John Shaw, Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Alberta
As recently as 20,000 years ago, North America had an array of large animals to rival the spectacular wildlife of modern Africa. Mammoths bigger than African elephants, as well as smaller, pointy-toothed mastodons, ranged from Alaska to Central America. Herds of horses and camels roamed the grasslands while ground sloths the size of oxen lived in the forests and bear-sized beavers built dams in the streams. By about 10,000 years ago, all of these animals – and others such as American lions, cheetahs, sabertooth cats and giant bears – were gone. Some 70 North American species disappeared, three-quarters of them large mammals. Why?
Washington Post, 21 November 2001
If you study the literature and talk to the experts on the last Ice Age, you will find that there are wide differences of opinion over such fundamental matters as the main sequence of events, the chronology and consequences of these events, and even the terminology used to describe them.
The very idea of ‘the last Ice Age’ is poorly defined and is used differently by different authorities. For some it refers to the period from roughly 125,000 years ago, when the ice-caps of the northern hemisphere began their most recent advance, down to about 21,000 years ago, when they reached their maximum extent (LGM – ‘the Last Glacial Maximum’) and then began to melt. Even here, though, there seems to be variation in the scientific literature, as I have seen the LGM dated as early as 25,000 years ago and as late as 18,000 years ago.1
Another school of semantics takes a longer view, pointing out that the ‘last Ice Age’ was merely the most recent surge in a boom-and-bust cycle of glaciations and deglaciations going back some 2.6 million years. To them it is this longer cycle that is the Ice Age – and it is not ‘the last Ice Age’ because we are still in it. They point out that the process of deglaciation after 17,000 years ago was extremely rapid – being largely over within 10,000 years – but not far beyond the norm set by previous deglaciations. Likewise, the relatively congenial conditions that we have enjoyed during the 7000 years since then are perhaps a little better than those in some previous interglacials, but not spectacularly so.
Although I am not concerned in this inquiry with epochs millions of years in the past, I note in passing how curiously the fortunes of the creature called man seem to be intertwined with the long chronology of the Ice Age:
The traces of our earliest, upright-walking ancestors of the genus Homo first begin to appear in the fossil record about 2.6 million years ago, when the great cycle of the current Ice Age began.
Another coincidence occurs approximately 125,000 years ago, the onset of the most recent surge of the ice-sheets. It is at about this time, or a little after, that the earliest remains of possible anatomically modern humans are found.
The earliest undisputed remains of anatomically modern humans are much more recent – perhaps 40,000 years old. This is around the same time that the first traces of classic European ‘cave art’ begin to appear – already mature and fully formed – in such locations as the Chauvet Cave in France.
The earliest undisputed remains of large-scale permanent settlements with monumental stone architecture are found around 10,000 years ago – Jericho for example, which stands in the Jordan valley in Palestine. Other impressive sites include Catal Huyuk in Turkey, dating to perhaps 8500 years ago. The whole idea of permanent settlement, however, does not seem to take very wide root until after about 7500 years ago. This is the time when the world’s climate begins to stabilize again after 10,000 years of unbelievable turbulence, melting ice and rising sea-levels.
The same chronology, more or less, and the same loose correlation to the end of the last glaciation, applies to accepted scientific models of the spread of agriculture.
But does it? Or is it possible that important parts of the story of our past could have been veiled from us by the upheavals of the glacial cycle?
Although I know that it was just the most recent of many glaciations, I use the term ‘the last Ice Age’ to refer to the latest glacial expansion between 125,000 and 17,000 years ago. When I use the term Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) I refer not to a specific moment but to a period of approximately 5000 years between 22,000 years and 17,000 years ago during which the ice-sheets remained at or near their maximum extent. There was some melting and sea-level rise after around 19,000 years ago but the volume was relatively small and there was little impact on coastlines. What may truly be described as the epoch of the ‘meltdown’ began immediately afterwards – say 16,500 years ago – with the mass of ice-sheet wasting and associated sea-level rise complete by 7000 years ago.
Before the flood
Imagine the world before the flood. Seventeen thousand years ago, at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, most of northern Europe and North America were buried under ice several kilometres thick. So much water was tied up in these continental ice-caps that global sea-level was between 115 and 120 metres lower than it is today. The antediluvian world, therefore, looked very different from the world we are familiar with.
A land-bridge joined Alaska and Siberia across what is now the Bering Strait.
It was possible to walk from southern England to northern France across the dry valley that would later become the English Channel.
Many more islands were exposed in the Mediterranean than are visible today and existing islands were much larger. Malta, for example, was certainly joined on to Sicily. Corsica and Sardinia formed a single huge island.
Further east, we’ve already seen that the whole of the Persian Gulf as far as the Strait of Hormuz was dry 17,000 years ago but for its great alluvium-rich river and its life-giving lakes …
Further east still, India’s coastlines were much more extensive at the end of the last Ice Age than they are today and the shape of the subcontinent was strikingly different. Sri Lanka was joined to the mainland and south of Sri Lanka, sprawling across the equator, the Maldive islands were far larger than they are today.
