All human life is entwined with planet earth. You probably don’t think about it, but every aspect of our society depends on the stable, favorable state of the environment. Today it is easy to think the earth has always looked like it does now. The reality could not be further from the truth. Scientists have revealed that the climate and even continents have undergone dramatic changes. So how did these events mold the human story? Let’s talk about Prehistory and the Younger Dryas Event in this episode.
Historians place human prehistory, or the precursor to us, beginning around 10 000BC. We attribute it to some very clever ancestors beginning the agricultural revolution. Never before has a species on earth farmed crops and lived settled sedentary lives. These are the foundations of modern human civilization.
So what caused this one single leap? Was it a marvel of our genius? An example of brain beating nature? We, humans, are so brilliant after all.
But no matter how smart you are, there’s only so much you can do to outrun an earthquake or a volcano. Mother Earth vs. Einstein is no real match in the end if she chooses to play.
Today, science introduces us to Mother Nature’s all-powerful influence over our lives. It is an influence that has always been there. However, only recently, did a particular set of events set the conditions for our modern lives.
Here’s the full transcript of this episode:
Steven: Welcome to The Human Origin Project where we explore The Science of You. To keep up to date go to our iTunes channel and subscribe and please leave a review if you enjoyed today’s show. Hello and welcome to today’s show.
Today we are going to be talking about the fascinating period in human history called the Younger Dryas period. It’s a time that predates human civilization. It actually lines up very close to when modern civilization began to live in its present form.
It dates roughly to 12000 years ago when the agricultural revolution was occurring and it describes a period of tumultuous conditions on planet earth. This becomes a multidisciplinary scientific discussion about the geology and the environment that the planet was going through at the time when human civilization was rising.
It’s a fascinating conversation and we will be featuring this topic more and more because there are many areas. But today we are going to give you an overview of the Younger Dryas period. Hello and welcome to the show. Stef, how’s your week this week?
Stefan: [0:01:15] Yeah, it’s been good. It’s been interesting. I went to a meditation night last night that was a kind of a sound, relaxation meditation session. Yeah, it was fun. It was interesting.
Steven: [0:01:28] Yeah, it’s always interesting. I’ve been trying to integrate meditation practice into my daily routine. It’s a real learning process and I find that going to classes that help you take steps forward and how you integrate into daily life, I still struggle with that but it’s something that I always find that those kinds of things help you birth through those doors, right?
Stefan: [0:01:50] Yeah, definitely and I feel like there is this kind of block that needs to be removed to get into this. It’s not only the conversations about these sorts of topics but the actual practice. It takes a lot to snap you out of your daily, the lives that we’ve grown up living, to sort of change our perspective slightly and start opening up to these other ideas.
Steven: [0:02:13] And to look within, right? Yeah but today we are actually going to look a little bit outside our realm in terms of where humans came from, look at the geological context of how humans and human history. A really crucial point is what we found is the agricultural revolution.
Looking back throughout history and context and you kind of get you read modern history and then back into ancient history. And really, we follow the line from potentially the Greeks, to Egyptians which goes to about 3200 BC. Pre-dynastic Egypt gets a bit fuzzy and then things really kind of get really murky from there, right?
Stefan: [0:03:04] Yeah, the further back you go the waters get muddy and then right where agriculture first pops up just before that was the end of the last glacial period or the end of the last Ice Age, as most people think of it as.
Steven: [0:03:21] Yeah, which is interesting. The agricultural revolution is that real starting point from where modern society really changed. This was really kind of brought upon me when starting to look at anthropological studies and they talked about the changes that happen in human teeth, for instance.
We see tooth decay pop up at the agricultural revolution. I remember seeing that and going, wow, that’s such a huge change. And you look at the time span of which we find human records on earth which goes back two million years, you only see these diseases in the last 12000 years.
That really kind of broke my perspective on how today we are in a modern iteration of humans and our kind of just group all of the prehistory stuff really into this very primal and very ancestral line. We don’t really attribute as to why the agricultural revolution happened. We know what and how it happened but we don’t know why and really, we don’t really even know how either, do we?
