It could be that recent revelations regarding the methods and motives of scientists behind the man-made global warming theory will give rise to a renewed skepticism about the pronouncements of “experts” in other fields. Certainly it is to be hoped that it will: for outrageous though the behavior of climate scientists may have been, it arguably looks almost honest compared with the behavior of evolutionary biologists and geologists over the past century and a half. In this field, so crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our place in the natural world, the “experts” have been involved in a cover-up and suppression of evidence that is arguably without comparison in the history of science.

I leave aside here the intractable problem of how new species of plants and animals actually appeared and refer instead to the question of how old species became extinct. Until fairly recently, textbooks invariably appealed to climate change or disease to account for the disappearance of creatures such as the dinosaurs and the large mammals of the Pleistocene epoch. But it was not always thus. Almost until the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, in 1859, it was assumed by the great majority of geologists and paleontologists that the earth had been struck repeatedly by immense natural catastrophes. This conviction came not so much from a reverential regard for tradition, but from interpretation of the observed geological facts.

Indeed, Georges Cuvier, the French founder of paleontology, as a child of the Enlightenment, was decidedly anti-biblical in his views; and yet he regarded it as proven that great upheavals of nature, of a planet-wide scope, had struck the earth repeatedly. He was led to this conclusion both by his observations of geology and by the study of faunal history. Cuvier performed much field-work and was first to identify and classify many species of extinct animals. Invariably, he was led to the conclusion that their destruction, both in manner and speed, could only be explained by immense paroxysms of nature. Cuvier held that human tradition, as found in the various Flood legends, did refer to the last -- and only the last -- of these events. He thus found corroboration for his views in myth and legend, but had already reached his conclusions quite independently of these.

As the nineteenth century progressed, the evidence for these catastrophes grew ever greater, and it continued to accumulate into the twentieth century, though by that time there was a determined effort to “reinterpret” it along uniformitarian lines. Furthermore, from the early twentieth century onwards it became the default position among academics to actually ignore evidence for catastrophes, and textbooks began to appear which spoke as if that material had never existed. Attempts throughout the twentieth century to call attention to such data was invariably dismissed as “fringe”, and increasingly categorized as “pseudo-science.”

Yet refusal to look at evidence does not mean it doesn’t exist; and by the late 1970s mainstream academia had once again been compelled -- mainly through the work of Luis Alvarez -- to accord a grudging acceptance of catastrophes in the history of our planet. But Alvarez’s work represented only a very limited return to the theory of catastrophes (his efforts concentrated on the extinction of the dinosaurs 63 million years ago), and the huge amount of evidence for much more recent cataclysms -- specifically those that terminated the epoch of the mammoth and other Pleistocene fauna -- continued (and continues) to be ignored.

Since the amount of evidence relating to the catastrophe at the end of the Pleistocene is now truly vast, I shall confine myself here to looking at a small portion of it.

In the early twentieth century paleontologists found skeletons of a number of whales in bog land of a post-Glacial date -- i.e. very recent -- in various parts of North America. These whales, it should be noted, were of a still-surviving species and were discovered at considerable elevations above sea-level, and often very many miles distant from the ocean. Thus for example in Michigan, skeletons of two whales were found over 190 meters above the present sea-level, whilst just to the north of Lake Ontario bones of a whale were found roughly 140 meters above present sea-level. Again, a skeleton of a whale was discovered in Vermont, over 160 meters above sea-level.

There can be no doubt that these creatures were deposited where they were found by enormous tidal waves, yet it is equally certain that these waves were an event of the recent past, for the bones were located in post-Glacial deposits.

From the other side of the planet, in Antarctica, the frozen bodies of whales, of species still living, are found sometimes hundreds of kilometers from the seashore and hundreds of meters above sea level. The bodies of these animals, often dismembered, as well as of seals and other marine life such as fish, are found perfectly preserved by the cold, and often look as if they might have died only a matter of weeks earlier. The occurrence of these cadavers on the southern ice-cap admit of only one possible explanation: They must have been placed there by tidal waves, tidal waves, of immense proportions. And, since all such creatures are of species still alive today, these waves must have washed the continent in very recent times.

