An ancient human settlement was obliterated by a comet that exploded in Earth’s atmosphere around 12,800 years ago, a study has found.
The event destroyed a village found in the Abu Hureyra dig site in Syria and splattered fragments of molten glass ‘hot enough to melt cars’ to the ground.
The impact is also believed to have contributed to the extinction of many large animals, including mammoths as well as North American horses and camels.
Experts believe the explosion helped bring about the demise of the North American Clovis culture and usher in an episode of climatic cooling.
The glass splatter found at Abu Hureya was found among the remains of bones, building material and plants from when the first nomads settled to cultivate crops.
‘Our new discoveries represent much more powerful evidence for very high temperatures that could only be associated with a cosmic impact,’ said paper author and geologist James Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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An ancient human settlement was obliterated by a comet that exploded in Earth’s atmosphere around 12,800 years ago, a study has found. Picture, an artist’s impression of the explosion
The Abu Hureyra site is located on the edge of a vast region known as the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) strewnfield, which incorporates around 30 sites across Europe, the Americas and parts of the Middle East.
The strewnfield is characterised by signs of massive-scale burning — including a ‘black mat’ layer that is rich in carbon and platinum and and contains millions of tiny nanodiamonds and tiny metal spheres that must have formed in great heat.
Experts had long wondered if this layer of devastation may have been caused by a catastrophic impact event — a hypothesis supported by the discovery of a contemporaneous impact crater under the Hiawatha Glacier in Greenland.
In their study, Professor Kennett and colleagues analysed the glass found at Abu Hureyra to determine its composition, structure and likely formation temperature — concluding that it formed at temperatures in excess of 3,992°F (2,200°C).
‘To help with perspective, such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute,’ said Professor Kennett.
‘The Abu Hureyra village would have been abruptly destroyed,’ he added.
Such intense heats could not be explained by contemporary human technology — or even lightning or a volcanic eruption.
In their study, Professor Kennett and colleagues analysed the meltglass found at Abu Hureyra (pictured) to determine its composition, structure and likely formation temperature — concluding that it formed at temperatures in excess of 3,992°F (2,200°C)
Instead, the researchers said, such must have resulted from an extremely violent, high-energy and high-velocity phenomenon — like a cosmic impact.
This conclusion is supported by the presence in the meltglass of minerals rich in chromium, iron, nickel, sulphides, titanium and even platinum and iridium-rich iron.
‘The critical materials are extremely rare under normal temperatures, but are commonly found during impact events,’ Professor Kennett explained.
The team found that the meltglass recovered from the Abu Hureyra site contained both material from the comet, but also vaporised soil, sediments and organic matter from the settlement that cooled nearly instantaneously to form glass.
The team found that the meltglass recovered from the Abu Hureyra site contained both material from the comet, but also vaporised soil, sediments and organic matter from the settlement that cooled nearly instantaneously to form glass. Pictured, samples of impact glass from the settlement that feature the imprints of plant matter on their surfaces
The researchers also found that the glass in the Syrian site chemically matched materials found from across the YDB strewnfield, suggesting that such came from the explosion — or ‘air burst’ — of a single comet in the atmosphere.
‘A single major asteroid impact would not have caused such widely scattered materials like those discovered at Abu Hureyra,’ Professor Kennett explained.
‘The largest cometary debris clusters are proposed to be capable of causing thousands of air bursts within a span of minutes across one entire hemisphere of Earth.
‘The YDB [impact] hypothesis proposed this mechanism to account for the widely dispersed [contemporary] materials across more than 14,000 kilometres of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
‘Our Abu Hureyra discoveries strongly support a major impact event from such a fragmented comet.’
The event destroyed a village found in the Abu Hureyra dig site in Syria and splattered fragments of molten glass ‘hot enough to melt cars’ to the ground
According to Professor Kennett, the air burst must have occurred close enough to the village to send heat and molten glass across the entirety of the settlement.
Experts had previously found evidence of meltglass deposits at another dig site — Pilauco, in southern Chile — however here only indirect evidence of human settlement, like the butchering of large animals, had been unearthed.
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Scientific Reports.