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Roughly 12,800 years ago, give or take a couple of thousand, Something Happened and life on Earth changed dramatically.
This is a book of fiction and not intended to be exactly a textbook about either ancient times or quantum physics.
But Something really did Happen right about that time, back in the long-ago days, and it was darned dramatic.
I almost stopped writing the book when I found out where all the inexplicable research I had been doing was leading me. I write fiction. I don't write 'actual stuff'.
But our Characters ... well ... if you know them you know they generally have good reasons for what they get me into. And they're notorious for the phrase 'Never Give Up and Never Give In'. Arguing the point is a waste of time so I may as well just write the Story as it comes.
This particular one started just after I got Danann written almost a year and a half ago. In between the Younglings and a couple three books of short stories and poems, the research kept taking me in the totally wrong direction - back and back and back instead of ahead like it was supposed to go. I was too fascinated (and curious) to quit the Search.
There had to be a reason I was looking at really ancient stuff, so I started actively looking for something that had to do with ancient North America.
Learned a lot, I did, as 'new' findings were coming to light even as my research was carrying me along that path. There were people here before there were supposed to be people here, did you know that? I hadn't either, except rumors. They were here a LONG time before our Native Tribes arrived across that Bering Land Bridge from Asia. In the days of the mammoth, not just at the tail end of those days. Some of our Tribes have ancient legends about the people who were here when they got here. Hadn't known that, either.
And just exactly who were the Clovis people? About all we have left of them are some spear points - which are nothing like anything Asian or Native. The closest anyone has been able to come were a people they call the Solutreans, in France.
Then comes the question: where did the Clovis people go? And what about the ones who were here before them, the really Old Folk?
See, the thing is that archaeologists and such have a fairly clear picture of the past few thousand years, and they have a pretty good idea about the Dinosaur Days and right up to when the large mammals like the mammoth and mastodon went extinct.
But there's this thing in between the 'newer' days and the 'older' days.
They call it 'The Black Mat' or 'Brady Soil' and it's a layer of compressed carbon that represents maybe a thousand years worth of carbon based life forms. In some places they've found bits of burnt bone embedded in that Black Mat - burnt at temperatures that indicate a heat source a whole lot hotter than a cook fire or a forest fire. 'Something Happened' back then.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents a pretty clear explanation of the Black Mat, Younger Dryas, etc. Here's a quote:
"Of the 70 sites in SI Table 2, 56 (80%) have skeletal elements of the Rancholabrean megafauna directly underlying the YD black mat (Table 1). Approximately 38.6% have mammoth remains, 37.1% bison, 8.6% horse, 7.1% camel, 2.9% mastodon, and 8.6% other extinct-species remains, all on the Clovis-age surface, and only bison remains appear in the overlying YD black mat."
Nature Geoscience has a bit about Brady Soil. Look it up; here's a quote:
"We identify high levels of black carbon, indicating extensive biomass burning. In addition, we found intact vascular plant lipids in soil organic matter with radiocarbon ages ranging from 10,500 to 12,400 cal yr BP, indicating decomposition was slowed by rapid burial at the start of the Holocene."
Again, 'Something Happened' - for example in southwestern Nebraska.
Loess is super-fine dirt, maybe ground to 'powder' by glacial movement, that's carried by winds and then falls and accumulates when the winds die down. It shows up mainly in the form of dunes. It brings to mind a horrifically more extensive version of the notoriously horrific dust storms the people who lived through the 'Dirty Thirties' (few and far between now, those folk) tell us about. Extrapolate from that to the tune of at least several hundred years, maybe a thousand. No wonder nobody can seem to find much of anything from right about then. There ain't nothin' left but burnt carbon in/under the loess.
Meanwhile, other scientists were developing better ways of obtaining and assessing things like core samples of ancient ice. Core samples are cylinders of ice (in this case) that go back a very long time; the deeper you drill, the older. They can date and test the ice samples to see what was going on in the world, a sort of timeline of temperatures and 'events' that left residue in the ice and such.They found some interesting stuff, including the fact that 'Something Happened' around about 12,800 years ago, give or take a couple thousand.
Erratics are rocks located sometimes far from their point of origination.
North Dakota Geological Survey has a good description of erratics. They are deposited by glaciers - but (fictionally speaking for the moment) might also have been carried in a flood ... Something Happened to get them from where they were to where they are.
And I'm learning new stuff as we go along here. Bear with me or click out; I'm gonna see where this takes me.
GeorgiaBeforePeople is a WordPress blog mentioning the effect of Lake Agassiz's ice-melt on the east coast of North America.
While that's significant, for our purposes the southern 'outlet breach' is more so.
Lake Agassiz was a glacial lake, forming at the foot of the glacier that covered pretty much everything north of it. The lake was bigger than all of the Great Lakes combined.
Fictionally speaking for the moment, think of the effect of 1) breaching the southern shore of that lake, combined with 2) massive additions of glacial ice-melt triggered by unimaginably hot asteroids exploding into the glacier. The equivalent of an over-land tsunami would have been a not-good thing. The impact of that much water moving that fast would have been plenty, but there was stuff in that water besides H2O.
Our (fictional) city of Phi (which we've 'located' near Kearney Nebraska on the Platte River) would have been directly in the path of both the fire spreading from 1) asteroid impacts throwing burning debris and starting fires; and 2) the powerfully over-heated atmosphere itself igniting everything in a kind of spontaneous combustion - and that mega-tsunami flood from both the breaching of the southern outlet area of Agassiz and the ice-melt from the glacier.
