Enzmann and Enzmann 1990s
The galaxy turns its year about 250,000,000 solar years. Each galactic year, the Earth endures a wintery ice age. The Pleistocene-Holocene of today, Dermo-carboniferous of 250 million BC Eco Cambrian 500 million BC, Nama 750 million BC, and the Dor Ice Age, already 5 billion years long, varies its intensity in 100,000-year cycles.
43,000 BC
Würm III ice age starts with the Farmdale (or Stettin) glaciation. Immediately after its bitter cold snows and winds lower the world sea level, the Beringia (Alaska-Siberia) land bridge is briefly exposed. The first evidence of Homo Sapiens appears in Europe, and in Central Asia and Australia after the Farmdale/Stettin. Perhaps we came over the Beringia Bridge. Proto Sapiens build a large dwelling along the Riviere.
Climax predator, Homo Neanderthalensis appears and dominates the world for a hundred thousand years. When he appears, our ancestors, Proto Sapiens, vanish. Where did we go? Perhaps we hid, but where? Did we live in the Americas, evolve, then during the Farmdale walk back to Siberia? Perhaps we paused in the delta lands at the mouth of the Lena River where the cold prairie teems with megafauna.
On the Adriatic coast, there are hints that Cro-Magnon was there by 42,000 BC, at the same time that other Sapiens colonize Australia.
Homo Sapien spears, a vastly better ability to speak, higher intelligence, ability to live in forests, organization as monogamous families of closely related clans, and possibly lack of immunity to Homo Sapien diseases, displaces Homo Neanderthalensis.
There is evidence in the Middle East of mingling between advanced Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. Certainly, Sapien’s prehistory is more complex than the above statement. Perhaps only one variety of Sapiens hides in the Americas. Speciation certainly operates on Sapiens; consider the drug’ Rhogam’ which ‘hopefully’ ameliorates Rh blood type incompatibilities.
37,000 BC
The Hengelo Denecamp warm interval saw growth of savannas and local reforestation. We suggest our Cro-Magnon ancestors spread from the Lena River Deltaic region along the oak tree ‘acorn trail’ into Western Europe.
In the Denecamp period (Perigordian I, Aurignacian Zero, 35,000 BC) Neanderthal had almost vanished. Cro-Magnon communities are widespread in Aquitania and elsewhere in Europe, like Ethiopia’s Gash, Egypt’s Soff, Namibia’s Etosha, or Botswana’s Okavango deltas, then an inland Deltaic cold prairie teeming with megafauna nourished by abundant grasses and other lush quick-growing flora. The winters were bitterly cold but dry, with very light snowfall only totaling a few centimeters, like Alaska’s Yukon valley betwixt the Alaska and Brooks Ranges.
32,000 BC
Episodic and calendric inscriptions characterize known Aurignacian archaeology. They count days, phases of the moon, and note annual migrations of fauna that they hunt. They write about what they see. Glaciers expand in the dry bitter-cold Aurignacian. Nine somewhat milder intervals relieve these miserable centuries. But glacial periods between milder intervals are brutal.
Yet: ‘Adversity shapes man.’ Family histories of the American Massachusetts Bay colonists attest to this. Descendants of the first, then progressively later, and ‘easier’ expeditions are progressively less successful and worse behaved than descendants of those who survive the horrors of the first New England winters.
Brazil’s Pedra Furada excavations show Sapiens presence in the Americas 32,000 BC.
Archaeological findings from these intervals show us as modern men, thinking physically and mathematically, just as we do today. Our numbers were minuscule, but the evidence left is enthralling and fascinating!
20,000 BC
Solutrean Episodic and Calendric
The Proto Solutrean and Proto Magdalenian commence during the Gardena A warm interval. The transitional Solutrean commences during the Gardena B warm interval and ends with the somewhat lengthy XIV phase of Würm III marked by the Brandenburg then the Frankfurt Moraines.
