> Based on the distribution of human bones on the upper and lower tall, we propose that the force of a high-temperature, debris-laden, high-velocity blast wave from an airburst/impact (i) incinerated and flayed their exposed flesh, (ii) decapitated and dismembered some individuals, (iii) shattered many bones into mostly cm-sized fragments, (iv) scattered their bones across several meters, (v) buried the bones in the destruction layer, and (vi) charred or disintegrated any bones that were still exposed.
What a way to go
I like the theory that this event is what inspired the biblical story of Sodom. It reminds me of how paleontologists use the ancient art and stories of Native Australians to figure out what Pleistocene animals looked like and how they may have behaved.
In the story, Lot and his family were one of the few people to escape the city before its destruction. God told his family to not look back at the city as it was being destroyed. Lot's wife looked back and turned into "a pillar of salt". Maybe this is a metaphor for the people who went back to the site and couldn't grow food there due to the hypersaline that was spread across the region by the airburst.
That area is full of salt pillars. The geology served as an opportunity to create a moral and religious story. Could this have also influenced the story? Perhaps, but the salt pillars are quite large, obvious, and unique.
Edit: I note that nearby Jericho is dated to have been destroyed and abandoned in the same time period (within 50 years, likely well within margins of error). One of the most striking thing about the Tel in Jericho is that half the Tel is missing. Specifically the side to the East, which would be facing this Tel. I have never seen any good reason given for that missing section of Jericho, and would not be surprised at all if the same event destroyed both cities. Obviously lending more weight to this event having been integrated into Biblical writings.
I get correlation and causation, but if I was sitting in an ancient Jericho, and watching another Army walk round the walls - and after they did a sodding great meteorite fell from the gods and blew down half my city walls, I would certainly think about religious conversion. :0)
On the other hand we should not get too carried away matching up events like this. The team behind this article took pains to prove it must have been an airburst by finding molten glass that could only come from certain temperatures etc etc.
I always understood that walking round the walls of Jericho was supposed to be cover for the sounds of sappers, just as the wooden horse of Troy may well have been a animal shaped cover for a battering ram, as opposed to a rather easy to avoid foot-gun.
My edit was to indicate that the air burst might have been a distant inspiration for the Jericho story as well as the Sodom story. There are about 600-1000 years between event and writing by most estimates, so there was plenty of time for it to inspire more than one story. But local geology plays a big role in many Biblical stories, not just these. People who are teachers look for teaching moments, and find them in the things that surround them.
> A sapper, also called pioneer or combat engineer, is a combatant or soldier who performs a variety of military engineering duties, such as breaching fortifications https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapper
Wasn't Jericho the one where they brought down the walls by making noise in the biblical story? I wonder if that could have been inspired by finding the wreckage of the city with the East wall destroyed.
Could it be the result of a weapon? I know this is on the edge of absurd but to let the possibility entertain the mind wouldn't a laser or some payload from space "glass" an area on the ground? I've never thought about people turning into salt before... it seems possible?
I think it's best to use Occam's razor on that one. But it would be great for an episode of Stargate.
Sometimes "aliens did it" makes more sense than a lot of the imaginative narrative that somehow explains 15 billion years in confidence of certainty. But yeah, I get your drift indeed.
Some time ago, I heard of another theory for the Sodom and Gomorrah story:
An asteroid clipped a mountain in the Alps, causing a landslide in Köfels (but no crater). The asteroid's trajectory had a low angle, which made the mushroom cloud arc over the Mediterranean and over the Levant, raining down fire and such. This asteroid was actually recorded by Assyrian scribes on a clay tablet, but its trajectory wasn't plotted until relatively recently (2008-ish).
air resistance is too high on the height where asteroid can clip a mountain, for something to reach levant. it’d explode right there. But I could believe in asteroid fragmented much higher
nice article. but 700 BC is my be more fitted to another biblical story. sorry I forgot exactly which one but there is a story about a battle that ended when god rained fire on one of the sides
You’re probably thinking of Joshua 10:11, but that’s quite some hundreds of years before 700 BC, which is more the time of Hezekiah.
I know that for a people who were not yet understanding about bolides and ways in which the astronomical environment interacted with the planet, ascribing the destruction of the city to a deity seems quite plausible.
If this event is the cause for the salt pillars in the area then I could also see people making up stories about it as well.
I am left with the question though of how does a bolide become full of salt?
Or maybe they watched her burn to a crisp from afar, did not go back to check and took the ashes for salt.
Like this? https://theconversation.com/of-bunyips-and-other-beasts-livi...
They reference this book which seems interesting: https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/edge-of-memory-9781472943262/
What is your source?
Well, that sure makes it work out to be one hell of a victim blame!
I find it interesting that despite so many years of scrutiny these biblical stories have yet to be conclusively invalidated. It seems there's some balance between each critique and each discovery, always leaving room for faith, never 'proving' but never snuffing out.
Given one side is positing an entity with a mysterious personality that can create literally everything, ex nihilo, in 6 days, I wouldn’t expect it to be possible to conclusively invalidate anything, ever, under any circumstances.
No matter how much evidence there is on the side saying the Bible is just as fictional as the Olympian, Roman, Egyptian, Aztec etc. pantheons, believers can always counter it.
The argument goes something like this:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
What does validating or invalidating have to do with a work of allegory?
Scoring points in some long-running argument based on the common misunderstanding of both sides isn't really all that important.
Why not, instead, focus on what you yourself can accept as ineffable and universal?
> For someone with this view, most of the New Testament makes little sense unless there was a literal Adam/Eve at some point
I’m surprised to read this. I was raised Catholic in the UK, and everyone in my school years seemed to be fine melding scientific and scriptural views without having any problem assuming that Adam and Eve did not need to be literal.
A proof requires the faith of truth, as truth can only exist as an axiom of consensus.
Here's just one of many anachronisms from the bible.
"Last week, archaeologists Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University released a new study that dates the arrival of the domesticated camel in the eastern Mediterranean region to the 10th century B.C. at the earliest, based on radioactive-carbon techniques. Abraham and the patriarchs, however, lived at least six centuries before then."
https://time.com/6662/the-mystery-of-the-bibles-phantom-came...
This is a really bad example of an anachronism, stop using it. They carbon dated a camel remain found in a particular settlement and are using it as the upper bound for domestication when it should be the lower bound. That's silly. Earlier this week on HN we saw evidence that camel statues in Saudia Arabia date to 5k BC or so. Clearly people have been interacting with camels in the region for quite a while.
"The 'Mystery' of the Bible's Phantom Camels"
There's one really obvious solution to that mystery.
Art and literature of all kinds has a long, long history of portraying people from the past in historically inaccurate ways that the people doing the portrayal take for granted.
One obvious religious example would be the many paintings of Christ showing him as a blonde European wearing contemporary (for the time of the painting) European clothing.
Camels were ubiquitous. And feral. The taming (camels remain undomesticated to this day - "trust in God and tie down your camel.") and exploitation of camels is what's anachronistic, not the camels themselves.
I remember seeing a late medieval painting of a saint and he's wearing spectacles.
And that solution comes in many, many shades of gray. Picking the right shade is less obvious.
I don't understand why you being downvoted, what is wrong with bible treasure hunting or validating one of the oldest books. if the bible was some part wrong it doesn't mean anything in it is false
Some part of it being wrong literally means that a thing in it is false, so I think you should rephrase the point you’re trying to make.
It's because many religions and mythologies based the stories they tell on actual events (or handed down stories of events). People naturally incorporate those into their own system of beliefs. Often the most prominent tales are shared amongst various religions and cultures and that certainly doesn't "prove" any one of their belief systems in particular. The prevalence does, however, help to validate the science behind the discovery.
Another major explosion theorized to be caused by bolides is the 1626 Wanggongchang Explosion[1] in Beijing which is considered one of the major causes of the fall of the Chinese Ming dynasty.
Although having its epicenter in the middle of a gunpowder factory would of course also heavily imply a gunpowder explosion (or maybe both).
This seems like the most obvious candidate for Occam's Razor, although stranger things have happened.
Part of me wonders if it's easier to 'invent' a comet strike or otherwise imply divine intervention as a way of avoiding blame for putting a gunpowder factory in the middle of a city.
In the political context of 17th century China (and many premodern polities), it's much preferable to blame a scapegoat official for putting a factory in the wrong place than to blame divine intervention.
