"Not a loop, but a spiral!" - the sophisticated reader will exclaim after reading the title of the article.
Indeed, even from the school philosophy course, everyone knows the concept of "spiral of evolution", according to which development always goes towards improvement, raising humanity to a higher level with each round.
If things really were that way, it would be just great and humanity would have nothing to do but sit on the banks of the flowing river of life and serenely dangle legs. Alas, there are facts that indicate that the spiral can turn into a loop.
There is a section of unusual phenomena, which can be conditionally defined as "strange geological finds", when objects of clearly artificial origin are found in the thickness of rocks that are up to several tens of millions of years old during mining operations.
So in 1844, reviews of reports from the British Association for the Advancement of Science reported the discovery of a steel nail with a head embedded in hard sandstone in the Kinguda quarry, which was located in Milnfield in northern Britain. The tip of this nail, partly eaten by rust, protruded into a layer of clay. David Brewster, who reported this, was a famous English naturalist, the author of dozens of scientific works, and therefore his message is credible.
In 1869, in the state of Nevada of the United States of America, a metal screw about five centimeters long was found in a piece of hard feldspar extracted from great depths.
At the end of the last century, a resident of the city of Springfield, gold digger Hiram Witt was quite surprised when, having broken a piece of gold-bearing quartz brought from California, he found a metal nail inside.
A rather sensational case can be attributed to the find in Austria in 1885, when a metal object resembling a parallelepiped and measuring 67x62x47 millimeters and weighing 785 grams was found in the layers of brown coal belonging to the Tertiary period. The peculiarity of the mysterious object was that the two opposite sides of the parallelepiped were rounded, and a deep incision passed along the other four sides. The too correct form of the object and traces of processing clearly inspired thoughts about its artificial origin.
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Of course, you can say that all these "bolts", "nails" and "parallelepipeds" are purely natural formations. Indeed, there are known minerals whose crystals are very much like nails. By the way, nails predominate in the list of mysterious finds. But there are a number of finds, the appearance of which allows us to classify them with 100% certainty as the creations of human hands.
So in 1891, the Morrisonville Times, published in Illinois, told of a woman who was chopping pieces of coal and was surprised to find that the two halves of the coal were connected by a small chain, the ends of which were firmly seated in the coal. The imprints of the links of this chain were also clearly visible on the surface of the pieces.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, near E-en-Provence in France, in limestone at a depth of 50 feet, workers found coins, tools, fragments of columns and stones on which there were traces of processing. Among the tools found was a petrified board one inch thick and 8 feet long. The Count of Bourbon, who studied the finds, was amazed to note the similarity of the tools found with those used by his workers. This would not be unusual if the "fossil tools" did not appear long before the formation of the rock in which they were found.
The journal Proceedings of the Scottish Antiquities Society, published in 1884 in Edinburgh, reported how, in December 1852, a strange-looking iron tool was found in a lump of coal mined near Glasgow. John Buchanan, who sent this find to society, wrote: “I completely agree with the generally accepted point of view in geology, according to which coal was formed long before the appearance of man on our planet; but it is strange how this tool, definitely out of human hands, could penetrate into a coal seam covered by a heavy mass of rock."
An even stranger object was discovered in 1851 near the American city of Dorchester after a rock explosion. There, among the pieces of rock, the workers found two fragments of a metal object, torn in half by the explosion. When these halves were joined together, a bell-shaped vessel was formed about 11 centimeters high, 16 centimeters wide at the base and 6 centimeters at the top. The wall thickness was about 3 millimeters. The metal from which the vessel was made resembled zinc or an alloy with the addition of silver. On the surface of the item, six images of a flower or bouquet, covered with pure silver, were clearly visible, and around the lower part there was a vine or wreath, also covered with silver. This vessel was removed from a layer of rock that was at a depth of about five meters before the explosion.
In The Secret Treasure, published in 1931, A. Hyatt Verrill described cases where coins were found in the sandstone at Chute Forest near Stonehenge and in the gravel quarry at Westerham, Kent.
The list of such finds can be continued further, but even the above cases are enough to make you wonder - who were the authors of the objects that have come down to us from the times when, according to modern scientific concepts, there was no man yet?
Anyone who has watched the artist's work may recall that at the beginning of the work, individual strokes left on the canvas with a brush are a chaotic pile of spots, from which it is impossible to understand what the future picture will be like. But gradually, stroke by stroke, the spots merge and form a specific image conceived by the artist. Along with this comes clarity and understanding to an outside observer.
