The Great Flood

rebirth everything, right. And Uh, in my situation, I remember like being a kid, and I think my parents maybe or maybe some other relatives gave me like an illustrated version, like a kid's version of the Bible, and it had like the Noah's Ark story in it. Uh. And now nowadays we have like Darren Aronofsky's Noah movie, which I haven't seen. You, I have not seen it either. I've heard there's like some crazy stuff going on with like

my Suster design and stuff like that. Yeah. I think they somehow worked the Nephelim into the story, so it sounds interesting. I don't know why I haven't gone around to seeing it, but it's everywhere. It's in our pop culture. It's in our religion, it's in our kids books. And that's not just here in America, right, it's uh, in

multiple cultures, as we're going to talk about today. Yeah, I mean it is pretty inescapable in Western culture, if for no other purpose reason than of all the Christian stories and Old Testament stories and you know, pretty much any stories in the Abrahamic tradition, Like that's the one that that little Children connected because it's got animals in it. It's less a story about people. It's a story about all these cool animals. And if they're more into vehicles,

it's got a big bode in it. And I was just the other day that there's a guy. Have you heard this story? You know, we probably should have pulled this for this episode. Are you talking about the museum? Yeah, that's been Yeah. Yeah, this guy who's rebuilding his own version of the Ark basically, but it's Kentucky. It's yeah, somewhere in the Midwest, I want to say. But anyway, Yeah, there's a guy who's like actually putting plans together to build an arcs an ARC museum with actual live animals

in it. Okay too, of two of every kind. I don't think they're going to be able to do that. And seven of all the clean animals. That's a detail. It's often overlooked. If I remember correctly, I think it's like, you know, the animals that will be there, basically like the kind of animals you'd find like a petting zoo. Okay, well he needs I think seven of each of them, because yeah, if I remember correctly, you gotta have you gotta have ones for the like the stock and of replenishing.

You have them from sacrifice, sacrifice and of course to the eating problems. And you certainly go to zoos a lot more than I do, so and and and petting zoos at that right, Bastion, Robert's son is very into animals. But but he's certainly has been into the Noah's Arc stories like that. He's acquired a couple of books about it. And and I remember as a kid, you know, thinking about this story as I read it, looking at these pictures.

They are all these wonderful picture, sometimes horrific pictures of the flooding, and you you can't help but wondering how would that work? How? How does is it possible that an enormous flood could sweep across the entire world, didn't without even getting into the questions of repopulating the earth with this arc. Yeah, yeah, I you know, it's weird, is and maybe this shows what a morbid kid I am.

But like I felt, like, you know, a lot of other kids or maybe in Sunday school or whatever, they would talk about this, and the focus would be on like, look, how cool this is. This guy built this boat and there's all these funny animals on it, and then they have a happy ending, and I'm like, what is this denon of iniquity that they're talking about? All these like they kept talking about all the centers that needed to be watched away, and I didn't quite know what they meant.

I mean, now, like you look at it, it's pretty obvious, like they're talking about prostitution and and uh, infidelity and all kinds of things. Gambling I think is in there too, right, But at the time they just are drawn as like kind of like evil like scheming people, and and so I was like, how does this how does this work out? This flood that's so huge that it kills everybody on Earth because Earth is a pretty big place. That's the that's the weird, like, um, cognitive dissonance. You have your

child in present day. You know, the Earth is a pretty big place, but you're trying to imagine, how does this flood work that's able to kill everybody except for Noah and his family and these animals on the boat. Yeah. So we have a pretty thought provoking myth here, and a very pervasive myth, and we were not gonna so this episode is gonna gonna look at some of these these global flood myths and they we're gonna look at

the the actual possible science behind the flood itself. Were there's a lot of research, lots of research into this. Now we are not going to get into a lot of the specifics of supposed arc construction. We're not going to get into a lot of of you know, creation as we're talking about how the Ark was built. Yeah. But but but instead we're gonna we're gonna focus on the myth. We're gonna focus on what we really know about massive floods and how some of these floods may

have informed, um, you know, this cultural legacy of catastrophic flooding. Yeah, absolutely, there is. I mean, I think it's safe to say almost an entire discipline of geology that's based around looking at, not confirming whether flood myths actually happened. But you know the history of water impact floods in particular on regions, and how you can track those back in it. It's fascinating, especially the core sample stuffinite we're gonna talk about with

the Baltic Sea. Yeah, alright, so let's sell Let's kick things off with just an overview of the the the big flood myth in uh in Western civilization, uh, that of Noah. Okay. So basically this is a staple of Abrahamic religion. So you find this in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and any various uh sub brand that has a spun off from those big three. So in this story, in this yeah, Aaronovskyism. In this myth, uh, Noah is an antediluvian human, Okay. So he's very much a resident of

a mythical time. According to the Book of Genesis, he's over five hundred years old before any of this flood business even gets going. I forgot about that six hundred when the flood comes down, and he lives to a rife old age of nine fifty years old. So given the other myths that we're gonna talk about today. I'm going to speculate that that has to do with the idea of him being a wise man, right, and so

