New Evidence For Younger Dryas Impact Found by Researchers in South Africa
An anomalous abundance of platinum discovered at an archaeological site in South Africa offers support in favor of a controversial theory, which attributes abrupt climate changes that occurred 12,800 years ago to a possible cometary impact.
The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, at one time widely dismissed by scientists, has continued to gain traction over the last several years. Most notably, the presence of platinum spikes in association with this period of cold reversal that occurred around 12,800 years ago strongly suggests that the climate changes may have been the result of an impact or airburst by a comet.
The late Quaternary archaeological site Wonderkrater, located in the Limpopo Province in South Africa, consists of a large spring and peat mound with deposits dated to more than 30,000 years ago. With the rich information this Middle Stone Age site has yielded, it was an ideal place to look for evidence of the curious “platinum spike” associated with the Younger Dryas, which had not previously been found on the African continent.
A team of researchers led by Professor Francis Thackeray of the University of Johannesburg’s Evolution Studies Institute now says they have found such evidence, in the form of temperature changes based on pollen analysis, as well as a similar abundance of platinum to that found in association with the Younger Dryas at other locations around the world.
According to the study’s extract:
A prominent spike in platinum is documented in a Wonderkrater sample (5614) with a mean date of 12,744 cal yr BP using a Bayesian model, preceding the onset of the YD cooling event. The YD platinum spike at Wonderkrater is the first to be observed in Africa in the southern hemisphere, supplementing new discoveries from Patagonia in South America, in addition to more than 25 sites with such platinum anomalies in the northern hemisphere.
As lead author Thackery notes, “The observations from South Africa serve to strengthen ongoing assessments of the controversial YD Impact Hypothesis, whereby it is proposed that a meteorite or cometary impact contributed to a decline in temperature, associated inter alia with a dispersion of atmospheric dust, mammalian extinctions, and cultural changes.”
New evidence in support of an extraterrestrial source behind an abrupt climate change event that occurred at the end of the last ice age has been found in Africa, according to a team of South African scientists. The discovery marks the first such evidence from the African continent found to-date.