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.

Comments

What about the firestorm?

[Podcaster]

a comet exploded over ice-covered Canada 12,900 years ago and triggered a firestorm across North America

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

Re:LOL What?

[Anonymous Coward]

And besides that the first American, Jesus, only live 2000 years ago.

Geologists are indeed conservative.

[jd]

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.

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[fredrated]

I remember picking up and looking over a geology text book circa 1950 at a garage sale. It said plate tectonics was full of crap, and said the same about another theory that escapes me. The other theory is also standard belief today. I didn't buy the book.

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[gEvil (beta)]

I was going to make the same comment, but you beat me to it. I have a degree in Geology, and I remember my Historical Geology teacher telling us about how when he was in school nearly all of his professors ridiculed the idea of plate tectonics. However (according to him), he dismissed them as fools since the theory seemed to fit in so nicely with the available evidence. Just goes to show that the most important thing you can learn in school is to evaluate the data yourself.

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[nizo]

Just goes to show that the most important thing you can learn in school is to evaluate the data yourself.

Yes indeed! My math teacher told me that PI is an irrational number; as soon as I am done computing it out to infinity I will know this fact for myself, but until then I am still pretty skeptical.

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[Temkin]

While I was wrapping up my Geology degree in the early 90's, I actually came across a old geezer with tenure at a symposium that kept rambling about granitizing fluids. Thankfully, he wasn't a prof at my school.

It's been said that any major change in the fundamental theories of a field will not be accepted until the old guard dies off. Plate tectonics was one such shift. I figure if we're wrong about global warming, we won't be able to admit it until 2045 or so...

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[zoikes]

Horses**t:
      Theory X was controversial, but turned out to be true.
      Theory Y is controversial, therefore theory Y is true.

Gimme a break.

Re: Geologists are indeed conservative.

[CheshireCatCO]

It's not always that bad in science: some theories are accepted pretty quickly. The Dark Energy theory has gained wide-spread acceptance almost overnight. The Giant Impact theory for the formation of the Moon was accepted by much of the community over the course of a single meeting, I've been told by a participant.

It seems to be a question of overwhelming evidence: if you don't have really compelling evidence, you'll have a slow, uphill battle. If you do, odds seem to be in your favor for gaining a much more rapid acceptance. In the end, there's nothing particularly wrong with that. Radical theories are *aren't* backed up by really powerful data or convincing models deserve to be treated with great skepticism.

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[R2.0]

I remember reading about the history of plate tectonics in a Philosophy of Science class. Over in the Smithsonian thread, someone opined that "politics has no place in science". He obviously didn't read the same history we did.

Re: Geologists are indeed conservative.

[General Wesc]

The Giant Impact theory for the formation of the Moon was accepted by much of the community over the course of a single meeting, I've been told by a participant.

A quick search reveals that is the case:

Some work was done by Thompson and Stevenson in 1983 about the formation of moonlets in the disk of debris that formed around Earth after the impact. However, in general the theory languished until 1984 when an international meeting was organized in Kona, Hawaii, about the origin of the moon. At that meeting, the giant impact hypothesis emerged as the leading hypothesis and has remained in that role ever since. Dr. Michael Drake, director of the University of Arizona's Planetary Science Department, recently described that meeting as perhaps the most successful in the history of planetary science.

That's very cool.

My economics professor told us essentially the same thing about the Coase theorem. Allegedly, Coase presented it to a group of economists all of whom rejected the theory right off, but by the time they'd left, he'd convinced every last one of them. (I, however, think it needs a few qualifications.)

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be cancelled out by an equally baseless prediction of "global cooling" in a few years. I think the only thing that's cyclical is idiocy in blindly believing the random end-of-world scenario du jour.

Weathermen can't accurately predict the weather a few hours out ... what makes anyone think they can predict the temperature years or decades out?

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[fractoid]

"You know how Einstein got bad grades? Yeah, well MINE are even WORSE!" - Calvin

Re:Geologists are indeed conservative.

[jlehtira]

Weathermen can't accurately predict the weather a few hours out ... what makes anyone think they can predict the temperature years or decades out?

