Mick Hartley

The meteorite impact theory’s been generally accepted as an explanation for the end of the Cretaceous period and the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone invoked it to explain the extinction of the American megafauna some 12,000 years ago:

Two University of Oregon researchers are on a multi-institutional 26-member team proposing a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out or fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago.

Driving the theory is a carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found, but not definitively explained, at some 50 Clovis-age sites in North America that date to the onset of a cooling period known as the Younger Dryas Event. The sites include several on the Channel Islands off California where UO archaeologists Douglas J. Kennett and Jon M. Erlandson have conducted research…

The researchers propose that a known reversal in the world’s ocean currents and associated rapid global cooling, which some scientists blame for the extinction of multiple species of animals and the end of the Clovis Period, was itself the result of a bigger event. While generally accepted theory says glacial melting from the North American interior caused the shift in currents, the new proposal points to a large extraterrestrial object exploding above or even into the Laurentide Ice Sheet north of the Great Lakes.

“Highest concentrations of extraterrestrial impact materials occur in the Great Lakes area and spread out from there,” Kennett said. “It would have had major effects on humans. Immediate effects would have been in the North and East, producing shockwaves, heat, flooding, wildfires, and a reduction and fragmentation of the human population.”

Well who knows? – maybe there’s something in it. It just seems to me too much of a coincidence that the Australian megafauna died out sometime around 50,000 years ago, just when humans first arrived. Then the American megafauna died out 12,000 years ago, just when humans first arrived. And the New Zealand megafauna (well, megabirds) died out around 1500 years ago, when humans first arrived. People and megafauna don’t mix, except in Africa where they evolved together.