An Alberta couple's archeological retirement project at their lakeside cottage southwest of Edmonton has produced artifacts that are now at the centre of one of science's most controversial debates: whether a massive comet or meteorite struck a glacier-encased Hudson Bay about 13,000 years ago, wiped out the mammoths and other Ice Age "megafauna" and destroyed the Clovis culture that represented the first major wave of human migration in the New World.
The hotly disputed theory was recently challenged by a 16-member research team from the United States, Britain and Belgium, which published a major study in February concluding that the odds of a four-kilometre-wide comet exploding across the Laurentide Ice Sheet that covered ancient Canada "are infinitesimal" given the lack of clear evidence, such as layers of so-called "shocked" rocks and minerals transformed by an Earth-shaking mega-blast.
"No impact craters of the appropriate size and age are known, and no unambiguously shocked material or other features diagnostic of impact have been found" to prove the theory, those authors stated in monograph published by the American Geophysical Union. "The climatological, paleontological and archeological events that the (proponents) are attempting to explain are not unique, are arguably misinterpreted" and "do not require an impact."
But last week, a team of 29 scientists from the U.S., Mexico, the Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic contradicted the February findings in a new, pro-impact study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And among the 18 archeological or geological hot spots around the world that the researchers identified as having evidence of a catastrophic meteoric or cometary explosion about 13,000 years ago was the Chobot site at Buck Lake, Alta.
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