Why Do Great Flood Myths Seem To Be Universal?

You should show up to see if we've forgotten how to do this, to see a skate around on stage, nervously sure, doubting ourselves and eventually bringing the funnies. Yeah, hopefully. Where do they go? They go to s f AS in San Francisco, SF sketch Beest dot com. Click on the schedule and tickets link. There are tons and tons and tons of great shows, so best comedy UH festival in the country in my opinion over the whole month of January. So go check us out and go check

out every body else as well. Yep, it's also a full vaccination show, so you've got to show proof of vaccination and wear some masks. Don't be naughty. Don't be naughty, be nice. So we'll see you guys on Friday, January one in San Francisco, California. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Ahoy, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're the captains of this here ship called Stuff you Should Know.

And uh, that's all there is to it, although I do think we need to allow for the fact that Jerry is rear admirable and by that, of course, I mean rear admiral, and by that, of course, I mean it's going to be a long episode. Has there ever been a cute c TV show called the Admirable Admiral? Uh? No, that sounds great. I think there was one. The Simpsons did one called Admirable Baby. All right, well that counts. Yeah. I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though

it could have been, like a terrible person. So I have a cold, so I just want to apologize up front. Just a head cold, but I'm a little stuffy, so I'm sorry if if it's coming across is untoward. I'm very proud of you for pushing through, Chuck, because lesser podcasters would not. They might they might just be like, I can I have a cold and people don't want to hear that. You say, the heck with that. I'm

going forward with it. Remember back in the day, you had like a three month cold that one year every year, every year for a little while, I used to get so sick. Yeah, no, it's terrible. But we've gotten much better, haven't we. Yeah, I think, Uh, I don't know. Maybe quitting smoking has something to do with that, Maybe just a touch. You don't get colds like that anymore for you. I really don't so, And yet another reason to quit smoking. Everybody who's out there on the fence. Uh So we're

talking today. The reason I said that we're sin because I was making a play on a story that it

seems like every single person Chuck knows about. At the very least, I can say with almost a hund percent confidence that everyone that you and I have ever met, seen in passing, talked to um, or been in the same like country with probably has heard of the story of Noah and the Flood, where Noah was told to go ahead and build a boat because the earth was going to flood and everybody was going to be killed. And by the way, grabs some animals put them on board so that you and your wife and then the

animals can all repopulate your respective species once the flood subsides. Right, it's a classic story. Everybody loves it. We we we read it out loud just about every Saturday at dinner time, and it's just a great story. Right, everybody knows this story. But it turns out, Chuck, that um, there's this idea that that actually happened, that that there and it's long been and I the that the that what the Noah's story is talking about happened in actuality, that there was

a point in time where the entire world flooded. And there's been a lot of scholarly research into this into how that's even possible. Yeah, and you know, I guess if we're talking about this particular, because you know, we've we've found after digging around and getting d to help us with this research, that there are flood myths and not every culture, but a lot of cultures over the years. And we'll get into that, you know, in lots of detail, but as far as actual Noah's actual flood from the

Old Testament. Um, there was a gentleman in eighteen seventy two named George Smith who was a hobbyist of all things Assyrian and an amateur sort of historical sleuth. But um a well educated one, nonetheless, because he could do

things like read cuneaform tablets. And he was doing that one day on I don't know if it was an actual lunch break or if that's just apocryphal, but supposedly on a lunch break went to a museum, was reading Cunea form and came across the story the Epic of Gilgamish and read this quote, build a boat abandoned wealth and seek survival. Spurn poverty, save life. Take on board all living things, seed animals. The boat you will build. Her dimensions shall be equal, her length and breadths shall

be the same. Doesn't seeing about cubits, but it's inferred. Cover her with a root, cover her with a roof like the ocean below, and he will send you a reign of plenty. And George Smith said, hey, this is strikingly familiar as the Christian slash Jewish Old Testament Noah's flood story. But this is several years previous. Yeah, and instead of um, God telling Noah or an angel telling Noah, it's the god in Leal who's telling a guy named Uta pished him to build this boat. Noah's nowhere to

