Frank Dodd (Tony) Smith, Jr. - 2010
Earth temperatures over its 4.6 billion year life are shown in the chart above from "Dynamical Paleoclimatology: Generalized Theory of Global Climate Change" by Barry Saltzman (Academic Press, New York, 2002, fig. 1-3) via John Baez's Temperature web page dated 1 October 2006.
From the two charts shown below from "Global Climate Change Student Guide" by Joe Buchdahl (aric, Manchester Metropolitan University 1999) it appears that sea levels for the past 150 million years
show that most of that period, up until about 20 million years ago, Earth was warm and sea levels were high - as shown by this map from a University of Arizona Chicxulub crater web page for 65 million years ago when asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs and cooled the Earth somewhat
and that the cooling of Earth and lowering of sea levels further down to their present low level coincided with the evolutionary emergence of Dolphins and other large-brained Cetaceans about 20 million years ago,
and that sea levels for the past 150,000 years, the time of evolutionary emergence of the basic current human form of mitochondrial mtDNA,
show that an Ice Age of about 150,000 years ago ended around 130,000 years ago with sea levels rising to nearly present levels,
then declining a bit with a significant dip marking the Toba Volcano eruption in Sumatra about 71,000 to 74,000 years ago, which may have killed off all but a few thousand of the humans then on Earth,
then, after a brief post-Toba warming of about 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, a significant cooling around 50,000 years ago coincided with the evolutionary emergence of the basic current human form of Y-chromosome DNA,
then, around 35,000 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of Gods on Earth and the evolutionary emergence of the Boskops, an Ice Age almost as deep as that of 150,000 years ago,
then, around 20,000 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of DemiGods and Spirits of the Dead, an end to the cooling trend and a relatively constant low sea level as shown in Eurasia / North Africa in this image from "The Times Atlas of World History" (Times Books (4th ed) 1993) in which red shows the extended land area due to low sea levels about 20,000 years ago, and green and yellow show areas favorable for human habitation in wet and dry periods, respectively (the two turqouise squares show the locations of the Sphinx-Giza complex at the mouth of the Nile River and of Gora Belukha in Central Asia, which may be known in China as Kunlun Shan, home of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen of the West, and in India as Su Meru, home of Indra)
and
then, around 11,600 years ago, at the beginning of Manetho's rule of Man and the evolutionary disappearance of the Boskops, a warming trend leading to the present warm interval sea levels.
The image below from "The Toba Volcano" by George Weber at www.andaman.org/BOOK/originals/Weber-Toba/ch3_explosion/textr3.htm ) describes the Toba eruption:
Perhaps 1,000 million tons of aerosols were put into the stratosphere. According to a Discover article: "... people all over the world are amazingly similar. Some anthropologists believe that this genetic homogeneity is the result of a "population bottleneck" -- that at some time in the past our ancestors went through an event that greatly reduced our numbers and thus our genetic variation. Based on estimates of mutation rates, Penn State geneticist Henry Harpending says the bottleneck happened sometime after ... 100,000 years ago and before a population increase ... around 50,000 years ago. Now archeologist Stan Ambrose of the University of Illinois has linked Harpending's theory with geologic evidence to explain what caused the bottleneck ... Mount Toba in Sumatra ... the largest volcanic eruption in more than 400 million years. Toba buried most of India under ash and must have darkened skies over a third of the hemisphere for weeks. ... a six-year global volcanic winter ensued, caused by light-reflecting sulfur particles lingering in the atmosphere. Average summer temperatures dropped by 21 degrees at high latitudes, and 75 percent of the Northern Hemisphere's plants may have died. ... A thousand-year ice age began ... The effect on humans, who had been enjoying a relatively warm period, must have been devastating. ... Perhaps only a few thousand people ... survived. ...".
