The Younger Dryas & Evidence of an Advanced Ancient Civilization | Randall Carlson

Summary

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Camp Gagnon - Episode Summary

Podcast: Camp Gagnon
Host: Mark Gagnon
Guest: Randall Carlson
Episode: The Younger Dryas & Evidence of an Advanced Ancient Civilization
Date: June 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the Younger Dryas Impact Theory—the idea that a sudden, cataclysmic event (likely a meteor or comet strike) triggered massive climate change, flooding, extinction, and possibly wiped out an advanced ancient civilization around 13,000 years ago. Randall Carlson, a renowned researcher in catastrophic geology and lost civilizations, takes listeners through the geological, archaeological, and mythological evidence, challenging mainstream notions of human history. The discussion traverses ice ages, sea level changes, the disappearance of megafauna, the origins of flood myths, lost civilizations like Atlantis, and cosmic risks still relevant today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Younger Dryas: Definition & Discovery

• [02:50-05:38] Randall explains the discovery:
  • 19th-century Swedish geologists discovered layers of the Arctic flower Dryas octopetala embedded in European earth strata. These alternating layers (arctic-temperate-arctic-temperate) revealed dramatic, rapid climate shifts.
  • The Younger Dryas was a sudden return to near-glacial conditions roughly 12,900 to 11,600 years ago.
  • The period is named after “Dryas,” reflecting the climate conditions suitable for this plant.

Quote:
"So when this plant was growing here, it was an Arctic climate, and then it was a period where it was a temperate climate, and then there was another layer below that where it was an Arctic climate… the climate has changed pretty dramatically."
— Randall [04:03]

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2. Catastrophic Ice Melt and Megafaunal Extinctions

• [06:48-10:53]
  • Thousands of feet-thick glaciers covered areas like present-day New York.
  • Ice sheets melted in catastrophic pulses, not gradually.
  • Extinction event: Up to half of Earth's large animal species (>100 lbs) disappeared, especially in the Americas.

Quote:
"Within a few thousand years, half those species were gone, extinguished from the face of the Earth so completely that there wasn't a single viable species or individuals to reproduce."
— Randall [08:00]

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3. What Caused the Sudden Climate Shift?

• [10:53-12:25]
  • The planet warmed rapidly (far more than the ~1°C in last 150 years).
  • Discussion of Milankovitch cycles: natural astronomical forces (Earth’s tilt, orbit, etc.) that modulate solar energy reaching Earth, but these alone do not explain the abrupt warming and then cold during the Younger Dryas.

Quote:
"Something caused an enormous warming in several pulses at the end of the last Ice Age."
— Randall [10:53]

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4. Ice-Free Corridor and Human Migrations

• [14:50-18:44]
  • The “ice-free corridor” between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets is often theorized as the migration route for first Americans.
  • Randall questions its viability; hazards like storms, bogs, and lack of resources would make it treacherous.
  • Posits that coastal or maritime migration is more plausible.

Quote:
"I think that idea is losing favor… migration came via sea, not the ice-free corridor."
— Randall [17:45]

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5. Dramatic Sea Level Changes and Lost Coastal Civilizations

• [21:01-25:36]
  • During the late glacial maximum, global sea levels were ~400 ft lower than today.
  • Coastlines, and possible ancient port cities, are now submerged, making underwater archaeology vital for future discoveries.

Quote:
"The future of archaeology is going to be marine archaeology… the coastlines of the late glacial maximum are now 400 ft under seawater."
— Randall [25:24]

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6. Catastrophic Floods Shaping Current Landscapes

• [26:56-27:50]
  • Ancient river valleys shaped by immense glacial meltwater floods, leaving features like the Hudson River valley and others, now much larger than their modern rivers.

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7. The Younger Dryas Impact Theory – Meteors, Myths, and Atlantis

• [30:23-35:41]
  • Sudden re-freeze (the Younger Dryas) lasted about 1,200 years, ended in abrupt warming (meltwater pulse 1B).
  • Strong evidence supporting a meteor impact provoking the Younger Dryas: micro-spherules, nanodiamonds, rare elements (e.g., iridium) in geological strata.
  • Plato’s Atlantis myth aligns precisely with the end of the Younger Dryas (~11,600 years ago), suggesting these myths may encode records of real events.

Quote:
"Plato has given us a date that totally perfectly matches one of the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last ice age. Is that a coincidence maybe?"
— Randall [38:28]

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8. Ancient Myths as Coded Catastrophe Records

• [42:09-48:27]
  • The myth of Phaeton (Greek mythology) is interpreted as metaphor for cosmic fire/cataclysm—potentially a comet or meteor impact.
  • Egyptian priests tell Solon (per Plato) that these “myths” actually signify real, recurring cosmic disasters—deluge (water) and fire.

Quote:
"Now, says the priest, this has the form of a myth, but really it signifies a declination… a great conflagration of all things upon the earth, recurring at long intervals of time."
— Randall quoting Plato [47:09]

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9. Scientific Evidence for Impact Events

• [48:44-54:44]
  • Comparison to KT boundary: the event that ended the dinosaurs, identified by worldwide iridium layer and crater in Yucatan.
  • Piggybacks on this: virtually identical impact proxies found at the Younger Dryas boundary (nanodiamonds, rare metals).
  • Fossils, soot layers, and signs of massive fires bolster the impact theory.

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10. Selective Survival of Species and Civilizations

• [56:08-58:45]
  • Geography dictated survival: 75% megafaunal extinction in the Americas, much less in Africa (10-15% loss).
  • Possible that Africa’s Rift Valley area acted as a refugium for life and perhaps humans.

Quote:
"Africa, 10, maybe as much as 15%. North Africa seems to have been pretty hard hit. But when you get south of there... that area, it looks like that might have been a refugium."
— Randall [57:22]

• The widespread abandonment of archaeological sites, such as those belonging to the Clovis culture, immediately after the Younger Dryas onset.

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11. Resistance from Mainstream Archaeology and the Gradualism Paradigm

• [60:12-61:45]
  • Academic resistance rooted in gradualism (uniformitarianism) which focuses on slow, steady change.
  • Punctuated equilibrium: periods of slow change interrupted by abrupt, violent cataclysms—a perspective once discounted but now gaining traction.

Quote:
"It's only half the story. And the other half of the story is that, in fact... there's a series of extreme events. And within that narrow window of extreme change, more erosion... more geomorphic work occurs... than may have occurred in the previous tens of thousands... of years."
— Randall [61:42]

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12. Geological Evidence: Catastrophic Floods & "Underfit" Rivers

• [67:36-81:34]
  • Modern rivers (e.g., Minnesota River) flow in channels far larger than needed—a legacy of meltwater megafloods.
  • Examples: converging spillways in the Dakotas and Manitoba, giant boulders carried by icebergs during floods.

Quote:
"This valley was probably carved in a week... A massive gush of water that carves this out."
— Randall and Mark [67:56-68:00]

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13. Mythic and Ancient Cosmological Cycles

• [81:46-86:33]
  • Ancient cultures, e.g. Persian and Vedic, had concepts of world cycles, recurrent cosmic disasters alternating between fire (ekpyrusis) and flood (cataclysmos)—often linked to planetary conjunctions and cometary influx.

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14. The Science of Comet Reservoirs and Catastrophic Risk

• [86:33-92:02]
  • Deep dive into how comets, stored in the distant Oort cloud and Kuiper belt, can be perturbed (by planetary alignments, galactic events), potentially leading to periodic comet showers—and thus catastrophic impacts.
  • Ancient knowledge of cyclical catastrophes might reflect real astronomical phenomena only recently corroborated by science.

Quote:
"The masses and the distances, just by coincidence, happen to be exactly what you would need to effect this transfer from the inner zone... it's almost like a cosmic bucket brigade."
— Randall [89:54]

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15. Implications for Understanding Civilization

• [74:44-76:42, 92:27-94:28]
  • If a society as advanced as Atlantis existed, its coastal remains might now be underwater.
  • The intensity of the Younger Dryas changes: "If that were to recur, we'd be back in the Stone Age."
  • Ancient myths may encode real memories of human survival through catastrophic events.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On extinction and flood:
  "If it was on the scale of the Younger Dryas, we would not survive—our civilization would not survive an event on the scale of the Younger Dryas."
  — Randall [93:44]

• On myth and science:
  "Now, says the priest, this has the form of a myth, but really it signifies... a great conflagration... recurring at long intervals of time."
  — Plato (via Randall) [47:07]

• On ancient cycles:
  "The doctrine of the great year was already connected with the myths of the deluge and ekpyrusis. These catastrophes were supposed to return periodically when the planets came together in certain signs of the zodiac."
  — Randall [83:25]

• Mark’s reaction to aligning myth and geology:
  "And the fact that you have these ancient stories that... coincidentally align so much with this theory... It's confounding."
  — Mark [48:43]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:50 — Randall begins explaining the Younger Dryas discovery
• 10:53 — Catastrophic pulses and energy input causing melting
• 21:01 — Global sea levels & lost coastlines
• 31:53 — Younger Dryas Impact Theory (meteor/asteroid hypothesis)
• 35:41 — Plato’s Atlantis in historical and geological context
• 47:07 — Myth of Phaeton and cosmic fire catastrophe
• 48:44 — Scientific evidence for impacts (nanodiamonds, rare metals)
• 57:22 — Survival of species and humans after the Younger Dryas
• 61:42 — Geological gradualism vs. punctuated catastrophe
• 67:36 — Catastrophic flood geomorphology & underfit rivers
• 81:46 — Ancient cosmological cycles and world years
• 86:33 — Science of comets and catastrophic risk
• 93:44 — Modern civilization’s vulnerability to cosmic events

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Conclusion: Episode Takeaways

In this lively, information-rich episode, Randall Carlson reframes catastrophic events like the Younger Dryas not as distant, irrelevant anomalies but as key drivers of geological, ecological, and human history—perhaps even periodically resetting civilization itself. Myths such as the flood of Atlantis may encode collective memories of real, worldwide disasters. Most crucially, evidence suggests these cycles could recur, reminding us of humanity’s fragility and the vast, often unpredictable forces shaping our planet and our past.

