New evidence of civilizations THRIVING before the cataclysmic flood
(Gaia) Is there archeological evidence across ancient sites from around the world that suggests civilizations thrived before the flood?
Experts piece together pre-flood history by examining antediluvian (pre-flood) myths alongside astrologically aligned megaliths on different continents.
Connecting data points from before the Great Deluge uncovers new evidence of unfathomable complexes from a mythological time when gods walked the Earth and influenced humanity.
ABOUT: Gaia offers the largest resource of consciousness expanding videos. Answer life's deeper questions and go beyond the mainstream narrative with Gaia— a member-supported media network of truth seekers and believers empowering an evolution of consciousness. Explore over 8,000 ad-free, streaming titles that challenge modern paradigms and allow us to manifest the reality that defines our being. Experience Gaia in English, Spanish, German, or French. It offers original, dubbed, or subtitled content in these languages. Join hundreds of thousands of members in 185 countries in awakening consciousness. #Gaia 8,000+ Films, shows, and classes on Gaia. Start FREE trial: cs-link.gaia.com/4f1gK5g Connect with #Gaia: Visit Gaia website: gaia.com
Gaia.com, July 18, 2025; Pat Macpherson (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly
The world's oldest forest dating hundreds of millions of years old has been found
What garden existed in ancient New York state?
The world's oldest forest, which dates back hundreds of millions of years, has been found.
Scientists have unearthed the world's oldest known forest in upstate New York, USA.
This 386-million-year-old woodland predates the dinosaurs by over 100 million years.
Researchers mapped 3,000 square meters of the ancient forest in Cairo, New York. What other prehistoric wonders might lie hidden beneath our feet?
These early species reproduced using spores rather than seeds. Archaeopteris, reaching heights of 30 meters, was among the first plants to develop leaves. How did these ancient trees shape the world we know today?
Ayurella Horn-Muller, CNN, 2/2/23; Kelly Ani, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Rare ancient tree discovery has scientists ‘gobsmacked’
Trees are believed to have originated hundreds of millions of years ago. Ever since, evidence of these ancient plant sentinels has been in short supply.
Shush! He's doing something important.
Now, a new discovery of uniquely 3D tree fossils has opened a window into what the world was like when the planet’s early forests were beginning to evolve [change in adaptation to changing environment], expanding our understanding of the architecture of trees throughout Earth’s history.
Five tree fossils buried alive by an earthquake 350 million years ago were found in a quarry in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, according to a study published today (Friday, 2/2/24) in the journal Current Biology.
The authors said these new and unusual fossil trees not only bear a surprising shape reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss illustration, they reveal clues about a period of life on Earth of which we know little.
“They are time capsules,” said Dr. Robert Gastaldo, an American paleontologist and sedimentologist who led the study, “literally little windows into deep-time landscapes and ecosystems.”
Coauthors Olivia King and Matthew Stimson unearthed the first of the ancient trees in 2017 while doing fieldwork in a rock quarry in New Brunswick.
One of the specimens they discovered is among a handful of cases in the entire plant fossil record — spanning more than 400 million years — in which a tree’s branches and crown leaves are still attached to its trunk.
Few tree fossils that date back to Earth’s earliest forests have ever been found, according to Dr. Gastaldo. Their discovery helps fill in some missing pieces of an incomplete fossil record.
“There are only five or six trees that we can document, at least in the Paleozoic, that were preserved with its crown intact,” said Prof. of Geology Gastaldo at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Most ancient tree specimens are relatively small, he noted, and often discovered in the form of a fossilized trunk with a stump or root system attached.
For his colleagues to find a preserved tree that could have been 15 feet tall in its maturity with an 18-foot diameter crown left the paleontologist “gobsmacked.”
The researchers excavated the first fossil tree about seven years ago, but it took another few years before four more specimens of the same plant were found in close proximity to one another.
Dubbed “Sanfordiacaulis,” the newly identified species was named in honor of Laurie Sanford, the owner of the quarry where the trees were unearthed.
The forms taken by these previously unknown 350-million-year-old plants look somewhat like a modern-day fern or palm, according to the study, despite the fact that those tree species didn’t appear until 300 million years later.
But while the tops of ferns or palms as we know them boast few leaves, the most complete specimen of the newly discovered fossils has more than 250 leaves preserved around its trunk, with each partially preserved leaf extending around 5.7 feet (1.7 meters).
That fossil is encased in a sandstone boulder and roughly the size of a small car, according to Dr. Stimson, an assistant curator of geology and paleontology at the New Brunswick Museum.