wisdom seem to have been measured in years lived back then. Well, and it's also just like supposedly humans live longer before to flood. There's this this idea. It's kind of like a superhuman mythical age. Yeah, you know, think of it as it's kind of like the the elves before humans. Yeah yeah, oh yeah, that's a really good and elves are supposed to be super wise too. There you go. So no is doing all right in the eyes of God in the scenario, okay, he but the rest of

the humanity is destroying the earth with her wickedness. So God decides to destroy humans with the earth to quote destroy all flesh. So it plans to flood everything, but he wants to safeguard certain aspects of his crea ation, so he gives Noah detailed instructions for a massive arc made of gopher wood, which has nothing to do with real with actual gophers. Um, probably a lost forgotten tree

species or lamentation. Uh process. There's been a lot of back and forth on the arc would be very different if it was just made of gophers. Uh, So he makes a covenant. God makes a covenant with Noah his family, two of every animal, seven of the clean ones food, and they're going to ride out the flood. And then the arc winds up touching down on Mount Ararat at the end of all this, and then Noah and his animals and his family they disembarked to rebuild a ruined world.

And then Noah also planted a vine vineyard and had himself a stiff drink, which I think was well deserved. Yeah, yeah,

he worked for it. So I I don't know about you, but I definitely had this idea in my like maybe teens early twenties where I was like, a great sci fi movie would be like the Bible is actually a prophecy and Noah's ark hasn't happened yet, and so this like a sci fi version of this would be like the floods are coming and you have to build the arc, And I'm sure there's got to be a movie out there, right, Well, I know there's been lots of like space arc that

have played out. Um. I remember there being an episode of the Old Avengers TV show with a Noah's Ark plotline. But really, do you mean like with Stephen Peel. Yeah, wow, Okay, I didn't know that. That's interesting why I can't remember the details on that one. But this is definitely something that like we're fascinated with as a culture, whether you're

religious or not. This this idea of this flood myth, uh, flood coming down and wiping the earth clean and then creating something in its wake, and we see it also in Sumerian myth And in fact, there's an idea here that this story that I'm about to tell you is actually the origin of the Noah story. That this is five thousand years old, maybe older than the other flood myths, and it might be where some of them came from. Yeah,

this one ties into like our our earliest written accounts. Yeah, and this guy, uh, this is primarily about his Unless anybody out there speaks ancient Sumerian, I'm going to guess that it's out and a pisht um uh. And but it's the epic of Gilgamesh that this story comes out of. And I'm only familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh because Gilgamesh is a Marvel Comics character. Yeah, like many Marvel

Comics characters. Uh, they just seem to have plucked characters out of religion and mythology around the world like thor uh and made them into superheroes that exist in present day. So I remember Gilgamesh from being in The Avengers in the like late eighties or something like that. Um, but he's supposed to be the same Gilgamesh that we're gonna talk about here. So the Sumerian poem myths that Gilgamesh appeared in date back as early as twenty one hundred BC.

They've been passed down through other cultures. So what we you know, we might present you here you may be familiar with from other cultures. It's just a little bit different. There's so many different iterations of these. This is just the eleventh heart of the whole like epic of Gilgamesh, Uh basically goes like this. Gilgamesh was the king of a place called Iraq, and he was two thirds God,

one third man. Sounds like an awesome superhero origin story, Like he's already even better than half God half Yeah, Like he had three parents, um, and uh, the elders of the city though even though he was their king, they didn't think he was wise enough yet to be a good king. Uh, So they sent a quote wild man of the step named in key Do to fight

him and teach him humility. Brief aside for a second, do you remember when Lost was on TV and there was this whole like side thread about how people thought that it was a mirror story of in Kid and Gilgamesh. There would read it. Yeah, some people out there might be familiar with us, but there was this whole thing that they thought that, like the writers have Lost were

somehow incorporating this myth into the show. Okay, So anyways, in Keydo and Gilgamesh fight because superheroes, right at least back then they're they're mythic superheroes. They fight to a standstill, but Gilgamesh wins and he in keito. Then they become best friends because they respect each other so much are the only ones who can basically like fight each other as well. So this is like the the original two

heroes bad duking it out coming to mutual respect. Yeah, exactly. Uh, And it's kind of like in They Live when Roddy Roddy Piper and David fight. Anyway, uh. They So they go on a bunch of adventures together, as you do. And that's, you know, a huge part of the epic of Gilgamesh, all those stories, in those stories in Keto eventually dies. I think it's of a disease that he dies. So Gilgamesh is upset that his friend is dead, and he's, you know, as most people do when they're faced with death,

wants to become immortal. So he goes in search of immortality, and he goes looking for this guy named Pished him. Now this him is gonna sound familiar to you. He's the only man who survived the great flood that killed everybody before him. He goes through a Now this is Gilgamesh I'm talking about here. Gilgamesh goes through all these trials wearing lion skins to meet this immortal person, and

