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this could've been the source of the biblical flood story inherited from ancient Mesopotamian legends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth https://en.wikip

this could've been the source of the biblical flood story inherited from ancient Mesopotamian legends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth Sumerian is a language isolate unlike any other neighbor languages and their civilization might have developed in "The Gulf Oasis" (the size of Great Britain) for tens of thousands of years before being flooded around ~8k BC https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-beneath-persian-gulf.html https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-... The hardships of that migration escaping the flood, and the fact multiple tribes had to suddenly co-exist in a crowded area with limited resources probably accelerated development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, and by extension, civilization.

ncmncm 5y ago
We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood. The Persian Gulf filled in over centuries as the oceans rose and swallowed up Doggerland, Sundaland, and Sahul. But it would be hard to keep oral histories consistent with actual drawn-out timelines. There are suspicions about a Black Sea deluge as the Bosphorus opened and closed, but nothing conclusive. Similarly, there are hints at a big meteor strike in the Gulf a few thousand years later that could have generated a huge tsunami. Floods are pretty common on coastlines and near rivers, and easy to confuse with other events as time goes by.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  Disclaimer: Not saying this is how any of this happened (people that actually looked into sources and did research have probably considered this). I always wonder how much exeggaration might be involved. Whether oral or at some point written down. Exeggarating and making things more dramatic seems like something that could easily happen over a timespan of a few hundred/thousand years, couldn't it? Basically a story of how 'our ancestors' slowly moved from one place to another to another to another as 'the sea kept swallowing up settlements' (as in over 500 years every 30 years or so they had to move a bit) could slowly morph into a catastrophic event, especially if the timeframes are such that these become children's stories. "Your grandma used to live over there. See where the fisher boats are now. That's where your grandma was born. And one day the sea swallowed it.". The fact that it took 10 years of minor floods until there finally was one bad enough to make them actually move gets lost and converted onto a catastrophic event.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    That is all absolutely plausible. If each generation, for centuries, could point to where their gradparents had lived, now under water, that could really cement a tradition.
- kkoncevicius 5y ago
  > We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood. I think we do have a lot evidence about that. We just haven't observed it during the past 1,000 years. There is one nice small-scale introduction video about this happening in the USA [1], but I remember reading recent scientific papers that talk about it as a world wide event. They put it roughly 12,000 years ago (not 2,000 years ago). Also the story of the discovered - J. Harlen Bretz - as sad as it is, is quite telling about how unscientific scientists can get. Mainstream geology rejected his ideas mainly because "his theory implied the potential possibilities of a Biblical flood, which the scientific community strongly rejected" [2]. In other words - they have already assumed that things described in the Bible must be nonsense, hence, any facts pointing to the contrary must be interpreted in a different way. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZgfPGtQEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZgfPGtQEs [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz#The_Spokane_floods:_an_outrageous_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz#The_Spokane_flo...
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    The seas started filling in 20kya, from 200m down. There were periods when the water rose at a rate of a meter in a century, for centuries, which corresponds to the shoreline retreating 20 meters or more, each century, in many places. All that water is still there; we think of it as just part of the ocean now, but there were millions of square miles of dry land all now underwater. The flood Bretz elucidated, that carved out the Washington State badlands at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, was catastrophic, scouring thousands of square miles down to bedrock and carving the Columbia River gorge in a matter of weeks, but would not account for flood myths on the opposite side of the world, even though it also signalled an increase in the rate of sea level rise. There have of course been extraordinarily large tsunamis, too, that would be generate their own stories, and regional floods. It is not hard to see how flood stories woul merge over time.

ncmncm 5y ago

We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood. The Persian Gulf filled in over centuries as the oceans rose and swallowed up Doggerland, Sundaland, and Sahul. But it would be hard to keep oral histories consistent with actual drawn-out timelines. There are suspicions about a Black Sea deluge as the Bosphorus opened and closed, but nothing conclusive. Similarly, there are hints at a big meteor strike in the Gulf a few thousand years later that could have generated a huge tsunami. Floods are pretty common on coastlines and near rivers, and easy to confuse with other events as time goes by.

tharkun__ 5y ago
Disclaimer: Not saying this is how any of this happened (people that actually looked into sources and did research have probably considered this). I always wonder how much exeggaration might be involved. Whether oral or at some point written down. Exeggarating and making things more dramatic seems like something that could easily happen over a timespan of a few hundred/thousand years, couldn't it? Basically a story of how 'our ancestors' slowly moved from one place to another to another to another as 'the sea kept swallowing up settlements' (as in over 500 years every 30 years or so they had to move a bit) could slowly morph into a catastrophic event, especially if the timeframes are such that these become children's stories. "Your grandma used to live over there. See where the fisher boats are now. That's where your grandma was born. And one day the sea swallowed it.". The fact that it took 10 years of minor floods until there finally was one bad enough to make them actually move gets lost and converted onto a catastrophic event.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  That is all absolutely plausible. If each generation, for centuries, could point to where their gradparents had lived, now under water, that could really cement a tradition.
kkoncevicius 5y ago
> We don't have any evidence for a sudden ("sodden"?) Noah-style flood. I think we do have a lot evidence about that. We just haven't observed it during the past 1,000 years. There is one nice small-scale introduction video about this happening in the USA [1], but I remember reading recent scientific papers that talk about it as a world wide event. They put it roughly 12,000 years ago (not 2,000 years ago). Also the story of the discovered - J. Harlen Bretz - as sad as it is, is quite telling about how unscientific scientists can get. Mainstream geology rejected his ideas mainly because "his theory implied the potential possibilities of a Biblical flood, which the scientific community strongly rejected" [2]. In other words - they have already assumed that things described in the Bible must be nonsense, hence, any facts pointing to the contrary must be interpreted in a different way. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZgfPGtQEs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWZgfPGtQEs [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz#The_Spokane_floods:_an_outrageous_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Harlen_Bretz#The_Spokane_flo...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The seas started filling in 20kya, from 200m down. There were periods when the water rose at a rate of a meter in a century, for centuries, which corresponds to the shoreline retreating 20 meters or more, each century, in many places. All that water is still there; we think of it as just part of the ocean now, but there were millions of square miles of dry land all now underwater. The flood Bretz elucidated, that carved out the Washington State badlands at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, was catastrophic, scouring thousands of square miles down to bedrock and carving the Columbia River gorge in a matter of weeks, but would not account for flood myths on the opposite side of the world, even though it also signalled an increase in the rate of sea level rise. There have of course been extraordinarily large tsunamis, too, that would be generate their own stories, and regional floods. It is not hard to see how flood stories woul merge over time.