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NEWS October 2024
OCTOBER 2024 The recent cyber attack on the Internet Archive is deplorable and can be reasonably compared with the repeated burning of the Great Library of Alexandria. I have used the Wayback Machine extensively, but, until the full extent of the permanent damage is clear, I am unable to assess its effect on Atlantipedia. At […]Read More »
Joining The Dots
I have now published my new book, Joining The Dots, which offers a fresh look at the Atlantis mystery. I have addressed the critical questions of when, where and who, using Plato’s own words, tempered with some critical thinking and a modicum of common sense.Read More »
mammoths
Mammoths
Mammoths existed as a number of species in many parts of Eurasia and the Americas and were the ancestors of today’s elephants, part of the fauna of Plato’s Atlantis. Mammoths existed for around 5 million years until their extinction over 10,000 years ago, apart, apparently, from a small population on Wrangel Island in Siberia(d), which appears to have lasted until possibly as late as 1700 BC. An intensive study of mammoth remains on Alaska’s St. Paul Island, which was once part of the Beringia landbridge has revealed that they finally died out there 5,600 years ago(e). “The St. Paul mammoth demise is now one of the best-dated prehistoric extinctions,” the researchers report today (August 1, 2016) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The remains of mammoths were probably not studied scientifically until early in the 19th century, with individual specimens such as the ‘Adams’ and the ‘Berezovka’ receiving great attention(c).
In 2022, the BBC reported(i) that “A whole baby woolly mammoth has been found frozen in the permafrost of north-western Canada – the first such discovery in North America.”
However, it was not until the 20th century that mammoths began to slowly enter the pages of the Atlantis story. Both John Cogan and Wolter Smit, among others, have used the mammoth evidence to support their belief that Atlantis was destroyed by an asteroid strike which caused a sudden Pole Shift and consequent freezing of the mammoths.
>>Jason Colavito has traced the story of the frozen mammoths back to the early catastrophist, George Cuvier in 1822(k), who was among the first to suggest that fossil elephant bones had been mistaken in ancient times for the bones of Giants!<<
Ludwik Zajdler believed that there was evidence of a collision between the Earth and Halley’s Comet in 9570 BC and that this caused a 30° alteration to the axis of the earth resulting in the sudden freezing of the Siberian mammoths.
In 2002, Michael Brass has published a paper(h) titled Tracing the Graham Hancock’s Shifting Cataclysm which is “An examination of a specific portion of Graham Hancock’s book Fingerprints of the Gods, relating to Earth Crustal Displacement, the climates and fauna of Siberia and Alaska, and the deaths of the mammoths, finds it to be critically flawed.” Readers should find the section dealing with the alleged instant freezing’ of the frozen mammoths of Alaska and Siberia particularly interesting.
Then Antarctica was also nominated by the Flem-Aths as the home of Atlantis, before its destruction, caused by a Pole Shift. However, in their scenario, this was caused by the movement of the Earth’s entire crust as a result of an excessive build-up of ice at the poles!
Theosophists have seized on the sudden demise of the very many mammoth remains discovered in Siberia and Alaska as vindication of Blavatsky’s Atlantis claims.(a)
R. Cedric Leonard has also reviewed the matter of the apparently instant death of many mammoths bodies discovered and the date of their end and posed the rhetorical question “Can it be merely coincidence that this is the very date (circa 10.000 BC) indicated by Plato for the floods and seismic disturbances which led to the sinking of Atlantis and the destruction of its empire?” (b)
Beverly Jaegers (1935- ) has written on a variety of subjects for Atlantis Rising and Hera magazines among others. In AR #22 she wrote of the various theories put forward to explain the mystery of the frozen mammoths but concluded that “Finally, it must be restated that little evidence exists for any of these events as a direct cause of giant mammoths expiring on their feet as suddenly as they must have done to freeze so quickly and so perfectly as to be still fresh millennia later. Although many prehistoric animal populations may have been affected by mass kills, these are fossils, and only the largest, frozen in such an apparently lightning-like moment of time, remain to tantalize the theorist. No single piece of this fascinating scientific puzzle yet covers all the gaps. None answers all the questions.”(f)
Jaegers also wrote a paper on the possibility of cloning mammoths(g).
