From William F. Warren's "Found Paradise at the North Pole" (1885):
“From the latitude of California and its sequoia groves on Mariposa to the Hebrides there is a long way towards the Pole, but we should not come to too simple a conclusion when we raise the question: was the starting point of this giant plant even higher?, that is, in the arctic area?
The Miocene fossils of the highest reachable Arctic latitudes tell their own story. With limited opportunities for excavation among these fossils, as Charles Lyell writes, “more than thirty specimens of conifers have been found, including several sequoias related to the giant wellingtonia of California … There are beeches, oaks, plane trees, poplars, walnuts, lindens and even magnolias, two cones of which were recently discovered, indicating that this beautiful evergreen not only grew here, but its seeds also ripened within the Arctic Circle. Many of the lindens, sycamores and oaks were broad-leaved, and their flowers and seeds were preserved, in addition to many leaves … Even in Spitsbergen, at a distance of 12 ° from the pole, no less than ninety-five species of fossil plants were found. "The splendor of the plant life of the Miocene period made a great impression on even veterans of geology as something "truly remarkable" …
Sequoia.
But the giant sequoia is a living and indisputable fact. While not the oldest of the conifers, it nonetheless serves as proof of the existence of some of the oldest opportunities that vegetation had. She tells botanists that plants that once have reached great abundance are dying out, and if people do not take care of them, they will disappear forever from the globe. In the last surviving representatives in nature, which have survived to this day thanks to the happy local conditions and their own inheritance of a long life, we see witnesses telling about the ancient world …
They tell us about the long past dawn of man's day. They bear in themselves indications of the extraordinary life that was characteristic of the distant place of their birth. And if these specimens of an endangered race could survive in adverse biological conditions for two thousand years, who is to say that it is impossible that a person from the time of the origin of the giant sequoia could not be more than six feet tall and reach an age far beyond our seventy years?
The abundance of animal life during the Miocene period is equally remarkable. To quote the same author again: “The invertebrates of this time are very numerous … the number of small Foraminifera shells is extremely large … Corals are abundant, and in many places they form real reefs … Numerous crabs and lobsters represent the Crustacea class … Only in Switzerland did Dr. Heer find in the Miocene layers of more than thirty hundred species of insects … Molluscs are very numerous … Polyzoans are abundant. Bivalves and Univalves are exceptionally well represented. The fish of this period are very abundant … The remains of reptiles are far exceeding the usual ones … In this period, land turtles also appear for the first time. The most remarkable form of this group is the huge Colossochelys Atlas, found in India in the Upper Miocene strata of the Sivalik Mountains and described by Dr. Falconer. Far larger than any living turtles, this enormous animal was about twenty feet long from the end of the nose to the tip of the tail, and seven feet high … The excellent paleontologists cited above report that some of the Hindu traditions would not consider it wrong that this colossal the turtle became extinct in the early centuries of the era of mankind …
Colossochelys Atlas.
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Miocene mammals were very numerous … Edentates (Sloths, etc.) are represented by two large European forms: one is the large Masgotherium giganteum, and the other is the even more gigantic Ancylotherium Pentelici, which, it seems, was almost larger than a rhinoceros … We can also note that "whales with a whalebone" are similar to the living "true whales" of the Arctic seas and belong to the same type; two of their specimens were found in the Miocene deposits of North America … A large number of Ungulates, or ungulates, are represented in the Miocene layers, and various new species appear here for the first time … So, for the first time, representatives of the Rhinoceridae family, including the only existing rhinos, are found … The tapir family is … sometimes very small in size, while others reach the size of a horse. Closely related to this family is one group of tetrapods, which Marsh described as Brontotheridae. These unusual animals, Brontotherium as such, are both close and at the same time different from existing tapirs … Brontotherium gigas are described as animals almost as large as elephants, while Brontotherium ingens reached even more gigantic proportions. The well-known Titanotherium also appears to belong to this group …The well-known Titanotherium also appears to belong to this group …The well-known Titanotherium also appears to belong to this group …
Brontotherium.