The former means the government executes a couple of people. The latter meant to most people that the government has lost 'the Mandate of Heaven' and is ready to be overthrown. That's extremely bad news to the government.
Alternatively, the story about a comet strike may have been invented/popularized by the next (the Qing) dynasty to further legitimize their power. It's not preferable to the Ming to blame divine intervention, but it would be preferable to the Qing.
Given the transportation options at the time, is that really the wrong place for such a factory? Clearly the factory exploding was bad, but without trains or trucks to move large amounts of processed material around, wouldn't in the middle of the city, dangerous as it was, be the best place to have the resources from which to be able to mount a defense from outside invaders?
It would be different with trains/cars, but before then?
You can see similar dynamics now. If an explosion was caused by a collapsed buerocracy and a corrupt government ignoring basic safety standards, it looks bad on the government.
It can be more convenient to imagine some evil terrorist organisation.
What a twisted logic they had back then. City got destroyed because of an incompetent government? That's fine, we can keep trusting them. City got destroyed by a meteorite? No way we can ever trust them again, they've lost the Mandate of Heaven!
In practice I would assume though that people weren't much different than today, and the Mandate of Heaven trick would only work if the government doesn't appear to be too incompetent.
Obviously, things have changed a bit, but we aren't that much better at judging what leaders are actually responsible for. The global economy is so big that in most circumstances it could be modeled as a purely natural force that can be at best managed, like weather, but American presidents can lose reelection as if they are personally responsible for economic performance. There's not that much evidence that a president, who has been in power for maybe a couple of years, could have more than a marginal impact on the trajectory of the economy in most circumstances. But we act like they do.
That's because your causation is very different from many past peoples. They viewed reality as very affected by divine forces and the 'natural' event as divine intervention (directly or indirectly).
City got destroyed by a meteorite? You view this as an accident. They think 'better remove whatever made the Heavens upset before we are smote again and again with meteorites or worse'.
Now, since the government controlled just about everything in theory (few limits on power), the government is held responsible. People start spreading the notion that perhaps the government needs to be altered to people more pleasing to Heaven, and from there we get civil wars, rebellions, etc. Which can lead to more disasters (badly maintained dams for example, because the civil war takes too many resources away from maintenance) and so on. It's a cycle of instability every ancient government wanted to avoid.
The Mandate of Heaven is not that weird, we place similar levels of trust on Market Forces and such things, we're not so different.
To be fair, the Mandate of Heaven was often judged in practice based on (somewhat) preventable disasters. E.g. in case of famine, it was supposed to be the duty of the government to maintain sufficient supplies in good times to remedy it. So the connection between bad governance and loss of the Mandate was generally more direct than in this example.
Ok my comment was semi ironic and didn't think anyone would care much about it. I did acknowledge that things probably aren't that different today.
>What a twisted logic they had back then. City got destroyed because of an incompetent government? That's fine, we can keep trusting them
Back then?
For how many years now have democrats been promising to be the savior of inner city minorities? And when are republicans going to get around to getting the government out of people's business?
Humans have changed very little over time.
A comet strike, which is surely divine intervention, would imply they lost the Mandate of Heaven, I would think. So I think two different ways of saying the same thing.
You need lots of gunpowder inside the city in case you are attacked, so you need an armory inside the city.
Adding a factory doesn’t seem to add that much risk to me. It can be cordoned of in a building with strong walls and light-weight ceilings. That directs any force of an accidental explosion upwards.
The armory, on the other hand, needs protection against incoming projectiles. That calls for strong ceilings.
I don’t believe “gun”powder was used in weaponry in the Ming era.
Your logic is sensible but is not for this specific example.
Learn something new every day. Thanks!
While I am by no means a historian, wouldn't a "comet strike" in a gunpowder factory be a great way for the Mings to loose the mandate of heaven? Perhaps there's a political angle we should consider on this occasion as well
Bolides will very rarely hit a city precisely, especially in the periods where cities were small and not sprawling. Moreover, they usually fly tangentially and cover a huge area (such as, Chelyabinsk meteor was also seen from Yekaterinburg, 200 km away).
There should be a lot of evidence towards it before it to be accepted as the primary cause (and not an omen, for example)
This isn't unusual. In 2009 I was sitting in my hot tub in Montana and saw this event, which hit in Utah, 500 miles away : https://www.nevadameteorites.com/nevadameteorites/November_1...
Thing is, it did not obliterate any specific area with 25 km radius.
No, high altitude burst.
Interesting! How do you know that this was a meteorite and not another thing that went wrong at Dugway?
In reality it could be both: meteor-flinging aliens.
The suggestion in the article is that the bolide impact (or airburst) was well outside the city, to the SW, since a lot of the evidence suggests a blast moving from SW to NE through the city.
Here is the website to model a bolide impact as referenced in the paper for those that didn't catch it.
Doesn't that sound really similar to a certain story from certain religious sources, where events supposedly took place exactly in that region?...
Edit: looks like it does:
> There is an ongoing debate as to whether Tall el-Hammam could be the biblical city of Sodom (Silvia2 and references therein), but this issue is beyond the scope of this investigation. Questions about the potential existence, age, and location of Sodom are not directly related to the fundamental question addressed in this investigation as to what processes produced high-temperature materials at Tall el-Hammam during the MBA. Nevertheless, we consider whether oral traditions about the destruction of this urban city by a cosmic object might be the source of the written version of Sodom in Genesis. We also consider whether the details recounted in Genesis are a reasonable match for the known details of a cosmic impact event.
A more interesting bit of the paper:
> It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed.
Somehow asteroid added to the descripition of the destruction of Sodom in Genesis makes Genesis much more real. Not just old wives stories, but -- wow, -- "kill infidels with an asteroid", it demands reverence.
As interesting for me are the myths of great floods across multiple cultures that can trace their history to sea level rises - particularly affecting the Persian Gulf, shifting populations ever northward to ancient Mesopotamia.
I find oral tradition fascinating and wonder how modern technology (eg. books onwards) has affected it.
One of the oldest writings still preserved contains the musings of an old man, on the proliferation of writing, complaining that the young will now no longer have to memorize their lessons because it can be now written down and read. If memory serves it is Egyptian.
Hasn't the sea level "lowered" in the Persian Gulf ? Silting made the sea significantly further away from the Sumerian heartland nowadays than it was back then.
I've always thought the flood narrative archetype had to do with uncontrolled river floods, predating early state building and large irrigation projects. It's certainly that way in China.
It doesn't however explain how Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt.
The Genesis story also includes a rain of burning sulphur which could have been identified by smell by the ancients. Sulphur isn't mentioned in the article but I'd be interested in knowing whether it was found in quantities above the normal background level.
I mean, it would be astonishing if all the details matched after hundreds to thousands of years of oral tradition. Embellishment and exaggeration were not unknown devices to Bronze Age storytellers, and neither was changing details to suit your agenda. And that’s besides the unintended “broken telephone” effect.
Considering the impact threw up a massive amount of salt, which in turn coated the surrounding landscape and is still measurable today, the "pillar of salt" might just be a description for "so much salt fell from the sky that she was covered in it".
Genesis chapter 19 verse 26 simply says "But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.", which maybe indicates someone being in such a state of shock that they just refused to move on, as the salt covered them.
I'm not a psychologist, but I could imagine such an event causing what we would now call PTSD, and maybe triggering catatonia or similar symptoms.
The abandonment of the region for approx. 600 years is judged as caused by hypersalinity preventing growing of crops till natural leaching lowered salt content of the soil.
I mean, see the Trojan War. It's somewhat plausible that such a thing happened, but there probably wasn't a wooden horse, and no-one got turned into a pig. Things get embellished, and weaving in the mystical was pretty standard.
The Odyssey is about Odysseus/Ulysses returning from the Trojan War, so I think it's fair to count it as part of the general Trojan War mythos :)
It's oral history; I can imagine they added Lot and other characters to turn it into a more exciting story with a lesson to be learned in there. I mean the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is best known for showing what happens with sinners. Likewise that of Noah, likewise that of the tower of Babel.
> For most excavated squares, the newly exposed MB II surface from each day’s archeological excavation produced an obvious white salt crust overnight as humidity leached salt to the surface.
...