The final Solutrean intervals A, B, and C are together known as the first Dordogne warm oscillations. The first and warmest, A, ends the Würm III cycle of glaciations. Archaeological evidence gives us the impression of a happy, healthy, well-fed population who, upon emerging from the dreadful Aurignacian and early Solutrean glaciations have almost an overabundance of energy, good health, and intelligence.
Final Solutrean A is almost pleasantly warm during spring and fall, the summers are hot and dry, the winters are cold but not unpleasant because they too are dry. Forestation in unglaciated Europe reaches 35-40%. Weapons and tools are abundant, varied, and beautifully made including spear, sling, needles, bow, boiling stones, laurel leaf points (made specifically for big game), and the atlal (a weapon of savage power). It takes skill and long practice to use an atlal, but in the hands of an expert to the power exceeds that of a magnum slug. An atlatl bolt can be driven through one side of a car and out the other.
Final Solutrean A is blessed with an abundance of starchy plant foods: sunflower roots and seeds, hazelnuts, chestnuts, tubers, and the ‘eternal acorn bread’ which the writer ate during the 1920s in Europe. It takes some knowledge and skill to steep out the bitter tannins, but it’s amazing how inspiring hunger is.
18,000 BC
By the final Solutrean B, meat was a major bar of the diet. Fat meat was relished during the cold months. Final Solutrean C, 17,000 BC, Parpello, on southern Spain’s coast, was not a region with abundant megafauna, which is padded with insulating layers of fat and massive bones so fat-filled that they can be burned for fuel in deep winter.
15,500 BC
Magdalenian I, a time of very low seas, global dust storms, and teeming megafauna grazing and browsing the protein-rich grasses, sedges, and other vegetations of Eurasia and North American cold prairies during the Lascaux or Blakendorf warm interval. Four seasons and two major and two lesser fauna are recognized. Laurel leaf points of the Solutrean gave way to the manufacture of aspen leaf points, useful for both big game and medium-sized critters such as antelopes and horses.
Art, astronomical science, and chronicles of events thrived. In addition to observing seasons and celestial events, the idea of matter conservation by transformation seems to be expressed by early views of the Yggdrasil (Tree of Life, World Tree). Its an idea that almost comes naturally if you have lived as a hunter. The writer lived for several years with a rifle when the Southern African High Veld still teemed with game. A dead creature almost seems to melt into the ground. Then the bush or trees take up the critter’s substance, making greenery which again becomes creatures’ bodies through nourishment. This concept is the foundation of the Yggdrasil myth and symbols.
14,000 BC
Magdalenian II, during the slight warming of the Buhl, was still so cold and dry that loess was deposited.
12,000 BC
During the Magdalenian V, the calendric and geographic Bølling Warm Interval was a golden age. The Gönnersdorf Archive includes several hundred readable tablets, aspen leaf and willow leaf points, and microliths for work.
(The Enzmann Archive has one of the most substantial Magdalenian taxonomies on the planet.)
Time measurements of the period were Lunar: 28-day months, 7-day weeks, 13-month years. Azimuth angles of the sun and moon were known. Episodic calendars were built about the tetra-faunal migrations of summer horses, fall bison, winter mammoths, and spring antelope. There are examples on stone, leather, and bone maps of Europe.
7800 BC
The Azilian tools are dominated by the use of microliths. This is because forests spread, wool was widely available, and microlith saws were made. Also, game was smaller, so smaller points were used. Dry cold years gave impetus to grain collection south of the Caucasus and herding in high hills east of the Tigris Euphrates. Evergreen ‘forest catastrophe’ along north shores of the Mediterranean and European cold prairie turns into savannah and tundra which did not support megafauna.
Calendric and geographic pre-Boreal Azilian and Maglemosian measurements are evidenced by Azilian painted pebble tally stones, number by upper Mesopotamia clay tokens, weights in obsidian trade, distance in time taken to walk, differential value in amber for commodities.
