast site could set fire miles away to cities, villages, and
croplands, much as the myth of Phaethon describes. That kind of hard
blow to the crust, in a region as seismically and volcanically active
as the eastern Mediterranean, might trigger earthquakes and initiate
lava flows. And then there would be the dust, rising in a plume into
the upper atmosphere, cooling the region for days or weeks like a veil
drawn across the sun.
Some evidence from the end of the Bronze Age fits this model.
People abandoned settlement sites that had been in use for centuries.
The attacking hordes that beset Egypt and spelled the eventual end of
the New Kingdom appear to have been part of a general movement
of people from northern latitudes to more southerly locations,
possibly a response to unusually severe winters. And a steep drop in
the growth of bog oaks in Ireland during the years 1159 to 1140 B.C.
points to a dramatic deterioration of climate of the sort that would
accompany a cosmic winter.
Similar evidence is mounting around the earlier Bronze Age
collapse in the late third millennium B.C. Researchers have found
unambiguous evidence of major climatic upset right around 2300 B.C.,
give or take a couple of centuries. Areas like the edge of the Sahara
and the plain around the Dead Sea, which had been farmed, dried into
deserts. Tree rings show disastrous growth conditions in circa 2350
B.c., and sediment cores from lakes in Europe and Africa indicate a
massive drop in water level. Large regions in Mesopotamia were
devastated, flooded, or burned. Something very big was going on.
And, I think, it came from the heavens, in the form of fragments from
a comet that had been sent our way from the Oort cloud millions of
years before.
Centuries ago, the English poet John Donne wrote that no man is
an island. Neither, it seems, is Earth.
Learning from the Past, Looking Toward
the Future

OF ALL THE CATASTROPHES THAT CAN DESTROY CIVILIZATION, the most

dangerous and destructive are asteroid and comet impacts. Space
objects have the capacity to cause widespread devastation and loss of
life on their own, and they can trigger follow-up events, such as
earthquakes, vulcanism, drastic climate change, accelerated tectonic
plate movements, even sudden shifts of the poles, that add to the
overall level of destruction. Obviously this danger isn’t simply
theoretical. The two Bronze Age catastrophes and the chaos in the
twelfth-century A.D. Pacific point up what can happen when the
Taurid stream sends its fragment swarms in Earth’s way. It may even
be that the advanced civilization that carved the original Great Sphinx
of Giza and then vanished was wiped out in this very same manner.
The understanding that asteroid and comet impacts have pro-
foundly affected the history of life and civilization has two important
ramifications. One is philosophical. As I pointed out in the beginning
of this book, the paradigm from which science views the world is
changing rapidly and completely. In the not-so- distant past,
biologists looked to the laboratory for their answers, geologists
looked to Earth, astronomers looked to the sky, and historians looked
to the human events of politics and culture, as if biological,
geological, and certainly astronomical reality were mere stage props
that had nothing to do with them. No longer does such a divided
worldview work. If civilization can rise or fall with events in the Oort
cloud 1.5 light-years away, then certainly our world is larger, more
perilous, and more interconnected than we had ever imagined.
The second ramification is practical. If we extrapolate the
thousand-year intervals Clube and Napier propose, it would appear
that, except for the occasional wayward bolide like the Tunguska
object, Earth is currently enjoying a quiescent period. But around
2200 A.D. it is likely that a new flow of comet fragments will enter
Earth-crossing orbits and pose a real threat to our planet. This
prospect grows even more ominous when we consider that changes
currently affecting life on Earth, namely stratospheric ozone
depletion and global warming, would augment the effects of bolide
impacts. As bad as the catastrophes were that befell Earth in the past,
future disasters could be much worse.

Living and Nonliving Together

An important part of the new developing paradigm, and the
framework from which we can best understand the implications of
major asteroid impacts in our world, is the Gaia hypothesis.
Developed largely by the pioneering work of the atmospheric sci-
entist James Lovelock and the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, the
Gaia hypothesis proposes that the physical and chemical conditions
of the Earth—including the planet’s surface, the atmosphere, and the
oceans—are formed by living organisms to create conditions
favorable for life. Where Darwin and his fellow evolutionary
theorists look at life as an adaptation to the physical and chemical
demands of the environment, Lovelock and Margulis maintain that
life itself has shaped the environment. The implications of the Gaia
hypothesis are enormous.
In the history of Western science, the foundation of the Gaia
hypothesis stretches back at least as far as James Hutton (1727-1797).
As we saw in chapter 1, Hutton envisioned Earth as a great recycling
machine whose purpose was creating an environment life could
inhabit. Rock weathers into soil, which is then eroded away and
carried by water into the oceans, where it accumulates into sediments,
which eventually compress into rock that is raised above sea level to
begin the cycle again. Since soil and marine sediments are critical to
all living things, life tlepends on the continuous recycling of
nonliving rock.

