Posted on 08/03/2007 11:29:34 PM PDT by ForGod'sSake
June 28, 2007
Comet theory collides with Clovis research, may explain disappearance of ancient people
A theory put forth by a group of 25 geo-scientists suggests that a massive comet exploded over Canada, possibly wiping out both beast and man around 12,900 years ago, and pushing the earth into another ice age.
University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear said the theory may not be such "out-of-this-world" thinking based on his study of ancient stone-tool artifacts he and his team have excavated from the Topper dig site in Allendale, as well as ones found in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.
The tools, or fluted spear points, made by flaking and chipping flint, were used for hunting and made by the Clovis people, who lived 13,100 to 12,900 years ago, and from the Redstone people who emerged afterwards. The two points are distinctly different in appearance, with Redstone points more impressively long and steeple-shaped.
"I saw a tremendous drop-off of Redstone points after Clovis," said Goodyear. "When you see such a widespread decline or pattern like that, you really have to wonder whether there is a population decline to go with it."
For every Redstone point, Goodyear says, there are four or five Clovis points. His findings are leading archaeologists from across North America to reexamine their fluted points, and their inventories are yielding similar results: a widespread decline of post-Clovis points that suggests a possible widespread decline of humans.
"What is interesting is that Redstone people came after Clovis people and may have lasted as many centuries as Clovis did, probably even longer, but there are fewer of these Redstone points than Clovis ones," Goodyear said. "That is really odd, because if the Redstone culture simply came right after the Clovis culture you'd expect at least as many Redstone points as Clovis ones. We just don't see that, and the question is why, and what happened to the people who made these tools?"
Archaeologists have long known that the great beasts of the age – the wooly mammoth and mastodon – suddenly disappeared around the same time period (12,900 - 12, 800 years ), but little was known about their demise. It was thought to be the result of over-hunting by Clovis man or climate change associated with a new ice age.
The notion that a comet collided with Earth and caused these events was farfetched until recently, when the group of scientists began looking for evidence of a comet impact, which they call the Younger - Dryas Event. They turned to Goodyear and the pristine Clovis site of Topper.
In 2005, Arizona geophysicist Dr. Allen West and his team traveled to Topper in hopes of finding concentrations of iridium, an extra-terrestrial element found in comets, in the layer of Clovis-era sediment.
"They found iridium and plenty of it," said Goodyear. "The high concentrations were much higher than you would normally see in the background of the earth's crust. That tends to be an indicator of a terrestrial impact from outer space."
The researchers also found high iridium concentrations at six other Clovis sites throughout North America, as well as in and along the rims of the Carolina Bays, the elliptically shaped depressions that are home to an array of flora and fauna along South Carolina's coast.
The Younger- Dryas Event suggests that a large comet exploded above Canada, creating a storm of fiery fragments that rained over North America. The fragments could have easily killed the giant mammals of the day, as well as Clovis man.
"No one has ever had a really good explanation for the disappearance of mammoth and mastodon," Goodyear said. "The archaeological community is waking up to the Younger-Dryas Event. It doesn't prove that these Clovis people were affected by this comet, but it is consistent with the idea that something catastrophic happened to the Clovis people at the same time period."
The comet theory dominated the recent annual meetings of the American Geophysical Union held in Mexico. Goodyear's Clovis-Redstone point study and West's research on the comet were featured at the AGU meetings and by the journal, Nature. The comet will be the subject of documentaries featured on the National Geographic Channel and NOVA television late this fall and in early 2008.
The Topper story
Dr. Al Goodyear, who conducts research through the University of South Carolina's S.C. Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology, began excavating Clovis artifacts along the Savannah River in Allendale County in 1984. In 1998, with the hope of finding evidence of a pre-Clovis culture earlier than the accepted 13,100 years, Goodyear began a concerted digging effort on a site called Topper, located on the property of the Clariant Co.
His efforts paid off. Goodyear unearthed blades made of flint and chert that he believed to be the tools of an ice age culture back some 16,000 years or more. His findings, as well as similar ones yielded at other pre-Clovis sites in North America, sparked great change and debate in the scientific community.
