The Comet Strike Theory That Just Won’t Die
An Anonymous Coward writes:
Science, or New Age Apocalyptics? You decide.
In 2007, a group of researchers, led by a nuclear physicist named Richard Firestone, announced an astonishing discovery. They had uncovered evidence, they said, that 12,900 years ago, a comet - or possibly a whole fleet of comets - struck Earth and changed the course of history. For the preceding two and a half million years, through the Pleistocene Epoch, the planet's climate fluctuated between frozen stretches, called glacials, and warm interglacials. At that time, Earth was warming again, and the ice sheets that covered much of North America, Europe and Asia were in retreat. Mammoths, steppe bison, wild horses and other enormous mammals still wandered the Americas, pursued by bands of humans wielding spears with fluted stone blades. Suddenly, somewhere over the Upper Midwest - an explosion.
[...] This cometary origin story, with its mix of ancient humans, vanished megafauna and global cataclysm, quickly spread beyond the confines of scientific journals. Media outlets around the world covered the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. It has been the subject of two more books and multiple documentaries, including one produced by PBS NOVA. Joe Rogan has discussed the hypothesis a dozen times on his podcast, and it provided the scientific underpinnings for Netflix's 2022 hit series "Ancient Apocalypse." But even as the hypothesis wormed its way into the public imagination, an important question persisted: Was any of it true?
[...] As they tried to replicate the Firestone team's findings, the skeptics noticed numerous odd details that seemed to hover around the hypothesis. There was, for example, "The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes," which came out just before the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study. The book's publisher was a division of Inner Traditions, which, according to its website, is "devoted exclusively to the subjects of spirituality, the occult, ancient mysteries, new science, holistic health and natural medicine." The book, written by West and Firestone, intersperses a breathless account of their work with the "astonishingly similar stories" of floods and celestial conflagrations from dozens of ancient cultures, including the tale of the "Long-Tailed-Heavenly-Climbing-Star," attributed to the Ojibwa. "It clearly wasn't a science book," says Jennifer Marlon, a paleoecologist at Yale who read the book soon after seeing the PNAS study. "I just thought, Well, this is kind of silly."
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