Imagine you were a hunter-gatherer about 13 thousand years ago. While you are busy with your work like collecting fruits and hunting wild animals, suddenly a huge fireball appears in the sky. It explodes with a deafening roar, sending shockwaves into the ground and shattering trees and houses.

New research shows that this is how the first seeds of agriculture were sown in Syria; This is a necessary adaptation to increase society’s chances of survival. After the comet’s debris hit Earth’s atmosphere, the climate changed dramatically and the plants and animals that depended on them became extinct.

The global team presented its thesis after analyzing sedimentary layers from the Neolithic site of Abu Hurayra, which was excavated in the 1970s before being buried under Lake Assad during the construction of the Euphrates dam. Abu Huraira is known as the place where the oldest evidence of the transition from hunting to agriculture is found. The group contributed four peer-reviewed papers to examine the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. This highly controversial hypothesis proposes that a cosmic impact caused the Younger Dryas (YD) period, a rather sudden, severe, and long-lasting interruption in Earth’s climate warming.

“We present important new quantitative evidence and interpretations supporting the hypothesis that comet fragments caused near-global climate change approximately 12,800 years ago and that a single airburst destroyed the village of Abu Hurairah,” the authors write.

Sediment layers revealed many factors, including the types of plants collected on warmer, wetter days before the YD climate change and cooler, drier days afterward.

“These data include changes in building architecture, nutrition, the first stages of permanent domestication of grains and legumes, and the first domestication of livestock, marking the beginning of sustainable agriculture and animal domestication,” the team adds.

During a comprehensive analysis, archaeologist Andrew Moore of the Rochester Institute of Technology and his team also found broken quartz grains consistent with the impact and evidence of a powerful firestorm.

“Shocked quartz is well known and probably the most reliable indicator of cosmic impact,” says James Kennett, an earth scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“In the paper, we characterize the morphology of these shock fractures in these low-pressure events.”

Their initial research confirmed cracks in the quartz rocks of Meteor Crater formed by the impact of the Barringer meteorite. More importantly, even if no impact crater is formed, similar damage occurs in quartz exposed to nuclear explosions in the air. This has big consequences; He suggests that an asteroid or comet breaking apart close enough to the Earth’s surface could also cause those shards to send shock waves around the world.

“We hypothesize, for the first time, that impact metamorphism in quartz grains exposed to an atomic explosion is essentially the same as in a low-altitude, low-pressure cosmic airburst,” Kennett adds.

The second study is the first to describe impact-cracked quartz in the Abu Hurairah sedimentary layer from the boundary (beginning) of the YD period. Detailed analysis revealed that some of the quartz grains in this layer are similar to those found in nuclear explosions and meteorite craters.

“We wanted to compare this to what we have in quartz that fractures due to shock loads at the YD limit,” says Kenneth, “and see if there was any comparison or similarity to what we saw at the Trinity nuclear test site.” others are atomic bomb explosions.”

Many of these quartz grains were exposed to temperatures of at least 1,713 °C (3,115 °F), the melting point of quartz, and possibly even higher than its boiling point, 2,200 °C.

Extremely high temperature and pressure cause quartz grains to break and melt, injecting fused silica into the cracks. The presence of this non-crystallized silica in fractured rocks is a clear indication of impact, as opposed to slow tectonic movement.

A third study found small diamonds, special crystals, and small spheres of silica and iron in sediments of the YD boundary layer. Some of these substances could only form under conditions of higher temperature or pressure than human technology could create at that time.

A substance made up of tiny globules called molten glass makes up about 1.6 percent of the sediment, and tools, bones and mud have been found in the walls, indicating that the impact did indeed disrupt life in the village. There are even detailed plant prints on the molten glass pieces.

The team found no similar material in millennia-old human deposits, particularly above the YD boundary layer. Recent research provides new evidence of a direct link between cosmic impacts, environmental changes and major changes in human societies. Source