More Evidence For a Clovis-Killer Comet 210
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."
Lonsdaleite (Score:5, Informative)
This is a type of diamond that seems to form when meteors enter the atmosphere and it a called Lonsdaleite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonsdaleite [wikipedia.org]
This material is of interest as a replacement for structural steel since it can be formed in a simple manner using chemistry. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/01/anaximenes-way.html [blogspot.com]
Tunguska event had no crater (Score:5, Informative)
Re:oldest event preserved in history? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:oldest event preserved in history? (Score:1, Informative)
What do you think cave paintings represent? The local news, or latest epic from Rockywood?
Re:Tunguska event had no crater (Score:1, Informative)
It actually corresponds with the Carolina Bay [wikipedia.org] phenomenon, where small elliptical impact craters appeared 14000 years BP all over the eastern US.
Re:12,900 years ago? (Score:3, Informative)
Mark 6:3 "This is the carpenter the son of Mary and the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon, is it not? "
Re:The solutrean hypothesis (Score:3, Informative)
Goddamnit, not that hypothesis again. The paper in question that proposes the connection was authored by Bradley & Stanford, published in World Archaeology 36(4), and is titled "The north Atlantic ice edge corridor: a possible Palaeolithic route to the new World.". They propose a north Atlantic warm water current that would push solutrean tech users from the spanish peninsula to the new world. They base this on a hypothetical similarity between the clovis and solutrean points. There is no such thing. The best thing to come out of that paper is the monster put-down by Strauss, Meltzer & Goebel, published in the same journal a year later and titled "Ice Age Atlantis? Exploring the Solutrean- Clovis "connection"". Man, that read is amusing, and i heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to see the way to kick ass in academia.
Re:oldest event preserved in history? (Score:5, Informative)
Gilgamesh is older than that. It was handed down from before the pictograms that preceded cuneiform.
First, that 3500 BC date includes the pictogram phase. The characteristic cuneiform wedges didn't come until later.
Second, there's not any evidence that the Gilgamesh epic was handed down from earlier. The earliest versions of the Gilgamesh legend date from the third dynasty of Ur, beginning roughly 2150 BC. There is some historical evidence for an actual Gilgamesh, who is mentioned in the Sumerian king list. There's also some contemporary evidence for some of the other kings mentioned in the epic. If he did exist, he probably dates to around 2700 BC.
To be fair, the epic of Gilgamesh could certainly be based on older legends. There's just no evidence for it.
Please be careful when taking excerpts (Score:5, Informative)
From the slashdot heading:
>> While disputing the current hypothesis, NASA's David Morrison allows, "They may have discovered something absolutely marvelous and unexplained."
From the article:
>> he said: "They may have discovered something absolutely marvelous and unexplained. But the impact hypothesis just doesn't make sense."
(bolds mine)
Re:12,900 years ago? (Score:4, Informative)
The Jihadi. It is nominally defined as the rate at which the zealot can destroy knowledge.
1 Jihadi = 1 Burning Library of Congress (BLoC) per fortnight.
Would that make the Crusade the Imperial unit? And if so, what's the conversion equation?
Re:12,900 years ago? (Score:3, Informative)
Very good points. I want to emphasise the target audience that you are discussing.
Telling a religious nutcase that he's an idiot, nay, even proving it to him, will never convince him to change his mind. Only the wise will change their minds after being shown that they are wrong. Yes, even if you show a religious person that Ockham's Razor makes a god nigh-impossible, he will usually fall back to "Probability describes only what you can infer given your data. I know that God is real, so your calculation, while valid, does not incorporate data that I have."
However, being intolerant of stupid ideas is still a good idea. While you won't convince religious people, you will have a good chance of convincing those who are on the fence, or who want to question but who have had their questions suppressed by family and "friends". Mocking religious people in private is generally useless (albeit fun), but I wanted to emphasise that public humiliation (cultural pressure) is a great weapon, especially when it has good science behind it.
The target is not the idiots. The target is their potential victims.
Re:oldest event preserved in history? (Score:2, Informative)
Evidence for the earliest temple mounds in Tallahassee points to 10,000 years ago.
Although there's not much in the way of writing from earlier than 5,000 years or so ago, there is overwhelming cumulative evidence, IMO, that the culture of that time originated from many thousands, probably many tens of thousands of years earlier. One large part of the evidence is the knowledge of astronomy at that time, and astronomical cycles on the scale of thousands of years. (Most of that knowledge was lost, before being rediscovered in more recent times.) Another large part of the evidence lies in the various mythologies. I believe that the earliest known mythologies contain an untapped wealth of information. Just as it is possible to data-mine DNA populations to determine dates of earliest common ancestors, I believe it is possible to do the same with mythologies. All that is lacking is someone smart enough and motivated enough to figure out how to do it.
Verifiable oral history -- Mâori tales (Score:1, Informative)
(Posting anon to not undo modding elsewhere in this thread...)
The Mâori have oral history traditions describing when some of the original Mâori settlers first arrived in Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud -- i.e. New Zealand [wikipedia.org]. Part of these tales depict the appearance of a much brighter star in a specific place in the sky -- which corresponds with the explosion that formed the Crab nebula [wikipedia.org] in 1054. And lo, this dating roughly agrees with modern archaeological findings.
So, yes, some oral history is in fact verifiable. :)
Cheers,