Customer Reviews

The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture

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This book has the most deceptive cover that I've ever seen applied to a scholarly work. It looks like something you'd see on a book of Nostradamas predictions, or perhaps as an ad for a grade B horror flick. And the title is wrong too. There is nothing in the book about a "cycle" of "cosmic" "catastrophes" in the "history" of civilization". It is about the cause of the extinction event in North America that killed about 30 species of large mammals about 13,000 years ago. Whoever is responsible for this should be fired and go to work for The National Enquirer. I only decided to buy it after I leafed through it to discover lots of graphs in it.

This book is a serious work, written by serious scientists who have a fascinating story to tell. They tell the story in a rather unconventional way, though it served to hook me pretty good. I couldn't put it down. The heart of the story is how they discovered clues to the extinction event, which were all new to me. The first was to closely examine the soil along a vertical line running through the Clovis layer at several archeological sites in North America. They applied a strong magnet to samples of the soil to recover magnetic grains and magnetic spherules. The concentration of these in the soil clearly peaked in the Clovis layer at all the sites they looked at, and show lots of graphs of their data. They argue that they are clues to an impact event.

Then they go over the Carolina Bays story, which is a wonderful story in itself. These thousands of shallow craters predominantly on the Eastern Seaboard, they persuasively argue, were formed in a comet strike at about the time of the extinction event. The origin of these geological features have been controversial for many decades and they reveal an entirely new line of evidence. They found in the sandy rims of the craters pieces of glassy carbon, which contain fullerenes, a form extremely rare on earth. What they find inside the fullerenes testify to their extraterrestrial origin!

There is nothing like a big scientific mystery that slowly unfolds in front of you. New data, and measurements made with new technologies applied to old questions show the real power of the scientific approach. A book like this always raises new questions, and makes the imagination sparkle.

Gad I love/hate books like this. I think these guys are 75% clearly onto something but the book is not the best-written (my guess as to one reason why it ended up with a dinky New-Age-ish publisher), some of the linking ideas are a bit muddy, and I'm not thrilled with the logic of supernova radiation bath (OK), followed by supernova debris wave (OK), followed by (a stretch to me) comet impacts.

Much better linkage needed to be established between the supernova and the comet appearances other than "they were knocked out of orbit" by the supernova--that's kitchen table physics; the kind of thinking about how the "out there" physical world works based on small scale home observation. If that was in fact the case, then the comet(s) could have come from nearly any direction, but the authors make minor hay of the idea that the comet(s) came from the same direction in the sky as the alleged supernova. The physics of orbital dynamics is not the same thing as the physics of making shots in a game of pool (meaning if you get your pool cue, the moon, and the Earth all in a line, and tap the orbiting moon with your cue, it's not going to sail straight at the Earth).

Oddly, the book by a certified expert in orbital dynamics, astronomer Tom Van Flandern ("Dark Matter, Missing Planets, and New Comets" from another metaphysical rinky-dink press) maintains that the comets are debris produced by the explosion of a gas-giant planet within our solar system. All comet orbits, he claims, roughly trace back to a single point of origin. His is yet another frustrating book full of stupendous insights and appalling credibility-blowing observations (he doesn't rule out the possibility that aliens blew up the planet!). Do some of these writers intentionally sabotage their own work?

Otherwise, the authors of this book make note of a lot of in-the-face oddities that other scientists should have been all over ages ago, like the Carolina bay "craters" (the accepted theories for their formation almost sound like pseudo-science) and the "Black Mat"--a layer of organic material that, beneath a certain level in the soil, seems to blanket nearly everything in North America, and dates to the extinction of the mega-fauna 13,000 years ago. We all know mainstream scientists are conservative, but to ignore this "Mat" and its potential implications one would have to be fossilized.

So you should probably pick this up and add it to the stack of variable-quality outsider Ancient Catastrophe books. It's better and more straight-up than nearly all of them. The authors need to push the supernova of 40,000 years ago theory; it's well-argued and palatable for stone-sober science types. They're over their heads on the comet impact idea for 13,000 years ago, though. Something big happened back then (at least that's what all the natives tell us), and it may have been a comet, but other ideas need to be examined and worked out more comprehensively.

