Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and I have one word to
Speaker 1: describe this week's select from twenty twenty one on why
Speaker 1: there are so many myths about a great flood founding
Speaker 1: cultures around the world. That word is fascinating, but I'll
Speaker 1: had a few more words. I guess this is one
Speaker 1: of those good old fashioned Stuff you Should Know episodes
Speaker 1: where we find out that a thing that everyone just
Speaker 1: kind of takes for granted actually has a lot more
Speaker 1: to it than it seems.
Speaker 2: And I love those.
Speaker 1: Episodes, and I love this episode, which is why I
Speaker 1: picked it.
Speaker 2: I hope you love it too.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Ahoy, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck,
Speaker 1: and we're the captains of this here ship called Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know. And that's all there is to it,
Speaker 1: although I do think we need to allow for the
Speaker 1: fact that Jerry is Rear Admirable and by that, of course,
Speaker 1: I mean Rear Admiral, and by that, of course, I
Speaker 1: mean it's gonna be a long episode.
Speaker 3: Has there ever been a cut c TV show called
Speaker 3: The Admirable Admiral?
Speaker 2: Uh No?
Speaker 1: That sounds great. I think there was one the Simpsons
Speaker 1: did one called Admiral Baby.
Speaker 3: Oh all right, well that counts.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though,
Speaker 1: it could have been like a terrible person.
Speaker 3: So I have a cold, So I just want to
Speaker 3: apologize up front. Just a head cold. But I'm a
Speaker 3: little stuffy, So I'm sorry if if it's coming across
Speaker 3: as untoward.
Speaker 1: I'm very proud of you for pushing through, chuck, because
Speaker 1: a lesser podcasters would not. They might they might just
Speaker 1: be like, I can I have a cold. People don't
Speaker 1: want to hear that, and you say, the heck with that.
Speaker 1: I'm going forward with it.
Speaker 3: Remember back in the day, you had like a three
Speaker 3: month cold that one year.
Speaker 1: Every year here for a little while, I used to
Speaker 1: get so sick. Yeah, no, it's terrible. But we've gotten
Speaker 1: much better, haven't we.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think I don't know, maybe quitting smoking and
Speaker 3: something to do with.
Speaker 2: That, maybe just a touch.
Speaker 3: You don't get colds like that anymore.
Speaker 1: No for you, I really don't. So yet another reason
Speaker 1: to quit smoking. Everybody who's out there on the fence,
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 2: So we're talking today.
Speaker 1: The reason I said that we're captains is because I
Speaker 1: was making a play on a story that it seems
Speaker 1: like every single person Chuck knows about. At the very least,
Speaker 1: I can say with almost one hundred percent confidence that
Speaker 1: everyone that you and I have ever met, seen in passing,
Speaker 1: talked to, or been in the same country with, probably
Speaker 1: has heard of the story of Noah and the Flood,
Speaker 1: where Noah was told to go ahead and build a
Speaker 1: boat because the earth was going to flood and everybody
Speaker 1: was going to be killed. And by the way, grab
Speaker 1: some animals put them on board so that you and
Speaker 1: your wife and then the animals can all repopulate your
Speaker 1: respective species once the flood's sides. Right, it's a classic story.
Speaker 1: Everybody loves it. We we read it out loud just
Speaker 1: about every Saturday at dinner time, and it's just a
Speaker 1: great story. Right, everybody knows this story. But it turns out, Chuck,
Speaker 1: that there's this idea that that actually happened. That there,
Speaker 1: and it's long been an idea that the what the
Speaker 1: Noah's story is talking about happened in actuality, that there
Speaker 1: was a point in time where the entire world flooded.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot of scholarly research into this
Speaker 1: into how that's even possible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, I guess if we're talking about
Speaker 3: this particular, because you know, we've we've found, after digging
Speaker 3: around and getting ed to help us with this research,
Speaker 3: that there are flood myths in not every culture but
Speaker 3: a lot of cultures over the years. And we'll get
Speaker 3: into that, you know, in lots of detail, but as
Speaker 3: far as actual Noah's actual flood from the Old Testament,
Speaker 3: there was a gentleman in eighteen seventy two named George
Speaker 3: Smith who is a hobbyist of all things Assyrian and
Speaker 3: an amateur sort of historical sleuth, but a well educated
Speaker 3: when nonetheless, because he could do things like read quneiform tablets,
Speaker 3: and he was doing that one day on I don't
Speaker 3: know if it was an actual lunch break or if
Speaker 3: that's just apocryphal, but supposedly on a lunch break, went
Speaker 3: to a museum, was reading quneiform and came across a
Speaker 3: story the Epic of Gilgamesh and read this quote, build
Speaker 3: a boat, abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn poverty, save life.
Speaker 3: Take on board all living things, seed animals. The boat
Speaker 3: you will build. Her dimension shall be equal her length
Speaker 3: and breadths shall be the same. It doesn't sing any
Speaker 3: about cubits, but it's inferred. Cover her with cover her
Speaker 3: with a roof like the ocean below, and he will
Speaker 3: send you a reign of plenty. And George Smith said, hey,
Speaker 3: this is strikingly familiar as the Christian slash Jewish Old
Speaker 3: Testament Noah's flood story. But this is several hundred years previous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and instead of God telling Noah or an angel
Speaker 1: telling Noah, it's the God in Lel who's telling a
Speaker 1: guy named utnapished him to build this boat.
Speaker 2: Noah's nowhere to be heard.
