Lonsdaleite, also called hexagonal diamond in reference to the crystal structure, is an allotrope of carbon with a hexagonal lattice, as opposed to the cubical lattice of conventional diamond. It is found in nature in meteorite debris; when meteors containing graphite strike the Earth, the immense heat and stress of the impact transforms the graphite into diamond, but retains graphite's hexagonal crystal lattice. Lonsdaleite was first identified in 1967 from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, where it occurs as microscopic crystals associated with ordinary diamond.
The Younger Dryas was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP). It is primarily known for the sudden or "abrupt" cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, when the North Atlantic Ocean cooled and annual air temperatures decreased by ~3 °C (5.4 °F) over North America, 2–6 °C (3.6–10.8 °F) in Europe and up to 10 °C (18 °F) in Greenland, in a few decades. Cooling in Greenland was particularly rapid, taking place over just 3 years or less. At the same time, the Southern Hemisphere experienced warming. This period ended as rapidly as it began, with dramatic warming over ~50 years, which transitioned the Earth from the glacial Pleistocene epoch into the current Holocene.
Tell Abu Hureyra is a prehistoric archaeological site in the Upper Euphrates valley in Syria. The tell was inhabited between 13,300 and 7,800 cal. BP in two main phases: Abu Hureyra 1, dated to the Epipalaeolithic, was a village of sedentary hunter-gatherers; Abu Hureyra 2, dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, was home to some of the world's first farmers. This almost continuous sequence of occupation through the Neolithic Revolution has made Abu Hureyra one of the most important sites in the study of the origins of agriculture.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, published since 1915, and publishes original research, scientific reviews, commentaries, and letters. According to Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2022 impact factor of 9.4. PNAS is the second most cited scientific journal, with more than 1.9 million cumulative citations from 2008 to 2018. In the past, PNAS has been described variously as "prestigious", "sedate", "renowned" and "high impact".
A flood myth or a deluge myth is a myth in which a great flood, usually sent by a deity or deities, destroys civilization, often in an act of divine retribution. Parallels are often drawn between the flood waters of these myths and the primeval waters which appear in certain creation myths, as the flood waters are described as a measure for the cleansing of humanity, in preparation for rebirth. Most flood myths also contain a culture hero, who "represents the human craving for life".
Environmental archaeology is a sub-field of archaeology which emerged in 1970s and is the science of reconstructing the relationships between past societies and the environments they lived in. The field represents an archaeological-palaeoecological approach to studying the palaeoenvironment through the methods of human palaeoecology and other geosciences. Reconstructing past environments and past peoples' relationships and interactions with the landscapes they inhabited provide archaeologists with insights into the origins and evolution of anthropogenic environments and human systems. This includes subjects such as including prehistoric lifestyle adaptations to change and economic practices.
Usselo ['ʏsəloː] is a Dutch village in the municipality of Enschede in the eastern Netherlands region of Twente. It is located just west of Enschede and east of Boekelo. It has existed for over 800 years. Archaeology shows that the region was inhabited more or less continuously since the last ice-age. The region is very fertile and will support agriculture and cattle. The countryside is marked by artificial hills, called es or esch, which were formed by depositing dung mixed with dirt. A prime example is the Fleringer Esch, near Fleringen.
William M. Napier is a Scottish author. Napier is best known for authoring five high tech thriller novels and a number of nonfiction science books that concern fringe and pseudoscientific theories.
Trinity Southwest University (TSU) is an unaccredited evangelical Christian institution of higher education with an office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Principally a theological school that encompasses both the Bible college and theological seminary concepts of Christian education, it offers distance education programs and degrees in biblical studies, theological studies, archaeology and biblical history, biblical counseling, biblical representational research, and university studies.
Mark Boslough is an American physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, research professor at University of New Mexico, fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel. He is an expert in the study of planetary impacts and global catastrophes. Due to his work in this field, Asteroid 73520 Boslough was named in his honor.
The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) proposes that the onset of the Younger Dryas (YD) cool period (stadial) at the end of the Last Glacial Period, around 12,900 years ago was the result of some kind of cosmic event with specific details varying between publications. The hypothesis is widely rejected by relevant experts. It is influenced by creationism, and has been compared to cold fusion by its critics due to the lack of reproducibility of results. It is an alternative to the long-standing and widely accepted explanation that the Younger Dryas was caused by a significant reduction in, or shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor due to a sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America.
Andrew Michael Tangye Moore, also known as A. M. T. Moore, is a British archaeologist and academic. He is a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Geophysical Union. It publishes original research articles dealing with all aspects of understanding and reconstructing Earth's past climate and environments from the Precambrian to modern analogs. Until the first of January 2018 the name of the journal was Paleoceanography.
Steven M. Stanley is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the Florida State University. He is best known for his empirical research documenting the evolutionary process of punctuated equilibrium in the fossil record.
Adrian Lewis Melott is an American physicist. He is one of the pioneers of using large-scale computing to investigate the formation of large-scale structure in a Universe dominated by dark matter. He later turned his attention to an area he calls “astrobiophysics”, examining a variety of ways that external events in our galaxy may have influenced the course of life on Earth, including analysis of gamma-ray burst events.
The Corossol structure, which is also known as the Corossol crater, is a circular, 4.3-by-3.9-kilometre in diameter, underwater bedrock feature that is exposed on the gulf floor of the northwestern Gulf of Saint Lawrence 20-kilometre (12 mi) offshore of the city of Sept-Îles, Quebec, in eastern Canada. It is hypothesized to be a possible pre-Pleistocene, extraterrestrial impact structure. It lies underwater at a depth of 40–208-metre (131–682 ft). This underwater feature was found during the study of high-resolution bathymetric and sub-bottom profiler data collected south of the city of Sept-Iles in the northwestern Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
James Lawrence Powell is an American geologist, writer, former college president and museum director. He chaired the geology department at Oberlin College later serving as its provost and president. Powell also served as president of Franklin & Marshall College as well as Reed College. Following his positions in higher education, Powell presided over the Franklin Institute and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.
Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilisation is a 2015 book by British pseudoarchaeology writer Graham Hancock, published by Thomas Dunne Books in the United States and by Coronet in the United Kingdom. Macmillan Publishers released an "updated and expanded" paperback edition in 2017.
Tell el-Hammam is an archaeological site in the Amman Governorate of Jordan, in the eastern part of the lower Jordan Valley 11.7 kilometers east of the Jordan River and not far from its mouth. It lies 12.6 kilometers northeast of the Dead Sea. The site has substantial remains from the Chalcolithic, Early, Intermediate and Middle Bronze Age, and from Iron Age II. There are different attempts at identifying the site with a biblical city. The Hammam Megalithic Field lies nearby. Other archaeological sites in the vicinity include Tall Nimrin, Tall Bleibel, Tall Mustah, Tall Iktanu, Tall Tahouna, Tall Barakat, Tall Kafrayn, and Tall Rama.
Ancient Apocalypse is a Netflix series, where the British writer Graham Hancock presents his pseudoarchaeological theory that there was an advanced civilization during the last ice age and that it was destroyed as a result of meteor impacts around 12,000 years ago. He argues that the survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers around the world, giving rise to all earliest known civilizations. The episodes feature Hancock visiting archaeological sites and natural features which he claims show evidence of this. He repeatedly alleges that archaeologists are ignoring or covering up the evidence.
