Recovering the Lost World,
A Saturnian Cosmology -- Jno Cook
Part 3: Saturn, Evolution, and Humans.

[Table of Contents]

$Revision: 23.25 $
Contents of this chapter: [The Solar System] [The Sun and Planets] [Something is Wrong] [Nevada Conference] [Initial Conditions] [A Comet's Path] [Ice Cover] [Seasonal Plants] [Periodic Extinctions] [Below the Pole] [New Postulates] [In the Solar System] [The Genesis of Life] [Recent Glaciations] [Ice Ages and Humans] [Homo Erectus] [Homo Sapiens] [Endnotes]

This chapter presents the celestial mechanics I have used as background to the narrative of this text. The time scales and the distances presented in this chapter are almost beyond the imagination. I will therefore start with an overview of the current Solar System and its planets. The distances in the Solar system are absolutely huge, while the sizes of the planets are minute compared to the Sun. Distances to the stars and galaxies are far, far greater yet.

I will then proceed with a description of how Saturn may have first entered the Solar System before the Cambrian, repeatedly returned at intervals of millions of years, and then in the last six or three million years returned to stay.

Last, I will suggest that the rise of complexity in life forms after the Cambrian is due entirely to periodic entry of Saturn into the Solar System. I will also present some information on the most recent glaciation, for this is the condition under which our species -- Homo sapiens sapiens -- eventually appeared. Glaciation, as I will suggest below, is one of the manifestations of a plasma contact from Saturn. The series of glaciations, which started some 3 million years ago (mya), continued intermittently until very recently, indicating that Saturn had remained in the neighborhood of the inner planets during that time. This period gave rise to a dozen species of hominids, of which we are the last survivors.

This will set the stage for the main narrative which starts in about 10,000 BC.

The Current Solar System

To understand the Solar System, we will need a sense of scale, but the representation of the Solar System in any graphic form is difficult. None of the orbits of the Solar System can be drawn to a scale which will show planet sizes at the same time. Below, however, is a scaled presentation -- the Burnham model -- which places the orbits to within a double arm span, although using invisibly small specks for planets. This is from Don Scott's (original) website [http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm]. We need to start with two facts: the radius of the Earth's orbit, called an Astronomical Unit (AU), 93,000,000 miles, and the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second.

The Burnham Model

"We sketch the orbit of the Earth around the Sun as a circle, one inch in radius. That sets the scale of the model. One light-year is one mile in this model."

A light-year is the distance traveled by light in a year -- 5,878,630,000,000 miles, which is 63,240 AU. An inch represents an AU, and thus a mile, as 63,360 inches, would represents a light-year.

"The Sun is approximately 880,000 miles in diameter. In the model [this] scales to 880,000 / 93,000,000 = 0.009 inches; (Approximately 1/100 of an inch in diameter). A very fine pencil point is needed to place it at the center of the (one inch radius) circle that represents the Earth's orbit."

"In this model, Pluto is an invisibly small speck approximately three and a half feet from the Sun. All the other planets follow almost circular paths inside of this 3.5 foot orbit."

Neglecting Pluto, the remaining planets fit within a distance of under three feet from the pencil-point Sun.

"The nearest star to us is over four light-years away. In our model, a light year is scaled down to one mile. So the nearest star to us is four and a half miles away in our model. So when we model our Sun and the nearest star to us, we have two specks of dust, each 1/100 inch in diameter, four and a half miles apart from one another. And this is in a moderately densely packed arm of our galaxy!"

The light of the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach us, traveling 186,000 miles per second. A space ship traveling at 40,000 miles per hour (which is about the best speed we can attain) would reach the Sun in about 100 days. The same ship traveling toward the nearest star would arrive 67,000 years later and then would look for a place to land.

Relative Sizes

Image: Relative sizes. These are not distances between planets.
Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune

The Sun and the other planets are shown to scale above. The Moon, not shown, is a little smaller than Mercury -- the small dot next to the Sun above.

The table below combines the sizes of the planets with the distances from the Sun. It is amazing to realize how tiny our domain in the Solar System is.

object diameter relative distance distance mass, [miles] size from sun from sun kilograms [million miles] [in AU] [x10exp24] Sun 864,000 1000 -- -- 1,989,100 Mercury 3,100 4 36 0.39 0.3 Venus 7,700 10 67 0.72 4.8 Earth 7,900 10 93 1.00 5.9 Moon 2,157 3 93 1.00 0.07 Mars 4,200 5 142 1.53 0.6 Jupiter 88,700 100 484 5.19 1898.6 Saturn 72,000 80 887 9.53 568.4 Uranus 32,000 40 1,787 19.17 86.8 Neptune 31,000 40 2,797 32.19 102.4

The puzzeling thing about our Solar System is that the thinly spread-out planets beyond Mars seem at odds with what little we know of other star systems where the planets which have been detected are very close to their star, although it is possible that we just have not noticed the outlying planets of other systems. We have, in fact, not seen any of the planets of other stars, we have only observed the transits of the primary (a brief dimming of the star), or the gravitational disturbance these planets produce to their stars (a back and forth movement).

The Sun and its Planets

The Sun: A very large glob of dense burning gas (or, more likely, a glowing electrical anode). The Sun is 100 times the diameter of the earth, and slowly rotates about itself once a month. It wouldn't fit between Earth and its moon, being more than three times larger than the distance between them. Flares bursting forth from the Sun reach thousands of miles into the surrounding space. [note 1]

Mercury: Messenger god of the Greeks and the angel of announcements of the Hebrews. About the size of our moon, Mercury is the Sun's moon, always keeping the same face towards the Sun in its 88 day "month," like our moon does to us. The fastest moving planet because it is closest to the Sun.

Venus: Athena of the Greeks and Venus of the Romans. Virtually the same size as the Earth, shrouded in clouds so dense that there is no light at the surface, and covered with active volcanoes, Venus is often the brightest object in the sky. Venus slowly rotates backwards, that is, it is turned upside down. Galileo, with his 200 foot telescope, discovered that Venus had phases like our moon. His mother-in-law could see that with her bare eyes. Venus orbits the Sun in 225 days. Seen from Earth, as both Earth and Venus move along their orbits, it takes 584 days before Venus passes Earth.

Earth: A word meaning soil or dirt in European languages; Ge of Geography to the Greeks. 1/100th the size of the Sun, wrapped in a thin layer of clouds, and mostly covered with water (there are also some land areas). The rotational axis is tilted at 23.5 degrees to the plane of its orbit about the Sun. It rotates once every 24 hours. A very large and distant 'satellite' (called "the Moon") orbits Earth once every 27 days (29.5 days as seen from Earth) at a distance of about a quarter million miles. [note 2]

Mars: Ariz of the Hebrews, Marut of the Hindus, names taken up by the Greeks as Ares and by the Romans as Mars. Since antiquity Mars has had two dogs (named "Fear" and "Terror") chasing about the legs his war horse (or had his war chariot pulled by two steeds of these names). Two very close-in and speedy satellites of Mars were discovered in 1877, and named accordingly. Mars is twice the diameter of our Moon, half the diameter of Earth, is tilted at 25 degrees to its orbit, similar to Earth, and also rotates in 24 hours. Mars orbits the Sun in somewhat under two Earth years (687 days), but since both Earth and Mars move forward in their orbits, Earth passes Mars only every 780 days. This last, 780 days, is known as the 'synodic period' of Mars.

Asteroid Belt: Beyond Mars and the next planet out from the Sun, Jupiter, there is a 'cloud' of millions of rocks and dust, known as the Asteroid Belt. (There is more material further out, as well as grouped into the orbit of Jupiter, following Mars, and inside the orbit of Earth.)

The Asteroid Belt as shown above is not to the same scale as the images of the Sun and planets shown in this section. It is as if seen from a slight angle above the ecliptic, and from much further away. Although presented as large dots above, the actual amount of material represents very little mass, less that 1/8th the mass of the Moon, about one tenth of one percent of the mass of the Earth. All the rocks are on elliptical orbits which also vary wildly in their angle to the ecliptic. Rocks with orbits which reach closer to the Sun start exhibiting the coma and tails by which comets are recognized.

Jupiter: Jove Pater - father Jove - of the Romans, Zeus of the Greeks. The largest planet, 10 times the diameter of Earth (and thus 1000 times the mass of Earth), it rotates in an incredible ten hours. Has more mass than all the other planets put together, and represents almost all the angular momentum of the solar system. Jupiter is brighter than any of the stars of the night sky, and easy to locate (at times Venus is brighter). Half a dozen of its satellites can be seen with binoculars. It takes 12 years to circle the Sun, and thus Jupiter moves one zodiac sign each year.

Saturn: The obscure Saturnus of the Romans, Kronos of the Greeks - meaning either time keeper (which actually Jupiter accomplishes), or crowned, ie, ringed. Companion to Jupiter, almost the same size and rotational speed, but was originally thought to be mostly a ball of gas around a small core, light enough to float on water. Crowned with rings at the equator. Circuits the Sun in 30 years. The furthest-out planet known and tracked since antiquity.

Uranus: Somewhat less than half the size of Jupiter, and discovered in the 18th century, it takes 84 years to make a leisurely circuit around the Sun. Named after "Father Sky" of the Greek creation myths. Rotates almost at right angles to the plane of its orbit. Looks like it has had an accident.

Neptune: After the Roman Neptune, another loser in the battle of the gods. About the same size as Uranus, but almost twice as far from the Sun. It takes 165 years to orbit the Sun.

Some Curious Facts

• All the planets travel about the sun in nearly the same plane, more or less at the Sun's equatorial plane, in a band called the ecliptic, which is actually defined as the plane of the Earth's orbit. Thus, seen from Earth, the Sun also travels in this band in the sky. The ecliptic is relatively easy to spot in the night sky if one or two planets can be found. Because the Earth's rotational axis is tilted, however, the ecliptic looks tilted and wobbles across the sky on a daily basis, and differently at different times of the year. Only at the equinoxes (March 21 and September 21) does it stand still, stretching from directly east to directly west.

• In the northern hemisphere, in addition to its wobble, the ecliptic is inclined at an angle -- seeming rising up from the southeast at an angle, and from the northeast six monthes later. The height depends on the latitude (north) from which it is viewed on Earth. At the equator it mostly stands almost directly overhead, and shows very little wobble. Near the north pole all of the ecliptic shows above the horizon during summer, not at all during winter.
  
  Image: The Sun in winter and summer for a mid latitude.

• As a result, the days and nights are nearly equal during all of the year in the tropics, and days get longer with summer the further north one is located.

• All the planets orbit about the Sun and revolve about themselves in the same direction -- counter clockwise as seen from far above the north pole of the Sun or the Earth -- except Venus, which slowly rotates backwards around itself, and Uranus, which seems to be lying on its side.

• All of the "regular" planetary satellites rotate in the same direction, and at the equators of the various planets. [note 3a]

• All the planets travel in ellipses about the Sun, but it would be impossible to tell these ellipses from circles at any visual scale, with the exception of Mercury.

• The planets closest to the Sun travel the fastest.

• In the conspicuous gap between Mars and Jupiter there orbit millions of rocks and asteroids -- an accident of the remote past.

• Our Sun is a star. The next nearest star in the Milky Way (our galaxy) is 4.5 miles away on the scale of the Burnham Model presented above -- another speck of dust -- but 4.5 light-years in actuality. This is a distance of 26,400,000,000,000 miles (26.4 * 10 exp 12).

• The Milky Way galaxy contains billions of stars. The distance to the nearest galaxy is incomprehensible. There are billions of galaxies beyond that.

Simulations of space travel as seen in films are generally wildly inaccurate, but they are part of popular culture, part of how we view ourselves as "in control," even of galactic distances. Stars flit by on "Star Trek," yet the stars would not noticeably move even at 1000 times the speed of light.

This perception of space as conquerable and controllable results from the fact that planet sizes and interplanetary distances, and by extension the distances involved in the Universe, cannot be properly imagined in our minds. Big numbers just remain meaningless big numbers.

The emptiness of space, the distances between planets, and the diminutive sizes of the planets in relationship to the sun, will remain meaningless unless they can be seen and experienced. This requires a very large scale model -- small enough to see the distances, yet large enough so that the planets do not disappear altogether from sight.

The distances, the magnitudes, and the emptiness involved in our diminutive occupation of a small parcel in an outsweeping arm of a remote galaxy, calls for a reduction of these dimensions to a physical model which, if it could be seen, might evolve in our minds some reasonable concepts about the relative magnitudes. The distances involved in our solar system are so large as to be virtually unimaginable. Stellar distances are 5 orders of magnitude (100,000 to 1,000,000 times) larger yet. The Burnham Model is a valiant attempt to visualize the distances.

Planet Inclinations

The next table lists the inclination of the axes of rotation of each planet to each planet's orbit (actually the deviation from the 'normal,' the perdendicular angle to the orbit), the inclination of the orbit to the ecliptic, and the eccentricity of the orbit. Since the ecliptic is defined as the plane of the Sun and Earth, the 'inclination of the orbit to the ecliptic' is a rather strange measure which in effect places the Earth at the center of the Universe. I have also shown the inclination of the orbits of the planets to the equator of the Sun (by subtracting this from the inclination of Mercury which orbits the Sun at its equator, 7 degrees from the ecliptic).

object inclination inclination inclination eccentricity of the axis of orbit to of orbit to of orbit to orbit ecliptic Sun's equator [degrees] [degrees] [degrees] Mercury 0 7.00 0.00 0.206 Venus 177 (1) 3.39 3.61 0.007 Earth 23.4 0.00 7.00 0.017 Moon 6.7 5.14 w/r Earth 0.055 w/r Earth 0.013 w/r Sun 6.98 Mars 25.1 1.85 5.15 0.093 Jupiter 3.13 1.31 5.67 0.048 Saturn 26.7 2.49 4.51 0.056 Uranus 97.8 0.77 6.23 0.047 Neptune 29.6 1.77 5.23 0.009 (1) within 3 degrees of complete inversion (180 degrees)

Axial Inclinations

Image: Planetary axes of rotation. Planets sizes not to scale.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune

Something is Wrong

The above information describes how the Solar System is currently configured, but it was not always thus. The first clue that something is awry is the fact that half the planets in our Solar System have the axes about which they rotate tipped 24 to 27 degrees to the perpendicular of the plane of their orbits. One is lying on its side and one is upside down. (The relative sizes shown in the graphic above are not correct.)

