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The settlement occupants left an abundant and continuous record of seeds, legumes and other foods...By studying these archaeological layers, Professor Kennett and colleagues were able to discern the types of plants that were being collected in the warmer, humid days before the climate changed and in the cooler, drier days after the onset of what we know now as the Younger Dryas cool period.Before the impact, the inhabitants' prehistoric diet involved wild legumes and wild-type grains, and small but significant amounts of wild fruits and berries.In the layers corresponding to the time after cooling, fruits and berries disappeared and their...

Abu Hureyra is an archaeological site that was occupied for thousands of years, spanning the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding. While a large body of research has explored this transition across many archaeological sites, much remains to be determined about the specific timeline, including the full range of early animal management practices that may have preceded large-scale herding.To shed new light, Smith and colleagues turned to ancient animal dung. Specifically, they analyzed the presence of dung spherulites—tiny calcium carbonate clumps found in the dung of animals—at Abu Hureyra, and considered this evidence alongside other archaeological, archaeobotanical,...

13,000 years ago, something very bad seems to have occurred, leaving a layer of carbon suggesting dramatic fires. But for much of the last decade, scientists inspecting the remnants of the village have debated what happened, unable to decide whether the carbon formed during an airburst or during more mundane fires among the thatched huts. So Moore decided to reexamine the glass in more detail. His analysis of the glass composition matched a 2012 finding claiming an airburst had destroyed Abu Hureyra, suggesting that the villagers' bucolic lifestyle ended suddenly when one or more fragments from a passing comet exploded...

Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival. That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago...

Researchers from Aarhus University, in collaboration with Stockholm University and the United States Geological Survey, analyzed samples from the previously inaccessible region north of Greenland...They showed that the sea ice in this region melted away during summer months around 10,000 years ago...During this time period, summer temperatures in the Arctic were higher than today...This was caused by natural climate variability [not] human-induced warming...

A study published in early March identified at least eight new groups of ancient humans that lived through earth’s most recent Ice Age. Researchers used the genomes of 357 ancient European humans who existed between 5,000 and 35,000 years ago to assess which ancestry profiles survived through the Last Glacial Maximum (25,000 t0 19,000 years ago), according to the study published March 1 in Nature. The analysis revealed eight distinct tribal groups who are believed to have existed in Europe and were developed enough to survive through the Ice Age. Each of the groups were given a unique name, such...

This paper supports the proposal that fragments of an asteroid or comet impacted Earth, deposited silica-and iron-rich microspherules and other proxies across several continents, and triggered the Younger Dryas cooling episode 12,900 years ago.

A carbon-rich black layer, dating to 12.9 ka, has been previously identified at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America and appears contemporaneous with the abrupt onset of Younger Dryas (YD) cooling. The in situ bones of extinct Pleistocene megafauna, along with Clovis tool assemblages, occur below this black layer but not within or above it. Causes for the extinctions, YD cooling, and termination of Clovis culture have long been controversial. In this paper, we provide evidence for an extraterrestrial (ET) impact event at 12.9 ka, which we hypothesize caused abrupt environmental changes that contributed to YD cooling, major ecological reorganization,...

Don't look now, but another big chunk of the "evidence" for man-made global warming suddenly disappeared. Poof! Researchers just reported that the world's most recent case of "abrupt climate change"—which occurred a mere 12,000 years ago—was probably due to a comet strike, not to "climate sensitivity." The Younger Dryas occurred as an Ice Age was ending. As the climate began to warm, a huge and sudden rush of fresh meltwater broke out from the Great Lakes and swept out to sea. The water surge was monumental enough that the meltwater lowered the salinity of the ocean, shut down the Atlantic...

Catastrophic Comet Chilled and Killed Ice Age Beasts Jeanna Bryner LiveScience Staff Writer LiveScience.com Mon May 21, 9:30 AM ET An extraterrestrial object with a three-mile girth might have exploded over southern Canada nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as megafauna like mastodons and mammoths. The blast could be to blame for a major cold spell called the Younger Dryas that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, a period of time spanning from about 1.8 million years ago to 11,500 years ago. Research, presented today at a meeting of the American...