be heard and for what reason? What do you mean? Well, I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where like Earth is being punished? Basically? Oh yeah, so um the reason that that Uh and Leo gave to Udna pitched him was because the humans were too noisy, and the gods were sick of humans, so they were going to flood the earth and kill off all humans, whereas in the Bible it was because humans had become too wicked to live. I think noisy and wicked are the same

thing back then, I guess so. And it makes you wonder like did somebody misread the word and they're like noisy okay, and just barreled on there like my lunch break is almost over. So George Smith just was like noisy,

it's they said noisy. But there was also the idea of saving animals, and there was also the idea that afterward birds were sent out to find dry land, just as a no story, right, and so Uh, you just kind of say whoops, because, um, the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Old Testament by at least several dred years, depending on what part you're talking about. And UM, so you might say, Okay, so the Noahs story is adapted from this, but that doesn't mean that it undermines the veracity.

They don't undermine the veracity of another. In fact, if you stop and think about it, the fact that one of the first things that was ever written down after the invention of writing Q form was the first written system humans ever devised, and that the first literary work ever created, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contained this flood story. Um, it kind of suggests that something actually may have happened, Like it was a really important story that has stuck

around for thousands and thousands of years. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written thirty four hundred years ago. Um that that it suggests that there might be some some kernel of truth to it. Yeah. And over the years, a lot of people have tried to um prove, whether scientifically or otherwise, that the the Noah's flood really did take place.

Bible literalists, is that what is that? What we call them, I think, so okay, Bible literalists, um, Bible historians, because that would uh, that would go a long way uh in Christianity if you could say, hey, the Bible is an actual historical document. This stuff is really true. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there was something called uh deluvialism, deluvial meaning like relating to a great flood.

But that was a big shaper of actual geology. Was basically saying, hey, this physical literally the physical world that we're living in came about after this flood. What kind of reset things? And then the real geological record came along when science got serious and they proved that was not the case, and that kind of went the way of the Dodo around you know, the mid eighteen hundreds. Yeah, they kind did it backwards. They said, the Noah flood

shaped the world as we see it. Go find proof, and when they found proof, they're like, it's not really adding up. So there's no evidence that there was a global flood that inundated the world. And in fact, the geological record that these geologists, the early ones and you know up to modern day ones have been putting together supports the exact opposite. Of that that Earth wasn't created

in a day luge. It was created over incredibly long distances of time, very very slowly, layer by layer, right, But people still say, okay, well, why number one, why have we been telling this flood story for so long? And then also, why is it, like you said, the idea of of flood myths seems almost universal. Doesn't that like still strongly suggest that there was, even if the

Bible doesn't quite have it right. And by the way, Noah's story also shows up in the Koran too, So it's in the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the Koran. And then there's the epic of Gilgamas story, Like, why is this important story still around? Doesn't it still support the idea that something happened? Why would there be universal flood myths from cultures that had never even heard of

Christianity before? And there have been like some attempts to explain that that I think are much more satisfying than the idea that we're just missing all of the evidence for great worldwide deluge that happened back in antiquity. Yeah, and there were you know that It's more than just those there were Chinese flood myths. There were uh flood

myths in southern Canada and the British Isles. Uh. So there was one study that picked out fifty cultures and they all had their own flood myths and that it was related to some kind of punishment. So they started looking, like you said, of like, why why is this happening? And there's a bunch of reasons and they all kind of make sense to me if I'm being honest. Um, one of them is that there there was a flood

in these cultures, but it wasn't a globe flood. But if you're you know, if if all you know is a certain area and you never get to leave that area and it wipes out everything you know, then the story that you pass along orally um through the years would sound like one that wiped out everything. Yeah, And like the whole idea is that this flood actually did happen way far back to one group, and then that group eventually kind of spread out and carried that flood

