Living the American Dream, 10,000 Years Ago

About 10,000 years ago, the Clovis society came to an abrupt end in the geologic record, an event that corresponds with the abrupt end to a number of North American animal species. This has been a mystery. The time of the Clovis was at the end of the Ice Age during the melting of the glaciers (10,000 RCYBP). It was a period of warming and great prosperity for the Clovis, who enjoyed dining on mammoth and bison. The record of the Clovis is heavy with finely-crafted stone arrow and spear tips, and the bones of their prey. This geologic record of the culture is brief; just a few hundred years, and yet the evidence of their presence can be found throughout the United States.

After that, the geologic record contains a mystery layer, called the black mat. Above the black mat, there are no Clovis and no mammoth or American camels and other animal types. I must conclude that some event caused the Clovis to be partially or completely destroyed as a population of human beings, but who knows, maybe there is a little Clovis in all of us.

The black mat matches the signature of the remnants of a massive asteroid air burst above the Great Lakes. It is thought that a massive fireball literally set the entire North American continent on fire and so clouded the atmosphere with smoke and debris that a thousand-year cooling period ensued; called the Younger Dryas Period .

A society can develop subterranean environment technologies that will allow human beings are to survive a major asteroid or meteoroid strike over populated areas. Let’s face it; we will not be space cowboys until we figure out gravity. Human beings cannot survive in low gravity without detrimental physical effects. I will expand on that in another post when I talk about the book Gravity’s Arc, by David Darling. I am into an exploration of gravity. It’s a major mystery; one of my favorite subjects.

So with the Younger Dryas period came the decline of human civilization. It is a sad thing to contemplate, so we need to develop better technologies to deal with Armageddon. Remember, we only have a few billion years before the sun burns out. If we keep getting destroyed by asteroids, we’re never going to be able to develop the gravitational technologies that can take us to the stars. We need to get busy.

Additional sources:

• K. Kris Hirst: About.com
• Daniel Jack Chasan