Comet theory false; doesn't explain Ice Age cold snap, Clovis changes, animal extinction

Science Codex ^ | 5-13-2014

[Renfield]

Ping

[Paladin2]

This goes against the consensus, it must be wrong...

[Avid Coug]

So, I guess under modern climatology standards, these renegade scientists would be called Comet Climate Change deniers.

[logi_cal869]

Oh, heaven NO!!!!!

A global climate change event in recent human history both unexplained and unable to be attached to human activities.

OH THE HORROR!!

/s

(the sun can’t possibly have anything to do with it, of course)

/s/s

[Don Corleone]

Ancient Astronaut Theorists believe......

[minnesota_bound]

I always thought the global warming was caused by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble and their friends.

[JimSEA]

“changes in ocean circulation patterns caused by glacial meltwater entering the ocean”

In view of the dramatic meltwater created Washington Scablands, and other rapid release of meltwater like Hudson Bay, I’ll stick with temporary ocean current disruption.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Renfield.

Controversy over what sparked the Younger Dryas, a brief return to near glacial conditions at the end of the Ice Age, includes a theory that it was caused by a comet hitting the Earth.

Huh? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not in the book I read. Straw Man Alert!

The Clovis comet impact model is correct, and is founded on valid data -- and merely explains the precipitous extinction of the megafauna. That includes the mammoth -- the youngest samples of which actually had micro-sized impact-related junk embedded in their tusks.

This "new" denial comes at a curious time, a year or two after the previous total refutation [sic] -- odd timing for something that has already been refuted, eh? This is the same process (and one of the same arguments) that went on (and still goes on, among unreconstructed natural selection zealots) over the K-T impact extinction model.

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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Renfield. More comments in my Catastrophism ping, above.

[SunkenCiv]

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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith

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[SunkenCiv]

OTOH...

[snip] The following ran in the Feb. 29, 2012, edition of the Washington Post. Anthropol[og]ist David Meltzer provided expertise for this story.

Radical theory of first Americans places Stone Age Europeans in Delmarva 20,000 years ago
March 9, 2012
By Brian Vastag

https://www.smu.edu/News/2012/david-meltzer-washingtonpost-9mar2012

[Sherman Logan]

In North America, the Ice Age was marked by the mass extinction of several dozen genera of large mammals, including mammoths, mastodons, American horses, Western camels, two types of deer, ancient bison, giant beaver, giant bears, sabre-toothed cats, giant bears, American cheetahs, and many other animals, as well as plants.

For quite a while the consensus theory was that this extinction was caused by human hunters.

I used to be quite resistant to this notion, as it just seem unlikely to me that human stone age hunters could exterminate so many animal across an entire continent in just a few centuries.

However, we have good the same thing happened in Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar and other islands. The mega-fauna disappeared within a couple of centuries of humans showing up.

So I'm a somewhat reluctant convert.

[Sawdring]

Why didn’t the mega fauna of Asia and Africa die out as well? I would have loved to see that huge armadillo cousin Glyptodont with its mace like tail walking near a stream during the last ice age.

[Sherman Logan]

The theory, which I don’t find entirely convincing, is that African, and to a lesser extent Asian, megafauna were around when humans evolved and had time to learn to adapt to them.

In the Americas, Oz and elsewhere the animals weren’t adapted to this uniquely effective predator and were wiped out by us.

[ForGod'sSake]

In the Americas, Oz and elsewhere the animals weren’t adapted to this uniquely effective predator and were wiped out by us.

Just curious, but how much have you actually looked into the distribution of massive accumulations of megafauna remains and other detritus deposited at or near the end of the last glaciation in North America and elsewhere?

In any case, for me, the "hunted to extinction" narrative has a "man made global warming" ring to it.

[ComputerGuy]

Meltzer can't stand the idea of a European connection. That's his main problem. He may or may not have a valid point with the data he's using for this, his latest attack on all things pre-Clovis. I don't know. What I do know is that the evidence for Europeans in ice-age America, which includes an artifact made from French flint, is overwhelming. Most Clovis sites are in the East and South. All pre-clovis sites are in the East and South.
For those interested in the subject, I heartily recommend Across Atlantic Ice by Stanford and Bradley.

“I’m not going to hang a completely novel interpretation of the peopling of the Americas from something dredged off the sea bottom 40 years ago and not properly documented,” said David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University....

[Explorer89]

This is an excellent book. I was convinced by it, and remain convinced. The authors showed the debris impact radiating through the U.S. through the existence of ponds that look like a sunburst....as I recall, as far away as North Carolina.

[Larry Lucido]

I hear there are still Rodents Of Unusual Size (ROUS).

[Sherman Logan]

The “hunted to extinction” theory is actually one of those neat theories that causes cognitive dissonance in PC-people.

It’s PC because it means Man is Evil. Look at how We wiped out so many wonderful creatures! This is the echo of global warming you hear. (Which does not of itself mean it isn’t true.)

OTOH, it would mean the ancestors of today’s Native Americans are the ones who did the wiping out. Which is obviously very much non-PC. There is immense irony in this, if true, because the extinction of the horse (and other potentially domesticable animals) in the Americas was a major contributor to their inability to effectively resist European invasion.

So I enjoy the Progressive types trying to figure out which implication of the “wiped-out” theory should take precedence on the PC-scale.

There are some problems with this mass extinction. The notion that it was entirely non-human related is made a good deal less likely by the fact that many of these animals had survived other cycles of glaciation and ends of the glaciation. Why did this particular one cause the extinction of so many species?

OTOH, the “wipe them out” theory is made less likely because it’s based on the notion that humans first hit the Americas about 12,000 years ago. There is increasing, though not yet really conclusive, evidence that humans have been around here perhaps twice that long. Which would mean that humans lived alongside the megafauna without wiping them out for 10,000 or 12,000 years.

I also find the sheer mechanics of the wipe-out improbable. How many stone-age hunters would it take to cause an extermination across two entire continents? Seems to me it would take many millions, and there just really isn’t evidence of that massive a population being around.

Americans wiped out the buffalo in less than a decade, but we had breech-loading rifles accurate at hundreds of yards. How long would it have taken with spears or even bows?

OTOH, there is that “coincidence” of similar mass extinctions within a century or two of humans reaching multiple other landmasses.

So I think the theory of wipe out is possible, but not conclusively proven.