DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
---------------------------------------------------------
FUNDAY
HTML https://funday.createaforum.com
---------------------------------------------------------
*****************************************************
DIR Return to: LK2 Fossils & Dating
*****************************************************
#Post#: 717--------------------------------------------------
EIU
By: Admin Date: July 30, 2024, 4:47 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
EARTH IN UPHEAVAL
CONTENTS
Foreword xi
Preface xv
Author's Note xix
Chapter I IN THE NORTH
In Alaska 1 -- The Ivory Islands 3
Chapter II REVOLUTION
The Erratic Boulders 9 -- Sea and Land Changed Places 11 -- The
Caves of England 14 -- The Aquatic Graveyards 16
Chapter III UNIFORMITY
The Doctrine of Uniformity 21 -- The Hippopotamus 25 -- Icebergs
27 -- Darwin in South America 29
Chapter IV ICE
The Birth of the Ice Age Theory 31 -- On the Russian Plains 34
-- Ice Age in the Tropics 36 -- Greenland 38
Corals of the Polar Regions 41 -- Whales in the Mountains 43
Chapter V TIDAL WAVE
Fissures in the Rocks 46 -- The Norfolk Forest-Bed 51 --
Cumberland Cavern 54 -- In Northern China 56
The Asphalt Pit of La Brea 59 -- Agate Spring Quarry 61
Chapter VI MOUNTAINS AND RIFTS
Mountain Thrusts in the Alps and Elsewhere 65 -- The Himalayas
68 -- The Siwalik Hills 73
Tiahuanacu in the Andes 75 -- The Columbia Plateau 81 -- A
Continent Torn Apart 82
Chapter VII DESERTS AND OCEANS
The Sahara 86 -- Arabia 88 -- The Carolina Bays 91 -- The Bottom
of the Atlantic 92 -- The Floor of the Seas 95
Chapter VIII POLES DISPLACED
The Cause of the Ice Ages 99 -- Shifting Poles 101 -- The
Sliding Continents 107-- The Changing Orbit 111 -- The Rotating
Crust 113
Chapter IX AXIS SHIFTED
Earth in a Vise 118 -- Evaporating Oceans 119-- Condensation 122
-- A Working Hypothesis 124-- Ice and Tide 127
Magnetic Poles Reversed 130 -- Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Comets
134
Chapter X THIRTY-FIVE CENTURIES AGO
Clock Unwound 140 The Glacial Eake Agassiz 145 -- Niagara Falls
146 -- The Rhone Glacier 147 -- The Mississippi 149
Fossils in Florida 151 -- Lakes of the Great Basin and the End
of the Ice Age 153
Chapter XI KLIMASTURZ
Klimasturz 157 -- Tree Rings 159 -- Lake Dwellings 160 --
Dropped Ocean Level 164 -- The North Sea 166
Chapter XII THE RUINS OF THE EAST
Crete 171 -- Troy 175 -- The Ruins of the East 177 -- Times and
Dates 181
Chapter XIII COLLAPSING SCHEMES
Geology and Archaeology 186
Collapsing Schemes 189 -- In Early Ages 192 -- Coal 195
Chapter XIV EXTINCTION
Fossils 201 -- Footprints 203 -- The Caverns 204 -- Extinction
207
Chapter XV CATACLYSMIC EVOLUTION
Catastrophism and Evolution 212 -- The Geological Record and
Changing Forms of Life 216 -- The Mechanism of Evolution 221
Mutations and New Species 226 -- Cataclysmic Evolution 231
Chapter XVI THE END 236
SUPPLEMENT 241 Worlds in Collision in the Light of Recent Finds
in Archaeology, Geology, and Astronomy
INDEX 275
CHAPTER I
IN THE NORTH
In Alaska
IN ALASKA, to the north of Mount McKinley, the tallest mountain
in North America, the Tanana River joins the Yukon. From the
===Tanana Valley and the valleys of its tributaries gold is
mined out of gravel and "muck." This muck is a frozen mass of
animals and trees. F. Rainey of the University of Alaska
described the scene: * "Wide cuts, often several miles in length
and sometimes as much as 140 feet in depth, are now being
sluiced out along stream valleys tributary to the Tanana in the
Fairbanks District. In order to reach gold-bearing gravel beds
an overburden of frozen silt or ==='muck' is removed with
hydraulic giants. This 'muck' contains enormous numbers of
frozen bones of extinct animals such as the ____mammoth,
mastodon, super-bison and horse."1 The horse became extinct in
pre-Columbian America; the present horses in the Western
Hemisphere are descendants of imported animals. These animals
perished in rather recent times; present estimates place their
extinction at the end of the Ice Age or in early post-glacial
times. The soil of Alaska covered their bodies together with
those of animals of species still surviving. Under what
conditions did this great slaughter take place, in which
millions upon millions of annuals were torn limb from limb and
mingled with uprooted trees? F. C. Hibben of the University of
New Mexico writes: "Although the formation of the deposits of
===muck is not clear, there is ample evidence that at least
portions of this material were deposited under catastrophic
conditions. Mammal remains are for the most part dismembered and
disarticulated, even though some fragments yet retain, in their
frozen state, portions of ligaments, skin, hair, and flesh.
Twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses. . . . At
least four considerable layers of volcanic ash may be traced in
these deposits, although they are extremely warped and
distorted. ..."3 Could it be that a volcanic eruption killed the
animal population of Alaska, the streams carrying down into the
valleys the bodies of the slaughtered animals? A volcanic
eruption would have charred the trees but would not have
uprooted and splintered them, if it killed animals, it would not
have dismembered them. The presence of ===volcanic ash indicates
that a volcanic eruption did take place, and repeatedly, in four
consecutive stages of the same epoch; but it is also apparent
that the trees could have been uprooted and splintered only by
hurricane or flood or a combination of both agencies. The
animals could have been dismembered only by a ===stupendous wave
that lifted and carried and smashed and tore and buried millions
of bodies and millions of trees. Also, the area of the
catastrophe was much greater than the action of a few volcanoes
could have covered. ===Muck deposits like those of the Tanana
River Valley are found in the lower reaches of the Yukon in the
western part of the peninsula, on the Koyukuk River that flows
into the Yukon from the north, on the Kuskokwim River that
empties its waters into Bering Sea, and at several places along
the Arctic coast, and so "may be considered to extend in greater
or lesser thickness over all unglaciated areas of the northern
peninsula."4 What could have caused the Arctic Sea and the
Pacific Ocean to irrupt and wash away forests with all their
animal population and throw the entire mingled mass in great
heaps scattered all over Alaska, the coast of which is longer
than the Atlantic seaboard from Newfoundland to Florida? Was it
not a tectonic revolution in the earth's crust, that also caused
the volcanoes to erupt and to cover the peninsula with ashes? In
various levels of the muck, ===stone artifacts were found
"frozen in situ at great depths and in apparent association"
with the Ice Age fauna, which implies that "men were
contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska." * Worked flints,
characteristically shaped, called Yuma points, were repeatedly
found in the Alaskan muck, one hundred and more feet below the
surface. One such spear point was found there between a lion's
jaw and a mammoth's tusk.6 Similar weapons were used only a few
generations ago by the Indians of the Athapascan tribe, who
camped in the upper Tanana Valley.7 "It has also been suggested
that even modern Eskimo points are remarkably Yuma-like," 8 all
of which indicates that the multitudes of torn animals and
splintered forests date from a time not many thousand years ago.
1 305. 2 F. Rainey, "Archaeological Investigation in Central
Alaska," American Antiquity, V (1940),
3 F. C. Hibben, "Evidence of Early Man in Alaska," American
Antiquity, VIII (1943), 256.
4 Ibid.
5 6 7 8 Rainey, American Antiquity, V, 307. Hibben, American
Antiquity, VIII. 257. Rainey. American Antiquity, V, 301.
Hibben, American Antiquity, VIII, 256.
The Ivory Islands
The arctic coast of Siberia is cold, bleak, inhospitable. The
sea is passable for ships maneuvering between floating ice for
two months of the year; from September to the middle of July the
ocean north of Siberia is fettered, an unbroken desert of ice.
Polar winds sweep over the frozen tundras of Siberia, where no
tree grows and the soil is never tilled. In his exploratory
voyage on the ship Vega in 1878, Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskjold,
the first to traverse this northern seaway from one end to the
other, traveled for weeks along the coast from Novaya Zemlya to
Cape Shelagskoi (170°30' East) on the eastern extremity of
Siberia without seeing a single human being on the shore.
Fossil tusks of the mammoth—an extinct elephant— were found in
northern Siberia and brought southward to markets at a very
early time, possibly in the days of Pliny in the first century
of the present era. The Chinese excelled in working delicate
designs in the ivory, much of which they obtained from the
north. And from the days of the conquest of Siberia (1582) by
the Cossack Yermak under Ivan the Terrible, until our own times,
trade in mammoths' tusks has gone on. Northern Siberia provided
more than half the world's supply of ivory, many piano keys and
many billiard balls being made from the fossil tusks of these
mammoths. In 1797 the body of a mammoth, with flesh, skin, and
hair, was found in northeastern Siberia, and since then bodies
of other mammoths have been unearthed from the frozen ground in
various parts of that region. The flesh had the appearance of
freshly frozen beef; it was edible, and wolves and sledge dogs
fed on it without harm.1 The ground must have been frozen ever
since the day of their entombment; had it not been frozen, the
bodies of the mammoths would have putrefied in a single summer,
but they remained unspoiled for some thousands of years. It is
therefore absolutely necessary to believe that the bodies were
frozen up immediately after the animals died, and were never
once thawed, until the day of their discovery. ^ High in the
north above Siberia, six hundred miles inside the Polar Circle,
in the Arctic Ocean, lie the ===Liakhov Islands. Liakhov was a
hunter who, in the days of Catherine II, ventured to these
islands and brought back the report that they abounded in
____mammoths' bones. "Such was the enormous quantity of
mammoths' remains that it seemed . . . that the island was
actually composed of the bones and tusks of ____elephants,
cemented together by icy sand." ^ The ===New Siberian Islands,
discovered in 1805 and 1806, as well as the ===islands of
Stolbovoi and Belkov to the west, present the same picture. "The
soil of these desolate islands is absolutely packed full of the
bones of ____elephants and rhinoceroses in astonishing
numbers."4 "These islands were full of ____mammoth bones, and
the quantity of tusks and teeth of ____elephants and
rhinoceroses, found in the newly discovered ===island of New
Siberia, was perfectly amazing, and surpassed anything which had
as yet been discovered." ^ Did the animals come there over the
ice, and for what purpose? On what food could they have lived?
Not on the lichens of the Siberian tundras, covered by deep snow
most of the year, and still less on the moss of the polar
islands, which are frozen ten months in the year: mammoths,
members of the voracious elephant family, required huge
quantities of vegetable food every day in the year. How could
large herds of them have existed in a country like northeast
Siberia, which is regarded as the coldest place in the world,
and where there was no food for them? ===Mammoth tusks have been
dredged in nets from the bottom of the ===Arctic Ocean; and
after arctic gales the shores of the islands are strewn with
tusks cast up by the billows. This is regarded as an indication
that the bottom of the Arctic Ocean between the islands and the
mainland was dry land in the days when mammoths roamed there.
Georges Cuvier, the great French paleontologist (1769— 1832),
thought that in a vast catastrophe of continental dimensions the
sea overwhelmed the land, the herds of mammoths perished, and in
a second spasmodic movement the sea rushed away, leaving the
carcasses behind. This catastrophe must have been accompanied by
a precipitous drop in temperature; the frost seized the dead
bodies and saved them from decomposition.6 In some mammoths,
when discovered, even the eyeballs were still preserved.
Charles Darwin, who denied the occurrence of continental
catastrophes in the past, in a letter to Sir Henry Howorth
admitted that the extinction of mammoths in Siberia was for him
an insoluble problem.7 J. D. Dana, the leading American
geologist of the second half of the last century, wrote: "The
encasing in ice of huge elephants, and the perfect preservation
of the flesh, shows that the cold finally became suddenly
extreme, as of a single winter's night, and knew no relenting
afterward." "In the stomachs and between the teeth of the
mammoths were found ===plants and grasses that do not grow now
in northern Siberia. "The contents of the stomachs have been
carefully examined; they showed the undigested food, ===leaves
of trees now found in Southern Siberia, but a long way from the
existing deposits of ivory. Microscopic examination of the skin
showed red blood corpuscles, which was a proof not only of a
sudden death, but that the death was due to suffocation either
by gases or water, evidently the latter in this case. But the
puzzle remained to account for the sudden freezing up of this
large mass of flesh so as to preserve it for future ages." ®
What could have caused a sudden change in the temperature of the
region? Today the country does not provide food for large
quadrupeds, the soil is barren and produces only moss and fungi
a few months in the year; at that time the animals fed on
plants. And not only mammoths pastured in northern Siberia and
on the islands of the Arctic Ocean. On Kotelnoi Island "neither
trees, nor shrubs, nor bushes, exist ... and yet the bones of
____elephants, rhinoceroses, buffaloes, and horses are found in
this icy wilderness in numbers which defy all calculation."*®
When Hedenstrom and Sannikov discovered the New Siberian Islands
in 1806, they found in the "desolate wilderness" of polar sea
the remains of "enormous petrified forests." These forests could
be seen tens of miles away. "The trunks of the trees in these
ruins of ancient forests were partly standing upright and partly
lying horizontally buried in the frozen soil. Their extent was
very great.11 Hedenstrom described them as follows! "On the
southern coast of New Siberia are found the remarkable wood
hills [piles of trunksl. They are 30 fathoms [180 feet] high,
and consist of horizontal strata of sandstone, alternating with
strata of bituminous beams or trunks of trees. On ascending
these hills, fossilized charcoal is everywhere met with, covered
apparently with ashes; but, on closer examination, this ash is
also found to be a petrifaction, and so hard that it can
scarcely be scraped off with a knife." ^ Some trunks are fixed
perpendicular in the sandstone, with broken ends. In 1829 the
German scientist G. A. Erman went to the Liakhov and the New
Siberian islands to measure there the magnetic field of the
earth. He described the soil as full of the bones of
____elephants, rhinoceroses, and buffaloes. Of the piles of wood
he wrote i "In New Siberia [Island], on the declivities facing
the south, lie hills 250 or 300 feet high, formed of driftwood,
the ancient origin of which, as well as of the fossil wood in
the tundras, anterior to the history of the Earth in its present
state, strikes at once even the most uneducated hunters. . . .
Other hills on the same island, and on Kotelnoi, which lies
further to the west, are heaped up to an equal height with
skeletons of pachyderms [elephants, rhinoceroses], bisons, etc.,
which are cemented together by frozen sand as well as by strata
and veins of ice. . . . On the summit of the hills they [the
trunks of trees] lie flung upon one another in the wildest
disorder, forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their
tops broken off or crushed, as if they had been thrown with
great violence from the south on a bank, and there heaped up.
Eduard von Toll repeatedly visited the New Siberian Islands from
1885 to 1902, when he perished in the Arctic Ocean. He examined
the "wood hills" and "found them to consist of carbonized trunks
of trees, with impressions of leaves and fruits." On Maloi, one
of the group of Liakhov Islands, Toll found bones of
____mammoths and other animals together with the trunks of
fossil trees, with leaves and cones. "This striking discovery
proves that in the days when the mammoths and rhinoceroses lived
in northern Siberia, these desolate islands were covered with
great forests, and bore a luxuriant vegetation." 15 A
hurricane, apparently, uprooted the trees of Siberia and flung
them to the extreme north; mountainous waves of the ocean piled
them in huge hills, and some agent of a bituminous nature
transformed them into charcoal, either before or after they were
deposited and cemented in drifted masses of sand that became
baked into sandstone. These petrified forests were swept from
northern Siberia into the ocean, and together with bones of
____animals and drifted sand built the islands. It may be that
not all the charred trees and the mammoths and other animals
were destroyed and swept away in a single catastrophe. It is
more probable that one huge cemetery of animals and trees came
flying through the air on the crest of a retreating tidal wave
to settle astride another, older, cemetery, deep in the Polar
Circle. The scientists who explored the "muck" beds of Alaska
have not reflected upon the similarity in appearance of animal
remains there and in the polar regions of Siberia and on arctic
islands, and have therefore not discussed a common cause. The
exploration of the New Siberian Islands, one thousand miles away
from Alaska, was the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
academicians who followed the hunters of fossil ivory; the
exploration of Alaskan soil was the work of twentieth-century
scientists who followed the gold-digging machines. These two
observations—one old, one new—came from the north. _____Before
presenting many more from all parts of the world, I shall review
a few dominant theories on the history of our earth and its
animal kingdom. We shall read in brief, in the original
statements of the authors, how the earlier naturalists explained
the phenomena; how, subsequently, the same phenomena were
interpreted in terms of slow evolution; and how in the last
fourscore years more and more facts have presented themselves
that do not square with the picture of a peaceful world molded
in a slow and uneventful process.
