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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...

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...

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...

The event destroyed a village found in the Abu Hureyra dig site in Syria... The impact is also believed to have contributed to the extinction of many large animals, including mammoths as well as North American horses and camels. Experts believe the explosion helped bring about the demise of the North American Clovis culture and usher in an episode of climatic cooling. The Abu Hureyra site is located on the edge of a vast region known as the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) strewnfield, which incorporates around 30 sites across Europe, the Americas and parts of the Middle East. The strewnfield...