🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan12.040948.13969@gallant.apple.com>, batman@apple.apple.com (Ken Laws) writes:
|> I was talking to a friend of mine about how I'd heard that most flood myths
|> originated from an event that may have happenned in the Tigris and Euphrades
|> delta area a few thousand years ago. So, is there evidence that a flood in
|> that valley may have turned into "THE FLOOD?"

A more likely hypothesis is that "THE FLOOD" is a concatenation of many
real life disasters.  Floods are memorable, but very similar, and tend
to run together in memory.  The biblical flood story has so many obviously
"instructive" elements that it seems to me more like a moral tale grafted
onto generic "flood" themes than any sort of historic or scientific report.

|> Part 2: my friend said he'd heard of "geological evidence" of the ocean level
|> rising a couple hundred feet sometime during humanity's existence. Sounds
|> like creationist pseudo-science to me. Anyone know where this idea came from?

There was an article not long ago in the NY Times (and presumably elsewhere)
recounting a place in France where a cave occupied by prehisoric humans.
The entrance was many hundreds of feet below the current level of the
Mediterranean.  But there are plenty of other possibilities.

Humans date back bo the last glaciation, and large changes in water 
levels definitely happened at that time all over the world.  There 
were at least two catastrophic floods about that time:  the forming of
the bad lands in Montana (or is is Wyoming?) and the flooding of the 
Mediteranean Sea.  I'm sure there have been plenty of tidal waves, 
mud slides, and just plain heavy rains in the history of humans, 
especially where humans have deforested highlands.

Creationists may make whatever they wish of these facts.  Since
many of these floods occurred more than 10K years ago, they don't
seem to offer much direct support for the more simple-minded
"young earth" theories.

-- 
  Robert E. McGrath
  Urbana Illinois
  mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu