Catastrophism through the Ages, and a Cosmic Catastrophe at the Origin of Civilization_Crimson Publishers

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Catastrophism through the Ages
The idea that the Earth has been subject to tremendous
catastrophes within the time span of human civilization originates
with the earliest myths and religions [1]. All over the World, cultures
have expressed their version of a great fire, or conflagration, and
a great flood, or deluge. Typically, they are associated with divine
retribution, fire-breathing, flying serpents and sea-monsters, heroic
battles and tales of survival. Wherever people have lived, these
myths have lived with them. In Western scholarship, the debate
concerning the possibility that such mythological disasters have a
basis in reality or are instead imagined, can be traced back to at
least as far as Plato and his student Aristotle [2]. Plato recounts the
destruction of Atlantis and the Phaethon myth, thereby promoting
Catastrophism, while Aristotle argues for unchanging celestial
spheres that support the sun, moon and planets, thereby promoting
only gradual changes on Earth, i.e. gradualism.
But the modern view of catastrophism developed primarily out
of the scientific resurgence in Western Europe after the renaissance
[2].Modernconceptsingeologyandevolutionarybiologydeveloped
alongside those of mathematics and astronomy, all the time putting
distance between science and religion. Copernicus re-established
the idea of a heliocentric universe in 1543 against the teachings
of the Catholic Church which had adopted Aristotle’s geocentric
paradigm of the sun, moon and planets supported by harmonious
celestial spheres [3]. Therefore, despite promoting catastrophes
via ‘God’s will’, the universe was essentially perfect in it and did
not suffer cosmic catastrophes through natural causes, according
to the Church. Giordano Bruno took the Copernican idea further
to propose that the stars are simply very distant suns, orbited by
their own planets perhaps supporting life. He was burned at the
stake in Rome in 1600 for this and other views contrary to Catholic
doctrine. Galileo also suffered long-term house arrest, from 1633 to
his death in 1642, at the hands of the Catholic Church for supporting
heliocentrism. Against this backdrop, it is understandable that
scientists of the age were keen to ensure their discoveries were
consistent with Catholic teachings.
Building on Tycho Brahe’s and Galileo’s observations, and
Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton published his seminal
Principia in 1687 which described a mechanical universe evolving
according to unchanging Laws of Motion and Universal Gravitation
[4]. Using his theory, he was able to provide a unified description
of planetary, lunar and cometary motion, and finally confirmed
the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system. While his
mechanicssupportedaviewoffixedplanetaryorbits,consistentwith
gradualism and his Christian beliefs, it also offered a catastrophic
mechanism via Earth’s interaction with comets. Indeed, his student,
and successor to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge,
William Whiston, proposed in 1696 that comets were responsible
for past catastrophes, including Noah’s Flood [5]. Edmund Halley,
after whom the famous comet is named, also held this view.
James Hutton, often called the father of modern geology,
advanced the gradualist paradigm in 1785 through his observations
and theories of sedimentation and erosion [6]. He held that
Earth’s surface changed only very slowly over geological time
through processes that are evident today, a concept later called
uniformitarianism. This was in contrast to the earlier flood geology
that attempted to explain geological observations in biblical terms.
Georges Cuvier, often called the father of paleontology, on the
other hand, did not accept the gradualist paradigm. Through his
Martin B Sweatman*
University of Edinburgh, UK
*Corresponding author: Martin B Sweatman, School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, UK
Submission: September 22, 2017; Published: November 03, 2017
Catastrophism through the Ages, and a Cosmic
Catastrophe at the Origin of Civilization
Review Article
Copyright © All rights are reserved by Martin B Sweatman.
CRIMSONpublishers
http://www.crimsonpublishers.com
Abstract
Developments in the Earth Sciences over the last decade point towards a great cosmic catastrophe at the onset of the Younger Dryas period, towards
the end of the Paleolithic. It has been suggested this event was caused by a collision with a swarm of comet fragments, consistent with the theory of
Coherent Catastrophism. Earlier this year, it was shown how symbols at the ancient archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe can be interpreted as supporting
this view. This convergence of geochemical, astronomical and archaeological evidence has potentially profound consequences for our understanding of
the emergence of civilization and ancient history.
