What was left
Three quarters of everything died, and what came through was small.
No land animal larger than a badger survived. That is the native fauna: the animals that grew here and were subject to what killed the dinosaurs.
The colonies were another matter.
Before the impact this planet was open to visitation. Reptilians held it and other races came and worked here.
They came as refugees, from their own wars and their own planet destructions. And Earth was hostile to them. The air, the water, the radiation, the gravity, and above all the vibration were wrong. So they lived in artificial environments, in domed cities, inside protective fields.
Which is why the hybrids were made.
Aerrhu, 2015: they built artificial cities to survive here, and for their souls to reincarnate they needed vessels compatible both with themselves and with the ecology of this planet. So they created such, using primate ancestors from Earth to begin with. As different versions came out they experimented and made them more compatible.
So the colonies were not settlements. They were a programme for building a body a visitor could live in. The operation at seventy-two million is one of those, using the stock available.
When the reset came, the colonies went.
And Bashar gives the other half. Sometimes they preserve the DNA and regrow the animals afterward. Just about every animal and plant species that has ever existed here still exists on other worlds, because it was taken there in one form or another.
The hybrid lines were most likely handled the same way. Removed when the planet became unlivable, held off-planet, planted again when it recovered.
Which is how a line can be present before a catastrophe and present after it without anything living through the catastrophe.
Jim Charles says some civilizations left this world before the reset. He does not say they lost what they had built.
And a distinction to hold from here on. None of this is about humans. Our own species is three hundred thousand years old, and every date in this chapter runs in millions. What was here before were parahumans and proto-humans: peoples of our kind and not our species, built for this planet and not descended from anything on it.
The big native niches were open and there was nobody native to take them.
That condition lasted about ten million years, which against the hundred and sixty-five the dinosaurs had held is about one part in sixteen. A short interval, and the world was remade inside it.
And then it got hot
Ten million years after the asteroid, around fifty-six million years ago, the temperature rose between five and eight degrees.
It took perhaps twenty thousand years. Against the ten million that had passed since the impact, that is one part in five hundred.
Carbon appeared in the oceans and the air on a scale nothing since has matched. Deep-sea life died off. The oceans acidified. And the land animals moved: this is the period when the ancestors of horses, of the even-toed animals, and of the primates spread across the northern continents.
Then the heat stayed.
For the next eight million years this was the warmest world since the dinosaurs. Forests at both poles. No permanent ice anywhere on the planet, north or south.
On Ellesmere Island, at seventy-eight degrees north, the ground from that period holds crocodiles, turtles, tapirs and palms. The Arctic Ocean itself was warm enough at one point to carry floating ferns across its entire surface. Antarctica was forested over the same span, with rivers and animals on it.
This is where the Mahatma letters put the height of the Atlantean cycle. A world at its warmest and most open, with the previous holders of the planet recently gone.
Which is the world that existed.
The land, for the next forty million years
India broke away from Madagascar, the large island off the east coast of Africa, about eighty-eight million years ago. It then crossed open water on its own, northward, for tens of millions of years. Around fifty million years ago it struck Asia and stopped.
The water it crossed is the Indian Ocean. The crumple where it struck is the Himalayas, still rising, because India is still pushing.
Africa was moving north at the same time, toward Europe. That collision began around forty-five million years ago and raised the Alps, though they did most of their growing far later, in the last five or six million years.
And the same collision closed the sea between Africa and Europe. What had been a wide ocean narrowed across tens of millions of years until one opening to the Atlantic was left, a single strait between Spain and Morocco.
That strait matters later.
What filled the world
The survivors were small and there was nothing above them.
Within ten million years the mammals had produced whales, bats, horses and primates. Against the hundred and sixty million years they had spent small, that is one part in sixteen. Grasslands appeared. Flowering plants took over everything that was not already theirs.
Orthodox biology takes that as vacancy filling: niches opened, and lineages radiated into them.
On the account this book is following it was another round of seeding, into a world that had just been emptied and was open again.
Was there a civilization
Probably not, and the sources say very little about the period.
The Lemurians were here. The esoteric sources put them across the whole span, in bodies not fully settled into matter, which is why the ground holds nothing of them.
And being out of matter is what they were for. They worked on the world rather than in it. Steiner has them building without engineering knowledge, by a faculty of imagination that acted with the sureness of instinct. Scott-Elliot has the motive power carried in the operator instead of in any machine. The early Atlantean word acted on the thing it named.
So the forty million years the ground records as primates in trees were the years the world was being shaped by people who had no need to touch it.
The primates
The first true primates appear shortly after the dinosaurs end. Small, living in trees.
They stay that way for a long time. Around twenty-five million years ago the apes separate from the monkeys. Around fifteen million the great apes diversify.
Forty million years of primates, and the stock that would later be used.
Thirty-four million years ago
The heat did not last. From about fifty million years ago the world has been cooling, unevenly, and it has never gone back.
At thirty-four million, sixteen million years after India struck Asia, Antarctica froze.
A continent that had carried forests, rivers and animals went under ice and has stayed there. The Arctic froze with it. The planet went from having no permanent ice anywhere to having ice caps, and it has had them since.
That was an extinction too, and a large one, and it reorganised the oceans and everything living in them.
