Did asteroid wipe out America's first people?

About | Contact | Mongabay on Facebook | Mongabay on Twitter | Subscribe

SHARE:

Did asteroid wipe out America's first people?
New evidence suggests extraterrestrial cause for disappearance of Clovis culture
mongabay.com
May 17, 2007

An asteroid may have caused the near-extinction of North America's first humans, argues a series of studies to be presented May 24, at the American Geophysical Union's meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. Nature reports that while the theory has been discounted in the past, new research suggests that an comet or asteroid could have exploded above or on the northern ice cap some 13,000 years ago, plunging regional temperatures to plunge for the next 1000 years. The theory would also help explain the disappearance of the continent's large mammals, including woolly mammoths, American lions, and the saber tooth tiger.

"The magnitude of this discovery is so important," Nature quotes James Kennett, a palaeoceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), as saying. "It explains three of the highest-debated controversies of recent decades."

The article says that the presentations will certainly be controversial since leading hypotheses already explain various occurrences during the period.

"A change in ocean circulation is generally thought to have brought about the onset of the millennium-long cooling, which is known as the Younger Dryas. This cooling might, in turn, have caused the Clovis hunters to disappear. And, if they had not previously been killed by disease or hunted to extinction, the big prehistoric beasts may also have been doomed by this change in climate," writes Rex Dalton, author of the Nature article.

The new evidence for the cosmic turn of events "comes in the form of geochemical analysis of sedimentary layers at 25 archaeological sites across North America - 9 of them Clovis," Dalton continues. "Certain features of the layers, say the team, suggest that they contain debris formed by an extraterrestrial impact. These include spherules of glass and carbon, and amounts of the element iridium said to be too high to have originated on Earth. In addition, the rocks contain black layers of carbonized material, which the team says are the remains of wildfires that swept across the continent after the impact."

CITATION: Rex Dalton. (2007) Blast in the past? Nature MAY 16, 2007

This article is based on a news release from the University of East Anglia

Comments?

News options Liquid error: Template not found languages/english/includes/x/_119.liquid

CITATION:
mongabay.com (May 17, 2007). Did asteroid wipe out America's first people?. http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0517-clovis.html

Tags:
ancient culture species climate science climate change extinction environment green

print

News index | RSS | News Feed | Twitter | Home

Advertisements:

Organic Apparel from Patagonia | Insect-repelling clothing

Mongabay Store
Wildlife of Madagascar T-shirt		Bold and Dangerous - Pygmy tyrant
Love me before I'm gone - Gladiator frog		Licking this frog may make you crazy

WEEKLY NEWSLETTER

SUPPORT
Mongabay.com seeks to raise interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging trends in climate, technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development (more)

Help support mongabay.com when you buy from Amazon.com

Photos

Alaska	Argentina	Australia
Belize	Brazil	Cambodia
China	Colombia	Costa Rica
Deforestation	Frog	Gabon
Grand Canyon	Honduras	India
Indonesia	Kenya	Laos
Lemur	Madagascar	Malaysia
Monkey	New Zealand	Panama
Peru	Rainforest	Sunset
Suriname	Tanzania	Thailand
Uganda	United States	Venezuela

HIGH RESOLUTION PHOTOS / PRINTS

CALENDARS

Mount Kenya

East Africa Safari Wildlife

Kenya's Turkana People

Madagascar Chameleons

CANVAS BAGS

Hallucinogenic frog bag

Madagascar wildlife bag

Mongabay.com's Fan Page on Facebook

Copyright mongabay 2010

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated from mongabay.com operations (server, data transfer, travel) are mitigated through an association with Anthrotect,
an organization working with Afro-indigenous and Embera communities to protect forests in Colombia's Darien region.
Anthrotect is protecting the habitat of mongabay's mascot: the scale-crested pygmy tyrant.