A brief paper published in Science on January 2, 2009, revealed data supporting an hypothesis about the abrupt end of the Clovis culture which was originally reported in 2007, and now has growing support among the scientific community.
Air Bombs
Cretaceous Period Chicxulub Crater, seen as a pale circle taking up a huge hunk of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. This is what an impact crater looks like--there is no evidence that such a crater is associated with the black mats and nanodiamonds
Photo Credit: NASA / Getty Images
The theory goes that an asteroid or asteroids either exploded in air above North America or landed on the Laurentide Ice Sheet which covered Canada about 10,900 RCYBP (calibrated to 12,900 years ago). Those explosions—I notice the Science paper doesn't talk about the ice sheet—triggered environmental changes called the Younger Dryas (YD). The unarguable effects of those changes include the disappearance of large-bodied animals like mammoths and mastodons (called collectively megafauna) and the disappearance of the Clovis culture, a human population who survived by hunting those megafauna. It's likely that the Clovis people themselves (or at least some of them) survived--they just changed to hunting smaller animals and collecting plants, called the "Archaic" period in the Americas.
The physical evidence for this catastrophe, say scientists, is a "black mat" covering several Clovis sites. A black mat is a thin, organic-rich layer of sediment, characterized by lots and lots of carbon and the presence of nano-diamonds. Black mats were first recognized at Clovis-period archaeological sites by C. Vance Haynes in the 1970s. Haynes tied the black mat to a climate shift, but didn't make the leap to asteroid impacts.
Nano Diamonds and Destruction
Enormous Cubic Diamond, Frankie B Fashion Show; not what you'll find in a black mat (or on the ring finger of any archaeologist, I daresay)
Photo Credit: Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
Nano-diamonds (or nano-sized diamonds) are thought to have been created out of the carbon by exposure to shock. Cubic diamonds—the kind you buy from the jewelry store—form under high temperatures and pressures, temperatures that surely would have killed everything and everybody; nano-diamonds formed under a lesser shock.
Researchers opined in 2007 that the occurrence of the nano-diamonds in the black mat is evidence of explosions in air, or an impact of an asteroid on top of the glaciers which covered Canada at the time. If there had been a full cometary explosion, the evidence would have included shocked minerals and impact craters, and those kinds of things, seen at crater sites like Chicxulub in Yucatan, are not found in North America dated to the appropriate time.
Science 2009
The latest paper is a peer-reviewed version of the earlier PNAS paper. It reports evidence of an abundance of nano-diamonds at the onset of the YD at Murray Springs, Arizona; Bull Creek, Oklahoma; Gainey, Michigan; Topper, South Carolina; Chobot, Alberta; and Lake Hind, Manitoba.
More on Black Mats, Nano-Diamonds and Clovis
- Clovis, Black Mats, and Extra-Terrestrials, lots more detail on the PNAS paper
- Who Were the Clovis People?
- The Megafaunal Extinctions
Academic Sources
- Firestone, R. B., et al. 2007 Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(41):16016-16021. Free download
- Haynes Jr., C. V. 1991 Geoarchaeological and Paleohydrological Evidence for a Clovis-Age Drought in North America and Its Bearing on Extinction. Quaternary Research 35:438-450.
- Haynes, Jr C. V. 2008 Younger Dryas "black mats" and the Rancholabrean termination in North America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(18):6520–6525.
- Kennett, D. J., et al. 2009 Nanodiamonds in the Younger Dryas Boundary Sediment Layer. Science 323:94.
- Quade, Jay, Richard M. Forester, William L. Pratt, and Claire Carter 1998 Black Mats, Spring-Fed Streams, and Late-Glacial-Age Recharge in the Southern Great Basin. Quaternary Research 49(2):129-148.