When compared to the spin axis of the Sun, the spin axes of the planets fall into two groups. Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, and the Moon all have their axes near ten degrees different from the Sun, with Jupiter at 8.8 degrees and the Moon at 13.6 degrees. The spin axes of Saturn and the planets Earth, Mars, and Neptune are all within less than one degree of 30.9 degrees different from the spin axis of the Sun. [note 3]

Mercury revolves at the equator of the Sun, but its orbit is understood to be inclined by 7 degrees from the ecliptic. The ecliptic is defined as the line (or plane) drawn from the Sun to Earth -- in other words, the ecliptic is defined as identical with the Earth's orbit. The inclination of the Earth's orbit thus deviates by zero degrees from the ecliptic but it is at an angle of 7 degrees with the Sun's equator. The discrepancies in the rotational axes of the planets show more clearly if they are compared to the rotational axis of the Sun.

inclination inclination inclination inclination of of orbit to of orbit to of the axis of spin axis ecliptic Sun's equator to orbit to Sun's axis object [degrees] [degrees] [degrees] [degrees] (A) (B) (C) (D) Mercury 7.0 0.0 0 0.0 Venus 3.4 3.6 177 -0.6 Earth 0.0 7.0 23.4 30.4 Moon 0.013 * 6.9 6.7 ** 13.6 Mars 1.85 5.15 25.1 30.25 Jupiter 1.31 5.69 3.13 8.82 Saturn 2.49 4.51 26.7 31.21 Neptune 1.77 5.23 29.6 31.83 * 5.14 w/r Earth; 0.013 w/r Sun ** 6.7 w/r the Sun [note 4]

In the chart above, by adding 7 degrees to the inclination of the orbit to the ecliptic ("A" in the chart above) for each of the planets, the orbital inclination of a planet to the equator of the Sun ("B") is found.

By adding the inclination of the orbit to the equatorial of the Sun ("B") to the inclination of a planet's spin axis to the orbit ("C"), the amount that a planet's spin axis differs from the spin axis of the Sun ("D") is found.

This corrects the data we are usually presented with to show the angle of the spin axes of all the planets measured against the axis of rotation of the Sun. I have left off Uranus which has a spin axis located 8 degrees below the plane of the ecliptic.

As can be seen, Mercury is the Sun's moon, and the only planet which behaves appropriately as a satellite. The spin axis of Venus is almost parallel to the Sun, but upside down. Jupiter is at an angle of 9 degrees. The Moon mimics the behaviour of the Earth. All the remaining planets are tilted at 30 to 32 degrees with respect to the spin axis of the Sun. The congruence of the tilt of the axes of four of the nine planets becomes even more noticeable when it is known that they fall to within one and a half degrees of each other.

Nothing currently explains why the rotation of Venus is backwards, or why Uranus lies on its side. Nothing explains why Mercury rotates at all, since it is obviously the Sun's moon.

Image: The locations in the 'dome of the stars' to which the rotational axes of the Sun and the planets point. The planets Earth, Saturn, Mars, and Neptune describe a circle of 30 to 32 degrees around the location in space of the Sun's axis of rotation. Locations from http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planetfact.html

The Earth's axis of rotation points, today, to the star 'Polaris' in the constellation Ursa Minor (just to the right of Saturn in the diagram above). The axis of rotation of the Sun points to a location a few degrees east of the main part of the constellation Draco.

Although all the planets are on orbits which are tilted with respect to the equator of the Sun, and the axis of rotation of each planet is additionally tilted with respect to its orbit, the rotational axes of the planets all point to a place in the sky which either falls close to where the axis of the Sun points, in Draco, or is displaced by about 30 or 31 degrees. The 30 degree circle around the location of the Sun's axis also describes the path through the stars taken by the Earth's polar axis over the course of 26,000 years -- the precession of the polar axis.

• Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus all point to the same region of the constellation Draco as the axis of the Sun. It is certain, however, that Venus is not related to the original Solar System. Only Jupiter and possible Mercury and the Moon are the original satellites of the Sun. There were originally three or more additional planets, of which the asteroids are the remnants. Reasons for considering Venus as a recent additions to the Solar System will be brought forward in a later chapter.

• The axes of the planets Earth, Saturn, Mars, and Neptune point to diverse locations all about thirty degrees removed from where the axis of the Sun points. I consider these planets as foreign to the Solar System. [note 5]

• Uranus has an axis of rotation which falls about 95 degrees away from the axis of the Sun because it is lying on its side (actually 10 degrees below the ecliptic). I will suggest in following chapters that this has been the case since remote antiquity. It can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic, and probably earlier.

2001 Nevada Conference

On a whim I attended a conference in Nevada in August of 2001, given by Kronia, the organization with a website of the same name, organized by David Talbott and others. The conference dealt with aspects of the Saturnian Configuration expanded on in these pages.

I was familiar with the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, and the subsequent work by David Talbott. Velikovsky, in "Worlds in Collision" (1950), described how Venus interacted with Earth in ca 1500 BC. Talbott, in "The Saturn Myth" (1980), established that, in remote antiquity, a large globe stood above the Earth at the north horizon. Talbott's book is overwhelming in detail, and convincing in its thesis (even though he would interpret some details differently today). The conference also brought out information by Wal Thornhill on plasma streams in the Universe. Others in attendence were Don Scott, Dwardu Cardona, Anthony Peratt, and Marinas van der Sluijs.

I came away from the conference unsatisfied. There was no cohesive chronology put forth, and the mechanics of an intersection of Saturn and the Solar System lacked elegance. I decided to start this text (as web pages) in an effort to put things in order and to develop a cohesive chronology. However, initially the lack of an adequate model of the celestial mechanics was also an obstacle.

After the conference I wrote up the information I had available and then the site lingered as I repeatedly got stuck. I backed up to study a few things. I had no problem with the plasma theories. What was missing were concepts and data from other disciplines. I needed a broader base to work from, and ended up spending time reading or rereading biology, evolution, geology, and archaeology. I read books supporting orthodoxy as well as books at the edge of speculation.

Problems with the Initial Conditions

By mid 2003, I knew that many of the statements I had made were not supportable and that a new explication was needed. What needed to be reinvestigated was the idea that Saturn, together with Earth, could enter the Solar System in about 3400 BC and end up in a circular path in a matter of 300 years. That just didn't make sense.

I started rewriting in February of 2004, and finished in draft form a year and a month later, March 2005. Now, in the fall of 2009, I see that additions, word edits, and data tweaks have continued for four years. (See the [change log] of the index file.)

There were three main problems with this hypothesis:

• Objects that enter the Solar System don't start on circular paths; they travel on extremely elliptical paths. The comets bear witness. Circularization will happen eventually, but it might take millions of years.

• Earth needed a tilted axis with respect to its orbit to account for a persistent ice cover at the poles, extending back 30 million years. That would not have been possible if the Earth had been part of the Saturnian System until 3400 BC, under the condition of being either an equatorial or sub-polar satellite.

• In fact, it looked as if Earth has experienced seasons for a very long time, at least 200 million years, and therefore Earth, with its tilted axis, had to have rotated about the Sun at least that long. A tilted axis would not be at all likely for Earth as a satellite of Saturn.

• Also, I could not initially imagine how Earth might have ended up suspended below the south pole of Saturn -- especially as an initial condition.

I juggled these problem areas simultaneously, often falling asleep imagining Saturnian orbits and Earth conditions. I'll address the problems below.

Image: A diagram of how Saturn and its planets entered the Solar System. The Saturnian System could have come from any direction. Over the following millions of years the orbit of Saturn would flatten to the ecliptic.

A Comet's Path

My first objection was to the suggestion of a 300 year period for Saturn to "corkscrew" into an orbit about the Sun, approaching the Solar System, from below the Sun's equator. In Thornhill's model this would have happened with Earth and Mars in tow below the south pole of Saturn. [note 6]

If Saturn were to be introduced into the Solar System, it would be because of the gravitational attraction of the Sun. Saturn would enter on a comet's path, headed straight to the Sun, but then, like all comets, swing tightly around the Sun, avoiding a direct collision, and disappear again into the far reaches of space.

Last, it would not matter from which direction the Saturnian System first approached the Solar System. Over time, Saturn would have leveled its orbit to the ecliptic due to gravitational interactions with the Sun's planets. This is especially true if, as I will show later, Jupiter was probably located at 0.7 AU, and would have gravitationally changed Saturn's wild orbit whenever Saturn closed in on the Sun. Additionally, the planets (Earth, Mars, Neptune) traveling with Saturn as it first approached the Solar System would have rotated at the equator of Saturn, as do the planets of the Sun, and as do the satellites of all the planets -- not below the Saturnian south pole.

With Saturn on an orbit which always turned close to the Sun at each approach, a satellite orbiting Saturn would have a good chance of switching orbits and being lost to the Sun. At some point on Saturn's swing around the Sun, a satellite of Saturn would come to a virtual standstil -- where the gravitational pull of the Sun could overcome that of Saturn. This would most likely happen when the planet was directly between Saturn and the Sun. The forward motion of the Saturnian System as a whole would carry the planet into an orbit around the Sun. [note 7]

Thus, as my new starting point, I assumed that the Saturnian System intersected with the Solar System at some point in the past with a number of planets -- Earth and Mars, at least, and perhaps others -- on equatorial orbits. Some planets (satellites) were lost to the Sun, to rotate independently as satellites (planets) of the Sun. It is likely that this happened over a very long period of time, enough time, in fact, so that Saturnian planets would end up on orbits flattened to the equator of the Sun.

Ice Cover

The Earth has an ice cover near the poles. The ice of Antarctica is estimated to be 30 million years old. Within the Arctic north polar region there is glacial ice in Greenland (but not elsewhere) estimated to date to three million years ago. There has been no other glaciation on Earth since the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. [note 8]

To allow for the formation of ice at the poles, I at first imagined Saturn with its planets on an elliptical path which would bring the whole system to perihelion with the Sun at infrequent intervals. That might start to account for the ice if, following Immanuel Velikovsky's suggestion, it was caused by the heat generated by a shifting lithosphere.

Velikovsky had suggested that the polar ice was generated in a very short timespan by massive freezing rains. The constant rains would be the result of a torque applied to the planet by another planet passing at close range (or in passing 'close' to the Sun) which might cause the lithosphere to relocate with respect to the underlying core. (This suggestion, however, is based on assigning glaciation as due to the process of a 'close passage' by Venus.) The lithosphere would crack, bulge, and split open and the heat generated would cause evaporation of oceanic water to the point of saturating the atmosphere. The saturated atmosphere would cause endless rains.

Velikovsky's suggestion actually made much more sense than many other theories, as, for example, basing northern glaciation on the fact that it snows constantly at the north pole (it does not), or invoking Milankovitch's cycles of changing global temperatures (but cold temperatures do not make glaciers), or on the long-term changes in the Sun's sun-spot cycle.

I had much less of a problem with Velikovsky's suggestion than these other theories and I allowed it to stand as a possibility. Perhaps, as he suggested, gravitational forces could wrench the Earth's lithosphere when Saturn came to perihelion with the Sun. But there were some drawbacks to this theory which continued to nag at me. For one thing, polar glacial ice is not frozen rain; it is compacted snow. Additionally, northern Asia has never been glaciated, even though it is clearly within the Arctic circle just like Greenland.

Whatever the cause of the glaciation, we can account for its persistence (as apposed to its deposition) only by having the Earth revolve around the Sun with the polar axis tilted at an angle. At a minimum, you would need a winter season of no sunlight (as we have today) to retain snow and eventually compact it to ice. If Earth had been on an equatorial orbit around Saturn until recently, there would have been no seasons -- since the axis of Saturn and Earth would almost certainly have pointed in the same direction of space, and there would not have been the dark polar winters. The same is true if Earth had been below the south pole of Saturn until 3400 BC. Then the north pole would have been directly lit by Saturn and would have been warmer than any other part of the planet. This cannot have been the case. The Greenland glacier is 3 million years old. (I'll offer a resolution further below, and also discuss glaciation in the next chapter.)

Seasonal Plants

The seasonal plants and even the diurnal habits of nearly all the animals on Earth argue against the Earth having been below the south pole of Saturn up until recent times (as Thornhill first suggested), or having existed within Saturn's coronal glow discharge envelope where there would be no difference between night and day (as Cardona once suggested).

The Earth might have been a satellite of Saturn at one time, but most likely that relationship had ended a long time ago. How long ago? Talbott at one time suggested the Eocene, 50 to 60 million years ago (mya). The Eocene makes some sense. It is the age of the expansion of mammals, the spread of grasses, and the takeover of modern plants -- all seemingly dependent on seasons. It also falls after the K/T boundary -- the giant 'meteor impact' in the Yucatan, 63 million years ago, which marked the eventual demise of the dinosaurs and the end of the Cretaceous period. This certainly represents the end of a biological era for Earth.

The earlier plant cover of the Earth (the Carboniferous, 345-300 mya) consisted of slow-growing, heavily-armored, and hard (siliciferous) plants. Pine trees (gymnosperms), which date from after that era (the Jurassic, 200-140 mya), even today take three years to come to seed, and without flowers. A later period (the Cretaceous, ending 140-65 mya) saw the development and spread of fast-growing, soft-bodied, seasonal flowering plants. [note 9]

Although the end of the Cretaceous, 65 million years ago, might be suggested as a division between these two biologically distinct periods, this is not early enough. Although grasses first developed during the Creteceous era (140 to 65 mya), the first flowering plants (Orchids!) date from the yet earlier Jurassic (200 to 140 mya) or Triassic (250 to 200 mya) periods. If we are to look for a time when Earth first joined the Sun's planets, it has to be earlier yet, perhaps in the period preceding the Triassic, the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago. The end of the Permian is a likely candidate for this time saw the largest extinction ever experienced. After the Permian, life on Earth started over.

I am suggesting that at the end of the Permian, Earth was still orbiting Saturn, the Earth would have had no seasons, since the Earth's rotational axis would have been parallel to Saturn's axis of rotation. At the time of the Permian extinction -- the largest extinction ever -- 99 percent of all aquatic species disappeared and 95 percent of land species. This was accompanied with equatorial glaciers. It is this last -- plus the extreme (and inexplicable) nature of this extinction which suggests that Earth would thus still have been on an equatorial orbit to Saturn at the end of the Permian.

period/epoch start features -Quaternary 1 mya glaciation in Europe and America -Tertiary pliocene 12 mya modern plants and animals, Rockies miocene 30 mya large mammals, Alps, Andes, Himalayas eocene 65 mya mammals dominate, primates -Cretaceous 140 mya early mammals, flowering plants, grasses, extinction of dinosaurs at 65 mya -Jurassic 200 mya pines, birds, small mammals -Triassic 250 mya dinosaurs, orchids -Permian 300 mya first reptiles, end of large trees -Carboniferous 345 mya fern trees, pines, insects, amphibians -Devonian 405 mya fish, first land plants -Silurian 425 mya corals, scorpions -Ordovician 500 mya marine invertebrates -Cambrian 600 mya snails, sponges, trilobites precambian 3100 mya single cell forms, sponges, algae (creation) 3900 mya (oldest rocks) Dates vary; these are from William Matthews, "Fossils" (1962)

Periodic Extinctions

Among the extinctions that life on Earth has experienced, the extinction and glaciation at the end of the Permian (250 mya) stands out. The Permian had produced the forerunners of both dinosaurs and mammals. The close of the Permian is marked by a drying of inland seas, equatorial glaciation, and mountain building (the Appalachians and proto-Rockies), and we see the largest extinction ever -- 99 percent of all aquatic species disappeared and 95 percent of land species.