In their 1994 book, When the Earth Nearly Died, D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair revisited the evidence gathered by dozens of nineteenth century geologists and explorers -- evidence now completely effaced from academic publications. In particular, they examined the question of “the Drift”, the vast deposit of clay, sand, gravel, and boulders (much of the latter rounded by the action of waves) that covers a great portion of the surface of the earth. They noted that this material, which is now explained away as the debris left behind by glaciers during one or more phases of the Ice Age, could only have been deposited where it is, in the condition it is found, by the action of onrushing waves. These waves, of apparently titanic dimensions, not only lifted forests and herds of animals wholesale, but even enormous boulders, some weighing thousands of tons, and tossed them around like pebbles. As well as uprooting forests, the waves also, in places, buried them under billions of tons of Drift material, where they are found to this day, often in a remarkably good state of preservation.

This is the case, for example, over much of North America. “…at Scarborough Heights and elsewhere near Ontario, clays yielded remains of cedar and pine trees, portions of rushes, leaves, a variety of seeds, specimens of Chara, Bryum, Fontinalis and two species of Hypnum. Then, near the River Don, Toronto, leaves and wood fragments were discovered in dark hued clays 70ft (22m) below ground level, where, also, a Maple leaf occurred in overlying reddish ferruginous sand, itself overlain by boulder-clay. Boulder-clay also overlies a bed at Rolling River, Manitoba, containing shell and fish debris mixed with a great variety of plant remains.” (D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, When the Earth Nearly Died (London, 1994) p. 91) Such remains were encountered throughout vast swathes of North America, taking in much of Canada and the United States.

In Canada, the buried trees were often of species, such as oak and plane, which can no longer grow in the latitudes where they occur. Indeed, the evidence shows clearly that even into the Arctic, great deciduous forests flourished at a very recent age. Thus, “The peaty and woody accumulations in the Bow and Belly river valleys of Alberta are…examples from western Canada, where pressure has sometimes hardened them to the consistency of lignite. Further north, just below the top soil at certain places in the valley of the Mackenzie River, shales forming the river banks are covered with the largely undecayed leaves of very ancient deciduous forest trees such as maple, oak and poplar, none of which can now thrive at that latitude.” (Ibid., pp. 91-2)

Early geologists were astonished by this evidence and reported it as they found it. They also drew the only conclusion that was possible from it: Namely that at some time in the recent past the climate of North America, including the Arctic reaches of Canada, had been much milder than now, and this mild epoch had been terminated by some cataclysm which had buried the forests under billions of tons of clay and gravel.

Nineteenth century explorers also drew special attention to the hecatombs of animals, of the same epoch as the buried forests, found in caves throughout the world. The bones of these creatures, typically of the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs, are found in great quantities all over the earth. The remains of hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lion, bear, deer, and occasionally mammoth and even man, lie smashed and mixed with a hardened mud known as “breccia.” Such remains first came to the attention of the scholarly world in the early nineteenth century. Explorers, first in Europe and then in other regions, such as North and South America, were astonished to find vast quantities of “normally incompatible kinds of animals lying in unnaturally close juxtaposition.” (Ibid., p. 111) Debris of every kind is found together: “Often accompanying these organic masses are both rounded and angular stones of dissimilar composition and, less frequently, sizable boulders.”

These sites, say Allan and Delair, “amount to underground charnel houses.” (Ibid.) One of the earliest reports, from Kent’s Cavern in Torquay, England, the remains of the animals “…suffered considerably from pressure, after having first undergone violence from the force which impelled and congregated them in this narrow creek. They were found driven into the interstices of the opposite wall, or piled in the greatest confusion against its side.” (J. McEnery, Cavern Researches, or discoveries of Organic remains and of British and Roman Relics, in the caves of Kent’s Hole, Anstis Cove, Chudleigh and Barry Head (London, 1859))

What, asked the explorers, could have caused such a phenomenon? What could have deposited the bodies of countless creatures, of diverse species and frequently of species not even from the same climate-zone or continent, into caves and fissures all over the world? What also could have shattered the bodies of these animals, mixed them with mud, gravel and other debris, and deposited them in the deepest and most inaccessible regions of the caves? The answer of the explorers, and the one agreed upon by Allan and Delair, was that the animals were washed into these caverns by onrushing waters and their bodies shattered and dismembered by the same force. It should be noted that the entrance to many of these caves is hundreds of meters above sea-level. Yet it would appear that not all of the creatures -- and occasionally men -- were washed into the caves. Many, think Allan and Delair, may have gone there of their own volition. Sensing some oncoming calamity, they appear to have huddled into the underground retreats in hope of escaping.

The most striking and perhaps most talked-about evidence for this recent cataclysm comes from the Arctic, more specifically from the permafrost regions of Siberia and Alaska. This material has been repeatedly highlighted by “alternative” thinkers over the past century, but habitually ignored by establishment academia.