Nicholas Wade, in a 7 December 1999 article in The New York Times, says: "... Dr. Richard G. Klein of Stanford University and others believe that some major genetically based neurological change, like the development of language, occurred about 50,000 years ago. ... A ... genetic survey... drawing on DNA data from 50 ethnic groups around the world, concludes that the ancestral population from which the first emigrants came may have numbered as few as 2,000 people. ... Another new genetic study, by Dr. Marcus Feldman of Stanford University and others ... looked at segments of the Y chromosome ... they concluded that the most recent common ancestor of all these Y's was carried by a man who lived only 40,000 years or so ago. ... The 40,000-year date, which has a large range of uncertainty, is much more recent than others, in part because the earlier estimates were forced to assume, quite unrealistically, that the size of the human population remained constant throughout prehistory. Dr. Feldman assumed an exponentially expanding population, which yields a more recent date of origin....".
the Geminga shock wave hit Earth;
the Late Wisconsin Glaciation of Earth began,;and
According to the Human History Chronology of Manetho * (Egyptian historian ca. 343 BC)
about 36,525 years ago Gods on Earth began to rule Earth, ruling until
about 22,625 years ago when Demigods and Spirits of the Dead (followers of Horus) succeeded them, ruling until
about 11,600 years ago Mortal Humans began to rule Earth, ruling up to the present day.
It is interesting that time that the Earth was ruled by Gods, Demigods and Spirits of the Dead, about 36,525 - 11,600 = 24,925 years, is roughly the time of one Earth precession period, which is also roughly the travel time of a light beam from the center of our Galaxy to our Sun.
According to the book Big Brain by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (Macmillan 2008):
(image from www.dwaf.gov.za web site) ]
This image is from a 29 April 2008 ebcak.com post by adminebcak:
According to a 28 December 2009 Discover Magazine article by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger:"... In the autumn of 1913, two farmers ... uncovered ... hominid skull fragments ... while digging a drainage ditch ...[in]... Boskop, a small town about 200 miles inland from the east coast of South Africa. ... Boskop's brain size is about 30 percent larger than our own - that is, a 1,750-cc brain to our average of 1,350 cc. And that leads to an increase in the prefrontal cortex of a staggering 53 percent. If these principled relations among brain parts hold true, then Boskops would have had not only an impressively large brain but an inconceivably large prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is closely linked to our highest cognitive functions ... possibly the jump from ourselves to Boskops generated new, qualitatively different mental capacities. ...
These [Boskop] people had small, childlike faces. ... A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike. ...
Just about 100 miles from the original Boskop discovery site, further excavations were once carried out by Frederick FitzSimons. ... The site had been at one time a communal living center, perhaps tens of thousands of years ago. There were many collected rocks, leftover bones, and some casually interred skeletons of normal-looking humans. But to one side of the site, in a clearing, was a single, carefully constructed tomb, built for a single occupant - perhaps the tomb of a leader or of a revered wise man. His remains had been positioned to face the rising sun. In repose, he appeared unremarkable in every regard...except for a giant skull. ...".
The Boskop skull reminds me of Teddy Bears - maybe that is why some people like Teddy Bears so much.
According to the National Geographic Genographic project: "... about 150,000 to 170,000 years ago, a woman was born from whom we are all descended. ... "Mitochondrial Eve" ... was the only female who had descendants that are now living in the present day. ...... mtDNA ...
mtDNA haplogroup L0 first appeared around 100,000 years ago ... Many L0 individuals in America share mitochondrial lineages with individuals from Mozambique. ... South America ... has a markedly higher proportion of L0 individuals ...
Y-chromosome ... haplogroup... M2 ...[originated]... .in Africa around 20,000 to 30,000 years ago ... then traveled south to sub-Saharan Africa ...
Maternally inherited mtDNA, governing the mitochondrial sub-cell of human cells, evolved to its basic current human form during the Ice Age of about 150,000 years ago, and the L0 humans emerged somewhat after that Ice Age ended around 130,000 years ago.
Paternally inherited Y-choromosome DNA, which along with X-chromosomal and non-sex-specific autosomal DNA governs the fundamental structural code of human cells, evolved to its basic current human form somewhat after the population bottleneck of the Toba Volcanic Eruption about 71,000 to 74,000 years ago.
