Ice Age Beasts Blasted from Space

ianare writes "Eight tusks and a bison skull all show signs of having being blasted with iron-nickel fragments, typical meteorite material. Raised, burnt surface rings trace the point of entry of high-velocity projectiles; and the punctures are on only one side, consistent with a blast coming from a single direction. But the team was astonished to find the animal remains were about 35,000 years old, rather than from the known impact of 13,000 years ago."

Comments

What About the Clovis?

[pln2bz]

I'm hoping that this is going to shift the discussion of the last extinction event *away* from the Clovis people finally. This can only be a good thing really as the theory is kind of a relic by now. From what I understand, there weren't even a large number of sites that included evidence of mammoth remains with evidence of human activity together, and a good number of those were certainly opportunistic situations. Mammoths are not exactly easy creatures to take out and the extinction event was unusual in its selectivity.

Re:What About the Clovis?

[pln2bz]

Therein lies the problem of ever ascribing certainty to any one event causing mass extinctions or any other climatological or biological shift. Earth is built with so many complex systems that it will almost always be a large combination of factors that result in change.

I'm kind of an unwanted celebrity around these parts because I have my own particular beliefs about what happened. To be honest, few people actually take the time to even dig into the issues in great depth. But it's a great subject though because the evidence is very specific; it's plentiful; and it's in fact *highly* enigmatic. There's something really wrong with the way that we teach science these days because had I learned about the evidence when I was younger, it would have inspired me to focus more heavily on getting a science degree (as opposed to engineering). People don't realize it, but the story of the extinction of the mammoths (and everything else) is one of the most fascinating mysteries out there, and the implications are pretty large. It's related to some of the biggest questions about the universe that people can even ask. The problem though is that the majority of scientists tend to treat the issue as if is settled, and they appear to be settling on some rather unlikely scenarios (like diseases).

Ginenthal in The Extinction of the Mammoths argues convincingly that the "mammoth steppe" did not exist. Mammoths did *not* live in a tundra environment. The extinction could not have occurred too long ago. 10,000 years is probably too long. 3,500 years ago might be a better estimate, because their tusks would not have been as preserved as well as they were if the tundra in which they are encased had melted, exposing the tusks to water. Many of the tusks were so pristine that they could be sold as ivory on the ivory market, and tusks will turn yellow and brown just like bone if exposed to water. But also, the mammoths could not have survived in a cold environment. Their shaggy manes would actually prevent them from walking through snow. There's really very little about their bodies that points to them being able to live in a cold environment. And the ecology of the tundra simply cannot support large mammals like that. The vegetation on the tundra would actually probably be toxic to them (as it is for other mammals) and we can tell from the contents of their stomachs and mouths that they were feeding on warm-weathered vegetation -- like from grasslands and forest-type areas. These details, combined, indicate pretty clearly that they existed in a warm climate, which most likely suddenly froze over.

How you attribute this catastrophic event, however, is the real question -- and this is where disagreement is completely legitimate and should in fact be encouraged. In fact, I think the best thing for the whole field of people who are studying this situation would be for them to abandon all of these highly speculative scenarios involving Clovis people and diseases and all of that, and completely switch over to creating some consensus that some sort of catastrophe occurred, and that it occurred relatively recently (around 3,500 years ago). The evidence for it seems to me quite strong, and has absolutely nothing to do with Creationism. If this new evidence points them into this overall direction, then it will be a *very* good thing because we need to start talking about what *kind* of catastrophes could have caused all of this mess.

Re:What About the Clovis?

[pln2bz]

I won't go much into what I believe happened, as it's a bit stranger than what you mention here. But, I will say this: I would be very wary of blindly accepting this notion that craters can only be the result of either volcanoes or physical impacts. And the reason I say this is because of the Deep Impact Mission. Around 1995, we shot an impactor at around 23,000 mph (6.3 miles per second) at comet Tempel 1. What was expected to happen based upon the physical impact model was a single flash. But, what in fact happened were two consecutive flashes. Considering that this is one of the best experiments we have to date for what happens in collisions like this, we'd be very wise to carefully consider the root cause of these two distinct flashes.

