SMARTER THAN WE THOUGHT!
Posted: 04 Sep 2015, 06:38
SMARTER THAN WE THOUGHT!
I've always said that evidence changes facts, that's why our view of history changes all the time. I have also suspected for a long time that the oldest Barlickers, our Stone Age ancestors, were smarter than we thought. These two threads have come together in the last couple of weeks for me.
I need to assault you with some very ancient history! For many years now we have known about what is generally called the 8,200 Year Event. Around 6,200BC global temperatures suddenly fell and this lasted for up to 400 years. There is plenty of evidence for this from many sources, notably the deep ice cores from the Arctic regions. What has changed is that we now begin to understand what caused this. Bear with me, I'll keep it as brief as possible and then apply it to our little corner of the world.
Until 6,200BC there was an enormous lake of melt water covering much of North America held back by remaining ice forming a dam on the east side of the continent. This dam broke as it gradually melted and allowed an enormous amount of cold water to drain suddenly into the Atlantic, enough to raise global sea levels between two and four meters. This sea level rise had effects all round the world but the one that concerns us happened in Norway where the rise triggered a vast landslide into the waters of the North Sea. This in turn caused a tsunami.
If we go back over ten years I was taken to task for writing an article about the land bridge that existed between our Isles and Europe, what we now call Doggerland which at the time of the tsunami was already under attack from the general sea level rise caused by the end of the last great Ice Age. We now believe that the Norwegian event was the last straw and that around 8,200BC Doggerland was completely overwhelmed in one major event, cutting us off from Europe.
So, we have a picture of a cataclysmic event, a sudden drop in temperature caused by the cooling effect of vast quantities of ice water into the Atlantic and the cutting off of the land route by which the Isles had been re-populated after the Ice Age by Celtic migrants from Europe. The first question we have to ask is how did this effect the population of what we now call Britain in general and Barlick in particular.
We have to step back here and consider another more gradual change that was under way at the same time, the advent of farming culture which was to change our way of life as we made the transition from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled agriculture. Remember that while we are discussing global events, we are also looking at factors that directly affected what was happening in what we now call Barlick. All this changes our view of what we thought was happening at the time.
The land bridge to Europe in 9,000BC.
I've always said that evidence changes facts, that's why our view of history changes all the time. I have also suspected for a long time that the oldest Barlickers, our Stone Age ancestors, were smarter than we thought. These two threads have come together in the last couple of weeks for me.
I need to assault you with some very ancient history! For many years now we have known about what is generally called the 8,200 Year Event. Around 6,200BC global temperatures suddenly fell and this lasted for up to 400 years. There is plenty of evidence for this from many sources, notably the deep ice cores from the Arctic regions. What has changed is that we now begin to understand what caused this. Bear with me, I'll keep it as brief as possible and then apply it to our little corner of the world.
Until 6,200BC there was an enormous lake of melt water covering much of North America held back by remaining ice forming a dam on the east side of the continent. This dam broke as it gradually melted and allowed an enormous amount of cold water to drain suddenly into the Atlantic, enough to raise global sea levels between two and four meters. This sea level rise had effects all round the world but the one that concerns us happened in Norway where the rise triggered a vast landslide into the waters of the North Sea. This in turn caused a tsunami.
If we go back over ten years I was taken to task for writing an article about the land bridge that existed between our Isles and Europe, what we now call Doggerland which at the time of the tsunami was already under attack from the general sea level rise caused by the end of the last great Ice Age. We now believe that the Norwegian event was the last straw and that around 8,200BC Doggerland was completely overwhelmed in one major event, cutting us off from Europe.
So, we have a picture of a cataclysmic event, a sudden drop in temperature caused by the cooling effect of vast quantities of ice water into the Atlantic and the cutting off of the land route by which the Isles had been re-populated after the Ice Age by Celtic migrants from Europe. The first question we have to ask is how did this effect the population of what we now call Britain in general and Barlick in particular.
We have to step back here and consider another more gradual change that was under way at the same time, the advent of farming culture which was to change our way of life as we made the transition from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled agriculture. Remember that while we are discussing global events, we are also looking at factors that directly affected what was happening in what we now call Barlick. All this changes our view of what we thought was happening at the time.
The land bridge to Europe in 9,000BC.