Stefan: [0:04:25] No. The period before when we were exiting the last Ice Age that period of history is really little. Little of it is understood, both the mechanisms of how we exited and why and what led up to that point. I guess we’ll get into it a bit later but that period of earth’s history is very interesting once you start looking into it, a lot of changes happening. We are only now in the last sort of like two decades, people are starting to put a picture together about what was going on and how.
Steven: [0:05:06] Yeah, how it all happened. When you think of human history you really kind of focus on human events instead of looking at the context around. This really kind of spans into how geological science interlocks with things like anthropology, archaeology, you have to look at the environmental context around what influenced mass species movements, biological shifts.
The earth is obviously instrumental in affecting all living creatures. I think we kind of disconnect this in the scientific realms and we are going to delve into a geological phenomenon today that really paints the context of why or what climate conditions were around during the agricultural revolution.
And I think that’s something that really spoke to me about this whole study of this period in time. It’s when the last Ice Age end, isn’t it so we call this the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene which is their current era and it all happened about 12000 years ago when the agricultural revolution occurred.
Stefan: [0:06:21] Yeah. It’s another way looking especially from a geological perspective. You need to have a shift of perspective in understanding these changes because what is taught to geologists at the moment and archaeologists is this really gradualistic approach to change.
So things change but really, really slowly. I think they say one drop of water, one grain of sand at a time. You can sort of look at things happening now and extrapolate that back and understand what was going on before.
Steven: [0:06:59] Yeah, this makes a lot of sense when you are thinking about very long geological times which for the most part of the 20th Century, the scientific community has focused on these really long spin periods, how do we understand the age of the earth and continent movement, stuff like that.
But geology also happens over shorter periods as well. This is really where light during the 20th Century we have this advancement into understanding what happens in shorter periods and in environmental conditions that really influence our time span as well.
So what happened in this agricultural period of 12000 years? Were there geological changes that were happening and there was one guy that really looked at this through the 20th century, didn’t he?
Stefan: [0:07:47] Yeah, he was a geologist named J Harlen Bretz who spent most of his professional life which was 50, 60+ years on the ground in North America looking at this evidence of huge geological changes that took place at the end of the last Ice Age.
He was documenting. He was collecting evidence of these giant megafloods that just tore through North America. This was before the time where aerial scans were possible before it was financially viable to go up and take scans from the air to understand what was going on. So he was scrambling around on his hands and knees, painstakingly collecting evidence.
Steven: [0:08:33] It seems trivial now because now we’ve got things like drones, you can just fly straight up and take a picture from the top but in the ‘20s that’s really, really expensive and difficult. And so geologists didn’t have that perspective to shape how they were building bits so they had to basically dig in and look at the fine little granules.
So you can understand why the perspective was on this very slow build-up because that’s all we could look at. But then when you kind of zoom out which is a lot of what we look at change our context, once you bring that other level of evidence, looking at the ground from a few a couple of hundred meters above you start to see like, well hang on, was there a largest cycle going on?
Stefan: [0:09:16] Yeah, it seems obvious to us now that we have the technology to do that but back then Bretz, especially, was coming up against this dogmatic science that was talking about gradualism as the only mechanism that drove geological change.
His idea and the evidence that he amassed pointed towards these huge earth changes that happened catastrophically. So in small amounts of time changes would occur that reshaped entire landscapes and even the planet.
Steven: [0:09:48] Yeah, and it really centered around the landscape of North America how certain geological features were argued to be this gradual slow result of ice movements and water flows. Whereas, he was arguing that some of these features were actually [00:10:11] quite quickly.
Those areas for instance up in Washington, there’s Dry Falls area. You compare these things and the timescales that we look at you are talking about very large violent acts in very small amounts of time.
Stefan: [0:10:26] Yeah. So what Bretz was trying to argue was that at the end of the last Ice Age when all the ice over North American melted there used to be four million more cubic miles of ice on the planet than there is today. All of that situated over North America.
Most of Canada was covered in ice, most of the USA was covered, even across most of Western Europe. In some areas, the ice was two miles thick which is insane to think about.