A man named Wallace Thornhill actually predicted that there would be two separate flashes based upon the notion that the comet was a charged body in space that possessed a different charge from the probe's impactor. As the two objects approached one another, they essentially charge-neutralized prior to imapact (like your finger charge-neutralizing with the doorknob before contact).

Thornhill got many other aspects of the mission right too, but this is the one that interests us here. The entire astrophysical world considers Thornhill a heretic of sorts, and they *dismissed* his accurate prediction based upon disagreement with what his theory says. And I'll leave it up to you as to whether or not you want to look into that further. Instead, they claimed that the layer of dust on the comet induced a "post-impact" flash, but anybody can do the math. At 6.3 miles per second, the dust layer would have to be impossibly thick in order to distinguish the two separate flashes.

But, the point is that that experiment demonstrated to us that we should carefully consider the idea that bodies in space are not electrically neutral. When you dig into the issue further, you come to realize that quasi-neutrality -- the idea that a given volume of space will contain equal numbers of positive and negative charge -- is in fact an assumption within astrophysics.

Just a couple of days ago, the THEMIS mission (which is studying the aurora) observed a "magnetic rope" as wide as the Earth connecting the Sun and the Earth. The significance of this will completely escape most people because few people actually understand much of what happens within a plasma physics laboratory. But, plasmas can behave as either a fluid or an electrodynamic phenomenon, depending on their charge density. In the laboratory, *electrical* plasmas will tend to form filaments of charged particles. These filaments possess long-range attraction and short-range repulsion with other filaments. The end result is that they will become braided just like rope, and like any current we've ever observed, they will be surrounded by magnetic fields. Space is completely filled with matter in the plasma state, so it's a very serious question.

What you may not realize is that there is a very long historical context for discussing the electrical nature of space plasmas. It's essentially a taboo subject within astrophysics, and the conversations become *extremely* heated. I take ridicule for discussing it here on these forums on a daily basis. But if you are observing striking morphological similarities between electrical plasmas within a plasma laboratory and space plasmas, then does it make sense to assume that it is a coincidence? To be honest, that's not very scientific. What's really happening is that observations like this magnetic rope are very potentially paradigm-shattering observations that cast doubt upon the assumption of quasi-neutrality. And this is a *very* big deal because quasi-neutrality is required to model space plasmas as fluids. If space plasmas as in fact electrodynamic phenomenon (like they behave in the lab), then you are basically changing the dominant force in the universe from gravity to electricity. It's just too shocking for astrophysicists and many people to accept

Re:What About the Clovis?

[nuuvario]

There's just so many problems with this... Listen, I don't profess to be an expert in mammoth or mastadon physiology, but I've spent a lot of time in the paleocliamte realm, and at certain universities considered experts in mammoth and mastadon paleontology. And you're right that there's a HUGE scientific 'mystery' surrounding the extinction of the mammoths (really, all the ice-age land mammals), and whether or not it was due to humans or climate. The thing is, most scientists who pay attention do NOT treat the issue as settled. Most (a generalization, sure) scientists would attribute the extinction to some sort of combination of anthropogenic stressors and climate-induced changes in food webs and related physiologic stress. 3,500 years ago as the extinction date? Only for relict populations on isolated islands -- maybe. Very little about their bodies enabling them to survive in cold environments? Just not true. Their whole set-up, their whole physiology, is a testament to evolution and the adaptation of the mammoth to a cold-weather environment. Mammoth and mastadon ears are TINY. Their feet are like snowshoes. Their hair keeps them warm (prevent them from walking in the snow???). Their tusks provide an excellent tool to scrape snow away and off of plants. As for the tundra -- maybe you're getting hung up on the tundra idea. Let's presume that much of the mammoth's environment wasn't so much tundra as it was grassland. You ever been to Nebraska in the winter? Plenty for a mammoth to eat. Not even that much snow. And it's COLD. Oh god, the cold. And the wind... Anyway, my point is this (that Ginenthal nonwithstanding): yes, big scientific unknown. Not settled by any means. LIkely humans and climate (see australia for a good example of human-induced extinctions). Your evidence for mammoth geographic and climatic preferences is highly suspect, if not downright erroneous.