myth with them. And so to those of us today historians anthropologists looking at like all of these groups that are spread out all over the world, all sharing basically the same story, it would make it seem like a flood had impacted all of these groups that were that far spread out, so it must have been a really big flood. But this explanation says, no, the flood was actually really localized. It was the group that it happened to that eventually spread out. That's one explanation. It makes

a lot of sense. And one of them, the groups that are usually UM kind of pinpointed as that this flood happening to or the Proto Indo Europeans who were known to have been around the the I think the Caucusus Mountains to start and then just spread out as far as the British Isles, um, basically all over Europe northwest, east, south UM. And that all of our languages like English, Germanic, um, just a whole slew of languages developed out of this group. Yeah.

And some more support for this is the fact that there aren't fled myths in Sub Saharan African cultures. And these were groups that when they left Africa, they didn't come back, so they would not have taken back with them, uh flood myth from proto Indo Europeans. So it all kind of makes sense. Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of related one to that um that says that there were floods,

just not a flood. That flooding is actually really common, so it happened to a lot of different groups, So it would make sense that all these different cultures would have flood myths. Sure. And again, if you're if you live in your riverside village and you don't get to travel very far from there and everything you know of gets destroyed again, it could be, you know, lend support to the idea that it gets translated as a worldwide flood.

And if everyone's having these localized floods, which which happened, you know, there's always been floods then uh, not necessarily of the forty days and forty nights variety. But when things are passed around orally and then they get rewritten, things get kind of mixed up. Yeah, and it's are bad those of us alive today who are mistaking or laying our interpretation of the world word world onto like

these cultures use of the word world. They're saying their world, which was much smaller than it is to those of us today. When we think the world, we think the whole globe. You know. Yeah, And speaking of laying your things on other cultures, the third one is Christian missionaries. Uh,

and there's evidence of this happening. They would go and tell the story of Noah's great flood, especially you know, when colonization was happening too, and between missionaries and colonization, all these other cultures picked up on that original biblical flood tail or. I don't know if we should call it a flood myth or or flood tail at this point, what should we call it? I think most people call it flood myths or Deluvian myths. Okay, Delivian myth that

sounds a little more academic. Uh so. Yeah, So Christian missionaries did this, and I think this is um also evidence in the fact that the South Pacific didn't really have one until eighteen fourteen when they came into contact with with Christian missionaries, and then all of a sudden

they had the Maori flood myths. Yeah. So they actually had a floyd myth before, but apparently it was more tsunami based, and then after contact with Christianity, it became much more of like a day lose and it just bore some striking resemblances to the Noah flood myth of Christianity, and apparently that happened all over the South Pacific as well, where um, these cultures will have their own kind of

flood myth, but it's always based on tsunamis. But then the Christians come and go, and all of a sudden, it's a day lose where the water rose after like you know, forty days and forty knights of rain and stuff. So that creates a lot of headaches for anthropologists, but it also at the same time explains why universal flood myth or a flood myth would seem universal of those of us around today, and why they seem to bear

such a striking resemblance to one another. You know. Indeed, I think we should take a break and I'm gonna go blow my nose and then we'll come back and talk about geo mythology right after this. So, Chuck, that was nice of you to blow your nose at the break rather than during recording, even though I still had to hear it. It was you know, what's funny, I

was listening to Uh. I don't know why I just thought of this, but I was listening to Paula Thompkins Stay at Hopkins podcast he does with his wife Janey the otherday, and he was talking about sneezing on stage and that that had happened to him once in his career. And Paul is someone who spent lots and lots and lots of time on stages, and I wonder if there's something to that of the body withholding things like sneezes, because I've never seen anyone's sneeze on stage. I've never

sneezed on stage. Isn't that weird? Yeah, I'm sure it's related to adrenaline fight or flight. That's what I was thinking. I mean, there's got to be something to that. Yeah, like your body's like I have time to waste all that energy and sneezing. We gotta get out of here. We're gonna put on a great show. It would be really weird to think about it if, like, I don't know, Barry Manilow in Vegas was talking about setting up Mandy