Around modern Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, and stretching as far north as Japan, lay the endless plains of ‘Sunda Land’, a fully fledged antediluvian continent. It was submerged very rapidly some time between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago.
Up until about 12,000 years ago, the three main islands of Japan formed a continuous landmass.
In the southern seas lay the gigantic Ice Age continent of Sahul, formed out of the united landmasses of Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea.
Across the Pacific the thousands of small, remote islands of today were integrated into much larger archipelagos 17,000 years ago.
In the western Atlantic, in the same epoch, the Grand Bahama Banks, now shallowly submerged, formed a huge plateau 120 metres above sea-level, and all of the Florida, Yucatan and Nicaragua shelves were exposed.2
In short, the habitable landmasses that modern civilizations have inherited from the meltdown of the last Ice Age only began to take their present form in the ten millennia between 17,000 and 7000 years ago.
Before that, areas that are densely populated today, Chicago, New York, Manchester, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Moscow – in fact most of North America and northern Europe – were absolutely uninhabitable due to the fact that they were covered by ice-caps several kilometres thick. Conversely, many areas that are uninhabitable today – on account of being on the bottom of the sea, or in the middle of hostile deserts such as the Sahara (which bloomed for about 4000 years at the end of the last Ice Age) – were once (and relatively recently) desirable places to live that were capable of supporting dense populations.
Geologists calculate that nearly 5 per cent of the earth’s surface – an area of around 25 million square kilometres or 10 million square miles – has been swallowed by rising sea-levels since the end of the Ice Age.3 That is roughly equivalent to the combined areas of the United States (9.6 million square kilometres) and the whole of South America (17 million square kilometres). It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much
larger than China and Europe combined.4
What adds greatly to the significance of these lost lands of the last Ice Age is not only their enormous area but also – because they were coastal and in predominantly warm latitudes – that they would have been among the very best lands available to humanity anywhere in the world at that time. Moreover, although they represent 5 per cent of the earth’s surface today, it is worth reminding ourselves that humanity during the Ice Age was denied useful access to much of northern Europe and North America because of the ice-sheets. So the 25 million square kilometres that were lost to the rising seas add up to a great deal more than 5 per cent of the earth’s useful and habitable landspace at that time.
Now, imagine if you were to discover a hidden secret: the entire orthodox account of world prehistory as it is presented in the classroom, at university, through books and in the media has been created by archaeologists with no reference whatsoever to China and Europe, or to South America and the land-mass of the USA. Having missed out entirely such large areas from their excavations and research wouldn’t you feel that their conclusions about world prehistory and the story of the origins of civilization were likely to be – to say the least – flawed? Well, it is a similar story with the 25 million square kilometres lost at the end of the Ice Age. Marine archaeologists have barely even begun a systematic survey for possible submerged sites on these flooded lands. Most would regard it as a waste of time even to look. In consequence, whether in Australia or Europe, the Middle East, India or south-east Asia, the enormous implications of the changes in land-use and rising sea-levels between 17,000 and 7000 years ago do not appear ever to have been seriously considered by historians and archaeologists seeking the origins of civilization.
A case history: the drowned 3 million square kilometres of Sahul
Let’s look more closely at what happened to Sahul – also known as ‘Greater Australia’ – between approximately 17,000 and 7000 years ago. Much of the story has been unravelled by the work of Jim Allen, an archaeologist at Australia’s La Trobe University, and Peter Kershaw from the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University, Melbourne.5
Sahul at the Last Glacial Maximum.
Until the end of the Last Glacial Maximum 17,000 years ago, and probably for several thousand years afterwards, New Guinea was fully integrated with the Australian continent across the Torres Strait and the Arafura Sea, Tasmania was fully integrated in the south – the Bass Strait then being dry land – and ‘other smaller, now offshore, islands were also incorporated’.6 In total Allen and Kershaw estimate that Sahul of 17,000 years ago extended ‘from almost exactly the Equator to nearly 44 degrees S and from 112 degrees E to 154 degrees E’.7
Then came the meltdown:
Between circa 16,000 BP and 7000 BP Greater Australia was reduced in area by more than three million square kilometres – an area much larger than Mexico. Three major landmasses existed where previously there had been one … Coastal sites were either submerged or preserved on islands, while sites of the former arid interior became coastal … In places the postglacial marine transgression reduced the width of the coastal plain by up to several hundred kilometres, thus presumably drowning many terminal Pleistocene sites in the process …’8
And how much else? There are, after all, a number of discontinuities and mysteries in the human story in Australia, not least the venerable antiquity of its first settlers – thought to date back as far as 50,000 years. Though there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever that a high civilization in the technical, material or urban senses ever flourished here before the modern era, there are certain aspects of Aboriginal culture that are frankly puzzling and do not fit in. These include evidence of sophisticated astronomical ideas from a very early date and the use of an ‘astronomical terminology’ that is also found in other very distant regions of the world. Thanks to the research of the Russian prehistorian Boris Frolov, for example, we must now ask ourselves whether it is a coincidence that indigenous tribal peoples as far afield as North America, Siberia and Australia all called the Pleiades star-group ‘the Seven Sisters’.9 Frolov’s own view is that coincidence is not a satisfactory explanation and that only an extremely ancient shared heritage can account for this and many other thought-provoking parallels that he has uncovered.10 But if Frolov is right, as the Cambridge anthropologist Richard Rudgley observes in his groundbreaking Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, then the implication is:
a tradition of communicable knowledge of the heavens that has existed for over 40,000 years, since a time roughly coinciding with the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic. This is something that is extremely awkward for most widely accepted views of the history of knowledge and science – in short it is far, far too early for most people to accept.11
Of course, it is true that archaeologists excavating Australian terrestrial sites have not turned up any evidence there of the kind of social infrastructure that would normally be associated with the spread of a global astronomical tradition. But with more than 3 million square kilometres of Greater Australia submerged between 16,000 and 7000 years ago, and almost entirely unexplored by archaeologists, who can be sure what yet might be found?