1 Observation of D. F. Hertz, in B. Digby, The Mammoth (1926),
p. 9.
2 D. Gath Whitley. "The Ivory Islands in the Arctic Ocean,"
Journal of the Philosophical Society of Great Britain, XII
(1910), 35.
8 Ibid., p. 41.
4 Ibid., p. 36.
5 6 Ibid., p. 42. Georges Cuvier, Discours sur les revolutions
de la surface du globe et sur les changements qu'elles ont
produits dans le regne animal (1825).
7 Whitley, Journal of the Philosophical Society of Great
Britain, XII (1910), 56. G. F. Kunz, Ivory and the Elephant
(1916), p. 236.
8 J. D. Dana, Manual of Geology (4th ed.; 1894), p. 1007.
9 10 Whitley, Journal of the Philosophical Society of Great
Britain, XII (1910), 56.
Ibid., p. 50;
11 Ibid., p. 43.
12 p p, Wrangell, Narrative of an Expedition to Siberia and the
PolttT {Polar?} Sea (1841), note to p. 173 of the American
edition
18 G. A. Ernian, Travels in Siberia (1848), 11, 376, 383.
14 Whitley, journal of the Philosophical Society of Great
Britain, XII (1910), 49.
15 Ibid., p. 50.
CHAPTER II REVOLUTION
The Erratic Boulders
THE WATERS of the ocean in which our mountains had been formed
still covered a part of these Alps when a violent paroxysm of
the globe suddenly opened great cavities . . . and ruptured many
rocks. ... "The waters were carried toward these abysses with
extreme violence, falling from the height they were before; they
crossed deep valleys and dragged immense quantities of earth,
sand, and debris of all kinds of rocks. This mass, shoved along
by the onrush of great waters, was left spread up the slopes
where we still see many scattered fragments."1 Thus did Horace
Benedict de Saussure, foremost Swiss naturalist of the end of
the eighteenth century, explain the presence of stones broken
off from the Alps and carried to the Jura Mountains to the west;
so also did he explain the marine remains found in alpine
ridges, and the sand, gravel, and clay that fill the valleys of
the Alps and the plains beyond them.
1 Horace Benedict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes, I (1779),
151.
The loose rocks lying on the Jura Mountains were torn from the
Alps; in their mineral composition they differ from the rock
formations of the Jura, showing their alpine origin. Rocks that
differ from the formations on which they lie are called "erratic
boulders." These stone blocks lie on the Jura Mountains at an
elevation of 2000 feet above Lake Geneva. Some of them are
thousands of cubic feet in size, and Pierre a Martin is over
10,000 cubic feet. They must have been carried across the space
now occupied by the lake and lifted to the height where they are
found. There are erratic boulders in many places of the world.
In the British Isles, on the shore and in the highlands, are
enormous quantities of them, transported there across the North
Sea from the mountains of Norway. Some force wrested them from
those massifs, bore them over the entire expanse that separates
Scandinavia from the British Isles, and set them down on the
coast and on the hills. From Scandinavia boulders were also
carried to Germany and spread over that country, in some places
so thickly that it seems as though they had been brought there
by masons to build cities. Also, high in the Harz Mountains, in
central Germany, lie stones that originated in Norway. From
Finland blocks of stone were swept to the Baltic regions and
over Poland and lifted onto the Carpathians. Another train of
boulders was fanned out from Finland, over the Valdai Hills,
over the site of Moscow, and as far as the Don. In North America
erratic blocks, broken from the granite of Canada and Labrador,
were spread over Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Ohio; they perch on top of ridges and lie on slopes and deep in
the valleys. They lie on the coastal plain and on the White
Mountains and the Berkshires, sometimes in an unbroken chain; in
the Pocono Mountains they balance precariously on the edge of
crests. The attentive traveler through the woods wonders at the
size of these rocks, brought there and abandoned sometime in the
past, frighteningly piled up. Some erratics are enormous. The
block near Conway, New Hampshire, is 90 by 40 by 38 feet and
weighs about 10,000 tons, the load of a large cargo ship.
Equally large is Mohegan Rock, which towers over the town of
Montville, in Connecticut. The great flat erratic in Warren
County, Ohio, weighs approximately 13,500 tons and covers three
quarters of an acre; the Ototoks erratic, thirty miles south of
Calgary, Alberta, consists of two pieces of quartzite "derived
from at least 50 miles to the <p11> west", of a calculated
weight of over 18,000 tons." Blocks of 250 to 300 feet in
circumference, however, are small when compared with a mass of
chalk stone near Malmo in southern Sweden, which is "three miles
long, one thousand feet wide and from one hundred to two hundred
feet in thickness, and which has been transported an indefinite
distance. . . ." It is quarried for commercial purposes. A
similar transported slab of chalk is found on the eastern coast
of England, "upon which a village had unwittingly been built."8
In innumerable places on the surface of the earth, as well as on
isolated ===islands in the Atlantic and Pacific and in
Antarctica,4 lie rocks of foreign origin, brought from afar by
some great force. Broken off from their parent mountain ridges
and coastal cliffs, they were carried down dale and up hill and
over land and sea.
Sea and Land Changed Places
2R. F. Flint, Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (1947),
pp. 116-17. 8 G. F. Wright, The Ice Age in North America and Its
Bearing upon the Antiquity of Man (5th cd.; 1911), pp. 238-39.
4E. H. Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic, II (1909),
illustration opposite p. 293.
The most renowned naturalist to come from the generation of the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars was Georges Cuvier. He
was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, or the science of
fossil bones, and thus of the science of ____extinct animals.
Studying the finds made in the gypsum formation of Montmartre in
===Paris and those elsewhere in France and the European
continent in general, he came to the conclusion that in the
midst of even the oldest strata of marine formations there are
other strata replete with animal or plant remains of terrestrial
or fresh-water forms; and that among the more recent strata, or
those that are nearer the surface, there are also land animals
buried under heaps of marine sediment. "It has frequently
happened that lands which have been laid dry, have been again
covered by the waters, in consequence either of their being
engulfed in the abyss, or of the sea having merely risen over
them. . . , These repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea
have neither all been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of
the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden;
and this is especially easy to be proven, with regard to the
last of these catastrophes, that which, by a twofold motion, has
inundated, and afterwards laid dry, our present continents, or
at least a part of the land which forms them at the present day.
* The breaking to pieces, the raising up and overturning of the
older strata [of the earth), leave no doubt upon the mind that
they have been reduced to the state in which we now see them, by
the action of sudden and violent causes; and even the force of
the motions excited in the mass of waters, is still attested by
the heaps of debris and rounded pebbles which are in many places
interposed between the solid strata. Life, therefore, has often
been disturbed on this earth by terrific events. Numberless
living beings have been the victims oi these catastrophes; some,
which inhabited the dry land, have been swallowed up by
inundations; others, which peopled the waters, have been laid
dry, the bottom of the sea having been suddenly raised; their
very races have been extinguished for ever, and have left no
other memorial of their existence than some fragments which the
naturalist can scarcely recognize. ^ Cuvier was surprised to
find that "life has not always existed upon the globe," for
there are deep strata which contain no vestiges of living
beings. The sea without inhabitants "would seem to have prepared
materials for the mollusca and zoophytes," and when they
appeared and populated the sea, they deposited their shells and
built coral, at first in small numbers, and eventually in vast
formations. Cuvier believed that changes have operated in nature
not just since the appearance of life, for the land masses
formed previous to that event also seemed to have experienced
violent displacements.3 1 Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of
the Earth (5th cd , 1827) (English translation of Discours sur
les revolutions de la surface du globe), pp. 13-14. 2 Ibid , p.
15. 8 Ibid., p. 20. He found in the gypsum deposits in the
suburbs of Paris marine limestone containing over eight hundred
<13> species of shells, all of them marine. Under this limestone
there is another—fresh-water— deposit formed of clay. Among the
shells, all of fresh-water (or land) origin, there are also
bones—but "what is remarkable," the bones are those of
____reptiles and not of mammals, "of ____crocodiles and
tortoises.*' Much of France was once sea; then it was land,
populated by land reptiles; then it became sea again and was
populated by marine animals; then it was land again, inhabited
by ____mammals; then it was once more sea, and again land. Each
stratum contains the evidence of its age in the bones and shells
of the ____animals that lived and propagated there at the time
and were entombed in recurrent upheavals. And as it was on the
site of Paris, so it was in other parts of France, and in other
countries of Europe. The strata of the earth disclose that "The
thread of operations is here broken; the march of Nature is
changed; and none of the agents which she now employs, would
have been sufficient for the production of her ancient works." *
"We have no evidence that the sea can now encrust those shells
with a paste as compact as that of the marbles, the sandstones,
or even the coarse limestone. . . . "In short, all [now active]
causes united, would not change, in an appreciable degree, the
level of the sea; nor raise a single stratum above its surface.
... It has been asserted that the sea has undergone a general
diminishing of level. . . . Admitting that there has been a
gradual diminution of the waters; that the sea has transported
solid matter in all directions; that the temperature of the
globe is either diminishing or increasing; none of these cases
could have overturned our strata, enveloped in ice large
animals, with their flesh and skin; laid dry marine [animals] .
. . and, lastly, destroyed numerous species, and even entire
genera." 5
4 Ibid., p. 24. 6 Ibid., pp. 32, 36—37. 6 Ibid., pp. 35-36.
Thus, we repeat, it is in vain that we search, among the powers
which now act at the surface of the earth, for causes sufficient
to produce the revolutions and catastrophes, the traces of which
are exhibited by its crust." ^ But what could have caused these
catastrophes? Cuvier reviewed the theories of the origin of the
world current in his time but found no answer to the question
that preoccupied him. He did not know the cause of these vast
cataclysms; he only knew that they had occurred. Many fruitless
efforts" had been made, and he felt that his search for the
causes of the cataclysms was fruitless too. These ideas have
haunted, I may almost say have tormented me during my researches
among fossil bones." ^
The Caves of England
In 1823, William Buckland, professor of geology at the
University of Oxford, published his Reliquiae diluvianae (Relics
of the Flood), with the subtitle, Observations on the organic
remains contained in caves, fissures, and diluvial gravel, and
on other geological phenomena, attest-mg the action of an
universal deluge. Buckland was one of the great authorities on
geology of the first half of the nineteenth century. In a cave
in Kirkdale in Yorkshire, eighty feet above the valley, under a
floor covering of stalagmites, he found teeth and bones of
____elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, horses, deer, tigers
(the teeth of which were "larger than those of the largest Hon
or Bengal tiger ), bears, wolves, hyenas, foxes, hares, rabbits,
as well as bones of ____ravens, pigeons, larks, snipe, and
ducks. Many of the animals had died "before the first set, or
milk teeth, had been shed." 1 Ibid., p. 242. Certain scholars
prior to Buckland had their own explanation for the provenience
of ____elephant bones in the soil of England, and to them
Buckland referred: "[The idea] which long prevailed, and was
considered satisfactory by the antiquaries [archaeologists] of
the last century, was, that they were the remains of elephants
imported by the Roman armies. This idea is also refuted: First,
by the anatomical facts of their belonging to an extinct species
of this genus; second, by their being usually accompanied by the
bones of ____rhinoceros and hippopotamus, animals which could
never have been attached to Roman armies; thirdly, by their
being found dispersed over Siberia and North America, in equal
or even greater abundance than in those parts of Europe which
were subjected to the Roman power." 1 It appeared that
____hippopotamus and reindeer and bison lived side by side at
Kirkdale; ____hippopotamus, reindeer, and mammoth pastured
together at Brentford near London.2 ____Reindeer and grizzly
bear lived with the hippopotamus at Cefn in Wales. ____Lemming
and reindeer bones were found together with bones of the
____cave lion and hyena at Bleadon in Somerset.8
____Hippopotamus, bison, and musk sheep were found together with
worked flint in the gravels of the Thames Valley.4 The remains
of ____reindeer lay with the bones of mammoth and rhinoceros in
the cave of Breugue in France, in the same red clay, encased by
the same stalagmites.5 At Arcy, France, also in a cave, bones of
the ____hippopotamus were found with bones of the reindeer, and
with them a worked flint.6 According to the prophecy of Isaiah
(11:6), in messianic times to come the lion and the calf would
pasture together. But even prophetic vision has not conceived of
a reindeer from snow covered Lapland and a hippopotamus from the
tropical Congo River living together on the British Isles or in
France. Yet they did leave their bones in the same mud of the
same caves, together with bones of other animals, in the
strangest assortments. These animal bones were found in gravel
and clay to which Buckland gave the name of diluvium.
1 W. Buckland, Reliquiae diluvianae, p. 173. 2 8 Ibid. 4 W. B.
Dawkins, Proceedings of the Geological Society (1869), p. 190*
James Geikie, Prehistoric Europe (1881), p. 137; Dawkins,
Cavtf-hunting (1874) > p. 416. 5 Cuyier, Recherches sur les
ossements fossiles des quadrupedes, IV, 94. 8 E. Lartet,
Reliquiae aquitanicae, pp. 147-48.
Buckland was concerned "to establish two important facts, first,
that there has been a recent and general inundation of the
globe, and, second, that the animals whose remains are found
interred in the wreck of that inundation were natives of high
north latitudes." The presence of tropical animals in northern
Europe "cannot be solved by supposing them to migrate
periodically . . • for in the case of crocodiles and tortoises
extensive emigration is almost impossible, and not less so to
such an unwieldy animal as the hippopotamus when out of the
water." But how could they live in the cold of northern Europe?
Buckland says: "It is equally difficult to imagine that they
could have passed their winters in lakes or rivers frozen up
with ice." If cold-blooded land animals are unable to hide
themselves in the ground over the winter, in icy climates their
blood would freeze solid: they lack the ability to regulate the
temperature of their bodies. Like Cuvier, Buckland was "nearly
certain that if any change of climate has taken place, it took
place suddenly. ' Of the time the catastrophe occurred, which
covered with mud and pebbles the bones in the Kirkdale cave,
Buckland wrote: "From the limited quantity of postdiluvian
stalactite, as well as from the undecayed condition of the
bones," one must deduce that "the time elapsed since the
introduction of the diluvial mud has not been of excessive
length." The bones were not yet fossilized; their organic matter
was not yet replaced by minerals. Buckland thought that the time
elapsed since a diluvial catastrophe could not have exceeded
____five or six thousand years, the figure adopted also by De
Luc, Dolomieu, and Cuvier, each of whom presented his own
reasons. Then the illustrious geologist added these words: "What
[the] cause was, whether a change in the inclination in the
earth's axis, or the near approach of a comet, or any other
cause or combination of causes purely astronomical, is a
question the discussion of which is foreign to the object of the
present memoir."
The Aquatic Graveyards
7 Buckland, Reliquiae diluvianae, p. 47. l Hugh Miller. The Old
Red Sandstone (Boston, 1865; first published In England in
1841), p. 48.
The Old Red Sandstone is regarded as one of the oldest strata
with signs of extinct life in it. No animal life higher than
fish is found there. Whatever the age of this formation, it
carries the testimony and "a wonderful record of violent death
falling at once, not on a few individuals, but on whole
tribes."1 <17> In the lute thirties of the last century Hugh
Miller made the Old Red Sandstone in Scotland the special
subject of his investigations. He observed: "The earth had
already become a vast sepulcher, to a depth beneath the bed of
the sea equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its
surface." ^ Ben Nevis in the Grampian Mountains is the highest
peak in Great Britain, 4406 feet high. The stratum of the Old
Red Sandstone is twice as thick. This formation presents the
spectacle of an upheaval immobilized at a particular moment and
petrified forever. Hugh Miller wrote: "The first scene in
[Shakespeare's] The Tempest opens amid the confusion and turmoil
of the hurricane—amid thunders and lightnings, the roar of the
wind, the shouts of the seamen, the rattling of cordage, and the
wild dash of the billows. The history of the period represented
by the Old Red Sandstone seems, in what now forms the
===northern half of Scotland, to have opened in a similar
manner. . . . The vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch
Ness, Dingwall and Gamrie, and many a thousand square miles
besides, was the scene of a shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful
currents, and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water-rolled
pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred
yards, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of
the disturbing agencies of this time of commotion." Miller found
that the hardest masses in the stratum—"porphyries of vitreous
fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of
quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel,—are yet
polished and ground down into bullet-like forms. . . . And yet
it is surely difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea
should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so
greatly extended a space . . • and for a period so prolonged,
that the entire area should have come to be covered with a
stratum of ===rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient
rock, fifteen stories' height in thickness."' 2
3 Ibid , p. 217. Ibid., pp. 217-18.
In the red sandstone an abundant ____aquatic fauna is embedded.