I'm not gonna go through all of them here. When he gets there, him basically explains to him, look, nothing has permanence. You don't want to be immortal. But then he still tells his story. He's like, Okay, here's how he became immortal. The ruler of the gods, who was named end Lil, sent a flood to destroy humanity. But the god Ea instructed pished him to build an arc and put quote the seed of everything in it. Then when the flood came, it was so horrible that the

gods themselves were just like really upset. It was. They were watching just like utter violence, and they they couldn't take it. So and Leal said, okay, how about this as a consolation prize, anybody who lived through the flood gets to be immortal. I'll give them everlasting life. So this is Utna pished him and his wife. They're now immortal, Gilgamesh is. They're hanging out with them now. It's like

like as if there were a class action lawsuit. And this was like, alright, we realize we're not going to admit fault, but we realized that the flood had some disastrous consequences. Survivors get immortality, and then we're done with it. Counterst So, but this isn't the end of the story. Used him says to Gilgamesh, look, you really want to be immortal that bad? All right, Let's start off. You need to not sleep for six days and seven nights.

And Gilgamesh immediately falls asleep and he wakes up seven days later, like he sleeps for seven days straight, uh, and you know he There's some variations on what goes on between him and Utna pished him and and his wife, but basically Gilgamesh returns back to the city as a wiser man, and he's now wearing an everlasting elder's robe. He's learned his lesson. Now he's ready to be king. Right,

He's learned that not all things are permanent. He's had all these adventures with his friend and he's learned from the world. But this is thought to be connected to the Noah's Ark myth because they're very similar, obviously, but we we don't get the sequel to Noah's Ark like we do here though they I don't remember any stories of like here's what happened to Noah afterward? Yeah, well it ends up, yeah, becoming part of the part of a larger story, right, it becomes it becomes because it's

moving into the existing mythos. Yeah, as kids who sort of carry the torch afterward. Right. But it's interesting to think of this too as as that the proto flood story, because you have to remember this, this this is the earliest account we have and it's from a portion of the world where we see civilization really begin to spin and take off, we see agriculture spinning and taking off. So there's this I in this region. Oh yeah, so there's this idea that this becomes just part of global

cultural DNA. Yeah yeah, And in fact, like here's the thing that we're going to find doubt And our next example will even prove this that these myths don't all pop up out of that one Mesopotamian area. Right there's myths from the Pacific Northwest. There's myths from Japan, there's myths from Norse mythology, and right now we're gonna give you one from India. Yes, so this one is uh the story of Manhu and Uh and and they experts

are kind of torn on this. Somethings think that this may have arisen independently, or that it might have ties to to other tales essentially dating back to the the epic of Gilgamesh. But like it might have traveled. Yeah, either it traveled, but also it could have it could have risen up independently because you know, as we'll discussed like flooding as a universal event, like like it's not like didn't just happen in that way. It's not like it's not like a flood happened, and someone said, whoa

flooding is possible, here's a great story about it. No, So this one involves a man by the name of Man Who. He's the first human. He's out good good name for a first human. He's he's out fishing, and he ends up talking to a fish. This great fish comes to him, speaks to him and says, hey, big flood's coming. You need to build a ship, and he agrees. The waters begin to rise, so he tethers the ship to the great horn of this fish. So it's like a kind of rides the fish out. Yeah. Yeah, the

fish carries him along. Fish carries him over the northern mountains and then has him buying the ship to a tree, and then the waters all abait and man who offers an offering of gee, sour milk away and curage to the water. And a year later a woman is born and she comes to to Man Who and tells him to use her in a sacrifice, and this resulted in their offspring. Wait, wait, so is this a human sacrifice that results in an offspring or it's a different kind

of sacrifice. Um, it's unclear. It's a little unclear. Um, we see, we see this in another myth. We're gonna discuss two where like the the idea of the flood not only as apocalypse but new beginning definitely a rebirth thing. Yeah, that makes sense that they would introduce this sort of mother figure. Yeah. Yeah, so it's it's a survival story, but it's also a second creation story. And this story

gets more involved as traditions build up, like everything in Hinduism. Uh. It leads to the establishment of Vishnu's fish Avatar matt Sayah and the flood motif is also important in Tamil literature, involving at least two different flood myths, one of creation one of survival. Uh. And it you know, continues to

spiral out from there. This is another key point here, and this was discussed in The Flood Myth, which is a book by Alan Dundee's that like a lot of these stories, humanity survives the calamity and then almost almost immediately faces a new threat to something we see in in Noah and and Beyond. Uh So. Yeah, so now we have the the Indian, the Hindu interpretation and of a great flood. So we've got another version of this all the way on the other side of the world

in Norris mythology. Uh. And again, like like with all of these, there's various iterations. And again there are characters here that Marvel comics is appropriated on their own. Uh. Anybody who's read Thor comics or seen Thor movies because those are a thing now, which is it's weird to me, uh is familiar with Odin and Thor and the Norris mythology stuff that that comes out of that. But this is the Norris myth of the ice giant mm Er.

