It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.

http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...

This doesn't even make any sense. A 1km asteroid going many kilometers a second entered at a six degree angle, tore through hundreds of miles of atmosphere without burning up or breaking up, hit a mountain causing a landslide and only then turned into a 5km fireball and traveled down the valley (at a height of ~1500 meters above the valley floor) and just sort of evaporated?

I don't think physics works the way the author of this piece thinks physics works.

Notably the article linked here doesn't even show the object! It only reproduces images of badly made replicas.

I don't know enough about the event to figure out the likelihood of either hypothesis, but this other data point is something to keep in mind.

“[The tablet] is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC”

But radiocarbon dating of trees buried in the landslide seems to have reliably dated the landslide to 7500 BC.

For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

Update:

The Wikipedia article about the coauthor Mark Hempsell says:

“Hempsell got public audience as author of the book "A Sumerian Observation of the Köfels' Impact Event", with Alan Bond proposes a theory not accepted by the scientific community…”

The link posted in this thread by user arto calls the theory “pseudoscience”:

“Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians…”

Now it seems very suspicious that the article claims that the tablet is from 3123 BC, when it was excavated from the palace of Ashurbanipal (650 BC).

vibe theorising