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For fans of ancient mysteries, geology, myths, and paradigm-shifting science, this is a must-listen — or, thanks to this summary, a must-read episode.

Transcript

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[C]

of the greatest catastrophes in human history has been hidden inside ancient myths the entire time? Well, Randall Carlson joins us again today to explore the shocking evidence behind the Younger Dryas impact theory.

[B]

When we talk about the Younger Dryas and the intensity, the extreme changes of the Younger Dryas were that to recur, we would literally be back in the Stone Age. Our civilization would not survive an event on the scale of the Younger Dryas,

[C]

a mysterious period roughly 13,000 years ago when massive climate shifts, catastrophic flooding, and a sudden extinction of countless species may have been triggered by some type of cosmic impact, some type of meteorite striking the Earth. We dive into the science behind giant meltwater pulses, lost civilizations now buried beneath the oceans. And why? Ancient stories like Atlantis, the great flood, myths that we hear in every single religion. And the myth of Faden may not be myths at all, but fragmented memories of a real global disaster witnessed by humanity itself. From Plato in ancient Egypt to comet impacts, vanished megafauna and hidden chapters of Earth's past, this episode challenges everything that archaeologists think we know about history and human beings and the origins of civilization itself. If you're interested in the work of Randall Carlson, one of the most viewed guests on the Joe Rogan podcast and one of the most interesting speakers in this space, well, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Now, one of the places I thought would be best to begin, and I know this has been the topic of much of your research and, you know, discussion around your work as well as other people in the space, is this Younger Dryas Theory. Now, could you explain to the people at home what the Younger Dryas theory is, why it's controversial, and if it is true, ultimately, what the implications are for how we understand archeology and the Anthropocene.

[B]

Well, let's go back a little, little bit and establish historical context. So we go back to the late 19th century, 1800s, and a couple of Swedish geologists. And one was a geologist, another was actually a botanist. And they noticed something in their research is that as they're excavating and looking at the layers of earth, they found this flower that didn't grow in southern Sweden or northern Europe anymore. And it was called Dryas octopetala, meaning eight petals Octo. Eight petals, right. Dryas octopetalum. And they knew that the closest place that they could find it growing was the very northern tip of Scandinavia and in Svalbard, which is this Arctic island. And as they looked into strata, they saw that it's not growing here now. But then they dug down a little further and there was the remains of Dryas octopetala. Then there it is, the eight petal flower. A beautiful white petaled flower. Yeah, that's it right there. Okay.

[C]

Wow, this guy's sharp, huh?

[B]

I tell you what, shout out to Christos. Okay, so then under the layer with the Dryas octopetala was another layer where there was none. And then under that was a layer of Dryas octopetala again. Now, they don't have any means of dating. The first paper I think that was published on this was about 1877. But what it told them was that. And in this paper, which was written in Swedish, and I procured a copy of the Swedish and used Google Translate to translate it into a semblance of English and then read a couple of different comments on it from English speaking scientists who were talking about it. But basically what it amounted to is they could see that, okay, so when this plant was growing here, it was an Arctic climate, and then it was a period where it was a temperate climate, and then there was another layer below that where it was an Arctic climate, and then below that a temperate climate. So that led him to believe that, wow, the climate has changed pretty dramatically. I mean, like New York here, we're in a temperate climate here, so you can actually have hot summers, as we're finding out today. But when you have an Arctic climate, it's different altogether. And we would not find Dryas octopetala growing here today. Now we may find it. I don't know if anybody's looked, but, you know, during the Ice Age, this place where we're sitting now was under nearly a mile of ice.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Now to get a handle on that, think about the new Trade Center, World Trade center building. That's 1,776ft high. Okay, you double that, you're still not as thick as the ice sheet was. Wow. And when this melted, when it melted, it didn't just kind of like gradually disappear like the glaciers we've been seeing disappearing the last hundred, 150 years. It catastrophically melted with so much meltwater that all over the North American continent and all over the northwestern European area, where there was also a great ice sheet. And I'm going to pull up a graphic in the middle in a minute so you can see the distribution of ice during the. What's called the Late Glacial maximum, when the ice was at its maximum extent, which was more than double the amount of ice in the world today, including all of Antarctica, all of Greenland, all of the mountain glaciers, all of that together was less than half the volume of ice during the Late Glacial maximum. And we're talking 14 to 20,000 years ago, roughly in that time span.

[C]

Wow. And how do we know that it melted so quickly?

[B]

Well, okay, here's how you would you know that, because we know that there was, for example, nothing growing, say, north of here. We know there was nothing growing here during, when the ice was here. Okay. Then the ice goes away and now forests come back. But originally the ice started receding back, but it receded back in pulses. It didn't just move smoothly, so it pulsed back around 14,600 years ago, and then the forests sort of followed it. Now, as the ice receded back, this area here right now where we're sitting, was more like tundra once the ice first disappeared. You then had permafrost, you had tundra, and you had, oh, I mean, New York had lots of Pleistocene megafauna, you know, mammoths, mastodons roaming into the forests here, a whole host of saber tooth cats, giant ground sloths, a whole menagerie of these exotic huge animals that had lived on the planet for, in many cases, hundreds of thousands, or in the case of mammoths, even millions of years.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And then between, say 11,600 and about 14,000 years ago, gone half of all species on Earth that weighed over 100 pounds in body weight. And that's kind of what's separate below 100 pounds, just fauna. And then megafauna, over 100 pounds. For anybody in Europe that's listening, it's 44 kilograms. Right. If we look at, if we did a census of every mammal on Earth today that weighs over 100 pounds in body weight, we're looking. Depends on how you divide species up, but we would be looking at 100 to 120 species and, you know, looking in North America. What would that include? Well, it would include mountain lions and moose and different species of bears and etc. Etc. Deer, elk. Right. We go back to the Ice Age. The number of large megafauna on Earth was at least double what it is now in species. Within a few thousand years, half those species were gone, extinguished from the face of the Earth so completely that there wasn't a single viable species or individuals to reproduce. Yeah, we don't see woolly mammoths or mastodons roaming around the forests of the Adirondacks, thank goodness. At least not to my knowledge. I know. Be cool if somebody did say, hey, there's a mastodon out there. But anyways. No, that. Just as an aside, I mean, you know that some scientists are looking at cloning, right?

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

Mammoths.

[C]

Ben Lamb is, I think, one of the proprietors of one of these companies. He brought back the dire wolves.

[B]

Oh, yeah, the dire wolves. See, now the dire wolves. Now, you would not. We were talking about wolves before we started recording. You would not want to encounter a pack of dire wolves. No, you wouldn't. Your chances of survival would be slim to none.

[C]

Right. And now we're doing Jurassic Park. We're bringing them back. As long as they're in a, you know, a cage somewhere, I think it's fine.

[B]

Yeah, as long as they're. Yeah, they're not. As long as they're not allowed to roam freely amongst the people at large, Anyways. So what's interesting, though, is that it looks like there was some evidence that species began to decline around 14,600 years ago. But there was also a great meltwater pulse at 14,600. Now, to accelerate rapid glacial melting, you have to have an energy input from somewhere. So this is kind of what raises some of the questions. Like, you know, we can go, okay, well, the planet, the temperature of the Earth has increased about one to one and a quarter degrees in the last 100 to 120 years. Right. That one degree warming has caused glaciers to shrink.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

Right. Now, it should be pointed out that the glacier shrinkage preceded the Industrial Revolution, and it preceded any significant introduction of carbon dioxide into the global atmosphere by at least 75 or 100 years. Okay. So we have to look at other agencies besides carbon dioxide for inducing a warming of the Earth. Something caused an enormous warming in several pulses at the end of the last Ice age.

[C]

So just for context, if we're looking at 1 to 1.5 degrees in the last 100, 150 years, what degree change would you say was at this period, you know, 14,000 years ago?

[B]

I'm going to show you a graph in a second here. I've got it all set up almost ready to look at.

[C]

Amazing.

[B]

And it's a pretty impressive graph. And it's from Greenland ice cores. We'll talk about that in a second because I'm kind of making a loop around. But I'm coming back to the question of the younger Dryas.

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

So the flower gave its name to this climatic change. Now, I don't know if you. Have you ever. Are you familiar at all or have heard of Milankovitch? Milankovitch. Okay. Milankovitch was a mathematician. What was he? I don't remember his Eastern European Sounds Russian to me. Yeah, probably. He could be Russian. I think it was Russian. Milutin. Milankovich was his name. He calculated. There he is. There's Milutin. Ah, Nair. What are the Milankovitch cycles?

[C]

I see.

