Ancient Mystery Unveiled: 8,000-Year-Old Drawings Found Within a Two-Billion-Year-Old Crater Challenge History
According to archaeologists Shiona Moodley and Jens Kriek, who worked at the Vredefort Crater site, Khoi-San mythology believed in a three-tiered universe. The top tier hosted their god and spirits of the dead, the middle tier represented the material or physical world, and the bottom tier held the dead. Snakes were believed to occupy all three realms and were believed to be creatures “of rain.”
The asteroid which created the crater was likely between six and nine miles wide and traveling at almost 43,500 miles per hour when it hit the earth. The impact area is southwest of present-day Johannesburg and is a half of a mile deep.
“If you consider that the original impact crater was a shallow bowl like you would serve food in, and you were able to slice horizontally through the bowl progressively, you would see that the bowl’s diameter will decrease with each slice you take off,” impact processes expert Roger Gibson of the University of the Witwatersrand explained to NASA’s Earth Observation.
According to Gibson, the exposed rocks at the site of the crater “preserve an almost continuous record spanning almost one-third of Earth’s history,” and now seems to preserve a chunk of human history, as well.
Next, read five mysteries uncovered by Google Earth. And then, learn how giant craters opened up across Siberia’s “End of the Earth” peninsula.
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