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.

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.