[B]

And he's talking. There's three of them. And it's basically, without going into the specifics of what the three are, it involves a changing geometric relationship between the Earth and the sun. And what it means is that there are times when more thermal energy is being delivered to the surface of the Earth and other times when there's less, you know, because, for example, the tilt of the Earth is not frozen at 23.5 degrees. It moves some. So if it tilts like this more steeply, the northern hemisphere towards the sun, the northern hemisphere is going to warm. Right. Also, the eccentricity of the elliptical orbit. So sometimes during perihelion, the Earth is closer to the sun and other times it's farther away. So that adds to it. The point is, there's sometimes you have the accumulation of these three forces that can sometimes negate each other, cancel each other out, and other times amplify each other. Now go back to around 14, five to 15,000 years ago. The forces of Milankovitch were lining up so that it led to a warming of the Earth. So the planet began to slowly warm out of the depths of the most extreme ice age. Right. Again, the late glacial maximum. So the ice sheets begin to shrink. Now, have you ever heard of the ice free corridor that was possibly a migratory route.

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Terms at aka mscollegepc yes, from Alaska, Alaska Interruption.

[B]

Alaska came across the Bering Land Bridge during lowered sea level and were able to come down to unglaciated North America via this corridor.

[C]

The Bering Strait, I guess.

[B]

Yeah, we're going to pull up a map. Okay. I tell you what, this guy is on top of things.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Okay, let me get my glasses on, see what he's got pulled up. Okay. It says right there, the ice free corridor theory suggests that the first humans to populate the Americas traveled from Beringia, Alaska and Siberia through a passageway that opened between the retreating Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets in Canada, allowing the passage of the U.S. great Plain passage into the U.S. great Plains 13 to 14,000 years ago. Okay, so that fits the model of the warming of the Milankovitch. Okay, There's a problem with that though. Now picture to get your nomenclature down, you've got two great ice sheets over North America, the Laurentide, which is the big one, and it was about the size that the South Polar Antarctic ice cap is today. Wow. Then the Cordilleran Ice sheet at its maximum was about the same size as the Greenland Ice sheet is today. Now, early on going back to around 30 to 40,000 years ago, and it's controversial how much ice there was then, it was vastly diminished from what it was at the maximum. But picture roughly around Hudson Bay, which is Laurentide, the ice starts growing and expanding. Over here in the western North America, it's also growing and expanding. And somewhere around 18,000 years ago, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet and the Laurentide Ice Sheet join. Right now at that point, nothing's going to be passing through there. Nothing's going to be coming from Alaska down to unglaciated lower North America. Right. Then with the warming, the ice sheets begin to shrink, the passageway opened up the ice free corridor. Now this is when, you know, a lot of the archeologists and anthropologists particularly believe that there might have been migration not only of humans, but megafauna as well.

[C]

Why couldn't they cross a more packed, dense ice sheet?

[B]

Well, first of all, you've got a thousand miles of ice pretty half a mile thick. Right.

[C]

So even if you're walking across that, that's going to be a long time without seeing an animal or being able to see it.

[B]

Yeah, there's not going to be, there's no, there's no foliage, there's not going to be food to harvest, there's not going to be animals to hunt up there. It's going to be, it'd be like walking across Antarctica.

[C]

So you need it to be small, you need to be warm enough to have a, to have fauna and something around to eat, but you need it to be cold enough to still have this ice sheet to get across.

[B]

So the idea is that once the ice sheets begin to recede, it opened up. However, I've looked at that and I think that idea is losing favorite because for one thing, it would have been unbelievably treacherous because you're gonna have extreme storms and wind through that corridor. You're gonna have alternating permafrost and peat bogs and it's gonna be. And in the winter, I mean it's gonna be extremely cold. Yeah. And you're gonna have these bogged like you find now say up in near the Arctic Circle where the ice has melted recently. And you have these, you know, almost like quicksand, like bogs. It would have been a very hazardous journey a thousand miles or so through that corridor. I'm of the mind and I think, I agree. I think Graham Hancock is looking at this idea and there's shifting that the migration came via sea, not the ice free corridor.

[C]

Interesting.

[B]

Yeah. Anyway, so These are the two ice sheets that existed say between 15 and 20 to somewhere around 25,000 years ago. Then we get to 25,000 years years ago, it becomes apparent that the ice was considerably reduced. Like, was it completely gone like it is today? Probably not, but it was considerably reduced in mass. And you know, you can think about this. If the ice sheets are growing and ice is accumulating on the continental land masses, where is that ice ultimately coming from? The water has to freeze as snow. It precipitates out. Imagine this. Imagine we were going to go if we went back into another ice age right now. And we also know that it could be this fast. And I'll show you some interesting results here in a minute. So imagine that we're up here in the wintertime. It gets cold. Snow. Right. Now imagine that winter comes on and you know it's cold, a lot of snow accumulates. I mean, what do you get around here? Western New York, northern New York?

[C]

I mean, in the city, not a ton.

[B]

Right. But once you get out into the rural areas, what, three, four, five, six

[C]

feet a year, a good winter, probably get into that.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, so now imagine spring comes, but spring doesn't come. In fact, imagine that it doesn't come for 10,000 years. That's basically what happens. And that is like what happened. And after 10,000, 15,000 years, none of that snow melts. It gets just compressed impact. Exactly. Builds up and builds up until over the center roughly of Hudson Bay, that area. The estimate is it was about 1 1/3/4 miles thick.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah. Just hard to even imagine. Yeah. Now where's all that moisture coming from?

[C]

I assume precipitation.

[B]

Precipitation. Where's the precipitation coming from?

[C]

I mean, I imagine there's some type of weather system pulling from a mountain or something.

[B]

Oceans.

[C]

Oh, that was an easy one. That was a.

[B]

The oceans.

[C]

Okay. Well, I feel like you kind of set me up there.

[B]

I did, I set you up. I wanted to hold you conspicuous before the world. No. Right. So you're pulling out. In fact, the estimate is that the total volume of ice during the late glacial maximum was at least 6 million cubic miles of ice. Now, to try to visualize that, imagine an ice cube. That's one mile on an edge. So go set that next to the Trade center about 17. 1776. Right. Number double that. You almost have to triple that. Right. So now if we're thinking that a mile, a cubic mile of ice is huge. Yeah. Right. Now imagine that you can suddenly melt that ice in an instant. You're going to have one hellacious flood, aren't you?

[C]

That's what it sounds like.

[B]

Okay. Now, during the lake glacial maximum, you got at least 6 million of those cubicles, 1 cubic mile ice cubes.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Now we got to get rid of that somehow. How do you get rid of it? That's still the mystery that nobody has really definitively said. Oh, this is how it was done.

[C]

Like what catalyzes the melt?

[B]

Yes. Yeah. Now, so imagine this. As the ice sheet is growing, the ice mass is growing, like from. From a new. There was two nuclei, one in the east near Hudson Bay and one in the west over the rocky, western rocky Mountains, they're growing. And as that precipitation that is from evaporation out of the oceans. But unlike now, when, you know, if it's in a southern climate, the, the rainfall falls into, becomes part of the, of the, the watersheds and it's either conveyed over to back to the oceans via surface or via subterranean waters. Right. Surface, of course is going to get there sooner. Subterranean waters might take, you know, decades or even centuries, but it is conveyed back to the oceans. So the oceans fluctuate a little bit, but it's a renewing cycle. You know, it, water is drawn out of the oceans during the northern hemisphere winter, but it's returned as soon as spring comes. And we have the southern hemisphere as well, which is in opposing. They're up in opposing. So when it's winter in the northern hemisphere, it's summer in the southern hemisphere. Okay. So now as the ice sheets are growing in mass, sea level is dropping. Right? Right. It reached its nadir or its lowest point probably like during the late glacial maximum. Let's just go back 15, 18,000 years ago. It's 400 to 450ft lower than now. 400, 400. Wow. So you know, we're reading about the fear and the panic over a 1 to 2 foot sea level rise in the next century. Right. Well, how do you explain a 400 foot sea level rise? Well, it was 400ft lower. Now think about this. You're standing on the, on the shoreline, you're out at the beach. What beaches are around here that you,

[C]

I mean you go to Rockaway.

[B]

Okay. Yeah.

[C]

You need to go to Atlantic City in Jersey.

[B]

Okay, so let's, we go to Atlantic City. And I'm not sure where the continental shelf hits 4 to 450ft, but it's going to be miles off east of the present coastline. Right. So the thing of it is is that you go stand there, you're in the middle of a forest or you're actually under the ice sheet. Now the ice sheet didn't end here at the current coastline. It extended out 20, 30, 40 miles out onto the continental shelf. See, then it began to melt. As it melted back, sea level began to rise. So as sea level rises, coastlines move landward. As sea level falls, coastlines move seaward. So the geological terms are transgression. As sea level is rising, it transgresses onto the land. When it's falling, it's regression.

[C]

Makes sense, right?

[B]

Makes sense. Yeah. So one of the things I've maintained for years is that the future of archeology A big part of the future of archaeology is going to be marine archaeology.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Because during the extreme conditions of the late glacial maximum, one of the places you would probably find the most benign to establish a settlement would be on the coastlines. Right. Because now you've got access to marine ecologies, you can fish.

[C]

Of course, we develop port cities to this day.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

But, you know, 14,000 years ago, if you're going to develop a coastal city, the coast is going to be way deep into the ocean.

[B]

That's right. It's going to be drowned now. Right. The coastlines of the lake glacial maximum are now 400ft under seawater. Wow.