Steven: [0:11:03] That’s a huge amount of ice, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:11:05] Yeah and one of the reasons Bretz was so passionate about researching this was because up until that point and even to this day no one can explain how that ice melted so rapidly. There’s nothing on earth that could account for melting and moving that ice.
Steven: [0:11:24] Lt’s just give the perspective of what he’s describing is it so roughly 20000 years ago we were starting to exit the last Ice Age and this was a Pleistocene period which was what we call a full glacial period where all these extra ice caps were situated of North American and some Western Europe.
And then from 20000 years, there was a graduate rise in temperatures until 12000 years which is the borderline of the Pleistocene where we move into the current era, the prehistoric era, the Holocene. And so what he was talking about potentially is that there was some kind of violent shift that could in this period.
Stefan: [0:12:01] Yeah and it wasn’t only the ice that melted. There were these other things going on on the planet at the time. To paint a bit of a picture of what was happening. The last Ice Age peaked at about 20000 years ago, give or take leading up until the start of the Younger Dryas which was roughly 12800 years ago.
The earth was exiting the full grips of an Ice Age and moving into a more stable interglacial period so global temperatures were rising steadily, naturally. The ice sheets were getting smaller. There was a more stable climate like there is today. And then something happened 12800 years ago that threw the earth back into the depths of the Ice Age, global temperatures dropped 10 to 15 degrees. It was that point in time where the ice caps out of nowhere just started growing again.
Steven: [0:12:58] Yeah. Why don’t we go back just before we move into that period and to explain what Bretz was trying to explain to his colleagues because he was long criticized for his view that things happened quickly? But his whole view didn’t he say that there was evidence in North America that something happened quite quickly in this period?
Stefan: [0:13:20] Yeah. All this evidence that he was amassing, all the documented—
Steven: [0:13:27] Trudging around the landscape.
Stefan: [0:13:28] Yeah, just wandering around taking notes, trying to convince people. He was looking at these extinct cataracts. Picture Niagara Falls without any water in it. That’s kind of the things he was saying again and again all through North America.
He was trying to convince people that this had to be the result of extreme, climatic conditions and it couldn’t just be gradual or gradualistic mechanisms that drove it because there’s nothing gradualist about some. We’ll post some of these images on our website but once you start seeing the pictures and trying to get your head around the number like the scale and the amount of water—
Stefan: [0:14:08] We are talking about thousands of tons of all the water of Niagara Falls.
Steven: [0:14:11] Yeah, there’s one place, in particular, Dry Falls, which is 600 feet high. There’s no water running through it anymore but 600 feet high. For some perspective on that Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high so it’s over three times as big.
Stefan: [0:14:28] Huge sheers cliffs that look like basically Niagara Falls without the water.
Steven: [0:14:33] Yeah and the latest research is suggesting all that was created and then abandoned by water within a few years which is just mind-blowing.
Stefan: [0:14:45] And to put that into perspective as well, Bretz was going around in the 20th Century pointing to this thing saying hey, this could have been a big flood or a big rush of water and they were saying no, it’s gradual.
This is this whole argument of which geological phenomena only happens gradually or for the most part, yet he was talking about a potentially recent event that shapes the landscape significantly. He ended up being awarded a very prestigious, is it the Penrose medal, was it?
Stefan: [0:15:14] Yes, Penrose medal which is the highest honor in geology and he was given that when he was in his 80s, I think, maybe even his 90s. One of his comments at the end he was sort of saying something to the effect of all this is all well and good but all of my opponents are dead so I’ve got no one left to gloat over. His whole life he was battling these people who were calling him a lunatic for even suggesting that.
Steven: [0:15:40] It’s a bit sad that it felt very empty to him because the people weren’t around to turn their opinions.
Stefan: [0:15:54] Yeah but it’s so great that. It would have been so tough but that there are people who stick with this and they just know that it’s so important to get that information out. And without people like Bretz paving the way we would have no idea.
The more that we’ve been researching and other people are researching this period of the Younger Dryas we are kind of realizing that it was more profound than Bretz could have imagined. It’s beyond belief some of the earth changes that were going on during that period, that roughly 1300 to the 1400 year period of earth-changing events.
