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America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

Book by Graham Hancock · 4 quotes · Deep Human History, Cataclysm, Younger Dryas

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America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization Quotes

“The Younger Dryas impacts, and subsequent sustained cataclysm, changed the face of the earth completely and wrought particularly significant havoc across North America. We have considered the question of huge volumes of meltwater released into the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans from the destabilized ice sheet and looked at the effects on global climate. But keep in mind that those enormous floods also devastated the rich North American mainland to the south, perhaps the best and most bounteous real estate then available anywhere. This immense and extraordinary deluge, 'possibly the largest flood in the history of the world,' swept away and utterly demolished everything that lay in its path. Jostling with icebergs, choked by whole forests ripped up by their roots, turbulent with mud and boulders swirling in the depths of the current, what the deluge left behind can still be seen in something of its raw form in the Channeled Scablands of the state of Washington today--a devastated blank slate [...] littered with 10,000-ton 'glacial erratics,' immense fossilized waterfalls, and 'current ripples' hundreds of feet long and dozens of feet high. If there were cities there, before the deluge, they would be gone. If there was any evidence of anything that we would recognize as technology there, before the deluge, it would be gone.”

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“If the Edfu Texts contain a record of these events, as I have proposed, then we should take seriously the message they transmit, that there were survivors of the cataclysm who made it their mission to bring about: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods. ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' These survivors are said to have wandered the earth, setting out and building sacred mounds wherever they went, and teaching the fundamentals of civilization, including religion, agriculture, and architecture.”

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“In the case of the Younger Dryas, the jeopardy that humanity faced was not from nuclear missiles but from the incoming fragments of a disintegrating giant comet, traveling at tens of kilometers per second, with the larger fragments as deadly as hundreds of nuclear warheads. Indeed, it is estimated that the total explosive power of the comet fragments that struck the earth in repeated episodes over a period of 21 years some 12,800 years ago would have been of the order of 10 million megatons--1,000 times greater than all the nuclear devices stockpiled in the world today.”

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“What we are looking for [...] is an agent capable--simultaneously and almost instantaneously--of bringing about all of the following: -a global flood -wildfires across an area of 10 million km2 -6 months of icy darkness followed by more than 1,000 years of glacially cold weather -a stratum of soil across more than 50 million km2 dated to the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) and infused with a cocktail of nanodiamonds, high-temperature iron-rich spherules, glassy silica-rich spherules, meltglass, platinum, iridium, osmium, and other exotic materials -a mass extinction of megafauna Wolfbach and her coauthors are forthright in their conclusion: 'Multiple lines of ice-core evidence appear synchronous, and this synchroneity of multiple events makes the YD interval one of the most unusual climate episodes in the entire Quaternary record. ... A cosmic impact is the only known event capable of simultaneously producing the collective evidence.”

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Book:America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization
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