And I think I'm saying that right. That's how I've always said since I was a kid, because Yemmer was like he was like the biggest, baddest monster in the Marvel universe. I don't know, Well, there's the ice one Yimmer, and then there's Surtur and he's the fire demon. So there's these two and various versions. And that's actually important. Although I don't know if Surtur actually comes from the myth he might just be a creation of like Stanley and jack Erba of the ice chience. We actually see

those in that first storm. Yeah. Yeah, and they are supposedly the children of Yemmer. So um. There again, there's tons of iterations on this, so if you're like a Norse mythology expert, my apologies, but this is basically like the boiled down summary version. Humor is this primordial being. This is the most metal story ever too. I was six to say this better, being very dark and and

and typically north. Oh yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if like a Mona Marthaur in Soperum or any of those like sort of like northern European metal bands have songs about hummer Um. But yeah, he's this primordial being that's formed from poisonous venom that's dropped on ice. Now this is before the world exists, but there are these realms. Uh. There's Nifflhelm and that's like the ice realm, and then

there's Muspelheim and that's like a fire realm. Uh and in between them they sort of meet like they're they're ice and uh fire. The heat from that comes together makes this venom. It drops down and forms Yemmer, and it sort of begins a proto universe. Similar if you've seen the Thor movies, then you know, like their version of it is the Nine Realms, right with Asgard and mid Guard and all the In fact, I think Nifflhelm

is in there as well. Um. Now, the gods in this story, including Odin, father of Thor, and the you know, the big guy in Norse mythology, subsequently formed aspects of the world from Yumor's body after they killed him, so they had a big battle with him. His blood became the oceans and caused a huge flood. Now before this, in this myth there were no bodies of water, so it's it's you know, the ideas that Yumer's blood basically forms rivers and lakes and oceans and all of that.

Um And the giants that you were talking about earlier that are in like that first Thor movie, they're supposed to be his children and they like spawned out of his body. Now, there's there's a couple of other things to this that are just fun that I'll throw in there. One of which is that, uh sometimes people say, well, if Humor was just created, like what did he eat? Uh? Well, apparently also created around the same time was a cow

called odd Humla. And this is like this giant mystic cow and four rivers of milk ran out of her teeths and that's what fed humor. So he there's I'm just trying to imagine like this huge ice giant floating in space, and you've got the space calf floating above. He's drinking from that. But basically, and the death story is basically Odin and two of his brothers just you know, annihilate him, uh, and it it ultimately results in what we know as the Earth, not just the blood, but

like the blood flowing around his dead body. Like they turned his skull into the sky, and they made stars out of like molten slag, and and they threw his rains in the sky to make clouds and like parts of earth and hills and things like that. They're all part of his body. So we're all living on his corpse right now in that myth um. But the thing about it is is that you know, this is yet

another flood myth from a whole different time. The difference being here is that this one doesn't have, you know, the the elder wise man who gets on a boat and saves everything, although I guess Odin in a way is sort of the wise man but he's like a warrior, wise man, so this is kind of a flood of death but also a flood of creation. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. I mean not only did the earth, it was the

earth created out of him. But then like if you you know, can wrap your head around the Norse mythology of all these different realms that sort of interact like a ven diagram. Uh. Yeah, he like partially came out of those and then like created a whole another realm

where these giants, the ice giants live. I believe it's David Montgomery of the University of Washington and who will will get into more of his work in the second half of this episode, but I believe he pointed out that you see a lot of beneficial flood myths in in African cultures and and and less in the way of cataclysmic floods, which is interesting because in this we see the geographic importance of the myth. We see the geography informing the myth. What does a flood mean in

the geography of this particular people. Yeah, absolutely, uh, And that's why you know, geographic studies in geological studies are super important to sort of I guess backtracking and trying to figure out where all of this came from. Cool, Well, I have another one here, and this is from This is from Chinese mythology. It's the has to do with

the great flood of Coon. You and this plays an important role in in Chinese mythology, though it's often the is often the case with the Chinese mythology, there's not necessarily a lot of internal consistency here. Uh, and this would have been a generation spanning flood. This is how it ends up playing out. There's this big flood and it's not really it's not divine punishment or anything. It's just kind of a natural occurrence. It's not so much

something that God's inflict. It just happens, all right. So humans are suffering, though humans are displaced, they're trying to figure out how to solve the problem of all of this catastrophic flooding. So you have this culture bear, this important cultural hero named Goon or Coon, and he ends up taking the divine self renewing soil from the gods in order to save humans from the flood. Um, you know, he's gonna build like damn works and whatnot. But he didn't.

He didn't wait for permission to actually obtain the divine So yeah, it's exactly it's a very much a prometheus myth. He's punished for stealing the gift uh he depending on which version you look at, he's either killed or he's turned into a bear or some sort of a turtle creature. There's at any rate he's taken out of the game for this, but the gift is permitted to remain, and the gods end up ordaining his son uh dar You

to continue his work with the divine soil. Only he ends up deviating from his father's plans and finishing his father's work. He constructs drainage channels, reconstructs earthen barriers, and in the end he manages to defeat this the Great Deluge and become emperor and founds the Shaya dynasty been uhvy to sixteen hundred BCS. So this actually binds into

like legitimate history that we have records of. That's interesting, yes and no, because you know, when you when you begin going back further and further in Chinese history, you see the you see myth and and actual history you know, becoming one, which is I guess pretty much the case with with most old cultures in society, certainly in Indian history.

