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The Younger Dryas is the date I come back to most often when I try to place the end of Atlantis and the great floods. It was a sudden return to cold near the end of the last Ice Age, from about 12,900 to about 11,700 years ago. Plato’s date for the fall of Atlantis lands near its end. This page collects what the site says about it.
A sudden cold and a fast end
On Did Genesis Combine Two Floods? The Priestly and Yahwist Noah Stories I describe how fast it ended. Greenland ice cores show a sharp warming about 11,700 years ago, roughly 9700 BCE, and geologists use that warming as the official start of the Holocene. mtDNA shows how human migrated gives the mainstream cause of the cooling: a massive freshwater release from Lake Agassiz that disrupted the climate.
The impact hypothesis
In 2007 Richard Firestone and 25 co-authors proposed that a comet or its fragments exploded over North America about 12,900 years ago. Taurid meteor stream follows Martin Sweatman, who dates the event to around 10,835 BCE and links it to the extinction of many megafauna species and the end of the Clovis culture. The critics are on the record too. The Genesis page lists the 2011 review that called the idea a “requiem” and the 2023 “comprehensive refutation”, followed by Sweatman’s 2024 reply. The debate is still open.
Did a Massive Solar Flare Cause the Pleistocene Megafauna Extinction? looks at a different cause: a massive solar proton event at the onset of the cold, with a 65% rise in excess carbon-14 over 200 years.
Göbekli Tepe
The temple hill in Turkey goes up soon after the cold ends, as I note on Why Is 95% of Göbekli Tepe Still Buried?. In the video The First Ancient Humans Suddenly Disappeared, Martin Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis read the Vulture Stone as a record of a comet impact.
Atlantis and the floods
The channeled sources put Atlantis inside the same window. On After the Floods, Bashar, channeled by Darryl Anka, says the Atlanteans spread out before the destruction of Atlantis, about 11,500 years ago, at the beginning of what scientists call the Younger Dryas. He ties it to the melting of the ice caps and the rise of the oceans, and says the survivors brought their technology and understanding to other civilizations.
Events leading to the final destruction of Atlantis sets the Taurid impact around 10,800 BCE and the end of the Younger Dryas around 9,600 BCE. In the video The Debate on Atlantis, Matt Lacroix points out that Plato’s date for the fall, about 11,600 years ago, matches the end of the period. Jon F. White stays skeptical.
The dates are not settled for me either. On Floods, Meteor strikes and Mantel shifts I write that I first placed the great flood at the end of the Younger Dryas, around 9600 BCE, and then kept a longer list of dated catastrophes. On the Genesis page I add a date problem: an impact would mark the start of the Younger Dryas, about 1,200 years before 9600 BCE, so at most it opens the long crisis.
Related pages
- Did Genesis Combine Two Floods? The Priestly and Yahwist Noah Stories
- Taurid meteor stream
- Events leading to the final destruction of Atlantis
- Floods, Meteor strikes and Mantel shifts
- After the Floods
- Did a Massive Solar Flare Cause the Pleistocene Megafauna Extinction?
- Why Is 95% of Göbekli Tepe Still Buried?
- The Dual Cataclysm That Ended a Civilization
- Mammoths: Ice Age Giants and Their Sudden End
For every page I tagged with Younger Dryas, see the Younger Dryas tag archive.
