by Lloyd » Tue Apr 29, 2025 9:00 pm
369404
2012 EU CATASTROPHISM PAPER HIGHLIGHTS
Trevor Palmer's 2012 paper, Science and Catastrophism, from Velikovsky to the Present Day
https://www.academia.edu/22585665
{Following are excerpts from the above 2012 paper, which have the most significance for my studies. You may find other excerpts there interesting too. I plan to add this to my bibliography as a reference at https://zzzzzzz.substack.com/p/cataclys ... ient-myths.}
__VENUS COMET TAIL
Further considerations involving escape velocity apply to Velikovsky’s theory that the object which became the planet Venus left Jupiter as a comet. In part I chapter II of Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky wrote that red dust, followed by gravel, fell on Egypt as the Earth entered deeper into the tail of this comet at the time of the Exodus. Five chapters later, he stated that stones from the same cometary tail fell on the Canaanites in the days of Joshua. It has now been established that cometary tails are formed by the evaporation of volatile material from the nucleus as it passes close to the Sun, with non-volatile material such as dust and gravel being carried along with the escaping gases. Typical comets, with nuclei a few kilometres in diameter, have two tails, one consisting of the gases, which are ionised (i.e. electrically charged), this tail always pointing directly away from the Sun, and the other consisting of dust, gravel and perhaps larger stones, this tail trailing behind the comet in its orbit, and normally appearing as the more spectacular of the two (Burnham, 2000; Steel, 2000, pp. 74-75; Man, 2001). A comet the size of Venus, i.e. one very much larger than a typical comet, could still have an ion tail, but not one containing dust and larger solid material, because the evaporation process could not possibly raise it to a speed in excess of 37,000 km/hr, the escape velocity necessary for solids to escape the gravitational constraints of a body like Venus. Thus, the possibility that Venus once had a cometary tail cannot be excluded, but it would not have been a particularly conspicuous one, and it could not have contained dust, gravel and stones to deposit on the Earth. ... we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that there was a cloud of dust, gravel and stones following Venus, which may have looked like a cometary tail, even though it could not have been thrown out from the planet.
__In the “Saturn Theory” developed during the 1980s by David Talbott and colleagues from the initial ideas of Velikovsky (and to which we shall return later), Venus was no longer thought to have been ejected from Jupiter as a comet, nor to have been a newcomer to the Solar System at the dawn of civilisation. As the theory developed, it was argued that the comet-like appearance of the planet inferred from ancient writings and depicted in rock-art images was the result of the discharge of plasma streamers, this relating to a period much earlier than the time of Velikovsky’s supposed Venus catastrophe (Talbott and Cochrane, 1984; Cochrane, 1988; Talbott, 2008).
__ORBIT CIRCULARIZATION
Regardless of timescale, British mathematician, Laurence Dixon, showed that considerations of the principles of conservation of energy and angular momentum demonstrated that it would have been possible for Venus to have moved to its present orbit following encounters with the Earth and Mars, but, assuming the masses of the planets remained constant, only if the first contact took place when the Earth was in an orbit in which its average distance from the Sun was around half of what it is now (Dixon, 2001). That is roughly consistent with what Velikovsky wrote in his 1942 summary, but, as currently understood, it would have put the Earth’s position at the time well outside of the “habitable zone”, where water could exist in liquid form at the surface of the planet (Fogg, 1992; Kasting, Whitmire and Reynolds, 1993; Weed, 2002). Neither human beings nor any other animal life could have existed under those conditions.
__VENUS FLIES
Worlds in Collision: all around the world people have associated the planet Venus with flies {probably due to a Peratt plasma apparition IMO. AI says, "The Maya referred to Venus as Xux Ek’, which translates as “Wasp Star” or “Fly Star”. This name appears in the Dresden Codex and other Maya sources, reflecting a cultural association between the planet Venus and stinging or flying insects."}
__EARLY BRONZE AGE CATASTROPHES
At the first SIS Cambridge Conference in 1993, John Bimson and Bob Porter, separately, gave assessments of Schaeffer’s findings in the light of subsequent developments in archaeology. They agreed that there was strong evidence of widespread catastrophic destructions of cities at the end of the Early Bronze Age, but the evidence for similar destructions at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the time of the Venus catastrophe, was much more tenuous. Although there was evidence of earthquake damage at many of the sites, there was nothing to indicate the kind of cosmic catastrophe envisaged by Velikovsky, and the main reason why the destructions at the end of the Middle Bronze Age had seemed of particular significance to Schaeffer was that he found evidence to suggest they had been followed at each site by an occupational gap of 100 – 150 years. However, to Porter, it seemed likely that this apparent hiatus was simply an artefact of the dating procedure used by Schaeffer (Bimson, 1993; Porter, 1993).
