Interesting article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3
The evidence seems to be a layer of Quartz, which is something found after high-pressure events (like a nuclear or meteor burst) and not otherwise.
The place is Tall el-Hammam in what is now Jordan and the impact was 15 Megatons, which is bigger than the largest US deployed nuclear warhead (the 9 MT B53).
There have been several large meteor strikes recorded in human history, the Tunguska event as in the link and members will remember the Chelyabinsk meteor from a few years ago (why is it always
Russia?). I recall reading that large meteor strikes (hitting with the impact of a large strategic nuclear warhead) are more common than was previously believed, pn scale of several times a year, but they almost always fall in the ocean or uninhabited areas.
And yes, social media is full linking it with Sodom and Gomorrah, a perhaps unknowable connection, though I would imagine such an event has at least some folk memory (the strike occurred a Millenium after the building of the pyramids) since the region had writing at the time.
Because Russia covers a LOT of territory, especially if by “Russia” you mean all the territory of the former USSR and not just the smaller Russia we know today which is still the largest country in land area even in its reduced form, covering 1/8 of the world’s inhabited land area according to Wikipedia. It’s a large target, which means the odds of hitting somewhere in Russia are higher for a meteorite than any other country in the world.
The Atlantis myth?
Well, your OP is about an event that happened in Jordan.
As I’ve noted on my webpage about Atlantis, I’m very suspicious about events that long ago forming the basis if myths. Lots of folks used to think the explosion of Thera/Santorini was responsible for the myth of Atlantis, which I doubted. I’m similarly suspicious of this event being the basis for myth.
I happened to see this while reading the wikipedia page on the Tunguska event:
Eugene Shoemaker estimated that 20-kiloton events occur annually and that Tunguska-sized events occur about once every 300 years. More recent estimates place Tunguska-sized events at about once every thousand years, with 5-kiloton air bursts averaging about once per year.
For context, the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 was 500 kilotons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were in the 15-20 kiloton range, and the Tunguska event was estimated to be 10-15 megatons.
I love that they were able to make a connection to Jericho.
On the other hand, some people think that The World’s Oldest Story may be as much as 100,000 years old!
Granted that some astronomical myths appear to be very old and widespread (an awful lot of different groups associate Ursa Major with a bear, for instance), I really think 100,000 years is pushing it.
Here’s a collection of some of the many twitter threads from experts in various fields picking the paper apart as “highly speculative” and full of cherry picked “evidence”.
Seeing that the sites are about 10 miles apart, it’s a pretty easy connection to make.
The Bronze age collapse was no joke. More than one historian has postulated that the story of the desert wandering and Jerichos capture are folk memories of the event.
Thanks for that. From a meteorite/impact enthusiast POV the story sounded like absolute horseshit to me, but it is nice to have expert opinions.
Agreed. I’m not one who thinks the Bible is fact, but it I’ve never believed that it’s pure fiction either. Many hand-me-down stories and fairytales get their start somewhere, whether it’s about great-grandma’s crazy 1st husband or about city walls that fall down.
They have a reasonable case for it, however.
Paper:
Why are there Seven Sisters?
Norris & Norris (2020)
Ray Norris is an astrophysicist at Western Sydney University and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) who has worked with Indigenous Australians.
Reasonable, but not conclusive. For instance, as the paper points out, the variability of the stars in the cluster is not fully understood. I’ve been writing about variable stars in myth for many years, and some stars are very irregular variables. I find it much easier to believe changes in magnitude more recent than 100,000 years than that the story about seven sisters has been handed down over such an immense stretch of time.
Also, in the in-between times of oral traditions and the commingling of different sources of written records some of which get lost, you wind up with the order of things getting flipped around and you may have the story of the fall of one city told as coming right after another when it really was 100 years before and the such.