To conclude on a sour note, few legit scientists seem to read these things (most won't jeopardize their reputations by even being seen with copies), and they'll instead get read and critiqued generally by people looking for Atlantis, or ley lines, or ancient astronauts. In other words the biggest fans will probably contribute to keeping the material at the margins of acceptance or consideration. The atrocious cover and title alone will keep this forever out of the hands of academics--it's up there with Chris Dunn's "The Giza Power Station," an amazing and thought-provoking book with cover art so insufferably knuckleheaded that I'm ashamed to show it to people.

Marketing.

In this book the authors attempt to prove that a cosmic chain of events began some 41,000 years ago and was the cause of a major global catastrophe 28,000 years later killing off the mammoths, other animals, and some indian tribes.

There is no question that the earth has been subject to several mass extinctions during its history. There is a pretty general consenus that the dinosaur extinction some 65 millian years ago was caused by the impact of something from out there. There is also little question that there have been other mass extinctions from time to time in the history of the planet.

In this book the authors combine the input from several oral traditional histories, observation and experiment to say that the 13,000 year ago extinction was also caused by extra-terrestrial events. The evidence they present is certainly indicitive of such an origin, but not what I'd call proof beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Could they be right? Certainly!

Could it happen in the future? Absolutely!

"The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes" is a must-read for any thinking and aware person. First, the evidence amassed is overwhelming that an ET/ELE (extraterrestrial/extinction level event) took place at some point in the past, culminating in a massive event at about 12,500 yrs BP. The authors of the book, most specifically Allen West and Richard Firestone, and I all totally agree something happened that was cosmic, catastrophic, and sudden. Firestone and I do not disagree, but rather are dealing with different levels of causality. For instance, whatever happened started with the Big Bang. Much later in time, there is no question but that supernovae did take place relatively near our solar system and those supernovae, or even one, must have had some effect on our sun ranging from ~ 0.1% to X%. I am focused on the immediate causation for what happened at about 12,500 yrs BP, and personally I see no way out of concluding that that event involved a massive and lethal neutron event, as you can read on a paper entitled, "Response to Comments" on Bob Kobres website, which makes the evidence clear.

Considering all of the available evidence that involves a massive neutron event, inverse radiocarbon resets from 14C being produced in situ, and the worldwide pattern as noted in the piece above, my own conviction is that only a giant solar flare could have done or caused all that happened, and it was over in one very, very bad day. If readers take some time to investigate giant solar flares, they will find the necessary conditions: antimatter to obliterate much of the atmosphere, entrapped neutrons in the flare's magnetic field, and a relatively short time span of less than one earth day which fits the evidence completely.

There also is a tantalizing clue in the book that indicates "they saw it coming" and got out. I believe my own view, which is that Paleo-Indians travelled by boat (probably skin), now is the prevailing view which would explain the lack of any human remains at all, particularly teeth. About the only thing they could have seen coming was a giant flare manifested by greatly increased solar activity. Flares arrive at varying speeds.

Radiocarbon dating does work, but the evidence at hand strongly suggests (if not proves) that before ~ 12,500 yrs BP nobody can say much of anything at all about "real dates" because of the production of 14C in a younger direction. This raises the interesting possibility, suggested as far back as the 1960's, that Paleo-Indian actually is a Mousterian (European) tradition. Mousterian toolkits remained virtually unchanged for about 200,000 years (depending on which sources indicate what dates) while later prehistoric toolkits persisted (in terms of style) for perhaps ~ 500 yrs. Most importantly, again as noted in the web-published piece, if the dates for Lewisville are as old as the most recent radiocarbon dates suggest, and lignite was NOT in the firepits), then as two world-class scholars have concluded that the only difference between European Solutrean and American Paleo-Indian are identical with the once exception of "fluting" not present in Solutrean, then the most logical conclusion is that European Solutrean derived from a longstanding American Mousterian tradition when those American Mousterians (and I am NOT saying Neanderthals) crossed back across the North Atlantic. In that event, which I believe to be the case, we (or I) are/am ruffling feathers but so be it.

One thing is certain about this book. The evidence at hand did not come from dedicated work and enormous salaries and expenditures at laboratories and universities, but rather from a dedicated and somewhat obsessive small group of people both professional and avocational who spent many years and very much of their own monies at this project. In and of itself, this is a "must read" for anyone in the world who wants to know how much, if not most scientific discovery, actually comes about.

William H. Topping, Ph.D.

In brief, the authors' thesis is this: 41,000 years ago, a Supernova (Geminga) exploded, in the cosmic vicinity of Earth. On at least three separate occasions, this event had significiant influence on the lives of creatures on this planet. 1.) The radiation from the Supernova killed or mutate species in Australia and southeast Asia. 2.) About 7,000 years later, the shockwave material began to arrive in our Solar System. 3.) A low density object (comet, or supernova material) impacted the norther hemisphere, wiping out megafauna (large animals - mammoths, mastodon, horses, rhinoceroses, etc.) and the paleoamerican Clovis culture, in North America.

The book, divided into three parts - Solving the Mystery, Describing The Event Sequence, and Presenting the Evidence - does a fantastic job of entertaining and educating the reader. We become (vicariously) an investigator, an eye-witness, and a multi-disciplinary scientist. In the process, the authors succeed in convincing us (most thoughtful, objective readers) of the validity of their theory's main points.

I like this book for a number of reasons. The first part, solving the mystery of the black mat, allows us to peer inside the recognizably human world of a scientific researcher. We get to share his travels and curiosity, sympathize with his hunches, and envy his luck. We also learn of his low tech pragmatism - using a shotgun to blast iron grains at a mammoth tusk, or tossing small objects into a cakepan filled with flour to see what kind of craters they make.

The second part provides a chilling account of the three times when there was Hell on Earth. No disaster movie yet made comes close to the intensity and devastation that this Event probably caused.

And while the third part - The Evidence - takes up most of the book, it too can be fascinating in its own right. Not only are we given the data gathered to support the authors' claim, but we are shown the reasoning which rules out previous, conventional explanations, and supports this theory as the correct one.

More importantly for me personally, and perhaps for anyone with an interest in cultural, spiritual and religious mythology, the authors take care to present a diverse sampling of ancient legends and stories which apparently attempt to convey what survivors of that time actually may have experienced or observed, albeit with symbolic embellishments being added along the way.

All told, this book/theory may explain a great deal about our world today. It implies that the event and our reaction to it, caused the prevalence of global disaster and flood myths around the world. Quite often we note that the gods or heavens were the source of our ancestors doom, and the blame is often laid upon the evil or wickedness of those who perished during the cleansing. Some say that it was because our ancestors forgot their creator, that he wanted to remind them/us that he was still important in their lives.

More specifically, the research tends to dispell the more recent myth that early Americans overhunted the mammoths, resulting in their extinction. And the timing with the disappearance of Atlantis, according to Plato, is too close for coincidence. What is not clear is whether this particular event is also responsible for the Biblical story of Noah and the Flood. Other sources cite a meteor impact closer to 5,000 years ago. Of course, the authors may have avoided this suggestion, for fear of alienating the religious fundamentalist who take exception with anything that appears to conflict with their understanding of scripture.

Finally, the authors issue an explicit warning that the consequences of this supernova event are not over yet. Mankind owes much of his current success, and overpopulation, due to the supernova events wiping out competing predators. They remark that after all extinction events, some species proliferate and overpopulate, but eventually succumb to limited resources, and suffer a massive depopulation eventually. Humans are still at the overpopulation stage, but may yet be on the brink of depopulation. In any event, the bombardment of the Earth by meteors and comets (due to the supernova) is far from over, and we are experiencing a rate of about 75% of the all-time high, about three times what it was a billion years ago.

None of this is to say that the book is without some faults. The wording is not as clear as I would like it (in places), and some of the statements are just plain wrong. For instance, Gemini is said to have only a few weeks every year when it rises in the northeast (as seen from a particular location.) The reality is, that at that latitude, Gemini always rises in the northeast, each and every day, whether it can be seen or not.

Yet on the whole, this is perhaps the most important book I have ever had the pleasure to read, because the theory answers so many questions I have long pondered, and it does so with the weight of scientific thought and evidence behind it.

It's sobering to think how quickly and without warning we could be affected by distant explosions of stars. This book is a well crafted presentation of what happened to this world after a star exploded a few hundred light years away 40,000 years ago, and the ensuing waves of destruction and extinction thousands of years later. The authors state their case in a very readable style. Refreshingly, most of it is from new research of their own in the field, not a re-hashing of other authors' work. Some of the stories of what they found here in Michigan, for example, remind me of the lone, thin, black layer of dirt deep in sandy soil I saw years ago, when workmen were digging a hole in the backyard where I grew up. I always wondered why that layer was there and why it looked so different from the rest of the soil.

