Brian Thompson

What do you think of <a href="http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/comet_bronzeage_011113-1.html" target="_blank">this discovery</a>?

Excerpt:

Biblical stories, apocalyptic visions, ancient art and scientific data all seem to intersect at around 2350 B.C., when one or more catastrophic events wiped out several advanced societies in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Increasingly, some scientists suspect comets and their associated meteor storms were the cause. History and culture provide clues: Icons and myths surrounding the alleged cataclysms persist in cults and religions today and even fuel terrorism.

And a newly found 2-mile-wide crater in Iraq, spotted serendipitously in a perusal of satellite images, could provide a smoking gun. The crater's discovery, which was announced in a recent issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, is a preliminary finding. Scientists stress that a ground expedition is needed to determine if the landform was actually carved out by an impact.

Also:

Mounting hard evidence collected from tree rings, soil layers and even dust that long ago settled to the ocean floor indicates there were widespread environmental nightmares in the Near East during the Early Bronze Age: Abrupt cooling of the climate, sudden floods and surges from the seas, huge earthquakes.

It's obvious something pretty major happened around 2350 BC and one possible explanation is a small asteroid impact, similar to <a href="http://www.psi.edu/projects/siberia/siberia.html" target="_blank">Tunguska, 1908</a>, but a little larger and obviously not just an airburst explosion. Maybe the <a href="http://www.barringercrater.com/science/" target="_blank">Barringer Meteorite Crater in Arizona</a> is a closer analogue, but regardless, I don't think for a second the Earth's axis would have been affected.

beausoleil

That the crater in Iraq, if it is a crater, if it dates to the right time, would have impacted nearby civilisations - seems reasonable to me. There's about oneTunguska sized impact on the Earth every century. so it isn't completely implausible.

That dating the great flood by summing back through biblical genealogies is reliable seems nonsense, especially since it is traced to the legend described in the epic of Gilgamesh. The generations seem to me to be pure fantasy.

That the impact was due to a comet breaking up, other pieces being responsible for the impacts in Argentina at the same time sounds like hooey to me. I'd expect them to be spread out along a line of latitude, or not to be correlated in time on the decade timescale. Once a bit misses the Earth first time round, its lifetime against impacts in the inner solar system is on the order of 10 million years.