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Did an Exploding Comet Doom Early Americans?
New Scientist outlines a new theory on the demise of the Clovis people in the southwest US over 10,000 years ago. A group of 25 researchers speculates that a comet exploded over ice-covered Canada 12,900 years ago and triggered a firestorm across North America that not only wiped out the Clovis people but also forced a number of large land mammals into extinciton and kicked off the Younger Dryas climate change. However, geologists are pretty conservative folks, according to the article, and some of them are not buying it.
According to TFA, the firestorm seems to be the most controversial part of their claims. All the dissenting voices in the article made mention of it.
According to the abstracts of the research, it looks like the strongest evidence of a trans-american firestorm is "... a carbon-rich black layer commonly referred to as a black mat, with a basal age of approximately 12.9 ka, ... identified at over 50 sites across North America"
-P
Be my friend.
Humans have only existed for 4000 years. What a joke....
The following replies are posted by unwashed nerds.
Wow! That Firestorm sounds like one Hell of a Shit Storm!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
According to Wikipedia, the Younger Dryashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas was not preceeded by the Older Wetass. It was a short period of time between the Pleistocene and the current Holocene climate eras.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Now I don't pretent to understand this stuff but if there was a comet large enough to wipe out a people then surely we'd see a reduction in population across the globe due to dust blocking out the sun and such. We'd also be able to see it in the ground, whether it's less plant material or rocks/fossils.
"Oh boy"
Well some of them were. You see this guy named John Smith appeared to one of them and told them to get out of the village.
Either that or I've been watching too much TV lately, hmmm....
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Just finished reading "The Map That Changed The World", the story of the discovery of plate tectonics. The reaction from the community was apparently not healthy skepticism but hostility bordering on fanaticism.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Looks like the firestorm even hit the other side of the world.
So if humans want to survive things like this in the future we should go back to living deep in caves rather than tall exposed buildings.
According to results presented by a team of 25 researchers this week, the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco Mexico: that's where the Clovis people's doom came from.
I hate it when my doom comes from American Geophysical Union meetings in Acapulco, Mexico.
Eventually blogs of the time created such a combustible mix of ideas that literally the air around them exploded in fire. There was no meteor - only Wordpress 0.1.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
75 MILLION YEARS AGO, COME OUT OF THE CLOSET
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
didn't jesus invent the earth like 3000 years ago?
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Clovis peoples did not "go extinct." They spread put across the Americas and developed in to more locally adapted cultures. The Folsom point is a fairly obvious derivative of the Clovis point see here. The Folsom point supplanted Clovis on the Lower Great Plains. From Missouri to the Atlantic coast the Dalton point is considered a direct outgrowth of Clovis, and on the western Gulf Coast, the San Patrice point seems to have filled the same role as the successor to Clovis. Aside from that, there is a lot of regional variation in Clovis itself prior to the emergence of Folsom, San Patrice etc.
The Pleistocene megafauna did go extinct, but the causes of that have been argued back and forth since I was a student in the 1970s, and with no end in sight. Some have blamed Clovis and closely related groups in the Americas, and refer to these extinctions as the result of a Clovis "blitzkrieg." However, there's also evidence to suggest that some were headed down the drain before humans reached the Americas. Late Pleistocene environments were drastically different from today. The southwest was fairly moist, not a desert at all. The southeast was considerably drier than now and had fine-grained, micro-environments quite unlike anything seen today. All of those environments changed drastically, and the intricately intermingled mico-ecologies of the southeast disappeared, and any fauna dependent on that was toast (my 2 cents, there).
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
July 24, 1802 - December 5, 1870, according to Wikipedia.
Don't know about the Smartas period though.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
the Clovis people got into a paeleolithic nuclear war with the Sivolc peoples of Northern Siberia, which explains the layer of burnt ash.
Using the natural reactor at Oklo, these stone-age engineers successfully developed stone atom bombs, and then delivered them across Alaska by suicide intercontinental mammoth-riders.
The last remanents of the Clovis people fled south, and eventually all perished due to a legal mix-up when someone patented breathing. Noone could hold their breath long enough to mount an effective defence.
So Plato was right about a great disaster 9000 years before his epoch.
What's in a sig?
The Navajo (Dine) people of the southwest US are directly related to the Dene of Canada. It's already been shown that it took the former over 20,000 years to migrate physically and linguistically. It's trivial to show the latter (in Canada, ground zero for the object in question) still exist.
The Hopi (Anasazi or "Ancient Ones" in Dine) can confirm that the Dine/Dene were here over 20,000 years ago. They met these descendents of the Tungusk coming across the Bering Land Bridge. Since this means the Hopi were here before the Bridge, it doesn't get taken seriously. Likewise, the Dine's name for the Hopi is that of another group that supposedly went extinct, indicating they didn't, is another fact that gets actively ignored.
Conducting archeology without conducting anthropology on people that still exist is like studying the history of New York by studying the subway maps and ignoring the people on the platforms and the streets above.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Even though that is what the data show.
This is especially bothersome to the PC crowd because the Siberians are the modern American Indians (for the most part, some European gene types remain in some groups, such as the Cheyene), and the Clovis/Red Paint People, appear to have come from Europe, hunting seal and walrus across the North Atlantic ice shelf.
And the earliest people appear to have been Melanesians from across the Pacific.