In 2021, it was reported that this idea may not be as far-fetched as some think, when the project received encouragement “in the form of $15m (£11m) raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.” (j)
(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20170603012148/https://www.atlantisquest.com/Paleontology.html
(c) https://mammothtales.blogspot.com/2010/04/zombies-of-mammoth-steppes.html
(d) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-mammoths-idUSKBN20200I or Chapter summary – WhisperingTales (archive.org) *
(f) Atlantis Rising magazine #22 At – PDF Archive
(g) Cloning Of Frozen Mammoths Remains Elusive (rense.com)
(h) p45.pdf (centerforinquiry.org)
(i) Frozen baby mammoth discovered in Yukon excites Canada (bbc.com)
(j) Firm raises $15m to bring back woolly mammoth from extinction | Extinct wildlife | The Guardian
(k) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-claim-of-flash-frozen-mammoths-is-older-than-i-thought *
Elephants *
Elephants are specifically mentioned by Plato as being indigenous to Atlantis. This must have significance for anyone trying to arrive at a credible location for Atlantis. For example, supporters of the Theran Atlantis School cannot show where such large animals could have lived on the small volcanic island. There are no physical remains, no frescos and no historical references. Rodney Castleden who supports the Minoan Hypothesis admits that “no raw elephant ivory has been found (on Thera) and very little in the way of worked ivory”[225.70]. He later speaks of the importation of ivory into Crete[p.172] having bravely denounced Plato’s description (Critias 115a) of herds of elephants on Atlantis as “false”[p.136].
Similarly, Spanuth’s Heligoland location would have been climatically unsuited to elephants. Spanuth himself admits that the elephant reference “is hard to explain“. Nevertheless, Felice Vinci who champions a Northern European origin for Greek mythology believes that Plato’s elephant reference may be a lingering memory of the woolly mammoths that inhabited Arctic regions as recently as 2500-2000 BC(t)(u). In the late 17th century Olof Rudbeck, recognising the problem that Plato’s reference to elephants presented for his Swedish Atlantis, argued that Plato had been speaking figuratively when describing the large voracious animals and had actually been referring to wolves, the Swedish word for wolf being ‘ulf’, which sounds like the beginning of ‘elephant’!!
Elephants in Western Europe were undoubtedly represented by mammoths, remains of which have been recovered from the North Sea – Doggerland and dated to around 40,000 years ago. Coincidentally, a tool made of mammoth bone, used for making rope, has also been dated to 40,000 years ago(i)(n). This discovery(s) by Nicholas Conard from the University of Tubingen was made shortly before Ashley Cowie published his interesting book[1454] on the history of rope-making. Further information on string, ropes and knots was published in March 2017(o). This ingenuity of our very distant ancestors, so often underestimated, is slowly being revealed by modern archaeology. In 2000, in the Czech Republic, it was discovered that woven cloth was being produced on looms 27,000 years ago(v). A few years later a team from Harvard’s Peabody Museum reported the discovery of fibres that ‘were spun, twisted or knotted’ and dated to at least 34,000 years ago(x). 2020 saw evidence emerge which suggested that even as far back as 41,000 – 52,000 years ago the Neanderthals had mastered the making of cords(w). Later the same year, further evidence was offered that string-making may have begun even earlier(y).
Allied to the demise of the Siberian mammoths is the often-repeated fib that when the remains were first discovered, their flesh was still fresh enough to eat, which has recently been debunked by Jason Colavito(j). He has also unearthed the truth behind that other canard relating to a Siberian mammoth, namely that fresh buttercups were found in its mouth(j). He has now(q) traced back the earliest reference to the frozen mammoths to George Cuvier in 1822 [1586.11].
