Attos' Magazine

Volume #71, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Ice Age and the Antiquity of Man

The mammoth lived in the age of man. Man pictured it on the walls of caves; remains of men have repeatedly been found in Central Europe together with remains of mammoths; occasionally the settlements of the neolithic man of Europe are found strewn with the bones of mammoths. Man moved southward when Europe was covered with ice and returned when the ice retreated. Historical man witnessed great variation in climate. The mammoth of Siberia, the meat of which is still fresh, is supposed to have been destroyed at the end of the last glacial period, simultaneously with the mammoths of Europe and Alaska. If this is so, the Siberian mammoth was also the contemporary of a rather modern man. At a time when in Europe, close to the ice sheet, man was still in the later stages of neolithic culture, in the Near and Middle East—the region of the great cultures of antiquity—he may already have progressed well into the metal age. There exists no chronological table of neolithic culture because the art of writing was invented approximately at the advent of the copper—the early—period of the Bronze Age. It is presumed that the neolithic man of Europe left pictures but no inscriptions, and consequently there are no means of determining the end of the Ice Age in terms of chronology.

Geologists have tried to find the time of the end of the last glacial period by measuring the detritus carried by rivers from the glaciers and the deposits of detritus in lakes. The quantity carried by the Rhone from the glaciers of the Alps and the amount on the bottom of the Lake of Geneva, through which the Rhone flows, were calculated, and from the figures obtained the time and velocity of the retreat of the glacial sheet of the last glacial period were estimated. According to the Swiss scholar François Forel, twelve thousand years have passed since the time the ice sheet of the last glacial period began to melt, an unexpectedly low figure, as it was thought that the ice age ended thirty to fifty thousand years ago.

Such calculations suffer from being only indirect evaluations; and since the velocity at which the glacial mud had been deposited in the lakes was not constant and the amount varied, the mud must have assembled on the bottom of a lake at a faster rate in the beginning when the glaciers were larger; and if the Ice Age terminated suddenly, the deposition of detritus would have been much heavier at first, and there would be little analogy to the accumulation of detritus from the seasonal melting of snow in the Alps. Therefore, the time that has elapsed since the end of the last glacial period must have been even shorter than reckoned.

Geologists regard the Great Lakes of America as having been formed at the end of the Ice Age when the continental glacier retreated and the depressions freed from the glacier became lakes. In the last two hundred years Niagara Falls has retreated from Lake Ontario toward Lake Erie at the rate of five feet annually, washing down the rocks of the bed of the falls. If this process has been going on at the same rate since the end of the last glacial period, about seven thousand years were needed to move Niagara Falls from the mouth of the gorge at Queenstown to its present position. The assumption that the quantity of water moving through the gorge has been uniform since the end of the Ice Age is the basis of this calculation, and therefore, it was concluded, seven thousand years may constitute “the maximum length of time since the birth of the falls.” In the beginning, when immense masses of water were released by the retreat of the continental glacier, the rate of movement of Niagara Falls must have been much more rapid; the time estimate “may need significant reduction,” and is sometimes lowered to five thousand years.

The erosion and sedimentation on the shores and the bottom of Lake Michigan also suggest a lapse of time counted in thousands, but not in tens of thousands, of years. Also the result of paleontological research in America carries evidence which constitutes “a guarantee that before the last period of glaciation, modern man, in the form of that highly developed race, the American Indian, was living on the eastern seaboard of North America” (A. Keith). It is assumed that with the advent of the last glacial period the Indians retreated southward, returning to the north when the ice uncovered the ground and when the Great Lakes emerged, the basin of the St. Lawrence was formed, and Niagara Falls began its retreat toward Lake Erie.

If the end of the last glacial period occurred only a few thousand years ago, in historical times or at a time when the art of writing may have been already employed in the centers of ancient civilization, the records written in rocks by nature and the records written by man must give a coordinated picture. Let us, therefore, investigate the traditions and the literary records of ancient man, and compare them with the records of nature.

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