Since work has begun on a vault that will hold the seeds of the world, maybe other scientists and world leaders should take this research into consideration as well and find a way to help warn and save humanity as much as possible from future incoming radiation and destruction from the cosmos.

This book is about the "Event" that took place about 12,000 years ago that is recorded in myth and legend variously as the Fall of Atlantis and Noah's Flood. Plato describes a destruction that occurred in a day and a night, and the Bible recounts the story of torrential rains and an immense flood in which most of the life on earth perished. There is also a rich body of Native American literature about a worldwide cataclysm of fires, followed by floods and death raining down from the skies. As many as fifty different cultures around the globe record versions of this story, and physicist Firestone, along with his geologist co-authors, have put together a book, based on hard scientific evidence, describing a cosmic chain of events that they believe culminated in the global catastrophe of circa 12,000 years ago. They believe that the Event was triggered by a nearby supernova that occurred 41,000 years ago.

Firestone et al propose that we are still traversing an "extinction cycle" related to that event and that may very well be so, but it may also be true that there is more to the matter.

On March 13, 2005, the UK Observer published an article entitled "Bad news - we are way past our 'extinct by' date" which tells us:

"After analysing the eradication of millions of ancient species, scientists have found that a mass extinction is due any moment now.

"Their research has shown that every 62 million years - plus or minus 3m years - creatures are wiped from the planet's surface in massive numbers. Even worse, scientists have no idea about its source.

"'There is no doubting the existence of this cycle of mass extinctions every 62m years. It is very, very clear from analysis of fossil records,' said Professor James Kirchner, of the University of California, Berkeley. 'Unfortunately, we are all completely baffled about the cause.'"

This part of the article is actually quite disingenuous. It is well known that there are other major extinctions and the cycle is not ONLY every 62 million years! There is also a very strong signal for a 26 million year extinction cycle. The different estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years are due mainly to what the individual researcher chooses as the threshold for naming an extinction event as "major" as well as what set of data he selects as the determinant measure of past diversity. As it happens, the 62 million event data stems mainly from marine fossil evidence. The article goes on to say:

"But what is responsible? Here, researchers ran into problems. They considered the passage of the solar system through gas clouds that permeate the galaxy. These clouds could trigger climatic mayhem. However, there is no known mechanism to explain why the passage might occur only every 62m years.

"Alternatively, the Sun may possess an undiscovered companion star. It could approach the Sun every 62m years, dislodging comets from the outer solar system and propelling them towards Earth. Such a companion star has never been observed, however, and in any case such a lengthy orbit would be unstable, Muller says.

"Or perhaps some internal geophysical cycle triggers massive volcanic activity every 62m years, Muller and Rohde wondered. Plumes from these would surround the planet and lead to a devastating drop in temperature that would freeze most creatures to death.

"Unfortunately, scientists know of no such geological cycle.

"'We have tried everything we can think of to find an explanation for these weird cycles of biodiversity and extinction,' Muller said. 'So far we have failed."

The fact is, the above article doesn't even mention the Pleistocene extinction which is the subject of "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes," yet a mountain of evidence points to the fact that this extinction was global and catastrophic.

Paleontologist George G. Simpson considers the extinction of the Pleistocene horse in North America to be one of the most mysterious episodes in zoological history, confessing, "no one knows the answer." He is also honest enough to admit that there is the larger problem of the extinction of many other species in America at the same time. [Simpson, George G., Horses, New York: Oxford University Press) 1961] The horse, giant tortoises living in the Caribbean, the giant sloth, the saber-toothed tiger, the glyptodont and toxodon. These were all tropical animals. These creatures didn't die because of the "gradual onset" of an ice age, "unless one is willing to postulate freezing temperatures across the equator, such an explanation clearly begs the question." [Martin, P. S. & Guilday, J. E., "Bestiary for Pleistocene Biologists", Pleistocene Extinction, Yale University, 1967]

Massive piles of mastodon and saber-toothed tiger bones were discovered in Florida. [Valentine, quoted by Berlitz, Charles, The Mystery of Atlantis (New York, 1969)] Mastodons, toxodons, giant sloths and other animals were found in Venezuela quick-frozen in mountain glaciers. Woolly rhinoceros, giant armadillos, giant beavers, giant jaguars, ground sloths, antelopes and scores of other entire species were all totally wiped out at the same time, at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately 12000 years ago.