The animals are in disturbed positions. At the period of the
past when these formations were composed, some terrible
catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish of an area
at least a ===hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps
much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed
thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of
violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved;
the tail in many instances is bent around to the head; the
spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as in fish
that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys4 shows its arms
extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy.
The attitudes of all the ichthyolites [any fossil fish] on this
platform are attitudes of fear, anger and pain. The remains,
too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after-attacks of
predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record
is one of destruction at once widely spread and total. ..."5
What agency of destruction could have accounted for "innumerable
existences of an area perhaps ===ten thousand square miles in
extent [being] annihilated at once"? "Conjecture lacks footing
in grappling with the enigma, and expatiates m uncertainty over
all the known phenomena of death," wrote Miller.6 The ravages of
no disease, however virulent, could explain some of the
phenomena of this arena of death. Rarely does disease fall
equally on many different genera at once, and never does it
strike with instantaneous suddenness; yet in the ruins of this
platform from ____ten to twelve distinct genera and many species
were involved; and so suddenly did the agency perform its work
that its victims were fixed in their first attitude of surprise
and terror. 4 An extinct fishlike animal with winglike
projections and with the anterior of the body encased in bony
plates. 5
6 Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, p. 222. Ibid., p. 223.
The area of the Old Red Sandstone investigated by Miller
comprises one half of Scotland, from Loch Ness to the land's
northern extremity and beyond to the Orkney Islands in the
north. "A thousand different localities" disclose the same scene
of destruction. <19> An identical picture can be found in many
other places all around the world, in similar and dissimilar
formations. Of Monte Bolca, near Verona in northern Italy,
Buckland wrote: "The circumstances under which the fossil fishes
are found at Monte Bolca seem to indicate that they perished
suddenly. . . . The skeletons of these fish lie parallel to the
laminae of the strata of the calcareous slate; they are always
entire, and closely packed on one another. . . . All these
fishes must have died suddenly . . . and have been speedily
buried in the calcareous sediment then in the course of
deposition. From the fact that certain individuals have even
preserved traces of colour upon their skin, we are certain that
they were entombed before decomposition of their soft parts had
taken place. The same author wrote about the fish deposits in
the area of the Harz Mountains in Germany: "Another celebrated
deposit of fossil fishes is that of the cupriferous slate
surrounding the Harz. Many of the fishes of this slate at
Mansfeld, Eisleben, etc., have a distorted attitude, which has
often been assigned to writhing in the agonies of death. . . .
As these fossil fishes maintain the attitude of the rigid stage
immediately succeeding death, it follows that they were buried
before putrefaction had commenced, and apparently in the same
bituminous mud, the influx of which had caused their
destruction." 8 The story of ao;ony and sudden death and
immediate encasing is told by the red sandstone of Scotland; the
limestone of Monte Bolca in Lombardy; the bituminous slate of
Mansfeld in Thuringia; and also by the coal formation of
Saarbriicken on the Saar, "the most celebrated deposits of
fossil fishes in Europe"; the calcareous slate of Solenhofen;
the blue slate of Glarus; the marl-stone of Oensingen in
Switzerland and of Aix-in-Pro-vence, to mention only a few of
the better-known sites in Europe. 7 8 W. Buckland, Geology and
Mineralogy (Philadelphia, 1837), p. 101. Ibid., p. 103. In North
America similar strata, "packed full of splendidly preserved
fishes," are found in the black limestone of Ohio and Michigan,
in the Green River bed of Arizona, the diatom beds of Lompoc,
California, and in many other formations.9 9 George McCready
Price, Evolutionary Geology and New Catastrophism (1926), p.
236; J. M. Macfarlane, Fishes the Source of Petroleum (1923). In
cataclysms of early ages fishes died in agony; and the sand and
the gravel of the upthrust sea bottom covered the aquatic
graveyards.
CHAPTER III UNIFORMITY
The Doctrine of Uniformity
FOR OVER twenty-five years, from the beginning of the French
Revolution in 1789 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Europe was
in turmoil. France beheaded her king and queen; many
revolutionaries in their turn went to the scaffold too. Spam,
Italy, Germany, Austria, and Russia became battlefields. \ he
British isles were in danger of being invaded, and Britain's
fleet fought at Trafalgar the tyrant who had sprung up from the
revolutionary army. After 1815 there was a universal desire for
peace and tranquility. The Holy Alliance was organized; Europe
sank into reaction, England into a spirit of conservatism. The
abortive revolutionary wave of 1830 did not reach the British
Isles. No wonder that in the climate of reaction to the
eruptions of revolution and the Napoleonic Wars the theory of
uniformity became popular and soon dominant in the natural
sciences. According to this theory, the development of the
surface of the globe has been going on through all the ages
without any disturbances; the process of very slow change that
we observe at present has been the only process of importance
from the beginning. This theory, first advanced by Hutton (1795)
and Lamarck (1800), was elevated to its present position as a
scientific law by Charles Lyell, a young attorney whose interest
in geology was to make him the most influential person in that
field, and by Lyell's disciple and friend, Charles Darwin.
Darwin built his theory of evolution on Lyell's principle of
uniformity. A modern exponent of the theory of evolution, H. F.
Osborn, wrote: "Present continuity implies the improbability of
past catastrophism and violence of change, either in the
lifeless or in the living world; moreover, we seek to interpret
the changes and laws of past time through those which we observe
at the present time. This was Darwin's secret, learned from
Lyell." 1 Lyell built his case with convincing dialectics. Wind
and solar heat and rain little by little crumble the rock in the
highlands. Rivers carry the detritus to the sea. The land is
lowered by this process, which continues for ages, until it
turns a vast region into detritus. Then the massive earth, as if
in a slow breathing process, every phase of which requires eons,
again slowly rises, the bottom of the sea subsides, and the
crumbling of the rock begins all over again. The land comes up
in an elevated plateau; the subsequent action of water and wind
cuts furrows, and little by little the highland changes into a
range of mountain peaks; more eons, and these heights crumble
too, wind and rain carrying them grain by grain into the sea;
the shallow sea encroaches on the land, then slowly retreats. No
great catastrophes intervene to change the face of the earth.
Although sporadic volcanic action occurs, Lyell did not consider
it to have an effect in changing the face of the earth
comparable in importance to that of rivers, wind, and waves of
the sea. 1 H. F. Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life
(1917), p. 24. What causes the eon-long process of elevation and
subsidence has not been determined. Naturalists of the
eighteenth century claimed to have observed a minute gradual
change in the level of the Gulf of Bothnia in the Baltic Sea in
relation to the coast line. Similar processes in past geological
ages must have brought about all the changes on the earth: the
majestic mountains that rose and others that were leveled, the
seacoast that moved in a slow rhythm back and forth, and the
earth mantle that was redistributed by rain and wind. According
to the theory of uniformity, no process took place in the past
that is not taking place at present; and not only the nature but
<23> also the intensity of physical phenomena of our age are the
criteria of what could have happened in the past. Since the
theory of uniformity is still taught in all places of learning,
and to question it is heresy, it is pertinent to reproduce here
some of Lyell's original statements, made in his Principles of
Geology; they served as a manifesto or credo for all his
followers, whether called uniformists or evolutionists. Lyell
wrote; "It has been truly observed that when we arrange the
known fossiliferous formations in chronological order, they
constitute a broken and defective series . . . we pass, without
any intermediate gradations from systems of strata which are
horizontal, to other systems which are highly inclined—from
rocks of peculiar mineral composition to others which have a
character wholly distinct —from one assemblage of organic
remains to another, in which frequently nearly all the species,
and a large part of the genera, are different. These violations
of continuity are so common as to constitute in most regions the
rule rather than the exception, and they have been considered by
many geologists as conclusive in favour of sudden revolutions in
the inanimate and animate world." 2 Thus he acknowledged that
the surface of the globe has the appearance of having been
subjected to great and violent sudden changes, but he believed
that the record is incomplete and that the major part of the
evidence is lost. "In the solid framework of the globe we have a
chronological chain of natural records, many links of which are
wanting." 3 To make this plausible, Lyell cited an example from
human affairs. If a census were taken every year in sixty
provinces, changes in the population would appear to be very
gradual; but if the census were taken every year in a different
province, and in only one, the change in the population of each
province between the visits of the census takers at sixty-year
intervals would be very great. Lyell maintained that this was
the way geological deposits were made. 2 3 Sir Charles Lyell,
Principles of Geology (12th ed.; 1875), I, 298. Ibid., p. 299.
The theory of uniformity, or of gradual changes in the past
measured by the extent of changes observed in the present, has,
as Lyell admitted, no positive evidence in the incomplete record
of the earth's crust; consequently the theory, building on
argumentum ex silentio, or argument by default, required further
analogies. "Suppose we have discovered two buried cities at the
foot of Vesuvius, immediately superimposed upon each other with
a great mass of tuff and lava intervening. . . . An antiquary
[archaeologist] might possibly be entitled to infer, from the
inscriptions on public edifices, that the inhabitants of the
inferior and older city were Greeks, and those of the modern
town Italians. But he would reason very hastily if he also
concluded from these data, that there had been a sudden change
from the Greek to the Italian language in Campania. But if he
afterwards found three buried cities, one above the other, the
intermediate one, being Roman . . . he would then perceive the
fallacy of his former opinion, and would begin to suspect that
the catastrophes, by which the cities were inhumed, might have
no relation whatever to the fluctuations in the language of the
inhabitants; and that, as the Roman tongue had evidently
intervened between the Greek and Italian, so many other dialects
may have been spoken in succession, and the passage from the
Greek to the Italian may have been very gradual. . . ."4 This
often-reprinted passage is an unfortunate example, for, in order
to prove that there had been no violent changes, Lyell chose to
present a picture of violent catastrophes: the strata are
separated by layers of lava. This is also the picture presented
in so many geological surveys. To use this example as a proof of
uniformity is a flight of dialectics. The comparison is followed
by an accusation that is all the more vigorous because of the
inadequacy of the example which is called on to substitute for
geological evidence. Lyell said: 4 Ibid., p. 316. "It appeared
clear that the earlier geologists had not only a scanty
acquaintance with existing changes [caused by wind, flowing
water, etc.], but were singularly unconscious of the amount of
their ignorance. With the presumption naturally inspired by this
unconsciousness, they had no hesitation in deciding at once that
time could never enable the existing powers of nature to work
out changes of great magnitude, still less such important
revolutions as those which are brought to light by geology " 6
And he proceeded: "Never was there a dogma more calculated to
foster indolence, and to blunt the edge of curiosity, than this
assumption of the discordance between the ancient and existing
causes of change. It produced a state of mind unfavourable in
the highest degree to the candid reception of the evidence of
those minute but incessant alterations which every part of the
earth's surface is undergoing." 6 At first the tone of this
pleading for the then unorthodox theory of uniformity was
defensive; the position was unsupported by sufficient evidence.
Then, as though a few analogies to human situations were so
strong that they could substitute for the defective record of
nature, the tone changed and became uncompromising. "For this
reason all theories are rejected which involve the assumption of
sudden and violent catastrophes and revolutions of the whole
earth, and its inhabitants—theories which are restrained by no
reference to existing analogies, and in which a desire is
manifested to cut, rather than patiently to untie, the Gordian
knot." 7 Notwithstanding the strong language employed, the
scientific principle which insists that whatever does not occur
at the present time has not occurred in the past is a
self-imposed limitation. Rather than a principle in science, it
is a statute of faith. And Lyell ended his famous chapter
accordingly, with an appeal for faith and with a precept for
believers i "If he [the student] finally believes in the
resemblance or identity of the ancient and present systems of
terrestrial changes,
he will regard every fact collected respecting the causes in
diurnal action as affording him a key to the interpretation of
some mystery in the past." 8
The Hippopotamus
5 Ibid., p. 317. 6 Ibid., p. 318. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 319.
The hippopotamus inhabits the larger rivers and marshes of
Africa; it is not found in Europe or America save in zoological
gardens where specimens of it wallow most of the time in pools,
submerging their huge bodies in muddy water. Next to the
elephant it is the largest of the land animals. Bones of
hippopotami are found in the soil of Europe as far north as
Yorkshire in England. Lyell gave the following explanation for
the presence of the hippopotamus in Europe: "The geologist . . .
may freely speculate on the time when herds of hippopotami
issued from North African rivers, such as the Nile, and swam
northward in summer along the coasts of the Mediterranean, or
even occasionally visited islands near the shore. Here and there
they may have landed to graze or browse, tarrying awhile, and
afterwards continuing their course northward. Others may have
swum in a few summer days from rivers in the south of Spain or
France to the Somme, Thames, or Severn [river in Wales and
England], making timely retreat to the south before the snow and
ice set in."1 An Argonaut expedition of hippopotami from the
rivers of Africa to the isles of Albion sounds like an idyll. In
the Victorian cave near ===Settle, in west Yorkshire, 1450 feet
above sea level, under twelve feet of clay deposit containing
some well-scratched boulders, were found numerous remains of the
____mammoth, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, bison, hyena, and other
animals. In ===northern Wales in the Vale of Clwyd, in numerous
caves remains of the ____hippopotamus lay together with those of
the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the cave lion. In the cave of
Cae Gwyn in the Vale of Clwyd, "during the excavations it became
clear that the bones had been greatly disturbed by water
action." The floor of the cavern was "covered afterwards by
clays and sand containing foreign pebbles. This seemed to prove
that the caverns, now 400 feet [above sea level] must have been
submerged subsequently to their occupation by the animals and by
man. . . . The contents of the cavern must have been dispersed
by marine action during the great submergence in mid-glacial
times, and afterwards covered by marine sands . . ." writes H.
B. Woodward.2
1 2 Charles Lyell, Antiquity of Man (1863), p. 180. H. B.
Woodward, Geology of England and Wales (2nd ed.; 1887), p. 543.
____Hippopotami not only traveled during the summer nights to
England and Wales, but also climbed hills to die peacefully
among other animals in the caves, and the ice, approaching
softly, tenderly spread little pebbles over the travelers
resting in peace, and the land with its hills and caverns in a
slow lullaby movement sank below the level of the sea and gentle
streams caressed the dead bodies and covered them with rosy
sand. Three assumptions were made by the exponents of
uniformity: Sometime not long ago the climate of the British
Isles was so warm that hippopotami used to visit there in
summer; the British Isles subsided so much that caves in the
hills became submerged; the land rose again to its present
height—and all this without any action of a violent nature. Or
was it, perchance, a mountain-high wave that crossed the land
and poured into the caves and filled them with marine sand and
gravel? Or did the ground submerge and then emerge again in some
paroxysm of nature in which the climate also changed? Did the
animals run away at the sign of the approaching catastrophe, and
did the trespassing sea follow and suffocate them in the caves
that were their last refuge and became the place of their
burial? Or did the sea sweep them from Africa, throw them in
heaps on the British Isles and in other places, and cover them
with earth and marine debris? The entrances to some caves were
too narrow and the caves themselves too "shrunk" (contracted) to
have been places of refuge for such huge animals as hippopotami
and rhinoceroses. Whichever of these answers or surmises is
correct, and whether the ____hippopotami lived in England or
were thrown there by the ocean, whether they sought refuge in
caves or the caves are but their graves, their bones on the
British Isles, as also on the bottom of the seas surrounding
these islands, are signs of some great natural change.
