Professor Jerry Kroth’s book 12,000 BC: Two Extinction-Level Events We Know Nothing About explores the often-popularized ancient-apocalypse narratives so frequently depicted on Netflix and YouTube. Kroth’s approach, however, is systematic in that it examines the science behind these controversies without tiptoeing into fringe or conspiracy literature to establish its credentials.
For example, mainstream archeology alleges the ice age came to its conclusion in a gradual manner while the spread of Homo Sapiens throughout the world resulted in the extinction of 35 species of megafauna, mainly as a result of humans hunting down large animals. Wooly Mammoths, Mastodons, Giant Sloths, and others went extinct because of this hunter-overkill hypothesis, so says the mainstream.
A counter argument to this view is that two major cosmic cataclysms occurred, first a Miyake solar storm that caused radiocarbon levels to rise across the planet. This occurred 14,300 years ago. It was one of the largest solar storms ever to hit the planet, far greater than the Carrington Event of 1859, and it caused massive melting of the ice caps and flooding, incineration of vegetation, fused rocks, etc. Dr. Kroth presents a great deal of experimental data to support this theory, backed up by interviews with scientists from around the world — and not from anthropology or archeology at all, but from solar physicists and other physical scientists.
A rapid increase in global temperatures resulted, but as a result of the soot rising from the cataclysm, global temperatures again fell precipitously, eventually ushering in the Younger Dryas, a period of unstable rising and falling global temperatures.
Then 12,300 years ago, a second cataclysmic event happened. A giant comet fragmented over the Northern Hemisphere destroying Lake Agassiz and causing massive flooding across America. It similarly exacerbated the extinctions that were taking place. The physical evidence (nanodiamonds, fused rocks, radiocarbon levels in fossilized tree rings) all point to the reality of these planetary shocks.
In Part II of 12,000 BC, Dr. Kroth examines the impact these events had on humanity. Besides wiping out the Clovis people of North America, recent DNA studies show that the human race also experienced a precipitous decline at this time.
Kroth then takes up issues of antediluvian human societies and looks at the evidence supporting the presence of advanced human societies before these cataclysms happened: Gobelki-Tepe, Atlantis, the Yonaguni Monuments, Gulang Padang. His conclusion from a review of this literature, in contradiction to Graham Hancock’s position, is that advanced human societies did not in fact exist. Stone Age peoples, yes, but some advanced mathematically sophisticated antediluvian culture does not succeed in passing through Kroth’s filter. The evidence is just not there. Perhaps if Atlantis one day is discovered, this theory will be revised, but as it stands, the earliest sophisticated and advanced human culture still remains that of Sumeria of only 6,000 years ago.
Part III of the text presents a uniquely controversial hypothesis to explain the rapid and exponential rise of human society. In a mere 6,000 years, human culture and technology developed so rapidly that conventional evolutionary biology and mainstream anthropology have enormous difficulty trying to explain how that all happened. Why did it take Homo sapiens 196,500 years to invent a wheel? Why was it 194,600 years before he got the idea of cultivating potatoes? Kroth provides a provocative explanation for these anomalies and vicissitudes of human cultural advance.