In earth sediments around Tall el-Hammam, an excavation site near the Dead Sea in Jordan, objects have been excavated that indicate that something catastrophic happened there about 3,600 years ago.
There were ceramics that boiled, large buildings smashed to pieces and human skeletal parts that appear to have been torn apart by a huge force.
A US-based group of archaeologists finds it most likely that a large meteorite crashed into the earth and exploded in the atmosphere above Tall el-Hammam, according to their findings published in the scientific journal Nature Scientific Reports.
Powdered buildings
The research is based, among other things, on 15 years of excavations of the area and calculations of what the consequences of a meteorite impact would be.
"This was followed by a high-temperature, hyper-velocity detonation wave that demolished and pulverized clay bricks across the city, leveled the city and caused widespread human deaths," the researchers write in the study.
All towns and cities within a couple of miles radius of Tall el-Hammams then seem to have been completely abandoned for 300 to 600 years.
The researchers explain this by saying that salt from, for example, the Dead Sea came to be spread as a result of the eruption, so that the soil became barren.
Looking at how different substances and materials have reacted and changed - there is, for example, very shocked quartz in the area - the researchers estimate that the temperature at at least a short time must have exceeded 2,000 degrees.
They compare the explosion to that which took place in the Siberian Tunguska in 1908, where a bolid caused a bang whose force was equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs of the kind dropped on Hiroshima in World War II.
Biblical track?
There were three cities in the Jordan Valley at that time and Tall el-Hammam is said to have been the largest of them.
An estimated 50,000 people lived in the area at the time.
One of the three cities was Jericho, which was destroyed at about the same time.
The researchers note that there are no other obvious explanations for the destruction there and that Jericho was also abandoned for a long time.
Given time and place, scholars draw loose parallels to the Bible.
Could the fireball that destroyed Tall el-Hammam have been the basis for the story of Sodom and Gomorrah?
“The description in Genesis of an urban center in the Dead Sea area agrees with being an eyewitness account of a cosmic explosion in the air.
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.: stones that fell from the sky, fire that came from the sky, thick smoke rose from the fires, a large city was destroyed, city dwellers were killed and the area's crops were destroyed ", they write in the study, although they emphasize that it is nothing more than speculation.