> we speculate that an impact into or an airburst above high-salinity surface sediments (26% of land in the southern Jordan Valley at > 1.3% salinity) and/or above the Dead Sea (with ~ 34 wt.% salt content) may have distributed hypersaline water across the lower Jordan Valley. If so, this influx of salt may have substantially increased the salinity of surface sediments within the city and in the surrounding fields. Any survivors of the blast would have been unable to grow crops and therefore likely to have been forced to abandon the area. After ~ 600 years, the high salt concentrations were sufficiently leached out of the salt-contaminated soil to allow the return of agriculture.
"The project is under the aegis of the School of Archaeology, Veritas International University [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritas_International_Universi...], Santa Ana, CA, and the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Southwest_University], Albuquerque, NM, under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan."
Veritas International University (VIU) is an accredited non-profit Christian university located in Santa Ana, California. Founded in 2008, the university began as a seminary before transitioning to a university with the addition of undergraduate and post-graduate degrees in late 2017.
Trinity Southwest University (TSU) is an unaccredited evangelical Christian institution of higher education with a campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Principally a theological school that encompasses both the Bible college and theological seminary concepts of Christian education, it offers on-campus and distance education programs and degrees in Biblical Studies, Theological Studies, Archaeology & Biblical History, Biblical Counseling, Biblical Representational Research, and University Studies.
The researchers in question are specifically looking for Sodom (and believe they have found it at Tall el Hammam).
the authors list as sponsoring institutions two quite small christian seminaries/universities - i don’t mean to impugn their fieldwork, but only mention it so as we may consider there to be some motivated reasoning in connecting it to events described in the Bible.
Many of the stories from the ancient world probably have a basis in fact. All the old civilizations in the area have a story about a massive flood, for example, like the story of Noah. Other biblical events have been linked to vulcano eruptions, comets, and other natural phenomena as well. The Bible was written as much a a holy text as it was a history book for its people. Some parts of it were made up or exaggerated (like the whole "slaves in Egypt" thing) but others were attributions of divine interaction by people who couldn't possibly understand the forces of nature they observed.
I think it stands to reason that at some point a city in the Levant was destroyed violently. A comet exploding and taking out a city seems like a very plausible reason for how such a event may be attributed to holy intervention. You can discuss whether or not it was some divine being sending a comet towards a particularly bad city or not, but I'd definitely tell stories about divine punishment if I saw the remains of a destroyed city like this. Even today, I think you'd find plenty of people who'd claim that whatever the people in those city were doing was bad enough to upset the divine powers enough to bomb them from space.
It's almost a universal for people who live around the ruins of an older society to attribute that society's downfall to some kind of sin.
The Navajos have a Soddom and Ghomorra tradition about the Anasazi.
THe Welsh had such traditions about the downfall of Roman Britain.
The Greeks accused the Minoans of hubris (hence the legend of Atlantis.)
The Jews accused themselves of sin again, and again, and again, every time an outside force came to their borders. Both exiles are attributed to corruption and sin.
Can you link me to any information you know about the Navajo thing? I'm pretty well versed in the area, but I'm not aware of anything like that. It's also worth noting that "Anasazi" is considered a bit offensive by modern puebloans. Ancestral puebloans is preferred by archeologists, but that could be interpreted as a political stance depending on who you are.
> Even today, I think you'd find plenty of people who'd claim that whatever the people in those city were doing was bad enough to upset the divine powers enough to bomb them from space.
See New Orleans and Katrina.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
From Tall el-Hammam's wiki:
> Starting with the publication of his book Discovering the city of Sodom in 2013 and after fifteen years of excavations of the upper and lower tall, Collins has been arguing that Tall el-Hammam is the site of the biblical city of Sodom. A 2018 conference paper identified a likely Tunguska-like airburst event near the Dead Sea ca. 1700 BCE, which destroyed a region including Tall el-Hammam[18]. According to professor Eugene H. Merrill, himself a Biblical inerrantist, the identification of Tall al-Hammam with Sodom would require an unacceptable restructuring of his early biblical chronology.
Seems worth noting that there's not a consensus in the inerrantist camp.
To this point, the Wikipedia article on Veritas International University notes their doctrinal stance as follows: “Veritas International University has an evangelical doctrinal statement that emphasizes ‘three legs’ of biblical authority: inspiration, infallibility, and biblical inerrancy.”
I admire the rigor of the archaeology and physical/chemical analysis of the site, but think it’s important to note the above when evaluating the conclusions.
Though if the evidence presented for this event is persuasive, then all they achieve by making the connection is to speculate on a natural cause for a biblical "miracle". I mean it can strengthen a view of the Bible as source of historical information, but not as the word of God.
If this event happened, I would expect it to leave long lasting trace in oral tradition.
One would have thought it would leave a written tradition---"The year a city in the Levant got blowed up" in one of the year lists or something.
Tunguska was apparently visible for 500 miles (800km); for a similar event north of the Dead Sea, that would be nearly to the Euphrates valley, central Anatolia, and most of the Nile Valley.
The paper in question is by people from a variety of institutions (none of them being Veritas International University). Early in the paper there is this comment:
"After eleven seasons of excavations, the site excavators [i.e., the folks affiliated with Veritas International University] independently concluded that evidence pointed to a possible cosmic impact. They contacted our outside group of experts from multiple impact-related and other disciplines to investigate potential formation mechanisms for the unusual suite of high-temperature evidence, which required explanation."
Interestingly, the "biblical connections" side of the paper would actually make certain issues with biblical inerrancy.
Namely, the article notes that the most probable locations for Sodoma and Jericho are two cities that show evidence for the air burst theory. Meaning story of Lot and the Fall of Jericho would have to happen on the same day, which kinda doesn't work with bible being infallible and inerrant.
The Bible is a major force behind archaeology in the Levant. Not only for religious reasons, but also because the prospect of correlating material culture and written documents is always exciting.
Not sure how this would strengthen the biblical story. This makes it an accidental destruction by a purely physical phenomenon, not an act of God based on the behaviour of the residents.
The publication is Scientific Reports, so there is no high quality peer review. Papers are "not assessed based on their perceived importance, significance or impact."
The authors wrote that this is "possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis)." This refers to the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
So, two early cities were destroyed by meteorites in the Bronze age, when there were very few cities world wide.
And that's it, as cities kept poping out everywhere, this never happened again.
Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements existed for tens of millenia, while modern cities only existed for 2½ millenia.
Between Abu Hereya (10'800 BC) and Tall el-Hammam (1'650 BC) there was a 9'000 year gap.
Of course you’re going to get more cosmic events if you wait a longer time.
EDIT: The article discusses the potential impact at Tall el-Hammam in 1'650 BC, which also covered Jericho. A second impact at Abu Hereya in 10'800 BC is only mentioned, but not discussed in detail.
This is reverse survivorship bias. There were probably bolides a'plenty, it's just they took down some trees, killed some animals, and interrupted a villagers sleep. There would be no record of such an event.
We should be able to find the impact geological records and build a probability model.
Best definition of a city ever: “bolide sensor”. Love it
Yes, there is geological evidence that the Tunguska event was a bolide explosion.
trees flattened in a radial pattern might show up in the geological record somehow.
OP's analysis demonstrates that it's very possible to detect theses events 1000s of years later, if you examine areas near the explosion.
We don't really have evidence of settlements lasting tens of millennia. Plus, there weren't that many people about. The estimates of human population just 10k BCE are about that of LA County - 10 million-ish.
Not individual settlements, but roughly the same areas stay populated over the whole timeframe. And while there were less humans around, they were still distributed over the whole world.
A simple counter-example to both 'same areas stay populated' and 'humans were all over the world' is human migration to the Americas which started, let's say 20kya, at the very low end of your 'tens of millennia' scale.
Even if that were true, what is your point? Where did these 10m people live if not in settlements?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_in... lists several cities already established (with walls) around 3000 BC. Why they would not be inhabitated millenia before? Just because we don't have written records?
I would recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind". It's really enlightening about the early days of human kind and even gives a new perspective for recent/current developments.
I think most people were nomadic hunter gatherers until agriculture was invented, binding them to their fields.
Does that mean there were two airbursts and not just one in the same place 9000 years apart?
Not disputing that, but my interpretation would be that there was just one airburst that covered both cities.
Jericho and Tall el-Hammam were destroyed in the same airburst, in the same place (~22km distance, ~same time).
Abu Hereya (several hundred kilometers away, 9000 years earlier) was also discussed in the article, and is a separate impact.
