Atlantis, the Great Flood and the Asteroid

By Prescott Rawlings

Atlantis, the Great Flood and the Asteroid examines the evidence for an asteroid impact in early human prehistory which interrupted the progression of human development. It considers whether a large asteroid caused the Earth to shift its axis, the Great Flood, a Mass Extinction Event and possibly sank the island of Atlantis right where Plato said it was. Clues come from geology, physics, archeology, paleontology, documented sources and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456602628

Book preview

Memoriam

Acknowledgments

There are a number of people whose contribution I want to recognize. I wish to thank Dr. C.V., Dr. D. M., P.E., J.K., P. and K. K., D.L., M.F., W.D., M.O., and R.C. for their encouragement and advice. Truer friends I have never found. For permission to quote from copyright I offer my heartfelt gratitude to those who provided it. I also apologize to any holders of copyright who I have been unable to trace. Since this work relies upon the expertise of many others in various fields of academic endeavor, I sincerely and gratefully acknowledge that my research depended upon their prowess in their respective disciplines. In addition, I wish to express my thanks to the people at eBookIt.com who were invaluable at bringing this book to market.

Chapter One – Introduction

One of the most frequent misunderstandings of the nature of scientific research by academics is the view that mistaken opinions among leaders are the result of inadequate evidence, that such views are corrected when adequate evidence becomes available – thus proving the feasibility and adaptability of science. There is, of course, obvious truth in this.

But what frequently happens is that on the basis of both inadequate evidence and faulty reasoning, false conclusions are published and repeated until hallowed by habit. This should not be so easily and erroneously excused among the leaders in any field of investigation.

(Norman Totten)¹

The quickest way to make an enemy is to tell someone that they are wrong.

(Mark Twain)

If there are no transitional forms found in the fossil record then my theory is false.

(Charles Darwin)²

This book will challenge long held beliefs about what happened in our past. To do this, it will follow the evidence to wherever it leads. In that process, we will examine the evidence for a real Atlantis which could surprise many, and generate discomfort. We will also explore whether the cause of its demise also spawned the Great Flood and a Mass Extinction Event during the course of the human experience. Our exploration will address many elements of prehistory and ascertain whether the signal event of our past was an Asteroid Impact Event. In doing so, we may explode many misconceptions in favor of the actual evidence. Hopefully this work will end up near the truth, which is whatever it is, regardless of how closely held many people cling to beliefs, whether academic or religious, to the contrary. At least, it may help get us closer to whatever the truth really is.

Evidence v Belief

One of the greatest impediments to getting at the truth of a matter occurs when people start with a belief and try to force the evidence to fit that belief. Because the belief is sacrosanct, such people will declare that the evidence which conflicts with their belief is invalid; or attempt to change the evidence to be something other than what it is; or simply ignore it, pretending that it is nonexistent and thus unable to refute their belief. They will even attack the messengers with name calling and insults.

Many would confine this phenomenon to religious belief but it is at least as prevalent among academic scholars. Often, professors stake their career on a particular theory. When evidence arises which explodes their long held but disproved belief, they will attack the new evidence and its purveyors. If they have sufficient clout then they can even destroy the career of the person who represents the threat to their belief. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they will cling to their belief until they are dead. Their fear is that to admit they were wrong all along could cost them their own career, or at least render their career irrelevant. Sometimes, the deaths of those who champion an invalid and obsolete theory are the only way to expunge it from academia in favor of one which actually fits the evidence.

When clinging to their belief, some people will dispute any evidence or hypothesis which contradicts their own but without offering any substantiation to their point of view. That is what this writer calls the ‘nuh-uh’ argument. It is a powerful and devastating critique for which there is no adequate response! Instead of weighing the evidence for or against, or offering evidence to the contrary of the hypothesis which unhinges theirs, they offer no evidence in support at all of their views but instead rely upon their academic standing to give weight to an otherwise empty contention. That such scholars get away with this subjective nonsense is a telling commentary on the fallacy of academic standards. They become politicized rather than simply and invariably follow the evidence to wherever it leads.

The result is that groundless hypotheses over time become entrenched theories with poor underpinnings of evidence. By sheer repetition over many years, they solidify into ‘facts,’ even though they are nothing of the kind. Then, because they took root and enjoyed endorsement from their believers, who by then occupied advanced seniority and authority in their discipline to safeguard the orthodoxy, these beliefs garnered champions who endlessly defend them against all comers, no matter how flimsy their own evidence or arguments. Many long standing beliefs became academic orthodoxy in this way.

The upshot is that evidence which suggests an alternative view, and perhaps far better represents the truth, gets relegated to the dust bin of myth or legend. A kernel of truth usually belies them but to dig into that truth could upend the comfortable conclusions which became ‘fact’ and accepted as such without question. This book offers those questions, and evidence, along with a hypothesis which actually makes sense of all the evidence, even if it contradicts long held beliefs.

A corollary of this tendency is the so-called ‘skeptic.’ These are often people who are determined to believe the opposite of what other people believe. They typically make the same mistake, though, ignoring evidence which unravels their contrarian belief, and skepticism. This writer is skeptical of skeptics, because they also fail to follow the evidence to wherever it leads.

In 1916, during the First World War a German submarine sank the British passenger liner Lusitania. The British had been shipping war supplies such as ammunition in the hold of non-military vessels like this one, in hopes that the Germans would refrain from torpedoing a ship which carried innocent civilians. Aware of what the British were doing, the Germans sank some of them anyway, after issuing public warnings before the ship sailed. About one tenth of the passengers on board the Lusitania, on her way back to the British Isles from New York City, were Americans. Her sinking so outraged the people of the United States that it eventually helped to lead that country to join the war on the side of the Triple Entente against Germany and her allies in the Central Powers. A story surfaced at the time about some of the passengers in the water after the sinking being attacked and eaten by a giant squid. No one believed it. As far as ‘science’ was concerned, there was no such thing as a giant squid. For centuries, sailors had reported outlandish accounts of various sea monsters. No one believed those stories, either. More than half a century after the Lusitania sank, though, specimens of giant squid began to take their place in natural history museums. Later spectacular underwater film captured on videotape a live giant squid in the deep. Now the scientific establishment embraces that giant squid are real. They do exist after all. Few people remember the reports from the survivors of the Lusitania, though. Giant squids did not come into existence between then and now. They have probably existed for far longer than humanity has. Its existence is not, and was not, dependent upon whether official academia believed that they did. What is true is true, regardless of whether anyone believes it or not.

Evolution

The most obvious example of this phenomenon is the theory of evolution. After a century and a half, there is still no adequate evidence to prove that this theory is true. In fact, there is mounting evidence that some key elements of it are unfounded. For example, it is demonstrably a fact that the overwhelming majority of species extinctions which have occurred in the natural history of the Earth happened not because of natural selection or the survival of the fittest but owing to periodic catastrophes; and that the equally overwhelming number of new species that have arisen did so in the aftermath of those cataclysms, to fill the void. This book will look at the last mass extinction event. Biologists have ascertained that it is impossible for the simple cell, the building block of all life, to have evolved. In addition, as Darwin himself noted, no transitional species have ever come to light. Yet, many scholars routinely regard evolution as not just theory but fact when it is nothing more than a long entrenched belief.

Creationism

To be sure, academia certainly has no exclusive rights to the practice of substituting belief for evidence. Religion features millions of people who make the same error. Those who take the Bible out of its textual, historic, cultural or linguistic context are doomed to misinterpretation.

For instance, the evidence is quite clear and overwhelming that God did not create the world in six days. Genesis One is a statement of theology and not one of science or history. Textually, at the end of the same chapter and into the next, God creates all the animals, then Adam; but Adam is lonely, so in an attempt to alleviate this loneliness, God creates all the animals – again. Linguistically and culturally, the ‘seven’ days refers to the Hebrew term for declaring an oath for the sake of establishing or maintaining a family or covenant relationship, shibathaim.³ In addition, the word translated from Hebrew into English as ‘day’ is yom, which actually means ‘period of time.’ It can mean day, week, month, year, decade, century, millennium or epoch. Thus, in Hebrew what Genesis One actually says is that God created the world for three periods of time; filled that world for three periods of time; and then rested for the seventh period of time to swear an oath in order to establish a family relationship with all that He created.

These same literalists maintain that not only was there a Great Flood but it occurred within the confines of their accepted timeline. Which is to say, they contend that it happened somewhere around 3100 BC (5100 BP). Yet there is no physical evidence of a Great Flood that occurred at that point in time, as we shall see.

On the other hand, some geologists assert that there is no evidence for a Great Flood at all. They are equally mistaken, as this text will show.

Those scriptural literalists who ignore blatant evidence which thoroughly contradicts their wedded belief is not faith but a belief built on inadequate information. (Curiously, these people will seize upon carbon-14 evidence which they think supports their belief while otherwise rejecting it when it proves their belief to be false.) It leads to dramatic misinterpretation of Scripture and even the imposition of social inequalities that God neither intended nor endorses.

Proponents of each of these belief systems consider anyone who disagrees with them to be in the camp of the other. Both of them are sincere in their belief but factually in error. This book may draw ire from each of them.