In the Miocene, different species of the horse family appear, but the most important and best known of them is the Hipparion. His remains have been found in different regions of Europe and India, and judging by the significant accumulations of his bones in some places, it can be argued that these ancestors of the horse, who lived in the middle period of the Tertiary era, gathered in large herds, like their modern descendants … with massive bony horns was first discovered here … Probably the most remarkable of all these Miocene ruminants was the Sivatherium giganteum, found in the Sivalik mountains in India. This extraordinary animal had two pairs of horns … If all these horns were simple,one could easily count Sivatherium as just a giant four-horned antelope … We must attribute the appearance of an important category of elephants and related Proboscidians to the Miocene period … Only three genus groups of this category are known to science, namely: the extinct Deinotherium, mastodons and elephants - and all these three groups were clearly limited by the sediments of the time … The most famous skull of Deinotherium is the only one found during excavations of layers of the Upper Miocene time in Darmstadt, Hesse, carried out in 1836. This skull is four and a half feet long and indicates the existence of an animal larger than any elephant living today. The environment of herbivorous tetrapods was, as we have seen, extremely abundant during the Miocene, and they often reached enormous sizes, while there were many predators (Camivora):most of the existing families have been discovered … Weasels and otters were already there, and at the same time, large cats of this period, especially huge saber-toothed tigers … Among mammalian rodents … all the main existing species emerged in the middle of the Tertiary era … And finally, different forms monkeys existed during the Miocene … Dryopithecus is referred to the form of "anthropoid monkeys" … It was also distinguished by its large size, equal to the height of a person, and, apparently, lived in trees and ate fruits. "different forms of monkeys existed during the Miocene … Dryopithecus is referred to the form of "anthropoid monkeys" … It was also distinguished by its large size, equal to the height of a person, and, apparently, lived in trees and ate fruits. "different forms of monkeys existed during the Miocene … Dryopithecus is referred to the form of "anthropoid monkeys" … It was also distinguished by its large size, equal to the height of a person, and, apparently, lived in trees and ate fruits."
Sivatherium giganteum.
Or we could recall the "colossal" Megatherium Cuvieri, whose "tibia is almost three times thicker than that of an elephant." Or, if we visit Colorado's Jurassic deposits, we might look at Titanosaurus, one of the late-discovered inhabitants of the ancient world, which John Labock says is “probably one of the most dignified animals known - it was one hundred feet long and at least at least thirty feet in height, although it is possible that even this incredible size could be surpassed by the size of Atlantosaurus "- also one of the new finds.
And again, speaking of the skeleton to which the Neanderthal skull belongs, he reports: "The teeth and ridges to which the muscles were attached are very strongly developed, from which we can conclude that the skull belongs to an extremely strong, physically developed person."
The indication that the animal world at the time of the initial development of man was a world of rudeness and monstrosity - this opinion was given an almost universal circulation of popular science books and magazines - in fact, is completely incorrect. In the light of a deeper science, the most beautiful Eden of the oldest legends appears, as far as early zoology is concerned, more reliable than the nascent science of paleontology said.
Everything that was generated by an area where the day lasted ten months, and the night only two, could not differ significantly from the places where on average almost 12 hours out of every twenty-four pass in the dark. “We should not ignore the fact that the plants and shells of the Arctic region are remarkable for their diversity.”
Arctic rocks speak of an even more amazing lost Atlantis than Plato. The fossilized deposits of ivory in Siberia are superior to anything else in the world. They have been used at least since Pliny's time, and they still draw this material from them. The remains of mammoths are so numerous that, as Gratakap says, "The northern islands of Siberia seem to be composed of a mass of these bones." Another scientist, speaking of the New Siberian Islands located north of the mouth of the Lena River, formulates this way: “Every year a huge amount of ivory is extracted from the earth. Actually, some of the islands look like clusters of logs and bodies of mammoths and other antediluvian animals, sealed by frost, carried away by the water. " The soil of these high-latitude arctic regions is so filled with these remains,that the Ostyaks (Khanty) and other tribes who do not know education believe that the mammoth is an underground animal that makes its way through the soil, like a mole, and lives there to this day ….
Notice, for example, the curious fact that while in ancient Eastern Aryan thought the gods of Mount Meru are of stunning stature, the inhabitants of the adjacent regions are somewhat smaller, although still gigantic, but they seem to gradually decrease in size from varsha to varsa until we reach the country of Bharata, varsa, which borders the equatorial ocean and is inhabited by ordinary people. And if the inhabitants of hell, located further to the south, should be, in accordance with a certain law of nature, even less than people, then the soul of Prince Satyavan, when it is carried away to the abode of Yama, is described in the Mahabharata only "as high as a thumb." … A striking sequence: starting with creatures several miles tall, it ends at the borders of the "Land of Death" with disembodied spirits, whose height is only the length of a thumb. But this idea of the size of the kingdom of spawned and changing life was not limited to the ancestors of the Hindus. In the earliest thought of Ancient Greece, the true abode of the pygmies was near the equatorial Ocean River; further to the north was the residence of the people; moving even farther, a person fell into the land of giants; while on the polar Olympus the gods were so huge that in his fall, the prostrate Ares "closed seven acres"
Here lies a kingdom of sunshine such as we have never dreamed of in our lower latitudes. Here we have such an intensity and direction of the Earth's magnetic field, with the biological significance of which we are completely unfamiliar. Here we are confronted with electrical forces flowing through each leaf of grass and the tops of the hills themselves with "waving flames."
