The two-horned rhinocerotine Ceratotherium neumayri. Credit: Reconstruction by Maëva J. Orliac; Antoine et al. (2012)

Archaeologists have unearthed a two-horned skull of a rhino that perished in a volcanic eruption 9.2 million years ago.

Found in Turkey, the rare fossil likely belonged to a large two-horned rhinocerotine Ceratotherium neumayri, an animal common in the late Miocene era of the eastern Mediterranean.

Unusual features such as structural changes to bones and partial disintegration of the teeth, indicate that the poor beast was “cooked to death” at temperatures that may have approached 500° C, in a volcanic eruption similar to that of Mount Vesuvius in Italy in 79AD.

“The correspondence is striking between the structural changes of hard tissues as observed in both the Karacaşar rhino skull and Pompeii-Herculaneum-Oplontis human and pet remains, which points to similar heating conditions in both events,” Pierre-Olivier Antoine and colleagues from the University of Montpellier, France, wrote in the journal PLOS ONE.

SEE ALSO: ‘Nursery’ Of Earliest Animals Found In Pompeii-Style Volcanic Ash

According to the researchers, the rhino’s death was near-immediate, and was followed by severe dehydration in the extreme heat of the eruption.

“The body was baked under a temperature approximating 400°C, then dismembered within the pyroclastic flow, and the skull separated from body,” they concluded.

Indeed, the flow of volcanic ash was so violent that it carried the skull about 19 miles north of the eruption site.

Pierre-Olivier Antoine, Maeva J. Orliac, Gokhan Atici, Inan Ulusoy, Erdal Sen, H. Evren Çubukçu, Ebru Albayrak, Neşe Oyal, Erkan Aydar, Sevket Sen. A Rhinocerotid Skull Cooked-to-Death in a 9.2 Ma-Old Ignimbrite Flow of Turkey. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (11): e49997 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049997

Stone carving of Venus symbol from Chichén Itzá in Yucatán, Mexico. Maya hieroglyphs tell the political history of the ancient civilization. Information from the UC Davis Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project, combined with precise climate records of the time, led an international team of researchers to conclude that extreme weather played a significant role in the downfall of the Maya. Credit: Martha Macri/UC Davis

The Maya calendar stopped forever because of long, catastrophic drought, according to a new study on the collapse of the Mesoamerican civilization.

Carried by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, the study combined a precise climatic record of the Maya environment with a precise record of Maya political history to shed light on the rapid decline of this ancient civilization.

Indeed, the collapse of the Maya between 800 and 1000 AD is one of the world’s most enduring mysteries.

“Here you had an amazing state-level society that had created calendars, magnificent architecture, works of art, and was engaged in trade throughout Central America,” said University of California, Davis, anthropology professor and co-author Bruce Winterhalder.

“They were incredible craftspersons, proficient in agriculture, statesmanship and warfare — and within about 80 years, it fell completely apart ,” he said.

To determine what was happening in the sociopolitical realm during each of those years, the study tapped the extensive Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project, run by linguist Martha Macri, a professor of Native American studies and director of the Native American Language Center at UC Davis.

A specialist in Maya hieroglyphs, Macri has been tracking the culture’s stone monuments for nearly 30 years.

“Every one of these Maya monuments is political history,” she said.

Inscribed on each monument is the date it was erected and dates of significant events, such as a ruler’s birthday or accession to power, as well as dates of some deaths, burials and major battles. The researchers noted that the number of monuments carved decreased in the years leading to the collapse.

But the monuments made no mention of ecological events, such as storms, drought or references to crop successes or failures.

For that information, the researchrts collected a stalagmite from a cave in Belize, less than 1 mile from the Maya site of Uxbenka and about 18 miles from three other important centers.

Using oxygen isotope dating in 0.1 millimeter increments along the length of the stalagmite, the scientists uncovered a physical record of rainfall over the past 2,000 years.

Combined, the stalagmite and hieroglyphs allowed the researchers to link precipitation to politics.

