An Ancient Tsunami That Ended a Civilization Gets Another Look | Hacker News Reader

An Ancient Tsunami That Ended a Civilization Gets Another Look

nytimes.com

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13332

Here's a link to the actual paper, the times article read more like a footnote.

Thanks for the link. I hadn't realized the enormous amount of matter involved in a pyroclastic flow... And I find solace in well documented and articulated articles as this one.

Thanks for the link!! Mods: please replace the NYT paywalled link with this one. It's free, and it's far more useful too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

Toba is another one that may have caused the population bottleneck ~50k YBP.

One thing to learn from these various events is that our lives and civilizations are very fragile in the short-term, but that humans as a species are amazingly resilient. At least, I hope so, survivorship and whatnot.

I wax poetic about this pretty often - but it's always been amazing to me that me, and you, and everyone in the world has an unbroken chain of ancestry all the way back to the first spark of life.

We're all stupendously lucky in that regard.

Of course, if that weren't the case, there wouldn't be anyone around to feel lucky. :)

I do quite enjoy that survivorship bias!

Thats usually the argument I used to explain why one doesn't need religion to feel a sense of awe: the fact you, or me exist at all is the result of millions of generations of our direct ancestors fighting for our survival with a mix of incredible luck and a lot of dedication.

That is formidable enough to ponder that that one doesn't need to disrespect all of these creature/persons thru the millions of years up to you/me by introducing a magic creator and wipe away all that effort.

Carl Sagan said it best, "The cosmos is also within us, we are made of star stuff"

There's probably millions of parallel universes where humans weren't so lucky and we're extinct. We happen to be living in the universe where they are.

Or, we live in the simulation where the parameters were tweaked so that we were "lucky" and managed to survive this long. Other simulation runs didn't turn out so well for humans.

There are stories written around this - the so-called 'Long Earth' with endless parallel worlds taking different evolutionary paths. Even one where dogs grew intelligent.

Another thing which fascinates me about these events is that as fragile as humans and even civilisations may be, stories and legends live on.

Santorini is thought to be the origins of the myths of a lost city that disappeared under the waves, as well as the biblical flood legend, and potentially also the parting of the Red Sea.

They're not contemporaneous in the bible, of course, but you do have to bear in mind that the Old Testament was cobbled together from the myths and legends of various peoples with various "long time agos", which got slotted into a chronology.

To stretch the limits of plausibility, there's always the Zanclean flood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood. That would make the flood myth a story handed down from our ancestors, the Australopithecus and/or Ardipithecus.

There's also the Black Sea deluge hypothesis, which would have been within civilization's memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

Is it so hard to see that floods are a common theme, especially in agrarian land near rivers (e.g. Mesopotamia and Egypt)? I don't see much evidence they all point to the same thing.

No, not hard to see at all, it's just not as much fun. :-)

Hah, no argument there.

Indeed. Some analysis of the similarities and differences between many culture's myths lead researchers to believe they could be very old indeed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12618341

I remember coming to sanatorini and wondering where the hell is that volcano some people have mentioned. Then, when waiting for something I looked at sanatorini map and I realised. Wow.

And yet we cant come up with a good explanation for the younger dras??

╰[•̀o•́]╯

Slow news day, and not enough /newest voters?

Being discussed hurts a submission's rankings. They do better when they are the kind of thing that people upvote to bookmark for later, and never get around to reading.

> Being discussed hurts a submission's rankings.

Only rarely is this actually the case.

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