Guest “geology lesson” by David Middleton
Fire from the Sky
Researchers find evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of the world’s earliest human settlements
By Sonia Fernandez
Friday, March 6, 2020Before the Taqba Dam impounded the Euphrates River in northern Syria in the 1970s, an archaeological site named Abu Hureyra bore witness to the moment ancient nomadic people first settled down and started cultivating crops. A large mound marks the settlement, which now lies under Lake Assad.
But before the lake formed, archaeologists were able to carefully extract and describe much material, including parts of houses, food and tools — an abundance of evidence that allowed them to identify the transition to agriculture nearly 12,800 years ago. It was one of the most significant events in our Earth’s cultural and environmental history.
Abu Hureyra, it turns out, has another story to tell. Found among the cereals and grains and splashed on early building material and animal bones was meltglass, some features of which suggest it was formed at extremely high temperatures — far higher than what humans could achieve at the time — or that could be attributed to fire, lighting or volcanism.
[…]
Abu Hureyra lies at the easternmost sector of what is known as the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) strewnfield, which encompasses about 30 other sites in the Americas, Europe and parts of the Middle East. These sites hold evidence of massive burning, including a widespread carbon-rich “black mat” layer that contains millions of nanodiamonds, high concentrations of platinum and tiny metallic spherules formed at very high temperatures. The YDB impact hypothesis has gained more traction in recent years because of many new discoveries, including a very young impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier of the Greenland ice sheet, and high-temperature meltglass and other similar evidence at an archaeological site in Pilauco, located in southern Chile.
[…]
UC Santa Barbara
The biggest problem with Younger Dryas impact crater hunters is their insistence on describing everything as evidence for their pet hypothesis. This is the most egregious example I have seen so far:
The YDB impact hypothesis has gained more traction in recent years because of many new discoveries, including a very young impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier of the Greenland ice sheet…
The Younger Dryas fits right into a well-established warming and cooling cycle exhibited throughout the Northern Hemisphere during the final Pleistocene glacial stage. Approximately every 1,500 years, Northern Hemisphere, occasionally global, temperatures sharply rose (Dansgaard-Oeschger events) and then rapidly cooled back to full glacial stage levels. The cold episodes are called glacial stadials and the warm episodes are called glacial interstadials. The final pair was the Bølling–Allerød glacial interstadial and Younger Dryas glacial stadial. The Bølling–Allerød interstadial was particularly warm, as warm as the Little Ice Age in Central Greenland. Setting aside the fact that the Younger Dryas stadial doesn’t really require a unique explanation, some of the evidence for a significant Younger Dryas impact event is actually quite compelling. The platinum anomalies (Petaev et al., 2013 and Moore et al., 2017) comprise the first (and just about only) relatively unambiguous pieces of evidence for a significant bollide event(s) at, or near the transition from the Late Pleistocene Bølling–Allerød interstadial to the Younger Dryas stadial (AKA the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB)). The GISP 2 anomaly (Petaev et al., 2013) is most compelling.
The most recent paper by the intrepid crater hunters alleges YDB impact evidence from an archaeological site at Abu Hureyra, Syria. For anyone interested, the full text is available. The paper cites Petaev et al., 2013, regarding a YDB platinum anomaly in the GISP2 ice core, as supporting evidence, which it isn’t. The paper also mentions the Hiawatha crater in Greenland. While it doesn’t specifically link it to the YDB, the UCSB press release does. The subject of this post is limited to the reasons why the GISP2 platinum anomaly and Hiawatha crater do not support any version of the YDB impact hypothesis.
GISP2 YDB Platinum Anomaly
In this paper, the term “airburst/impact” refers to a collision of a cosmic body with the Earth’s atmosphere, after which numerous smaller fragments may strike the ground forming transient surface craters. These studies propose that such an impact event triggered a cascade of secondary effects, including a brief impact winter and severe Younger Dryas (YD) climate change (span: ~12,800–11,500 cal BP)1,13,14, along with possible contributions to the megafaunal extinctions and human population declines23. Moore and Kennett24 concluded that impact-triggered climate change caused the prehistoric villagers at Abu Hureyra to transition from hunting/gathering to cultivation, indicative of earliest agriculture, one of the most significant cultural transformations in human history.
Moore, Andrew (not Christopher), et al., 2020
Petaev et al., 2013 comes just about as close as you can get, short of finding a crater, to unambiguous evidence of a significant YDB impact event. Unfortunately, it contradicts one of the favored hypotheses: The bolide triggered widespread fires, triggering a sort of nuclear winter, sinking Earth into the Younger Dryas cooling period.
Until the question about the nature of Pt-rich material and the means of its delivery to the ice is resolved, an extraterrestrial source of Pt appears likely. For example, the Pt anomaly could be explained by multiple impacts of an iron meteorite like Sikhote-Alin or Grant (21, 26); the former is a large crater-forming meteorite shower. Assuming a global anomaly, the 62.5-cm-thick ice layer with the average Pt concentration of 30 parts per trillion (ppt) (Fig. 1) would require an iron meteorite like Sikhote-Alin of ∼0.8 km in diameter to account for the Pt budget at the YDB. Because complete disintegration of such a large iron meteorite during its atmospheric passage seems unlikely, the event is expected to form a crater of a few kilometers in diameter. No such crater at YDB has been found so far.
The main conclusion of our study is the detection of an unusual event during the Bølling-Allerød–YD transition period that resulted in deposition of a large amount of Pt to the Greenland ice. The Pt anomaly precedes the ammonium and nitrate spike in the GISP2 ice core (2) by ∼30 y and, thus, this event is unlikely to have triggered the biomass burning and destruction thought to be responsible for ammonium increase in the atmosphere and the Greenland ice (11). Although the data do not allow an unambiguous identification of the Pt source, they clearly rule out a chondritic origin of Pt. One of the plausible sources of the Pt spike is a metal impactor with an unusual composition derived from a highly fractionated portion of a proto-planetary core.
Petaev et al., 2013
The YDB platinum anomaly is not consistent with a cometary or chondritic airburst. The platinum anomaly is consistent with a Pt-rich, Al-poor, Ir-poor iron meteorite, which would have left a significant crater. Furthermore, Pt anomalies have not been found in any other Greenland ice cores, nor has any ejecta material been observed in any Greenland ice cores.
So, where’s the YDB crater?
Hiawatha Crater
What he brought home clinched the case for a grand discovery. Hidden beneath Hiawatha is a 31-kilometer-wide impact crater, big enough to swallow Washington, D.C., Kjær and 21 co-authors report today in a paper in Science Advances. The crater was left when an iron asteroid 1.5 kilometers across slammed into Earth, possibly within the past 100,000 years.
Though not as cataclysmic as the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact, which carved out a 200-kilometer-wide crater in Mexico about 66 million years ago, the Hiawatha impactor, too, may have left an imprint on the planet’s history. The timing is still up for debate, but some researchers on the discovery team believe the asteroid struck at a crucial moment: roughly 13,000 years ago, just as the world was thawing from the last ice age. That would mean it crashed into Earth when mammoths and other megafauna were in decline and people were spreading across North America.
The impact would have been a spectacle for anyone within 500 kilometers. A white fireball four times larger and three times brighter than the sun would have streaked across the sky. If the object struck an ice sheet, it would have tunneled through to the bedrock, vaporizing water and stone alike in a flash. The resulting explosion packed the energy of 700 1-megaton nuclear bombs, and even an observer hundreds of kilometers away would have experienced a buffeting shock wave, a monstrous thunder-clap, and hurricane-force winds. Later, rock debris might have rained down on North America and Europe, and the released steam, a greenhouse gas, could have locally warmed Greenland, melting even more ice.
The news of the impact discovery has reawakened an old debate among scientists who study ancient climate. A massive impact on the ice sheet would have sent meltwater pouring into the Atlantic Ocean—potentially disrupting the conveyor belt of ocean currents and causing temperatures to plunge, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. “What would it mean for species or life at the time? It’s a huge open question,” says Jennifer Marlon, a paleoclimatologist at Yale University.
A decade ago, a small group of scientists proposed a similar scenario. They were trying to explain a cooling event, more than 1000 years long, called the Younger Dryas, which began 12,800 years ago, as the last ice age was ending. Their controversial solution was to invoke an extraterrestrial agent: the impact of one or more comets. The researchers proposed that besides changing the plumbing of the North Atlantic, the impact also ignited wildfires across two continents that led to the extinction of large mammals and the disappearance of the mammoth-hunting Clovis people of North America. The research group marshaled suggestive but inconclusive evidence, and few other scientists were convinced. But the idea caught the public’s imagination despite an obvious limitation: No one could find an impact crater.
Proponents of a Younger Dryas impact now feel vindicated. “I’d unequivocally predict that this crater is the same age as the Younger Dryas,” says James Kennett, a marine geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, one of the idea’s original boosters.
Science Magazine, 2018
There is little doubt that this is an impact crater, a fairly big one. There is also little doubt that it is, geologically speaking, fairly young, almost certainly less than 2 million years old. There’s just one problem with it having occurred at the onset of the Younger Dryas: There is no evidence that the ice sheets were affected.
The full text of Kjær et al., 2018 is also available. The paper is well-worth reading. While it does not assert that the impact occurred at the YDB, it notes that the radar imagery below the Holocene is “either poorly expressed or absent stratigraphic layering”. We can see in Figure S5, from the Supplemental Material, that the Younger Dryas reflector is not present in at the location of the nearest ice core, Camp Century, and that the Pleistocene ice is poorly imaged. A similar pattern is observed at the most distant ice core, DYE-3.
Radar imaging of the Younger Dryas and Pleistocene is poor at both outboard (Camp Century & DYE-3) core locations. These are also where the most ice has been lost since the end of the Pleistocene.
A massive impact 13-14 ka would have left a very clear mark in the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene ice record, however there is no indication of a disruptive event in any of the ice cores, not even the nearby (~130 miles) Camp Century…
Radiostratigraphy (MacGregor et al, 2015) indicate there there is a continuous ice column from 11.7 ka down to 29 ka very close to Hiawatha crater, and the edge of the full Holocene to Last Glacial Maximum column is no different anywhere else along the northern edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The closest Greenland ice core to Hiawatha, Camp Century, encountered a full section through the Last Glacial Maximum, including the Younger Dryas. It exhibits a nearly perfect correlation to the most distant, Dye 3.
Furthermore, the area near Hiawatha crater was covered by ice up until at least 10,000 years ago (Dyke, 2004). There is no indication that this portion of the Greenland coastline was uncovered any earlier than about 10,000 years ago. The Hiawatha impact most likely occurred, prior to the onset of the final Pleistocene glacial stage, possibly during the Eemian interglactial stage, more likely in an earlier warm interglacial stage.
So, while it is young, geologically speaking, the Hiawatha impact predated the Younger Dryas, most likely before the Last Glacial Maximum.
Proponents of the YDB impact theory would be better served by sticking to the less ambiguous evidence. The fact that they insist on hammering every “square peg into a round hole” undercuts their cause… Which is another problem, science shouldn’t have causes.