6000 BC
The Cochran Glaciation (scattered local loess VII) is a global event accompanied by widespread drought – a catastrophe giving impetus to Middle East farming. The several centuries of dry cold do not lead to a return of the megafauna. The lush quickly growing vegetations of the cold prairies have given way to sparse, slow-growing sedges, grasses, mosses, lichens, dwarf trees, and other tundra flora that tend to package and/or exude noxious somewhat toxic tannins and other chemicals that discourage most browsers and grazers. As temperatures drop, tundra flora appears first, later cold prairie flora slowly replaces it. Summer fish paste and fatty meat paste (Pemmican) were staples.
It is the Cochran that forces proto-Celts we know as Guanches of the Canary Islands and the original Berbers of North Africa and Ethiopia out of Europe to the south. Similarly, proto-Celts or close cousins seem to have been forced out of Central Asia, southward into the Indian Peninsula to mingle with the Dravidians, and into South East Asia of which the Hmong and others are remnants.
A curious civil project ‘Air Well Trails’, does not seem to be mentioned anywhere in any literature known to the writer. In areas of North Africa, air wells of incredible age may still be found. A few still work. It seems probable that they were built during dry intervals such as the 6000 BC Cochran, Early Sub Boreal Drought of 3700 BC, or the late Sub Boreal Drought of 2700 BC.
5900 BC
The Atlantic Grand Climate Optimum includes four warm phases punctuated by mild but pleasant intervals. Human population expands enormously.
Measurements include the megalithic meter (yard) standard length; angles at megalithic observatories with 20” accuracy using features on the ½ degree Moon; triangulation by mariners on headlands, mountains, stone pillars, and beacons set on shores; clay-enveloped tally tokens.
Quite sensitive to polarization of skylight, Cordierite crystals were used to find the Sun’s position through overcast skies.
Measurements take on a civil significance. By 5000 BC, the megalithic yard comes into widespread use. By 4800 a textile, pottery, amber, obsidian, flint, and copper trade developed about the Aegean. Pelorus navigation with sightings on known headlands and landmarks dominates. By 4300, the lower Tigris/Euphrates swamps dry significantly, and regional irrigation commences.
The Grand Climate Optimum ends ca. 3700 BC, with the Sub Boreal Drought. Sub Atlantic climate prevails with cataclysmic starvations, migrations, and wars. The Jewish calendar begins with the drought in 3700.
3600 BC
The Old Egyptian Kingdom is organized by Berbers from Libya and other regions west of the Nile Valley. During the Early Sub Boreal I, diagrammatic successive droughts drive Kurgans out of central Eurasia. Semites out of the Arabian Peninsula, Hamites/ Berbers out of dying North African savannah, Negro movement eastward and southward from Congo Niger coastal regions totally displace Berber populations of Ethiopia. In Egypt, measurements of seasonally flooded lands are made with harpedonaptai (a stretcher) ropes with twelve knots on them to make three-four-five right triangles.
2700 BC
The second Sub Boreal Drought II devastates savannas of the Arabian Peninsula, driving Semites into Mesopotamia. Somewhat later, ca 2450, Semites invade both Lower and Upper Egypt, already troubled for some time by bad crops during the last several dynasties of the Old Kingdom. Ca. 2575 begins the first Little Ice Age and the desiccation of North Africa. By 2100 BC, Ur II sexagesimal 350, 60’, 60” ziggurat semaphore was in use. Ca. 1950 BC, the Patriarch Abraham visits the Nile Delta, and Moses gets water from a stone (a calcified spring.)
1750 BC
So enormous was the Thyra volcanic explosion that it shapes all subsequent history. The blast destroys the Aegean civilization, earthquakes shatter cities, tidal waves destroy Minoan sea power and entire coastal civilizations. ‘Typhoon’ surges over the Nile Delta, much of the Greek, Italian, and North African littoral is annihilated, but on the Levantine Coast, the wave is but one to two meters high. Ash-fall suffocates people and domestic animals. It blankets crops and upsets farming for years afterward.
Hyksos, with iron weapons, invaded Egypt, ending the Middle Kingdom. The Hyksos were likely a group related to the Indo-European Hittites from North Central Anatolia, who, ca. 2500, migrated there from north of the Black Sea and even earlier from a region where bog-ore smelting was understood.
