The great flood legends - ancient misreadings of the fossil record?

Antiquity ^ | June 2004 | Richard K. Jeck

[aculeus]

Over the past two decades there have been renewed attempts to search for remains of Noah's ark and to discover evidence of the biblical Flood itself. In the early 1980s, several expeditions led by an American astronaut and others ascended Mt. Ararat, the legendary resting place of Noah's ark in northern Turkey, in an unsuccessful search for remains of the ark. More recently, evidence has been reported that the Black Sea may have formed suddenly about 7500 years ago by break-through flooding from the Mediterranean Sea (Ryan & Pitman 1998; Ballard 2001). These authors speculate that this natural disaster (for the then dwellers of the Black Sea basin) was the source of biblical and other ancient deluge legends.

It has been generally assumed that since the Flood is such a detailed and epic part of the book of Genesis, the Flood must have really happened. But what if the ancients among whom the story originated simply, but falsely, inferred from perceived evidence around them, that a flood of such great magnitude must have occurred sometime in their past? Their seemingly irrefutable evidence may be no more than the presence of marine fossils in high elevations.

Fossils of marine organisms, especially shellfish like clams and other molluscs, and sometimes fish, can be found in relatively high elevations in many places around the world. They are found throughout the Near East and countries bordering the Mediterranean. These include Egypt and Libya (Turek et al. 1989:303-306), Lebanon (Case 1982:412-415), and in the mountains and hills of Armenia, Syria, Israel, Egypt and Jordan (deMaillet 1968:70,89,96,249,267,292,299,304). An extreme example in the Western Hemisphere is shown in Figure 1.

Now, to the ancients, fish and/or seashell fossils up in the hills and mountains naturally implied that water levels at some time in the past had to be that high. How else would those seashells get up there?

In the experience of the ancients, only a persistent, calamitous flood could account for such high water in a region that is otherwise largely desert, and where the nearest lakes and seas are far below the elevations where some of these fossils are found.

The world-wide occurrence of marine fossils in high elevations can explain why stories of a great flood are found in the folklore or legends of ancient peoples in diverse places around the globe (Bright 1961; Wickersham 2000: 66-69). It is understandable that primitive peoples had no other conclusion to draw than that a deep flood, one like no other in their experience, must have put those seashells way up there. They did not know about mountain building and the geological processes that can raise fossil-bearing, sedimentary rock strata to great heights. In their minds, the mountains and hills had always been there, just as they saw them, from the beginning of time. The mountains never changed over their lifetime or even over generations. They had no way of knowing about the slow geological processes that we know about today.

The occurrence of marine fossils in high elevations also explains the ancient conclusion that a flood that deep must have covered the whole earth. To the ancients, a global flood also seemed to nicely explain why seashells were found on the hills and mountains in distant countries as well.

In any case, if this fossil explanation is correct, then searches for any remains of Noah's ark and for evidence of the Great Flood will continue to be futile, despite the possible discovery of major, local events like the filling of the Black Sea. The evidence today is the same evidence the ancients had---marine fossils on mountains and hills. They needed a great flood to explain why seashells were up that high. We know today that those marine creatures lived in low-lying lakes or seas millions of years ago. Their fossilised remains were gradually lifted to present-day heights by slow, mountain-building processes that were totally unknown to the ancients.

So it is simply the lowly, or should we say lofty, fossil that is probably the culprit behind the Great Flood stories around the world. Some writers and thinkers from early Christian times to the present have cited fossils as evidence of the Great Flood (Halstead 1982: 10, 32, 70-72). But nobody seems to have considered the possibility that the ancient contributors to Genesis did the same.

References

BALLARD, R.D. 2001 Deep Black Sea. National Geographic, May 2001: 52-69. BRIGHT, J. 1961 Has Archaeology Found Evidence of the Flood?, in G. Wright & D. Freedman (eds.), The Biblical Archaeologist Reader, 1: 32-40. New York: Doubleday. CASE, G.R. 1982 A Pictorial Guide to Fossils. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. DE MAILLET, B. 1755. Telliamed. (English translation, 1968) Urbana (IL): University of Illinois Press. HALSTEAD, L.B. 1982 The Search for the Past. New York: Doubleday. RYAN, W. & W. PITMAN 1998 Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed the World. New York: Simon & Schuster. TUREK, V., J. MAREK & J. BENES. 1989. Fossils of the World. New York: Arch Cape Press. WICKERSHAM, J.M. (ed.). 2000. Myths and Legends of the World. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan Reference USA.