Lovelock took this idea much further, although he had no such

intention at the time. During the 1960s, Lovelock served as an
instrumentation consultant to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California. One of JPL’s projects was assessing the
likelihood of life on Mars. Most of the technological answers being
explored by JPL scientists entailed taking a series of samples from
the Martian surface and analyzing them for either microorganisms or
chemicals whose presence would signal the prior or current presence
of life. Lovelock wondered about this approach. How, he asked,
could we be sure that life on Mars followed the Earth model? The
more Lovelock considered that question, the more he realized he was
actually asking something deeper: What, after all, is life?
Increasingly, Lovelock saw that the answer had to do with entropy,
one of the most confusing and misunderstood concepts in physics.
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, all energy will
eventually dissipate into heat and be unavailable for useful purposes
to either machine or living organism and thus increase entropy, which
stands for randomness or chaos. Life works against entropy, by
organizing energy in ways that counter the constant running-down
into chaos. When an animal or plant dies and its body decays, entropy
increases. But while the organism remains alive, its activities
counteract entropy. Find a site where entropy is other than what the
laws of physics and chemistry would predict, Lovelock reasoned, and
you are looking at the evidence of life.
Following this line of thought, Lovelock studied what it was that
made Earth different from Mars and Venus. An atmospheric scientist
by profession, he paid particular attention to the atmospheres of the
three planets. Earth’s air, which is a mixture of gases, has a
composition markedly different from the blend constituting the
atmospheres of the other two planets. Our atmosphere is
approximately 20.9 percent oxygen and a little more than 0.035
percent carbon dioxide. On Mars and Venus, carbon dioxide exceeds
95 percent and oxygen is barely present. According to the laws of
chemistry, Lovelock realized, Earth’s atmosphere shouldn’t be what
it is. If the nonliving components of Earth’s surface and its
atmospheric gases were placed in an immense bottle and subjected to
the same level of sunlight that falls on our planet, they would react
chemically with one another, always in a way that increased entropy.
Over time, the result would be an atmosphere very much like that
found on Mars and Venus—mostly carbon dioxide, with only a trace
of molecular oxygen.
Earth’s atmosphere maintains its curious and unpredictable
combination only because of the presence of life, Lovelock deduced.
We have our air because plants and photosynthetic microorganisms
take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. The carbon dioxide-
oxygen cycle is only one of many biological mechanisms that work
something like a thermostat to regulate atmospheric gases within the
zone life needs in order to exist.
An example of this process, technically called homeostasis, arises
after a major impact, like that of Chicxulub. The huge forest, brush,
and grassland fires resulting from the blast released massive amounts
of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. At the same time, however,
the immense quantities of upper- atmospheric dust resulting from the
explosion killed off a substantial number of photosynthesizing
organisms, both land plants and marine organisms. As a result, less
of the now more abundant carbon dioxide was being used, and less
oxygen was being produced. The atmospheric concentration of the
one gas rose, while that of the other fell. Surely some plant species
that had survived the immediate effects of the impact became extinct
in this atmosphere, while others somehow survived and perhaps even
took advantage of opportunities presented by the changes. As these
survivors evolved in the brave new world of the postimpact era, their
population rose, more carbon dioxide was consumed, and more
oxygen was produced. Over time—likely millions if not tens of
millions of years—the atmospheric system followed a life-driven
route back toward its original steady state.
This is homeostasis, the sum of many complex interactions
between the living and the nonliving that contributes to conditions
suitable to life. Homeostasis guides the system back toward a
desirable range even in the face of an upset as large as an incoming
comet.
When Lovelock was developing his original formulation of this
idea, he didn’t really know what to call it. He toyed with various
complicated monikers drawn from scientific jargon, but none of them
seemed to fit. Then one of his neighbors with a pronounced gift for
words, the Nobel Prize-winning English novelist William Golding,
author of Lord of the Flies, proposed Gaia, the name of the ancient
Greek goddess who symbolized Earth itself. Lovelock liked the
association, and the name stuck.
Naming the hypothesis after a goddess has given it a certain cachet
among New Age types who tend to misunderstand the concept in
their rush to use it for their own purposes. The Gaia hypothesis,
however, is very good science that is playing a major role in the
scientific paradigm shift now unfolding around us.
Old-paradigm science separated the living and the nonliving as
mutually exclusive. We geologists studied rocks, while the biologists
did microorganisms, plants, animals, fungi, and viruses. Now we are
seeing that the line is arbitrary and in some ways false. Surely, I am
alive and this rock in my hand is not. Yet my life depends upon this
rock and others like it to produce and maintain the chemical
constituents that form my body, the air I breathe, the water I drink.
Without this rock, I cannot be. Gaia is made up of both the living and
the nonliving joined in one complex overall organism.
The Gaia hypothesis emphasizes the ability of Earth’s living and
nonliving system to achieve a homeostatic balance that supports life.
Yet we must not derive false comfort from Gaia’s ability to heal.
Within limits, the planet can respond, but misuse or abuse of Earth’s
systems could lead to global disasters. Gaia is something like the
human body. A cut on the finger, a cold in the head, a pull in a muscle
poses only a small challenge to our inherent healing mechanisms. But
a burst of assault-rifle fire in the chest is likely to be too much, even
if the victim has access to a well-equipped trauma center. From some
wounds the body simply cannot recover.
No catastrophe in the past that we know of eliminated every living
thing. Chicxulub killed all the dinosaurs, yet smaller reptiles and
many mammals made it, eventually evolving into the range of
animals we see about us today. Likewise, a comet streaking into Earth
next month or year would not kill everything, unless it was
unimaginably large. Some species would survive and, over the next
millions and tens of millions of years, take advantage of new
evolutionary opportunities and Gaia’s eventual return to homeostasis.
Life, though changed, would almost certainly go on.
Yet much more is at stake than the simple hand-to-mouth of
biological survival. We civilized humans live in an exquisitely com-
plex, highly interwoven web of relationships with the nonliving
world, other living species, and each other. Much of what makes our
lives interesting and worthwhile draws from this complexity. Were it
shattered, our bodies might survive, but the quality of our way of life
would be impoverished. Take the end of the Bronze Age as an
example. Despite what must have been a heavy death toll, human life
in the eastern Mediterranean was nowhere near snuffed out by the
annual flurry of incoming comets. Yet there followed several
centuries of a dark age in which the major accomplishments of the
prior millennium were lost. Likewise, we as yet do not know what
became of the civilization that carved the original Great Sphinx of
Giza, and a similarly dark age divided the time of the Sphinx-builders
from the period of the pyramids in the Old Kingdom. Surely, we
ourselves wish to avoid the same fate.
Yet the odds for such an outcome may be heightened because of
what we humans are doing, often inadvertently and unintentionally,
to the planet. Recovery from a catastrophe, or any other disaster,
requires a resilient Gaian system, one with the capacity to move back
to its homeostatic state after a major disturbance. Yet without
realizing what we are doing, we are changing the physical systems of
the Earth in two primary ways that will make the consequences of an
asteroid impact even worse and may well compromise the planet’s—
and our—ability to recover.

Patching the Hole in the Sky

One of these ways is depletion of the layer of ozone (O3) naturally
found in the upper level of the atmosphere known as the stratosphere
and most strongly concentrated at an altitude of twelve to sixteen
miles. Much of the time, oxygen is in the diatomic state, or O2. When
diatomic oxygen is struck by high- energy ultraviolet radiation,
usually in the stratosphere, the diatomic molecule splits into two
separate oxygen atoms. Each of the oxygen atoms can then combine
with another diatomic oxygen to form ozone (O2+O O3). Other
reactions in the stratosphere remove ozone. If an ozone molecule
absorbs ultraviolet radiation, it splits into diatomic oxygen and a
single oxygen atom. The oxygen atom can then either recombine with
a diatomic oxygen molecule to form ozone once again, combine with
another atomic oxygen to form diatomic oxygen, or combine with
some other substance in the stratosphere. Before humans began
interfering with the atmosphere, ozone production equaled ozone
destruction, so that the stratosphere always contained a small amount
of ozone—a classic example of one of Gaia’s many homeostatic
mechanisms.
Though small in quantity, stratospheric ozone is essential to the
preservation of current forms of life on the Earth because it acts as a
shield to keep out the biologically dangerous form of ultraviolet
radiation known as UV-B. When an ozone molecule is hit by UV-B
and broken into diatomic oxygen and a single oxygen atom, the
radiation’s energy is absorbed and heat given off. This reaction keeps
most of the UV-B radiation from reaching Earth’s surface and, by
giving off heat, contributes to relatively stable climatic conditions on
and near the ground.
As is widely known, the concentration of stratospheric ozone has
been declining as a result of human interference, largely through our
release of enormous quantities of ozone-destroying substances into
the atmosphere. The most important of these is a class of chemicals
known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that, until recently, were
widely used in refrigerators and freezers, automobile air conditioners,
and aerosol cans; in the production of Styrofoam and other plastics;
in insulators; and in solvents and cleaning agents used in the
electronics industry. CFCs are almost inert in the atmospheric layer
that covers the immediate surface of Earth, and eventually air
currents carry them up into the stratosphere. There, ultraviolet
radiation breaks down the CFC molecules, releasing atomic chlorine.
The chlorine then reacts with an ozone molecule, removing one
oxygen atom from the ozone, which then combines with the chlorine
to form chlorine monoxide. The remainder of the ozone molecule is
converted into diatomic oxygen. Since chlorine monoxide is
unstable, it commonly reacts with an oxygen atom, which releases
the chlorine atom to destroy yet another ozone molecule. Once
released from a CFC, the single chlorine atom acts as a catalyst that
can destroy tens of thousands of ozone molecules.
After this process became understood in the 1970s, a hue and cry
was raised over the effects of increased UV-B radiation resulting
from ozone depletion. There was good reason to be concerned. A
small amount of UV radiation is necessary for well-being, because it
promotes the synthesis of vitamin D in humans and acts as a
germicide to control disease-causing microorganisms. Yet an
increase in UV-B radiation at Earth’s surface can have numerous
adverse effects on health, primarily by causing skin cancer, including
dangerous malignant melanomas, and cataracts, which impair or
destroy vision.
Ultimately, the widespread ecosystem damage caused by increased
UV-B may be more deleterious than its health effects. Abnormally
high levels of UV-B radiation inhibit photosynthesis, metabolism,
and growth in a number of plants, including important food crops like
soybeans, potatoes, and wheat, as well as destroying cells and causing
mutations. Since many tree species are particularly sensitive to UV
levels, increasing amounts of UV may result in a major decline in
forest productivity. Elevated levels of UV radiation affect insects,
which are key to many terrestrial ecosystems. Numerous aquatic and
marine plants and animals are extremely sensitive to UV levels, a
particular concern in that UV-B can penetrate several yards of water.
Phytoplankton—the plants and algae that form the basis of many
food chains—and fish, crab, and shrimp larvae appear to be
especially susceptible. Thus ozone depletion and an increase in UV-
B radiation could seriously deplete our food supply. They add, too,
to the stress put on the Gaian system, by weakening the living portion
of the Earth organism.
The situation would only get worse if—or, more accurately,
when—a large piece of cosmic rock or ice falls out of the sky and
explodes. Nitrous oxide, another gas that attacks stratospheric ozone,
is formed in the atmosphere in the extreme temperatures of a bolide
blast. Research by Richard P. Turco and colleagues suggests that the
Tunguska collision created so much nitrous oxide that up to 30
percent of the planet’s stratospheric ozone was stripped away. In the
early years of this century, before modern industry was producing
and releasing CFCs and other ozonedestroying gases, the
atmosphere’s homeostatic mechanisms replaced the destroyed ozone
in relatively short order. But think what would happen if another
bolide the size of Tunguska appeared now, with the ozone layer
already compromised. The UV-B effect likely to result from an
impact would be increased, with deleterious effects on human health
and the ability of many organisms, both plant and animal, to survive..