Two sources place people at the poles
Koot Hoomi, writing in 1882, on the Siberian islands. The region now locked in the fetters of eternal winter and uninhabited by man will very soon be proved to have had a tropical climate, which he notes science already accepts, and to have been the seat of one of the most ancient civilizations of the fourth race. He adds that its highest relics survive in the Chinese and its lowest are intermixed with remnants of the third race.
In the same passage he speaks of civilizations of the anteglacial period, and says the claim sounds preposterous even to the learned.
Bashar, on the other pole. Among the ancient civilizations he names are one in what is now the Gobi Desert, one on the high plateaus of South America, and one in the Antarctic region before it was covered with ice.
Tekkrr, a Lyran voice, in 2017, describes an energetic vortex at the Antarctic pole, pyramids found beneath the surface, and a craft found there.
Neither pole had ice for twenty million years before the freeze. Both had forests. Both were habitable.
Whether the two civilizations were one thing or two, or contemporary at all, no source says.
And the place Koot Hoomi names was habitable twice. The New Siberian Islands sit on a shallow shelf, and through the ice ages, with the sea a hundred and twenty metres lower, that whole shelf stood above water as dry plain, joined westward to Siberia and eastward to Alaska. Open land at seventy-five degrees north, flooded when the ice melted eleven thousand years ago.
The Lifewave regressions run Lemuria across this whole span, from forty million to fifteen. They give no event inside it.
Eighteen million years ago
This is the cleanest deep-time date in the esoteric literature, and it recurs across sources that had no contact with each other.
Blavatsky gives it as a number rather than an epoch: the first fully physical being of our kind on this planet, the separation of the sexes, and the awakening of mind.
The Theosophical summaries carry the same figure. So does Jurriaanse, who adds the arrival of superior beings, especially from Venus, at eighteen and a half million, initiating mental development. The Aetherius Society puts an arrival from the destroyed planet Maldek at eighteen million, finding an already-civilized population here.
And a session from 2016 arrives at seventeen million independently, through a different channel a century later: the first inhabitants of our kind, arriving from Lyra, the Pleiades and Andromeda, onto a world free of disease and deception.
Four traditions, one number.
And whatever arrived was not us. Our own species is three hundred thousand years old, which against eighteen million is one part in sixty. Something of our kind became fully physical at that date and it was a parahuman, not a human. Seventeen and a half million years separate the two.
What the ground shows at that date is a warm forested world with apes diversifying in it.
The separation of the sexes
Of the three things the sources place at that date, this is the one with consequences.
Sex was here long before. The reptiles had it. The primates had it. The plants had it. Nearly everything visible on this planet reproduces sexually, and has for hundreds of millions of years. What arrived at eighteen million was not the invention. It was the arrival of a people who took it up.
And it came into this world from outside it. Sex is not a terrestrial invention any more than the lineages that carry it are.
What it buys is speed.
Every child is a new combination of two parents. A line without sex makes copies, and its only new material is whatever mutation happens to supply. A sexual line produces arrangements that have never existed, every generation, indefinitely.
And it creates a second competition.
Before sex, an organism competes against the weather and against other species. After it, the sharpest competition is against its own kind, for mates.
That competition has no ceiling. Environmental pressure stops once you are adapted well enough. Sexual competition never stops, because the standard is whoever is standing next to you, and they are changing too.
Which is why traits under sexual selection move faster than anything else. And why it can select for things the environment barely notices. Intelligence. Social skill. Judgement. The weather does not care about any of those.
The choosing runs both ways, in animals like us.
The sex that invests more is the choosier one. Where the female carries the pregnancy and the male leaves, she chooses. Where the male carries it, as in seahorses, the females compete and the males choose.
And where both parents raise the young, both sexes choose and both sexes compete. That is most birds. It is a great many mammals. And it is us. In human societies men choose women and women choose men, and both are being chosen at the same time.
So in the lineages where minds are being selected for, the selecting is mutual.
And competition is only half of what sex produced. It also requires cooperation between two parties who are not the same, in every generation, for the whole history of the lineage. Most of what we call social behaviour grew out of that requirement.
So: a mechanism from off this planet, adopted here, which set the whole biosphere running faster and gave the competition somewhere to go. And it became the central fact of human life.
Fifteen million years ago
The climate turns here.
The warmest stretch of the period ran from about seventeen million years ago to fifteen. The world was hot, and Antarctica held far less ice than it does now.
Then it ended. Between fifteen and fourteen million the Antarctic ice sheet expanded sharply and temperatures dropped worldwide. That cooling never reversed. Everything since has been a colder world than the one before it.
And one body of regression work places the shift from Lemuria to Atlantis at the same date.
Those regressions were collected in the nineteen eighties by the Lifewave Meditation Group, from hypnotised subjects. What the subjects describe is bodies becoming more physical over immense spans: the earliest forms barely material, and each stage denser than the one before.
The date they give is the date the planet changed state.
Ten million years ago
Lord Rama, speaking through Jim Charles in 2018, puts people on this planet at ten million years, and many different species alongside them, before anything that would be called Homo sapiens and before Atlantis was significant.
Cayce places a life at about the same depth, in what is now northwestern New Mexico.
And the Lacerta material describes a technological reptilian civilization here at ten million years, with cities and genetic engineering, built from three reptilian species combined into one lineage.
Several peoples, in several places, none of them us.