Icebergs
The theory that rejected the occurrence of catastrophic events
in the past was incompatible with the then prevailing teaching,
which ascribed the distribution of drift (the deposit of rock
debris, clay, and organic material that covers continental
areas) and of erratic boulders to the action of water in the
form of great tidal waves breaking upon the continents. A
slow-moving source, able to do the same work, but in a longer
time, had to be found. Lyell assumed that icebergs transferred
rocks over the expanse of the sea. Icebergs are broken-off parts
of glaciers that descend from the mountainous coasts to the sea.
Mariners in northern waters have observed icebergs with pieces
of rock attached to them. And if we think of the enormity of
past geological epochs and multiply the action of icebergs as
carriers of earth and rocks by the time elapsed, we may explain,
so argued Lyell, the presence of erratic boulders as well as of
till and gravel on land. Erratic boulders are found far from the
seashore: Lyell taught that the land was submerged and icebergs
traveling over it dropped their load of stones; later the land
emerged with the stones on it. Erratic boulders are found on the
mountains; therefore, these mountains were under shallow water
when icebergs carrying stones from other regions dropped them on
the summits. In order to explain in this manner the provenience
of erratic boulders, it was necessary to submerge large parts of
continents in rather recent times. In some places erratic
boulders are distributed in a long string—as in the Berkshires.
Icebergs could not have acted as intelligent carriers, and Lyell
must have felt the weakness of his theory on this point. The
only alternative known at that time was that of a tidal wave.
But Lyell abhorred catastrophes. He detested them alike in the
political life of Europe and in nature. Characteristically, his
autobiography begins with this description of the most vivid
memory of his early childhood: 1 Charles Lyell, Life, Utters and
Journals (1881), I, 2. "I was four and a half when an event
happened which was not likely to be forgotten." His family
traveled in two carriages a stage and a half from Edinburgh. "On
a narrow road, with a steep brae above, and an equally
precipitous one below, and no parapet on the roadside, a flock
of sheep jumped down into the road, and frightened the horses
[of the other carriage]. Away they ran, and with the chaise,
man, horses and all, disappeared clean out of sight, over the
brae in an instant." There was a rescue through the broken pane
of glass, a little blood ran, and somebody fainted.1 It left the
first and strongest impres- <29> sion of his childhood in the
memory of the author of the theory of uniformity. Darwin in
South America Charles Darwin, who had previously dropped his
medical studies at Edinburgh University, upon his graduation in
theology from Christ College, Cambridge, went in December 1831
as a naturalist on the ship Beagle, which sailed around the
world on a five-year surveying expedition. Darwin had with him
the newly published volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology that
became his bible. On this voyage he wrote his Journal, the
second edition of which he dedicated to Lyell. This
round-the-world voyage was Darwin's only field-work experience
in geology and paleontology, and he drew on it all his life
long. He wrote later that these observations served as the
"origin of all my views." His observations were made in the
Southern Hemisphere and more particularly in South America, a
continent that had attracted the attention of naturalists since
the exploration travels of Alexander von Humboldt (1799—1804).
Darwin was impressed by the numerous assemblages of fossils of
____extinct animals, mostly of much greater size than species
now living; these fossils spoke of a flourishing fauna that
suddenly came to its end in a recent geological age. He wrote
under January 9, 1834, in the Journal of his voyage! "It is
impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American
continent without the deepest astonishment. Formerly it must
have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pigmies,
compared with the antecedent, allied races." He proceeded thus:
"The greater number, if not all, of these extinct quadrupeds
lived at a late period, and were the contemporaries of most of
the existing sea-shells. Since they lived, no very great change
in the form of the land can have taken place. What, then, has
exterminated so many species and whole genera? The mind at first
is irresistibly hurried into the belief of some great
catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, both large and small,
in Southern Patagonia, in Brazil, on the Cordillera of Peru, in
North America up to Behring's [Bering's] Straits, we must shake
the entire framework of the globe" No lesser physical event
could have brought about this wholesale destruction, not only in
the Americas but in the entire world. And such an event being
beyond consideration, Darwin did not know the answer. "It could
hardly have been a change of temperature, which at about the
same time destroyed the inhabitants of tropical, temperate, and
arctic latitudes on both sides of the globe." Certainly it could
not have been man in the role of the destroyer; and were he to
attack all large animals, would he also be the ===cause of
extinction "of the many fossil mice and other small quadrupeds?"
Darwin asked.
l Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History
and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S.
Beagle Round the World, under date of January 9, 1834.
"No one will imagine that a drought . . . could destroy every
individual of every species from Southern Patagonia to Behring's
Straits. What shall we say of the extinction of the horse? Did
those plains fail of pasture, which have since been overrun by
thousands and hundreds of thousands of the descendants of the
stock introduced by the Spaniards?" Darwin concluded:
"Certainly, no fact in the long history of the world is so
startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its
inhabitants." * Out of Darwin's embarrassment grew the idea of
extinction of species as a prelude to natural selection.
CHAPTER IV ICE
The Birth of the Ice Age Theory
IN 1836, Louis Agassiz, a young Swiss naturalist, went with
Professor Jean Charpentier, another naturalist, to an alpine
glacier to demonstrate to him the fallacy of the new idea that
an ice sheet once covered a large part of Europe. Four years
before, a teacher in a small-town forestry school, A. Bernardi,
had written: "Once the polar ice reached as far as the southern
limit of the district which is still marked by the erratics."1 A
botanist, C. Schimper, had come upon the same idea, probably
independently, and coined the term die Eiszeit; he had succeeded
in winning Charpentier to the hypothesis. At the edge of the
glacier, Agassiz, who came as a skeptic, was himself converted;
he became the chief apostle of the new theory. He built a hut on
the glacier of Aar and lived in it, so that he could observe the
movements of the ice, and thereby attracted the attention of
naturalists and curiosity seekers all over Europe.
l A. Bernardi, "Wie kamen die aus dem Norden stammenden
Fels-bruchstiicke und Geschiebe, welche man in Norddeutschland
und den benachbarten LMndern findet, an ihre gegenwSrtigen
FMndorte?" fahr-buch fiXt Mineralogie, Geognoste und
Petrefactenkunde, III (1832), 57—67.
The study of the glaciers in the Alps revealed that glacial ice
may move by its own weight a few feet daily; it actually
transports stones by carrying and pushing them. Some loose rocks
are shoved aside to form lateral moraines; some are pushed by
the advancing front of the ice to form terminal moraines. When
the glacier melts and retreats, the loose rocks remain where
they were at the time of the greatest expansion of the glacier.
Agassiz assumed that the erratic boulders on the Jura Mountains
had been carried there by ice from the Alps and that the trains
of boulders in northern Europe and America had been formed by
the gigantic glaciers that, sometime in the past, covered large
parts of these continents. He also concluded that the drift had
been brought and left by the ice sheet. Ice scratched the
underlying rock with the help of flint and other fragments of
hard stone it retained in its grasp; and it polished the rocky
floors of slopes and valleys, and excavated the beds of lakes.
Agassiz made his conclusions with respect to other parts of the
world on the basis of observations limited to Switzerland and
its surroundings. He thought that if he could convert two of the
leading geologists, Buckland, the author of Reliquiae
diluvianae, and Murchison, to the Ice Age theory and thus win
their support, the task of gaining recognition for it would
become much easier. Agassiz went to the British Isles. In later
years, as his widow described it, "recalling the scientific
isolation in which he then stood, opposed as he was to all the
prominent geologists of the day, he said: 'Among the older
naturalists, only one stood by me: Dr. Buckland, Dean of
Westminster. . . . Wc went first to the Highlands of Scotland,
and it is one of the delightful recollections of my life that as
we approached the castle of the Duke of Argyll, standing in a
valley not unlike some of the Swiss valleys, I said to Buckland:
"Here we shall find our first traces of glaciers"; and, as the
stage entered the valley, we actually drove over an ancient
terminal moraine, which spanned the opening of the valley.' "
2 It was a setting for a revelation. Agassiz won a follower. 2
Louis Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Cary
Agassiz (1893), I, 307.
A few weeks later, on November 4, 1840, Agassiz read a paper
before the Geological Society of London, summarizing the
excursion in the light of the Ice Age theory, and Buckland, who
was then president of the society, followed with a paper of his
own on the same subject. Even before the meeting he had written
to Agassiz of <33> the success of his missionary work: "Lyell
has adopted your theory in toto!!l On my showing him a beautiful
cluster of moraines, within two miles of his father's house, he
instantly accepted it, as solving a host of difficulties that
have all his life embarrassed him."8 Lyell, too, agreed to read
a paper less than three weeks after this episode, on the day
following the Agassiz and Buck-land lectures. In this paper,
hastily prepared, he explained the moraines in Great Britain in
the light of Agassiz's teachings. At the November 4 meeting of
the society, Murchison "attempted an opposition" but, in the
words of Agassiz, "did not produce much effect." He added: "Dr.
Buck-land was truly eloquent. That same year (1840) Agassiz
published his theory in a work entitled Etudes SUT les glaciers.
He wrote: "The surface of Europe previously adorned with
tropical vegetation and populated by herds of huge elephants,
enormous hippopotami, and gigantic carnivora, was suddenly
buried under a vast mantle of ice, covering plains, lakes, seas,
and plateaus. Upon the life and movement of a vigorous creation
fell the silence of death. Springs vanished, rivers ceased
flowing, the rays of the sun, rising upon this frozen shore (if,
indeed, they reached it), encountered only the breath of winter
from the north and the thunder of crevasses as they opened up
across the surface of this icy sea." * 3 4 Ibid., I, 309. Louis
Agassiz, Etudes sur les glaciers (1840) p. 314. Agassiz regarded
the inception and the termination of the Ice Age as catastrophic
events. He believed that mammoths in Siberia were suddenly
caught in the ice that spread swiftly over the larger part of
the globe. He expressed the belief that repeated global
catastrophes were accompanied by a fall in the temperature of
the globe and its atmosphere, and that glacial ages, of which
the earth experienced more than one, were terminated each time
by renewed igneous activity in the interior of the earth
(eruptions de Vinterieur). Thus he maintained that the western
Alps had risen very recently, at the end of the last Ice Age,
and were younger than the carcasses of mammoths in Siberia, the
flesh of which is still edible, these animals, he thought, had
been killed at the beginning of the Ice Age.5 With the renewal
of igneous activity, the ice cover melted, great floods ensued,
the mountains and lakes in Switzerland and in many other places
were formed, and the relief map of the world was generally
changed. It is often said that Agassiz added from half a million
to a million years to the recent history of the world by
inserting the Great Ice Age between the Tertiary, or the age of
mammals, and the Recent (comprising the Late Stone Age and
historical times). It should be borne in mind, however, that the
million-year span for the Ice Age is Lyell's estimate, and he
interpreted Agassiz's theory in the spirit of uniformity. The
theory of a continental ice cover was acceptable to Lyell. He
agreed to it, satisfied to go no farther for his proof than two
miles from his home. He realized that floating icebergs could
not explain the phenomena of drift and erratic boulders in all
places. The only alternative had been the waves of translation,
or tidal waves traveling on land, but this was outright
catastrophic. Now, with the continental ice theory, he felt he
had the correct solution if the catastrophic aspect of the
theory, as originally suggested by Agassiz, a follower of
Cuvier, was eliminated. It was not yet asked what produced such
a cover.
On the Russian Plains
5 Ibid., pp. 304—29. 6 Lyell borrowed the estimate of a
million-year span of time for the Ice Age from ).
Croll, who needed this length of time for his astronomical
theory of glacial periods, a theory long since abandoned. Soon
after the historic meeting at which the Ice Age theory was
accepted by the majority of the members of the Geological
Society, R. I. Murchison went to Russia, where he had been
invited by Czar Nicholas I to make a geological survey of the
empire. Out of this survey grew recognition of the Permian
System; the Permian, Silurian, and the Devonian, also first
recognized by Murchison (Devonian in collaboration with
Sedgwick), constitute three of the great divisions in the modern
concept of early geological ages. For many months Murchison
crossed the latitudes and longitudes of Russia, carefully <35>
observing the erratic boulders strewn over the great Russian
plains and rechecking the validity of Agassiz's theory. In
Finland and the northern Russian provinces he found very large
blocks; but they diminished in size the farther south one went,
which pointed to the action of water, a tide that came down from
the north or northwest, spreading rock fragments along its way.
He also observed that erratic boulders in the Carpathian
Mountains were not of local but of Scandinavian origin. Of the
drift, or "the piles of stone, sand, clay and gravel which are
spread out in such enormous masses over the low countries of
Russia, Poland, and Germany," Murchison expressed the conviction
that "a vast portion, by far the greater part . . . has been
transported by aqueous action, consequent of powerful waves of
translation and currents occasioned by relative and often
paroxysmal changes of the level of sea and land." 1 Whatever may
have been the cause of the irruption of the sea, such aqueous
debacles "with the help of ice floes" produced the drift.
"Seeing that there are no mountains whatever from which a
glacier can ever have been propelled in southern Sweden,
Finland, or north-eastern Russia, and yet that these regions are
powerfully abraded, scored and polished," Murchison came to the
conclusion that effects so extensively developed over such flat
countries must have resulted from an irrupting sea that also
left behind enormous masses of debris and rolled stone.
Murchison "rejected the application of the terrestrial glacier
theory of Sweden, Finland, north eastern Russia, and the whole
of northern Germany—in short to all the low countries of
Europe." ^ He agreed that in mountainous northern Scandinavia
and Lapland arctic glaciers formerly did exist. Ice floes
descending from these glaciers carried angular broken stones
over land covered by sea and dropped them on top of the drift
created by the irruption of the sea.
1 R. 1. Murchison, The Geology of Russia in Europe and the Ural
Mountains, I (London, 1845), 553. 2 Ibid., p. 554. $ Ibid.
Murchison called attention to the fact that "Siberia is entirely
free from erratic blocks, though environed on three sides by
high mountains." 8 He required the aid of icebergs detached from
the glaciers to "account for certain superficial phenomena, but
he confidently maintained that "aqueous detrital conditions will
best account for the great diffusion of drift over the surface
of the globe, and at the same time explain the very general
striation and abrasion of the rocks, at low as well as high
levels, in numerous parallels of latitude." 4 In his later
years, Murchison, without retracting any of his observations and
conclusions made in Russia, admitted in a letter to Agassiz that
he regretted his early opposition to the Ice Age theory. On the
other hand, marine deposits of recent age were found in large
areas of European and Asiatic Russia. In the Caspian Sea, which
stretches between southern Russia and Persia, live seals related
to the seals of the Arctic Ocean. It is concluded that the polar
sea spread and established a connection with the Caspian Sea,
and this in Recent time. "Since the ice withdrew, the Arctic
Ocean has spread over large areas of northern Russia and in many
places has left marine deposits on the glacial drift as well as
on the firmer rocks. The Arctic water spread also over the Obi
Basin far to the south and established connections with the
Caspian Sea, at which time the progenitors of the present seals
of the Caspian rocky islands migrated thither to become stranded
when the waters withdrew."
6 Ice Age in the Tropics 4 Ibid. 5 G. D. Hubbard, The Geography
of Europe (1937), p. 47.
In 1865, Agassiz went to equatorial Brazil, one of the hottest
places in the world, where he found all the signs he ascribed to
the action of ice. Now even those who had previously agreed with
him became distressed. An ice cover in the tropics, on the very
equator? There were drift accumulations, and scratched rocks,
and erratic boulders, and fluted valleys, and the smooth surface
of tillite (rock formed of consolidated till), so there must
have been ice to carry and polish, and the region must have gone
through an ice period. What could have caused <37> a tropical
region to be covered by ice several thousand feet thick?
Abundant vestiges of an ice age were likewise found in British
Guiana, another of the hottest places on earth. Soon the same
word came from equatorial Africa; and what appeared even more
strange, the marks there indicated not only that equatorial
Africa and Madagascar had been under a sheet of ice but that the
ice had moved, spreading from the equator toward the higher
latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, or in the wrong direction.
Then vestiges of an ice age were discovered in India, and there,
too, the ice had moved from the equator, and not merely toward
higher latitudes, but uphill, from the lowland up the foothills
of the Himalayas. On reconsideration, the vestiges of ice in
equatorial regions were ascribed to a different ice age that had
taken place not thousands but many millions of years ago. Today
the glacial phenomena in the tropics and in the Southern
Hemisphere are ascribed, in the main, to the Permian Age, a much
earlier period than the recent Ice Age. "The most remarkable
feature of the Permian glaciation is its distribution," writes C
O. Dunbar of Yale University. "South America bears evidence of
glaciation in Argentina and southeastern Brazil, even within 10°
of the equator. In the northern hemisphere, peninsular India,
within 20° of the equator, was the chief scene of glaciation,
with the ice flowing north [or from the tropics to higher
latitudes]. * The icecap covered practically all of southern
Africa up to at least latitude 22 °S and also spread to
Madagascar." 2 1 C. O. Dunbar, Historical Geology (1949), pp.
