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Space Science

Ice Age Beasts Blasted from Space 202

Posted by samzenpus from the the-galactic-shotgun dept.
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."
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Ice Age Beasts Blasted from Space More

Ice Age Beasts Blasted from Space

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  • Hey! I remember that episode (Score:5, Funny)

    by alshithead ( 981606 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @08:53PM (#21679131)
    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?

    • Re:Hey! I remember that episode (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:20PM (#21679335)
      Dude, you are mixing your episodes... Isn't that considered a serious faux pas around here? They did NOT go back in time for the episode where the captain had to go one on one against the Gorn Captain. That one was setup by an advanced race - the Metrons. There were time jumping episodes, but the one where he had to make gunpowder from raw sulphur, salt peter (or whatever - go ahead and correct me), etc. was definitely NOT a time jumping one.

      However, I do believe this "Gorn" episode was the one that "Galaxy Quest" targeted (precisely) when they had "crewman number 6" (Guy) ask Commander Tagert if he could construct a "rudimentary lathe".

      Damn. If you are going to invoke Trek - get it right!
      • Dude, I know...I was trying to be funny. I pulled in time travel due the disparities in time of 13,000 years ago versus 35,000 years ago. And, the third ingredient for gunpowder would be charcoal and...wait for it...the projectiles for his cannon were raw diamonds if I remember correctly.
      • 'whatever' in this instance is diamond powder. :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ed Avis ( 5917 )
        In our universe, yes. But in a parallel universe there is certainly a Star Trek episode where Kirk goes back in time and makes a handmade cannon.
  • Is that these animals were innocent bystanders to the great Time War. This is clearly the result of a Time Lord sending a Dalek hurtling backwards in time. When it landed in the ice age, it tried to do its whole "EXTERMINATE!!" thing, but it's weaponry was on the fritz. "Peppered with meteorite fragments" smacks of being the victim of some malfunctioning Dalek weapon. So as you can clearly see, there is nothing see, so move along...

    QED

  • What About the Clovis? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pln2bz ( 449850 ) * on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @08:56PM (#21679151)
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by explosivejared ( 1186049 ) <hagan.jared@nOSPAm.gmail.com> on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:04PM (#21679197)
      "For us the difficulty is that we see patterns but we don't understand what the underlying process is; so it becomes difficult to ascribe causation," he explained.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by G-funk ( 22712 )
        Sssh! Is not! It's all our fault!

        Or,

        It's not our fault at all! The sun is getting hotter!

        Earth goes through cycles, nothing we can do will change it!

        etc etc

      • Re:What About the Clovis? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by pln2bz ( 449850 ) * on Thursday December 13, 2007 @01:01AM (#21680571)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Valdrax ( 32670 )

          Mammoths did *not* live in a tundra environment. [...] 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.

          Ooookay, then. How do you explain the 10,000 year old frozen baby mammoth carcass [pinktentacle.com] 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?

          • 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

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by CFTM ( 513264 )
          Interesting, this week I was watching the History Channel's TV show "Mega Disasters" and they were talking about comet impacts; some scientists are currently trying to determine if there was an actual catastrophic event that corresponded with "The Great Flood" which I believe is one of few myths that is almost completely universal among cultures (bear with me a little bit). According to the information provided by the TV Show (yeah yeah yeah, that's like using Wiki as a source I know :), they were arguing

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by pln2bz ( 449850 ) *
            I won't go much into what I believe happened, as it's a bit stranger than what you mention here. But, I will say this: I would be very wary of blindly accepting this notion that craters can only be the result of either volcanoes or physical impacts. And the reason I say this is because of the Deep Impact Mission. Around 1995, we shot an impactor at around 23,000 mph (6.3 miles per second) at comet Tempel 1. What was expected to happen based upon the physical impact model was a single flash. But, what i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

      I'm hoping that this is going to shift the discussion of the last extinction event *away* from the Clovis people finally. ... Mammoths are not exactly easy creatures to take out

      Why are you so anxious to exonerate Clovis people? Not that I care much one way or the other, but it is an odd coincidence that all these large creatures exist for millions of years, then suddenly disappear relatively simultaniously with the arrival of humans. I generally don't believe in conincidence.

      The implication that Clovis coul

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pln2bz ( 449850 ) *
        Charles Ginenthal talks a lot about this subject of Clovis people and mammoths. The mammoth's had incredibly thick whool, skin and fat beneath that skin. All combined, the three layers amounted to 15 inches of material! It's been demonstrated that even with iron spear-heads and elephants, it is very rare that a spear-head will penetrate an organ.

        In order to kill mammoths with spear heads, you could not hope to strike an organ. You'd have to hope that it would bleed to death. Based upon an observation o

  • so *that's* where buffalo nickles came from (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @08:58PM (#21679161)
    Ok, I got nothing.
  • According to the friendly article, these animals were clearly blasted with space debris, not blasted from space.

    Luckily I brought a spare underwear to work today, because I seriously wet my pants reading the headline, thinking some intelligently designed beasts lived in some remote planets, and were blasted into earth after their home planet exploded.
  • So, were they blasted INTO space our OUT BY space objects?