Charles Fort and others wrote about this

[Anonymous Coward]

Charles Fort and other people have written about this one. Some of the fragments resemble 'bullets'... so this is not the only example of this phenomenon.

Re:1,000,000,000 to 1

[ackthpt]

Small meteors hit the earth all the time, its a long shot but maybe this animal was just in the wrong place place at the wrong time.

Small meteors usually don't make it to the ground with enough velocity to knock over a blade of grass.

how does it advance the cause of reason

[circletimessquare]

to protect those who act against reason?

creationism is not science. it never was. and it never will be. giving them or denying them info does not give them more or less data to suddenly turn into reasonable people. it is merely denying ammunition for a propaganda machine that is not nor ever was interested in the truth

13,000 year even not proven

[badinsults]

I remember a few months back, when the paper on the apparent Younger Dryas meteor event came out. Me and my buddy (I am a geophysicist who studies ice sheet history during the period, and he is a Quaternary geologist) picked it apart pretty well. The lines of evidence they used to correlate the event were not the same for each site. For instance, at some sites they used irridium, others charcoal, and still others Helium-3. The biggest problem with their correlation is that they were using the age of drumlins found in Ontario to date others over 2000 km away. There is no widespread evidence that all of North America burned due a meteorite impact 13,000 years ago. I mean have a look at the distribution of sites. If there truely was an impact that caused widespread destruction across North America, why has there been no published evidence in the central United States. Here in southwestern British Columbia, there is no evidence of any unusual sedimentation during the late Pleistocene. If there was an impact or explosion event that was so intense that it caused the extinction of early people in the Americas, would it not have had measurable material blown globally? I don't recall hearing about any such anomalies in the Greenland or Antarctic cores. It is a crackpot theory at best. One shouldn't discount that one of the main proponents of this hypothesis had only a couple of years ago suggested that a supernova caused the Younger Dryas (an idea that was quickly laughed at).

Re:13,000 year even not proven

[12357bd]

Plato, talking about Atlantis, refers a major blast on that time frame (9000 years before his epoch), but related to a major event in the Atlantic Ocean, maybe the remains found in America were not the main or sole impact.

There's also a lot of 'deluge' legends on tribes at both sides of Atlantic Ocean that locates the blast/explosion/destrucion on the middle on the actual Atlantic Ocean (sud-american tradition located at the east cost refers to a major destruction an corresponding or escape episode from the east, and african/europan traditions located at the west coastal rim talks about the same kind of episodes but from the west.

Of course oral traditions are ambigous, and unreliable, but in this case ('deluge' mith), many of them share a curios aspect: They explicitely state the need to pass to further generations the testimonial of the existance and experience of such a major disastrous event that will be not be considered possible to exist for future generations.

Did only the recent specimens heal?

[fotoguzzi]

The article is a bit of a mess. They scientists wonder if an event 13,000 years ago hit both the tusks of living animals and tusks that had been lying on the surface for 20,000 years. What the article does not address is whether only the 13,000-year-old samples had healed around the particle strikes.

Re:How long to make a fossil?

[pushing-robot]

People have been able to artificially petrify/permineralize/fossilize things in far less time than that; under the right conditions, especially porous materials (wood, for example) can be "petrified" in a matter of months, weeks, or days. Hard materials take longer than softer ones, but you could definitely have your own working fossils in a relatively short time assuming you provide ideal conditions for permineralization.

Of course, the real world doesn't tend to provide "ideal conditions", but I do know that certain fossilized bones have been dated at between 10 and 50 Ka - like the Hofmeyr skull or the Cuddie Springs finds.