298-99. 2 Ibid., p. 298. SR. T. Chamberlin, "The Origin and
History of the Earth" In The World and Man, ed. F. R. Moulton
(1937), p. 80. Even if the phenomenon took place very long ago,
an ice cover thousands of feet thick in the hottest places of
the world is a challenging enigma. R. T. Chamberlin says: "Some
of these huge ice sheets advanced even into the tropics, where
their deposits of glacier-borne debris, hundreds of feet in
thickness, amaze the geologists who see them. No satisfactory
explanation has yet been offered for the extent and location of
these extraordinary glaciers. . . . Glaciers, almost
unbelievable because of their location and size, certainly did
not form in deserts. . . ." ®
Greenland
Greenland is the contemporary example of what, according to the
Ice Age theory, happened to a large part of the world in times
past. Greenland belongs to the great archipelago that crowns
northeastern Canada, though it is sometimes regarded as a part
of Europe. It is the largest island in the world, if we consider
Antarctica and Australia as continents. The island is 1660 miles
long, largely within the Arctic Circle, reaching the northern
latitude of 83°39/. Of its 840,000 square miles of surface, over
700,000 are covered with an immense mountain of ice that leaves
free only the coastal fringes. The thickness of the ice is
measured by listening to the echo that comes from the bedrock
when a detonation is set off on top of the ice. It is found to
be over six thousand feet thick. "For a long time it was the
belief of many that a large region in the interior of Greenland
was free from ice, and was perhaps inhabited. It was in part to
solve this problem that Baron [N.A.E.] Nordenskjold set out upon
his expedition of 1883." 1 He ascended the icecap from Disko Bay
(latitude 69°) and went eastward for eighteen days across the
ice field. "Rivers were flowing in channels upon the surface
like those cut on land . . . only that the pure blue of the
ice-walls was, by comparison, infinitely more beautiful. These
rivers were not, however, perfectly continuous. After flowing
for a distance in channels on the surface, they, one and all,
plunged with deafening roar into some yawning crevasse, to find
their way to the sea through sub-glacial channels. Numerous
lakes with shores of ice were also encountered."
1 Wright, The Ice Age in North America, p. 75.
"On bending down the ear to the ice," wrote the explorer, "we
could hear on every side a peculiar subterranean hum, proceeding
from rivers flowing within the ice; and occasionally a loud
single report like that of a cannon gave notice of the formation
of a new glacier-cleft. ... In the afternoon we saw at some
distance from us a well-defined pillar of mist which, when we
approached it, appeared to rise from a bottomless abyss, into
which a mighty glacier-river fell. The vast roaring water-mass
had bored for itself a vertical hole, probably down to the rock,
certainly more than 2000 feet beneath, on which the glacier
rested." a The Ice Age survived in Greenland. This arctic island
reveals how vast continental areas looked in the past. However,
it does not explain how ice could have covered British Guiana or
Madagascar in the tropics. And what is no less surprising, the
northern part of Greenland, according to the concerted opinion
of glaciologists, was never glaciated. "Probably, then as now,
an exception was the northernmost part of Greenland; for it
seems a rule that the most northerly lands are not, and never
were, glaciated, writes the polar explorer Vilhjalmur
Stefansson.3 "The islands of the Arctic Archipelago," writes
another scientist, "were never glaciated. Neither was the
interior of Alaska." * "It is a remarkable fact that no ice mass
covered the low lands of northern Siberia any more than those of
Alaska," wrote James D. Dana, the leading American geologist of
the last century.5 In northern Siberia and on polar islands in
the Arctic Ocean spires of rock were observed that would
certainly have been broken off if an ice cover had moved over
those parts.6 Bones of ____Greenland reindeer have been found in
southern New Jersey and southern France, and bones of
____Lapland reindeer in the Crimea. This was explained as due to
the invasion of ice and the retreat of northern animals to the
south. The ____hippopotamus was found in France and England and
the ____lion in Alaska. To explain similar occurrences, an
interglacial period was introduced into the scheme: the land was
warmed up and the southern animals visited northern latitudes.
And since the change from one fauna to another took place
repeatedly, four glacial periods with three interglacial were
generally counted, though the number of periods is not
consistent with all lands or with all investigators.
2 Ibid. 8 V. Stefansson, Greenland (1942), p. 4. 4R. F. Griggs,
Science, XCV (1942), 2473. 5 Dana, Manual of Geology (4th ed.),
p. 977. 6 Whitley, Journal of the Philosophical Society of Great
Britain, XII, 55.
But why the polar lands were not glaciated during the Ice Age
was never explained. Greenland presents still another enigma in
the preceding formations, those of the Tertiary Age. In the
1860s, O. Heer of Zurich published his classical work on the
fossil plants of the Arctic; he identified the plant remains of
the northern parts of Greenland as magnolia and fig trees, among
other species.7 Forests of exotic trees and groves of juicy
subtropical plants grew in the land that lies deep in the cold
Arctic and is immersed yearly in a continuous polar night of six
months' duration. Cordis of the Polar Regions Spitsbergen in the
Arctic Ocean is as far north from Oslo in Norway as Oslo is from
Naples. Heer identified 136 species of fossil plants from
Spitsbergen (78°56' north latitude), which he ascribed to the
Tertiary Age. Among the plants were pines, firs, spruces, and
cypresses, also elms, hazels, and water lilies. At the
northernmost tip of Spitsbergen Archipelago, a bed of black and
lustrous coal twenty-five to thirty feet thick was found; it is
covered with black shale and sandstone encrusted with fossilized
land plants. "When we remember that this vegetation grew
luxuriantly within 8° 15' of the North Pole, in a region which
is in darkness for half of the year and is now almost
continuously buried under snow and ice, we can realize the
difficulty of the problem in the distribution of climate which
these facts present to the geologist. 1 T O. Heer, Flora Arctica
Fossllis: Die fossile Flora der Polarlander (1868).
l Archibald Gcikie, Text-Book of Geology (1882), p. 869.
There must have been great forests on Spitsbergen to produce a
bed of coal thirty feet thick. And even if Spitsbergen, almost
one thousand miles inside the Arctic Circle, for some unknown
reason had the warm climate of the French Riviera on the
Mediterranean, still these thick forests could not have grown
there, because the place is six months in continuous night. The
rest of the year the sun stands low over the horizon. Not only
fossil trees and coal but corals, too, were found there. Corals
grow only in tropical water. In the Mediterranean, in the
climate of Egypt or Morocco, it is too cold for them. But they
grew in Spitsbergen. Today large formations of coral covered
with snow can be seen. It does not solve the problem of their
deposition, if they were formed in an older geological epoch. At
some time in the remote past corals grew and are still found on
the entire fringe of polar North America— in Alaska, Canada, and
Greenland.2 In later times (Tertiary) fig palms bloomed within
the Arctic Circle; forests of Sequoia gigantea, the giant tree
of California, grew from Bering Strait to north of Labrador. "It
is difficult to imagine any possible conditions of climate in
which these plants could grow so near the pole, deprived of
sunlight for many months of the year."8 It is usually said that
in ages past the climate all over the world was the same, or
that a characteristic of the "warm periods which have formed the
major part of geological time was the small temperature
difference between equatorial and polar regions. To this C. E.
P. Brooks, in his book, Climate through the Ages, says: "So long
as the axis of rotation remains in nearly its present position
relative to the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun, the
outer limit of the atmosphere in tropical regions must receive
more of the sun's heat than [in] the middle latitudes, and [in]
the middle latitudes more than [in] the polar regions; this is
an invariable law. ... It is much more difficult to think of a
cause which will raise the temperature of polar regions by some
30 F. or more, while leaving that of equatorial regions almost
unchanged.
2 Dunbar, Historical Geology, pp. 162, 194. 3 4 D. H. Campbell,
"Continental Drift and Plant Distribution," Science, January 16,
1942. C. E. P. Brooks, Climate through the Ages (1949), p. 31.
The continent of Antarctica is larger than Europe, European
Russia included. It has not a single tree, not a single bush,
not a single blade of grass. Very few fungi have been found.
Reports of polar explorers indicate that no land animals larger
than insects have been seen, and these insects are exceedingly
few and degenerate. Penguins and sea gulls come from the sea.
Storms of great velocity circle the Antarctic most of the year.
The greatest part of the continent is covered with ice that in
some places descends into the ocean. E, H. Shackleton, during
his expedition to Antarctica in 1907—9, found fossil wood in the
sandstone of a moraine at latitude 85°5'. He also found erratic
boulders of granite on the slopes of Mount Erebus, a volcano.
Then he discovered seven seams of coal, also at about latitude
85°. The seams are each between three and seven feet thick.
Associated with the coal is sandstone containing coniferous
wood.6 Antarctica, too, must have had great forests in the past.
It often appears that the historian of climate has chosen a
field as hard to master as it is to square the circle. It seems
sometimes that the history of climate is a collection of
unsolved, even unsolvable, questions. Without drastic changes in
the position of the terrestrial axis or in the form of the orbit
or both, conditions could not have existed in which tropical
plants flourished in polar regions. If anyone is not convinced
of this, he should try to cultivate coral at the North Pole.
Whales In the Mountains
In bogs covering glacial deposits in Michigan, skeletons of
____two whales were discovered. Whales are marine animals. How
did they come to Michigan in the postglacial epoch? Whales do
not travel by land. Glaciers do not carry whales, and the ice
sheet would not have brought them to the middle of a continent.
Besides, the ____whale bones were found in post-glacial
deposits. Was there a sea in Michigan after the glacial epoch,
only a few thousand years ago?
5 Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic, II, 314, 316, 319,
323, and photographs opposite pp. 293, 316.
According to Chamberlin, coal is found only two hundred miles
from the South Pole. In order to account for ____whales in
Michigan, it was conjectured that in the post-glacial epoch the
Great Lakes were part of an arm of the sea. At present the
surface of Lake Michigan is 582 feet above sea level. Bones of
____whale have been found 440 feet above sea level, north of
Lake Ontario; a skeleton of another ____whale was discovered in
Vermont, more than 500 feet above sea level;1 and still another
in the Montreal-Quebec area, about 600 feet above sea level.'
Although the ____Humphrey whale and beluga occasionally enter
the mouth of the St. Lawrence, they do not climb hills. To
account for the presence of whales in the hills of Vermont and
Montreal, at elevations of 500 and 600 feet, requires the
lowering of the land to that extent. Another solution would be
for an ocean tide, carrying the whales, to have trespassed upon
the land. In either case herculean force would have been
required to push mountains below sea level or to cause the sea
to irrupt, but the latter explanation is clearly catastrophic.
Therefore the accepted theory is that the land in the region of
Montreal and Vermont was depressed more than 600 feet by the
weight of ice and kept in this position for a while after the
ice melted. But along the coast of Nova Scotia and New England
stumps of trees stand in water, telling of once forested country
that became submerged. And opposite the mouths of the St.
Lawrence and the Hudson rivers are deep canyons stretching for
hundreds of miles into the ocean. These indicate that the land
became sea, being depressed in post-glacial times. Then did both
processes go on simultaneously, in neighboring areas, here up,
there down? A species of Tertiary ____whale, Zeuglodon, left its
bones in great numbers in Alabama and other Gulf States. The
bones of these creatures covered the fields in such abundance
and were "so much of a nuisance on the top of the ground that
the farmers piled them up to make fences." 8 There was no ice
cover in the Gulf States; then what had caused the submergence
and emergence of the land there?
l Dana, Manual oj Geology, p. 983. 8 Dunbar, Historical Geology,
p. 453. 8 George McCready Price, Common-sense Geology (1946),
pp. 204—5.
The ocean coast, not only of the area covered by ice, but all
the way from Maine to Florida, was at one time submerged and
then uplifted. Reginald A. Daly of Harvard wrote: "Not long ago
in a geological sense, the flat plain from New Jersey to Florida
was under the sea. At that time the ocean surf broke directly on
the Old Appalachian Mountains. ... The wedge-like mass of marine
sediments was then uplifted and cut into by rivers, giving the
Atlantic Coastal Plain of the United States. Why was it
uplifted? To the westward are the Appalachians. The geologist
tells us of the stressful times when a belt of rocks, extending
from Alabama to Newfoundland, was jammed, crumpled, thrust
together, to make this mountain system. Why? How was it done? In
former times the sea flooded the region of the Great Plains from
Mexico to Alaska, and then withdrew. Why this change?" 4 In
Georgia marine deposits occur at altitudes of 160 feet and in
northern Florida at altitudes of "at least 240 feet." Walrus is
found in Georgian deposits. "Pleistocene [Ice Age] marine
features are present along the Gulf coast east of the
Mississippi River, in some places at altitudes that may exceed
200 feet."5 In ===Texas ____mammalian land animals of the Ice
Age are found in marine deposits. These areas were not covered
by the ice which, advancing from the north, reached only as far
as Pennsylvania. A marine deposit overlies the seaboard of
===northeastern states and the ===Arctic coast of Canada; in
this deposit ____walrus, seals and at least five genera of
whales are found. Marine deposits of land "identified with both
glacial and interglacial ages," or containing ____animals of
Arctic and of temperate latitudes, "exist along both ===Arctic
and Pacific coasts in places extending more than 200 miles
inland."
4 5 6 R. A. Daly, Our Mobile Earth (1926), p. 90. R. F. Flint,
Glacial Geology and the Pleistocene Epoch (1947), pp. 294-95.
Ibid., p. 362.
The change in land elevation in the region previously covered by
ice is ascribed to the removal of the ice cover that weighed
down the earth's crust; but what changed the elevation of other
areas outside the ice cover? If the land slowly rose when freed
from ice and carried the bones of ____whales to the summits of
hills, why did the neighboring land subside miles deep, as the
undersea canyons indicate?
7 Daly, The Changing World of the Ice Age (1934), p. 111. Daly
concluded: "The Pleistocene history of North America holds ten
major mysteries for every one that has already been solved." 7
CHAPTER V TIDAL WAVE
Fissures in the Rocks
JOSEPH PRESTWICH, professor of geology at Oxford (1874-88) and
acknowledged authority on the Quaternary (Glacial and Recent)
Age in England, was struck by numerous phenomena, all of which
led him to the belief that "the south of England had been
submerged to the depth of not less than about 1000 feet between
the Glacial—or Post-Glacial—and the recent or Neolithic [Late
StoneJ periods." 1 In a spasmodic movement of the terrain, the
coast and the land masses of southern England were submerged to
such a depth that points 1000 feet high were below sea level.2 .
A most striking phenomenon among those observed by Prestwich was
in the fissures in the rocks. In the neighborhood of ===Plymouth
on the Channel, clefts of various widths in limestone formations
are filled with rock frag-
1 Joseph Prestwich, "The Raised Beaches and 'Head' or
Rubble-drift of the South of England," Quarterly Journal of the
Geological Society, XLV111 (1892), 319-37; Prestwich, "On the
Evidences of a Submergence of Western Europe and of the
Mediterranean Coasts at the Close of the Glacial or So-called
Post-Glacial Period, and Immediately Preceding the Neolithic or
Recent Period," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
of London, 1893, Series A (1894), pp. 904ff. 2 Ibid., p. 906.
ments, angular and sharp, and with bones of animals—
____mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, horse, polar bear, bison.
The bones are "broken into innumerable fragments. No skeleton is
found entire. The separate bones, in fact, have been dispersed
in the most irregular manner, and without any bearing to their
relative position in the skeleton. Neither do they show wear,
nor have they been gnawed by beasts of prey, though they occur
with the bones of ____hyaena, wolf, bear and lion." In other
places in ===Devonshire and also in ===Pembrokeshire in Wales,
ossiferous breccia or conglomerates of broken bones and stones
in fissures in limestone consist of angular rock fragments and
"broken and splintered" bones with sharp fractured edges in a
"fresh state," and in "splendid condition, showing no traces of
gnawing.4 If the crevices were pitfalls into which the animals
fell alive, then some of the skeletons would have been preserved
entire. But this is "never the case." "Again, if left for a time
exposed in the fissures, the bones would be variously weathered,
which they are not. Nor would the mere fall have been sufficient
to have caused the extensive breakage the bones have undergone:
these, I consider, are fatal objections to this explanation, and
none other has since been offered," wrote Prestwich.8 Fissures
in the rocks, not only in England and Wales, but all over
===western Europe, are choked with bones of animals, some of
extinct races, others, though of the same age, of races still
surviving. Osseous breccia in the ===valleys around Paris have
been described, as well as fissures in the rocks on the tops of
isolated hills in ===central France. They contain remnants of
____mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, and other animals. These hills
are often of considerable height. "One very striking example"6
is found near ===Semur in Burgundy: a hill—Mont Genay— 1430 feet
high is capped by a breccia containing remains of ____mammoth,
reindeer, horse, and other animals.
