[urxvtcd]

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.

[abainbridge]

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]

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]

Eh, so too good to be true.

[qubex]

I find it an absolutely amazing (note I did not use ‘incredible’ on purpose: I consider this explanation very credible indeed). We have a creditable record of a meteor impact dated exactly 29 June 3123 BC. That’s 1,880,145 days ago as of today. It simply boggles my mind.

[beloch]

"The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels."

---------

This is what I find most amazing: Sub-degree accuracy in a measurement from before chariots. The people of this time had donkey-pulled battle carts that were so slow they had to be abandoned if there was a retreat, but they were able to record and measure astronomical events this accurately.

It's also mind-boggling to consider why they were making such observations. It was all about omens that could determine the success of harvests or battles. There is certainly some of what we might now consider scientific thought going on here. They produced omen tables that exhaustively covered every combination of events they could think of, not yet realizing that some combinations were impossible (e.g. A Lunar eclipse at high noon).

Omens sound silly today, but the fundamental motivation of early astronomers was to make sense of what was going on in the heavens in order to help make better decisions on the ground. If everyone believed in these omens, they had real power and the predictions these astronomers made may have had large impacts.

[uoaei]

Humanity is awesome because we are naturally constrained in semantic-space, making it relatively straightforward to reverse engineer things that ancient humans made even if we share basically zero overlap in culture.

[xenospn]

Not true! We loved beer then and we definitely still love it now.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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]

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?

[baxtr]

Or… we are very good at telling amazing stories that make sense.

[scrollop]

And then they make tiktok