Gravity Anomalies Seen In Wide Binary Stars Systems

No time to write. The paper is here.

Salient ET impacts, volcanic eruptions and climate events

Version one of this post is from memory. I plan to add links and confirm details later.

ET Impacts:

1. The Tunguska event. Russia, June 30, 1908.

2. The meteor strike (an airburst actually) that destroyed Sodom and Gomorra. Levant, 1650 BCE.

3. The biggest meteor impact on Earth in the last 10,000 years struck far Western India around 4955 BCE. The crater it left behind is known as the Luna structure. It didn't have obvious cultural or civilizational impact in Neolithic South Asia.

4. The Young Dryas impact. North America, ca. 12,900 years ago in North America.

5. The Southeast Asian ET impact. 790,000 years ago near Laos. Close in time to the emergence of a common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, and close in time to a hominin population bottleneck apparent in our DNA.

6. The ET impact that killed the dinosaurs. ca. 66 million years ago.

Volcanic eruptions:

1. Mount Tambora. Indonesia. 1815 CE (as a comment notes, the impact of this event on climate that impacted horses may have spurred the invention of a workable bicycle).

2. Volcanic eruption. 1345 CE. Place uncertain but probably a near tropical event in the Northern Hemisphere. Led to the Little Ice Age and a black plague outbreak in Europe.

3. The eruptions that led to the Justinian plague. ca. 536 CE.

4. Pompei. Mount Vesuvius. 76 CE. Italy. Honestly, not all that exceptional an eruption in the greater span of history, but notable because it was well attested and created a time capsule of that time period that has been archaeologically important.

5. The Santorini (Thera) eruption, occurring around 1600 BCE, in what is now Greece, dealt a serious blow to Minoan civilization, even though most residents of the island fled to safety before it occurred.

5. The volcanic eruptions at the Upper Paleolithic boundary in Europe that probable drove modern human Cro-Magnon replacement of Neanderthals. Europe. ca. 40,000 years ago.

6. The Toba eruption ca. 74,000 years ago in Indonesia. This coincides with behavioral modernity in modern humans including technologies like the bow and arrow (even though anatomically modern humans date to about 300,000 years ago), and to the first expansion of modern humans past India to Southeast Asia. Possibly a cause of the extinction of Homo erectus in Asia (the youngest attested confidently classified H. erectus remains are from ca. 100,000 years ago, but remains are scarce, and new finds could fill the gap).

7.  Yellowstone's last big eruption ca. 630,000 years ago.

Climate events:

1.  The European Little Ice Age. ca. 1300-1850 CE.

2.  The drought in the American SE that ended ancient Puebloan culture. 

3.  The drought that took down the Mayans. A century or two before Y1K.

4. The horrible year: 536 CE. This was the start of the "Late Antique Little Ice Age," which lasted about 150 years and was probably volcanic in origin.

5.  The Bronze Age collapse event. ca. 1200 BCE.

6.  The aridity event that preceded Indo-European expansion and led to collapses in civilizations in Europe, the Middle East, West Asia, and India. ca. 4,000 years ago.

7.  The Green Sahara and its end. ca. 15,000 to 5,000 years ago.

8.  The Younger Dryas. ca. 12,900 years ago. Delayed the Neolthic revolution by about 3,000 years. Suddenly ended the North American Clovis culture.

9.  The Last Glacial Maximum ca. 20,000 years ago.