Slashdot Mirror
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."
Wasn't that when the Enterprise went back in time and Captain Kirk made a hand held cannon that used primitive gunpowder and meteor fragments to blast the bad alien beasties?
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
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.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Ok, I got nothing.
Except that the article states that there was healing around some of the holes, indicating the animal was alive for at least a while after getting "dusted".
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.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The simplest explanation tends to be the best. Tyrannosaurs in F-14's.
Sounds like someone didn't do too well on the SATs.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
Zombiesaurs...
(Hey why isn't there a movie about dinosaur zombies yet?)
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.
The ratios of different types of atoms in the fragments meant it was most unlikely they had originated on Earth, the team told the AGU meeting. A meteorite would not be my first thought. That would be alien hunters.
These actually aren't earth animals, they're the skeletons from Xenu's spacecraft! Tom Cruise was right all along!
Sorry, part of being a true scientist is not afraid to say you were wrong. By clinging to falsities to advance an agenda, you're no better than any creationist.
Yeah, science should totally just abandon making hypotheses about anything controversial, because it might be grounds for anti-science groups to speak out against!
I don't mean to be obnoxious, but that is about as anti-scientific as it gets. Manipulating facts and theories to play politics is pretty much the antithesis of science. Please don't ever suggest something like that again.
I got a catholic block.
Don't you find your desire for censorship/alteration of findings to be a bit ironic?
Nice try James. We know it's you.
God sneezed. Intelligent Sneezing, no less!
Too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise.
So that's how the Ice Age movies finally end!
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
I dunno, the summary seems cooler than the story to me. I was expecting an article about aliens mounting a war against mammoths, and was quite disappointed.
-------
Incite and flee.
Why were the scientists surprised? Do they think that no meteorites fell to the Earth at any other time? That seems weird.
This is old news... We've known for how-long now that mammoths had shotguns!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is funny, I was just watching a documentary a couple hours ago on the History Channel that discussed this very thing. Though they were concentrating more on Mammoths. One guy used a shotgun for of small specs and shot if at an old arrow head to see if that much power could embed pieces of metal into it, which it didn't. So he concluded the arrowhead he had found with small metal specs had to be caused by a cosmic impact (turned out they were micro-meterites). Also another gentleman was using a highpower magnet over 2 tones of mammoth tusks looking for similiar metal pieces. Was a good show.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe it was like this Sci-Fi authors Ryk E. Spoor and Eric Flint wrote in the book Boundary. Link to the first 1/4 of the book. http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416509321/1416509321.htm?blurb Great book I liked it; I am still waiting to see if aliens wipe out the dinosaurs. Hope book two is out in the near future. Tim S
The earth is only 6,000 years old.
Anybody who studied science in Kansas knows that.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
They're only 35000 years old - they are not fossils! They are simply old remains and are still bones, not rock.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Finally, we have it!!!!!
2. ???^WZombiesaurs
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).
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.
Their they're doing there hair.
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.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
If you love knowledge and truth, then you must honor it. Not exploring or publishing certain ideas out of spite is no less anti-science and anti-reason than any creationist notion. --The only difference is that creationists champion ignorance out of foolishness. You are suggesting we do it out of fear and anger. I'm not sure which is worse.
-FL
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
A movie? I don't know about that.
But I'm sure there's porn for it.
Sigs are for the weak.
Ooookay, then. How do you explain the 10,000 year old frozen baby mammoth carcass found in Siberia a few years ago, then? Also, how did they cross the land bridge into the Americas without being able to tolerate cold during the Ice Ages?
Maybe the plasma arcs that supposedly explain meteor craters better than kinetic impact are somehow responsible...
This is classic crackpottery.
The Crackpot wants to claim that they are really a Revolutionary, that they have investigated the weak edges of science and found a fundamental problem, that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and that they hold the solution. A solution that up-ends the existing theories. They will claim that the reason they and they alone were able to discover this solution is because the Science Establishment is too set in their ways, too dogmatic, and simply refuses to question or investigate those areas where the science is weak and various mysteries inadequately explained. They will claim that the only reason that they are given the label "Crackpot" is because the Science Establishment is afraid of their ideas. The Science Establishment hates Revolutionaries, you see, and will not accept the scientific evidence the Revolutionary brings to bear no matter what.
Of course this is nonsense. Real Revolutions happen and up-end the "Establishment", they're just uncommon. Because in most cases, the existing science is by and large good and well established and supported by mountains of evidence. Einstein was a Revolutionary and General Relativity was a Revolution. His theory completely changed how we view the nature of the universe, and one of our most basic assumptions -- that Time itself is constant across all frames of reference. Quantum Mechanics was a huge Revolution in Science, again reversing some of our most basic assumptions about the universe. Yet these Revolutions are now the Scientific Establishment, by the simple virtue of the experimental evidence these Revolutions brought to bear, and now these theories are also supported by mountains of evidence, equally difficult to up-end.
So what then is the difference between the Crackpot and the Revolutionary? Well a major difference is that the true Revolutionary explains the new, explains the experimental data that the old theory cannot, but just as importantly also explains the experimental data that the old theory explained. Relativity didn't prove that Newtonian physics was wrong, it simply showed it to be an approximation for common conditions. It didn't suddenly come out and say "No, actually you can approximate gravitational attraction using the cube root of the distance between masses!" because anyone can drop an object and track its position and see that, in fact, Newton's Laws are correct within the precision of any available measuring device. Quantum Mechanics didn't prove that simpler models of atoms were completely flawed and false -- because all that chemistry you did in high school works just fine using those simpler models. QM only explains what the simpler model cannot.
The Crackpot's theory, on the other hand, cannot explain the existing evidence. The Crackpot, desperate to prove that they are Revolutionaries, then must try to deny the existing evidence, and deny the large successes of the existing theory at explaining the existing evidence.
This is the case with the Electric Universe shlock our "unwelcome celebrity" champions -- it actually tries to replace Newtonian (and relativistic) mechanics with electricity and plasma. Not just show that some of the difficult to explain parts of the universe (dark energy etc) are better explained with electricity, but that extremely easy and well explained parts of the universe (like meteor impacts, planetary motion) are also explained. It's this attempt to shoe-horn their theory into places it doesn't belong, to up-end science that needs no up-ending, that reveals the Crackpot.
Of course that's the point where most people stop reading. The Crackpot th
The enemies of Democracy are