Speaker 3: And for what reason?
Speaker 2: What do you mean?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where
Speaker 3: like Earth is being punished? Basically?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, So the reason that U and Lel gave
Speaker 1: to Udina pished him was because the humans were too
Speaker 1: noisy and the gods were sick of humans, so they
Speaker 1: were going to flood the earth and kill off all humans,
Speaker 1: whereas in the Bible it was because humans had become
Speaker 1: too wicked to live.
Speaker 3: I think noisy and wicked are the same thing back then.
Speaker 2: I guess so.
Speaker 1: And it makes you wonder, like, did somebody misread the
Speaker 1: word and they're like noisy, okay, and just barreled on.
Speaker 1: They're like, my lunch break is almost over. So George
Speaker 1: Smith's was like noisy, it's they said noisy.
Speaker 3: But there was also the idea of saving animals, and
Speaker 3: there was also the idea that afterward birds were sent
Speaker 3: out to find dry land, just as a no.
Speaker 1: Story, right, And so you just kind of say, whoops.
Speaker 1: Because the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Old Testament by
Speaker 1: at least several hundred years, depending on what part you're
Speaker 1: talking about, And so you might say, okay, so the
Speaker 1: Noahs story is adapted from this, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that it undermines the veracity. They don't undermine the veracity
Speaker 1: of one another. In fact, if you stop and think
Speaker 1: about it, the fact that one of the first things
Speaker 1: that was ever written down after the invention of writing,
Speaker 1: qn aiform, was the first written system humans ever devised,
Speaker 1: and that the first literary work ever created, the Epic
Speaker 1: of Gilgamesh, contained this flood story. It kind of suggests
Speaker 1: that something actually may have happened, like it was a
Speaker 1: really important story that has stuck around for thousands and
Speaker 1: thousands of years. The Epic of gilgrimesh was written thirty
Speaker 1: four hundred years ago, that it suggests that there might
Speaker 1: be some some kernel of truth to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and over the years, a lot of people have
Speaker 3: tried to prove, whether scientifically or otherwise, that the the
Speaker 3: Noah's Flood really did take place. Bible literalists, is that
Speaker 3: is that what we call them? I think so, okay,
Speaker 3: Bible literalists Bible historians, because that would, uh, that would
Speaker 3: go a long way in Christianity if you could say, hey,
Speaker 3: the Bible is an actual historical document, this stuff is
Speaker 3: really true. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there
Speaker 3: was something called deluvialism, deluvial meaning like relating to a
Speaker 3: great flood. But that was a big shape of actual geology.
Speaker 3: Was basically saying, hey, this physical literally the physical world
Speaker 3: that we're living in came about after this flood. What
Speaker 3: kind of reset things? And then the real geological record
Speaker 3: came along once science got serious and they proved that
Speaker 3: was not the case, and that kind of went the
Speaker 3: way of the Dodo around you know, the mid eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they kind of did it backwards. They said the
Speaker 1: Noah Flood shaped the world as we see it. Go
Speaker 1: find proof, and when they found proof, they were like,
Speaker 1: it's not really adding up. Yeah, So there's no evidence
Speaker 1: that there was a global flood that inundated the world.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the geological record that these geologists, the
Speaker 1: early Ones and you know, up to modern day ones
Speaker 1: have been putting together supports the exact opposite of that
Speaker 1: that Earth wasn't created in a deluge. It was created
Speaker 1: over incredibly long distances of time, very very slowly, layer
Speaker 1: by layer.
Speaker 3: Right, that's right.
Speaker 1: But people still say, okay, welly number one, why have
Speaker 1: we been telling this flood story for so long? And
Speaker 1: then also, why is it, like you said, the idea
Speaker 1: of flood myths seems almost universal. Doesn't that like still
Speaker 1: strongly suggest that there was, even if the Bible doesn't
Speaker 1: quite have it right. And by the way, Noah's story
Speaker 1: also shows up in the Quran too, so it's in
Speaker 1: the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the Quran. And
Speaker 1: then there's the epic of Gilgemach story, Like, why is
Speaker 1: this important story still around? Doesn't that still support the
Speaker 1: idea that something happened? Why would there be universal flood
Speaker 1: myths from cultures that had never even heard of Christianity before,
Speaker 1: and there have been some attempts to explain that that
Speaker 1: I think are much more satisfying than the idea that
Speaker 1: we're just missing all of the evidence for a great
Speaker 1: worldwide deluge that happened back in antiquity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there were you know that it's more than
Speaker 3: just those There were Chinese flood myths. There were flood
Speaker 3: myths in southern Canada and the British Isles. So there
Speaker 3: was one study picked out fifty cultures and they all
Speaker 3: had their own flood myth and that it was related
Speaker 3: to some kind of punishment. So they started looking, like
Speaker 3: you said, of like why why is this happening? And
Speaker 3: there's a bunch of reasons and they all kind of
Speaker 3: make sense to me if I'm being honest. One of
Speaker 3: them is that there was a flood in these cultures,
Speaker 3: but it wasn't a global flood. But if you're you know,
Speaker 3: if all you know is a certain area and you
Speaker 3: never get to leave that area and it wipes out
Speaker 3: everything you know, then the story that you pass along
Speaker 3: orally through the years would sound like one that wiped
Speaker 3: out everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like the whole idea is that this flood
Speaker 1: actually did happen way far back to one group, and
Speaker 1: then that group eventually kind of spread out and carried
Speaker 1: that flood myth with them, And so to those of
Speaker 1: us today historians anthropologists, looking at like all of these
Speaker 1: groups that are spread out all over the world, all
Speaker 1: sharing basically the same story, it would make it seem
Speaker 1: like a flood had impacted all of these groups that
Speaker 1: were that far spread.
