by Peter Watson
Now if early humankind did leave Africa at about or some time after 125,000 years ago, and if the people followed a beachcombing route that took them around what is now Yemen and Aden, and on to the Iranian, Afghanistan and Pakistan coast, and if they were isolated and held up from time to time by adverse climatic variations, they could have arrived in South Asia more or less on schedule to meet the Toba eruption. This is in fact confirmed by excavations in India and Malaysia, which have found Palaeolithic tools embedded both above and below volcanic ash at this date. According to some calculations, the population of this vast area could have been reduced from an estimated 100,000 to between 2,000 and 8,000 (a similar population crash is known to have occurred among chimpanzees). But we cannot overlook the fact that population estimates for so long ago are very speculative.6
At a conference in Oxford in February 2010 the ‘catastrophic’ nature of the Toba eruption was queried, and new evidence presented to suggest that the temperature dropped by only 2.5°C. But no one is suggesting that Toba’s effects were other than far-reaching and the conference also heard fresh evidence that tools made by Homo sapiens straddled the ash layer.7 So two things may be inferred from this. The volcanic winter may have all but wiped out the early humans living in a wide swathe centred on India, meaning that certain specific survival strategies would have been devised and which may have been memorised in myth form; and second, that the area would have been recolonised later, both from the west and the east.*
The ‘separation’ myth is a not-inaccurate description of what would have happened over large areas of the globe, in South East Asia, after the Toba eruption and the volcanic winter that would have followed (see map 7 for the spread of the Toba explosion). Sunlight would have been cut out, the darkness would have been ‘thick’ with ash, the ash would gradually have sunk to the ground and, after a long, long time, the sky would gradually have got brighter, lighter and clearer, but there would have been no sun or moon visible perhaps for generations. There would have been light but no sun, not for years, not until a magical day when, finally, the sun at last became visible. We take the sun for granted but for early humankind it (and the moon, eventually) would have been a new entity in the ever-lightening sky. Mythologically, it makes sense for this event to be regarded as the beginning of time.
The discovery of the Toba eruption, therefore, was almost as important a breakthrough for mythology as it was for geology. And as we are about to see, there are grounds for believing that many other ancient myths and legends, far from being the products of our deep unconscious – as Carl Jung or Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted – are in fact based on real events.
While myths were interesting to anthropologists, they were treated to begin with as mainly fictional accounts, revealing more about early man’s primitive beliefs than anything else. Sir James Frazer, the late-nineteenth-century anthropologist and author of The Golden Bough, recorded many of these myths in his book, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, published in London in 1918, and where he had this to say: ‘How are we to explain the numerous and striking similarities which obtain between the beliefs and customs of races inhabiting different parts of the world? Are such resemblances due to the transmission of the customs and beliefs from one race to another, either by immediate contact or through the medium of intervening peoples? Or have they arisen independently in many different races through the similar workings of the human mind under similar circumstances?’8
Attitudes evolved somewhat when, a few years later, in 1927, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley began to dig at the biblical Ur of Chaldea, in Iraq, the alleged home of Abraham, founder of the Jews. Woolley was to make several important discoveries at Ur, two of them momentous. In the first place he found the royal tombs, in which the king and queen were buried, together with a company of soldiers and nine ladies of the royal court, still wearing their elaborate headdresses. However, no text had ever hinted at this collective sacrifice, from which he drew the important conclusion that the ceremony had taken place before writing had been invented to record this extraordinary event, an inference that was subsequently substantiated. And second, when Woolley dug down as far as the forty-feet level he came upon nothing, nothing at all. For more than eight feet there was just clay, completely free from remains of any kind. For a deposit of clay eight feet thick to be laid down, he concluded that a tremendous flood must at some time have inundated the land of Sumer. Was this then the flood referred to in the bible?
Many people – then and now – thought that it was. But just as many didn’t. They didn’t because the bible text says that the flood covered mountain tops – i.e., it was rather more than eight feet deep – and because the flood was supposed to extend right across the world. An eight-feet flood of the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia did not suggest anything more than a local event. Or, had the ancients exaggerated? Since in those days hardly anyone travelled far, perhaps a reference to a ‘world-wide flood’ was just a manner of speaking.
That is more or less where matters remained for several decades. In recent years, however, new light has been cast on three events – or rather, three sets of events – deep in our past. The history of the years covering the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene – from the Ice Age to modern times – has undergone a major revision recently and, to put the matter briefly, the latest scholarship of the period shows three things. It shows that the world suffered not one but three major floods, at (roughly speaking) ~14,000, ~11,500 and ~8,000 years ago, and that the last of these was especially catastrophic, changing life drastically for many of the people then on Earth. This has produced a sudden surge of interest among archaeologists in the relatively shallow land bridges and offshore continental shelves of the world, as areas which may have been dry at various times in the remote past, and therefore locations where early peoples lived. Thousands of radio-carbon dates from ~300 sites have been obtained (some by diving), in certain cases going back more than 45,000 years, but little of substance has been discovered before 13,000 years ago. Walls, clay floors, hearths and stone tools have been found down to depths of 145 metres, at distances of up to 50 kilometres off such disparate locations as Sweden and California, in the Red Sea, in Beringia, and in the Mediterranean stretching from off Gibraltar to off Israel.
