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Comment by robbedpeter | Hacker News Reader

This coincides with the Dryas impact era - there seems to be a lot of cultural advances, settlements, and other artifacts that pop up around that time. It seems very plausible to me that many of the discoveries aren't the first of their kind, but the first reimplementation after humans began to rebuild.

The Dryas impact is a fascinating event - if validated, it has the potential to shake up a lot of the currently accepted historical model of human civilization.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...

The impact hypothesis suggests a global hellscape was caused, radically and rapidly causing massive flooding- a likely source for great flood mythologies found in almost every culture.

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I love reading about this. I hope one day we will understand what happened back then.

In Hawaiian mythology, there is a creation chant[1] that includes names of the purported parents of 800 generations; after those 800 generations, there is an interesting interim passage describing an event:

Line 1530: "Born was Polaʻa/ Born was rough weather, born the current/ Born the roaring, advancing, and receding of waves, the rumbling sound, the earthquake/ The sea rages, rises over the beach/ Rises silently to the inhabited places/ Rises gradually up over the land/"

It's notable because the previous 800 lines are nothing but names of husband and wife; it must have been a big event to get mentioned as such. I'm sure there are other similar stories in the oral tradition. I wonder if anyone has ever compared them all. I hope one day more geological and archeological evidence can connect all these threads.

[1]http://www.ulukau.org/elib/cgi-bin/library?e=d-0beckwit2-000...

Thanks for posting this, never heard of the event. PBS has a Youtube channel called "Eons" (seems cool)- I watched their video about it and found it super interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95u2sk_lRoQ

I also generally think the idea of a recently linear progression of human collaboration and advancement is misguided

I think fossilization is merely rare and difficult

While I actually do believe in the Dryas impact hypothesis myself, there is definitely quite a bit of stigma surrounding the idea, especially since controversal figures like Graham Hancock have embraced it.

While I think a lot of his ideas are pretty out there, I do agree with him that I would need substantially more evidence than there actually is for concluding that civilisation really is only 6000-10000 years old. Modern humans have been around for more than 10 times that length and our actual fossil records are incredibly spotty.

The criticism section of the second article puts strong doubts about the impact hypothesis.

Surely there were sudden drop in average temperatures in the Northern hemisphere, but we do not know what triggered it.

On my todo list for a while has been to dig down to see if I can find the "black mat".

I don’t know much about the Dryas impact theory, but skimming the second link it seems to really emphasize the Americas? Should it be matched with data from China like in the main article?

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