Eckart Kahlhofer, in a forthcoming book[715] advocates a North-West European location for Atlantis, and suggests that where Plato referred to elephants he actually meant deer! Kahlhofer offers, as a simple explanation for this seemingly daft contention, the fact that the Greek for elephant, elephas, is very similar to the Greek elaphos which means deer. He claims that a simple transcription error by a scribe could have caused the mix-up.
The elk was the largest species of deer to be found in the northern hemisphere and is still to be found in Scandinavia. The Great Irish Deer which died out around 5500 BC had an antler span of 11ft and a maximum height of 10ft, though usually less. The tallest African elephant ever recorded was 13 feet at the shoulder, which would appear to give the elephant the edge over the deer heightwise. Furthermore, It is worth pointing out, again, that Plato described his elephants as the ‘largest and most voracious’ animal, so when we realise that an adult elephant eats 250-300 lbs a day, while a moose manages on 40-60 lbs, there seems to be no contest.
Gene Matlock in an attempt to bolster his Mexican location for Atlantis has suggested that Plato’s elephants were in reality the long-snouted tapirs of Meso-America!(c), an idea ‘borrowed’ from Hyde Clarke
While the elephant issue should not be dealt with in isolation it does serve to illustrate the difficulties involved in analysing Plato’s text. Consider the possibility that the early date of 9600 BC for Atlantis is accepted, then the islands that are too small today to accommodate elephants may have been considerably larger and sometimes connected to each other or a mainland during the Ice Age, when sea levels were lower, and consequently capable of supporting pachyderms. In this regard, Sundaland would have been the most suitable candidate. Not only would today’s South China Sea archipelagos have been a single landmass, but there would have been access to the region from the Asian mainland, home today to large numbers of elephants.
Strangely enough, even the Andes, considered by some as the home of Atlantis, reveal the fact that during the last Ice Age, a species of elephant called Cuvieronius lived there but became extinct around 8000 BC. These animals are to be found carved on the great Gateway of the Sun in Tiahuanaco suggesting that they were common in the region. Supporters of an Atlantis link with Tiahuanaco have highlighted this fact.
James Bailey who supports[149][150] the idea of Atlantis in America believes that Plato’s mention of elephants could be a reference to the American mammoth, generally believed to have died out circa 10,000 BC, although Victor von Hagen, the American explorer, contentiously maintained that they survived as late 2000 BC. A similar idea was presented at the 2005 Atlantis Conference by the American researcher, Monique Petersen.
The Schoppes, in support of their theory of Atlantis in the Black Sea region, contend(l) that Indian elephants existed there until 800 BC and support this with a reference to the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmosis III who killed 120 elephants ‘there’ around 1200 BC, which is a strange claim as Thutmosis did not venture beyond Syria and he died circa 1426 BC!
Elephas Antiquus (Palaeoloxodon), is a dwarf species whose remains have been found throughout the islands of the Mediterranean from Sardinia to Cyprus. All those found were dated 200,000 BC or earlier! In sharp contrast, Simon Davis, in an article in New Scientist (3 Jan.1985), dated Mediterranean dwarf elephants to as recent as 6000 BC(p). Some writers, such as Roger Coghill, have tried to use the pygmy elephant as an explanation for Plato’s text (Crit. 114e & 115a) where we find that he describes the elephants as being ‘of its nature the largest and most voracious’. This is not a description of pygmy elephants.
Victoria Louise Herridge is a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. She has published a lengthy paper in two parts(z)(aa) offering an in-depth technical study of dwarf elephant species found on Mediterranean islands.
However, Ghar Hasan or Hasan’s Cave in southeast Malta has palaeolithic cave paintings that depict elephants, indicating more recent contact with the animals. Whether these represented full-sized or the pygmy variety is unclear. A small booklet[214] by Dr. Anton Mifsud and Dr. Charles Savona-Ventura describes this cave system.