Steven: [0:16:30] Yeah. And what we are discussing today is really subsequent evidence that shows that there was an event and Bretz contributed significantly to this idea in the geological scientific community that there are very significant, very recent events that potentially occurred.
But now subsequently, there’s been this whole discovery of a phenomenon that occurred. And it’s all points the same era of time which points to the agricultural revolution which why we cover it so important because I think, as this podcast progresses setting this context of what we scientifically understand about the agricultural revolution is really important because it helps us to frame what was happening on the planet at that time.
You zoom right out and say right, let’s look at the planet 12000 years ago. What’s happening? Why would human civilization rise? I think that’s really important and something that we haven’t incorporated in our scientific models of why humans began farming.
Stefan: [0:17:30] Yeah, it is so important. It is having that context of we know that we started full out people started farming and the agricultural revolution began. But what happened to the world at that time I think is as important as what the people were doing like learning about these changes and trying to imagine how people came straight out of that and then invented agriculture, just at the drop of a hat, it doesn’t really make sense.
Steven: [0:18:00] Yeah, completely. What really kind of sparked is that Bretz kind of like pointed to these huge signs in the land. And there are marks all over North America they have these huge ripples in the—
Stefan: [0:18:16].
Steven: [0:18:16], yeah, and these huge ripples and you can imagine. You’ve seen them on the beach, these waves that are formed by sea levels going through just the sand then you can imagine the amount of water. You can calculate all this, how much water it would take. It’s pretty simple geology yet you need the perspective of zooming up to see it.
Reasonably recently another area of scientific study has revealed this period was subject to a very, very violent change. So if we go back to the earth exiting out of the Ice Age from 20000 years at 12800 years ago, something happened and it all was discovered by a flower in Europe.
Stefan: [0:18:59] Yeah, that’s where the Younger Dryas period gets its name. There was a species of a wildflower called the Dryas Octopetala which grows in glacial conditions. It was found everywhere in the record during the last Ice Age and then it disappeared as we were exiting out of this natural warming period and then it reappears right when the earth got pulled back into the ice.
The Younger Dryas began in the earth got pulled back into the full glacial conditions. This flower pops up and thrives again for the next 1,200 years until the end of the Younger Dryas. That was really how scientists first understood that there was something strange that going on at this time.
Steven: [0:19:47] This flower dependant on this low temperature gradually disappeared, then suddenly reappeared. It was 1100 years, wasn’t it? So at 12800 years, we were more or less rising and then all sudden, we were thrown back in. What’s really interesting is that the context of the full glacial period.
So we have all that ice, that all the volume of ice sitting over North America. Suddenly it also disappears at that time, too, doesn’t it? So the geological signs that Bretz was pointing to and the body of ice sitting over North America, we then see the temperature drop which was first discovered via the flowering of this plant and found in the geological records. But then we started to see that there were actual temperature drops, as well, and that was recorded in the Greenland ice courts.
Stefan: [0:20:44] Yeah. We are talking about 10 or 15 degrees Celsius changes in decades, which today we are talking about climate change. It’s really detrimental to the planet if temperatures change five degrees over decades whereas this change was 10 to 15 degrees in the blink of an eye.
It’s hard to put that into perspective. And it wasn’t only these temperature changes but both at the start and the end of the Younger Dryas there were these spikes in sea level rises. So right at the start, whatever caused the ice to melt, there was this huge influx of fresh water into the oceans not only happening at the start but also at the end of the Younger Dryas so all the ice melts in two big hits.
Steven: [0:21:36] There was more ice over North America and then what we’ve recorded is there was a 400-foot sea level rise.
Stefan: [0:21:43] Yeah. Throughout the entire period from the start of the Younger Dryas to the end of it, sea levels rose 400ft.
Steven: [0:21:50] In two main meltwater pulses, right?
Stefan: [0:21:51] Yeah, meltwater pulse 1A and meltwater pulse 1B are kind of like the bookends to the Younger Dryas period. So there were two events that melted the ice. You can see the spikes in the record.