__ICE CORES
Whilst it cannot be said that the ice-core evidence has provided conclusive proof against the theory of a global catastrophe in the fifteenth century BCE, it is evident that it has not provided any positive support for the notion.
__LINEAR SATURN MODEL PROBLEM
The “polar configuration” hypothesis ... maintains that Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars and Earth once orbited the Sun as a single linear unit, rotating about a point close to Saturn. ... “The most obvious objection to the Saturn theory is its apparent incompatibility with conventional astrophysics. ...{The theory needs} a viable physical model for the polar configuration” An early attempt at such a model (Grubaugh, 1993) was found by Slabinski to be untenable (Slabinski, 1994). In the year 2000, Italian mathematicians Emilio Spedicato and Antonino Del Popolo developed a model which showed that the polar configuration could hold together, but only for a very short period of time (Spedicato and Del Popolo, 2000). This model did not take into account tidal effects or electromagnetic forces, which offered some hope to the supporters of the Saturn theory, but the formulation of a viable physical model is still awaited. {At
https://www.velikovsky.info/saturn-theory/: On Spedicato’s model, Cardona notes that: “.. the results from the equations involved did not confirm the required sustained dynamical stability of the model.[43] 43 On the contrary, it was found that the stability of such an axially aligned system would be lost “rather fast, with its maximum duration corresponding to only about 3 months, when its “expected stability should extend at least over several thousand years”}
__EARTH SURVIVAL PROBLEM
Speaking after Cochrane at the SIS Silver Jubilee conference, historian Peter James said that the most obvious problem with the Saturn Theory was not the lack of a viable physical model, nor the shortage of specific details which had so far been supplied, but how to explain how the Earth - and its inhabitants - could possibly have survived the upheaval of being wrenched from its position which was always close to Saturn and hurled into an independent orbit around the Sun. James suggested that the apparent description of Saturn in ancient writings as a brilliant object could be explained if a large body had crashed into Saturn at around this time and turned the planet into an incandescent ball of vapour, out of which Saturn’s rings were eventually formed (James, 2000).
__PERATT SOLAR WIND
Peratt has shown that an aurora would take the form of an enormous column if the solar wind was one or two orders of magnitude greater than it is at the present time, so the ancients may have witnessed a long-lasting high-energy auroral storm (Sluijs, 2008).
__COMET ENCKE CATASTROPHES
(Clube, 1984). Estimates of the range of diameters of cometary nuclei in the regions beyond Jupiter suggested that, although most would be between 1 and 10 km, there were likely to be a significant number as large as 200 km. Although small by planetary standards, a giant comet of this size could pose a very serious threat to Earth if propelled into the Inner Solar System. Even if there was no direct collision with the Earth, the giant nucleus could well disintegrate under the gravitational influence of the Sun, releasing large amounts of dust and boulders, to cause significant problems for life on Earth. Such a scenario, involving devastation on Earth because of a cluster of impacts over a short period of time, couple with global cooling caused by the dusting of the upper atmosphere, has been termed coherent catastrophism (Steel, 1995). Clube and Napier have argued that the present orbits of Comet Encke, the Taurid meteor stream and several asteroids, e.g. Oljato, indicate that they were all part of the same body, probably the nucleus of a giant comet, a little over 20,000 years ago. This giant comet, proto- Encke, came into the Inner Solar System and began to disintegrate during the Pleistocene epoch. They linked the glacial conditions of the Late Pleistocene to the dusting of the Earth’s atmosphere by some of the breakdown products. This situation eased around 10,000 years ago, allowing temperatures to rise, but remnants of the giant comet continued to threaten the Earth. Clube and Napier have suggested that the Earth encountered a swarm of meteors and cometary debris between around 2,500 and 2,100 BCE, when there appeared to have been a general deterioration in climate, and again at the time of the Exodus, which they dated to 1369 BCE. At times during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, Comet Encke would have appeared as a brilliant object in the morning and evening sky, so myths and legends arising from catastrophes during this period may subsequently have been transferred to deities associated with the planet Venus, which would have been the brightest object in the morning and evening skies after Comet Encke dimmed following further disintegration (Clube and Napier, 1990, pp. 181-204). ... However, questions have been raised about how well the Clube-Napier theory can explain details of ancient literature and ancient art (Cochrane, 1998).
