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Possible Human Observation of the Impact

The North American continent was populated by the Clovis Culture for several thousands of years prior to the Younger Dryas. If our proposed impact had occurred 12 to 14 thousand years ago, there is a possibility that the event was witnessed by humans. If it was witnessed, and those who witnessed survived the distribution of impact debris, how would they have memorialized the event. Perhaps a cave painting, or an effigy mound?The following quotes are extracted from the Wikipedia entry:

The Great Serpent Mound is a 1,330-foot-long, three-foot-high prehistoric effigy mound located on a plateau of the Serpent Mound crater along Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County, Ohio. Maintained within a park by the Ohio Historical Society, it has been designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of Interior. The Serpent Mound of Ohio was first reported by Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis in their historic volume Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, published in 1848 by the newly founded Smithsonian Museum. Researchers have attributed construction of the mound to three different indigenous cultures. Based on the use of more advanced technology and additional evidence, scholars now generally believe that members of the Fort Ancient culture built it about 1070 CE.

Certainly the largest effigy mound built in North America would likely reference a significant event. The Serpent mound is know to be at least 3,000 years old. Could it be older - maintained over the eons as a memorial by the indigenous populations? The alignment of the structure has been attributed to the generic cosmological connection with the summer solstice. Others have suggested mappings of the constellation Draco.

Scholars propose the mound was built by members of the Adena culture, the Hopewell culture, or the Fort Ancient culture. In the 18th century the missionary John Heckewelder reported that Native Americans of the Lenni Lenape (later Delaware) nation told him the Allegheny people had built the mound, as they lived in the Ohio Valley in an ancient time. Both Lenape and Iroquois legends tell of the Allegheny or Allegewi People, sometimes called Tallegewi. They were said to have lived in the Ohio Valley in a remotely ancient period, believed pre-Adena, i.e., Archaic or pre-Woodland period (before 1200 BCE). Because many academics did not consider Native American oral traditions reliable as history, and archaeological evidence suggests separation between ancient cultures and more recent Native American cultures, academic accounts do not propose the Allegheny Nation built the Serpent Mound.

One striking feature to us is the presence of a ovoid shaped object. A detailed mapping was done by by Ephraim Squire and Edwin Davis in their historic volume Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, published in 1848. This graphic clearly shows the ovoid form at the "mouth" end of the serpent.



Unfortunately, the mound does not look like this today, as it was "reconstructed" in 1865 by Putnam. A later graphic depicts the serpent's curves as more pronounced. This configuration more closely follows the shape of the mound as it exists today. A great many details are significantly altered. The reconstruction may have simply obliterated the original in an attempt to be more dramatic.



Our interpretation of the effigy - in the context of an impact hypothesis - would suggest the snake is representing the arc across the sky of a blob of ejecta. The ejecta was emplaced in our suggested oval "splat" geoform, creating an identifiable characteristic to the witnesses. Thus, the snake is depositing the landform after "springing from the location at it's tail. Can the tail spiral and the dot in the center of the oval be used as a sighting tool? The next graphic here displays a high resolution LiDAR image and the Squire & Davis graphics as overlays in Google Earth:



If so where would it point to? The following graphic, created in Google earth, extends the sightline outward.



We recognize that correlation this might be only a coincidence. It is also a challenge to suggest that this monument, along with the oral histories of the indigenous survivors of the Clovis culture, could have successfully maintained the relevance of such an incidence across 10,000 years. The LiDAR image does identify several Carolina-like depression in the hilltop to the north.



A set of KML is available for use in Google Earth.