Has anybody thought that the end of the mammoths and other large mammals like the saber-toothed tiger looks a lot like the demise of the dinosaurs?  Mass extinction events are one of my personal interests, especially when they involve a celestial body or event.  We have a lot of evidence to support an impact event as a contributing factor to the end of the dinosaurs, but what about the large mammals about 12,000 years ago?

Smilodon, the Saber-Tooth Cat - Image by Wiki user Wallace63- on display at the American Natural History, New York - all rights reserved

Now, guess what:  You are not going to believe this, but scientists working in Antarctica have found a LARGE distribution of hexagonal nanodiamonds at the level about 12,000 years ago.  We only get hexagonal nanodiamonds in an impact event, they aren’t formed naturally on Earth.  They’re called “presolar grains”, and they’re probably formed in the supernova of red giants, like Betelgeuse.

No crater has been found to correspond with the findings in Antarctica, but the geological record shows a “black mat” (containing Iridium) at the level of about 12,000 years ago, so it looks like something happened.

Dodo Bird - remake of a 1626 painting by Roelant Savery - copyright expired

There have been many mass extinctions in Earth’s history.  Over 98% of all the species ever living have gone extinct.  We’re in the middle of an extinction event right now, the Holocene extinction (possibly having it’s origins 12,000 years ago).  From 1500 to 2009, we’ve documented the loss of 875 species.  Since extinctions often go unnoticed, some scientists think that we may have lost up to 2 million species.  The Species-area theory puts the loss at 140,000 species annually.  The UN Convention on Biological Diversity estimates that species are being lost faster than they are discovered… at the rate of three per hour.  Yes.  Three per hour, the worst extinction in millions of years.

Impact nanodiamond - STEM image - image by Wiki User "NIMSoffice" - all rights reserved

Now that I have your attention, the Younger Dryas event postulates that we had an air-burst comet over the North America Great Lakes Area ca 12,900 BP  (“BP” just means “before present”), much like the Tunguska Event.  A Paleo-Indian culture called the Clovis Culture was also lost during this event.  The Clovis Culture has long been blamed for the loss of the mammoth due to over-hunting; a good hypothesis, considering we of European descent almost wiped out the buffalo due to stupidity and greed… but look at Indigenous people in recorded history.  They don’t usually over-hunt like that… they have more respect for their environment.

Wooly Mammoth - by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins - copyright expired

Scientist are taking closer looks at past extinction events, and it looks like a celestial event may be a contributing factor in more of them than previously thought.  What’s exciting is the ice record in Antarctica.  It’s a frozen record of what the environment was like thousands of years ago, and as we get better at understanding the record, we learn more about the past.

What do you think about it?  I’d be very interested in hearing your considered opinion.