[C]

I mean, we can think of the island of Manhattan, you know, surrounded by rivers on either side that would have just been one solid landmass.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

No river dividing it now.

[B]

Right. And right now a lot of Manhattan is actually built because when the ice sheet melted, virtually every river valley in North America was conveying much, much larger volumes of water than they are today. I mean, orders of magnitude greater, including, like the Hudson River. So you had huge floods coming down the Hudson River. In fact, let's see.

[C]

Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion, Camp, history Camp and Camp Gagnon. Now, let's get back to it.

[B]

Catastrophic meltwater discharge down the Hudson Valley. A potential trigger for the intra alrod cold period. I'll come back to what that is, but there it is right there. There's a paper this is documenting, and this isn't the first. There's been many papers documenting gigantic floods coming down the Hudson. Wow, Val. In fact, that's one reason why it is shaped as it is. It was first carved by huge glacial masses. Then you had these gigantic floods coming down and that washed debris down. It created what's called a fan delta. And a lot of New York City is built on that fan delta. I know there are places where it's particularly soft, where like, say, the height of skyscrapers had to be reduced because of the fact that the ground was too compressible. Right. And that is the sediment from this. These floods. Wow.

[C]

I mean, New York, I mean, all the way up until the Dutch got here, was kind of just like a marsh.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And ultimately it was the Dutch, I think, that kind of excavated the water out and was able to make it habitable.

[B]

Yeah. Just like they did over in the Netherlands.

[C]

Right, Exactly.

[B]

Yeah. So anyways, yeah, it's an interesting story, but.

[C]

So the question still looms, though, that heat, what is it that causes this massive meltdown?

[B]

Well, that, to me, is the question. That's the fundamental question. And was that whatever that force was, you know, we had this transition from what is now called the older Dryas. Then the older Dryas was followed by this, the warming, the Milankovitch, and that is the Allarode. And this was just said intra allarode. So within that warming period, there was a spike of cold. Well, that's attributed to the fact that so much meltwater was coming off the eastern sector of the great ice sheets and down the Hudson river that this really cold meltwater discharged into the North Atlantic. And that interrupted the. What's called the thermohaline circulation, which we think of as thermal, the Gulf Stream that now brings water up, warm water, up through the equator. From the equator, it loops through the Gulf of Mexico, and then it rises up and it dumps. As it loops around, it dumps its heat up near the British Isles, Scandinavia. Then it reverses and comes south, but it's cooling. So cool water is denser than warm water. So it sinks to the bottom. And this rising and falling as the water heats, it then rises. But it's also driving this circulation. See? Well, the idea is, and it makes some sense that a huge influx of cold, cold, rapidly melted ice water from what was then the Arctic region is enough to interrupt this cycle. And it's interrupted. So now it's not delivering its heat to northern Europe. Okay, so they're correlating that. They're saying, okay, maybe that older Dryas that happened maybe around 14,600 years ago, there was a big influx of cold meltwater. It interrupted the heat to northern Europe. And Dryas, Octopetala, like that, it came back.

[C]

I see.

[B]

But then, because of Milankovitch forces, it continued warming after that. And then octopedry disappeared and it migrated north. But then around 12,000, just this side of 12,900 years ago, it suddenly came back.

[C]

I see.

[B]

And that's the younger Dryas.

[C]

I see.

[B]

So you got the older Dryas and the younger Dryas. And that younger Dryas lasted for about almost 12 to 1300 years, right? From about. Figure about 12,900 to about 11,600. And at 11,600, there was a sudden catastrophic warming and a huge influx of meltwater. It's called oceanographers. Marine geologists call it meltwater pulse 1B. Meltwater pulse 1A happened about. Is now dated about 14,600.

[C]

That's older Dryas.

[B]

Yes, that would be. So meltwater pulse 1a could have triggered the older Dryas.

[C]

I see.

[B]

Right. It's a lot of pieces to put together.

[C]

No, it makes sense, though.

[B]

Good. It does. Oh, yeah. And you're following this?

[C]

Yeah, absolutely.

[B]

Okay, I'm impressed. So two days in a row I'm talking to somebody who's actually following it. Okay, so let's. Let's see what Christos has here. Ooh, younger Dryas. Okay, there's one of the theories over on the right.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Meteorite impact 12,900 years ago. And there we go. See the graph there next to it shows where there were these sudden pulses of meltwater into the. Into the oceans. So now. But my problem with this idea is this. Not the impact hypothesis, but yeah, you see meltwater pulse 1A. What is that? I can't see what that.

[C]

Some type of small insignia, like a

[B]

little O. Yeah, one A, small one A, one B. And once. So now there's one C. I'm going to add another one in there between one A and one B. And that would be right there roughly at the inception of the younger Dryas. But there's some really new work that's come out in the last three to five years showing that it looks like there was a huge meltwater pulse north into the Arctic Ocean.

[C]

And do you think that the meteor theory is credible? And if, if, if that's not the most credible, what are some other theories?

[B]

I think the meteor theory is the most credible.

[C]

And effectively that idea is that massive meteorites, many of them crashed into Earth, and that injection of energy is ultimately what led to this massive meltwater.

[B]

That's what I think is the most credible. And that was an idea that 25 years ago, when I was really studying this stuff, I'm trying to come up with something that could explain that. And I go back to a book I read in the 1970s by Ignatius Donnelly. He was a congressman from Minnesota who wrote two books on Atlantis that were published in the early 1880s. And Ignatius believed that Atlantis was destroyed as a result of a cometary impact. And he proposed that in a book in 1883. I believe it was Ignatius Donnelly.

[C]

There he is.

[B]

There he is. Yeah. So I read those two books in the Atlantis, the Antediluvian World and Antediluvian Means before the Flood, published 1882. Yeah. His Ragnarok, the follow up, was 1883. It's foundational work that popularized the idea of Atlantis as a real advanced civilization. That was the source of all other ancient cultures. Donnelly argued that Plato's account was historical fact, proposing that survivors of a catastrophic flood spread Atlantean knowledge, technology, culture, religion across the globe. Now generally, he's dismissed as a crank, yet when you actually read his work, it's not so extreme. Right. We could get into a whole discussion about that. And what's interesting to me though is we talked about meltwater pulse 1b and the end of the Younger Dryas, which is also the transition from the previous geological epoch, the Pleistocene transition, to the modern, the current geological epoch, the Holocene. And that date has shifted around, you know, a couple of thousand years this way, couple of thousand years that way, ever since I learned about it in the 70s. Right, but where is it at now? 11,600 years ago, precisely the end of the Younger Dryas. I see, okay. Now why to me, when it got refined to 11,600, I thought, well, now that's interesting. The reason it's interesting is because if you read Plato and we can refer to Christos on this, in fact, Christos gonna help me read Plato in the original Greek, which he could me and Google.

[C]

Yes, I thought he stole Christos.

[B]

Good, okay, so in Plato's Dialogues you have the story of Solon, 600 B.C. leaves Athens, leaves Greece, goes on a self imposed exile, ends up in Egypt. And he's talking to these ancient Egyptian priests and he's telling them about, you know, here's our traditions of old times in Greece. And the old priests say to him, ah, you guys are like children, you don't really remember anything. You only remember one great flood, there were at least three. Right. And they go on that there's. And they says there's a story about one of the most heroic events in our history and your history that is preserved in our sacred registers of 9,000 years. Then he proceeds to tell Solon the story of Atlantis. And he says to Solon, all of these events, there was a great war between the civilization from inside the Mediterranean to this great power that came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean and tried to subdue all of the cultures inside the Mediterranean and enslave them. But your predecessors, the Proto Athenians, they didn't use that term. I use that term. But who of 9,000 years ago organized all of the peoples within the Mediterranean and fought this great war and drove them out back into where they came from in the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean. And then right after that there was this gigantic catastrophe that had seismic movements and this culture, this society, this Civilization rather, that came forth out of the Atlantic, came from this island or group of islands that they basically place it in the mid Atlantic, right? And then right after the succession of this war, the ending of this war, there was this great catastrophe and there was a seismic collapse in the Atlantic and this island, or islands, subsided beneath the waves. And that was the end of the Atlantean civilization. Well, as he says, this happened 9,000 years ago. So do the math. 2,600 years ago to Solon's journey to Egypt, plus 9,000 is 11,600 years. So Plato has given us a date that totally perfectly matches one of the great meltwater pulses at the end of the last ice age. Now, I. Is that a coincidence maybe?

[C]

Pretty compelling coincidence.

[B]

Compelling coincidence. I referred. I just wrote a. I think I actually recorded a short a clip where I'm saying this is a lurking variable. You know what a lurking variable is? Lurking variable is in statistics. If you have your cohort of data there and you're looking at everything kind of fits and makes sense, like, oh, yeah, it looks like all of this stuff is pointing to a date of 2,000 years ago. Okay. But then there's these outliers, a couple of outliers, like, ah, why this date here is, you know, 3,000 years ago. So there must be something wrong here. We'll just leave that out of our equation. Right? It's an outlier. We don't need to include it in our statistical analysis. But once in a while there's an outlier that actually is legitimate. And the problem with outliers is that if you include one, then it changes the whole outcome of the thing. See, and I kind of look at this as well. Generally, if scholars even know. Typically the scholars who are familiar with Plato and reading Plato don't know anything about oceanography or marine geology. And so they don't make any connection with. Well, wait a second. The date that the priests gave Solon, that Solon gave to Dropidus and him to the rest before it got to Socrates and Critias. Right. That that date actually precisely coincides with a catastrophic event that included a rapid rise in sea level. Yes. Right.