The more obvious connection is with Sodom & Gomorra being destroyed by divine wrath. Evidence of high temperatures and increased salinity..
It worth actually to follow links to Abu Hureyra paper [1] to learn that this event is considered not as a solitary impact, but just one in a series of events across four continents. Abu Hureyra's paper also reference paper [2] with a telling name "Evidence for deposition of 10 million tonnes of impact spherules across four continents 12,800 y ago". Here's a fragment of conclusion from that paper:
"The geographical extent of the (Younger Drias) YD impact is limited by the range of sites available for study to date and is presumably much larger, because we have found consistent, supporting evidence over an increasingly wide area. The nature of the impactor remains unclear, although we suggest that the most likely hypothesis is that of multiple airbursts/impacts by a large comet or asteroid that fragmented in solar orbit, as is common for nearly all comets. The YD impact at 12.8 ka is coincidental with major environmental events, including abrupt cooling at the YD onset, major extinction of some end-Pleistocene megafauna, disappearance of Clovis cultural traditions, widespread biomass burning, and often, the deposition of dark, carbon-rich sediments (black mat). It is reasonable to hypothesize a relationship between these events and the YDB impact, although much work remains to understand the causal mechanisms."
Here's another one, 1490 in China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event
And of course if the 2013 Chelyabinsk bolide had been just a bit larger, then the city would no longer exist. (Larger size = lower airburst, so even a modest increase in megatonnage can result in substantially more energy transferred to the ground).
And there are other recent city-killer-size impacts that are well-known but fortunately didn't have cities underneath them, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campo_del_Cielo
> And of course if the 2013 Chelyabinsk bolide had been just a bit larger, then the city would no longer exist.
Looked it up, from Wikipedia:
> The power of the explosion was about 500 kilotons of TNT (about 1.8 PJ), which is 20–30 times more energy than was released from the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima. The city managed to avoid large casualties and destruction due to the high altitude of the explosion.
The speed of detonation also matters, a meteorite detonation is surely slower than a nuclear bomb which releases the energy in milliseconds.
Moreover to that - as far as I understand the Tall el-Hammam's paper, the only reason why they ruled out nuclear explosion is "because of the age of the site". Other than that (as I understand), it's indistinguishable.
Even though an atomic bomb blast is not applicable because of the historic absence of atomic explosions in the area, an atomic blast produces a wide range of melt products that are morphologically indistinguishable from the melted material found at TeH (Fig. 51). These include shocked quartz64; melted and decorated zircon grains (Fig. 51a, b); globules of melted material (Fig. 51c, d); meltglass containing large vesicles lined with Fe-rich crystals likely deposited by vapor deposition (Fig. 51e, f); spherules embedded in a meltglass matrix (Fig. 51g, h). Also, atomic detonations can replicate the physical destruction of buildings, the human lethality, and the incineration of a city, as occurred in World War II.
added: though, I forget to mention, that they also found many chemical elements and compositions that are hard to find under normal conditions (atomic bomb tests included as I understood), but abundant in meteorites.
On a tangential note, I find it wild that we have so little record of such an extraordinary event that happened as recent as 1490 (when China was prospering under a unified empire): sounds like historians were writing "It was reported that stones rained down from the sky, killing ten thousand, in an obscure town in Gansu province. Anyway, back to the court..."
> And that's it, as cities kept poping out everywhere, this never happened again.
I don't think this claim is supported by the article. There have been other cosmic air bursts, like the 1490 Ch'ing-yang event, which had a large number of casualties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch%27ing-yang_event
Yeah, that's a claim I made, out of ignorance.
It seems the chinese were lucky like the russians while the Bronze Age folks were not so lucky.
So I guess we should invest more in asteroid defense.
We should. I've seen an analysis which concluded that your chances of dying in a meteor impact are about the same as your chances of dying in a car crash -- eg., really quite high. This doesn't sound right, because at as an individual, you're obviously far more likely to die in a car crash -- it's extremely unlikely that you'll personally die from a meteor impact. However in the very rare event that you are killed by an impact, then there's a very high probability that anywhere from tens of thousands to tens of millions will also be killed by the same event. So overall the numbers roughly balance out, and are high enough to be worth taking seriously.
Fortunately there are groups that are doing just that: https://b612foundation.org/
What's the cost of a nuclear missile (or X chosen method?) Whats the cost of NYC turning in a smoldering crater * 0.5% (or whatever)?
The cost of all rockets ever launched is a pittance compared to NYC real estate
Also there is a project for a space telescooe spesifically designed to locate asteroids, its not that difficult or even expensive.
The global reaction to COVID is highly relevant to this discussion. As with covid the secondary and tertiary effects will be vastly greater than the primary effects.
There is a fascinating logistics and timing feature to this whole topic. Aside from global panic'd masses. There is a huge logistical difference between sudden and unplanned electrical grid shutdown and subsequent black start vs a pre-planned five minutes outage (assuming we can predict impact to five minutes). Another interesting electrical utility issue is the radiological damage from a melted-down nuclear power plant varies exponentially with time... There's a huge difference in expected damage between whacking the coolant pumps a month in advance vs a day in advance vs a minute of warning vs no warning at all just no coolant flow.
About the water part: Historically you are completely right, but with the crazy amount of global shipping in the 21st century, I think lots of sea impacts would be detected and/or sink a couple of ships. Take a look at vessel finder and you'll see that there are only a few areas where ships are really far apart.
Veritasium did pretty good video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw
You were exactly correct.
All these stories are bullshit of course. Indiana Jones style tales. Literally from the Bible for top post.
Read the account, that's not even close to anything like a air burst.
It's hail if anything to a normal person -
"Stones fell like rain in the Ch’ing-yang district. The larger ones were 4 to 5 catties (about 1.5 kg), and the smaller ones were 2 to 3 catties (about 1 kg). Numerous stones rained in Ch'ing-yang. Their sizes were all different. The larger ones were like goose's eggs and the smaller ones were like water-chestnuts. More than 10,000 people were struck dead. All of the people in the city fled to other places."
There was also the Tunguska incident (no city) and a recent near miss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sulawesi_superbolide
They happen every now and again; of course normally they're not close enough to a city to be a big problem, but over ten millennia...
And, I mean, what's the alternative explanation? Bronze Age nuclear war? You'd have a hell of a time making an ICBM out of bronze :)
It would look magnificent in the May day parade though.
It does seem strange that the impact was so close to a city. Statistically, this would infer that many many of these impacts have happened all over the place, and there's not much evidence of that.
Another fun theory is that there's an alien berserker in far solar orbit that is periodically sending asteroids to Earth to stunt human development while a more powerful device is dispatched to exterminate us. This would imply that additional "events" are immanent. ...food for thought.
I think such an alien adversary would have been more than capable of wiping out humans long ago if they already had the capabilities to direct asteroids toward us. (And also travel the very vast distance to get to us.)
I could maybe believe it if they were throwing them for fun / to study how we react. Which might go in line with the theories that many "UFOlogists" espouse: that sightings are sporadic and rare because aliens are basically pranksters trolling us all. (For the record, I find this pretty contrived, and I believe the far more likely explanation is that there haven't ever been any visitations.)
If you assume that berserkers are difficult to produce and disperse throughout the galaxy, then you might conclude that they have limited capabilities.
Perhaps after detecting intelligent life and reporting it, perhaps it attached itself to the largest convenient asteroid/comet, and altered it's orbit just so to stunt human development just enough to allow for a more complete extermination ship to be dispatched.
Like a galactic immune system - suicide berserkers designed to signal the human infection, and then suicide themselves to slow the disease evolution.
The galaxy is many billions of years old. I would not rule out the development of such a system.
The fact that the galaxy is billions of years old is one part of what would lead me to think that such an immune system would destroy the entire planet, or at least kill all life on it, with the very first projectile/attack.
sounds like a scenario of Starship troopers rather than a food for thought.
Not really. People at this time lived with a much lower population density. Our modern cities that can house millions of people within a few square miles are only possible because of advanced infrastructure for transporting water, food, and waste, and only desirable because of our industrial society where all these people can work in close proximity.
In ancient times, people were much more limited by the distribution of resources, so rather than one big city, they'd have lots of smaller settlements. Note that most ancient "cities" would be small towns by modern standards - Jerusalem for example had a population of around 5000 inhabitants around 1000 BCE. Pretty much every place where there could be such a settlement, there would be.