In Dossier Malta – Neanderthal [1587] Mifsud has drawn attention to another cavern, not far away, formerly known as Ghar Dulam, now Ghar Dalam, where thousands of dwarf elephant bones were discovered. Dulam means ‘small elephant’ in Arabic. This is one of the mainstays of his ‘Atlantis in Malta’ theory. Whether these diminutive creatures justify Plato’s description that they were the “largest and most voracious” of animals (Crit.115a) is clearly debatable. For me, this is not a description of pygmy elephants and so in all probability is an indication of a North African location or, as some claim, an Asian one!
The Atlanteans had control in Europe as far as Tyrrhenia and Egypt, which would have included what is now modern Tunisia, the home of the last recorded wild elephants in that region!
The exact extent of Egyptian-controlled territory in Libya at the time of Atlantis is unclear. We do know that “In the mid-13th
century, Marmarica was dominated by an Egyptian fortress chain stretching along the coast as far west as the area around Marsa Matruh; by the early 12th century, Egypt claimed overlordship of Cyrenaican tribes as well. At one point a ruler chosen by Egypt was set up (briefly!) over the combined tribes of Meshwesh, Libu, and Soped.”(ac)
A Wikipedia(ab) map suggests that the Egyptian New Kingdom control stretched at least halfway towards Syrtis Major, which has been proposed by some as the location of Atlantis.
Readers should be aware that there is general acceptance that the North African Elephant inhabited the Atlas Mountains until they became extinct in Roman times(e)(h). The New Scientist magazine of 7th February 1985(d) outlined the evidence that Tunisia had native elephants until at least the end of the Roman Empire.
H.R. Stahel in Atlantis Illustrated [560] is the only commentator that I have encountered who suggested that elephants were used in the construction of the magnificent buildings described by Plato. This would make sense as Stahel calculated that surrounding the city of Atlantis “the aggregate length of the walls was almost 50 miles; they were 50 feet broad and twice as high. To build them, and their gates and towers, was a feat as impressive as the construction of the canals. The quantity of stone required was roughly 27 times that used in an Egyptian pyramid.” [p94]
In Elephant Destiny[1301] Martin Meredith records that one of the earliest references to the African elephant came from Hanno, the 5th century BC Carthaginian explorer, who related how he came across marshes at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, which “were haunted by elephants and multitudes of other grazing beasts.” Meredith also mentions that stables for as many as 300 elephants were to be found within the city of Carthage itself.
Nevertheless, the species of elephant used by Hannibal has been a source of debate for years(f). The Numidians of North Africa (202 BC–46 BC) also used local elephants in warfare(g). It would seem to me that the North African Elephant, rather than the Asian or African species, would have been more suited to the trek across the Alps. Needless to say, the Atlas Mountains were part of the Atlantean sphere of control (Timaeus 25a-b) and so may be the reason that Plato mentioned them. It is also reported that during the reign of the Ptolemies in Egypt (323 BC-30 BC), they imported war elephants from Eritrea in East Africa(r).
Dustin Kolb, is a German researcher, who also advocates a Mexican location for Atlantis and endeavoured, unconvincingly, to explain away Plato’s mention of elephants as a reference to bulls and bison!
The latter half of 2010 saw a new piece of nonsense hit the blogosophere when a claim that the Atlanteans had flying machines made of elephant skins suddenly appeared and before you could say “cut and paste” it was ‘adopted’ by a variety of websites(a)(b). So Dumbo was not the first flying elephant! In fact, this daft idea was just a recycling of one of Edgar Cayce’s ‘revelations’ (Reading 364-6)(m).