Current thinking is that the land extinctions were caused by massive lava flows which happened in Siberia, accompanied by increased carbon dioxide and methane gases. As the methane oxidized (along with organic material from the lowered inland seas), carbon dioxide increased even further and oxygen levels dropped. But these particulars are not at all certain.

Some seven lifeless layers of sediment (wind blown sand and dust) follow each other at the end of the Permian. This is today visible in South Africa's Karoo Desert. Today these layers are estimated to span 100,000 years, but this time span is based on guesses at the sedimentation rates. I doubt if all of it extended over more than a period of a few thousand years. The Permian depositions of material and extinctions were perhaps serial but they were rapid. The extinctions at the end of the Permian were not the result of a single, or occasional plasma contact with Saturn, but the result of a nova event. I think that this happened as Earth was still in orbit around Saturn for, in this instance, it is certain that the equatorial regions of Earth were hit. Shallow inland seas were vaporized and a dense cloud cover followed which cooled the Earth. The falling snows built glaciers in central Africa, India, and equatorial South America. The nova event might have been initiated by a visit to the inner Solar System, but could have continued well beyond that.

At this point, harking back to the earlier concept (by Velikovsky) of the possible jolting of the Earth in the periodic visits of Saturn to the Sun, I realized that the frequent and periodic extinctions of the Paleozoic (the period since the Cambrian) might be due to more than just geological upheavals. [note 10]

Robert Bakker has put forward a theory of simple causes for extinctions -- changes in climate, the spread of species hostile to others into new territories, the spread of viral or bacterial infections. This suggests that geological changes were not per se the cause, although these happened with some regularity. Of course, new territories would open up with the periodic orogeny and the frequent retreats and advances of the inland seas (as in central North America). But it would seem that these theories also could not explain the periodicity of extinctions -- events which were sudden and wholesale, followed by millions of years where nothing happened. [note 11]

If Saturn's occasional return to the Sun were to have a worldwide impact on the Earth, there had to be some mechanism to account for it, other than possible geological disturbances. Mountain building, or the draining of inland seas, is extremely slow from a biological point of view. Biological organisms will adapt during the millions of years that it takes to raise mountains (if mountain building indeed takes millions of years). What was needed to explain the extinctions was a more sudden cataclysmic event.

Then I realized that massive plasma discharges could have been almost totally responsible for the extinctions. Similar to any comet, a coma and tail would form as Saturn approached the Sun, and Saturn, because of its enormous size and the extended time spent at a much lower electrical potential away from the Sun, would discharge electrically to anything nearby, whether that was Earth still in orbit around Saturn, or Earth in a close orbit around the Sun, or any of the other planets of the Sun. [note 12]

It would not matter if Earth were still a satellite of Saturn, or had become a planet orbiting the Sun, the plasma discharges of Saturn, as it neared perihelion with the Sun, would affect Earth in either case. The major difference between these two situations would be that, if Earth were in orbit around the Sun, the plasma discharges might be of an entirely different magnitude, and thus have an entirely different extinction effect. The effect would also depend on where the plasma struck the face of Earth (land or ocean) and how close Earth was to Saturn as it passed by. As a matter of fact, it is the case that no two extinction events have been alike. Their effect at any one time is completely different from their effect at other times. The biological extinctions were estimated by Gould at an interval of about 27 million years. [note 13]

During any of the near approaches of Saturn, the Earth could have been displaced to a new orbit, depending on how the two planets approached each other. The new orbit would have had a major effect on the climate. In fact, the biological record indicates that Earth experienced extreme changes in climate, lasting tens of millions of years following extinction events.

These concepts might be the answer to the "Planet X" theory, which suggests that an unknown planet of very long period caused the mass extinctions of life on Earth at 26,000,000 year intervals since the Cambrian, 560,000,000 years ago. It has been suggested that Planet X would travel at a right angle to the equator of the Sun, that is, circumpolar, since nothing like Planet X has been found in the ecliptic.

Most likely Saturn was "Planet X," and not on a circumpolar orbit but on or near the ecliptic. The extinctions would be caused by changes in climatic conditions coupled with X-rays, UV radiation, and Gamma rays (high energy photons). Plasma discharges would certainly be to blame for the last. If we recognize the Yucatan Chicxulub impact crater (65 million ya) as an anode burn mark, it serves as an example of the possible destructiveness of an arc mode plasma contact. [note 14]

Below the Pole of Saturn

Lastly, as I mentioned, I could not accept the postulate of the Earth located below the south pole of Saturn as an a priori condition. Nothing in all our experience with the paths of planets or satellites indicates that this would be remotely possible as an initial condition. Secondaries revolve around their primaries at the equator of the primaries, they do not hang suspended sub-polar. Of course I would have to accept the sub-polar configuration as an accidental condition at some later time, for certainly all of the Saturn imagery describes this condition.

The solution to this last problem came from considering, first, the mechanics of both planets as satellites of the Sun, and second, the charge of the planets which is sensed by both when plasmaspheres meet and merge.

Once a planet orbits the Sun, it would be governed by the gravitational forces of the Sun. The possibility of Earth being recaptured by Saturn as a satellite is virtually nil. Capture requires a forward motion which not only matches the passing planet, but requires passage on the outward side of the capturing planet (away from the Sun), and then a sudden change in direction and dramatic reduction in speed to become a satellite. If a planet were to meet Saturn the planet would be pulled or pushed, gravitationally and electrically, into a larger or smaller solar orbit. It would not end up orbiting Saturn.

But if, as noted above, Saturn and another planet were to override each other, which could easily happen because the orbits of all the planets are tilted at different angles, the smaller planet would be gravitationally attracted to Saturn while electrostatically repelled -- if the smaller planet had entered the plasmasphere of Saturn. This would not change the orbits around the Sun of either Saturn or the planet.

We are talking about Earth, although this process apparently also applies to a number of other planets which met up with Saturn over the course of three million years.

Back to the description of the modifications to Earth's orbit: The described condition would thus leave Earth on the same orbit, but with the orbit tilted at a different angle. The orbit of the planet would come to coincide with the orbit of Saturn over a long period of time. Each additional circuit of the planets around the Sun would continue to slightly modify the smaller planet's orbit.

It is thus likely that Earth (as with Mars) would end up on an orbit (around the Sun) below Saturn. This would be a stable position, due entirely to the differences of the gravitational and electrical fields of Saturn. Gravitation expresses itself spherically; the electric field, on the other hand, is shaped more like an apple -- in response to the shape of the magnetic field around Saturn. In the dimple of the electric field below Saturn, Earth would find a stable location. Any movement to the side would increase the electrical repulsion and shove Earth back to its original central location. [note 15]

New Postulates

At this point I started to rewrite the web pages. The following were the new postulates and some corollaries:

• Earth, Mars, and Neptune (and possibly the Moon) were all planets (satellites) of the star Saturn, and had been orbiting Saturn for billions of years since their creation when, shortly before the Cambrian, 560 million years ago, Saturn intersected with the Solar System -- perhaps for the first time.

• Saturn swept around the Sun like a comet, to return every 26,000,000 or 27,000,000 years, still with the original planets in tow.

• Over time, some of Saturn's planets were captured by the Sun. This happened to Earth after the Permian, 250 million years ago.

• The return of Saturn at 26,000,000 year intervals was responsible for the periodic extinctions which the Earth has experienced since the Cambrian. On reaching perihelion with the Sun, Saturn would attempt to discharge to any nearby objects, including, of course, Earth. (This would be true whether Earth traveled with Saturn as a satellite, or Earth was already orbiting the Sun.)

• Extinctions, and perhaps orogeny as well, were thus most likely to have been caused by massive discharges from Saturn (and shocka) when at perihelion in its path around the Sun. (However, there seem to be other causes for orogeny as well.)

• The specificity of the extent of many extinctions can probably be attributed to the different locations of the strike point of the arcing from Saturn (on land, shallow sea, or ocean), and the fact that at different times (different occurrences of the 26,000,000 year cycle) the contact would have varied with the chance location of Saturn and the position of Earth.

• It might even be suggested that plasma discharges to Earth decreased over time, being perhaps massive at the start of the Cambrian, then lessening sporadically, with another large hit (so to speak) at the end of the Permian.

• Saturn may have been responsible for the development of all life (speciation) after the Cambrian, and especially the complex species which developed since that time.

• Speciation probably took place shortly after every extinction period, although it might have taken many thousands of years before new species stabilized and would show up in the record.

• The fact that Saturn was never deflected by the Solar System planet Jupiter would be explained by the fact that in 500,000,000 years Saturn would have entered the Solar System only 19 or 20 times. [note 16]

• Once the period of Saturn was significantly reduced at 6 or 3 million years ago, bringing it closer to the Sun year-round (so to speak), smaller planets of the Sun would have a greater chance of being captured into a sub-polar or supra-polar orbit by Saturn. This is the only stable location for planets which encounter Saturn on its periodic sweep through the inner region of the Solar System. In fact, it would be likely that over time all the smaller inner planets would be captured in this manner. Only planets further away from the Sun would be safe from this because they would be less likely to encounter Saturn.

With the above list as a starting point, I could proceed to visualize the interaction of Saturn and Earth after 6000 BC, and have some confidence of being on the right path toward a connected narrative. At the same time a 4 billion year vista of the past suddenly opened up.

Although for the most part we know next to nothing about the specifics, it should be possible to chart a course of likely events and probable dynamics which match the sparse information we have. The new element added to the normal planetary dynamics is, of course, the part played by planetary plasmaspheres, the repulsive electrical forces when these intersect, and the attendent electrical discharges.

What I will attempt to do in the following chapters is to plot the progression of changes for the planets of the early Solar System, using the simplest and most likely explanation which makes the case at any point and sets the stage for following events. This removes much of the inexplicable "changes in orbits" for which the catastrophism of Velikovsky and Talbott have been faulted. I hope to bring the story back to the normal expected interactions between a star and its planets. In fact, most of the events after 3147 BC reduce to a series of small changes in a set of nearly identical orbits of two groups of two planets, Mercury and Mars, and Venus and Earth.

In this chapter I have offered some measure of the size of the Solar System and have hinted at the 500 million year long history of the repeated interactions of Saturn with the Solar System. In the next chapter I will show that Saturn probably was the cause of the development of higher life on this planet, and in subsequent chapters tell how our remote ancestors experienced Saturn in the skies above Earth, probably since 27,000 BC. But first, a few more notes.

Saturn and the Solar System

For the sake of readers not familiar with terms like 'Precambrian' and 'Permian' I am producing a chart of the biological ages of the Earth below -- to scale.

-- 3.9 bya (billion years ago): first (oldest) rocks - - - - - - - - -- 3 bya - - - The whole of this period - (from 3.9 bya to the Cambrian - in 500 mya) is known as the - "Precambrian." Primitive life - forms exist, but do not 'advance' - until the "Cambrian Explosion." - -- 2 bya - - - - - - - - - -- 1 bya - - - - - 500 mya 560 mya: Cambrian explosion; 20 phyla established; - first animals with hard exoskeletons. - 300 mya 350 mya: Devonian. First land plants and animals. - 200 mya 250 mya: Permian mass extinction. - 100 mya 60 mya: Primates (end of dinosaurs); 30 mya: last extinction -- 0 ya 12 mya: Modern plants and animals; 3 mya: glaciers, hominids; 0.1 mya: h.sapiens; 0.06 mya: Cromagnon

After the Precambrian (560 million ya) and before the Triassic or Jurassic (200 million ya), when Earth was still traveling with Saturn, the infrequent excursions into the Solar System would radically change the heat and radiation received by the Earth as Saturn approached the Sun and changed its coma. The orbit of Earth around Saturn might have been altered, accounting for some of the long-lasting climatic changes. And Earth would become suddenly (even if rather briefly) subjected to plasma discharges from Saturn at arc level as Saturn got yet closer to the Sun -- with all the attendant results. Certainly such events would cause some massive global changes -- severe changes in climate and perhaps geological disturbances. It would also cause extinctions, followed (later) by speciation.

Once released from Saturn, the Earth would have orbitted the Sun. The certainty of plasma contacts by Saturn with Earth is almost guaranteed. First, because the two planets would certainly come close enough -- both physically and electrically -- to exchange an electrical arc.

Secondly, an electrical arc, as a toroidal plasma thunderbolt, could travel millions of miles. (In a later chapter I will describe a return lightning strike from Jupiter to the Sun in 685 BC, witnessed worldwide, which traveled 480,000,000 miles.)

A plasma contact from another planet will change the climate. If the plasma arc is localized, it will burn giant craters on land surfaces, vaporize material, raise stupendous clouds of dust, and explosively launch the dust but also large rocks. If the arc strikes water it will bring ocean water to a boil, raising clouds into the stratosphere which will condense to snow or freezing rain. If this happens near land an ice cover will form, with a much longer climatic effect. Conditions would be stable for very long periods of time, and then Saturn would reappear in the sky and a brush with death would ensue for the planets near the Sun. The radical changes in climate over the last 500 million years attests to this.

Saturn thus kept returning to disturb the inner planets of the Sun, although not always to the same degree. But it is not likely that Saturn would ever come very close to any of the inner planets (that is, within a few million miles), because even a few degrees difference in orbital inclination adds up to millions of miles of separation when two planets are both the same distance from the Sun and in the same sector of the ecliptic.

In addition, planets do not collide, for they are each protected by their electric field, that is, by their plasmaspheres. Planets do not see each other unless the outer edges of their plasmaspheres touch. Once the plasmaspheres merge the difference in charge between the two planets, now enclosed in a single plasmasphere, will cause the transmission of a sudden stupendous repulsive impulse (force). The shock of sensing an electic field is instantaneous and massive. A planet like Earth could be moved to a larger orbit from a distance of 20,000,000 miles.

This is followed with an attempt to equalize charge -- resulting in an arc between the two planets which could travel millions of miles and last (as in the case of Saturn and Earth) for hundreds of years. However, plasma discharges seem to have lessened in intensity over time, especially in the last few million years, with more frequent contacts between Saturn and Earth.

Saved from Destruction

You might wonder why the Earth was not utterly destroyed in the repeated massive plasma discharges from Saturn during the previous four billion years. Mars and the Moon and all the planetary satellites have been dried up, evacuated of any atmosphere, and sculpted with craters and scars. Only Earth, Venus, and Titan (a satellite of Saturn), have atmospheres. But only Earth has an atmosphere which does not consist of poisonous gases. Only Earth has unfrozen water, and lots of it. Earth was at a distance from the Sun so as not to be either fried to a crisp or turned into a frozen wasteland. And only Earth seems to be crawling with life. How did we escape the destruction that all the others have experienced? [note 17]

The answer apparently lies with the unique combination of our particular distance from the Sun (which actually is not all that critical), the existence of a magnetic field, lots of water, an atmosphere, and a fast spin. Earth and Mercury are the only inner planet with a magnetic field. However, Mercury has only a very slight magnetic field. And Mercury also is but a small dried-up prune of a planet, nearly standing still, baked ceaselessly by the Sun, and only a little larger than our Moon. It is the Sun's moon. No hope for life there.

