Re: Younger Dryas Impact
From the thunderbolts forum:CharlesChandler said:
I still believe that ancient symbols were inspired by celestial events. I just think that it was a swarm of asteroids that came through, lighting up the daytime sky, causing a few impacts, and generally doing a pretty good job of making a lasting impression on the humans who were running around at the time, before heading back out into the interstellar medium. And I believe that this was the Younger Dryas event(s). The one impact that we know about is the one that hit the Laurentide Ice Sheet, sending huge chunks of ice through the air, which caused the Carolina Bays when they bounced, before landing somewhere in the Atlantic. There could have also been a number of other near misses, and there could have been arc discharges powerful enough to catch everybody's attention. Just imagine what it would have been like to have been a hunter gatherer, 12900 BP, witnessing such events! And how would you explain such things to your children? I think that future generations then attempted to rationalize the stories, and mapped the events to objects that they could still find in the night sky, leaving us with lore associated with known planets from events that had nothing to do with the planets. The swarm that left its mark on our planet, and changed the evolutionary path of humans, while causing the extinction of many other species, is long gone. But it's interesting to consider the possibility that we could actually piece it all together someday, from the lore and from the scientific evidence. People don't just make up wild-n-crazy stories about things that don't relate directly to everyday life. So when such stories pop up all over the place, there has to be a reason.I'm still mulling over this, but I really think that this deserves closer scrutiny. It seems to me that the archaeological community is highly critical of new ideas, unless of course there is already some sort of trend in that direction, in which case the ideas are instantly accepted. Either way, the criterion was not scientific, and we are no closer to the truth. So I'll be working on iterating through the evidence, to see where the arguments stand.For a good overview of the debate, see the Wikipedia article:BTW, for whatever reason, I was thinking that the YD extinction resulted in the human population being reduced to approximately 2,000 (or at least those are the ones from whom we are descended). Actually, that was a different extinction, perhaps due to the eruption of the Lake Toba supervolcano, which was 70,000 years ago.