Speaker 2: Out, so it must have been a really big flood.
Speaker 1: But this explanation says no, the flood was actually really localized.
Speaker 1: It was the group that it happened to that eventually
Speaker 1: spread out. That's one explanation. It makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: And one of the groups that are usually kind of
Speaker 1: pinpointed as this flood happening to or the proto Indo
Speaker 1: Europeans who were known to have been around the I
Speaker 1: think the Caucasus Mountains to start, and then just spread
Speaker 1: out as far as the British Isles, basically all over
Speaker 1: Europe northwest, east, south, and that all of our languages
Speaker 1: like English, Germanic, just a whole slew of languages developed
Speaker 1: out of this group.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and some more support for this is the fact
Speaker 3: that there aren't flood myths in Sub Saharan African cultures,
Speaker 3: and these were groups that when they left Africa they
Speaker 3: didn't come back, so they would not have taken back
Speaker 3: with them a flood myth from proto Indo Europeans. So
Speaker 3: it all kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of related one too, that
Speaker 1: that says that there were floods, just not a flood.
Speaker 1: That flooding is actually really common, so it happened to
Speaker 1: a lot of different groups, So it would make sense
Speaker 1: that all these different cultures would have flood myths.
Speaker 3: Sure. And again, if you live in your riverside village
Speaker 3: and you don't get to travel very far from there
Speaker 3: and everything you know of gets destroyed again, it could be,
Speaker 3: you know, lend support to the idea that it gets
Speaker 3: translated as a worldwide flood. And if everyone's having these
Speaker 3: localized floods which happened, you know, there's always been floods then,
Speaker 3: not necessarily of the forty days and forty nights variety.
Speaker 3: But when things are passed around orally and then they
Speaker 3: get rewritten, things get kind of mixed up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's our bad, those of us alive today
Speaker 1: who are mistaking or laying our interpretation of the word
Speaker 1: world onto like these culture's use of the word world.
Speaker 1: They're saying their world, which is much smaller than it
Speaker 1: is to those of us today. When we think the world,
Speaker 1: we think the whole globe, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And speaking of laying your things on other cultures,
Speaker 3: the third one is Christian missionaries, and there's evidence of
Speaker 3: this happening. They would go and tell the story of
Speaker 3: Noah's Great flood, especially you know, when colonization was happening too,
Speaker 3: and between missionaries and colonization, all these other cultures picked
Speaker 3: up on that original Biblical flood tale or I don't
Speaker 3: know if we should call it a flood myth or
Speaker 3: flood tale at this point, what should we call it?
Speaker 1: I think most people call it flood myths or Deluvian myths.
Speaker 3: Okay, Delivian myth that sounds a little more academic. So yeah,
Speaker 3: So Christian myth stiononaries did this, and I think this
Speaker 3: is also evidence in the fact that the South Pacific
Speaker 3: didn't really have one until eighteen fourteen when they came
Speaker 3: into contact with Christian missionaries, and then all of a
Speaker 3: sudden they had the Maori flood myths.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they actually had a flood myth before, but
Speaker 1: apparently it was more tsunami based, and then after contact
Speaker 1: with Christianity, it became much more of like a deluge,
Speaker 1: and it just bore some striking resemblances to the Noah
Speaker 1: flood myth of Christianity, And apparently that happened all over
Speaker 1: the South Pacific as well, where these cultures will have
Speaker 1: their own kind of flood myth, but it's always based
Speaker 1: on tsunamis. But then the Christians come and go, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, it's a day luge where the
Speaker 1: water rose after like forty days and forty nights of
Speaker 1: rain and stuff. So that creates a lot of headaches
Speaker 1: for anthropologists, but it also at the same time explains
Speaker 1: why a universal flood myth or a flood myth would
Speaker 1: seem universal of those of us around today, and why
Speaker 1: they seem to bear such a striking resemblance still one another.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Indeed, I think we should take a break and I'm
Speaker 3: gonna go blow my nose, okay, and then we'll come
Speaker 3: back and talk about geo mythology right after this.
Speaker 1: So, Chuck, that was a nice view to blow your
Speaker 1: nose at the break rather than during recording, even though
Speaker 1: I still had to hear it.
Speaker 3: You know what's funny, I was listening to I don't
Speaker 3: know why I just thought of this, but I was
Speaker 3: listening to Paula Tompkins Stay at Homepkins podcast he does
Speaker 3: with his wife Janey the other day, and he was
Speaker 3: talking about sneezing on stage and that that had happened
Speaker 3: to him once in his career. And Paula someone who
Speaker 3: spent lots and lots and lots of time on stages,
Speaker 3: And I wonder if there's something to that of the
Speaker 3: body withholding things like sneezes, because I've never seen anyone
Speaker 3: sneeze on stage. I've never sneezed on stage. Yeah, isn't
Speaker 3: that weird?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure it's related to adrenaline in fight or flight.
Speaker 3: That's what I was thinking. I mean, there's got to
Speaker 3: be something to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like your body's like I have time to waste
Speaker 1: all that energy on sneezing. We got to get out
Speaker 1: of here, We got to put on a great show.
