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Meteor May Have Wiped Out Middle East Civilization
GFD writes "The Telegraph has a story about how a recently discovered impact crater in Iraq could have wiped out several civilizations that 'collapsed mysteriously' about 4000 years ago. This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly. Very thought provoking."
>>This is the first find, AFAIK, of a meteor impact affecting human civilization directly.
I seem to recall a meteor impact in Siberia in the early 1900's flattening a relatively large area... recently they discovered that it vaporized to an unusal degree on impact leaving a very small geological footprint, the area looked similar to Mnt. St. Helens after it erupted. In any case, I would be inclined to say that this affected human civilization directly, granted on a much smaller scale given the remote nature of the region hit.
A date of around 2300 BC for the impact may also cast new light on the legend of Gilgamesh, dating from the same period. The legend talks of "the Seven Judges of Hell", who raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, and a storm that turned day into night, "smashed the land like a cup", and flooded the area.
That is from the article.101010b 2Ah 52o
The article doesn't say they vanished "without a trace" anywhere. Actually, it says many civilizations "went into sudden decline", which is different entirely. We know they went into decline, and we know which civilizations they were.
Now, IANAA, but there might be no truly objective record of this at all - nobody would write "today, a meteor struck my town". All we have are epics of Gilgamesh, and other legends, that other posts here are trying to interpret in these terms. The point is, we do have legends, and plenty of them, but we don't know what they mean.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?
Travel back then wasn't the luxury it once was, and so isolated tribes/villiages/civilizations would be rather prone to oblivion.
Also, things get passed down, but there are very few stories that do not get warped with each telling. Perhaps, too, that this story is in religious texts, but how are we to know which? The symbolism may be too obscure or too abstract for us to pick up on immediately.
That being said, the article specifically mentions an ancient story:
A date of around 2300 BC for the impact may also cast new light on the legend of Gilgamesh, dating from the same period. The legend talks of "the Seven Judges of Hell", who raised their torches, lighting the land with flame, and a storm that turned day into night, "smashed the land like a cup", and flooded the area.
That may be to what you refer to. Perhaps they didn't mention the civilizations that were destroyed because the land being lit with flame and a storm turning day into night, smashing the land like a cup and flooding the area were kind of heavy on their minds at the time.
--Dan
Sorry, E Velikovsky's work is just pseudo scientific garbage. In "Worlds in Collison" he claimed that Venus was born in Jupiter somehow, was expelled from the strongest planetary gravitational field, wandered the Solar system before settling into its current orbit. He also claimed that the Earth's rotation was stopped by Venus' passage and then restarted by another passage. Somehow Venus countered all of Earth's angular momentum and then returned it later. Velikovsky was not scientifically trained or educated, his "theories" were based on coming up with specious,impossible solutions to Biblical stories, and his work must be totally discounted.
There is sufficient evidence to see climatic change effecting the survival of civilisations, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire from the 300s AD onwards and the ending of the little summer which caused the progressive abandonment of Greenland after 1300 are both examples of when the average temperature fell there was a reduction in agricultural production and trade that led to mass movements of people and the abandonment of marginal land.
From Scientific American, page 30, Oct. 2001, in the "Skeptic" column by Michael Shermer:
Amen.Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
As for crossing the Red Sea, according to Jewish history the exodus from Egypt happened in the year 2448, or 1312 BC, so the meteor would not have had much to do with the plagues or the splitting of the sea.
Hope that helps answer your question!
I might be able to shed some light - To say that the Minoan (yes you are correct) civilization was destroyed by a volcanic eruption is an oversimplification, that was certainly part of it, but mostly they were destroyed by the Mycenean (the first Indo-European wave into what is now Greece) civilization. I am not familiar with direct references to something resembling a meteorite hit in Greco-Roman or Middle Eastern mythology, apart from a brief mention that the entire earth (Gaia) was "charred and burned" after either the Titanomachy or the Gigantomachy; but I would say that's really stretching things. Btw, this is very early Greek myth, so the time of it's actual conception would be sometime 2000BC-1500BC, maybe earlier.
sic transit gloria mundi
Yeah, Velikovsky suggested that Venus sprang out of Jupiter.
He was dismissed by the leading scientists of the time because the evidence didn't support his claims. Hell, when the mythology didn't support his point, he ignored it. Forgot about physical evidence!
The guy was a crank, pure and simple.
So anything coming from space that leaves a crater, is a meteorite.
sic transit gloria mundi
The Akkadian civilization hardly gets any attention. Silly given the fact they were more easily more important than the Sumerians. Their language was used by the Babylonians, and Akkadians. The city of Akkad has also never been located. It was only referenced as having been between Bagdad, and Basra.
:)
Nice to see them get reference after all this time.
well, as for birds evolving from dinsaurs, there's conflicting evidence.
But there is growing speculation of a kind of 'in-between' state that was neither fully warm-blooed or cold-blooded. THe problem is that this evidence doesnt really survive in the fossil record, so may never really gain credence. The belief that dinosaurs were cold-blooded is based on coparisons between modern day reptile bone structure and fossil evidence. Good arguments have been made that they were warm-blooded, but still there isnt enough evidence to disprove anything.
