Early humans pulled off something the dinosaurs couldn't and survived an extinction-level asteroid strike, new research suggests.
Around 12,800 years ago the Earth rapidly cooled into a brief Ice Age-like period known as the Younger Dryas. Several species died and there's strong evidence of a decline in the number of Stone Age humans around the same time.
Most scientists believe it was triggered by fresh water from a massive North American glacier flowing into the North Atlantic, messing up the flow of warm tropical water. But there's growing evidence it was actually triggered by a comet or asteroid slamming into the planet.
A new study published in journal Scientific Reports this week has found "unusually high concentrations of platinum and iridium in outwash sediments from a recently discovered crater in Greenland that could have been the impact point".
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Radiocarbon dating has shown "a large platinum anomaly" across a number of sites at the start of the Younger Dryas, as well as soot, "indicating regional large-scale wildfires" at the same time.
Scientists have also found high levels of iridium dated to 12,800 years ago - iridium was also present in huge quantities in the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
University of South Carolina archaeologist Christopher Moore, who led the study, said they still believe the melting glacier caused the cooling - but the melting was triggered by the asteroid's fiery impact.
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The impact hypothesis was first mooted in the 1600s as an explanation for the biblical flood myth, and in the 1900s as evidence the doomed fictional city of Atlantis really existed. Scientists revived the idea in the 2000s, this time backed with scientific evidence.
"These kinds of things in science sometimes take a really long time to gain widespread acceptance," said Dr Moore, not expecting other scientists to agree right away.
"That was true for the dinosaur extinction when the idea was proposed that an impact had killed them. It was the same thing with plate tectonics. But now those ideas are completely established science."
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