Perhaps the Boskop were who Richard Poe had in mind when in his book "Black Spark, White Fire" (Prima 1997) he quoted Diodorus of Sicily, author of Bibliotheca Historica, lived in the time of Julius Caesar and Augustus (Encyclopaedia Britannica). as saying:
"Now the Ethiopians ... were the first of all men. ... the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians, Osiris having been the leader of the colony ... Osiris ... gathered together a great army, with the intention of visiting all the inhabited earth and teaching the race of men how to cultivate ... for he supposed that if he made men give up their savagery and adopt a gentle manner of life he would receive immortal honors. ...".
Lynch and Granger, in their 28 December 2009 Discover Magazine article, say: "... We internally activate many thoughts at once, but we can retrieve only one at a time. Could the Boskop brain have achieved the ability to retrieve one memory while effortlessly processing others in the background, a split-screen effect enabling far more power of attention? ...", which might be related to the possible ability of Dolphins, with their two sub-brains acting together as a quantum computer interference device (similar to a device proposed by Andrew Gray) to give a perspective Dolphin vision of the Worlds of the Quantum Many-Worlds.
Another (possibly related) type of enhanced mental capacity might occur if the Boskop produced increased amounts of endogenous DMT.
According to "Endogenous hallucinogens as ligands of the trace amine receptors: a possible role in sensory perception." by J. V. Wallach (Med Hypotheses. 2009 Jan;72(1):91-4. Epub 2008 Sep 20): "... The recent discovery of the trace amine associated receptors and the activity of DMT and other hallucinogenic compounds at these receptor sites leads to the hypothesis that the endogenous hallucinogens act as neurotransmitters of a subclass of these trace amine receptors ... the trace amine receptors along with their endogenous hallucinogen ligands may serve an endogenous role in mediating sensory perception in the mammalian central nervous system. Thus the theory proposed states that these compounds act as true endogenous hallucinogenic transmitters acting in regions of the central nervous system involved in sensory perception. ...".
Endogenous DMT need not be produced in the brain itself (and so could be produced in such organs as the pineal glant), as noted by Michael S. Jacob, David E. Prest in their article "Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsidered: an anxiolytic role for dimethyltryptamine" (Medical Hypotheses (2004)) where they said: "... DMT production could occur outside the brain and still have activity in the brain because DMT can readily cross the blood brain barrier. This would be different from most neurotransmitters, which do not have significant blood&endash;brain-barrier permeability and thus must be produced within the brain. ...".
Such endogenous DMT enhanced perception might have given the Boskops mental/spiritual abilities such as those described by Terence McKenna in his May 1993 OMNI magazine interview: "... In his 1992 book Food of the Gods, McKenna delineates a radical history of drugs and human evolution ... extolling the virtues of psilocybin mushrooms and DMT (dimethyltryptamine) ... DMT ... Dimethyltryptamine is ... a serotonin agonist; that is, it mimics the neurotransmitter serotonin ...
MCKENNA: ... From 75,000 [ the time of the Toba Volcanic eruption ] to about 15,000 years ago [ near the end of the last Ice Age ], there was a kind of human paradise on Earth. ... Nobody went more than three or four weeks before they were redissolved into pure feeling and boundary dissolution. ...DMT drops you into a place where the stress is on a transcending language. ... You burst into a space. ... The world is not a single, one-dimensional, forward-moving, causal, connected thing, but some kind of interdimensional nexus. ... entities are there ... They are teaching something. Theirs is a higher dimensional language that condenses as a visible syntax. ... they ... offer you something ... so beautiful, so intricately wrought, so something else that cannot be said in English, that just gazing on this thing, you realize such an object is impossible. ... The object generates other objects, and it's all happening in a scene of wild merriment and confusion. ... [compare El Aleph, written in 1945 by Jorge Luis Borges]
Something in an unseen dimension is acting as an attractor for our forward movement in understanding. ... It's a point in the future that affects us in the present. ... Our model that everything is pushed by the past into the future, by the necessity of causality, is wrong. There are actual attractors ahead of us in time -- like the gravitational field of a planet. Once you fall under an attractor's influence, your trajectory is diverted. ... I think [that the attractor has a kind of intelligence]...".