E-mail: Jeckmail@juno.com

[nightdriver]

"So, how'd the coal get so deep ?"

That has always been a more fascinating mystery to me than the Biblical Flood.

Here you have a layer of coal with basalt rock (cooled molten lava) on top of it, sealed up for the ages. Not only that, there may be another layer underneath the first one.

Had the hapless forest (or other plant life) been left on the surface of the ground, it would have slowly rotted, oxidized and gone away, never to be seen again.

Those layers of coal could tell us much more about the pre-history of the earth if we were interested enough to study them.

[sphinx]

Actually, the Sumerians and their Saami relatives might well have been among the few human beings to survive the melting of Antarctica. When that happened ocean levels rose hundreds of feet drowning all human habitation in our natural range ~ river estuaries!

What is the current thinking on the time frame? A slow melt wouldn't do the job. A rapid rise in sea level would, I presume, require that a massive continental ice pack broke free and slid quickly into the ocean. Is there evidence for this?

[Eric in the Ozarks]

I have stood on a coal seam and looked up at eighty feet of shale wall (in an open pit mine) and wondered how long it took for the coal to solidify and how the heck all that shale got on top of it. A further puzzle; just above the shale, in certain locations contained in a clay band, was another thin seam of coal...

[ASA Vet]

Are you a turtle?

[whattajoke]

Are you a turtle?

yes. we are an offshoot of the Illuminati.

[Ichneumon]

If petroleum is supposed to be a non-renewable resource and a product of organic material that was buried, how come it only is found thousands of feet underground and below the fossil record?

That's an easy question to answer. The answer is, "you're quite mistaken about petroleum only being found deep, and there are many mechanisms by which biogenerated petroleum can end up in so-called 'basement reservoirs'".

Where did you get these fallacies -- creationist tracts, or anti-oil-industry conspiracy sites?

The world's first successful drilled oil well was the Drake well in Titusville Pennsylvania, in 1859. It struck oil at the depth of a whopping 69.5 feet. That's not a typo.

Drake chose this area because people had been striking oil accidentally while digging water wells.

I'm sorry, did I hear you say that petroleum is only found at depths of thousands of feet?

Sure, most modern wells are typically thousands of feet deep, but only because a) we're able to drill that deep now with high-tech equipment, and b) the "easier" shallower fields have mostly already been drilled and drained over the past 140+ years.

Here's a depth distribution of US oil-producing formations:

As for "below the fossil record", note that life existed on Earth long before it developed hard body parts (like shells) which would readily fossilize. "Below the fossil record" is not synonymous with "below the point where there was life".

But in any case, there are known ways by which biogenic petroleum can end up in basement rock, including:

There are many possible sources for the oil accumulations in basement reservoirs, however, three sources are referenced most commonly:

1. Overlying organic rock from which the oil was expelled downward during compaction.
   
2. Lateral, off-the-basement but topographically lower, organic rock from which oil was squeezed into an underlying carrier bed through which it migrated updip into the basement rock.
   
3. Lower, lateral reservoirs from which earlier trapped oil was spilled due to tilting or overfilling (Landes et al, 1960).

Mechanisms have been identified that could allow the downward migration of oil into fractured basement when fracture dilation is caused during shearing in an anisotropic stress field (Pine & Batchelor, 1984). Dilatancy in the underlying reservoir rock reduces hydrostatic pressures in local areas of deformation. Pressure gradients are thereby established between the potential basement reservoir rocks and the overlying source and carrier beds containing oil, gas and water. Thus, a tendency to 'suck in' fluids into the basement rocks will be created; this view is supported by direct observation, McNaughton (1953) and McNaughton & Garb (1975).

-- from Hydrocarbon Production From Fractured Basement Reservoirs

[muawiyah]

The idea would be rather massive melting in Antarctica for quite a long time. A large ring of ice would remain like a tub wall around the perimeter of the continent. This would be firmly anchored to the ocean bottom and probably constitute a wall of ice 2 to 3 miles high.

Think of the ice dam that kept Lake Agassiz in place only on a far larger scale.

