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  In Nordic folklore the twin streams formed by the Milky Way’s Great Rift, in the vicinity of Cygnus, have been identified as the “two streams of saliva” that fall from the Fenris Wolf ’s jaws, one named Wil, the other called Wan, or Van, known also as “Hell’s stream” or the “road of the dead”6 (see figure 15.1 on p. 138). Fenris’s alternative name, Vanargandr, actually means monster guardian of the River Van,7 so there is tantalizing evidence that the wolf was linked in some manner with the Milky Way’s Great Rift, and through this to the celestial pole and axis mundi, from which the monster was finally able to break free of his bonds to wreak havoc in the world.

  BLACK DOG

  And the Fenris Wolf was not the only supernatural canid of European folklore to have been perceived as a threat to the stability of the world pillar. Ukrainian sky lore relates how the constellation of Ursa Major, which includes the seven stars making up the Plough or Big Dipper, is a team of horses tethered to a harness and that “every night a black dog tries to bite through the harness, in order to destroy the world, but he does not achieve his disastrous aim: at dawn, when he runs to drink from a spring, the harness renews itself.”8 Since the Big Dipper circles around the celestial pole, the horses tethered to the sky pole are the method by which the heavens turn. The “black dog” is, of course, the cosmic trickster attempting to break the horses free in order to collapse the sky pole and bring about the destruction of the world.

  Variations of the Ukrainian sky myth say that the black dog was bound in chains beside the constellation of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, which is the location of the current Pole Star, Polaris. Here the animal attempts to gnaw through its shackles, and when this occurs the world will end,9 a clear comparison with the actions of the Fenris Wolf in Norse sky lore.

  THE ETERNAL STRUGGLE

  In a similar vein, Russian philologist Dr. Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote that the eternal struggle against the dragon in Slavonic folklore derives from a much older tradition in which heroic blacksmiths were able to bind and chain “a terrible dog.” Ivanov goes on to say that “over the whole territory of Eurasia, this mythological complex is associated . . . with the Great Bear . . . (and) with a star near it as a dog which is dangerous for the Universe.”10

  Figure 16.3. Dacian battle standard known as the Draco, or Drago. Note its cometlike tail.

  Although it’s not stated which star “near” Ursa Major the infernal dog is to be identified with, almost certainly it is Alcor, the Fox Star, or Wolf Star. It is a conclusion confirmed by the fact that this canine “is dangerous for the Universe” and has the ability to bring about the destruction of everything. As sky monsters, the wolf and dragon are essentially one and the same, as is shown by the battle standard of the Dacians, the pre-Roman peoples of Romania. With a wolf ’s head and serpent-like tail, it is called the Draco, or Drago, the dragon, and has been identified as a possible representation of a comet (see figure 16.3).11

  TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY

  The great philologist and mythologist Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) in his multivolume work Teutonic Mythology discusses the role of the supernatural canid in catastrophe folklore. He saw the Fenris Wolf as quite simply the trickster god Loki “in a second birth . . . (although now) in the shape of a wolf.”12

  Grimm cites also an old Scottish story about “the tayl of the wolfe and the warldis end,”13 a reference to the world falling apart following the appearance of a wolf ’s tail, which we can be pretty sure is a metaphor for a comet. Grimm wrote that much fuller stories of how a great wolf or dog had brought destruction to the world must once have existed “all over Germany, and beyond it,” adding that, “we still say, when baneful and perilous disturbances arise, ‘the devil is broke loose,’ while in the North they would say ‘Loki er or böndum (Loki is out of control).’”14

  Grimm quotes other examples of catastrophe-based folklore and folk beliefs among the peoples of medieval Europe. They include a popular French song about King Henry IV that “expresses the far end of the future as the time when the wolf ’s teeth shall get at the moon”15; in other words, the wolf will cause it to be extinguished, bringing about the world’s end. All these stories seem to be fragmented memories of a terrible cataclysm, coupled with an unerring fear that one day it could all happen again.