Around11,600 years ago, about when the Vela X supernova was seen in Earth, a very sudden (50 years or so) warming event ended the Ice Age and marked the start of the HOLOCENE AGE of warm climate and glacial retreat, and rising sea levels flooded much productive land creating shortages of food and consequently competition for available food, and what Terence McKenna called "tooth-and-claw dominance". As Gary Lynch and Richard Granger said in their 28 December 2009 Discover Magazine article: "... human history has often been a history of savagery. ... Perhaps the preternaturally civilized Boskops had no chance against our barbarous ancestors ...".
Not only might the "preternaturally civilized" Boskops have been at a physical disadvantage in fighting smaller-brain humans, but the social organizations useful in forming successful armies to seize resources might tend to create evolutionary pressure in favor of humans with less creativity and more blind-faith obedience to authority. As examples from the dominant power of the late 20th century, the USA Army trained soldiers that "there is the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way, and you will do it the Army way" because "you can't fight the Green Machine", and the USA Navy would disqualify sailors from working on nuclear power plants of ships and submarines if their test results showed too much creativity.
Further, as John Hawks said on his weblog on 30 March 2008, "... brains are [energetically] expensive ... brains take a long time to mature ... brains require high protein and fat consumption ...", all of which factors would work against the Boskop in an age of scarcity after about 11,600 years ago,
so it is not surprising that John Hawks also noted that "... "... there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China -- pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking ...".
As Terence McKenna in his May 1993 OMNI magazine interview: "... For 10,000 years ... we've pursued an agenda of beasts and demons ... If history goes off endlessly into the future, it will be about scarcity, preservation of privilege, forced control of populations, the ever-more-sophisticated use of ideology to enchain and delude people. ...".
All this is consistent with the Vedic view (see nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~ghi/vcchap.html) of what happened after about 11,600 years ago, into the Bronze and Iron Ages and on through the present Industrial Age: "...prior to the beginning of Kali-yuga ... all living beings were on a higher average level than they are at present, and advanced beings such as demigods and great sages regularly visited the earth. ... Once the Kali-yuga began, demigods and higher beings greatly curtailed communications with people on the earth, and the general sensory level of human beings also declined. ... due to the lack of feedback from higher sources and the natural cheating propensity of human beings, the traditions ... became more and more garbled ... the present stage of civilization was reached, in which old traditions are widely viewed as useless mythology, and people seek knowledge entirely through the use of their current, limited senses.".
Although all the Boskop may have been physically killed off around 11,600 years ago, the remaining humans could have picked up some of the Boskop language and culture.
As to language, the language of Africans most closely related to the Boskop may shed light on Boskop language. The language characteristic of the South African Boskop region is the KhoiSan group, as shown in this image from Wikipedia
According to "History of Click-Speaking Populations of Africa Inferred from mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Variation" (Molecular Biology and Evolution 2007 24(10):2180-2195) by Tishkoff et al: "... South African Khoisan (SAK) ... languages ...[include]... Khwe ...[and]... !Kung ...
According to http://countrystudies.us/south-africa/51.htm "... The San hunters and gatherers who occupied southern Africa for several thousand years organized their society into small kinship-based villages, often including fewer than fifty people. The San economy developed out of the efficient use of the environment; their diet included a wide array of birds, animals, plants, and, among coastal populations, fish and shellfish. The San espoused generally egalitarian values and recognized few leadership roles, except that of religious specialist, or diviner. ... in the 1990s ... All remaining Khoisan speakers ... are believed to be San, living in the Kalahari Desert region in the Northern Cape and North-West Province. The ... South Africa ... government has no accurate count of their numbers, although it is generally believed that larger numbers of San live in Botswana and Namibia. ...".
Elizabeth Culotta and Brooks Hanson, in the Introduction "First Words" to Science 27 February 2004, said: "... linguistic and genetic clues suggest that ... the first language ... was rich with clicking and sucking noises now heard only in a few corners of Africa (see Pennisi's story on p. 1319) ...".