    Did they find any Sleestaks, or other creatures from Land of the Lost?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Lost_(1974_TV_series) [wikipedia.org]

    http://www.landofthelost.com/ [landofthelost.com]

  • 1,000,000,000 to 1 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mastershake_phd ( 1050150 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:04PM (#21679199) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:1,000,000,000 to 1 (Score:4, Funny)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:08PM (#21679235) Homepage Journal
      Hey! I just got hit by a small meteor, you insensitive clod! Ouch!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by da_foz ( 751028 )
      That would be pretty impressive...considering so far they have seven tusks and a skull that show the impact marks. If it was one animal that would be one hell of a large skull. Maybe something like this but even bigger: http://www.geekroar.com/film/archives/rotk_war_elephants.jpg [geekroar.com]

    • Re:1,000,000,000 to 1 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Prof.Phreak ( 584152 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:44PM (#21679477) Homepage
      Or from scientist's perspective, it was in the right place at the right time.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 )

      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.

      Small meteors usually don't make it to the ground with enough velocity to knock over a blade of grass.

      • ***Small meteors usually don't make it to the ground with enough velocity to knock over a blade of grass.***

        A bit more than that I think. Terminal velocity in fact. Bigger pieces have enough MV^2 to punch through the roof of a house or the trunk metal on a car -- both have happened. Smaller pieces -- probably enough to puncture the skin and maybe enough to penetrate a bone. Apparently enough to embed themselves in tooth enamel. People have been injured and even killed by bullets fired into the air

    • from the the summary:

      Eight tusks and a bison skull
      An eight tusked Bison in the wrong place at the wrong time?

      from TFA:

      The ancient remains [tusks] come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks.

  • That was no comet (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tyrsenus ( 858934 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:05PM (#21679213)
    The simplest explanation tends to be the best. Tyrannosaurs in F-14's.

  • Isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Funny)

    by raddan ( 519638 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:16PM (#21679309)

    The mammoth and bison remains all display small (about 2-3mm in size) perforations.

    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.

    • Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Funny)

      by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:21PM (#21679345) Homepage
      > A meteorite would not be my first thought. That would be alien hunters.

      Inept alien hunters, hunting mammoths with birdshot. Now if they just look around the site maybe they will find a trampled alien...
      • It would be too easy to hunt primitive Earth creatures with your laser, the challenge lies in creating weapons from locally found resources. It's considered acceptable to use your laser for smelting and boring to create the weapons though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bark76 ( 410275 )
        Actually the Mammoths were out hunting quail when one of them accidently shot the other. This all happened around the same time as the downfall of the elephant party.

  • Xenu is my homeboy (Score:4, Funny)

    by scubamage ( 727538 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:17PM (#21679315)
    These actually aren't earth animals, they're the skeletons from Xenu's spacecraft! Tom Cruise was right all along!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by samkass ( 174571 )
      Sorry, wrong time scale. Xenu came to Earth 75 million years ago in DC-8s to strap Thetans to volcanos that geologists claim (sacrilege!) didn't exist at the time. Which is, of course, in the same geologic ballpark as the meteor that brought down the dinosaurs, so who knows.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by witte ( 681163 )
      My guess is, it's caused by a crack in the crust below the sea bottom, with sand filling the opened gap. Just guessing, though.

  • Blast points? (Score:5, Funny)

    by QuantumFlux ( 228693 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @09:57PM (#21679557)
    Too accurate for Sandpeople. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise.
    • Come to think about it... In the movies, the sand people always hit and the stormtroopers always missed (at least with hand-held blasters). Old Ben certainly had a peculiar way of seeing things.

  • Ahh! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cleon ( 471197 ) <cleon42@NoSpam.yahoo.com> on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @10:04PM (#21679605) Homepage
    So that's how the Ice Age movies finally end!

  • Not understanding... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by __aagmrb7289 ( 652113 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @10:30PM (#21679765) Journal
    Why were the scientists surprised? Do they think that no meteorites fell to the Earth at any other time? That seems weird.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jamesh ( 87723 )

      Why were the scientists surprised?

      Scientists are easily surprised. It's not that strange.

  • Was on TV (Score:5, Informative)

    by jshriverWVU ( 810740 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @10:34PM (#21679797)
    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.

  • That's impossible. (Score:4, Funny)

    by TomatoMan ( 93630 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @11:23PM (#21680079) Homepage Journal
    The earth is only 6,000 years old.

    Anybody who studied science in Kansas knows that.

    • The earth is only 6,000 years old. Anybody who studied science in Kansas knows that.

      That's right. And God planted dead mamoths in the arctic with buckshot in their skulls just to fuck with us.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by remmelt ( 837671 )
        Don't you know? It's a test of faith! (Or he's really fucking with us.) (Or, the earth really is that old. Hi, mr Occam!)

  • 13,000 year even not proven (Score:5, Interesting)

    by badinsults ( 1152183 ) on Wednesday December 12, 2007 @11:44PM (#21680177) Homepage
    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 [pnas.org] 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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 12357bd ( 686909 ) on Thursday December 13, 2007 @06:04AM (#21681817)

      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.

      • Actually, Plato refers to an apocalyptic war between the Atlanteans and the Athenians of the day. Have you even played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 12357bd ( 686909 )

          Sorry but no, Plato does not refer to an 'apocaliptic war' at all. There's a war between Atlanteans and Atheneans, yes, but the destruction of Atlantis is not an effect of this war, in fact is indirectly pointed out as a posible cause.

          So no, I've played Fate of Atlantis, yes, but not that much! :)

  • Clearly it must be related to the crash landing of the Golgafrincham B Ark.
  • 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.
  • Something seems a bit funny here - particles that small should slow down pretty quickly (a few hundred yards), even if they come from some kind of an explosion.
  • The meteorite obviously exploded with so much force that its fragments traveled faster than light.
    Duh.

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