The ending of the original Planet of the Apes shook me. When Charlton Heston — SPOILER ALERT! — discovered the ruins of the Statute of Liberty on that beach, he realized that he’d never left Earth. Instead, he was the survivor of an ancient extinct civilization that left almost no trace of its existence.
Stories like that have me down the path of speculative histories from a variety of authors/researchers who specialize in the concept of advanced peoples who may have occupied this planet before us.
One of the more fascinating theories I’ve encountered comes from a book called The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: How a Stone-Age Comet Changed the Course of World Culture.
Like my Planet of the Apes experience many years ago, I can’t stop wondering about this.
And yes, there is a music angle to what I’m about to outline.
Homo sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago and for the next 260,000 years, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, wandering from place to place with the seasons and animal migrations. We outlasted similar species — Neanderthals, the Denisovans, homo erectus, and several others, most likely because we developed bigger brains faster. This is not speculation; it’s accepted scientific fact.
Archeological and geological evidence — largely radiocarbon spikes in the rings of ancient trees — points to a star about 200 light years away that went supernova some 41,000 years ago. We’re not sure which star because astronomers can’t find any trace of it. Humans on the side of the planet facing that part of the sky would have seen a sudden, dazzling flash of light that created a new light in the heavens bigger and brighter than the full moon. It would have remained in the sky day and night for almost a month before it started to fade. Within a decade, it was gone.
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But the supernova wasn’t done with us. The explosion sent shock waves through the Oort Cloud, an area surrounding the outer part of the solar system that contains a seemingly infinite number of rocks, balls of ice, and other debris. The shock waves disturbed the orbits of many, many of those objects, sending them on trajectories toward the Sun.
Over the following centuries, untold numbers of them hit Earth. Some were big enough to alter the climate, leading to a period of intense glacialization beginning about 26,000 years ago. Ice was especially thick over North America, piling up several kilometres high. The Earth was cooler than it had been in at least 150,000 years. It was hard for all homo species — but homo sapiens was tough.
But that’s not the only thing that happened. The supernova emitted a massive burst of gamma radiation that produced reactions in our atmosphere. Tremendous amounts of radiation at least seven times worse than what Chornobyl had to offer rained silently down on the planet. The ozone layer was also damaged, allowing harmful radiation from the Sun to reach the surface. Every living thing on the planet was subjected to sickness and death over decades, maybe centuries. Many species went extinct. DNA damage was extensive and anything that survived could not escape mutations on the cellular level.
However, some of those mutations seem to have had a beneficial effect on homo sapiens. Around the time all this radiation was bombarding the planet, there seems to have been a change in a key human gene called microcephalin, which regulates fetal brain size. Scientists have uncovered evidence of other specific mutations to our DNA that can be traced back to the time of this alleged supernova. These changes, allegedly, allowed for humans to be born with larger brains that had more processing power and thus were capable of more complex thought.
These mutations coincide with the appearance of not only language, toolmaking, and the domestication of dogs, but also of ancient cave paintings and — here’s the music connection — the first musical instruments (vulture bones constructed into flutes).
Today, evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists tell us that for some still-unknown reasons, our brains come pre-wired for music in very specific, very useful ways. There doesn’t seem to be an evolutionary need for music, yet we all come equipped this way.
The theory continues. Big brain humans quickly developed civilization, peaking with (according to Plato’s myths outlined in Timaeus and Critias) the naval and technological empire of Atlantis. When it was destroyed by another Oort Cloud cometary disaster somewhere around 10,000 BCE (an event that ended the last ice age), the few survivors scattered about the planet, distributing their technology, math, and art through the Middle East, Egypt, and Central and South America.
Putting on my Ancient Aliens voice, is it possible that everything from language to art to music can be traced back to an exploding star 200 light-years away some 41,000 years ago?
If that’s the case, we — and all our music and art — really are just a fluke of the universe.
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