Four years after Cuvier’s death, Agassiz was exploring Switzerland’s sheer crevices and towering mountains with two friends who were students of Alpine glaciers. The germ of an idea was planted as the two persuaded Agassiz that the dominating boulders they were climbing over had been pushed, heaved, and hauled to their positions by glaciers. Agassiz saw the possibilities at once, and in 1837 he announced his theory of the ice ages to an unsuspecting Europe. “Siberian winter,” he declared, “established itself for a time over a world previously covered with rich vegetation and peopled with large mammalia, similar to those now inhabiting the warm regions of India and Africa. Death enveloped all nature in a shroud, and the cold, having reached its highest degree, gave to this mass of ice at the maximum tension, the greatest possible hardness!”17
Although the term ice ages has become part of our modern vocabulary, it was an unusual and startling concept when Agassiz first proposed it. Hand in hand with our concept of the ice ages comes the meaning of the term glacial. Today it is generally accepted as indicating a ponderous, slow movement, an inch-by-inch advancement (and thus losing its original sense of catastrophe). But Agassiz, in first proposing that the earth had suffered traumatic periods of extreme cold, insisted that the ice ages had descended on the earth suddenly and catastrophically, plunging it into its darkest winter. He wrote, “A sudden intense winter, that was to last for ages, fell upon our globe; it spread over the very countries where these tropical animals had their homes, and so suddenly did it come upon them that they were embalmed beneath masses of snow and ice, without time even for the decay which follows death.”18
To Agassiz this theory of catastrophic ice ages cleared the overgrown trail leading to the heart of the mystery of extinctions. The onslaught of a sudden deadly ice age would have entombed massive creatures where they stood, mute witnesses to a season of disaster.
When Agassiz first presented the idea of ice ages to the scientific community in 1837, he was met with great skepticism. However, he proved that the movement of glaciers could account for the placement of massive boulders. The skeptics were forced to accept that the earth had indeed once been gripped by deadly winters. The trigger for these paralyzing winters remained a puzzle. Agassiz had recognized this obstacle from the beginning.
We have as yet no clew [sic] to the source of this great and sudden change of climate. Various suggestions have been made—among others, that formerly the inclination of the earth’s axis was greater, or that a submersion of the continents under water might have produced a decided increase of cold; but none of these explanations are satisfactory, and science has yet to find any cause which accounts for all the phenomena connected with it.19
This grand cycle of destruction may have been the cause of periodic bouts of mass extinctions. There have been many of these disasters, each one of which has had a profound impact upon the course of evolution. The late Pleistocene extinctions, which occurred shortly after 9600 BCE, have been studied in detail by scientists attempting to solve the mystery of these deadly events.
One line of inquiry puts the blame on humankind. Charles Darwin’s codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) advanced the idea that the extinctions at the end of the last ice age were caused not only by climatic changes but also by humans. In 1911, he wrote, “The extinction of so many large Mammalia is actually due to man’s agency, acting in co-operation with those general causes which at the culmination of each geological era has led to the extinction of the larger, the most specialized, or the most strangely modified forms.”20
Like Darwin, Wallace was strongly committed to the Hutton/Lyell model of strict, gradual change in the earth’s history. But even Lyell couldn’t ignore the problems in resting all the terrible responsibility for extinctions on humans. “It is probable that causes more general and powerful than the agency of Man, alterations in climate, variations in the range of many species of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and of plants, geographical changes in the height, depth, and extent of land and sea, or all of these combined, have given rise, in a vast series of years, to the annihilation . . . of many large mammals.”21
Despite Lyell’s warnings, the idea of humankind as the cause of extinctions has a great following among anthropologists and paleontologists. The modern spokesman for the “overkill hypothesis” is Dr. Paul S. Martin of the University of Arizona. He believes that human migration to the New World caused the mass extinctions. North America did experience massive extinctions at this time. The great bears, saber-toothed tigers, mammoths, and mastodons all became extinct shortly after 9600 BCE. (Many archaeologists believe that people first arrived in the New World shortly after 9600 BCE, an idea we will examine in detail in chapter 10.) Martin conjectures that the animals that humans encountered had not developed the necessary skills to escape the newcomers’ hunting techniques and were consequently slaughtered to extinction.22 In contrast, the animals of the Old World, especially in Europe and Africa, had evolved evasion strategies to deal with hunters, thereby avoiding the fate of their counterparts in the New World.
It is perhaps a natural view to adopt in the twenty-first century, given our shameful record in annihilating so many species, but the overkill hypothesis can only explain one set of mass extinctions. It can’t explain those that occurred earlier than the Pleistocene. Nor can the overkill hypothesis explain the deaths of vast numbers of large animals that once thrived in temperate northern Siberia, land that is now barren tundra. To support these animals Siberia’s climate must have been much warmer than it is today. Russian scientists are convinced that humankind played little or no role in their extinction and that only a dramatic climate change can account for so many deaths.23
The physical facts are not in dispute. Various continents have experienced different rates of extinction at different times. Nearly twelve thousand years ago, North America, South America, Australia, and the Arctic regions suffered massive extinctions, while at the same time there were relatively few in Europe and Africa.24 These varying rates of disappearance would seem, at first glance, to support the overkill hypothesis. “The lack of synchroneity between the extinctions on different continents and their variable intensity, for example, heavier in America than Africa, appears to eliminate as a cause any sudden extraterrestrial or cosmic catastrophe.”25
But an earth crust displacement would cause extinctions to occur on different continents at different rates as a result of varying changes in the world’s latitudes. Some continents experience great climatic change, while others are largely unaffected. Changing climates produce extinctions as creatures succumb to different temperatures and alien seasons.