Smelting bog ore is a very natural discovery wherever peat is burned. Almost everyone blows on the briquettes with straws. It is impossible not to notice occasional glowing blebs of iron. If the bleb is low in sulfur it is malleable when you hammer it between stones. It is more malleable when it is red hot and one bleb can be hammer welded to another. It is but a short step from welding blebs together, to making an arrowhead or knife.
Phoenician and Sephardim (Carthaginians) war fifteen hundred years to control the Mediterranean. The war culminated with the Bronze Age tin blockade against the Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Scythians, to deny them tools and weapons.
The tin blockade enormously furthers the Hallstatt smelter/smith industry of Central Europe and the Northern European Plain. Iron and steel flowed to the Greeks, Early Romans, Gauls, Scythians, and Iberians over long-established trade routes. The ores, easily smelted limonite-goethite nodules, are raked out of peat bogs, where the iron molecules leached from fresh glacial sands are ‘fixed’ by iron-eating bacteria. Quantities processed are surprising: in Poland of today, slag indicates millions of tons over these centuries.
Phoenician/Carthaginian armed merchantmen traded in Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Norway, West Africa. They sailed to East Africa, India, Indonesia, and in small numbers certainly reached both North and South America.
Phonetic writing is descended from varieties of Linear A and Linear B, and/or from Phoenician phonetics. One wonders why any group would tolerate a syllabary alphabet, its simplification to a short alphabet is so blatantly obvious. Greek geometric art of around 1000 BC ends at about the time of the 770 BC Alalia Sea Battle. Early Archaic Greek art of ca 700 to 500 BC is strongly influenced by the Orient which dominates much of the Mediterranean. By 1650, at Ahmose, Egypt, the ‘Rhind Papyrus’ shows calculus of fractions.
1580 BC
The New Egyptian Kingdom of the warm Mycenean Optimum dates from 1580, when Ahmose I force the Hyksos and Jews out of Lower Egypt and the rich delta farmlands.
1200 BC
The Mycenean Drought causes starvation in many areas, migrations and wars result. This is the century of the Trojan War. These are the centuries of the Sea People including Indo-Europeans of Greek kinship, Etruscans from Asia Minor who, driven by starvation, invade northern Italy, and a combination of Phoenician and Sephardim Semites are at war throughout the Mediterranean. Cold plotting is used to preserve foods while drying them.
This is the classical world of Mycenean Troy and the beginning of the Dorian migration. Ca. 1000 BC, Polynesian diagrammatic stick charts showing ocean waves and zonal winds were used for navigation
RDE: in 1945 and later in the 1960s, we navigated a destroyer for some thousands of miles with a stick chart after some weeks of instruction in its lore. We set the course for well over a thousand miles before the captain interceded to bring us closer to the course.
950 BC
During the pleasant, generally mild Sub Atlantic I, the Ionic School thrives in Anatolia (land of the sunrise). Following the 1200 BC drought, which forced the Dorians southward from Hyperborea, the milder climate is called the Dorian Optimum.
546 BC
Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Asia Minor. In 499 BC Ionia revolted but was crushed by Darius I. The Ionian School collapsed with its refugees fleeing to both Greece and Southern Italy. These times may be compared with the years before WW II started when a flood of talented refugees fled Europe.
A World War started which raged for twenty years. Greece stood almost alone, as did England for part of WW II. Against it was arrayed the Persian Empire, the Phoenicians and their navies, and Carthage with its Western Mediterranean Allies and Colonies with their enormous navies. Greece’s weaker allies included Scythians, Romans, Gauls, and other Europeans. In 490 BC the death struggle commenced on the Plains of Marathon where the Athenians drove back the Persians.
In 480 BC, the war climaxed with the stand of heroes at Thermopylae and the burning of Athens, which had been abandoned, for the intent was to depopulate Greece. The battles in the World War culminated with the colossal naval clashes at Salamis, and a thousand miles away on the same day, at Syracuse. The Persian, Phoenician, and Carthaginian navies were defeated. In 489 BC, at Plataea, the Persian forces were finally forced out of Europe.
