Supervolcano Catastrophe Wiped Out Neanderthals

"And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;" -- Revelation 6:12

"The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

Physorg: Volcanoes wiped Neanderthals out, research suggests.

New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia.

The research, led by Liubov Vitaliena Golovanova and Vladimir Borisovich Doronichev of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia, is reported in the October issue of Current Anthropology.

“[W]e offer the hypothesis that the Neanderthal demise occurred abruptly (on a geological time-scale) … after the most powerful volcanic activity in western Eurasia during the period of Neanderthal evolutionary history,” the researchers write. “[T]his catastrophe not only drastically destroyed the ecological niches of Neanderthal populations but also caused their mass physical depopulation.”

Evidence for the catastrophe comes from Mezmaiskaya cave in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, a site rich in Neanderthal bones and artifacts. Recent excavations of the cave revealed two distinct layers of volcanic ash that coincide with large-scale volcanic events that occurred around 40,000 years ago, the researchers say.

Geological layers containing the ashes also hold evidence of an abrupt and potentially devastating climate change. Sediment samples from the two layers reveal greatly reduced pollen concentrations compared to surrounding layers. That’s an indication of a dramatic shift to a cooler and dryer climate, the researchers say. Further, the second of the two eruptions seems to mark the end of Neanderthal presence at Mezmaiskaya. Numerous Neanderthal bones, stone tools, and the bones of prey animals have been found in the geological layers below the second ash deposit, but none are found above it.

The ash layers correspond chronologically to what is known as the Campanian Ignimbrite super-eruption which occurred around 40,000 years ago in modern day Italy, and a smaller eruption thought to have occurred around the same time in the Caucasus Mountains. The researchers argue that these eruptions caused a “volcanic winter” as ash clouds obscured the sun’s rays, possibly for years. The climatic shift devastated the region’s ecosystems, “possibly resulting in the mass death of hominins and prey animals and the severe alteration of foraging zones.”

Heart of Darkness Quotes (That Influenced Cormac McCarthy)

"The ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, April 19th 1992

Conrad, J., Heart of Darkness, 1899

... in the august light of abiding memories. [Suttree]

... evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. [Suttree/Blood Meridian]

... they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of might within the land, bearers of a spark from a sacred fire. [No Country For Old Men/The Road]

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." [Outer Dark]

But darkness was here yesterday. [Outer Dark]

Imagine him here -- the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke... [Blood Meridian/The Road]

They must have been dying like flies here. [Blood Meridian/The Road]

... feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, -- all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of men. [Outer Dark/Child of God/Blood Meridian/The Road]

It had become a place of darkness. [Outer Dark]

... when an opportunity had offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. [Blood Meridian]

Mad terror had scattered them. [Blood Meridian]

It was just as though I had been let in to some conspiracy -- I don't know -- something not quite right.... [Blood Meridian/No Country For Old Men]

Not many of those she ever looked at ever saw her again -- not half, by a long way. [Blood Meridian/No Country For Old Men]

... the changes take place inside, you know. [Child of God/Blood Meridian/No Country For Old Men]

The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. [Outer Dark]

... what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness ... [Outer Dark/Child of God]

For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull ... There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding ... and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives -- he called them enemies! -- hidden out of sight somewhere.

'Fine lot these government chaps -- are they not?' he went on, speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness.

I said to him I expected to see that soon. 'So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye ahead vigilantly. 'Don't be too sure,' he continued. 'The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. [Outer Dark]

... this scene of inhabited devastation. [Blood Meridian/The Road]

After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. [Blood Meridian]

I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men -- men, I tell you. [Blood Meridian]

... the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions ... [Blood Meridian]

Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be considered as a permanent improvement. [Blood Meridian]

... the ... devil was running that show. [Blood Meridian]

Certainly the affair was too stupid -- when I think of it -- to be altogether natural. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

... for out there there were no external checks. [Blood Meridian]

I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. [Blood Meridian]

You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. [Blood Meridian]

... afterwards he arose and went out -- and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again. [Outer Dark/Child of God]

Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. [No Country For Old Men/The Road]

... they were all waiting ... the only thing that ever came to them was disease -- as far as I could see.