References
Kjær, Kurt, Larsen, Nicolaj, Binder, Tobias, Bjørk, Anders, Eisen, Olaf, Fahnestock, Mark & Funder, Svend & Garde, Adam & Haack, Henning & Helm, Veit, Houmark-Nielsen, Michael, Kjeldsen, Kristian, Khan, Shfaqat, Machguth, Horst, Mcdonald, Iain, Morlighem, Mathieu, Mouginot, Jeremie’ Paden, J., Waight, Tod & MacGregor, Joseph. (2018). “A large impact crater beneath Hiawatha Glacier in northwest Greenland”. Science Advances. 4. eaar8173. 10.1126/sciadv.aar8173.
MacGregor, J. A., Fahnestock, M. A., Catania, G. A., Paden, J. D., Prasad Gogineni, S., Young, S. K., Rybarski, S. C., Mabrey, A. N., Wagman, B. M. and Morlighem, M. ( 2015), “Radiostratigraphy and age structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet”. J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surf., 120: 212– 241. doi: 10.1002/2014JF003215.
Moore, A.M.T., Kennett, J.P., Napier, W.M. et al. Evidence of Cosmic Impact at Abu Hureyra, Syria at the Younger Dryas Onset (~12.8 ka): High-temperature melting at >2200 °C. Sci Rep 10, 4185 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-60867-w
Moore, C., West, A., LeCompte, M. et al. Widespread platinum anomaly documented at the Younger Dryas onset in North American sedimentary sequences. Sci Rep 7, 44031 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep44031
Petaev, Michail I., Shichun Huang, Stein B. Jacobsen, Alan Zindler. “Large Pt anomaly at the onset of the Younger Dryas”.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Aug 2013, 110 (32) 12917-12920; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1303924110
Day 13 of America Held Hostage by ChiCom-19
Since Harris County (Houston) is now locked down like Dallas, pretty well the entire company is working from home. Because oil companies are deemed “critical infrastructure”, we can go to the office if necessary, we just have to get a letter from the company, just in case the “authorities” stop us and want to see our permission slips… Is this next?
In the meantime…
| Dallas County | CHICOM-19 | |
| Population | Cases | Deaths |
| 2,637,772 | 367 | 7 |
| % of population with | 0.0139% | 0.00027% |
| % without | 99.9861% | 99.9997% |
| % without rounded | 100.0% | 100.000% |
The county is ramping up drive-through testing. It’s still mostly limited to people with symptoms, medical professionals, first responders and Parkland Hospital (the county hospital) patients and employees. About 10% are testing positive. I’m still working on a “when a coronavirus gets its lime” meme.
Featured Image
The Younger Dryas impact speculation is so easily shown false that only religious adherence can possibly explain the persistence of this preposterous conjecture.
Thank you David for pointing this out. What I found is that the whole of the YDIH is riddled with this kind of circular reasoning. The null hypothesis is the truth of the YDIH.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/09/10/ydih/
Anomalies are anomalies, they support nting without extensive evidence clearly demonstrating the linkage.
Really!? Located at the opposite ends of the Earth in a different hemisphere?
This site is 4,060 miles (6,532 km) as the meteorite ejecta splashes. Passing over the Northern Atlantic, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine, Turkey and the Black Sea on the way to Syria. An impressive blast wave…
Unified, this theory is not.
So, we have an air burst that left some stuff. Given that oceans cover 71% of the planet, why would we expect to find a crater? What am I missing?
hello commieBob, you are missing the “malleability” of the theory as explained in my ydih post
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/09/10/ydih/
commieBob, what you are obviously missing is the fact that ……. for any up & coming geologist,
paleontologist, whatever, ….. their fondest dream is to find an ancient “crater” and write a paper on the “extinction event” that it caused. “Publish or perish”, …… ya know.
“The fact that they insist on hammering every “square peg into a round hole” undercuts their cause… Which is another problem, science shouldn’t have causes.”
That last statement is brilliant. It bears repeating to anyone and everyone on either side of a politically-charged scientific controversy.
Causes contaminate even peripherally involved science. During some space conference or other (they run together), I sat in on a talk by Dr. Amy Mainzer. She is the Principal Investigator for the NEOWISE program, which looks for near-earth objects (NEOs) using data from multiple sources.
The talk explained the methodology used, and the results, which are that we’ve found “almost all” of the potentially hazardous NEOs (this talk was before Chelyabinsk). Then Dr. Mainzer went on to explain why it was important to continue the work, which she did by invoking the Chicxulub impact. She listed the results, but went off on a tangent to assert that the “consensus” explanation for Chicxulub’s extinction of the dinosaurs was wrong. We’ve always assumed that it caused a global winter lasting long enough to kill off the dinosaurs.
Well, that’s wrong, she asserted. A layer of “carbon” around the globe dating from the Chicxulub time frame indicates that the impact caused all of the vegetation on Earth to burn up, which in turn released enough CO2 into the atmosphere to cause catastrophic global warming…and that’s what killed the dinosaurs (and we need to pay attention to climate change).
My very first thought was “if all of the vegetation burned up, that cut off the terrestrial food chain at its base, and all animals would die within days or weeks.” There wouldn’t be any time for “climate” to do anything to the dinosaurs.
I almost stopped listening to her at that point.
Almost. Except she’s really hot, and yes, I am that shallow.
I arrived at the same obvious conclusion: burnt greenery = short rations for the critters. But would all the veggies have to burn to raise the CO₂ to dangerous levels?
My favorite big dinosaur extinction hypothesis is O₂ depletion from 30% down to 20%, which would favor littler critters, with larger nostril area to body weight ratios.
“Well, that’s wrong, she asserted. A layer of “carbon” around the globe dating from the Chicxulub time frame indicates that the impact caused all of the vegetation on Earth to burn up, which in turn released enough CO2 into the atmosphere to cause catastrophic global warming…and that’s what killed the dinosaurs (and we need to pay attention to climate change).”
Wow! How ignorant!
These people get CO2 on their minds and they insert it into everything.
And she’s found all the dangerous asteriods and comets, she says.
Michael S. Kelly – March 28, 2020 at 7:41 pm
Paraphrasing what by Dr. Amy Mainzer insinuated, to wit:
Michael S. Kelly, iffen you check out this Paleo historic proxy graph of atmospheric CO2 and temperatures …… you should readily note that it wasn’t too much CO2 that spelt “doom” for the dinosaurs, …….. nor was it the Chicxulub asteroid “impact”, …….. but was directly caused by the decreasing atmospheric CO2 which began at 144 mya ….. and continued decreasing until all the large dinosaurs died off at 66 mya.
In effect, when the atmospheric CO2 decreased below 1,000 ppm, there was insufficient green-growing biomass to feed the large herbivores and they died off, ….. which in turn caused the die off of the large carnivores.
The Age of the Dinosaurs, ….. about 252 million years ago to about 66 million years ago.
It should be quite obvious to most anyone, ….. that if the Chicxulub asteroid “impact” was violent enough to kill off all the dinosaurs, … then it would have also killed off 99% of all other animal species.
Common sense thinking, logical reasoning and intelligent deductions, ….. ya can’t beat um with a stick.
Read up a bit on the Tanis site, North Dakota, please.
“then it would have also killed off 99% of all other animal species.”
It almost certainly did. For example very nearly all birds went extinct. Modern birds come from less than 10 species that survived Chicxulub.
And it did kill all pterosaurs, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, ammonites, rudists etc etc
Shur nuff, …… tty, …… and iffen that asteroid impact was as powerful as ya’ll claim, ….it surely shudda caused a “nuclear winter” for several years which would have aided in killing all plants and animals. But the ancestors of horses didn’t die.
The genera that survived the Chicxulub impact are the ancestors of all extant genera.
“WOW”, …… now who wudda thought that was possible, …… that I am a survivor of my ancestors?
“Evolution, baby!”
@ David Middleton
David, fossils are the results of “accidents” that occurred in the natural world.
The bones, etc., of animals were not placed between layers of silt, sand, etc., by the God of the Bible or the Flying Spaghetti Monster …… just so that modern humans could later find them in their fossilized state of preservation.
If one is lucky enough to find the fossilized bone or bones of a once existing animal, the only thing of a factual nature that can be determined by said ….. is that said animal did in fact exist at an earlier time, …. and/or, …. if the age of said bone or bones can be determined then one can also claim a potential date that that particular animal was alive, ….. was living, ….. when the “accident” occurred that started the fossilizing process.
But, David M, …. me thinks that you and thousands of other learned scientists are VIOLATING one of the fundamental “Rules” of science, and that is, you are claiming the miraculous ability to …… “prove a negative”.
David, you and others are claiming that the absence of a specific animal’s fossil in the, per se, “fossil record”, ….. is absolutely, positively scientifically factual “proof” that said animal species became extinct at the date that was determined for the aforesaid fossil. BULLCRAP, …… thousands of members of said species could have survived for tens-of-thousands of years after the aforesaid “fossil date” and no one, including you, David ……. will ever know it ever happened unless another fossil is found and dated to a later time period.
David, you are making those silly claims about “extinctions’ …… when you know damn well that …… “An absence (of a particular fossil) does not constitute proof of anything. Nothing can be derived from nothing.”
“DUH”, anyone claiming that birds were descendants of dinosaurs …… were declared (by the likes of you) to be silly, stupid, ignorant and uneducated ………. and then someone discovered a fossilized Archaeopteryx …….. and a majority of the world had to be reeducated whether they liked it or not.
And David, you should cease with your dependency on YouTube and FaceBook Videos for providing you with “talking points” when discussing the biological evolution of the natural world.
That’s how extinctions are defined in the fossil record. If fossils are subsequently found in younger strata, the age of extinction is adjusted. If fossils of non-avian dinosaurs are discovered in Cenozoic sedimentary rocks, their timing of extinction would have to be adjusted. The Coelacanth required a very large adjustment (>66 million years), when subsequent observations found it to still be extant.
Faith & Surovell used a statistical model to demonstrate that the lack of fossils in the Terminal Pleistocene could be a function of an incomplete fossil record. It’s certainly possible that all 35 went extinct in the Terminal Pleistocene. If fossils of the 19/35 North American megafauna genera, not found in the Terminal Pleistocene, are subsequently found in the Terminal Pleistocene, their extinction ages will have to be adjusted. Until then, they went extinct long before the Younger Dryas.
Science is based on observations, not guesses that there might be as yet unobserved observations.
The videos are strictly for humor. The movie Paul isn’t a “talking point”; but it’s funnier than schist.
Oh, my, my, ….. David, ….. I did not know the above was a standard practice associated with paleontological research, ….. thus I sincerely apologize for questioning any of you commentary associated with the “origin and/or evolution of the species”, ….. the biology of planet earth ….. or any of the sciences of the natural world.
Your learned knowledge, ….. and especially your “original thinking” is truly impressive …. and pretty much discredits the majority of my posted commentary.
I feel so ashamed I could just schist.
Yours truly, ….. the ole logical designer “dinosaur” of the 60’s and 70’s+
Samuel C Cogar, …. AB Degrees in the Biological and Physical Sciences, …. GSC 1963.
I’ve seen Mainzer on some of the TV astronomy shows. My opinion is to beware a pretty face….
Indeed, there are problems with the Chicxulub dinosour-killing impact theory. The alternate view is suppressed rather than examined by believers (sound familiar?). For example, the Deccan volcano eruptions match better the timeline for those extinctions.
