dv said:
Divine Angel said:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/comet-upended-life-paleolithic-village-12800-years-ago-180974575/
A village, currently underneath Lake Assad, was excavated in the early 1970s and found to be one layer under another. Severe burning and materials have led archeologists and scientists to conclude that a fragment of comet created an air burst above or near the village. It is the only known air burst to have impacted a human settlement.
Damn, what are the odds? There must have been like three villages in the world.
That’s a good question. How many villages were there 12,800 years ago? Let’s start with the world population back then. Found it “world population estimates 12,000 years ago range roughly between one and ten million”. How many in a village? It’d be 50 to 200 at a guess. So of the rough order of 20,000 to 50,000 villages. Of the same order of magnitude as the number of cities in the world now. So they’d be scattered fairly thin. But then a major comet impact affects a lot of area, Tunguska flattened 2,000 km^2, and this isn’t a case of flattening anything, just a fire following the impact, so the area affected could be a lot bigger.
The odds of a village being impacted by a comet airburst are not too bad. The odds of one such being found by an archaeological excavation are much smaller. Unless the fire and comet impact are unrelated, but just happened to occur in the same century.
> The researchers think that upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, the already-fractured comet likely broke up into several more pieces, many of which didn’t reach the ground. Instead, they produced a string of explosions in the atmosphere known as airbursts.
Yep. Comet’s do that. Always.
> soil samples from Abu Hureyra were filled with tiny pieces of melt glass—small bits of vaporized soil that solidified quickly after the explosion. They found melt glass among the seeds and cereal grains recovered from the site, as well as splattered in the adobe that covered the buildings. Most of these bits of melt glass are between 1 and 2 millimeters in diameter. The team also found high concentrations of microscopic nanodiamonds, tiny carbon spherules, and charcoal—all of them likely formed during a cosmic impact.
OK, I’ll buy that. But replacing the words “during a cosmic impact” by “in the comet before impact”.