There's a view that the dark ages were literally dark (didn't check these old links):Small but deadly comets identifiedDr Matt Genge, from London's Natural History Museum... identifies comets between just 50 to 100 metres wide as the most terrifyingly destructive, with massive heat and shock waves burning people and crushing buildings... A 60-metre-wide comet exploded over Siberia in 1908 with 600 times the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It laid waste to a 40-km-wide patch of forest, but, fortunately, the area was unpopulated. However, comets of this size are expected to strike the Earth every 100 to 300 years. If the 1908 comet had arrived just eight hours earlier, it would have struck London, killing everything as Dr Genge described... Ironically, it is because the 50 to 100-metre-wide comets are so weak that they are so dangerous. They break up into fragments which explode just a few kilometres above the ground - "the optimum altitude for maximum devastation", said Dr Genge.
by Damian Carrington
Thursday, September 16, 1999
This was put forward in 1994. David Keys' book which attributes it to a volcanic eruption (Keys is a journalist, not a scientist) is just a couple of years old. For more links, click the link after "in reply to" (beginning of this message) to see an earlier post on this topic.Ancient myths, tree rings point to giant comet's visit to EarthMike Baillie, professor of palaeoecology at Queen's University in Belfast, UK, said it was very clear from the narrowness of growth rings in bog oaks and archaeological timbers that a great catastrophe struck the Earth in AD 540. He said mythical stories certainly seemed to point to a comet striking the Earth at about the right time. He said King Arthur died in this period and some stories talk about long arms in the sky delivering mighty blows. Professor Baillie said chemical analysis would be carried out on the tree rings to investigate the comet idea further. He hopes also to get access to ice cores to see if they record any interesting data that might support the comet theory.
Ancient Myths And Tree Rings Point To Giant Comet's Visit To Earth
Tree rings challenge history
by BBC News Online's Jonathan AmosTree Rings Hint At Dark Ages MysterySomething catastrophic occurred on Earth 1,500 years ago that may have led to the Dark Ages and coincided with the end of the Roman Empire and the death of King Arthur, Professor Mike Baillie of Queen’s University in Belfast reported Friday. The global environmental event that occurred around A.D. 540 is not recorded in any history books. But the tree ring chronologies compiled from samples of trees, some preserved in bogs, which date back thousands of years, single out something that was quite extraordinary. Baillie believes the slowdown of tree growth recorded in the rings around A.D. 540 was due to a bombardment of cometary debris that happened around the time of King Arthur’s death, the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages.The 536 AD Dust-Veil Event"There are two possibilities: a huge volcanic eruption or a collision between the Earth and a solid object: an asteroid or comet. Ice-cores drilled from Greenland show no evidence of large-scale volcanic activity at that time, so Professor Baillie and others now believe a cosmic impact is more likely. The result would have been to throw up a huge veil of dust and debris, cooling the Earth and producing widespread crop failures."
by William R. Corliss
[my comment from 2000] I still haven't read it, but have bought it. I've heard plenty about it and have been interested in it for some time. During a search for "dark ages" and "asteroid" I found a page by some real crank that discusses it, and attributes to Keys the idea that an eruption of Krakatoa was responsible. Previously I'd heard only about an NE Eurasian impact as the source of these literally "dark ages".
Catastrophe:
A Quest for the Origins
of the Modern World
by David KeysIt was a catastrophe without precedent in recorded history: for months on end, starting in A.D. 535, a strange, dusky haze robbed much of the earth of normal sunlight. Keys's narrative circles the globe as he identifies the eerie fallout from the months of darkness: unprecedented drought in Central America, a strange yellow dust drifting like snow over eastern Asia, prolonged famine, and the hideous pandemic of the bubonic plague. With a superb command of ancient literatures and historical records, Keys makes hitherto unrecognized connections between the "wasteland" that overspread the British countryside and the fall of the great pyramid-building Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico, between a little-known "Jewish empire" in Eastern Europe and the rise of the Japanese nation-state, between storms in France and pestilence in Ireland.
In this fascinating, groundbreaking, totally accessible book, archaeological journalist David Keys dramatically reconstructs the global chain of revolutions that began in the catastrophe of A.D. 535, then offers a definitive explanation of how and why this cataclysm occurred on that momentous day centuries ago. -- dead link