[C]

Now I'm curious though. In that telling, there's no mention of meteorite or some type of heat transfer, is there?

[B]

Well, there's some. Some very interesting hints. I mean, we could pull it up and actually look at a quote from by all means. Well, let's do that then.

[C]

What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I want to tell you a scary story. Yeah. Specifically for the dudes. All right? Imagine you're going out with your wife, okay? You're having some dinner. You know, you get some drinks. The vibes are good. And you go back to your apartment, your house, the lights are low. You got a little Miguel playing on the radio, and all of a sudden you realize your piece is like, yeah, dude, I'm actually good. Yeah. Wait, what? We're ready to go. And your piece is like, nah, dude, I'm just actually going to sit this out. I mean, you're trying everything, all right? And your wife's just looking at you like, all right, are we going to do this? And you got to be like, maybe. Maybe tomorrow. Well, this doesn't have to happen anymore because I want to tell you about Bluechew Gold. Yes. Because this isn't just about showing up physically and being the man that you are. It's about actually being in the moment. Bluechew Gold's new formula combines ingredients that support blood flow and mental arousal. And that's also going to help blood flow flow to your brain. You're probably thinking of funny lines. You know what I mean? Being. Being cool off the cuff. It's not just performance. It's connection. All right? And now you're not overthinking. You're not stressed. You're just there and able to be you. Now, if this is a tablet that dissolves under your tongue and it's really simple and discreet and you can just put it in your wallet or something, that way you are always ready to go. And ladies, if you're listening, send your man the link. Turn him into a trophy husband. Keep him in the house. You know what I mean? A stay at home, house, husband. That's what you want, right? Give it to him and let him lay it down. All right? No awkward timing, no weird pressure. Just the confidence you really want. So discover your options right [e-mail] and we got a special deal for the listeners of this program. Yes, if you were hearing my voice right now. When you buy two months of BlueChew Gold, you're gonna get a third free with the promo code Gagnon. That's right, the promo code. Gagnon. G A G N o N. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important, important safety information. And we thank Blue Shoe for sponsoring this podcast and making this show possible. Now let's get back to it.

[B]

Let me back up a little bit. Go to the Greek mythology. Do you know the story of Phaeton Chris, I don't. Okay. Bullfinch's mythology has probably the best exposition I've seen of the Phaeton myth. And Phaeton was the son of Helios, but he didn't know it. I forget the mother's name who kept a secret from her son, Phaeton, that his dad was actually the sun God. So he's at school and all the boys are bragging about how cool their dads are, and he doesn't even know. He goes home and he complains to his mother and says, you know, I don't. Who's my dad? Everybody's talking about how great and wonderful their dad is. I don't even know who my dad is. And she finally decides she's going to tell him. She says, well, your dad is none other than the sun God himself. So then Phaeton finds that out. So he makes it his life's commitment to go to find his father. So he goes and he finds, opens the passes through the gates of the sun, where Helios is dwelling with his great chariot driven, pulled by the mighty steeds, right? And in the mythology of the gods, the gods have all of these powers that us mere mortals don't have, right? But one of the things, for whatever reason, if a God makes a promise, they're bound to it. They have to fulfill that promise. So Helios is so glad and overjoyed to see his son, and he says, well, I'll grant you any boon that you want. And then Phaeton says, oh, okay, I want to drive your chariot. And Helios says, ah, well, timeout. I meant anything. Anything except that. But then Phaeton is so insistent, he won't give up, he keeps. No, please, you promised. You said anything I wanted, you know, you would. Finally, Helios relents and says, okay, but whatever you do, don't turn loose of the reins, because as soon as you turn loose of the reins, you're going to lose control of the chariot, and the result will be catastrophic. So Phaeton, finally, he climbs aboard the chariot, the gates fly open, and the steeds, boom, they go out. And then all of a sudden, Phaeton is looking, and they're going through the zodiacal belt. He sees the great scorpion with his stinger and the crab, and he's seeing. They're passing through. It's very clear, okay? It's talking about the chariot passing through the zodiacal signs. Well, then, as it is, the mighty steeds, they feel that there's whoever's controlling the reins doesn't have it. And so the chariot veers off of the standard pathway of the sun, which, of course, is what defines the 12 signs of the zodiac. Right. Well, as soon as it does that, it begins to descend towards the Earth and it sets the earth on fire. And if you pull up, pull up Bulfinch's mythology myth of Phaeton. And it describes how great cities are burned, ocean is drying up because of this fierce, intense heat, because of the chariot of the sun, which is not the sun, it's Phaeton.

[C]

I mean, this is pretty clearly a metaphor to describe a meteor impact.

[B]

Oh, totally. And especially when you read Bulfinch's account at the end, in his narration of the Greek, he even says at the end, this has the appearance of a comet. Now, listen to what Plato says after this. He says there have been many catastrophes brought about by the agencies of fire and water. And then the priest says to Solon, there's a story which even you have preserved, that once upon a time, Phaeton, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, but because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, he burned up all that was upon the earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. And now here's where it gets significant. Now, says the priest, this has the form of a myth, but really it signifies a declination, declining, moving downward, a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of all things upon the earth, recurring at long intervals of time.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

So Plato's playing it out right there. That's his preface to the story of Atlantis. And I don't think that that's coincidental. I think that was intentional. You know, he's saying that, yeah, there was a great destruction involved, this sinking of Atlantis beneath the waves of the north of the Atlantic Ocean. But he precedes that story by reciting the myth of fate. And I think that's Plato giving us a clue.

[C]

So if you were to sit before this Egyptian priest today and he was just speaking to you in regular, plain American English, he would be like, yeah, look, there was this great city. But before I tell you about the city, you know that there was this great catastrophe where all these comets and meteorites crashed out on Earth, these massive amounts of fire. And I know this sounds like a myth, but it's actually real. There was a massive catastrophe that caused this city to go away.

[B]

Yeah, that's basically what he's saying. Yeah. It has the form of a myth,

[C]

he says, but he specifically says it's not.

[B]

But really, in reality, what it signifies, and it's clearly a declaration of it means to descend downwards.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So it's moving in the heavens around the Earth, probably around the sun, and at some point, it encounters the Earth and causes this conflagration. Wow. That is fascinating, isn't it, though?

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And the fact that you have these ancient stories that from, I would say many scholars specifically of, you know, Greek history, they would say this is obviously a metaphor, but the fact that these metaphors coincidentally aligns so much with this theory.

[B]

Right.

[C]

It's confounding.

[B]

And now we have the evidence accruing that there was some type of a cosmic impact event. And if we look at the evidence, one of the things that first clued scientists in the early 2000s into this was large deposits of soot, right. From conflagrations, fires.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And then that was followed by the discovery of impact proxies, Right. Like micro spherules and nano diamonds and, you know, platinum group metals, all of which are rare in the surface of the Earth, but abundant in meteorites and comets. That was how, for example, that was the discovery of iridium. That first clued in, like Lewis and Walter Alvarez and their team back in 1979, they found the spike of iridium at the same boundary, right. Exactly where the dinosaurs boomed. They disappeared.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And that was what? Well, he said, well, iridium, where does that come from? It comes from extraterrestrial objects. Right. So then what they did, this is in Italy. They're looking in Italy, and they're looking at a Cretaceous Tertiary boundary, where the Cretaceous era gave way to the not era, but Cretaceous period gave way to the Tertiary, which is also a great era transition from the Mesozoic, the great era of middle life, to the Cenozoic, because the transition was so complete that 3/4 of all the species on land disappeared pretty much in a geological eye blink. So they contacted their colleagues. One, I think, group was in Denmark and another one in New Zealand. They said, go back and take another look at the KT boundary and see if there's an iridium spike there. Sure enough, both Denmark and New Zealand, prominent iridium spike. Wow. So then over the next year or 2, every KT boundary site that scientists looked at had an iridium spike. So it became apparent that the whole planet got dusted in iridium. So now you calculate from that how much iridium is delivered to the Earth. Then the proportion or percentage of iridium that's in, say, an asteroid, how big of an asteroid would you have to have to deliver that much iridium to the Earth? The answer was an asteroid about 6 miles in diameter. Then the next question was, okay, if a 6 mile diameter asteroid impacted the Earth, it's gonna make a crater. How big does the crater it's gonna make, how big is that crater? And the answer was 120 to 180 miles, something like that, depending on the velocity of impact, the angle of approach and so on.

[C]

Well, certainly we would see that, I mean, 180 mile long crater on Earth,

[B]

but if it's 66 million years old, it could be buried.

[C]

I see.

[B]

Well, so the critics, the skeptics came out and said, ah, get out of here. We know that it was a much slower than this, you know, you know, this is too far out, too exotic of an idea. This would have been 1980. Of course, in 1980, interestingly, there was two other teams that independently wrote papers that were published in the peer reviewed scientific press, proposing some variant on that theory that it was some kind of an extraterrestrial encounter that triggered the death of the dinosaurs and the death of a lot of the great marine animals. So the devastation was not only on land, it was also in the oceans. So then they said, well, you know, we don't know, but, you know, the fingerprints of an impact are here. We don't know where there's a crater. But then there was a succession of clues between 1980 and early 1980. And those clues led to somewhere around the Gulf of Mexico. And sure enough, there was a Mexican petroleum. Mexico. Mexico. Pemex had taken core samples looking for oil and they had drilled into the northern Yucatan peninsula. And they'd come up, they went down was about maybe a half a mile and they brought up this peculiar green glass, this vitrified stuff, and they thought, what is this? And they had it. They knew about this, but nobody was making the connection. And then you had. Was it Hildebrand? I don't remember. There was a couple of American geologists that found out about that and said, we want to have a better look at that. And they went and they started looking at core samples. And then what took a couple of years of ground penetrating radar and more samples and stuff. It turned out about a half a mile under accumulated limestone was a gigantic crater.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

About 120 to 150 miles in diameter. And it dated precisely.