Periods of high and increasing rainfall coincided with a rise in population and political centers between A.D. 300 and 660. A climate reversal and drying trend between A.D. 660 and 1000 triggered political competition, increased warfare, overall sociopolitical instability, and finally, political collapse.

This was followed by an extended drought between A.D. 1020 and 1100 that likely corresponded with crop failures, death, famine, migration and, ultimately, the collapse of the Maya population.

“It’s a cautionary tale about how fragile our political structure might be. Are we in danger the same way the Classic Maya were in danger? I don’t know. But I suspect that just before their rapid descent and disappearance, Maya political elites were quite confident about their achievements,” Winterhalder said.

According to Macri, the study confirms that “weather events can cause a lot of political unrest and subject societies to disease and invasion.”

“Now it’s clear. There is physical evidence that correlates right along with it. We are dependent on climatological events that are beyond our control,” Winterhalder said.

Source: D. J. Kennett, S. F. M. Breitenbach, V. V. Aquino, Y. Asmerom, J. Awe, J. U. L. Baldini, P. Bartlein, B. J. Culleton, C. Ebert, C. Jazwa, M. J. Macri, N. Marwan, V. Polyak, K. M. Prufer, H. E. Ridley, H. Sodemann, B. Winterhalder, G. H. Haug. Development and Disintegration of Maya Political Systems in Response to Climate Change. Science, 2012; 338 (6108): 788 DOI: 10.1126/science.1226299

Block of turtle fossils during preparation. Credit: Copyright Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin

A spectacular find of about 1,800 fossilized turtles from the Jurassic era has emerged from northwestern China’s Xinjiang province, according to German paleontologists.

“Bones upon bones, we couldn’t believe our eyes,” Oliver Wings, paleontologist and guest researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, said.

An image of the theatre at Interamna Lirenas, in Southern Lazio.The grey background shows the magnetrometry image which revealed that a large building was on that spot. The white square is taken from a Ground Penetrating Radar survey which showed the shape and dimensions of the building in more detail. This revealed it to be a Roman theatre, marked in yellow. Credit: University of Cambridge.

An ancient Italian town, which disappeared after its abandonment 1,500 years ago and now lies buried underground, has been mapped by researchers, revealing the location of its theatre, marketplace and other buildings.

Originally founded as a Roman colony in the 4th century BCE, the site of Interamna Lirenas lies in the Liri Valley in Southern Lazio, about 50 miles south of Rome itself. After it was abandoned around the year 500 CE, it was scavenged for building materials and, over time, its remains were completely lost from view. Today, the site is an uninterrupted stretch of farmland, with no recognisable archaeological features.

Now, researchers have successfully produced the first images of the ancient site, using geophysical methods that allowed them to look beneath the surface of the earth and map the layout of the entire settlement, which spans 25 hectares.

The resulting pictures have already thrown up a few surprises. Earlier scholars had previously imagined that the Roman town of Interamna Lirenas was something of a sleepy backwater, but the large marketplace and theatre instead suggest that, in fact, it was a bustling economic and social centre in its own right.

“Having the complete streetplan and being able to pick out individual details allows us to start zoning the settlement and examine how it worked and changed through time,” Martin Millett, Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, said.

“It shows that this was a lively and busy place, even though most scholars have reckoned that it was marginal and stagnating. We have also carried out research in the surrounding countryside which adds to the picture because it shows that the nearby farmland was thriving as well.”

The images are the result of a project which began in 2010 that aims to understand more about what happened in towns established by the Romans as colonies in Italy following her conquest. This research is led by Millett and Alessandro Launaro (British Academy Postoctoral Fellow and Fellow of Darwin College) in collaboration with Giovanna Rita Bellini (Director of the Archaeological Area of Interamna Lirenas, Italian State Archaeological Service), the British School at Rome and the Archaeological Prospection Services of Southampton University. It has been generously supported by the British Academy, the Faculty of Classics (University of Cambridge), the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research (University of Cambridge) and the town of Pignataro Interamna.