In the Fairbanks district of Alaska, where the Tanana River joins the Yukon, gold is mined out of gravel and “muck”. This muck is a frozen mass of animals and trees. F. Rainey, of the University of Alaska, described the scene in 1940: “Wide cuts, often several miles in length and sometimes as much as 140 feet in depth, are now being sluiced out along stream valleys tributary to the Tanana in the Fairbanks District. In order to reach the gold-bearing gravel-beds an over-burden of frozen silt or "muck" is removed with hydraulic giants. This "muck" contains enormous numbers of frozen bones of extinct animals such as mammoth, mastodon, super-bison and horse.” (F. Rainey, “Archaeological Investigation in Central Alaska,” American Antiquity, V (1940), 305)

It is freely admitted that these animals perished in comparatively recent times. Along with extinct species were found enormous quantities of animals of species still surviving. Mixed with the bodies of the animals, most of whom were dismembered and whose bones were smashed -- although their flesh and skin are often well preserved -- were found millions upon millions of uprooted and smashed trees, along with other types of debris, such as sand and gravel. The whole mass of animals, trees and gravel was found thoroughly mixed in a promiscuous mass, as though thrown together by some immense and virtually random force. According to F. C. Hibben of the University of New Mexico; “Although the formation of the deposits of muck is not clear, there is ample evidence that at least parts of this material were deposited under catastrophic conditions. Mammal remains are for the most part dismembered and disarticulated, even though some fragments yet retain, in their frozen state, portions of ligaments, skin, hair, and flesh. Twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses...At least four considerable layers of volcanic ash may be traced in these deposits, although they are extremely warped and distorted...” (F. C. Hibben, “Evidence of Early Man in Alaska,” American Antiquity, VIII (1943), 256)

It seems apparent that when these deposits were laid down the area was subjected to repeated and violent volcanic activity; yet the scale and nature of the devastation goes well beyond anything attributable to volcanoes alone. Evidently great waves from the ocean had repeatedly, on four separate occasions, uprooted entire forests and lifted herds of animals, of every kind and variety, and thrown them together, twisted, smashed and dismembered, along with billions of tons of sand and gravel, into the Polar regions.

In various levels of the icy muck, stone implements were found “frozen in situ at great depths and in apparent association” with the Ice Age fauna, implying that “men were contemporary with extinct animals in Alaska.” (Rainey, loc cit., p. 307) In the words of Immanuel Velikovsky, “Worked flints, characteristically shaped, called Yuma points, were repeatedly found in the Alaskan muck, one hundred and more feet [about thirty meters] below the surface. One spear point was found there between a lion’s jaw and a mammoth’s tusk.” (Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval (1956) p. 5) Yet similar weapons were used only a few generations ago by the Athapascan Indians, who camped in the Upper Tanana Valley. (Rainey, loc cit., p. 301) According to Hibben, “It has been suggested that even modern Eskimo points are remarkably Yuma-like,” all of which, as Velikovsky noted, “indicates that the multitudes of torn animals and splintered forests date from a time not many thousand years ago.”

Such discoveries recall the opinion of a number of American geologists in the latter part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries; among them George Frederick Wright (1838–1921), Newton Horace Winchell (1839–1914) and Warren Upham (1850–1934). Wright came to the conclusion that the Ice Age “did not close until about the time that the civilization of Egypt, Babylonia and Western Turkestan had attained a high degree of development,” a view opposed to the “greatly exaggerated ideas of the antiquity of the glacial epoch.” (G. F. Wright, The Ice Age in North America, (1891) p. 683)

The permafrost regions of the Russian north revealed a situation precisely paralleling that in Alaska. From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Russian explorers and trappers began to penetrate the frozen wastelands of Siberia, there came reports of elephants, of a type no longer in existence, found in great quantities in the icy ground. A lucrative trade in mammoth ivory quickly developed. By the middle of the nineteenth century so much of this material was reaching Europe that people began to talk about the “ivory mines” of the region, and soon Northern Siberia was to provide more than half the world’s supply of the material.

One remarkable feature of these creatures was the state of preservation of the soft tissue. Flesh, skin and hair are often seen, and the flesh so well-preserved by the cold, that it can, on occasion, be safely eaten.

