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."
oldest event preserved in history? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:12,900 years ago? (Score:2, Interesting)
I would laugh, but I live around too many people who would say exactly that.
Very true (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tunguska event had no crater (Score:5, Interesting)
The solutrean hypothesis (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to point this interesting, if far fetched, hypothesis [wikipedia.org] about the origin of Clovis people, based on the striking resemblance of their stone tools and that of those found from the Solutrean [wikipedia.org].
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.
Re:Tunguska event had no crater (Score:1, Interesting)
Maybe something similar is at the bottom of one of the great lakes?
does Gilgamesh remember big flood? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:12,900 years ago? (Score:2, Interesting)
7000 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
That is not writing or oral but interesting.
Re:oldest event preserved in history? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't say there's no evidence for it. The strong connections between the Gilgamesh epic and other, generally dissimilar mythologies, the best example perhaps being the connections between the flood myth in Gilgamesh and other flood myths around the world at the same time, is evidence of an earlier common connection.
Re:12,900 years ago? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the greatest tragedy of the whole evolution/creation/ID mess is the confusion of these two stances. It's a tragedy started by the anti-religious types, but the anti-science types did a lot of work dragging the rest of Religion in it themselves. But you can be pro-science without being anti-religion, and there's obviously people who have reconciled religious belief with scientific inquiry, through a variety of means. Yea, even with ultra-literal Sola Scriptura Protestant fundamentalists, something can be argued; you can pull a Luke 20:25 on them and tell them to render unto Science that which belongs to Science, and give to God what is God's. (Those who never insisted the Bible was literal in every letter have it easier.)
Back when they showed us Inherit the Wind in middle school, one of the characters (a journalist, IIRC) had a small piece about how this was about nothing less than the freedom of thought at stake! But he was wrong. The trial itself was never about free thought. No one was under arrest, or fined, for thinking. It was about teaching standards. These are a potent issue, to be true, but free thought was not that which was addressed. And in these days, we have come to see in the great national debate (outside the courthouses and legislatures proper) that freedom of thought is under attack, but now it is the freedom of thought to believe in God, or intelligent design, or even young-earth 7-day Creationism. Oh, they may not be right thoughts, but they are free. And so things have come full circle. While it's easy to support freedom when most people are right, do we as a society really support the freedom of people to be wrong?
Disclaimer. I believe in God and not Intelligent Design (in the sense of any principles espoused by the movement which calls itself by that name) and not literal 7-day Young-Earth Creationism. I happen to like "Let there be light" as ancient analogy for the Big Bang.
Re:12,900 years ago? (Score:3, Interesting)
If I had a child, I'd be tempted to teach him or her to respond "my father taught me to be respectful toward people who believe in biblical horse shit".
I think we're right in the middle of a flood myth revival: the flood of data, genetic data. Unlike that blogging outfit, Adam and Eve made a *lot* of off-orchard backups. with some diligence, we might yet recover much of the original.
This time, however, the bible thumpers will paddle for 40 days and 40 nights, and the flood will not recede. This time the dove will land with a genetic scroll in its beak.
Curiously, one question I've never seen asked is this: how many genes present in the human population 7000 years ago (or 70ka or 700ka) have since gone extinct within modern humanity? How would one go about determining this?
It could be the case that we have an essential modern gene that converges on an introduction (fork) into the genome X years ago, but prior to X some other gene we no longer have must have been there, or the genotype would have been lethal.
Adam wasn't much of a poet, was he? Only woman in the known universe, and he doesn't even mention her eye color.
No, wait, he did, but some zealot wiped it out.
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_8.html#zeilinger [edge.org]