Princeton expert Gerta Keller, Professor of Geosciences at Princeton, has studied this issue since the 1990s and tells all at her website CHICXULUB: THE IMPACT CONTROVERSY
https://massextinction.princeton.edu/chicxulub
My synopsis: https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2018/08/17/chicxulub-asteroid-apocalypse-not-so-fast-august-update/
“For example, the Deccan volcano eruptions match better the timeline for those extinctions.”
No. There are dinosaurs in the inter-trappan beds, so the Deccan eruptions started well before the extinctions.
This reminds me of some linear features (apparently) chiseled into bedrock on the bench above and to the north of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, that are surprisingly aligned quite accurately towards Mesa Verde to the north and just as amazingly straight. There was an archaeologist who managed to convince himself, as I recall from reading notes in the visitor center, that these had to be water-control features constructed by the Pueblo culture to direct water from rainfall towards the settlements in the canyon, and their agriculture on the adjacent canyon floor.
The trouble was, water would have had to flow uphill for that to be correct. From what I remember reading, he remained undeterred from his thesis for some time even after that was made obvious.
This is just silly:
“The researchers proposed that besides changing the plumbing of the North Atlantic, the impact also ignited wildfires across two continents that led to the extinction of large mammals and the disappearance of the mammoth-hunting Clovis people of North America.”
And this is sillier:
“Moore and Kennett24 concluded that impact-triggered climate change caused the prehistoric villagers at Abu Hureyra to transition from hunting/gathering to cultivation, indicative of earliest agriculture…”
Notice at least that this hypothesis isn’t very compatible with the barely more scientific theory that rising CO2 concentration catalyzed the appearance of agriculture. M&K say it got too cold to hunt mammoths so they planted crops, somewhere in India or in the Fertile Crescent I guess. Of course what really happens when the game are hunted to extinction is the hunters go extinct with them, hence the disappearance of Clovis spearheads in America. –AGF
A G Foster – March 28, 2020 at 9:21 pm
You are correct, A G Foster, …… “just plain silly”.
The Clovis culture first “appeared” on the east coast of North America and migrated westward to what is now Colorado and New Mexico as denoted by this Clovis point site map.
And the Clovis people didn’t “disappear”, …… they just changed their flint ”napping” technique (design).
“The Clovis culture first “appeared” on the east coast of North America and migrated westward to what is now Colorado and New Mexico as denoted by this Clovis point site map.”
Nonsense. Clovis technology was so short lived that all known finds are as good as simultaneous; no inference of point of origin may be made from distribution alone. The only Clovis burial site, which yielded human DNA, showed Clovis people to be related to modern Amerinds (excluding Athabascans), confirming the long held theory of their arrival through Beringia.
A G Foster – March 29, 2020 at 10:15 am
Foster, apparently you averted your eyes to the contents of said Clovis point site map. PS, that was a ‘hyperlink’, click-it and broaden your knowledge of the subject.
Then, …… Foster, …. you can tell everyone how it was possible for the Clovis people to populate all that area of North America in only 400 years (from about 13,000 years ago to about 12,600 years ago as denoted below)
And …… Foster, …. just how in hell can the above noted “Montana Clovis DNA” be capable of confirming the long held theory of their arrival through Beringia” ….. when it would have been damn near impossible for anyone to cross the northern Rocky Mountains during that period of time. “DUH”, and that is why the child’s DNA more closely related to those in Central and South America.
Why cross the Northern Rockies? The first humans probably came south from Beringia along the coast.
And the Great Basin was certainly colonized very early. One of the very few reasonably secure Pre-Clovis sites is Fort Rock Caves in Oregon.
tty, …… to get from the Pacific coast to Montana, …….. one has to cross over the northern end of the Rocky Mountains.
And tty, …… the lack of “Clovis Point” evidence at Fort Rock Caves in Oregon doesn’t mean that it is a Pre-Clovis sites, …… but only that said “site” is dated earlier than know Clovis sites.
GEEEZZZE, …… there could be hundreds of really, really old Clovis sites that no one has discovered yet.
Remember Otzi the Iceman and his copper ax head, ….. things had to be re-dated after that find.
The ice-free corridor between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets opened up between 13,000 and 12,500 years ago. The corridor was along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountain ranges.
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/29/8057
Panel C represents 13,000-12,500 year2 ago, this is a pathway taken by bison and it didn’t require crossing major mountain ranges.
There is also archaeological evidence of humans in this pathway.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaat5473?utm_campaign=toc_advances_2018-08-10&et_rid=17774313&et_cid=2249093
It wouldn’t have been an easy trek… But, about the only thing that was probably easy back then was dying.
David Middleton – March 30, 2020 at 12:13 pm
David, that “opening” of a corridor was sure convenient (Of central importance 😊 )for those Beringia migrants in route to Clovis, New Mexico, right? It opened up @ 13k yBP …. and they crossed the Beringia bridge @ 13k yBP.
But David, ….. just how did they get from Beringia to that corridor …. iffen it was along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountain range. ….. Did they build a boat and float it north to the Beaufort Sea, then come ashore and trek south to the Great Plains area of Montana.
Surely they didn’t attempt to “cross over” the Brooks Range, … Alaska Range, …. Coastal Range, …. the Cascades, … the Sierra Nevada’s … and/or the northern Rocky Mountains …… when it was much easier walking, with plenty of food, if they hiked along the Pacific Coast until they got to southern California and then went east.
“YUP”, but “easy” isn’t the word for it, …….just “click” that above hyperlink again to see how many mountain ranges they had to cross ….. to go due East from the Beringia bridge.
The Beringia bridge crossing doesn’t pass the “smell” test, ….. let alone the “common sense” or “logical reasoning” tests.
They could have gone north or south of the Brooks Range. There are archaeological sites and geological/biological evidence of ice-free conditions along both pathways.
Cogar’s arguments are mystifying. Lewis and Clark traversed the continent in both directions in three years, and Cogar insists the Clovis hunters couldn’t do it in what? Three generations? Three centuries? These impact/YD enthusiasts sure aren’t scientists–they’re modern day Velikovskians. –AGF
And this:
“Then, …… Foster, …. you can tell everyone how it was possible for the Clovis people to populate all that area of North America in only 400 years (from about 13,000 years ago to about 12,600 years ago as denoted below) ”
How does Cogar think Europeans populated North America in 400 years? Mystifying. –AGF
A G Foster – March 31, 2020 at 12:02 pm
Foster, iffen you continue to post such “tripe & piffle” ….. people will surely think you are little more than a “blooming idiot”.
GETTA CLUE, …… Foster, …… iffen there were Asian immigrants that crossed Beringia to North America, …….. or the Clovis culture that migrated westward across North America, ….. they, either group, sure as hell didn’t have a ‘guide’ to lead them to where they wanted to go.
And neither group had horses, or boats, or wagons (wheels) …… but Lewis and Clark did, ….. and so did 99% of the Europeans in their quest for Manifest Destiny.
YEAH, we know, …… Foster, …… iffen an astronaut can soar to the Moon in less than a week, ….. those early immigrants couda, shouda been able to walk across North America in a couple days. 😊
David Middleton – March 31, 2020 at 9:08 am
You are correct, David, ……. they cudda, wudda, shudda, ……. but did they?
David, iffen you were in one of those group(s) of Beringia immigrants, ….. which way would have ventured into the “unknown”, …… down the coast or across country toward the snow covered mountains?
Which had the greatest prospects for finding food and water and shelter and burnable biomass?
Don’t forget, David, …….. fall, winter and spring are still brutal seasons in that locale ….. and summers are damn short and not exceptionally warm.
Life was rough back then.
Re., Cogar et al:
Actually Clovis man had plenty of wild horses on his menu, so they went extinct along with the mammoths. Lewis and Clark traveled by river whenever possible, and just couldn’t fit any horses on their canoes. They did buy some 30 pack horses from the Shoshone in order to carry two tons of gear over the summit to the Salmon River, but I suppose it would have to be explained to Cogar that you generally don’t ride a pack horse.
Clovis could have run rings around Lewis and Clark, but they had no need or inclination to explore–only to hunt big game. Which they did successfully for long enough to multiply and cover a continent till the prey was scarce. Then the population declined as the big game disappeared except for those which were not easily killed with a spear.
It would be 3000 years before any Folsom points showed up; this was a different technology entirely, probably based on much smaller bands than the Clovis. A few Neanderthal genes survived, so we may suppose a few Clovis genes did too, but their technology went extinct generally along with the high population required to leave behind so many spear points to be discovered. Clearly Clovis technology did not evolve into Folsom technology until long after the Clovis had largely disappeared, if there was any continuity at all.
Will Cogar learn anything from this? Not a chance. His specious and desperate arguments reveal a mind impervious to sound argument. Rest assured he will die in a self assured stupor. –AGF
A G Foster – April 1, 2020 at 12:44 pm
Shur nuff, …. Foster, ….. I believe, I believe.
Clovis man was a mighty hunter who musta had a preference for barbecued horse and mammoth steaks. And they easily, with their bipedal gait, out ran those quadrapedally running horses and kilt them with their “Clovis point” flint tipped projectiles. Kilt them right into “extinction”, they did.
And they did likewise with the quadrapedally running mammoths, which was easier because they couldn’t run as fast as the horses. And mammoth steaks were bigger and juicier. And they kilt them right into “extinction”, also.
But funny thing though, …… Clovis man must not have liked the taste of barbecued bison, pronghorn antelope, caribou, moose, elk, deer, mountain goat or bighorn sheep …. because they didn’t kill them to “extinction”.
“WHAT”, …… horses were only found in “snowy”, ”icy” Alaska ……. and that is why it was easy for Clovis man to kill and eat them, …….. RIGHT?
And “yup”, ….. Cogar learned a lot from A G Foster. Why he learned so much that he won’t have to go to College to get smart.
Strange. I remember going from California to Montana without crossing the Northern Rockies. Wonder how I did that? I do remember there was a lot of desert and prairie.
There is no reason to cross the northern Rockies. Every year I drive from Alaska to Maryland and back, and manage to avoid the Rockies altogether. Look on the map at the path of the Alaska highway, from Dawson Creek, BC to Tok, AK, and you can see the US government took the easiest path when they built the Alaska highway in 1942 (in just one year, an amazing feat). The road passes north of the northernmost extension of the Canadian Rockies, and well south of the Brooks range. Tons of space, and one still sees plenty of free-roaming bison to this day. The road is long but not hard, several byciclists do it every year. It is a gorgeous drive, I highly recommend it.
When I was a geology student in the 1950s, I recall learning of the unexplained glass, IIRC, found in desserts in North Africa.
You know, when you have a pet theory and are looking for evidence, it abounds, often from sources, like in this case, archeological digs and the like. No one walks across the quadrangle and disturbs a geologist like David, or chemist, or engineer depending on the ‘ideation’.
Number one, yes we do get platinum anomalies associated with bolide impacts, but we also have osmium, iridium, platinum, ruthenium, rhodium and palladium on earth – widely scattered in Canada and Greenland and in the north and far east of Russia, South Africa, Australia, Peru, etc. All deposits don’t have all the plat group metals in each. Tasmania has an Osmium deposit.
If a comparatively small bolide hit Norilsk, God forbid, a lot of nickel, Pd, lesser Pt, Os, and some Ir would show up widely scattered. It woudln’t melt ice in Greenland but could settle on the snow there.
