Expedition to the ancestors. "Migrant Boulders"
This is what they are - “migrant boulders”. Photo krasivoe-foto.ru
There is no movement, said the bearded sage.
Another was silent and began to walk before him.
He could not have objected more strongly;
All praised the convoluted answer.
But, gentlemen, this is a funny case
Another example comes to mind:
After all, every day the sun walks before us,
However, stubborn Galileo is right.
AS Pushkin
Another was silent and began to walk before him.
He could not have objected more strongly;
All praised the convoluted answer.
But, gentlemen, this is a funny case
Another example comes to mind:
After all, every day the sun walks before us,
However, stubborn Galileo is right.
AS Pushkin
Migrants and migrations. Not long ago, in his commentary to the next article in the “Expedition to the Ancestors” series, one of our readers did not understand an error made in the text and asked for clarification - “is it not from the flood” that the given dating was given. They say that different faiths define the “global flood,” as well as the “creation of the world,” in different ways, so it is advisable to clarify the dates! Moreover, the flood itself is “denied by science altogether.”
I explained to the interested person that I was mistaken, they say, it happens. Even in reputable publications published in the USSR, after their publication, errors were found and... special leaflets were printed indicating the pages and “how to do it correctly.” Well, then I thought: what exactly does science deny, which science and at what specific time? Because it was science that put forward the most, let’s say, “funny hypotheses” and then defended them with great motivation. And then new knowledge was found that changed everything. And since "story science" is interesting in the same way as any other "history", we will now talk about these views on the very recent past.
Ah, boulders, you are my boulders...
Other mysteries of nature and society are so cunningly disguised that they are never immediately visible. While others - here they lie on the surface right under your nose. Here, let's say, huge, smoothly polished boulders. There are many of them among the steppes of the Russian Plain, where there are no other stones at all; they are found, in abundance, in the north of continental Europe, and even in the north of Canada, far from the mountains, also huge boulders - one larger than the other.
In the past, people could not give a logically consistent explanation for such a strange phenomenon and attributed the appearance of these boulders to the machinations of evil spirits. And only towards the end of the 10th century it was finally established that more than 000 years ago, namely during the Great Glaciation, these stones were brought with them and scattered across the area by an ancient glacier of incredible thickness!
Glaciation 27 years ago. Photo: icemap.no
A riddle for the inquisitive mind
How often do people talk about how we need to trust our common sense. But how far can this “meaning” go in relation to the case of boulders? Do they meet in an open field? Yes, they are dating! And at the top of the hill? And there are... If you take a closer look, you will notice that the soil under the block is loose, grass is even growing. That is, common sense will tell us that the stone here is foreign, that it came from... “out of nowhere.”
But how did he get here? What force brought him here and from what distant places? Common sense can say that he did not fall from the sky (otherwise he would have sunk very deeply!), and, of course, he did not grow up on the spot either.
If there was only one boulder, it would be possible to assume that people brought it here, say, for ritual purposes. But there are millions of these boulders! And here that same common sense comes to the rescue, because in this case you should not think, but... know!
Glaciation 27 years ago. Photo: icemap.no
Traces of the Flood!
For a long time no one paid any attention to these boulders. But the Age of Enlightenment came, sailors visited different lands and countries, seas, oceans, and it was then that European scientists began to think: where did these stones come from in their native lands? What if these stones are nothing more than traces of the Great Flood, when the waves that rushed onto the shore hit them with force one against the other and thus smoothed them out?
A scientific society was created in Germany, which set as its goal to find the homeland of these boulders, which were scientifically called erratic, that is, “wandering.” But in vain the members of this society went to the mountains, scoured the hills, trying to find rocks identical to the rocks of local boulders. It was not possible to find such rocks nearby!
Glaciation 18 years ago. Photo: icemap.no
By the end of the XNUMXth century, it was finally discovered that most boulders were made of granite. But how and why are these “primordial stones” located above loose sedimentary rocks, what force extracted them from the bowels of the earth? The science of that time could not give an answer to these questions.
Migrant stones
And here the German scientists Leopold von Buch and Johann Friedrich Gausmann found in Scandinavia the very rocks that made up the boulders in their homeland. And Russian travelers and geologists Pyotr Pallas, Ivan Lepekhin, Vasily Severgin and Grigory Razumovsky also found the place from where the “migrant stones” came to the Russian Plain.
It turned out that this was Finland and, again, Scandinavia.
Just what kind of force tore these boulders from the pristine mountains, rolled them smoothly, and even transported them many hundreds of miles from their original native places?