Steven: [0:22:05] It boggles the mind to think that we have the record like the rock hard scientific evidence that the planet was going through all of this all at one time. We were exiting out of the Ice Age, suddenly thrown back into the Ice Age. Temperatures plummet for 1200 years then we see these Ice Age conditions pop back up, again, this flower blooms. We see the sea levels rise. It’s the landmass of China and Europe basically being devoured in a very, very short space of time.
Stefan: [0:22:39] Yeah, and if we imagine that happening today, I mean most of the major cities are built on the coastline or built on a river system or near water. Most of the planet’s major cities would vanish. If we had a 400-foot sea level rise today, civilization would be flattened. There’ll be almost nothing left of the major cities in the world.
Steven: [0:23:01] Climate change does talk about sea level rise, but it’s tiny compared to this. And what really brought me to this kind of shocking realization about how significant this was, was the data from the Greenland ice core which were meticulously extracted from the pure Greenland ice and what it showed.
The funny thing is that everyone focuses on the very recent changes and how we are having increases of a couple of degrees, potentially, and how disastrous that would be. But then you look at the Younger Dryas period as we were exiting from the Pleistocene to the Holocene and you’ve got this huge downward drop.
It’s 15 times the magnitude of anything we are seeing now and then it flies back up at 11600 years. At the same time, human civilization pops out right at that point when the temperature run rises back up and it’s like how could this be? It doesn’t really paint the context of which—
Stefan: [0:24:00] Yeah, how do you come from that sort of earth change to then the temperatures rise and it’s all fine again and we just invented agriculture and carry on in our merry way? It’s hard to imagine coming out of something like that and just spawning what would shape where we are today in terms of civilization.
Steven: [0:24:20] Yeah. And in terms of the agricultural revolution, going back to anthropological records, we have records going back roughly two million years of humans being on earth.
We say well we were hunter-gatherers for all this time, and then suddenly 12000 years which is a tiny, tiny, if you drew a line and made a long, you could barely draw the 12000 years that would represent the whole two million years, time that we’ve been on earth.
You could barely draw it on that line. That’s how recent it is in terms of the whole scale. And so, you start to see how tiny our modern society is in terms of the large scales to time. But then we are seeing very, very significant, very violent geological context shifting right before human civilization rises.
For me, as soon as I started to see this area of study it doesn’t fathom to me that we can explain why after two million years you would just pop into agriculture. I mean, maybe it was a bottleneck. Maybe it was really hard to survive and we had to farm, for instance. That’s maybe one explanation.
But if you are surviving, surely being a hunter-gatherer would be easier. And the other thing that happens at this time is the megafauna disappear from North America too, don’t they?
Stefan: [0:25:40] Yeah, so at the moment, the largest population of megafauna on the planet in Africa. You think of elephants and giraffes and antelope and all these big animals. If you go back to the end of the last Ice Age around 13000 years ago, North America was home to the largest population of megafauna on the planet.
There were giant armadillos, giant ground sloths, 30 feet tall, giant beavers, mammoths, mastodons, the American lion which was as big as a horse, these huge mammals. They all vanish at the same time as these temperature changes are going on, and these huge megafloods are flying through North America.
And it paints a really grim picture for the people that were alive at that time too because in the record—there’s a lot of debate going on about that. But one of the cultures that lived in North America at the time was known as the Clovis people and they disappear at the same time as all these events going on.
So it really puts into perspective how insane life would have been on earth at that time, not only whether this sea level rises and mega floods, there was also this extinction event for not only people but the megafauna that were living for millions of years before that.
Steven: [0:27:07] Yeah. And now you are starting to see because we are connecting geology to biology. It’s like well really, there’s a very significant discussion we need to have about how those conditions shaped what eventually would rise I’m on civilization.
And so in megafauna disappearing, humans are classed as a large mammal. So, we are in the same category as many of this megafauna went extinct, there was a population there, the Clovis people used a specific speed. There’s a little record but there’s a record that they mined, that they had a religious or a ceremonial, kind of, they use red ochre for instance which is used across the planet in ancient societies for ceremonial purposes.
So there was a significant amount of people present that suddenly vanished. And this really starts to it’s like a murder mystery in a way. There is all these kind of little points of evidence, fingerprints pointing potentially to an event. It is a mystery as to how the North American ice sheet vanishes so quickly and we still don’t have an explanation for that.
