Clovis Catastrophe

Several individuals grouped fearfully around the perimeter of a burning hot fire and peered ominously at the spreading wave of heat as it transferred across the parched vegetation that made up their dry homeland.

The heat wave billowed in the searing sunlight and reinforced the fiery tract of earth further spreading the rippling biomass flames that encapsulated the lonely, barren valley. The group, attired in stretches of loose cloth-like materials, bunched together as the burning flames licked ever higher in twists of greenish tongues feeding on the molten air. All around the valley flames exploded from the earth in flickering lashes driving from the burning floor into the burning atmosphere above. The charred remains of people struck by the first stormy waves lay prostrate in the molten furnace, melting as the temperatures increased to catastrophic levels. The trembling group crouched in an island of blackened earth untouched by the raging fiery seas which, as quick as they appeared, suddenly consumed their source of fuel, licking at the air in a final flaming sputter to disappear.          

The valley was a microcosm of the entire landscape of North America, where vast tracks of vegetative land were suddenly eviscerated in a gelatinous explosive storm. The ignominious event occurred roughly 12,900 years ago, when the archaeological record showed an enormous super-heat event that stripped the landscape across North America in an extraordinarily swift and hugely catastrophic (to the Stone Age settlers) continental episode. The peoples who lived in this period (known in the archaeological record as the Clovis, due to a particular tool they used) were impacted to a shattering dimension. Records show that the Clovis tool declined a staggering 70 per cent in the 10 to 20 years following the biomass fires. This bears a direct correlation to the declination of the Clovis population itself, as tool counts virtually always represent population percentages. The Clovis people were spread out right across the North American continent in large independent patches of makeshift civilisations when disaster struck so suddenly, and from (until now) an unknown, staggeringly brutal source.

The surging biomass fires would have appeared to the Clovis as though they erupted from the ground – searing heat instantaneously following – and spreading in several seconds to as far as the eye could view. The very atmosphere drenching in liquid heat would have burned any mass in its environment. Scientists previously took the episode to have been initiated by some form of enormously turbulent activity within the Earth's core, forcing the molten pressures upwards to the land surface above. However, the problems with this remained throughout their investigations; the heat required was infinitely more intense than Earth could have produced with the alacrity the evidence demanded. So, too, the geographical distance involved. The Clovis people experienced a cataclysmic event that shook the breadth of their known world, completely altering their way of life on a permanent basis, and in every known area they appeared to have resided in; and all in the exact same period. It took a force inordinately more combustible and capable of covering a far larger geographical area than had been previously surmised. But now a theory has come to fruition that fits these specific parameters and lays to rest the legacy of the sudden decline of the Clovis people. Approximately 12,900 years ago, North America was the partial impact site of a relatively large celestial asteroid.

The differences in this particular impact, to what one would expect to be the normal results of such an impact, were that it appears to have left little evidence of the collision itself. Astrological scientists, working in tandem with archaeologists, searched the record for such an impact site when the Clovis peoples were first discovered. The record contained little practical evidence of an impact but did show the staggering remnants of the aforementioned biomass fires, which appeared to have hit many parts of the North American continent at precisely the same period. One of the few evidential markers left of the asteroid's collision was a spatial dust that was dug up in differing parts of the continent that was commonly understood to have arrived via celestial impacts, though it could (and does) appear of its own accord through solar winds. The confusion for the teams first involved in locating an answer to the rapid declination of the Clovis was the lack of a coherent reason for these biomass fires that had ripped across the continent. As time went on, volcanic disruptions took the place of asteroid impact as the natural theory based on evidence – until a team lead by Richard Firestone in California resolved a clear alternative theory reintroducing the evident possibility of a continental-wide colloidal impact.

As mentioned previously, the team located fragmented material that could only have arisen from outside the Earth's atmosphere. Firestone's team traced the spatial dusts, buried at the same soil levels as the Clovis tools, throughout the North American continent, providing strong evidence of a link between the decimation of the Clovis and this odd grouping of extraterrestrial debris. It included miniscule nanodiamonds (commonly located in meteorites), tiny carbon spherules that form when molten droplets cool rapidly in air, among other assorted cosmological findings. However, the expansive question for Firestone's team was, if an asteroid had struck our planet 12,900 years ago – how come it failed to leave an impact crater? It was at this point that a member of Firestone's team hypothesized on the widespread biomass fires, and formulated an account of those tragic events that has reinvigorated paleontological and archaeological debate concerning possible celestial impacts. If an asteroid had collided with a large landmass, it would have annihilated far more people than appears to have occurred, and thus was it not possible that the asteroid had burned up in Earth's atmosphere – not directly impacting the continent but exploding in a veritable planetary firestorm that burned through the atmosphere above North America from Canada right the way down to Mexico?

The account fits the evidential remains; the biomass fires that are found throughout the archaeological record burned extremely quickly, dying out as suddenly as they appeared, though they still managed to wreak devastation on the local peoples. It allows for the extraterrestrial materials, and covers the significant lack of a recognisable impact site. It also explains a long-queried conundrum for climatologists - why the pre-declined Clovis period was followed by a mini ice age. According to the Firestone theory, the exploding asteroid (which would have combusted above modern Canada) burned through the northern ice sheets, forcing the ice-melt southwards into North America, and more specifically, the Atlantic Ocean. With the rapid increase of fresh water, the “conveyor-belt” of the Gulf Stream (carrying warm water to the northern Atlantic) lost its saline content and switched itself off, resulting in Siberian-styled temperatures in Western Europe and beyond. The resulting ice age swept across the world.

Earth's past contains a series of such ice ages, as temperatures rise and fall through millennia, and climatologists are hard pressed to locate logical reasons for much of the sweeping climate changes that have occurred throughout our history (indeed, the diverse nature of the planet's climate is used continuously as a counter-argument to global warming). The possibility that an asteroid's semi-impact could further affect planetary climate changes is a significant addition to the study of the science of climatology; however, the major discovery by Firestone's team was the celestial collision itself. If an asteroid could have exploded over the North American continent and remain virtually unrecognised until relatively recently, it could have occurred (and likely did) in several other instances during Earth's smoldering history. It opens a staggeringly lucrative avenue of research as the theory expands to provide possible answers to the vast changes apparent in many periods in the archaeological record – as life was extinguished under highly dramatic, and to this day, mysteriously unknown events.