Glaciation 15 years ago. Photo: icemap.no
And it was then that the Swiss Horace Saussure discovered blocks of granites and gneisses in the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland. Moreover, it was known that such rocks occur in the central part of the Alpine ridge. And how then could they end up in the Jura Mountains, overcoming mountain valleys and passes?
So he suggested that glaciers in the Alps once upon a time were larger than modern ones, and it was they who moved these boulders over a distance of many tens of kilometers.
Plutonists vs Neptunists
But he was immediately asked the question, where did the “stray stones” on the plains come from?
Moreover, both the Plutonists, who gave preference to the influence of internal forces on the relief of the planet, and the Neptunists, who advocated the Great Flood, undertook to answer it. It is interesting that our Mikhailo Lomonosov also belonged to the plutonists, who believed that they created it the way it became - volcanoes. The Plutonists came up with a witty proposal, again, at the level of common sense. Since the Alps are young mountains, and were raised to the surface from the bowels of the earth relatively recently, these boulders allegedly simply rolled down from their peaks. Moreover, the rise was accompanied by volcanic eruptions and explosions, which threw stones over long distances.
Glaciation 11600 years ago. Photo: icemap.no
Yes, but how did these boulders end up “thrown” across the Baltic from Scandinavia to the Russian Plain?
And Horace Saussure found a solution from the standpoint of Neptunism. They say there were large glacial lakes in the mountains. Earthquakes destroyed their lintels, and water from them rushed into the valleys and carried stones with it. This happens in the mountains, but how strong did the flow have to be for it to reach from the Baltic to the Russian Plain without weakening?
Therefore, the Neptunists declared that the “migrant boulders” are real witnesses of the Flood. They say that the waters of the northern seas and the Arctic Ocean rushed to the south and brought them with them from Scandinavia.
Glaciation and caves where people lived
True, it was no longer a worldwide flood, but a kind of northern great flood.
And then the French zoologist Georges Cuvier, having studied the remains of a number of extinct animals, including mammoths, concluded that in the past in the Northern Hemisphere it was much colder than now. So the waters of the flood did not need to be so turbulent. The sea could gradually flood the plains, icebergs floated on the water, but migrating boulders lay on them.
We just had an ice age...
Jean-Pierre Perrodin, a hunter from the Southern Alps, offered a different explanation, not only for the boulders, but also for the ramparts of loose rock on the plains. In his opinion, they were formed by huge ancient glaciers, and it was they who brought these boulders with them.
It is interesting that geographers did not support this idea of his at first. But our Russian mineralogist Vasily Severgin spoke in favor of it, writing:
“As for the Finnish mountains in particular, it is likely that they were covered with ancient ice... that the ice rolled along with it the torn off masses; that some of them were left separately in the swamps; melted ice in the depths produced lakes.”
This hypothesis seemed incredible to many scientists, but how else could it be possible to explain the presence of loose sediments, very similar to marine sediments, but completely devoid of any remains of marine life?
Well, then the Swiss-American scientist Jean Louis Agassiz, in his essay “Research on Glaciers,” moved on to global generalizations:
“The Earth became covered with an icy crust that stretched from the North Pole to most of the Northern Hemisphere.”
The great glaciation of the planet, in his opinion, was sudden in the spirit of Cuvier. And this hypothesis made such a strong impression on the scientific world that the popularizer of science, a certain Wilhelm Belsche, even spoke about it like this:
“The picture of the ice sheet is so monstrous that fantasy is barely able to follow it... We are forced to imagine such a mass of ice that at first glance it becomes scary even for the theory itself.”
P. A. Kropotkin in the 1880s
To science from the dungeon!
But the most interesting from all points of view was the “Research on the Ice Age”, written nowhere else, but in the harsh dungeons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, by the famous geographer, anarchist and representative of the princely family of the Kropotkins - Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin. In prison, many prisoners went crazy, but he worked, wrote, occupied his mind, in general, he had no time for “that.”
And here’s what’s interesting: the theory of the ice age was proposed almost simultaneously by the Swiss Jean Louis Agassiz, the Scotsman John Geikie, the Swede Otto Thorell and our compatriot Peter Kropotkin!
Throughout the XNUMXth century, this theory developed and has now reached the level of awareness of “well, who didn’t know this.”
This is how they studied ancient stones and mountains. The drawing was made by P. A. Kropotkin during a Siberian expedition between 1862 and 1865.
However, several years ago there lived in Penza a fireman who wrote in the local newspaper that the Great Flood happened, that the ancient Egyptians knew about it and built the Great Pyramids - “breakwaters from the flood.”
But, it is clear that this is nothing more than a “burp” from some overabundance of knowledge, which our society today is so guilty of, confusing “weak minds”...
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