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6873
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of the worl
URL: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of the world’s earliest human settlements
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Before 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 melt glass, 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. “To help with perspective, such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute,” said James Kennett, a UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor of geology. Such intensity, he added, could only have resulted from an extremely violent, high-energy, high- velocity phenomenon, something on the order of a cosmic impact. Based on materials collected before the site was flooded, Kennett and his colleagues contend Abu Hureyra is the first site to document the direct effects of a fragmented comet on a human settlement. These fragments are all part of the same comet that likely slammed into Earth and exploded in the atmosphere at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, according to Kennett. This impact contributed to the extinction of most large animals, including mammoths, and American horses and camels; the disappearance of the North American Clovis culture; and to the abrupt onset of the end-glacial Younger Dryas cooling episode. The team’s findings are highlighted in a paper published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. “Our new discoveries represent much more powerful evidence for very high temperatures that could only be associated with a cosmic impact,” said Kennett, who with his colleagues first reported evidence of such an event in the region in 2012. 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. “The Abu Hureyra village would have been abruptly destroyed,” Kennett said. Unlike the evidence from Pilauco, which was limited to human butchering of large animals up to but not younger than the YDB impact burn layer, Abu Hureyra shows direct evidence of the disaster on this early human settlement. An impact or an airburst must have occurred sufficiently close to send massive heat and molten glass over the entire early village, Kennett noted. The glass was analyzed for geochemical composition, shape, structure, formation temperature, magnetic characteristics and water content. Results from the analysis showed that it formed at very high temperatures and included minerals rich in chromium, iron, nickel, sulfides, titanium and even platinum- and iridium-rich melted iron — all of which formed in temperatures higher than 2200 degrees Celsius. “The critical materials are extremely rare under normal temperatures, but are commonly found during impact events,” Kennett said. According to the study, the melt glass was formed “from the nearly instantaneous melting and vaporization of regional biomass, soils and floodplain deposits, followed by instantaneous cooling.” Additionally, because the materials found are consistent with those found in the YDB layers at the other sites across the world, it’s likely that they resulted from a fragmented comet, as opposed to impacts caused by individual comets or asteroids. “A single major asteroid impact would not have caused such widely scattered materials like those discovered at Abu Hureyra,” Kennett said. “The largest cometary debris clusters are proposed to be capable of causing thousands of airbursts within a span of minutes across one entire hemisphere of Earth. The YDB hypothesis proposed this mechanism to account for the widely dispersed coeval materials across more than 14,000 kilometers of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Our Abu Hureyra discoveries strongly support a major impact event from such a fragmented comet.” |
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[6874] [6875] [6876] [6877] [6878] [6879] [6880] [6881] [6882] [6883]
6874
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of the...
| we still cannot conceive that ancient civilizations were more advanced than ours... |
Responses:
[6875] [6876] [6877] [6878] [6879] [6880] [6881] [6882] [6883]
6875
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
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This was a protofarming settlement - what makes you think it was more advanced than today? The prehistoric villagers at Abu Hureyra were transitioning from hunting/gathering to cultivation, indicative of earliest agriculture, one of the most significant cultural transformations in human history. 
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[6876] [6877] [6878] [6879] [6880] [6881] [6882] [6883]
6876
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
| more ancient than abu hureyra...pre-babylonian... |
6877
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
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At March 11, 2020 at 09:11:19, ryan wrote: more ancient than abu hureyra...pre-babylonian... Pre-Babylonian Sumerians 4500 – c. 1900 BC ? They're more recent than when Abu Hureyra got whacked (12,500 years ago) Sumerians farmed, weaved, metalworked, made clay pots, wrote on clay tablets lived in settlements, intvented wheel, had a military - clever stuff, esp brewing beer, for their time but what makes you believe their civilization was more advanced than ours? |
6878
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
| older...more advanced because they worked as a civilization to evolve...to use their existence for the benefit of the whole instead for themselves...but they had electricity and many other marvels, and the wisdom to use them expeditiously..."modern" man, has forgotten who we are, what is required of us, and why we exist... |
6879
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
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So this ancient 'Pre-Pre-Babylonian' civ (can you give an approx date?) had electricity (oil?, gas?, nuclear? hydro? solar? crystal? wind? powered) and was way more advanced - who or what that they didn't foresee wiped them out? |
6880
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
| i highly suggest you read gurdjieff's book, beelzebub's tales to his grandson for a different look at history and reality...or, i made it easy for you, i read it... |
6881
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
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How come he remembers what we forgot in the past? What Chapter covers his musings on this early lost civilization? I used to think I was so clever as a kid reading Erik von Daniken, that was until I grew up... |
6882
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
| he spent the last years of the 19th century scouring the remote regions of the middle east, northern africa and central asia...he read old manuscripts in hidden monasteries and found ancient monuments with inscriptions etc...it's all in the books...gurdjieff was a scholar, an investigator and researcher...a lot of chapters cover what he found...try 22-29...I think you will find them highly interesting...what could it hurt?...daniken is a flea to G's elephant... |
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[6883]
6883
From: Alan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Evidence of a cosmic impact that caused destruction of one of...
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He seemed to just make things up as he went along havigng read of his visit to the then only just discovered lascaux cave paintings - dipping into legend and whatever suited his fancy - a bit like 'georg' here in flights of fantasy and connecting dots in a rather ill disiplined haphazard fashion. "...migrated northward, he sought out these elements and then reassembled and reformulated them for contemporary mentality" Think I'll stick with Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett who did't try to seriously pretend they are trying to found a cargo cult. "And so on the morning of August 31, 1949, Gurdjieff, "smoking a cigarette in a big black holder, with his red fez at a jaunty angle on the back of his head and a pocketbook bulging with thousand-franc notes," left Paris in a car loaded with students and hampers of food. Two more carloads of Gurdjieff's students followed." Sounds very bohemian - did he ever hang out with Dali or Picasso? |
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