__3200 BC CATASTROPHE
Moving forward a few thousand years, Lonnie Thompson, a geophysicist and climatologist at Ohio State University, has assembled evidence from around the world of an abrupt climate change at approximately 3200 BCE, which was co-incident with structural changes in several emerging civilisations (Thompson, Mosley-Thompson et al, 2006; Thompson, 2010). Plants were covered by the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes at this time, and the Sahara switched from a habitable region to a barren desert. Also, tree rings from Ireland and England were unusually narrow, and there was an acidity peak in Greenland ice-cores (Baillie, 1999, pp. 51, 54). Thompson attributed the various indications of climate change and its consequences at around 3200 BCE to a dramatic fluctuation in solar energy reaching the Earth (
http://www.researchnews.osu.edu/archive/5200event.htm). The University of Vienna geologist, Alexander Tollmann, together with his wife, Edith, had previously proposed that there had been an impact event at around 3150 BCE, following a larger one at around 7640 BCE (which they linked to the legend of Noah’s Flood) (Tollmann and Kristan-Tollmann, 1994). More recently, British engineers Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell have argued, on the basis of their claimed decipherment of an Assyrian inscription, that Sumerian astronomers in 3123 BCE recorded the passage of a fireball across the sky in a low, flat trajectory, heading in the direction of Austria. Bond and Hempsell went on to deduce that the fireball, an Aten asteroid, exploded in the vicinity of Köfels, causing an enormous landslide, of which evidence still exists (Bond and Hempsell, 2008).
__2300 BC CATASTROPHE
Clear indications of climate change, coincident with the collapse of civilisations, are also found at the end of the Early Bronze Age, dated to around 2300 BCE by conventional scholars, and also by Velikovsky in chapter XII of Earth in Upheaval. This was the period of Velikovsky’s proposed catastrophic episode associated with “Jupiter of the Thunderbolt”, when the Old Kingdom of Egypt fell, the impressive Troy II civilisation ended, and the cities of the Jordan plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah, were destroyed by fire from above. Irish oaks show an episode of reduced growth centred on 2345 BCE (Baillie, 1999, p. 54), and the American engineer, Moe Mandelkehr, compiled a wealth of evidence of catastrophic events and rapid climate change at this time, this being presented in a series of papers in the publications of the SIS from 1983 to 2007, and towards the end of that period as a book in three volumes (Mandelkehr, 2006). Similar evidence was also presented by others at the 2nd SIS Cambridge Conference in 1997 (Peiser, Palmer and Bailey, 1998, pp. 93-139).
__OLD KINGDOM CATASTROPHE
Investigations by Fekri Hassan of University College London have demonstrated that the Old Kingdom of Egypt came to an end at a time of droughts and famine (Hassan, 2007). Similarly, a detailed examination at Tell Leilan in northern Syria by a team led by Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss, showed that the climate in the region of this previously thriving site had suddenly become arid at the end of the Early Bronze Age, resulting in its abandonment for a period of several centuries (Weiss, Courty et al, 1993; Kerr, 1998; Marshall, 2012). This seemed to be typical of what happened throughout the Middle East, and a layer of tephra particles at the level of climate change at several sites implicated a volcanic eruption as the cause. On the other hand, Peter James and Nick Thorpe considered it more likely that the prime cause had been an extraterrestrial impact (James and Thorpe, 1999, pp. 50-58). Mandelkehr suggested that, at this time, there had been an encounter with the Taurid complex (Mandelkehr, 2001, 2006), as in the Clube-Napier model. French geologist Marie-Agnès Courty, who had worked with Weiss, found that a dust layer at Tell Leilan and other sites in the Middle East showed evidence of having been formed as a result of an impact into igneous rock (Peiser, Palmer and Bailey, 1998, pp. 93-108). However, no appropriate impact crater has yet been discovered.