The Earth's magnetic field protects the atmosphere with a tightly-held ionosphere (the inner surface of the more extensive plasmasphere). The atmosphere and the oceans, or the shallow inland seas at an earlier time, in turn deflected much of the damage of any electrical plasma strike directed at Earth through the vacuum of space. [note 18]

We were also saved from possible obliteration during the nova event of Saturn in 4200 BC by being located below Saturn rather than in its equatorial plane. Otherwise the nova blowout might have brought humanity to an end, like a similar nova event nearly obliterated all life at the end of the Permian, 250 million years earlier, when Earth was still orbiting Saturn at its equator. At that time Earth suffered a plasma discharge at equatorial level to the shallow seas of Central Africa or the Sahara, resulting in a glacier which covered South America, North Africa, and India -- which were joined together at that time.

The Genesis of Life

A few billion years ago, the Earth must have been in a condition similar to what Venus experiences today -- a cooling crust, unremitting volcanism, ceaseless lightning, and a turbulent poisonous atmosphere -- conditions which grind rocks to dust and build landscapes. Add water to this mix, and couple it with extreme electrical conditions, and you have the makings for the genesis of life. This will probably happen on Venus but it will take some billions of years.

These same conditions were probably what first brought complex molecules and self-replicating molecules into existence on Earth. Experiments with a reducing hydrogen atmosphere, methane, ammonia, water, and an electrical arc have produced many of the organic compounds which form the basis of life. This is, in fact, a popular high school Science Fair experiment. More complex versions of this experiment have produced the long-chained polymer molecules which are also needed and recently have generated cell-like enclosures and the basics of RNA. The probability of achieving a living replicating organism are not all that astronomically high. However, no one has had the time to run the experiments for a half billion years.

But Earth did run these experiments, for nearly 4 billion years. During almost all of that time, 'life' never went very far beyond the simplest forms. The 'progress' was incredibly slow. And it occurred in two or three spurts. Most of the 4 billion year-long era is called the Precambrian and it extends over nine-tenths of the history of the Earth.

Early life forms may not even have had cell walls. But after a half billion years, 3.2 billion years ago, the first cellular organisms (procaryotic cells) show up in the geological record. These are simple microscopic single-cell forms, akin to bacteria and blue-green algae. They have cell walls and a single chromosome, but no nucleus. There is also very early evidence of photosythesis pointing to the slow creation of atmospheric oxygen. [note 19]

After another two billion years (at 1.6 or 1.2 billion years ago), the much larger eucaryotic cells -- cells with a nucleus and other inclusions like mitochondria -- show up. And then, near the end of the Precambrian (560 million years ago) we start to see the first multicellular soft-bodied organisms (worms and plants) -- by evidence left as impressions in mud and sediment. The explosion of life in the Cambrian, and all that followed, is but a continuation of this. However, despite the high complexity of life forms which eventually develop, it is the first forms, the simple procaryotic cells (cells without a nucleus, like bacteria), which still constitute the bulk of living tissue today. Gould has estimated that bacteria and other single cell organisms constitute 80 percent of the biomass of Earth today.

The three discontinuous steps in the development of cellular complexity are approximately 650 to 700 million years apart. The geology of the Precambrian follows a similar series of geological alterations at 700 million year intervals, paralleling the development of life forms. I suspect that the cause of each of these alterations was a mass expulsion and severe plasma blast initiated by Saturn -- a nova event. Many organisms continued an existence through the Precambrian because the life forms remained below the surface of the Earth's waters.

At the close of the Precambrian we see another massive destruction of the terrestrial landscape. Following this is the most impressive expansion of the complexity of life ever. It is as if species spring up out of nowhere. Some 20 phyla show up for the first time, although some date from before the Cambrian. But only half of them last through the extinctions of the following 500 million years, and no new phyla are ever established again.

The genesis of life (barring the complexity of the Cambrian) may very well be a condition regularly experienced by planets throughout the Universe. The process is almost predictable. Certainly the chemistry -- methane, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide gases, water, and electrical discharges -- is common, and most of the planets that we have detected elsewhere are close enough to their star to receive heat from their primary.

However, it requires plasma activity to create advanced life forms -- not a continuous flow, which will destroy all the cellular forms already in existence, but periodic bursts, short enough to allow a portion of the cells to escape complete destruction but long enough to effectively alter millions upon millions of the organic chemical structures of the remaining cells, almost all of which will die off. A few will survive, with altered forms and functions. This is what we would otherwise call the slow 'random' process of 'natural selection' -- but with a billion years of changes occurring all at once. Left to itself, random changes from chemicals, heat, and gamma rays will never create anything beyond bacteria -- even given the span of the billions upon billions of years ascribed to the 'life' of the Universe. A single nova event at the end of the Precambrian did what the previous 4 billion years had not managed to accomplish. [note 20]

The Earth today would still be largely populated by the ocean-bottom plants and animals of the Precambrian -- sponges, seaweed, worms, and trilobites -- if it had not been for the much more frequently repeating series of limited plasma discharges which started some time after the Cambrian. These were completely different from the infrequent novas; they involved attempts at charge equalization by Saturn on reaching the neighborhood of the Sun, a space that was regularly traversed by Saturn after the Cambrian. The amount of plasma flow was limited by the short time duration that Saturn was close to the Sun -- probably only a matter of months.

I would vote for life being almost universal throughout the Galaxy. But I doubt if any of the life forms will ever get beyond the simplest organisms. It is likely that life anywhere else will never go beyond sponges and trilobites.

Recent Glaciations

As I have noted, repeated extinctions mark all biological life on Earth at least since the Cambrian, 560 mya. The interval between major extinctions has been estimated to be on the order of 26 to 27 million years. The only two glaciations the Earth has experienced since the Permian (200 mya) also seem to fit the pattern of 26 or 27 million year intervals. These are the Antarctic glacier of 30 mya (some have this as 40 million) and the northern glaciation which started 3 mya -- actually 2.7 mya.

Based on the likelihood that long-term plasma contacts with Saturn were responsible for the glaciation, it looks as if Saturn arrived again in the vicinity of the inner planets of the Solar System about 2.7 mya, when the cycles of northern glaciation start. But this time the evidence indicates that Saturn not only returned, but stayed. After some 20 previous entries into the Solar System since the Cambrian, Saturn probably met up with Jupiter, and was forced into a much shorter orbital period -- certainly much shorter than the previous 26 million year period.

The indication that Saturn may have remained among the inner planets is the record of a series of intermittent glaciations, accompanied with sporadic speciation. Included in the new species are the first set of six hominids, followed at a later date with three more. All of these except the very last one, which is us, have become extinct.

The intermittent glaciations of the last three million years would suggest that these plasma contacts were made in passing -- as Saturn passed by -- rather than in a configuration where Saturn would be close to Earth and deliver a stream of plasma over an extended period of time. With 80 percent of Earth covered by oceans, it is likely that many earlier strikes were never recorded, although there are land strikes (always identified as 'meteor impacts') of uncertain ages. One much earlier plasma strike to land, which has been dated with some certainty, is the absolutely gigantic circular Chicxulub 'cometary' depression in the Yucatan, made 65 mya and 110 miles in diameter, resulting in the (eventual) demise of the dinosaurs. But even land strikes of plasma in arc mode, if made at various intervals in the past in multiples of 27 million years, are unlikely to leave much of a dateable record today. [note 21]

It is thus unusual that there were plasma strikes which were close enough to land areas and of an extended duration to leave a record in land glaciers. The last two strikes (of 30 mya and 3 mya) were perhaps qualitatively different from contacts in the more remote past. What was different is that the last two series of plasma contacts (30 mya and 3 mya) extended over a long period of time and contacted the Earth from above or below or both (rather than laterally), concentrating at the magnetic poles. The past strikes, like the one that formed the Chicxulub crater (plus 5 additional 'craters'), instead may have been gigantic single bolts of interplanetary lightning -- plasmoid lightning bolts -- not a constant streaming of plasma. [note 22]

Again, however, glaciations, although they may indicate Saturn's visits, are not a reliable index. Glaciers, which end up marking up the landscape with their movements, require a continuous fall of snow over an extended period of time. Thus, a brief plasma contact, or a plasma contact in dark mode which might disperse upon reaching the Earth's ionosphere, would leave no visible record on the Earth's surface.

The plasma stream has to be at least in glow mode, and has to last a long time in order to boil off large quantities of ocean waters. In glow mode the plasma stream would attempt to follow the curvature of the Earth's magnetic field and contact the Earth's surface at the magnetic poles (both the north and the south). At a magnetic pole the plasma stream would increase in density to become visible in arc mode. The arc would vaporize ocean water, raise stupendous clouds, and drop snow in an area maybe a thousand miles in diameter.

But, still, we would have no glaciation record if the magnetic poles were located in oceans away from land. That, as a matter of fact, seems to have happened repeatedly in the past. Anytime in the past when the magnetic pole of Earth was located in the mid latitudes of the Pacific or Atlantic ocean there would have been no glaciation at all. [note 23]

... Geological Record

There are three sets of data which bear on glaciation and thus provide secondary data for plasma contacts. The first is the geological record. This consists of the scars and sediment left behind at each advance and retreat of the edges of land glaciers. This is the most reliable record of glaciation. The geological records include those of northern Europe, Canada and the northern USA. From this data three (or four) recent major land glaciations have been identified, starting at 2.7 mya in Europe, and followed at intervals by the Illinois and Wisconsin glaciations of Canada and the USA. The glaciers have different names in Europe and America. [note 24]

However, the usefulness of the geological record is limited. The glaciations repeatedly built up and retreated and there are long periods during which nothing seems to have happened. Also, a study of where the edges of the glaciers appeared (and retreated) tells nothing of the central areas, and in fact it is still not even agreed if there were three or four glaciers (or five) or how they overlapped. [note 25]

... The Greenland Ice Cores

Another set of data which bears on glaciation is provided by the Greenland ice cores, from holes bored 9000 feet into Greenland's nearly two mile thick glacier. These provide a record of temperatures of the fallen snow in the past (gaged from the chemical makeup of the ice), but not over nearly as long a period as, for example, the data from Oceanic Oxygen Isotopes cores (see below). The ice cores reach bedrock after 120,000 layers -- assumed to represent 120,000 years.

In fact, the date of 120,000 years ago, when the bottom of the glacier is reached, corresponds to an interglacial warming period, the Eemian, dated from 130,000 to 120,000 years ago, and corresponding to stage 5e in the Oceanic Oxygen Isotope Series (see below). Greenland was apparently clear of glaciers at that time. Antarctic ice cores also reach bedrock in as many layers.

However, there is something wrong here. The interpretation of the data of the ice cores is based on two questionable assumptions. The first assumption is that the glaciation was continuous over long spans of time. But if we accept the idea that intersections with the orbit of Saturn were the cause of the temperature swings and the less frequent land glaciation, we must conclude that the actual periods of glaciation were intermittent and possibly very short. It is only the snow fall in the mountains of Greenland that is continuous. [note 26]

The second assumption is that glaciation is associated with the north pole. Yet the region of northern Asia, which, like Greenland, lies within the arctic circle, was never glaciated. The glacier layers of Greenland were assumed to represent a year-by-year record of deposition which would vary little from one location to another. Since the center of glaciation moved over time, even over short periods of time (as the north magnetic pole does today), we could expect the deposition layers of snow and ice in different locations of Greenland to be different. This has proven to be so; the discrepancy between ice cores bored at different locations has been noted and a concept of discontinuity is being woven into the current analysis by the researchers.

The last boring brought up organic material -- in defiance of the fact that a glacier would have scoured the surface clean (noted by the researchers). Stuck to the bottom of the drill bit was what looked like a pine needle.

It should also be noted that despite much bragging to the contrary, little data has actually been obtained from the ice cores which correlates to other world-wide events, like volcanic eruptions. Only a single late worldwide event has been correlated, and not with any certainty. [note 27]

... Oceanic Oxygen Isotopes

A third set of data bearing on glaciation is the data of Oceanic Oxygen Isotope cores (from the sludge of sunken skeletons of surface foraminifera) which is understood as an index of ocean temperatures near the surface and thus should indicate the existence of glaciation, or at least glacial melting. The data is used as an index of ocean volume compared to the amount of water locked up as land glaciers.

Oceanic oxygen isotope analysis gives results which extend back 65 million years, and is thought to represent a measure of world-wide climatic conditions. The record during the last few million years is extremely variable. The cooler periods during the last three million years have an interval of about 100,000 years (and intermediate intervals at 50,000 years). The standard explanation is that the cold periods correspond to periods of glacial buildup. I will suggest other causes in the second half of this chapter, below.

During the last 200,000 years there are even shorter intervals (20,000 years) between cooler periods. Then at about 60,000 years ago, the variation becomes almost impossibly chaotic, so that in the most recent period we encounter temperature swings at intervals as short as 3,000 years. The "fine detail" of the Greenland cores record shows swings in temperature as short as 70 years. Some geological records for the same period show even shorter intervals between glacial build-up and retreats -- as short as 20 years. [note 28]

The data from oceanic oxygen isotopes is problematic in that there is likely to be a time lag between glacial buildup and changes in the mix of oxygen isotopes. Melt waters after a glaciation ends may give the indication of 'cold,' even though there is no current glaciation. The melts may have lasted thousands of years. The oceans may not have responded as we would expect them to react under current conditions. For example, based on lake-bottom pollen studies, paleontologists have noted the continuity of plant species indicating warm climatic conditions which carry through periods marked as cold by the oceanic oxygen isotopes studies.

What can be said of all three of these records (geology, ice cores, and oceanic oxygen) is that they represent a lengthy period of glaciations of indeterminate lengths and a wildly chaotic climate -- which may represent the existence of glaciers, or which may have yet other or additional causes. [note 29]

A solution should be sought in the possibility of intermittent plasma contacts with Saturn at the magnetic poles, which would build glaciers on adjacent land areas, which will in turn melt, or at least partially, before another contact is made at a different location, because the magnetic pole has had thousands of years to drift to a new location.

Although elaborate theories have been brought forward to account for the temperature swings, it would be difficult to estimate global conditions if they were due to an unimaginable billion ampere arc boiling away an ocean at its contact point, resulting in a continuous snowfall over a region a thousand miles in diameter. And, as I note elsewhere, I seriously think 'warm' climatic periods should be associated with glaciation, and 'cold' with the intermediate periods -- rather the reverse of what is held today.

To this should be added the possibility that the plasma contacts could have lasted for years or even hundreds of years and that the contacts could radically change the climate of Earth (for the better or worse) in ways which are totally beyond our comprehension today because we have never experienced anything like it in our stable modern world.