This event was global. The mammoths of Siberia became extinct at the same time as the giant rhinoceros of Europe; the mastodons of Alaska, the bison of Siberia, the Asian elephants and the American camels. It is obvious that the cause of these extinctions must be common to both hemispheres, and that it was not gradual. A "uniformitarian glaciation" would not have caused extinctions because the various animals would have simply migrated to better pasture. What is seen is a surprising event of uncontrolled violence. [Leonard, R. Cedric, Appendix A in "A Geological Study of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge", Special Paper No. 1 ( Bethany: Cowen Publishing 1979)] In other words, 12000 years ago, something terrible happened - so terrible that life on earth was nearly wiped out in a single day.

Harold P. Lippman admits that the magnitude of fossils and tusks encased in the Siberian permafrost present an "insuperable difficulty" to the theory of uniformitarianism, since no gradual process can result in the preservation of tens of thousands of tusks and whole individuals, "even if they died in winter." [Lippman, Harold E., "Frozen Mammoths", Physical Geology, (New York 1969)] Especially when many of these individuals have undigested grasses and leaves in their belly. Pleistocene geologist William R. Farrand of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, who is opposed to catastrophism in any form, states: "Sudden death is indicated by the robust condition of the animals and their full stomachs ... the animals were robust and healthy when they died." [Farrand, William R., "Frozen Mammoths and Modern Geology", Science, Vol.133, No. 3455, March 17, 1961] Unfortunately, in spite of this admission, this poor guy seems to have been incapable of facing the reality of worldwide catastrophe represented by the millions of bones deposited all over this planet right at the end of the Pleistocene. Hibben sums up the situation in a single statement: "The Pleistocene period ended in death. This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period, which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive." [Hibben, op. cit.]

This is the event that Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith discuss in their book, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization. They suggest that, as a result of the above mentioned supernova, Planet Earth encountered a massive "swarm" of cometary bodies that nearly destroyed every living thing on Earth about 12000 years ago. They write:

"Until recently, the astronomical mainstream was highly critical of Clube and Napier's giant comet hypothesis. However, the crash of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994 has led to a change in attitudes. The comet, watched by the world's observatories, was seen split into 20 pieces and slam into different parts of the planet over a period of several days. A similar impact on Earth, it hardly needs saying, would have been devastating." [...]

"In 1990, Victor Clube, an astrophysicist, and Bill Napier, an astronomer, published The Cosmic Winter, a book in which they describe performing orbital analyses of several of the meteor showers that hit Earth every year. Using sophisticated computer software, they carefully looked backward for thousands of years, tracing the orbits of comets, asteroids, and meteor showers until they uncovered something astounding. Many meteor showers are related to one another, such as the Taurids, Perseids, Piscids, and Orionids. In addition, some very large cosmic objects are related: the comets Encke and Rudnicki, the asteroids Oljato, Hephaistos, and about 100 others. Every one of those 100-plus cosmic bodies is at least a half-mile in diameter and some are miles wide. And what do they have in common? According to those scientists, every one is the offspring of the same massive comet that first entered our system less than 20,000 years ago! Clube and Napier calculated that, to account for all the debris they found strewn throughout our solar system, the original comet had to have been enormous.

"So was this our megafauna killer? All the known facts fit. The comet may have ridden in on the supernova wave, [or was knocked into the solar system by the Companion Sun - LKJ] then gone into orbit around the sun less than 20,000 years ago; or, if it was already here, the supernova debris wave may have knocked it into an Earth-crossing orbit. Either way, any time we look up into the night sky at a beautiful, dazzling display of shooting stars, there is an ominous side to that beauty. We are very likely seeing the leftover debris from a monster comet that finished off 40 million animals 12 to 13,000 years ago.

"Clube and Napier also calculated that, because of subtle changes in the orbits of Earth and the remaining cosmic debris, Earth crosses through the densest part of the giant comet clouds about every 2 ,000 to 4,000 years [or 3,600 years?]. When we look at climate and ice-core records, we can see that pattern. For example the iridium, helium-3, nitrate, ammonium, and other key measurements seem to rise and fall in tandem, producing noticeable peaks around 18,000, 16,000, 13,000, 9,000, 5,000, and 2,000 years ago. In that pattern of peaks every 2,000 to 4,000 years, we may be seeing the "calling cards" of the returning megacomet.