Interamna Lirenas is an enticing case study because, in spite of its size, it did not expand significantly during the high point of Rome’s Imperial age, meaning that it retained much of its original colonial shape and features.

Thanks to antiquarian research, archaeologists have long since known that a town existed on the site, but it has never been excavated. One reason is that until relatively recently, experts believed that all Roman colonial settlements followed the same template – something which the new pictures from Interamna Lirenas are now helping to question.

Knowing that a full-scale excavation of such a large area would be impractical, the research team decided to carry out a systematic geophysical analysis instead.

The main techniques they used were magnetometry and Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). Magnetometry measures changes in the earth’s magnetic field caused by different features beneath the surface, and allowed the researchers to identify the town’s overall layout, many individual buildings and a wide open area in the settlement’s centre – its forum or marketplace.

GPR sends electromagnetic radar waves through the soil to search for changes in its composition and the presence of structures. It does this by measuring the time in nanoseconds that elapses between a radar wave being sent and the reflected wave returning.

This technique was applied after the initial survey revealed the existence of a large building at the northern corner of the forum that the researchers could not make out. GPR analysis revealed that the building had several walls arranged in a radial pattern, creating a semicircular seating area. This conclusively proved that they were looking at the remains of a Roman theatre. Judging by its structure, it is believed to date from some time around the turn of the First Millennium.

Major public buildings of this type strongly suggest that, far from a backwater, Interamna Lirenas was in fact an important urban centre in its own right. In addition, the images add to growing evidence that Roman colonial settlements were more varied than some scholars have previously believed. As such sites are uncovered, it is becoming clear that even two colonial towns in close proximity to one another could often be quite different.

The site of Interamna Lirenas itself, for example, lies close to the remains of another settlement, Fregellae. Both were built astride the Via Latina, the principal road running south-east from Rome. Yet despite certain similarities, the new results from Interamna Lirenas reveal important differences, including the position and plan of its market-place which includes a dominant temple and adjacent theatre.

These features matter, Millett argues, because the traditional view was that each colonial settlement had a standard template so that Rome could project a certain image of itself for the benefit of a subject population. Yet the new pictures from Interamna Lirenas show how different towns were designed according to equally different ideas about how a colonial town should look, and what the community’s priorities should be.

The Cambridge team is now about to embark on a five-year project which will try to confirm this conjecture, and answer other questions, using further geophysical analysis. The first proper archaeological excavation at Interamna Lirenas is now also being planned.

Further studies should also help to confirm how many people lived in the settlement at different times. “Part of our analysis involves trying to say which areas were used for housing and what types of houses they were,” Millett said. “Until we have been able to do this it will be difficult to put a firm figure on the population. However, we are talking about a community of a few thousand people.”

A Sorbet Seller in Naples by Pinelli, c. 1819 Credit: Melissa Calaresu

Food historians have long portrayed ice cream as a luxury product confined to the elite until freezing technology brought it to the masses.

Indeed, surviving artefacts relating to the consumption of iced desserts tend to be those made by manufacturers such as Sèvres and Capodimonte, both royal porcelain factories, which produced fashionable items commanding high prices.

But new research suggests that in Italy iced products were enjoyed by rich and poor alike as long as 300 years ago.

“Contemporary sources suggest that there was much greater intermingling and over-lapping of social milieus in cities such as Naples than historians have thought,” Melissa Calaresu,  a  historian of 18th century Italy at Cambridge University, UK, said.

Calaresu focused her  research on Naples in southern Italy: not surprisingly,  much of the earliest evidence of ice-cream making dates back to places where the weather is reliably hot.  We know that the Romans loved the cool taste of ice mixed with fruit and the Emperor Nero reputedly ordered snow to be brought down from the mountains to make into refreshing desserts.

Until the late 19th century, ice-cream making relied on large amounts of ice to freeze the mix as it was churned to keep it smooth. Throughout much of southern Europe, ice was harvested, often from glaciers in the mountains, and transported to towns and cities where it was used to cool buckets of mixes. Snow too was gathered and made into ice by being compressed in pits – in southern Italy known asneviere – where it was kept cold for months. Ice harvesting, and probably ice making too, was a mini-industry with teams of people busy both winter and summer.