ISSN: 2577-1949

How to cite this article: Martin B S. Catastrophism through the Ages, and a Cosmic Catastrophe at the Origin of Civilization. Arch & Anthropol Open Acc. 1(2).
AAOA.000506. 2017. DOI: 10.31031/AAOA.2017.01.000506
Archaeology & Anthropology: Open Access
2/5
Arch & Anthropol Open Acc
observations of sedimentary strata containing abrupt changes in
the fossil record, he proposed in 1812 a theory of extinctions and
episodes of catastrophic change at Earth’s surface [7].
But Charles Lyell, an influential geologist, supported Hutton’s
gradualist interpretation of change [8]. In his three volume work
Principles of Geology published between 1830 and 1833, he argued
that sudden changes in geological strata, and therefore abrupt
changes in the fossil record, were an illusion generated by wholesale
erosion of strata over geological timescales. Moreover, catastrophic
changes required speculation about forces and mechanisms that
are not currently observed, and therefore run contrary to the
principle of uniformitarianism.
With a copy of Lyell’s Principles on board the Beagle, Darwin
ventured to the Southern Ocean to find evidence for this theory
of natural selection. After his return, a committed gradualist, he
published his Origin of Species in 1859 [9]. This was a decisive
move in favor of gradualism. There was now a mutually consistent
gradualistic framework, with Newton’s mechanical universe that
ran like clockwork, Hutton and Lyell’s uniformitarian geology, and
Darwin’s biological evolution. Moreover, observations of comets
showed their nuclei were quite small, and there were too few of
them to provide a threat to Earth, especially on the timescale of
human evolution. Whether, or not, this gradualistic paradigm
supported the Christian doctrine depended on your point of view.
On the one hand, it supported the view that catastrophes on human
timescales could only occur through God’s will. However, it also
supported the view that God was no longer needed at all to explain
the workings of the Universe, except perhaps as an initial creator,
and that the Bible could not be trusted for historical accuracy. But
this initial divergence of science from religion was quite limited.
Christianity maintained a powerful hold over the establishment,
and Darwin faced considerable criticism from those who could
not accept evolution through natural law, rather than God’s hand,
and specifically the evolution of man from ape. The gradualistic
paradigm solidified further well into the 20th
Century. First Gregor
Mendel and then Avery and colleagues and Crick and Watson
provided the mechanism for biological evolution; the inheritance
of genes encoded in molecular DNA [10-12]. Darwin’s theory of
evolution through natural selection was now firmly established.
Although it still did not demand a gradualistic basis, Darwin’s
support for gradualism was very influential. By the 1950s, a modern
synthesis of Darwinism had developed in which slow changes in the
environment, consistent with Hutton’s uniformitarian principle of
geology, provoked equally slow changes in species through natural
selection [13,14]. That this gradual change in the biosphere was not
reflected in the fossil record did not seem to matter. Nevertheless,
gradualism was now the dominant paradigm, and catastrophism
was generally the reserve of supposed cranks. Confirmation of
the slow creeps of continents in the mid-60s, i.e. continental drift
though plate tectonics provided further support to the gradualistic
paradigm, and another mechanism for the diversification of species.
The intervention of Immanuel Velikovsky only served to
reinforce this dominance. On the basis of his expertise in psycho-
analysis, he proposed in 1950 there had been major catastrophes on
the time scale of human civilization, and also proposed a revisionist
version of history to account for them [15]. By themselves, these
ideas could have been worthy of debate, however he coupled his
theory with an un-physical mechanism; that part of Jupiter had
been ejected as a comet, and collided with Earth before being
transformed into Venus. While not taken seriously by the academic
community generally, his ideas took hold within the public
imagination.
However, in the early 1970s Eldridge and Gould proposed their
theory of punctuated equilibrium to account for the abrupt changes
seeninthefossilrecord,whichitwasnowrecognizedwerenotinfact
an artifact of slow geological processes [16]. This was supposedly a
modification of the modern synthesis, and therefore of Darwinism,
that allowed periods of rapid change in speciation together with
rapid changes in the environment. Although the novelty of this idea
continues to be debated within that research community, in that
manypaleontologistsandevolutionarybiologistsarguethatthenew
synthesis and even Darwinism already allowed for rapid changes in
the rate of speciation on geological timescales, the key point is that
it recognizes that a complete theory of biological evolution must
cater for mass extinctions and rapid bursts in evolution. Although
catastrophism was not thought necessary by most, at the time, to
explain these rapid bursts of evolution and extinction events, the
tide had clearly turned.
