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Comets, Climate Change, and Cultural Responses

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By Laurie Milne April 24, 2017 - 11:23am

A recent article by Martin B. Sweatman and Dimitrios Tsikritsis of the School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, which appears in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 17(1):233-250 offers support that meteor showers depicted on the Vulture Stone from the Neolithic town of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey and dated to 10950 BC +/- 250 years may in fact be responsible for the climate event known as the Younger-Dryas.  Researchers believe that symbols on the stone indicate long-term changes in the Earth's rotational axis as well as a catastrophic comet strike.  Human responses to the climate changes included the selective breeding of plants and animals, development of farming technologies and eventually irrigation.

It should be noted that meteor/comet strikes have also been implicated in the demise of the dinosaurs and the megafauna hunted by Clovis Complex peoples in North America. 

 

http://maajournal.com/Issues/2017/Vol17-1/Sweatman%20and%20Tsikritsis%2017%281%29.pdf