Hapgood’s data permits us to see the Pleistocene extinctions in a clear light. Using his determination of the location of the earth’s crust before 9600 BCE, we can observe the latitude changes that occurred after the displacement. An imaginary circle drawn around the globe through the locations of the current and previous positions of the North and South poles reveals the area that experienced the largest latitude change, thereby suffering the greatest trauma. We call it the line of greatest displacement (LGD) or ring of death. This line runs through North America, west of South America, bisects Antarctica, travels through Southeast Asia, goes on to Siberia, and then back to North America (see figure 9.5). The ring of death corresponds directly with those regions of the globe that suffered the most extinctions.
The line of least displacement (LLD) intersects with those climatic regions that remained relatively stable both during and after the catastrophe. It runs through Greenland, Europe, and Africa before cutting between Australia and New Zealand, passing Hawaii, and then returning to Greenland. This LLD corresponds directly with those regions that experienced the least extinctions (see figure 9.5).
Unlike the overkill hypothesis, the theory of earth crust displacement provides a model for the study of mass extinctions in general. The same principle can be applied to earlier geological periods and is not
dependent on our guesses as to the ability of animals to avoid human hunters. An earth crust displacement randomly determines which species will survive and which will perish. The remnants of species that survive the destruction of an earth crust displacement represent smaller gene pools, increasing the probability of the development of new species because mutations can take a better “hold” within small communities. Ocean creatures stand a much greater chance because they can swim to climates to which they are already adapted. Land animals, however, have their mobility hampered by mountains, deserts, lakes, and oceans. With escape cut off they must adapt or extinction is inevitable. This explains why evolution appears to occur faster on land than within the oceans.
Figure 9.5. Each earth crust displacement results in dramatic climatic changes. Some regions experience far more dramatic latitude change than others. The last displacement left a path of extinction across the line of greatest shift. Along the line of least displacement extinctions were few. North America lost large mammals such as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, while Africa’s elephants and lions survived.
The most recent earth crust displacement left its evidence in a ring of death around the globe. All the continents along the line of greatest displacement experienced mass extinctions, while the continents closest to the line of least displacement experienced relatively few. The mass graves of so many giant creatures bear last witness to the great upheavals that periodically shatter our planet.
TEN
BROKEN PARADIGM
On July 4, 1996, geologist Dr. Tim Heaton was excavating in an abandoned bear cave at the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island in the Alaska panhandle. The site known as On Your Knees Cave had been discovered in 1993 by a logging survey team. Just a kilometer from Sumner Strait and 125 meters above sea level, the cave’s small entrance concealed two tunnels, one of which held a small spring. It was the final day of the excavation, and Heaton was filling his last bag of sediment when he came across the lower jaw and pelvis of an ancient human.
The bones were that of a man about twenty years old who had died in that beautiful, isolated spot some ten thousand years before. The discovery of the oldest skeleton in Alaska and Canada generated much discussion within the archaeology “club” and the media. The assumption was that the existence of this ancient mariner provided positive proof in support of the Pacific Coast theory of the peopling of America. One of the stone tools found with the body was geologically unlike anything else from Prince of Wales Island, suggesting that this young man had not been a local.
A mystery emerged. Where did he come from?
In 2008, DNA evidence extracted from the remains revealed that he was genetically unique and in all probability had died a very long way from home. Less than 2 percent of First Nations peoples hold the unique DNA signature of these bones. Known as Haplogroup D4h3a, this group “is mostly found in South America with the exception of eight samples from Mexico and two found in California.”1
Our ancient mariner may have traveled from as far a way as Tierra del Fuego. It is there that we find the Yaghan people, one of the few groups who have this unique genetic makeup.2 Terra del Fuego is the closest large landmass to Antarctica. A large islanda about the size of Massachusetts and New Jersey combined, it lies south of the South American landmass.
The Yaghan people have a rich and varied culture that may stretch back to 11,600 years ago, to the very century of the destruction of Atlantis. They commonly cremate the bodies of their dead so no ancient remains from Tierra del Fuego have yet been found. But physical evidence for human occupation of this land, so close to Lesser Antarctica, dates to 11,880 (plus or minus 250 years) at a site called Tres Arroyos.3
Today there is only one person, Cristina Calderón, still fluent in the Yaghan language, which is remarkably rich in vocabulary and has been classified as an “isolate,” meaning that it appears to be unrelated to any other known language in the world. It contains more than thirty-two thousand concepts, and its unique grammar allows for the creation of several hundred thousand words.4 When one considers that only 850 words are necessary to speak basic English,5 the volume of Yaghan words is nothing short of amazing.