...and that's the end of our show. Donk!
The relationship between crater size and impactor size is a complicated one. A simple rule of thumb, though is that the crater is 20 times the diameter of the object that created it. in this case the object was probably about 150 meters in diameter.
There would probably be a record in sediments in the region, in particular nearby. I don't know much about the geology of Iraq, though. If the imact occured in deep water, tsunamis were generated and tsunami deposits could be found away from the impact site. Melt glass and tectites (and perhapes deposits of irridium-rich dust) may also be found far afield from the site. No one, to my knowledge has documeneted these deposits, which isn't to say they don't exist (or even that they haven't been found and been ignored or unrecognized). It just means no one has really been looking.
The article says that the crater is developed in sediments known to be ca 6000 years old. If this is true, the crater must be younger than that. You are right, though, field work is necessary, but politically it's not going to be easy getting in there to do it. Too bad.
The comet impact does not appear to be nonsense from those working in the field. There is evidence of a massive cloud of dust covering the earth and settling down around the end of the Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs are not found above the line of silt from that impacted and a huge number of variations of mammals are found above that. Added to that there is other evidence from the same time of a massive impact off the coast in Yuctan, Mexico. The
Chicxulub crater appears to have caused massive direct damage to North America and would have the strength to kick up the cloud found in other places throughout the world. The geological evidence points to a cataclysimic change in the Earth over a period of about 50 years
It appears that dinosaurs may be warm blooded. And more like modern birds and mammals than the lizards and amphibians. And in size they ranged from as big as a blue whale to as small as a chicken. They survived a huge number of gradual changes to the environment in their time on the earth. They seem to have a lot in common with modern mammals and birds, especially in terms of diversity and habitats.
On your over all hypothosis that mammals are superior to dinosaurs is really just statistical conjecture. If being fit means alive now then, yes mammals are more fit. But if fit takes on other qualities, then it is really a question of which was more fit (even the best solutions don't always get chosen in today's world). In the end I believe that, mammals really got lucky. They were the right size at the time of the impact, if they'd been larger they would of suffered the same fate as the bigger and more diverse dinosaurs. Dinosaurs just got caught buying into a system that all of a sudden just dissappeared on them. If the same thing happened today, probably most mammals (including humans) would suffer the same fate.
the other fact about very large "planet killer" meteors - is that some of them can actually penetrate the crust of the planet. This usually causes a large bulge in the surface on the exact opposite side of the planet.... as we have here (IIRC between the yucatan and the giza platau - no globe here so someone look whats on the opposite of the yucatan)
and the same is true with mars. however it is believed that the mars planet killer was much greater in size that the one that hit earth - as the "hemispherical" rift on mars would indicate that the entire crust moved after the impact and the many many mile high bulge on the opposite side of the planet.
also consider that the scattered craters can also be caused by ejection from a very large impact - and may not even be alien in origin. one other theory is that a largely water based planet such as earth has a greater chance of survival from large impacts as the areas hit can be quickly filled over - and therefore not spewing as much dust and smoke (given that the impact area can be filled by water after the impact)
The meteor hypothesis can be considered scientific because it makes testable predictions which have not yet (to my knowledge) been refuted by observational data. People can go and take core samples, look for glassy beads concentrated near the crater, magnetic alignmnets consistant with the location of the crater, isotope anomallies concentrated on the crater, etc. If several of these support the meteor prediction, then most scientists will probably put a fair bit of credance in the meteor hypothesis. If they don't, then most scientists will probably dismiss it.
If some of the data is consistant and some is not what was expected, then people will think more about the avaliable data and how they can perform additional tests. Maybe there's a coincidence or maybe scientists can learn a little more about meteor impacts. In any case, there will probably remain a few scientits who cling to their original hypothesis as long as the data remotely allow. That's actually good, because they'll be motivated to keep performing additional tests when most scientists will think the case is solved. Most of the time they'll just dig their own graves, but ocassionally a scientist previously thought a crackpot manages to produce data that changes people's mind.
My point is that, yes, at this point, it's certainly not cemented. However, it's not just idle speculation. People can (and most likely will) collect data, do experiements, make models, and see whether a meteor is the most likely hypothesis to explain the avaliable data. Neither of us know what the outcome will be, but I have confidence that with time (maybe several decades), scientists will be able to make a convincing case either for or against the meteor hypothesis.
If you really want to understand why most serious scientist do not bother refuting these claims, just imagine how much time you could spend trying to convince a Mac fanatic that an open OS was better than a closed one. Different universes -- different rules -- different conclusions. Why would a credible scientist waste time trying?
FYI, Carl Sagan also presents a refutation of Velikovsky's theories in Broca's Brain.
It's been a while since I last read it, but here are a few of Sagan's argument that I remember off-hand:
There's other objections too-- I think Sagan has about ten-- but those are the ones I remember.