[C]

Wow. And that's in the Gulf of Mexico, Roughly right.

[B]

Half of it, the bottom half of it is pretty much the northern Yucatan Peninsula and the upper half of it is under the Gulf of Mexico.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

So in 19, no, 2000, when did I go down there? I went down there to explore that and the connection between the Mayan culture. Because the Mayan culture, there's no rivers that flow over the surface in the northern Yucatan, because it's porous limestone, all of the rivers have gone subterranean.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

So I actually have a slide here. I could show you some if we want to segue into this because it's very interesting. And there's a long arc that connects what happened 66 million years ago to what happened 12,900 years ago.

[C]

What do you mean by a long arc?

[B]

Well, because a lot of the interesting proxies that we discovered, we, I mean, the scientists discovered associated with that 66 million year old KT impact are reproduced almost identically in the strata from 12,900 years ago.

[C]

Wow. So 66 million years ago you have this massive meteor strike that effectively wipes out the dinosaurs.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

And then you're saying that there's a similar, I guess, sedimentary. I guess. Yeah, Signal.

[B]

Signal's a good, A good word for it.

[C]

That is, you would say directly proportional to what happened in that impacts.

[B]

Yes. For example, the closest approach, the closest analogy to the nano diamonds that were found at the KT boundary 66 million years ago are found at the Younger Dryas boundary. Yeah, that's one example. Now, the Younger Dryas would not have been as catastrophic because if it was,

[C]

we wouldn't be here.

[B]

No, we wouldn't be here. Wow.

[C]

Now, certainly human beings were alive during this period.

[B]

I mean, like during the Younger Dryas.

[C]

Right. Human beings are.

[B]

Oh, oh, yeah.

[C]

Modern human beings were alive 150, 200,000 years old in. Yeah, yeah, something like that.

[B]

Something like that.

[C]

So human beings are witnessing this event in some way, shape or form. Now, I imagine if you're living near the Yucatan and there's some type of massive meteor impact, none of those people make it.

[B]

Correct.

[C]

There's no way.

[B]

There's no way.

[C]

So what pockets of civilization would exist and be able to withstand this type of not only impact, but the floods that then would follow?

[B]

Say that again.

[C]

So where on Earth. Let's say, you know, there's at this point, let's say there's people inhabiting, you know, different pockets of Earth. I don't know exactly what the, my migratory pattern would be, but you have this massive impact plus floods.

[B]

Yes, people. Where would you want to be to perhaps survive?

[C]

Sure. I imagine Central Africa, people are probably doing all right.

[B]

Well, okay, you pretty much nailed it. See, now what we can do is we can look at the extinction of species. Like, where were the greatest percentage of species lost? North America? South America? Very close. Right. The extermination of species is going to be directly tied to loss of habitat. Right. So what it's telling us is if in North America and South America, just in round numbers, about 3/4 of all species over 100 pounds in body weight did not survive the Younger Dryas. Wow. Eurasia, it was about 35% lost. Wow. Africa, 10, maybe as much as 15%. North Africa seems to have been pretty hard hit. But when you get south of there, like, particularly around the Great Rift area, Tanganyika, Kenya, that area, it looks like that might have been a refugium, as paleontologists refer to it. I see a place where species could survive an event like that. Right. And this is speculative, but it seems to make sense that, yeah, that there would have been places where your probabilities of survival would have been much higher than other places, like eastern United States. Your survival chances are virtually nil. And there were. We know that pre Younger Dryas, there were. The Clovis culture was quite prolific over unglaciated North America. There's over 50 sites that were attributed to the Clovis culture. And after the Younger Dryas onset, they're all abandoned.

[C]

Wow. Now, the Clovis people, is this accepted by mainstream archaeology?

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[C]

And what years, roughly, do they exist?

[B]

They existed for about 400 years, and they disappeared right at like, 12,900, right at the onset of the Younger Dryas.

[C]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Apparently, they did not survive the Younger Dryas. And then post Younger Dryas, you have a culture that's called the Folsom. Now, I think that probably Clovis people did survive some of them. And there's probably cultural links between the Clovis and the Folsom, but the Folsom were different. And I'm not an expert in this, but, you know, there was a lot of differences that have been cataloged in the literature before there was ever any association with the Younger Dryas. That there was a hiatus. And then you see a different culture, and that's why it was given a different name, because their tool kits and their lifestyles, their spear tips, all of that was different. And so it was speculated. Well, the Folsom is a different culture, and there's a hiatus. Well, now, this is preceding the ideas of the Younger Dryas. But the Younger Dryas now we know was very catastrophic. And, you know, mainstream archaeology has really resisted that. They don't want to go there for some reason. And I can speculate why they would not want to go there. Perhaps.

[C]

Yeah. Why is it such an affront? That's the thing I never understood with this theory, is that it seems like there's so much, at least circumstantial evidence that would point us to conclude. At the very least, this is an interesting idea, but from the mainstream archaeological world, there's so much pushback.

[B]

Well, one of the reasons, I think, has to do with sort of political correctness, because we have inherited a history of the world that dominates scientific, Dominated scientific thinking from the first decades after, say, the Civil War down to the 1980s, 1990s. This is gradualism, uniformitarianism. The idea is that we can understand the past by looking at modern change and extrapolating backwards. If we see a stream eroding its banks, we can extrapolate backwards from that. If we see a glacier up in the mountain doing certain kind of geomorphic work, we can extrapolate from that. If we look at modern things, we look at the wind moving desert sands. And so it basically, it could be expressed sort of succinctly by saying change, the pace of change is measured as one drop of water and one grain of sand at a time. But given millions and millions of years, those changes can accumulate.

[C]

It's very simple to map.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And it doesn't account for cataclysm, the problem.

[B]

And it's a very effective conceptual tool for understanding past change. However, in my opinion, and in a growing opinion amongst a lot of researchers and thinkers, it's only half the story. And the other half of the story is that in fact, it goes back to Stephen Jay Gould, who was a famous anthropologist who coined the term punctuated equilibrium, that you'll have periods of time where things are only changing relatively in minor amounts, and then suddenly there's something that breaks the continuity. There's a series of extreme events. And within that narrow window of extreme change, more erosion, more sedimentation, more geomorphic work occurs during that little window than may have occurred in the previous tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. Well, since he proposed that, probably in the early 80s, he's no longer with us, but that term has been around quite a while, and he was considered a very esteemed anthropologist, paleontologist, that sort of made it acceptable to start thinking, oh, well, there are these discontinuities within the continuum of of slow, gradual change. Now if we go back to the origins of geological science pre, say in the years, decades leading up to about the time of the Civil War, virtually all the founding fathers of geology were catastrophists. And they looked at the world without any preconceptions, without dogmas, without models. They just looked at what they were seeing in the landscape and what the landscapes told them was a story about catastrophic change. They looked, for example, at a huge valley in a modern river, which was minuscule compared to that valley. And they thought, you know what? They didn't think millions of years for that tiny river by relative comparison, that it wasn't millions of years, but there was once time when this, there was a huge river flowing there. And I've told the story that that's kind of in a way how I first started cluing into catastrophic geology. The year 1969, year out of high school and. Christos, can you pull up Google Maps? Yeah, and I'm going to show you where I was and what I saw that made me think there's something unusual, something here that I want to know more about. Even though at the time I was more interested in other things, which I won't really get into, but you know, typically what an 18 year old, you know, healthy red blooded American male is interested in. Yes.

[C]

Okay, so different types of caverns, I guess.

[B]

Yeah. So anyhow, but what it was, was, and I've told this story before, but it's an interesting story and people are always asking me, how did you get into this? And I say, well, there was not just one thing, but there was several things. One of those was what happened in the summer of 69. Every weekend in that summer there was free rock concerts out on these bluffs overlooking the Minnesota river valley. And there was a Flying Cloud airport there. And so it was flat on the top. And then near the airport and the rim of these bluffs, which were about 200ft tall, they'd set up a stage and there'd be free rock concerts. So I was out there just for the rock and roll and whatever else. But they had a break, as I recall. There was a break in the music and I was probably, well, it's hard to say, but I was almost certainly back in those days in a, an altered state, we'll put it that way.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

Okay. So I wandered over to the edge of the bluff and I was looking and down below me is the modern Minnesota River. And as I'm standing here, I'm looking out and I saw that the river was in this little entrenched in the floor of the valley below me. And I had this impression because I could see that it looked like so like two, two and a half miles south of me, there was another set of bluffs. Right. And I kind of was looking and I had this impression that this down here was also the same thing as this, except this was a much larger. Okay, so put in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. And I'm going to show you something. I'm going to show you an example of an underfit river, as it's called.

