Minimalist wrote:E.P., I'm curious about one thing.
Is it your position that every event in human history is reliant on some rock falling from outer space?
NO.
There's a reason why my book is "Man and Impact in the Americas" and not "Man and Impact in the Ancient Near East". Let me see if I can explain it to you:
The description of Comet Encke in 1628 BCE in Exodus may upset your religious views and your biblical text analysis. But then I don't care really care much about ancient Israel or the interplay of current Israeli archaeology and modern Israeli nationalism.
The ancient contemporaneous records and remains are what matters. Later texts are just what they are, later texts. When your biases interfere with working with both primary and secondary materials, and the field materials, and the geological materials, then you have a problem, not me.
As Tecumseh once said, trouble no one about their religion.
Before 1997 I had the opinion that Edward Teller et al. prattling on about the impact hazard were just some nuclear scientists looking for work. In 1997 I learned that impact was indeed a significant threat.
What I attempted to do from 1997 until 2005 was to determine the recent impact rate as accurately as possible for space planning purposes. What is at stake is the direction of the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, and hundreds of millions of peoples lives.
This was not simply a theoretical exercise. You don't seem to understand this yet, but the next impact megatsunami will kill around 60,000,000; the next land impact say 1,000,000,000 by starvation. Their recent rate is 1 per 1,000 years. That's 60,000 per year for case one; 1,000,000 per year for case two. 7 tenths of the Earth is covered by water. You can work out rate of lives per hour.
Those peoples' lives are the only thing that makes dealing with this kind of crap almost daily worth it.
Tungsuka class events have recently been around 1 per 100 years. You can break that into lives per hour as well, and then add.
Comet and asteroid impacts are a major unconsidered factor which explain a lot of human history and behavior, as well as major parts of our evolution. In other words, impacts occurred and they were very very significant.
Impacts are also a terrific tool for chronological work as well. For example, all of the people on Malta died in 2,360 BCE, the same year as the Rio Cuarto impacts in Argentina.
The destruction of the "Minoan" armies by impact led to the end of LM1B, and set back civilization by 2 millenia or more. It was a 1-2 punch that took down the "Minoans": Thera, they were coping with, but then the impact...
The "Minoans" are gone, leaving one to deal with modern Greek, Turkish, Israeli, and Egyptian nationalism... along with everyone who has their career tied into alternative explanations...