Hothouse Earth
The same point holds true for global warming, a phenomenon that is
much more complex than ozone depletion. The threat to the ozone
layer is relatively simple: One important environmental constituent
is affected directly by several human-made industrial products. The
link from cause to effect is straightforward, and the solution apparent.
Global warming poses a vastly more complex body of issues and a
potentially greater threat to civilization, one that would become
vasdy more complicated—and more dangerous—in the event of a
bolide impact.
As practically everyone who picks up a newspaper or turns on a
television knows by now, global warming results from what is known
as the greenhouse effect, a natural homeostatic mechanism that
humans have unwittingly tampered with. Because we have been
filling the atmosphere with increased amounts of so- called
greenhouse gases—particularly carbon dioxide, CFCs, and methane
(natural gas), all of which tend to retain solar radiation and slow its
passage into space—Earth has been warming up. In three of the past
eight years—1990, 1995, and 1997—mean average temperatures
were higher than in any other years since at least A.D. 1400. Global
average temperature has risen a litde less than one degree Fahrenheit
in the past two decades.
Such a rise in global temperature in twenty years sounds less than
dramatic, yet it is actually very rapid indeed. The warming trend that
ended the most recent ice age came quickly by natural standards, yet
this warming occurred at an average rate of approximately 1.8
degrees Fahrenheit every 500 or 600 years (although, as we saw in
chapter 5, a Greenland ice core records a fourteen-degree jump in
only fifteen years during the tenth millennium B.c:.). The current
global warming rale is some ten times or more faster than the natural
average annual global increase in temperature at the end of the last
ice age—a rise that is nothing short of ominous. And it’s not going
to stop anytime soon. In 1992 a group of about 200 scientists working
under the auspices of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate* Change concluded that a rise in global mean temperature of
4.5 degrees Fahrenheit can be expected by 2100.

As Earth heats up, the warming will be unequally distributed, with

higher latitudes generally warming up more, relative to the lower
latitudes; the least change will occur in the equatorial regions.
Climatic patterns will shift, and in some places local weather
conditions will become much more violent. Cold air currents may be
displaced such that, ironically, regions that are currently relatively
warm may experience unusual cold snaps and abnormal winter
storms. Changes in rainfall patterns might turn the American
Midwest into a dust bowl, as the rain that has fallen in this region
moves north into the Canadian prairies. Rainfall could also shift from
one season to another. Some agricultural regions may receive more
rain on average than at present, but the bulk of it will come during
the winter months, when it is of little use for crops. As a result, an
increase of only 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit might cause a decline in grain
yields of up to 17 percent in North America and Europe, a loss of
food this hungry world can ill afford.
The paths of ocean currents will also shift. Currently, for instance,
cold water sinks in the Arctic Ocean and then travels southward along
the bottom of the seas toward the equator. In the tropics the water is
warmed and then moves north once again as a surface current,
forming what can be thought of as a giant convection cell. With
global warming, the northern polar regions may heat up enough to
disrupt the convection cell; adequate quantities of cold water will no
longer sink to the bottom to drive the surface currents back to the
pole. The Gulf Stream in particular may slow down, stop flowing, or
even change its direction. This cotdd dramatically change local
weather and climate patterns. England’s weather, for instance, is
heavily influenced by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream passing by
its shores. If global warming disrupts the Gulf Stream, British winters
may become much colder and harsher. Also, disrupting deep-water
currents may affect the circulation of nutrients in the oceans, exacting
a heavy toll on the extremely delicate ecosystems of the oceans.
As global warming continues, sea level will certainly rise. Water
expands as it warms, and the possible melting of the polar ice caps
will fin ther swell the oceans. The 1992 United Nations Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report estimates that
the rise in sea level will amount to about nineteen inches by the year
2100. Like the increase in average temperature, that number sounds
small, but its effects will be devastating. Approximately one-third of
the world’s population lives within thirtyseven miles of the sea, often
al elevations so close to sea level that a rise in the oceans would force
hundreds of millions of people to higher ground. The IPCC estimated
that a mere three-foot rise in global sea level, a distinct possibility
within the next few centuries given current trends in global warming,
would flood almost 250,000 miles of coastlines around the world.
Species other than humans would be affected. As climatic zones
migrate away from the equator, trees will find themselves living in
environments for which they are not adapted. Very small changes in
average temperatures could spell death for large tracts of forest. One
analysis suggests that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere doubles, the ranges of such trees as the eastern hemlock,
yellow birch, beech, and sugar maple would have to migrate 300 to
600 miles north. If the warming occurs rapidly, as is expected, many
of the trees will simply die. A large number of plant and animal
species require very narrow ranges of temperature and moisture. As
greenhouse warming modifies their habitats, they will find it difficult
to adapt or migrate. Many will succumb and become extinct.
This already gloomy picture grows far gloomier when a major
bolide hits Earth. Global warming, like damage to the ozone layer,
weakens the Gaian system. Add the widespread devastation and
global effects of cosmic collision, and a big problem becomes a
catastrophe.
Consider what is likely to happen if a bolide two-thirds of a mile
or more in diameter strikes the ocean. The most dangerous short-term
effect of a marine impact is the series of tsunamis pulsating out from
the point of the collision. With sea level rising from global warming,
the impact waves will be more devastating, sweeping farther into the
continental landmasses, killing populations crowded into coastal
urban centers, subjecting even more land to saltwater contamination.
An oceanic impact would also disturb Earth’s climate. One of the
effects of global warming is a rise in atmospheric moisture. After all,
with everything hotter, water evaporates more rapidly, creating
conditions that are wetter overall and more likely to produce severe
storms. The collision of a bolide into the ocean would multiply this
effect. The impact would vaporize an immense quantity of sea water,
which would add to the load of moisture in the atmosphere. Colossal
rainstorms of the sort that prompted the stories of Noah and
Utnapishtim would sweep across the continents and create
devastating floods. If the bolide cracks the ocean floor and hot
magma flows out into the sea, evaporating even more water,
atmospheric moisture would continue at high levels and the planet
could turn wet and warm. The effect, in essence, would be a kick-
start for catastrophic global warming, with further rises in sea level,
more and more storms, greater shifts in rainfall patterns, and
wholesale changes in ocean currents. The death toll among humans
would be enormous, and our civilization could well collapse under
the strain of such changes.
A continental impact would be just as catastrophic, but in the
opposite climatic direction: It could start the next ice age. As we saw
in chapter 6, the dust veil created by a collision into a landmass
augments the greenhouse effect by trapping heat that otherwise
would have escaped into space. Evaporation from the oceans into the
water-heavy atmosphere would increase in this hotter atmosphere.
With the planet moving toward temperature equilibrium—cooling
the lower-latitude oceans while warming the higher-latitude ones—
violent storms would arise, which would be all the more powerful
because of the increased amount of water vapor in the warmed
atmosphere. Even though the high latitudes would rise in
temperature, they still would remain more than cold enough for the
colossal precipitation of the raging storms to accumulate as snow and
turn into ice, laying the foundation for new glaciers. Within the three
years it would take for the dust veil to fall back to Earth, enough snow
and ice would have built up that it would reflect a larger proportion
of the sun’s energy back into space and cool the planet. The
snowfields and glaciers that had begun in that first three years could
continue to grow until another ice age was under way.
Perhaps this is the ultimate irony of human environmental
tampering: By warming Gaia too rapidly, we have set the stage for
catastrophe by ice.