369404
[color=#FF0000]2012 EU CATASTROPHISM PAPER HIGHLIGHTS[/color]
Trevor Palmer's 2012 paper, Science and Catastrophism, from Velikovsky to the Present Day
https://www.academia.edu/22585665
[i][color=#00BF00]{Following are excerpts from the above 2012 paper, which have the most significance for my studies. You may find other excerpts there interesting too. I plan to add this to my bibliography as a reference at https://zzzzzzz.substack.com/p/cataclysms-and-ancient-myths.}[/color][/i]
[color=#0000FF]__VENUS COMET TAIL[/color]
Further considerations involving escape velocity apply to Velikovsky’s theory that the object which became the planet Venus left Jupiter as a comet. In part I chapter II of Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky wrote that red dust, followed by gravel, fell on Egypt as the Earth entered deeper into the tail of this comet at the time of the Exodus. Five chapters later, he stated that stones from the same cometary tail fell on the Canaanites in the days of Joshua. It has now been established that cometary tails are formed by the evaporation of volatile material from the nucleus as it passes close to the Sun, with non-volatile material such as dust and gravel being carried along with the escaping gases. Typical comets, with nuclei a few kilometres in diameter, have two tails, one consisting of the gases, which are ionised (i.e. electrically charged), this tail always pointing directly away from the Sun, and the other consisting of dust, gravel and perhaps larger stones, this tail trailing behind the comet in its orbit, and normally appearing as the more spectacular of the two (Burnham, 2000; Steel, 2000, pp. 74-75; Man, 2001). A comet the size of Venus, i.e. one very much larger than a typical comet, could still have an ion tail, but not one containing dust and larger solid material, because the evaporation process could not possibly raise it to a speed in excess of 37,000 km/hr, the escape velocity necessary for solids to escape the gravitational constraints of a body like Venus. Thus, the possibility that Venus once had a cometary tail cannot be excluded, but it would not have been a particularly conspicuous one, and it could not have contained dust, gravel and stones to deposit on the Earth. ... we cannot entirely exclude the possibility that there was a cloud of dust, gravel and stones following Venus, which may have looked like a cometary tail, even though it could not have been thrown out from the planet.
__In the “Saturn Theory” developed during the 1980s by David Talbott and colleagues from the initial ideas of Velikovsky (and to which we shall return later), Venus was no longer thought to have been ejected from Jupiter as a comet, nor to have been a newcomer to the Solar System at the dawn of civilisation. As the theory developed, it was argued that the comet-like appearance of the planet inferred from ancient writings and depicted in rock-art images was the result of the discharge of plasma streamers, this relating to a period much earlier than the time of Velikovsky’s supposed Venus catastrophe (Talbott and Cochrane, 1984; Cochrane, 1988; Talbott, 2008).
[color=#0000FF]__ORBIT CIRCULARIZATION[/color]
Regardless of timescale, British mathematician, Laurence Dixon, showed that considerations of the principles of conservation of energy and angular momentum demonstrated that it would have been possible for Venus to have moved to its present orbit following encounters with the Earth and Mars, but, assuming the masses of the planets remained constant, only if the first contact took place when the Earth was in an orbit in which its average distance from the Sun was around half of what it is now (Dixon, 2001). That is roughly consistent with what Velikovsky wrote in his 1942 summary, but, as currently understood, it would have put the Earth’s position at the time well outside of the “habitable zone”, where water could exist in liquid form at the surface of the planet (Fogg, 1992; Kasting, Whitmire and Reynolds, 1993; Weed, 2002). Neither human beings nor any other animal life could have existed under those conditions.
[color=#0000FF]__VENUS FLIES[/color]
Worlds in Collision: all around the world people have associated the planet Venus with flies {probably due to a Peratt plasma apparition IMO. AI says, "The Maya referred to Venus as Xux Ek’, which translates as “Wasp Star” or “Fly Star”. This name appears in the Dresden Codex and other Maya sources, reflecting a cultural association between the planet Venus and stinging or flying insects."}
[color=#0000FF]__EARLY BRONZE AGE CATASTROPHES[/color]
At the first SIS Cambridge Conference in 1993, John Bimson and Bob Porter, separately, gave assessments of Schaeffer’s findings in the light of subsequent developments in archaeology. They agreed that there was strong evidence of widespread catastrophic destructions of cities at the end of the Early Bronze Age, but the evidence for similar destructions at the end of the Middle Bronze Age, the time of the Venus catastrophe, was much more tenuous. Although there was evidence of earthquake damage at many of the sites, there was nothing to indicate the kind of cosmic catastrophe envisaged by Velikovsky, and the main reason why the destructions at the end of the Middle Bronze Age had seemed of particular significance to Schaeffer was that he found evidence to suggest they had been followed at each site by an occupational gap of 100 – 150 years. However, to Porter, it seemed likely that this apparent hiatus was simply an artefact of the dating procedure used by Schaeffer (Bimson, 1993; Porter, 1993).
