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Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)

https://archaeologyworlds.com/5500-year-old-sumerian-star-map-recorded/
35•griffzhowl•2h ago

Comments

INTPenis•1h ago
That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps

It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.

adzm•1h ago
A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.
jacquesm•33m ago
It is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.
urxvtcd•1h ago
We found an ancient tablet, dated it, reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it, reconstructed the night sky on that day, five and a half thousand years ago, found the orbit of this thing, and connected it to a geological formation thousands of kilometers away. Humans can do some amazing stuff.
arto•34m ago
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html

http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...

metalman•32m ago
slop
mjd•24m ago
Even if you were right, your comment would have been a useless waste of time.

But the article appears to be a copy of a press release from the University of Bristol from 2008.

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2008/212017945233.html

mjd•9m ago
There is something here that I do not understand. The article claims that

“[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”

But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.

For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

Update:

The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:

“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”

The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:

“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”

Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings

https://antirender.com/
1237•iambateman•14h ago•278 comments

Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)

https://archaeologyworlds.com/5500-year-old-sumerian-star-map-recorded/
36•griffzhowl•2h ago•8 comments

Show HN: I trained a 9M speech model to fix my Mandarin tones

https://simedw.com/2026/01/31/ear-pronunication-via-ctc/
246•simedw•9h ago•89 comments

YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other Browsers

https://piunikaweb.com/2026/01/28/youtube-background-play-samsung-internet-brave/
88•croes•2h ago•61 comments

A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/sicilian-man-leonardo-sciascia-rise-mafia-struggle...
41•Thevet•3d ago•21 comments

Direct Current Data Centers

https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/direct-current-data-centers/
9•jk_tech•10h ago•0 comments

A Step Behind the Bleeding Edge: A Philosophy on AI in Dev

https://somehowmanage.com/2026/01/22/a-step-behind-the-bleeding-edge-monarchs-philosophy-on-ai-in...
8•Ozzie_osman•1d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Phage Explorer

https://phage-explorer.org/
64•eigenvalue•4h ago•11 comments

Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent

https://peerweb.lol/
261•dtj1123•13h ago•91 comments

Ashcan Comic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcan_comic
34•benbreen•1d ago•7 comments

An anecdote about backward compatibility

https://blog.plover.com/2026/01/26/#wrterm
35•speckx•4d ago•4 comments

My Ridiculously Robust Photo Management System (Immich Edition)

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-photo-management-system-immich-edition/
21•jmathai•2d ago•12 comments

Naples' 1790s civil war was intensified by moral panic over Real Analysis (2023)

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/foundational-anxieties-modern-mathematics-and-the-political-i...
35•OgsyedIE•6h ago•7 comments

Moltbook

https://www.moltbook.com/
1474•teej•1d ago•697 comments

HTTP Cats

https://http.cat/
369•surprisetalk•20h ago•65 comments

Disrupting the largest residential proxy network

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/disrupting-largest-residential-proxy-net...
165•cdrnsf•2d ago•143 comments

Kimi K2.5 Technical Report [pdf]

https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K2.5/blob/master/tech_report.pdf
302•vinhnx•17h ago•112 comments

Stonebraker on CAP theorem and Databases (2010)

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/04/stonebraker-on-cap-theorem-and-databases/
67•onurkanbkrc•10h ago•29 comments

Designing a Passively Safe API

https://www.danealbaugh.com/articles/passively-safe-apis
22•dalbaugh•4d ago•3 comments

Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/01/27/surely-it-has-to-be-soon/
308•Wilsoniumite•1d ago•439 comments

CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider

https://physicsworld.com/a/cern-accepts-1bn-in-private-cash-towards-future-circular-collider/
4•zeristor•16m ago•1 comments

The engineer who invented the Mars rover suspension in his garage [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKSPk_0N4Jc
321•UltraSane•4d ago•45 comments

P vs. NP and the Difficulty of Computation: A ruliological approach

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/p-vs-np-and-the-difficulty-of-computation-a-ruliologi...
72•tzury•12h ago•33 comments

Ask HN: Do you still physical calculators?

3•speedylight•40m ago•0 comments

International Collection of Tongue Twisters (2018)

https://tongue-twister.net
19•NaOH•4d ago•5 comments

Coding is when we're least productive

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/coding-is-when-were-least-productive/
24•vinhnx•8h ago•7 comments

Starlink updates privacy policy to allow consumer data to train

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musks-starlink-updates-privacy-policy-230853500.html
57•malchow•4h ago•15 comments

Code is cheap. Show me the talk

https://nadh.in/blog/code-is-cheap/
227•ghostfoxgod•22h ago•195 comments

Declassifying JUMPSEAT: an American pioneer in space

https://www.nro.gov/news-media-featured-stories/news-media-archive/News-Article/Article/4392223/d...
37•mkmk•2d ago•15 comments

The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-100-billion-megadeal-between-openai-and-nvidia-is-on-ice-aa3025e3
304•pixelesque•10h ago•221 comments