Three Efforts for the Future

The new emerging paradigm, particularly the Gaia hypothesis,
reminds us that we humans depend on the plants, animals, and
physiochemical systems of Earth for our survival. For 4 billion years
the planet’s biological and nonbiological systems have survived a
wide variety of onslaughts, including true polar wander, bolide
impacts, ice ages, earthquakes, and widespread vulcanism, and still
somehow recovered. Geological history shows the system to be
resilient, but recent human actions are stretching this resilience to its
limits.
To build responsibly for the human and planetary future, we must
do three things: preserve the ozone layer, counter global warming,
and protect the planet against colliding asteroids and comets.

Ozone: What’s Being Done?

It is possible that the beginning of the end of the ozone crisis came in
June 1990, when ninety-three countries meeting in London agreed to
end the production of CFCs and various other ozone-destroying
chemicals by the year 2000 (with the exception of certain developing
countries, which have until 2010 to stop CFC production). An
international fund of more than $200 million was also established to
assist the developing countries in switching to CFC substitutes,
which often cost more than the CFCs they replace. The latter
provision recognized an important aspect of the global issue: Most of
the CFCs have been dumped into the atmosphere by the rich,
industrialized countries, who then expect rich and poor alike to help
solve the problem. The developing countries, however, want the
refrigerators, air conditioners, electronics, and other conveniences
common in the West. Only if the developed world contributes to the
developing world can global cooperation on the ozone issue be
achieved.
Additionally, a number of nations met again in Copenhagen in
1992 to update an earlier agreement signed in Montreal. The
proposed phase-out date for all CFCs was moved up to January 1,
1996, with a ten-year grace period for the developing countries.
Even with the complete phase-out of CFCs and related chlorine-
bearing chemicals, however, stratospheric chlorine concentrations
are expected to remain high well into the twenty-first century and
beyond, as already released CFC molecules rise into the stratosphere,
a journey that can take fifteen years. Some CFCs have life
expectancies of between 75 and 110 years, and the chlorine catalyst
in the stratosphere can also be quite long-lived. As a result, scientists
estimate that the ozone layer will continue to be depleted until at least
2050, resulting in ozone losses of as high as 10 to 30 percent over the
northern latitudes, where most of the world’s population resides.
During the latter half of the next century, stratospheric ozone may
start to build up again, but measurable amounts of CFCs will continue
to reside in the atmosphere well into the twenty-fourth century.
Despite our best efforts, the ozone layer will continue to thin for
several decades to come.
Furthermore, CFCs are not the only potential threat to the ozone
layer. Serious concern is being raised over other classes of chemicals
that may also be contributing to ozone thinning. Some researchers are
convinced that methyl bromide, a widely used agricultural pesticide,
poses the biggest threat of all. Some studies indicate that a molecule
of methyl bromide can break down ozone about 40 to 50 times as
quickly as a CFC molecule, and it has been suggested that methyl
bromide may currently account for 10 percent of all stratospheric
ozone damage. As a result of such allegations, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and agencies of the United
Nations have suggested complete bans on the production and use of
methyl bromide.
Even with the worldwide control of CFCs, stratospheric ozone
depletion will remain a problem well into the future. Still, the ozone
story provides the basis for cautious optimism, as scientific
understanding prevails and provides the basis for prudent policy. And
the nations of the Earth have displayed a willingness to cooperate in
the pursuit of a global solution to a global problem. When we humans
come together in this intelligent and cooperative spirit, Gaia is well
served.

Global Warming: Can the Trend Be Slopped?

Even though global warming is a clear threat that needs to be
countered by effective action, most governments have pursued a
weak compromise strategy, opting more for show than substance.
Following the 1992 Earth Summit sponsored by the United Nations
in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, more than 160 countries signed the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),
which requires its signatories to control emissions of greenhouse
gases at specified levels. According to many scientists, however, the
convention does not go nearly far enough. A follow-up meeting in
December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, produced a new protocol requiring
the signing nations to reduce six key greenhouse gas emissions by 5
percent below 1990 levels by 2012. That’s a step forward—but is it
enough?
The main ways to control the greenhouse effect are to cut down on
emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and CFCs into the atmosphere
and to restore the natural resources, such as forests, that convert
carbon dioxide to nongaseous forms of carbon. Interestingly,
virtually all measures that curb greenhouse gas emissions have
additional benefits as well. Reducing emissions of CFCs and related
gases will protect the ozone layer as well as helping to mitigate the
greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide emissions can be readily
controlled by increasing energy efficiency, decreasing global
dependence on fossil fuels, and developing alternative power
technologies such as solar and wind.
Another important source of greenhouse gases is the carbon
dioxide released during deforestation. Saving Earth’s forests will not
only help lessen the greenhouse effect by removing carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere and releasing diatomic oxygen, but will also
contribute to the preservation of biodiversity, help protect soils, and
soften climatic extremes.
Clearly, we are falling short of stopping global warming. The
problem is more difficult than ozone depletion because its sources
are more diverse and complex and because they cut more deeply to
the basic industrial processes of our civilization. The wake-up call
has come in, but direct, concerted action is still lacking. The potential
for disaster—slow, inevitable, and ultimately catastrophic—remains.

Impacts: Can We Dodge Bullets in the Cosmic Shooting Gallery ?

Although no asteroid or comet of sufficient size to do continental
damage is likely to fall in my lifetime or in yours, some such collision
is bound to happen sooner or later. Regular near misses serve as
reminders of just how little separates us from catastrophe. In March
1989, an asteroid named 1989FC, with an explosive potential
equivalent to 2,000 megatons of TNT— approximately 100,000
times more than the Hiroshima blast— came within seven hours of
hitting Earth and setting off a major regional catastrophe. On
December 8, 1992, the asteroid Toutatis missed Earth by a distance
equal to twice the span between our planet and the moon. In
astronomical terms, that was like ducking the bullet—or, given
Toutatis’s size, the big bomb. Toutatis is 2.5 miles across, large
enough to set off a blast equal to 9 million megatons of TNT, an
explosion sure to result in global disaster.

