Claim: Humans recorded asteroid strike that caused mini-ice age

[Ursa major]

I found another article about the same subject, but much more interesting and professional.

It states:

One of its pillars seems to have served as a memorial to this devastating event

The most relevant word in that sentence fragment is "seems" which, in the absence of any other evidence, means that we're dealing with pure speculation and so the story can be dismissed as lacking any scientific basis. And that's without all the other evidence that this is a load of old nonsense.

 

[Alexa]

Brian, as I can see this article, we are dealing with a hypothesis of catastrophic event.They still have to finish the digging to try to prove anything. And honestly, if they have only stones on hand, no matter how old they are, all they can do is to speculate about a subject.

Much more archaeology waits to be performed at Göbekli Tepe and neighbouring sites like Karahan Tepe. It will be very interesting to see how the additional evidence from these sites accumulates. Meanwhile, it seems prudent to take coherent catastrophism seriously.

(page 13/18 from Sweatman and Tsikritsis)

Ursa, Brian found the original document which looks to be the source of inspiration for both articles mentionned above.

 

[2DaveWixon]

A story carved in stone about a carved stone ?

And using stone tools, of course!

 

[Brian G Turner]

Lol! I'm dissing my own thread.

 

[2DaveWixon]

Brian has a point. Passing down folk stories between generations by word of mouth is one thing. Remembering accurately, the exact positions in the night sky, of stars for 2000 years, before recording them carved on stone is another.

Unless, it was accurately transcribed from an earlier stone in an earlier temple.

Or unless the stone was carved first, and a temple built around it later?

 

[2DaveWixon]

Lol! I'm dissing my own thread.

What you're really doing is transmuting it from science to science fiction!

 

[Ursa major]

is transmuting it from science to science fiction

I think it's more like how some sculptors describe what they're doing, in Brian's case, revealing -- well, unearthing -- the science fiction (not particularly well hidden) within the science-y speculation.

 

[J Riff]

13,000 is getting close. I hear 12,000 and change. And it's not the first time this same asteroid rubble has come round and dropped in for a little mass destruction.

 

[Alexa]

Lol! I'm dissing my own thread.

No worries. We helped you a bit with non required information and had fun in the process.

 

[hej]

Ancient carvings show comet hit Earth and triggered mini ice age.

Pretty neat if true. The use of symbols (e.g. the Ishango Bone and representations of animals in cave art) predate even (extant) proto-writing by millenia.

On a somewhat related note is the origin of the Kaali Crater in Estonia.

It resulted from a meteor strike that could have happened 1530–1450 BCE (or perhaps much earlier). I find it interesting for a number of reasons, including the following.

1. The meteor (pieces) landed apparently in a populated area.
2. The meteor seems to appear in the Kalevala (Finnish epic).
3. The meteor, to my knowledge, does not appear in the Kalevipoeg (Estonian epic, which bears some similarities to the Finnish one).

I find the second point dubious because Elias Lönnrot composed the Kalevala from folk tales in the 19th century -- millenia after the most recent estimate for the crater. If true, though, I find inspiring that a people could keep a story alive for so long in their collective memory.

 

[Vertigo]

This piece continues to bother me, so I dug deeper - the original research paper can be found here:
http://maajournal.com/Issues/2017/Vol17-1/Sweatman and Tsikritsis 17(1).pdf

What it basically says is that someone looked to see if they could get images of animals on a specific stone to match constellations using a piece of software. They did get a fit, but only for 4 specific dates:

2,000 AD – Winter solstice
4,350 BC – Autumnal equinox
10,950 BC – Summer solstice
18,000 BC – Spring equinox

They then checked to see whether any related to dating of the stone.

But here's the strange part - someone previously radiocarbon dated the stone to around 11,000 BC. But the last I heard, stone cannot be radiocarbon-dated because ... it's stone. You can only do this with organic matter, because that contains the carbon matter for dating.

So the researcher decided on the 10,950 BC date to match the radiocarbon dating - even though this means the structure would pre-date the settlement by 2,000 years.

In fact, the research paper itself mentions almost nothing about the actual archaeology or dating on the site.

But the researcher has heard of the comet theory for wiping out the mammoths, so immediately connected both dates. That's what the paper states.

The rest of the stone markings remain unexplained, but there is a circle - which is now presumed to be the comet to fit this date.

Which now becomes a "fragmented asteroid" that wiped out the mammoths. The irony being, the Telegraph article in an earlier post points out that the theory that a comet wiped out the mammoths is no longer accepted.

IMO this study is based on flawed assumptions from start to finish, resulting in a grand statement that just isn't supported by the actual evidence.

You might want to be a little careful with those dates @Brian G Turner as the radiocarbon dating referred to in the article (done on organic matter in the plaster of some of the walls rather than the stone itself) gave a date of 11,530BP which is different to BC/BCE. As I understand it BP refers to years before 'present.' In this case present refers to 1950 when radiocarbon dating first started. This gives a BCE age of around 10,000 odd years.