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

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: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.