According to "Language ecology and photographic sound in the McWorld" by John Wynne in Organised Sound11(1):45-54 (Cambridge University Press 2006): "... Khoisan languages are highly complex: 'in grammatical and structural terms, [they] are world class competitors in structural complexity' ... !Xoo ...[has]... forty-eight distinct click variations [ 48 = root vectors of F4 ] and some eighty-three different ways of starting a word with a click, this language represents 'something like a maximum for human linguistic behaviour' ... there are plenty of examples of languages acquiring clicks from others, but none of languages losing them. ...
According to The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter (The Teaching Company 2004): "... The Khoi-San languages ... are about 50 ... they do not form a tidy group as, for example, Indo-European does. There is barely a typical "Khoi-San" grammar - some bristle with case endings like Latin, while others are more "naked" like Chinese, and there are not many words that appear in similar guises in all or even many of them. This suggests that these languages are quite ancient, having diverged over a vast amount of time. ... it is very hard to conceive of how clicks could emerge in a language. It may be that the clicks were present in the first language(s) and have disappeared almost everywhere but where they originally existed. ... Thus, the click languages may be the descendants of the first one. ...".
Could Boskopian IFA Divination Structures represent what Terence McKenna described in his May 1993 OMNI magazine interview as "... a higher dimensional language that condenses as a visible syntax. ... something ... so beautiful, so intricately wrought ... The object generates other objects ...", reminiscent of El Aleph, written in 1945 by Jorge Luis Borges ?
If so, then Boskopian IFA Divination Structures could act as Terence McKenna's Attractor
"... Something in an unseen dimension is acting as an attractor for our forward movement in understanding. ... It's a point in the future that affects us in the present. ... Our model that everything is pushed by the past into the future, by the necessity of causality, is wrong. There are actual attractors ahead of us in time -- like the gravitational field of a planet. Once you fall under an attractor's influence, your trajectory is diverted. ... I think [that the attractor has a kind of intelligence]..."
and its influence of the Future of Humanity could be as Terence McKenna described:
"... If history goes off endlessly [as it has been doing the past 11,600 years or so] into the future, it will be about scarcity, preservation of privilege, forced control of populations, the ever-more-sophisticated use of ideology to enchain and delude people.We are at the breakpoint.
It's like when a woman comes to term. At a certain point, if the child is not severed from the mother and launched into its own separate existence, toxemia will set in and create a huge medical crisis.
The mushrooms said clearly, "When a species prepares to depart for the stars, the planet will be shaken to its core."
All evolution has pushed for this moment, and there is no going back. What lies ahead is a dimension of such freedom and transcendence, that once in place, the idea of returning to the womb will be preposterous.
We will live in the imagination.
We will quickly become unrecognizable to our former selves because we're now defined by our limitations: the laws of gravity; the need to eat, excrete, and make money.
We have the will to expand infinitely into pleasure, caring, attention, and connectedness. If nothing more -- and it's a lot more -- it's permission to hope. ...".
According to "Berossos and Manetho" by Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham (Michigan 1996, 2001)
"... Only two men partially succeeded in preserving the old Mesopotamia and Egypt for the new Greek Mesopotamia and Egypt. Berossos wrote a history of Babylonia in Greek, and Manetho wrote a history of Egypt in Greek. Unfortunately, their works have not survived from antiquity ...[and]... neither Berossos nor Manetho insprired successors who would build on the history each had written ... we are totally dependent on what survives [in secondary sources] from Berossos and Manetho for an organized attempt to present the entire history of ancient Babylonia and ancient EgyptManetho ... was living and active ... when the successors of Alexander the Great had become kings in their own right and own name ... [Syncellus asserts]... that Manetho's work (specifically the History of Egyp) appeared at about the same time as or slightly after that of Berossos ...
Berossos was born during Alexander's reign over Babylon ... between 330 and 323 B.C. ... he published his History of Babylonia in Greek ... most likely around 290 B.C. for the Macedonian king Antiochos I ...".