The unique fossilization of the cluster of trees is likely due to a “catastrophic” earthquake-induced landslide that took place in an ancient rift lake, he said.
“These trees were alive when the earthquake happened. They were buried very quickly, very rapidly after that, at the bottom of the lake, and then the lake (went) back to normal,” Dr. Stimson said.
Finding complete fossil trees is rare and much less common than finding a complete dinosaur, according to paleobotanist Prof. of Geosciences Peter Wilf at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved with the study.
Prof. Wilf noted via email that the “unusual” new fossil tree was a relic of a time period from which there are almost no tree fossils.
“The new fossils are a milestone in our understanding of how early forest structure evolved, eventually leading to the complex rainforest architectures that support most of Earth’s living biodiversity,” Prof. Wilf added.
‘Very Dr. Seuss’
AI does not read much Dr. Seuss but it tries.
To King, a research associate at the New Brunswick Museum who found the group of fossils, the Sanfordiacaulis would have looked like something plucked straight out of Dr. Seuss’ most popular works.
“You know in ‘The Lorax,’ the trees have these big pom-poms at the top and narrow trunks? These probably have a similar structure. You have this massive crown at the top, and then it does narrow and paper into this very small trunk,” King said. “It’s a very Dr. Seuss-looking tree. It’s a weird and wonderful idea of what this thing could look like.”
But the reign of the Sanfordiacaulis was short-lived, the researchers said. “We do not see this architecture of plant again,” Dr. Stimson told CNN.
He noted that it grew in the early Carboniferous, a time period at the end of the Paleozoic Era when plants and animals were diversifying as they started to make their way from water to land.
Much of evolution is experimental, with success often measured by a species’ versatility, or ability to adapt to many different places and conditions.
The peculiar set of tree fossils presents proof of a “failed experiment of science and evolution,” Dr. Stimson added. “We’re really starting to paint that picture as to what life was like 350 million years ago.”
Fossils such as the Sanfordiacaulis are not just useful in helping humans understand how life changed in the past, they can help scientists figure out where life on our planet might be headed next.
The existence of this particular species suggests that trees of the period were starting to occupy different ecological niches beyond what was previously understood, according to the researchers behind its discovery.
Dr. Gastaldo sees this as an indication that plants — much like early invertebrates — were experimenting with how they adapted to the environment.
The earthquake that likely led to the trees’ fossilization also offers new geological evidence of what may have been occurring in Earth’s systems at the same moment in time.
“This is really the first evidence we have of [a tree] that would be between what grows on the ground and what would tower way above the ground,” Dr. Gastaldo said. “What else was there?”
Steve Quayle was interviewed on a classic Coast to Coast episode discussing the mountain of evidence for giants (called asuras or "titans" in Buddhism).
There is a growing body of fossil evidence that is hidden away -- except in Central and South America and a jaw and enormous artifacts in the US. Quayle's book LongWalkers explores the story of a fresh redheaded giant with extra digits and two rows of teeth brought out of Afghanistan by the US military.
There is a worldwide history of giants as well as architecture built for and by them -- Sumerian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Judeo-Christian. Many modern giants are regarded as anomalies or simply relegated to basketball (such as Shaquille O'Neal, shown alongside his new girlfriend Nicole Alexander).
But the giants recorded in histories around the world were strong, voracious, war-like titans, the hybrid result of miscegenation with humans. Documented scientific cases of skeletons, sightings, interaction, artifacts, uncounted burial mounds, and native legends go back hundred of years by early explorers in the US and elsewhere -- many of them concerning Native American tribes of "savage" giants among ordinary nations.
Buddhism speaks not only of asuras but also nagas (which can mean reptilian or any massive creature), cannibalistic cave and forest-dwelling ogres (yakkhas), and hungry "ghosts" (pretas and bhumma-devas) who are often chimeras (crossbred animals from bestial acts).
Not only giants, but bestial fallen angels (inimical visitors from space), mermaids, and monsters are recorded in the histories of Sumerians, Aztecs, Incas, Peruvians, Native Americans, Irish, British, East Indian, Pharaohs, biblical figures, and many other "mythological" creatures. More interestingly, some small percentage exist to this day on the planet.
(July 4, 2011) On the cutting edge of science and culture issues, dissident intellectual Michael Cremo will appear on Coast to Coast for a radio interview discussing his continuing work in the field of forbidden archeology -- looking at human origins including artifacts and discoveries that do not fit into conventional time lines and theories promoted by academic and scientific circles.