Carbonado – black grainy aggegates of diamond with graphite occur only in Brazil and Central African Republic (once joined together) and is another mystery. No source rock has been found. Theories abound and bolide strike is one of them but, once again, esoteric explanations stretch credulity. Apparently the carbon appears isotopically to be organic. Once asked about it, I suggested a bolide striking a limestone or a coal seam may have created this unique material. Nope couldnt be that!
Diamonds can turn into graphite, and probably mostly do so when erupted which is the reason they are so rare. Graphite coated diamonds actually occur in Kimberlites.
And much of the carbon in diamonds is of organic origin as shown by the isotope ratios. Organic carbon is carried down deep into the mantle by subduction and some of it is carried back to the surface by kimberlite eruptions.
Limestones and coal have organic carbon too! Trust me, the localized occurrence of carbonado and the fact there is no source been found for this very valuable commodity, apparent lack of associated minerals that could lead to a kimberlitic type source, the coarse sizes of the aggregates, porousness, patina of what looks like chemical vapor deposition of glassy diamond material on the outside, and other features are puzzling to geologists.
Another really interesting topic, David! And illustrating yet again, science is oft influenced and misrepresented by flawed human desire for a favorite hypothesis to be ‘true’.
Perhaps deeper is the human desire to find the cause for every effect. Not having the cause for an obvious effect seems to create a cognitive disturbance. This is a feature, not a bug.
There are not many people who can resist that urge and accept that the unknown exists (perhaps temporarily). Some must think they have grasped the cause, others seem to deny the effects in order to ease the discomfort.
‘Tis truth forsooth”, lcf!
As a metallurgical engineer working in R and D, manufacturing trouble shooting, and failure analysis for 30 years, I was immersed in efforts to determine root cause and corrective actions for a wide variety of vexing problems. There were times where exact cause and effect could not be resolved, but less than perfect corrective actions could be applied to minimize defects, reduce rejection rates and inspection costs, and enhance product performance/reliability. In product development and continual process improvement, a ‘good’ incremental step that reduces losses is more valuable than having a ‘bogged down’ project canceled before an extended effort to create the ‘perfect’ corrective action can be completed. The incremental improvements also provide guidance for the next efforts to ‘dig deeper’ and find the true root causation, if the economics or need for greater product reliability still justified the effort. In other cases, we must admit that the limitations of the current process or manufacturing method is not capable of achieving the necessary results and a more capable alternate method (if available) should be implemented… or the project must be significantly revised or canceled. On occasion, ‘Ending is better than Mending’.
In all such efforts, the first thing to remember is ‘correlation does not establish cause and effect’. This is the trap that many folks with a ‘pet hypothesis’ fall into. It is a temptation the principal investigator must also resist. Experience and disciplined, logical analysis teaches this lesson to many…. but some never grow beyond their emotional/territorial reflex.
Worse, turning effects into causes! Reading CV news from Spain yesterday about medical staff infected with CV complaining that they didn’t have proper sanitation equipment and protective clothing, it didn’t seem to occur to the doctors that that meant they were probably the cause of the cluster of infection s (ditto Italy) and had been spreading it amongst the vulnerable (as asymptomatic carriers) for weeks.
Well, I just finished ‘The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes by Richard Firestone’, Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith. Notably, I didn’t see anything in the critique of the theory posted here that addressed anything at all detailed in the book.
The authors provide extensive, indeed exhaustive, factual evidence that something occurred circa 10,500 BCE which had a global impact on not only climate, but geologically. They theorize as to what the evidence suggests this event might have been caused by.
Short version: Trace elements spike at specific layers, particularly across N. America, within the time frames of 41,000, 34,000 and 13,000 years ago. They suggest that this sequence may have been related to a supernova involving the pulsar, Geminga. There are three facets of such an event, if close enough to the earth at that time, which could have consequence: 1) Radiation wave, traveling almost at light speed; 2) Shock wave, considerably slower; 3) Debris wave, much slower. The math works. They theorize that it was the wave of material propelled across space that set off a chain of events circa 13,000 years ago.
References to the ‘Caroline Bays’ are particularly intriguing.
But what’s more interesting, and IMHO, supremely relevant, and which they also relate, are the legends of as many as 600 cultures worldwide which describe a catastrophic sequence of events that changed their world forever. It is almost axiomatic that most legends have their basis in an element of truth. The word ‘mythology’ is tossed about often to all too conveniently write off the oral and/or written histories of ancient peoples.
Read the book! It’s well written, and well thought through.
As opposed to critiquing the movie without actually first watching it…if you get my drift.
“But what’s more interesting, and IMHO, supremely relevant, and which they also relate, are the legends of as many as 600 cultures worldwide which describe a catastrophic sequence of events that changed their world forever. It is almost axiomatic that most legends have their basis in an element of truth. The word ‘mythology’ is tossed about often to all too conveniently write off the oral and/or written histories of ancient peoples.”
Right, and legends from around the world attest to a global flood, as every creationist knows. Now if we could just figure out where all the water came from and where it all went. Genesis has a convenient answer: the flood gates of heaven were opened. Where did it all go? No problem. The closed hydrological budget isn’t recognized till Ecclesiastes a few centuries later, probably through a little help from the Greeks. –AGF
For the record, I’m no creationist, and I don’t do ‘religion’.
Consider the consequences had a comet of loosely packed ice and some rock, not an iron or nickel meteorite, struck the two mile thick sheet of ice that covered Hudson Bay at that time at about 70,000 mph…and there is evidence of an impact on the sea floor at that locale. Consider that at the height of the last ice age global sea levels were some 400 ft lower than today. That’s a helluva lot of water that came from somewhere…and apparently a lot of it came over a very short time span.
Track down images of the Carolina Bays, only one example of several found across the US, and proffer a logical cause that stands up to scrutiny. Interesting little book, about 84 pages, by Antonio Zamora, that specifically addresses this phenomena in very scientific terms, where so many others apparently have failed.
Dismissing literally hundreds of oral/written traditions out of hand many thousands of years old, from every area of the globe, almost all of which describe essentially the same world shattering event, smacks of a certain level of self-righteous arrogance that is all too common within the science community, and has been for some time.
Carolina Bays are older than Younger Dryas and definitively not impact related features and there is no evidence that the Laurentide (or any other) ice sheet was disrupted at Younger Dryas time.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/03/uniformitarian-impact-craters-part-deux-carolina-bays-edition/
All of the “evidence” cited by Firestone, West, Kennett, etc., except for the Pt anomalies and possibly scoria like objects (SLO) is ambiguous. Subsequent efforts to reproduce their work from similar materials have yielded different results. And the more recent paper on Pt anomalies, was not able to conclude an extraterrestrial origin.
The only two pieces of unambiguous evidence of a significant impact event that could have occurred at Younger Dryas time, contradict their hypothesis… Yet, the GISP2 Pt anomaly and Hiawatha crater are cited as supporting evidence.
This post deals with the two pieces of unambiguous evidence.
Uniform vs catastrophic change, the debate rages on. In fact, both are realities. Things change gradually, until something catastrophic happens, and then things go back to changing gradually. Catastrophic, such as Toba super volcano event 75,000 years ago, which happens to coincide with a bottleneck in mitochondrial DNA, implying as few as several thousand humans may have been the sole survivors.
Velikovsky wrote about this many decades ago; he approached the topic from two angles – the physical evidence, and oral/traditional history. Bottom line; something catastrophic happened on this planet not all that long ago. Indeed, literally tens of millions of people were witness to the event, most of whom did not survive. Those that did passed down their version, in their terms that somehow made sense of it all to them, so that it would never be forgotten.
Had the Tunguska event instead occurred over London or Paris, it goes pretty much without saying that the collective human race this day would have an entirely different perspective on the earth’s meanderings through space and time. But, thankfully, it happened in a virtual no man’s land, so remote that it was almost twenty years before the results were even seen. As they say, outta sight, outta mind.
Carolina Bays – the debate about this reminds me of the adage that says, more or less, when all else fails to explain something, the obvious solution is probably the right one. What’s obvious here is that these craters of sorts across N. America amount to, for lack of a better word, splatter. Again, think in terms of a comet, not a meteorite. If a comet, somewhat already broken up by gravitational forces (perhaps Jupiter’s or Saturn), slammed into the glacial cover across Canada (and to a lesser degree, Europe) from a relatively low angle, and at about 70,000 mph, the debris/ejecta – mostly ice and water – launched across the continent, at similarly low angles of departure/arrival, leave pretty much what we see on the ground as testimony to the event. There are two approaches to this taken regarding this event: a) using science to explain it away in order to, IMHO, protect a narrative (bordering on ideology) – Uniformitarianism. And b) Trying to understand the science that makes sense of the obvious…wherever that may lead! Such as has Zamora in his short book, “Killler Comet”.
Rather, we are asked to believe in such proposals as the “Overkill Theory”, essentially a bunch of Clovis people with slightly more sophisticated spear tips than anyone else in their time, were somehow able to wipe out, single handed, 35 species of mega-fauna in a matter of a couple thousand years. Now, if these mammals had already been decimated by the catastrophic event we’re onto here, it is conceivable that the few remaining Clovis survivors may have had the wherewithal to finish off the rest over the ensuing few months or even years to feed what was left of their tribes.
I have no axe to grind. Confirmation bias works both ways. I’m also a climate skeptic, in good part because I am also somewhat skeptical of lot of other stuff being pushed down our throats by “science”. Science that has a fairly long track record of marginalizing any and all who step outside the proverbial box…often viciously. There is too damned little difference this day in how “science” handles naysayers to their narratives from how the Church of Rome dealt with the likes of Galileo, and threatened the likes of Newton.
I would finish by quoting Freeman Dyson: What the world needs is more heretics.
Hear, hear!
Stay healthy everyone!
Al in Cranbrook, you are full of it. You don’t know the first thing about comparative mythology, linguistic evolution or cultural transmission. You couldn’t give a single example of a universal legend or myth, let alone one that has proven to have a historical basis. And you seem to think primitive man went to school to learn his technology rather than having it passed down from parent to child.
Clovis man specialized in big game, so successfully that the Clovis population bloomed. Big game hunting is efficient: one kill feeds the band for a week. When big game disappeared the population plummeted. Mind you these were people with high mortality (i.e., short life spans). The loss of big game left them poorly equipped to compete with less numerous small game hunters, if they even existed at the time (they probably did).
Primitive technological breakthroughs were typically genetically imperialistic. Domesticate animals? Your descendants will take over a continent. Invent dairy farming? (Indo-Europeans) Your language will spread forever. Domesticate the horse? (Turks) Indo-Europeans beware. Invent the crossbow? (Huns) End of the Roman Empire. The technology passes from father to son faster than from culture to culture. –AGF
Al in Cranbrook, you are full of it. You don’t know the first thing about comparative mythology, linguistic evolution or cultural transmission. You couldn’t give a single example of a universal legend or myth, let alone one that has proven to have a historical basis. And you seem to think primitive man went to school to learn his technology rather than having it passed down from parent to child.
Clovis man specialized in big game, so successfully that the Clovis population bloomed. Big game hunting is efficient: one kill feeds the band for a week. When big game disappeared the population plummeted. Mind you these were people with high mortality (i.e., short life spans). The loss of big game left them poorly equipped to compete with less numerous small game hunters, if they even existed at the time (they probably did).