Fortunately, astronomers know of no comet or asteroid likely to

collide with Earth any time in the next century. The phrase “know
of” is crucial, however. According to various estimates, somewhere
between 1,500 and 3,000 objects more than two- thirds of a mile wide
move in orbits that intersect Earth’s. Of these, however, we have
detected only about a hundred. The rest still have to be discovered,
mapped, and tracked. Given this gap in our knowledge, there exists
the potential that an object, even a relatively large one, could get
close to Earth before we became aware of its presence. Asteroid
1989FC, the one that passed within seven hours of Earth in 1989, was
detected only a few days in advance of its closest approach. The
threat may be greatest with spent comets, which are as black as
chimney soot, give off no easy-to-spot tail, and fly at speeds typically
twice that of asteroids—100,000 miles per hour versus 50,000 miles
per hour.
The first step to be taken in preparing to meet the threat of
catastrophe from space is finding all the near-Earth objects and
determining which ones pose a risk of collision. Eugene Shoemaker,
the co-discoverer of P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 and a lifelong student of
impacts and their threat, proposed a project called Spaceguard to
serve as a planetary surveillance system. Spaceguard would comprise
six large telescopes located around the world and linked to a central
data-processing facility for analysis, verification, and tracking.
Shoemaker estimated that with this commitment of resources, about
75 percent of NEOs more than two-thirds of a mile in diameter could
be detected in approximately twenty-five years. The cost was steep—
$50 million in initial investment, $10 million in annual
maintenance—yet, given the economic results of a major impact as
well as the loss of life, the trade-off seemed small indeed.
Still, our planet’s nations have not exactly rushed to embrace the
Spaceguard idea and pick up the tab. Until recently, for example, the
entire annual expenditure by the United States federal government
for NEO detection was only $1 million. Now that amount has risen
to $3 million, a substantial increase, yet still not enough to do the
necessary work as quickly as it should be done.
Currently, live telescopes are working full- or part-time at NEO
detection. The Spacewalch project, run by Tom Gehrels and Robert
S. McMillan of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary
Laboratory, has been at the task the longest, since 1989. Near-Earth
Asteroid Tracking (NEAT), a cooperative project between NASA/Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and the United States Air Force, is now
operating from an observatory on the Haleakala volcano on the island
of Maui. The air force is also funding the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid
Research (LINEAR) project run by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, which uses a telescope on the While Sands Proving
Ground in Socorro, New Mexico. The Lowell Observatory Near-
Earth Object Search (LONEOS) system, which came online in
January 1998, is sited in Flagstaff, Arizona. France and Germany are
collaborating in the OGA-DLR Asteroid Survey (ODAS), which
combines the resources of the Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur in
Nice, France, with those of the Institute of Planetary Exploration in
Berlin- Adlershof, Germany. The Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., serves as the central
clearinghouse for the data gathered in the telescopes’ systematic
searching of the skies.
In addition to finding the asteroids and comets that pose the
greatest threat, we need to know more about what they’re made of
and how they’re put together. This kind of information is critical to
knowing what we can do to stop, destroy, or deflect an NEO heading
Earth’s way. A few satellites have performed flybys of NEOs. An
even more advanced mission, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous
(NEAR) satellite launched in February 1996, has already done a flyby
of asteroid Mathilde in June 1997 and is scheduled to explore the
asteroid Eros beginning in January 1999. Providing the first
quantitative and comprehensive measurements of an asteroid’s
composition and structure, NEAR will aim to characterize Eros’s
physical and geological properties, such as the elements and minerals
it contains and its density, shape, spin slate, and internal structure.
Flyby missions have also been planned by the European Space
Agency, the German Center of Applied Space Technology, and the
Japanese Institute of Astronomical and Space Science.
The importance of this kind of research is underscored by an old
joke physicists like to tell. The joke, which has to do with physics’
need for mathematical abstraction, ends with the punchline, “We
assume a spherical chicken.” You and I know, of course, that
chickens aren’t spherical. Chickens are in fact uniquely chicken-
shaped, yet the mathematics of the chicken shape are difficult to
handle. Calculations become much easier if we assume, as physicists
do, that chickens are perfect spheres. The result is elegant
mathematics, with an overriding air of unreality.
 We’ve been doing much the same with asteroids and comets.
Rough calculations of our ability to deflect or destroy an NEO on a
flight path into Earth rest on the assumption of a spherical object of
homogeneous composition. That assumption is every bit as unreal as
the spherical chicken. A recent computersimulation study by a
research team headed by E. Asphaug showed that the results of a
collision, whether with another asteroid or a nuclear weapon, has
much to do with the asteroid’s physical structure. Voids, fractures,
and faults, for example, dampen the shock wave and protect the
farthest points of the object, while the zone right at the point of
collision is pulverized. A large, complex comet, for example, formed
of rock and tar bound by ice, might be only partially destroyed, with
the remainder of its bulk fragmenting into a number of pieces that
plummet into Earth like P/Shoemaker-Levy 9’s fiery parade. This
kind of study makes it clear that we need to know what we are
attacking before we set out to attack it.
For the next fifty years at least—a period in which, fortunately, the
impact threat to Earth appears to be small—the only technology
capable of destroying or deflecting an asteroid or comet is the nuclear
weapon. Stockpiling and deploying nuclear weapons against
asteroids or comets does, however, pose enormous problems. To
begin with, nuclear weapons of the sort that would be used in space
have to be tested under the conditions of use, and such testing is
illegal. The international Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in
the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Underwater, which went into
effect in 1963 and was one of the first steps toward world
disarmament, specifically forbids the very kind of testing that would
be necessary. In addition, the Treaty on Principles Governing the
Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space,
Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, which has been part
of international law since 1967, prohibits the deployment or use of
any nuclear device in orbit or on the moon. The late Carl Sagan was
deeply disturbed that the rush to develop a nuclear weapons system
to defend Earth against incoming objects might undermine legal
agreements that have contributed to the slow easing of nuclear
tensions on Earth and the first tentative steps toward destroying the
Cold War’s accumulated nuclear arsenals. And the very fact of
possessing and storing nuclear weapons raises the specter of theft by
terrorist, attack by rogue nation, or detonation by accident.
Since Earth has an apparent breathing spell until the next likely
swarm of dangerous incoming bolides, we should devote ourselves
to developing technologies that are less threatening to our own
survival than nuclear weapons, yet have the capability of destroying
or deflecting a cosmic object headed Earth’s way. Various
technologies have been proposed—futuristic Buck Rogers-type
tractor beams, gravitational deflection devices, and chemical
weapons that consume the object, much like salt on ice or acid on a
rock. Research on these possibilities needs to begin, sooner rather
than later.
The impact threat is a global fact of life, and it must be met with a
global response, one that does away with nationalistic maneuvering.
Even the United States Air Force recognizes this. The military task
force that developed the basic oudine for what it calls a planetary
defense system (PDS) maintains that the system must be under
international control through the United Nations if it is to be credible.
This necessary cooperation might be one of the major benefits of
developing PDS. Creating the system would probably lead to new
technologies that would prove useful in nondefensive uses. Even
more important, the nations of the world would learn again that, when
it comes to the big problems, we all have to learn how to get along.
The sense of global community created in building and maintaining
PDS could not only save the planet from major damage by an
unwelcome space visitor, but also, by laying a new foundation for
cooperation, help preserve us against the insane violence we have
delivered upon each other since the beginning of history.

Gaia’s Ancient Face

In Gaia, James Lovelock writes, “To my mind the outstanding spin-
off from space research is not new technology. The real bonus has
been that for the first time in human history we have

had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information
gained from seeing from the outside our azure-green planet in all its
global beauty has given rise to a whole new set of questions and
answers.”
Much the same can be said of the study of the ancient past, which
is showing us clearly how catastrophe has shaped our planet and our
civilization. Some people think the world of long ago contains a body
of great secrets, like some treasure trove of insights that will unlock
the universe’s hidden doors, or new, undiscovered technologies that
will free us from drudgery. I doubt that such is the case. The gifts of
the ancient world go much deeper.
When I first went to Egypt to study the Great Sphinx of Giza, I
journeyed as a scientist must, with an open, blank mind not given to
preconceptions. Because of that necessary professional standpoint,
the Sphinx gave me answers I didn’t expect and revealed things I
didn’t think were possible.
Yet the Sphinx gave me more than data. As I spent time with that
great ancient monument, I realized the sense of mystery and awe with
which these people of long ago approached their world. Looking at
the universe, with its cosmic rhythms, untold beauty, and great
dangers, they understood themselves as part of something bigger than
they themselves were. They knew their place in the order of things.
We need to recover that sense of the world. As we come together
to understand and work against global warming, ozone depletion, and
the impact threat, we too discover some corner of the mystery we live
in, the grandeur of the life we contain and the universe we occupy. In
waking up to the new paradigm, we recover something long lost,
something very old, in ourselves.
Epilogue