(a) https://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Speaking-of-Atlantis/1872335 (Offline October 2017)
(b) https://www.saching.com/Articles/Historical-Proof-of-Atlantis-2888.html
(c) https://viewzone.com/atlantis22.html
(d) New Scientist, 7 February 1985
(e) https://interesting-africa-facts.com/Africa-Landforms/Atlas-Mountains-Facts.html
(f) https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/18/science/the-mystery-of-hannibal-s-elephants.html
(g) https://nabataea.net/explore/history/the-elephant-and-the-nabataeans/
(h) 5 Animals That Once Roamed Morocco but No Longer Exist (archive.org)
(i) https://www.seeker.com/how-rope-was-made-40000-years-ago-1943454415.html
(j) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/dining-on-frozen-mammoth-steaks-the-evolution-of-a-strange-rumor
(l) https://web.archive.org/web/20190830053312/https://www.black-sea-atlantis.com/black-sea-atlantis/
(m) Edgar Cayce Reading 364-6 (hpage.com)
(n) https://www.q-mag.org/40000-years-of-rope-making.html
(o) https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-long-knotty-world-spanning-story-of-string/
(p) New Scientist (3 Jan.1985)
(q) https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/the-claim-of-flash-frozen-mammoths-is-older-than-i-thought
(r) https://www.livescience.com/64407-ancient-egypt-fortress-war-elephants.html
(s) https://www.seeker.com/how-rope-was-made-40000-years-ago-1943454415.html
(u) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrangel_Island#Flora_and_fauna
(v) https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/790569.stm
(w) The Oldest String Ever Found May Have Been Made By Neanderthals | WUNC *
https://www.capradio.org/news/npr/story?storyid=828400733
(x) https://web.archive.org/web/20090930011321/https://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=529173
(y) 120,000-calendar year-outdated necklace tells of the origin of string (archive.org)
(z) https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/133456/1/133456_Vol.1.pdf
(aa) https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/133456/2/133456_Vol.2.pdf
(ab) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Kingdom_of_Egypt
(ac) https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/egyptians-and-libyans-in-the-new-kingdom/
Zajdler, Ludwik
Ludwik Zajdler (1905-1985) was a Polish astronomer who published
Atlantyda in Warsaw in 1963. In 1966 it was translated into Russian by leading atlantologist Nicolai Zhirov. It is widely quoted on the Internet that the 3rd Polish 1972 edition had a print run of 30,000 copies, which is unbelievably spectacular. However, this report goes on to claim that this number equals the total number of all books on Atlantis published in the USA and UK during the previous twenty years, which also seems questionable.
Zajdler divided his book into three sections, Atlantis in myth, Atlantis in history and the date and cause of its destruction. The author believed that there was evidence of a collision between the Earth and Halley’s Comet in 9570 BC and that this caused a 30° alteration to the axis of the earth resulting in the sudden freezing of the Siberian mammoths.
Zhirov noted[458.378] Zajdler had identified some remarkable similarities between the ancient Egyptian and Mayan calendars, which led him to conclude that they had to have a common origin that he assumed to have been Atlantis.
Zajdler also had a fascination with sundials and timekeeping, which led to him write Dzieje zegara (The History of the Clock).
Atlantis from a Geographer’s Perspective
Atlantis from a Geographer’s Perspective [319] by Dr. Ulf Erlingsson, a Swedish geographer and geomorphologist, endeavours to identify Ireland as the original Atlantis described by Plato. As an Irishman, I would be delighted to support this view, if the evidence was strong enough. Unfortunately, I cannot see Erlingsson’s book advancing the case for an Irish Atlantis. I am willing to accept that the megalithic cultures of Western Europe and North Africa were probably part of a loose confederation of societies that led to a later tale of a mighty empire, as its existence was relayed through the myths of succeeding civilisations. However, to claim that 
Ireland was the centre of this civilisation is rather fanciful and unsubstantiated by anything other than the fertile imagination of Dr. Erlingsson.
Erlingsson refers to Henry O’Brien’s book, The Round Towers of Ireland[0124] as a sort of precursor of his own. In fact, O’Brien’s book was an attempt to link the Round Towers of Ireland with a pre-Christian period. O’Brien never referred to Plato or Atlantis at all. Now after more than a hundred and fifty years, no evidence to support O’Brien’s claim has been forthcoming. There is a consensus that the round towers date from the early part of the first millennium AD, but it must be admitted that with regard to their purpose, some mystery still exists.