before he sings it and just lets out a big sneeze. Yeah, well, thank you for setting me up to reminisce yet again about the time that you me and I saw Barry Manilow front Road Center in Vegas. You would have been sneezed on with that big snoze. Yes, we actually would have been covered in his his sneeze. All right, So

we promised talk of geo mythology. Here's the idea. Since science really got attacked together, there have been a couple of different ways to look at things like flood myths as either um, this is a story about our cultural values and there's a lot of religious metaphor involved, or this was an actual historical event and geo mythology came along to kind of say, hey, man, it can kind of be both, like there could have been a real flood, and it also took on metaphor and took on cultural

values and was used as a as a story of I can't think of the word I'm trying to think of to teach you a lesson. What's that called fable? Yeah, like a fable. So this kind of this field has emerged since, um, I believe the sixties and actually it was I was reading about. This field of geomethology is like still really trying to establish itself in the field

of geology, and most most geomethologists are trained geologists. That's where you start out D and D probably, but they they also are, like, you know, they have to really defend what they're doing against their fellow geologists because they're they're basically saying, all of these myths, all of these legends, all of this history, these these folk traditions, they actually contain eyewitness accounts of natural disas, sters, of weird events,

and earth of early finds of fossils. And yeah, they've they've been cloaked them in the language of mythology and the terminology of mythology and monsters and weirdness and all this stuff that makes it just seem completely um legendary to us today. But um, that's how these pre scientific and often preliterate cultures um passed along really valuable information. And like we've been kind of foolish to just discount these as all nothing but legend, as if there's no

fact whatsoever in there. And so the bathwater exactly, and so that's what geo mythology is doing. They're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, if you just look at this the right way, we are covered up in historical accounts just waiting for us to unravel. If we learn how to to read these correctly and then also correlate

with actual, like known geological events that we've discovered through science. Yeah, like, hey, you see that story that uh seems completely crazy about a demon god who lives in a mountain and gets angry and spouts uh fire from its top. Like that's a volcano, bros. And like, just because it sounds crazy doesn't mean we shouldn't look at the fact that an

actual volcano eruption might have happened. Then, and let's kind of marry these two things and let's just all get along, right, and so like that that that legend about the volcano with the angry god that sometimes spews like scary stuff forth.

And if you ever hear the mountains starting to make rumbles, it means that God is waking up and you should run, like, um, that's that is a way for a culture that is aware that this mountains actually a volcano, and that volcano can sit dormant for generations at a stretch, so those there will be people born in the future who aren't aware that that's a volcano. And this is the way

that the culture passes down over deep time. This really important and information If the volcanover makes it sound run because you don't want the fiery breath of that god that's trapped inside it makes it I love this stuff. Like before science came along, all humans did from the moment they could sort of form thoughts was trying to explain what was going on around them, from rain and thunder to volcanoes and floods. And I don't know, I

think it's super interesting. It's almost like these proto early warning systems like nuclear didn't really know how to explain the science of it, exactly like nuclear semiatics. Remember we did an episode on that on how to tell people ten thousand years in the future about steering clear of nuclear waste. Right, it's the same exact principle. It's just chuck. Somewhere along the way, we later generations became arrogant and just completely discounted any of that those pre scientific traditions

because they didn't appear scientific. But it is exactly like what you were saying. It was the way that they made sense of actual stuff. And so there's plenty of stuff to learn from those those accounts and those tales and those myths and legends. We just have to basically kind of eat a little bit of crow and go back and be like, well, we've been ignoring this to

our own detriment. Yeah, And it's like you said earlier, it's it's it's a tough roadeho though for scientists these days if they take this on, because you know, you have mixed results when you go back and you look at these tales. Some of them may just be folk tales and legends and some may have kernels of truth,