500 BC
During the mild Sub Atlantic II years, the Platonic School was founded and thrived in Southern Italy. Following the cool dry interval after Sub Atlantic I, the Dorian and Macedonian Greeks flourished with the improvement in farming and herding; this may be called the Donian Climate Optimum. This brought us Plato’s The Republic and Timaeus. The Platonic School’s Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music is the basis of education to this day.
400 BC
Brought us Archytas of Tarentum. Pythagorean number theory, a point is unity in position, and what if I put my hand in a void?’ were all considerations. Theaetetus irrational numbers caused a crisis (Euclid’s ‘elements’ vol 10) resolved by Eudoxus with his theory of proportions and Exhaustion Method. Kepler similarly viewed circles as tiny segments, and today’s line integrals are similar.
334 BC
Alexander commenced a World War, founding an empire including all powers except Carthage. Within its boundaries and its successor states were Ptolemy’s Egypt, Seleucid’s Middle East centered at Baghdad, and Antigone’s Greece; European learning flourished.
International Hellenic Library and Museum Schools were, for the first time in mankind’s known history offering general education. (We venture ancestors of the Greeks during the Atlantic Climate Optimum, ca 5000 – 3500 BC, with their megalith observatories may have foreshadowed the Hellenic Schools.) These centuries brought us Euclid, Hero, and Archimedes, hydrology, and the geometric basis for particle physics. Rome built roads and used semaphore.
100 BC
The Sub Atlantic III climate was pleasant, rain in North Africa was bountiful for several centuries and it was a granary. These years are aptly named the Roman Optimum; Roman schools were excellent. Historians seem to ignore the intensive practical education needed to build a tri-continental road system, viaducts to supply water to great cities, or to obtain the collection of animals from regions distant as Rhodesia and even Namibia in S. W. Africa for the wonderous social function called ‘bread and circus.’
Perhaps the most magnificent Roman civil work is its communications system. This can be appreciated by those who apply Shannon’s Theory, and its builders would, in turn, have immediately appreciated and quickly understood modern communications systems.
The writer, first in Corsica and Sardinia, then in North Africa, along the North Mediterranean coastlines at the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) to the Black Sea, and past that to the Caspian and Bactria, found remnants of the Roman Communications System.
A typical station was a tower perhaps 100 feet or more high. The bases were massive, often fathoms thick. There were no stairs in the lower part, access was by ladder. In the upper stories, there were stone stairs between the several stories. Only an army could have broken the base of these towers. Interestingly they were also constructed such that a large fire built in the lower part would not disturb the group in the upper stories.
During the day communication from tower to tower was by mirror, flashed – an early form of Rudyard Kipling’s tick tack tick heliograph. By night communication from tower to tower was by signal flashing signal fires. Communication from Gibraltar in Spain to the Black Sea was possible in hours. It is amazing that historians do not mention this.
500 AD
Massive migrations, one of the Turkish peoples from Central Asia into Anatolia, and the second of Arabs and other Semitic peoples from the Arabian Peninsula into Libya, Tunis, and Morocco set the stage for the destruction of Greek, Kurdish, and Armenian peoples of Anatolia, and one of the Berbers of North Africa.
700 AD
This time saw the Mediterranean War and the Christian Dark Ages. The communication system of Ziggurats Signal Towers prompted the story of the tower of Babel and the command to ‘confound the language.’
1100 AD
Mild Pacific climate characterized the centuries of the Crusades, which are a continuation of the wars between Arabs and Sephardim from North Africa against Spain, Italy, and France for control of Europe to the west, and wars between now Muslim Turks and Greeks, Romans, and Black Sea Slavs for control of Europe to the east.
1500 AD
When Constantinople is finally taken by the Turks, which marks the beginning of Europe’s Renaissance, the relatively mild Neo Boreal Climate characterized the Turkish Optimum. It is triggered by Greek teachers, scientists, and artisans fearing the Turks, together with European fear and hatred of the Middle Easterners. 1492 AD marks the nullification of the Arab, Turks, and Sephardim Mediterranean blockade which started 700 AD when Tariq crossed into Spain from Morocco.
