Archaeologica.org

The mammoths and other megafauna did not go extinct as a consequence of an impact from a comet, meteor, or asteroid: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7854348.stm

The Empire Strikes Back!

Excuse me, RS, but most of the scientists involved did not say that, with the exception of Breukner.

Denial is not simply a river in Egypt.

The abandonment of chert quarries and the reduced populations are not mentioned.

Then there's the little problem of the First Peoples' memories of this. If an impact event did not occur, then why would they have made up such explicit and outlandish stories?

Why does any people make up an outlandish story?

I assure you that the guy who wrote Godzilla never saw a 400 foot tall dinosaur crushing Tokyo.

Besides: the human memory has scientifically been demonstrated to be about the most untrustworthy medium imaginable. Let alone if that's a 'collective memory' of events one hundred centuries ago.
A demo of collective selective memory: everybody knows and remembers the 6 million Jews that perished in the holocaust of WWII. But nobody talks about the 5 million other victims of the concentration camps and ghettos anymore! They've already faded from collective memory. 5 million!
And that was only half a century ago!

Regrettably RS that is so true. The same with the millions that Stalin murdered.
But at the same time fairy stories etc can retain a kernal of truth over many generations.

Roy.

Digit wrote:But at the same time fairy stories etc can retain a kernal of truth over many generations

Is that right?
So where and when did you see a fairy...?

GAY time TV?

Roy.

Digit wrote:GAY time TV?

To each his own, I guess.
(Remind me to avoid southern Wales... or to bring a cork!).

Minimalist wrote: Why does any people make up an outlandish story?
I assure you that the guy who wrote Godzilla never saw a 400 foot tall dinosaur crushing Tokyo.

It appears that few here understand the difference between fiction and non-fiction that Native Americans held.

As for Godzilla, the best explanation I've read is that he is a displacement mechanism for US B-36 bombers.

I can't comment about south Wales RS, I don't live there.

Roy.

I have some reservations about the posted BBC article that maybe reading the PNAS report will clear up, specifically the following comments:

Analysis of charcoal and pollen records from around 13,000 years ago showed no evidence of continental-scale fires the cometary impact theory suggests.

Then:

However, the results showed increased fires after periods of climate change.

Alright, which is it? If there were increased fires after 12,900bp, then the comet hypothesis still stands.

The cometary impact hypothesis holds that an enormous comet slammed into or exploded over North America in the Younger Dryas period some 12,900 years ago.

Close but not quite, Firestone maintains that the comet initiated the Younger Drya cooling period.

Wallace Broecker Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory "Even if you have cometary impact data, that doesn't imply they generated wildfires that killed off the mammoths.

Again, comet impact yes or no?

The finding does not refute the possibility of comet strikes in the past, Professor Scott notes, but casts serious doubt on the grand scale wildfires that would have wiped out whole species and cultures.

So they appear to be discussing the prevalence of continent-wide wildfires versus cometary impact?

"One by one, every piece of evidence they [comet hypothesis proponents] have presented is going to fall," Professor Broecker told BBC News.

Hubris.

Richard Firestone, commenting on the work, does not believe it presents a serious challenge to the impact theory - in fact, he argues that they are in agreement.

"Their data is too low resolution to say much about what happened 12,900 years ago," he told BBC News.

"The paper merely shows that fires increased near the onset of the Younger Dryas and continued for some time. These results are in complete agreement with what we observed."

I hope there is better science in the PNAS report than the BBC release. I am not vested in whether a comet impact began the Younger Dryas or not, but reading through crap science is annoying.

As has been noted many times before, Cogs, there are different standards between a scientific report and the mainstream media. Such writings as this need to be carefully evaluated....as you have done.

Digit wrote:I can't comment about south Wales RS, I don't live there.

But perilously (conveniently?) close...

All the YD impact specialists are at a meeting right now, but you can expect a full reply at http://cosmictusk.com shortly.

Today Impact stories always draw readers, which was not true when I first started reporting on the hazard.

After some 20 years we still regularly see stories that impact did not kill the dinosaurs, so you can imagine how stories on more recent deadly impacts will go. Denial is not simply a river in Egypt.