By the 16th century, Naples was one of the many cities linked into that network of suppliers transporting a cargo of coolness by land and sea to a populace keen to sample the new tastes hitherto associated with the tables of the rich and powerful.

Calaresu studied  the gathering places of Naples, which at the end of the 18th century was the third largest city in Europe.

“Coffee houses were places where people met and socialised, read the newspapers and exchanged titbits of gossip. But they also met in ice-cream houses – called sorbetterie in Italy,” she said. All these places played an important role in the spread of the Enlightenment, a movement that ushered in a belief in human progress.

Calaresu’s research into historical sources now suggests that ice cream and other frozen desserts were sold on the street and were enjoyed by a wider range of people than has been thought. The stifling heat of Neapolitan summer represented a lucrative market for cool refreshments that would have encompassed both rich and poor, both those living in the city and tourists.

The English travel writer Henry Swinburne, who travelled to Naples in the 1780s, wrote: “The passion for iced water is so great and so general in Naples, that none but mere beggars would drink it in its natural state; and, I believe, a scarcity of bread would not be more severely felt than a failure of snow.”

Official records held in Naples show that the demand for ice was so great that it was considered an important commodity; along with other staples such as grain and oil, it was taxed and prices for it were recorded and regulated. The status of ice and snow as a source of revenue is also illustrated by the presence of chapels named after Santa Maria delle Neve (Virgin of the Snow) which were visited by sailors to say a quick prayer before they crossed the bay of Naples with boats laden with ice.

Naples was a stopping point on the Grand Tour of the 18th century – a rite of passage undertaken by middle and upper class young men from Northern Europe who soaked up not just the splendours of the classical world but also remarkable natural sights such as Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

These well-heeled visitors purchased souvenirs (such as prints) of their cultural pilgrimages as proof of their status as educated and well-travelled young gentlemen prepared to take their place in polite society.  Accounts written at the time reveal that travellers were as interested in the customs of local people as they were in sites of historical and geographical interest.

Prints sold as souvenirs suggest that iced treats were enjoyed by the lazzaroni (Neopolitan lower classes) as well as by the aristocracy.

An engraving by Pietro Fabris, owned by the British Library, shows a couple of barefoot boys reaching out to lick the spoon of an ice-cream seller who has stationed himself and his wooden pails in a square beside Naples’s Angevin castle.

An engraving of a similar scene, by Achille Vianelli, shows a sorbet vendor with a long apron selling his wares from a table set near the in Castel Nuovo. Two gentlemen in top hats and fitted jackets scoop their sorbets from small pots while a rascally-looking fellow with bare feet and a missing trouser leg tips his sorbet straight into his open mouth.

The dependence of the poor as well as rich on iced products was remarked on by many travellers. It even caused John Moore, an English doctor living in Naples in the 1780s, to see cold drinks as a serious threat to social order. He remarked disparagingly that: “The half naked lazzarone is often tempted to spend the small pittance destined for the maintenance of his family, on this bewitching beverage, as the most dissolute of the low people in London spend their wages on gin and brandy.”

Museums and private collectors have examples of ice cream containers made in silver and porcelain; the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has a fine example of a porcelain stand designed to hold ice cream cup. Made by Sèvres, it was originally part of a service given by Louis XV to Maria Theresa of Austria.

Little is known about containers used on the street.  Calaresu suggests that vendors might have sold their wares in re-usable pewter bowls.

From the mid-19th century, ice cream bought on the street was served in thick glass bowls known as penny licks. Concerns about hygiene led an American entrepreneur to invent an edible container and the concept of the cone was born.

Juvenile example of the rangeomorph fossil Charnia, measuring just 17 millimetres in length. Note the fine detail of the branches. Credit: OU/Jack Matthews

Researchers have discovered the strange shapes of the world’s earliest-known baby animals preserved as fossils in rocks in Newfoundland, Canada, thanks to a Pompeii-style volcanic eruption more than a half-billion years ago.

