[meteorite-list] ARCTIC IRONS, was Mammoth Stew, etc

From: E.P. Grondine <epgrondine_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 21:46:27 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <115989.40210.qm_at_web36902.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

Hi all -

Thank you Sterling for this most valuable information.
I did not cover the Arctic in "Man and Impact in the
Americas", as I already had too much.

I do want to mention to the list that the locals have
been attempting to have The Old Woman and another
large iron returned to them. I was asked to support
them in this effort, but declined.

The reason for my decision was that they had used it
for making tools, a very different situation from
Williamette, where the use was religious. I was told
that Perry had told the locals that it was okay for
him to remove the large irons, as they could now get
their tools from European traders. To the conquerors
go the spoils....

One may wonder about an iron debris stream, with
multiple impacts, but...

Hittite iron and ancient meteoritic iron was covered
by Karen Reiter, Die Metalle in Alte Oriente(?
spelling etc.). I've forgotten most of the specifics
now, but... The Hittite King Te Hantilishi and his
appenage forces were hit ca. 1585 BCE while resisting
the ancient Israelites, and the ancient Israelites had
a good supply of iron for trade thereafter, not to be
replaced by smelted stuff until about 1100 BCE, if I
remember right, and I probably don't, but its in her
book. (Coincidentally, ancient metals was a specialty
of my acquaintance the late Ted Wertime.) The Lycian
accounts spoke of a shower of small irons like bees
(no citation for this remaining in my brain, even
though I corresponded with the translator. sorry).

Earlier use of iron meteorites for tools easily
explains the lack of irons from NWA, which I had
attributed to market forces.

Given the arctic harvesting for tool use, clearly one
place to look is Alaskan archaeological and west coast
archaeological studies - but then with the constant
back and forth and the later fur trade, any find may
have been dismissed as an import.

The glacial situation ca 31,000 BCE might be a good
thing to look at as well. The mammoth who had their
tusks peppered had to be eating something, so they
would have been on the edge of the ice sheet.

Assuming the Barringer spherule spread is
representative, scale the impact by the C14
calibration chart, and that may give a rough idea of
the range to be looked at. There's that 1 find from
Siberia as well, which might indicate direction.

good hunting all,
E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

--- "Sterling K. Webb" <sterling_k_webb at sbcglobal.net>
wrote:

> Hi, All,
>
> You couldn't ask for a less likely place to
> search for iron
> meteorites than the Canadian Arctic. First, a great
> deal of
> Canadian Arctic surficial material was "pushed" far
> south by
> those glaciers; there's a nice "car-eating"
> three-ton chunk of
> Canada on the road about a quarter-mile from my
> house (Illinois).
> Then, there's Bigger-Than-Biblical Floods at the end
> of glaciations,
> which would disperse the material remains
> (meteorites) of an
> impact. Then, there's those Jack-Daw Humans, picking
> them
> all up and using the iron for tools!
>
> About four years ago I posted to the List a
> reference to a paper
> by a group of archaeologists at one of Canada's
> national museums
> (which now I can't find, of course), documenting the
> distribution of
> pre-Columbian iron artifacts all across the ancient
> Eastern Arctic.
> Analysis of the material used showed that most, but
> not all of them
> came from the great Greenland irons (Cape York).
> Almost found it:
> short report full of other referrences here:
> http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1988Metic..23R.288M
>
> The age of the sites shows that the Greenland
> irons were being
> used for tools as early as 1300-1200 BC and the
> tools from it were
> spread out over 800 miles away from Cape York!
> Curiously,
> this makes the Neolithic North's iron tools pretty
> much the same
> age as first iron "tools" (weapons) in the "Cradle
> of Civilization"
> (the Hittites), which raises some interesting
> questions about the
> meaning of progress, innovation, and that
> "civilization" thing...
>
> Clearly, if iron meteorites from an ancient
> impact covered that
> portion of Canada, they would have been used also.
> If an ancient
> (33,000 BP) iron impactor had struck the ice cap and
> was the same
> compositional type as Cape York, they could be in
> that material,
> One of eleven ancient tools recently analyzed was
> from a different
> meteorite than Cape York, so we know there was
> another source in
> the extreme East Canadian Arctic (not Disko Island
> telluric iron
> either).
>
> The terrestrial age of Cape York is not known.
> Buchwald only
> says it is at least 2,000 years, but could be
> "10,000's of years."
> We tend not to think of the giant Cape Yorks as mere
> cast-off
> fragments of a bigger impact object, but they could
> be, of course.
> If the giant meteorites were being used for tool
> material, obviously
> all smaller pieces of the same material would have
> been used first,
> before undertaking the effort of beating chunks off
> the giants. Not
> an easy task.
>
> The distribution (or relative absence) of irons
> in NWA material
> shows that there is no doubt that the NWA area was
> "cleaned out"
> of most of the iron meteorites that could be found
> thousands of years
> ago. Of course, they missed a few. But if the NWA
> meteorites
> reflected the "normal" distribution of irons and
> stones, there would
> be many, many more irons.
>
> Finding any Arctic Canada iron meteorites may be
> impossible,
> if you consider that thousands of years of gathering
> by sharp-eyed
> locals intimately familiar with the region may have
> worked the ground
> first!
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "E.P. Grondine" <epgrondine at yahoo.com>
> To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Sent: Monday, December 24, 2007 12:32 PM
> Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] Mammoth Stew, Jason
> stops
>
>
> Hi Jason, all -
>
> Glad to hear you're done. That makes for a Merry
> Christmas indeed! I and others will be working on
> possible neutron flux from large hyper velocity
> impacts over the next few days, and its nice to know
> that you won't be distracting us with dribble.
>
> Now as for your latest nonsense:
>
> "But the fact of the matter is that you can't prove
> "that either an airburst or ice-impact occurred
> "without, in all likelihood, several years, if not
> "decades of intense geological field studies, and
> this
> "seems to be the point on which our methodologies
> "differ.
>
> Actually, Jason, the isotopic analysis of the IRON
> PEPPER in the mammoth tusks itself is proof enough.
> But the recovery of large iron meteorites from the
> 31,000 BCE iron impact by THE VERY SAME METEORITE
> HUNTERS who use this list could prove the 31,000 BCE
> impact to the MOST DENSE.
>
> And that is one point where our methodologies do
> differ.
>
> good hunting all,
> E.P. Grondine
> Man and Impact in the Americas
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Tue 25 Dec 2007 12:46:27 AM PST