ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) (10/13/85)
The following excerpts are from Michael Mcneil's recent flame of my article on extinction. Maybe someday I'll find a way to get people to READ these articles before flaming them. > > > > 4. I would want the prey to be big enough to justify the effort, > > but not big enough to pose any ridiculous danger to me and my > > companions. Again, elephants are the wrong choice; bison > > would be more like it. [TED] >So you think *bison herds* are safe to hunt, do you Ted? Can I watch? "Less than ridiculously dangerous" and "safe" are totally different things. Please don't put words in my mouth. I'm not the one claiming to believe that these fire and stampede-over-cliff hunts were commonplace, by the way. The whole statement began with: "Assuming I intended to.....". In real life, that would be a bad assumption. I'd be out hunting dear and leave the elephant and rhino stampeding to Friesen et. al. who claim to believe in it. >> I read about Pigmies hunting elephants. A little hunter can incapacitate >> a big elephant by himself. First, he spread shit of some animal on his >> skin, so the elephant would not feel the human smell. Then he walks >> under the elephant and slits Achilles tendons. Voila! The giant cannot >> walk anymore. No skeletons of Pygmies at all! [PIOTR] >Very interesting example, Piotr. I don't actually recall anyone >in this newgroup arguing that *mammoths* were stampeded off cliffs. This got started months ago when I made the claim that only global catastrophies of the sort described in "Worlds in Collision" could account for the extinction of virtually ALL of the earth's megafauna. Other contributers, including Stan Friesen, Wm. Jefferys, and several others have attempted to advance the claim that man was primarily responsible for killing off the megafauna, mostly via cliff-stampeding and fire. I claim this is ridiculous, that man could have killed a few mammoths here and there, but nothing like enough to let anyone claim man as a major cause of their extinction. I further claim that several of the mega-predators of the so- called "ice-age" would have been so totally dangerous that sane humans would have simply avoided them, hence that humans could not possibly be credited with their extinction either. One friend of mine who has seen some of these skeletons at La Brea claims to have been struck particularly at how tiny the sabre-tooth tiger skeletons appeared next to those of the North American super-lions. The sabre-tooth, of course, other than the giant teeth, was just a normal sized tiger. Now, a "just normal" sized tiger is dangerous as hell; anyone who would attempt to take on a cat which made "just normal" sized tigers look tiny with spears, in my estimation, would have to be crazy. I just can't picture it. Rhinos are another such case. Modern rhinos are bad enough; the ancient ones were twice the size of the modern ones. Any takers for killing one of these with a spear? Remember, rhinos don't shuffle like elephants; they charge at a gallop, and the little birds which eat ticks off them would warn them in plenty of time to stomp any shit covered pygmie (or scientist) attempting to sneak up on them and cut their achilles tendons. >In all probability, other techniques (such as that of the pygmies) >>were used on them. >> You theorise, those people were doing this for living. I would not >> consult you how to hunt (if I would be a primitive tribesman) or how >> to walk, if I would be a dinosaur. [PIOTR] >I would add: In what sense, when hunters are out trying to obtain >food to feed their families, are they not doing it "for a living"? "Those people"? Who? Pygmies walking around covered with shit in Siberia, northern Russia, the Liakhovs, Novo Sibirsk, and Northern Alaska? I mean, what are you guys talking about? Do you guys have any idea how cold it gets in Novo Sibirsk? How long could you stand walking around covered with frozen shit, Michael? There's no place to take a warm shower in Novo Sibirsk, Michael. You'd never get clean again. Do you think you could stand it long enough to have killed all of the thousands of mammoths whose bodies are up there? Don't you think hunting deer in SOUTHERN Russia or India might have been easier? Of course, you might try to claim that Siberia was a warm steppe land 5000 or 10000 years ago (as Stan Friesen apparently has), but at that point, you will have basically admitted to believing in Velikovskian catastrophism. There is absolutely NOTHING in the standard uniformitarian view of origins which could possibly account for Siberia or the Liakhovs ever having been warm enough to support mammoth herds within the age of man. > > I am completely turned off by modern science's insistence on > > describing our ancesters as idiots at every