[C]

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[B]

All right, so this is two giant meltwater spillways converge about four miles west of Minot, North Dakota. In the old gradualist models, just the assumption, the unexamined assumption is that, oh, it took, you know, many, many, many eons or however long. But no, this valley was probably carved in a week.

[C]

Really?

[B]

Yes.

[C]

A massive gush of water that carves this out.

[B]

Right. And as I go through. Let's see, these aren't showing up. There we go. This one shows up pretty good. Here's another example of an underfit convergence of the Cuapel and Assiniboine river spillways. This is up in Manitoba. Now, this is a legacy of. Of the rapid melting of the ice sheets is what this is. I see. And it creates these huge meltwater flows that carve deep channels. The modern rivers get captured into those, and once they get captured in, they never get out. Right, Right. They're stuck in there.

[C]

Then eventually that Floodwater from these melted glaciers melts off.

[B]

Right. Eventually melts off. That's right. Until it's gone.

[C]

Becomes just the seasonal snowpack that melts.

[B]

Yes. And so all of these that I'm showing you, there's hundreds of these crisscrossing the North American continent. And in fact, most rivers in North America are flowing in channels that are huge compared to their. The predecessors. Now, this. You can't see these too well here. Let me just.

[C]

The ridges are quite strange.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Or these ridges.

[B]

Here we go. Now, this shows you a good example. Here's the modern river you see down here. Right. But you look at the size of the channel it's flowing in.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So that river did not erode that channel. That channel was eroded by a flow that was probably measured 30 to 50 cubic million cubic feet per second.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

In that range.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Here's another example. So you crisscross the. The prairie regions, and these things are all over the place. See, anyways.

[C]

I mean, that is significant.

[B]

Yeah. So I was standing. Let's see. I think I even have a. Let's see. This is Graham Hancock here. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's Graham. I took him to a place where. This is a very interesting place called Big Stone Lake. And it's right at the outlet of glacial Lake Agassiz, which was one of the leftover gigantic inland seas of fresh water that drained catastrophically. And there were three outlets to it. Southern outlet carved what is now the modern Minnesota river valley. The eastern outlet, right through this area here, flowed up through the St. Lawrence Seaway into the North Atlantic. And then the third discharge point was up where the Mackenzie river now flows into the Arctic. So it had three points where the massive meltwater pulses were discharging off the Laurentide ice sheet.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Right. This is called a whaleback here, almost suggestive of a whale. And this is Big Stone Lake. It's called Big Stone Lake because there's these big old stones right there at the outlet. So I brought Graham and I, what we were doing. He was researching the catastrophe of North America. So we spent a couple of weeks together traveling from Portland, Oregon to Minneapolis, Minnesota. And we basically followed the southern route of the great ice sheet. And so I was showing him all of these places where these tremendously huge meltwater discharges had gushed off the ice sheets. So he wrote. There's a couple of chapters in the book where he's writing about that. So this was one of the places we stopped.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And here's some of the big boulders that are just Laying out in the prairie with like, how did they get there

[C]

and how did they get there?

[B]

Well, they got there because they were carried. The glaciers probably quarried them. And then during the meltdown, one of the things that happened was the meltdown also was associated with the catastrophic destruction of the ice sheets themselves. And when you follow, particularly out in the Pacific Northwest, you can follow the path of the floodwaters off the ice sheets which just came over the Canadian border basically. And there were thousands of gigantic icebergs being swept along in the waters of these floods. In a lot of these icebergs they were carrying huge boulders. Some of these icebergs were the size of tanker ships.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And some of These boulders weighed 10,000, 15,000, 18,000 tons. And they're being carried aboard the icebergs. Now there's a whole scenario there of how does that happen? Right. Like there's a place in, just east of the Rocky Mountain front in Alberta where you can see these train of these type of boulders called metaquartzite. Right. And I've followed this train 500 miles up the Rocky Mountain front and then it actually turns up the valley of the Athabasca river which leads up to the Continental Divide up near Jasper Park. And you can find the origin of these meta quartzite boulders on a mountain called Mount Edith Cavell. Now what's interesting there and what really puzzled me about this was that Mount Edith Cavell is on the western side of the Continental Dividend. And this train of boulders, huge metaquartzite boulders reaching from where the Athabasca river discharges from the Rocky Mountain front all the way to Montana is on the eastern side of the Continental Divide.

[C]

So how does it get there?

[B]

Well, how did it get? Well, they were carried aboard icebergs. And what else is interesting is the pathway of these quartzite boulders is exactly coincides with the ice free corridor.

[C]

I see.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Interesting.

[B]

So a lot of pieces fitting together. But then the question is, how do you get an 18,000 ton boulder from the west side of the Continental Divide to the east side? Well, first of all, you have to bury the mountains and glaciers a mile and a half thick. And now all you got is the peaks of the mountains sticking up. Now you have to have some kind of tremendous force to pulverize the shoulders of these mountains. At the same time you're fracturing the ice sheet and melting huge volumes.

[C]

A giant meteorite could do that.

[B]

A giant meteorite could do that.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

It absolutely could do that. And I don't Know what else would do it? Wow.

[C]

Now, I'm curious. What are the implications of this theory for how we understand archeology and human civilization?

[B]

Good question. That's a really good question. Because if we. We were talking earlier and you mentioned how long modern humans have been around, let's say, conservatively, 150,000 years. Well, this happened only 12 to 13,000 years ago. We're looking at these events at the end of the last great ice age, and we're seeing an event that wiped out half the great megafaunal species of the Earth and probably devastated human culture. But see, once you begin to understand the scale of these geomorphic changes that occurred on the Earth at these times, you begin to understand. Okay, I can see now why archeologists have missed the possibilities of what may have preceded these events. You know, we're kind of almost getting into a biblical framework of thinking here, because in the biblical story, just like all the others, just like the stories of Deucalion and Pera in the Greek, you know, Zisuthras in the Sumerian, Utnapishtim in the Chaldean, Mani in the Indian, the Native American tribes of North America and South America all have these traditions about how they are descended from the survivors of these great events that included both deluges. And the Greek term for deluge is cataclysmos, or great fires. And the Greek term for fires is ekpyrusis. Right. Ekpyrusis, like pyro is the root. And we get the word. The word cataclysm literally means a debacle, a deluge of water. Right. So we get cataclysmos, destruction of the world by water, ekpyrusis, destruction of the world by fire.

[C]

I mean, every culture on Earth has a flood myth. Yeah, pretty much, virtually. I mean, I can think of, you know, the Bhagavan Gita, the Abrahamic religions, and certainly there's, you know, cataclysmic fire events, you know, whether it's, you know, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and I'm sure there's many others that I'm forgetting.

[B]

Prime example. And there's evidence now at Tel El Hammam, which is prime candidate for being the origin of the Sodom and Gomorrah story. And what are they finding there? They're finding impact proxies, in fact, at the Cosmic Summit. What's his name? I'm going to interview him, the chief scientist working on that, who discovered the impact proxies, aren't they also?

[C]

They're finding, like, trinitite.

[B]

Similar. Very well. Okay. Remember I mentioned the strange green glass that they came up into? Yucatan, very much like trinitite, which is

[C]

basically the residue of the Trinity bombs that basically petrified the sand in New Mexico that created this glass.

[B]

Exactly. Okay, let's go back to. Here's the story I was telling. Let's see if this will come up here. This is the Minnesota River. Here we. Let's see if we can get that. And I can show you right where I was standing. And you're going to see this is an underfit river. So the Minnesota. The modern Minnesota river, its starting point is right there at the discharge of the southern extremity of Lake Agassiz, where it's now called Big Stone Lake. Okay, let's see here. Are we in Google Maps?

[C]

Yeah, I pulled up the view.

[B]

Oh, this is what we were looking for.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

All right. Way to go, Christos. Okay, zoom out. Okay, I'm right up. That's me standing up there.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Okay. And I'm looking down into that valley. And now if Christos will pan the scene up, you'll see the modern Minnesota River. Okay. I mean, go down, go down, go down. Keep going down. You're like at the bluffs, 200ft. Okay, now zoom out, zoom out. Okay, stop right there.

[C]

See the Minnesota river right there.

[B]

There it is. Now, the valley that it's flowing in is gigantic compared to the river. Right. In fact, there have been studies by geologists. They call this flow coming out of Lake Agassiz glacial river warren. The peak discharge of that was 4,000 times greater than the river that's now flowing in that valley. Right. And if we pan to the south, Christos, we'll see the counterpart. It's not quite as. Keep going. And you'll see there's a set of bluffs on the south. You're going to have to keep going. Keep going. Okay, you're almost there. There they are right there. You see it? Yeah. So from the northern bluff to the southern bluff, that was the full width of glacial river Warren.

[C]

Can you zoom out a little? I just wanna see both the bluffs. Oh, I see them right there. Right.

[B]

Wow. Now do this, Christos. Follow. You see the little river, the Blue river up there, Minnesota River. Just start following that to the E to the west and just pan over and we'll follow that. And you can see, you can trace it.

[C]

Goes perfectly along that bluff.

[B]

Yes, that's right. And you can begin to see that the valley it's flowing in is Huge compared to the modern river. And you can follow that right across the prairie, right up to its outlet at glacial Lake Agassiz. Wow.

[C]

And the story is that this current Minnesota river is what carved out that whole thing.

[B]

Well, that. Not anymore. It used to be. Yeah. If anybody even addressed themselves to the question. But after these studies, I think that were done in the 80s, they identified a glacial river warren. And yeah. I mean, there you can see it as plain as day.

