We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.
Seems like it is no longer considered to be anything to do with a meteorite impact. It's hard to find a good source. This is the best I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct...
This paper's abstract claims that wooden debris from the landslide has been dated to 5000 years older than the Sumerian tablet: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153343_The_produ...
That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps
It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.
A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.
It is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.
There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that
“[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”
But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.
For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...
Update:
The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:
“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”
The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:
“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”
Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).
Ah, oh well. Was an interesting story. But I mainly shared this to remind myself of this incredible star map, or whatever it really is... Seems not easy to find bona fide information on it, maybe because it's untranslated/decoded except for this Kofels' story, which indeed appears to be out of the bounds of likelihood by 4000 years.
slop
vibe theorising
Even if you were right, your comment would have been a useless waste of time.
But the article appears to be a copy of a press release from the University of Bristol from 2008.
drivle, then 1km impactor my ass a german landslide and a mesopotamian clay disk, 5000 years ago, uhuhuh, ya NO! that needs a very very very high level of documentation to even dare hold up your hand
do you know about the acedemic/beurocratic practice of "shelving" ?, I am quite certain that it applies to whover "publishied" the original.