Thus in that period, if you picked a random spot on earth, the odds that there would be a (by the standards of the day) dense population center in close proximity would be much higher than today.
> ...food for thought.
Is it though? Isn't food for thought something you're supposed to think about? I'm not going to spend much time pondering a petulant alien overlord scenario, especially considering that humanity would probably qualify for a rock or two from such a being as of late and none have been forthcoming.
Keep in mind the bronze age lasted a long time, over 2000 years.
Poisson clumping.
That's stochastic events for ya.
Could it have been ancient aliens ?!!!?....
When they get around to it, it'll be interesting to see them describe how the following is 'just a coincidence':
"diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C."
"Meteors are space objects that have contacted Earth’s atmosphere and are beginning to incinerate, creating a visible vapor trail. Sometimes these are referred to as shooting stars, but if they are exceptionally bright they are called bolides or fireballs. Airbursts are violent explosions that occur when mid-sized meteors streak through the atmosphere, disaggregating as they begin to burn up."[1]
Confirming or falsifying this and locating the potential impact crater seems relatively easy conceptually, but it requires that they go beyond the archeological approach and into statistical geological tools. Shocked quartz is characteristic of impact events, and if shocked quartz is present in a layer here, it will be present in the surrounding areas (all of them, not just the ones where warfare is a reasonable alternate hypothesis) in a characteristically greater thickness & concentration, centered on the crater. Drill a few hundred or a few thousand sediment cores from the surrounding areas, and map out the shocked quartz layer.
Is it possible the burst was even larger, perhaps so far as to be a cause precipitating the Bronze Age collapse? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
Lots of close by civilizations had a rapid decline during the same timeframe.
If I remember correctly, currently it is thought that the collapse was caused by many negative events happening almost at the same time. One of those are so-called Sea Peoples (seriously [0]). A single impact could explain a collapse of a city or a country, but not the fall of the whole region.
Extra Credits once did a series of videos describing various weak points that could lead to the Late Bronze Age collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMP328eU5Q
> Sea Peoples (seriously [0]).
There are worse names. Like the Beaker Folk. A thousand years of presumably history and culture, and you get named after a cup.
Honestly most names are like that. Sea peoples sounds dumb but The Thalassoi or the Marenians sound badass. Conversely Italians are Young Cattle Peoples, the French are Javelin Peoples, and the English are Peoples from Hook Land. There are some exceptions though - the Spanish are Men of the Ultimate West, the Japanese are Rising Sun Peoples, and Israelis are the God Fighters.
However, a single impact could well cause a trade, agricultural or refugee crisis, or radically upset the balance of power in the region, which could have then triggered other crises as a domino effect.
It seems the impacts can chuck a lot of dust in the air, changing weather patterns for quite a while.
The timelines do not match. OP's event took place in 1650BCE, while the Bronze Age collapse was 450 years later, in 1200BCE.
Those dates are separated significantly beyond their margins of error.
I've read that this impact was thought to kick up water vapor from the dead sea and salt the surface of the earth in this area enough that agriculture would be nonviable for hundreds of years in the region. That's enough of an impetus to throw the social order out of whack with a whole sector of the economy eliminated, a pretty important one at that. I wouldn't be surprised if the survivors in this region had to resort to raiding further and further out for resources, eventually being known as these fabled "sea peoples" if their land was barren in this way over these same centuries.
Sorry I must have misread the paper I thought it said 1200BCE! Don’t HN late at night kids
The late Bronze age collapse was around 500 years later.
It's been thought that this impact marred the fertility of the land for the next few centuries in this area. That would certainly be enough to distrupt the social order of a former agrarian regional economy as the survivors increase in population and are forced to raid farther and farther out with each larger generation due to their local land being barren.
Sounds like it may have been a fair bit worse than Tunguska. I don't remember any shocked quartz or diamond like carbon from that one.
I think it's pretty clear now that the collapse was caused by mass migrations, but we don't know the root cause of those migrations. I don't see how a localized event such as this could have caused them.
One theory: a triple-whammy of drought, famine and earthquakes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImnqYT9C0Ws
> Eric Cline, Professor of Classics and Anthropology at George Washington University, discusses the factors that caused the Bronze Age to come to an end.
There is also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4 by Eric Cline, an (alternative) accompaniment to his book "1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed".
- I do recommend the book, but for most folks the YouTube lecture is probably enough detail :)
Scott Manley had an interesting video on the Meteor Crater where he also talked about the 1908 event and the differences in the projectile bodies.
Relevant criticisms of this paper have surfaced (as well as some fairly convincing ad-hominem attacks): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28717721 https://retractionwatch.com/2021/10/01/criticism-engulfs-pap...
Does anyone have a mental model for why an airburst generates so much energy?
For the Chelyabinsk meteor, quick math shows the kinetic energy was about 2e15 joules or .5 megatons. Apparently, ALL of the kinetic energy was converted to radiation and heat, even though it never hit the ground.
My mental model was that something that big (20m) would just punch through the atmosphere and hit the ground, converting all its kinetic energy, and leaving a nice crater.
An airburst, instead, is caused by the inverse operation, i.e., the atmosphere punching into the meteor and shredding it.
Hmm. In the airburst case, the meteor is slowed down just as if it had hit the ground. Okay. Model updated. Thanks for reading.
Yeah, for some reason, I was thinking that stuff that got vaporized by the atmosphere didn't generate as much energy compared to the stuff hitting the ground.
What I’d really like to know is how far away from the center of impact would a human have to be to escape life-threatening or -deforming harm?
apparently adding this reference to Wikipedia article on Tel El Hammam is repeatedly reverted by some wikipedia "power user"
This is a fictional story.
It should not be on Wikipedia other than perhaps people belief systems about magic meteors blowing up magic towns all stated as fact.
How Wikipedia deals with this is problematic.
It seems like a valid source. No one has had time to put out comment it's false.
Could you use to to screw up the astronomy section how contrary to all the decades of modelling they are wrong as well?
Reminds me of an old David Letterman joke when it was about similar news about an old asteroid. "Bob Dole: Oh was that what I heard?!". Seems like it would have been in the 90s...
This should have a "(1650 BCE)" added to the title.
Not necessary, as the title is already qualified by "Bronze Age."
Tsk. Someone didn’t make the right burnt offering.
I expected there to be suggestions this city was nuked by ancient aliens.
All wrong. As everybody should know by now it has been the former residents of Atlantis who disabled them in order to remain the only superior nation on the planet's face. That was shortly before a inner political force succeeded and they started space travel and submerged their old city.
Curiously, the sea people are associated with the collapse of the bronze age but there's still no real indication of who these mariners were.
Errrr… yes. Ok. I’ll back gently out of the room and leave now, keeping my eyes on you the whole time.
Just remember you can't escape from the Illuminati.
In a way, there are. It's theorized to be the ancient city of Sodom which was nuked by an "alien".
A creator alien who loves us and knows every detail of your life and is a total prude
Time machine failures, I like to imagine.
In fairness, the odds of an asteroid hitting so close to a major city is so small, that an intentional alien attack should not be entirely ruled out.
A berserker in far solar orbit could conceivably stunt human development every couple thousand years with an asteroid, while a more effective extermination ship is being dispatched.
*maybe
So that’s the infamous Sodom
Look for pillars of salt!
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Could this incident be the source for stories like Sodom and Gomorrah?
It's discussed in the article, including also the story of Jericho - whose fall happened around the same time frame, and could be explained by blast wave destroying city wall (archeological evidence shows damage concentrated on one side) with thermal radiation starting fire that devastated the rest of the city.
Interestingly enough, the explosion is hypothesized to cause hypersalinity in the area, which caused its abandonment for around 600 years (as it made it impossible to grow crops).
The description is pretty scary. More worrisome is what are the chances of an event like this being mistaken for a nuclear attack and triggering a nuclear war.
For example, if such an event happened to a major city in the US, how could you confirm that it was a bolide, and how do you convince the public calling for retaliation that it was not a nuclear attack.
There exists protocols to differentiate nuclear detonation from all other large explosions.
Satellites dedicated for this purpose have gamma ray, x-rays, and neutron detectors. They would instantly rule out nuclear explosion.
