Velikovsky was/is vilified for bringing up Catastrophism, but if you look around the world, something sure beat the Hell out of planet Earth way back when.
Posted on 03/20/2018 8:40:10 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Scholz's star -- named after the German astronomer who discovered it -- approached less than a light-year from the Sun. Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, a reservoir of trans-Neptunian objects located at the confines of the solar system.
...
Now two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid, the brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, together with the researcher Sverre J. Aarseth of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), have analyzed for the first time the nearly 340 objects of the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very open V-shaped, not the typical elliptical), and in doing so they have detected that the trajectory of some of them is influenced by the passage of Scholz´s star.
...
"In principle," he adds, "one would expect those positions to be evenly distributed in the sky, particularly if these objects come from the Oort cloud; however, what we find is very different: a statistically significant accumulation of radiants. The pronounced over-density appears projected in the direction of the constellation of Gemini, which fits the close encounter with Scholz´s star."
...
Scholz´s star is actually a binary system formed by a small red dwarf, with about 9% of the mass of the Sun, around which a much less bright and smaller brown dwarf orbits. It is likely that our ancestors saw its faint reddish light in the nights of prehistory.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
Fungi complains about dirt!
Actually, no. Most recently:
How do we know that, Darks?
Why is that hard to believe? That’s less than 1/3600 of the speed of light.
Velikovsky was/is vilified for bringing up Catastrophism, but if you look around the world, something sure beat the Hell out of planet Earth way back when.
I was actually aware of the recent report from South Africa about the impact of the Toba explosion on African humans.
It was an interesting article, but in my opinion, reached sweeping generalized conclusions that were not supported by the evidence.
I probably should have said “some” scientists believed African humans were almost wiped out, instead of “many” scientists.
As I recall, the original theory was that homo sapiens in Africa may have been reduced to about 10,000 individuals.
The evidence for earlier out-migration of African humans gets stronger and stronger every year. There is pretty clear evidence for homo sapiens in Israel and the Caucasus region by 100,000 years ago, and probably before that.
Bottom Line...
I thought it was a very interesting coincidence that the huge Toba explosion occurred at almost exactly the same point in time that a wandering star passed through the Ort Cloud.
The late Zecharia Sitchin wasn't much of a scholar, so he didn't realize the text was supposed to be read from right to left, hence, URIBIN. ;^)
The Toba "supereruption" is first off, a way for volcanologists to stay in the game -- they were blindsided and thrown out the front door by the bouncers when the Alvarez model took hold. Dewey Mclean (may he rest in peace) got dragged along out of his uniformitarian gradualist fantasyland, became the de facto leader of the opposition to the insurgent theory, and eventually wound up in a downward spiral, blaming Luis Alvarez for the sudden decline of his previously obscure career. Alvarez probably tried to give him some friendlly advice in private, that hey, Dewey, you're making yourself look bad, which Dewey then publically branded a threat. He found out that there was a level of discontent among others in his department and at the university at his overall performance.
The second thing the Toba "supereruption" did was try to plug a few holes in the Out-of-Africa/Replacement Model, which is the quintessential master race model of the modern sciences. Our various ancestors spent much of the past two million years emerging from whatever came before, and that time was mostly spent on the now-submerged continental shelf, as what we now regard as the Earth was ice-covered. Use of watercraft is at least 800,000 years old, so they got around without much impediment. /pedantic off
And not just the one time. :^)
It's great to know I'm not the only one. :^) Heiser's rebuttals are superb. The fact that Sitchin was such a liar is what bothers me most. I used to be troubled by the many camp followers he had, but they have, if anything, helped destroy his credbility with their own half-baked spinoffs and (ahem) borrowings from his BS.
Yes, on an object, but not on the cloud overall. Cometary bodies at that distance are thought to be very sparse.
The answer is somewhat self-evident, however, because the solar system did not experience a massive influx of cometary bodies in the last 70k years. :)
I was about to ask, “What does this have to do with Toba?” But you beat me to it. True, the earth was already in an Ice Age at that point, but if you look at long term temperature charts you can see a significant dip after 74,000 ya.
I don’t know when temperatures hit their maximum low, but glaciers did not reach maximum until 20,000 years ago.
About 19,000 years ago, CO2 reached its maximum low around 180 ppm, which I believe is still the all time record low, at least in “modern” times.
The consensus is that 150 ppm is the tipping point where most plants and trees would die, which, of course, means that almost all large herbivores and carnivores would die, too.
I’m not sure what 150 ppm would mean for sea life, but phytoplankton, which need sunlight and CO2, are the first link in the food chain for most sea life.
That is a very startling claim.
Were they constructed and used by Homo Erectus?
Are there real artifacts to confirm this?
Thanks for clarifying.
It pertains to the tools on Flores island -- the island was never part of the mainland in human times, and that's the age of the oldest artifacts found there. What we're expected to believe by the "land bridge" advocates is, it was a one time deal, and then no one thought to do this again until the settlement of New Guinea 740,000 years later, and in that part of the world, another 15,000 went by before anyone built another boat and went to Australia, and thereafter another 44,700 years went by before the next boat reached Australia.
Not familiar with any of this.
Off to Wikipedia for the basics, then to Google for more depth.
You are right. Temperatures continued to fall after the sudden dip around 74kya. Google Images Temperature Charts and you can probably find a good one.
My pleasure.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.