The Yaghan’s rich mythology records “three world cataclysms: a glaciation, a world conflagration and a flood.”6 This association of a flood with glaciation is rare. In our research of world mythology we have only discovered one other instance: the ancient Vedic story of Airyana Vaêjo (see chapter 6), which was said to have been covered with a thick blanket of ice at the time of the Flood, when a “dire winter” destroyed the island paradise.
The Yaghan society was based in the closest place on Earth to the former site of Atlantis. However, is there a possible connection between the Yaghan people and the Atlanteans other than location? To find out, let’s examine both culture’s gender roles. One of the modern features of ancient Atlantis was the role that women played in the community. In The First Sex, Elizabeth Gould Davis notes that Plato related that the Atlanteans enjoyed equal rights. “In Critias he had spoken of the former primacy of the goddess and of the equality of men and women in ancient times. In the Republic he envisions a similar criterion for leadership where women will have all the advantages of education and all the opportunities for advancement available to men. ‘Public offices are to be held by women as well as men,’ as was the way of the ancients.”7
As for the Yaghan, their women held powerful roles as shamans and dictated the final say over important matters because they were thought to rule the sea8 Only women learned to swim. Men were forbidden to marry within the tribe and were expected to embark on sea quests to find wives. The young mariner found at On Your Knees Cave may have been on one of these long canoe searches for a wife when he died on Prince of Wales Island.
In 1931, after years of study, anthropologist E. M. Loeb concluded that there were rituals, ceremonies, and rites of passage that the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego shared with some of the tribes of California.9 Loeb could not have known, in 1931, that his theory of a connection between the two groups would be confirmed using genetic evidence. In California many of the First Nations people, including the Chumash tribe, practiced a Kukusu Cult ritual of dance and masks and appeals to the spirit world. In 2008, it was reported that the Chumash possess the same distinct Haplogroup D4h3a genetic marker as the Yaghan.10
Bears were important animals in the Kukusu Cult. Bear caves were considered ideal sites in which to follow spirit quests. Given what we know of the Yaghan’s mastery of the sea, their long quests for mates, and their adventurous nature, it is not impossible that the young man with the D4h3a genetic marker found on Prince of Wales Island may have traveled from Tierra del Fuego. If so, then this discovery, along with a host of other excavations, has the potential to break open the prevailing paradigm of the peopling of America.
This entrenched paradigm dictates that North America was colonized before South America. On the contrary, human migration may well have moved in the opposite direction. Increasingly, evidence from South America points to this radical conclusion.
THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA
Our perceptions of how people originally came to America have been forged by European- and North American–centered prejudices and a long view of history that became more and more narrow until very recently.
The story begins in 1552, when Cortes’s secretary and biographer, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, wrote Historia general da las Indies, in which he informed the world that the Aztec’s original island homeland of Aztlan was one and the same as Atlantis. It was, he argued, a white island in the ocean and must have been the very same lost island continent that was the subject of Plato’s writings. In 1572, the historian Pedro Sarmiento came to the same conclusion based on his understanding of South American mythology. Thanks to their writings, for nearly forty years (1552–1589) Atlantis was widely believed to be the original homeland of the native people of America.11
Joseph de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary who had lived in Peru, wrote
Historia natural moral de las Indies, (1589) in which he pondered the question of the origins of the people and animals of America. His religion told him that Noah’s ark was the only ship to have survived the Flood, but evidence pointed to the conclusion that some people and animals had escaped the Flood and reached America. Acosta’s faith in the Bible was so complete that he determined that some descendants from Noah’s ark must have reached America by way of a land bridge, either in the far south or north. His idea would come to bear fruit in the twentieth century, as we will shortly see.
In 1607, another writer, Gregorio Garcia, took a different approach. He assumed that shipbuilding was an ancient art that had survived Eden’s destruction by the Great Flood. He wrote, “The art of navigation has been invented by Noah and was therefore as old as man.”12 If ancient man could indeed travel by sea, then perhaps the Aztec and Incan civilizations were offshoots of other civilizations. Egypt became the “motherland” of choice because the Egyptians had boats, built pyramids, and worshipped the sun, as did the people of Mexico and Peru. Moreover, Egypt’s founding god, Osiris, was said to have traveled far, taking civilization to the rest of the world.
The idea of Mexico and Peru owing their civilizations to the influence of the Old World appealed to Europeans. Perhaps it served to rationalize their brutal plundering of the New World: destroying them was not such a sin. What was given could be taken.
THE LAND BRIDGE
After a century of speculation about the “diffusion” of culture from the Old World to the New World, an event occurred that permanently changed the common notion of how the original people had arrived in America. In 1728, Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator serving the Russian czar, Peter the Great, reached the northeast limit of the Asian continent. His discovery of the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska would eventually revolutionize the debate about the origins of Native Americans. Now, one could easily imagine the people of Siberia crossing this narrow stretch of water and populating the New World. The Atlantic Ocean avenue to America was effectively ruled out.
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