Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site imsvax.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!elsie!imsvax!ted From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) Newsgroups: net.origins Subject: Re: McNeil on Extinction Message-ID: <432@imsvax.UUCP> Date: Sun, 13-Oct-85 14:46:06 EDT Article-I.D.: imsvax.432 Posted: Sun Oct 13 14:46:06 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 15-Oct-85 05:49:18 EDT Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD Lines: 156 The following excerpts are from Michael Mcneil's recent flame of my article on extinction. Maybe someday I'll find a way to get people to READ these articles before flaming them. > > > > 4. I would want the prey to be big enough to justify the effort, > > but not big enough to pose any ridiculous danger to me and my > > companions. Again, elephants are the wrong choice; bison > > would be more like it. [TED] >So you think *bison herds* are safe to hunt, do you Ted? Can I watch? "Less than ridiculously dangerous" and "safe" are totally different things. Please don't put words in my mouth. I'm not the one claiming to believe that these fire and stampede-over-cliff hunts were commonplace, by the way. The whole statement began with: "Assuming I intended to.....". In real life, that would be a bad assumption. I'd be out hunting dear and leave the elephant and rhino stampeding to Friesen et. al. who claim to believe in it. >> I read about Pigmies hunting elephants. A little hunter can incapacitate >> a big elephant by himself. First, he spread shit of some animal on his >> skin, so the elephant would not feel the human smell. Then he walks >> under the elephant and slits Achilles tendons. Voila! The giant cannot >> walk anymore. No skeletons of Pygmies at all! [PIOTR] >Very interesting example, Piotr. I don't actually recall anyone >in this newgroup arguing that *mammoths* were stampeded off cliffs. This got started months ago when I made the claim that only global catastrophies of the sort described in "Worlds in Collision" could account for the extinction of virtually ALL of the earth's megafauna. Other contributers, including Stan Friesen, Wm. Jefferys, and several others have attempted to advance the claim that man was primarily responsible for killing off the megafauna, mostly via cliff-stampeding and fire. I claim this is ridiculous, that man could have killed a few mammoths here and there, but nothing like enough to let anyone claim man as a major cause of their extinction. I further claim that several of the mega-predators of the so- called "ice-age" would have been so totally dangerous that sane humans would have simply avoided them, hence that humans could not possibly be credited with their extinction either. One friend of mine who has seen some of these skeletons at La Brea claims to have been struck particularly at how tiny the sabre-tooth tiger skeletons appeared next to those of the North American super-lions. The sabre-tooth, of course, other than the giant teeth, was just a normal sized tiger. Now, a "just normal" sized tiger is dangerous as hell; anyone who would attempt to take on a cat which made "just normal" sized tigers look tiny with spears, in my estimation, would have to be crazy. I just can't picture it. Rhinos are another such case. Modern rhinos are bad enough; the ancient ones were twice the size of the modern ones. Any takers for killing one of these with a spear? Remember, rhinos don't shuffle like elephants; they charge at a gallop, and the little birds which eat ticks off them would warn them in plenty of time to stomp any shit covered pygmie (or scientist) attempting to sneak up on them and cut their achilles tendons. >In all probability, other techniques (such as that of the pygmies) >>were used on them. >> You theorise, those people were doing this for living. I would not >> consult you how to hunt (if I would be a primitive tribesman) or how >> to walk, if I would be a dinosaur. [PIOTR] >I would add: In what sense, when hunters are out trying to obtain >food to feed their families, are they not doing it "for a living"? "Those people"? Who? Pygmies walking around covered with shit in Siberia, northern Russia, the Liakhovs, Novo Sibirsk, and Northern Alaska? I mean, what are you guys talking about? Do you guys have any idea how cold it gets in Novo Sibirsk? How long could you stand walking around covered with frozen shit, Michael? There's no place to take a warm shower in Novo Sibirsk, Michael. You'd never get clean again. Do you think you could stand it long enough to have killed all of the thousands of mammoths whose bodies are up there? Don't you think hunting deer in SOUTHERN Russia or India might have been easier? Of