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A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-prehistoric-cosmic-airburst-advent-agriculture.html [phys.org]
Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.
That's the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago was the result of a cosmic impact.
"In this general region, there was a change from more humid conditions that were forested and with diverse sources of food for hunter-gatherers, to drier, cooler conditions when they could no longer subsist only as hunter-gatherers," said Earth scientist James Kennett, a professor emeritus of UC Santa Barbara . The settlement at Abu Hureyra is famous among archaeologists for its evidence of the earliest known transition from foraging to farming. "The villagers started to cultivate barley, wheat and legumes," he noted. "This is what the evidence clearly shows."
...
In the 12,800-year-old layers corresponding to the shift between hunting and gathering and agriculture, the record at Abu Hureyra shows evidence of massive burning. The evidence includes a carbon-rich "black mat" layer with high concentrations of platinum, nanodiamonds and tiny metallic spherules that could only have been formed under extremely high temperatures—higher than any that could have been produced by man's technology at the time.
The airburst flattened trees and straw huts, splashing meltglass onto cereals and grains, as well as on the early buildings, tools and animal bones found in the mound—and most likely on people, too.
