Category: Mammoth extinction

A quite perfectly delightful hypothesis holds that air bursts and perhaps direct impact on solid earth by a comet or comets 12,000-plus years ago triggered climatological spasm on Earth while pushing North American megafauna such as mammoths over the brink to extinction. Comet showers have surely happened. The animals did die as did the iconic big-spear-toting Clovis Culture that is the first human culture to have left a large archeological footprint in what is now the US and Canada. It's a dramatic marriage of possibility and fact.

Since first presented in 2007 via a report at an American Geophysical Union meeting in Mexico and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - the favored journal for the proponents of the...