Believing that if Clovis and Redstone people thrived near the banks of the Savannah River, Goodyear thought the area could haven been an ideal location for a more ancient culture. Acting on a hunch in 2004, Goodyear dug even deeper down into the Pleistocene Terrace and found more artifacts of a pre-Clovis type buried in a layer of sediment stained with charcoal deposits. Radio carbon dates of the burnt plant remains yielded dates of 50,000 years, which suggested man was in South Carolina long before the last ice age. Goodyear's finding not only captured international media attention, but it has put the archaeology field in flux, opening scientific minds to the possibility of an even earlier pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas.
Since 2004, Goodyear has continued his Clovis and pre-Clovis excavations at Topper. With support of Clariant Corp. and SCANA, plus numerous individual donors, a massive shelter and viewing deck now sit above the dig site to allow Goodyear and his team of graduate students and community volunteers to dig free from the heat and rain and to protect what may be the most significant early-man dig in America.
Yeah, I quite agree, Syria did come very close. The defense was so fierce (and costly) on the Israeli side that the Syrians may have thought the reserves had arrived. They did indeed begin to pour in during that lull or regrouping or whatever it was. The Syrian losses to that point must have been daunting; the final toll was something close to 1000 tanks lost. The consideration on the Syrian side may have been to assess whether the attack could/should continue. As one of the biggest tank battles since WWII, and as a Soviet-style massed armor offensive, I’m glad to hear that it is studied.
It’s odd to me that the massive tank-killer tactics used by the Egyptians hasn’t caught on per se. Seems like an effective counter against a foe with superior quality or quantity of armor.
But anyway... Greenspan’s erudite style and intransigence really got to the Congress. He basically blackmailed them into balancing the budget in order to get the lower rates they were trying to demand. :’)
And then the comet hit, and...
There really hasn't been a conflict that would showcase modern anti-tank equipment and tactics since 1973. We expected it in the first Gulf War, but Saddam's antitank weapons were older and basically ineffective against the Abrams, so he mainly relied on tank v. tank defenses. If we ever have to take on Syria, they have some of the Russians' more up to date equipment.
BTW, I remember participating in a huge war game simulating a Warsaw Pact conventional attack on Germany. With heavy losses, we stopped them about half way across. When I read Tom Clancy's book on the same subject it struck me how close our results were to his description of the Army side of the conflict. I always wondered if he was privy to the results.
Don't know if it will provide any more info than you already have, but impact research is a topic I'm fascinated by. And Gene Shoemaker is one of my heroes. I happened to visit Meteor crater only a few weeks after his death and met several people there who had worked with him and knew him well. They were pleased that someone knew who he was, his connection with Meteor Crater as well as the Apollo program and not just the Shoemaker/Levy 9 comet.
I go out of my way to travel the area and hunt along the current water ways. It is very clear that at one point there was much more water there than the current situation and not just the inland sea that covered the area all the way to SLC.
The nuclear deterrent kept ‘em right where they were. Then, as Shevrednze (? whew...) said to Gorbachev, “the whole thing has gone rotten”, and a bunch of hardware got sold to China. That was really nice of the Russians, eh? ;’) It was good that a ground war never took place during the Cold War (two major threats or more toward West Berlin, during the Truman administration, and again during, hmm, the Missile Crisis), because judging from WWII, huge losses don’t phase the overall ground movements of the Red Army.
DNA has the potential, and I believe, will shortly solve some of these mysteries. I just hope it happens before I die, lol.
True. The Sov's weren't troubled by casualties.
We took the threat seriously. Since Ike NATO depended on the reserved right to first use of nukes to deter a Soviet ground attack and their superior numbers. But in post-Vietnam America, especially with Jimmuh in the White House, there was a lot of suspicion that the Sov's would not be met with a nuke response and we would have to slug out a conventional war. We were concerned the Sov's sized up the situation the same way and might just be tempted.
Thankfully, it never happened. They got bogged down in Afghanistan.
In hindsight it may look silly, now that we know how near collapse the Soviet economy was and how bad training and morale were in their army, but at the time our intel seemed to think they were formidable.
What were you saying about that comet? :-))
One of the things I was and am most curioius about is I had heard before the meeting they were going to present findings linking the event to the Carolina Bays. I didn't find anything in that particular link making a connection so it may be necessary to dig a little more.
