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More Evidence For a Clovis-Killer Comet
fortapocalypse sends word that a new paper was published today in the journal Science on the hypothesis that a comet impact wiped out the Clovis people 12,900 years ago. (We discussed this hypothesis last year when it was put forth.) The new evidence is a layer of nanodiamonds at locations all across North America, at a depth corresponding to 12,900 years ago, none earlier or later. The researchers hypothesize that the comet that initiated the Younger Dryas, reversing the warming from the previous ice age, fragmented and exploded in a continent-wide conflagration that produced a layer of diamond from carbon on the surface. While disputing the current hypothesis, NASA's David Morrison allows, "They may have discovered something absolutely marvelous and unexplained."
They're actually investigating Lake Cheko as a possible impact site for a fragment of the Tunguska body. 8 km away, conical, pointed straight away from the blast center, seems (magnetically) to have a metal rock about a meter wide at the bottom (which the University of Bologna intends to dig up some time this year).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Just to point this interesting, if far fetched, hypothesis about the origin of Clovis people, based on the striking resemblance of their stone tools and that of those found from the Solutrean.
A friend who's studying archaeology told me about this. He's learned to make stone tools, and that made the connection quite appealing. The particularities that both techniques are not found in any other stone using culture.
Again, it's far fetched, probably not true but makes for a captivating story to get started in studying the paleolithic.