New Delhi:
Asteroids are small, rocky objects. Asteroids can bring tsunamis, shock waves and flattening winds that could be catastrophic. The space rocks approach towards the Earth due to the gravitational forces that affect them. A car-sized asteroid (space rock) slams into the Earth's atmosphere about once in a year. On the other hand, an asteroid large enough to threaten the existence of life on Earth arrives once in every few million years. Now a science expert has come up with a shocking revelation that a huge asteroid may have wiped out a human culture in North America 13,000 years ago.
According to a report of express.co.uk, the new scientific study blames an asteroid impact for triggering the ‘Younger Dryas’ period in Earth’s history, when temperatures declined rapidly. This has been linked to the extinction of numerous giant animals including in South Africa and Europe. Also, at the same time the Clovis people, an early North American culture, vanished, claimed the study. Similar disappearances took place in Africa too.
A team of scientists including Professor Francis Thackeray believe platinum deposits dug up in Wonderkrater, South Africa, support the asteroid strike theory.
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“Our finding at least partially supports the highly controversial Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. We seriously need to explore the view that an asteroid impact somewhere on earth may have caused climate change on a global scale,” express.co.uk quoted Professor Francis Thackeray as saying.
He further said, “It could have contributed to some extent to the process of extinctions of large animals at the end of the Pleistocene, after the last ice age.”
“We cautiously hint at the possibility that these technological changes, in North America and on the African subcontinent at about the same time, might have been associated indirectly with an asteroid impact with major global consequences,” he added.
“We cannot be certain, but a cosmic impact could have affected humans as a result of local changes in environment and the availability of food resources, associated with sudden climate change,” concluded Francis Thackeray.
It is worth mentioning here that in November last year, scientists had found a 19-mile-wide asteroid impact crater in Greenland.
