More Evidence For Comet Over Canada That Killed Clovis and Megafauna

Exploding Asteroid Theory Strengthened by New Evidence Located in Ohio, Indiana

For many years there has been a mystery as to what exactly brought about the extinction event that wiped out most of America's megafauna almost 13,000 years ago, which had previously been ascribed to the sudden arrival of humankind in the the New World - it had been suggested that a Pleistocene Overkill event had witnessed Ice Age hunters killing so many large animals that population numbers crashed beyond a point of no return.

More recently we have read of how a comet is thought to have exploded high over Canada, and evidence for such a scenario has thus far been intriguing, as archaeologists across a wide range of sites on continental North America, had spotted an anomalous layer in ancient deposits, and how other researchers had debated the origins of the Carolina Bays.

Following on from all this, comes news of how in an attempt to disprove this theory, anthropologist Ken Tankersley succeeded in confirming its probable veracity; this from the University of Cincinnati...

Now University of Cincinnati Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ken Tankersley, working in conjunction with Allen West and Indiana Geological Society Research Scientist Nelson R. Schaffer, has verified evidence from sites in Ohio and Indiana – including, locally, Hamilton and Clermont counties in Ohio and Brown County in Indiana – that offers the strongest support yet for the exploding comet/asteroid theory.

Samples of diamonds, gold and silver that have been found in the region have been conclusively sourced through X-ray diffractometry in the lab of UC Professor of Geology Warren Huff back to the diamond fields region of Canada.

The only plausible scenario available now for explaining their presence this far south is the kind of cataclysmic explosive event described by West’s theory. "We believe this is the strongest evidence yet indicating a comet impact in that time period," says Tankersley...

...Tankersley was familiar through years of work in this area with the diamonds, gold and silver deposits, which at one point could be found in such abundance in this region that the Hopewell Indians who lived here about 2,000 years ago engaged in trade in these items.

Prevailing thought said that these deposits, which are found at a soil depth consistent with the time frame of the comet/asteroid event, had been brought south from the Great Lakes region by glaciers.

"My smoking gun to disprove (West) was going to be the gold, silver and diamonds," Tankersley says. "But what I didn’t know at that point was a conclusion he had reached that he had not yet made public – that the likely point of impact for the comet wasn’t just anywhere over Canada, but located over Canada’s diamond-bearing fields. Instead of becoming the basis for rejecting his hypothesis, these items became the very best evidence to support it."

Much of the work is being done in Sheriden Cave in north-central Ohio’s Wyandot County, a rich repository of material dating back to the Ice Age.

Sheriden Cave is an interesting site in its own right, as we see from the abstract of a 2005 paper titled 'Evidence of Early Paleoindian Bone Modification and Use at the Sheriden Cave Site (33WY252), Wyandot County, Ohio', from which the following abstract is taken...

The analysis of osseous (bone, antler, or ivory) beveled shafts or "rods" has become an important focus in the study of early Paleoindian tool technology. Since 1995 two carved and beveled bone rods have been recovered from Sheriden Cave in northwest Ohio in depositional strata that are radiocarbon dated to between 11,060 and 10,400 radiocarbon years B.P. These strata also contained a small, reworked, Gainey-style fluted point; cut and burned animal bone; and the remains of flat-headed peccary, caribou, giant beaver, and other taxa.

The tapered tips and overall morphology of the bone rods demonstrate that they served as projectile points as opposed to other functional types such as fore shafts. Microscopic and radiographic examinations of the bone points reveal that they were manufactured from split sections of mega-mammal bone.

These artifacts resemble bone and ivory points found at early Paleoindian sites in western North America and northern Florida but also bear significant morphological similarities to bone sugaie or javelin tips known from Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe. The close spatial and temporal associations between the Sheriden Cave artifacts suggest that they represent the remains of an early Paleoindian tool cache within a small resource extraction campsite.

We don't know what impact the putative comet would have had on the cultural life of humans living a millennia or two after the event, but it would be most interesting to know if this disaster had been passed on down the generations through word of mouth, and how this event had been interpreted. Neither will we ever know whether this catastrophe prompted the first mythologies of the New World, whether it replaced earlier ones, or even whether it even became part of mythology at all, but it's a fair bet that the story lived on in the minds of people for many generations thereafter.

Whether some or all Palaeoindians understood that a vast amount of floral and faunal life had disappeared because of a natural catastrophe, or whether they thought that humans and animals together had been punished for whatever reasons by presumably angry gods, is open to speculation - I don't know of any contemporary rock art which might depict such an event, or indeed anything else from around the world at that time that appears to directly refer to it.

However, there are at least two possible references to the events of 13 kya, expressed in the folklore of bothe the Iroquois and Pawnee Indians, and detailed in a book called 'The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes', of which Allen West is one of the co-authors.

