Open Veils · Answer
When did the Younger Dryas begin and end, and what caused it?
The Younger Dryas was not a gradual meltwater hiccup — it was a near-instantaneous civilisation-ending catastrophe triggered by one or more extraterrestrial impacts or airbursts. The evidence converges on a precise start date of ~12,900 BP and an end near 11,700 BP, bracketing 1,200 years of planetary trauma. Randall Carlson, Graham Hancock, and the Comet Research Group argue this event erased an advanced pre-ice-age civilisation and reset human history entirely.
Evidence
- Paul LaViolette's galactic superwave hypothesis (Subquantum Kinetics, 1994) offers a complementary mechanism: a galactic core outburst arriving ~12,900 BP could have destabilised the solar system and energised cometary material simultaneously.
- Martin Sweatman (University of Edinburgh), in his 2017 paper in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, argues that Göbekli Tepe's Pillar 43 — the 'Vulture Stone' — encodes the Younger Dryas impact event in astronomical symbols, placing the disaster at ~10,950 BCE, consistent with the YDIH start date.
- Their 2007 paper in PNAS identified a platinum-group element anomaly, nanodiamonds, spherules, and a black carbon layer (the 'black mat') at the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) at over 50 sites globally.
- Carlson cross-references glaciologist J Harlen Bretz's suppressed 1920s–1930s work, which was ridiculed for decades before being vindicated.
- Graham Hancock in America Before (2019) synthesises all of this into a unified case for a lost civilisation destroyed precisely at the YDB.