so may have a little more truth. So there's a lot to sort of parse through as a geologist these days, if you're as you're if you're working as or with a geo mythologist, right, um, and so when when you are laying this out and trying to figure out, okay, what what is this myth describing? You know, again you're a trained geologist if you're a geo mythologist, but you're also working with people from other scientific fields, um as far as trying to uncover, um this the fact the

kernel of truth behind these flood myths. You would be working with paleo hydrology or paleo bath immetry, which is the study of ancient sea levels like where they were at in the past, and um so you're going to take like the findings from these fields and then say, okay, let me see if I can correlate it with a myth. Or you find a myth and you say, okay, let me see if I can correlate it with paleo bath immetry or paleo hydrology findings. Um, And they've actually turned

up some really interesting stuff so far. Yeah, there was in two thousand sixteen, there was a study that tied together one of the Chinese flood myths from about four thousand years ago. Basically that there was a great flood whited out China, lasted for a couple of decades, and then this great man came along who had become Emperor, Emperor You, and tamed the water. So geologists went back and they said, all right, there's an ancient landside around that same time that damned up a river and a

lake filled up behind it. And about six months or so and then that flooded. Uh, that river got flooded, broke through the dam, and there was this huge flood, and they have found uh sediment that sort of tracks along these lines. Then they found the Emperor You. Actually, it turns out he may not have been you know, magically tamed the water. He just had a knack for early engineering, and that he dredged the waters and it cleared up the river's flow. Things returned to normal, and

he became emperor. But back then it gets you know, told as a tale of this you know, great soon to be emperor that tames the waters when he was just good at what he was doing. Right. But they, I mean, they found like evidence, geological evidence that backs all of this up, that this whole series of events, the earthquake that triggered the landslide, the landslide, the damn, the lake filling up in six months, the lake breaking and flooding, that all this happened within a single year.

That is definitely the kind of thing that your culture is going to make note of and pass down over the years, that this kind of thing can happen. And then not only that this great person came along and freed us from the burden of these floodwaters that apparently stuck around for twenty years. That's right, It's pretty cool.

There's another one that is just beyond thrilling. If you ask me that a lot of people say this is probably, this is possibly and I think that's a that's a big reasons A lot of like mainstream geologists have problems with geo mythology as we we can't really see a course to getting to the point we were saying, this is the one. This is this flood that we have evidence of is what gave rise to the epic of

Gilgamesh and Noah's story. But you can say there's a really good chance that this this is the one, this fits the bill, and this one does kind of stick out like that, that's right, this one. Uh. In the nineties that became fairly popular that basically said there was

oceanographer named William Ryan and another guy named Walter Pittman. Uh. They were I think in the early two thousand's, and they said that rising sea levels at one point caused a Mediterranean to burst through the Bosporus straight about seven thousand years ago. And this was a like a legit serious flood that I'm sure seemed like a flood, like a global type of thing. Uh. It created a waterfall a volume two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, and I think enough water in one day they could have

flooded Manhattan by three thousand feet. Yeah, that's that's a flood. It's quite a bit. They also determined that the um the Mediterranean Sea moved inland. The coast moved inland by about a mile a day. Can you imagine seeing that happened before your eyes, like you're just you almost lose your mind again. That would make a really great story that you would pass along and explain it in whatever

terms you could. But there would have been coastal settlements along the bospor Us uh straight on either side, on the Mediterranean side and also on the Black seaside, all this water poured into and it would have just completely wiped those settlements out. So the people who did survive would have been like, something really bad happened here, and this is how we're going to make sense of it. And the timing of it was just right. Um, it

happened probably about seven thousand years ago. And as we'll see, there's a lot of stuff that happened around seven thousand, seventy undred years ago around the world because the end of that last glacial period started in the sea levels, rows and and all sorts of crazy stuff happened as a result. But that's a that's one that people point to, is like that maybe the flood that gave rise to the Gilgamesh and Noah stories, no pun intended gave rise.