Additionally I would suggest that the proximity of the huge planet Saturn (as well as the proximity of Jupiter) would frequently displace Earth in its orbit so that the climatic effect of the Sun would vary for long periods. Based on scant information from some creation myths, and currently on physical evidence just now developing (after 2009), there exists a clear indication that in 10,500 BC the Earth made electrical contact with Saturn plasmasphere. This resulted in an intense electrical shock, causing the "darkness before creation" which seems to have ended only about 9,000 BC, when the climate of Earth suddenly improved. This was not the only electrical contact with Saturn that we can trace. The cessation of northern glaciation in Greenland was not at cause, for the Greenland ice cores continue to count layers of snowfall to the present day. But all of northern Europe and Canada was cleared of ice in a matter of a few hundred years. I will get back to this further below (in the next chapter).

Image: Extent of all glaciation over the last three million years superimposed on each other. On the map above, not all of the indicated area was glaciated at the same time. The stars are three estimated center-points of glaciation over the last 60,000 years. "X" is the current location of the magnetic north pole.

... The Last Glaciation

The accepted last interglacial period in Europe, but not elsewhere (or worldwide), stretched from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago. It is a period which saw both the Neanderthals and Cromagnon populations in Europe. The Cromagnon people are us. The last glaciation followed between 25,000 to 12,000 years ago. The Neanderthals had disappeared by this time, although 'pockets' of Neanderthals persist late in Spain and the Levant, perhaps as late as 8000 BC.

The following is the record of glaciation and interglacials for central England for the last half million years. Some of the periods correspond in name from one country to the next. The "Windermeer" interglacial, for example, does, but many of the names and date estimates are local. For example, the "Anglian" glaciation in England, shown below, will not match glaciation names (or dates) for Switzerland. Interglacials -- periods of warmer climate -- are shown in parenthesis below.

glaciation period (interglacials) Years Before Present Notes on hominids ---------------- -------------------- ------------------ Anglian 480,000 -- (Cromerian) (480,000 - 426,000) H.heidelbergensis (Hoxmian) (425,000 - 375,000) H.erectus (?) Wolstonian 330,000 - 135,000 - tools (Ipswichian) (135,000 - 35,000) - tools Devensian 70,000 - 10,000 H.neanderthalis - maximum at.. 25,000 and 10,000 English channel dry (Chelford) (65,000 - 59,000) - H.n tools (Upton Warren) (42,000 - 38,000) (H.sapiens in Europe) (25,000 - 8,000) large mammals disappear - cold - 27,650 (last H.n in Europe) - ice retreat - 14,500 (in England) (Windermeer) (13,800 - 12,000) - tools - colder - 12,500 - cold snap 10,500 - 9,000 (Younger Dryas) - glacier gone - 10,000 - warming - 9,000 and after channel flooded - cooling 6,500 - 4,500 6,500 - after (4500 BC) farming established

I have shown the above to give some scope to the variability of glaciation, as well as to indicate the presence of hominids only miles from the glacier. [note 30]

Ice Ages and Humans

What the data of the oceanic oxygen isotopes record and the ice cores reveal is a long series of interactions with Saturn. Some of the interactions are of short duration, all are sporadically weaker or stronger, with long periods of thousands of years where nothing happened. The only certainty is that the hominids of the northern hemisphere were repeatedly and (in geological time spans) unremittingly exposed to bursts of plasma.

There ought to be a coincidence between the 'evolving' hominids (or speciation, as I have pointed out in the previous chapter) and the plasma strikes of the last three million years, or, as our only evidence of the plasma strikes, the glaciations. The following chart compares hominids and estimates of glaciation. The table is based on an illustrator's interpretation, done for a popular book, with the various species fading in and out as bar graphs. I'm sure the creation of the chart was supervised and critiqued by 'experts' (Meave Leaky was involved in some of the editing), and is probably as close to actuality as we can expect given the lack of solid data and the imprecision of date ranges.

What struck me, perhaps from the perspective of the bias of my thesis, was that the data of first appearances and extinctions of hominids appear in clumps, so that the appearance and demise of various species happen at roughly the same time period (although often with a lag of 50,000 to 200,000 years).

A.afarensis------------------------ --A.africanus------------------ -Aa----- -Hr------- -Ab--------- -Ha------- -Ar---- -He----------------- -Hh- -Hn- Hs 6..-..-..-..5..-..-..-..4..-..-..-..3..-..-..-..2..-..-..-..1..-..-..-..0 - millions of years ago - xxxxx?x?x?x.x.x?x?x?x.x.x.xxxx.xx. x?x?x -- uncertain glaciation x.x.x -- sporadic glaciation xxxxx -- persistent glaciation Australopithecus Homo Aa -- A.aethiopicus Hr -- H.rudolfensis Ab -- A.boisei Ha -- H.habilis Ar -- A.robustus He -- H.erectus Hh -- H.heidelbergensis Hn -- H.neanderthalis Hs -- H.sapiens -- from Robin McKie "The Dawn of Man" (2000)

I have shown both the Australopithecus and Homo hominid species above. Australopithecus (a hominid species originating 6 mya or more) has no issue after 1.2 mya. I have added the "glaciation record" as an utter simplification. I should note that the "persistent glaciation" is based on temperature records, and may not correctly represent glaciation.

Most interesting is how we are represented by only two species for a span of over 3 million years. However, as the northern glaciation of Earth starts up about 2.7 mya, Australopithecus Africanus disappears, to be replaced in a short time (geological short time) by six new species of Australopithecus and Homo hominids. [note 31]

For nearly 30 to 60 million years primates had existed throughout the world. They were very common in the northern hemisphere, including North America, 35 mya. But the species disappear from the northern regions everywhere by 30 mya and are reduced to the tropics. It looked like the primates outside of the tropics of Africa and Asia did not survive the changes at the end of the Eocene, 30 mya. At that time we see glaciation in Antarctica, extinctions, and a drop in global temperatures.

"Following the terminal Eocene extinction which took out the Dinocerata, Archeoceti, and most of the Titanotheres and Creodonts, new kinds of mammals evolved and expanded in an evolutionary radiation of many new types. These included the prehistoric ancestors of dogs, cats, rhinoceroses, and horses."
-- [http://www.palaeos.com]

Nothing much happens with the primates anywhere following the extinctions of 30 mya, except for the bipedalism of Australopithecus in Africa. That appears to have happened 6 or 5 mya. Bipedalism is important, yet paleontologists cannot figure out why this change occurred. It is a major change in the bone structure of the legs, hips, knees, and neck. The thinking initially was that bipedalism evolved to release the arms to make tools and carry food. But no tools have been found from this remote time. It would be more likely that the arms were used to carry babies, which could no longer travel on mom's hairy back. (But as usual, this confuses causes and effects.) Bipedal walking, however, is amazingly efficient compared to the knuckle walking of our predecessors. And, as the central African jungles shrank, walking needed to be done to gather food. A better suggestion has been that the bipedalism is part of a well-developed running ability. We don't sprint any better than other carnivores, but we can run forever.

Australopithecus thus appears adapted to a changing environment -- he is no longer confined to the jungles of Zaire (Congo), as his (and our) nearest relatives, the Chimpanzees, continue to be. He could become a creature of the savanna and expand his territory as environmental changes continue to occur in Africa after 5 or 4 mya.

About 2.7 mya the northern glaciation starts. Shortly thereafter (in geological time spans) we see a proliferation of Australopithecus and the first two Homo species. H.rudolfensis and A.aethiopithecus appear at about 2.5 mya, while A.africanus disappears. This is followed at 2.25 mya by the appearance of A.boisei and H.habilis.

Diversification and disappearances continued another half million years with the appearance of A.robustus and H.erectus (2 mya), and then the almost simultaneous disappearance of five out of the six species of Australopithecus and Homo at 1.75 to 1.5 mya. Only H.erectus survives.

If these extinctions had happened in the more remote past it would have entered the biological record as another mass extinction. But because these changes happened so near our time, and especially since they involve our predecessors, the tendency is to think of it as 'evolutionary changes,' where some species are fit and some are not -- in Darwin's parlance, "natural selection."

But in fact we should be impressed by the fact that, after a period of nearly 30 million years during which no 'evolution' occurs, we are suddenly confronted by the appearance of six species, all of whom, except one, disappear again after a "mere" million years. I would suspect a visit by Saturn as the speciation event, 2.7 mya, and a return visit about two million years later. That means that, for the first time in 500 million years, the orbit of Saturn had been reduced from 27 million years to a very short orbit of a million years or perhaps even much less.

Only a single species, H.erectus, carried through the long 2 million year period only to disappear in turn about 200,000 to 50,000 years ago. This is a long stretch where nothing happened, and it is thought to represent a long interglacial periods or only sporadic glaciation. Only towards the end of the 2 million year span, 500,000 years ago, do we see the appearance of other Homo species -- H.heidelbergensis, H.neanderthalensis, and later H.sapiens. Glaciation had definitely started up again in earnest by then (about 600,000 years ago).

Homo Erectus

"The suite of discovery, innovation, and increasing intelligence that gave some australopithecine a better ability to hunt, prepare food, and so on, happened perhaps around 2.5 Ma [mya] at a brain size that was typically australopithecine. That suite changed the diet toward meat, higher protein, less chewing, etc, and at some point the evolving jaw reached a morphology [more] typically [of] Homo. The larger brain [of Erectus] came later, but it perhaps came more easily because the jaw musculature was smaller."
-- Richard Cowen, at [http://www.geology.ucdavis.edu]

In the million years after H.erectus became the sole surviving hominid, he spread everywhere -- into all of Africa, Asia, Europe (apparently), and possibly into the Americas (although there is only slim evidence of this). H.erectus is our only connection to the remote past, the single link to the earlier diversity. [note 32]

Erectus was most likely naked, and had a very thick skull, like the later Neanderthals. Unlike the later Neanderthals, he did not bury his dead. He ate fruit, vegetables, and road kill; but also hunted down antelope, used fire to roast meat and burn down prairies, and made tools... well, he made one tool.

In the following, Noel Boaz, a paleontologist, reacts appropriately to this long lineage in detailing a single outstanding fact. This is from his book "Eco Homo" (1997). He is writing about H.erectus, who ranged over East Africa and Asia (into China) from 1,800,000 to maybe 200,000 years ago (50,000 ya in southeast Asia) -- a very long time, more than one and a half million years. H.erectus had a brain case (after a half million years) only a little smaller than ours, and likely was a lot smarter than dogs, apes, or chimps. But did he 'think?' Noel Boaz writes...

"The available archaeological data on Homo Erectus reveals that one type of tool was used for about a million years -- one type of stone tool, for a million years, all over Africa wherever Homo Erectus is found after 1.4 mya. For some reason it is not associated with Asian Homo Erectus."

Actually they are also found in Europe and into the western part of Asia.

"This stone tool is the Acheulean hand ax."

"It is not an easy tool to make and modern Homo Sapiens graduate students are not able to fashion a very good one even after an entire academic term of practical experience."

"The implication is that Homo Erectus would have expended a tremendous amount of time and energy -- years -- laboriously learning how to make hand axes. The technique must have been passed on by rote repetition. Hand axes stayed the same for untold generations."

"This method of cultural transmission is entirely foreign to us. Nothing that we Homo Sapiens learn and internalize stays the same. We have to change it, improve it, make it look better, modify it to fit our specific needs -- be it a chair, an art form, or our own language. But this never occurred to Homo Erectus, not in a million years."
-- Noel Boaz, "Eco Homo" 1997

Erectus made additional tools of stone, but these are at best described as crude, consisting mostly of split pebbles. The Acheulean hand axe is so unusual, and so clearly a finished product of a very specific design, that it almost looks like an import from the future. It is flat, carefully chipped (and sharp) along all edges, almond shaped with the pointed end always displaced to one side of the central axis, and consistently modeled to a shape which does not vary over an enormous span of time and geography. Since it apparently did not enter central or eastern Asia or the Americas, we would have to assume a cultural transmission originating in central Africa.

What Boaz fails to note is that the Acheulean hand axe is a very hefty device, weighing over 20 pounds, and requiring at least two hands to lift, if not two people. It is useless as a tool for working wood, preparing hides, cutting meat, or pulverizing roots. It looks more like an assault weapon for taking down hooved animals by splitting open their skulls.

Image: Acheulean hand axe of classical design. Neanderthals in Europe, after about 300,000 BC, reduce the design to look more like a oversized triangular arrow head with a rounded bottom.

William H. Calvin, in "The Ascent of Mind, Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence" (1990), suggests that the Acheulean hand axe is indeed an assault weapon. When tossed en masse by a group of Erectus hominids at a closely packed herd of antelope at a watering hole, the axes would cause deep cuts in the skin of the animals, because the aerodynamics of the axes cause them to spin and always exit from the fall with its edge down. The eccentric point of the axe would rotate and cause a rip in the skin. Calvin writes, about experiments performed by Eileen O'Brien..

"The replica indeed spun well; that flattened shape and bilateral symmetry are very useful for setting a spin. O'Brien and her two athletic friends discovered a totally unsuspected aerodynamic property of their hand-ax replica: in mid-flight, it would turn on edge and land that way. Indeed, the hand ax would usually slice into the ground and bury its point."

"..the tendency to land edge-on matches up with a previously puzzling aspect of the archaeology: hand axes are often found in dried-up ponds and lakes and creeks, sometimes standing on edge!"

The natural reflex of an antelope, writes Calvin, to an impact by a tossed boulder, is to set out its legs on the side opposite the impact. But the reflex to a tear in the skin of its back is to flex its knees, as when the back catches on overhanging branches as happens in walking through brush. In the next moment the herd, stampeding in flight to the attack, would have trampled and killed the unbalanced animals.

This reasoning, along with other evidence, suggests group action not unlike the group hunting tactics of chimpanzees today. It requires only the coordination of underhand tosses of the group. But to lob this device at individual animals would require quite a bit more hand-eye coordination. Calvin suggests that this may be one of the evolutionary circumstances which quadrupled the brain of Erectus over the course of two million years.

Considering the failure of Erectus to evolve the design of the Acheulean hand axe, I wonder how they conceived of the design and its use in the first place. The Acheulean hand axe includes three required design elements: It has to be flat, it has to be sharpened on all edges, and it has to have an almond shape. This last item, the pointed shape at one end, is such a fine design detail, yet so logically useful (for it is the rotating point which rips the skin), that it is amazing it ever came into being.

There is, however, a fourth design element which seems to have no useful function. This is the offset of the pointed end from the central axis of the axe. Yet it is copied from one hand axe to the next on three continents over the course of a million years. Every hand axe is lopsided in design, and they all copy from each other. I will try to answer this question further below.

In the African Great Rift Valley, at a site known as Olorgesaille, in Kenya, there is a ten acre site littered with thousands of Acheulean hand axes. The materials were sorted into groups -- raw materials, finished axes, and blunted axes (apparently for resharpening) -- suggesting a factory. Raw materials were carted from 6 miles away. The factory remained in use for one million years. [note 33]

The only possible users of the site (there are no bones found) would have been Homo Erectus. We can ask the question, "Are these humans or smart animals?" They certainly are not us, and there is no indication that we, Homo Sapiens, slowly evolved from these hominids. When we do finally appear, it is complete and with astounding suddenness.

