Part of the Casswiki article series Books
The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization is a scholarly work by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith, first published in 2006.
The book presents an excellent case for attributing a great deal of the mass extinctions, migrations, “plagues” and other tragic events in the past to comets, cometary debris, asteroids and other cosmic “stuff”. The authors present evidence for a massive cometary bombardment of North America during the final centuries of the last ice age, approximately 13,000 years ago. The resulting destruction was immense, and led to mass extinctions, and the events left behind a wide variety of archaeological clues scattered over the plains, bays, and lakes of Canada and the United States. The memory of these events has been preserved in the form of a variety of end-of-the-world myths.
This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of research showing that Earth was once host to regular encounters with massive comets and their explosive fragments.