It really was unintended. Yeah. Another one about years ago was the creation of the Persian Gulf. Kind of a similar kind of thing during the last Ice Age, it what is now the Persian Gulf used to not be. It used to be a very nice river valley, uh, near the Fertile Crescent where people lived. And the thing here though, that I don't quite get is that they haven't they haven't found any evidence of of things underwater there, right, No,

they haven't. They they The reason why they think this happened, Chuck, is because all of a sudden, on the shores of the Gulf as we know it today, some like really well established settlements with decorative pottery and well built stone houses and all sorts of other things. Domesticated animals just sprang up basically overnight. So they were relocated essentially. Yeah,

that's really the only explanation. I went from hunting settlements, hunting camps to all of a sudden, these people are like an advanced society, so that the best explanation is that their original settlement is down there beneath the Persian Gulf, we just haven't found it yet. What about dogger Land,

So dogger Land is another similar story. They both share what's called aqua terra um, by the way, which is a coin or a term that was coined in the nineties to describe these lands that were exposed for a hundred and fifty thousand years that humans were kind of developing and forming societies. And then we're lost just seven thousand, seventy five years ago when the sea levels rose again.

So dogger Land and the idea of the Gulf being um an underwater now submerged settlement dogger Lands like that, but instead of in the Persian Gulf, it's been in the North Sea. It was a patch of land that connected the British Isles to Scandinavia before until about eighty five hundred years ago. Right. And here they have actually found submerged traces of settlements under the sea, unlike the one in the Persian Gulf, right um. And they actually

think that it's possible. Some some people are saying no, it's probably just you know, slow steady sea level rise that that flooded dogger Land. Um. But they there was a massive landslide in I think Norway called the Storaga event UM. That happened eighty five hundred years ago, and it probably generated a massive tsunami UM and it could have been big enough to have submerged dogger Land permanently after that. Apparently that's how big that underwater landslide was.

I was about to say underwater. You gotta point that out out. But there's a flood story UM from Brittany around that area that says that a king's daughter um was possessed by a demon and opened like the their their country's floodgates and that that was flooded, you know, catastrophically. So it's like, you know, are they talking about this event that happened eighty five hundred years ago that this

is survived as this legend until today. And yet another right here in the well and now the U s of A. But in the nineteen eighties and nineties they investigated flood miss of the indigenous people's in the Pacific Northwest and they found out that their flood miss uh this was a little more recent, this was around sev D. But the idea is that there was a like magnitude nine earthquake that caused the tsunami, unleashing these big waves from basically sort of Vancouver Island all the way down

to northern California. Yeah, it was the hoe and the quill you people, um who had this legend of thunderbird and whale getting in a fight. And UM. What's what's interesting is, I mean, there's all sorts of geological evidence. Apparently there's still trees that are just not where they're they're just not growing back. They were wiped clean from

the tsunami. UM. But the they there's a Japanese temple of Buddhist temple that mark the date January six hundred because the tsunami wave made it all the way to Japan and they noted it. So by basically cross correlating that Japanese um noting of the date with the hoe and the quill yus um story about thunder ward thunderbird and whale, they've said, this is this story is about

this particular event, which is pretty awesome. And then sometimes it's just uh a culture like pre science again making sense out of finding weird things like the Zuni people in the southwest of the United States obviously not back then they saw these you know, ancient marine animals and seashells and the fossils that they were finding, and they said, well,

this is part of our creation story. There there was a great flood, and that's how this stuff got here, Yeah, here in the desert, which is I mean, that's how a pre scientific commuce culture would make sense of that kind of thing. Pretty cool. So, UM, I say we take one more break and we're gonna talk about the other aspect of these myths, the mythology part of it,

right right after this. Okay. So if you take um a myth and you strip the mythology off and you just look at the kernel of historicity and try to figure out, you know, what event it's actually describing. UM, you don't want to just forget the myth part. You want to go back and also look at the myth part too, because that reveals a lot about humans, uh and who we are and how how we think spread

out even across cultures throughout the world. UM. And there's a lot of similarities that pop up from UM from examining geo mythology, especially with flood myths. Even when you set aside the idea or I should say, even when you um account for the idea of missionaries spreading the Noah flood too. So yeah, you know, one of the things that's interesting to look at is how these things are, how these myths are similar. And one way that a lot of these flood myths are similar is that uh.