Floods and civilization
Were the post-glacial ‘floods’ really floods at all? It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to work out that 120 metres of sea-level rise spread out over 10,000 years amounts to an average of not much more than a metre a century. Inconvenient, certainly … But surely not enough to submerge and sweep away all traces of a great civilization? Surely not enough to inspire the global myth of the flood-so often accompanied, as it was in Sumer, by the unshakeable conviction that the gods had resolved to obliterate mankind?
In previous books I have discussed the cycle of the Ice Ages. Over the past 2.6 million years, this cycle shows strong correlations with the (slowly changing) obliquity and precession of the earth’s axis and the varying degree of eccentricity of its orbit around the sun. Some scientists feel that these large-scale astronomical influences are sufficient, on their own, to explain the recurrent glaciations and deglaciations of our planet. Others feel that trigger factors must also be involved – extreme episodes of volcanism, asteroidal or cometary impacts, a realignment of the earth’s crust or mantle, and so on and so forth.
Irrespective of the cause, however, there is no dispute about the biggest consequence of the meltdown of the last Ice Age: sea-level is now 120 metres higher than it was 17,000 years ago. This, by any standards, represents a dramatic change in the distribution of habitats for human settlement and should, one might expect, be a matter of great interest to archaeologists. When I began to research this subject I was therefore surprised to learn that this is not at all the case:
only an infinitesimal amount of marine archaeology has been done along continental shelves (infinitesimal in relation to the total area of land submerged worldwide);
of the marine archaeology that has been done, the largest part has been focused upon the discovery and excavation of shipwrecks and of sites submerged in historical times;12
with the exception of Robert Ballard’s exciting underwater survey of the Black Sea for the National Geographic Society, which got underway in 2000 and has been oriented directly towards an investigation of a colossal incursion of the Mediterranean through the Bosporus narrows 7500 years ago, marine archaeology has simply not concerned itself with the possibility that the post-glacial floods might in any way be connected to the problem of the rise of civilizations.
I am aware that there is a new mood of political correctness amongst archaeologists and a willingness to accept, and state publicly, that the peoples of the Stone Age were neither ignorant savages nor lowbrow ‘cave men’ – although one need only spend a moment glancing at the transcendental art of Lascaux to realize that! But still it seems to me true to say that the great majority of archaeologists see no particular trend or connection that obviously links the ‘Palaeolithic’ way of life, 17,000 o
r even 12,000 years ago, to the urban way of life that first appears at Jericho, Catal Huyuk and a handful of other sites between 10,000 and 7000 years ago. This is why, although they are certainly more open than they were before to the spirituality and high artistic culture of the ancients, archaeologists – almost without exception – do still assume that the population of the earth was at a uniformly hunter-gatherer level of social and economic development 17,000 years ago, and still about 7000 years away from founding the first cities. They therefore have no particular reason to be interested in the fact that millions of square kilometres of continental shelf were flooded in the intervening years, changing the face of the habitable earth completely.
If, on the other hand, the level of development of different cultures in that period was not uniform (as is the case in the world today) and if one or several cultures had concentrated along the ancient sea-shores – or in any other areas which might have been rapidly and cataclysmically inundated – then it is possible that the post-glacial floods could have had enormous significance for the story of civilization.
Moreover, the rise in sea-level of 120 metres over those 10,000 years between 17,000 and 7000 years ago is large enough to have engulfed entire cities for ever and either demolished or covered up with millennial deposits of silt and muck all evidence of their former existence. If the waves rose slowly, such hypothetical cities would have been pounded for centuries in the high-energy intertidal zone which makes short work even of granite structures. But if the sea-level rise was due to some cataclysmic surge, then walls of water would have borne down on and crushed beyond recognition much that stood in their path.
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