Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Seger. So,
Speaker 1: no matter what culture you come from, you've probably heard
Speaker 1: of the Great flood myth. Right, Yeah, it seems to
Speaker 1: be a common trope. Just no matter what culture you
Speaker 1: come from, there's some tale about floods, and often they're
Speaker 1: catastrophic in nature. Yeah, exactly, they cleansy earth and re
Speaker 1: rebirth everything, right. And Uh, in my situation, I remember
Speaker 1: like being a kid, and I think my parents maybe
Speaker 1: or maybe some other relatives gave me like an illustrated version,
Speaker 1: like a kid's version of the Bible, and it had
Speaker 1: like the Noah's Ark story in it. Uh. And now
Speaker 1: nowadays we have like Darren Aronofsky's Noah movie, which I
Speaker 1: haven't seen. You, I have not seen it either. I've
Speaker 1: heard there's like some crazy stuff going on with like
Speaker 1: my Suster design and stuff like that. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: they somehow worked the Nephelim into the story, so it
Speaker 1: sounds interesting. I don't know why I haven't gone around
Speaker 1: to seeing it, but it's everywhere. It's in our pop culture.
Speaker 1: It's in our religion, it's in our kids books. And
Speaker 1: that's not just here in America, right, it's uh, in
Speaker 1: multiple cultures, as we're going to talk about today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it is pretty inescapable in Western culture, if
Speaker 1: for no other purpose reason than of all the Christian
Speaker 1: stories and Old Testament stories and you know, pretty much
Speaker 1: any stories in the Abrahamic tradition, Like that's the one
Speaker 1: that that little Children connected because it's got animals in it.
Speaker 1: It's less a story about people. It's a story about
Speaker 1: all these cool animals. And if they're more into vehicles,
Speaker 1: it's got a big bode in it. And I was
Speaker 1: just the other day that there's a guy. Have you
Speaker 1: heard this story? You know, we probably should have pulled
Speaker 1: this for this episode. Are you talking about the museum? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's been Yeah. Yeah, this guy who's rebuilding his own
Speaker 1: version of the Ark basically, but it's Kentucky. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: somewhere in the Midwest, I want to say. But anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a guy who's like actually putting plans together to
Speaker 1: build an arcs an ARC museum with actual live animals
Speaker 1: in it. Okay too, of two of every kind. I
Speaker 1: don't think they're going to be able to do that.
Speaker 1: And seven of all the clean animals. That's a detail.
Speaker 1: It's often overlooked. If I remember correctly, I think it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, the animals that will be there, basically like
Speaker 1: the kind of animals you'd find like a petting zoo. Okay,
Speaker 1: well he needs I think seven of each of them,
Speaker 1: because yeah, if I remember correctly, you gotta have you
Speaker 1: gotta have ones for the like the stock and of replenishing.
Speaker 1: You have them from sacrifice, sacrifice and of course to
Speaker 1: the eating problems. And you certainly go to zoos a
Speaker 1: lot more than I do, so and and and petting
Speaker 1: zoos at that right, Bastion, Robert's son is very into animals.
Speaker 1: But but he's certainly has been into the Noah's Arc
Speaker 1: stories like that. He's acquired a couple of books about it.
Speaker 1: And and I remember as a kid, you know, thinking
Speaker 1: about this story as I read it, looking at these pictures.
Speaker 1: They are all these wonderful picture, sometimes horrific pictures of
Speaker 1: the flooding, and you you can't help but wondering how
Speaker 1: would that work? How? How does is it possible that
Speaker 1: an enormous flood could sweep across the entire world, didn't
Speaker 1: without even getting into the questions of repopulating the earth
Speaker 1: with this arc. Yeah, yeah, I you know, it's weird,
Speaker 1: is and maybe this shows what a morbid kid I am.
Speaker 1: But like I felt, like, you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: other kids or maybe in Sunday school or whatever, they
Speaker 1: would talk about this, and the focus would be on like, look,
Speaker 1: how cool this is. This guy built this boat and
Speaker 1: there's all these funny animals on it, and then they
Speaker 1: have a happy ending, and I'm like, what is this
Speaker 1: denon of iniquity that they're talking about? All these like
Speaker 1: they kept talking about all the centers that needed to
Speaker 1: be watched away, and I didn't quite know what they meant.
