July 26, 2016 • 53 mins
From tales of Utnapishtim and Noah to Yü and Manu, everyone loves a good mythical deluge. But why are flood myths so important? What sort of natural phenomena could cause the sort of massive flooding likely to resonate through the heritage memories of a flood-traumatized civilization? Join Robert and Christian for a Stuff to Blow Your Mind exploration.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Seger. So,
no matter what culture you come from, you've probably heard
(00:23):
of the Great flood myth. Right, Yeah, it seems to
be a common trope. Just no matter what culture you
come from, there's some tale about floods, and often they're
catastrophic in nature. Yeah, exactly, they cleansy earth and re
rebirth everything, right. And Uh, in my situation, I remember
like being a kid, and I think my parents maybe
(00:44):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:26):
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
(01:47):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:30):
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.
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:36):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:18):
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
(04:39):
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,
(05:02):
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,
(05:23):
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,
(05:44):
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
(06:06):
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
(06:29):
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
(06:51):
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
(07:13):
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.
(07:37):
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
(08:01):
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,
(08:22):
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
(08:43):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:27):
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.
(09:48):
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,
(10:09):
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
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
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
(11:13):
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.
(11:34):
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.
(11:57):
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
(12:19):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:26):
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,
(13:47):
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
(14:07):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:51):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:34):
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,
(15:56):
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
(16:16):
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
(16:37):
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
(16:58):
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.
(17:22):
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
(17:43):
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
(18:04):
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,
(18:26):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:12):
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
(19:35):
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
(19:56):
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
(20:18):
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,
(20:40):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:07):
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,
(22:28):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:35):
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
(23:56):
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
(24:17):
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.
(24:39):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:26):
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
(25:48):
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,
(26:10):
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
(26:30):
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
(26:51):
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,
(27:14):
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
(27:38):
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,
(28:00):
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
(28:22):
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,
(28:43):
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
(29:04):
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,
(29:27):
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
(29:47):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:30):
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
(30:51):
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
(31:13):
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.
(31:34):
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
(31:55):
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
(32:18):
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
(32:38):
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
(32:59):
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
(33:20):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:04):
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.
(34:26):
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
(34:46):
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.
(35:09):
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
(35:30):
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
(35:50):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:34):
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
(36:56):
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
(37:18):
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
(37:40):
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
(38:01):
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
(38:22):
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
(38:45):
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
(39:07):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:50):
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
(40:14):
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,
(40:36):
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
(40:57):
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
(41:18):
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
(41:40):
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,
(42:02):
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
(42:24):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
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,
(43:31):
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,
(43:52):
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,
(44:14):
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
(44:34):
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
(44:56):
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
(45:16):
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
(45:39):
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
(46:00):
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
(46:21):
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
(46:43):
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
(47:05):
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,
(47:28):
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,
(47:52):
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
(48:14):
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,
(48:36):
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
(48:56):
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,
(49:18):
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.
(49:42):
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?
(50:04):
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
(50:26):
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
(50:47):
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
(51:08):
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
(51:32):
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,
(51:54):
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.
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(52:15):
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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
(52:44):
and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works
dot com. Previous Gatty Pro
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Seger. So,
no matter what culture you come from, you've probably heard
(00:23):
of the Great flood myth. Right, Yeah, it seems to
be a common trope. Just no matter what culture you
come from, there's some tale about floods, and often they're
catastrophic in nature. Yeah, exactly, they cleansy earth and re
rebirth everything, right. And Uh, in my situation, I remember
like being a kid, and I think my parents maybe
(00:44):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:26):
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
(01:47):
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
(02:10):
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
(02:30):
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.
(02:53):
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
(03:13):
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
(03:36):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:18):
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
(04:39):
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,
(05:02):
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,
(05:23):
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,
(05:44):
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
(06:06):
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
(06:29):
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
(06:51):
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
(07:13):
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.
(07:37):
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
(08:01):
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,
(08:22):
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
(08:43):
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
(09:05):
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
(09:27):
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.
(09:48):
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,
(10:09):
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
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
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
(11:13):
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.
(11:34):
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.
(11:57):
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
(12:19):
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
(12:42):
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
(13:05):
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
(13:26):
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,
(13:47):
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
(14:07):
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
(14:29):
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
(14:51):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:34):
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,
(15:56):
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
(16:16):
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
(16:37):
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
(16:58):
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.
(17:22):
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
(17:43):
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
(18:04):
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,
(18:26):
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
(18:49):
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
(19:12):
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
(19:35):
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
(19:56):
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
(20:18):
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,
(20:40):
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
(21:01):
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
(21:22):
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
(21:45):
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
(22:07):
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,
(22:28):
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
(22:51):
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
(23:12):
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
(23:35):
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
(23:56):
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
(24:17):
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.
(24:39):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:26):
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
(25:48):
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,
(26:10):
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
(26:30):
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
(26:51):
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,
(27:14):
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
(27:38):
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,
(28:00):
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
(28:22):
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,
(28:43):
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
(29:04):
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,
(29:27):
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
(29:47):
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
(30:09):
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
(30:30):
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
(30:51):
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
(31:13):
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.
(31:34):
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
(31:55):
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
(32:18):
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
(32:38):
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
(32:59):
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
(33:20):
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
(33:43):
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
(34:04):
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.
(34:26):
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
(34:46):
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.
(35:09):
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
(35:30):
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
(35:50):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:34):
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
(36:56):
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
(37:18):
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
(37:40):
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
(38:01):
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
(38:22):
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
(38:45):
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
(39:07):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:50):
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
(40:14):
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,
(40:36):
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
(40:57):
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
(41:18):
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
(41:40):
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,
(42:02):
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
(42:24):
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
(42:47):
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
(43:08):
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,
(43:31):
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,
(43:52):
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,
(44:14):
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
(44:34):
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
(44:56):
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
(45:16):
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
(45:39):
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
(46:00):
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
(46:21):
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
(46:43):
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
(47:05):
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,
(47:28):
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,
(47:52):
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
(48:14):
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,
(48:36):
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
(48:56):
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,
(49:18):
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.
(49:42):
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?
(50:04):
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
(50:26):
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
(50:47):
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
(51:08):
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
(51:32):
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,
(51:54):
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,
(52:15):
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
(52:44):
and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works
dot com. Previous Gatty Pro
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