Speaker 3: It would be really weird to think about it if, Like,
Speaker 3: I don't know, Barry Manilow in Vegas was talking about
Speaker 3: setting up Mandy before he sings it and just lets
Speaker 3: out a big sneeze.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, thank you for setting me up to reminisce
Speaker 1: yet again about the time that you, me and I
Speaker 1: saw Barry manilo front Row Center in Vegas.
Speaker 3: You would have been sneezed on with that big snoze.
Speaker 1: Yes, we actually would have been covered in his sneeze.
Speaker 3: All right, So we promised talk of geo mythology. Here's
Speaker 3: the idea. Since science really got attacked together, there have
Speaker 3: been a couple of different ways to look at things
Speaker 3: like flood myths as either this is a story about
Speaker 3: our cultural values and there is a lot of religious
Speaker 3: metaphor involved, or this was an actual historical event and
Speaker 3: geomethology came along to kind of say, hey, man, it
Speaker 3: can kind of be both, like there could have been
Speaker 3: a real flood and it also took on metaphor and
Speaker 3: took on cultural values and was used as a story
Speaker 3: of I can't think of the word I'm trying to
Speaker 3: think of to teach you a lesson.
Speaker 2: What's it called fable?
Speaker 3: Yeah, like a fable.
Speaker 1: So this kind of this field has emerged since I
Speaker 1: believe the sixties, and actually I was reading about this
Speaker 1: field of geomethology is like still really trying to establish
Speaker 1: itself in the field of geology. And most geo mythologists
Speaker 1: are trained geologists. That's where you start out, probably, but
Speaker 1: they they also are like, you know, they have to
Speaker 1: really defend what they're doing against their fellow geologists because
Speaker 1: they're they're basically saying, all of these myths, all of
Speaker 1: these legends, all of this historical, these these folk traditions,
Speaker 1: they actually contain eyewitness accounts of natural disasters, of weird
Speaker 1: events and earth of early finds of fossils, and yeah,
Speaker 1: they've they've cloaked them in the language of mythology and
Speaker 1: the terminology of mythology and monsters and weirdness and all
Speaker 1: this stuff that makes it just seem completely legendary to
Speaker 1: us today. But that's how these pre scientific and often
Speaker 1: preliterate cultures passed along really valuable information, and like we've
Speaker 1: been kind of foolish to just discount them as all
Speaker 1: nothing but legend, as if there's no fact whatsoever in there.
Speaker 2: Water exactly. And so that's what geomithology is doing.
Speaker 1: They're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, if you
Speaker 1: just look at this the right way, we are covered
Speaker 1: up in historical accounts, just waiting for us to unravel
Speaker 1: if we learn how to read these correctly and then
Speaker 1: also correlate with actual, like known geological events that we've
Speaker 1: discovered through science.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like, hey, you see that story that seems completely
Speaker 3: crazy about a demon god who lives in a mountain
Speaker 3: and gets angry and spouts fire from its top. Like
Speaker 3: that's a volcano, bros. And like, just because it sounds
Speaker 3: crazy doesn't mean we shouldn't look at the fact that
Speaker 3: an actual volcano eruption might have happened then, and let's
Speaker 3: kind of marry these two things and let's just all
Speaker 3: get along.
Speaker 1: Right, And so like that legend about the volcano with
Speaker 1: the angry god that sometimes spews like scary stuff forth,
Speaker 1: and if you ever hear the mountains starting to make rumbles,
Speaker 1: it means the god is way up and you should run.
Speaker 1: Like that's that is a way for a culture that
Speaker 1: is aware that this mountain's actually a volcano, and that
Speaker 1: volcano can sit dormant for generations at a stretch, so
Speaker 1: those there will be people born in the future who
Speaker 1: aren't aware that that's a volcano. And this is the
Speaker 1: way that the culture passes down over deep time. This
Speaker 1: really important information. If the volcano ever makes a sound
Speaker 1: run because you don't want the fiery breath of that
Speaker 1: god that's trapped inside it makes it.
Speaker 3: I've heard. I love this stuff. Like, Yeah, before science
Speaker 3: came along, all humans did from the moment they could
Speaker 3: sort of form thoughts was try and explain what was
Speaker 3: going on around them, from rain and thunder to volcanoes
Speaker 3: and floods. And I don't know, I think it's super interesting.
Speaker 3: It's almost like these proto early warning systems, right, like
Speaker 3: nuclears didn't really know how to explain the science of it.
Speaker 1: Exactly like nuclear semiox Remember we did an episode on
Speaker 1: that on how to tell people ten thousand years in
Speaker 1: the future about steering clear of nuclear waste. Right, it's
Speaker 1: the same exact principle. It's just chuck. Somewhere along the way,
Speaker 1: we later generations became arrogant and just completely discounted any
Speaker 1: of that those pre scientific traditions because they didn't appear scientific.
Speaker 1: But it is exactly like what you were saying. It
Speaker 1: was the way that they made sense of actual stuff.
Speaker 1: And so there's plenty of stuff to learn from those
Speaker 1: those accounts and those tales and those myths and legends.
Speaker 1: We just have to basically kind of eat a little
Speaker 1: bit of crow and go back and be like, well.
Speaker 2: We've been ignoring this to our own detriment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's like you said earlier, it's a tough
Speaker 3: road to ho though for scientists these days if they
Speaker 3: take this on, because you know, you have mixed results
Speaker 3: when you go back and you look at these tales.
