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A NICKEL PICKLE

/The Problems of Building High-Tech From a Meteoroid Wreck/

*/by Bob Kobres/*

Part E

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*Short of a full contemporary investigation of the Carolina Bays, the
strongest physical evidence that seems to link the mega-fauna extinction
with an extraterrestrial event is in the form of an artifact known as
the Lenape Stone.*

[95%x95% image here] <lstono.jpg> <lstono.jpg>

*The largest piece of this gorget was discovered in 1872 by Barnard
Hansell while plowing on his father's farm in Bucks County,
Pennsylvania.* After carrying the stone in his pocket for a few days,
young Hansell put it in a tobacco box with other Indian relics he had
found and there it stayed until the spring of 1881 when he sold it along
with about 200 arrowheads and other artifacts for the sum of two dollars
and fifty cents to Henry D. Paxon, the son of the local justice of the
peace, Albert Paxon. The nineteen-year-old collector (Paxon) asked
Hansell about the missing piece of stone and indicated that he would
like to have it should it turn up. This prompted Hansell to be on the
look-out for the other piece which he found while harvesting corn in the
fall of the same year. Hansell gave the smaller piece of the Lenape
Stone to young Paxon free of charge on the ninth day of November, 1881,
while visiting the Paxon's home for the purpose of paying his
(Hansell's) taxes.

*This carved gorget soon attracted academic interest and became the
subject of a small book published in 1885. The author of **The Lenape
Stone* <lstone_a.html>*, H.C. Mercer, was very much aware of fraudulent
Indian relics that were becoming all too common during this time period
and so spent a great deal of time and effort to establish the
authenticity of this find. During the course of his investigation, which
included an excavation on the Hansell property, three other carved
gorgets were found on this farm. Mercer felt very sure that this stone
was a real artifact of the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians known to have
lived in this region.* To date, nothing has been found to
contra-indicate Mercer's assessment of this gorget.

*Most impressive to Mercer was the correlation between the images on the
stone and the legend Jefferson had recorded.* After quoting this story
from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Mercer conveys to his readers that:

*Making due allowance for translation, and a reasonable amount of
garbling, the points of similarity between the carving and the
tradition--the great man above (the sun) looking down, the
lightning, and the big bull presenting his forehead to the shafts,
and at length wounded in the side--are very striking; and if we
compare the curious circle enclosing a dot, on the inclined
foreground to the right, with the "neighboring mountain," and the
footprint on the rock of the tradition, the correspondence seems
again too unusual for mere coincidence.* On the other hand, the
tradition says nothing of warriors or wigwams, or of planets, moon,
and stars, yet these differences may naturally be accounted for if
we suppose the stone older than the tradition, and that in the
latter the local and matter- of-fact elements of time, place, and
human agency would have been the first to fade away as time went on.
But this is not the only Indian tradition of a great monster
--presumably the mammoth--which has been preserved to us.

The element of divine wrath, common to monster myths among barbarous
peoples, again occurs in a Wyandot version of the same tradition,
taken down from a band of Iroquois and Wyandots by Colonel G.
Croghan, at the Salt Licks in Kentucky in 1748, and given in
Winterbotham's "History of the United States," vol. iii., page 139.
The head chief, says the writer, having been flattered with presents
of tobacco, paint, ammunition, etc., on being asked about the large
bones, related the ancient tradition of his people as follows: "That
the red man, placed on this island by the Great Spirit, had been
exceedingly happy for ages, but foolish young people forgetting his
rules became ill-tempered and wicked, in consequence of which the
Great Spirit created the Great Buffalo, the bones of which we now
see before us. These made war upon the human species alone, and
destroyed all but a few, who repented and promised the Great Spirit
to live according to his laws if he would restrain the devouring
enemy; whereupon he sent lightning and thunder, and destroyed the
whole race in this spot, two excepted, a male and female, whom he
shut up in yonder mountain, ready to let loose again should occasion
require."