Tiny balls of fungus and feces may disprove the theory that a huge space rock exploded over North America about 12,900 years ago, triggering a thousand-year cold snap, according to a new study. The ancient temperature drop, called the Younger Dryas, has been well documented in the geologic record, including soil and ice core samples.The cool-down also coincides with the extinction of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals in North America, and it's thought to have spurred our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Middle East to adopt an agricultural lifestyle.But the theory that a comet or asteroid explosion is behind the...

Did Comets Cause Ancient American Extinctions?Anne Casselman for National Geographic NewsMay 6, 2008 Debate has heated up over a controversial theory that suggests huge comet impacts wiped out North America's large mammals nearly 13,000 years ago. The hypothesis, first presented in May 2007, proposes that an onslaught of extraterrestrial bodies caused the mass extinction known as the Younger Dryas event and triggered a period of climatic cooling. The theory has been debated widely since it was introduced, but it drew new scrutiny in March at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Vancouver, Canada. Stuart...

JUST months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated. Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years. Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took...

Asteroid Day this year, June 30, 2021, is 113 years after the Tunguska impact event in Siberia, which destroyed an area of pristine forest the size of Tokyo. With blasted and burnt tree trunks leveled and stripped bare over such a vast area, it is as though a large atomic bomb had been dropped on the forest. The debate still goes on in the research literature, but a popular theory is that this impact was caused by a small comet fragment, in the region of 328 feet (100 meters) in diameter, that exploded at an altitude of around 5 miles...

Scientists think that a cluster of comet shards may have smashed into Earth's surface 13,000 years ago... While the first Homo sapiens emerged between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, much farther in the past than this impact, the researchers found that this comet crash actually coincided with significant changes in how human societies self-organized. This work builds on previous research that has suggested that a significant impact may have preceded the beginning of the Neolithic period, the first part of the Stone Age in which a number of major developments in human civilization took place, including notable steps forward in...

Scientists discovered a strange, tall, humanoid wooden figure under four meters of peat in a Russian bog. The figure, dubbed the Shirgir Idol (after the bog where it was found), is more than twice as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Gold miners stumbled upon pieces of the wooden figure in 1894. 100 years later, radiocarbon dating helped researchers trace the sculpture back some 9,900 years, which made it the oldest monumental sculpture in the world. The most recent analysis of the idol, published in Antiquity journal, pegged the figure at about 11,500 years old.

In 1894, gold prospectors near the city of Yekaterinburg in Russia unearthed not gold, but wood, and a very special wood at that. Specifically, they unearthed what's now known as the Shigir Idol, a 5-meter (16-foot) carved wooden statue that was marked with recognizable human faces and hands, as well as several intricate markings. The statue was believed to be merely a few thousand years old, and it simply sat on display at a Russian Museum for many years. In 1990s, researchers conducted a radiocarbon analysis of the statues to finally determine how old it really is, and turned up...

　 Beaver's teeth 'used to carve the oldest wooden statue in the world' By The Siberian Times reporter 15 June 2017 Dating back 11,000 years - with a coded message left by ancient man from the Mesolithic Age - the Shigir Idol is almost three times as old as the Egyptian pyramids. Two years ago German scientists dated the Idol as being 11,000 years old. Picture: The Siberian Times New scientific findings suggest that images and hieroglyphics on the wooden statue were carved with the jaw of a beaver, its teeth intact. Originally dug out of a peat bog by...

The air was likely frigid as the hunter lit a small fire. The caribou would come in the morning—forced through the narrow strip of marshland where he camped. There was nowhere else to go. The land was flanked by water on both sides, and large stones had been laid out in slanting lines to funnel the animals into this bottleneck. The hunter struck his weapon to sharpen its edge in anticipation. In that moment, two glassy flakes splintered away from the point of impact and fell to his feet. They would be buried there for nearly 10,000 years.In 2013 those...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron, on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes. The researchers located what they believe to be caribou-hunting structures and camps used by the early hunters of the period. "This is the first time we've identified structures like these on the lake bottom," said John O'Shea, curator of Great Lakes Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology and professor in the Department of Anthropology. "Scientifically, it's important because the...