Furthermore, by 1980 it was known that near-Earth space
was teeming with asteroids with a wide range of sizes. Indeed, the
Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter contained objects up to
900km in diameter. Moreover, impact craters on the moon and inner
solar system planets confirmed a similar impact history for Earth,
even if craters on Earth remained relatively elusive. Catastrophic
mechanisms were now easy to provide if evidence on the ground
required them.
Everything changed in 1980 when Alvarez et al. proposed a
massive asteroid impact at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary that
ended the age of dinosaurs [17]. Their evidence was compelling,
especially a global iridium anomaly at the geological boundary.
When the Chicxulub crater, at 180km in diameter, was located off
the Yucatan peninsula, the case was practically confirmed. Earth
was under threat after all, and catastrophism via cosmic events
was revived. Today, the debate has moved on to the causes of
major catastrophes and extinction-level events, and in particular
the relative importance and correlation between cosmic impact
and massive volcanism [18]. But the possibility that more recent
extinction-level catastrophes could have occurred within the time
span of human civilization as a result of cosmic impacts (since it
is clear there have been no recent super-volcanic eruptions since
Toba) is generally thought to be negligible, and dismissed by many
academics.
This, despite the famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 event of 1994 in
which a comet impacted Jupiter. The comet, fragmented by Jupiter’s
tidal forces into a long string of over 20 large pieces, collided with

AAOA.000506. 2017. DOI: 10.31031/AAOA.2017.01.000506
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Jupiter to produce intense surface explosions, each large enough
to have devastated Earth’s biosphere, in the short space of a few
days. Once again, this event challenged the prevailing gradualistic
view: here was a massive collision of a comet with a planet of the
solar system within our own lifetime. Clearly, these events could
no longer be considered exceptionally rare, at least for Jupiter.
Gradualistic views were no longer tenable, you might think, as
cosmic catastrophism had been proven to occur. But, of course, it
can be argued that Jupiter’s gravity places it at special risk and that
the same risks simply don’t apply to Earth. Indeed, one can argue
that Jupiter shields Earth from such violent events by ‘mopping up’
errant comets.
To summarize the debate, until the 1970s science had provided
the ammunition to separate itself from the catastrophes of myth
of religion. But over the next quarter century a rapid reversal
occurred with the realization that (i) the fossil record really does
exhibit abrupt extinctions followed by rapid bursts of evolution, (ii)
near-Earth space contains millions of hazardous bodies, and (iii)
such catastrophic impacts have been observed on Jupiter in our
own lifetime.
A Catastrophe at The Origin of Civilization
Despite all this, the possibility that human civilization could
have been significantly affected by such events is still denied by
many to the present day. Although a risk on the timescale of millions
of years is recognized, it is generally considered implausible that a
global cosmic catastrophe could have occurred over the last, say,
ten or twenty thousand years. The argument given to support
this denial is usually probabilistic; assuming the number and size
distribution of near-Earth asteroids is fixed over time, a major
cosmic collision within the timescale of human civilization remains
unlikely; not impossible of course, just very unlikely. But notice
the assumption here; is it really reasonable to assume that the
population of asteroids and comets in near-Earth space has not
changed significantly over the course of human civilization? What
evidence is there for this?
Recent research indicates, almost certainly, that the above
assumption is incorrect. Over the last two decades, it has become
clear that the Taurid meteor complex is very large, very old, and has
been generated by the break-up of a giant comet in the inner solar
system. Moreover, this fragmentation process would have resulted
in a greatly enhanced risk of bombardment for Earth, which is likely
to be reflected in the archaeological record [19]. Strong evidence for
this comes in two main forms [20]. First, the orbits of some of the
largest near-Earth objects in orbits similar to that of comet Encke,
which is associated with the Taurid meteor complex, are highly
correlated, indicating that most of them are fragmentation products
of a single very large and very old progenitor comet [19]. Second,
the mass of the zodiacal dust cloud (to which comets trapped in
the inner solar system eventually decay) cannot be accounted for
by the cometary population currently observed; it instead points
strongly towards the input of a very large cometary mass into the
inner solar system over the timescale of human civilization or
somewhat longer [21].
