The End of the Ice Age, Flood Myths and Atlantis

The Ice Age was the Best Age

I've wondered why anyone attaches significance to the precession of the equinox. The spring equinox marked the start of the year for cultures for a long time. It's a good day to use as an anchor for the year for people who practice agriculture and it's a convenient day for making observations, too, because it's the day the sun rises due east.

In a human lifetime, the apparent position of the constellations on the equinox shift about 1 degree on the horizon. People who used even rudimentary instruments to make observations would notice, but why would anyone attribute significance to it? It's really akin to a phenomenon like moon phases.

I think the Pleistocene, the ice age, was really, in many ways, the best time for humanity. It was the garden of eden era of mankind. The population was low and spread out. The hunter gatherer lifestyle worked well and people who were healthy and well fed were probably about as happy as humans can be. It was like a permanent camping trip. I think this is encapsulated in the story of Enkidu living with the animals.

The end of the ice age was probably really bad for the long established civilizations of the time. Melting glaciers and ice caps led to steadily rising seas, and a handful of localized cataclysmic floods. Weather patterns changed drastically too.

Those changes probably plagued people for many generations. Species died off, landscapes changed, and ways of life went obsolete. Cities arose at roughly the same time and for the former pastoralists, cities must have been like hell on earth. They were relatively crowded, disease ridden and filled with garbage. Conversely, the arrival of comparatively heavily armed, horse riding pastoralist warriors probably sucked for the small agricultural communities of the day. The Mongols invasions of Europe were probably similar.

The "scientists" of those days might have associated the large scale changes with the astrological ages, and in true astrological/fortune teller fashion were "correct" in retrospect. The Great Month/Astrological Age probably arose from a concrete event but gradually turned into a more vague, hoodoo astrology hippie dippy concept and became much more human oriented as the beast of civilization started to devour the whole world.

I can't help wonder if Atlantis was just the Americas. As sea levels rose, the Europeans lost contact with the North and South America continents, which had formerly been more readily accessible when sea levels were much lower. Over generations, the story became the archetypal "lost civilization/lost city" tale because it was told by people who lived in cities.