Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)(archaeologyworlds.com)
42 pointsby griffzhowl3 hours ago5 comments
  • urxvtcdan hour ago
    We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.
  • INTPenis2 hours ago
    That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps

    It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.

    • adzm2 hours ago
      A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.
      • jacquesman hour ago
        It is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.
  • mjd30 minutes ago
    There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that

    “[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”

    But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.

    For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

    Update:

    The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:

    “Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”

    The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:

    “Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”

    Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).

    • griffzhowl7 minutes ago
      Ah, oh well. Was an interesting story. But I mainly shared this to remind myself of this incredible star map, or whatever it really is... Seems not easy to find bona fide information on it, maybe because it's untranslated/decoded except for this Kofels' story, which indeed appears to be out of the bounds of likelihood by 4000 years.
  • metalmanan hour ago
    slop

    vibe theorising

    • mjdan hour ago
      Even if you were right, your comment would have been a useless waste of time.

      But the article appears to be a copy of a press release from the University of Bristol from 2008.

      https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html

      • metalman7 minutes ago
        drivle, then 1km impactor my ass a german landslide and a mesopotamian clay disk, 5000 years ago, uhuhuh, ya NO! that needs a very very very high level of documentation to even dare hold up your hand

        do you know about the acedemic/beurocratic practice of "shelving" ?, I am quite certain that it applies to whover "publishied" the original.