The Ice Age: Rising Seas, Megafauna, Hancock and the Hunters

The last ice age sits underneath most of the questions I follow: how much land lay where the sea is now, which animals vanished and when, and who was living through it.

Ice, sea and memory

Last Glacial Maximum holds the numbers that frame the rest. The sea rose from about 20,000 to 7,000 years ago, and in three bursts called Meltwater Pulses 1a, 1b and 1c it rose by several metres within a few centuries. The same page collects the Aboriginal stories of a coast “where the Great Barrier Reef now stands”. One Yidindji story has Fitzroy Island joined to the mainland, which would place its origin between about 10,000 and 13,000 years ago.

The cold snap and the animals

Younger Dryas: The Last Cold Snap and the Fall of Atlantis covers the return of the cold around 12,900 years ago, the impact hypothesis and the dates the Atlantis sources give. Mammoths: Ice Age Giants and Their Sudden End follows the animals through that period. Did a Massive Solar Flare Cause the Pleistocene Megafauna Extinction? sets out Paul LaViolette’s 2011 paper, which reads a 65% rise in carbon-14 as the sign of a solar proton event. It is one explanation among several, next to human hunting, climate change and a comet.

Hancock and the lost ice age society

Graham Hancock argues that an advanced society lived through the ice age and was drowned by the rising sea. Graham Hancock on ice age maps and drowned coasts and Graham Hancock on ice age sailors and old maps make his case from the lost shorelines and the old charts. Hancock on an ice age homeland is where he admits the limit of that case:

The hunters

The Cosmic Hunt Myth – 40,000 years old follows the story of hunters chasing a great animal across the sky, a myth that John White traces back about 40,000 years by comparing versions from different peoples. History Fuzz and a carved ice age shelter follows a film team through rock shelters on the Bogotá savanna, where butchered ice age animals are dated to about 12,900 to 11,700 years ago and the team argues the carvings are deliberate. It is their case from surveys without excavation, not a dig report. These two pages remind me that the people in the numbers above had stories of their own.

Related pages

• Last Glacial Maximum
• Younger Dryas: The Last Cold Snap and the Fall of Atlantis
• Mammoths: Ice Age Giants and Their Sudden End
• Did a Massive Solar Flare Cause the Pleistocene Megafauna Extinction?
• Graham Hancock on ice age maps and drowned coasts
• Graham Hancock on ice age sailors and old maps
• Hancock on an ice age homeland
• The Cosmic Hunt Myth – 40,000 years old
• History Fuzz and a carved ice age shelter

For every page I tagged with Last Glacial Maximum, see the Last Glacial Maximum tag archive.