Speaker 3: Some of them may just be folk tales and legends,
Speaker 3: and some may have kernels of truth, some may have
Speaker 3: a little more truth. So there's a lot to sort
Speaker 3: of parse through as a geologist these days, if you're
Speaker 3: if you're working as or with the geo mythologist.
Speaker 1: Right, and so when you are laying this out and
Speaker 1: trying to figure out, okay, what is this myth describing.
Speaker 1: You know, again you're a trained geologist if you're a geomthologist,
Speaker 1: but you're also working with people from other scientific fields
Speaker 1: as far as trying to uncover the fact the kernel
Speaker 1: of truth behind these flood myths. You would be working
Speaker 1: with paleohydrology or paleo bathymetry, which is the study of
Speaker 1: ancient sea levels like where they were at in the past,
Speaker 1: and so you're going to take like the findings from
Speaker 1: these fields and then say, okay, let me see if
Speaker 1: I can correlate it with a myth. Or you find
Speaker 1: a myth and you say, okay, let me see if
Speaker 1: I can correlate it with paleobathymetry or paleohydrology findings. And
Speaker 1: they've actually turned up some really interesting stuff so far.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was in twenty sixteen, there was a study
Speaker 3: that tied together one of the Chinese flood myths from
Speaker 3: about four thousand years ago, basically that there was a
Speaker 3: great flood wiped out China. It lasted for a couple
Speaker 3: of decades, and then this great man came along who
Speaker 3: had become emperor, Emperor U, and tamed the water. So
Speaker 3: geologists went back and they said, all right, there's an
Speaker 3: ancient landslide around that same time that damned up a
Speaker 3: river and a lake filled up behind it in about
Speaker 3: six months or so, and then that flooded. That river
Speaker 3: got flooded, broke through the dam, and there was this
Speaker 3: huge flood, and they have found sediment that sort of
Speaker 3: tracks along these lines. Then they found the Emperor U.
Speaker 3: Actually it turns out he may not have been you know,
Speaker 3: magically tamed the water. He just had a knack for
Speaker 3: early engineering, and that he dredged the waters and it
Speaker 3: cleared up the river's flow. Things returned to normal, and
Speaker 3: he became emperor. But back then it gets you know,
Speaker 3: told as it take of this, you know, great soon
Speaker 3: to be emperor that tames the waters when he was
Speaker 3: just good at what he was doing, right.
Speaker 1: But they, I mean, they found like evidence, geological evidence
Speaker 1: that backs all of this up, that this whole series
Speaker 1: of events, the earthquake that tragdered, the landslide, the landslide,
Speaker 1: the damn, the lake filling up in six months, the
Speaker 1: lake breaking and flooding, that all this happened within a
Speaker 1: single year. That is definitely the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: your culture is going to make note of and pass
Speaker 1: down over the years, that this kind of thing can happen.
Speaker 1: And then not only that this great person came along
Speaker 1: in freed us from the burden of these floodwaters that
Speaker 1: apparently stuck around for twenty years. That's right, It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: There's another one that is just beyond thrilling. If you
Speaker 1: ask me that a lot of people say this is probably,
Speaker 1: this is possibly and I think That's a big reasons
Speaker 1: a lot of mainstream geologists have problems with geo mythology
Speaker 1: is we can't really see a course to getting to
Speaker 1: the point where we're saying this is the one. This
Speaker 1: is this flood that we have evidence of is what
Speaker 1: gave rise to the epic of Gilgamesh and Noah's story.
Speaker 1: But you can say there's a really good chance that
Speaker 1: this is the one, this fits the bill, and this
Speaker 1: one does kind of stick out like that.
Speaker 3: That's right, this one. In the nineties, it became fairly
Speaker 3: popular that basically said there was an oceanographer named William
Speaker 3: Ryan and another guy named Walter Pittman. They were i
Speaker 3: think in the early two thousands, and they said that
Speaker 3: rising sea levels at one point caused a Mediterranean to
Speaker 3: burst through the Bosporus Strait about seven thousand years ago.
Speaker 3: And this was a like a legit serious flood that
Speaker 3: I'm sure seemed like a flood, like a global type
Speaker 3: of thing. It created a waterfall a volume two hundred
Speaker 3: times that of Niagara Falls, and I think enough water
Speaker 3: in one day that could have flooded Manhattan by three
Speaker 3: thousand feet. Yeah, that's well, that's a flood.
Speaker 2: It's quite a bit.
Speaker 1: They also determined that the mediterrane and see moved inland.
Speaker 1: The coast moved inland by about a mile a day.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine seeing that happen before your eyes, like
Speaker 1: you're just you'd almost lose your mind again. That would
Speaker 1: make a really great story that you would pass along
Speaker 1: and explain it in whatever terms you could. But there
Speaker 1: would have been coastal settlements along the Bosporus Strait on
Speaker 1: either side, on the Mediterranean side and also on the
Speaker 1: Black Sea side that all this water poured into, and
Speaker 1: it would have just completely wiped those settlements out. So
Speaker 1: the people who did survive would have been like, something
Speaker 1: really bad happened here, and this is how we're going
Speaker 1: to make sense of it. And the timing of it
Speaker 1: was just right. It happened probably about seven thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: And as we'll see, there's a lot of stuff that
Speaker 1: happened around seven seventy five hundred years ago around the
Speaker 1: world because the end of that last glacial period started
Speaker 1: in the sea levels rose, and all sorts of crazy
Speaker 1: stuff happened as result. But that's one that people point to,
Speaker 1: is like that maybe the flood that gave rise to
Speaker 1: the Gilgamesh and Noah stories. No pun intended gave rise,
Speaker 1: I think, so it really was unintended. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another one about seventy five hundred years ago was the
Speaker 3: creation of the Persian Gulf. Kind of a similar kind
Speaker 3: of thing during the last Ice Age that what is
Speaker 3: now the Persian Gulf used to not be. It used
Speaker 3: to be a very nice river valley near the Fertile
Speaker 3: Crescent where people lived. And the thing here though, that
Speaker 3: I don't quite get is that they haven't they haven't
Speaker 3: found any evidence of things underwater there, right.