You go back far enough, you're dealing with wars that may or may not have actually happened, and then you have to try and separate the from the react well, and then even here you've got like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, stuff like that that like supposedly mixed in. I remember learning about that stuff when I was a kid and thinking it was totally real. Well, I wonder if they're norse implications of day than to

believe there is. Somebody just wrote into us the other day, by the way, about a mistake they said that we made in an episode. We were talking about Johnny Appleseeds, and they said Johnny apple Seed was actually based on a real person. He was, Yeah, that's come up a couple of times, and I honestly can't remember what we even said about talking about EPs, legends and myth. We're talking about ways of looking at mythology, and we're talking

about the difference between myth and legend and folklore. And yeah, at any rate, if if there's any confusion on that, yes, Johnny Appleseed was is based on a real person, so it would be more of like a legend folklore as

opposed to be. But it becomes difficult when you start going further and further back in time, because there's like the snowball effect, right, Important individuals become wrapped up in our expectations and our ideas and our mythic and magical understanding of the war old and if if there's a real person at the heart of that snowball, you kind

of lose them after a while. Yeah, there was just a study that just came out earlier this week that we read about on Monday morning that was saying, you know, basically that they had confirmed evidence that our memories are unreliable, but not just our memories, but our memories of people

who have passed away. Right, So then if you extrapolate that outwards to people who actually existed but we've never met, it's it gets further and further unreliable the longer in time we get away from them, right, So naturally we're going to turn them into mythological figures. Now, these accounts that we've given you, this is just a sampling of global flood myths. Yeah, there are all kinds as well that we're not going to dive deep into. But I'll

just give you a couple here. There's flood stories from Fiji and Tahiti that say that giant waves struck the islands there without any warning. Uh. In central Chili, there's a story of two giant serpents that fought each other by trying to lift the sea up to its highest point, and this resulted in earthquakes and flooding. Tibetans of the Sepango or maybe it's Sangpo Valley, they have a flood myth that describes basically a giant glacial dam that breaks uh.

And then in the Pacific Northwest here in the in the North America, native tribes tell a story that's similar about thunderbird and whale. And here's where this gets interesting and sort of is a nice segue for us into the science part that we're gonna talk about here. Japanese temples actually have records of a major earthquake that happened in seventeen hundred and sent waves all the way to Japan. Now, this earth earthquake presumably happened in the Pacific Northwest somewhere,

maybe in the ocean just off of it. This could have been the event that created the myth of thunderbird and whale and caused Native Americans that we're living on the western coast to flee and move further inland. So that's really like the beginning of what I guess we're gonna refer to today as like geo mythology, which is um taking a look at the mythology and then taking a look at the records or or using science to look at the actual land masses and figure out what

happened here thousands of years ago. Yeah, and it also brings us back again to the notion that a flood myth is going to be informed by what flooding looks like to those people into that reagion. So here we've looked at a few examples that are coastal and Pacific, and those are of course going to be informed by earthquakes and Tsunamis that sort of occurrence as opposed to river lands, which are going to be formed out of you know, the experiences with rising uh water levels in

the rivers. Yeah, Like I didn't think about this until now, but like imagine if Hurricane Katrina happened and we didn't have like present day technology and information culture right, Like, there would have certainly been crazy stories that spawned out of an event that is as devastating as that, right, yeah, exactly. I mean, what is the hurricane pane hurricane making landfall other than a cataclysmic flood of epic proportions. That's the

kind of thing that will spiral out myths. Yeah, and if you know, wow, this is dawning on me as well. Even at the time, do you remember that there were some people who were saying, like, oh, well, New Orleans is being punished because it's a city of sin, and of course this happened there because they're getting what they deserved, which is like a horrible thing to say, But like even in present day, people are cooking up stories like that about these huge natural disasters. Well from a you know,

from a religious framework. I guess sometimes something an idea like that, as awful as it is, is easier to digest than the than the other reasons, right to get down to why do horrible things happen on a particular day, and that it's totally out of our control and where

nothing but gnats compared to natural disasters. So it took quite a while for modern scientific understanding of her to geological and biological history, to fully disengage from Western Christian religious traditions, and to fully remove the sacred time frame from the profane time frame. Uh. So we see the earliest approaches to understanding Earth's history. We see those shackled to this idea of an antediluvian world, a pre flood world, uh within the periods of of a pre adamic and

edemic time. So it's all about like you know, Eden and Adam and then the Great flood and Noah surviving it. Like that is just interwoven with our early scientific understanding of the world. And there's this kind of fascinating weave of religion and science that happens in the Roman Catholic Church, but in the other clergy as well, but primarily through a guy named Nicholas Steno, And he's the seventeenth century Roman Catholic priest who is one of the earliest known geologists.