The Pompeii-like deluge of ash preserved over 100 fossils of what are believed to be ‘baby’ rangeomorphs. These are bizarre frond-shaped organisms which lived 580-550 million years ago and superficially resemble sea-pen corals. On closer inspection, they are unlike any creature alive today.

Because they lived deep beneath the ocean where there would have been no light, the rangeomorphs are not thought to be plants although they may not have had all of the characteristics of animals.

Mysteriously, their frond-shaped body-plan, which might have helped them gather oxygen or food, does not survive into the Cambrian period (542-488 million years ago).

SEE ALSO: Evolution Of Birds Ended Reign Of Bug-Eyed Monsters

“The fossilised ‘babies’ we found are all less than three centimetres long and are often as small as six millimetres; many times smaller than the ‘parent’ forms, seen in neighbouring areas, which can reach up to two metres in length,” Martin Brasier of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences, said.

Braiser and colleagues from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Memorial University of Newfoundland, detailed their findings in the current issue of the Journal of the Geological Society.

Exceptionally well preserved, the fossilized babies include species never before found in rocks from the mysterious Ediacaran period (635-542 million years ago) in which the first ‘animals’ — complex multicellular organisms — appeared.

SEE ALSO: Caught In The Act: Prehistoric Turtle Sex

“We think that, around 579 million years ago, an underwater ‘nursery’ of baby Ediacaran fronds was overwhelmed, Pompeii-style, by an ash fall from a volcanic eruption on a nearby island that smothered and preserved them for posterity,” Brasier said.

The find reinforces the idea that “life got large” around 580 million years ago, with the advent of these frond-like forms, some of which grew up — in better times — to reach almost two metres in length.

“We are now exploring even further back in time to try and discover exactly when these mysterious organisms first appeared and learn more about the processes that led to their diversification in an ‘Ediacaran explosion’ that may have mirrored the profusion of new life forms we see in the Cambrian,” Brasier said.

Alexander Liu, Martin Brasier, Jack Matthews and Duncan McIlroy. A new assemblage of juvenile Ediacaran fronds from the Drook Formation, Newfoundland. Journal of the Geological Society, July 2012

An artistic expression of how a large meteorite impact into the sea might have looked in the first second of the impacting. Credit: Carsten Egestal Thuesen, GEUS

An international team of scientists has discovered in Greenland the Earth’s oldest known impact site.

Reporting in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the researchers concluded that a 60 mile wide crater near the Maniitsoq region of West Greenland is the result of a massive asteroid or comet impact three billion years ago.

The previously oldest known crater on Earth, the 186 mile wide Vredefort crater in South Africa, formed 2 billion years ago and is heavily eroded. Chances of finding an even older impact were thought to be, literally, astronomically low.

Now, a team of scientists from Cardiff, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) in Copenhagen, Lund University in Sweden and the Institute of Planetary Science in Moscow has upset these odds.

“This single discovery means that we can study the effects of cratering on the Earth nearly a billion years further back in time than was possible before,” Iain McDonald of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who was part of the team, said.

Finding the evidence was made all the harder because there is no obvious bowl-shaped crater left to find.

SEE ALSO: New Evidence Supports Cosmic Impact Theory

Over the 3 billion years since the impact, the land has been eroded down to expose deeper crust 16 miles below the original surface. All external parts of the impact structure have been removed, but the effects of the intense impact shock wave penetrated deep into the crust — far deeper than at any other known crater — and these remain visible.

However, because the effects of impact at these depths have never been observed before it has taken nearly three years of painstaking work to assemble all the key evidence.

“The process was rather like a Sherlock Holmes story. We eliminated the impossible in terms of any conventional terrestrial processes, and were left with a giant impact as the only explanation for all of the facts,” said McDonald.

Only around 180 impact craters have ever been discovered on Earth and around 30 percent of them contain important natural resources of minerals or oil and gas.

“It has taken us nearly three years to convince our peers in the scientific community of this but the mining industry was far more receptive,” McDonald said.