Manetho's Rule on Earth of Gods, Demigods and Spirits of the Dead covered the period of about 24,925 years (roughly the time of one Earth precession period and also roughly the travel time of a light beam from the Center of our Galaxy to our Sun)
As for Berossos, in "Berossos and Manetho" Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham say "... Berossos reports, according to Apollidoros, that there were ten kings friom Aloros, the first king, to Xisouthros, under whom, he says, the ... Great Flood took place ... The times of this rule of these kings he reckoned as 120 saroi ... the Babylonian saros ... consists of 3,600 years .... ". Therefore, the total period for the Berossos chronology analagous to Manetho's Gods, Demigod and Spirits of the Dead was about 432,000 years, giving for the Berossos chronology
Feuerstein, Kak, and Frawley, in their book In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Quest 1995), say "... The principal and, taken in its totality, the oldest of the four Vedic hymnbodies is the Rig-Veda. ... The Sanskrit word ric, which for euphonic reasons is changed to rig, means literally "praise". ... The Sanskrit word veda means literally "knowledge" or "wisdom". ... The Rig-Veda is the oldest book in the Sanskrit language ... More than that, if we are correct, it is the oldest book in the world ...".
Therefore, it seems likely to me that Babylonia of Berossos inherited its chronology from the older Vedic civilization of India, which itself had direct contact via the Indian Ocean (the map below is adapted from "Past Worlds, The Times Atlas of Archaeology" (Crescent Books 1995))
with the oldest civilization on Earth - Africa, whose culture, including IFA Divination, was not preserved in writing.
It also seems likely that Babylonians such as Berossos may not have inherited and used the oldest, most fundamental version of Vedic cosmology, but instead have used a later, not so fundamental version, such as that described by Ronnie Gale Dreyer in her book "Vedic Astrology" (Weiser 1997):
"... The Indian system of epochs (known as Yugas) ... is made up of four ... eras which, when added together, comprise Maha Yuga (literally "great age"). Consisting of 4,320,000 years, Maha Yuga is divided into ratios of 4:3:2:1 as follows:
- Krtia Yuga (Golden Age) 1,728,000 years = 4
- Treta Yuga (Silver Age) 1,296,000 years = 3
- Dvapara Yuga (Copper Age) 864,000 years = 2
- Kali Yuga (Earthen [Bronze, Iron, etc] Age) 432,000 years = 1 ...".
So, it appears to me that the 432,000 year Antediluvian Period of Berossos was imported from Vedic India the Earthen Age Kali Yuga part of the Maha Yuga, leading to the question:
According to John Major Jenkins in his 2001-2002 paper "The Solstice Gateways and the Polar-to-Solar Shift":
"... My analysis of the yuga timing question ... began with the first Vedic source of commentary on the yuga doctrine, the Laws of Manu. That ancient text implicates a 24,000-year period for the yugas, clearly a reference to the precession of the equinoxes.The larger numbers generated in some yuga calculations are usually base-ten multiples of the key yuga numbers ... and derived either from an inappropriate excitement over generating "big numbers" or from an interest in speculating about very large cosmic cycles.
However, let's stick to the Laws of Manu. The Hindu swami, Sri Yukteswar, in his little book The Holy Science (originally written around 1895), explains the Vedic and Hindu ideas related to the yuga doctrine as found in the Laws of Manu. The 24,000-year period, following the devayana / pitriyana doctrine of ascending and descending phases of all temporal processes, is divided into two halves. One ascends ... and the other descends away from it. One extreme indicates a Golden Age, the other extreme indicates a very Dark Age. Each half is divided into four ages, with the following numerological scheme:
- Golden Age = 4800 years
- Silver Age = 3600 years
- Bronze Age = 2400 years
- Iron Age (Kali Yuga) = 1200 years
The total equals the half cycle of 12,000 years, one-half of a precession cycle. ...
