[SunkenCiv]

Cue the Looney Toons theme, no reason.

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[rstrahan]

You cannot get an ‘intense’ fire from a mud-and-straw building. The straw is encased in the mud, and the wooden beams will burn, but slowly.

‘Gee, this impact does not fit my scenario, so I will find a way to discredit it.’

[ckilmer]

Something happened 12,000 years ago which caused a sharp cooling of climate for a 1000 years. Contemporaneously, in the northern hemisphere most of the megafauna died off—including whoever made the clovis points. We call this period the younger dryas. Why did the sharp counter trend in temperature occur? Did this result in a cascade of events that caused the megafauna to die? Mere cold would not have done it—since the megafauna had experienced many 1000’s of years of cold before without going extinct.

Currently there are a lot of theories as to why this happened. The most popular are human hunters killing the megafauna and the comet strike or some combination of the two. All of them sound plausible. None are proved.

[Fred Nerks]

The mystery of mammoth tusks with iron fillings

Embedded iron particles surrounded by carbonized rings in the outer layer of a mammoth tusk from Alaska. Inset photo shows how an object ripped through the tusk. Image courtesy Richard Firestone.