He actually achieved three of the four steps to being declared a saint, So this guy is very highly regarded within the Catholic Church. Steno was one of the first people to show that rocks tell their own stories, and sometimes these stories either guide religious doctrine or they can refute it, right, And in this instance he was referring to the flood myth right. And so by the time of Darwin, Uh, the clergy basically came to the understanding with the field of geology and abandoned the idea that

a literal global flood had happened. Now, we were just talking to our co host Joe McCormick about this before we came in. Now, Joe said that there are like some I guess creationist geologists who have said, you know, well, you know, we we disregard that. We do think that there was a global flood, and you can see it's markers here, here, here, and here, and like one of

the examples he gave us was the Grand Canyon. But for the most part, the discipline of geology and even many clergy members disregard that and think of it as more of a metaphor or as being something that was localized. Right that Uh, science, with what we have with science today, it seems like it would be impossible for the world to actually have experienced a global flood exactly. Yeah, there are a number of reasons why this is is just

not the case. So for for starters. There is no global culture in early human history, so there's no there's no there's no internet in ancient Battlodian times. So if there was a global flood, we have no way of reporting it, you know, we would have to depend on a divine being I guess to report it to us.

That would be the loophole to explain it. Also, um if you of course, this is a big one here, there's just not enough water in the earth system to account for water levels to rise above the highest mountain um uniformly rising level would not allow the water to have the erosive capabilities that are often attributed to a global flood. Particularly and you know in the Abrahamic tradition and some rock formations millions of years old, they show

no evidence of large scale water erosion. The rocks are not telling us that this is taking place. And then of course there are a number of other cultural things to think back on here, again coming back to the idea that there's no global culture in early human history. You look back to the earliest human empires and they're

all very regional. The Akkadian Empire and from three fifty to b C. And modern Iraq and the following that, the Hittite Empire, the Assyrians, they're all fairly localized, but to them that was the world. The world was what they knew, so it would make sense that, of course this would be a world myth, even though they're unaware

that Japan exists. Right. And then the other big one, of course, is that human society's early human co stures they built up around waterways and waterways, flood, rivers, flood uh ponds, flood lakes, flood the waves come crashing in. There are tsunamis, there are hurricanes. So rising water levels would be a pretty much a universal experience of any early humans. So everyone would have the chance to experience this and form their own myths about it, or certainly

to uh intercept another myth and make it their own. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, as we have seen just today with the Gilgamesh epic sort of morphing into the Noah's Ark story that we know today. Yeah. Uh and this is what uh this there's this term I U I threw it out earlier, but I really like it. It came

up in the research. It's called geo mythology, and it was coined by a woman named Dorothy Bataliano in the nineteen sixties, and she was essentially trying to describe oral storytelling that explains landforms that have been created by earthquakes, fires, floods, volcanoes, diverting waterways, or even like the sudden emergence or disappearance of islands. Right, these huge natural events. There is some evidence that these are grounded in real events, but they're

connected to myth as well, so geo mythology. In the case of the Great flood myth though, as we're saying now, most people think that it differs from region to region. Yeah, So, so the the the immediate take home here is that while nobody is seriously considering the idea of a global catastrophic flood, there's plenty of really cool science and really

cool research um that that applies to regional floods in history. Yeah. Uh. And so this leads us to this book called The Rocks Don't Lie by geologist David Montgomery, and he wrote really a long interesting piece in Nautilus magazine that we read for this episode that dives pretty deep into looking at in particular, he was what was the part of the world that he was in that he was describing I believe to bet he was looking at at at some Tibetan floodplaints and he was there, but then he

was extrapolating it outward to all these other regions that had flood myths, and he's sort of our go to on this. Yeah. He has a great quote from the from that book. He said, if your world is small enough, all floods are global. I keep coming back to that again again. Uh. There's also another quote I want to read, real quit from a man by the name of Irving Finkel, curator at the British Museum and author of the book The Ark Before Noah, Decoding the Story of the Flood

and another very interesting author. Stealing seriously with the subject matter. He says, quote, there must have been a heritage memory of the destructive power of floodwater based on various terrible floods, and the people who survived would have been people in boats. You can imagine someone sunbathing in a canoe, half asleep and waking up however long later, and they're in the middle of the Persian Gulf, and that's the beginning of

the flood story. Yeah, I'm thinking of there's there's an episode of that Andy Daly Show review with Forest McNeil. Have you ever seen that? I don't think it's really funny, but that that happens in it. He goes to sleep in a canoe and wakes up and he's actually in the um what's the great Pacific garbage? He wakes up there anyways, So yeah, David Montgomery really kind of pulls

it all together. But there's been a lot of geologists who have looked at this over the years, right, So yeah, David Montgomery is really like the guy who's been pulling

a lot of this together. And in particular, in two thousand two, he did this analysis of the Spango again sang Po River in the Tibetan Plateau, uh, and he found evidence in sediment layers that there was a great valley that had formed in this you know, uh, or there was a lake that had formed in this valley centuries ago at once but number of times, right, yeah, yeah,

it apparently flooded several several times. Uh. Downstream, he found evidence that a glacier on several different occasions advanced far enough to block the river, creating a huge lake. But since ice makes ununstable dam over time, the ice thins, and then it finally gives way and antalicius this tremendous torrent of water that just surges down to the deepest gorge. Now, in Montgomery's book The Rocks Don't Lie, he makes arguments that there's two centuries of evidence that the global flood