  THE BUNDAHISHN

  That these examples of canine cosmic tricksters, manifesting in the skies as planet killers such as comets and asteroids, come from Europe and not Anatolia need not concern us, for similar cosmological themes exist in sky lore much closer to Göbekli Tepe. The Bundahishn, a sacred text of Zoroastrianism, a religious doctrine that once thrived in Iran, India, and Armenia, contains its own graphic account of a Ragnarök-style scenario, which includes the following somewhat enigmatic lines: “As Gokihar falls in the celestial sphere from a moon-beam on to earth, the distress of the earth becomes such-like as that of a sheep when a wolf falls upon it.”16

  Gokihar is generally translated as “meteor,”17 that is, an incoming comet fragment, asteroid, or bolide of some sort, while the name itself has been interpreted as meaning “wolf progeny.”18 The double allusion in this statement to the wolf is significant, and one can envisage, and even feel, the force of the assumed impact, here likened to the manner that a sheep’s legs bend and collapse when pounced on by a wolf.

  That Gokihar’s appearance heralds some kind of apocalyptic event seems confirmed in the verse that follows: “Afterward, the fire and halo melt the metal of [the archangel] Shatvairo, in the hills and mountains, and it [the molten metal] remains on this earth like a river.”19 If the impact of a comet fragment or asteroid is implied, then the presence afterward of firestorms and rivers of molten “metal” caused by the eruption of volcanoes would be inevitable.

  After the destruction of the seven evil spirits under the rule of the evil principle, named Ahriman, Gokihar “burns the serpent in the melted metal, and the stench and pollution which were in hell are burned in that metal, and it (hell) becomes quite pure.”20

  Once again these are indications that Gokihar, the “wolf progeny,” is involved directly with apocalyptic events described in the Bundahishn, and although they focus on a day of reckoning for both the gods and humanity, there is a sense of them forming part of a repeating cycle. In other words, the Bundahishn describes a replay of events that have already taken place. Christians in countries where the Norse myths remained strong associated the events of Ragnarök with the coming Day of Judgment, described in the book of Revelation; in other words, they saw them as events to come, not events that had occurred during some previous age.

  Gokihar ably takes the place of the Fenris Wolf in the Norse myths, although in the Bundahishn there is a strange twist—the comet, or bolide, personified as a supernatural wolf, actually becomes a cleansing agent, clearing away the wicked in order to make the world “immortal forever and everlasting.”21

  It is a disturbing account of a past that is to be repeated in the future, and if all this is true, then the cataclysm that Donnelly envisaged as having taken place in some former epoch of humankind must have been so powerful, so all encompassing, that it affected not just a few isolated communities here and there, but human populations all over the world. What then was this event, and how did it come to affect the mind-set of the Epipaleolithic peoples that occupied southeast Anatolia in the age immediately prior to the construction of Göbekli Tepe?

  As we see next, those who lived in the Near East at this time might have had every reason to be suffering from catastrophobia (as publisher, visionary, and mysteries writer Barbara Hand Clow so aptly put it in her book of the same name22), for the great cataclysm did not pass them by. Instead, it engulfed them in a quite terrifying manner that the scientific world is only now piecing together for the first time.

  17

  A DARK DAY IN SYRIA

  Tell Abu Hureyra is an archaeological site of great importance on the Middle Euphrates of northern Syria. It was occupied from the late Epipaleolithic age, ca. 11
,340 BC, to the Neolithic age, ca. 5500 BC, although today it lies beneath the waters of Lake Assad, created in 1973 following the completion of the Tabqa Dam.

  Investigation of Abu Hureyra began in 1972 under the leadership of Andrew Moore from the University of Oxford. Yet as the rising waters began to lap around the base of the tell during the second digging season, the excavation changed into a frantic salvage operation as the British archaeologist’s team desperately attempted to understand the significance of the occupational mound before its final submergence.