Primitive technological breakthroughs were typically genetically imperialistic. Domesticate animals? Your descendants will take over a continent. Invent dairy farming? (Indo-Europeans) Your language will spread forever. Domesticate the horse? (Mongols) Indo-Europeans beware. Ride the horse and Invent the crossbow? (Turks and Huns) End of the Roman Empire. The technology passes from father to son faster than from culture to culture until cities evolve. –AGF
Al in Cranbrook, how expert are you in comparative mythology, linguistic evolution or cultural transmission. You couldn’t give a single example of a universal legend or myth, let alone one that has proven to have a historical basis. And you seem to think primitive man went to school to learn his technology rather than having it passed down from parent to child.
Clovis man specialized in big game, so successfully that the Clovis population mushroomed. Big game hunting is efficient: one kill feeds the band for a week in summer, for a month in winter. When big game disappeared the population plummeted. Mind you these were people with high mortality (i.e., short life spans). The loss of big game left them poorly equipped to compete with less numerous small game hunters, if they even existed at the time (they probably did).
Primitive technological breakthroughs were typically genetically imperialistic. Domesticate animals? Your descendants will take over a continent. Invent dairy farming? (Indo-Europeans) Your language will spread forever. Domesticate the horse? ( Mongols) Indo-Europeans beware. Ride it (Hittites? Turks?) Canaanites beware. Invent the crossbow? (Huns?) End of the Roman Empire. The technology passes from father to son faster than from culture to culture. –AGF
A G Foster – March 28, 2020 at 10:40 pm
A G Foster, ….. I thought you knew where all that flood water came from, …….. unless you are one of those misnurtured, ….. miseducated, …… Bible believing creationist.
Foster, check out this Post-Glacial Sea Level Rise proxy graph and note that when the glaciers melted the sea level increased by 140 meters (450 feet).
And iffen there were “600 cultures worldwide” sometime between 22,000 yBP and 8,000 yBP, most of them were surely living close to the shore of the ocean or a connected sea, …… and iffen a 450 feet rise in water level didn’t constitute a “flood”, I don’t know what would.
When the Black Sea’s Bosporus Straight was breached and the Mediterranean “inflowed” it musta been awesome to those who inhabited the area..
Well get your story straight: is it global sea level rise (which has probably never been noticeable by primitive man) or the Black Sea (which was quite noticeable)? And don’t you understand that the more flood events you cite the weaker your argument for a universal myth becomes? A few archeologists thought they had discovered the great flood in Sumer until they found a Gilgamesh tablet still deeper in the excavation.
Even literate peoples have a hard time getting their history straight, and you guys are claiming continuity across half a thousand illiterate generations and two or three dozen languages. Silly. –AGF
Quick and easy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
I get the impression, AG, that the very idea that ancient peoples were much more than knuckle dragging, slightly glorified apes kinda bothers you a tad?
Have a look at the ruins of Puma Punku, 50 ton blocks cut with a degree of precision that mystifies the best masons of our day, who can only begin to match such with the best modern technology has to offer. And then take notice that these 50 ton blocks are scattered about in the same manner as if junior, in a tantrum, tossed his Lego set across the living room!
Is it mere coincidence that Gobekli Tepe dates precisely to end of the Younger Dryas circa 9600 BCE? These ruins in ancient Cuzco demonstrate a complexity in construction that defies comprehension – https://hiddenincatours.com/the-giant-builders-of-ancient-cusco-peru/ How is it that the oldest monolithic constructions, virtually anywhere in the world one cares to look, are of superior design and construction than later attempts?
And I could go on, and on, and on. Point being – illiterate? In what sense of the word? And by whose standards? Ours? We couldn’t duplicate the Giza plateau construction today if our bloody lives depended on it! Well, okay…maybe for about umpteen kabillion dollars and the very best technology and modern heavy equipment money could buy…maybe.
Frankly, some of the explanations by ‘science’ are even more preposterous than the notion that ET showed up and built this stuff for us…as if they couldn’t think of anything better to do after travelling half way across the galaxy!
Any scientist worth his salt will tell you that to freeze a mammoth so completely that its meat is still edible 13,000 years later requires a drop in temperature to -150 F within a matter of mere minutes. How did that happen? How is it that ancient lore carried down through hundreds of generations across the globe describe the same event – hell raining down from the skies in fire, debris, black goo, blood, you name it, instant floods, torrential rain, mountains shaking and crumbling to the ground, death and destruction on every horizon as far as the eye could see?
The more I read…and I’ve been doing this for about 50 years now…the more I am convinced that we don’t have a clue in hell about our early history. Or the honesty to admit it. But to put a finer point on it, the guts and integrity to go and figure it out, wherever that leads us.
Agendas and/or ideologies always seem to be the first order of business.
I guess I do have an axe to grind, eh?
A G Foster – March 29, 2020 at 12:39 pm
AH SO, …… Foster, …… you are a Bible believing Creationist, …… aren’t you?
Shur nuff, ….. iffen your God created man (and woman) 6,000 years ago ….. then they and/or their descendants couldn’t possibly be witness to a global sea level rise that occurred prior to (3,000+ years) them being created by your God, ……. Right?
A G Foster, being you are a Bible believing Creationist …… you really shouldn’t be engaging in any serious discussions about the “natural world” that you live in.
For instance, …… to wit:
Quit talking silly, Foster, your above CYA doesn’t improve your standing and creditability one iota.
All floods or flooding that I cite are actual, factual, scientifically proven events, …… unlike your “universal myth”, ….. claiming your God “did it”.
And ps, …. AG, ……. your Biblical account of “Noah’s Flood” ……. is nothing more than a plagiarized version of the Gilgamesh flood story.
But keep it up, Foster, …… cause I got more scientifically factual answers than you have miseducated questions to be asking.
@ Al in Cranbrook – March 29, 2020 at 7:36 pm
Al, I’ve been doing likewise for more than 60 years, …… experiencing, learning, reading and studying the natural world I live in and the world before my time, ….. and I agree 99% with what you said, the exception being there are a few of us that have determined, ……. via common sense thinking, logical reasoning and intelligent deductions, …… the “path” that our early hominoid ancestors had to have “traveled” to evolve into present day H Sapiens sapiens.
Damn right you are, …… Al, ……… and the Egyptians were not capable of constructing the Great Pyramid of Giza. They didn’t have the craftsmen, the tool or the technology to construct the basic pyramid. And for damn sure they didn’t have the craftsmen, the tools, the mathematics or the technology to “cut” and/or “shape” all of that pure ‘white’ limestone that originally covered all four (4) sides of the Pyramid with a pretty much ”seamless” and perfectly “flat” veneer. (DUH, the Great Pyramid of Giza could have originally been used as a “reflecting telescope” for studying the movement of the Sun, earth, Moon and stars, ….. the equinoxes and solstices, etc., etc.)
Sam…
We’re on the same page. I’m reminded of that saying: Man fears time, and time fears the pyramids.
I think Schoch has done as much as anyone could, applying the science of water erosion, to trash the notion that the Sphinx dates to 2500 BCE. And I personally don’t believe for a second that the pyramids do, either. Nevertheless, Egyptology is good for business, and thus the narrative must be protected…truth and real science be damned.
Two interesting reads, if you haven’t already: Hidden History of the Human Race (condensed version of Forbidden Archeology ) by Michael Cremo – stuff conventional science prefers to sweep under the nearest rug. And The Missing Lands by Freddy Silva – world tour of monolithic construction sites and the legends recalled by locals regarding such.
My gut feeling is that something is missing from our history books regarding civilization. That a cataclysm of global proportions may have occurred at the onset of the Younger Dryas seems to fill in a helluva lot of blanks.
Plato, one of history’s more notable philosophers and intellects, nevertheless becomes the joker from hell when he wrote about the dreaded “A” word of 9000 years earlier…which, oddly enough, just happens to coincide with the end of the Younger Dryas.
Pretty tough to discover anything when one is in the first place convinced it never existed, eh?
Al, ……
Great minds think alike.
And one shouldn’t forget that the Egyptians never constructed anything anywhere that they didn’t “sign” their name(s) [images & hieroglyphs] all over it/in it …….. except for the Great Pyramid. HA, probably because they couldn’t figure out how to get inside of it …… because the only doorway was concealed behind one (1) piece of that white limestone.
Anyway, my personal belief is that present day humans are just the most recent inhabitants of intelligent beings to inhabit the surface of the earth. There are archeological remains scattered about the surface that present day humans can’t explain or reproduce without extreme hardship.
And Al, ……. you might enjoy my three (3) posts beginning with this one, to wit: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/16/nasa-gavin-schmidt-searching-for-the-silurians/#comment-2330762
The next 2 are 4 posts down from that one, ……… enjoy, … especially #3, …. it is a per se, Sci-Fi commentary with a lot of included truths. 😊
Geminga is a pulsating neutron star (Pulsar), 815 ly away. It resulted from a supernova that occurred over 300,000 years ago, not 13,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Encyclopedia_of_Science
Firestone et al address this in the book on page 174/6. They additionally quote several other scientists who contend that such might not be the case with Geminga. In any event, they offer it up as one potential culprit, and do not pretend that they have a any kind of a lock on this as fact.
The theory of a super nova as a root cause nevertheless remains, as per their accumulated evidence, quite intriguing. Such an event would quite naturally leave evidence on other surfaces within our solar system, and they suggest that indeed such evidence has been recorded on the northern hemisphere of the moon with regard to trace elements, particularly Thorium-232 and Potassium-40. Notably, they don’t appear in the opposite hemisphere.
I should note, too, that these two trace elements, among others, appear in elevated levels in the layer dated to 13,000 years ago, or the YDB. The time period as the Clovis people almost completely vanished from the landscape.
Al in Cranbrook – March 29, 2020 at 8:27 pm
Al in C, …… now I have been a “student of the natural world” for at least the past 75+ years …. and am also a learned scientist in the Biological and Physical and therefore I do not believe in magic, miracles, Religious hallucinations or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Likewise, I do not think it possible for a specific group of humans to “magically” appear from places unknown …… and then later, “magically” disappear from the face of the earth.
Al in C, …… given the fact that historical “examples” of Clovis Point napping has only ever been found in North America, …… in the specific locale of what is now known as America or the USA, …… then I have to assume that it was a part or portion of the native American population that developed or invented the “napping technique” for producing said “Clovis Points”, ….. and according to archeological research, said “Clovis Points” were in use by one or more groups of Native Americans for like 400 years (from about 13,000 years ago to about 12,600 years ago).
Now, Al in Cranbrook, …… for whatever reason, which I do not know for fact, … but I have to assume that the Native Americans being referred to as the Clovis culture, did so at about 12,600 years ago, decided to quit the “napping” of “Clovis arrow & spear Points” ….. and restart the “napping” of the more common “arrow & spear points” (click the hyperlink to see pictures).
The “napping” skill required …… and/or …… the method of attachment of the “point” to the ”shaft” could have been reason enough to quit producing “Clovis Points”.
Cheers, Sam C
Thank you, David, once again, for an educational post.
Stay safe and healthy,
Bob
PS: Say hello to Harris County/Houston for me. It’s been many decades since I’ve lived there.