Speaker 1: I mean, now, like you look at it, it's pretty obvious,
Speaker 1: like they're talking about prostitution and and uh, infidelity and
Speaker 1: all kinds of things. Gambling I think is in there too, right,
Speaker 1: But at the time they just are drawn as like
Speaker 1: kind of like evil like scheming people, and and so
Speaker 1: I was like, how does this how does this work out?
Speaker 1: This flood that's so huge that it kills everybody on
Speaker 1: Earth because Earth is a pretty big place. That's the
Speaker 1: that's the weird, like, um, cognitive dissonance. You have your
Speaker 1: child in present day. You know, the Earth is a
Speaker 1: pretty big place, but you're trying to imagine, how does
Speaker 1: this flood work that's able to kill everybody except for
Speaker 1: Noah and his family and these animals on the boat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we have a pretty thought provoking myth here, and
Speaker 1: a very pervasive myth, and we were not gonna so
Speaker 1: this episode is gonna gonna look at some of these
Speaker 1: these global flood myths and they we're gonna look at
Speaker 1: the the actual possible science behind the flood itself. Were
Speaker 1: there's a lot of research, lots of research into this.
Speaker 1: Now we are not going to get into a lot
Speaker 1: of the specifics of supposed arc construction. We're not going
Speaker 1: to get into a lot of of you know, creation
Speaker 1: as we're talking about how the Ark was built. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But but but instead we're gonna we're gonna focus on
Speaker 1: the myth. We're gonna focus on what we really know
Speaker 1: about massive floods and how some of these floods may
Speaker 1: have informed, um, you know, this cultural legacy of catastrophic flooding. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: there is. I mean, I think it's safe to say
Speaker 1: almost an entire discipline of geology that's based around looking at,
Speaker 1: not confirming whether flood myths actually happened. But you know
Speaker 1: the history of water impact floods in particular on regions,
Speaker 1: and how you can track those back in it. It's fascinating,
Speaker 1: especially the core sample stuffinite we're gonna talk about with
Speaker 1: the Baltic Sea. Yeah, alright, so let's sell Let's kick
Speaker 1: things off with just an overview of the the the
Speaker 1: big flood myth in uh in Western civilization, uh, that
Speaker 1: of Noah. Okay. So basically this is a staple of
Speaker 1: Abrahamic religion. So you find this in Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
Speaker 1: and any various uh sub brand that has a spun
Speaker 1: off from those big three. So in this story, in
Speaker 1: this yeah, Aaronovskyism. In this myth, uh, Noah is an
Speaker 1: antediluvian human, Okay. So he's very much a resident of
Speaker 1: a mythical time. According to the Book of Genesis, he's
Speaker 1: over five hundred years old before any of this flood
Speaker 1: business even gets going. I forgot about that six hundred
Speaker 1: when the flood comes down, and he lives to a
Speaker 1: rife old age of nine fifty years old. So given
Speaker 1: the other myths that we're gonna talk about today. I'm
Speaker 1: going to speculate that that has to do with the
Speaker 1: idea of him being a wise man, right, and so
Speaker 1: wisdom seem to have been measured in years lived back then. Well,
Speaker 1: and it's also just like supposedly humans live longer before
Speaker 1: to flood. There's this this idea. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: a superhuman mythical age. Yeah, you know, think of it
Speaker 1: as it's kind of like the the elves before humans.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, oh yeah, that's a really good and elves
Speaker 1: are supposed to be super wise too. There you go.
Speaker 1: So no is doing all right in the eyes of
Speaker 1: God in the scenario, okay, he but the rest of
Speaker 1: the humanity is destroying the earth with her wickedness. So
Speaker 1: God decides to destroy humans with the earth to quote
Speaker 1: destroy all flesh. So it plans to flood everything, but
Speaker 1: he wants to safeguard certain aspects of his crea ation,
Speaker 1: so he gives Noah detailed instructions for a massive arc
Speaker 1: made of gopher wood, which has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: real with actual gophers. Um, probably a lost forgotten tree
Speaker 1: species or lamentation. Uh process. There's been a lot of
Speaker 1: back and forth on the arc would be very different
Speaker 1: if it was just made of gophers. Uh, So he
Speaker 1: makes a covenant. God makes a covenant with Noah his family,
Speaker 1: two of every animal, seven of the clean ones food,
Speaker 1: and they're going to ride out the flood. And then
Speaker 1: the arc winds up touching down on Mount Ararat at
Speaker 1: the end of all this, and then Noah and his
Speaker 1: animals and his family they disembarked to rebuild a ruined world.