Anyone that’s watched the movie An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore will recall him talking about the exit of last Ice Age and how significant that flood of water was into the Atlantic and the current blocking of the Atlantic Ocean. I remember seeing that in his movie and thinking, wow that is really significant.
The funny thing is that since 2001 when he released that movie, despite the increasing conversation in global warming we’ve not tried to discuss why this North American ice sheet broke. It is the most significant event in modern human civilization yet we’ve not understood it yet. All this evidence is kind of coming up and showing a decent explanation of what’s happening yet we’ve still not put it together.
Stefan: [0:29:15] Yeah and I think that’s why it’s so important to have this discussion where we can draw on lots of interdisciplinary fields and talk about not only what was happening in terms of the climate but also the geology and also anthropology and also in the animal record.
Just to paint a bit of a picture of how catastrophic this event was, they’ve found huge woolly mammoths that were flash frozen so quickly that the food in their stomach is still fresh to this day. When they found mammoth remains, the food is still fresh.
Even it’s sometimes so called that the food in their mouth is still fresh. If a person dies the food in their stomach still gets digested. That still keeps working for a few days afterward. On the scale of a mammoth, I don’t know how quickly it would have.
Steven: [0:30:14] It’s was basically chewing on grass.
Stefan: [0:30:16] Yeah, and then five times of meat frozen through. It doesn’t make sense.
Steven: [0:30:22] And they can tell the difference in the research, can’t they? They can tell the difference between a mammoth that has died over or something that’s flash frozen.
Stefan: [0:30:30] Yeah and there’s all this evidence of these mammals that were standing up and then all that’s left are their feet in the mud and their bodies have been thrown back.
Steven: [0:30:39] It’s actually just or hoof or foot, wow!
Stefan: [0:30:43] Yeah, and then there are carcasses of mammals kind of just all twisted up and like there was a huge burst of air or burst of something that shot them back. Not only that but there are these mass graveyards of all sorts of megafauna, that it seems like there was this one event that sort of wipes the majority of them out.
I mean, they didn’t all go extinct at that time but they are dating back to that time there is evidence of these mass graveyards, they call them where they’ve all died of natural causes and we still don’t know what in the world caused that to happen.
Steven: [0:31:16] I think they found some evidence of woolly mammoths living in the Siberian era to a little bit later. But ultimately more or less, the majority went missing, 75% wasn’t it?
Stefan: [0:31:28] Yes, 75% of all the megafauna in North America which was like 120 species just disappeared.
Steven: [0:31:35] Crazy. The funny thing too is that all that evidence, this is all showing up in the geological record but then there’s other stuff that’s popping up in terms of so all these can be dated to a certain level.
This is how geologists build their data. But then there is a sediment layer that they are examining the shows there was an unusual environment on earth straight after this period that there was a black matte layer.
Stefan: [0:32:10] Yeah. They call it the black matte layer. Some people thought it was because of the wildfires that went through. To make this picture even bleaker at the time of the Younger Dryas, there were wildfires covering most of the planet. It’s something like 10% of the earth’s biomass was on fire.
Steven: [0:32:28] And so that left of carbon footprint so black like one little layer. If you look at the pictures, you see one little rock, and you see this one black layer going through the rock.
Stefan: [0:32:37] Yeah but they are not quite sure if the black layer is from the soot or if it’s just because conditions on earth were so wet and so soggy that there was just like this layer of decomposing forest land or decomposing whatever.
Steven: [0:32:51] And they can date that exactly to 12800 years, right?
Stefan: [0:32:55] Yeah. And what’s fascinating about that layer is below if you find all of these extinct mammals and these bones of the Clovis people and bones of all sorts of animals that no longer exist. But then above it, there’s no sign of it. So it’s like whatever happened to cause the Younger Dryas left this mark that sort of clamped that period of history closed and then the new chapter began.
Steven: [0:33:21] So the Younger Dryas took hold. The megafauna disappear, the Clovis people disappear, North America seems to be ripped through but the ice sheet grew in that time as well, didn’t it?
