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

instance in Celtic lore

[iskander]

Wouldn't somebody have survived (maybe somebody who was traveling at the time) and passed the story of this down through history?

I think I have a candidate for you to consider. The so-called pre-Roman Celts of what is now France and northwestern Spain feared that the sky might fall on their heads. Although the so-called Celtic (as opposed to Basque) ethnic groups in present-day France and the mountains in the north of Spain (Liguri, Asturi, Kantauri, Gallici) most probably came from other mountain homelands in Europe, like (in the case of the probably Celtic Liguri) the Alps, poet and historian Robert Graves has pointed to similarities between Celtic myths of the western Celts (Spanish, Irish, Welsh, and Brittonic) and myths which were "displaced" in early recorded history (euphemism for ethnically cleansed) in lands that were later to become Greece and Persia. Now, it seems reasonable to object that people that far west could not have seen this event, but it is known that Celts, who preferred to live in easily -defended high grounds, periodically migrated in large groups; Julius Caesar reported that, during his "last" campaign against the Gauls, thousands of Celts passed near his encampment, apparently on their way to the Iberian peninsula. What I am trying to say is that the Celts may well have lived that far east a long time ago; indeed, not so long ago, the Isauri [sp?] were a well-documented (and almost certainly Celtic) pain in the ass in the middle east -- during early recorded history, IIRC. Or maybe there were many meteor impacts, some of which remain to be discovered near the traditional Celtic homelands. In any case, I don't know whether the collective Celtic memory of the sky "falling" is linked to the cataclysm alluded to in the article, but it's an interesting conjecture -- one that I make on no authority (I am not a historian) strictly for the sake of discussion.