"A horned serpent" is an evocative description. A comet with two tails?
Clearly the comet didn't hit, but a chunk might have broken off after warming up by the Sun. Chelyabinsk--or maybe more the size of Tunguska...
Interesting. I'd be surprised if there was just one chunk, though of course the odds of hitting the Earth are pretty small. Unless a small chunk blew up near someplace literate, we'd not know likely learn about it, and certainly have no idea about the date.
According to the Ohio History Central, the Ohio Hopewell built mounds up until 500AD, so they may have been set back by crop loss (as the article suggests), but they weren't done for. Assuming the platinum and iridium are the smoking guns here that they usually are...
Most serpent stories seem not to be astronomical, some do.
For the curious, W Bruce Masse proposes that the flood myths from around the world suggest that "only a globally catastrophic deep-water oceanic comet impact could account for all environmental information encoded in the corpus of worldwide flood myths" Hmm. Global tsunamis? Some places would be far less effected than others.
2 comments:
You may remember over at my site that you entered into a conversation about malt with Graham Dineley of Orkney, who also suggested the possibility of cometary influences on the end of the Neolithic Period. I was not that convinced, but it's not nothing. His comment then:
The Stone Age was terminated by a 9 year winter, 2354-2345BC, which would have killed off 95% of the sedentary people across Europe. This was caused by a close encounter with a comet. See Mike Baillie's work:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16121685-700-exodus-to-arthur-by-mike-baillie/
The nomadic, at that time, Yamnaya would have survived this and then went on to develop a "war lord" culture with bronze swords and tools. This dominated Europe and Britain.
The technophobic archaeologists hate his ideas of Cometry Catastrophes as much as they hate our ideas about early brewing. These go against "the received wisdom" and are unacceptable.
See my comment on this blog:
http://abc-publishing-group.co.uk/archaeological-pulp-fiction-has-archaeology-turned-from-science?
If I wasn't clear, I apologize--global tsunamis don't sound reasonable. There's a 1/R dropoff in energy, and several bottlenecks. A strike in the Indian Ocean could make hash out of a lot of things, but wouldn't do nearly as much to West Africa or Europe or the Eastern Americas, and the Mediterranean -- well, maybe an overtopping pulse up the Red Sea would make it in. That would leave a mark.
I looked at the abc-etc link, and couldn't find comments. His claim that woodhenge would use 100' high posts is perfectly sound on aesthetic grounds--you want to make it as impressive as possible, but I don't see why ramps are better than wood scaffolding for hauling a post vertical. Ramps don't get shoved around as easily, but you can reuse scaffolding. And maybe the picture was bad, but it looked like his "canal" ran uphill. I'd believe that the word "dyke" changed meanings before I'd believe they had a pumping system.
Folklore can be accurate or creative, so I like to have iridium fragments, or the residue of a landslide, before we interpret a story about the gods fighting in a valley as an echo of a real catastrophe.
The bias against reporting meteors from remote sites is diminishing, and the satellite reports, though they only cover a little time, suggest to me that damaging strikes aren't nearly as rare I was led to expect in my youth.
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