Watermark The Disaster That Changed the World and Humanity 12,000 Years Ago

Chapter One: In the Beginning Twelve thousand years ago countless humans, animals, and plants perished almost overnight, and great portions of the world were drastically and violently altered. Our ancestors, numb with shock and exhaustion, faced a challenge: either cease to exist as a species or survive in a grave new world. This is not exactly the history most of us were taught in school. Yet it is there, told in the scars on stones, the broken and buried bones of animals, and the memories of our species.We thrust a stick into a clear pond, and it looks broken. It is just a distortion of light, but our eyes, ignorant of the physics behind it, see only a broken stick. As we look back in history, time distorts what we perceive, and even though we believe we understand its nature, we see history like that broken stick. This distortion is then magnified by both facts and our subjectivity, leaving us, in the end, with a flawed view of our past. This view, when enough people believe it to be true, becomes our worldview or paradigm.This book is about a subject as simple yet as complex as that stick. It involves time, space, the Ice Age, Paradise, the nature of God, how we came to be who we are, and the end of the world. In other words: everything. Our story begins in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when scholars and scientists developed a global paradigm. They had grown aware, through accumulated evidence, of immense scarred rocks scattered across the world in unexpected places. They also found deep deposits of sands, gravels, and mud in valleys and on mountaintops, broken and shattered animal bones in vast numbers, and made the first discoveries of frozen mammoth carcasses in the Arctic. From this hard evidence these scientists and scholars concluded that at some time in the not-too-distant past, the world suffered an appalling disaster. The hypothesis they developed was called Catastrophism. Much debate determined that water, in massive and swiftly moving amounts, was probably the main culprit. Among scientists and the general public many saw this as evidence of the Biblical Flood. To the surprise and pleasure of the clergy, science now supported their religious convictions. Yet even as they spoke of this momentous conversion from the pulpit, the Floodwaters, in some minds, were already beginning to freeze. In 1830, Charles Lyell, a lawyer and amateur geologist, published his Principles of Geology. He insisted that instead of a sudden worldwide flood, a long, gradual accumulation of debris over millions of years had created the evidence. The hypothesis came to be called Uniformitarianism. He went on to say that the cause was terrestrial rather than cosmic and divine in nature, and if ever there was a catastrophic flood it was a regional and not global event. Lyell's idea proved to be popular among scientists. Over the following century his approach to geology and history replaced the catastrophic point-of-view and opened the door to the concept of the Ice Age, Darwin's revolution in evolution, and more recently the belief in continental drift and plate tectonics. Considered together they have established the current unifying paradigm of our world. Today the wind has changed. Our current fascination with Uniformity and our belief in the long, slow geological and evolutionary process is beginning to crumble, like immense stone blocks falling from a walled city. How do we know the walls are crumbling? Imagine a barking dog nipping at your heels, demanding your attention. Most of us would look down to see what the commotion was about, because from our earliest memories this companion has alerted us to things we should pay heed to. Our association with dogs has changed us profoundly, though some consider them a nuisance. Science would call this pesky canine behavior an anomaly. An anomaly is an unexplained fact, a fact that can contradict part of the prevailing paradigChristy-Vitale, Joseph is the author of 'Watermark The Disaster That Changed the World and Humanity 12,000 Years Ago', published 2004 under ISBN 9780743491907 and ISBN 0743491904.