So I had never heard of this before this year, when a friend of mine dropped a claim on me that "something big happened 12,000 years ago, something no one has been able to explain, and it changed history". He's since linked me to a Stephen Mehler (I don't really know him, so not sure how credible of a source this is) video talking about this supposed event, talking about how a ton of different cultures/ancient lores talk about some giant event that happened around that time, and also gone on to claim it could be linked to things like the extinction of mega-fauna and collapses of several advanced civilizations around that time.
I guess my question is - is this total BS? Or is there actually some firm evidence that supports the existence of this event?
this sounds like a convoluted reference to the conjectured Younger Dryas Impact Event, where about 12,000 years ago, several asteroids are conjectured to have struck the Earth. as the hypothesis goes, their impacts were largely over North America, South America, Asia and Europe
the impact event's existence is controversial as the evidence is contradictory. no craters have been conclusively identified although there are suspects, leading the investigators to hypothesize the impacts were mostly airbursts.
one paper you can examine (on the against side) is: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155470.
i only know the fringes of what Mehler talks about but the only culture hypothesized to have been destroyed was the hunter-gatherer Clovis culture in the United States.