"Fortunately, the oldest peaks were the heaviest bombardments, and things have been getting quieter since then, as the remains of the comet break up into even smaller pieces The danger is not past, however. Some of the remaining miles-wide pieces are big enough to do serious damage to our cities, climate, and global economy. Clube and Napier (1984) predicted that in the year 2000 and continuing for 400 years, Earth would enter another dangerous time in which the planet's changing orbit would bring us into a potential collision course with the densest parts of the clouds containing some very large debris. Twenty years after their prediction, we have just now moved into the danger zone. It is a widely accepted fact that some of those large objects are in Earth-crossing orbits at this very moment, and the only uncertainty is whether they will miss us, as is most likely, or whether they will crash into some part of our planet. [...]

"We are years away from being able to control our own destiny as it relates to supernovae and giant comets and asteroids, but scientists are working on solutions. This is not a high priority with the world's governments, however, which typically prefer to confront terrestrial threats rather than cosmic ones. To prevent one of those giant objects from smashing into us, collectively, we spend about $10 to $20 million annually, an amount less than the cost of one or two sophisticated fighter jets. Almost no money is spent trying to detect imminent supernovae [or comets or asteroids].

"Our politicians are seriously underestimating these severe threats, which are capable of ending our species, just as they snuffed out the mammoths a mere 13,000 years ago, only an eyeblink in cosmic terms. There are few threats of that magnitude facing us today. The survival of the human race is not seriously threatened by the avian flu, Al Qaeda attacks, the end of the Age of Oil, monster hurricanes, giant earthquakes, or enormous tsunamis; if any of those occur, most of us will continue with our lives. Furthermore, nothing on that list is broadly accepted as having caused worldwide extinctions in the past. The same cannot be said about supernovae and massive [cometary] impacts. Those two cosmic events are implicated in many of the largest extinctions on our planet over the last millions of years. Fortunately, we survived them, but many of our fellow species did not. Humankind might not survive the next one. It seems reasonable to forgo several of our military fighter jets each year to decrease our chances of being" nuked" from space by a supernova or a comet."

So, indeed, perhaps humanity has passed its "extinct by" date and, just as it was in the days of Noah...

"They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.

"Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all."

You can tell a "soft science" when it's central dogmas can be permanently disrupted by a physicist messing around in his spare time. The best example is how you can still detect the "post-traumatic-stress" in the voices of paleontologists even decades after "Comet Alvarez" crashed their party. Hey, they had a century head-start and like Ted Turner says, they should be prepared to "Lead, follow, or get out of the way..."

Firestone and his colleagues may be initiating a repeat along the same lines as Walter Alvarez and his stalwarts did with the K/T extinction back in the 1980's. While this book has it's minor flaws, there seems to be enough evidence here to foresee the demise of the overkill theory of megafaunal extinction. And not a minute too soon. As a big fan of Vine Deloria's Red Earth, White Lies, I found this both predictable and highly entertaining. So, just as Dr. Alvarez found pieces of the "smoking bullet" spread around the planet, so also Firestone and his colleagues have found impressive evidence sprayed out onto vast areas of North America at the exact end of the so-called Clovis era. Mark your calender and start counting how many decades it takes the overkill advocates to die off...

Yet, evidence, and interpretation-of-evidence are two different things. The evidence convinces that the Clovis era and it's embattled beasties came to a sudden demise by an extraterrestrial cause. But what was that cause? Firestone and crew interpret the evidence in ways that suggest a nearby supernovae set the whole deadly chain of events in motion. Even if the evidence is solid for a group of related cataclysms, is a supernove, per se, the best or only explanation? I have only gotten 3/4's of the way through the book and I am not yet wholly sold on that. One can take a leisurely look at pictures of the Crab nebula and ponder the 6 light year diameter remnant, 6300 light years distant, as it expands at 600 miles per second. Would such an event deliver enough mass in particles to fill the entire expanding spherical shell so densely that, after traveling hundreds of light years.... it could still plausibly deliver swarms of impactors to earth to form the Carolina Bays? It seems that the surface area of the spherical shell would be too great. Could smaller particles enter the atmosphere fast enough to embed themselves in Mammoth tusks, without also having had enough velocity to burn up much higher above ground before they could reach the surface? It seems there is something wrong here, but perhaps the explanation is that the particles found embedded in the tusks were like secondary cosmic rays: just fragments of much larger chunks of hypervelocity bodies that did detonate at high altitudes. Who knows? Maybe the particles found embedded in the tree trunks at the Tunguska ground zero will be instructive here.