Speaker 1: And then Noah also planted a vine vineyard and had
Speaker 1: himself a stiff drink, which I think was well deserved. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he worked for it. So I I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but I definitely had this idea in my like maybe
Speaker 1: teens early twenties where I was like, a great sci
Speaker 1: fi movie would be like the Bible is actually a
Speaker 1: prophecy and Noah's ark hasn't happened yet, and so this
Speaker 1: like a sci fi version of this would be like
Speaker 1: the floods are coming and you have to build the arc,
Speaker 1: And I'm sure there's got to be a movie out there, right, Well,
Speaker 1: I know there's been lots of like space arc that
Speaker 1: have played out. Um. I remember there being an episode
Speaker 1: of the Old Avengers TV show with a Noah's Ark plotline.
Speaker 1: But really, do you mean like with Stephen Peel. Yeah, wow, Okay,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. That's interesting why I can't remember
Speaker 1: the details on that one. But this is definitely something
Speaker 1: that like we're fascinated with as a culture, whether you're
Speaker 1: religious or not. This this idea of this flood myth, uh,
Speaker 1: flood coming down and wiping the earth clean and then
Speaker 1: creating something in its wake, and we see it also
Speaker 1: in Sumerian myth And in fact, there's an idea here
Speaker 1: that this story that I'm about to tell you is
Speaker 1: actually the origin of the Noah story. That this is
Speaker 1: five thousand years old, maybe older than the other flood myths,
Speaker 1: and it might be where some of them came from. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this one ties into like our our earliest written accounts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this guy, uh, this is primarily about his Unless
Speaker 1: anybody out there speaks ancient Sumerian, I'm going to guess
Speaker 1: that it's out and a pisht um uh. And but
Speaker 1: it's the epic of Gilgamesh that this story comes out of.
Speaker 1: And I'm only familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh because
Speaker 1: Gilgamesh is a Marvel Comics character. Yeah, like many Marvel
Speaker 1: Comics characters. Uh, they just seem to have plucked characters
Speaker 1: out of religion and mythology around the world like thor
Speaker 1: uh and made them into superheroes that exist in present day.
Speaker 1: So I remember Gilgamesh from being in The Avengers in
Speaker 1: the like late eighties or something like that. Um, but
Speaker 1: he's supposed to be the same Gilgamesh that we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about here. So the Sumerian poem myths that Gilgamesh
Speaker 1: appeared in date back as early as twenty one hundred BC.
Speaker 1: They've been passed down through other cultures. So what we
Speaker 1: you know, we might present you here you may be
Speaker 1: familiar with from other cultures. It's just a little bit different.
Speaker 1: There's so many different iterations of these. This is just
Speaker 1: the eleventh heart of the whole like epic of Gilgamesh,
Speaker 1: Uh basically goes like this. Gilgamesh was the king of
Speaker 1: a place called Iraq, and he was two thirds God,
Speaker 1: one third man. Sounds like an awesome superhero origin story,
Speaker 1: Like he's already even better than half God half Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like he had three parents, um, and uh, the elders
Speaker 1: of the city though even though he was their king,
Speaker 1: they didn't think he was wise enough yet to be
Speaker 1: a good king. Uh, So they sent a quote wild
Speaker 1: man of the step named in key Do to fight
Speaker 1: him and teach him humility. Brief aside for a second,
Speaker 1: do you remember when Lost was on TV and there
Speaker 1: was this whole like side thread about how people thought
Speaker 1: that it was a mirror story of in Kid and Gilgamesh.
Speaker 1: There would read it. Yeah, some people out there might
Speaker 1: be familiar with us, but there was this whole thing
Speaker 1: that they thought that, like the writers have Lost were
Speaker 1: somehow incorporating this myth into the show. Okay, So anyways,
Speaker 1: in Keydo and Gilgamesh fight because superheroes, right at least
Speaker 1: back then they're they're mythic superheroes. They fight to a standstill,
Speaker 1: but Gilgamesh wins and he in keito. Then they become
Speaker 1: best friends because they respect each other so much are
Speaker 1: the only ones who can basically like fight each other
Speaker 1: as well. So this is like the the original two
Speaker 1: heroes bad duking it out coming to mutual respect. Yeah, exactly. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it's kind of like in They Live when Roddy
Speaker 1: Roddy Piper and David fight. Anyway, uh. They So they
Speaker 1: go on a bunch of adventures together, as you do.
