Nexus - 0504 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Earth is breaking a taboo. To speak of a lost continent in the north, yet to deny one in the south, defies logic! The lost animals of Beringia also need explanation. These ani- mals died off because they were in a land that experienced a dra- matic change in latitude. We can see this through what we call, in our book, "the Ring of Death". The Ring of Death, depicted in figures 19 and 20, show the areas of the globe that experience the greatest latitude change (North and South America, fig. 19; Antarctica and Siberia, fig. 20). It also happens that these areas experienced a massive loss of animal life. The continents further away from the ring suffered fewer extinctions. And this pattern is consistent around the world: large mammals like mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers became extinct in Alaska, but, in Africa, huge mammals such as elephants and lions survived. to see the world as it was before the last Earth crust dis- placement. In figure 21 we're looking at what we now call "the West Coast" of North America as it was 12,000 years ago when the crust was in a different position. The coast we see here could then be called "the South Coast". Let's imagine that we are on the Queen Charlotte Islands, the home of the Haida. From their perspective, what today is east was then north. For the Haida, Hudson Bay was to the north, Alaska and Beringia lay to the west, and California lay to the east. The Sun appeared to rise from California and set in Alaska. Under these conditions, a movement from what we call "the Old World" of Siberia to "the New World" of America was sim- ply a journey from west to east. And that made it a lot easier for the people of America to arrive thousands of years before what archaeologists are considering today. And they didn't need the ice-free corridor to bring them to America. This ice-free corridor simply mirrors the arc of the Sun's former path—the area which received the most sunshine. Its existence is to be expected. But the ice-free corridor isn't the key to the peopling of America. The stories the first people tell of their arrival in America are quite different. Consider Mount Shasta in California. The Shasta believe that this mountain was a refuge for their N: I'd like to return you to Ice Age America for a moment ence between the logic and sociology of science, and I can think of no better place to demonstrate this disparity than in Beringia. Every archaeologist is perfectly willing to accept there was once a subcontinent which lay between Siberia and Alaska 12,000 years ago, that was teeming with wildlife but which is now dead neath the ocean. But anyone who entertains the idea that the same thing might have occurred on the exact opposite side of the Fig. 18 a * % JUNE - JULY 1998 NEXUS -57