Vedic/Indian Time Scales Michael Cremo What does Krishna mean by the beginning of creation? According to the Puranas (Vedic histories), there have been innumerable "creations" in the course of cyclical time.
The basic unit of Vedic cyclical time is the day of Brahma, which lasts 4.32 billion years. The day of Brahma (which Buddhism and other Indian traditions call a kalpa) is followed by a night of Brahma, also lasting 4.32 billion years.
The cycle of days and nights of Brahma goes on for Brahma's lifetime of one hundred years (36,000 nights), equivalent to 311.04 trillion human years. During the day of Brahma, life, including human life, is manifest. During the night of Brahma, it is not. More
These government autopsy photos released as "leaks" try to promote the view that "space aliens" are strange, scary, and dangerous. The truth is they blend in and breed with humans. A former Canadian defense minister, U.S. Air Force pilots, and even Stephen Hawking insist that alien life IS out there (CNET). NASA Scientist Has Fossil Evidence of Alien Life
Living in the Bay Area, one often wonders where certain beings really came from. And it seems that the pressure for authorities to admit that everything down here isn't exactly human increases every day. Now an astrobiologist with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Dr. Richard B. Hoover, has added to the excitement.
Hoover has spent considerable years traveling to remote places like Alaska and Siberia. There, he's collected meteorites, which he's taken back to his lab and examined. He published his conclusions yesterday in the Journal of Cosmology, and one can only describe his findings as very, very interesting. His conclusions came out of deep examination of CI1 carbonaceous chondrites--meteorites that you don't come across terribly often. Apparently, there are only nine of them on earth. More>>
China's Yiren, "Wild Man," in Buddhist lore a Yakkha, "ogre," like the Himalayan Yeti
There's an expression about "giving the devil his due." China may be the devil in this case -- atrocities in Tibet and other ethnic provinces and getting ready to consume the consumer world -- and it deserves its due. It does everything better nowadays. It crushes the US economy (by our unpayable debt), rules exports, builds staggering supercomputers, dams, bullet trains, space programs, railroads in the Himalayas, and even accepts WalMart's penny pinching prices.
Now it undertakes a fame-making, legend-busting breakthrough -- proving that Bigfoot exists once and for all. Except in China Bigfoot is known as the Wild Man. [We maintain these creatures found around the world are yakkhas, ogres in Buddhist cosmology, a kind of intelligent ape, gorilla, simian somewhere between a human and a bonobo.] Recent discoveries of a new kind of monkey in Burma and a langur in Indonesia may be news to science, but it isn't news to the locals.
Inhabitants of mountains and forests know abominable Bigfoot creatures exist as guardians of the natural environment and possess intuition or a sixth sense that has allowed them to evade confirmed detection. Not that any proof short of many corpses and endless DNA samples, acceptance by "experts" and officials, will really convince anyone at this point. We don't really want to believe. And when we're forced to, we'll say we knew all along.
China to search for elusive "Bigfoot"
(Fox News) North America has its Sasquatch "Bigfoot," [Nepal has its Yeti, "Abominable Snowman"], and China has its [Yiren] "Wild Man."
A group of Chinese scientists are on the hunt for the Yeren, the Chinese equivalent of our Bigfoot. Scientists and international researchers refer to the Yeren as "Wild Man" and are on a renewed quest to find him.
Thirty years ago, China's Academy of Science sent three teams of researchers looking for the mysterious creature. Those teams turned up surprising results: hair, excrement, footprints, and a possible "Wild Man" sleeping nest. Alas, those findings weren't conclusive, so they areat it again.
This time around the members of the Hubei Wild Man Research Association are hoping to collect donations to help catch the legendary creature. They need $1.5 million to kick off the project.
This research is not without its merits. Over the years people have reported400 sightings of a reddish hair ape-like man that looks a lot like an Orangutan but stands nearly 7ft tall. Nicholas Redfern, one of the world's leading cryptozoologists, thinks this newest expedition in China is worthwhile because of the fossil record.
"A lot of monster stories can be traced back to myth and folk lore. What people don't know is that in this instance we actually have the fossil record of a large ape-like creature that lived in that area over 300,000 years ago," Redfern told FoxNews.com.
In fact, primatologists have jaw bones, teeth and other bones from a creature found in that area known as Gigantopithecus that would've measured nearly 9ft tall (but probably hunched like an ape). More>>
Cartoon depictions of the first animals to emerge from the ocean and walk on land often show simple fish with feet venturing onto land. But Jennifer Clack, a paleonto-logist at the University of Cambridge who has studied the fossils of these extinct creatures for more than two decades, says the earliest land vertebrates -- also known as tetrapods -- were more diverse than we could possibly imagine.