8 Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena Belonging to the Close of the
Last Geological Period and on Their Bearing upon the Tradition
of the Flood (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895), pp. 25—26. 4
Prestwich, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, XLVIII,
336. 5 6 Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena, p. 30. Ibid., p. 36.
In the rock on the summit of ===Mont de Sautenay—a flat-topped
hill near ===Chalon-sur-Sadne between Dijon and Lyons—there is a
fissure filled, with animal bones. "Why should so many
____wolves, bears, horses, and oxen have ascended a hill
isolated on all sides?" asked Albert Gaudry, professor at the
Jardin des Plantes. According to him, the bones in this cleft
are mostly broken and splintered into innumerable sharp
fragments and are "evidently not those of animals devoured by
beasts of prey; nor have they been broken by man. Nevertheless,
the remains of ____wolf were particularly abundant, together
with those of ____cave lion, bear, rhinoceros, horse, ox, and
deer. It is not possible to suppose that animals of such
different natures, and of such different habitats, would in life
ever have been together."7 Yet the state of preservation of the
bones indicates that the animals—all of them— perished in the
same period of time. Prestwich thought that the animal bones,
"now associated in the fissure on the summit of the hill," were
found in common heaps because, "we may suppose, all these
animals had fled [there] to escape the rising waters."8 On the
===Mediterranean coast of France there are numerous clefts in
the rocks crammed to overflowing with animal bones. Marcel de
Serres wrote in his survey of the ===Montagne de Pedemar in the
Department of Gard: "It is within this limited area that the
strange phenomenon has happened of the accumulation of a large
quantity of bones of diverse animals in hollows or fissures." De
Serres found the bones all broken into fragments, but neither
gnawed nor rolled. No coprolites (hardened animal feces) were
found, indicating that the dead beasts had not lived in these
hollows or fissures.
7 8 9 Ibid., pp. 37-38. Ibid., p. 38. ' Marcel de Serres, "Note
sur de nouvelles breches osseuses d6cou-du-Forte (Gard),"
Bulletin du Socliti Ge"ologique de France, 2e S6rie, vertes sur
la montagne de P6d6mar dans les environs de Saint-Hippolyte-XV
(1858), 233.
The Rock of Gibraltar is intersected by numerous crevices filled
with bones. The bones are broken and splintered. The remains of
____panther, lynx, caffir-cat, hyaena, wolf, bear, rhinoceros,
horse, wild boar, red deer, fallow deer, ibex, ox, hare, rabbit,
have been found in these ossiferous fissures. The bones are most
likely broken into thousands of fragments—-none are worn or
rolled, nor any of them gnawed, though so many carnivores then
lived on the rock," says Prestwich,10 adding: "A great and
common danger, such as a great flood, alone could have driven
together the ____animals of the plains and of the crags and
caves."1 The Rock is extensively faulted and fissured. Beaches
high on Gibraltar show that the expression that makes of this
rock the symbol of immovability is unfounded. These beaches
indicate that at some time the waters of the sea lapped the Rock
at the 600-foot mark', the Rock now rises over 1370 feet above
the sea. It was therefore, in Quaternary times [or the age of
man], an island not more than about 800 feet, or less high,
which rose by successive stages to its present height. It is
more than probable, however, that at some time before it settled
at that level, the whole of the area was upheaved to such an
extent that a land passage was formed to the African coast. . .
." ^ A ____human molar and some flints worked by Paleolithic
(old stone) man, as well as broken pieces of pottery of
Neolithic (recent or polished stone) man, were discovered among
the animal bones in some of the crevices of the Rock.18
10 Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena, p. 47; Idem, Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, 1893, p. 935. 11 12 13 14
Prestwich, On Certain Phenomena, p. 48. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p.
48. Ibid., p. 50.
On ===Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, as on the continent of
Europe and the British Isles, the broken bones of animals choke
the fissures in the rocks. The hills around ===Palermo in Sicily
disclosed an "extraordinary quantity of bones of
____hippopotami—in complete hecatombs." "Twenty tons of these
bones were shipped from around the one cave of San Ciro, near
Palermo, within the first six months of exploiting them, and
they were so fresh that they were sent to Marseilles to furnish
animal charcoal for use in the sugar factories. How could this
bone breccia have been accumulated? No predaceous animals could
have brought together and left such a collection of bones."14 No
teeth marks of hyena or of any other animal are found in this
osseous mass. Did the animals come there to die as old age
approached? "The bones are those of ____animals of all ages down
to the foetus, nor do they show traces of weathering or
exposure. "The extremely fresh condition of the bones, proved by
the retention of so large a proportion of animal matter," shows
that "the event was, geologically, comparatively recent"; and
the "fact that animals of all ages were involved in the
catastrophe" shows it "to have been sudden." Prestwich was of
the opinion that, together with central Europe and England, the
Mediterranean islands, Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily, had been
submerged. "The animals in the plain of Palermo naturally
retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the amphitheatre
of hills until they found themselves embayed . . . the animals
must have thronged together in vast multitudes, crushing into
the more accessible caves, and swarming over the ground at their
entrance, until overtaken by the waters and destroyed. . . .
Rocky debris and large blocks from the sides of the hills were
hurled down by the current of water, crushing and smashing the
bones."16
15 16 17 18 19 20 Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., pp. 51-52. Ibid., p. vi.
Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 74.
Prestwich, who subscribed to the Ice Age theory and is regarded
as the foremost authority on the geology of the Ice Age in
England, was compelled to construct a theory of submergence of
Western Europe and of' the Mediterranean coasts at the close of
the Glacial or so-called Post Glacial Period, and immediately
preceding the Neolithic or Recent Period," which quotation was
the title of a paper read by him before the Royal Society of
London. It was published in the Society's Philosophical
Transactions. It became clear to Prestwich that it was
"impossible to account for the specific geological phenomena • .
. by any agency of which our time has offered us experience."17
"The agency, whatever it was, must have acted with sufficient
violence to smash the bones."18 "Nor could this have been the
work of a long time, for the entombed bones, though much broken,
are singularly fresh."19 "Certain communities of early man must
have suffered in the general catastrophe."20 The Rock of
Gibraltar rose to close the strait, then sank down part way; the
coast of England and even hills 1000 feet high were submerged;
the island of Sicily was inundated, as were elevations in the
interior of France. Everywhere the evidence betokens a
catastrophe that occurred in not too remote times and engulfed
an area of at least continental dimensions. Great avalanches of
water loaded with stones were hurled on the land, shattering
massifs, and searching out the fissures among the rocks, rushed
through them, breaking and smashing every animal in their way.
In Prestwich's opinion the cause of the catastrophe was the
sinking of the continent and its subsequent elevation, which was
sudden, and during which water from the heights broke upon lower
levels, bringing chaos and destruction. Prestwich suspected that
the area involved must have been much larger than that discussed
in his works. He gave no reason for such submergence and
emergence. The catastrophe occurred when England was entering
the age of polished stone, or, possibly, when the centers of
ancient civilization were in the Bronze Age. In a later section
of this book are presented archaeological evidences of vast
catastrophes that more than once shattered every city and
settlement of the ancient world! Crete, Asia Minor, the
Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Iran, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, and Egypt
were simultaneously and repeatedly laid waste. These
catastrophes occurred when Egypt was in the Bronze Age and when
Europe was entering the Neolithic Age. The Norfolk Forest-Bed As
an area is investigated, more problems are raised than are
solved. Britain is the land of great geologists, the founders
and leaders of that science, and the soil of Britain has been
explored more than any other soil on the five continents or in
the seven seas. Examination of Britain's record of the Ice Age
levels discloses a "complex interbedding of drift sheets derived
from different sources." "When we add the additional
complications imposed by thin drifts, scanty interglacial
deposits, and the frequent presence in fossil-bearing beds of
secondary [displaced] fossils derived from the reworking of
older horizons, we get a truly difficult over-all problem. . . .
All in all, British glacial stratigraphic research has
encountered exceptional difficulties, writes R. F. Flint,
professor of geology at Yale University.1 In ===Cromer, Norfolk,
close to the North Sea coast, and in ===other places on the
British Isles, "____forest beds'' have been found. The name
derives from the presence of a great number of stumps of trees
once supposed to have rooted and grown where they are now found.
Many of the stumps are in upright positions, and their roots are
often interlocked. Today these forests are recognized as having
drifted; the roots do not end in small fibers, but are broken
off, in most cases one to three feet from the trunk. Bones of
sixty species of ____mammals, besides birds, frogs, and snakes,
were found in the forest bed of Norfolk. Among the mammals were
the ____saber-toothed tiger, huge bear (Ursus horribilis),
mammoth, straight-tusked elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros,
bison, and modern horse (Equus caballus). Two exclusively
northern species —____glutton and musk-ox—were found among
____animals from temperate and tropical latitudes. Of the thirty
species of large land animals of the forest-bed, only six still
exist in any part of the world—all the others are extinct—and
only three are presently native to the British Isles.2 The
abundance of animals of so many different species on an island
the size of Great Britain caused speculation that at one time it
must have been part of a continent and that the Strait of Dover
was not then opened. It was furl Flint, Glacial Geology and the
Pleistocene Epoch, p. 377.
2 W. B. Wright, The Quaternary Ice Age (1937), p. 110. 8 Ibid.
Remains of sixty-eight species of plants were obtained from the
Norfolk forest-bed; they indicate "a climate and geographical
conditions very similar to those of Norfolk at the present
day."3 In view of the sensitivity of plants to thermal
conditions, the conclusion might well be drawn that the climate
at the time the forest-bed was deposited was not different from
the present, which conclusion the fauna, comprising southern as
well as northern animals, contradicts. {He} conjectured that the
Rhine flowed on to the north across the area at present occupied
by the sea—the Thames being one of its tributaries—and that the
estuary of the Rhine was for some time at Cromer; that the trees
were carried there by the Rhine; that they grew on the banks of
the river, and the water washed out their roots and the falling
trunks were carried away and deposited as the forest-bed. "It is
necessary to point out, however, that the opening of the Straits
of Dover is a geological revolution of considerable magnitude,
such as one might well hesitate to ascribe to the comparatively
short period embraced by glacial and post-glacial time."4
Immediately above the forest-bed there is a fresh-water deposit
with arctic plants—arctic willow and dwarf birch —and land
shells. It is "a remarkable change from the climatic conditions
of the Forest-bed below. . . . [It] is such as to indicate a
lowering of temperature of about 20°."5 On top of the ____arctic
fresh-water plants and shells is a marine bed. ____Astarte
borealis and other mollusk shells are found "in the position of
life, with both valves united." These species "are arctic, but,
as the bed seems in other places to contain Ostrea edulis [a
mollusk], which requires a temperate sea, the evidence is
conflicting as to the climate." What could have brought,
together or in quick succession, all these animals and plants,
from the tundra of the Arctic Circle and from the jungle of the
tropics, from lush oak forest and from desert, from lands of
many latitudes and altitudes, from fresh-water lakes and rivers,
and from the salt seas of the north and the south? The shells
with closed valves furnish evidence that the mollusks did not
die a natural death but were buried alive.
4 Ibid., p. ill. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.
It would appear that this agglomeration was brought together by
a moving force that rushed overland, left in its wake marine
sand and deep-water creatures, swept animals and trees from the
south to the north, and then, turning from the polar regions
back toward the warm regions, mixed its burden of arctic plants
and animals in the same sediment where it had left those from
the south. Animals and plants of land and sea from various parts
of the world were thrown together, one group upon another, by
some elemental force that could not have been an overflowing
river. Also bones of ____animals already extinct in earlier
epochs were carried out of their beds and thrown into the
jumble. The finding of ____warm-climate animals and plants in
===polar regions, coral and palms in the ===Arctic Circle,
presents these alternatives; either these animals and plants
lived there at some time in the past or they were brought there
by tidal waves. In some cases the first is true, as where stumps
of ____trees (palms) are found in situ. In other cases the
second is true, as where, in one and the same deposit,
____animals and plants from sea and land, from south and north,
are found in a medley. But in both cases one thing is apparent:
such changes could not have occurred unless the terrestrial
globe veered from its path, either because of a disturbance in
the speed of rotation or because of a shift in the astronomical
or geographical position of the terrestrial axis. In many cases
it can be shown that southern plants grew in the north; either
the geographical position of the pole and the latitudes or the
inclination of the axis must have changed since then. In many
other cases it can be shown that a marine irruption threw into
one deposit living creatures from the tropics and from the
Arctic; the change must have been sudden, instantaneous. We have
both kinds of cases. Consequently there must have been changes
in the position of the axis, and they must have been sudden.
Cumberland Cavern
In 1912 near ===Cumberland, Maryland, workmen cutting the way
for a railroad with dynamite and steam shovel came upon a cavern
or a closed fissure with "a peculiar ____assemblage of animals.
Many of the species are comparable to forms now living in the
vicinity of the cave; but others are distinctly northern or
Boreal in their affin- <55> ities, and some are related to
species peculiar to the southern, or Lower Austral, region."
Thus wrote J. W. Gidley and C. L. Gazin of the United States
National Museum.1 A ____crocodilid and a tapir are
representative of southern climate; a wolverine and a lemming
"are distinctly northern. It seems "highly improbable" that they
coexisted in one place; the usual assumption was made that the
cave received the animal remains in a glacial and an
interglacial period. However, the scientist who explored the
cavern for the Smithsonian Institution as soon as it was
discovered and who returned there in the following years for
closer investigation, J. W. Gidley, contended that the animals
were contemporaneous: the position of the bones excluded any
other explanation. "This strange assemblage of fossil remains
occurs hopelessly intermingled. ..."2 The bones of the
Cumberland cavern were "for the most part much ===broken, yet
show no sign of being water worn." 3 This would signify that the
bones were not carried for any length of time by a stream;
however, it is quite possible that ____the animals were dashed
against the rocks by an avalanche of water that carried them
from far off, broke their bones inside their bodies—thus the
bones are not water-worn—and there smashed together all kinds of
animals; then ===gravel and rocks enclosed them.
1 J. W. Gidley and C. L. Gazin, The Pleistocene Vertebrate Fauna
from Cumberland Cave, Maryland, U. S. National Museum Bulletin
171 (1938). 2 Gidley in Explorations and Field-work of the
Smithsonian Institution for the Year 1913 (Washington, 1914);
Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1918, pp.
281-87. 3 Explorations and Field-work of the Smithsonian
Institution for the Year 1913, pp. 94-95.
So also it happened that ____animals of northern
regions-—-wolverine and lemming, the long-tailed shrew, mink,
red squirrel, muskrat, porcupine, hare, and elk—were heaped
together with ____animals "suggesting warmer climatic
conditions"—peccary, crocodilid, and tapir. ____Animals that now
live on the western coast of America—coyote, badger, and
puma-like cat—are in this assemblage. ____Animals that live in
areas of plentiful water supply—beaver and musk-rat and mink—are
found in the Cumberland cavern jumbled together with animals of
arid regions— coyote and badger—and those of wooded regions
together with animals of open terrain, like the horse and the
hare. This is truly "a peculiar assemblage of animals." Extinct
animals are found there intermingled with extant forms. Death
came to all of them at the same time. Any theory that attempts
to explain the presence of animal bones from ____various
climates in one and the same locality by a sequence of glacial
and inter glacial periods must stumble on the bones of the
Cumberland cavern.
