Cataclysm [Paperback]

When I bought this book I was intrigued by the title and had hopes as to what it would tell me. I had already read several other books alluding to a disaster of recent human memory that had been a worldwide event which modern man had forgotten. All they had failed to supply was anything "scientific" to account for why such changes had taken place if they were not due to the uniformitarian concepts that I was schooled to believe. This book did.

There are too many unanswered questions when it comes to Man's recent history, too many anomalies and this book is the best I have read which goes some way towards answering them. Some reviewers have used the term Pseudo-Science when dismissing this title as mere speculation based on myth, which I believe is just too narrow-minded an approach to take. Something happened. It may not have been Phaeton as this book suggests, but whatever it was is not answered by conventional theory, the evidence just doesn't add up. This is just an opinion but if you want to read a thought-prevoking book about something so huge that it almost wiped out our whole planet I'd give it a try.

Thought provoking? Absolutely. Am I sold on their theory of an interstellar chunk of stellar material playing havoc on the Earth? I have my reasonable doubts, but there was more than enough footnotes for me to check it out for myself. And the more I research, the more I become convinced that *something* happened to this biosphere ~12K years ago. That said, this endeavour has shaken my education to its foundation. Indeed, there are numerous instances that the authors bring to light that make one question what one has been taught in school. As an anthropologist, I believe that myth (and especially the Deluge myth) was founded on reality and filtered through the limited understanding of ancient peoples. Any anthropologist worth his salt realizes that different peoples of tribes, locals, even continents, have myths of remarkably similar themes, these make one wonder WHY the common thread; and WHY is this so easily dismissed? Those who dismiss myth as fantasy ought to remember that history is manipulated thru the perceptions of the author, a modern myth. It's very sad that the modern-day religion of science takes the position of dismissing reasonable factoids on the general principal of "doesn't compute with current theories so talk to the hand." Read it for yourself. Take it to a local library and research the bibliography for yourself. You might find yourself doing a remarkable thing, becoming a questioning being and not a rote automaton.

Looking at the other reviews I was prompted to write this one in an effort to redress the objectionable references to pseudo-science. Derek Allan spent a lifetime in teaching and in his spare time spent over 40 years collecting and cataloguing geological information and this book is the culmination of all that research. It was published in the latter years of his life which is why some of his sources appear outdated. However, unlike other authors on the end of the Pleistocene the authors of this book include a vast amount of material from Russian field research published in obscure and difficult to get hold of journals and as such this work has a novel twist that other western geological authors do not possess. There are some surprising similarities between this model and the more recent Firestone and West et al theory of a cometary airburst at the beginning of the Younger Dryas (the end of the Pleistocene). The actual chronology is different, with the Pliocene overlapping with the Pleistocene in the Allan and Delair model, an idea that has been overtaken by the sheer weight of modern research, and in particular ice cores, ocean sediment cores, and various dating methodologies. In that respect this book is in many ways out of date - but the research spans a very long period of time, research that is often ignored by modern geologists and commenters. As such, some factors in this book can be taken with an upraised eye, but generally they are pointing a finger at a real anomaly, something dramatic happened at the end of the Ice Ages. Earlier ice ages did not result in the extinction of large numbers of species, far from it as they appear to have thrived not only during the cold episodes but through the various warm interglacials, some of which were warmer than average temperatures nowadays. Then we have those huge depressions in the crust that are in places up to four thousand feet deep and filled with the mixed remains of animals, plants, trees, rocks and gravels etc They are evidence I would have thought but evidence that is generally passed over by scientists simply because they do not fit the pattern of the uniformitarian model. The same with all those Pleistocene bones, jumbled and mixed, regularly found by potholers in the 20th century, when most of Britain's cave systems were explored. The tar pits in California are another huge hotchpotch of mangled bones of extinct and surviving species that are not adequately explained. Comments in textbooks tend to concentrate on individual specimens and rarely describe or mention the sheer multitude of remains - you have to read books like this to find out about this factor. That is strange science in a way - ignore what does not fit the consensus. Not really very objective - and that goes for those reviews that describe this book as pseudo-science. Mainstream science is just as prejudiced - possibly more so. It has a series of consensus views and evidence is manipulated into that model. If the evidence does not fit it is ignored - and I've just illustrated how the extinctions at the Pleistocene are ignored because they raise embarrassing questions. Books like this raise embarrassing questions too - that is why they are dismissed as pseudo-science. Clear case of poppycock.