'He is a prodigy,' he said at last. 'He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else. [Blood Meridian]

Pitiless, pitiless. That's the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations for the future. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

... the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight ... [Outer Dark]

I knew once a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars. ... If you as much as smiled, he would -- though a man of sixty -- offer to fight you.

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream ... [Outer Dark]

... he judged it necessary to inform me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man.

They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. [Blood Meridian]

Look at the influence that man must have. Is it not frightful?' They both agreed it was frightful ... [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

'get him hanged! Why not? Anything -- anything can be done in this country. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

... till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once -- somewhere -- far away -- in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face ... [The Road]

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian/The Road]

The earth seemed unearthly. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian/The Road]

It was unearthly, and the men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

... we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of the first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign -- and no memories. [Outer Dark/Blood Meridian]

... a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the night of first ages -- could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but truth -- truth stripped of its cloak of time.

'Catch 'im,' he snapped, with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth -- 'catch 'im. Give 'im to us.' 'To you, eh?' I asked; 'what would you do with them?' 'Eat 'im!' he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail, looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude. I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry ... [Outer Dark]

... my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark red under the wheel ... To tell the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. 'He is dead,' murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. 'No doubt about it,' said I.... [No Country For Old Men]

Cormac McCarthy On Forgotten Worlds

"He [Judge Holden] gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire and he shook out the wagonsheet and folded it away among his possibles together with the notebook. Then he sat with his hands cupped in his lap and he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at it's creation. A Tennessean named [Marcus] Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

"What is true of one man, said the judge, is true of many. The people who once lived here are called the Anasazi. The old ones. ... The tools, the art, the building -- these things stand in judgement on the latter races. Yet there is nothing for them to grapple with. The old ones are gone like phantoms and the savages wander these canyons to the sound of an ancient laughter." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

"All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery...." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

"This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

"The rocks about in every sheltered place were covered with ancient paintings and the judge was soon among them copying out certain ones into his book to take away with him. ... Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

"The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor host nor scribe, to tell any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

"They're gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they'd never been at all. The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there's other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

"Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

"...the universe of which you may say it knows nothing. And yet know it must." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"He thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"Tattered gods slouching in their waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a travelling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have been carried off by wolves." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"He'd come to see a message in each such late history, a message and a warning, and so this tableau of the slain and devoured had come to be." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"He thought the road would be so bad that no one was on it but he was wrong." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

"Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of." -- Cormac McCarthy, author, The Road, 2006

To be honest I don't really care much for fiction. Paul Bowles, one of my favorite wordsmiths, once said, "I don't think you make anything much out of that which is false. No. Why bother? When you can do it with what's true?" So when a contemporary fiction writer like Cormac McCarthy joins the ranks of literary giants, I think it's worth mentioning. My hand is not exactly on the Muse's pulse so excuse my tardiness.

Whitworth, A., Knoxvillian Receives Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Journalist, Apr 2007

A recently honored American author proved Monday that selling books is about much more than book tours and signings.

Former Knoxvillian Cormac McCarthy received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel "The Road," which follows an unnamed father and his young son through a post-apocalyptic world. ...

McCarthy, known for being reclusive, is notoriously publicity-shy. He has granted very few interviews for print publications and has surprised many in the literary community by granting an on-camera interview with Oprah Winfrey. The interview has not yet aired.

"It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent," Richard Woodward wrote in an April 19, 1992, story for The New York Times.

McCarthy's writing has been praised and criticized for its often grisly nature.

Bill Hardwig, a lecturer in the English department, said Wednesday, "He definitely seems to be interested in evil unleashed-people who are outside the bounds of any kind of normalcy; violence, but beyond normal violence; outlaws, but beyond the outlaw just trying to get by."

Hardwig said McCarthy's earlier works are "a bit of a struggle" in their stylistic patterns.

"Some people hate McCarthy because you'll be reading the story ... and he'll go into a 15-page diversion about whatever-the beauty of something, or more likely the horror of something. He sort of switches tone that way," Hardwig said.

Hardwig said McCarthy uses themes similar to those found in William Faulkner's works. According to Hardwig, Faulkner worked a lot with the ideas of loss and defeat in the southern post-slavery psyche. Hardwig said McCarthy modernized Faulkner's ideas.

Hardwig said McCarthy's most recent novel, the prize-winning "The Road," is a change from his past books, in which he used more flowery language. He said "The Road" is more in line with Ernest Hemingway's minimalist writing style.