“A Canadian exploration company has been using the impact model to explore for deposits of nickel and platinum metals at Maniitsoq since the autumn of 2011,” he added.

Adam A. Garde, Iain McDonald, Brendan Dyck, Nynke Keulen. Searching for giant, ancient impact structures on Earth: The Mesoarchaean Maniitsoq structure, West Greenland. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2012; 337-338: 197 DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2012.04.026

It may look simple, but it is a highly complex tool: a Bushman’s bow from Botswana. Credit: Image courtesy of Universitaet Tübingen

German and South African researchers have decoded the conceptual foundations of the bow and arrow, revealing sophisticated design and technology developed by early humans.

Regarded as a possible indicator of culture in prehistoric times, bows and arrows appear to have been in use for some 64,000 years, given evidence from South Africa.

However “little effort has yet been made to investigate explicitly what these tool sets could indicate about human cognitive evolution,” Miriam Haidle of the Heidelberg Academy’s ROCEEH project and the University of Tübingen and Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg, wrote in the latest edition of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Using archaeological finds and ethnological parallels, Haidle and Lombard were able to reconstruct the complex steps needed to make a bow and arrows.

SEE ALSO: Flutes Date To 42,000 Years Ago

“The effective chain reconstructed for a bow-and-arrow set shows a cognitive development expressed in technological symbiosis, i.e. the ability to conceptualize a set of separate, yet inter-dependent tools,” wrote the researchers.

Alike needle and thread, fishing rod and line, hammer and chisel, bow and arrows are complimentary tools — separate, but developed interdependently.

As simple as they may look, bow and arrows are particularly complex tools whose production required “24 decoupled operational units,” the researchers concluded.

Indeed, no less than 10 different tools are needed to manufacture a simple bow and arrows with foreshafts. Moreover, it takes 22 raw materials, 3 semi-finished goods (binding materials, multi-component glue) and 5 production phases to make a bow, and further steps to make the arrows to go with it.

SEE ALSO: Bronze Age Facebook Found In Rock Art

The study was able to show a high level of complexity in the use of tools at an early stage in the history of homo sapiens.

“Once humans were able to fully decouple tools and satisfaction of basic needs, assemble objects and actions in an amplified modular way, combine several fully unrelated elements to create a new concept, and conceptualize a set of separate yet inter-dependent tools, the range of innovative and/or creative problem-solving became almost limitless,” the researchers wrote.

Lombard, Marlize & Miriam Noël Haidle. Thinking a bow-and-arrow: cognitive implica-tions of Middle Stone Age bow and stone-tipped arrow technology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2012; 22/2, 237-264

A pair of Allaeochelys crassesculpta from the Messel fossil pit. The turtles died 47 million years ago while mating. Credit: Senckenberg Gesellschaft

German palaeontologists have unearthed nine pairs of fossilized turtles that perished while having sex some 47 million years ago, unveiling the first-ever fossil record of copulating vertebrates.

Dug up at the Messel Fossil Pit, a UNESCO world heritage site south of Frankfurt in western Germany, the turtles belonged to an extinct species known as Allaeochelys crassesculpta. It is believed the copulating turtles succumbed to poisonous gas at the bottom of a volcanic crater.

Detailed analysis of the fossil material, published in the latest edition of the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters, revealed that each pair consisted of a female and male individual.

More importantly, even though the males typically face away from the females, the tail of some male individuals can be found wrapped under the shell of the female.

“There is no doubt in my mind. These animals died some 47 million years ago in the act of mating. No other vertebrates are known to have died during this important biological process and then been fossilized ,” Walter Joyce, a geoscientist from the University of Tübingen, said.

SEE ALSO: Ancient Turtle Was Size of Smart Car

Most scientists agree that the Messel Pit Fossil Site originated as a deep volcanic crater lake that preserved animals and plants that sank to its bottom. But some questions remain, such as whether the lake had poisonous surface or only subsurface waters.