Speaker 2: No, they haven't.
Speaker 1: They The reason why they think this happened, Chuck, is
Speaker 1: because all of a sudden, on the shores of the
Speaker 1: Gulf as we know it today, some like really well
Speaker 1: established settlements with decorative pottery and well built stone houses
Speaker 1: and all sorts of other things. Domesticated animals just sprang
Speaker 1: up basically overnight.
Speaker 3: So they were relocated essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really the only explanation. I went from hunting settlements,
Speaker 1: hunting camps to all of a sudden, these people are
Speaker 1: like an advanced society, so that the best explanation is
Speaker 1: that their original settlement is down there beneath the Persian Gulf,
Speaker 1: we just haven't found it yet.
Speaker 3: What about Doggerland.
Speaker 1: So Doggerland is another similar story. They both share what's
Speaker 1: called aquaterra, by the way, which is a coin or
Speaker 1: a term that was coined in the nineties to describe
Speaker 1: these lands that were exposed for one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: thousand years that humans were kind of developing and forming societies,
Speaker 1: and then were lost just seven seventy five hundred years
Speaker 1: ago when the sea levels rose again. So Doggerland and
Speaker 1: the idea of the Gulf being an underwater now submerged settlement,
Speaker 1: Doggerlands like that, but instead of in the Persian Gulf,
Speaker 1: it's been in the north. It was a patch of
Speaker 1: land that connected the British Isles to Scandinavia before until
Speaker 1: about eighty five hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: Right, And here they have actually found submerged traces of
Speaker 3: settlements under the sea, unlike the one in the Persian Gulf.
Speaker 1: Right, And they actually think that it's possible. Some people
Speaker 1: are saying no, it's probably just you know, slow, steady
Speaker 1: sea level rise that flooded Doggerland. But there was a
Speaker 1: massive landslide in I think Norway called the Storiga event
Speaker 1: that happened eighty five hundred years ago, and it probably
Speaker 1: generated a massive tsunami, and it could have been big
Speaker 1: enough to have submerged dogger Land permanently after that. Apparently
Speaker 1: that's how big that underwater landslide was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was about to say underwater. Can you get
Speaker 3: to point that out out?
Speaker 1: Yeah, But there's a flood story from Brittany around that
Speaker 1: area that says that a king's daughter was possessed by
Speaker 1: a demon and opened like their country's floodgates and that
Speaker 1: was flooded, you know, catastrophically. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: are they talking about this event that happened eighty five
Speaker 1: hundred years ago that this has survived as this legend
Speaker 1: until today.
Speaker 3: That's right. And yet another right here in the well
Speaker 3: and now the US of A. But in the nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties and nineties they investigated flood miss of the indigenous
Speaker 3: peoples in the Pacific Northwest and they found out that
Speaker 3: their flood miss this was a little more recent. This
Speaker 3: was around seventeen hundred a d. But the idea is
Speaker 3: that there was a like magnitude nine earthquake that caused
Speaker 3: the tsunami, unleashing these big waves from basically sort of
Speaker 3: Vancouver Island all the way down to northern California.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was the hoe and the Quilliute people who
Speaker 1: had this legend of thunderbird and whale getting in a fight.
Speaker 1: And it interesting is I mean, there's all sorts of
Speaker 1: geological evidence. Apparently there's still trees that are just not where,
Speaker 1: they're just not growing back they were wipe clean from
Speaker 1: the tsunami. But there's a Japanese temple, a Buddhist temple
Speaker 1: that marked the date January sixth, seventeen hundred because the
Speaker 1: tsunami wave made it all the way to Japan and
Speaker 1: they noted it. So by basically cross correlating that Japanese
Speaker 1: noting of the date with the hoe and the quil
Speaker 1: Yuk's story about thunderbird and whale, they've said, this story
Speaker 1: is about this particular event, which is pretty awesome.
Speaker 3: And then sometimes it's just a culture like prescience again
Speaker 3: making sense out of finding weird things like the Zuni
Speaker 3: people in the southwest of the United States obviously not
Speaker 3: back then, they saw these you know, ancient marine animals
Speaker 3: and seashells in the fossils that they were finding and
Speaker 3: they said, well, this is part of our creation story.