did not happen. Uh. First, as we said, there's not enough water on Earth to account for water levels that could even rise above our highest mountains. And secondly, any uniformly rising level would have left erosive evidence rock formations that are millions of years old. They don't show large scale water erosion, so it's more likely that these were regional. So his that's sort of his general thesis that he

keeps coming back to over and over again. So Montgomery has actually written about that Pacific Northwest region as well that I was talking about earlier. But this is different from the thunderbird whale myth that I was talking about. This is from ten thousand years ago, probably again caused by melting glaciers. There's now evidence from geological research that show displaced boulders and deep scores in the earth and deep ripple marks on the prairies, all of which are

signs of what we refer to today as the Missoula Flood. Now, these same floods likely eroded away Land that also created the English Channel all the way on the other side, you know, a continent away. Uh, they made England into an island. The myth connected to this, though, is different. Uh. The Ojibwa Indians. They have a legend that a great snow fell down and a bag containing the sun's heat

was breached when a mouse nibbled into it. The warmth from the bag spilled over, melted all the snow and produced the flood, and everyone drowned except for one old man who was drifting around in a canoe rescuing animals. Interesting again, we see that a particular geography of a region, the particular weather of a region, playing into their own particular flood myths. Yeah, I would imagine, Uh, if this was Carl Young was in the room with us, he'd

be screaming about collective unconscious right now. Indeed, so all right, we've got two, maybe three pretty big geological discipline studies that have come out in the last i'd say thirty years that have really gone deep, and literally by by saying gone deep, they've literally drilled the deep into the earth to find out what's going on with these flood myths. Uh. And so the first of these are William Ryan and

Walter Pittman. That's right. These are these are geologists from Columbia University, and in the nine they proposed that a great flood in the Middle East resulted from rising water levels at the end of the last Ice Age, that would been about seven thousand years ago. At that time, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake and the lands

around it were farmlands. When the European glaciers melted, the Mediterranean Sea overflowed with a force of two times greater than that of Niagara Falls, converting the Black Sea from a fresh to saltwater body and flooding the entire area. So the way these guys came to this conclusion was they analyzed sediment cores from the bed of the Black Sea, making them think that the sea used to be a freshwater lake. The glacial ice melted at our poles, raising

the world sea levels, and this caused the huge inflow. Now, this is where the world's earliest farming communities lived, as Robert just mentioned, So maybe they're the ones who brought this story to Mesopotamia. It then turns into the Gilgamesh legend, which then turns into the Noah legend, which maybe then travels to India. Who knows. Yeah, I mean that this would have rapidly inundated odd plane occupied by some of

the world's earliest farming communities. They're traumat traumatized by the flood. Uh. They bring these tales with them to new lands and new culture. So perhaps the tail of the Great Flood was essentially hard coded into the secret of agriculture. You get one, you get the other, Okay. So other researchers have since looked at sediment cores from the delta of

the Danube River, which empties into the Black Sea. Yeah. Indeed, one of these studies was actually National Geographic Society explorer Robert Bower, and he was inspired by Ryan and Pippen's hypothesis, and he's discovered supporting physical evidence, including an underwater river valley and ancient shorelines, as well as stone age structures

and tools beneath the Black Sea. His team was also able to unearthed fossils that show now extinct freshwater species dating back some seventy four thousand, sixty to fifteen thousand, five hundred years. Wow. Uh, I'm wondering now, like looking looking at this because it seems like he's connected maybe to the Laurentide Eye a sheet hypothesis. Maybe he was part of that team in two thousand seven as well. Then we've got Bruce Massey, I think is how you

say his last name? Uh? And he has a comment theory. Um. Now, he's an environmental archaeologist at the Lost Alamos National Laboratory and he has his own theory. He thinks that more comets and meteors have struck Earth than we're aware of, which sounds reasonable. Uh, And that the great flood stories all sprung out of a comet hitting the planet five thousand years ago. This is rather perfect, right, especially when you start looking at these models where the flooding is

a divine action. So here we see a cosmic body actually plummeting to the Earth and causing the flooding. It could it could be, although I wonder if guys like Montgomery would argue with him and say, well, that's sort of going back to a more global catastrophe rather than

a regional one. But basically his argument is that there is a three mile or four point eight kilometer wide commet that crashed into the ocean just off of the coast of what we now call Madagascar, and this caused violent, huge tsunamis and hurricanes that just basically wrecked the whole planet because the superheated water vapor from the comet goes up into the air along with aerosol particles. They're shot up, they go into the jet streams and they just you know,

wreck havoc on the weather patterns. Now, he says he's found evidence for this theory in ancient petroglyphs, drawings and historical records. But then in two thousand four he gets really excited because he thinks he's found physical evidence. He says, a tsunami that's six hundred feet tall would of course leave evidence on our geology. Well, he thinks that he found evidence or another team found evidence, and he, uh, you know, glommed onto this that in Africa and Asia

there are what we call chevron. So you think of chevron like the gas station, it's kind of like they're symbol. They're these wedge shaped configurations that come up out of the sand. Now, the Holocene Impact Working Group found a lot of these in that area with satellite imagery, and he's connected onto that and said, well, this is evidence of this comment theory that I have. The next step for them is basically to go into these chevrons and carbon date all the fossils that are within them to