Modern relatives of the fossil turtles found at Messel have permeable skin that allows them to breathe and stay under water for a long time. However, this adaptation can become lethal if these turtles enter poisonous waters.

According to the researchers, the very fact that turtles were seeking to reproduce at Messel reveals that the surface waters of the volcanic lake supported a thriving biotope.

“In our opinion, it is implausible that the A. crassesculpta couples found at Messel would actively swim, court and finally mate in poisonous surface waters or ingest poisonous surface waters only while mating,” Joyce and colleagues wrote.

SEE ALSO: 3D Model Shows How Ancient Creature Got Around

“We propose, instead, that the turtles initiated copulation in habitable surface waters, perished when their skin started to absorb poisons while sinking during their embrace into deeper portions of the lake made toxic from the build up of volcanic gases or decay of organic matter, and fully or partially separated once they reached the bottom of the lake.”

They added: “The mating pairs from Messel are therefore more consistent with a stratified, volcanic maar lake with inhabitable surface waters and a deadly abyss.”

W. G. Joyce, N. Micklich, S. F. K. Schaal, T. M. Scheyer. Caught in the act: the first record of copulating fossil vertebrates. Biology Letters, 2012; DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0361

Melt glass known as trinitite formed at the ground surface from the melting of sediments and rocks by the very high temperatures of the Trinity nuclear airburst in New Mexico in 1945.  This material is very similar to the glassy melt materials now reported from the cosmic impact YDB layer. Credit: UCSB

Melt-glass material found in sedimentary rocks at sites around the world has provided new evidence for an extraterrestrial impact about 13,000 years ago, says a new study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to an international team of researchers that includes James Kennett, professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara, the material, found in  Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Syria, was formed at temperatures of 1,700 to 2,200 degrees Celsius (3,100 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit), and is the result of a cosmic body impacting Earth.

These new data strongly support the controversial Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) hypothesis, which proposes that a cosmic impact occurred 12,900 years ago at the onset of an unusual cold climatic period called the Younger Dryas.

The episode occurred at or close to the time of major extinction of the North American megafauna, including mammoths and giant ground sloths; and the disappearance of the prehistoric and widely distributed Clovis culture.

Morphological and geochemical evidence of the melt-glass confirms that the material is not cosmic, volcanic, or of human-made origin.

“The very high temperature melt-glass appears identical to that produced in known cosmic impact events such as Meteor Crater in Arizona, and the Australasian tektite field,” said Kennett.

“The melt material also matches melt-glass produced by the Trinity nuclear airburst of 1945 in Socorro, New Mexico. The extreme temperatures required are equal to those of an atomic bomb blast, high enough to make sand melt and boil,” he said.

Images of melted quartz from the YDB cosmic impact layer at Abu Hureyra, Syria, showing evidence of burst bubbles and flow textures that resulted from the melting and boiling of rock at very high temperatures. A: Light microscope image; B: scanning electron microscope image. Credit: UCSB

The material evidence supporting the YDB cosmic impact hypothesis spans three continents, and covers nearly one-third of the planet, from California to Western Europe, and into the Middle East.

The discovery extends the range of evidence into Germany and Syria, the easternmost site yet identified in the northern hemisphere. The researchers have yet to identify a limit to the debris field of the impact.

“Because these three sites in North America and the Middle East are separated by 1,000 to 10,000 kilometers, there were most likely three or more major impact/airburst epicenters for the YDB impact event, likely caused by a swarm of cosmic objects that were fragments of either a meteorite or comet,” said Kennett.

He added that the archaeological site in Syria where the melt-glass material was found –– Abu Hureyra, in the Euphrates Valley –– is one of the few sites of its kind that record the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmer-hunters who live in permanent villages.

“Archeologists and anthropologists consider this area the ‘birthplace of agriculture,’ which occurred close to 12,900 years ago,” Kennett said.

“The presence of a thick charcoal layer in the ancient village in Syria indicates a major fire associated with the melt-glass and impact spherules 12,900 years ago. Evidence suggests that the effects on that settlement and its inhabitants would have been severe,” he said.