Alberta Review: Noah's Flood
An intriguing hypothesis supported by geology, hydrography, and a lot of inference
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There were so many coincidences throughout ancient civilizations—from the epic pyramid to something else—that a cottage industry now exists, largely on TV and YouTube, to explain them. Too often, this devolves into conspiracy and…aliens. But there is always a subsection of researchers who take the questions seriously and want legitimate answers to the connective tissues that join so much of humanity.
The authors of Noah’s Flood eventually did this, although they didn’t begin that way. They started as scientists looking at data, for one thing. They ended up with a hypothesis for how the great flood myth began and why so many cultures throughout Eurasia have so many similarities, from language to farming to village constructions—and, of course, myths.
The book is written as a narrative, with each discovery leading to more supportive evidence for the idea that, at one point, sedentary people lived around the Black Sea, a lake, and the geological actions resulting in its marriage to the Mediterranean were sudden and apocalyptic. As a result, a great movement of people occurred into Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, as far away as Egypt and China. They brought with them farming, animals, and the flood myth. They contend that one of the most important myths of Western civilization had its roots in an actual event.
“As an oasis the Black Sea rim might have acted as a mixing pot, both for genes and language. Perhaps this is why Gamkrelidze was able to recognize so many words shared by the proto-Europeans, the proto-Kartvelians, the proto-Semites, and the proto-Ubaidians who would one day parent the Sumerians. It may also explain the transfer of a propensity for type B blood from settlers in southern Russia to those who would later immigrate to Mesopotamia and Egypt. The refuge for already-practicing farmers might also have provided a place to share tools, practical knowledge, see, and livestock. As noted by many linguists, the borrowed vocabulary is especially rich in agrarian jargon. With its fertile river valleys, potential for grazing and hunting, abundant fish, and ease of communication by boat.
The crashing through of the ocean at the Bosporus, permanently drowning all the fertile oases that had brought the assembly together, scattered the inhabitants like leaves in the swirling wind. Both the language tree and the genetic tree show a great fissioning event. With hardly any warning, the inhabitants abandoned homes, fields, possessions, and food to escape with family upstream or on the high seas. Little but knowledge and skill could be rescued. Ryan and Pitman believe that the Semites and Ubaids fled southward to the Levant and Mesopotamia; the Kartvelians retreated to the Caucasus; the LBK dashed across Europe, leapfrogging from one site to the next, pushing ahead their frontier for reasons never adequately explained; the Vinča retreated upstream to the enclosed valley of the Hungarian plain. Others went to the Adriatic and the islands of the Aegean. Some refugees migrated into the heartland of Eurasia via the Don. Still others used the Volga as access to the distant steppes of the southern Ural mountains. In due course, the Indo-Europeans soon occupied an arc extending from the Adriatic, western Europe, and the Balkans across Ukraine to the Caspian Sea. From somewhere in this strip the Tocharians struck out east to settle one day in the Tarim basin at the edge of what was to become the Old Silk Route.”
This isn’t just a story about geology, science, and archaeology. It’s about myths, how they develop, and how they spread. There is a wonderfully written section about epic poetry and how it passes through cultures for thousands of years.
“As Milman Parry discovered, for a myth to survive unscathed from repeated recitation, it needs a powerful story. A narrative of human history from its origins to its present is, on its own, compelling, especially when interleaved with great events that might be interpreted as the random whims of the supernatural gods (chaos) or deserved punishment (determinism) for one’s own transgressions, and which lead to heroic struggle for survival and eventual understanding of one’s place within the wider cosmos. Oral tradition tells such stories. But so does the decipherment by the natural scientist who works from a text recorded in layers of mud, sand, and gravel from the bottom of lakes and seas using all the tools and principles of physics, chemistry, and biology. The scientific plot can then be given richer detail and new themes from the supporting contributions of the archaeologist, the linguist, and the geneticist.”
There’s a lot in this book. It is incredibly enlightening and interesting. But the human stories shine as much as the scientific. By tying so many different kinds of discoveries together, Noah’s Flood details the decades of work and dedication that go into scientific discoveries and how much success can result from coincidence and personal connections. That so many discoveries regarding the Black Sea's natural history took decades longer than necessary because of the Cold War is a pertinent piece of the story as we descend again into new geopolitical divisions in Cold War 2.5.
Of course, the “Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis” is just that, a hypothesis. Some contend the evidence isn’t strong enough, that the Black Sea actually filled first, or that the flood was nowhere near as catastrophic and sudden as the authors contend (they believe that the Black Sea could’ve been rising by half a foot per day—someone would have had to travel a quarter mile per day to stay ahead of flooding, and up to a mile per day in the flat areas around rivers). The authors accept that without any archaeological evidence of villages around the now-submerged coastline, there is no real way to prove their theory. But, in addition to the geological hydrographical, and paleontological evidence they provide, they make their case by pointing out that the only uniting element of the disparate theories of an original of the Proto-Indo-European language and culture group is its proximity to the Black Sea, and that there is sufficient archeological and genetic evidence for a large-scale and sudden movement of people out of the Black Sea region. So their theory does contain a lot of inference, but when you’re dealing in myth, a bit of faith and charity is always required.
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