The terrible impact crater recently found in Heilongjiang (China) may be evidence of the largest alien object that has ever crashed to Earth since Homo sapiens appeared.

According to the South China Morning Post, many large impact craters have been found across the Earth, but most of them were formed before our Homo sapiens species appeared on the planet.

But the particularly large and deep impact crater recently discovered in Yilan county (near Harbin, in Heilongjiang province, China) was only formed 49,000 years ago.

The alien attacker was identified as an asteroid about 100 meters wide, which plunged vertically and created a special type of impact crater. It is estimated that the impact released hundreds of times more energy than the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima (Japan). It was much smaller than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, but traveled much faster

The deadly heat and shockwave created by the impact were strong enough to melt and turn granite into glass, devastating an area with a radius of tens of kilometers around the impact crater. The original impact crater was 579 meters deep and is now hidden in a desolate, wooded area.

According to Professor Chen Ming from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry (under the Chinese Academy of Sciences), this alien attack would be an “absolute disaster” for the Stone Age population in the area, possibly including our Homo sapiens ancestors and several other human species. This is the area where evidence has appeared of individuals of different species of the genus Human, belonging to extinct lineages.

The research was just published in the scientific journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.