One of the oldest writings in Vedic literature comes from a pseudo-historical god-man called Manu. René Guénon pointed out that Manu belongs to a family of related archetypal figures, which include Melchezidek, Metatron, St Michael, Gabriel, and Enoch. As an angelic inspiration for the rebirth of humanity at the dawn of a new era, or manvantara, Manu is the primal law-giver, and his laws were recorded in the extremely ancient Vedic text called the Laws of Manu ... there is a section that deals with the ancient Vedic doctrine of World Ages - the yugas. Manu indicates that a period of 24,000 years - clearly a reference to precession - consists of a series of four yugas or ages, each shorter and spiritually darker than the last. ...".
which is substantially consistent with Manetho's Antediluvian Period
if you consider that Manetho's transition from the Rule of Gods on Earth took place during the Descending Golden Age from about 23,600 years ago to about 18,800 years ago, so that the Demigods and Spirits of the Dead were ruling Earth at the time of Maximal Glaciation of the Last Ice Age as indicated in this map of Earth as of 18,000 years ago from Steven Stanley's book "Earth and Life Through Time" (Freeman (2nd ed) 1989)
at which time sea levels were about 85 meters lower than now.
Around 11,600 years ago, at the conclusion of the Rule of the Demigods and Spirits of the Dead, just before the present Warm Interval ended the Last Ice Age, the Rule of Man on Earth began. Roughly at the same time, about 11,400 years ago, a supernova exploded in the constellation Vela. The Distance to the Vela Supernova Remnant was measured by Cha, Sembach, and Danks, who reported in astro-ph/9902230 that "... the Vela SNR has ... a ...distance ... of 250 +/-30 pc, with a conservative upper limit of 390 +/- 100 pc. ...". They also state that people on earth saw the explosion about 11,000 years ago as a star of magnitude -10, as bright as a 7-day old Moon. According to Timothy Ferris in his book "Coming of age in the Milky Way" (William Morrow & Co. 1988) the Sumerians, who were living on the plains of the Tigris-Euphrates, identified the supernova with their god Ea, who invented writing and agriculture. The Vela X supernova may have roughly coincided with the primary breakup of a large parent comet of Comet Encke and the Taurid meteors. Possibly associated with Vela X, Comet Encke, and the Taurids might be Comet Hale-Bopp, which recently had perihelion in 1997, also had perihelia about 4,200 years ago, about 7,800 years ago, and, coincident with Vela X, about 11,400 years ago.
Around 7,800 years ago, according to Sailing to Paradise - the Discovery of the Americas by 7000 B.C. by Jim Bailey (Simon and Schuster 1994): "... the earliest pure copper was extracted in economic quantities ...[at]... Lake Superior ... Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula ... around 6000 B.C. Much of it was in the form of boulders of pure copper. To the Greeks these were the golden apples of the Hesperides, the island in the remote west beyond the Atlantic ... to the Welsh these would be the apples of Avalon. ... Mining and the fashioning of copper tools and weapons were carried on ... at Lake Superior ... from the sixth millennium B.C. to 1000 B.C. ... This dating ... means that the use of copper began at about the same time in America as around the Black Sea and in the Middle East. ... Greek tradition suggests that in the Copper Age nations were relatively peaceful, differences being settled by agreement or by casting lots. ...".
Around 4,200 years ago:
Around 1997 AD:
Abundant cheap oil reached and began to pass its peak production, as shown by this chart adapted from Scientific American (March 1998)
The USA/UK attempted to secure Caspian Oil through the NATO Kosovo war of 1999, but after a successful war found that, as W. Clark said in a 2003 ratville times article "... Since the mid-late 1990s the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia was thought to hold approximately 200 billion barrels of untapped oil (... comparable to Saudi Arabia's reserve base) ... After three exploratory wells were built and analyzed, it was reported that the Caspian region holds only approximately 10 to 20 billion barrels of oil (although it does have a lot of natural gas) ... The oil is also of poor quality, with high sulfur content. ...[so]... The Bush administration quickly turned its attention to a known quantity, Iraq, with its proven reserves totaling 11% of the world's oil reserves. ...". Now, in 2010, the USA/UK are still bogged down in war in Iraq (and, for some reason that may be clear to President Obama, but not to me, also in Afghanistan). Meanwhile, the production of cheap oil is now about a decade past its peak, which will inexorably lead to shortage and the necessity to replace oil with nuclear energy, with gas, methane, and coal as intermediate stop-gaps.