Speaker 1: And that's, you know, a huge part of the epic
Speaker 1: of Gilgamesh, all those stories, in those stories in Keto
Speaker 1: eventually dies. I think it's of a disease that he dies.
Speaker 1: So Gilgamesh is upset that his friend is dead, and he's,
Speaker 1: you know, as most people do when they're faced with death,
Speaker 1: wants to become immortal. So he goes in search of immortality,
Speaker 1: and he goes looking for this guy named Pished him.
Speaker 1: Now this him is gonna sound familiar to you. He's
Speaker 1: the only man who survived the great flood that killed
Speaker 1: everybody before him. He goes through a Now this is
Speaker 1: Gilgamesh I'm talking about here. Gilgamesh goes through all these
Speaker 1: trials wearing lion skins to meet this immortal person, and
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna go through all of them here. When
Speaker 1: he gets there, him basically explains to him, look, nothing
Speaker 1: has permanence. You don't want to be immortal. But then
Speaker 1: he still tells his story. He's like, Okay, here's how
Speaker 1: he became immortal. The ruler of the gods, who was
Speaker 1: named end Lil, sent a flood to destroy humanity. But
Speaker 1: the god Ea instructed pished him to build an arc
Speaker 1: and put quote the seed of everything in it. Then
Speaker 1: when the flood came, it was so horrible that the
Speaker 1: gods themselves were just like really upset. It was. They
Speaker 1: were watching just like utter violence, and they they couldn't
Speaker 1: take it. So and Leal said, okay, how about this
Speaker 1: as a consolation prize, anybody who lived through the flood
Speaker 1: gets to be immortal. I'll give them everlasting life. So
Speaker 1: this is Utna pished him and his wife. They're now immortal,
Speaker 1: Gilgamesh is. They're hanging out with them now. It's like
Speaker 1: like as if there were a class action lawsuit. And
Speaker 1: this was like, alright, we realize we're not going to
Speaker 1: admit fault, but we realized that the flood had some
Speaker 1: disastrous consequences. Survivors get immortality, and then we're done with it.
Speaker 1: Counterst So, but this isn't the end of the story.
Speaker 1: Used him says to Gilgamesh, look, you really want to
Speaker 1: be immortal that bad? All right, Let's start off. You
Speaker 1: need to not sleep for six days and seven nights.
Speaker 1: And Gilgamesh immediately falls asleep and he wakes up seven
Speaker 1: days later, like he sleeps for seven days straight, uh,
Speaker 1: and you know he There's some variations on what goes
Speaker 1: on between him and Utna pished him and and his wife,
Speaker 1: but basically Gilgamesh returns back to the city as a
Speaker 1: wiser man, and he's now wearing an everlasting elder's robe.
Speaker 1: He's learned his lesson. Now he's ready to be king. Right,
Speaker 1: He's learned that not all things are permanent. He's had
Speaker 1: all these adventures with his friend and he's learned from
Speaker 1: the world. But this is thought to be connected to
Speaker 1: the Noah's Ark myth because they're very similar, obviously, but
Speaker 1: we we don't get the sequel to Noah's Ark like
Speaker 1: we do here though they I don't remember any stories
Speaker 1: of like here's what happened to Noah afterward? Yeah, well
Speaker 1: it ends up, yeah, becoming part of the part of
Speaker 1: a larger story, right, it becomes it becomes because it's
Speaker 1: moving into the existing mythos. Yeah, as kids who sort
Speaker 1: of carry the torch afterward. Right. But it's interesting to
Speaker 1: think of this too as as that the proto flood story,
Speaker 1: because you have to remember this, this this is the
Speaker 1: earliest account we have and it's from a portion of
Speaker 1: the world where we see civilization really begin to spin
Speaker 1: and take off, we see agriculture spinning and taking off.