Homo Sapiens

We are preceded, however, on the European continent by Homo Neanderthalis. The later Erectus and the following Neanderthals developed the method of making cutting blades by knapping pre-shaped flint nodules. This was a development which may have derived from the Acheulean hand axe. For 300,000 years the blades are consistently the same size. Clive Gamble notes that it was the process of knapping which was culturally carried forward. The Neanderthal mind was on the technique, not on the end product. Only this explains how the blades remain the same for such an unimaginable long time, and how no variations are ever developed. Yet the Neanderthals were effective predators and scavengers.

However, for 100,000 years the Neanderthals never once dug a trench to sleep in, set up tent poles, placed rocks in a circle for a fire, pierced shells or pretty stones, carved a representative image, or buried their dead. We, H.sapiens, did. And we made art as well. [note 34]

Only during the last 20,000 years, when contact is made with the Cromagnon H.sapiens, who had invaded Europe from the east, does the repertoire of the Neanderthals start to include other cutting tools, as well as ornaments. There are even some Neanderthal burials. Not all groups interchanged ideas and materials with the Cromagnon. Some remained separate for upward to 10,000 years. Meanwhile, Cromagnon groups are painting cave walls.

About the explosive material culture, which is seen to arrive in eastern and western Europe at the beginning of what (as a result) is defined as the Upper Paleolithic (45,000 to 35,000 ya), James Shreeve, in "The Neanderthal Enigma" (1995), writes..

"New types of stone tools proliferate, taking on regional style where before there was global monotony. In Africa as well as Europe, elegant implements carved from bone, antler, and ivory appear in abundance. Change replaces stasis."

"In France new industries rush in and disappear again like Paris fashions -- the Aurignacian, the Gravettian, the Solutrean, the Magdalanian -- each with technological styles and innovations all but unknown in the period preceding it. From Spain to the Urals, site lists begin to read like proto-Sears catalogs: sewing needles, barbed projectile points, fish hooks, rope, meat-drying racks, stone lamps, temperature-controlled hearths, complex dwelling structures."

The Neanderthals had appeared in Europe a few hundred thousand years ago, preceded by 100,000 years by H.heidelbergensis. In Europe, also, H.erectus disappears after the Neanderthals show up. H.erectus remains throughout central Africa and southeast Asia to 50,000 years ago and maybe later. Later finds of skulls in Asia tend to show a combination of features of H.erectus and H.sapiens, suggesting to some paleontologists an 'evolution' of H.sapiens.

By many estimates H.erectus is our progenitor because portions of mitochondrial DNA extracted from some H.neanderthalis do not match ours. Before these determinations, H.neanderthalis was our favored grandparent. But there are problems with H.erectus also. In addition to the fact that H.erectus seemed to have had the brains of a gnat, the skull thickness does not match. Erectus and Neanderthals both have thick skulls, at one time suggested as a defense against club attacks by members of the same species; we definitely do not. Since the identities of various species shift with the identification of additional specimens, and as a result also their temporal and geographic distribution, there is no telling exactly where we (H.sapiens) came from.

By the time we are established as the single surviving species of hominid, our ancestors had passed through three bottlenecks. The first was the disappearance of primates almost everywhere some 30 mya at the end of the Eocene. The second was the disappearance of all except one of the six species of hominids about 1.5 mya.

The third was the return of Saturn 120 thousand years ago. Three of the four species of hominids in existence at that time become extinct at about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, although H.erectus may have disappeared earlier in Europe. We seem to have speciated at about this time. Perhaps we developed a certain immunity to radiation from the continued plasma strikes. Among paleontologists the typical thinking is that we rose to prominence by wiping out the competing Neanderthals (which mainly existed only in Europe). It is certainly possible, but it is as likely that we either outbred the Neanderthals or interbred. That might also be true for any groups of H.erectus, and certainly H.erectus traits show up among modern humans. We are very closely related species, and interbreeding would most likely have produced results.

Analysis of our mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), taken from populations throughout the world, places our genesis at about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago -- by mathematical theories of spontaneous changes -- and in East Africa, popularly known as the "out of Africa" thesis. But as noted by R. A. Fonda, one among many,

"The putative common source of all human mtDNA is probably neither chronologically nor causally related to the origin of H.sapiens."

What Fonda is saying is, that the "out of Africa" thesis does not add up. The physical barriers are immense, and the mtDNA trail (the biological inheritance relationship between humans) points to derivations from diverse and long separated H.erectus groups. Fonda suggests a genesis of H.sapiens in eastern Asia as much more likely, followed by the subsequent interbreeding with Asiatic and African H.erectus populations. Since Asiatic H.erectus can be biologically traced to Africa, the data is easily misread or misinterpreted as concluding that all modern humans came originally from Africa.

The 'moderns' (H.sapiens.sapiens) show up in Australia by 65,000 years ago (as Cromagnon types, today dated to 40,000 ya), in central Asia and the Levant by 50,000 years ago (currently estimated at 100,000 years ago), in South Africa by as long as 75,000 years ago, and in Europe by 40,000 years ago. We are likely between glaciations during this time. By the time glaciation starts up again sporadically we are established nearly everywhere. [note 35]

If H.erectus was a traveler who could spread thoughout all of Asia in a few hundred thousand years, H.sapiens, by comparison, races across the globe. After having been sighted in southeastern Asia (Australia) 65,000 years ago, H.sapiens has spread to southern Europe by 40,000 years ago, the edge of the Arctic Sea by 30,000 years ago, and to the Americas by 35,000 to 30,000 years ago. Estimates vary, but the coincidence of dates is remarkable. About the same time H.neanderthalis and H.erectus disappear (H.heidelbergensis having disappeared earlier); we are everywhere. [note 36]

How did we get there, and especially, how did we get to the Americas? Someone suggested that Native Americans could easily have walked from Alaska to Patagonia in 1000 years at a pace of a mile per day, with frequent rest stops. This assumes humans spread to Alaska from Asia via the Bering Straits. But that discounts the intermediate barriers of the glaciated mountains south of Alaska, the jungles of Central America, and the high Andes. And, also, who would want to walk a mile a day for a thousand years?

There is another route, both to Alaska as well as the entire Pacific coast of the Americas, and that is by boat. However, that notion is something almost totally unthinkable to archaeologists who contemplate today's wooly oceans and additionally hold our ancestors as inept. I'll get back to that in a following chapter, for it also involves the spread of languages. [note 37]

---

Endnotes

Note 1 --

The descriptions of this text are mostly lifted from the hand-out brochure "Walking Tour" presented by me for an installation at an outdoor group exhibition at the Morris Civic Auditorium Plaza in South Bend, Indiana, sponsored by the South Bend Regional Museum Of Art (Indiana) on July 2 - 4, 1993. The point of the installation was a demonstration of the absolute vastness of space (and nearby space at that) at a time when "space travel" was a popular notion and a severe misconception induced by the excitement of "Star Wars" and furthered by a president and his flamboyant SDI program.

The model in South Bend was 175 feet in its largest dimension. Milliwatt lamps were used for the planets, measuring 1/16 of an inch in diameter. Even so, all of the planets could be spotted at these distances, despite sunlight, competing street lights at night, and the business of trees, people, and automobiles.
[return to text]

Note 2 --

The Moon is actually not a satellite of the Earth, but an independent planet sharing the Earth's orbit. Although the orbit of the Moon, as measured from the Sun, is only a fraction of a degree different from the orbit of Earth, it is enough to raise the Moon 20,000 miles above the north pole of the Earth in part of its spiralling path, followed six months later with travel 20,000 miles below the south pole. The moon does not travel on the Earth's equator, which it would if it were a satellite. It travels in the ecliptic. None of the planetary satellites do that. That is why the moon relocates higher and lower in the sky over the period of the year, and there are only four lunar or solar eclipses per year -- in the month when the Moon passes the Earth in its up and down travel.

Image: Earth and Moon orbits are differently inclined.

The Moon is also much too far from its primary (Earth), and way too large to be a satellite of Earth. Two satellites of Jupiter and one of Saturn are larger than our Moon, but they orbit planets which are 10 times larger than Earth in diameter, and none of these large satellites are as far away from their primary as the Moon is from Earth. Most satellites of all the planets are very close to their primary. Only Saturn's moons (satellites) Iapetus and Phoebe are very distant (2 and 8 million miles), and the eight outer moons of Jupiter are all beyond 8 million miles and on very irregular orbits.
[return to text]

Note 3a --

"Using both ground-based telescopes and space probes, a large number of Giant Planet moons (satellites) have been discovered, as summarized below. These fall into two categories as defined by their orbital parameters: 1) regular moons - those with almost circular orbits that generally follow nearly equatorial paths; and 2) irregular moons - those with highly elliptical, large, and tilted orbits; many with retrograde motion, i.e., moving in a direction opposite to the rotation of their parent planet. The bulk of these satellites are small (many just a few kilometers in longest dimension) and irregular in shape. Most are likely captured asteroids and perhaps comets."

"The current inventory of Giant Planet moons is as follows (information extracted from Jewitt, Sheppard, and Kleyna, The Strangest Satellites in the Solar System, Scientific American, August 2006, pp. 41-47):"

• Jupiter: 8 regular moons; 55 irregular.
• Saturn: 21 regular; 26 irregular
• Uranus: 18 regular; 9 irregular
• Neptune: 6 regular; 7 irregular
• Pluto: 1 regular; 2 irregular

"This grand total of 153 moons will likely increase as Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are eventually visited by spacecraft that can detect small objects not yet visible from ground telescopes. This number of moons is in stark contrast to the inner planets which so far have only 3 satellites orbiting around Earth and Mars."

-- http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sect19/Sect19_14.html#19-52

[return to text]

Note 3 --

The diagram below compares the spin axis of the Earth with the spin axis of the Sun. The diagram would represent the mid winter position along the orbit, when the plane defined by the spin axis of Earth and the radius of the orbit is perpendicular to the plane of the orbit.

Image: Earth and Sun axial and Orbital Inclination.

By adding the inclination of the orbit to the equatorial of the Sun, 7 degrees, to the inclination of the Earth's spin axis to the orbit, 23.5 degrees (known as its obliquity), the amount that the Earth's spin axis differs from the spin axis of the Sun is found to be 30.5 degrees.

Of course the condition of having the winter solstice at the 'lowest' part of the orbit with respect to the Sun's equatorial (as shown above) does not happen in actuality. But since the orientation of a planet's spin axis in space does not change with travel along its orbit, the calculation is valid even though the diagram represents the equivalent of a thought experiment.
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Note 4 --

The geometry for the Moon assumes that the spiral path around the Earth is also an orbit around the Sun. The distance the Moon travels above the Earth (and thus above the ecliptic) can be found from the radius of the Moon's orbit and the maximum angle made with the ecliptic as seen from Earth, 238,757 * sin(5.145/deg) = 21,410 mi. The Moon falls below the Earth by the same distance.

Image: Orbit of the Moon with respect to the Sun. Side view.

The diameter of the orbit of the Moon averages to the diameter of the Earth's orbit. But it is a disk differently inclined to the orbit of the Earth, and thus at an angle to the ecliptic. Measured from the Sun, the inclination of the Moon's orbit with respect to the ecliptic can be found as the arctangent, (arctangent(21,410 / AU))/rad = 0.013 degrees.

The obliquity of the Moon to its orbit around Earth is 6.7 degrees. This is the angle of the rotational axis of the Moon with respect to the equivalent orbit around the Sun.
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Note 5 --

Although the spin axes of Earth, Saturn, Mars, and Neptune all point to locations of the sky which are 31 degrees away from where the axis of the Sun points, it is curious that they are not bunched together. It is this last which would be expected if indeed it is difficult to change the spin of a planet and if all the Saturnian planets came into the Solar System pointing initially to the same location among the stars.

Although today the locations where the axes of these planets point are different from each other, yet they are all about the same angular measure away from the axis of the Sun. This suggests that, if the axis of a planet is to swing to a new location, it follows a path which describes a circle which has as its center the rotational axis of the Sun. The question remains, Why would this be so? The only significant physical element in the Solar System which could have the property of always pointing in the 'up' direction of the Sun, is an up-down magnetic field experienced at the location of the Sun's equatorial disk (which has not been detected). Combined with a radial current flow at the level of the Sun's equatorial (for which the Solar Wind would qualify) this would provide a force moving the planets forward. This is the right-hand rule of electricity and magnetism (F = I -> * B ->). However, things are not likely to be that simple.

Additionally, there is the curious phenomenon of the precession of the Earth's axial inclination, which advances the Earth's axis in a circle, and is otherwise known as the precession of the equinoxes. The center of this circle, which has been confidently defined by astronomers, is the self same circle where half the planet axes are located, and which has as its center the rotational axis of the Sun.

The precession is caused by the Earth's Moon, the only 'satellite' of any planet which, with every rotation, moves out of and back into the Earth's plasmasphere. The disturbance is real, for the precession has been noted since late antiquity. But the disturbed axis of the Earth remains at an inclination which keeps it on the 30 degree radius circle about the rotational axis of the Sun.

The often mentioned notion, that the inclination of the spin axis of Earth and Mars are the same, is a fiction. The angles have a close numerical value, but, as can be seen from the diagram in the text, they point to entirely different location in the dome of the stars. So, rather than the axial inclination of the two planets being nearly identical, in reality they differ by over 40 spherical degrees.
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Note 6 --

The corkscrew idea was reiterated (to me) by the Saturnian people as late as summer of 2007. Interestingly, in the 2007 book by Wallace Thorhill and David Talbott, "The Electric Universe," there is an illustration of circular and spiralling magnetic lines, shaped like a funnel, located above (and below) the axis of the Solar System, with the Sun as the main focus (attributed to S. T. Zuess, 1999). The magnetic lines spiral toward the Sun, and are reminiscent of the proposed spiral (corkscrew) path taken by Saturn on approaching the Solar System. This book illustration would be a slim basis for insisting on a spiral path for a planet. Certainly comets elevated above the ecliptic do not spiral into the poles of the Sun.

Dwardu Cardona, in a series of three books (see the [book list]), also maintains the thesis of a single entry of Saturn (with Mars and Earth) into the Solar System.
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Note 7 --

I am assuming that all of Saturn's satellites also rotated about Saturn in a prograde direction (counterclockwise direction as seen from above the north pole), as they do today.

The prograde direction of Saturn's travel around the Sun is probably critical, because a satellite circling Saturn would describe an epicycloidal path in moving around the Sun with Saturn, making it look as if at some point it were standing still. The 'stand-still' nodes for this path are located between the passing Saturn and the Sun. And, in fact, at these locations, the satellite would still have the forward speed of Saturn, appropriate for a new orbit around the Sun at that location, but reduced somewhat by the orbital speed of the satellite in the reverse direction around its planet.

If the satellites of Saturn had rotated retrograde, the stand-still nodes would be placed on the outside of the orbit of Saturn. There are of course two additional possibilities, based on an initial orbit of Saturn in a retrograde direction around the Sun.