The seas of the Arctic abound in animals. Land animals such as bear, wolf, reindeer, musk ox, arctic fox are scattered across the frozen surface of the earth, where they find food. The air is inhabited by innumerable flocks of birds; hardy vegetation extends almost to the Arctic Circle, and beyond it exists in mosses, lichens, low grass, sorrel, small stunted bushes, stunted trees and in summer beautiful flowers. In Antarctica, on the other hand, vegetation stops growing at some border, trees disappear at about 56 ° S. sh. The seas are teeming with animals unknown in the Arctic; there are many birds, but no four-legged animals have been found on land"
“As science developed, people looked with ever deeper longing at the mystical circles of the polar regions. Icebergs appear there, glaciers begin; there is a cradle of streams, there is a whale's "nursery"; there the winds end their circuits, and the sea currents complete their circle; there the dawn lights up, and the trembling compass needle goes to rest; and there, in the labyrinths of the mystical circle, earthly forces of secret power and wide influence on human well-being are constantly playing. Within the Arctic Circle are the pole of the winds and the pole of cold, the earth's pole and the magnetic pole. This is a circle of secrets….
Darwin argues that man should be seen as “descended from a hairy four-legged animal with a tail and pointed ears, probably with the habits of a tree dweller and inhabiting the Old World. According to Haeckel, this Homo primigenius - the Firstborn Man - was blackish, with thick curly hair and protruding jaws, an ape-like creature, with a long narrow head. His body was completely covered with hair and he was unable to speak. Examples of this distortion of ancient thought and language, worse than medieval ignorance, abound.
It turns out that the era of iguanodonts (a group of ornithischis dinosaurs) was much earlier than the ancient snakes of the Eocene and the now living boa (boa constrictor), whereas in our time the highest representative of this class is the crocodile, in this important subclass of vertebrates the return movement should be recognized. This agrees with the emphatic statement of Andrew Wilson: “The study of the facts of animal development is well calculated and shows that life is not only progress, but includes both progress and regression….
… throughout all the innumerable eras, during which this creature matured and improved, the earth steadily lost its life-giving warmth, its once delightful and almost even climate slowly gave way to the heat of the Sahara and the cold of the Arctic, its once abundant vegetation gave way to the worst types, and this degenerating vegetation ceased to rise to the height of the preceding forms. This suggests that the same centuries-old environmental degradation deprived of life and led to decay all forms of life except one, namely the helpless and lonely, it raised this one to physical, intellectual and spiritual domination over the world.
Caspari no less emphatically confirms that the condition of North American Indian and Australian society is not an indicator of primitiveness, but a consequence of degeneration. He says: "We know a number of tribes that continue to exist in fact only as degenerated and decaying groups and fragments of the state, which, wild and cruel, wander in primeval forests, doomed to miserable death."
Ralph Waldo Emerson was the one who penned the following expression of this feeling: “As we degenerate, the difference between us and our home becomes more evident. We are just as alien in nature as we are alien to God. We do not understand the signs of birds, the fox and deer run away from us; the bear and the tiger are tearing us apart … Man is a god lying in ruins.
Both physical and moral change resulted in the global upheaval, which Plato called "The Great Flood of Everything." In it, what Hesiod, Ovid and many others called the "golden race" of people perished - the first, the best, the strongest, the longest of all divine things that ever wore human form.
The new physical conditions in which humanity was placed became the conditions brought by the cataclysm of the Flood. These included: 1) expulsion from the homeland, as the great ice age forced the human family to completely abandon the maternal area; 2) dispersal, for the frosty and lifeless conditions even in the region that is now the northern temperate zone made the struggle for food intensive and difficult; 3) deterioration of physical condition corresponding to the biological conditions of the new and deteriorated environment; 4) … a reduction in the normal life expectancy that existed in the past …"