According to Terence McKenna, psilocybin (a drug ob-tained from a certain kind of mushroom) may have transformed emergent human culture on the African savannah (where it grew) from the dominant-male structure of ape society to a gentler human partnership society which flourished for the first long period of human pre-history and history. (The transformation to “make love not war”, which is a real al-ternative for planet Earth, situated as it is between Mars the God of War and Venus the Goddess of Love. Yet according to Greek mythology Mars and Venus were husband and wife. Is Gaia their child?). But later we lost the rite of the sacred mushroom and partly relapsed to patriarchy, from which we are just beginning to recover. Yet even patriarchy was never as savage as ape male dominance, where the newly-winning male would kill all the infants fathered by the previous lord of the harem.

According to John Anthony West, the Sphinx in Egypt shows signs of erosion by water, while situated in the desert. It is probably much older than commonly thought (some 5,000 years), possibly 10,000 or even 15,000 years old. The Sahara, originally a forest, was a savannah when humans originated, only later it became a desert. What intervened was the Flood, richly illustrated in Babylonian and Biblical legends. The Flood could have actually occur-red, and may have resulted from the melting of glaciers as the last Ice Age ended. Prior to this, the Mediterranean basin was dry (this is a fact known in archeo-geology) and the Flood has filled it to make the Mediterranean Sea. When the basin was dry, it may have been the site of ancient At-lantis, a civilization that perished when it was submerged by water. So perhaps it was the Atlantis people who built the Sphinx. This is an intriguing scheme merging the Baby-lonian and Biblical Flood stories with the Greek myth of Atlantis, and with the science of the Ice Ages (caused by the Sun’s activity cycles).

There were several successive glaciations in the Quaternary Era. Somehow in this era the Gaian temperature homeostasis partially failed. Instead of keeping the tempe-rature constant, as a good thermostat would, it allowed the temperature to oscillate periodically, like a thermostat with a sluggish response. This is like a pre-chaotic trans-ition (bifurcation) from a single attractor to two attrac-tors.

This leads to further intriguing speculation. Perhaps there was a great human civilization in all (or some of the later) interglacial periods, going on into the next ice age in subtropical regions like the Mediterranean, and then completely obliterated by a flood at the end of the glacial period, but with a few survivors to start the next cycle. We live in an interglacial period, and our civilization cycle (the only one we know) started after the Flood, when Noah saved only the breeding pairs from the end of Atlantis. My guess is that we had to start from scratch, with a stone-age culture of hunters and gatherers. The former inventions of agriculture and other technologies were gone and forgotten.

The books about Ayla and Jondalar stem from this time. The Flatheads (Neanderthals) were still around then, co-existing with Sapiens types, though in a state of acute ra-cist tensions. Now we are in the late interglacial, awaiting the next Ice Age and then the Flood.