Speaker 3: There there was a great flood, and that's how this
Speaker 3: stuff got here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here in the desert, which is I mean, that's
Speaker 1: how a pre scientific culture would make sense of that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Pretty cool, absolutely, So I say we
Speaker 1: take one more break, and we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the other aspect of these myths, the mythology part of it,
Speaker 1: right right after this. Okay, So if you take a
Speaker 1: myth and you strip the mythology off and you just
Speaker 1: look at the kernel of historicity and try to figure out,
Speaker 1: you know, what it's actually describing. You don't want to
Speaker 1: just forget the myth part. You want to go back
Speaker 1: and also look at the myth part too, because that
Speaker 1: reveals a lot about humans and who we are and
Speaker 1: how we think spread out even across cultures throughout the world.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of similarities that pop up from
Speaker 1: examining geomithology, especially with flood myths, even when you set
Speaker 1: aside the idea or I should say, even when you
Speaker 1: account for the idea of missionaries spreading the Noah flood too.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, you know, one of the things that's interesting
Speaker 3: to look at is how these things are, how these
Speaker 3: myths are similar. And one way that a lot of
Speaker 3: these flood myths are similar is that and we've already
Speaker 3: seen a little bit, and what we've talked about is
Speaker 3: oftentimes it's a man and a woman, usually a man
Speaker 3: and a wife, who are charged with gathering up the animals,
Speaker 3: with repopulating the earth afterward saving the species essentially, usually
Speaker 3: a warning, whether it's Noah's flood myth or all the others,
Speaker 3: where you know, someone comes along and says, you know,
Speaker 3: you better get your act together earth, or tell everybody
Speaker 3: on earth you know you were the messenger to get
Speaker 3: their act together, or else I will rain down rain
Speaker 3: upon you.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's also sometimes a warning, I guess one of
Speaker 1: the warnings, Chuck, that came through. I think we said
Speaker 1: earlier that the Chinese have like at least four flood myths,
Speaker 1: And one of the warnings that came through was to
Speaker 1: this brother and sister who freed a thunder god from
Speaker 1: their father's I guess Chicken Cooper or whatever. Their father
Speaker 1: had captured him. And so the thunder god said, hey,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot of kids. By the way, the things
Speaker 1: are about to get serious around here. You might want
Speaker 1: to build a boat. Actually, yeah, I think they build
Speaker 1: a boat. But they're one of those interesting stories where
Speaker 1: you said, usually it's a man and wife who end
Speaker 1: up having to repopulate the earth. That put these two
Speaker 1: kids in the position of having to repopulate, and that
Speaker 1: was a taboo. Incests is a basically the universal taboo
Speaker 1: one of them, and that was the same in ancient
Speaker 1: China as well. So in different versions of the story,
Speaker 1: either the brother and sister basically got to pass this time.
Speaker 1: Another version is that the brother had to go through
Speaker 1: a huge series of physical challenges and couldn't and that
Speaker 1: somehow the earth became populated anyway. And the third version
Speaker 1: is that they just made everybody out of clay, that
Speaker 1: they made themselves, right, Okay, But if you start really
Speaker 1: kind of looking at floods, there's like especially the purpose
Speaker 1: of the flood. That's the thing, Like it's very rare
Speaker 1: that the flood happens in a flood myth just for fun,
Speaker 1: Like there's almost always a reason, Like humans want there
Speaker 1: to be a reason. So we've come up with different
Speaker 1: reasons over the years, and one of them is basically
Speaker 1: the apocalypse, that humanity is being wiped out, usually as
Speaker 1: punishment and that we deserve to survive, and we would
Speaker 1: have to survive or else we wouldn't be around to
Speaker 1: be passing the story along.
Speaker 2: So somebody had to survive.
Speaker 1: So that's where those people who repopulate the earth come from.
Speaker 1: But the rest of us we got wiped out because
Speaker 1: we displeased the gods.
Speaker 3: That's right. Another one is that we started out as
Speaker 3: an ocean and nothing but ocean, So this is just
Speaker 3: a reset to that, return to our original state here
Speaker 3: on planet Earth. And there are a lot of cultures
Speaker 3: around the world that basically thought that we started out
Speaker 3: as an ocean from ancient Egypt north I think in
Speaker 3: Japan as well, and basically, you know, it's either returns
Speaker 3: us to a state of water or an island above an.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's I mean, that's so closely related to
Speaker 1: the apocalyptic one too. It's just that's we just happen
Speaker 1: to be returning to how things were before, which is
Speaker 1: also related to another kind of theme as a reason
Speaker 1: for the flood, which is purification. Like, yes, you're being punished,
Speaker 1: and yes you're returning to this primordial state, but the
Speaker 1: ultimate reason that say like God or the gods have
Speaker 1: is to purify things, to get to rid the world
Speaker 1: of evil and just keep the good and start over
Speaker 1: with just the good. Basically, that's another big one too,
Speaker 1: and they're all kind of, you know, pretty tightly wound
Speaker 1: up together.
Speaker 3: Yeah, then there's just angry gods. And it might not
Speaker 3: have anything to do with you doing anything wrong as
Speaker 3: a culture or getting your act together. It's just that
Speaker 3: the gods were angry, so they they kicked open the
Speaker 3: top of that mountain and it became a volcano. And
Speaker 3: sorry ts for you guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it just happens.
Speaker 1: But that's still interesting that people this rationalization even in
Speaker 1: itself though, isn't it. It's just kind of like sometimes
Speaker 1: that happens even if you didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 3: I think so.
Speaker 1: So there's another one too, that Emperor U myth is
Speaker 1: a good example of industriousness, people working together, people controlling things.