I have to do that by WebEx. I’m being held hostage in Dallas County… 😎
“Science starts with observations (what we know) and then works to form hypotheses to explain the observations. The hypotheses are then tested to see if they can become scientific theories. Ideally, the hypotheses are tested empirically, in controlled experiments. Unfortunately, in geology, most hypothesis can only be tested by gathering more observations. This is why Chamberlin’s Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses is taught by many geology departments. For every given set of Earth Science observations, there are, almost invariably, multiple working hypotheses (non-uniqueness). As more observations are collected, some hypotheses will survive, others will have to be modified or discarded.”
Too bad climate “science” isn’t approached in a similar manner.
“When I seek to prove something – to myself but especially to others – I seek out data that supports my belief and filter out that which doesn’t. This allows me much certainty to the point that I “know” my belief is fact…”
Quote from the pseudo scientist…
Interesting geologic posting, David. I remember touring the Sudbury Cu-Ni-PGE deposits in the 1980’s, and visiting the famous cone-in-cone structures that the impact side of the genetic origin cited. Anyway, here in Mendoza, Argentina we are in day 10 of quarantine. In all of Argentina there are 745 cases of China Virus and 19 fatal, and here in the Province of Mendoza, population 2 million, there are 9 cases and 1 fatal (guy 81 years old, heart attack history, pacemaker, type 2 diabetic, and grossly overweight, obviously in the check-out zone!). I have adopted a “better safe than sorry” attitude, and, lucky me, discovered a Tom Clancy book I bought and forgot to read. Press On!
Before I discovered WUWT many years ago and began to start thinking critically from evidence based science, I listened and watched a few of the Randall Carlson YouTube videos, who had devoted a lot of time to this impactor subject, claiming it the cause of extinctions at the Younger Dryas. Not to mention that the extinctions went on over thousands of years in different locations…but he has probably single handedly done more than most to promote this idea to pop science culture.
He of course supplied all the ‘proofs’ such as the nano diamonds and burnt mass vegetation further south and the location of some erratic large rock and boulders in southern Alberta that originated on the other side of the continental divide in BC, where he postulated that the impactor hit somewhere in central to northern BC on the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. This of course caused so much major local flash flooding that it carried these massive erratics over the continental divide to southern Alberta. And also contributed to Lake Missoula massive flooding events creating the scablands in eastern Washington State. Of course he didn’t mention that Lake Missoula had damed and flash drained countless times during Pleistocene Epoch as the time period that began about 2.6 million years ago with the onset of periodic continental glaciation.
Another one of his main arguments for a bolide impact on the Cordilleran/Laurentide Ice Sheet was it melting quicker than available atmospheric heating capacity was capable of supplying that many BTU’s in the six-seven thousand years it took too melt a big chunk of the LIS. Of course, warm rain instead of cold snow could have supplied much of required ‘heat’ for that glacial melting opportunity accounting for the missing heat to melt things so quickly. One of the problems with his hypothesis as described is that the Cordilleran Ice Sheet in British Columbia mostly melted out several thousand years prior to the YD.
Randal Carlson seems up front very knowledgeable and a very good presenter, but he is just too much all over the map trying to make up all this impactor theory fit with a pre-determined line of thought. A lot of the general public thinking is that this is a credible scientific explanation and comes from these types of smart sounding people and popular ‘science’ being sold on dubious evidence. It’s also too bad he decided to go down the pop fake science rabbit hole with the Bigfoot and Aliens and that is when I quit listening. But he did make some sciency sounding videos that sort of made sense to a semi knowledgeable lay person, until of course the evidence is found to be lacking. But this is where these kinds of pop science subjects lead, which is to people believing things that might not be true. Sort of sounds like the preaching of climate science and similar people lap it all up, including politicians and media type.
Well said. Now consider the advantage both grogs had over their speechless cousin apes, who could give no specific information on food sources or precise danger. –AGF
Thank you David. I look forward to your educational and thought provoking posts.
Trying to figure out what happened in the past is never as easy as one might think. After all, “something” did actually happen (snipe at modeling..:)).
I spent a significant part of my technical career as a “Root Cause” Investigator. I spent years trying to figure out what actually happened during certain events…fires, injuries, equipment failure etc. Usually these events happened hours and at most days or weeks in the past. Usually we had many human witnesses, video recordings, data dumps, physical (forensic) evidence. You’d think it would be a slam dunk to figure out what happened (that’s the commonly held perception). Nope. Dam hard. Sometimes impossible. Most of the tools used by root cause investigators try to alleviate the effects of one single (human) problem. Confirmation bias. As far as I am concerned, the entire point of the “scientific method” is to try to minimize the effect of confirmation bias. In my decades of investigating and studying root cause analysis, the most significant basic “cause” out there (amongst us humans) is that we evolved to intrinsically want answers. Ambiguity was/is literally the enemy. Not knowing did not help feed your family, or hunt a woolly mammoth. Two stoneage hunters are asked where the best place to hunt a mammoth is: Grog1 replies…”I really don’t have any idea…lets try over there by that hill”. Grog2 replies: “They are by the swamp”. Who (then and now) gets the attention? Anybody with an answer. Group think is an evolutionary advantage in a world that is not even remotely understood. Why do we scream when faced with certain doom? It may help warn others nearby. This behavior is an intrinsic part of who and what we are. It demonstrably worked great for thousands of years. Now, having figured out that most of the time (now at least) there really is not a monster under the bed, we struggle to control this behavior. The ongoing tension between Grog1 and Grog2 continues. We naturally gravitate to anyone who, faced with uncertainty, says” I know the answer”. We skeptics always were, and probably always will be the spoiler at the big party. Fortunately we are making incremental progress in realizing that sometimes it is not dangerous to openly acknowledge that we have not the slightest idea of what is going on.
Regards,
Ethan Brand
David,
Black mat micro spherical 10 Million tons over 3-continents…De-bunkers didn’t follow protocals. I have them want to study the crater, not claim it. Clearly impacts have impacted life on the planet and the planet itself..as the moon was a major collision.
There is ample evidence of the Comet Research Groups Hypothesis: https://youtu.be/U2acXpGC15w
https://cometresearchgroup.org/comets-diamonds-mammoths/#impact-overview
The black mat bit is 100% ambiguous.
Well get your story straight: is it global sea level rise (which has probably never been noticeable by primitive man) or the Black Sea (which was quite noticeable)? And don’t you understand that the more flood events you cite the weaker your argument for a universal myth becomes? A few archeologists thought they had discovered the great flood in Sumer until they found a Gilgamesh tablet still deeper in the excavation.
Even literate peoples have a hard time getting their history straight, and you guys are claiming continuity across half a thousand illiterate generations and two or three dozen languages. Silly. –AGF
Are you saying there’s a Gilgamesh epic without the flood story? How would you know it’s complete?
Tierney, the point was a flood tablet was discovered below major flood deposits. So they probably did not find Noah’s or Gilgamesh’s flood. –AGF
Meh, the Tigris and Euphrates flooded all the time. Doesn’t mean those were “the” flood.
The comments don’t behave the same way twice today. Sometimes disappear, sometimes hold in moderation, sometimes post immediately. What gives?
To Tierney: And just what was “the flood”? The impossible biblical account? –AGF
I don’t think anyone knows! Personally I think the biblical story is cribbed from Mesopotamian flood epics. I’m not convinced it was the breaching of the Med into the Black Sea. That would have been impressive, but not like everyone-except-one-guy-drowning-impressive. I also don’t think the eruption of Santorini was big enough. I think it was something bigger- maybe caused by the YDI, maybe not- I’m waiting for more evidence. Maybe it is all just lost in the mists of time and we’ll never know.
David, a word of caution: in your Dallas County percentages, you take official numbers uncritically. The “percentage with Covid-19” should be “percentage with at least”. The “percentage without” has never been measured.
The sarcasm should be self evident.
“There is little doubt that this is an impact crater.” Based solely on a shape? Can I claim that the Hudson Bay is an impact site?
I linked to the full text of Kjær et al., 2018. They lay out in extensive detail the comprehensive evidence that this is an impact crater. It’s the exact opposite of crater hunters circling up round things on satellite images.
Why does the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis publishing team not deserve the same respect? We have published over 60 peer-reviewed highly controversial papers — that destroy the paleoclimate story you yourself decry — and you dismiss out of hand, again and again. Read The Bib and tell me, why on earth would you defend the status of quo of impact science, and consider it any less beholden to politicization than “climate science”? Their is tremendous overlap between your critics and ours: https://cosmictusk.com/younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-bibliography-and-paper-archive/
I’ll be back with a more fulsome commentary about your inexplicable rejection of non-consensus well-published science, David Middleton.
Many of those papers have been followed up by papers that came up with different results. This doesn’t mean that your hypothesis is wrong. It just means that the evidence is ambiguous. The purpose of this post was to look at the least ambiguous pieces of evidence… Not the wide range of ambiguous evidence.
In the cases of the Pt anomaly in the GISP2 ice core and Hiawatha crater, there is very little room for alternate interpretations. However, in both cases, the impactor would have been an iron or other metallic meteoroid or asteroid, neither of seems to be consistent with the hypothesis that an impact event caused the Younger Dryas and megafauna extinctions. That said, about half of the Rancholabrean extinctions do appear to have occurred in a short (~2,000 yr) period in the Terminal Pleistocene. This coupled with the Pt anomalies is definitely consistent with some of the extinctions being due to an impact.
The purpose of this post was to look at the least ambiguous pieces of evidence… Not the wide range of ambiguous evidence.
That bibliography is very well done.
we just have to get a letter from the company, just in case the “authorities” stop us and want to see our permission slips… Is this next?
Yes, some states are issuing cards to demonstrate “need” to be out & about. More & more reminding me of the classical N*zi “Vair are yoor papas?”
Here in PA, even tough they have ridiculous/contradictory mandates on what businesses can/cannot be open, at least they don’t require “papers” for being out and about.
At the moment it’s not illegal to carry no ID while out and about here in Australia, but I can certainly see it will be mandatory in coming years. I know it is a legal requirement to carry ID in Belgium, not sure about any other countries in the EU zone.
I have always wondered if the shadow that shows in the US centered around a spot between Huntsville, Gadsden and Birmingham, AL is an impact. You can see a circular ‘rim’ that passes through Tupelo, MS to Starksville, then to Selma, AL and Montgomery, AL. It looks pre-collision of the mass that created the Blue Ridge mountains as that has made the rest of the rim disappear.
The ice at the bottom of the crater is melted/disturbed, I thought.
I’ve read preliminary (unpublished) work from the group that found the crater. They are quite convinced it is young enough to be the YDI crater. I think more data will be published quite soon and we shall see.
All outboard basal ice is melted and/or deformed and much of the interior basal ice is melted and/or deformed.
The only way a Younger Dryas impactor could have not left a YUGE mark in every Greenland ice core, would have been if it had a northward trajectory. In which case the ejecta material would not have landed in the United States, Syria or any of the other alleges YDB impact sites.
Even with a northward trajectory, the heat from the impact should have left a clear mark in the Camp Century core. It didn’t.
The trajectory doesn’t matter if there were airbursts and smaller impacts along the way as the object broke apart to scatter the proxies. You seem to be wishing the almost world wide proxy evidence away. Hiawatha doesn’t need to be “the” YDI crater… it might just be one of them.