An Update to the Redating of the

Sphinx, and Other Pertinent Matters

EVER SINCE I BECAME INVOLVED IN THE CONTROVERSY OVER the redating of

the Great Sphinx of Giza, mistaken opinions that started with
somebody else have been attributed to me. Sometimes I’ve even
wondered if there was a Robert Schoch impersonator masquerading
in a pith helmet, geologizing in Egypt and Japan, and tossing about
misquotations and misinterpretations. Voices of the Rocks represents
the opinions of the one true Robert Schoch.
Since I completed this book in August 1998, I have become even
more convinced that my original conclusion about the Great Sphinx
holds true — the core body, or oldest portion, is considerably older
than the traditional date of circa 2500 B.C. Most likely it was sculpted
in approximately 5000 to 7000 B.C. Although this finding works to the
consternation of various Egyptologists, geoarchaeologists, and other
scholars, it is the one theory that fits the data.
A number of researchers, such as Zahi Hawass, Mark Lehner,
James Harrell, and K. Lal Gauri, have countered my work and
conclusions, but none of their arguments stand up to rigorous
scrutiny. In fact, even though they keep writing, they don’t seem to
come up with anything new. For instance, Zahi Hawass recently
published a booklet entitled “The Secrets of the Sphinx: Restoration
Past and Present” (The American University in Cairo Press, 1998) in
which he misrepresents my analysis, claims mistakenly that I do not
understand the stratigraphy of the Giza Plateau, and criticizes my
scientific analysis based on the popular video The Mystery of the
Sphinx rather than my technical articles.

One example shows how Hawass misrepresents my work. He

asserts that I believe that the “back wall” behind the rump of the
Sphinx was excavated about 2500 B.c., yet, he writes, this structure
shows “rain weathering . . . that would date it thousands of years
before Khafre.” Hawass then claims that this obvious contradiction
refutes my analysis. Actually it does nothing of the kind, which
Hawass well knows. He neglects to tell readers that two “back walls”
lie behind the rump of the Sphinx, a distinction made in all my
technical papers. The higher “back wall,” which lies farther to the
west, does indeed show rain weathering and dates back to pre-Old
Kingdom times. The seismic studies indicate that the lower “back
wall,” set directly behind the rump of the Sphinx, may have been
excavated much later, possibly in Khafre’s time (circa 2500 B.c.),
when I believe the rump of the Sphinx was reworked and possibly
carved down to the same level as the floor of the Sphinx enclosure
on the other three sides of the sculpture.
Since the original manuscript of Voices was completed and the first
American edition published, two independent geological studies of
the Great Sphinx go a long way toward supporting my analysis and
rebutting the inadequate counterarguments. Both corroborate the
primary conclusions of my original studies, namely that the Sphinx
and Sphinx enclosure show evidence of significant precipitation-
induced weathering and erosion (degradation) and that the core body
of the Sphinx and the oldest portions of the Sphinx Temple pre-date
the pharaohs Khafre (circa 2500 B.c.) and Khufu (who was a
predecessor of Khafre, reigning about 2551-2528 B.C.).
The first study was undertaken by geologist David Coxill
(“The Riddle of the Sphinx," Inscription: Journal of Ancient Egypt,
spring 1998, pp. 13-19). After confirming my observations on
the weathering and erosion of the Sphinx and pointing out that
contrary explanations do not work, Coxill clearly states his own
analysis “implies that the Sphinx is at least 5,000 years old and pre-
dates dynastic times.” Although Coxill neither supports nor refutes
the seismic work by Thomas Dobecki and myself that serves as the
basis for my estimate of an initial date of 5000- 7000 B.c. for the
earliest parts of the Sphinx, he writes that “it [the Sphinx] is clearly
older than the traditional date ....”
The bottom line is obvious. Coxill agrees with the heart of my
analysis. He too concludes that the oldest portions of the Sphinx date
to before circa 3000 B.c.
Colin Reader, who holds a degree in geological engineering from
London University, has also pursued a meticulous study of
weathering and erosion features on the Sphinx and inside the Sphinx
enclosure, and combined this work with a detailed analysis of the
ancient hydrology of the Giza Plateau. Reader has been circulating
his work as an illustrated paper entitled “Khufu Knew the Sphinx”;
the copy I have is dated July 1998. Like Coxill, Reader points out the
problems and weaknesses in the arguments of my opponents and
notes that there is “a marked increase in the intensity of the
degradation [that is, weathering and erosion] towards the west
[western end] of the Sphinx enclosure.” Reader continues, “In my
opinion, the only mechanism that can fully explain this increase in
intensity is the action of rainfall run-off discharging into the Sphinx
enclosure from the higher plateau in the north and west... However,
large quarries worked during the reign of Khufu and located
immediately up- slope, will have prevented any significant run-off
reaching the Sphinx.” Reader concludes that “the distribution of
degradation within the Sphinx enclosure indicates that the excavation
of the Sphinx pre-dates Khufu’s early Fourth Dynasty development
at Giza.”
Reader’s logic makes sense. The quarries dug by Khufu would
have prevented the damage. Therefore, since the damage is present,
it must have happened earlier, before the quarries were dug.
Interestingly, Reader also concludes that the so-called Khafre’s
Causeway (which runs from the area of the Sphinx, Sphinx Temple,
and Khafre Valley Temple up to the Mortuary Temple on the eastern
side of the Khafre Pyramid), part of “Khafre’s” Mortuary Temple
(which Reader renames the Proto-mortuary Temple), and the Sphinx
Temple also pre-date the reign of Khufu.
As I have written in Voices, I strongly believe that not only is the
Sphinx older than conventionally thought, but also the Sphinx
Temple is equally old and thus earlier than Khafre and the Fourth
Dynasty. Independently of Reader, John Anthony West and I
concluded that part of “Khafre’s” Mortuary Temple predates Khafre,
but I have not yet published this conclusion, nor spoken of it at length
in public since I wanted to collect more corroborative evidence first.
Reader has come to the same conclusion concerning “Khafre’s”
Mortuary Temple, and I am pleased to see his confirmation.
Reader tentatively dates the excavation of the Sphinx and the
construction of the Sphinx Temple, Protomortuary Temple, and
“Khafre’s” Causeway to “sometime in the latter half of the Early
Dynastic Period” (that is, circa 2800-2600 B.c. or so) on the basis of
“the known use of stone in ancient Egyptian architecture.” I believe
that Reader’s estimated date for the excavation of the earliest portions
of the Sphinx is later than the evidence indicates. Three points apply:
1. The nature and degree of weathering and erosion (degradation) on
the Sphinx and in the Sphinx enclosure is much different from
what would be expected if the Sphinx had not been carved until
2800 B.c. or even 3000 B.c. Mudbrick mastabas on the Saqqara
Plateau, dated to circa 2800 B.c., show no evidence of significant
rain weathering, indicating just how dry the climate has been for
the last 5,000 years. I continue to believe that the erosional
features on the Sphinx and in the Sphinx enclosure indicate a much
earlier date than 3000 or 2800 B.c. In my opinion, it strains
credulity to believe that the amount, type, and degree of
precipitation-induced erosion seen in the Sphinx enclosure was
produced in only a few centuries. Even Zahi Hawass contends that
some of the weathering and erosion on the body of the Sphinx was
covered over and repaired during Old Kingdom times. Thus we
can safely assume that the initial core body of the Sphinx was
carved out much earlier than the end of the third millennium B.C.

