‘Absolutely brilliant’ – Paul Ross, Talk Radio
‘the most important book since the Bible’- George Howard @cosmictusk
‘groundbreaking study that offers a new way of conceptualising prehistoric art’ – Graham Hancock
Prehistory Decoded (2019) introduces new ways of thinking about archaeology and the environment with emphasis on the causes and mechanisms of the climate catastrophe known as the Younger Dryas (YD) and the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe as a key cultural aftermath of that event.
Martin Sweatman develops the Coherent Catastrophism theory of the astrophysicists Victor Clube and Bill Napier, seen in The Cosmic Serpent (1982), The Cosmic Winter (1990) and related research since. An additional paper of particular interest to Sweatman’s enquiry is by Firestone, R.B. et al. “Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafauna extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2007).
Catastrophism has occupied one side in a “debate” with gradualism at least since Plato and Aristotle. Sweatman provides an illuminating review of catastrophism in the history of ideas from the classical world up through the European Renaissance and Enlightenment to modern times. As their descriptions imply, catastrophism promotes that Earth has been subject to abrupt, catastrophic change, while gradualism supports very slow, gradual change. Gradualism became the dominant paradigm but catastrophism is making a comeback especially in matters related to the YD.
The YD is not itself a controversial topic – it happened – but ideas about its cause have become so. Basically, since the peak of the last Ice Age or Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) 21,000 years ago, Earth had been gradually rising to warmer climates for 10,000 years. Global temperatures had been building steadily and the ice caps were melting. Then, 12,800 years ago, temperatures dropped like a rock to conditions nearly as cold as the peak of the LGM. This abrupt freeze, the YD, lasted twelve centuries. Immediately following this 1,200-year cold snap, the warming trend quickly resumed which led to our current Holocene climate. The remaining ice caps melted causing a near-uniform surge in sea level that swallowed coastlines worldwide.
Ice ages are not rare events; we currently live in the midst of an interglacial period. At first sight the YD exhibits similar signals to the climate-switching ocean currents and temperature alterations named Daansgard-Oeschger events thought to initiate ice ages. Relative to the background warming trend following the LGM, however, the YD sticks out as unusually abrupt – although the freeze built up gradually, the initial temperature fluctuation launched within the geological eye-blink of a year. This rapid burst of chill, with a host of other irregular signals led many scientists, Sweatman included, to question if the initial trigger came from sources more exotic than Earth’s natural climate system.
Sweatman provides a comprehensive breakdown of the platinum-rich “black mats”, human depopulations, megafauna extinctions, and a variety of other geochemical evidence that supports the YD mini ice age was caused by Earth colliding with debris from a disintegrating comet. This is known as the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH). Sweatman since has offered an extensive literature review of virtually all scientific research, for and against, the YDIH:
Part 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SNs68ic7CY
Part 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgZ8b2Pny2o
Part 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7xgJm5W8Q
Part 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYtGau_Jj_4
Part 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qlk0Vo0tJ8
Part 6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO3pd86c-ZM
Part 7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9et5mwXE_c
Part 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khk9SsktbCE
Part 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUTmTPtn8DM
Part 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J63C576Epdg
Part 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2acXpGC15w
Together, Sweatman’s investigation demonstrates how the YDIH has graduated from a hypothesis to a theory.
In the book, Sweatman’s concision sails us through the complex astrophysical details of the cometary family held accountable for causing the YD. He elucidates comets, asteroids and meteors, and their behaviour in the cosmic environment, with ease. The fragment thought responsible for starting the YD is identified as a member of the Taurid meteor shower (named after the bull constellation, Taurus). This old and diffuse meteor stream is associated with the comet Encke, since it is thought the Taurids are the wreckage of Encke or, possibly, of a larger mother comet which entered the inner solar system about 50,000-30,000 years ago and gradually fragmented. Sweatman names the former ancestor comet Satan, in respect to the havoc it wrought on Earth in timescales relevant to human civilisations.
The thousand-year, clockwork-like intervals when Earth intersects denser regions of the Taurid stream and becomes more susceptible to contact is what defines this genre of catastrophism as coherent. Relatedly, Sweatman highlights how Taurid prowlers would not need to physically impact Earth to precipitate events like the YD, rather than produce multiple, high-energy airbursts comparable to Tunguska-like events. Thicker portions of the Taurid stream, invisible to us, might contain thousands to millions of Tunguska-sized objects.
Prehistory Decoded also proposes that ancient humans had a much better grasp of naked-eye astronomy than has been realised. Sweatman suggests that a zodiacal-system – used for recording time and events – is evident in very ancient artworks beginning in Ice Age Europe. This would come as a shock to those fixed in the belief that the basis of the modern western zodiac was an ex nihilo Babylonian invention. Despite working with Martin on parts of this zodiac I’m not too biased to judge it because I don’t agree with everything, but what he says is interesting. The zodiac begins with the Lion-man statue of Holstein Cave, which he suggests represents the Cancer constellation at the winter solstice c.38,000 BP. Species of astro-animal symbols, e.g. bulls, horses, ducks and leopards, run a zodiacal curve all the way down to predynastic Egypt from Lion-man’s remote time.
How did he figure this out? Sweatman reveals hidden patterns in cave art with statistics which correlate with ecliptic constellation images to a significant level of agreement. A vital point about his approach is that his tests do not prove that ‘this symbol’ equals ‘that constellation’. He is instead testing whether there is a correlation between a whole set of symbols and their supposed constellations. In this way he is testing a zodiacal hypothesis overall, not any specific symbol to constellation association. His error margin compensates for getting a few of the symbols wrong (but not too many) and that the system wouldn’t necessarily remain constant over a 40,000-year window.
