A REALLY Bad Day
May 25th, 2007 by 
Steven Gould
Just under 13,000 years ago, the earth entered a profound cooling period in Europe and Asia that lasted about 1000 years. In conjunction with this was the die off of most of the mammoths in North America and Europe and the disappearance of the early Stone Age humans from North America. This was known as the Younger-Dryas period and until very recently there were several competing theories as to why this happened.
… at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. A group of US scientists that include West will report that they have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. 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.’
Estimates put the comet as five kilometers in diameter. Link.
Posted in Dammit!, History, Science, Steve | 
6 Comments »
May 26th, 2007 at 9:26 am
I read that it was nearly so-long-it’s-been-good-to-know-ya for humans, too.
May 26th, 2007 at 10:19 am
And it could easily be so-long-it’s-been-good-to-know-ya again if we don’t a)continue to monitor potential collisions a B)develop a means to get out there and divert the suckers.
May 26th, 2007 at 10:53 am
Yeah, it’s certainly an eye-opener to realize how recently we came to the brink of a human extinction level event…
May 27th, 2007 at 11:09 am
A couple of years back, I read an article on the net that said that DNA analysis indicated that the human population dropped down to about 10,000 worldwide at one point. I haven’t been able to find the right sequence of search keywords to find it since then.
Wonder if this was the event that caused that. Anybody here got a link?
May 27th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Rory, Keywords “population bottleneck.”
http://www.bookrags.com/research/population-bottleneck-gen-03/
May 27th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Looks like it was longer ago than 13,000 years according the LDA’s info. I guess we’d spread sufficiently in the southern hemispheres by then.
So, 12,900 years ago is rougly 10,900 BC. The oldest known granary is 9,500 BC. Considering that fairly vast pre-Columbian North American indian nations vanished in the wave of germ pathogens, and, because their cultural artifacts were earth works and decomposable plant structures, we don’t have a good record of them, it’s conceivable that some of our early (non-stone building) civilizations were in existence when this thing hit.
It’s also interesting that the oldest civilizations in the western hemisphere are in South America, not the North, which should’ve been populated first. So, earlier waves of land bridge colonizers made it down into an area that wasn’t as affected by both the impacts and the subsequent cooling, possibly resulting in a jump-start on civilization that North America didn’t have.