[HN Gopher] A mystery that took 13k years to crack
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A mystery that took 13k years to crack
Author : diodorus
Score : 85 points
Date : 2022-06-25 03:04 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| CodeBeater wrote:
| https://archive.is/hzj3b
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Like how the age of the planet is a mystery that took 4.6 billion
| years to crack?
| alserio wrote:
| well, technically...
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| That's a pretty well written piece! And it's amazing that
| isotopic analysis of bones can pick out where they traveled.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The article obscures that it was not human hunting that did in
| the mammoths, as it insinuates, but rather the comet strike c.
| 10,818 BCE that initiated the Younger Dryas cold spell, most
| probably by suddenly dumping hundreds of cubic miles of meltwater
| into the oceans and filling the upper atmosphere with soot.
|
| This event took out some 30 genera in North America alone,
| including mammoths, mastodons, giant sloth and beaver, dire
| wolves, a bear bigger than the grizzly, horses, camels, and saber
| toothed cats, and also all hint of the then only 200-year-old
| Clovis culture known for its beautiful spearpoints, and still
| often blamed, as in TFA, for suddenly wiping out all these
| genera.
|
| Fought tooth and nail by extraordinarily disingenuous opponents
| (one, a retired historian, still er... curates the Wikipedia
| page), it was finally established to the satisfaction of all
| scrupulous observers in 2018 with evidence from a layer of
| spiking platinum concentration, shocked quartz, and soot
| coincident on four continents, with proof of a continent-wide
| conflagration with no sulfur spike of volcanism, in stratigraphic
| cores from dozens of sites and as far away as South Africa.
|
| It happened after glacier cover from the last ice age had begun
| receding 7000 years before, and sea level had already risen 40
| meters (with 80 meters left to go, ending ~8000 years ago). The
| Younger Dryas cold spell lasted some 12-1300 years, ending
| coincident with construction at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. (Other
| similar work found nearby predates that.)
|
| We still have no crater to associate with the strike, which might
| have been an airburst like the Tunguska strike, or have left
| craters mainly in the miles-thick ice sheet covering Canada. (An
| apparent crater in Greenland under 1200ft of ice, if it is one,
| seems to be too old, although this is inconclusive.)
|
| The real mystery is why modern humans waited from 300,000 years
| ago until the Younger Dryas to begin activities that would lead
| to civilization. We find evidence of uniform cultural practices
| across many thousands of miles and tens of millennia (painting
| preserved in caves from Sulawesi 45kya ago to Spain 22kya),
| ocean-going navigation >50kya (occupation of Sulawesi and
| Australia, never connected by land) and footprints in North
| America 22kya, mechanical drilling 40kya in a Denisovan bracelet,
| and ceramics in China 18kya.
|
| The actual work, isotopic analysis of strata in a tusk, does not
| suffer from the flaws of the article exploiting it.
| natch wrote:
| This writing is great!
| magic_hamster wrote:
| That was absolutely spectacular. The writing is truly inspiring.
| drewcoo wrote:
| It only took me 60s to determine this article was BS.
|
| Or was it 4.6B years?
|
| Ridonculous.
| jphsnsir wrote:
| ogogmad wrote:
| Should comments like the above be flagged?
| Timwi wrote:
| ... No?
|
| Are you offended by the abbreviation tldr?
| ogogmad wrote:
| It means "Too long; didn't read". The guidelines say:
|
| _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of
| other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._
| 867-5309 wrote:
| "shunned elephant gets tusk bandsawed for clickbait"
| xmprt wrote:
| This is the worst type of clickbait. The types of people who
| would be attracted by the title will hate the article because it
| doesn't have a straightforward title. And the types of people who
| would enjoy the story probably won't be too intrigued by the
| title.
|
| A title like this should emphasize on the 13,200 years part and
| why it took so long to solve this mystery. Instead it talks about
| the life of a mastodon, which while very interesting, isn't
| really much of a mystery. In fact, the word mystery appears only
| in the title and nowhere else.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Quite a few click/ false headlines appearing of late. That's
| why I always immediately go to the comments, and rarely bother
| with the articles.
| lmc wrote:
| Yeah it's a quality article, but it's more "The Story That Took
| 13,200 Years to Tell"
| joegahona wrote:
| I came here to say something similar about the title, but you
| said it far more powerfully than I could have. Also it's a
| terrible title for SEO.
| smoyer wrote:
| Remember that the author writes the content but usually has
| very little control over the title that will ultimately adorn
| their prose. I agree that the article was click-baiting but
| perhaps I'm the rare person who enjoys a good mystery and isn't
| repelled by content that actually teaches me something.
| shusaku wrote:
| The problem is that hacker news doesn't let the submitter write
| the very helpful subtitle.
|
| > Hidden in the tusk of a 34-year-old mastodon was a record of
| time and space that helped explain his violent death.
|
| We should be complaining about the aggregators, not the actual
| sites.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The subtitle is usually fine here (but sometimes the mods
| rever them if they don't like the change). A random sentence
| in the middle of the article is not fine here (but sometimes
| the mods use it anyway when the title and subtitle are bad).
|
| The subtitle has more than 80 characters, but it can be
| reduced to
|
| > _Tusk of a mastodon has a record of time and space that
| helped explain his death_
| 13of40 wrote:
| One of the worst examples I've seen recently was that article
| with the title "Physicists Have Discovered A Never-Before-Seen
| Particle - Sitting On A Tabletop". I can just imagine some
| annoyed grad student trying to explain how they detected this
| new particle using a small, highly polarized optical detector
| while the intern from Planet News is giggling and asking to
| hear less science junk and more about the tabletop.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The problem _was_ the title: There was no mystery. A mammoth
| lived, and then died, as did every mammoth ever born. There had
| once been a mystery about their extinction, but the article
| gets that one wrong.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > A title like this should emphasize on the 13,200 years part
| and why it took so long to solve this mystery.
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong because I stopped reading quickly after
| realizing it was clickbait, but the skeleton was discovered in
| 1998, so at best the mystery took 24 years to resolve, so I
| don't see what there is to emphasize.
|
| Anyway, I'm off to figure out the billions of years old mystery
| of what I'm gonna have for breakfast.
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