2. Reader never addresses the seismic work that Dobecki and I

pursued around the Sphinx, which is in part my basis for cali-
brating a crude estimate of the age of the earliest excavations in
the Sphinx enclosure. The date estimate based on our seismic work
is compatible with the type and amount of erosion and weathering
seen in the Sphinx enclosure, and it also correlates nicely with the
known ancient climate history of the Giza Plateau.
3. Dating the Sphinx on the basis of “the known use of stone in
ancient Egyptian architecture” is hardly convincing. Massive
stoneworks were erected millennia earlier than circa 2800 B.c. in
other parts of the Mediterranean (for instance, at Jericho). Even in
Egypt, megalithic structures were raised at Nabta (west of Abu
Simbel in Upper Egypt; discussed in the text of Voices) by the fifth
millennium B.C. and the pre-dynastic object called the Libyan
palette (circa 3100-3000 B.c.), now housed in the Cairo Museum,
 records fortified cities (which may well have included
architectural stonework) along the western edge of the Nile delta
at a very early date. I find it quite conceivable that architectural
stonework was being pursued at Giza before 2800 or 3000 B.C:.

Again, the bottom line is clear. Reader is one more geologist who has
corroborated my basic observations and conclusions. The oldest
portions of the Sphinx date back to a period well before circa 2500
B.C.

Just before I wrote this, I had the opportunity to revisit the Giza
Plateau and once again check my observations. I feel more confident
than ever that my conclusions concerning the age of the Sphinx are
correct.
In the time since I finished writing this book, there have been
significant developments in areas besides the redating of the Sphinx.
In June 1999 I was invited to speak at an amazing conference entitled
“New Scenarios for the Solar System Evolution and Consequences
in History of Earth and Man,” organized by Professor Emilio
Spedicato of the University of Bergamo, held in Milan and Bergamo,
Italy. A number of scientists and researchers representing various
“alternative,” heretical, and “catastrophic” viewpoints laid out
startling evidence that our history is other than what we like to think
it is.
University of Vienna geologist, Alexander Tollmann, discussed
the work he pursued with his late wife, Edith. The Tollmanns
accumulated a mass of evidence supporting cometary impacts with
Earth at the end of the last Ice Age, some 9,500 to 13,000 years ago
(between circa 11,000 and 7500 B.c.). Certainly this corroborates
themes and ideas developed in the text of Voices. The mythic collapse
of Atlantis and the war of the ninth millennium B.c. was a time of
upheaval, perhaps in some ways comparable to the turmoil of the
Hundred Years’ War in Europe, followed by the Reformation in the
fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The social unrest of the ninth
millennium B.c. may well have been aggravated, triggered or caused
by cometary impacts.
Another important researcher attending the “New Scenarios”
conference was Mike Baillie, a dendrochronologist at Queen’s
University in Belfast. Further supporting themes developed in
Voices, Baillie has documented a series of “narrowest-ring events” in
Irish oak tree-ring chronology at 3195 B.C., 2345 B.C., 1628 B.c., 1159
B.C., 207 B.c., and A.D. 540, a cycle of roughly 500 to 1,000 years.
As Baillie pointed out, these dates mark major environmental
downturns and also signal severe disruptions in the history of human
civilizations:
• 3195 B.C.: possibly marks the final end of the “Sphinx culture”
(the builders of the Sphinx and other very ancient megalithic
monuments). Its collapse and the resulting cultural vacuum paved
the way for the dynastic culture of Egypt and other Mediterranean
civilizations
• 2345 B.c.: the early Bronze Age crisis, discussed in this book
• 1628 B.c:.: the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt; dynastic
changes in China
• 1159 B.C.: the end of the Bronze Age, discussed in this book
• 207 B.c.: social disruption in China and the Far East; the decline
of the Hellenistic empires in the circum-Mediterranean region,
which cleared the way for the Roman empire
• A.D. 540: the death blow that ended the ancient world and set off
the Dark Ages.

These dates, along with the A.D. 1178 date elucidated by Professor
Spedicato and discussed in Voices, may all represent periods of
cometary impacts somewhere on our planet. Clearly the evidence
continues to accumulate that extraterrestrial, and in particular
cometary, events have directly influenced the course of human
civilization.
More than ever, I believe we must learn from the past even as we
prepare for the future. Let us hope we learn in time.

Robert M. Schoch July

1999
Sources

Chapter 1. The Changing of the Paradigm

Clube, Victor, and Bill Napier. The Cosmic Winter. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1990.
Cramer, John G. “The Pump of Evolution.” http://mist.npl.wash
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Eldredge, Niles, and Stephen Jay Gould. “Punctuated Equilibria: An
Alternative to Phyletic Gradualism.” In Models in Paleobiology,
edited byT.J. M. Schopf, 82-115. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper,
1972.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1962, revised 1970.
Palmer, Trevor. “The Fall and Rise of Catastrophism.” http:
//euler.ntu.ac.uk/lsstaff/fallc.htm. 15 December 1997.
Schoch, Robert M. Stratigraphy: Principles and Methods. New
York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1989.

Chapter 2. A Shape with Lion Body and the Head of a Man

Dobecki, Thomas L., and Robert M. Schoch. “Seismic Investigations
in the Vicinity of the Great Sphinx of Giza, Egypt.” Geo-
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Schoch, Robert M. (Interview by A. R. Smith.) “The Sphinx: Older
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Index

Alexander the Great, 92 ('•atal Huyuk, 58-59, 74, 78, 124.