[C]

Right.

[B]

You can see the size of the valley compared to the modern river. The modern river did not create that valley. In fact, there's multiple ways we can prove that there was a huge flow of water through there. And like I said, it's been paleo hydrologists.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Scientists that study ancient water movement have used a whole series of different proxies to estimate the size of the volume. Like, for example, when you have a boulder sitting there and that Boulder might weigh 5,000 tons. Right. That is not being moved by the modern Minnesota River.

[C]

Of course not.

[B]

It was being transported by a much bigger, more vigorous flow of water. I see.

[C]

So I guess my question is, what does this mean for our understanding of civilization?

[B]

Well, okay, so, okay, so this is from the World year of the Persians, published in 1963 in a journal of the American Oriental Society by a couple of very esteemed scholars. They're talking about. This is the tradition of the Persians. And they had a concept of the world year, okay. Which is a grander cycle. Right. And again, this is part of a lot of ancient cultures had this idea of, you know, you had the daily cycle, you had the annual cycle, and then you had greater cycles within cycles. That concept is very prevalent in the Vedic cosmological traditions. Right.

[C]

The age of Kali. You have these worlds that kind of die and restart.

[B]

Right. So the notion of cyclically recurrent. And I'm quoting the notion of a cyclically recurrent cosmic disasters. A catastrophe by flood alternating with one by fire has been traced from ancient Babylonia and Iran through Pythagorean and Stoic philosophy, and thence into the medieval world.

[C]

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[B]

In classical Greek and Hellenistic literature, the doctrine of the great year was already connected with the myths of the deluge and Ekpyrusis. These catastrophes were supposed to return periodically when the planets came together in certain signs of the zodiac. In the Persian system, we still find the deluge connected with a conjunction of the planets. Now, how in the world could conjunctions of planets be associated with catastrophic events? Well, there is a potential model that might sort of explain that, and that is that the transference of comets from their reservoirs outside the orbits of Neptune, going all the way out halfway to, you know, a near star, you have two reservoirs. You have the Kuiper disk, which orbits relatively within the plane of the ecliptic. The plane of the ecliptic. Let's define that for anybody who's listening. It's the plane of the orbit around the sun. And the 12 constellations of the zodiac are the constellations that occupy the zone of the ecliptic roughly 8 degrees north and 8 degrees south of that line, representing the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Now, of course, we're on the Earth. The Earth is moving. So from us, what it looks like, of course, is the sun moving against the backdrop of stars, right? But you know, it's not the Sun's movement that we're seeing, it's our movement moving around the sun. Well, so you have the Kuiper disk, which is a reservoir billions of comets. And we could get into why we think that there's billions of comets, but they burn us, lay into the plane of the ecliptic, and then as you move outward from there, they transition into the Oort cloud, which is a very great spherical, basically spherical cloud of comets, also billions of comets. The current theory is that they are the leftover refuge of the refuse of the creation of the solar system, right? Sort of like the stone the builders rejected, okay? And they occupy this reservoir. Now you can have several different. So then now the tactical problem becomes how do you transfer comets from those zones out there to where they can become Earth crossers, where they come into the inner solar system? Well, there's a couple of mechanisms. One potentially on a galactic level can cause. Now you have to picture that these cometary masses are in a quasi stable orbit. Now what does that mean? Well, it means that if you imagine like a hill with a valley and a hill and a valley, and you take a marble or a sphere and you put it down in the valley,

[C]

it's going to stay there.

[B]

It's going to stay there. Let's say you put it up on top of the ridge of the hill.

[C]

Well, then it can move.

[B]

It can move. It might be precariously placed there. It's not Moving, unless there's something that perturbs it, then it falls. Right? So in a way, they're like that. And there's. Out there in space, there's not much that's going to perturb them. And they're all basically out there over very long periods of time, orbiting. They're moving. They're not just sitting there. They're moving like orbiting about the Sun. Well, how do you perturb them? Well, the outer zone, which is the Oort cloud, may be something on a galactic level. You know, there's ideas of, like, galactic core explosions, right. Hypothetical. But that could be something that could potentially perturb the Oort cloud. A passing star passing through the zone of the Oort cloud, which is not out of the question, could also disrupt. Or if there's an unseen massive companion to our sun that's somehow way out there, that could be another potential. Apparently there is something, though, that can disturb the equilibrium of these comets. Now, the Kuiper disk seems to be sort of a holding reservoir where oftentimes the comets will transfer into this disk and they will be orbiting the Sun. And what then can happen is, is that conjunctions of Uranus and Neptune, the two big outer planets, can perturb comets on the inner zone of the Kuiper disk. So there is a potential planetary mechanism by which, like, picture this. They're moving like this around the sun, okay? Now, if you've got here's Neptune coming up, and here's Uranus. Now they conjunct. And now it doesn't take a lot, just a little nudge. The combined gravity fields of Uranus and Neptune perturb these comets that are in the inner zone right. Now, let's say that as they're coming up like this, the comets up here, and everything's moving this way, right? So now the comedy. The gravity attraction of the outer planets here tend to put the brakes on. It causes them to. They lose energy because they're breaking, right? So then what happens to them? It's just like an electron losing energy around the nucleus. It moves to a lower level, a lower orbital shell. Now, it just so happens that the spacing of the planets from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus to Neptune, the masses and the distances, just by coincidence, happen to be exactly what you would need to effect this transfer from the inner zone of the Kuiper disk, slowing it down, letting it transfer inside the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. And now Saturn and Uranus can do the same thing.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And it's, in fact, some of the physicists and astrophysicists that have looked at this called it almost like a cosmic bucket brigade, right?

[C]

It's like a gravitational ladder coming from one to the next rung to the next rung.

[B]

And once it's handed off to Jupiter, Jupiter, you know, the king of the gods will take that object and either sling it back out or throw it in towards the Sun. Throws it in towards the sun, it now potentially becomes an Earth crosser and it begins to go through this hierarchy of changes. Now see, when the cometary mass is out there in deep space, it's in deep frozen hibernation. Once it gets handed into the inner solar system, it's like ignition. It comes alive, it wakes up, right? And it begins as it comes in towards the sun and passes the planets, the gravity fields of the planets, the attraction of the sun, even the solar energy itself will cause these cometary nuclei to begin to wake up and they begin to devolatilize, they begin to spew because they're aggregates of complex composition and they begin to spew off these gases and then what'll happen is they'll get captured typically between a Jovian orbit, Jupiter and the sun. And then they may like Comet Halley has been probably 5,000 to 10,000 years within this Jovian orbit, right? By every 76 years it comes back around. And I remember when it came by in whatever year it was 1986, I went out and watched it through binoculars. You know, previous to that it was 1910. And you might know the story of Mark twain. He was 76 years old when he passed and he was basically, he was born when Halley's comet was in the sky. And he always said, I think I'm gonna check out when Halley's comet comes back. And sure enough, 1910, he did. Wow. Yeah.

[C]

I mean, this is the science behind it, behind this massive comet reservoir sort of in hibernation that's able to get agitated by the gravitational fields of Uranus and Neptune getting put into this Kuiper disk that then gets passed all the way down this planetary chain to Jupiter, then gets blasted into the sun and then eventually can crash onto Earth is pretty complex. But it was known by the Persians. How long ago?

[B]

Oh my God, at least two or three thousand years ago. But see, even then I think the Persians inherited traditions, you know, I mean, I think that there are traditions that go back beyond the Ice age. And see, when we get into. You talked about the implications for us today. And I think it is that if we look at the last quarter million years, let's say 250,000 years, there have been apparently four glacial interglacial cycles. The previous one before the Holocene was called the Eemian and it lasted about 12,000 years. And it was actually quite a bit warmer during the Eemian than it is now. Sea levels were up to 20, 25ft higher worldwide. Ice masses vastly reduced. In fact, the Greenland ice sheet was so reduced in mass that it was only two separate domes, one in the south and one in the north. And around the middle of Greenland where it's huge thick mile and a half of ice. Now you could have traveled potentially from east to west because there was no ice there. That's how much ice had melted during the Eemian.

[C]

That sounds nice and habitable.

[B]

Well, it would have been a totally different environment back then. So the Eemian was considered the analog for the Holocene. But the problem is that within the Eemian there were at least several spikes of extreme change. And some of the spikes like. The thing I like to point out is that, well, when we talked about the Younger Dryas and the intensity, the extreme changes of the Younger Dryas were that to recur, we'd be back in the Stone Age. We would literally be back in the Stone Age. We would not building our civilization would not survive an event on the scale of the Younger Dryas.

[C]

And that has been my conversation with Randall Carlson specifically on the Younger Dryas impact theory. We covered everything from ancient myths to Atlantis to comet impacts and catastrophic floods and civilizations. This conversation really challenged the way that I think about human history and kind of our place in it. And we put these episodes kind of flip flopped in the order. So that's why I'm doing a separate outro for it. But if you guys enjoyed this episode, well, make sure you subscribe, leave a comment and I would love to know what you think and let me know what topics to explore next. If you missed the first drop that we did with Randall Carlson, specifically on sacred geometry and Stonehenge and the Holy Grail, we go through a bunch of other mythological lore and maybe not all of it is as, as mythological as we might think. Huge thank you to Randall Carlson and his entire team and make sure you check out the university he's creating. It's absolutely awesome. You can check it out in the description and we will see you guys in the next episode. Peace.