The most glaring flaw in Erlingsson’s theory is his arbitrary use of the diagonal dimensions of Ireland in order to shoehorn it into Plato’s dimensions. Using the island’s latitudinal and longtitudinal dimensions, a much smaller figure would have resulted. However, his application of Plato’s 3,000 x 2,000 stadia (550 x 370 km) to the entire island, is dishonest as Plato’s figures only refer to the plain of Atlantis, whereas the Central Plain of Ireland would only occupy a fraction of that area.
Some of my other reasons for dismissing Dr. Erlingsson’s theory are:
- Ireland is too far north to have produced two crops annually and was mainly covered in ice during the last Ice Age. Furthermore;
- Ireland did not disappear beneath the sea
- Ireland has always been somewhat short of elephants
- Ireland does not have hot springs
- There is no evidence of any harbour in the immediate vicinity of Tara or Newgrange.
- Conventional archaeology indicates that Ireland did not have dressed stone structures until around 5th Century AD.
*Erlingsson, in order to explain the fact that Ireland was not submerged, has proposed that when the story of megalithic Ireland reached Egypt, it became confused with the tale of the inundation of Doggerland, which resulted from the Norwegian storegga event of around 6200 BC.*
My final gripe with the book, or should I say booklet, as it contains just a hundred pages, is that it lacks an index, an irritating omission that a number of authors reviewed here have also been guilty of.
On 19th August 2004, the respected The Irish Times newspaper, reported(c) that Erlingsson had appeared to backtrack on some of his initial claims when he said that “The existence of Atlantis has never been proven” and that “the purpose of his book was to test Plato’s claim that he based the utopia on a real, historic place.”
UPDATE – JULY 2016
It’s over ten years since I read Erlingsson’s book and have only recently re-read it because the author wrote to me complaining that I had included inaccuracies in my original comments on his book. Having perused the first chapter again, I quickly realised that any shortcomings on my part were greatly exceeded by those of Erlingsson’s.
Firstly, he claims that Atlantis was Ireland, but the island which sank, referred to by Plato, was in the North Sea, part of Doggerland. He claims that the story of a sunken island was a tale from Atlantis, not about Atlantis! He attempts to explain this away by simply claiming that Solon/Plato made a mistake! It is far more likely that Erlingsson is making a mistake.
He then uses Doggerland to explain away the elephants that Plato said inhabited Atlantis, claiming that the remains of mammoths were reclaimed from the North Sea. However, he fails to record that the mammoths in question were dated at 40,000 BC(b), tens of thousands of years before Atlantis.*Nevertheless, there is now evidence that mammoths may have existed on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean as recently as 2500-2000 BC(d)(e).*
My second complaint is that he initially matches the dimensions of the entire island of Ireland with those of the plain of Atlantis given by Plato, namely 3000 x 2000 stadia. I have already pointed out that if you remove the mountains from the Ireland, the remaining plains of our island, if combined, might amount to a third of that of the plain of Atlantis(a). In order to shoehorn Ireland into his hypothesis he abitrarily chose to use a value of 166m to the stade, instead of the more generally accepted 185m. On top of that, as already noted, he measured Ireland diagonally rather than north-south and east-west.
Furthermore, speaking of mountains, the highest Irish peak is only 1,038m high. On the other hand, Plato describes the mountains of Atlantis being renowned for their number, size and beauty, which apart from beauty cannot be applied to the modest Irish mountain ranges. I would expect better from a geographer.
The first chapter contains other errors, including the idea that the ancient Greeks knew of America. In fact they only knew of three continents, Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa). Herodotus, who flourished after Solon and before Plato, was quite clear that there were only three known to the Greeks. [Histories 4.42].
There are more speculative claims in this first chapter, but, at this point I could take no more and gave up, unwilling to waste any more time on this nonsense. Erlingsson claims that his hypothesis matches Plato’s Atlantis story with a probability of 99.98%. Hilarious.
