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Meltwater Graves

19 April 2017
Catastrophism

At http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/spring-2017/article/megafaunal-exti… … research from the University of Adelaide has found that the bones of Ice Age megafaunal animals across Eurasia and the Americas died as a result of meltwater flooding. However, it doesn't quite say that as that would have upset their uniformitarian peers – but that is the inference we might take. In other words, it doesn't really validate Velikovsky or any other catastrophist, but it goes some way along the line. It merely says, 'melting permafrost and glaciers caused widespread glacial age grasslands to be rapidly replaced by peat beds and bogs, fragmenting populations of herbivore grazers. Of course we all know the grasslands didn't really disappear – they moved somewhere else (the modern praire landscape or the  steppe zone of Russia and Siberia). These grasslands are, or were, perfect for Holocene herbivore grazers.

The paper is published in 'Nature Ecology and Evolution' journal and the claim is that ancient bones provide direct biochemical evidence of environmental upheaval. Basically, they found evidence of a large increase in moisture (from the bones) – as one might expect from meltwaters driving across the landscape of a rapidly disappearing ice sheet. It affected Europe, Canada and the US, and Siberia, with a disappearing permafrost zone (which also shifted geographical position) and melting glaciers etc.  This is later said to be a 'massive increase in moisture' which sounds very much what we would expect of meltwater run-off. To add music to the ear they add that in Africa it was different. There was little extinction of animals and the savannal is of course still around – harbouring lions and elephants and giraffe etc. We may note that meltwater flooding would not have affected Africa.

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