If a supernovae did the dirty deed, we should be able to find the remnant, or at very least a huge cavity in the interstellar gases within our neighborhood of the Milky Way. If, on the other hand, it is implausible that a supernovae could deliver such mass and disruption to our solar system at Firestone's proposed distance of hundreds of light years, than perhaps a more modest cataclysm at closer range might better explain the evidence. Is there anything in the solar sytem that suggests such an explosive event? Perhaps, but the time scales do not jive. Pardon the digression but I refer to Thom VanFlandern's theory on the origin of comets. If Thom VanFlandern is correct, something very interesting happened in the solar system about 3.2 million years ago. Whatever could have caused that event, could also have deposited alot of hell on earth, but again, the time scales do not jive.

So, the book is an A+ for the evidence it presents, and a solid "A" for the theory of causation. This is a must-read book. It is another wonderful proof of the notion that the difference between dinosaurs and men might turn out to be due to the work of physicists. Not to suggest that "soft" scientists are like dinosaurs...but you know, it might just turn out that way....once again.

I have no problem with the main theory of this book, that a body, or bodies from space struck the earth and caused geologic havoc and mass extinction principally to the North American continent as evidenced by the ray-pattern of craters centering on the Hudson's Bay region of Canada. What I would like to draw reader's attention to is the curious coincidence that this body struck the earth at the very same spot geologists (and the author) consider to be the center of the most recent period of glaciation, a process reputedly occurring at the time of impact. It has always puzzled me why such glaciation did not radiate from the pole. Theories put forth to explain this anomaly have always seemed rather forced. Could it be that many of the scars left on the earth by the last glaciation were actually caused by almost unimaginable displacements of water as a result of the impact documented in this book?
I am not competent to assert a final answer to this question. The very notion flies in the face of traditional geology as developed over the past century and a half, however, stronger and longer held ideas have fallen to the wayside in the light of new discovery. Glacial theory is a child of the uniformitarian paradigm. As more and more evidence comes to light, such as is presented in this book, of cataclysmic meteor or comet impact we may be forced to come to grips with a new and rather unsettling story of our planet's past and the implications it may have for our future.

First, let me say that I agree with other reviewers -- this book is not to be judged by its cover. It's a very serious (but not in any way forbidding) work of science.

30+ years ago as a geology undergraduate I heard that all important geological processes were slow, uniform, and undramatic. Perhaps because I had grown up in a landscape created by the quite recent glaciers of the last Ice Age, I wasn't entirely convinced. For better or worse, I never became a professional geologist, but ever since I've kept an eye on theories of climate and catastrophe -- a pretty obscure interest at first, but recently much less so. I've read quite a number of theories about what suddenly killed off the mammoths and other large Ice Age critters of North America. Some were fun, but ridiculous -- my favorite one had the Earth suddenly tilting on its axis, causing massive windstorms and an immediately change in climate (the novel which lays out this idea, "The H.A.B. Theory," is quite enjoyable and was still in print last time I checked).

What's different about these guys is that they appear to have nailed it. Some similar books consist mostly of eye-watering trips through obscure references to old scientific papers. Not this one. The three authors have expertise and advanced degrees in a number of scientific fields and they went out and did their own research. They also have a knack for explaining their research to non-scientists. The book is written a bit like a detective story. In each chapter they lay out their questions, do their research, discuss their evidence, reach tentative conclusions, and then move on to explore the next part of the mystery. The book is very well written and has many very useful and interesting photographs. And yes, there are charts and graphs, but nothing scarier than what you saw in 9th-grade math class.

Their conclusion is also amazing -- an impact did it. Meaning that all of us live in the immediate aftermath of a dramatic and bizarre catastrophe. I'd give more specifics, but I don't want to spoil the mystery.

This book is all the more relevant as our attempt to populate the planet with several billion people seems to be resulting in its own dramatic and bizarre catastrophes. I'm going to buy a copy for my father, a retired scientist who also loves geology, and another for the professional geologist who lives down the street. I'll just have to warn them about the cover.