And we've already seen a little bit and what we've talked about is oftentimes it's a man and a woman. Uh, usually a man and a wife who are charged with um, gathering up the animals, with repopulating the earth afterward, uh,

saving the species essentially. Um. There's usually a warning, um, whether it's Noah's flood myth or all the others where you know, someone comes along and says, you know, you better get your act together earth, or tell everybody on Earth you know you were the messenger to get their act together, or else I will rain down rain upon you. Right. Yeah, Um, there's also sometimes a warning. I guess one of the warnings, Chuck, that came through. I think we said earlier that the

Chinese have like at least four flood myths, um. And one of the warnings that that came through was to this brother and sister who freed a thunder god, um from their father's I guess Chicken Cooper or whatever. Their their father had captured him, and so the the thunder god said, hey, thanks a lot of kids. By the way, the things are about to get serious around here. You might want to build a boat. Actually, yeah, I think

that's a bill of boat. Um. But they're one of those interesting stories where you said, usually it's a man and wife who end up having to repopulate the earth. That put these two kids in the position of having to repopulate and um, that was a taboo incest is a basically the universal taboo one of them. Um. And that was the same in ancient China as well. So in different versions of the story, either the brother and

sister basically got a pass this time. Another version is that, um, the brother had to go through a huge series of physical challenges and couldn't and that somehow the earth became populated anyway. And the third version is that they just made everybody out of clay, that they made themselves, right, okay, Um. But the the if you start really kind of looking at floods, there's like especially the purpose of the flood. That's the thing, Like it's very rare that the flood

happens in a flood myth just for fun. Like there's almost always a reason, like humans want there to be a reason. So we've come up with different reasons over them over the years, and one of them is basically the apocalypse, that that humanity is being wiped out, usually as as punishment, uh, and that we deserve to survive, and we would have to survive or else we wouldn't be around to be passing the story along. So somebody had to survive, so that's where those people who repopulate

the earth come from. But the rest of us, we got wiped out because we displease the gods, that's right. Another one is that we started out as an ocean, uh, and nothing but ocean. So this is just a reset to that, return to our original state here on planet Earth. And there are a lot of cultures around the world that basically thought that we started out as an ocean from ancient Egypt north I think in Japan as well, and basically you know, it's either returns us to a

state of water or an island above an ocean. Yeah, and that's I mean, that's so closely related to the apocalyptic one. Too. It's just that's we just happened to be returning to how things were before, which is also related to another kind of theme as a reason for

the flood, which is purification. Like, yes you're being punished and yes you're returning to this primordial state, but the ultimate reason that say, like God or the gods have is to purify things, to get to rid the world of evil and just keep the good and start over with just the good. Basically, that's another big one too, and they're all kind of, you know, pretty tightly wound up together. Yeah, then there's just angry gods, and it might have anything to do with you, um doing any

wrong is a culture or getting your act together. It's just that the gods were angry, so they they kicked open the top of that mountain and it became a volcano. And sorry t s for you guys. It just happens. But that's still interesting that people the rationalization even in itself, though, isn't it. It's just kind of like sometimes that happens even if you didn't do anything wrong. I think so.

