A mystery that took 13k years to crack | Hacker News Reader

A mystery that took 13k years to crack

theatlantic.com

90 pointsdiodorus22 comments

The article obscures that it was not human hunting that did in the mammoths, as it insinuates, but rather the comet strike c. 10,818 BCE that initiated the Younger Dryas cold spell, most probably by suddenly dumping hundreds of cubic miles of meltwater into the oceans and filling the upper atmosphere with soot.

This event took out some 30 genera in North America alone, including mammoths, mastodons, giant sloth and beaver, dire wolves, a bear bigger than the grizzly, horses, camels, and saber toothed cats, and also all hint of the then only 200-year-old Clovis culture known for its beautiful spearpoints, and still often blamed, as in TFA, for suddenly wiping out all these genera.

Fought tooth and nail by extraordinarily disingenuous opponents (one, a retired historian, still er... curates the Wikipedia page), it was finally established to the satisfaction of all scrupulous observers in 2018 with evidence from a layer of spiking platinum concentration, shocked quartz, and soot coincident on four continents, with proof of a continent-wide conflagration with no sulfur spike of volcanism, in stratigraphic cores from dozens of sites and as far away as South Africa.

It happened after glacier cover from the last ice age had begun receding 7000 years before, and sea level had already risen 40 meters (with 80 meters left to go, ending ~8000 years ago). The Younger Dryas cold spell lasted some 12-1300 years, ending coincident with construction at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. (Other similar work found nearby predates that.)

We still have no crater to associate with the strike, which might have been an airburst like the Tunguska strike, or have left craters mainly in the miles-thick ice sheet covering Canada. (An apparent crater in Greenland under 1200ft of ice, if it is one, seems to be too old, although this is inconclusive.)

The real mystery is why modern humans waited from 300,000 years ago until the Younger Dryas to begin activities that would lead to civilization. We find evidence of uniform cultural practices across many thousands of miles and tens of millennia (painting preserved in caves from Sulawesi 45kya ago to Spain 22kya), ocean-going navigation >50kya (occupation of Sulawesi and Australia, never connected by land) and footprints in North America 22kya, mechanical drilling 40kya in a Denisovan bracelet, and ceramics in China 18kya.

The actual work, isotopic analysis of strata in a tusk, does not suffer from the flaws of the article exploiting it.

Like how the age of the planet is a mystery that took 4.6 billion years to crack?

well, technically...

That's a pretty well written piece! And it's amazing that isotopic analysis of bones can pick out where they traveled.

That was absolutely spectacular. The writing is truly inspiring.

This writing is great!

This is the worst type of clickbait. The types of people who would be attracted by the title will hate the article because it doesn't have a straightforward title. And the types of people who would enjoy the story probably won't be too intrigued by the title.

A title like this should emphasize on the 13,200 years part and why it took so long to solve this mystery. Instead it talks about the life of a mastodon, which while very interesting, isn't really much of a mystery. In fact, the word mystery appears only in the title and nowhere else.

The problem is that hacker news doesn’t let the submitter write the very helpful subtitle.

> Hidden in the tusk of a 34-year-old mastodon was a record of time and space that helped explain his violent death.

We should be complaining about the aggregators, not the actual sites.

The subtitle is usually fine here (but sometimes the mods rever them if they don't like the change). A random sentence in the middle of the article is not fine here (but sometimes the mods use it anyway when the title and subtitle are bad).

The subtitle has more than 80 characters, but it can be reduced to

> Tusk of a mastodon has a record of time and space that helped explain his death

Yeah it's a quality article, but it's more "The Story That Took 13,200 Years to Tell"

Quite a few click/ false headlines appearing of late. That's why I always immediately go to the comments, and rarely bother with the articles.

> A title like this should emphasize on the 13,200 years part and why it took so long to solve this mystery.

Correct me if I'm wrong because I stopped reading quickly after realizing it was clickbait, but the skeleton was discovered in 1998, so at best the mystery took 24 years to resolve, so I don't see what there is to emphasize.

Anyway, I'm off to figure out the billions of years old mystery of what I'm gonna have for breakfast.

Remember that the author writes the content but usually has very little control over the title that will ultimately adorn their prose. I agree that the article was click-baiting but perhaps I'm the rare person who enjoys a good mystery and isn't repelled by content that actually teaches me something.

One of the worst examples I've seen recently was that article with the title "Physicists Have Discovered A Never-Before-Seen Particle – Sitting On A Tabletop". I can just imagine some annoyed grad student trying to explain how they detected this new particle using a small, highly polarized optical detector while the intern from Planet News is giggling and asking to hear less science junk and more about the tabletop.

The problem was the title: There was no mystery. A mammoth lived, and then died, as did every mammoth ever born. There had once been a mystery about their extinction, but the article gets that one wrong.

I came here to say something similar about the title, but you said it far more powerfully than I could have. Also it's a terrible title for SEO.

It only took me 60s to determine this article was BS.

Or was it 4.6B years?

Ridonculous.

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