Friday, July 14, 2017

Memories of an Heroic Age

Something dramatic happened 10 000 years ago. In the space of a very short time, almost all the woolly mammoths died out. Only a small group survived. 6 000 years later, they too went extinct.

This may well have been a gravity related extinction event. If so, we can assume that the mammoths that survived for the additional 6 000 years were smaller than the average size of the original population. They were the midgets, so to speak. What must have been a disadvantage before the catastrophic event 10 000 years ago, was what saved them, all be it for only a few thousand years more.

If there really was a gravity related extinction event 10 000 years ago, this can hardly have gone unnoticed by the people living back then. By all accounts, the extinction event was swift. It may not have taken more than a few generations.

This would mean that people would have been aware of a time when gravity was less. There would have been stories of people lifting things with ease, and jumping a lot higher and farther than what was possible after the event.

The people must have been baffled. They must have wondered why everybody were so much stronger and agile in the past.

Could this be the origin of the legend of the heroic age? In Homer's Iliad, there is certainly a lot of super-human jumping about, throwing and lifting. The spirit of the story is most definitely that everybody were much stronger in the past. They were not mere mortals. They were all heroes.

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