Timothy Birdnow

This is not just a little ominous.

It is known that the Yellowstone supervolcano was responsible for at least one mass extinction, and another was caused by a supervolcano in Siberia. And it is now even believed that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by one too. The theory that it was caused by a big asteroid has faded a bit. (In fact the volcano is now thought to be the prime cause but the asteroid strike was the cherry on top of the sundae, finishing Dino off where they may have survived, at least some of them, the volcanic eruptions.)

The article summary states:

While this may sound like a purely academic matter - supervolcanoes fill back up with magma - it also may be, rather, a harbinger; if these volcanoes are refilling maybe one of 'em will blow again.

Interesting little tidbit the last time this particular volcano blew was 7300 years ago. Know what else happened then? There was a major drop in genetic diversity among our little ole ancestors. Coincidence? I think not.

More likely our ancestor's food supply dropped way off from this event.

In fact most MEN died off, leaving a world chock full of chicks. There were 17 women for every man. Why would that be? In a world bereft of food the men would risk their lives more as the situation grew desperate, and they would also fight more wars to take what little food there was. It would be natural, in a world governed by force and where there was no women's lib, the men would do the dying. (BTW this may well have been the genesis of feminism in the first place as women, with no men around, would have to "wear the pants" or in their case the loincloths.) Probably the men who survived were lame and couldn't go out in a desperate search for food, or were powerful enough not to have to.

This is conjecture, of course, but I strongly suspect these two situations are causally linked.

The theory being offered in the article suggests that powerful warlords were able to eliminate most of their competitors and so a few families were the primary ones to procreate. But this STILL does not explain WHY these few warlords survived while everyone else perished. I think the volcano eruption may well have tied in with it.

This article also suggests war killed off most of the men.

There are other tantalizing tidbits; in Saharan Africa, which then was a lush, green paradise, the natives were genetically unrelated to any other peoples who now inhabit the region or anyone else we know today. They practiced animal husbandry but don't appear to have interbred with other ethnic groups. They are completely gone now as the Sahara desertified, and probably the disappearance of both (the people and the Sahara) are tied to this supervolcano.

There had been a sharp decrease in planetary temperatures in the 8.2 kiloyear event, a little ice age that lasted four centuries and marked the beginning of the Northgrippian, an epoch of cooler temps globally. (Also, this caused a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by 25 ppm, illustrating that atmospheric carbon dioxide naturally dissipates and this over three hundred years not the ten thousand years the climate alarmists always tell us.)

At any rate something happened during this millennium and it may well have tied to this supervolcano in some way. Obviously other things were happening too - the climate was changing WITHOUT any major human impact.

I noticed in researching some of this that there are some of the Gang Geen blaming the climate change on...drumroll please...human activity, particularly burning wood and clearing forest land! They just cannot believe that human beings are NOT the center of the universe, are not godlike in their power to create and destroy. Yet the climate had changed many times without human intervention; the Younger Dryas, which kicked off the Holocene, saw a much bigger drop in planetary temperatures and there were far fewer people twelve thousand years ago, the end of the paleolithic. (No doubt the colder temperatures forced humans to find new sources of food and thus new tools and a more sedentary way of life hence the ending of living in caves and wandering around scrounging for chow.) Human activity could not impact this cooling period but we are told it did in the Northgrippian.

At any rate the 7000nds was a very bad time, especially to be a man since you would probably die. But if you lived, momma mia!

The Beach Boys couldn't possible have dreamed of conditions like THAT: they would have had to sing "17 girls for every boy!"

Nice work when you can get it.

Anyway, to get back on topic, the supervolcano in Japan is filling up and that may be a bad sign. A supervolcanic eruption could do what this thing did last time. And it's just one supervolcano we need to worry about; Yellowstone is way bigger and more dangerous and is showing signs of life.

The more we learn the more we should realize we are living here by the grace of God and there are so very many things that could kill us. We are the biggest, meanest germs on a petri dish and think ourselves lords of creation when the lab researcher can sterilize our dish any time he pleases and start over. It's time we learned some humility.

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