Ragnarok: the Age of Fire and Gravel

Ignatius Donnelly

Jan 1883 · Library of Alexandria

About this ebook

"Ragnarok, The Age of Fire and Gravel, proposes that a comet impacted the Earth several tens of thousands of years ago; the impact produced the 'Drift' layers of gravel which have been attributed to the ice ages; this event destroyed a civilization which had high technology, a civilization which vanished completely except for some myths; the disaster was accompanied by catastrophic fire followed by years-long cloud cover and extreme cold. Humanity survived only by hiding in deep caves; when they re-emerged they had to restart civilization from scratch. Donnelly provides extensive geological, archeological, astronomical and mythological evidence for this theory. The book is not academic and often sensationalistic, but his populist style does not seem to detract from the argument. Today, mass extinction from cometary impact is considered mainstream science, supported by a huge body of physical evidence. In Donnelly's time it was unknown that cometary or asteroid impacts had even occurred on this planet ... There have also been other mass extinctions in the geological past, for instance the Permian extinction before the age of the dinosaurs which also wiped out nearly all life on earth ... However, the theory that such an event occurred in the recent geological or even historical past is still considered speculative"--Quote from sacred-texts.com.