Air sampling and nuclear forensics makes it possible to even identify the culprit from the radionuclides.
nukes have a peculiar "famous" double flash
Also don't forget the EMP effects of a large nuke. Just because a large nuke on the surface doesn't "vaporize all global electronics magically" doesn't mean it would be unmeasurable.
I am curious how unclassified the detail level can be for seismographic analysis. Certainly, oil prospectors can output detailed 3-d models given prior preparation and "generic earthquakes" have nearly instant results for depth of the earthquake and precise location. Anyway my point is the destruction in the linked article was spread along a 100 KM (or so..) SW to NE line simultaneously whereas nukes are obviously point sources. I suppose incredibly unluckily a meteor could come precisely 90 degrees straight down to fool such analysis but those impacts are statistically unlikely. It would seem pretty trivial given enough seismographs on the ground and enough global computing power to instantly detect the difference between a single point source and a geographically long linear impact source.
Because IAEA coordinates and monitors NPT-treaty there is lots of open source information about the subject.
Seismographic analysis has become really accurate. 0.1 t .. 10 t aka (extremely-low-yield testing) can be concealed from seismographs. Very-low-yield testing between 10 t and 1-2 kt is very hard to conceal, and everything from low-yield testing up (>20kt) can be detected with certainty.
> More worrisome is what are the chances of an event like this being mistaken for a nuclear attack and triggering a nuclear war.
Before worrying about the second-order effect maybe we should worry about having no defenses against such impacts.
There are satellites continuously monitoring the Earth for nuclear bursts. The latter have a characteristic double pulse of optical radiation, even in the case of a simple fission device.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_MASINT#Space-based_N...
We have radars you can see nuclear missile coming. Also you have radiation.
In any case, how do you retaliate if you have no idea who attacked you?
It wouldn't take much:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83#False_alarm_fro...
" false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds underneath the satellites' orbits. "
The odds of erroneously detecting a missile launch and then a meteor exploding over a city at the exact time and place predicted by that fake missile's trajectory is astronomically small.
> In any case, how do you retaliate if you have no idea who attacked you?
You get to choose who you want to attack, go invade your preferred targets? It worked for the US about 20 years ago. It's not a hypothetical, it's recent occurrence.
> We have radars
What if your strategic enemy secretly figured out how to evade detection?
> also you have radiation.
Ah, the lack of radiation explains it: this city-killing explosion was the horrible work of a top-secret kinetic impactor weapons program developed by [insert strategic enemy here]!
> how do you retaliate if you have no idea who attacked you?
The same way the USA justified invading Iraq: lie. The inevitable blizzard of online disinformation wouldn't help things either.
What's to stop these people from just nuking themselves and claim it was their strategic enemy's stealth strike?
If people want to go to war, it doesn't make a lot of sense to wait around for an asteroid.
Neither, I am asking if you're going to do a false flag, why wait for an incredibly improbable scenario to use as pretext as opposed to just fabricating such a pretext?
The whole point of the False Flag is the False part.
> What if your strategic enemy secretly figured out how to evade detection?
They probably already do; stealth tech is a thing, as are hypersonic long distance missiles. Plus submarines, to bring the nukes in real close, reducing response time.
Or just a suitcase bomb and person. (I'm sure there are _some_ detectors in ports and airports, but doubt they're infalible).
We invaded Iraq after 15 Saudis flew planes into the WTC and the Pentagon - so it doesn't matter if you know who did it or not.
We'd ideally get early warnings of asteroids.
Also, nukes don't get automatically launched (unless you're Russia at high alert and activated dead hand), that's why leaders exist.
Unlikely. The one that hit a couple years ago in Russia was not detected at all because it came from the solar side.
What I find interesting is that, civilizations have fallen so many times due to catastrophic natural disasters or in the hands of each other. Some fell suddenly (Pompeii, Tall el-Hammam) and some perished gradually (Indus valley, Mayans). All these prayed to different gods who were not much use. And we still continue to put our faith in another set of gods hoping that they are the real deal (until the next city-block sized asteroid comes along). Humans are truly incapable of learning anything from history.
PS: in case someone wonders where all this is coming from, I was pondering on the arrow that points to the Temple in this picture (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3/figures/1). Countless may have prayed at its steps for their safety and at the end, universe just swept all that aside.
Pompeii wasn't a "civilization", it was one destroyed city (a couple, really, with Herculaneum). The Roman Empire lasted quite a bit longer!
What would you like them to learn?
Humans are small and the world they operate in is big. Sometimes humans get crushed.
Indeed. I guess I am going for not persecuting humans following other gods in the name of one's own gods.
Build giant underground cities or diversify chance of survival by colonizing other planets
Giant underground cities have so many cost, safety, supply, and water issues that colonizing other planets can start looking darn attractive by comparison.
my opinion is that god/religions evolve simply to provide psychological comfort to people and for social control. I don't think any rational person believes their god is going to save their city.
how many people would be motivated to do anything if they knew that when you die, you cease to be? Or that there's no trial of your life's deeds.
Most? I’m not aware of any general apathy amongst the atheist crowd (who generally believe those things) and instead see a high percentage of them rising to positions of power and influence in Hollywood and science, IE places they don’t generally have to hide their feelings on the subject. It’s up to you to decide how many of our politicians you think are lip service Christians.
Allow me this quote:
I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void, searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for difficult people. I take pity.
Sandia Labs did some amazing supercomputer simulation work related to the Tunguska event, and produced a set of fascinating simulation videos [1].
It looks like these simulations were referenced in the illustration & chart just ahead of the Conclusion section.
Also some pretty interesting results in the Sandia study: >> “The asteroid that caused the extensive damage was much smaller than we had thought,” says Sandia principal investigator Mark Boslough of the impact that occurred June 30, 1908. “That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had believed.”
Definitely worth checking out [1] https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/releases/2007/asteroid.html
The bones were splashed with molten metal.
Imagine holding a silver cup. You raise it to give a toast. All of a sudden, the wine in your cup begins to boil, your flesh turns to ash and flies away as if someone with an infinity gauntlet had willed you away, the cup melts and splatters silver over your charred bones.
The only other place where I think I was impressed by scenery of this sort was the opening to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. It seems that reality is even scarier than what our writers and cinematographers can imagine.
In Russian schools, there's a class named "fundamentals of life safety". For the most part, it covers basic disaster preparedness and survival, but also civil defense. So there's a lesson on nuclear warfare, complete with charts showing how much gets destroyed where, tables specifying proper amounts of radioactivity-blocking materials to use for shelters etc.
Now, that has a lot of duck-and-cover type stuff that should be familiar to older American readers. But if your teacher is prone to irony and dark humor, you can get some extras. In our case, it was a military joke that went thus:
"What should you do if you're a soldier, and a nuclear weapon goes off in the immediate vicinity?"
"Stand still and hold your AK in front of you, arms fully stretched out."
"Why?"
"So that the molten metal doesn't drip on and burn through your government-issued boots. Another recruit could still use them."
There was an 80's book called Nuclear War Survival Skills covered here a week or two ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28481782
I'd argue that this is one of the most humane ways to die. You're gone in a flash. Compare this to diseases like several cancers that kill you slowly over a period of time, while you suffer all the way through.
Yah, that planted an impressive meme into our minds, didn't it?
But TBH, would it even matter? I mean, to be that near for it to happen, there is so much radiation under way that it makes you unconscious before you even know it, I'd guess.
Maybe you'd see a flash, and then you would be gone. In the timescale of such things loooong before anythings starts to heat, char, be blown apart, away, to ashes and steam.
For an asteroid to hit a city this closely - the odds are so astronomical - that it implies that this magnitude of impact occurs frequently, perhaps every couple hundred years.
Which means it is very possible that we will see one in our lifetime. Hopefully it'll hit the ocean.
Meteor bursts in the upper atmosphere are a fairly frequent occurrence, detection is made with acoustic using sensors developed to detect atomic explosions. It is very rare that they occur low to the ground though.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229492086_Historica...
Impacts of this magnitude exploding near enough to the surface to cause significant damage on land are not common at all - perhaps on the order of once per century - given the recording of modern technology over the last ~150 years (obvious wide margin of error there).
Despite that, hitting the city in OPs article, even 35 centuries ago, still seems like an extremely low probability event happened.
Would such an event in/over the ocean create a tsunami?