While it is impossible to divulge artistic subtlety with statistics, Sweatman’s zodiacal dating answers to the difficulty of relying on artistic style as a dating method. A form of archaeological modelling, it provides an alignment of data in relation to past environments which offers a cultural complement of carbon dating. Strangely, astronomical readings of cave art never held weight in the mainstream despite the barber’s chair of shifting opinion it otherwise entertains. The religious and mythological dimensions this approach potentially unites is significant.
For example, a paper from last year by Georges Sauvet: “The Hierarchy of Animals in the Paleolithic Iconography” in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2019), suggests painted cave animals to have been hierarchically structured, like pantheons, with the horse holding high status in a hunter-gatherer mythology or religion. The fact the horse represented the winter solstice during the Magdalenian period should be considered relevant. Likewise, proposing Lion-man had a relationship with a solstice of his day – embodied a telling about unseen forces behind the transformation of a year, perhaps – drags the artefact out of its unknowable ritual into a different frame.
Back to the book’s main thrust, Prehistory Decoded looks at one of the most challenging questions in anthropology – how people grouped into civilisations. Generally, civilisations are understood as population growths out of which leaders and social hierarchies with different specialisms emerge. As modern ideas about surplus and specialism may not reflect ancient realities, the most objective definition of a civilisation, Sweatman suggests, is its population size.
In a perspective shift, he considers the phenomenon of clustering in physics. Here, clusters consistently form in completely different systems so that you could, in relation to a civilisation, compare a person to a particle. Animals and humans share the same kind of clustering behaviour, we learn, as amino acids in aqueous solutions of soluble molecules. Despite their different environments, in both cases the clustering impulse is characterised by long-range repulsion and short-range attraction. In the case of hunter-gatherer communities, for example, the long-range repulsion and short-range attraction manifests in competition for food between groups and the need for group togetherness. The balance between long-range repulsions and short-range attractions is how clusters become stable and evolve under the right conditions.
There yet remains the question of why it took our species so long to develop into giant communities of civilisation scale. Humans had been brained up the same for hundreds of thousands of years before the change in lifestyle that led to plant and animal domestication, but caught in a culture trap. Sweatman proposes, on a basis of geochemical evidence, that the move behind the “cognitive revolution” of 50,000-40,000 years ago (characterised by the first appearance of cave art) was triggered by the arrival of Satan into our solar system. Amid other factors, he asks if this creative explosion, for which no other genetic or climatological cause has been identified, resulted from a new astro-mythology.
This is exactly the type of thing he sees incised in stone at Göbekli Tepe. Sweatman’s decoding of this site, which constitutes the core of the book, looks to Pillar 43, the Vulture Stone, as an encryption of the YD event. He decodes the pillar’s complex relief in the manner of a cosmic crossword puzzle and uses that basis as the blueprint for decoding other animal symbols on other pillars at the site. His analysis of the unlikelihood of the animals appearing on Pillar 43 by pure chance is extensive, but a small part of his statistical method can be gleaned here:
… let’s try to estimate the number of different combinations of animal symbols that can appear on this part of the Vulture Stone properly. There are at least 13 different animal symbols used on the broad faces of pillars at Göbekli Tepe. … That means there are at least 13⁵ = 371,293 different combinations of 5 animal symbols that could have been placed on this part of the Vulture Stone. Now we need to estimate how many of these are at least as good a match to the constellations around Scorpius as the ones that actually appear on the pillar. In my estimation, the symbols that actually appear on the pillar are the best possible combination – there are no better ones. That gives us a tiny probability of about 1 in 0.37 million of choosing that combination by pure chance. That’s a pretty small chance. (p29)
The spatial match between the animal symbols on pillar 43 and their corresponding constellations is important, as Sweatman believes the Vulture Stone records the date of 10,950 BCE which marks the onset of the YD. Although this is over a thousand years earlier than the earliest known radiocarbon date known at the site (obtained from wall plaster from Enclosure D), he argues the walls were a later addition which they likely were. What is more, ground-penetrating radar has revealed circles resembling the older monumental circles which, feasibly, might be older than Enclosure D given the time lapse between the known ones.
For now, the animal forms on Pillar 2 (Enclosure A) feature in Sweatman’s reading importantly. Despite their temporal distance, these magnificent cut beasts are key characters in Enclosure D. For Sweatman, the aurochs, fox and crane describe the radiant of the Northern Taurids. A radiant identifies from where a meteor shower appears to emanate and during Göbekli Tepe’s occupancy, the Taurid radiant ran through Capricornus, Northern Aquarius and Pisces. For Sweatman, these correspond to the aurochs, fox and crane respectively. Playing out annually in high southern skies, these celestial fireballs would have been visible from the site.
Is this a bit farfetched? Since his YDIH literature review, The Comet Research Group published another paper on the devastating influences suffered by a former Natufian settlement at Abu Hureyra located in northern Syria, now buried beneath Lake Assad. Although the geochemical signals are not different to that found at other YD boundary sites, the paper seems to have grabbed attention because it involved human heritage. Whether Abu Hureyra was affected by cosmic airburst or impact, its location is significantly close, in terms of this type of trauma, to Göbekli Tepe only 160 kilometres to the north. It is reasonable to ask, as Sweatman does, if surviving witnesses of this massive event formed an astral-religion or comet cult – a mindset at large in the cultural climate of Neolithic unfolding.
Given the unprecedented cultural transition that followed, there was something unique and anomalous about the YD as an environmental catastrophe which Göbekli Tepe is connected to one way or the other. Prehistory Decoded puts both in compelling context and changes our relationship with the past.