determine if they were formed five thousand years ago. Right around the time he's pitching that this comment landed. Well, however it ends up playing out, I think it's a fascinating theory. Yeah, it is. It's interesting it um. I

don't know. I guess like in the face of all these other geologists that we've we've read today that say well it's probably localized because of this, this and this, then to have a guy come along and say like, actually, no, there's a super big comment man, Like, it sounds cool. It sounds like an epic like movie. But I don't know,

it sounds a little too epic, that's the thing. It sounds like in a and I don't I'm not saying this as a criticism of his research, No, I mean it sounds like an epic idea to support a a large scale flooding that has already been dismissed. Yeah, and and to his credit. I don't want to make him sound like a crackpot or anything, but to his credit, he's actually coming up with evidence, and he's looking for scientific evidence as well as cultural evidence. So I think

that's important. So wow, So we've got all these myths, and then we've just looked through all of these geologists and the science that they're working on. They're still drilling, pulling sediment cores, analyzing what's in them, trying to figure out what actually happened with water in our land masses and the history of the planet. What if we've got another flood coming. What if my prediction from earlier, what

if Noah's Noah's ark is actually like a prophecy. Well you, depending on where you live in the world, that certainly could play out. Uh. In two thousand fourteen, the inter Governmental Panel and Climate Change released its fifth Assessment report, predicting that the oceans would rise by more than three feet by the year that's enough to swamp many of

these cities along the US East Coast, for example. And they're they're even more extreme estimates out there, and certainly they have been made over the years, including a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet and that would push sea levels to rise twenty three feet or seven meters, and that's not to actually submerge London. Wow, okay, so yeah, I'm thinking about like the end of Spielberg and Kubrick's AI. Yes,

like the cities or underwater. Yeah, yeah, that would be unpleasant. Yeah, I mean, based on most of the predictions we see out there, rising water levels and the inevitable flooding of coastal regions, that can be mitigated. Uh, you know, if we get our craft together in time. Well, I love coastal cities. I grew up in around a closet coastal

city at love to live near one again. Right now, we live four hours away from the coast, so I would imagine Atlanta's probably maybe Atlanta will become beachfront property. But uh yeah, I certainly hope that, you know, our coastal cities don't get totally wiped out. But it it does come back to just why these myths were so pervasive, because humans have always lived in coastal regions. Humans have always lived along rivers, They've made their life along rivers.

We've we've lived in many resources to yeah, we've lived in this tenuous balance with the water that the in some of these myths, the water and flooding itself kind of takes on a divine um energy and it is personified even in the the idea of river and flood gods. And that makes sense that this this wrathful entity that we depend on uh is also a great danger and we see that no matter you know which age we

live in. Well, best case scenario, it ends up like water World, right, and we're Kevin Costner swimming around and riding on our catamaran. I can't believe I didn't think about water World. Is there any land in water World?

There is that Well spoilers for water World from the end, but that's the whole like mcguffin of the movie, is that they're searching for the last bit of land that supposedly exists and they find like a I mean, I think it's an island at the end, but yeah, like the little kid has like the tattoo of the map on his back that shows how to get to the I barely remember that movie, but yeah, the whole mission is for them to figure out if this myth is true and do they invoke Noah and the Great flood

at all, and I don't think they ever mentioned Noah now that I think about it, although, like I said, it's been a long time. I mean, I just remember Dennis Hopper on the like oil ship commanding a gang of like mad Max esque pirates. Um. Yeah, that's weird movie. A lot of people bash that movie because of how expensive it was, and it was kind of a flop. But I loved it when it came out, and now I want to see it. I've never seen it, in large part because I remember when it came out the

media was at the time. I'm just completely said, oh it's it's a disasters to gratulate. You don't see it, And now it sounds rather attractive. It's not the worst movie in the world. You you could do far worse things with two hours of your time. All right, Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and head for land. On this one, we're gonna go ahead and um and cling to the mountain side and let these the floodwaters

of knowledge recede. But hopefully we were able to provide you know, in instance, you've got got to get your feet wet and uh. In global flood myths in the underlying science of large scale regional flooding in our past, and uh, you know, who knows, Maybe we'll discuss some of the fringe your stuff in the future. Yeah, that

would be interesting. And if you know, I'd love to hear from people out in the audience who maybe you are you know, aware of some kind of cultural myth that we missed that's that's really interesting related to floods, or you live in an area that's been experiencing a lot of flooding, uh, and you've got something to say about that connected to this, we'd love to hear from you. Uh. There's so many ways to get in touch with us. We're on Facebook, We're on Twitter, We're on tumbler, we're

on Instagram. We post all of our episodes on those platforms. We are below the Mind or some iteration thereof. On there, it's pretty easy to find, uh. You look for beautiful pictures of me, Robert and Joe McCormick. And the other place where you can certainly find information on how to contact us is our landing page, our Mother's ship, stuff to blow your mind dot com. And if you want to get in touch with us the old fashioned why I just shoot us an email at blow the Mind

at how stuff works dot com. Well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. Previous Gatty Pro