[color=#0000FF]__ICE CORES[/color]
Whilst it cannot be said that the ice-core evidence has provided conclusive proof against the theory of a global catastrophe in the fifteenth century BCE, it is evident that it has not provided any positive support for the notion.
[color=#0000FF]__LINEAR SATURN MODEL PROBLEM[/color]
The “polar configuration” hypothesis ... maintains that Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars and Earth once orbited the Sun as a single linear unit, rotating about a point close to Saturn. ... “The most obvious objection to the Saturn theory is its apparent incompatibility with conventional astrophysics. ...{The theory needs} a viable physical model for the polar configuration” An early attempt at such a model (Grubaugh, 1993) was found by Slabinski to be untenable (Slabinski, 1994). In the year 2000, Italian mathematicians Emilio Spedicato and Antonino Del Popolo developed a model which showed that the polar configuration could hold together, but only for a very short period of time (Spedicato and Del Popolo, 2000). This model did not take into account tidal effects or electromagnetic forces, which offered some hope to the supporters of the Saturn theory, but the formulation of a viable physical model is still awaited. {At https://www.velikovsky.info/saturn-theory/: On Spedicato’s model, Cardona notes that: “.. the results from the equations involved did not confirm the required sustained dynamical stability of the model.[43] 43 On the contrary, it was found that the stability of such an axially aligned system would be lost “rather fast, with its maximum duration corresponding to only about 3 months, when its “expected stability should extend at least over several thousand years”}
[color=#0000FF]__EARTH SURVIVAL PROBLEM[/color]
Speaking after Cochrane at the SIS Silver Jubilee conference, historian Peter James said that the most obvious problem with the Saturn Theory was not the lack of a viable physical model, nor the shortage of specific details which had so far been supplied, but how to explain how the Earth - and its inhabitants - could possibly have survived the upheaval of being wrenched from its position which was always close to Saturn and hurled into an independent orbit around the Sun. James suggested that the apparent description of Saturn in ancient writings as a brilliant object could be explained if a large body had crashed into Saturn at around this time and turned the planet into an incandescent ball of vapour, out of which Saturn’s rings were eventually formed (James, 2000).
[color=#0000FF]__PERATT SOLAR WIND[/color]
Peratt has shown that an aurora would take the form of an enormous column if the solar wind was one or two orders of magnitude greater than it is at the present time, so the ancients may have witnessed a long-lasting high-energy auroral storm (Sluijs, 2008).
[color=#0000FF]__COMET ENCKE CATASTROPHES[/color]
(Clube, 1984). Estimates of the range of diameters of cometary nuclei in the regions beyond Jupiter suggested that, although most would be between 1 and 10 km, there were likely to be a significant number as large as 200 km. Although small by planetary standards, a giant comet of this size could pose a very serious threat to Earth if propelled into the Inner Solar System. Even if there was no direct collision with the Earth, the giant nucleus could well disintegrate under the gravitational influence of the Sun, releasing large amounts of dust and boulders, to cause significant problems for life on Earth. Such a scenario, involving devastation on Earth because of a cluster of impacts over a short period of time, couple with global cooling caused by the dusting of the upper atmosphere, has been termed coherent catastrophism (Steel, 1995). Clube and Napier have argued that the present orbits of Comet Encke, the Taurid meteor stream and several asteroids, e.g. Oljato, indicate that they were all part of the same body, probably the nucleus of a giant comet, a little over 20,000 years ago. This giant comet, proto- Encke, came into the Inner Solar System and began to disintegrate during the Pleistocene epoch. They linked the glacial conditions of the Late Pleistocene to the dusting of the Earth’s atmosphere by some of the breakdown products. This situation eased around 10,000 years ago, allowing temperatures to rise, but remnants of the giant comet continued to threaten the Earth. Clube and Napier have suggested that the Earth encountered a swarm of meteors and cometary debris between around 2,500 and 2,100 BCE, when there appeared to have been a general deterioration in climate, and again at the time of the Exodus, which they dated to 1369 BCE. At times during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, Comet Encke would have appeared as a brilliant object in the morning and evening sky, so myths and legends arising from catastrophes during this period may subsequently have been transferred to deities associated with the planet Venus, which would have been the brightest object in the morning and evening skies after Comet Encke dimmed following further disintegration (Clube and Napier, 1990, pp. 181-204). ... However, questions have been raised about how well the Clube-Napier theory can explain details of ancient literature and ancient art (Cochrane, 1998).