In the Arctic Ocean, just to the north of Siberia, lie various groups of islands. The earliest of these to be explored, the Liakhov Islands, were found to be full of the bones of mammoths and other creatures. “Such was the enormous quantity of mammoths’ remains that it seemed...that the island was actually composed of the bones and tusks of elephants, cemented together by icy sand.” (D. Garth Whitley, “The Ivory Islands of the Arctic Ocean,” Journal of the Philosophical Society of Great Britain, XII (1910), 35) The New Siberian Islands, discovered in 1806 and 1806, present the same picture. “The soil of these desolate islands is absolutely packed full of the bones of elephants and rhinoceroses in astonishing numbers.” (Ibid., p. 36) Again, “These islands were full of mammoth bones, and the quantity of tusks and teeth of elephants and rhinoceroses, found in the nearby island of New Siberia, was perfectly amazing, and surpassed anything which had as yet been discovered.” (Ibid., p. 42)

It would appear that these islands were formed, at least in part, by billions of tons of animal and vegetable matter, as well as sand and gravel, which was swept into the polar regions by enormous waves, waves which were, by the nineteenth century, termed “waves of translation”. These waves, it appears, were accompanied by a sudden and dramatic climate change. Temperatures dropped catastrophically. J. D. Dana, the leading American geologist of the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote: “The encasing in ice of huge elephants, and the perfect preservation of the flesh, shows that the cold finally became suddenly extreme, as of a single winter’s night, and knew no relenting afterward.” (J. D. Dana, Manual of Geology (4th ed, 1894), p. 1007)

It has often been emphasized, rightly, that the mammoth, as well as the woolly rhinoceros, so many of whose bodies are found in Siberia, are not, in spite of their hairy coats, creatures of the Arctic. Elephants in particular, whose daily calorie intake is enormous, could never survive on the sparse mosses and lichens which now cover the barren wastelands of northern Siberia. These were animals of the temperate zones, a fact confirmed by the contents of their mouths and stomachs. Here were found plants and grasses that do not now grow in northern Siberia. “The contents of the stomachs have been carefully examined; they showed the undigested food, leaves of trees now found in Southern Siberia, but a long way from the existing deposits of ivory. Microscopic examination of the skin showed red blood corpuscles, which was proof not only of a sudden death, but that the death was due to suffocation either by gases or water, evidently the latter in this case. But the puzzle remained to account for the sudden freezing up of this large mass of flesh so as to preserve it for future ages.” (Whitely, loc cit., p. 56)

On the islands of the Arctic Ocean “neither trees, nor shrubs, no bushes, exist...and yet the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, buffaloes, and horses are found in this icy wilderness in numbers which defy all calculation.” (Ibid., p. 50) Clearly, either the climate of the region was much warmer when the above creatures lived, or they were swept into these latitudes by some titanic force, almost certainly tidal waves. Or, alternatively, both these options might be correct: The cataclysm which threw together the animals and extinguished their lives, may also have changed the climate suddenly and dramatically; a freezing so rapid that flesh and hair was preserved intact.

The contents of the mammoths’ mouths and stomachs revealed another astonishing fact. Some had been eating, as well as grass and other herbs, flowering plants, such as buttercups in full bloom. The comments of American zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson say it all: “…not one trace of pine needles or of the leaves of any other trees were in the stomach of the Berezovka mammoth; little flowering buttercups, tender sedges and grasses were found exclusively. Buttercups will not even grow at forty degrees (4.4°C), and they cannot flower in the absence of sunlight. A detailed analysis of the contents of the Berezovka mammoth’s stomach brought to light a long list of plants, some of which still grow in the arctic, but are actually much more typical of Southern Siberia today. Therefore, the mammoths either made annual migrations north for the short summer, or the part of the earth where their corpses are found today was somewhere else in warmer latitudes at the time of their death, or both.” (Ivan T. Sanderson, “Riddle of the Frozen Giants,” Saturday Evening Post, No. 39, (January, 1960))

The circumstances surrounding the deaths of these creatures constitute, in Sanderson’s testimony, a profound mystery: “Here is a really shocking -- to our previous way of thinking -- picture. Vast herds of enormous, well-fed beasts not especially designed for extreme cold, placidly feeding in sunny pastures, delicately plucking flowering buttercups at a temperature in which we would probably not even have needed a coat. Suddenly they were all killed without any visible sign of violence and before they could so much as swallow a last mouthful of food, and then were quick-frozen so rapidly that every cell of their bodies is perfectly preserved, despite their great bulk and their high temperature. What, we may well ask, could possibly do this?”

What indeed.

(For the answer to this question, read our article Earth Rings and Noah's Flood! -- Editor)

Hope of Israel Ministries -- Proclaiming the Good News of the Soon-Coming Kingdom of YEHOVAH God!

Hope of Israel Ministries P.O. Box 853 Azusa, CA 91702, U.S.A. www.hope-of-israel.org

Scan with your Smartphone for more information