Second, this new understanding shows that the area of the world most affected by the floods was not Mesopotamia but South East Asia, where a whole continent was drowned. If these floods did have most effect in South East Asia, it would mean that the inhabitants of that sunken continent would have been forced to migrate all over the world – north to China and then to the New World, east to the Pacific islands and Australia, and back west to India, and possibly as far as Asia Minor, Africa and Europe, taking their skills with them. The third aspect of this new chronology is that many of the early skills of civilisation, such as agriculture – which have always been understood as being invented in the Middle East – were actually first developed much further east, in South East Asia and in India.
It is a contentious theory. Critics point out that when sea levels rose, they would have risen everywhere, so coastal migration would have been less likely than movement inland; these critics also insist that north Asian stone tools are very different from South East Asian ones, casting doubt on the (otherwise seemingly firm) genetic findings that there was a migration up the coast of East Asia. But even if the theory is only partly true, it has a major consequence for the ideas behind this book, not least because it may help to explain Johanna Nichols’ conclusion, that there was a great linguistic split between the Old World and the Pacific peoples, which played an important role in the peopling of the New World.
The evidence is now substantial to suggest that the rise in sea levels after the last Ice Age was neither slow nor uniform. Instead, three sudden ice melts, the last only 8,000 years ago (6000 BC) had a devastating effect on certain tropical coastlines, which had extensive flat continental shelves. These changes were accompanied by
massive earthquakes, caused as the weight of the great ice sheets was removed from the land and transferred to the seas.9 These giant earthquakes would have generated super-waves, tsunamis. Geologically, the Earth was much more violent then than it is now.
The overall oceanographic record between 20,000 and 5,000 years ago reveals that sea levels rose at least 120 metres (~400 feet) and affected human activity in three ways. In the first place, in South East Asia and China, which have a large flat continental shelf, all examples of coastal and lowland settlement were inundated and for all time. Those settlements have been underwater for thousands of years and will most likely remain so. Second, during the final rise in sea level, at 8,000 years ago, the water did not retreat for about 2,500 years, with the result that many areas there that are now above water are nevertheless covered with a layer of silt that is many feet thick. Third, as already mentioned, the floods that devastated South East Asia required the inhabitants to move out.10
This picture is supported by the curious dating pattern of the Neolithic Revolution in eastern Eurasia. According to such sites as have been found (admittedly few), the Pacific rim cultures seem to have begun their development well before those in the West but then, apparently, stopped. For example, pottery appeared for the first time in southern Japan around 12,500 years ago; 1,500 years later it had spread to both China and Indo-China. It is important to say that these examples pre-date any of the sites in Mesopotamia, India or the Mediterranean region by as much as 3,500–2,500 years.11 In other words, these early signs of proto-civilisation occurred much, much earlier in South East Asia than anywhere else.
(Although these sites are further away from Africa than many other Mediterranean, central Asian and Mesopotamian locations, their chronological primacy makes sense if early peoples were beachcombers. Early migrants would have realised that rivers – sources of fresh water – occurred relatively frequently along the coasts, flowing into oceans, but that, when following a river inland to its source, fresh water ran out and there was no guarantee where the next river would be. If the migrants were forced out from any one area, by population pressure, moving further along the coast was therefore less risky than moving inland.)
In addition to the early beginnings of pottery in Japan and Indo-China, around 12,000–11,000 years ago, a wide range of Neolithic tools has been found in East Asia – choppers, scrapers, awls and grinding stones, as well as hearths and kitchen waste – but these finds tend to be found in inland caves. There are almost no Neolithic sites in lowland areas dating to between 10,000 and 5,000 BC.
Two explanations have been put forward to account for this anomaly. One view has it that in island South East Asia the Neolithic period only started 4,000 years ago, with migrants coming down through Taiwan and the Philippines and introducing new skills and artefacts. This is why, these scholars say, most South East Asian caves are empty; there were few people around. Such is the view of the eminent Australian archaeologist, Peter Bellwood, who says that nowhere in South East Asia is there currently good evidence for any form of food production before 3500 BC. At this time, too, the early Neolithic, he observes a shift in cave use, from habitation to burial, which he thinks must have accompanied the beginnings of village life. The other view is more ambitious: people were living in South East Asia at the end of the Ice Age and had developed their agricultural (and sailing) skills much earlier than people elsewhere (in the Near East, for example) but were forced into long-distance migration, both east, north and west as a result of flooding brought about by the melting glaciers.12 And, as well as forcing these people out, the associated silt covered up many sites.13
WOBBLES, TILTS AND PERFECT STORMS
These are clearly important assertions and so the floods need to be fully described if we are to be able to judge the merit of these new theories. This may seem like a large detour from our main story but the reader is asked to be patient: a consistent picture will emerge which suggests that the people who entered the New World first did so after a distinct set of experiences that separates them from many of those they left behind in the Old World.