course, you might try to claim that Siberia was a warm steppe land 5000 or 10000 years ago (as Stan Friesen apparently has), but at that point, you will have basically admitted to believing in Velikovskian catastrophism. There is absolutely NOTHING in the standard uniformitarian view of origins which could possibly account for Siberia or the Liakhovs ever having been warm enough to support mammoth herds within the age of man. > > I am completely turned off by modern science's insistence on > > describing our ancesters as idiots at every opportunity. Can anybody > > believe that our ancestors were so stupid as to ALWAYS go after the > > biggest and most dangerous and wretched tasting game when there were > > always deer and cattle and buffalo and rabbits and ducks nearby? [TED] >No, I'd say it's the present-day idiots who think that "there were always >deer and cattle and buffalo and rabbits and ducks nearby." Which world >are *you* living in, Ted? (Or was it the Garden of Eden?) There are >dry seasons, droughts, animal migrations, changing climates, etc., etc. >This was the ice age! Mammoths died out very recently. There are pictures of them in ancient American artwork. Do you have any explanation as to how ice sheets could have crept over temperate zones that recently, Michael? I mean an explanation for so called "ice-ages"? If you have, it should be good for at least a PHD dissertation somewhere; nobody else has ever come up with such an explanation. On the other hand, Immanuel Velikovsky has presented very good explanations as to catastrophies causing effects which scientists could MISCONSTRUE as evidence of ice sheets having once crept over temperate zones. I honestly regard "ice-ages" as a modern fiction. > > ... but that is not why > > mammoths are extinct. The really big mammoth kill sites, in Alaska > > and in northern Siberia and in the islands off the north coast of > > Russia and Siberia, show no evidence of man's hand; only that of a > > violent nature. Velikovsky's book, "Earth in Upheaval", gives a good > > account of several of these. [TED] > > Mammoths are found in those plases because they got well preserved in the > permafrost. Probably the drown in Arctic bogs and later were submerged > in the permafrost, like a lot of other creatures. Because of those > marvelously preserved specimens we know that mammoth, unlike elephant, > was very hairy: a trait of a subarctic animal. [PIOTR] You mean like chimps and leopards and collies? I mean, there are lots of these in Northern Siberia now, aren't there, Piotr? The fur coats keep them nice and warm on -100 degree nights and keep them from starving too, don't they? Most people don't have any real idea of what -100 degrees F means; for one thing, it means rubber tires becoming brittle and shattering..... >Enough theorizing in a vacuum! Let's look at a specific culture >and see if Ted's hypothesizing pans out. In central Russia there >was an extraordinary culture some 15,000 years ago (as determined >by carbon-14 dating) which is usually known ...... This is about the point at which a decent Fortran or C compiler would put out some such message as: "fatal error, compilation ceases at this point". Radio carbon dating simply cannot be used to date ANYTHING prior to the last round of global cosmic violence which occured around 700 B.C. Prior to that, there simply is no guessing as to the ratios of regular to radio carbon. Six or seven thousand years ago, a global flood almost annihilated this planet; Noah and his family and many animal species survived on the great ship and handfulls of men and animals survived on mountaintops elsewhere, but most died afterwards, as Ovid says, in "Metamorphoses": "And almost every being that breathed on earth drowned as it met the flood, those who survived Died of starvation on the shores of mountains." There is almost no possability of knowing what was going on 15000 years ago. There is every probability that most, if not all of the places which man inhabited prior to the flood are now under water, and every probability that things such as the mammoth-bone buildings, which "scientists" who still believe in radio-carbon dating date at 13000 BC, actually belong to the age between the flood and the great global disaster of 1500 BC, described in "Worlds in Collision". As to ancient Russians having actually killed that many mammoths, I simply don't believe it. It seems far more likely that the bones were simply lying around, remnants of the catastrophies; handy building materials for people who hunted ducks and deers and rabbits, and ate shchi and Kasha as Russians do now. Or do you think those people DRAGGED those bone houses around whilst following mammoth herds, Michael?