I found this while doing a little research....interesting, but the theory of an asteroid impact induced great flood myth was apparantly ridiculed by mainstream scientists...oh well, thats to be expected! The whole article called 'Cosmic Dancers on History’s Stage? The Permanent Revolution in the Earth Sciences' is a long read, heres part of the Taurid Demons section...
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:...lnk&cd=4&gl=us
Even within the short history of Homo sapiens, the most violent events onEarth have been extraterrestrial impacts.’John Lewis111Like the supporters of Gaia, the advocates of the Shiva hypothesis are asmall but seminal scientific minority. In light of the overwhelming evi-dence that impact cratering has remained a significant geological processthroughout the Phanerozoic aeon, they have built a respectable case forits episodic role in detouring evolution down new and unpredictablepathways. And, together with other neo-catastrophists, they have addedimpressive scaffolding to the Gould-Eldredge theory of punctuatedequilibrium and chaotic Earth history. The Impact Hypothesis, in otherwords, now has a firm purchase within geological time (107to 109years),and an important beachhead, established by the k/t debate, within evo-lutionary time (106to 108years). But what about ecological time (104to106years) and cultural time (102to 104years)? Have impact events lefttheir catastrophic imprints within human history? Few questions inEarth science are more controversial.In 1993, for example, two Austrian scientists published a book in whichthey claimed to solve the mystery of ‘the darkest chapter in human his-tory’: the deluge catastrophe chronicled in the Gilgamesh Epic, the OldTestament, the Vedas and scores of oral traditions all over the world.Edith Kristan-Tollmann and Alexander Tollman marshalled anthropo-logical and geological evidence to support their thesis that seven largecometary fragments had struck the ocean nearly ten millennia ago, caus-ing terrible tsunamis now recalled as the Flood. On the one hand, theycited numerous ancient accounts of ‘seven invading stars’, ranging fromthe ‘great burning mountains’ of the Jewish prophet Henoch to the ‘fierysons of Muspels’ in Icelandic saga, which they interpreted as contempo-raneous with flood legends. On the other hand, they presented ‘geologi-cal proof’ in the form of tektites (glassy impact ejecta) ‘with an age ofnearly ten thousand years’ from Australia and Vietnam, as well as thesmall Kofels impact crater in the Austrian Tyrol—caused, they said, by a‘splinter’ of the Noachian comet.112110Sara Genuth, ‘Newton and the Ongoing Teleological Role of Comets’, in Thrower,Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, pp. 302–3. Halley’s assertion—with which Newtonapparently concurred—that the earth was ‘the wreck of a former world’ caused consterna-tion in Church of England circles and led to his loss of the Savilian chair in astronomy atOxford. See Kubrin, in ibid., pp. 64–6.111Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice, p. 157. 112Edith Kristan–Tollmann and Alexander Tollmann, ‘The Youngest Big Impact onEarth Deduced from Geological and Historical Evidence’, Terra Nova, no. 6, 1994, pp.209–17.
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77Although the Tollmans created a predictable stir in the popular media,they were punctually massacred in the scientific press. In one review, ateam of eminent meteoriticists, including R.A.F. Grieve, dismissed their‘evidence’ as ‘sheer fantasy’ and characterized their approach as ‘pseudo-science in the tradition of Donnelly and Velikovsky’. The critics system-atically demolished their tektite dating as well as their exaggeratedclaims for the Kofels structure.113Of course, this is hardly the first case where the self-proclaimed confir-mation for biblical or mythical events has turned into a fiasco. The wholeintellectual terrain of archaeological and historical catastrophism hasbeen polluted by far too many bizarre hypotheses and spurious discover-ies. Rare or unique astronomical phenomena have become the staple dietof a burgeoning genre of fringe-science, mega-disaster books.114Yet, atthe risk of ridicule, cometary astronomers—led by Victor Clube atOxford and William Napier at Edinburgh—have persevered in arguinga scientific case for cosmic intervention in human history. They claim, infact, that some ancient societies almost surely experienced the shatteringequivalent of nuclear warfare. In an important restatement of the theory that they have been develop-ing over the last twenty years, Clube and Napier—together with DavidAsher and Duncan Steel from the Anglo-Australian Observatory—con-trast two different interpretations of impact tectonics. ‘Stochastic cata-strophism’, as they call it, is concerned with the extra-terrestrialinfluence upon the geological longue durée. It relies on averaged crateringrates, derived from known terrestrial structures and from the impactrecords of the Moon and inner planets. The history of small, but morefrequent impactors (less than one kilometre in diameter) is discriminatedagainst in this approach because they do not individually produce globalconsequences, and because terrestrial erosion more quickly erases theirfootprints.115Moreover, the data set is too coarse-grained to resolve tem-poral heterogeneities—clustered events, for instance—within frequen-cies of less than one million years. As a result, it cannot differentiatewhat Clube and Napier call the ‘microstructure of terrestrial cata-strophism’ within the time periods relevant to human evolution.116‘Coherent catastrophism’, on the other hand, contends that ‘the overalleffect of giant comets on terrestrial evolution is far more complex thanthat of single giant impacts.’ Impact events operate on all time-scales,and punctuational crises are ‘hierarchically nested in the overall mannerof glacial-interglacials’. To visualize this entire spectrum of phenomena,especially the influence of small-body impacts, Clube and Napier haveaugmented cratering data and near-Earth-object censuses with a wealth113Alexander Deutsch et al., ‘The Impact-Flood Connection: Does It Exist?’, Terra Nova,no. 6, pp. 644–50. Ignatius Donnelly was the apocalyptic American populist, whoseRagnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, was a sensation of the 1880s; while Immanuel Veli-kovsky, of course, is the notorious author of Worlds in Collision, 1950.114For a recent example, see D. Allan and J. Declair, When the Earth Nearly Died: Compel-ling Evidence of a Catastrophic World Change—9,5000 BC, Bath 1995.115For a discussion of the dependence of the ‘decay constant’ on crater size, see S. Yabu-shita, ‘Are Periodicities in Crater Formations and Mass Extinctions Related?’, Earth, Moonand Planets, no. 64, 1994, pp. 209–10.116D. Asher, S. Clube, W. Napier and D. Steel, ‘Coherent Catastrophism’, Vistas inAstronomy, no. 38, 1994, pp. 5, 20–1.
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78of historical data, including medieval European records and Chineseastronomical archives.117While other researchers, moreover, have been absorbed in the search for cat-astrophic celebrities, like billion-megaton exterminator bolides, they havebeen focused on the study of the more prosaic population of communitionproducts—small Apollo asteroids, meteoroidal swarms, zodiacal dust—resulting from the break-up of giant comets. Although the comets onlyarrive in Earth-crossing orbits at 100,000–year-or-so intervals, their debris‘interact catastrophically with the Earth on relatively short time-scales:102–105years’. Clube, in fact, has argued that because of the frequency ofsmall-body impacts, terrestrial catastrophism may be ‘uniformitarian’ at alltime-scales greater than a millennium. Thus, a ‘new world view, embracingthe effects of the full range of “small bodies” in the Solar System...hasbecome one of the outstanding imperatives of our time’.