The weather a few hours out is about the distribution of mass and energy in our atmosphere.

The temperature decades out is about the total amount of mass and energy in our atmosphere.

You've got to admit that the latter is a much easier problem.

Re:Younger Dryas

[Bearpaw]

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.

So ... when were the Dumas and Smartas periods?

Re:Reflected across the world

[Eideewt]

Do you pretend to RTFA?

The idea is that the comet started fires that wiped out these people. They would not have affected the rest of the globe hugely due to the interfering presence of oceans. Although you would expect the smoke of a burning continent to have an effect.

According to TFA, the suggested impact happened at a time when "35 genera of the continent's mammals went extinct". Would that count as "seeing it in the ground?"

Confusing Sentence Structure

[andrewd18]

According to results presented by a team of 25 researchers this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, that's where the Clovis people's doom came from.

I definitely read this as:

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.

Re:Younger Dryas

[Dr Caleb]

"So ... when were the Dumas and Smartas periods?"

When FreeRepublic and Fark went online.

Re:Reflected across the world

[Ramble]

Are you crazy? No-one on /. RTFA.

Re:So if humans want to survive we should

[DohnJoe]

So if humans want to survive things like this in the future we should go back to living deep in caves I think most slashdotters are already aware of this danger, living in the safety of their parents basement ;)

Teh community will be saved!!!

Re:So if humans want to survive we should

[R2.0]

For 1 generation. Then the total lack of women basement dwellers will doom the race.

Re:So if humans want to survive we should

[Grishnakh]

That's why we need to become highly active in do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Then we can grow our own females in our basements. And our genetically engineered females will be superior to natural ones, as we can design them to be thin, beautiful, bisexual, and only interested in geeks (and other hot women).

Problem

[KwKSilver]

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).

Re:Problem

[RamblinLonghorn]

"Some have blamed Clovis and closely related groups in the Americas, and refer to these extinctions as the result of a Clovis 'blitzkrieg.'" I recall reading/hearing something about a similar "blitzkrieg" by the First human inhabitants of Australia. And more recently, the decimation of the Moa and other flightless birds in New Zealand. Point being, I think we underestimate the power even primitive humans had to drastically change their environments, especially ones they aren't native to. But I must say, an exploding comet sounds really cool.

Re:Problem

[Inexile2002]

There is some indirect evidence that the Clovis culture died out even if some of the Folsom people were ancestors of the Clovis people. You say that the Folsom point is derivative of the Clovis point when most sources that compare the two note that the Folsom point was inferior to the Clovis. The vast majority of Folsom points were found using rock quarried from relatively local sources, where as the Clovis points are often found thousands of kilometers from the rock quarries that the stone originated from. Clovis peoples valued higher quality stone enough that they either traveled or engaged in VERY long distance trade to get it. They produced some of the most sophisticated stone tools ever developed by human beings, only really being surpassed by Pre-Colombian native Americans almost ten thousand years later. Finally, Clovis points with nearly identical workmanship have been found from Alberta to California to Patagonia and as far east as Floria - points that have been dated to within hundreds of years of years of each other. All of this indicates a sophisticated, wide ranging, traveling culture.

The Folsom people by contrast didn't leave evidence of this type of wide ranging travel and sophistication, a change that seems to have happened quite quickly. Archaeologists have speculated that climate change led to conditions that were more hostile to longer distance travel - forcing them to use lower quality stone and thus simpler stone work techniques, but the evidence does seem to indicate the death of the Clovis culture (if not the people themselves). The true reasons for the sudden culture change will probably never be known. If there's good evidence of a Pliestocine comet explosion then it almost definitely was a nail in the coffin of the Clovis peoples.

Re:So if humans want to survive we should

[DohnJoe]

I guess the first words those women hear will be: 'please be gentle'

The Dumas period was:

[einhverfr]

July 24, 1802 - December 5, 1870, according to Wikipedia.

Don't know about the Smartas period though.

Atlantis

[12357bd]

So Plato was right about a great disaster 9000 years before his epoch.

Ask People Instead of Rocks

[DynaSoar]

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.