30 ms·

Same time frame as the biblical flood

robbedpeter 4y ago
Not necessarily. The biblical flood and a majority of flood myths around the world, go back much farther than that. Many seem to have been inspired by events during the Younger Dryas period, around 12,000 years ago. There's a "black mat" layer in soil all over the world, suspected to be the result of some sort of cosmic impact - a comet or asteroid hit North American ice, resulting in cataclysmic flooding and a radical reshaping of the geology. The fires from the resulting storms pumped so much ash into the sky that we now have a visually distinctive indicator. Anything above the black mat layer is younger than 12,000 years. North American megafauna disappeared at this time, which is a pretty serious crack in the assertion that overhunting by people caused their extinction. Storms from this event left evidence of massive flooding in the years following the impact all over the world. I have no doubt that there are cultural myths that stem from not recent flood events but the younger Dryas impact is likely the source for the oldest myths, as the destruction seemed to be so profound that it would have wiped out any coastal settlements all over the world, leaving us with evidence of the survivors and nothing of what they lost. Various sites and clues around the world hint that even 12,000 years ago there may have been relatively advanced cultures that built in stone and wood, planted crops, likely had advanced shipbuilding, math, astronomy, and navigation. There are petroglyphs at sites all over the world resembling stick figure men that seem to be inspired by massive plasma discharge patterns in the sky, and the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis provides an explanation for storms powerful enough to produce such patterns. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800560105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800560105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...
ncmncm 4y ago
The untold secret of the biblical flood is that, after the water rose and drowned everything anyone had ever known, it never went back down. All the water is still there. We just call it the sea now. It didn't happen all in one week, year, or millennium. But, starting 20,000 years ago, generation after generation found the village its grandparents built washed by waves, and had to move higher and build again. Usually other people already lived higher up, so conflicts arose. Australian oral history still records compacts settling those. After the rise finally leveled off 8000 years ago, 120 meters upslope and often hundreds of miles inland, the tales came unmoored from personal experience, and shifted gradually, over more millennia, to what we know today. The whole Persian Gulf had filled in, and the South China Sea, a million square miles below what are now Indonesian islands ("Sundaland") between and around Australia / New Guinea ("Sahul"), off India and Japan, and between Ireland, Britannia and Europe ("Doggerland") were forever gone. The oldest civilizations we know are uphill from a few of those places, and the oldest rock art we know was painted in the mountains offshore of what was, 40,000 years ago, Sundaland. Possibly what triggered the beginnings of civilization was the continuous need to adapt to new circumstances, and habit of discovering a new way of life among strangers, generation after generation, over the millennia from 20,000 years ago to 8000 years ago, and then ending, leaving uninterrupted stability. The Younger Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago that wiped out most big animals in North America and darkened the whole world for years after must have had some impact. Gobekli Tepe, the oldest documented temple, was built after. But Gunung Padang on Java was in use before the water ever started to rise. There were no ice ages there.

Not necessarily. The biblical flood and a majority of flood myths around the world, go back much farther than that. Many seem to have been inspired by events during the Younger Dryas period, around 12,000 years ago. There's a "black mat" layer in soil all over the world, suspected to be the result of some sort of cosmic impact - a comet or asteroid hit North American ice, resulting in cataclysmic flooding and a radical reshaping of the geology. The fires from the resulting storms pumped so much ash into the sky that we now have a visually distinctive indicator. Anything above the black mat layer is younger than 12,000 years. North American megafauna disappeared at this time, which is a pretty serious crack in the assertion that overhunting by people caused their extinction. Storms from this event left evidence of massive flooding in the years following the impact all over the world. I have no doubt that there are cultural myths that stem from not recent flood events but the younger Dryas impact is likely the source for the oldest myths, as the destruction seemed to be so profound that it would have wiped out any coastal settlements all over the world, leaving us with evidence of the survivors and nothing of what they lost. Various sites and clues around the world hint that even 12,000 years ago there may have been relatively advanced cultures that built in stone and wood, planted crops, likely had advanced shipbuilding, math, astronomy, and navigation. There are petroglyphs at sites all over the world resembling stick figure men that seem to be inspired by massive plasma discharge patterns in the sky, and the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis provides an explanation for storms powerful enough to produce such patterns. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800560105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800560105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi...

ncmncm 4y ago

The untold secret of the biblical flood is that, after the water rose and drowned everything anyone had ever known, it never went back down. All the water is still there. We just call it the sea now. It didn't happen all in one week, year, or millennium. But, starting 20,000 years ago, generation after generation found the village its grandparents built washed by waves, and had to move higher and build again. Usually other people already lived higher up, so conflicts arose. Australian oral history still records compacts settling those. After the rise finally leveled off 8000 years ago, 120 meters upslope and often hundreds of miles inland, the tales came unmoored from personal experience, and shifted gradually, over more millennia, to what we know today. The whole Persian Gulf had filled in, and the South China Sea, a million square miles below what are now Indonesian islands ("Sundaland") between and around Australia / New Guinea ("Sahul"), off India and Japan, and between Ireland, Britannia and Europe ("Doggerland") were forever gone. The oldest civilizations we know are uphill from a few of those places, and the oldest rock art we know was painted in the mountains offshore of what was, 40,000 years ago, Sundaland. Possibly what triggered the beginnings of civilization was the continuous need to adapt to new circumstances, and habit of discovering a new way of life among strangers, generation after generation, over the millennia from 20,000 years ago to 8000 years ago, and then ending, leaving uninterrupted stability. The Younger Dryas cataclysm 12,000 years ago that wiped out most big animals in North America and darkened the whole world for years after must have had some impact. Gobekli Tepe, the oldest documented temple, was built after. But Gunung Padang on Java was in use before the water ever started to rise. There were no ice ages there.