Check out this article over at BBC News online. It suggests that a large space rock exploded over North America 13,000 years ago. The blast may have wiped out one of America's first Stone Age cultures as well as the continent's big mammals such as the mammoth and the mastodon. They find evidence in nanodiamonds and high levels of iridium, which I suppose is suggestive, but I am certainly no geologist. I do find interest, though, in the theories of the extinction at the end of the Pleistocene. I think it was quite multifactorial, but who knows. Disease, hunting, and climate change could have all had a disastrous effect. A explosion in the sky is also possible, but admittedly weird. They say "No crater remains, possibly because the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which blanketed thousands of square kilometers of North America during the last Ice Age, was thick enough to mask the impact. Another possibility is that it exploded in the air." One might say convenient, and I can just imagine the water floods after that episode! An air explosion is just cool.



(Full resolution here)

As mentioned above, the blast may have devastated the first Stone Age cultures in North America, aka Clovis. The points are really cool, and clearly, can be pretty large as evidenced in the picture, but no mind to size...they were everywhere in America during the Pleistocene and then die out and give rise to smaller traditions at about the time of this explosion. Correlation?

Jason