> given the recording of modern technology over the last ~150 years
Is it possible we could pass through a non-uniform, high probability density region? Perhaps a debris field where the orbit intersection with Earth is infrequent, but periodic?
It happens, only the probability of hitting someone-something human is almost nothing.
Years ago,while I was teaching the starts to kids on the mountain at night one of them asked for a bright star on the sky. We looked at the star and it became bigger until it was a big ball of fire so bright that we had to look away.
For two or three seconds, it became as bright as in daylight, but shadow moving ultrafast.
Then nothing,it became dark again. No sound, no nothing.
Nobody talked about that in the news. Most people were sleep. It must be normal.
Tunguska in 1908 and Chelyabinsk in 2013, with who knows how many impacting the ocean or other harder to notice regions. Yeah, you're not wrong.
Chelyabinsk was lucky that the burst occurred very high in the atmosphere. Even with that, the amount of damage from the blast was shocking.
Dashcams were common in Russia and it happened in the YouTube era, so there were plenty of videos of the event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpmXyJrs7iU
Nearly all the damage was broken windows.
Not relevant to a prehistoric explosion.
Had the Tunguska event occurred over a densely populated area, and the damage and loss of life would have been catastrophic.
Hell, just have the Chelyabinsk strike happen somewhere it could trigger an avalanche or landslide, or even a dense city with highrises.
> For an asteroid to hit a city this closely - the odds are so astronomical - that it implies that this magnitude of impact occurs frequently, perhaps every couple hundred years
You can't calculate the frequency of an event from one occurrence. At least, not without near infinite error bars.
In a Bayesian sense you can calculate the frequency of an event from one occurrence: if it happened once to a city 3600 years ago, you can use that information to update whatever your prior probability distribution was over these event frequencies. Your untutored intuition that this is not enough to give you a very tight distribution is correct, but I think "frequently, perhaps every couple hundred years" is a justifiable description of it.
As dredmorbius points out, we actually have a fairly comprehensive dataset of smaller events we can also use, plus a couple of bigger ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28612676
A thing to keep in mind is how very few cities there were 3600 years ago. There might have been 10-50 million people in total, the size of a single small town in China today.
Yes, of course you're right about that.
> But your prior probability distribution is either (1) based on a lot of other data, so that the final result is not based on the single data point, or (2) garbage.
To do Bayesian reasoning at all, you need an initial prior probability distribution based on zero events, and all your posterior results are calculated from it. So if it's really "garbage" you're kind of in trouble regardless of how much data you have. In fact, it's easy to construct priors that cause Bayesian methods to give results that are obviously garbage by any standard even after updated with arbitrarily large amounts of data. This is often used as an argument for preferring frequentist statistics.
This is a fairly central aspect of Bayesian statistics: what can you pick as an "uninformative prior" for an unbounded distribution? A uniform distribution over the entire positive number line unfortunately isn't normalizable, so we unavoidably have some kind of falloff as we go to sufficiently low frequencies, and an exponential distribution is the least unreasonable thing to pick.
But, if we're completely uninformed and don't know anything about Earth or the universe, we might start with a prior exponential distribution whose median is at "one city-destroying-sized meteor explosion on Earth per nanosecond," not realizing that the Earth would be molten if this happened, or at "one city-destroying-meteor explosion on Earth per googol years", not realizing that the universe is vastly younger than that and in fact meteors do hit occasionally. Then, given the observed data that apparently a city was thus destroyed 3600 years ago, when cities covered maybe 0.001% of the land, and apparently less than ten cities have been destroyed since, and definitely none in the last 200 years even though cities spread to cover 1% of the land, the first of these gives us the posterior "city-destroying meteors happen every few hundred to every few thousand years" (even though it's not "based on a lot of other data" and the prior isn't very similar to that posterior, it succumbs to the evidence of those quintillions of nanoseconds when no cities got destroyed), while the second one gives us a much less reasonable estimate which could reasonably be described as "near infinite error bars" or "garbage".
So, in summary:
• you can compute the frequency of an event from a single observed occurrence;
• your prior does not have to derive from a lot of other data for this, not even the fact that the Earth is not currently molten;
• the only Bayesian way to derive a prior probability from a lot of other data is to use a prior that does not derive from any data, so any epistemology that rejects such priors as "garbage" necessarily rejects purely Bayesian reasoning entirely;
• such an uninformative prior can be obviously wrong in certain ways, to the point of absurdity, and still give you reasonable inference results; and
• these are very elementary facts about Bayesian statistics.
In short, the things you are saying are (with respect to Bayesian statistics) as incorrect as claims like "you can't trisect an angle," "you can't subtract 4 from 3," or "3 - 4 = -1 but there's no square root of -1."
> > Your untutored intuition
> It wasn't either, thanks, and its arrogant as fuck for you to assume this.
You evidently didn't know the elementary aspects of Bayesian statistics I explained above, so arrogant as fuck or no, I turned out to be right about that; I'd describe it more as an inference than an assumption. I probably can't teach you anything while you're in ego defense mode, but maybe I can keep you from misleading anybody else. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, and if there is some way I could have totally dismissed your incorrect opinion without hurting your feelings, please tell me what it is so I can do it in the future.
> That has no impact on the uncertainty of the estimate from a single data point, only the actual estimate.
Yes, you're right, or very close anyway (since a proper prior for this problem necessarily depends on at least some kind of scale parameter, the shape of the results will vary slightly depending on at least the ratio between that scale parameter and the actual frequency estimate).
It's not one data point. There are many many documented asteroid impacts. If you assume that hitting ANY spot on Earth is randomly distributed (or at least randomly outside the poles), and you know the rate of meteor impacts (even within an order of magnitude), you can easily calculate the probability of destroying a city to be extremely low. Particularly given the number of cities in 1650 BCE.
Tunguska and Chelyabinsk were about 105 years apart, and it looks like there are roughly 40 people who lived through both on this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
So, maybe two?
The average time between two events, is not the same as taking a window just barely including two data points.
> the odds are so astronomical
Heh, in more ways than one I suppose
Rule of thumb I'm familiar with suggests that a Tunguska-scale event is rougly a once-a-century occurrance. Frequently scales inversely with size on a logarithmic basis (10x larger is 10x less frequent).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris...
Especially at a time when cities were dramatically fewer and farther between.
> Hopefully it'll hit the ocean.
I give it about a 70% shot.
Why? Ever heard of tsunamis?
The whole paper is definitely worth reading. The methods they've used to rule out everything else then a meteor blast. Or the microphotograph of bone with embedded molten glass
The quartz shocking was a bit weak as it wasn't clear how they dated it to the same time as the theoretical blast - similarly for the other metal deposits found.
This made their other arguments a little weaker as we as it reduced the temperature evidenced to just that of the melted bricks - which makes it possible that what they found was evidence of contemporary furnaces and/or other fire events/war/etc.
Still pretty compelling overall.
I understand they theorize an airburst, but I wonder if it would be possible to find a "ground zero" for the explosion, and thus more direct evidence.
> The quartz shocking was a bit weak as it wasn't clear how they dated it to the same time as the theoretical blast
They found it in the rubble layer they are studying? How would it get there if it wasn't produced at the same time as the rest of the stuff in that layer?
For things in a sediment layer to not be of equal age, you need some sort of transport mechanism to move the quartz there from some earlier or later period, and there's not much convective motion in dirt.
Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratigraphy_(archaeology)
I'll take a glance as I'm wondering if they included the possibility of a weapon. Although technically, a meteor could be a weapon with a sufficiently proper setup. A cosmic Slingshot.
> In summary, although man-made explosives and atomic bombs can account for an extreme range of damage to humans, they can be ruled out because of the age of the site.
If you can’t rule something out because it goes against everything else we know, then you can’t rule anything out, ever, for any reason.
If you don’t respect consistency and prior probability, then causality itself breaks down, and I’m wondering how exactly do you feed yourself and cross streets safely. Unless you know perfectly well how reasoning works and you just don’t apply that when you comment on science articles.
Somebody's been watching Starship Troopers.
Like what? With this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agneya ?
The same way some people say what happened to Mohenjo Daro?
Thanks for that connection. Quite interesting!
> In some Hindu texts, Agneya is considered the most powerful form of "holy energy" ever to have been created. The "Agneya Astra" is believed to have been the most powerful of the ancient nuclear energies and was often invoked by the most elite of Gods to ensure the victory of good forces. Hindu texts associate the Agneya Astra as a near infinite energy source with the power, brilliance, heat, and light exceeding those of a billion trillion Suns.