Ice Ages

For our purposes, another such belief is in Ice Ages. They were the invention of a few scholars in the 19th century who offered little substantiating evidence to prove their model but it stuck:

Reinhard Bernhardi, a professor of natural science in Germany, seems to have been the first to propose the theory of the glacial ages to account for the ‘erratic boulders’ and other evidence found in northern Europe. This was in the year 1832. He was quickly followed by Louis Jean Agassiz, Swiss naturalist, who came to the United States in 1846 and became a professor at Harvard the following year. Agassiz had studied the living glaciers in the Alps and had seen all of the signs of their ancient greatness. When he came to America he soon found the even more fertile field of glaciation in North America and proceeded to build the theory of the ‘Ice Ages’ which is still in vogue today.⁴

It became entrenched as a belief during the 19th century:

The classic definition of the Ice Age centres on the concept of extensive, continuous, and often enormously thick ice sheets smothering virtually all polar latitudes down to approximately 50º N and S latitude, with the greatest accumulations apparently occurring in the northern hemisphere. This concept reached its greatest development in the writings of various late nineteenth century glacialists, of whom Giekie, Dawkins, Croll and Penck were especially prominent. Although later research has signally emended those views, from time to time the outmoded hypothesis they represented still finds its way into textbooks about Earth history, and persist in being the popular concept of the Ice Age generally.

…The retention of the term ‘glacial,’ initially devised to accurately reflect the nature of the icy model postulated by nineteenth century glacialists, and its application to modern Ice Age concepts, although technically correct, unfortunately still tends to perpetuate a false (the discarded) panorama for interested modern lay-readers as yet familiar only with the older nineteenth century Ice Age doctrines.⁵

We will take a closer look to evaluate whether there even ever was such a thing as an Ice Age.

A related misconception is the land bridge over which Asians supposedly migrated across what is now the Bering Strait. This was an invention of a Spanish priest in Latin America during their occupation of the region following the conquests of the Conquistadors. He concocted this ‘theory’ without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever. It was just an idea which over time gained universal standing and acceptance as though it were a proven fact. In other words, it became an unassailable and infallible belief.

At the time, the ocean levels were lower because the on-land glaciation locked up so much more ice than is presently the case. That exposed the seabed which links North America and Asia in what we call Beringia. Then some scholars noted that even had this been the case, people would have had trouble crossing because they would have run into an impassible ice sheet. Thus they devised the notion of a corridor through the ice. This did explain how both humans and wildlife crossed into North America but its primary purpose was to avoid having to admit that people sailed down the coast in boats.

Current thinking, based on real evidence, is that the ice occupied the land sporadically rather than in one massive sheet, and that people migrated into the continent in boats among other methods.⁶ Archaeological evidence demonstrates that people have inhabited Australia for as much as 60,000 years, yet because that continent has been separate from the former Pangaea for many millions of years, the only way they could have gotten there was in boats. Undersea archaeology has begun to find evidence of human transit down the Pacific Coast of North America, both on what was at the time dry land and in the waters offshore.

Clovis First

One of the most hallowed beliefs among older North American archaeologists is Clovis First. This belief maintains that the Clovis Culture was the first to inhabit North America. For many years, they fended off evidence from one archaeological site after another which demonstrated earlier dates of occupation by ‘officially’ finding fault with the methodologies of data collection. Scientifically derived dates were invalid because of contamination of one sort or another. Some of these are actually valid considerations. Water leakage into lower strata can interfere with proper dating. Fire can cause this, too. Because these are valid arguments, True Believers in Clovis First successfully swept under the rug every site which revealed an earlier date than their cherished belief would allow. They even destroyed the career of one conscientious archaeologist who repeatedly tested and then reported an occupation date that went back 250,000 years. Eventually, two well respected archaeologists, Thomas Dillehay⁷ and James Adovacio,⁸ published evidence from their respective long standing digs, during which they each performed their craft with indisputable professionalism and precision, which exploded the Clovis First belief once and for all. Even then, many archaeologists whose careers were tied to their belief refused to jettison the theory in favor of the evidence.

Columbus First

In similar fashion, True Believers in Columbus First maintain that Europeans, or anyone else except ancestors of the red race from Asia, only began to migrate into the Americas in 1492; with an admission of a sole, brief and limited incursion of Vikings at Vinland. This belief, though, is patently absurd. Viking artifacts have come to light as far away from L’Anse aux Meadows as Florida and Vancouver, British Columbia, and in places in between such as Minnesota, South Dakota⁹ and Oklahoma.¹⁰ One artifact found at L’Anse aux Meadows dates to the sixth century of the Christian era.¹¹ The written Micmac Indian language proved to be a dialect of