opportunity. Can anybody > > believe that our ancestors were so stupid as to ALWAYS go after the > > biggest and most dangerous and wretched tasting game when there were > > always deer and cattle and buffalo and rabbits and ducks nearby? [TED] >No, I'd say it's the present-day idiots who think that "there were always >deer and cattle and buffalo and rabbits and ducks nearby." Which world >are *you* living in, Ted? (Or was it the Garden of Eden?) There are >dry seasons, droughts, animal migrations, changing climates, etc., etc. >This was the ice age! Mammoths died out very recently. There are pictures of them in ancient American artwork. Do you have any explanation as to how ice sheets could have crept over temperate zones that recently, Michael? I mean an explanation for so called "ice-ages"? If you have, it should be good for at least a PHD dissertation somewhere; nobody else has ever come up with such an explanation. On the other hand, Immanuel Velikovsky has presented very good explanations as to catastrophies causing effects which scientists could MISCONSTRUE as evidence of ice sheets having once crept over temperate zones. I honestly regard "ice-ages" as a modern fiction. > > ... but that is not why > > mammoths are extinct. The really big mammoth kill sites, in Alaska > > and in northern Siberia and in the islands off the north coast of > > Russia and Siberia, show no evidence of man's hand; only that of a > > violent nature. Velikovsky's book, "Earth in Upheaval", gives a good > > account of several of these. [TED] > > Mammoths are found in those plases because they got well preserved in the > permafrost. Probably the drown in Arctic bogs and later were submerged > in the permafrost, like a lot of other creatures. Because of those > marvelously preserved specimens we know that mammoth, unlike elephant, > was very hairy: a trait of a subarctic animal. [PIOTR] You mean like chimps and leopards and collies? I mean, there are lots of these in Northern Siberia now, aren't there, Piotr? The fur coats keep them nice and warm on -100 degree nights and keep them from starving too, don't they? Most people don't have any real idea of what -100 degrees F means; for one thing, it means rubber tires becoming brittle and shattering..... >Enough theorizing in a vacuum! Let's look at a specific culture >and see if Ted's hypothesizing pans out. In central Russia there >was an extraordinary culture some 15,000 years ago (as determined >by carbon-14 dating) which is usually known ...... This is about the point at which a decent Fortran or C compiler would put out some such message as: "fatal error, compilation ceases at this point". Radio carbon dating simply cannot be used to date ANYTHING prior to the last round of global cosmic violence which occured around 700 B.C. Prior to that, there simply is no guessing as to the ratios of regular to radio carbon. Six or seven thousand years ago, a global flood almost annihilated this planet; Noah and his family and many animal species survived on the great ship and handfulls of men and animals survived on mountaintops elsewhere, but most died afterwards, as Ovid says, in "Metamorphoses": "And almost every being that breathed on earth drowned as it met the flood, those who survived Died of starvation on the shores of mountains." There is almost no possability of knowing what was going on 15000 years ago. There is every probability that most, if not all of the places which man inhabited prior to the flood are now under water, and every probability that things such as the mammoth-bone buildings, which "scientists" who still believe in radio-carbon dating date at 13000 BC, actually belong to the age between the flood and the great global disaster of 1500 BC, described in "Worlds in Collision". As to ancient Russians having actually killed that many mammoths, I simply don't believe it. It seems far more likely that the bones were simply lying around, remnants of the catastrophies; handy building materials for people who hunted ducks and deers and rabbits, and ate shchi and Kasha as Russians do now. Or do you think those people DRAGGED those bone houses around whilst following mammoth herds, Michael?
clewis@mnetor.UUCP (Chris Lewis) (10/16/85)
I don't know why I bother, but here we go again...
In article <432@imsvax.UUCP> ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes:
No large animals in Siberia Ted? Ever heard of a Polar bear? Siberian
Tiger? Caribou? Arctic wolves? Reindeer? Bears? Has it ever
occured to you that a Woolly Mammoth was woolly precisely because it
was COLD? In fact, they probably couldn't survive long in warmer
climates because they would overheat (remember the volume/surface area
calculations you were so fond of?) Sure it gets down to -100F every
once in a while, it gets close to that in the Canadian Arctic.