So the there's another one to um that Emperor you myth is a good example of um industriousness, people working together, people controlling things. UM, where the earth has done something crazy, maybe the gods were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it, either in the the the form of like a savior, like emperor you. Um. There's one in Bhutan. I believe

there's a legend about Guru reproach Um and the Zangpo Valley. Um. He shows up and basically drains a lake, exposing all this fertile farm land where a village was then settled or the um. And I apologize for this. I genuinely could not find a pronunciation for it, Chuck, I really tried. But the goon ganny g Aboriginal people g U and g g a n y j I Um, they have one where Um, the tsunami keeps coming and coming and

the sea levels are rising and rising. So the people are organized and get together and start rolling boulders down into the sea and it actually prevents the sea levels from rising any further. So I think that's probably my favorite one. The industriousness and control ones. It's good stuff. And then people have gotten a little weird over the

years with trying to explain these away. Uh. There was a Hungarian psychoanalyst named Giza Roe I'm uh in the nineteen thirties that said, no, the reason why we have all these flood myths is because they're just from people's dreams. And people in ancient times drank a lot of water and peede a lot at night, and so they dreamt

about floods and told stories about floods. Or maybe it is um the God's urinate on urinating on people like literally, which and there are myths that literally talk about that that floods the result of God's being on earth. Um, But I don't know about expanding that to like all the cultural flood miss all over the world for all time, right, And there's others that explain it is like men's jealousy of not being able to give birth and then it's a reference to the bursting of the amniotic sack or

something like that. Um. I feel like when when psychoanalysis gets involved, especially in this day and age, kind of like that was a nice try, everybody. Let's just move on to geo mythology instead, you know what I think? So That's where I'm putting my money, Chuck, Geo mythology. It's fantastic stuff. Uh, and also I should say I want to give a shout out to one of our past episodes. Was there real Atlantis? We were doing geo

mythology without even realizing it, that's right. Uh. If you want to know more about geo mythology and flood myths, then just start searching the internet because there's a lot of interesting stuff out there about it. And since I said that it's time for a listener mail, this is a shout out to the one of the winners of the Stuff you Should Know five K. This is something that the Stuff you Should Know Army puts together every year now in a in a virtual way right now.

But our buddy Aaron Mozelle is one of the people who works on this um. They're looking to do this again next year. Because here's the deal. As they sent me this stuff afterward, and I was like, well, we need to get this before, so I'm gonna go ahead and say it now and then we'll see if you can remind people. But people voted to have this happen in late September early October. Uh, so is when it's hopefully going to happen again. No official registration, no entry fee.

There's an event page. I guess that the Stuff you Should Know Army Facebook site and um, I think people had two weekends to participate this year and they had bike riders this year. So regarding you know, regardless of what your status is an athlete does, they're finding wlace for you to get involved, which is really cool. So this is from Amanda though, riding in to say that

I'm a winner. Baby. Uh, you guys have the best been listening for years and I was happy to participate in the virtual Stuff you Should Know five K this year. It's a cool event that brought some really nice people together at our little corner of the internet. I'm not a particularly good or fast runner, but I get out there and I did the dang thing, and that's what counts. The other participants in the five k radiate that spirit

and are so encouraging of each other. Don't ask me how, but somehow I achieve fastest five k for a woman in this event. What a cool feeling. So today I listened to Venus fly Traps on the way home and came across the package addressed Stuff you Should Know five K champ Amanda Thompson and just about cried and got a hand crafted by Stuff you Should Know Army member metal racked uh for her efforts and it's really great. That's pretty great. She has to buy her her own

metal though, I don't think so. That's fantastic Van. Congratulations Amanda, that's wonderful news. And congratulations to everybody who participated and finished or even just started or even thought about doing it. Maybe you'll do it next year, who knows, that's right. Congratulations to everyone. Yeah. Uh, and again that is a very cool thing. That Stuff you should Know fans too, and it makes us love you guys even more. Uh. You got anything else, No, just be on the lookout

next late summer fall for news on the Army facebook page. Yeah. Somebody please remind us ahead of time so we can tell everybody else. Uh. And if you want to remind us of something, we would love to be reminded because that probably means we forgot. And you can put that reminder in the form of an email, which you can send to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff

you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,