*Clearly, as Mercer asserted in his book, this gorget served as a
mnemonic devise. Whether this particular artifact was carved in final
days of the large herbivores or produced later from images on a prior
story telling aide, the likeness of a large elephant is very strong
evidence that the legend of Yah Qua Whee was born over ten thousand
years ago.*

The lines rendered on this stone convey much more today than they could
have in Mercer's time. *No scholar of the late eighteen hundreds knew of
impact craters and the academic appraisal of comets was, as revealed
earlier, far from accurate. Mercer, thus, had no conceptual basis for
viewing the "curious circle enclosing a dot, on the inclined foreground"
as anything other than the legendary "footprint on the rock."* Ignorance
of impact phenomena also blinded Mercer to lines that, given the overall
context of the drawing, were likely meant to depict broken trees. One
could, of course, argue that these two triangular scratches were,
indeed, wigwams as Mercer thought and that there is nothing curious
about the circular feature for it was intended to represent a pond. Such
a contention would, however, be at odds with the rest of the
picture--particularly Mercer's 'sun.' *Actually this radiating
bullet-like image, with face, combined with the crater-like feature,
goes further in demonstrating the authenticity of this carved gorget
than does the rendered proboscidean. Skillfully scribed images of the
mammoth had been uncovered in France prior to the discovery of the
Lenape stone, making it conceivable, though all circumstances of the
Pennsylvania find argue against it, that the first carved image of an
elephant found in North America was engraved upon a genuine native
artifact by a palefaced prankster. However, if a mischievous
anthropological savant of this era had planned to fool some people by
producing a pictorial version of a known legend, would this late
nineteenth century joker not make the 'footprint' look more like a
footprint? And what would prompt a forger to render anything like the
image actually carved on the Lenape Stone, if this was to represent "the
great man above," whether the perpetrator took the term literally or as
a metaphor for the Sun? Obviously, the projectile-shaped 'head' engraved
on this stone has more in common with an image of a comet or meteor than
any other celestial object.* In the opinion of this author, the 'flying
face' represents a very large comet in close proximity to Earth. As
mentioned earlier, only fragments of this object have struck our planet.
The main berg continued on, likely retaining its visually dominant
status for thousands of years. Little imagination is required to posit
that our ancestors regarded this chief comet as the head, or great,
spirit which had the ability to influence events on Earth. An apparent
lack of extensive tail in this rendering does not argue against the
image's cometary inspiration. The length of a comet's tail is a function
of its proximity to the Sun; when the head of such an object is near
Earth its trail is shorter than it will be when the comet is at
perihelion. Also, a comet falling toward the Sun on a path which brings
it close to our planet will provide observers on Earth with an almost
head-on view of the object, making full appreciation of tail length
impossible.

There is, however, little reason to view the scene depicted on this rock
as a realistic portrait of what took place. It is most probable that the
legend of Yah Qua Whee and its pictorial record were composed several
decades (perhaps a century or more) after the actual catastrophe. One of
the problems Kulik encountered on his quest was finding native Tungus
people willing to enter the devastated area <evenkiv.html>; most
believed the destruction was due to the wrath of Ogdy, their god of
fire. To them the territory was cursed--visiting it might bring injury
to the intruder, or worse, re-anger the god. Quite likely survivors of
the Carolina Bays event held similar reservations.

*It would be an error to infer that the Leni Lenape were the originators
of this story. Assuming genuine native work, the only information
gleaned from the engraving on the stone is that who ever first composed
this scene knew what a living Mammoth looked like and had ventured into
the devastated area soon enough to observe small impact craters and
downed trees. The composition also suggests that the originator was
aware of what caused the destruction. Quite likely the Lenape inherited
this legend and its pictorial representation.* Their own traditional
history, the Walam Olum, suggests that they were located in the Pacific
Northwest area when the 'mighty snake' attacked; this would square well
with the vast flooding they record. *It is quite possible that
subsequent geologic field work will show that the major episode of
flooding which created the channeled scabland was triggered by an impact
event--probably the one that produced the Carolina Bays. An object
entering Earth's atmosphere can quickly acquire an external temperature
hotter than the Sun's surface. Glacial ice would readily absorb some of
this heat in form of infrared radiation and, so, melt very rapidly.
Obviously, this would quickly over burden normal melt-water channels and
soon produce a swell of cascading water which no pre-established glacial
lake could contain.* A Chippewa legend provides a bit of support for
such a supposition. It reads:

. . . In the beginning of time, in the month of September, there was
a great snow. A little mouse nibbled a hole in the leather bag which
contained the sun's heat, and the heat poured out over the earth and
melted all the snow in an instant. The meltwater rose to the tops of
the highest pines and kept on rising until even the highest
mountains were submerged . . .

*Enough though, of legends--no story from the past can, in isolation,
provide proof that certain phenomena occurred; only objective field work
will do that. Legends have been employed here primarily to show that
there is ample reason to view, as suspect, a picture of our past which
has been pieced together without regard to the potential influence of
impact events. Contemporary evidence indicates a need for a total
reappraisal of our journey through the last twelve thousand years.*

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