Speaker 1: So there's this I in this region. Oh yeah, so
Speaker 1: there's this idea that this becomes just part of global
Speaker 1: cultural DNA. Yeah yeah, And in fact, like here's the
Speaker 1: thing that we're going to find doubt And our next
Speaker 1: example will even prove this that these myths don't all
Speaker 1: pop up out of that one Mesopotamian area. Right there's
Speaker 1: myths from the Pacific Northwest. There's myths from Japan, there's
Speaker 1: myths from Norse mythology, and right now we're gonna give
Speaker 1: you one from India. Yes, so this one is uh
Speaker 1: the story of Manhu and Uh and and they experts
Speaker 1: are kind of torn on this. Somethings think that this
Speaker 1: may have arisen independently, or that it might have ties
Speaker 1: to to other tales essentially dating back to the the
Speaker 1: epic of Gilgamesh. But like it might have traveled. Yeah,
Speaker 1: either it traveled, but also it could have it could
Speaker 1: have risen up independently because you know, as we'll discussed
Speaker 1: like flooding as a universal event, like like it's not
Speaker 1: like didn't just happen in that way. It's not like
Speaker 1: it's not like a flood happened, and someone said, whoa
Speaker 1: flooding is possible, here's a great story about it. No,
Speaker 1: So this one involves a man by the name of
Speaker 1: Man Who. He's the first human. He's out good good
Speaker 1: name for a first human. He's he's out fishing, and
Speaker 1: he ends up talking to a fish. This great fish
Speaker 1: comes to him, speaks to him and says, hey, big
Speaker 1: flood's coming. You need to build a ship, and he agrees.
Speaker 1: The waters begin to rise, so he tethers the ship
Speaker 1: to the great horn of this fish. So it's like
Speaker 1: a kind of rides the fish out. Yeah. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: fish carries him along. Fish carries him over the northern
Speaker 1: mountains and then has him buying the ship to a tree,
Speaker 1: and then the waters all abait and man who offers
Speaker 1: an offering of gee, sour milk away and curage to
Speaker 1: the water. And a year later a woman is born
Speaker 1: and she comes to to Man Who and tells him
Speaker 1: to use her in a sacrifice, and this resulted in
Speaker 1: their offspring. Wait, wait, so is this a human sacrifice
Speaker 1: that results in an offspring or it's a different kind
Speaker 1: of sacrifice. Um, it's unclear. It's a little unclear. Um,
Speaker 1: we see, we see this in another myth. We're gonna
Speaker 1: discuss two where like the the idea of the flood
Speaker 1: not only as apocalypse but new beginning definitely a rebirth thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense that they would introduce this sort of
Speaker 1: mother figure. Yeah. Yeah, so it's it's a survival story,
Speaker 1: but it's also a second creation story. And this story
Speaker 1: gets more involved as traditions build up, like everything in Hinduism. Uh.
Speaker 1: It leads to the establishment of Vishnu's fish Avatar matt
Speaker 1: Sayah and the flood motif is also important in Tamil literature,
Speaker 1: involving at least two different flood myths, one of creation
Speaker 1: one of survival. Uh. And it you know, continues to
Speaker 1: spiral out from there. This is another key point here,
Speaker 1: and this was discussed in The Flood Myth, which is
Speaker 1: a book by Alan Dundee's that like a lot of
Speaker 1: these stories, humanity survives the calamity and then almost almost
Speaker 1: immediately faces a new threat to something we see in
Speaker 1: in Noah and and Beyond. Uh So. Yeah, so now
Speaker 1: we have the the Indian, the Hindu interpretation and of
Speaker 1: a great flood. So we've got another version of this
Speaker 1: all the way on the other side of the world
Speaker 1: in Norris mythology. Uh. And again, like like with all
Speaker 1: of these, there's various iterations. And again there are characters
Speaker 1: here that Marvel comics is appropriated on their own. Uh.
Speaker 1: Anybody who's read Thor comics or seen Thor movies because
Speaker 1: those are a thing now, which is it's weird to me,
Speaker 1: uh is familiar with Odin and Thor and the Norris
Speaker 1: mythology stuff that that comes out of that. But this
Speaker 1: is the Norris myth of the ice giant mm Er.
Speaker 1: And I think I'm saying that right. That's how I've
Speaker 1: always said since I was a kid, because Yemmer was
Speaker 1: like he was like the biggest, baddest monster in the
Speaker 1: Marvel universe. I don't know, Well, there's the ice one Yimmer,
Speaker 1: and then there's Surtur and he's the fire demon. So
Speaker 1: there's these two and various versions. And that's actually important.
