Wiped Out by a Comet

It took them more than a month, but on Sunday the Star Tribune Science section reprinted a Washington Post story called Did an exploding comet trigger the end of a Native American culture?

It's based on research published in early February by archaeologists at the University of Cincinnati, studying the people called the Hopewell culture, who were located in the Ohio river valley. Their actual name is lost, though they are known to be the genetic ancestors of the Ojibwe, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, Miami, and Lenape peoples.

The whole story is one holy s*#% moment after another. 

The physical evidence indicates that between 252 and 383 A.D., a comet exploded in the sky just above the earth in their place. It created an air burst that would have been similar to the explosion over the Tunguska River in Siberia in 1908, "which flattened trees for hundreds of miles." 

What physical evidence do the researchers describe?

...everywhere we excavated … we found burned earth, fire hardened.” He added, “We also found burned villages.”

At one site, he and his colleagues discovered “ash-covered surfaces with post-molds filled with wood charcoal,” they wrote.

At another site, the earth looked as if it had been exposed to heat from a blast furnace, and limestone “had been thermally reduced to lime,” a process requiring a temperature of about 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, they reported.

If a similar event took place over New York or Washington, D.C., today, he said, “it would be mistaken as a thermonuclear device having gone off.”

Oral histories of distant descendants give clues as well:

“The Ottawa talk about it as a day when the sun fell from the sky,” Tankersley said, referring to a tribe from the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. “It would have been that bright. If the air burst occurred during the daytime, it would have been as bright as the sun.”

The Iroquois [Haudenosaunee] speak of a Sky Panther, Dajoji, which has the power to tear down forests.

The surviving people in the area commemorated the comet with an earthwork:

They built “monumental landscape architecture,” the authors of the study wrote, including the largest geometric earthen enclosures in the world, water management systems and massive burial mounds.


This illustration of the earthwork is from 1848.

Researchers can tell the earthwork was built after the explosion damage because there are remnants of the comet below the earthwork. The tail of the earthwork is a half-mile long and the circular head is a quarter-mile in circumference.

I found myself wondering what, if any, indication there would have been of this event on the other side of the world, say in China or Rome. Or farther south in Mexico. Would it have caused a bad winter globally? Does it show up in the tree rings?

The fact that people generally had no idea what reality was, up in the sky, that could result in some random piece of flaming junk dropping onto your civilization is mind-boggling to me, but it also makes me have a lot more patience with the existence of religion. At least it was an explanation of the unexplainable.