"I think he's trying to strip experience to its basest level of what would it mean to survive in a (post-apocalyptic) world like that. So (it is) super grim in that way, but very readable on the sentence level compared to his other stuff," Hardwig said.

"The Road," like many of McCarthy's novels, is often devoid of punctuation, from quotation marks to commas and semicolons. McCarthy also frequently uses sentence fragments.

Though many critics have said McCarthy's lack of punctuation and complete thoughts takes away from his novels, Woodward commended the sparse style. "McCarthy's prose restores the terror and grandeur of the physical world with a biblical gravity that can shatter a reader. A page from any of his books-minimally punctuated, without quotation marks, avoiding apostrophes, colons or semicolons-has a stylized spareness that magnifies the force and precision of his words."

Goodwin, C., Ten Things That Make Cormac McCarthy Special, The Sunday Times, Jan 2008

CORMAC McCARTHY IS NOW THE GREATEST AMERICAN NOVELIST McCarthy’s fans are messianic, believing he’s the greatest American novelist since William Faulkner. What’s so great about him? Thematically, his novels - 10 so far - have a searing, apocalyptic, existential grandeur. His main characters are solitary outsiders, criminals or outcasts. Stylistically, he is seen as the heir to Faulkner and Joyce. Saul Bellow praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”. Most believe McCarthy’s masterpiece is Blood Meridian, about a gang of mercenaries paid to clear Indians from the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the 1840s, which they do by flaying them and selling their scalps for gold. “In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian,” believes the critic Steven Shaviro. “Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness.” ...

CORMAC McCARTHY IS A POET OF VIOLENCE If there is a dominant, recurring theme in McCarthy’s work, it is the unrelenting imminence of human violence. “There is no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he says. His early novels “trade in necrophilia, perversion and baby murder, and reading them one is struck repeatedly by the way he displays the bloody-minded glee of the horror writer, the gross-out artist”, writes the novelist Michael Chabon. Blood Meridian is his bloody masterpiece. The Atlantic called the novel “the most beautifully written, unrelievedly ghastly chronicle of violence, carnage, torture, rapine, plunder, murder and every other conceivable variety of barbarism to be found anywhere in our literature”.

“If I wrote about violence in an exaggerated way, it was looking at a future that I imagined would be a lot morevio-lent,” McCarthy said recently. “And it is. Can you remember, 20 years ago, having beheadings on TV? I can’t.” ...

CORMAC McCARTHY PREFERS SCIENTISTS TO WRITERS McCarthy doesn’t read fiction, and doesn’t have much time for writers other than Melville, Dostoevsky, Joyce and Faulkner. He doesn’t rate anyone who doesn’t “deal with the issues of life and death”. Writers like Proust and Henry James? “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature.” McCarthy hangs out most days at the Sante Fe Institute, a think-tank for superbrainy boffins. He has no duties, and for many years didn’t even have an office there.

Jurgensen, J., Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy, The Wall Street Journal, Nov 2009

WSJ: When you discussed making "The Road" into a movie with John, did he press you on what had caused the disaster in the story?

CM: A lot of people ask me. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who've gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.

WSJ: What kind of things make you worry?

CM: If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It's more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it's just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there's a problem you can take to bed with you at night.

Kennedy, R., Cormac McCarthy's Typewriter Brings $254,500 at Auction, The New York Times, Dec 2009

The little typewriter that clacked out about 5 million fairly renowned words over 50 years — with the able assistance of the novelist Cormac McCarthy — ended up being worth a lot more than anyone expected.

A heavily weathered, light blue, Lettera 32 Olivetti manual machine that Mr. McCarthy said he bought in 1963 for $50 and used to type all his novels, including a couple that won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, sold Friday at Christie’s to an unidentified American collector for $254,500, more than 10 times its high estimate of $20,000. (The price includes Christie’s commission.) The proceeds will be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.

Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer who handled the auction for Mr. McCarthy, told The New York Times earlier this week: “When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the postwar era was composed on such a simple, functional, frail-looking machine, it conferred a sort of talismanic quality to Cormac’s typewriter. It’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife.”

Mr. McCarthy will not be using the opportunity to go digital after all these years. A friend of his recently bought him a replacement typewriter, the same Olivetti model — for less than $20.