Wow. Brings to mind the world wide "flood" stories.
I thought this would be about a NEW meteor to wipe out the region without us needing to do it our way. Nature's daisy cutter! No more Iran, No more Iraq, No more Saudis, No more Yemenis! The War on Terror would be O-V-E-R and just in time for a nap!
You've REALLY disappointed me...
Would explain the similar flood myths in pre-Colombian culture that coincide with the more reknowned biblical floods of Noah and the bible...
Happy New Year, Blam! Hope it's your best year ever.
I think the 'estimates' of the timeframe are pure guesswork calculated to get a headline. It's likely the impact crater is much eariler.
As far as I know, there is no way to get a close estimate an impact site's age simply from a photograph. As far as I know, the only sign you can possibly key on is the 'look' of the edges, and guess at how much erosion has taken place. This wouldn't allow a guess to be anywhere near this accurate, unless I'm completely mistaken.
You can tell 'young' craters from 'old' craters. But you can't even guess within a few thousand years how old they may be.
I think it rather likely that the area-wide 'apocalypse' around 2300bce, the event that ended these civs, was actually the eruption/explosion of Thera.
And I think it's pretty likely that the 'Atlantis' story refers to this event. And the 'Moses' bit about the plagues of Egypt. And the Odysey.
Of course, that's just a wild guess.
Disaster that struck the ancients
Four thousand two hundred years ago, the first great civilisation in Egypt collapsed.
The pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom had built the mightiest legacy of the ancient world - the pyramids at Giza. But after nearly a thousand years of stability, central authority disintegrated and the country collapsed into chaos for more than a 100 years.
What happened, and why, has remained a huge controversy. But Professor Fekri Hassan, from University College London, UK, wanted to solve the mystery, by gathering together scientific clues.
His inspiration was the little known tomb in southern Egypt of a regional governor, Ankhtifi. The hieroglyphs there reported "all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children".
Dismissed as exaggeration and fantasy by most other Egyptologists, Fekri was determined to prove the writings were true and accurate. He also had to find a culprit capable of producing such misery.
Stalactites and stalagmites
"My hunch from the beginning was that it had to do with the environment in which the Egyptians lived." Fekri felt sure the Nile, the river that has always been at the heart of Egyptian life, was implicated.
He studied the meticulous records, kept since the 7th Century, of Nile floods. He was amazed to see that there was a huge variation in the size of the annual Nile floods - the floods that were vital for irrigating the land.
But no records existed for 2,200BC. Then came a breakthrough - a new discovery in the hills of neighbouring Israel. Mira Bar-Matthews of the Geological Survey of Israel had found a unique record of past climates, locked in the stalactites and stalagmites of a cave near Tel Aviv.
What they show is a sudden and dramatic drop in rainfall, by 20%. It is the largest climate event in 5,000 years. And the date? 2,200 BC.
As Israel and Egypt are in different weather systems, Fekri needed evidence of some worldwide climate event to link this to the collapse of the Old Kingdom. And the evidence came out of the blue.
Geologist Gerard Bond, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, looks for climate evidence in the icebergs of Iceland. As they melt on their journey south, they leave shards of volcanic ash on the ocean floor.
Dry lake
How far they travelled before melting tells him how cold it was. Cores of mud from the ocean floor revealed to him regular periods of extreme cold - mini ice ages - in Europe every 1,500 years, and lasting 200 years. And one mini ice age occurred at 2,200 BC.
Gerard's colleague, Peter deMenocal, looked at climate records for the rest of the world at exactly the same time. From pollen records to sand, the story was the same - a dramatic climate change from Indonesia to the Mediterranean, Greenland to North America.
Scientists were confirming everything Fekri believed - severe climate change causing widespread human misery 4,200 years ago, misery we are only now learning about for the first time.
Back in Egypt, Fekri wanted to put the last piece of the puzzle in place. He wanted direct evidence of this severe climate change in the Nile. And he found it drilling cores in a large lake that had been fed by a tributary of the Nile in ancient times.
He discovered in the critical period, as the Old Kingdom collapsed, the lake had dried up completely - the only time in the whole history of this lake that this had happened. At last, Fekri felt he had proved that the writings on Ankhtifi's tomb were really true. It was nature that had driven people to desperation.
The Ancient Apocalypse series begins on BBC Two on Thursday, 26 July, at 2100 BST
I've heard that there was a great Vedic society of legend that also disappeared some 4K(?) years ago, whose people spoke "Indo-European", a language that gave rise to Sandskrit, Greek and Proto-Germanic. It was the society from which the Vedas come from, the oldest scriptures known.