This looks like a very interesting paper, suggesting that a Tunguska-like event wiped out the ancient Middle East, and could explain a lot of myths. (Ctrl-F for “Tunguska” to see the specific abstract.)
And of course, it has current implications that we’ve been lucky, and dodging bullets.
[Late-afternoon update]
Forbes has a story.
Interesting!
I look forward to that research coming out. Coupled with recent evidence pointing at an even in northwest Greenland related to the younger-dryas, IMHO it’s quite likely that Earth has indeed had far more numerous such impacts (and air bursts) than previously believed.
I also find the timeframe for the Middle east event interesting in another way; the legend of Atlantis. Plato’s original was claimed to be a passed-down account, and if, as suspected by some, the 9000 years timeframe was a translation error from Egyptian, and 900 was meant, this basically fits. Then again, so too does the Santorini eruption, which dates to roughly 100 years before this Middle East event. It makes me wonder if both events, mangled by time and retelling, were the basis for Plato’s Atlantis.
Planetary scientist John S. Lewis suggests that stories of rocks falling from the sky may be based on actual events. Earlier the conventional wisdom was that rocks don’t fall from the sky so accounts were dismissed as old wives tales or fantasies.
Lewis talks about this in his book Rain of Iron and Ice.
I tend to agree with him. If Tunguska and Chelyabinsk are indicators we should get a destructive impactor every century or so.
Somewhere, Chicken Little smiles.
I’d say that was the original Rod from God.
Interesting theory. It would have to be some sort of Tunguska event that doesn’t leave a crater. One interesting point is that the site was unoccupied for 6-7 centuries. Perhaps something bad happened there that caused everyone to stay away for a long while?
OTOH, maybe it was just destroyed like several other nearby cities of the time (particularly Jericho) by the invading Israelites (or other faction) of the time and nobody could muster necessary resources to resettle the area.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/31/kofels_asteroid/
The dating of the fall of Jericho is highly contentious, especially when it comes to the question of whether the biblical account in Joshua is anything other than propagandistic fiction. For instance, the current state of the Wiki article on Jericho is firmly in the grasp of the ‘Joshua is total fiction’ crowd.
Either way, Tell-es-Sultan was destroyed either at least a century after the destruction of Tall al Hammam (by the ‘biblical fiction’ assessment) or three centuries later (by the ‘biblical historical account’ assessment). Whether they’re respectively biblical Jericho and Soddom is a separate question. (I was told when I was a kid that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was a just-so story about the creation of the Dead Sea, for what little that’s worth.)