We now know that the three catastrophic floods referred to above occurred because of three interlocking astronomical cycles, each different and each affecting the warmth transmitted by the sun to various parts of the Earth. Stephen Oppenheimer calls these the 100,000-year ‘stretch’, the 41,000-year ‘tilt’ and the 23,000-year ‘wobble’.14 The first arises from the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which is elliptical and means that the distance from Earth to sun varies by as much as 18.26 million miles, producing marked variations in the force of gravity. The second cycle relates to the tilt that the Earth presents to the sun as it rotates. This varies – over 41,000 years – between 21.5 and 24.5 degrees and affects the seasonal imbalance in heat delivered from the sun. Third, the Earth rotates on its own axis, in a so-called ‘axial precession’, every 22,000–23,000 years. These three cycles perform an elaborate dance that produces an infinite array of combinations but which, when they come together in a ‘perfect storm’, can provoke very dramatic and very sudden climate change on Earth. And it is these complex rhythms which triggered not one but three floods in the ancient world.
The glaciers which melted to cause these floods were massive, the largest covering huge areas such as Canada and were several miles thick. One has been estimated as being 84,000 cubic kilometres. They could take hundreds of years to melt completely but eventually raised sea levels by as much as forty-four feet.
One of the interesting effects of the changes that followed the second catastrophe (after 11,000 years ago) was that, as sea levels rose, river gradients were lowered and, after 9,500 years ago, river deltas began to form all around the world. The importance of this lay in the fact that these deltas formed very fertile alluvial plains – in Mesopotamia, the Ganges, the Chao Phraya in Thailand, the Mahakam in Borneo and the Chiang Jiang (Yangtze) in China; overall more than forty such deltas have been identified as forming at that time on all continents. Many of these alluvial plains/deltas played a role in the growth of agriculture and the subsequent birth of civilisation.15 Deltas are suitable for certain kinds of plants and not others, as we shall see.
But it was the most recent flood, at 8,000 years ago, that had the greatest effect.16 Its dimensions were truly awe-inspiring and the reason for its sensationally catastrophic nature had quite a lot to do with the geological structure of Canada which, around the Hudson Bay area, is shaped not unlike a huge saucer that, in places, is hundreds of feet above sea level. Added to that, the Hudson Strait (leading north between Baffin Island and the Labrador Sea) acts like a spout or narrow channel into the ocean.
What seems to have happened is that the Laurentide glacier, stretching for thousands of miles right across Canada, began to melt at the edges but the water couldn’t escape into the sea; it was instead trapped in the massive saucer, above sea level, and was also kept in place by the ice blocking the Hudson Strait, which acted as a giant plug. The main body of ice then began to crack and melt until, eventually, the plug gave way – and a truly massive body of water and cracked ice sluiced through the Hudson Strait out into the ocean. The glacier was a third the size of Canada and 1.5 kilometres thick.17 It raised global sea levels by 20–40 centimetres (eight to sixteen inches) more or less instantaneously and the remaining ice would have eventually melted as it was swept out to sea, adding another 5–10 metres (sixteen to thirty-two feet) to the sea level.
The sudden removal of the ice sheets from the North American and European continents, releasing massive amounts of ice and water into the world’s great ocean basins, meant that a sudden change in the spread of weight across the Earth occurred, and this would have caused great earthquakes, increased volcanism and massive tsunamis crashing ashore on all continents, an epic period of natural disasters that, as we shall see, had a profound effect on the mental life of ancient men and women. The fact that the Earth’s crust is soft and springy – not at all as brittle as it might at t
imes seem – also meant that the effects of the earthquakes and tsunamis were not uniform across the world. (The Earth is, in a way, not unlike an enormous tennis ball. It is a firm sphere but if enough pressure is applied to a certain point, it can be dented or flattened.)
The importance of this flood, so recently established, cannot be exaggerated for our purposes, as it had several important consequences. One was that a flood and tsunamis of such dimensions would have deposited layer upon layer of silt many feet thick across huge areas, layers that must have covered crucial examples of early human development between, say, 8,000 years ago and when the seas receded again many hundreds if not thousands of years later. This ‘silt curtain’, as Stephen Oppenheimer calls it, must in turn affect our understanding of world chronology.18 A second consequence arises from the natural geography of the world, where the largest landmass that was inundated by the flood was almost certainly South East Asia, where there could be found the largest shallow continental shelf, stretching out into the South China Sea for 160 kilometres (see map 7). Crucially, for an understanding of early chronology, and perhaps for a full grasp of the emergence of civilisation, these two consequences can be put together.
