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."

Comments

siberian impact

[Anonymous Coward]

>>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.

Re:One Thing Missing

[dodald]

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.

Re:One Thing Missing

[Man of E]

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.

Re:One Thing Missing

[Sentry21]

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

Re:Velikovsky said this all those years ago.

[ryants]

Uh... yeah... except that Velikovsky is a certified crackpot, and that the article has nothing to do with Venus coming close to the Earth.

From Scientific American, page 30, Oct. 2001, in the "Skeptic" column by Michael Shermer:

Nearly a quarter of a century later, after a special session devoted to his theory was organized by Carl Sagan at the 1974 AAAS meeting, Velikovsky boasted, despite all the errors and mistakes that experts had identified in his book, that "my Worlds in Collision as well as Earth in Upheaval do not require any revisions, whereas all books on terestrial and celestial science of 1950 need complete rewriting... and nobody can change a single sentence in my books." Unwillingness to submit to peer review and inability to admit error are the antitheses of good science.

Amen.

Re:Any stories in the Bible/Koran/etc that coincid

[selan]

Well, for starters, there is a Jewish tradition that the Great Flood took place in the Jewish year 1656, or 2104 BC, which would be about 200 years before this meteor is supposed to have hit. The Bible gives a chronology of the time from creation until the flood and, off the top of my head, I can't think of any other major cataclysms mentioned in that time.

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!

Your friendly NAG reminder.

[glwtta]

The National Association of Grammarians, would like to point out that:

1. A Meteor is a chunk of rock (or some other solid) that flies around in space.
2. A Meteorite is a meteor that has actually impacted on the Earth's surface (i.e. didn't burn up in the atmosphere)

So anything coming from space that leaves a crater, is a meteorite.

Re:well it depends....

[jmauro]

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.

Re:I find this hard to believe.

[astrophysics]

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.

Re:Velikovsky CRACKPOT

[Cat Mara]

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:

• The energy required to eject a planetary mass from Jupiter's gravity well would be more than enough to vapourise said mass. Also, an ejection event of this size is likely to produce a quantity of bodies, some of which ought to still be raining down on us.
• The escape velocity from the Jovian system is very close to the escape velocity of the solar system as a whole. Presumably, if a planet-sized body somehow managed to be ejected from Jupiter without being melted, it is more likely to go flying off into deep space than settle down into orbit (an orbit, furthermore, with one of the lowest eccentricities of any body in the Solar System) around the Sun. The whole "Venus born of Jupiter's brow" shtick is an over-literal (and somewhat forced, IMHO; wasn't it Athene/Minerva who was born from Zeus/Jupiter's brow, not Aphrodite/Venus?) interpretation of Greek myth. An alternative, and somewhat more plausible explanation for this myth can be found here.
• The near approaches of Venus to Earth with the consequent slowing of the Earth's rotation violates the law of conservation of angular momentum. Also, the circularisation of Venus' orbit after these transits doesn't jibe with what we know about gravity, tidal effects, etc.

There's other objections too-- I think Sagan has about ten-- but those are the ones I remember.