Abject nonsense.
Hiawatha crater was the result of an iron or iron-nickel asteroid impacting the Earth. It is a 31 km diameter crater. This wasn’t an airburst of anything. It wasn’t a small fragment. It wasn’t commetary material. It wasn’t a chondrite.
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaar8173
Having “causes” is inevitable and unavoidable. Scientists are human, and humans have causes. They go into a particular field or discipline because they have a cause. The Scientific Method is designed to counter that, by pitting one cause against another. Having scientists desperately trying to prove their arguments and another (or more than one) desperately trying to prove them wrong works.
Where it has stopped working is in some areas where one cause has been able to control the argument – and even whether there is an argument. Climate science is the obvious one, where nobody is able to challenge orthodoxy (as Climategate showed).
So much BS, so little time. And such slow moderation.
Al in Cranbrook (AIC) takes Velikovsky seriously. That explains a lot. You can’t know anything about anything and think Velikovsky was a capable scientist or historian. Just ask Dyson (whom AIC mentions in the same post). AIC seems to think the Incas were literate. He doesn’t seem to know the definition of the word. ‘Literate’ means you can read or right, which presupposes that you have a writing system to work with. If he has any evidence for Inca writing, he’s the only one. All that is known about their at distance communication is some kind of knot signaling. And because I call the ancients ‘illiterate’ it means I think they were knuckle draggers. Well I suspect the Inca could communicate long distance better than AIC and I can.
I spent four months in Cuzco, went to Machu Picchu four times, the last time with a guide who knew little more than AIC. The consensus is that it was built at least partly after Pizarro’s arrival, and all of it either shortly after or shortly before. That at least explains the rapid deterioration in construction skill exhibited: the bottom stones are cut with superb craftsmanship; the upper stones show little skill. The construction may have been hurried, but more likely the skilled artisans were dropping of disease like flies. Microbes were the allies of the Spanish.
Let’s see now, AIC makes this claim:
“Any scientist worth his salt will tell you that to freeze a mammoth so completely that its meat is still edible 13,000 years later requires a drop in temperature to -150 F within a matter of mere minutes.”
I think any scientist who knows his thermodynamics will tell you that at absolute zero you could not freeze a mammoth “within a matter of mere minutes,” under any reasonable definition of “mere,” nor could AIC propose any scenario which would drop the temperature to -150F within minutes or millennia, but these Velikovsky dupes aren’t much better off than Greta Thunberg dupes. What you need is for the carcass to never thaw out for the duration.
What else? “Is it mere coincidence that Gobekli Tepe dates precisely to end of the Younger Dryas circa 9600 BCE? ”
AIC has his own private YD chronology, as Middleton has pointed out, so coincidences are easy to come by. As for Velikovsky, he utterly rejects Newtonian physics with his outlandish fairy tales of a captured Venus. AIC knows less than a creationist about real science and can only waste our time here. –AGF
So much BS, so little time. And such slow moderation.
Al in Cranbrook (AIC) takes Velikovsky seriously. That explains a lot. You can’t know anything about anything and think Velikovsky was a capable scientist or historian. Just ask Dyson (whom AIC mentions in the same post). AIC seems to think the Incas were literate. He doesn’t seem to know the definition of the word. ‘Literate’ means you can read or right, which presupposes that you have a writing system to work with. If he has any evidence for Inca writing, he’s the only one. All that is known about their at-distance communication is some kind of knot signaling. And because I call the ancients ‘illiterate’ it means I think they were knuckle draggers. Well I suspect the Inca could communicate long distance better than AIC and I can.
I spent four months in Cuzco, went to Machu Picchu four times, the last time with a guide who knew little more than AIC. The consensus is that it was built at least partly after Pizarro’s arrival, and all of it either shortly after or shortly before. That at least explains the rapid deterioration in construction skill exhibited: the bottom stones are cut with superb craftsmanship; the upper stones show little skill. The construction may have been hurried, but more likely the skilled artisans were dropping of disease like flies. Microbes were the allies of the Spanish.
Let’s see now, AIC makes this claim:
“Any scientist worth his salt will tell you that to freeze a mammoth so completely that its meat is still edible 13,000 years later requires a drop in temperature to -150 F within a matter of mere minutes.”
I think any scientist who knows his thermodynamics will tell you that at absolute zero you could not freeze a mammoth “within a matter of mere minutes,” under any reasonable definition of “mere,” nor could AIC propose any scenario which would drop the temperature to -150F within minutes or millennia, but these Velikovsky dupes aren’t much better off than Greta Thunberg dupes. In any case, what you need is for the carcass to never thaw out for the duration. It’s hardly an experiment AIC or anyone else has any experience with, but AIC seems to claim omniscience of a sort.
What else? “Is it mere coincidence that Gobekli Tepe dates precisely to end of the Younger Dryas circa 9600 BCE? ”
AIC has his own private YD chronology, as Middleton has pointed out, so coincidences are easy to come by.
And as for Velikovsky, he utterly rejects Newtonian physics with his outlandish fairy tales of a captured Venus. AIC knows less than a creationist about real science and can only waste our time here. –AGF
Then again, ‘literate’ might mean you can read and write the word ‘write’ right.
I work for an hour on a post and it just disappears. If this keeps up I’ll have to give up on WUWT. –AGF
David,
I’m with you on the overboard response to a tiny number of cases. In my county, we currently have 96 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 1 death. The estimated population of the county is 658,000, meaning that approximately .014% are confirmed to be infected, similar to yours. Be still, my beating heart! Even if the real number is 10 times that, it’s hardly cause for alarm, yet people around me are genuinely alarmed.
Middleton, if the cavalry were coming for your motley band you would take target practice at their horses. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypotheses knocks the legs out of the fearsome claim that “abrupt change” results from mysterious “tipping points.” It also demonstrates that (while I do not fear monger on either subject) that concern for +1.4 degrees over the last 150 years is like arguing about the radio station while sitting on the train tracks.
Ill address some of your technical misunderstandings of the Kjaer paper in separate comments. But for this one I’d like to point out how your jihad on the YDIH is shamefully counter-productive to your own mission, and your readers mission, to unravel the sham that is climate fear communication.
I was at AGU 2010 in San Francisco when the high priest and “grandfather of climate science” Wally Broecker’s position regarding the YD impact was quite clear. He addressed the YDIH team and assembled and struck Comet in his slides as the cause of the climate period he had built his career studying. It was devastating to our study of the period. (I have over 600 co-author citations on the YDIH.)
In fact, my very first blog was concerned that conference: https://cosmictusk.com/hello-world-2/
However, not long before he died last year, Wally Broecker sent a memo to his team at Lamont-Doherty admitting that his iconic period – the Younger Dryas – was indeed the result of a globe cooling impact.
He said in the memo,
“Although I don’t for a minute believe that this impact did in the mammoths and the Clovis people, I do think that it triggered the YD.”
See Broecker’s entirely unreported internal memo here: https://cosmictusk.com/wally-broecker-says-a-cosmic-impact-caused-the-younger-dryas/
To say this was a profound reversal is an understatement.
So, here’s my question: If an octogenarian at the end of a hagiographic climate career can admit he was dead wrong about his most important claim – which had been pimped in print, film and TV as a fearful example of abrupt climate change – why can’t a climate truth pajama blogger like you?
And if you support the traditional understanding of the YD as an earthly forced period – but were proven wrong – wouldn’t that conclusion nonetheless further your efforts to base climate science on facts and not hysterical anti-science fearmongering?
Your effort to take down an enemy of your enemy with unbalanced, drive-by attacks is not helpful to your cause or to science. You have joined the legion of climate fear pimps that regularly attack the (damn difficult to get published) YD impact science. Both you and Anthony need to sit down and carefully read our heretical work (see last sentence), perhaps reach out to some of the authors (we don’t hide our work or data), and explore this theory as an opportunity to “change the conversation.”
Or, at the very least, lower your rifle and see if we can help save you.
(As a matter of record, I am a conservative climate skeptic, a position which is financially and politically dangerous for me. As CEO of http://www.restorationsystems.com, one of the world’s largest environmental credit traders, I have more to gain from “carbon trading” than anyone on earth — and I wouldn’t sell an ounce. I worked in the US Senate for six years (three for Jesse Helms) and three in the Environment and Public Works Committee. I fought the battle for eco-realism on the front lines, preceding Marc Morano of Climate Depot at that Committee. I have an extensive background in the difficult world of truthful environmental science messaging and maintain every YDIH paper and a comprehensive bibliography at my pajama blog here: https://cosmictusk.com/younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-bibliography-and-paper-archive/)
(whoops caught a typo)
Middleton, if the cavalry were coming for your motley band you would take target practice at their horses. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypotheses knocks the legs out of the fearsome claim that “abrupt change” results from mysterious “tipping points.” It also demonstrates that (while I do not fearmonger on either subject) concern for +1.4 degrees over the last 150 years is like arguing about the radio station while sitting on the train tracks.
Ill address some of your technical misunderstandings of the Kjaer paper in separate posts. But for this one I’d like to point out how your jihad on the YDIH is shamefully counter-productive to your own mission, and your readers mission, to unravel the sham that is climate fear communication.
I was at AGU 2010 in San Francisco when the high priest and “grandfather of climate science” Wally Broecker’s position regarding the YD impact was quite clear. He addressed the YDIH team and assembled and struck Comet in his slides as the cause of the climate period he had built his career studying. It was devastating to our study of the period. (I have over 600 co-author citations on the YDIH.)
In fact, my very first blog concerned that conference: https://cosmictusk.com/hello-world-2/
However, not long before he died last year, Wally Broecker sent a memo to his team at Lamont-Doherty admitting that his iconic period – the Younger Dryas – was indeed the result of a globe cooling impact.
He said in the memo,
“Although I don’t for a minute believe that this impact did in the mammoths and the Clovis people, I do think that it triggered the YD.”
See Broecker’s entirely unreported internal memo here: https://cosmictusk.com/wally-broecker-says-a-cosmic-impact-caused-the-younger-dryas/
To say this was a profound reversal is an understatement.
So, here’s my question: If an octogenarian at the end of a hagiographic climate career can admit he was dead wrong about his most important claim – which had been pimped in print, film and TV as a fearful example of abrupt climate change – why can’t a climate truth pajama blogger like you?
And if you support the traditional understanding of the YD as an earthly forced period – but were proven wrong – wouldn’t that conclusion nonetheless further your efforts to base climate science on facts and not hysterical anti-science fearmongering?
Your effort to take down an enemy of your enemy with unbalanced, drive-by attacks is not helpful to your cause or to science. You have joined the legion of climate fear pimps that regularly attack the (damn difficult to get published) YD impact science. Both you and Anthony need to sit down and carefully read our heretical work, perhaps reach out to some of the authors (we don’t hide our work or data), and explore this theory as an opportunity to “change the conversation.”
Or, at the very least, lower your rifle and see if we can help save you.