In addition, geochemical evidence, accrued over the last
decade, points very strongly to a catastrophic cosmic encounter
with an asteroid or comet at the onset of the Younger Dryas period
[22,23]. Indeed, recent evidence from the last few years from three
independent research groups has revealed a platinum anomaly that
extends at least across North America, Greenland and North-West
Europe, coeval with other evidence for a cosmic impact, including
impact spherules, magnetic grains and nano diamonds [24-26].
Although disputed by several prominent and vocal research groups,
their counter-arguments are generally weak to non-existent
while evidence from independent research groups continues to
accumulate [27-34].
Finally, and quite astonishingly, this event appears to be
recorded in stone by its survivors in the Fertile Crescent at Göbekli
Tepe, southern Anatolia, currently perhaps the World’s most
important archaeological site. With Dimitrios Tsikritsis, I recently
provided an interpretation of symbolism at Göbekli Tepe, a site that
appears at the nexus of the Neolithic revolution, consistent with the
astronomical, geochemical and archaeological evidence [35,36].
Moreover, our statistical analysis of this interpretation indicates it
is very likely to be correct. In particular,
Figure 1: Pillar 43, the Vulture Stone, at Göbekli Tepe,
embedded into the rough stone wall of enclosure D (courtesy
of Alistair Coombs).
• Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe (Figure 1), popularly known as the
Vulture Stone, can be interpreted as the date of the event (which
agrees very well with the timing of the platinum anomaly in the
Greenland GISP2 ice core at the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling
[24]) encoded using precession of the equinoxes, with animal

AAOA.000506. 2017. DOI: 10.31031/AAOA.2017.01.000506
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symbols representing specific constellations similar to those
known today in Western Europe, thought to be acquired from the
ancient Greeks.
Figure 2: Pillar 2, Enclosure a of Göbekli Tepe (image by
Teomancimit from Wikipedia).
• Pillar 2 at Göbekli Tepe (Figure 2) can be interpreted as
an observation of the track of the radiant of the Northern Taurid
meteor stream, also using animal symbols as constellations.
Figure 3: Left: Close-up of the bottom of Pillar 18. Right:
Pillars 31 (foreground) and 18 (background) in Enclosure D
at Göbekli Tepe (both courtesy of Alistair Coombs).
• Pillar 18, one of the main central pillars (Figure 3), can be
interpreted as providing the mechanism of the event corresponding
to the date on Pillar 43, i.e. an encounter with the Northern Taurids.
Specifically, its vulpine symbolism corresponds to the northern
asterism of our Aquarius constellation, which in turn likely
corresponds to the position of maximum intensity of Northern
Taurid meteors at the time of the event.
Conclusion
This convergence of the astronomical, geochemical and
archaeological evidence suggests it is very likely that the theory
of Coherent Catastrophism, pioneered by Victor Clube and Bill
Napier in the Early 1980s, is correct [37,38]. The implications
for archaeology and anthropology, at least, are profound, in
that Coherent Catastrophism implies other catastrophic cosmic
encounters with the Taurids, with a wide range of magnitudes,
likely occurred both before and after this main event. Indeed, due to
orbital precession of the Taurid complex, we can expect to observe
an enhanced risk of bombardment to occur for a period of 500
years or so, due to overlap of two separate risk peaks, every 3000
years over the Holocene, although that enhanced risk might have
decayed, along with the offending giant comet, towards background
levels today.
Normally, any evidence of cosmic catastrophes over the
course of human civilization is interpreted as being the result of
other causes. Clearly, it is now important that existing scientific
data indicating pre-historic and historical catastrophes, including
major and correlated episodes of cultural transition, civilization
collapse, population migration, climate change, earthquake, war,
famine, pestilence and conflagration and flooding, is re-assessed
to properly consider cosmic bombardment as a possible causal
mechanism. Moreover, it appears the capabilities of people in the
Fertile Crescent at the Paleolithic to Neolithic transition have been
underestimated, and a key influence on the Neolithic revolution
might have been over-looked.
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