In Northern China
In the village of ===Choukoutien, near Peiping (Peking) in
northern China, in caverns and in fissures in rocks, a ____great
mass of animal bones was found. "The most astonishing fact was
the discovery of this unimaginable wealth of bones of ____fossil
animals" (Weidenreich). These rich ossiferous deposits occur in
association with ____human skeletal remains. "As Weidenreich
began his studies, other amazing, nearly unexplainable features
appeared." The fractured bones of ____seven human individuals
were found there. ____"A European, a Melanesian, and an Eskimo
type lying dead in one close-knit group in a cave, on a Chinese
hillside! Weidenreich marvelled."1 It was assumed that the seven
inhabitants of the narrow fissure were murdered because their
skulls and bones are fractured. It is possible that these
several types of man came together in Choukoutien, since the
migrations of ancient man were on a greater scale than is
generally thought.
1R. Moore, Man, Time, and Fossils (1953), pp. 274-75.
But the finders of the conglomerates of bones were perplexed
also by the animal remains: the bones belonged to ____animals of
the tundras, or a cold-wet climate, of steppes and prairies, or
dry climate; and of jungles, or warm-moist climate, "in a
strange mixture." ____Mammoths and buffaloes and ostriches and
arctic animals left their teeth, horns, claws, and bones in one
great melange, and though we have met very similar situations in
various places in other parts of the world, the geologists of
China regarded their find as enigmatic. "No conclusive evidence
can be derived from this faunal assemblage as regards the
prevailing temperature at the time when it lived," says J. S.
Lee in his Geology of China.2 Some animals point "to a ===rather
severe climate," other animals to "a ===warm climate." "It is
almost inconceivable" that animals of such various habitats
should live together. "And yet their remains are found side by
side." It is asserted that since before the age of man—since
late Tertiary times and through the time of the Great Ice Age in
Europe and America—northern China experienced "progressive
desiccation interrupted by pluvial intervals." 3 Arid conditions
prevailed over northern China and "the general absence of
ice-sculptured features" led the naturalist to the conclusion
that in northern China, as in northern Siberia, there were no
glacial conditions and no formation of ice cover. "On the other
hand, certain obscure facts not in agreement with the foregoing
interpretation are accumulating throughout the country. *
Erratic blocks and striated boulders are found in the valleys
and on the hills. But if there was no ice cover in northern
China or in Siberia to the north, what was it that carried the
bones of animals into fissures in the rocks? And what striated
the rocks and transported boulders far from the source of their
origin and high onto hills? At the same time convincing evidence
was brought forth that "the mountain ranges in western China
have been elevated since the Glacial Age."5
2 I. S. Lee, The Geology of China (London, 1939), p. 370. 3
Ibid., p. 371. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 207. « Ibid., p. 206.
At Tientsin marine sands and clays with the ____shells of sea
mollusks have been found exposed on the surface of the ground.
Borings made in the same location "showed the presence of sand
and clays with ____fresh-water shells down to a depth of more
than 507 feet below the marine layer which is exposed on the
surface."6 Thus signs of both recent elevation and submergence
are present. Was not the irrupted sea the agent that threw
together the animals of various latitudes and carried rocks of
foreign origin to the tops of hills? Did not the ===mountains
that sprang up in the age of man rise in the upheaval that also
moved the seas out of their borders? Were not ____animals of
various habitats swept into fissures ■—____human beings
with them—when mountains rose, seas irrupted, rock debris was
carried toward summits, and climate changed? The fossils of
===Choukoutien are found embedded in a reddish loam, a mixture
of clay and sand, the deposition of which belongs to the same
stage as the fossils; this ===reddish loam occurs extensively
all over ===northern China. Teilhard and Young concluded that
the observed coloration "can neither be a quality inherited from
the original material of which the loams are composed, nor a
condition brought about by slow chemical processes long after
their formation." The coloration of this widespread formation
being of some extraneous and unexplained origin, the only
definite statement concerning it is that some violent change of
climate, in itself not the cause of the change of color,
occurred "immediately before the deposition of red loams—or soon
after the deposition."7 Similar observations were made in other
parts of the world. ===Drift, the displacement of which is
attributed to the ice cover, is often found tinted a reddish
color. R. T. Chamberlin, looking for the origin of this hue,
offered the hypothesis that "granite pebbles were decomposed,
the liberated iron staining the drift reddish." 8
i J. S Lee, The Geology of China, pp. 202, 368, 371. 8
Chamberlin in Man and Science, ed. Moulton, p. 92. 9 H.
Pettersson, "Chronology of the Deep Ocean Bed," Tellus
(Quarterly journal of Geophysics), I (1949). 10 See the section,
"The Floor of the Seas."
H. Pettersson, of the Oceanographic Institute at Goteborg, on
examining ===red clay from the bottom of the Pacific, found that
the abysmal clay contains layers of ash and a high content of
nickel, almost completely absent in the water.9 Pettersson,
whose work will be described on a later page, attributed the
origin of nickel and iron in the clay to prodigious showers of
meteorites; the lavas of the oceanic bedrock he recognized as
"of recent origin." 10 All this points to a ===great shower of
ferruginous dust at a recent geological date, when the red clays
of the Pacific, the drift of the Western Hemisphere, and the
loam of China were deposited, and when the climate also changed.
The Asphalt Pit of La Brea
At ===Rancho La Brea, once on the western outskirts of Los
Angeles, and at present in the immediate neighborhood of the
luxurious shopping center of that city, bones of ____extinct
animals and of still living species are found in abundance in
asphalt mixed with clay and sand. In 1875 some fossil remains of
this bituminous deposit were described for the first time. By
then thousands of tons of asphalt had already been removed and
shipped to San Francisco for roofing and paving.1 Beds of
petroleum shale (rock of laminated structure formed by the
consolidation of clay), ascribed to the Tertiary Age, having in
many places a thickness of about two thousand feet, extend from
Cape Mendocino in northern California to Los Angeles and beyond,
a distance of over four hundred and fifty miles. The asphalt
beds of Rancho La Brea are an outcrop of this large bituminous
formation. Since 1906 the University of California has been
collecting the fossils of Rancho La Brea, "a most remarkable
mass of skeletal material." When found, these fossils were
regarded as representing the fauna of the late Tertiary
(Pliocene) or early Pleistocene (Ice Age). The Pleistocene
strata, fifty to one hundred feet thick, overlie the Tertiary
formations in which the main oil-bearing beds are found. The
deposit containing the fossils consists of alluvium, clay,
coarse sand, gravel, and asphalt.
l Cf. J. C. Merriam, "The Fauna of Rancho La Brea," Memoirs of
the University of California, I, No. 2 (1911).
Most spectacular among the animals found at Rancho La Brea is
the ____saber-toothed tiger (Smilodon), previously unknown
elsewhere in the New or Old World, but found since then in other
places too. The canine teeth of this animal, over ten inches
long, projected from his mouth like two curved knives. With this
weapon the tiger tore the flesh of his prey. The animal remains
are crowded together in the asphalt pit in an unbelievable
agglomeration. In the first excavation carried on by the
University of California "a bed of bones was encountered in
which the number of ____saber-tooth and wolf skulls together
averaged twenty per cubic yard."2 No fewer than ____seven
hundred skulls of the saber-toothed tiger have been recovered.3
Among other animals unearthed in this pit were ____bison,
horses, * camels, sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and also
____birds, including peacocks. In the time following the
discovery of America this region of the coast was rather
sparsely populated with animals; early immigrants found only
"semi-starved coyotes and rattlesnakes."4 But when Rancho La
Brea received its skeletons "there lived an amazing assemblage
of animals in Western America." ^ To explain the presence of
these bones in the asphalt, the theory was offered that the
animals became entrapped in the tar, sank in it, and were
embedded in asphalt when the tar hardened. However, the large
number of animals that filled this asphalt bed to overflowing is
baffling. Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of them are
carnivorous, whereas in any fauna the majority of animals would
be herbivorous—otherwise the carnivores would have no victims
for their daily food—requires explanation. So it was assumed
that some animal, caught in the tar, cried out, thus attracting
more of its kind, and these were trapped, too, and at their
cries carnivorous animals came, followed by more and more.
2 Ibid. 8 R. S. Lull, Fossils (1931), p. 28. 4 George McCready
Price, The New Geology (1923), p. 579.
This explanation might be valid if the state of the bones did
not testify that the ensnarement of the animals by the tar
happened under violent circumstances. Oil from which the
volatile elements have evaporated leaves asphalt, tar, and other
bitumens. "As the greater number of the animals in the Rancho La
Brea beds have been entrapped in the tar, it is to be presumed
that in a large percentage of cases the major portion of the
skeleton has been preserved. Contrary to expectations, connected
skeletons are not common."6 The bones are "splendidly"
preserved7 in the asphalt, but they are "broken, mashed,
contorted, and mixed in a most heterogeneous mass, such as could
never have resulted from the chance trapping and burial of a few
stragglers."8 Were not the herds of frightened animals found at
La Brea engulfed in a catastrophe? Could it be that at this
particular spot large herds of wild beasts, mostly carnivorous,
were overwhelmed by falling gravel, tempests, tides, and raining
bitumen?9 Similar finds in asphalt have been unearthed in two
other places in California, at ===Carpinteria and McKittrick;
the depositions were made under comparable circumstances. The
plants of the Carpinteria tar pits were found, with one
exception, to have been "members of the ____Recent flora," or of
the flora now living 200 miles to the north.10 Separate bones of
a ____human skeleton were also discovered in the asphalt of La
Brea. The skull belonged to an Indian of the Ice Age, it is
assumed. However, it does not show any deviation from the normal
skulls of Indians. The human bones were found in the asphalt
under the bones of a ____vulture of an extinct species. These
finds suggest that the time when the human body was buried
preceded the extinction of that species of vulture or at least
coincided with it; in a turmoil of elements the vulture met its
death, as did possibly the rest of its kind, with the
____saber-toothed tiger and many other species and genera.
Agate Spring Quarry
e Merriam. Memoirs of the University of California, I, No. 2. 7
Lull, Fossils, p. 28. 8 9 Price, The New Geology, p. 579. C. E.
Brasscur, Histoire des nations civilise"es du Mexique (185759),
I, 55; Popul-Vuh, le livre sacre, ed. Brasseur (1861), p. 25. 10
R. W. Chaney and H. L. Mason, "A Pleistocene Flora from the
Asphalt Deposits at Carpinterla, California," in Studies of the
Pleistocene Paleobotany of California (Carnegie Institution,
1934).
In ===Sioux County, Nebraska, on the ===south side of the
Niobrara River, in Agate Spring Quarry, is a fossil-bearing
deposit up to twenty inches thick. The state of the bones
indicates a ===long and violent transportation before they
reached their final resting place. "The fossils are in such
remarkable profusion in places as to form a veritable pavement
of interlacing bones, very few of which are in their natural
articulation with one another," says R. S. Lull, director of the
Peabody Museum at Yale, in his book on fossils.1 The profusion
of bones in Agate Spring Quarry may be judged by a single block
now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This
block contains about 100 bones to the square foot. There is no
way of explaining such an aggregation of fossils as a natural
death retreat of animals of various genera. The animals found
there were ____mammals. The most numerous was the ____small
twin-horned rhinoceros (Diceratherium). There was another
extinct animal ____(Moropus) with a head not unlike that of a
horse but with heavy legs and claws like those of a carnivorous
animal; and bones of a ____giant swine that stood six feet high
(Dinohyus hollcindi) were also unearthed. The Carnegie Museum,
which likewise excavated in Agate Spring Quarry, in a space of
1350 square feet found 164,000 bones or about ____820 skeletons.
A mammal skeleton averages 200 bones. This area represents only
one twentieth of the fossil bed in the quarry, suggesting to
Lull that the entire area would yield about ____16,400 skeletons
of the twin-horned rhinoceros, 500 skeletons of the clawed
horse, and 100 skeletons of the giant swine. A ===few miles to
the east, in another quarry, were found skeletons of an animal
which, because of its similarity to two extant species, is
called a ____gazelle camel (Stenomylus). A ____herd of these
animals was destroyed in a disaster. As in Agate Spring Quarry,
the fossil bones were ===deposited in sand transported by water.
The transportation was in a violent cataract of water, sand, and
gravel, that left ____marks on the bones. ____Tens of thousands
of animals were carried over an unknown distance, then smashed
into a common grave. The catastrophe was most probably
ubiquitous, for these animals—the ____small twin-horned
rhinoceros, clawed horse, giant swine, and gazelle camel—did not
survive, but became extinct. There is nothing in their skeletons
to warrant regarding them as degenerate and doomed to
extinction. And the very circumstances in which they are found
bespeak a violent death at the hands of the elements, not slow
extinction in a process of evolution. In many other places of
the world similar finds have been made, and in one of the
sections to follow we shall discuss the famous bone quarry of
Siwalik. In the United States, ===Big Bone Lick, Kentucky,
twenty miles south of Cincinnati, contained the bones of ____one
hundred mastodons, besides many ____other extinct animals.
President Jefferson gathered there his famous collection of
fossils. In ===San Pedro Valley, California, skeletons of the
____mastodon are found standing upright, in the posture in which
they died, ===mired in gravel, ash, and sand. ____Fossils found
in ===John Day Basin, Oregon, and the glacial ===Lake
Florissant, Colorado, are ===embedded in volcanic ash. In the
===Southern states ____fossil bones are quarried for the
commercial exploitation of phosphates. In ===Switzerland a
conglomerate of bones of ____animals that belong to different
climates and habitats was found in ===Kesslerloch near Thayngen:
Alpine types are there in one "Tiergemisch" with animals of the
steppe and of the forest fauna.2 In ===Germany a gravel pit at
===Neukoin (formerly Rixdorf), a suburb of Berlin, disclosed two
faunas: ____mammoth, musk ox, reindeer, and arctic fox "suggest
a boreal climate"; ____lion, hyena, bison, ox, and two species
of elephant suggest varying degrees of warmer climate." The
faunas were interpreted as belonging to two periods—glacial and
interglacial—but the bones were found all together. "It seems
probable that the relations are more complicated than has been
realized."8 There has not yet been found "a satisfactory
climatic interpretation.
a Helerll, "Das Kesslerloch bei Thayngen," Neue Denkschrlften
der Schwetzerischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft, Vol. XL1II
(1907); H. Brockmann-Jerosch in Die Verdnderungen des Klimas,
publ. by the XI-th International Geological Congress (1910). 8
Flint, Glacial Geology, p. 329.
Great multitudes of animals that filled prairies and forests,
water and air, forms, fragile or sturdy, with an urge to live
and multiply, were more than once suddenly called upon to write
their names in the register of extinction.
CHAPTER VI MOUNTAINS AND RIFTS
Mountain Thrusts in the Alps and Elsewhere
THE AGE of a rock formation is ascertained with the help of the
fossils it contains. To the surprise of many scientists, it was
found that mountains have traveled, since older formations have
been pushed over on top of younger ones. Chief Mountain in
Montana is a massif standing several thousand feet above the
Great Plains. It "has been thrust bodily upon the much younger
strata of the Great Plains, and then driven over them eastward,
for a distance of at least eight miles. Indeed, the thrust may
have been several times eight miles," writes Daly.1 "By similar
thrusting, the whole Rocky Mountain Front, for hundreds of
miles, has been pushed up and then out, many miles over the
plains." 2 Such titanic displacements of mountains have been
found in many places on the earth. The displacement of the Alps
is especially extensive. 1 2 Daly, Our Mobile Earth, pp. 228-29.
Ibid., p. 231. "During the building of the Alps gigantic slabs
of rock, thousands of feet thick, hundreds of miles long, and
tens of miles wide, were thrust up and then over, relatively to
the rocks beneath. The direction of the relative over-thrusting
movement was from Africa toward the main mass of Europe on the
north. The visible rocks of the northern Alps of Switzerland
have thus been shoved northward distances of the order of 100
miles. In a sense the Alps used to be on the present site of
northern Italy."8 Mont Blanc was moved from its place and the
Matterhorn was overturned. Those portions of the Alps that
surround the valley of the Linth, in the canton of Glarus in
Switzerland, have lower parts of Tertiary formations or of the
age of mammals; their upper parts are Permian (preceding the age
of reptiles) and Jurassic (of the age of reptiles). This impels
to one of two conclusions! either the division of rocks into
sequences based on the fossils they contain is fallacious, or
the old mountains were moved bodily and set on the shoulders of
more recent formations. The latter conclusion is chosen; and if
De Saussure's notion of the sea sweeping over the Alps appeared
fantastic, the idea of mountains traveling considerable
distances must sound even more fantastic, unless we know of a
physical cause that could have brought it about. But even the
very ^StHs^e of mountain building itself is obscure. The problem
of mountain-making is a vexing one: Many of them [mountains] are
composed of tangentially compressed and overthrust rocks that
indicate scores of miles of circumferential shortening in the
Earth's crust. Radial shrinkage is woefully inadequate to cause
the observed amount of horizontal compression. Therein lies the
real perplexity of the problem of mountain making. Geologists
have not yet found a satisfactory escape from this dilemma,"
says F. K. Mather of Harvard University.4
8 Ibid., pp. 232-33. 4 F. K. Mather, reviewing G. Gamow,
Biography of the Earth, in Science, January 16, 1942.