(As a matter of record, I am a conservative climate skeptic, a position which is financially and politically dangerous for me. As CEO of (www.restorationsystems.com) I have more to gain from “carbon trading” than anyone on earth — and I wouldn’t selling an ounce for $10,000. I worked in the US Senate for six years (three for Jesse Helms) and three in the Environment and Public Works Committee. I fought the battle for eco-realism on the front lines, preceding Marc Morano of Climate Depot at that Committee. I have an extensive background in the difficult world of truthful environmental science messaging and maintain every YDIH paper and a comprehensive bibliography at my blog http://www.cosmictusk.com)
This post is about the Hiawatha Crater and Pt anomalies associated with the YDB, the closest things to unambiguous evidence of an impact…. Not bizarre conspiracy theories. I am happy to discuss the subject of this post. If you want to write a rambling narrative on hammering square pegs into round holes, please submit it as a post. Anthony is usually open to publishing guest posts and WUWT has posted numerous articles both supporting and criticizing the YDIH. If asked, I would certainly recommend publishing your submission.
YDIH is totally unrelated to the causes of modern climate change or cyclical Quaternary changes. So the “enemy of your enemy” bit is beyond bizarre. Science is not about picking sides or supporting causes.
Broeker also acknowledged back in 2000 that his thermohaline circulation catastrophe theory was probably wrong because Bond noted that the millennial scale fluctuations continued on into the Holocene, albeit in a muted fashion.
Note the pattern in the GISP2 ice core:
The most anomalous feature is not the Younger Dryas stadial. It’s the preceding Bølling–Allerød interstadial. No one knows for certain what drove the ~1,500 year Late Pleistocene climate oscillation. The Younger Dryas is simply not anomalous in the context of the final Pleistocene glacial stage.
Except that ~250 species went extinct. You are rallying the wise to defend the ignorant. Just because you may have personal history of calling the YD unexceptional, does not undermine the evidence something profoundly significant happened at that moment. That’s why we split geological epochs there, do you use the terms Holocene and Pleistocene? To say nothing significant happened ~12,877 years ago may be an early trope of climate communication, but it does trump the fact that very few people agree with you, or mammoths.
Except that ~250 species went extinct. You are rallying the wise to defend the ignorant. Just because you may have a personal history of calling the YD unexceptional, does not undermine the evidence something profoundly significant happened at that moment. That’s why we split geological epochs there long before climate hysteria. Do you use the terms Holocene and Pleistocene? To say nothing significant happened ~12,877 years ago may be an early trope of your climate communication, but it does not trump the fact that very few people agree with you — or mammoths.
Is the hypothesis that an impact caused the Younger Dryas? Or that an impact might have played a role in some extinctions? It seems to frequently change.
While the Younger Dryas and the transition from the last Pleistocene glacial stage to the current interglacial stage (the Holocene) may have been unremarkable from a climatology perspective, about 90 genera of megafauna (mammals weighing at least 44 kg) became extinct during the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene (Late Quaternary).
The Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene megafauna extinctions took place over 10’s of thousands of years at different times on different continents (Koch & Barnosky, 2006).
“Australia lost 14 of its 16 genera of Pleistocene mammalian megafauna along with “all megafaunal reptiles” (Koch & Barnosky, 2006). By 40,000 years ago, Australia had already lost more than 90% its larger species (Prideaux et al., 2010).
North American (Rancholabrean) extinctions appear to have occurred much later and possibly in at least two phases. While 16 of 35 Rancholabrean genera extinctions took place during the terminal Pleistocene (~2,000 yr period coincident with the Younger Dryas), the other 19 genera disappeared from the North American fossil record thousands of years earlier (Faith & Surovell, 2009).
2,000 years is a geological blink of the eye. Something catastrophic may have happened in North America during the terminal Pleistocene. This was also when the Folsom culture replaced the Clovis culture. A bolide is certainly a possibility in explaining some of the Rancholabrean extinctions. The Pt anomalies, particularly the one in the GISP2, provide strong evidence that a significant, crater-forming iron meteoroid/asteroid impact event occurred at YDB time.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/14/poking-a-hole-in-the-latest-younger-dryas-impact-paper-uniformitarian-impact-craters-part-trois/
Much of the evidence cited in the various YDIH papers could be evidence of an impact, but it is ambiguous – subject to a wide range of interpretations.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/27/the-single-biggest-problem-with-the-younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-uniformitarian-impact-craters-part-cinq/
Some of the “evidence” cited is just crackpot psuedo-science.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/25/uniformitarian-impact-craters-same-as-it-ever-was/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/03/uniformitarian-impact-craters-part-deux-carolina-bays-edition/
And has been pointed out so many times here, wherever people go, big animals disappear in a hurry: in Australia, North America, South America, New Zealand, Madagascar, Wrangel Island, Crete, Komodo, etc. It must be those big game diseases the newcomers carry. –AGF
Funny since Africa, the continent with the longest continuous human presence, is the only one that retains its diversity of megafauna…
Of course. In Africa, and to a lesser extent in Asia, humans and animals evolved together. Did Africans eat elephants? –AGF
Humans and megafauna evolved together in Africa. From about 4 MYA to about 1.4 MYA, they hunted our ancestors, that all changed when Homo erectus started making stone tools…
https://owlcation.com/stem/The-African-Megafauna
–
The African climate and landscape wasn’t as seriously impacted by Pleistocene glacial cycles as North America, Europe and Asia were. When humans began spreading into the Americas, the megafauna would have already been experiencing habitat disruptions related to deglaciation, further complicated by the Bølling-Allerød interstadials and Dryas stadials. Our ancestors in Europe, Asia and the Americas benefited from more advanced weapons and tools, improved hunting methods and, perhaps most importantly, domesticated wolves (AKA dogs). With these advantages, they ran headlong into what were likely limited populations of megafauna, with no instinctive fear of humans.
Humans weren’t the sole cause of the megafauna extinctions… We were more like the “straw that broke the Camelops’ back.
Yeah, I know, I am since 1997 “the Carolina Bay man”. And still I believe those features are relatively poor evidence for the #YDIH, which more than shared by the lead authors and why they discarded the bays as we make the better case — more than a decade later. Science doesn’t require a perfect first draft. (Nonetheless, Carolina Bays are adequately explained, even by you, David). The unambiguous evidence is over 100 sites on multiple continents presenting material at well dated strata that could not be without hellish temps >2200 C. That’s a fact and probably why in your post above, you lead with a sensational reporting of the fact, but do not address the journal article that inspired the news article. And turn to bays and craters not featured in our papers.
I know how it is, I don’t read a lot of papers that disagree with my beliefs, but then again I don’t then proceed to write drive by posts without mention of the papers I didn’t read. You, Anthony and Morano et al. need to drop back a bit on this subject and read the papers, and the quality of the critiques, much more carefully. It is in your interest.
And mine.
I doubt you are open minded, David, but perhaps your misinformed readers are. Here is a post on how I perceive the relationship between “global warming” and the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis: https://cosmictusk.com/science_communicators_global_warming_hiawatha_crater_greenland_younger_dryas_cosmic_tusk/
EMP? I’ll let the Air Force worry about that. If an A-bomb fries my laptop I’ll have worse things to worry about than EMP. Superstar Bill Nye? They don’t come any dumber. –AGF
Good work, Mr. Middleton, and thanks for the bit on African paleontology. As for the climate contribution to megafauna extinction, it reminds me of the war for oil myth: it’s never explained whether the motivation is keep the price of gas high or low, that is, whether to benefit Big Oil or the gas guzzling consumers. Likewise the assumption that a warming climate was detrimental to mammoths and the dozens of other species that disappeared over a few millennia doesn’t make much sense to me; what was bad for the woolly mammoth should have been good for the Columbian mammoth and vice versa if temperature were the prime consideration, and if habitat, the same should go for mammoths versus mastodons.
Woolly mammoths disappeared from Wrangel Island at around the date of the first Eskimo archeological site, and a thousand years earlier on St. Paul Island, maybe when the Aleuts came around. Channel Island mammoths disappeared along with those on the mainland, not at all safe from the arrival of the mainlanders. Big and little elephants went extinct on islands in the Mediterranean and Indonesia, usually in association with human colonization, or at least modern (neolithic or thereabouts) human colonization. And the same goes for all the other megafauna that disappeared in Australia and South America. Blaming it even a little on climate change seems like politically correct hand waving: those noble savages were worthy caretakers of the land, nothing like us moderns.
But the pattern is clear; when the hunter moves in the hunted move out. Regards, –AGF
Yeah, I know, I’m the “Carolina Bay guy” since 1996. And still I believe those features are relatively poor evidence for the #YDIH, which more than shared by the lead authors and why they discarded the bays as we make the better case — more than a decade later. Science doesn’t require a perfect first draft. (Nonetheless, Carolina Bays are inadequately explained, even by you, David).
The unambiguous evidence is over 100 sites on multiple continents presenting microscopic and atomic materials at well dated strata that could not be, without hellish temps >2200 C. That’s a fact and probably why in your post above, you lead with a sensational reporting of the fact, but do not address the journal article that inspired the news article. And turn to bays and craters not featured in our papers.
I know how it is, I don’t read a lot of papers that disagree with my beliefs, but then again I don’t proceed to write drive by posts without mention of the papers I didn’t read. You, Anthony and Morano et al. need to drop back a bit on this subject and read the papers, and the quality of the critiques, much more carefully. It is in your interest and mine.
George,
I have written a lot of WUWT posts on this subject. I have read and referenced many, if not most, of the papers supporting and criticizing the YDIH. Each post generally deals with a specific aspect because…
“It is beyond the scope of this study to present” everything.
And…
In each post, I highlight a specific “experiment” that failed.
Petaev et al., 2013 and, to a lesser extent, Moore (Christopher) et al., 2017 pretty conclusively demonstrate that a significant impact event occurred at or near YDB time. Scoria like objects (SLO), basically volcanic glass, also support an impact, or impacts, near YDB time. Hiawatha Crater is a clear example of a relatively large, geologically young impact crater, probably older than 50,000 years ago and almost certainly younger than 2 million years ago. The timing of at least half of the Rancholabrean extinctions is also consistent with a catastrophic event.
The YDIH papers have presented evidence of biomass burning and potentially high temperature fires. However, this evidence is ambiguous. It has been interpreted in other ways. Almost all of the YDB sites have low chrono-stratigraphic resolution. The site with the highest chrono-stratigraphic resolution, the GISP2 ice core, clearly shows that the biomass burning occurred about 30 years after the impact, therefore the impact didn’t cause the biomass burning. Furthermore, like the Younger Dryas itself, the YDB biomass burning was not anomalous…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/27/the-single-biggest-problem-with-the-younger-dryas-impact-hypothesis-uniformitarian-impact-craters-part-cinq/
David, I am having trouble understanding the central claim of your post, which I have read a dozen times. Are you saying that, since the ice cores distant from Hiawatha still show the YD and layed ice above and below, this means there was no impact at the YD-start? Is your underlying assumption here any impact would have removed the ice across the entire island? Help me out.
I’d add an anecdotal understanding that Kjaer et al. believed the crater dated to 12.9 based on the remaining ice at the location being, in their informed opinion, no older than 12.9. It is heard the Science reviewers struck all 27 original references to the YDIH, and not one remained, which is clearly suppressive. A paper such as this should be allowed to discuss whether their evidence comports with other published theories. But no, it endures the same repression encountered by evidence which undermines AGW. Here is the author of the Science magazine popular article on difficulties encountered by the Kjaer et al. https://cosmictusk.com/intrigue-at-science/