🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <C0r7ID.EHA@cs.uiuc.edu>, mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu (Robert McGrath) writes:
|> [...]
|> 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.

Add to that the fact that ancient people (those involved in agriculture 
anyway) tend to live in wide, flat river valleys which, when flooded, 
appear to be flooded from horizon to horizon.  Finally, taken with 
the human propensity to exaggerate and the finding of sea creatures 
(as fossils anyway) on mountaintops, this leads to whole-world scale 
flood stories.  

|> [...]
|> 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.

Actually, the last glaciation only ended about 12,000 years ago and the
flooding of the once-dry Mediteranean was just over 5 million years ago
(or, a couple or three glaciations back).  Humans were Australopithecines
that far back.

The formation of the Washington scablands was about 19,000 years ago (and possibly predates human habitation there - depending on whether you believe
some of the claims for new world human settlements older than about 12,000 
years.  About 15,000 years ago, there was a somewhat smaller flood which
drained the area now occupied by the Great Salt Lake and related salt
flats in Utah.  This latter flood was still huge by any standards - the
rough equivalent of all modern rivers put together.

Interesting sources for laymen on these events are "The Making of a
Continent" by Ron Redfern and "The Ring of Truth" by Phillip Morrison
(both also are available as video documentaries).

-- 
J. Giles