At some point this structure would have to break, either due to melting, or earth movements. When that happened the entire mass of melt water, and residual ice, would immediately rush to the North, but in such vast quantities that the wave forms could not be contained locally. A soliton, or near soliton would be created around the perimeter.

This soliton would move North until it crashed into a continental land mass. Think of the Cheetah ~ they are so genetically identical it is thought that 14 thousand years ago (about the time of the Antarctic melt) that all of their kind but one mother with two kits were destroyed. They live ONLY in Southern Africa! Most everything in the South up to the Khalahari desert would probably have been destroyed by this soliton. A mother cheetah in a deep cave could have crawled out to a strange world for sure.

To the East, the Soliton would have devastated everything from Kenya to Indonesia along the coast, and as far inland as a 2 mile high mountain of water can go.

Further East, and North of the Equator, converging solitons might have raised even higher ~ maybe to 4 or 5 mile heights. They would crash into Japan, Siberia, Beringia, and the North American coast all the way to Baja.

This could be a very good reason why we don't have any good evidence of early human habitation in North America! South America would be as thoroughly devastated.

Even high civilization would be ground up like so much dust.

So, who would be left after this event? Well, people in Central Africa, those in Northern Europe and Asia, and folks in the Himalayan highlands would still be around.

And, if you take a good look, that's who we've got these days ~

BTW, I'm not a geophysicist by any means but I've been thinking about this problem for many years as a result of reading an analysis that has the entire Antarctic meltoff occuring as a slow runoff that creates a gentle 66 foot rise in the ocean that took hundreds of years.

The article at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0317_030317_iceshelf.html touches on the idea, but it still projects a slow runoff over 200 years. This does not affect the propagation of the soliton! The soliton wave moves North rapidly using the deep ocean medium in which it finds itself. The body of water that generated it follows slowly behind raising the ocean levels by 66 feet. Unfortunately for the surviving humans, the soliton destroyed the existing shorelines in their favorite warm climate estuaries.

No doubt the survivors would have noticed both the passing of the soliton and the subsequent flood. I suppose this would be considered a Universal Flood.

[nightdriver]

"A further puzzle; just above the shale, in certain locations contained in a clay band, was another thin seam of coal..."

Right! However it happened, it had to be catastrophic!

I was reading in "Power" magazine (a trade magazine for the power industry, where they use a lot of coal) where some operator found a bracelet stuck in a lump of coal as it went up a conveyor in a power plant.

I'd love to see the explanation of that one!

[fso301]

Problem is, the flood waters only covered the earth for 40 days. Not long enought for the formation of sea shells and mollusks.

[cookcounty]

"I've also read recent articles that place the Biblical accounts of Noah as being based upon legends of the ancient Babylonians. Those accounts predate the Bible by several thousand years, and would have been available to the Jews who were taken to Babylon."

These were oral stories before they were written. It is not known with whom the stories originated. Gilgamesh is certainly old, but does it stem from something more ancient? ---probably.

[furball4paws]

BTW the Babylonian story, which appears to be about 1000 years older in its origins vs. Noah, the story is very similar and the ark was a cube! How could that thing float?

Noah's ark has always intrigued me. I once had a disagreement with a fundamentalist engineer. "Didn't you ever have a course in the Strengths of Materials?". Could a vessel made of any wood, let alone gopher wood (whatever that is) actually hold together? Depending on what a cubit is, the vessel was quite large, probable bigger than the Titanic. A wood vessel that large? Man that's a lot of trees.

How did the sloths get there? let alone all those animals that cannot swim from S. America and N. America and thousands of miles from Asia?

And: there is not enough hydrogen or oxygen on or near the Earth's crust to make enough water to flood the Earth. The water would have to be 5 miles deeper than now to cover Mt. Everest.

It's a great story for teaching lessons, but more than impossible from a practical point of view.

[cookcounty]

"Problem is, the flood waters only covered the earth for 40 days. Not long enought for the formation of sea shells and mollusks'

Having read a bit of the "Flood" argumentation, I think you will find that the flood advocates argue that the flood was accompanied by massive and rapid catastrophic events, including rapid elevation of mountain ranges, vast tsunamis, and enormous erosional events. I have not come across any flood advocates who think that sea shells and mollusks grew "in situ" on mountain ranges.