Artist's depiction of the tree-of-life for early tetrapods, showing 100 million years of palate evolution and diversification with the outer edges of the diagram representing the diversity of palate size and shape (artwork by Brian Sidlauskas).
“Some looked like crocodiles, some looked like little lizards, some like moray eels, and some were snake-like,” Clack said. “They occupied all sorts of niches and habitats. And they varied tremendously in size -- from about four inches (10 cm) long to 16 feet (5 meters).”
Long before mammals, birds, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the first four-legged creatures took their first steps onto land and quickly inhabited a wide range of ter-restrial environments. These early land vertebrates varied considerably in size and shape, Clack added.
“One of the big questions at the moment is, Where did modern amphibians come from?” Clack explained. “One of the hypotheses is that they have evolved by paedomorphosis and miniaturization from early tetrapods. This study lends weight to that idea.”
The team's results will be detailed in the July 16, 2009 online issue of the Journal of Anatomy.More>>
Ancient Mammals Wintered in Warm, Dark Arctic Frances Alonzo (VOA, 6/12/09)
Diorama of plant and animal life in the Eocene High Arctic (AMNH).
Fifty-three million years ago, scientists say the Arctic was a warm, swamp-like environment filled with plants and vegetation. Recent findings suggest a large number of mammals thrived there year round including six months of a dark, Arctic winter.
In a study released in June’s issue of Geology, scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder say through the analyses of carbon and oxygen isotopes in fossil teeth, they uncovered evidence that during the winter, mammals ate twigs, leaf litter, and fungi.
Field search for mammal fossils in the High Arctic in 2004.
The chief author of the study, Jaelyn Eberle says a few types of animals found at that time were hippo-like creatures, rhino-type animals, as well as distant cousins of tapirs, primates, flying lemurs, and rodents “did not migrate” and could withstand “months of continuous darkness.” More>>
PARIS (AFP) – The tiny an-cient humans dubbed hobbits, whose remains were discovered on an Indonesian island in 2003, were a previously unknown species altogether, according to two new studies.
Debate has raged in the scientific community since the fossils were found on the island of Flores, with some experts insisting they were descended from Homo erectus and others saying evolution could not account for their small brains.
About three feet (a meter) tall and weighing 65 pounds (30 kilos), the tiny, tool-making hunters may have roamed the remote island as recently as 8,000 years ago. Their fossils are about 18,000 years old.
Many scientists have said Homo floresiensis, as the creature is now formally known, was a prehistoric human stunted by natural selection... More>>
PHOTO: U. of Wollongong, Australia, artist's impression of a human species discovered on Indonesian in 2003. Diminutive humans are a new species, not pygmies with shrivelled brains, researchers reported (Daily Mail/Nat'l Geo).
What three-foot tall humans might have looked like (0:29)
Artist's conception of asteroid impact leading to mass extinction (space.com; msnbc).
The great impact of an asteroid that might have wiped out the dinosaurs apparently didn't get all of them. New fossil evidence suggests some dinosaurs survived for up to half a million years after the impact in remote parts of New Mexico and Colorado.
The whole idea that a space rock destroyed the dinosaurs has become controversial in recent years. Many scientists now suspect other factors were involved, from increased volcanic activity to climate change. Either way, some 70 percent of life on Earth perished, and an asteroid impact almost surely played a role. More>>
All materials on this site are submitted by editors and readers. All images, unless otherwise noted, were taken from the Internet and are assumed to be in the public domain.
In the event that there is still a problem, issue, or error with copyrighted material, the break of the copyright is unintentional and noncommercial, and the material will be removed immediately upon presented proof.
Contact us by submitting a comment marked "private."
Do not follow this journal if you are under vinaya or parental restrictions. Secure protection by Sucuri.
Wisdom Quarterly: American Buddhist Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at creativecommons.org/about/licenses.
(July 4, 2011) On the cutting edge of science and culture issues, dissident intellectual 
![China has its [Yiren] "Wild Man."](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5JMyLWLiLHSbAj7YJwTeeBE5zPJxStcxZ898Kj3TrkDUwrrRQHAl6-ikfSw2WVEo7Z_s7Bfy8jGEyENkJZ-NXKYB0lAbHBZiF6u6gCbhsHJY3LiqzsI6xRjX86O1e-asf8KZr9LIKHqg/s1600/yeren.jpg){kind=link}