Speaker 1: Where the Earth has done something crazy, maybe the gods
Speaker 1: were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it, either in
Speaker 1: the form of a savior like Emperor U. There's one
Speaker 1: in Bhutan. I believe there's a legend about Guru Reproach
Speaker 1: and the Zangpo Valley. He shows up and basically drains
Speaker 1: a lake exposing all this fertile farm land where a
Speaker 1: village was then settled or the and I apologize for this,
Speaker 1: I genuinely could not find a pronunciation for it, Chuck,
Speaker 1: I really tried. But the gung ganny g Aboriginal people
Speaker 1: g u n g g a n y j I,
Speaker 1: they have one where the tsunami keeps coming and coming
Speaker 1: and the sea levels are rising and rising. So the
Speaker 1: people are organizing, get together and start rolling boulders down
Speaker 1: into the sea, and it actually prevents the sea levels
Speaker 1: from rising any further. So I think that's probably my
Speaker 1: favorite one. The industriousness and control ones.
Speaker 3: It's good stuff. And then people have gotten a little
Speaker 3: weird over the years with trying to explain these away.
Speaker 3: There was a Hungarian psychoanalyst named Giza Roim in the
Speaker 3: nineteen thirties. It said, no, the reason why we have
Speaker 3: with these flood myths is because they're just from people's dreams.
Speaker 3: And people in ancient times drank a lot of water
Speaker 3: and peed a lot at night, and so they dreamt
Speaker 3: about floods and told stories about floods. Or maybe it
Speaker 3: is the gods urinate, urinating on people like literally which
Speaker 3: and there are myths that literally talk about that that
Speaker 3: floods a result of God's peeing on earth, But I
Speaker 3: don't know about expanding that to like all the cultural
Speaker 3: flood myths all over the world for all time.
Speaker 1: Right, And there's others that explain it as like men's
Speaker 1: jealousy of not being able to give birth and that
Speaker 1: it's a reference to the bursting of the amniotic sack
Speaker 1: or something like that. I feel like when psychoanalysis gets involved,
Speaker 1: especially in this day and age, it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: that was a nice try, everybody. Let's just move on
Speaker 1: to geomethology instead, you know, I think, so That's where
Speaker 1: I'm putting my money. Chuck geomethology. It's fantastic stuff. And
Speaker 1: also I should say I want to give a shout
Speaker 1: out to one of our past episodes, Was there real Atlantis?
Speaker 1: We were doing geomethology without even realizing it.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about geomethology and flood myths,
Speaker 1: then just start searching the internet because there's a lot
Speaker 1: of interesting stuff out there about it. And since I
Speaker 1: said that, it's time for a listener, may.
Speaker 3: This is a shout out to the one of the
Speaker 3: winners of this Stuff you Should Know five k. This
Speaker 3: is something that the Stuff You Should Know Army puts
Speaker 3: together every year now in a virtual way right now.
Speaker 3: But our buddy Aaron Mazel is one of the people
Speaker 3: who works on this. They're looking to do this again
Speaker 3: next year. Because here's the deal is they sent me
Speaker 3: this stuff afterward and I was like, well, we need
Speaker 3: to get this before, so I'm going to go ahead
Speaker 3: and say it now and then we'll see if you
Speaker 3: can remind people. But people voted to have this happen
Speaker 3: in late September early October, so twenty twenty two is
Speaker 3: when it's hopefully going to happen again. No official registration,
Speaker 3: no entry fee. There's an event page, I guess at
Speaker 3: the Stuff you Should Know Army facebook site, and I
Speaker 3: think people had two weekends to participate this year and
Speaker 3: they had bike riders this year. So regarding regardless of
Speaker 3: what your status is an athlete is, they're finding ways
Speaker 3: for you to get involved, which is really cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So this is from Amanda though, writing in to say
Speaker 3: that I'm a winner baby. You guys had the best
Speaker 3: been listening for years and I was happy to participate
Speaker 3: in the virtual stuff you should Know five K this year.
Speaker 3: It's a cool event that brought some really nice people
Speaker 3: together at our little corner of the internet. I'm not
Speaker 3: a particularly good or fast runner, but I get out
Speaker 3: there and I did the dang thing, and that's what counts.
Speaker 3: The other participants in the five k radiate that spirit
Speaker 3: and are so encouraging of each other. Don't ask me how,
Speaker 3: but somehow I achieved fastest five K for a woman
Speaker 3: in this event. What a cool feeling. So today I
Speaker 3: listened to Venus fly Traps on the way home and
Speaker 3: came across a package addressed Stuff you Should Know five
Speaker 3: K champ Amanda Thompson and just about cried and got
Speaker 3: a hand crafted by Stuff you should Know Army member
Speaker 3: metal racked for her efforts. And it's really great.
Speaker 1: That's pretty great. She has to buy her own metal though.
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 1: That's fantastic, man. Congratulations Amanda, that's wonderful news. And congratulations
Speaker 1: to everybody who participated and finished or even just started
Speaker 1: or even thought.
Speaker 2: About doing it. Maybe you'll do it next year, who knows,
Speaker 2: that's right.
Speaker 3: Congratulations to everyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and again, that is a very cool thing. That
Speaker 1: Stuff you should Know fans to and it makes us
Speaker 1: love you guys even more.
Speaker 3: You got anything else, No, just be able to look
Speaker 3: out next late summer fall for news on the Army
Speaker 3: Facebook page.
Speaker 1: Yeah, somebody please remind us ahead of time so we
Speaker 1: can tell everybody else. And if you want to remind
Speaker 1: us of something, we would love to be reminded because
Speaker 1: that probably means we forgot. And you can put that
Speaker 1: reminder in the form of an email, which you can
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