[color=#0000FF]__3200 BC CATASTROPHE[/color]
Moving forward a few thousand years, Lonnie Thompson, a geophysicist and climatologist at Ohio State University, has assembled evidence from around the world of an abrupt climate change at approximately 3200 BCE, which was co-incident with structural changes in several emerging civilisations (Thompson, Mosley-Thompson et al, 2006; Thompson, 2010). Plants were covered by the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes at this time, and the Sahara switched from a habitable region to a barren desert. Also, tree rings from Ireland and England were unusually narrow, and there was an acidity peak in Greenland ice-cores (Baillie, 1999, pp. 51, 54). Thompson attributed the various indications of climate change and its consequences at around 3200 BCE to a dramatic fluctuation in solar energy reaching the Earth (http://www.researchnews.osu.edu/archive/5200event.htm). The University of Vienna geologist, Alexander Tollmann, together with his wife, Edith, had previously proposed that there had been an impact event at around 3150 BCE, following a larger one at around 7640 BCE (which they linked to the legend of Noah’s Flood) (Tollmann and Kristan-Tollmann, 1994). More recently, British engineers Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell have argued, on the basis of their claimed decipherment of an Assyrian inscription, that Sumerian astronomers in 3123 BCE recorded the passage of a fireball across the sky in a low, flat trajectory, heading in the direction of Austria. Bond and Hempsell went on to deduce that the fireball, an Aten asteroid, exploded in the vicinity of Köfels, causing an enormous landslide, of which evidence still exists (Bond and Hempsell, 2008).
[color=#0000FF]__2300 BC CATASTROPHE[/color]
Clear indications of climate change, coincident with the collapse of civilisations, are also found at the end of the Early Bronze Age, dated to around 2300 BCE by conventional scholars, and also by Velikovsky in chapter XII of Earth in Upheaval. This was the period of Velikovsky’s proposed catastrophic episode associated with “Jupiter of the Thunderbolt”, when the Old Kingdom of Egypt fell, the impressive Troy II civilisation ended, and the cities of the Jordan plain, including Sodom and Gomorrah, were destroyed by fire from above. Irish oaks show an episode of reduced growth centred on 2345 BCE (Baillie, 1999, p. 54), and the American engineer, Moe Mandelkehr, compiled a wealth of evidence of catastrophic events and rapid climate change at this time, this being presented in a series of papers in the publications of the SIS from 1983 to 2007, and towards the end of that period as a book in three volumes (Mandelkehr, 2006). Similar evidence was also presented by others at the 2nd SIS Cambridge Conference in 1997 (Peiser, Palmer and Bailey, 1998, pp. 93-139).
[color=#0000FF]__OLD KINGDOM CATASTROPHE[/color]
Investigations by Fekri Hassan of University College London have demonstrated that the Old Kingdom of Egypt came to an end at a time of droughts and famine (Hassan, 2007). Similarly, a detailed examination at Tell Leilan in northern Syria by a team led by Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss, showed that the climate in the region of this previously thriving site had suddenly become arid at the end of the Early Bronze Age, resulting in its abandonment for a period of several centuries (Weiss, Courty et al, 1993; Kerr, 1998; Marshall, 2012). This seemed to be typical of what happened throughout the Middle East, and a layer of tephra particles at the level of climate change at several sites implicated a volcanic eruption as the cause. On the other hand, Peter James and Nick Thorpe considered it more likely that the prime cause had been an extraterrestrial impact (James and Thorpe, 1999, pp. 50-58). Mandelkehr suggested that, at this time, there had been an encounter with the Taurid complex (Mandelkehr, 2001, 2006), as in the Clube-Napier model. French geologist Marie-Agnès Courty, who had worked with Weiss, found that a dust layer at Tell Leilan and other sites in the Middle East showed evidence of having been formed as a result of an impact into igneous rock (Peiser, Palmer and Bailey, 1998, pp. 93-108). However, no appropriate impact crater has yet been discovered.