LTC (founded by Myron Scholes (MIT and Stanford) and Robert Merton (Harvard), who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Economics) collapsed, setting the tone for the following years of bubble-building and and collapsing of the USA/UK Global Financial System. According to a series of articles in The New York Times, "... [USA President] Bill Clinton ... and Robert E. Rubin, [former] head of Goldman Sachs & Company ... pushed harder to win opportunities for American banks, brokerages and insurance companies ... for free movement of capital ... in financial markets around the globe. ... Washington's policies ... fostered vulnerabilities that are an underlying cause of the economic crisis that began in Thailand in July 1997 ...[and]... rippled through Asia and Russia ... China ... evaded the crisis, and what saved it from catastrophe may in part have been its unwillingness to listen to Western economists. Urged to make its currency freely tradable with the dollar, it resisted. ...". According to a 22 April 2009 economictimes.indiatimes.com article by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Alyar: "... the Obama administration is prolonging the recession by avoiding surgery to remove dead wood from its financial sector. Some call this cowardice. Others, such as former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, writing in The Atlantic, say Wall Street has captured the White House. ... Johnson says the US now resembles Russia, where business oligarchs and government officials protect each others' financial interests, at the expense of the economy. ... This ... highlights the priority given by the Obama administration to save the titans of Wall Street rather than end the recession quickly. ... Technically, the financial sector is comprehensively bust. It needs to recognise the losses, writing off trillions. ... The market solution would be to force insolvent banks into bankruptcy, with shareholders and creditors taking a huge hit ... Many titans of Wall Street will disappear ... the Obama administration refuses to contemplate this obvious solution. ... Wall Street has captured the White House, so nothing will be done to imperil the politico-financial network that rules the US. Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, treasury secretaries of Clinton and Bush, were both from Goldman Sachs. Larry Summers, the current treasury secretary, earned millions as a hedge fund consultant. In a market economy, well-managed companies should be rewarded with profits, while mismanaged companies should go bust. This basic rule has been suspended almost entirely for the titans of Wall Street. ... Accounting norms have been tweaked to permit zombie banks to pretend they are alive and solvent....". According to a March 2009 OCC Quarterly Report "... NOTIONAL AMOUNT OF DERIVATIVE CONTRACTS ... MARCH 31, 2009, $ MILLIONS
RANK Holding Company ASSETS DERIVATIVES 1 JPMORGAN CHASE $2,079,188 $81,108,352 2 BANK OF AMERICA 2,323,415 77,874,726 3 GOLDMAN SACHS 925,987 47,749,124 4 MORGAN STANLEY 626,023 39,125,255 5 CITIGROUP 1,822,578 31,715,734 ..."
Note that if the derivatives go bad (as they are almost certain to do, given the ongoing economic collapse), there is no way that any of the Big Five Banks that control the USA government have enough assets to cover, as their total assets are only about $7.8 trillion against about $277.6 trillion Derivative Exposure.
Deng Xiaoping died, construction began on the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, and China continued to march toward Global Economic Dominance by becoming Earth's primary manufacturer, based initially on cheap labor. Although some regard China as a top-down dictatorship, the true situation is quite different. According to a 23 April 2009 popsci.com article by Mara Hvistendahl "..... the relationship between citizen and state is fluid in China ... The Chinese distinction between the private and public domains is very small. ...". The Chinese Government/People System may be in accord with what Ron Eglash, Ron Eglash, in his book "African Fractals" (Rutgers 1999), describes as "African traditions of decentralized decision making", and so might be a mechanism through which Boskopian IFA Divination Structures can act as Terence McKenna's Intelligent El Aleph Attractor to lead humanity through its breakpoint, shaking the Earth to its core, to a future dimension of freedom and transcendence.
Perhaps a Chinese Dawn of the Future of Man might be symbolized by the 9 March 1997 apparition of Comet Hale-Bopp at the beginning of a Solar Eclipse as seen from Kunlun Shan looking East to China, in a painting by Shigemi Numazawa (note the planet Saturn near the horizon to the left of the Sun/Moon and the planets Mercuiry, Venus, and Jupiter (and Uranus and Neptune too faint to be shown) to the right of the Sun/Moon), and that the Sun/Moon is at the boundary of Pisces and Aquarius, while Mars is almost antipodal in Virgo near Leo):
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