We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.

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abainbridge an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Seems like it is no longer considered to be anything to do with a meteorite impact. It's hard to find a good source. This is the best I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_struct...

I think this paper's abstract claims that wooden debris from the landslide has been dated to 5000 years older than the Sumerian tablet: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329153343_The_produ...

	▲	griffzhowl an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you're looking for a source on the landslide, another commenter here posted this, that seems more reliable than wikipedia. Searching for Kofel's impact, rather than landslide, brings up nonsense because there's only pseudo-evidence for that. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695... It dates the landslide to about 9400 years ago (BP), so this article about the star map putting it at 5500 years ago seems to be a colourful fabrication (my bad). The author of the meteor theory apparently even tries to connect it to Sodom and Gomorrah being hit by the passing heat! Lol Finding reliable info on this "planisphere" tablet isn't easy. As far as I can tell it was untranslated and kept a low profile until this impact story
	▲	urxvtcd an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Eh, so too good to be true.

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thaumasiotes 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it

We "reconstructed" Sumerian through the fairly intuitive process of finding reference works describing the language, and reading them.

	▲	griffzhowl 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's cool isn't it? Even to the Akkadians, Sumerian was an ancient language (prehistoric!), that became sacred. Aren't there also bilingual texts that are used for learning it? Or maybe I'm thinking of different versions of stories, in Sumerian and later Akkadian or Babylonian. I'm curious how the modern pronunciation is arrived at. Is that a lot of convention and guess work or is it reasonably secure through knowing (approximately) Akkadian pronunciation via other Semitic languages?