Today we see very little 'flattening' of orbits. This can be blamed on the wide dispersal of the planets, in effect minimizing their gravitational interactions. But as long as Jupiter remained within the realm of the inner planets (before 3147 BC) there would have been much greater gravitational interactions. Thus it is likely that during this earlier period the orbits of the inner planets (plus Neptune) were flattened to the equator of the Sun, or, more likely, to the orbit of Jupiter. This could have extended back 500 million years for some planets, and 250 million years for Earth. Of course the opposite effect happened at some time before 30,000 BC, when Saturn started to capture some of the individual planets -- to be discussed in later Chapters.
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Note 8 --

Ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica only show a series of about 120 thousand years for the current glaciation, however.
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Note 9 --

There is a greater variety (and geographic distribution) of orchids than any other flowering plant -- on the order of 40,000 or 70,000 species. Orchids are found from the Arctic to the tropics.

Grasses grow from the bottom, rather than the top, as other plants do. This is a biological solution to being grazed, just as trees attempted to move away from ground level. Most earlier plants had attempted to protect themselves by being tough and difficult to chew.

Before grasses became well established, before the end of the Cretaceous (and the end of the age of the dinosaurs), when the wind blew, dust was everywhere. It is these duststorms which have provided us with the fossils of that era. Sands and volcanic dust have piled up in some areas to depths of hundreds of feet. The remains of animals covered in thick layers of sand cannot be destroyed by scavengers. After the spread of grasses the sedimentation rate dropped. It is one of the noted differences between the periods before and after the Cretaceous. We have found far fewer fossils from this later era.
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Note 10 --

Robert Bakker, in "The Dinosaur Heresies" (1986), convincingly suggests dinosaurs were warm blooded, and also writes about the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, stating the rather startling fact that "sedimentation stopped" after this time. He did not note that this was the time of the takeover of the soil by grasses. Bakker's claim about sedimentation started my search for the point in time between the two differing biologies that the Earth seems to have experienced.

See Peter Douglas Ward "Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History" (2004), which deals with the Permian land extinction of 250 million years ago. This is a personal account of ten year's research for clues to the causes in South Africa's Karoo Desert.

And see also a more recent work by Douglas H. Erwin "Extinction, How Life on Earth Nearly Ended 250 Million Years ago" (2006). Erwin start out by stating that he does not know the answer. At the end of the book, after reviewing a dozen theories, he still does not know.
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Note 11 --

I checked the record of orogeny (mountain building), at least for the American continent; it looks periodic as well. However, orogony is more likely to be caused by an expansion of the Earth -- which is a whole different topic altogether. The expansion and the creation of the world's oceans dates from the Jurassic during which time the oldest ocean depressions were formed. See the [Changing Size of the Earth] file for more. The disappearances of the inland seas after the Permian is probably the result of a runoff to the much lower levels of the first true ocean depressions.
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Note 12 --

I will assume that all the 'lost planets' of Saturn ended up orbiting the Sun at close distances, the location Saturn reached as it swung about the Sun at perihelion -- perhaps something on the order of one-half AU. Mercury today orbits the Sun at 1/3rd AU; Venus orbits at about 2/3rd AU. An orbit at 1/2 AU would make the climate of Earth much warmer, but it would be moderated by the Earth's enclosing atmosphere.
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Note 13 --

Niles Eldredge and Stephan J. Gould, "Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism" Anual Meeting of the Geological Society of America (1971).

Gould and Eldredge, "Punctuated equilibria: the tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered" Paleobiology (1977).
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Note 14 --

The Chicxulub 'impact crater' is impressively large and circular (112 miles in diameter), but it is not an impact crater. It is surrounded with smaller perforations along the edge typical of any of similar anode burn marks elsewhere, such as the craters of the Moon. These are the cenotes (sinkholes) of the northern Yucatan. Their circular pattern is clearly seen in satellite images. A gravitational anomaly mapping shows a ridge inside the complete ring of the 'crater' which, of course, has lead to the suggestion that the crater was formed by the impact of a smaller object only 6 miles in diameter. I'll suggest that the crater was made by a lightning bolt 112 miles in diameter.

The Chicxulub crater marks the boundary between two geological periods, the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods (the start of the Eocene), 65 million years ago, which also marks the extinction of the dinosaurs. Tom Van Flandern writes, about the "K/T boundary," the Iridium layer separating the two periods..

"Was the K/T boundary event the result of a single asteroid impact (causing the 200-300 km diameter Chicxulub crater in Mexico) or something more? We note the following points as evidence that it was something more:"

"The global set of craters Manson, Karn, Kamensk, Gusev, and another impact in the Pacific Ocean apparently all date from close to the same epoch. However, the diameter and abundance of quartz grains are larger in western North America than elsewhere in the world, suggesting that the single largest impact was the Chicxulub event."

• "The K/T boundary consists of two distinct claystone layers, the upper (soot, iridium) one with shocked grains, the lower one without."

• "Gorceixite (altered tektites with swirl patterns) is segregated within each layer, suggesting that different impact events formed these glassy beads."

• "A single bolide impact cannot simultaneously explain the pattern of major floral extinctions on land and other extinctions at sea."

• "Sediments in Cuba range from 5 to 450 m thick, probably from a giant wave. The (upper) ejecta layer is 50 cm thick in nearby Haiti, far more than at any other site, suggesting a major impact within 1000 km, which would be far from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico."

• "The K/T boundary layer is apparently absent from the Antarctic regions. Just as for the Sun, planets spend up to six months continually below the horizon as seen from each polar region alternately. So the boundary event apparently affected the entire globe except for the south polar regions. This pattern suggests multiple impacts from an exogenous source over a period of at least one day."

"Considering these factors arguing against a single impact, noting the strong evidence for at least one planetary explosion event, and remembering the earlier list of predictions made by the Exploding Planet Hypothesis that are fulfilled at the K/T boundary on Earth, we conclude that the explosion of a solar system body was the most probable cause of the K/T boundary event at 65 Ma [mya]. The earlier P/T [Permian/Triassic] boundary event at 250 Ma [mya] may also have been caused by the explosion of another solar system body, either larger or much closer than the K/T boundary source body. Other geological extinction events may have been caused by single asteroid impacts, or by other types of cosmic catastrophes."

-- originally from from www.meteresearch.org, now at [http://metaresearch.org]

The accumulation of data cited above starts to look more and more like a gigantic plasma strike followed or preceded by smaller strikes, "over a period of at least one day."
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Note 15 --

A less likely sequence, which I will develop in the following chapter, is that Earth's first connection to Saturn was at a lateral level before dropping below the south pole of Saturn. I estimate that this last process took from ca 10,500 BC to ca 5800 BC. Moving into the plasmasphere of Saturn, Earth would have received a massive repulsive shock, followed soon by a thunderbolt from Saturn. This would account for the cold period of the Younger Dryas between 10,500 BC and 9,000 BC, for the shock wave would be of high temperature, and incinerated forests and prairies. Micro-fine carbon (nanometer particles) would have entered the stratosphere, in effect casting Earth into an extended period of darkness and cold. I'll discuss this, in the following chapter, "Ice Ages and Humans." During this condition (being cast into darkness), Earth would have progressively been relocated to below the pole of Saturn. We have the record of Earth passing through three of the edges of the giant lower flower-shaped plasma cusp below Saturn, which will be detailed in Chapter 5, "Saturn and Archaeology."
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Note 16 --

With a period of 27,000,000 years, Saturn would have been on an orbit with an average radius of 90,000 AU -- from Kepler's third law. This distance is nearly twice as far as a hypothesized spherical cloud of comets surrounding the Sun (the "Oort Cloud"), which is considered part of the Solar System. Otherwise the extent of the Sun's plasmasphere is estimated at a modest 100 AU.

Even with an extreme eccentricity, Saturn at aphelion would unlikely be twice as far from the Sun, 180,000 AU. This is only somewhat greater than half the distance to the star nearest to the Sun -- Proxima Centauri, at 268,000 AU -- which, however, exists only as a single point in one location, somewhere in the sky. There are, however, some 32 stars within a distance of 950,000 AU (15 light years) from the Sun.
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Note 17 --

The Cassini space probe, launched by the Huygens space ship, has determined a methane, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide atmosphere for Titan in January 2005. Hardly poisonous, but not exactly benign.

The distance that the Earth is from the Sun will make the overall climate warmer or colder, but the climate is not likely to be as extreme as it is estimated it would be if Earth were located at a different location from the Sun. These climate estimates are based only on solar radiation.
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Note 18 --

Magnetic fields are without doubt the most mysterious aspect of the planets. Nothing -- spin, size, density, or location -- seems to correlate with the magnetic field of a planet. Mercury, thought to have a metallic core, has only a very weak magnetic field. Venus should have a magnetic field since it is the same size as the Earth, but it does not. Yet Venus has a gigantic coma and plasma tail, usually indicated for a planet with a magnetic field. Mars should have a magnetic field since it is larger than Mercury, but has none. Jupiter's magnetic pole is upside down and ten times stronger than the magnetic field of any other planet. Uranus should have a magnetic field closely aligned with its axis of rotation, as other planets do, but the axis of its magnetic field is at right angles to the axis of planetary rotation instead.

The Earth's ionosphere is actually a separate element, consisting of a shell closer to Earth, of the much larger plasmasphere (generally identified as the "magnetosphere"). I have, in these discussions, also neglected the toroidal Van Allen belts which encircle the Earth above the equator.
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Note 19 --

Bacteria reproduce by simply dividing into two organisms, but will exchange their chromosomal material at times. They will also release their chromosomal material to the environment, encased in a shell. We know these packets as viruses.

"Bacteria trade genes more frantically than a pit full of traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange."

-- Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "What Is Life?" (1995)

Most bacteria reproduce very frequently. An exception are the methane-producing bacteria deep within oceanic muds near coastal regions, which are thought to reproduce only every thousand to ten thousand years.

See also Toby White's essays on early biology at [http://www.palaeos.com].
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Note 20 --

The outstanding parameter of life is that it reacts to the environment. This is true for single cells as well as complex organisms. It is the inadvertent outcome of repeated extinctions which 'select for' those organisms which have the ability to adapt to the environment
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Note 21 --

The Chicxulub crater is the result of a lateral strike to the Earth (probably as a series of pulses). Saturn and Earth must have been at about the same elevation at the time of the strike. See the information by Tom Van Flandern, in an endnote of the previous chapter.

The Chicxulub strike fits the series of regular extinctions. The next extinctions would then be expected at 39 or 40 mya and at 13 or 11 mya and this actually matches the early date of 40 mya for Antarctic glaciation and recent (2007) reports of evidence that the most recent northern glaciations may have first started 11 or 9 mya. Starting dates for glaciation are not easy to determine. I have used 30 mya and 3 mya as the dates since the Antarctic and northern glaciations.

It took the dinosaurs some 10 million years to die out, as estimated by Robert Bakker.
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Note 22 --

A plasmoid is a disconnected 'spurt' of plasma, a thunderbolt traveling as a discrete object. These have been observed experimentally. The disconnection of the arc from the source is due to a lowering of the driving potential after discharge. On release the extended arc tends to condense back upon itself (while traveling) to form a shortened 'object' of a distinct shape -- a twisted body with balls and three tines at each end. The plasmoids are also known from sculptural records in antiquity (as late as Roman times), especially in relation to Jupiter, and closely resemble the shapes of the experimental laboratory discharges. Depictions of the Egyptian 'serehk' (the name symbol for a temple, a God, or a pharaoh) for the predynasic pharaoh Narmer ("catfish-chisel"), dating to 3100 BC, are obviously plasmoids, complete with a rope-twisted body (in one case), a tripartite tail, and a snout with two whiskers. Models of plasmoids, as seen by humans in later antiquity, still exist in Tibet and Japan today. The European Fleur-de-lis is a late remnant of this design, which is first depicted on coins in antiquity, although the form is one of a foreshortened plasmoid.

For Tom Flandern's comments on the Chicxulub crater, see endnotes in the previous chapter. See also [http://geoweb.princeton.edu/people/faculty/keller/] for recent geological and dating studies which suggest a 300,000 year interval between the creation of the Chickxulub Crater and the K/T boundary.
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Note 23 --

The location of the magnetic pole at any specific time in the past can be triangulated from the direction in which low level magnetism of rocks point at the time the rocks cools from a molten state (as for example, lava flows). If the rocks can be dated, then a record of the dates and locations of the magnetic pole can be derived.

The magnetic pole was located in the mid Pacific in the remote past. Over an extended time period it moved north. There is also a record showing the magnetic pole traveling north in the mid-Atlantic ocean. The large displacement of the magnetic pole from the geographical pole of a planet is not unusual.
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Note 24 --

The glaciers, in historical order, are known in Europe as the Günz, Mindel, Riss, and Würm. These correspond to the German names, Weichsel, Saale, Elster, and Weybourne, and the North American names, Nebraskan, Kansas, Illinoian, and Wisconsin. This nomenclature has largely been abandonded in favor of a dating based on the Oceanic Oxygen Isotope record.

The last glaciation, the Würm, started up 70,000 to 60,000 ya. Alpine glacier records suggest that the Würm consisted of four separate glaciation periods.

The Greenland ice core data of the last 120,000 years, which tends to exaggerate temperature fluctuations, suggests 6 long periods of cold (as long as 4000 years) and a greater number of short periods (lasting less than a thousand years). Temperature estimates (the coldest month of winter) from drill cores of a bog in northern Italy mostly support this, but shows less rapid variation in terrestrial temperatures. Charts are shown below.
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Note 25 --

There is evidence of very early glaciation (2 billion years ago), some hundreds of million years (900 to 650 mya) before the Cambrian, during the Ordovician (450 mya), and at the end of the Permian (250 mya).

The last glaciation of 3 mya may have started earlier than 2.7 mya. Mark Maslin and Jonathan Adams, in "The Onset of Northern Hemisphere Glaciation during the Tertiary and Quaternary" (Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1998), report..

"The earliest recorded glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere is between 10 and 6 Ma [mya] during the late Miocene. [references deleted] This involved a significant buildup of ice on Southern Greenland. However, the process did not gain much momentum until 3.5-3 Ma [mya], when the Greenland ice sheet expanded to include Northern Greenland."

The last extensive (and officially recognized) European glaciation stopped around 12,000 ya (10,000 BC) and had consisted of a period of nearly 2000 years when the climate became as cold as it had been in 35,000 years. But from about 10,500 BC the mean temperature had started to increase rapidly (except for one extreem cold period, the Younger Dryas) and by 9,500 BC the glacier in Europe had receded almost completely. By this time farming had been taken up on the highlands of Anatolia and Iran, while hunting continued as the mainstay in Europe and the Levant.

There is currently still no consensus on the dates, ranges, or the number of glaciations over the last 3 million years. The earliest glaciers may have completely melted before the most 'recent' glaciations appeared, dating roughly to after about 60,000 ya.

"The problem is that glaciers act like giant erasers. Each advance eradicates almost all traces of what's come before."