The origin of the mountains is not explained; and still less is
their thrust or shift across valleys and over other mountains.
____The Alps were shoved a hundred miles to the north. ____Chief
Mountain in Montana traveled across the plains and climbed the
slope of another mountain and <67> settled on top of it. **. . .
____All of the Glacier National Park in Montana and all the
Rocky Mountain area up to the Yellowhead Pass in Alberta" moved
for many miles.8 ____The mountains of western Scotland shifted
from their places. ____The entire length of the Norwegian
mountains showed a similar overthrust. What could have caused
these mountains to travel across valley and uphill with their
masses of granite weighing billions of tons? No force acting
from inside the earth, pulling inward or pushing outward, could
have created these overthrusts. Only twisting could have
produced them. It could hardly have occurred if the rotation and
revolution of our planet had never been disturbed. ____In the
Alps, caverns with human artifacts of stone and bone dating from
the Pleistocene (Ice Age) have been found at remarkably high
altitudes. During the Ice Age the slopes and valleys of the
Alps, more than other parts of the continent, must have been
covered by glaciers; today in central Europe there are great
glaciers only in the Alps. The presence of men at high altitudes
during the Pleistocene or Paleolithic (rude stone) Age seems
baffling. The cavern of Wildkirchli, near the top of Ebenalp, is
4900 feet above sea level. It was occupied by man sometime
during the Pleistocene. "Even more remarkable, in respect to
altitude, is the cavern of Drachenloch at a height of 2445
meters (8028 feet)," near the top of Drachenberg, south of
Ragaz. This is a steep, snow-covered massif. "Both of these
stations are in the very heart of the Alpine field of
glaciation. ®
5 George McCready Price, Common-sense Geology, p. 120. Idem,
"The Fossils as Age-makers in Geology," Princeton Theological
Review, Vol. XX, No. 4, October 1922. 9 G. G. MacCurdy, Human
Origins (1924), I, 77.
A continental ice sheet thousands of feet thick filled the
entire valley between the Alps and the Jura, where now Lake
Geneva lies, to the height of the erratic boulders torn from the
Alps and placed on the Jura Mountains. In the same geological
epoch, between two advances of the ice cover, during an
interglacial intermission, human beings must have occupied
caverns 8000 feet above sea level. No satisfactory explanation
for such location of Stone Age man has ever been offered. Could
it be that the mountains rose as late as in the age of man and
carried up with them the caverns of early man? In recent years
evidence has grown rapidly to show, in contrast to previous
opinions, that the Alps and other mountains rose and attained
their present heights, and also traveled long distances, in the
age of man. "Mountain uplifts amounting to many thousands of
feet have occurred within the Pleistocene epoch [Ice Age]
itself." This occurred with "the Cordilleran mountain system in
both North and South America, the Alps-Caucasus-Central Asian
system, and many others. . . ." ^ The fact of the late upthrust
of the major ridges of the world created, when recognized, great
perplexity among geologists who, under the weight of much
evidence, were forced to this view. The revision of the concepts
is not always radical enough. Not only in the age of man, but in
the age of historical man, mountains were thrust up, valleys
were torn out, lakes were dragged uphill and emptied. Helmut
Gams and Rolf Nordhagen brought together very extensive material
concerning the Bavarian Alps and the Tyrol, or Eastern Alps. We
shall deal with this material in Chapter XI, "Klimasturz.' "The
great mountain chains challenge credulity by their extreme
youth," wrote the explorer Bailey Willis about Asian mountains.8
The Himalayas
The ===Himalayas, highest mountains in the world, rise like a
thousand-mile-long wall north of India. This mountain wall
stretches from Kashmir in the west to and beyond Bhutan in the
east, with many of its peaks towering over 20,000 feet, and
Mount Everest reaching 29,000 feet, or over five miles. The
summits of these lofty massifs are capped by eternal snow in
those regions of the heavens where eagles do not fly nor any
other bird of the sky. Scientists of the nineteenth century were
dismayed to find that, as high as they climbed, the rocks of the
massifs <Epoch, pp. 9-10.> yielded skeletons of ____marine
animals, fish that swim in the ocean, and shells of mollusks.
This was evidence that the Himalayas had risen from beneath the
sea. At some time in the past azure waters of the ocean streamed
over Mount Everest, carrying ____fish, crabs, and mollusks, and
marine animals looked down to where now we look up and where
man, after many unsuccessful efforts, has until now succeeded
only once in putting his feet. Until recently it was assumed
that the Himalayas rose from the bottom of the sea to their
present height tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of years
ago. Such a long period of time, so long ago, was enough even
for the Himalayas to have risen to their present height. Do we
not, when we tell young listeners a story about giants and
monsters, begin with: Once upon a time, long, long ago . . . ?
And the giants are no longer threatening and the monsters are no
longer real. According to the general geological scheme, five
hundred million years ago the first forms of life appeared on
earth; two hundred million years ago life developed into
reptilian forms that dominated the scene, achieving gigantic
size. The huge reptiles died out seventy million years ago, and
mammals occupied the earth—they belonged to the Tertiary.
According to this scheme, the last mountain uplifts took place
at the end of the Tertiary, during the Pliocene; this period
lasted until a million years ago, when the Quaternary period,
the age of man, began. The Quaternary is also the time of the
Ice Age or the Pleistocene—the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age; and
the very end of the Quaternary, since the end of the Ice Age, is
called Recent time: the Neolithic (Late, or polished, Stone),
Bronze, and Iron cultures. Since the appearance of man on earth,
or since the beginning of the Ice Age, there have been no
uplifts on any substantial scale. In other words, we have been
told, the profile of the earth with its mountains and oceans was
already established when man first appeared. In the last few
decades, however, numerous facts have emerged from mountains and
valleys that tell a different story. In ICashmir, Helmut de
Terra discovered sedimentary deposits of an ancient sea bottom
that was elevated at places to an altitude of 5000 feet or more
and tilted at an angle of as much as 40°; the basin was dragged
up by the rise of the mountain. But this was entirely
unexpected. These deposits contain paleolithic fossils." And
this, according
to Arnold Heim, Swiss geologist, would make it plausible that
the mountain passes in the Himalayas may have risen, in the age
of man, three thousand feet or more, "however fantastic changes
so extensive may seem to a modern geologist.*'* Studies on the
Ice Age in Indict and Associated Human Cultures, published in
1939 by De Terra, working for the Carnegie Institution, with the
assistance of Professor T. T. Paterson of Harvard University, is
one long argument and demonstration that the Himalayas were
arising during the Glacial Age and reached their present heights
only after the end of the Glacial Age, and actually in
historical times. From other mountain ridges came similar
reports. De Terra divided the Ice Age of the Kashmir slopes of
the Himalayas into Lower Pleistocene (embracing the first
glacial and interglacial stages). Middle Pleistocene (the
second, major glaciation and the following interglacial), and
Upper Pleistocene (comprising the last two glaciations and an
interglacial stage). "The scenery which this region presented at
the beginning of the Pleistocene must have differed greatly from
that of our time. . . . The Kashmir valley was less elevated,
and its southern rampart, the Pir Panjal, lacked that Alpine
grandeur that enchants the traveler today. . . Then various
formation groups moved "both horizontally and vertically,
resulting in a southward displacement of older rocks upon
foreland sediments, accompanied by uplift of the mobile belt."**
1 Arnold Heim and August Gausser, The Throne of the Cods, an
Account of the First Swiss Expedition to the Himalayas (1939),
p. 218. 2 H. de Terra and T. T. Paterson, Studies on the Ice Age
in India and Associated Human Cultures (1939), p. 223. 8 Ibid.,
p. 225.
"The main Himalayas suffered sharp uplift in consequence of
which the Kashmir lake beds were compressed and dragged upward
on the slope of the most mobile range. . . . Uplift was
accompanied by a southward shifting of the Pir Panjal block
toward the foreland of northwestern India."3 The Pir Panjal
massif that was pushed toward India is at present 15,000 feet
high. In the beginning of this period the fauna was greatly
impoverished, but thereafter, judging from remains, large cats,
elephants, true horses, pigs, and hippopotami occupied the area.
In the Middle Pleistocene, or Ice Age, there was a "continued
uplift." "The archaeological records prove that early
paleolithic man inhabited the adjoining plains." De Terra refers
to "abundance of paleolithic sites." Man used stone implements
of "flake" form, like those found in the Cromer forest-bed in
England. Then once more the Himalayas were pushed upward.
"Tilting of terraces and lacustrine beds" indicates a "continued
uplift of the entire Himalayan tract" during the last phases of
the Ice Age.4 In the last stages of the Ice Age, when man worked
stone in the mountains, he might have been living in the bronze
stage down in the valleys. It has been repeatedly admitted by
various authorities—quoted subsequently in this book—that the
end of the glacial epoch may have been almost contemporaneous
with the time of the rise of the great cultures of antiquity, of
Egypt and Sumeria and, it follows, also of India and China. The
Stone Age in some regions could have been contemporaneous with
the Bronze Age in others. Even now there are numerous tribes in
Africa, Australia, and Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of the
Americas, still living in the Stone Age, and many other regions
of the modern world would have remained in the Stone Age had it
not been for the importation of iron from more advanced regions.
The aborigines of Tasmania never got so far as to produce a
polished—neolithic—stone implement, and in fact barely entered
the crudest stone age. This large island south of Australia was
discovered in 1642 by Abel Tasman*, the last Tasmanian died in
exile in 1876, and the race became extinct. 4 Ibid., p. 222. The
more recent uplifts in the Himalayas took place also in the age
of modern man. "The postglacial terrace record suggests that
there was at least one prominent postglacial advance [of ice],"
and this, in the eyes of De Terra and Paterson, is indicative of
a diastrophic movement of the mountains. "We must be emphatic on
one particular feature—namely, the dependence of Pleistocene
glaciation on the diastrophic character of a mobile mountain
belt. This relationship, we feel, has not been sufficiently
recognized in other glaciated regions, such as Central Asia and
the Alps, where similar if not identical conditions are found."
8 It had been generally assumed that loess—thin windblown dust
that is built into clays—is a product of a glacial age. However,
in the Himalayas De Terra reported finding neolithic, or
polished stone, implements in loess and commented; "Of
importance for us is the fact that loess formation was not
restricted to the glacial age but that it continued . . . into
postglacial times." In China and m Europe, too, the presence of
polished stone artifacts in loess prompted a similar revision.
The neolithic stage that began, according to the accepted
scheme, at the end of the Ice Age, still persisted in Europe and
in many other places at the time when, in the centers of
civilization, the Bronze Age was already flourishing. R.
Finsterwalder, exploring the Nanga Parbat massif in the western
Himalayas (26,660 feet high), dated the Himalayan glaciation as
post-glacial; in other words, the expansion of the glaciers in
the Himalayas took place much closer to our time than had been
previously assumed. Great uplifts of the Himalayas took place in
part after the time designated as the Ice Age, or only a few
thousand years ago.
6 Ibid., p. 223.
Heim, investigating the mountain ranges of western China,
adjacent to Tibet and east to the Himalayas, came to the
conclusion (1930) that they had been elevated since the glacial
age. 5
6 R. Finsterwalder, "Die Formen der Nanga Parbat-Gruppe,"
Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1936, pp.
321ff. T Lee, The Geology of China, p. 207. 8 Heim and Gausser,
The Throne of the Gods, p. 220.
The great massif of the Himalayas rose to its present height in
the age of modem, actually historical, man. "The highest
mountains in the world are also the youngest." 8 With their
topmost peaks the mountains have shattered the entire scheme of
the geology of the "long, long ago.
The Siwalik Hills
The ===Siwalik Hills are in the foothills of the Himalayas,
===north of Delhi; they extend for several hundred miles and are
2000 to 3000 feet high. In the nineteenth century their
unusually ____rich fossil beds drew the attention of scientists.
Animal bones of species and genera, living and extinct, were
found there in most amazing profusion. Some of the animals
looked as though nature had conducted an abortive experiment
with them and had discarded the species as not fit for life. The
carapace of a ____tortoise twenty feet long was found there; how
could such an animal have moved on hilly terrain?1 The Elephas
ganesa, an ____elephant species found in the Siwalik Hills, had
tusks about fourteen feet long and over three feet in
circumference. One author says of them; "It is a mystery how
these animals ever carried them, owing to their enormous size
and leverage."2 The Siwalik fossil beds are stocked with animals
of so many and such varied species that the animal world of
today seems impoverished by comparison. It looks as though all
these animals invaded the world at one time! "This sudden
bursting on the stage of such a varied population of
____herbivores, carnivores, rodents and of primates, the highest
order of the mammals, must be regarded as a most remarkable
instance of rapid evolution of species," writes D. N. Wadia in
his Geology of India. The ____hippopotamus, which generally is a
climatically specialized type (De Terra), pigs, rhinoceroses,
apes, oxen filled the interior of the hills almost to bursting.
A. R. Wallace, who shares with Darwin the honor of being the
originator of the theory of natural selection, was among the
first to draw attention, in terms of astonishment, to the
Siwalik extinction.
1 2 D. N. Wadia, Geology of India (2nd ed.; 1939), p. 268. J. T.
Wheeler, The Zonal-Belt Hypothesis (1908), p. 68.
A pair of tusks of this size is on view in the Paleontological
museum of Princeton University.
8 Wadia, Geology of India, p. 268.
Many of the genera that comprised a wealth of species were
extinguished to the last one; some are still represented, but by
only a few species. Of ____nearly thirty species of elephants
found in the Siwalik beds, only one species has survived in
India. "The sudden and widespread reduction by extinction of the
Siwalik mammals is a most startling event for the geologist as
well as the biologist. The great carnivores, the varied races of
elephants belonging to no less than 25 to 30 species . . . the
numerous tribes of large and ____highly specialized ungulates
[hoofed animals] which found such suitable habitats in the
Siwalik jungles of the Pliocene epoch, are to be seen no more in
an immediately succeeding age." 4 It used to be assumed that the
advent of the Ice Age killed them, but subsequently it has been
recognized that great destructions took place in the age of man,
much closer to our day. The older geologists thought that the
Siwalik deposits were alluvial in their nature, that they were
debris carried down by the torrential Himalayan streams. But it
was realized that this explanation "does not appear to be
tenable on the ground of the remarkable homogeneity that the
deposits possess and a uniformity of lithologic composition" in
a multitude of isolated basins, at considerable distances from
one another.5 There must have been some agent that carried these
animals and deposited them at the feet of the Himalayas, and,
after the passage of a geological age, repeated the
performance—for in the Siwalik Hills there are animals of more
than one age, and signs of more than one destruction. There was
also a ===movement of the ground: "The disrupted part of the
fold has slipped bodily over for long distances, thus thrusting
the older pre-Siwalik rock of the inner ranges of the mountains
over the younger rocks of the outer ranges." 6
4 Ibid., p. 279. 5 6 Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 264.
If the cause of these paroxysms and destruction was not local,
it must have produced similar effects at the other end of the
Himalayas and beyond that range. Thirteen hundred miles from the
Siwalik Hills, in ===central Burma, the deposits cut by the
Irrawaddy River "may reach 10,000 feet." "Two ____fossiliferous
horizons occur in this series separated by about 4000 feet of
sands." The upper horizon (bed), characterized by ____mastodon,
hippopotamus, and ox, is similar to one of the beds in the
Siwaliks. "The sediments are remarkable for the large quantities
of ____fossil-wood associated with them. . . • Hundreds and
thousands of entire trunks of silicified trees and huge logs
lying in the sandstones" suggest the denudation of "thickly
forested" areas.7 Animals met death and extinction by the
elementary forces of nature, which also uprooted forests and
from Kashmir to Indo-China ===threw sand over species and genera
in mountains thousands of feet high.
*****************************************************