I can't find an online text to copy and paste from at the moment, but the book reproduces an Iroquois myth, 'The Monster Mammoth and the Horned Serpent' from which this is a brief extract...

"Gradually, Thunder's onslaught drove the serpent back into the deepest part of the Lake (Ontario), but he could not kill it. In one final attempt, Thunder hurled down the most powerful thunderbolt ever seen. The concussion was so great that the mountains shook and entire forests blew over.

The stars broke loose from the sky, and some came falling down to Earth. Fearing for the safety of the tribe, Thunder tried to catch the stars, but he could not reach them all. The falling stars hurtled right toward the Iroquois camp, hissing with a fiery glare. With a ferocious blast and scorching heat, a star smashed into the Earth near their camp, blasting earth and trees in all directions.

Another star fell right into the Lake on top of the Horned Serpent, wounding it with a huge explosion of steam. The great serpent thrashed its tail in pain, and each whip of its tail sent gigantic waves coursing down the river valleys, and surging over the hills in a series of colossal floods." (retold from E. Johnson, 1881)

The above was taken from Chapter 19, 'The Main Craters' which posits that there were probably multiple impact sites; next we have this from Chapter 20,'Bays on the High Plains' which looks at craters similar to the Carolina Bays, but which are to be found 1200 miles away in Nebraska. Here's an excerpt from a story related by the Pawnee tribe, 'Stuck in the Mud', and addresses the topic of the vanished megafauna, whom having been made by Tirawa, the Creator, apparently went on something of a global rampage...

"Being so big and powerful, they did what they wanted.

After a while, they began fighting with each other to see who was the greatest and most powerful among them. This led to many fierce struggles, and their constant fighting tore up the forests, dug up the prairies, and knocked down the mountains. Because they were so strong, there was great destruction."

We are then told how Tirawa invoked a mighty flood, which caused all the large animals to drown, as they became bogged down in a rising sea of mud...

"...When Tirawa saw that all of them were finished, the god waved a hand over the land, causing the sun to dry out the Earth"

The first humans were then created, and from which all subsequent Pawnee were descended...

"Now when the Pawnee walk along the the riverbanks, sometimes they find giant bones sticking out of the silt and mud. These are the bones from the animals that Tirawa drowned. They are there as a reminder not to forget the Creator." (retold from Grinnell, 1889).

The January 2008 issue of 'Mammoth Trumpet' has a related (PDF) article, 'The Clovis Comet', from which this is the closing segment...

Although the jury’s still out on the matter, the clues unearthed by West and his team point toward a catastrophic impact at the end of the Clovis era.

But what happened, exactly? The details remain sketchy, but the culprit was apparently a heavily fragmented multi-kilometer-sized icy body, similar to but much larger than the Tunguska impactor, which exploded over the continental ice sheet covering northeastern
Canada.

A cushion of ice 1 to 2 miles thick, after all, might explain why an impact crater associated with the event hasn’t been found. While West admits that the absence of a crater blunts the theory, he argues that the other evidence more than makes up for it.

“We have more than 14 lines of evidence that there was an impact,” he points out. “We tell the people who don’t believe this to point to a single place in the geological record where all these markers occur that isn’t considered an impact.”

This week marked the centenary of the Tunguska event of 1908, when something much smaller exploded over Siberia, directly affecting an area of some 2,000 square km.)

As we have seen, Western Europe may well have also been affected by this comet, as research from from Lommel in Belgium, and mentioned in the MT article linked to above appear to indicate.

Here's a final snippet from the University of Cincinnati news article...

The timing attached to this theory of about 12,900 years ago is consistent with the known disappearances in North America of the wooly mammoth population and the first distinct human society to inhabit the continent, known as the Clovis civilization. At that time, climatic history suggests the Ice Age should have been drawing to a close, but a rapid change known as the Younger Dryas event, instead ushered in another 1,300 years of glacial conditions. A cataclysmic explosion consistent with West’s theory would have the potential to create the kind of atmospheric turmoil necessary to produce such conditions.

"The kind of evidence we are finding does suggest that climate change at the end of the last Ice Age was the result of a catastrophic event," Tankersley says.

Currently, Tankersley can be seen in a new documentary airing on the National Geographic channel. The film "Asteroids" is part of that network’s "Naked Science" series.

The new discoveries made working with West and Schaffer will be incorporated into two more specials that Tankersley is currently involved with – one for the PBS series "Nova" and a second for the History Channel that will be filming Tankersley and his UC students in the field this summer. Another documentary, this one being produced by the Discovery Channel and the British public television network Channel 4, will also be following Tankersley and his students later this summer.

There should be plenty more on this over the coming months and years, which hopefully will be addressed in as yet unwritten posts on this blog.

see also: The 2008 Allendale Paleoamerican Expedition