Speaker 1: Although I don't know if Surtur actually comes from the
Speaker 1: myth he might just be a creation of like Stanley
Speaker 1: and jack Erba of the ice chience. We actually see
Speaker 1: those in that first storm. Yeah. Yeah, and they are
Speaker 1: supposedly the children of Yemmer. So um. There again, there's
Speaker 1: tons of iterations on this, so if you're like a
Speaker 1: Norse mythology expert, my apologies, but this is basically like
Speaker 1: the boiled down summary version. Humor is this primordial being.
Speaker 1: This is the most metal story ever too. I was
Speaker 1: six to say this better, being very dark and and
Speaker 1: and typically north. Oh yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if
Speaker 1: like a Mona Marthaur in Soperum or any of those
Speaker 1: like sort of like northern European metal bands have songs
Speaker 1: about hummer Um. But yeah, he's this primordial being that's
Speaker 1: formed from poisonous venom that's dropped on ice. Now this
Speaker 1: is before the world exists, but there are these realms. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's Nifflhelm and that's like the ice realm, and then
Speaker 1: there's Muspelheim and that's like a fire realm. Uh and
Speaker 1: in between them they sort of meet like they're they're
Speaker 1: ice and uh fire. The heat from that comes together
Speaker 1: makes this venom. It drops down and forms Yemmer, and
Speaker 1: it sort of begins a proto universe. Similar if you've
Speaker 1: seen the Thor movies, then you know, like their version
Speaker 1: of it is the Nine Realms, right with Asgard and
Speaker 1: mid Guard and all the In fact, I think Nifflhelm
Speaker 1: is in there as well. Um. Now, the gods in
Speaker 1: this story, including Odin, father of Thor, and the you know,
Speaker 1: the big guy in Norse mythology, subsequently formed aspects of
Speaker 1: the world from Yumor's body after they killed him, so
Speaker 1: they had a big battle with him. His blood became
Speaker 1: the oceans and caused a huge flood. Now before this,
Speaker 1: in this myth there were no bodies of water, so
Speaker 1: it's it's you know, the ideas that Yumer's blood basically
Speaker 1: forms rivers and lakes and oceans and all of that.
Speaker 1: Um And the giants that you were talking about earlier
Speaker 1: that are in like that first Thor movie, they're supposed
Speaker 1: to be his children and they like spawned out of
Speaker 1: his body. Now, there's there's a couple of other things
Speaker 1: to this that are just fun that I'll throw in there.
Speaker 1: One of which is that, uh sometimes people say, well,
Speaker 1: if Humor was just created, like what did he eat? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: apparently also created around the same time was a cow
Speaker 1: called odd Humla. And this is like this giant mystic
Speaker 1: cow and four rivers of milk ran out of her
Speaker 1: teeths and that's what fed humor. So he there's I'm
Speaker 1: just trying to imagine like this huge ice giant floating
Speaker 1: in space, and you've got the space calf floating above.
Speaker 1: He's drinking from that. But basically, and the death story
Speaker 1: is basically Odin and two of his brothers just you know,
Speaker 1: annihilate him, uh, and it it ultimately results in what
Speaker 1: we know as the Earth, not just the blood, but
Speaker 1: like the blood flowing around his dead body. Like they
Speaker 1: turned his skull into the sky, and they made stars
Speaker 1: out of like molten slag, and and they threw his
Speaker 1: rains in the sky to make clouds and like parts
Speaker 1: of earth and hills and things like that. They're all
Speaker 1: part of his body. So we're all living on his
Speaker 1: corpse right now in that myth um. But the thing
Speaker 1: about it is is that you know, this is yet
Speaker 1: another flood myth from a whole different time. The difference
Speaker 1: being here is that this one doesn't have, you know,
Speaker 1: the the elder wise man who gets on a boat
Speaker 1: and saves everything, although I guess Odin in a way
Speaker 1: is sort of the wise man but he's like a warrior,
Speaker 1: wise man, so this is kind of a flood of
Speaker 1: death but also a flood of creation. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean not only did the earth, it was the
Speaker 1: earth created out of him. But then like if you
Speaker 1: you know, can wrap your head around the Norse mythology
Speaker 1: of all these different realms that sort of interact like
Speaker 1: a ven diagram. Uh. Yeah, he like partially came out
Speaker 1: of those and then like created a whole another realm
Speaker 1: where these giants, the ice giants live. I believe it's
Speaker 1: David Montgomery of the University of Washington and who will
Speaker 1: will get into more of his work in the second
