After recent academic papers showing strong evidence for a Younger Dryas impact, are there any efforts by historians to revise the timeline of ancient mankind?

by Sendmyabar

Papers from two different academic institutions, the first being Kansas U and the second being the Journal of Geology from the University of Chicago, have shown considerable evidence of a civilisation-changing event circa 12,500 B.C.

Is there any effort in the field of ancient historians to revise the timeline of our species and development of civilisation based on this new evidence?

CommodoreCoCo

So the short answer is "No," and the long answer isn't an answer but a question: why should we?

We have been roughly aware of dramatic changes at the end of what we now call the Pleistocene since the 1820s with Jens Esmarck's early theories of receding glaciers. The earliest studies of Clovis sites, such as this one on Naco, Arizona by Haury, et al. from 1959, identify significant environmental changes immediately after the Clovis occupation ends as indicated by the "black mat." The YDI theory to explain such changes is hardly "new," with the first major publications on it coming out in 2007 as an explanation for paleoclimate research from as early as 1989, though it has not gone without criticism. Our image of terminal Pleistocene humans has, for the past few decades, been developed in light of these substantial, global climate events- YDI offers an explanation for those events, but the effects it explains were known before. More fundamentally, this pair of papers offers geologic and paleoclimatological evidence for a geologic event. For us to reapproach our anthropological timeline, we would need anthropological evidence. This 2010 article from Holliday and Metzler presents some of the issues with the post-Clovis population decline theory; the comments at the end are more important and worth a read for understanding what new evidence would be useful for helping us clarify this time period- most of it is independent of YDI even happening or not.

Searocksandtrees

Hi, just FYI questions on deep prehistory are worth x-posting to our sister sub, /r/AskAnthropology. While there are some anthropologists here, events from that far back are typically beyond their scope.