Recent News Stories and Blogs
- Discover Magazine: Nano-Diamond Discovery Suggests a Comet Impact Killed the Mammoths January 5, 2009
- Nature Blog: Did killer comets bring the bling? January 5, 2009
- Science Daily: Six North American Sites Hold 12,900-year-old Nanodiamond-rich Soil January 2, 2009
- University of Oregon PR: Six North American sites hold 12,900-year-old nanodiamond-rich soil
- BoingBoing: Devastating comet hit North America 13,000 years ago? January 2, 2009
Comments
have to remark about your quote…”the Clovis culture, a human population who survived by hunting those megafauna” i wish that yourself and others in the field would help dispel this myth. the facts are the paleo-indians only hunted mammoths and bison, just two species of the over twenty megafauna. additionally, you also know that that survival based on hunting these beasts would be exceedingly impractical. sorry, just tired of seeing this type of misinformation.
Interesting news. Can you pass along some academic references for us all to delve into?
thanks!
Kris
I was at a Barbara Purdy lecture last night. She’s working a site in north central Florida and plans to call in some people to look for nano-diamonds there. She had some VERY interesting artifacts dated to 22-26k.
Cool! Looking forward to hearing all about it…
“just tired of seeing this type of misinformation.”
No Clovis person ever ate a vegetable, fruit or rabbit? Yea, right! Pitiful.
Who says this? Where does it say anything but “clovis were reliant on big game hunting”? I’ve never said “Clovis only ate mammoth and mastodon”. If that’s what’s been implied, it is wrong.
The implications of the black mat is that when the mastodon and mammoth went away, Clovis shifted to a broader resource base. There is no doubt that they already knew about the resource base; but by and large Clovis and ohter lanceolate points were not for killing rabbits or digging vegetables.
Specifically, I wonder if nanodiamonds have been found in the 13,000 year old debris field (18 miles) from the Mary Bay (Yellowstone hydrothermal explosion crater) event? How about above or below it? I think whether or not they are would be significant information in the continuing nanodiamond research.
The “Nano diamonds” which contain HEXAGONAL Architecture did not originate on Planet Earth. Craters are not always necessary because:
A)-Asteroids, Meteors, etc. can crash into bodies of water scattering Nano diamonds as they shed or crash and can further scatter upon striking the water as the Tsunami splashes lift them onto land, or Asteroids may break up upon entry, or may also cascade off mountain peaks, or crash into mountains peaks and ricochet onto land masses below and for miles, they may enter the atmosphere as Meteor showers. There are many reasons why some scientists lacking brainstorming ability can miss options sans craters.
I’ve been told mammoths lived on Wrangell Is. (off of northern Siberia) as late as 3,500 years ago. Is that true?
I really am skeptical all of the megafauna died out from a single event. Extinctions have been shown to occur over 100′s of thousands of years, not one or two years.
Devil is in the details.
it was a comet that hit earth a comet is made of ice and nano diamonds found in space and on easrth around extreme presure either the nano diamonds are from space form the comet or the huge climate change caused it extreme presure.
They recently discovered ice crystals on the moon and the scientific community is eager to drill for water on the moon. Wow. I think that they could spend their time better by wondering WHY the moon is where it is to begin with…and where did it come from.
Personally, I visualize it rocketing through space with a number of other celestial bodies of varying shapes and sizes and I visualize those bodies striking the Earth early one evening …and the results were…catostrophic.
The moon struck just off dead center in the middle of what is now the Pacific Ocean,..leaving no impact crater other than the “Ring of Fire”. It backed off as the Earth moved away, out of it’s orbit, and the moon was trapped forever in the Earth’s gravity.
The other bodies hit, mostly in oceans and areas that may still go unnoticed for the ricochet points that they are, and careened off to continue their journey through the depths of space. These impacts caused 5-6,000 ‘ tsunamis which washed across the Earth’s continents at a very high rate of speed and destroyed any animal life (dinosaurs,etc) that didn’t live high and out of reach and all a large portion of the Earth’s existing vegetation. The water came in fast and it went out fast…creating many wonders (Grand Canyon..Great Rift Valley..Amozon Delta.. The Badlands..The Caucasues…The Middle East…etc)….and, FOSSIL FUELS in all the places where flora and fauna could back up and be covered up. These impacts created the Ice Age and resulting “second freeze”.
You want a Big Bang Theory….there you go. Think about it.