These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago, they say. The huge pressures and heat triggered by the fragments crashing to Earth turned the comet’s carbon into diamond dust. ‘The shock waves and the heat would have been tremendous,’ said West. ‘It would have set fire to animals’ fur and to the clothing worn by men and women. The searing heat would have also set fire to the grasslands of the northern hemisphere. Great grazing animals like the mammoth that had survived the original blast would later have died in their thousands from starvation. Only animals, including humans, that had a wide range of food would have survived the aftermath.’
The scientists point out that archaeological evidence shows that early Stone Age cultures clearly suffered serious setbacks at this time. In particular, American Stone Age hunters, descendants of the hunter-gatherers who had migrated to the continent from Asia, vanished around this time.
These people were some of the fiercest hunters on Earth, men and women who made magnificent stone spearheads which they used to hunt animals including the mammoth. Their disappearance at this time has been a cause of intense debate, with climate change being put forward as a key explanation. Now there is a new idea: the first Americans were killed by a comet.
Fortunately, my underground counter-tenor lair is almost complete.
My Phantom Organ, or, How I Became a Counter-Tenor:
Yeah, yeah. Compensation.
UPDATE: Mars says sorry for animal products in chocolate
Sure, they are.
The thing is, catastrophes like this? Entirely preventable if people would just Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
I didn’t know they were that old. But carbon-rich I can understand—I doubt they got the kind of gas mileage we’d expect today.
And crash-safety standards? Forget about it!
Ah, so Velikovsky was right!
Thanks, Merovign—exellent link.
I like the parrot – nice touch.
Giant ants from space
Waste the human race.
Then they eat your face,
Never leave a trace.
La la, la la la, la la, la la la, la la, la la la.
LOL, I like the mustache. :D
Velikovsky. Heh. I actually own a copy of Worlds In Collision; interesting, but utter crap. Most succinctly put: a genius on par with L. Ron Hubbard.
I’m going to have to remember that one.
Velikovsky, despite having had an education in mathematics, was stunningly reluctant to use any of it. If he had, he’d have spot-checked a few of his assertions and noticed that, well, the energy required to stop Earth’s rotation is on the order of one hundred trillion megatons of TNT, which would have to be applied all over again to spin the Earth back up again.
Sort of reminiscent of creationist hand-waving, I think.
Or that Jupiter, being composed of mostly hydrogen and helium, could not possibly have ejected Venus out, particularly not in anything resembling solid form. How Venus’ orbit became roughly circular after that is also, unaccountably, left as an exercise for the reader.
After that, the suggestion that Jupiter gave rise to the plagues of locusts, etc just add a little icing of amusement to the cake.