There are days when I think it’s a good thing that planets get so many opportunities to do the whole planet thing. A lot can go wrong in the history of a world, and new research has found that not all attacks from space leave dramatic impacts on the land; sometimes, the evidence is hidden in the histories and arts of human societies.

Throughout the North American indigenous cultures, there are stories of a great terror coming from the sky: the Miami called it a horned serpent, the Shawnee saw it as a sky panther that tore down the forest, the Ottawa said the Sun fell from the sky, and the Wyandot recount a dark cloud that rolled across the sky and was destroyed by a fiery dart. From modern-day Florida to Ottawa, these stories are told.

These stories mirror the descriptions of the people who witnessed the Tunguska event in Siberia, which is now believed to be the explosion of a comet or asteroid that made it into the atmosphere but not to the surface of the land. The primary difference is that the stories we hear from the indigenous peoples of the Americas have been passed down for generations, and it is then easy to label them as mythology instead of as descriptive accounts by pre-science people of an actual event. Which it appears is what they are.

Research teams exploring the end of the Hopewell culture have uncovered evidence for a massive air explosion in the form of large numbers of meteorites spread across multiple Hopewell sites. According to lead researcher Kenneth Tankersley: These micrometeorites have a chemical fingerprint. Cosmic events like asteroids and comet airbursts leave behind high quantities of a rare element known as platinum. The problem is platinum also occurs in volcanic eruptions. So we also look for another rare element found in non-terrestrial events such as meteorite impact craters — iridium. And we found a spike in both, iridium and platinum.

In addition to meteorites being strewn throughout the sites, they also found jewelry and musical instruments made out of meteorites.

While the stories and artifacts are awesome, they are also tied to a time the society collapsed. The layers with meteorites are tied to ash and signs of massive regional fires. Co-author of this work, David Lentz, explains: It looks like this event was very injurious to agriculture. People didn’t have good ways to store corn for a long period of time. Losing a crop or two would have caused widespread suffering.

This work was published in the journal Scientific Reports and is a strong reminder that the Universe is trying to kill us, and sometimes, it succeeds.

More Information

UC Cincinnati press release

“The Hopewell airburst event, 1699–1567 years ago (252–383 CE),” Kenneth Barnett Tankersley et al., 2022 February 1, Scientific Reports