Fragments of an exploding short-period comet may have caused destruction of the Paleolithic settlement at Abu Hureyra in northern Syria about 12,800 years ago, according to new research led by Comet Research Group scientists.
“Our new discoveries represent much more powerful evidence for very high temperatures that could only be associated with a cosmic impact. To help with perspective, such high temperatures would completely melt an automobile in less than a minute,” said James Kennett, a UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor of geology, who with his colleagues first reported evidence of an event in 2012 of the direct effects of a fragmented comet on a human settlement. Such intensity, he added, could only have resulted from an extremely violent, high-energy, high-velocity phenomenon, something on the order of a cosmic impact.