Alvarez, Luis and Walter, 27-28, 126-27 catastrophism, 6, 18-19, 21-
184, 206, 210 25, 30-32, 201-6; See also impact
Antarctica, 88, 95-106, 114 collisions
Aratake, Kihachiro, 107, 108 cave paintings, 62-65, 78, 123, 124
Arbuthnot, Michael, 111 Cerve, W. S., 92, 94-95
Aristotle, 15-16, 72, 80, 180 Churchward, James, 92, 185
Arrhenius, Svante August, 117 Chyba, Christopher, 191 climate
Asphaug, E., 239 change, 97, 125, 142-48, 196-99,
asteroids, 17-18, 28, 184, 200-1, 229-36
203-5; See also impact Clube, Victor, 15, 16, 201-7, 209,
collisions 211, 217-18, 221
Atlantis, 79-92, 95-106, 120-27, 134, Columbus, Christopher, 95, 96, 104
148, 199 comets, 16-17, 25-26, 179-80, 202-5;
Aztecs, 215 See
also impact collisions
Barbiero, Flavio, 172-74, 195 continental drift, 150-51 Cornford,
Bard, Kathryn, 48 Francis, 122 Cuvier, Georges, 21,
Bauv.il, Robert, 76-78 22
Beaumont, I^eonce Elie de, 21-22
Besant, Annie, 94 Daichi, Shun, 108 Daniken, Erich
Blavatsky, Madame, 94, 185 von, 113-14 Darwin, Charles, 10,
Brahe, Tycho, 17 18, 23-24, 26, 30-31,
Brandenburg, John, 119 52, 221
Brilla, Keith R„ 132-33 da Silva, Shanaka, 132 Dechend,
Brown, Hugh Auchincloss, 155 Hertha von, 70-74, 76-77, 212
Buache, Philippe, 99-100, 103 Denton, George, 102 Dillehay, Tom
Budge, E. A. Wallis, 43 D., 60-61 Diodorus Siculus, 80, 202
DiPietro, Vincent, 115
Cabrera, Javier, 92, 93 Dobecki, Thomas L., 38, 40, 46, 76
Callame, O., 213 Domingo, Frank, 44-45 Donnelly,
Cumbrian explosion, 168-72 Ignatius, 88
('ampbell, Joseph, 69, 70 Caneiro, Drews, Robert, 134 Dzhenkoul,
Nicolo de, 105 Vasiliy, 187
Carlotlo, Mark, 116
earthquakes, 133-35, 152, 154
Earth’s shift, 163-67 Eddy, Robert, Herodotus, 80. 120
34 Edge, Frank, 62-65 Hills,Jack, 192
Egypt, ancient, 54-59, 74-78, 113 Hipparchus, 67-68
Einstein, Albert, 150 El-Baz, Homer, 85, 124, 128, 129, 130, 135
Farouk, 47 Humboldt, Alexander von, 10
Eldredge, Niles, 31 Eliade, Mircea, Hut, Piet, 210
69 Emiliani, C., 140, 142, 148 Hutton, James, 20-21, 23, 222
entropy, 222-23 Evans, Arthur, 86
ice ages, 59-60, 140-48, 197-99, 233
impact collisions, 29-30, 172-74,
263 180-225, 232-33, 236-41
Evans, David A., 169 evolution. 3, Incas, 215 interstadial events, 147-
18. 23-24, 30-32. 52-53, 168-69 48
extinction, 18, 23. 24, 26-30. 184-85. Izokh, E. P., 198
206-11
Jericho, 58, 59, 78, 124
Faiia, Sanlha, 108 |ung, Carl Gustav, 69
Fast. Wilhelm, 190 Jupiter, 30, 185-86, 191, 199, 200,
Finaeus, Oronteus, 98, 99-100, 103 203
Flem-Ath, Rand and Rose. 95, 100- Kazantsev, Alexander, 189
101, 102. 158 Kelley, Simon, 208
(loods, 136-41. 196, 198-99, 232 Kepler, Johannes, 17
Fought, Richard, 192 Khafre, 34-37, 40-41, 43-46, 75
Gaia hypothesis, 221-26, 233 Khufu (Cheops), 45, 75
Galileo, 17 Kidenas, 68
Galli, Menolti, 191 Kimura, Masaaki, 107, 109, 111
Gauri, K. lai. 46, 49 Kircher, Athanasius, 81, 100
Gehrels, Tom, 238 Kirschvink, Joseph L., 169-71, 172
Genghis Khan, 216 Knossos, 85^-86, 88-90
Gervase (monk), 212 Kowai, Kozo, 190
Gilbert, Adrian, 76-78 Krakatoa, 89-91, 131, 132, 144
Glatzmaier, Gary, 150 global K-T boundary, 27-29, 30, 199, 207,
warming, 229-36 Goda, Patrick, 210 Kuhn, Thomas, 12, 13
192 Kukal, Zdenek, 79
Golding, William, 224 Kulik, I^onid, 188-89
Gondwana, 169-70 land bridges, 59-60, 93-94, 151
Gould, Stephen Jay, 31 laplace, Pierre-Simon, 180 lascaux
Graves, Robert, 70 cave, 61-65, 78, 123
gravity. 160-63, 202, 203 Ix'hner, Mark, 41, 44, 46, 50
Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich, 93-94 I'einuria, 92-95, 151
Halley, Edmund, 180 I Leonardo da Vinci, 19
Halstead, Beverley, 28 I-evy, David, 185
Hancock. Graham, 76-78, 95/99- 1J Ch’un Feng, 179-80
100, 103, 106, 108 Livy, 179
Hapgood. Charles, 95-103, 105, Izivelock, James, 221-24, 241-42
155-59, 163, 172 Lyell, Charles, 22-23, 24, 26, 30-31
Hartung, J. B.. 212-13 Lyne, Evans, 192
Hassan, Selim, 42-43, 45 Magdalenians, 123, 125, 126
Haughton Astrobleme, 1-3 Magellan, Ferdinand, 97, 105
Mallery, Arlington H., 97 Plekhanov, Gennady, 189-90
Malville. J. McKim, 57 Poag, Wylie, 182-83
Marchant, David, 102 polar shifting, 155-58, 172-74
Margulis, Lynn, 221 precession. 66-68, 70-74, 78, 146,
Marinatos, Spyridon, 88 212 P/Shoemaker-I-evy 9, 30, 185-
Mars, 114-20, 171, 181, 191,200, 87, 199, 203 Ptolemy, 105
222 punctuated equilibrium theory, 31-
Marshack, Alexander, 65-66 32 pyramids, 75-78, 115,
Mazar, Ali A., 57 116,215,217
McKay, David, 117-18
McMillan, Robert S„ 238 meteors, Radlof, Johann Gottlieb, 25
26, 117-18, 179 Rapp, George, Jr., 48
Milankovitch, Milutin, 145-46 Raup, David, 209-11 Redniont,
Minoans, 85-86, 88-90, 122 Carol, 50-51
molecular clouds, 201-2, 206, 207, Reis, Kemal, 95-96, 104
209 Reis, Piri, 95-99, 103-6
Molenaar, Gregory, 115 Richards, Paul, 150
Mongol invasion, 216 Ripperdan, Robert L, 169 Roberts,
Monson, Brian, 160 Paul, 150 Rowley, David, 208
Monte Verde (Chile), 60-61, 141 Ryan, Bill, 138
Moon, 64-65, 162-63, 181, 204, 212- Sagan, Carl, 240
14 Santillana, Giorgio de, 70-74, 76-
Mulholland, J. D., 213 77, 212 Santos, Arysio Nunes dos,
Muller, Richard, 209-11 myth, 14- 91
15, 68-74. 78, 135-39, 175-79, 211- Scalter, Philip L., 94 Schaeffer, C.
12 F. A., 133 Schild, Romauld, 57
Nabta, 56-58, 59, 77, 78 Schliemann, Heinrich, 85—86
Napier, Bill, 15, 16, 201-7, 209, 211, Schwaller de Lubicz, Rene Aor, 34-
217-18,221 35 Scott-Elliot, W., 94
NASA, 117-19, 20H Natufians, Sepkoski, J. John, Jr., 209-11
123—24 near-Earth objects, 200- Settegast, Mary, 55-56, 122-23, 125,
202, 238-39 Nemesis (twin star), 126 Shoemaker, (Carolyn, 185
210-11 Shoemaker, Eugene, 181, 185, 237-
Ness, Christopher, 180 Newell, 38
Norman, 26-27 Newton, Isaac, 17 Sitchin, Zecharia, 114, 117
Nichols, Johanna, 61 Socrates, 79, 81, 84, 85, 121
Noone, Richard W„ 158-63 Solon, 82, 85, 89, 121
Song, Xiaodong, 150
Ocampo, Adriana, 208 Spedicato, Emilio, 197-98, 199, 214
Oort cloud, 201, 202, 204-6, 210, Sphinx of Giza, 5-6, 33-56, 74-78,
219 Ovid, 136, 176 242 Spray, John, 208
Owen, Tobias, 115 ozone layer, Steel, Duncan, 184
226-29, 234-35, 236 Steno, Nicolaus, 19-20
paleomagnetism, 156-57, 169 Stobnicza, Johannes de, 105
Petrie, Flinders, 43 Strain, Mac B.. 163-67, 172, 173,
Pitman. Walt, 138 195 sunspots, 143-44
plate tectonics, 93, 94, 144, 151-55, Tambora, 131, 132, 144
163 Plato, 79-91, 100, 120-28, 134, Tauber, Michael, 192
138, 148, 199
Thera, 88, 89, 90, 133
Thomas, Paul, 191
Thomas Aquinas, 16, 80
Thucydides, 120, 122
Tollmann, Alexander, 198-99
Troy, 85, 128-29, 135
true polar wander, 170-72
tsunamis, 89, 131, 196, 198, 215,
217, 232
Tunguska bolide, 187-94, 205, 213,
228
Turco, Richard P., 228
uniformitarianism, 18, 20-26, 30,
180
Varille, Alexandre, 35
Velikovsky, Immanuel, 25, 27, 155,
185
Vermeersch, P. M., 56
Vespucci, Amerigo, 105
Volcan Huaynaputina, 132-33, 144
volcanoes, 28-30, 89-91, 130-33,
144, 152-53
Watanabe, Yasuo, 108
Webb, Peter, 101-2
Wegener, Alfred, 151, 163
Wendorf, Fred, 56, 57
West, John Anthony, 5, 34—36, 37,
107-8, 111, 113
Whipple, F. L., 26
William of Occam, 11
Wright, Herbert, 140
Yeats, William Butler, 33
Yonaguni Monument, 106-13
Yurco, FrankJ., 47—48
Zahnle, Kevin, 191
Zielinski, Gregory A., 132