-- Wallace S. Broecker "Glaciers That Speak in Tongues and other tales of global warming" (2001) Natural History

Three or four of the recent glaciations have been identified, covering parts of northwestern Europe, eastern North America, and central Canada. In each case the areas covered by ice are roughly circular and cover an area of about 25 to 30 degrees radius of the sphere of the Earth.

The earliest of these recent glaciations, the European glacier, seems to be centered west of Norway. Two later glaciations are centered on the sea west of Greenland near Baffin Island and at Hudson Bay. The very last glaciation was located in the north Atlantic east of Greenland and south of Iceland. In all instances, all or part of Greenland would fall within about a 30 degree radius of the center points.

Because the diameter of the glaciations coincides with what we would expect if glaciation were centered on the north pole, that is, at the center of the Arctic Circle of 23.5 degrees radius, the locations of the centerpoints these glaciations are often held as evidence that the poles shifted. But this is not required at all. Glaciation is related to the magnetic pole, not to the geographic pole.

The centerpoints of the glaciations follow the moving location of the north magnetic pole. The north magnetic pole moves in large circles over long time periods and, since the 16th century, has moved southwest from a location near Spitsbergen (west of Norway), through the Atlantic, and across Greenland. It is currently moving north from a location west of Baffin Bay (and thus west of Greenland).

We have additional clear evidence of the fact that the glaciers have nothing to do with the north pole. The portion of Greenland closest to the north pole was never glaciated, while the remainder of Greenland is covered with 6000 feet of ice. The movement of the Greenland glacier is towards the north as well as the south.

We also have the evidence of the limited extent and the peculiar pattern of glaciation, both in Europe and the Americas. It used to be held that the last European glaciation (ending about 10,000 BC) had extended south from the north pole over Europe (where evidence was found) and throughout Russia and Siberia (where no geologist had ever been). But today we know better. Siberia and almost all of Russia have never been glaciated. The limit of the European glacier, the Wurm, extended across France, ran northeast through Central Europe, and met the Arctic Sea in northwestern Russia. It is part of a circle which certainly does not have the north pole as its center.

The American Illinois glacier likewise followed a circular pattern, covering the region from New York State through Illinois or Wisconsin and most of eastern Canada, but none of the western states, not even northern Alaska, and certainly not the north pole. (There is an exception in that increased moisture is also responsible for mountain glaciation -- as in the Rocky Mountains south of Alaska which often look to be part of a traditional 'polar' glacier.) The Wisconsin glacier also deposited snow in a circular pattern, further west than the Illionoian, and somewhat further north, to include most of western Canada.

It has been suggested that most of Russia and all of Siberia was never glaciated because the eastward moving air masses had already discharged the moisture they received over the Atlantic on the west coast of Europe. But the opposite seems to be true for the Americas. It is the east of North America which was glaciated, not the far west, except for mountainous terrain. Yet North America also experiences predominantly eastward moving air masses.

Lastly, in southern Europe, between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, you see a compression of climatic zones, with a sub-arctic zone only a few hundred miles away from a sub-tropical zone. It is the strange mix of sub-arctic and tropical animals which is often simultaneously represented in the 300 painted caves in southern France and Spain (dated 30,000 to 10,000 BC). This is not evidence of a frozen world. It looks instead like a moderate, if not warm, climate. Knowing today that the European 'polar' glacier centered on some location off the coast of Norway, we can understand how it was that a temperate zone extended diagonally east and north through Eastern Europe and into Asia to reach almost to within the Arctic circle. Archaeological investigation in Siberia is spotty because it is cold there today, but hunting camps have been found in northeastern Siberia, dating to 30,000 BC, and close enough to the Bering Straits to suggest that fishermen and hunters could have easily expanded into the Americas long ago. Log cabin villages have been found north of Anchorage, Alaska, and within the Polar Circle.

During the time of the last glaciation, the climate was much milder than imagined by geologists, and mankind thrived and reached every continent. Only US archaeologists still hold that the American Indians arrived after 10,500 BC by walking across the Bering Straits while ocean waters were locked up in massive glaciation on a global scale. (This has changed in the last decade.) See the book by Vine Delorian "Red Earth, White Lies" (1995) where he makes a clear case for why a 10,500 BC 'invasion' of the Americas by Asiatics is unlikely, but also especially why the notion is held with such tenacity in the USA. Virtually everywhere else throughout the world it is acknowledged that the Americas were occupied, although sparsely, by 30,000 BC. A more recent book by Charles Mann, "1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus" (2006), also presents evidence against the '10,500 BC invasion.'
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Note 26 --

My original take on the Greenland ice core data followed the critique of the followers of Velikovsky, but their objections cannot be sustained. See, for example, Charles Ginenthal "Ice Core Evidence" in 'The Velikovskian' (1995?). This article was heavily disputed by Sean Mewhinney, in "Minds in Ablation" (1998). I cannot support either side of the arguments.

Alfred de Grazia wrote, in "The Burning of Troy" (1984), with respect to the Greenland ice cores..

"There is a certain grim quality to the confrontation of uniformitarians and catastrophists. The antagonists prowl in the jungle of natural history seeking the one definitive test that will finally discomfit and silence the other."

That has been the case for the Greenland ice cores. And nothing has been proven -- we could almost say, either way.
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Note 27 --

The more recent ice core temperature records are continuous through today, as determined, for example, by traces of lead, which represents Bronze Age smelting practices, the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, and the use of leaded gasoline in the 20th century. With the introduction of unleaded gasolines the lead traces have dropped.

On the 'signature' of the Thera explosion, Peter James, author of "Centuries of Darkness" (1991), writes..

"We have always remained sceptical of the case for a high date for Thera [the 16th century BC volcanic explosion], suspecting that the whole thing would eventually fall through. Unfortunately, our position recently led an otherwise favourable reviewer to remark that we took a "sceptical view of the new scientific dating techniques" (Gerding 1997/8, 160), which is far from the truth. Proxy dating is not to be confused with the scientific techniques themselves."

"As it happens, we have now been vindicated. When further work was published on the Greenland ice-cores the real reason why the 1620s date looked so conspicuous became clear. Due to budgetary constraints, a thorough search measuring the sulphuric acid from each year had never been undertaken! When this was done, the 1620s BC 'event' ceased to be special. Similar peaks of sulphuric acid are now known to exist in the 16th, 15th, 14th and 13th centuries (Zielinski et al. 1994)! Any of these (for example those from the ice-core years 1594, 1454, 1327 and 1284) might represent the Thera eruption. Worse still, small particles of volcanic ejecta have now been found in one of the very ice-levels from Greenland. Analysis has shown that their chemical composition does not match that of Thera (Zielinski & Germani 1998a). Clearly miffed, Manning (1998) published a "correction" to the geologists' conclusions, arguing that they had misinterpreted their data and that the particles came from Thera after all. The geologists' response (Zielinksi & Germani 1998b) stated, in as many words, that Manning was out of his depth and simply did not understand the methods involved."

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Note 28 --

Over the last 250,000 years there were some 17 reversals of the temperature, some representing very short jogs (and thus 8 interglacial periods followed by glacial periods). This represents my inspection of a published chart. Clive Gamble (below) counts 8 complete interglacial/glacial cycles since 787,000 ya, but counts the last five periods since 127,000 ya as one. Other published results have noted 24 interstadials since ca 120,000 ya.

Some of the coldest temperatures are recorded at about 18,000 to 10,000 years ago, and represent a slow gradual decline from a warmer period 120,000 years ago, which followed another cold period of 200,000 to 130,000 years ago (186,000 to 127,000 ya, per Gamble, below).
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Note 29 --

Tables of chronological correlations are shown by Clive Gamble, in "The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe" (1999). These include Oxygen-16 and Oxygen-18 ratios from a Pacific Ocean Core, to 787,000 ya (page 103); another oceanic isotope core, to 350,000 ya, presented as the ratio of ice and ocean levels (page 185); and Greenland ice core and a pollen record (an Italian bog), to 80,000 ya, presented as mean (actually the mid-winter mean) temperatures of the pollen site and the ice core, along with ratios for tree and grass pollen (page 187). Reduced versions of these are shown below, with the temperature ordinate flipped to show temperature increasing to the top. Note that the units of the abscissa cannot be compared.

Image: Oxygen-16 and Oxygen-18 ratios from the Pacific Ocean Core, shown as representing oceanic water temperature, from 787,000 ya to the present. After Gamble (103).

Image: Oxygen-16 and Oxygen-18 ratios from an Oceanic Core, shown as representing ocean and ice cap levels (equivalent to oceanic temperature), from 340,000 ya to the present. After Gamble (185).

Image: Upper chart: Temperature of the coldest month of an Italian bog. Lower chart: Ice Core temperature; From 80,000 ya to the present. The Heinrich events are marked. Heinrich events are dated debris layers carried out to the Atlantic by glaciers skidding into the ocean, and are suggested to represent melting conditions. After Gamble (186).

Gamble notes the chaotic nature of the records, and comments on the fact that there is, as yet, little agreement among researchers on absolute dates, or, for that matter, the mechanism which gave rise to the repeated cycles of glacial and interglacial periods.
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Note 30 --

Some of the interglacial periods listed for England do not match Oceanic Oxygen Isotope records which are suggested to represent worldwide temperatures.

The existence of Homo erectus in Europe is not well established. Erectus is today held to have a genesis in Africa. At an earlier time he was assumed to have first shown up in southeast Asia and in China.
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Note 31 --

I have radically abbreviated the whole course of hominid fossils. If you are interested in more details, look at the following two recent books (plus Gamble, above) which describe the developmemt of paleoanthropology and archaeology of the Paleolithic.

Ian Tattersall, in "The Fossil Trail" (1995), describes the workings of the discipline from the perspective of an insider. He has coauthered articles with Niles Eldredge (who developed the concept of 'puctuated equilibrium' with Stephen Gould). Especially interesting are the details of how the researchers remained stuck with received wisdom, and only slowly adopt new concepts.

James Shreeve, in "The Neandertal Enigma" (1995), spends more time on the European and Middle Eastern Neanderthal fossils. As a science reporter, his book is eminently readable, but as inconclusive as Tattersall's. Nothing really is conclusively resolved, yet all the data is presented, generally from discussions with the researchers at the source sites. Only in the last two chapters does he attempt a resolution, but it is entirely based on applying a contemporary perspective to the remote past.

What will strike you, in both books, is, first, that far ranging conclusions are based on enormously sparse data, and, second, that the conclusions which are reached are strongly imbedded in contemporary philosophical constructs. Over the past century these last have included, for example, the belief that brain volume related to advanced modernity, that there is some innate push toward progress (read, "us") in the changes of fossil forms over time, that only one species of 'humans' would have existed at any one time over the last 5 or 6 million years, that all changes in body structure were gradual, that is, evolutionary, and that our forebears were like us in the many guessed-at aspects of behaviour. All of these notions, as these two books point out, are baseless or wrong.
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Note 32 --

Clive Gamble notes that hominids (H.erectus) did not invade Europe until after 500,000 BC, and suggests a combination of the prior existence of large African predators and a very variable climate as responsible for their absence. The climate was the result of repeated extensive glaciation in northwestern Europe. The cats disappeared after a half mya, but the variability of the climate in western Europe, compared to the rest of the world, did not improve.

In western Europe H.heidelbergensis appears after 500,000 BC, followed in about 300,000 BC by H.neanderthalensis. Both of these are indigenous to Europe. H.sapiens (Cromagnon) is a foreigner who invades western Europe after 40,000 or 50,000 BC from the east.
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Note 33 --

Information on the Olorgesaille site is related by Bill Bryson in "A Short History of Nearly Everything" (2004)

Every Acheulean hand axe looks like every other Acheulean hand axe, although there is some variation in overall size. Because of the consistent shape, it has been suggested by some people (I cannot source) that these were religious objects.
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Note 34 --

The 300,000 year range includes H.heidelbergensis and signs of H.erectus. H.neanderthalis, as a fossil of distinct morphology, dates from 100,000 to 150,000 ya. The date range is from Gamble, who does not distinguish between the three subspecies.
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Note 35 --

We are H.sapiens.sapiens. Erectus is officialy H.sapiens.erectus; Neanderthal is H.sapiens.neanderthalis.
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Note 36 --

For the more recent speciation date of H.sapiens, see Ronald A. Fonda in "Age and Origins of the Human Species" Mankind Quarterly (2000). Other pages at [http://www.rafonda.com/] expand on this. The studies border on Eurocentrism. Throughout his writings, Fonda identifies the primary H.sapiens as "Eurasians," despite definitive differences between the two groups.

Fonda suggests northeast Asia for the location of the speciation event. He also suggests interbreeding with H.erectus in southeast Asia and Africa. He shows that the chromosomes of the population (of current humans) in these last two regions are further apart than any other two human groups. He suggest that this is due to the million year separation of H.erectus in southeast Asia from its ancestors in Africa. Physical characteristics of Erectus show up among H.sapiens, as, for example, in the thick skulls of Australian Aborigines.

If the magnetic pole, where a plasma arc from Saturn would touch down, rotated around Greenland to be relocated in northeastern North America (eastern Canada), as it seems to have done over the last 60,000 years, then it would have been likely for H.sapiens to have speciated (and perhaps in a number of varieties) in North America or northeastern Asia. But North America was unpopulated 60,000 years ago.

The dates of the appearance of H.sapiens.sapiens suggest movement from east or northeast Asia in the direction south and west into western Asia, Europe, and Africa. The Americas may have been populated fairly early from east Asia and Africa may have been populated (invaded) at nearly the same dates as Europe. Along with the early 'archaic' H.sapiens in South Africa (at 100,000 and 75,000 years ago), the dates suggest travel by boat along the east and west coasts of Asia, the east coast of Africa, and the west coast of the Americas. There are also sugestions of travel to the Americas via Antarctica.
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Note 37 --

The concept of the ice-free corridor between the Canadian Rockies and the Wisconsin glacier which covered much of Canada, which would form a route of entry between Alaska and the northwestern states of the US, has been rethought. "Even when the ice-free corridor existed it was utterly inhospitable," writes Charles Mann, in "1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus" (2005). He also reports that the parallel concept of people streaming through the corridor as big game hunters and the extermination of all the large animals of North America (known as the "Overkill Hypothesis"), has been demolished by paleontologists. Most of the animals disappeared before any sign of humans. Mann quotes Knut Fladmark of Simon Fraser University, as providing an alternative for the population of the Americas, based on migration by (fishing) boats from the northeastern coasts of Asia to the northwestern coasts of Alaska and North America..

"Even primitive boats could traverse the entire Pacific coast of North and South America in less than 10-15 years."

Mann adds..

"Native Americans may have been in the Americas for twenty thousand or even thirty thousand years. .. If [the archaeological date of] Monte Verde [in Chile] is correct, as most believe, people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works."

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Calculations are in Unix bc notation, where ^ denotes exponentiation; the functions (a)rctangent, (s)ine, and (c)osine use radians; angle conversions to radians or degrees by the divisors rad=.017+ and deg=57.2+; other functions are shown as f( );
units: million == 1,000,000; billion == 1,000,000,000;
one AU == 93,000,000 miles.

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