Graham Hancock says that enough studies have been done at this point for him to conclude that a series of cometary impacts that occurred between 11,600-12,800 years ago were the cause of a mass extinction event. In the work of Hancock and others, including Dr. Victor Clube, retired Dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford and former astronomer at the Royal Observatory, as well as Dr. Richard Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California.
These and others believe that the collapse of several Bronze Age civilizations in the Fertile Crescent was caused by meteoric impacts from the breakup of a larger body that is today known as Comet Encke and its accompanying Taurid complex, a stream of matter that is the largest in the inner Solar System. Taurid meteor showers occur twice per year but the stream has a cycle of activity that peaks every 2,500 to 3,000 years, when there are larger impactors. The Royal Observatory in Scotland estimates that the next peak involving large-sized meteors from the Taurids will begin sometime between the years 2400-3000 AD. Some astronomers note that dates for megalith structures such as Stonehenge are associated with these peaks.
Encke and the Taurids are believed to be remnants of a much larger comet, which has disintegrated over the past 20,000 to 30,000 years, breaking into several pieces and releasing material by normal cometary activity or perhaps occasionally by close encounters with the gravitational field of Earth or other planets. Due to the stream’s size, the Earth takes several weeks to pass through it, causing an extended period of meteor activity, compared with the much smaller periods of activity in other showers. The Taurids are also made up of weightier material, pebbles instead of dust grains. Many astronomers consider these to be the cause of the 1908 Tunguska event. I wrote about all of this at length in this book.
Graham believes that we are capable of solving this problem, of sweeping the cosmic environment. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s covered in this interview with the great Graham Hancock.