I have not been able to determine if there is enough of any DNA in the "bones" left to run a sample on. When I press the question with the museum they get weird. Guess I need to make a big donation!!!! Too bad becasue my daughter has access to one the best DNA labs in the West.
Also I remembered over dinner that 9 years ago when I started this quest an old rancher was the first to tell me about the red headed people. He maintained that they were nothing more than Vikings and the Paiutes couldn't tell time. After some research I went back to him and asked how explained the "findings". He said "Nothing can be counted on when it has been covered with bat cra$ for a few hundred years!"
The Carolina Bays, one of the most conspicuous geomorphic features on the Atlantic Coastal Plain of the United States, are a group of about 500,000, oriented, crater-like, elliptical lakes, wetlands, and depressions, ranging from a few dozen meters to about 11 km in length. Although long proposed as impact structures (Melton and Schriever, 1933; Prouty, 1934), this origin for the Carolina Bays has remained controversial mainly because of an apparent absence of associated extraterrestrial materials. Analyses of Bay orientation showed that their long axes converge near the Great Lakes, suggesting that an impact or airburst over that region may have formed the Bays (Eyton and Parkhurst, 1975).However, Bays dates have been reported over a wide range, calling into question whether all Carolina Bays could have formed simultaneously, although this issue remains unresolved and controversial. Many Bay researchers, who subscribe to widely differing theories, agree that modern Carolina Bays have been subject to repeated modification and that they most likely evolved from some type of ancestral depressions.
Now for the first time, we present conclusive geochemical and sedimentary evidence in support of an extraterrestrial connection for the Carolina Bays. Analyses of sediment from the rim sands and basins of fifteen Bays, widely distributed across North and South Carolina, reveal anomalously high abundances of microspherules, iridium, fullerenes with ET helium, carbon spherules, glass-like carbon, and other potential markers for extraterrestrial impact. No such markers were found in paleosols beneath the rim sands or basal sediments of the Bays examined. The assemblage of geochemical and sediment signatures of extraterrestrial impact found in Bay sediments are essentially the same as in the pan-North-American Younger Dryas impact boundary layer (the YDB), dated at 12.9 ka.
We hypothesize that at least some Bays were formed by the YD impact during the last deglacial, and we present OSL and radiocarbon dating, along with stratigraphic profiling, in support of this age. Data from the Carolina Bays we have examined suggest that at least some modern Carolina Bays may have evolved from depressions which were excavated by primary ejecta, secondary ejecta, and/or the shock wave from the Younger Dryas impact event.
Are you convinced??? The fly in the ointment seems to be differing dates of the bays themselves. Odd.
Any teeth? You have a much better chance of getting ancient mtDNA from teeth.
The On Your Knees Cave sample, at 10,300 years old, was obtained from a tooth and yielded usable mtDNA (after about three years of work). Brian Kemp, who did that work, is setting up a new lab to concentrate on ancient DNA, so there should be some great new data coming!
In hindsight it may look silly, now that we know how near collapse the Soviet economy was and how bad training and morale were in their army, but at the time our intel seemed to think they were formidable.nah, not silly. The WWII-era Soviet public put up with terrible privation, well, I guess that goes for the Soviet-era public in general; and yet they mounted the largest ground assault in the history of the world in response to Operation Barbarossa. The threat was real. No one had a gun to their head when they set up a proxy puppet state in Afghanistan then invaded under the terms of the so-called mutual defense pact when the Muzzies went hog-wild to oppose the puppets. The media was state controlled, but no one could control the word of mouth when the body bags started to arrive, and everyone seemed to know someone who had lost a son, brother, or father.
IMHO insufficient credit has been given to Afghanistan in the demise of the Soviet Union. I think the devastating impact on both the economy and the Red Army influenced the decisions not to respond with force in Poland and Lithuania when they began to break away. I don’t buy Gorby’s line that he didn’t do it because he was just a closet liberal social democrat all along.
To this day, Gorbachev doesn’t want to admit that he was pushed around from inside and outside the country.
Ping.
just a fake bookmark for myself:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1876220/posts?page=18#18
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Just updating the GGG info, not sending a general distribution. |
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Ping.
Thank you for the link to this very interesting thread.
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