[Rockhounds] Archivists uncover earliest evidence of a person being killed by a meteorite

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Our planet experiences falls of meteorites with different airburst and
ground impact risk. Some of these meteors can survive after the atmospheric
passage and fall into the ground. Although there are claims that people
were hit and killed by meteorites in history, the historical records do not
prove this fact so far. This issue might be due to the fact that either the
manuscript was written in a language other than English or there is not
enough interest in historical records. To the best of our knowledge, we
show the first proof of an event ever that a meteorite hit and killed a man
and left paralyzed another on August 22, 1888 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, based
on three manuscripts written in Ottoman Turkish that were extracted from
the General Directorate of State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic
of Turkey. This event was also reported to Abdul Hamid II (34th sultan of
the Ottoman Empire) by the governor of Sulaymaniyah. These findings suggest
other historical records may still exist that describe other events that
caused death and injuries by meteorites.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/maps.13469

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/archivists-uncover-earliest-evidence-person-being-killed-meteorite