[cookcounty]

""So, how'd the coal get so deep ?" That has always been a more fascinating mystery to me than the Biblical Flood. Here you have a layer of coal with basalt rock (cooled molten lava) on top of it, sealed up for the ages. Not only that, there may be another layer underneath the first one. Had the hapless forest (or other plant life) been left on the surface of the ground, it would have slowly rotted, oxidized and gone away, never to be seen again. Those layers of coal could tell us much more about the pre-history of the earth if we were interested enough to study them."

Either way, it points to catastrophic source for coal, not a 260 million year process.

[Chewbacca]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38645

An intriguing theory now permeating oil company research staffs suggests that crude oil may actually be a natural inorganic product, not a stepchild of unfathomable time and organic degradation. The theory suggests there may be huge, yet-to-be-discovered reserves of oil at depths that dwarf current world estimates.

The theory is simple: Crude oil forms as a natural inorganic process which occurs between the mantle and the crust, somewhere between 5 and 20 miles deep. The proposed mechanism is as follows:

* Methane (CH4) is a common molecule found in quantity throughout our solar system – huge concentrations exist at great depth in the Earth.

* At the mantle-crust interface, roughly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, rapidly rising streams of compressed methane-based gasses hit pockets of high temperature causing the condensation of heavier hydrocarbons. The product of this condensation is commonly known as crude oil.

* Some compressed methane-based gasses migrate into pockets and reservoirs we extract as "natural gas."

* In the geologically "cooler," more tectonically stable regions around the globe, the crude oil pools into reservoirs.

* In the "hotter," more volcanic and tectonically active areas, the oil and natural gas continue to condense and eventually to oxidize, producing carbon dioxide and steam, which exits from active volcanoes.

* Periodically, depending on variations of geology and Earth movement, oil seeps to the surface in quantity, creating the vast oil-sand deposits of Canada and Venezuela, or the continual seeps found beneath the Gulf of Mexico and Uzbekistan.

* Periodically, depending on variations of geology, the vast, deep pools of oil break free and replenish existing known reserves of oil.

[sphinx]

Interesting theory. That would be some wave. Bet some surfers are sorry they missed it ....

[Lysander]

It's fair to presume Abraham was an historical figure. After all, there's no evidence he isn't.

There is no evidence Hercules was not a historical figure either. Do you believe in Greek mythology as fact? Myths teach truth, not facts.

[whattajoke]

I was reading in "Power" magazine (a trade magazine for the power industry, where they use a lot of coal) where some operator found a bracelet stuck in a lump of coal as it went up a conveyor in a power plant

That's funny, b/c if you had been reading FR crevo threads, you'd have heard one variation or another of this same exact story from someone's "uncle's friend," or "father's business partner." Tired old wives tale, nothing more.

[nightdriver]

"Tired old wives tale, nothing more."

Or tired old power-plant operator's tale, huh? LOL

[mdmathis6]

Good shot but the Pentateuch and Torah was already in existence by then...the beginnings of the Talmud(to protect the torah from being watered down) was already in process by the last years of the first Diaspora...the biginning of the socalled...400 silent years between the old and new Testaments. Noah was already written about!

Still to consider the other side, certainly the various flood stories were in circulation hundreds of years before Abraham for sure!

[muawiyah]

Modern people have difficulty with stories from pre-literate times. First you have to have a readily recalled memnonic device ~ e.g. a "memory palace". Then, you have to associate current events, things and persons with the memnonic elements.

In the old days they knew how to keep the two straight in their minds. Unfortunately, once the materials were written down in a more literate time, the memnomic structure gets confused with the content.

In the hands of a religious reformer like Moses, you might end up with nothing but the memnomic (Noah's Ark) without the content which was probably something like the animal, god and demigod stories we see in the Mahabarata. The Garden of Eden was probably a good memnonic device since it had a zillion trees and animals in it. YOu could remember quite a bit with it.

The Heracles stories follow the same pattern. There were undoubtedly real individuals who traveled hither and yon and met various folks, and fought numerous fights, but for the bards and story tellers to remember all of these things they had to remember them in the context of Heracles, the gods, the demigods, the animals, the trees, and the other plants.

So, you ask if I believe Greek myths?

First you have to tell me what you think Greek myths really are.