[ notice where this posting is from Ted! We know what "cold" is like.
We occasionally get temps as low as -50F plus windchill factors of -80F
or lower in Toronto. It's a hell of a lot colder farther north. ].
Herbivorous animals can survive in such areas precisely as they do in
Canada or the Northwestern US. That's what their fur is for Ted. It
doesn't snow much (it's too cold for it) in the far north of the USSR
or Canada. This allows grazing animals to get food by digging through
the snow. As they do in winter all through the northern US and
Canada. And the herbivorous animals migrate Ted. They leave the area
before it gets really cold. But the polar bears and wolves stay, Ted.
They burrow into the snow. The larger herbivorous animals can do the same
(or keep together to conserve heat) too if they are caught by early
snows. Even when it gets down to -80F or lower. Mammoths weren't made
out of rubber Ted, so there's no danger of them shattering.
In fact, there is a much simpler explanation for the mass Mammoth dieoffs
than some ridiculous overnight climactic change brought on by Velikovskism.
Does the term "winter kill" mean anything to you? The term, Ted, means
that animals have been caught by a heavy snowstorm (and probably freakishly
early if the animals migrate) and that the snow is too deep for them to
dig through. Hence they starve. It happens all the time even now. Every
once in a while you hear of deer herds starving because of snow depth and
frequently the wildlife services airlift food in for them.
Mass dieoffs is NOT a sign of catastrophism Ted. There's usually a much
simpler explanation. 15,000 caribou died during their migration last spring
in one place. It wasn't due to planets in collision, or 48 hour days or
divine intervention. They drowned. In a flash flood.
Another thing, Ted, is that animals would have an easier time of it in
Siberia than in Northern Canada [which, even you must admit, has lots of
large animals]. The growing season in Siberia is typically on the order
of 3 to 5 months. In northern Canada the growing season is usually MUCH
shorter (6-8 weeks). This is because the northern Canadian climate is
"moderated" (if you consider -50F moderate) by the nearby Arctic ocean
and doesn't change much. In Siberia the prevailing winds are East to West
and thus is not moderated much by the ocean. Summer temperatures get
right up into the 70's. In Siberia they have hardwood forests (and of
course, coniferous too) right up to the shores of the Arctic ocean. They
can EVEN GROW CORN up there! In contrast, Northern Canada is frozen mud
most of the year, and swamp the rest. There are NO trees within a thousand
miles of the Arctic ocean in Canada. Hence, even mammoths would have
enough to eat.
One very readable reference: Sibir, by Farley Mowat.
Besides, "uniformitarian" [what in the hell does this term mean Ted? I've
never heard it before] Science has a perfectly reasonable AND PROVEN beyond
any doubt mechanism for long term climactic cycles. Have you heard of
polar precession Ted? The Earth is wobbling on its axis with a period of
26,000 years. 13,000 years from now the pole star will be Draconis NOT
Polaris. This is observable, measurable, and fits with ancient astronomical
observations. And, it means that the Earth's equator-Sun angle changes.
So the winters and summers slowly change in a 26,000 year cycle.
Ice-ages not explainable Ted? Obviously you don't know anything about the
subject. Nobody could write a PH.d. thesis on it because it already HAS
been explained. Quite thoroughly. And, there's no way on earth Velikovskianism
can possibly explain the geological evidence contained in just one area:
Peterborough, Ontario (less than 50 miles north of here). I'd love to
see Velikovsky explain drumlins, eskers, kame moraines, kettles and the
finger lakes (Peterborough and New York State versions).
Carbon-14 dating not accurate before 700 BC Ted? Because of the catastrophe
Ted? 700 BC ? Don't be silly, there was NO global catastrophe in 700 BC.
Historical evidence of it wouldn't be mythical, it would be factual and
obvious.
--
Chris Lewis,
UUCP: {allegra, linus, ihnp4}!utzoo!mnetor!clewis
BELL: (416)-475-8980 ext. 321