A Comet Killed America's Cavemen

By Cernig

A comet which broke up into many large chunks, spreading fireballs with the power of nuclear bombs across the Northern hemisphere, was responsible for the mysterious dissapearance of America's Stone Age inhabitants and mammoths, according to a group of US scientists.

The theory is to be outlined at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. A group of US scientists that include West will report that they have found a layer of microscopic diamonds at 26 different sites in Europe, Canada and America. These are the remains of a giant carbon-rich comet that crashed in pieces on our planet 12,900 years ago, they say. The huge pressures and heat triggered by the fragments crashing to Earth turned the comet's carbon into diamond dust. 'The shock waves and the heat would have been tremendous,' said West. 'It would have set fire to animals' fur and to the clothing worn by men and women. The searing heat would have also set fire to the grasslands of the northern hemisphere. Great grazing animals like the mammoth that had survived the original blast would later have died in their thousands from starvation. Only animals, including humans, that had a wide range of food would have survived the aftermath.'

...It was not just America that bore the brunt of the comet crash. At this time, the Earth was emerging from the last Ice Age. The climate was slowly warming, though extensive ice fields still covered higher latitudes. The disintegrating comet would have plunged into these ice sheets, causing widespread melting. These waters would have poured into the Atlantic, disrupting its currents, including the Gulf stream. The long-term effect was a 1,000-year cold spell that hit Europe and Asia.

...'The magnitude of this discovery is so important,' team member James Kennett, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the journal. 'It explains three of the highest-debated controversies of recent decades.'

These are the sudden disappearance of the first Stone Age people of America, the disappearance of mammoths throughout much of Europe and America and the sudden cooling of the planet, an event known as the Younger-Dryas period.

So no, it wasn't because they couldn't make it to the Ark in time.