Stefan: [0:33:34] Yeah. At the side of the Younger Dryas when the temperature dropped and we went back into a period of full glaciation there were about 1200 years of climate like that on earth. So the ice sheets grew again to as big as they were, if not bigger
Steven: [0:33:56] And after that you’ve got 1100 years of basically terror on the planet potentially and then all of a sudden you see in the Greenland ice cores that the temperatures rise up 10 to 15 degrees to their current form. So we come out of the Ice Age into our current form almost overnight as well, don’t we?
Stefan: [0:34:15] Yeah and it’s almost as violent as the start. At the start of the Younger Dryas, it’s this intense cooling period where we are sucked into the depths of the Ice Age again. And then at the end where temperatures shoot back up, which is also the exact same time as there’s another huge meltwater spike in the ocean.
So whatever ice was left melts rapidly. From that period to the period we are in now it’s been one of the most stable climatic periods in the earth’s history, or at least what the Greenland ice cores tell us for the last sort of 250000 years. This last 12000 years have been one of the most stable climatic periods.
It’s so fundamental to life on earth. We never really think about it, but if we went into the grips of an Ice Age today the world would be completely different. So it’s interesting thinking about putting ourselves in the shoes of the people that would have lived back then to what life would have been like and how on earth you come out of something like that and then invent agriculture and build civilization.
Steven: [0:35:25] One thing that we’ll look at in future episodes on this topic is the genetic information about what was happening at the time because we do know populations potentially plummeted. But also there are ways to kind of track, for instance, the genetic lines of wheat and animal husbandry.
And so it’s a very interesting line of environmental evidence that you build this picture around what humans were doing and then you can kind of tell what was happening. To me, the Younger Dryas still sends kind of chills to my bones thinking about our ancestors lived through that. Bretz was talking about these cataclysmic events that do happen on the planet and we’ve kind of fail to talk about that these things do happen in our time.
One interesting example is from the discovery of dinosaurs which wasn’t all that long ago, to the point of understanding where they went. So as soon as always dinosaur bones showed up it was only in the 1800s really and the early 1900s, where we admitted there were dinosaurs or we amassed enough evidence.
But then what happened is that it wasn’t until the 1990s that we understood that there was a cover sheet and we had to find the crater. And so that black matte there has been another body of evidence that shows potentially there was maybe an event from our space that could have caused this kind of mass terror across the planet.
Stefan: [0:37:04] Yeah and that’s one of the things that Bretz had trouble proving. It’s all well and good saying something caused this but what exactly caused that, he couldn’t pinpoint.
Steven: [0:37:13] He never tried to either. He just said, well, look, this is clearly sudden.
Stefan: [0:37:16] Yeah. It doesn’t matter what it is, here’s the evidence. It’s very controversial. I think there’s a lot of debate still going on and it has been for the last 20 plus years as to what caused the earth changes during the Younger Dryas.
But yeah, there are these strange kinds of spikes in the record that show elevated levels of platinum and elevated levels of iridium. These things are known as impact proxies, evidence that pops up in the soil in the sediment layer that point towards cosmic impact.
It’s the same with the dinosaur extinctions. They found this abnormal layer of iridium in the soil. And from there, they decided, well, it must have been something cosmic that caused the dinosaur extinction and then the next step was finding the crater.
Steven: [0:38:07] But they wouldn’t agree. No one would agree on that until they found the crater. They wouldn’t. There was all this evidence around and you kind of look at it now says, oh, of course, it was a crater but it’s not that easy until you have the evidence in front of you.
But if you see we are in that stage now, I’m not saying that it’s definitely a comet, but there’s enough evidence to show that there was some kind of outside influence that affected the geology of the earth. There’s also talk of solar flares and different changes in solar activity which we do have evidence for as well. And so it’s interesting, I think that it took decades for the dinosaurs to be reconciled as being wiped off by a meteor.
There’s even argument saying that they weren’t wiped out, they gradually kind of limped along. My kind of thought is have we advanced long enough now where we don’t need all of that, where we can make some kind of guided conclusion without that last step?