  THE BIG CHILL

  Even after the first season’s expedition it was clear that Abu Hureyra was a quite extraordinary site that would reveal much about the transition from the age of the hunter-gatherer to the establishment of settled farming communities across the Near East. The second year of excavation, along with the subsequent work continued both in Syria and at various foreign universities, enabled Moore to get a pretty good picture of what had been going on at the site at the end of the Paleolithic age. He concluded that the first people to occupy the region arrived as the climate warmed during the Allerød interstadial, which heralded the end of the last ice age, around 13,000 BC.

  In the two thousand years that followed there was a population boom throughout the Fertile Crescent, and it was during this new golden age that Abu Hureyra was established. Its inhabitants—who belonged to the Natufian culture, which inhabited the Levant region, ca. 12,900–9500 BC—lived mainly by hunting, fishing, and cultivating lentils and wild cereals, such as einkorn, emmer, and rye.

  With the onset of the big chill, known as the Younger Dryas, around 10,900 BC, there was a sudden and unexpected disruption to migratory animals across the region. One animal that all but disappeared from the Fertile Crescent was the Persian gazelle, which until that time had formed a major part of the diet of the hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra.

  Adding to the problems of the Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers was the disappearance of forageable foods, such as wild grain and pistachio nuts, almost certainly caused by the rapid climate change, which had brought with it a severe drought, revealed by an analysis of plant remains recovered from Abu Hureyra. In the end, its inhabitants were left with no alternative but to seek warmer climes. It was the same throughout the Fertile Crescent, Natufian settlements being abandoned to the elements, their distinctive style of living vanishing completely.

  The mini ice age lasted for approximately 1,300 years. After its cessation around 9600 BC, just before the creation of the first large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe, the temperatures began to rise again. A new community was established at Abu Hureyra, which built mud brick houses on the site of earlier dwellings. The inhabitants, now classed as members of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A culture, used much fatter grain seeds for cultivation, making this perhaps one of the oldest sites where the domestication of cereal crops is thought to have occurred.1

  MICROSPHERULES AND SLOS

  Theories about Tell Abu Hureyra and its role in the birth of agriculture at the point of transition from the Epipaleolithic age to the earliest Neolithic farming communities remain controversial. Yet none of the scholars attempting to understand the evolution of the site, and its place in the emergence of the PrePottery Neolithic world, can have been prepared for what an eighteen-member international team of researchers, including James Kennett, professor of earth science at the University of California, found after examining sediment materials removed from the site during Moore’s excavations in 1972 and 1973.

  Soil taken from a depth of 11.8 feet (3.6 meters) below the surface revealed, quite astonishingly, that it contained large quantities of almost nano-sized magnetic and glass balls known as microspherules, along with something called SLOs, short for “siliceous scoria-like objects.” These are microscopic glassy particles up to a quarter of an inch (roughly 6.5 millimeters) in size that are highly porous and vesiculated, which means they are full of small sacs created by gas bubbles. In appearance the SLOs resemble scoria, the name given to jagged rock fragments ejected from volcanoes.

  What is so remarkable about SLOs is that they form only under incredibly high temperatures, in the range of 3,100 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,700 to 1,980 degrees Celsius),2 which, believe it or not, is the boiling point of quartz, a form of silica. This, in its molten form, is one of the main constituents of SLOs, which can appear dark brown, green, white, or black. The extraordinary heat needed to create these glassy objects rules out their manufacture by either human activity or volcanic action—or by any other natural process connected with the earth itself.

  Also discounted was the possibility that the tiny glass objects were produced in space, then fell to earth as micrometeors. Results show that 90 percent of the microspherules and SLOs are composed of elements not only distinct from cosmic material, but also closely match the geochemistry of the rocks and sediment in the area of their recovery, clearly indicating their terrestrial origin.

  MELT PRODUCTS

  The microspherules and SLOs are also geochemically and morphologically comparable with each other; in other words, they derive from the same or very similar source materials. More significantly, they both show evidence of “high-energy interparticle collisions” of the sort that occur inside impact plumes.3 Both are also comparable with melt products, tiny objects of molten glass, found at Meteor Crater, Arizona, the site of an impact event around fifty thousand years ago, and also at tektite-strewn fields in Australasia (tektites are glassy objects created from a mixture of terrestrial and extraterrestrial matter ejected during impacts).