Uffda.
Yes.
Uffda.
And I'm not even Norwegian unless from over a thousand years ago or so, that I know of.
Catastrophic Glacial Lake Outbursts are discussed by Kehew and Lord at a site about geomorphology.
Figure 5. Exposure of coarse gravel deposited by glacial lake outburst flood. The deposit lacks bedding and large clasts are surrounded by sand-size matrix, suggesting hyperconcentrated flow conditions.
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- Catastrophic glacial-lake outburst spillways: form and process relationships.
http://serc.carleton.edu/vignettes/collection/36631.html
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Just looking up all this stuff is enough to give a person chills.
I live in central North Dakota USA, although I might move to Minnesota one day, or Colorado. Right now I'm in North Dakota.
The Red River Valley was part of the lake bed of Agassiz - it's got maybe the richest darned dirt in the world, very deep and very black. Amazing stuff. Then there's us - breaking equipment every which way from Tuesday on Canadian rocks. One of these days I'll take a little road trip around our county and take photos of some of our rock piles. A lot of them have gone as rip-rap to protect the shores of our lakes and rivers, but ... you know ... there seem to always be more rocks. Now we know how they got there. Something Happened to put them there. On the positive side, we've got some great gravel pits.
Not to change the subject or anything, but I just found something I hadn't really paid attention to before, not being all that interested in SLOTHS to be honest. But the link has information that I find handy. Here's a quote:
"A well-preserved ungual of a pes documents the presence of Jefferson's ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii) at the end of the Wisconsinan in North Dakota. This is the 1st report of M. jeffersonii in North Dakota, and one of few records from the upper Great Plains. An accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon age of 11,915 ± 40 years ago was obtained from the specimen, suggesting that the sloth resided in North Dakota during the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age, just before extinction of the species. Palynological records from sites near the sloth occurrence and of the same age indicate that it resided in a cool, moist, spruce-dominated forest habitat in a riparian setting along the Missouri River. Its presence in that setting corroborates the notion that Jefferson's ground sloth was a browsing inhabitant of gallery forests associated with rivers. It is likely that M. jeffersonii used river valleys, such as the Missouri River valley, as migration routes. ... Kihm (1987) noted the scarcity of Ice Age mammalian fossil records in North Dakota and listed mammoth, horse, stag-moose, and bison as being present in the North Dakota Ice Age megafauna. A recently discovered skull of the giant bison (Bison latifrons) from Mountrail County near New Town with an age of >47,500 years ago was reported by Hoganson (2003)."
And now we know, kind of, what it was like around here back in the day.
Kinda makes me want to dig a really deep hole in my back yard just to see what I can see.
To make a long story even longer, at the same time I was going back and back and back in time I was also studying quantum physics and learning about stuff like entanglement, and nano transistors, and particle vs wave vs both, and possibly inhabitable planets 'nearby', and the meaning of PHI (1.618...) and what shows up when you take a picture of two of the tiniest bits of 'matter' we can isolate whamming into each other at breakneck speed (phi) while our space vehicles are sending back photos of the immensity of our universes (shaped like spirals - phi again), and lunar/solar 'clocks' that are twice as old as any such thing is supposed to be (let alone where no such thing was supposed to have been possible), and that Canadian kid 'locating' an ancient site using logic and star maps and site maps, and the Progression of the Equinoxes, and yada yada.
It was both encouraging and kind of creepy to get scientific 'validation' for concepts I'd already written into our story lines but I'm getting used to that so I'm not quite as freaked out by it as I used to be.
Eventually the disparate lines of research came together, fictionally speaking. I first designed the city of Phi's physical lay-out, with its circles of out-lying Settlements and thought Hey that makes sense. Then I ran across Atlantis stuff and had to scrap that design as it had already been kind of taken - too close for me to want to use mine, that's for sure.
I wasn't looking for Atlantis or even thinking about it, but when a person runs multiple searches for both ancient days and advanced technology type stuff ... eventually the two are going to meet if there's any kind of possible connection at all. So Atlantis popped up, along with a bunch of other weird stuff involving stone carvings and such that I might or might not use.
The point is that obviously I'm not the first one to think that there might have been 'advanced cultures' a long time before our own. The concept was well in place clear back in Plato's time for cryin' out loud. It's not a new thought by any means.
Neither is time travel. Neither is the colonization of other planets. Neither is blinking your eyes and being somewhere else, or sometime else. Neither are a lot of the things our Characters do. For me, the fact that I was getting 'new' scientific information that directly relates to that stuff is what almost made me just drop the whole thing.
Then I ran across another time that 'Something Happened' and I really wanted to just stop right there.
Apparently it wasn't enough that Alianora and Drustann had traveled back in time and found themselves in the ELE that took out the large mammals.
Noooooooo.
So I have to write the Story. COME HELL AND HIGH WATER, I have to write it.
So be it.
What has been will again become; what now is has been already and will be again ... the wheel goes 'round and 'round ... and our world is founded, maintained, and progresses under the rule of PHI - the Spiral and the Perfect Balance.
Again I'll say it:
Uffda.
All because the next Keeper of the Faith was born.
Good grief.
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