Speaker 1: half of this episode, but I believe he pointed out
Speaker 1: that you see a lot of beneficial flood myths in
Speaker 1: in African cultures and and and less in the way
Speaker 1: of cataclysmic floods, which is interesting because in this we
Speaker 1: see the geographic importance of the myth. We see the
Speaker 1: geography informing the myth. What does a flood mean in
Speaker 1: the geography of this particular people. Yeah, absolutely, uh, And
Speaker 1: that's why you know, geographic studies in geological studies are
Speaker 1: super important to sort of I guess backtracking and trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where all of this came from. Cool, Well,
Speaker 1: I have another one here, and this is from This
Speaker 1: is from Chinese mythology. It's the has to do with
Speaker 1: the great flood of Coon. You and this plays an
Speaker 1: important role in in Chinese mythology, though it's often the
Speaker 1: is often the case with the Chinese mythology, there's not
Speaker 1: necessarily a lot of internal consistency here. Uh, and this
Speaker 1: would have been a generation spanning flood. This is how
Speaker 1: it ends up playing out. There's this big flood and
Speaker 1: it's not really it's not divine punishment or anything. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of a natural occurrence. It's not so much
Speaker 1: something that God's inflict. It just happens, all right. So
Speaker 1: humans are suffering, though humans are displaced, they're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to solve the problem of all of
Speaker 1: this catastrophic flooding. So you have this culture bear, this
Speaker 1: important cultural hero named Goon or Coon, and he ends
Speaker 1: up taking the divine self renewing soil from the gods
Speaker 1: in order to save humans from the flood. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: he's gonna build like damn works and whatnot. But he didn't.
Speaker 1: He didn't wait for permission to actually obtain the divine
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's exactly it's a very much a prometheus myth.
Speaker 1: He's punished for stealing the gift uh he depending on
Speaker 1: which version you look at, he's either killed or he's
Speaker 1: turned into a bear or some sort of a turtle creature.
Speaker 1: There's at any rate he's taken out of the game
Speaker 1: for this, but the gift is permitted to remain, and
Speaker 1: the gods end up ordaining his son uh dar You
Speaker 1: to continue his work with the divine soil. Only he
Speaker 1: ends up deviating from his father's plans and finishing his
Speaker 1: father's work. He constructs drainage channels, reconstructs earthen barriers, and
Speaker 1: in the end he manages to defeat this the Great
Speaker 1: Deluge and become emperor and founds the Shaya dynasty been
Speaker 1: uhvy to sixteen hundred BCS. So this actually binds into
Speaker 1: like legitimate history that we have records of. That's interesting,
Speaker 1: yes and no, because you know, when you when you
Speaker 1: begin going back further and further in Chinese history, you
Speaker 1: see the you see myth and and actual history you know,
Speaker 1: becoming one, which is I guess pretty much the case
Speaker 1: with with most old cultures in society, certainly in Indian history.
Speaker 1: You go back far enough, you're dealing with wars that
Speaker 1: may or may not have actually happened, and then you
Speaker 1: have to try and separate the from the react well,
Speaker 1: and then even here you've got like Paul Bunyan and
Speaker 1: Babe the Blue Ox, stuff like that that like supposedly
Speaker 1: mixed in. I remember learning about that stuff when I
Speaker 1: was a kid and thinking it was totally real. Well,
Speaker 1: I wonder if they're norse implications of day than to
Speaker 1: believe there is. Somebody just wrote into us the other day,
Speaker 1: by the way, about a mistake they said that we
Speaker 1: made in an episode. We were talking about Johnny Appleseeds,
Speaker 1: and they said Johnny apple Seed was actually based on
Speaker 1: a real person. He was, Yeah, that's come up a
Speaker 1: couple of times, and I honestly can't remember what we
Speaker 1: even said about talking about EPs, legends and myth. We're
Speaker 1: talking about ways of looking at mythology, and we're talking
Speaker 1: about the difference between myth and legend and folklore. And yeah,
Speaker 1: at any rate, if if there's any confusion on that, yes,
Speaker 1: Johnny Appleseed was is based on a real person, so
Speaker 1: it would be more of like a legend folklore as
Speaker 1: opposed to be. But it becomes difficult when you start
Speaker 1: going further and further back in time, because there's like
Speaker 1: the snowball effect, right, Important individuals become wrapped up in