It's fascinating to think how many early civilizations or cities may have met a similar fate with the remains just too obliterated to identify / study.
This is very reminiscent of the Hiroshima attack. The city was so devastated that it took much time for reports of the destruction to reach the emperor and advisors. And even then it wasn't fully believed.
If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well.
The bombing of Hiroshima was unimaginable destruction, and yet did less damage than the very first mass firebombing attack on Japan four months earlier.
At this point in the war the Americans had been hitting Japanese cities with 300-500 super heavy bomber firebombing raids for four months. After bombing all the major cities the Americans were now well into their list of twenty five smaller 75,000 to 300,000 population cities.
So Hiroshima was just another day in Japan, just another bombed city. The only thing new to the Japanese was that the destruction was from a new kind of bomb, and the following morning an investigation group had been formed.
The Japanese leadership met the following morning, discussed that the city was wiped out via a new bomb, and decided to continue fighting while seeing what kind of better terms they could get before surrendering. Which is what they had been doing for quite some time, and continued to do even as the Soviets declared war on them a few days later.
News of the attack traveled to the Tokyo quickly.
For example, a major Go championship was being played on the outskirts of Hiroshima at the time of the bomb explosion. Although the windows of the building the game were played in were blown out, and one of the players knocked over, gameplay resumed a few hours later and the match was finished. (https://senseis.xmp.net/?AtomicBombGame) It was assumed in Tokyo that day that the players were probably killed, indicating that news of the city being hit had traveled there.
Japan's ability to defend itself from air attacks was essentially over before the mass firebombing attacks even began. Before the first firebomb raid the US removed all but one machine gun from each B-29's in order to carry more bombs, judging correctly that the Japanese defenses were weak enough.
50+ would have been a small raid. the firebombing of tokyo was like over 300 bombers. Same with those larger raids in europe that destroyed 50% or more of many major cities. WWII was about overwhelming air defenses with a sea of bombers. Japan couldn't do anything about a bomber fleet of that size by like 1943 when US had total air superiority in the pacific and could bomb anything anywhere at that point with their carriers.
> Each of those "firebombings" were conducted by 50+ B-29 bombers. When you see so many bombers show up on radar, you dispatch the fighters, you know things are about to happen.
1. By mid-1945, Japan no longer had any fuel for those fighters.
2. B-29s cruised at 40,000', way out of reach of Japanese fighters.
At that point in the war, whether or not you see a single, or 50 B-29s, Japanese air defense would ignore them, because Japan no longer had a working air defense. The only difference is that in the latter, the firefighting crews would start getting ready.
I don't think the Japanese was defending very well against the firebombs either by that point.
> Japan didn't have the resources to fight against singular bombers anymore. They focused only on the groups of bombers. At this point, it was clear that their air-force was soundly defeated.
It doesn't really make sense that it is easier to take down 10 bombers than 1, does it?
It sounds like you mean the hypothetical where as many bombers were each sent individual to nuke as many cities that would be harder to defend against, because any bombers that got through would do so much more damage.
So it's important to differential between potential destruction and actual destruction. The firebombings did incontrovertibly more damage, and after the war both governments had reason to not emphasize this.
> If I'm not misremembering history, then their delay in action - due to the difficulty of getting news of the situation out of the area of destruction - led to the bombing of Nagasaki as well
It was a bit more complicated than that [0]. There was intense resistance to the Allies' demands for unconditional surrender. Japanese scientists confirmed on the 7th August (the day after the bombing) that Hiroshima had been atom bombed and Nagasaki was bombed on the 9th. The Japanese didn't actually surrender until the 15th August, following a failed coup d'état in which elements of the Army rebelled against the emerging surrender plans [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#Attempted_c...
There's a lot of revisionist history out there.
The Emperor singled-out the atomic bombs in his surrender message. Japan was depending on the USSR to mediate a conditional surrender, until they entered the war, which closed that avenue. And the reason the USSR hastily entered the war was because of the atomic bomb, they knew it was about to end. Japan was no doubt very concerned about a second front in the war, but I don't know of any particular fear of the USSR... Japan had soundly defeated a pre-USSR Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.
It's quite possible that they would have endured the USSR joining the war effort, if not for the additional "shock" of the atomic bombs, and Truman's bluff that the US would be dropping one every week...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/pacific/#t...
That largely agrees with what I've read. There were no large air raids on the day of the Hiroshima bombing, and very few would have considered a bomb of that power. So in the first hours at least and into the next day, outside of the city there wasn't an understanding the whole city was basically gone. From their perspective immediately after, there were communication problems that had cut all the telegraph and telephone lines, presumably due to some sort of large (but more normal) disaster in the city centre. Only once the smoke started to clear and an aerial survey could be performed, along with large numbers of survivors pouring into neighbouring cities and towns, would the true scale of it have been clear to the Japanese government (around the same time the Americans were surveying the results, I suppose, a day or two later).
This sounds completely improbable.
Phones / telegrams and cameras existed.
Nagasaki happened 3 days later, I find it hard to believe information couldn't travel that fast.
You're correct, but the circumstances of the first atomic attack caused significant delays for accurate information to reach the Imperial General Headquarters. The first info stated that Hiroshima was devastated in an air raid, but the officers at high command considered this to be an error due to the lack of reports of hundreds of American bombers over the city on that day. However, they were unable to get any communication from Hiroshima (note that the military headquarters was at the Hiroshima Castle which was completely destroyed).
It didn't take days, but it did take many hours for Tokyo to realize that indeed Hiroshima was devastated in an attack. Some officers even thought it was a traditional bombing raid and that there was a technical issue or even sabotage with their communication lines between Hiroshima and Tokyo. Tho Officer Corps at first had little knowledge to understand that it might have been an atomic attack, and that therefore the war had changed in a very serious manner.
The first outside sign of trouble at Hiroshima was actually the instantaneous loss of all commmunications. The bomb was dropped at 8:15. At 8:16, the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo noticed a loss of communications with their office in Hiroshima. Twenty minutes later, the Tokyo railroad telegraph office noticed communications had failed just north of Hiroshima, with confused reports of a "large explosion" in Hiroshima from other stations nearby.
There were confused reports of a large explosion. As others have noted, there was no large observed flight of US/Alied aircraft, was would have been typical of a bombing raid.
It wasn't until the early afternoon that a Japanese Imperial Army aircraft was flown over the city and made the first direct assessment of the damage incurred to those outside the city. It wasn't until the United States Government informed the Japanese via diplomatic cable the next day that it was clear that what had delivered the damage was a new type of weapon.
That initial symptom of loss of communications is actually highly typical of major disasters. For smaller incidents, a more usual problem is that those directly involved simply fail to accept or change their viewpoint to understand what it is that's transpiring. In almost any large disaster, though, a highly consistent consequence is loss of regular or effective means of communications, such that this itself is a fair indication of the scope and scale of a disaster.
Compare for example the HMS Sheffield attack during the Falklands War.
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/atomic/hiroshim/hiro_med.html#AT...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wf9yc/on_disa...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2ab25z/on_disa...
Sodom, Gomorrah... there's quite a list in the ancient literature from the region of cities obliterated.
Sodom is specifically named in the article.
> It is worth speculating that a remarkable catastrophe, such as the destruction of Tall el-Hammam by a cosmic object, may have generated an oral tradition that, after being passed down through many generations, became the source of the written story of biblical Sodom in Genesis. The description in Genesis of the destruction of an urban center in the Dead Sea area is consistent with having been an eyewitness account of a cosmic airburst, e.g., (i) stones fell from the sky; (ii) fire came down from the sky; (iii) thick smoke rose from the fires; (iv) a major city was devastated; (v) city inhabitants were killed; and (vi) area crops were destroyed. If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam is possibly the second oldest known incident of impact-related destruction of a human settlement, after Abu Hureyra in Syria ~ 12,800 years ago.
Volcanic eruptions also figure prominently in oral traditions throughout the world.
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/victoria-s-volcanic-...
'some' theorized Tall el-Hammam is Sodom and Gomorrah
I would expect very few considering how rare early cities were and how rare these low-atmosphere explosions are (and presumably were as well).
Better to go that way than be on the periphery and get badly burned and maimed and die slowly.
But people keep saying they want to go out with a bang.