  More disturbingly, the SLOs found at Abu Hureyra and two other sites in the United States (Blackville, South Carolina, and Melrose, Pennsylvania) resemble “high-temperature materials”4 found at the Trinity site, which forms part of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, New Mexico, following the detonation there of the first atomic bomb in 1945. Apparently, the thermal blast melted 0.5–1 inch (1–2.5 centimeters) of the desert floor for a radius of approximately 500 feet (150 meters) and left puddles of melted silica glass objects across a wide area.

  MULTIPLE IMPACTORS

  Nature herself creates such unbelievably high temperatures only during lightning strikes. Under such conditions microspherules and SLOs can result, although when this occurs, the lateral spread of glassy objects is only around 60 inches (1.5 meters); none generally reach beyond this point. However, the SLOs discovered at Abu Hureyra indicate a minimum spread of 14.5 feet (4.5 meters), ruling out lightning as their cause.

  All this supports the slightly disturbing conclusion that the microspherules and SLOs found at Abu Hureyra were the product of an unimaginable impact plume or fireball cloud. Moreover, the fact that similar microparticles were discovered at three of the eighteen sites where evidence of an impact event was found by the team tells us there must have been “multiple impactors,” air blasts caused by a fragmenting comet or asteroid, most likely the former.5 Most significant to this debate are the final words in the published paper containing the findings of the international team:

  Because these three sites in North America and the Middle East [i.e., Syria, where SLOs were found] are separated by 1,000–10,000 km, we propose that there were three or more major impact/airburst epicenters for the YDB [Younger Dryas Boundary] impact event. If so, the much higher concentration of SLOs at Abu Hureyra suggests that the effects on that settlement and its inhabitants would have been severe.6

  The Younger Dryas Boundary (or YDB) impact event is the name given to this proposed comet collision with Earth, which is believed to have occurred around 10,900 BC. This date marks the “boundary” or “horizon” between the Allerød interstadial and the Younger Dryas mini ice age. The glass microspherules and SLOs found at Abu Hureyra were located at this Younger Dryas Boundary, immediately beneath an organic-rich layer referred to as the “black mat,” which, the report claims, has been found at a number of sites in North and South America, Europe, and now Syria.

  TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

  We
can only imagine how the Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers of Abu Hureyra felt around 12,900 years ago, gazing out of their subsurface round houses and seeing one or more blinding balls of fire crossing the open sky (like the meteor caught so spectacularly on film as it passed over Russia’s Chelyabinsk region in February 2013) before exploding shortly before impact with the ground and as a result causing thunderous explosions, unlike anything ever imagined before in the lives of these people. Moments later, everything—livestock, buildings, and people—are hit by a shock wave of soaring heat and wind that peppers everything in its path with microscopic glassy objects, like the discharge of a hundred thousand shotguns all fired at once.

  This is just a glimpse of what might have happened at one location on the Euphrates River, but other Natufian settlements in the Levant and elsewhere could also have been affected by the Younger Dryas impact event. Indeed, we have no real idea just how widespread the proposed devastation might have been, with the only clue being the Usselo horizon. This is a “charcoalrich layer” measuring 8 inches (20 centimeters) in thickness that has been detected at the Allerød–Younger Dryas Boundary at sites in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium, Belarus, Poland, India, South Africa, Egypt, and Australia.7

  This strange black layer has been found to contain magnetic grains, microspherules, iridium (an element commonly found in cosmic impactors), and nanodiamonds,8 that is, pure carbon, all of which supports the conclusion that the Usselo horizon is the result of multiple impact events that sent ash, soot, and other debris high into the atmosphere. This mixture would eventually have fallen back to earth to create the Usselo horizon, which now becomes a telltale marker for the effects of the impact event around 12,900 years ago.