I don’t know. Can we make those kinds of conclusions? But at least maybe we don’t need to find any impact. They talk about because there was such a large ice sheet there, did it hit the sheet and then disappear? There are these kinds of explanations and the black matte and the high levels of iridium and platinum and so forth, they spread over a very, very big array of the earth.
Stefan: [0:39:39] Yeah, I think it’s something like 50 million square kilometers. There’s an area of the earth that spans that amount of space that shows these impact proxies that date to this kind of Younger Dryas period.
It is very important to work out what caused it but just acknowledging that there was a lot of insane earth changes going on at the time is almost enough to get the context in place and to really understand that there were these things going on that we can’t explain.
Steven: [0:40:12] We don’t need to know what caused it to place any kind of understanding about can we reframe our idea of the agricultural revolution base. We basically know the conditions that it went through. We don’t know what caused the conditions but do we need that? Yeah, I don’t think we do.
Stefan: [0:40:31] Yeah. My perspective on the history of the planet is changed after learning about the Younger Dryas and learning about the context going into the agricultural revolution. It kind of like raises more questions than I had ever had before because it’s just blown everything right open like did we just invent agriculture straight after?
Steven: [0:40:53] If you look at the progression of humans on earth evolutionary, we show that there’s evidence now that our progression moved from tree-based plant eaters to meet and cooking meat and that really shifted our move to big brains. There are a lot of arguments around that.
This dietary change fueled our move to our modern brain. But then the next change you see that significantly shifts the craniofacial form is the agricultural revolution. And so to have that huge change happen during our time on earth, for me, it’s difficult to reconcile those kinds of conditions and then that kind of innovation moving forward. But maybe they had to. Maybe humans had to innovate in that way in order to survive and that’s what accumulated. It’s an interesting topic, anyway, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:41:46] Yeah. It’s really interesting talking to people because there’s a lot of research going on at the moment into that period, in particular of earth’s history. Not only geologically and anthropologically but also in the archaeological record there are these ancient sites that pop up at exactly the same time that are so sophisticated and so advanced that they couldn’t have been made by hunter-gatherers.
Or if they were it would have required a huge workforce. It all dates the period just after the Younger Dryas when for the last 1200 years, people were trying to run from these insane global events that were going on.
Steven: [0:42:27] 11600 years and that’s happening at the Fertile Crescent where we put the Garden of Eden all our modern, we call them myths. I don’t like the word myth but our creation. Not creation but these kinds of stories are embedded into many, many traditional cultures.
But the one that we attribute our modern society too is sprouting the farming agricultural revolution from the Turkey Syria region where this archaeological site Göbekli Tepe pops up. We’ll cover that in our next show because it’s so fascinating to see this area of archaeological evidence popping up and coinciding with geological evidence.
And then once you start to see a picture that does potentially tells that there’s more to the history of the maybe we were really put in the book. For me, I’d be really obsessed, and focus on understanding the agricultural revolution. The Younger Dryas and all these geological marking points have really helped me to further my understanding of potentially what happened.
I think next week we are going to look at Göbekli Tepe and the archaeological findings there, but contextualize it within arising from this Younger Dryas period. I’m really excited too and we are just going to push forward.
The Human Origin Project is all about following these lines of evidence. It really does paint as long as you stick to the storyline, I’m just amazed every day what we are finding. It’s quite remarkable, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:44:11] Yeah, definitely. And I think learning about Göbekli Tepe was so fascinating but then putting it in the context of appearing straight after the Younger Dryas has just made it even more fascinating because it comes out of nowhere, it shouldn’t exist.
Up until it was on earthed, it was thought that nothing of that size or sophistication could exist because it’s older than the tools that they thought could build it. It’s something like 6000 years older than Stonehenge or 7000 years older than Stonehenge which I can’t even fathom those numbers.
Steven: [0:44:47] Yeah. If you are interested in the Younger Dryas jump on thehumanoriginproject.com and check out. There’s a number of articles on there discussing all of these research areas from Bretz, to the climate change, to sea level rises and megafauna, the Clovis culture, all of those a covered on the sites.
We really want to push forward a discussion as to what do you think happens. So leave a comment on social media and on iTunes. If you enjoyed the show please leave a rating.
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