So here, if we add no less strange formations called "black shales" to the mysterious finds in the thickness of rocks, the picture will become even clearer and more definite. So what are “black shales”?
In one of the issues of the magazine "Science and Life" Lev Yudasin spoke about the geologist Sergei Germanovich Neruchev, who was dealing with the problem of the origin of oil.
According to one hypothesis, oil is formed from biological residues at a certain depth, where there is the required temperature and pressure. Associated layers are called suites.
One of the largest oil-bearing formations is located in Western Siberia and is called Bazhenovskaya. There, just in a thirty-meter layer, there are unthinkable billions of tons of oil. What a colossal amount of organic remains had to be buried in this area 150 million years ago to get an ocean of "black gold"!
It also turned out that the Bazhenov Formation exists not only in Western Siberia, where it occupies more than a million square kilometers, but is clearly traced in Mongolia, England, Australia, South America, etc., that is, it has a global worldwide distribution. And on other continents, it is also richly saturated with organic matter. Moreover, everywhere its lower and upper boundaries are fixed very clearly and look something like this - light, almost without remnants of life, older sediments are suddenly replaced by black shale - dark rocks, highly saturated with organic matter. The most amazing thing is that the rock change took place very abruptly, and all over the Earth these black layers were formed almost at the same time - at the border of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
Further studies showed that such oddities are characteristic not only of the Bazhenov Formation - it turned out that layers of black shales are found earlier and later, and the oldest known ones are more than three billion years old. There are also very young black shales formed very close to our time - in the middle of the Cretaceous period. And in almost every case, they covered almost the entire globe. In total, in the history of the Earth, Neruchev counted about twenty short-term (on the scale of geological time!) Eras of rapid and abundant accumulation of organic matter in sedimentary strata. Such epochs were repeated rhythmically and always over most of the world.
This is not the end of the mysteries of black shale. The fact is that these rocks contain only the remains of the simplest organisms. The impression was that all organic life suddenly disappeared on Earth and only some species of protozoa, for example, unicellular blue-green algae, began to multiply at a fantastic rate, filling the entire surface of the globe in a short time. Millions of years later, the living world of the planet was restored again, and suddenly something happened again and again only blue-green algae remained on Earth. What could have caused this process?
The results of chemical analysis of black shale gave an answer to this question. Regardless of age and location, these rocks were uranium-rich everywhere. It was the increased radioactivity that caused the rapid multiplication of some organisms. But could it also serve as the cause of the extinction of the rest of the planet's living world?
Geochemical studies show that for the modern ocean, the usual concentration of uranium is ten millionths of a percent, and in the past it also corresponded to these norms. And during some geological eras, it suddenly increased tens, and sometimes a thousand times. And each time this happened when new black shales were laid. A legitimate question arises - where did the increased radioactivity suddenly occur, covering almost all earthly continents?
Sergey Germanovich finally concluded that the reason for this was the periodic activation of faults in the earth's crust, accompanied by an increase in the concentration of uranium in seawater. But taking into account the facts mentioned at the beginning of the article, another conclusion can be drawn - are not black shales the remains of civilizations that already existed on Earth, which, let's say, were not very careful with nuclear technologies at a certain stage of their development?
A rather bleak picture emerges - for more than three billion years in South Africa (where the most ancient black shales were discovered), a human civilization emerges, developing according to a scenario familiar to us. Epochs are changing, tools of labor are being improved, new technologies inherent in technical civilization appear. Clashes between various states are becoming more and more massive, sophisticated - with the use of weapons of mass destruction. The finish is sad - only blue-green algae remain on Earth, while the rest of the living world, including our ancestors, becomes the material for the formation of oil.
After a certain number of millions of years, the Earth heals the wounds inflicted by the atomic bacchanalia, and everything starts all over again. So can this process be called the "spiral of evolution"? It turns out the most that neither is a "loop".
What do we have today? And today we have just that stage of human development when it is able to instantly destroy all life on Earth. This is evidenced, in particular, by the statements of the military, who assert that the nuclear reserves accumulated in the world are quite sufficient for this purpose. And even there is some excess of them.
So, are we going to form a new layer of black shale again? Now everything depends on ourselves. Let's not put a noose around our neck, but use the spiral wisely. For this, not so much is needed - everyone needs only to be a little kinder and more tolerant of each other, and, I'm sure, the loop itself will turn into a spiral. How long can you surprise your descendants with mysterious geological finds!