A team of researchers with the University of Edinburgh has found what they describe as evidence of a comet striking the Earth at approximately the same time as the onset of the Younger Dryas in carvings on an ancient stone pillar in southern Turkey. The group has published their findings in the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry. Prior evidence based on ice cores taken from Greenland has suggested that a strike by a comet may have led to the onset of the Younger Dryas—a period of Earth cooling that lasted for approximately 1000 years. Other evidence also suggests that the cooling period caused groups of people to band together to cultivate crops, leading to the development of agriculture, which in turn led to huge leaps in technological innovations and societal developments, i.e. Neolithic civilization. In this new effort, the researchers describe evidence they found on a stone pillar at Gobekli Tepe (the oldest known temple site) that aligns with the ice core findings—that a comet struck the Earth in approximately 10,950 B.C.

Comet Encke, along with the other debris, now resides in a short period eccentric orbit of the sun of a little over three years. Over this time, an orbital ring of debris has formed that the Earth intersects, resulting in, among other meteor showers, the Southern and Northern Taurids in October to November, and their daylight counterparts, the beta-Taurids and zeta-Perseids, in June and July. Due to precession of the perihelion of these orbits, high density regions of this debris ring intersect Earth’s orbital path four times every complete cycle of the perihelion, i.e. roughly every 6000 years.

In 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, the North Taurid meteor shower peaks Nov. 10 to 11. The South Taurid meteor shower peaks in October, but viewers in both hemispheres can still see meteors through late November. The Taurids are associated with Comet Encke.

Read More: Abstract Paper

. . . .