For years I've been fascinated by what could be considered as one of the greatest mysteries of our planet: the demise of the woolly mammoths. Try to imagine the barely imaginable: millions of giant mammoths inexplicably flash-frozen overnight.
This is a fascinating event for several reasons. First,
flash-freezing is a very peculiar process that does not really occur on our planet. Also, given the death circumstances, the
magnitude and power involved to virtually wipe out the whole mammoth genus is truly astounding.
Mammoth painting in Rouffignac cave
But maybe the most fascinating aspect of this event is that it occurred just 13,000 years ago when
the human race was already widely established on planet Earth. For comparison, the
upper paleolithic cave paintings found in Southern France (Lascaux, Niaux, Rouffignac,...) were made 17,000 to 13,000 years ago.
This event challenges our uniformitarian vision of history where the progress of life on our planet is a linear process, increasing day after day, undisturbed by any major external setback. Therefore such an event casts a different light on
our human condition and the pervasive delusion that human beings are some kind of all-mighty creatures that are above natural laws, including those that govern major catastrophes.
It is a fascinating and puzzling topic because the numerous theories that have been proposed over the last two centuries to explain the demise of the woolly mammoths - such as them being caught in frozen rivers, victims of over-hunting, covered by hail storms, buried in mudslides, fallen in ice crevasses, caught by the ice age - are not sufficient to
fully explain this mass extinction.
So, in the following article, I will try to provide explanations about how and why millions of woolly mammoths ended up flash-frozen overnight.
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