A meteor demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city possibly inspiring Sodom myth | Hacker News Reader

A meteor demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city possibly inspiring Sodom myth

sc.edu

63 pointshistorynops25 comments

Scott Manley posted a rebuttal at [1] recently. He's not an archaeology expert but he does provide references to experts who disagree with the hypothesis.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0h4QNt4FLE

He notes that some of the science was not strong. Concluding that it was all wrong? That's a leap.

Not sure if you listened to his explanation, but I took it to be a bit more nuanced. His main complaint is that the authors have in the past made big claims about their findings, making this in context appear that they are making the science fit a narrative, rather than using the science to construct the narrative. All this stuff could have happened, but it seems to ignore other evidence that doesn’t support the narrative, like that it is normal in ancient cities to have layers of burned out structure under others.

He’s not fully dismissive, just critical of the leading narrative, and any scientist should have the same skepticism in their own work, these scientists don’t seem to work that way, if we are being a bit uncharitable (which seems OK in context). If they are right, they can address the concerns in future grant-funded research :)

It may be helpful to add I worked and published in academic research. My leads always got giddy when a hypothesis we had wasn’t supported as expected by the data, much science is indeed initiated because of an existing opinion or bias, but we use our tools to find the true answers and construct a better understanding of our existence, and accept when we are wrong, or find better evidence to support our often strongly held intuition.

Specific example, one project was to determine if the brightness of the Gegenschein was decreasing, indicating a rate of change of the contents of the outer solar system (asteroid belts), we had unique data that could prove it, and doing so would be exciting new science.

No matter how we looked at the data, it was very stable. Itself useful to contribute, but not exciting and not something grants are excited to pay for.

All you really need is materials shown to have melted at temperatures well beyond what could be achieved at the time, and a sharp peak of platinum-group metals.

Then the burden is on the skeptics to explain how those got there by some other means.

If you think you got some shocked quartz, you might as well take pics. If it's not, really, that doesn't matter.

We have lots of both in coincident layers all over North America, South America, Africa, and at Abu Hureyra, demonstrating a strike coincident with the start of the Younger Dryas 1400-year freeze and 32+ genera of large American mammals suddenly gone extinct, including a cheetah, horses, camels, dire wolves, sabretooth cats, several pachyderms, a giant sloth, and a bear much bigger than the grizzly.

If we have a platinum metals peak there, and demonstrated melting of materials that need 2000+°C to melt, that is good enough for me. It is remarkably good aim to devastate two nearby sites only 10,000 years apart, but how surprising is it that disasters happened at places we were interested enough in to dig up? There could be plenty more strikes at places we don't dig up, and so haven't noticed.

The actual paper only mentions Sodom in passing. The news stories are what play it up. What bothers me some is that I have not heard of a meteor delivering a lot of NaCL anywhere else. Also there is not much detail on what is supposed to have happened at Jericho.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but what makes you expect the NaCL would be delivered by meteor? The area is geologically rich in salt already. From wiki:

Movements of the Great Rift Valley system, along with the pressure generated by the slow accumulation of earth and rock, pressed down on the layers of salt, creating Mount Sodom. It is about 80% salt, 720 feet (220 m) high, capped by a layer of limestone [...] Because of weathering, some portions have separated. One of these pillars is known as "Lot's wife", in reference to the Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

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

I see. So, the salt might be from a tsunami or something splashed up from the Dead Sea.

The change of title from the article to this HN post is noted. I guess it was worth a try.

What was the original title? (Always interested to see the style of moderation and what counts as problematic)

It wasn't the title of the HN post itself that was changed, but rather the discrepancy between the title of the HN post and the title of the article.

As for the title of the article, well, follow the link.

Ah! Thank you

This (title editing) is by far the worst aspect of how HN moderates. I don’t think they’ve especially misrepresented the article here, but they routinely remove “how” or “why” or numbers to produce titles that wildly misrepresent what’s behind the link. I understand the reasoning behind the rules but it’s long overdue for some adjustment.

Could you help me understand the reasoning behind the editing rules?

They’re intended to make titles less clickbaity, I think in the spirit of leveling the “curious discussion” playing field.

But the heuristics aren’t great, it’s like the world stopped at listicles and Clickhole is the oracle. I’m not necessarily opposed to the notion of curating link titles, but I honestly think it’s too high volume and produces the opposite of what’s intended.

Thank you.

And more:

https://twitter.com/NeolithicSheep/status/144324842853702451...

https://twitter.com/FlintDibble/status/1443244748794441730

I'm agnostic about that and have nothing in this game, I wonder if anything encoded using heavy mpeg motion comp is going to do this to noisy parts of images finding near matches and then duplicating them

Discussed at length about a week ago, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603118

Imagine the cultural impact of something like this happening to a modern-day mega city.

see: Japan, Hiroshima.

just scale up a little.

This is 100% fiction.

21st century and people still believe in Sodom and it's destruction.

The I don't believe god I believe natural things delusion. This is part of the scam. By saying it's not magic, as an atheist you have to believe them else you believe in god.

Meteor's don't do this. If they did we'd see it elsewhere. (Please don't say Tunguska or the made up events like Ch'ing-yang)

Back when no one was around and most people did not live in cities, 8000 people died in magic town. But we've never seen it again in modern times with most of the population in cities and everyone has a cell phone and satellites or going back 500 years, printing to actually record it.

Archaeologists write fiction. This is not hard to understand, they are the same as historians, they are artists. They tell good stories. Some of their stories overlap with reality a bit. That's not the case here.

I don't think your comment deserved to be killed but I also don't think this is a very good take. Just because something is mentioned in the bible doesn't mean it's made up. Is your argument that "if meteors could destroy cities we'd see more cities destroyed by meteors"?

Is your belief system so weak that thinking an ancient myth could have been inspired by a real event is that dangerous?

If I were a religious extremist like you I would do the reverse, "see the Bible is right, God sent that meteorite".

On the other topic how is possible to be an anti-science Christian while at the same time the priests and monks have many member that are scientists (including historians and astronomers)

We have videos of lights from the sky shattering glass in russia?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com