(a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Ireland
(c) https://www.irishtimes.com/news/swedish-academic-plays-down-atlantis-claims-1.987962
(e) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrangel_Island#Flora_and_fauna*
Petersen, Monique
Monique Petersen is an American researcher who addressed the 2005 Atlantis Conference promoting her view that America was Atlantis. She accepts the 9600 BC date for its demise as correct and identifies the elephants referred to by Plato as the Columbian Mammoth that roamed North America at that time.
James Bailey held similar views regarding the American mammoth being the reality behind Plato’s reference to elephants. However, Bailey considered Peru as the most likely location of Atlantis
Allan & Delair *
J.B. Delair
D.S. Allan
Derek S. Allan(1917-) & J. Bernard Delair(1932-) are two British scientists who authored Cataclysm: Compelling Evidence of a Catastrophic World Change, 9,500 BC [014], which discusses a global catastrophe that affected the planet during the 10th millennium BC. It was originally published as When the Earth Nearly Died [1901]. Nigel Blair posted a positive review in 1996(b).
The authors have built upon and refined the catastrophist theories of Velikovsky[037][038]. Drawing on the details of worldwide myths and recent scientific research they have developed a plausible argument for believing that the Earth was violently impacted by an extraterrestrial event over eleven thousand years ago. They contend that ejecta, of varying sizes, from a supernova in the nearby Vela constellation, entered our solar system resulting in devastation on a planetary scale. The Earth did not escape and the destruction visited on our world is the sobering subject of this book. In 1977, George Michanowsky also referred[282] to the Vela supernova but dated it to 4000 BC and considered its effects to be more visual than physical. Neither Michanowsky nor his book was referred to by Allan & Delair.
Walter Parks in Atlantis the Eyewitnesses [749] also refers to the Vela supernova and blames it for the destruction of Atlantis over 11,000 years ago.
The authors boldly challenge accepted Ice Age theory, denying that the usual evidence of glacial damage is correct, as such striations are found in areas that did not have to endure an ice age! This book will no doubt require revision, as our understanding of the past continues to develop, but for the present, it offers an insight into the incredible disasters that could have wiped out our ancestors. Delair wryly commented that “evolution may not be just the survival of the fittest but also the survival of the luckiest.”
I note two things about Cataclysm, first the authors touch on the subject of Atlantis, usually in the context of catastrophism and secondly the Foreward was written by Rand Flem-Ath who is arguably the leading proponent of the idea of Atlantis in Antarctica. Commenting on the destruction of Atlantis they also wrote [p.225] that “we found Plato’s account of the loss of the legendary continent of Atlantis (the empire of Atlas) to be but one recollection of the occurrence of radical worldwide topographical changes some 11,500 years ago initiated by powerful and violent celestial agents.”[014.225] So it would seem that at the very least they were sympathetic to the reality of Atlantis!
Allan & Delair have used scientific evidence to indicate that 9500 BC was the approximate date for their proposed cataclysmic event. The coincidence of this date with the one apparently related to Solon has been seized upon by the more fundamentalist Atlantologists, who insist that Plato’s early date for the destruction of Atlantis is, euphemistically speaking, written in stone.
The authors range over the entire spectrum of catastrophist elements, such as the Deluge, extraterrestrial encounters, bone caves, frozen mammoths and pole shift. Inevitably, they were forced to engage in some speculation, but, if nothing else, this valuable work throws some light on a dark and terrifying period in our planet’s history.
Maurice A. Williams, who has written on several scientific and religious subjects has offered a very positive review(a) of Cataclysm describing it as a ‘must-read’ book. While I concur, I would also urge caution.
What fascinates me, is that Richard Firestone and his colleagues, although generally using a different set of evidence have concluded that a global cataclysm took place in the same timeframe as the catastrophe described by Allan & Delair. I wonder if some combination of the two might offer a more robust hypothesis.