These things may be fairly common on a geologic scale.
I’m reading a book called “Is Atheism Dead” by Eric Metaxas.
One story that he tells is that scientist have found the old city of Sodom in northern Jordan above the Sea of Galilee. Its a big tell now. When scientists dug down into the tell, they found a black mat layer that dates to about 1800 BC. That black mat layer looks like every other black layer that’s indicative of some kind of cometary/asteroid strike. The next layer above the black mat layer shows that human habitation stops dead for about 700 years. Meaning, people avoided that area for a long time subsequently. Why? Well, read the bible. The area was thought to be cursed.
Some time ago SC posted information that as a result of draining the Iraq marshes, a 2000 bc crater had been discovered. There seems to be a lot of termoil in the Middle East around 2000 bc. Perhaps the black mat layer you reference belongs to that same calamity that hit Iraq. There were no doubt many fatalities in the entire area surrounding that crater, which if I remember was quite large.