[meteorite-list] Re:Comet hit Britain in mid sixth, century, AD?

From: Marco Langbroek <marco.langbroek_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat Jul 22 06:54:12 2006
Message-ID: <44C203CC.20208_at_wanadoo.nl>

Sterling K. Webb wrote:

> The scientist you're referring to is Michael Baillie,
> an Irish dentrochronologist (not Bailey).

Too many Bailey'/Baillie's around, sorry... And its dendrochronologist, not
dentrochronologist.


> Their suggestion arose from uncovering a 19th century
> account of an excavation on the island of Anglesey (which
> is the least forested portion of the UK, less than 0.5%)
> of an ancient forest which had been flattened and crushed
> wholesale and apparently instantaneously and which to
> them greatly resembled a naive description of the flattened
> forest on the Tungus River caused by the Tunguska object,
> only much larger.

Which is a naive "Pompei Premise" about general taphonomic processes and ignores
that in the 19th century, taphonomic and post-depositional processes were
concepts still completely ignored. And catastrophic thinking reigned those days.
Have you ever been to a peat excavation? It looks like Tunguska allright, fallen
tree trunks everywhere. Only it isn't.


> Yes, Marco, History is Change. But there are also
> those "with a known fetish" AGAINST impacts or any
> other physical event as a source" for any historical change.
> The sudden collapse of the "Byzantine" or eastern Roman
> Empire after 534 AD is without known social, political,
> economic, military nor other human cause. It is the sudden
> commencement of the Dark Ages for no apparent reason.
> Dark Ages are rare, and always without apparent explanation
> (1200 BC to 800 BC is another, and there was another
> about 4000 years ago, too).


Don't lecture me that condescendingly man. Who's got the PhD in prehistoric
archaeology here?

The point is that many (pre-) historic events indeed DON'T HAVE and DON'T NEED
TO HAVE a clearly identifiable prime-mover. Thinking in prime-movers only to
explain (pre-)historic change is utterly simplistic. That's why the whole
neo-catastrophic movement of primarily ASTROPHYSICISTS who bring up cosmic
impact as a prime-mover in far too many cases of (pre-)historic change is just a
too simplistic look on (pre-)history, and in my opinion is pseudo-science.

Complex societies are inherently instable. There's no need for a clear-cut
external prime-mover to make such a society collapse.

Volcanic super eruptions, cosmic impacts and other natural disasters happen. And
when they happen, they can have a profound impact on human society in the
affected area, no doubt (an appendix to my own dissertation explores the
possible effekts of the Australasian impact for early Asian Homo erectus, in
fact). And there are some good historic examples of that too (for the case of
volcanic eruptions at least).
But some people use them as Dei ex Machinae to explain everything we don't
readily understand.

Large impact phenomena come with a suit of identifiable things. If there was
such an event in Britain as recent as AD 540, then where are the ejecta layers,
the dust layers, the spherule layers, the impact glasses, the shocked quartz,
the impact craters, the extinction events in flora and fauna? There is no reason
why these should have vanished from the geological record in this case.

A set of narrow tree rings that can have multiple causes is not enough to see an
impact evidenced. And its all we have here. A very meagre set of proxy data by
all means. I do not doubt Baillie's tree ring analysis, but the whole hypothesis
attached to it I do doubt for it is founded on very flimsy multi-interpretable
proxy data.

As far as short-term climatic fluctuation is concerned, there is much more cause
to look at variations in solar flux as a possible explanation than to impact.

Clube, Napier, Steel and such have their own agenda to see "impacts" in history
and recent pre-history everywhere. It ties in with their idea's on the evolution
of the Taurid meteor complex as being derived from the arrival and breakup of a
giant comet a few millenia ago. They believe this showered the earth with impact
fragments. As a result, they have a strong tendency to see everything which in
their perception is "odd" in the history of the past few millenia as "evidence"
for their theory. Even Stonehenge is a giant memorial to celestial Taurid
displays in e.g. Steels opinion. In my opinion, this conceptually is very near
to Von D?niken seeing Alien influence and references to Alien visitors
everywhere as its the result of a similar simplistic and biased idee-fixe look
at (pre-) history.

And please note that "Dark age" is an often misused and misunderstood concept.
It says more about our inability to access the character of that period, than
about that period itself.

- Marco

-----
Dr Marco Langbroek
Dutch Meteor Society (DMS)

e-mail: meteorites_at_dmsweb.org
private website http://home.wanadoo.nl/marco.langbroek
DMS website http://www.dmsweb.org
-----
Received on Sat 22 Jul 2006 06:54:04 AM PDT