Culture Shock

The Younger Dryas Trigger

CLOVIS

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The Younger Dryas Trigger by Hermann Trappman.

Did an impact trigger the Younger Dryas?

A recent hypotheses suggests that one or more extraterrestrial bodies,  known as the Clovis Comet, broke up over North America about 12.9 to 11.6 thousand years ago, causing abrupt climatic cooling. Some scientists have proposed this triggered by catastrophic discharge of freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean as the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted, causing a massive die-off of megafauna called the Younger Dryas extinction. The Clovis culture, the people who inhabited North America from about 14,000 years ago, also experienced a marked population decline at the same time.

Mysteries from Beneath the Earth: Little Salt Spring by Hermann Trappman

Species after species disappeared after at the end of paleo period when sea-levels began to rise destroying environments. Mammoths, mastodons, two species of bison, horse, llama, ground sloths, and many more were gone from the scene. Many species of shellfish went extinct. Tides crept in, swallowing Florida’s coastal villages.

Choked with melt-water of glaciers, the Mississippi River cut off the herds’ migration routes to the west.

98 feet down in the Little Salt Springs sink hole, a giant land tortoise was found, laying on its back, on a limestone shelf. Of course, the tortoise could not have ended up that way by itself.

Giant tortoises went extinct around the same time as these powerful climatic changes. Did of the world familiar to the ancient people who lived here disappear? Was the tortoise a symbol of something meaningful to those ancient people.

I imagine these ancient people climbing down into that hole in the earth. They knew of their connection to the Mother Earth.

Although humans were weak and could easily be killed by a Short-faced bear or an American lion, they could kill these animals too. Humans found strength in the tools and weapons they created. Their songs filled the mysterious night with the stories of their bravery. They reached out to that Great Mystery. Their mouths formed the words and the words rose with the smoke. Their struggle for survival connected them to their landscape in an intelligent way, and it was with that intelligence that they reached out.

Did the throat of Little Salt Springs vibrate with their chant, their hope for the future?

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