The Younger Dryas Was Likely the Most Traumatic Event to Hit This Planet in Five Million Years

Randall Carlson places the Younger Dryas catastrophe in a geological context that fundamentally reframes its significance. Using megafaunal species loss as a proxy for habitat destruction - a standard method in palaeontology - Randall arrives at a conclusion that the mainstream timeline of human history has been slow to absorb.

The event was not merely significant by human standards. It was, in Randall's assessment, the most traumatic episode to afflict this planet in somewhere between three and five million years. To find a comparable mass extinction in the fossil record you have to reach back to the Hemphill alien event of approximately five million years ago - a period of profound faunal turnover that reshaped the large mammal populations of North America and beyond. That is the scale against which the Younger Dryas boundary event should be measured.

The megafaunal losses at the Younger Dryas - the mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, short-faced bears, American horses, and dozens of other genera - were not a gradual ecological adjustment. They were part of a rapid, catastrophic restructuring of terrestrial habitat on a global scale. And it is out of the rubble of that restructuring, Randall notes, that the civilisation currently sitting in the room with him was eventually built. Everything we have constructed, every institution, every tradition, every piece of knowledge we are now working to recover - all of it emerged from the aftermath of an extinction event that rivals anything in the last five million years of Earth history.

See real evidence of the Younger Dryas Impact’s mark on the East Coast’s landscape in the field with Randall Carlson. Join him for his 2026 Finger Lakes Tour, Aug 30-Sep 5.