Speaker 1: our expectations and our ideas and our mythic and magical
Speaker 1: understanding of the war old and if if there's a
Speaker 1: real person at the heart of that snowball, you kind
Speaker 1: of lose them after a while. Yeah, there was just
Speaker 1: a study that just came out earlier this week that
Speaker 1: we read about on Monday morning that was saying, you know,
Speaker 1: basically that they had confirmed evidence that our memories are unreliable,
Speaker 1: but not just our memories, but our memories of people
Speaker 1: who have passed away. Right, So then if you extrapolate
Speaker 1: that outwards to people who actually existed but we've never met,
Speaker 1: it's it gets further and further unreliable the longer in
Speaker 1: time we get away from them, right, So naturally we're
Speaker 1: going to turn them into mythological figures. Now, these accounts
Speaker 1: that we've given you, this is just a sampling of
Speaker 1: global flood myths. Yeah, there are all kinds as well
Speaker 1: that we're not going to dive deep into. But I'll
Speaker 1: just give you a couple here. There's flood stories from
Speaker 1: Fiji and Tahiti that say that giant waves struck the
Speaker 1: islands there without any warning. Uh. In central Chili, there's
Speaker 1: a story of two giant serpents that fought each other
Speaker 1: by trying to lift the sea up to its highest point,
Speaker 1: and this resulted in earthquakes and flooding. Tibetans of the
Speaker 1: Sepango or maybe it's Sangpo Valley, they have a flood
Speaker 1: myth that describes basically a giant glacial dam that breaks uh.
Speaker 1: And then in the Pacific Northwest here in the in
Speaker 1: the North America, native tribes tell a story that's similar
Speaker 1: about thunderbird and whale. And here's where this gets interesting
Speaker 1: and sort of is a nice segue for us into
Speaker 1: the science part that we're gonna talk about here. Japanese
Speaker 1: temples actually have records of a major earthquake that happened
Speaker 1: in seventeen hundred and sent waves all the way to Japan. Now,
Speaker 1: this earth earthquake presumably happened in the Pacific Northwest somewhere,
Speaker 1: maybe in the ocean just off of it. This could
Speaker 1: have been the event that created the myth of thunderbird
Speaker 1: and whale and caused Native Americans that we're living on
Speaker 1: the western coast to flee and move further inland. So
Speaker 1: that's really like the beginning of what I guess we're
Speaker 1: gonna refer to today as like geo mythology, which is
Speaker 1: um taking a look at the mythology and then taking
Speaker 1: a look at the records or or using science to
Speaker 1: look at the actual land masses and figure out what
Speaker 1: happened here thousands of years ago. Yeah, and it also
Speaker 1: brings us back again to the notion that a flood
Speaker 1: myth is going to be informed by what flooding looks
Speaker 1: like to those people into that reagion. So here we've
Speaker 1: looked at a few examples that are coastal and Pacific,
Speaker 1: and those are of course going to be informed by
Speaker 1: earthquakes and Tsunamis that sort of occurrence as opposed to
Speaker 1: river lands, which are going to be formed out of
Speaker 1: you know, the experiences with rising uh water levels in
Speaker 1: the rivers. Yeah, Like I didn't think about this until now,
Speaker 1: but like imagine if Hurricane Katrina happened and we didn't
Speaker 1: have like present day technology and information culture right, Like,
Speaker 1: there would have certainly been crazy stories that spawned out
Speaker 1: of an event that is as devastating as that, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, what is the hurricane pane hurricane making landfall
Speaker 1: other than a cataclysmic flood of epic proportions. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that will spiral out myths. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: if you know, wow, this is dawning on me as well.
Speaker 1: Even at the time, do you remember that there were
Speaker 1: some people who were saying, like, oh, well, New Orleans
Speaker 1: is being punished because it's a city of sin, and
Speaker 1: of course this happened there because they're getting what they deserved,
Speaker 1: which is like a horrible thing to say, But like
Speaker 1: even in present day, people are cooking up stories like
Speaker 1: that about these huge natural disasters. Well from a you know,
Speaker 1: from a religious framework. I guess sometimes something an idea
Speaker 1: like that, as awful as it is, is easier to
Speaker 1: digest than the than the other reasons, right to get
Speaker 1: down to why do horrible things happen on a particular day,
Speaker 1: and that it's totally out of our control and where
Speaker 1: nothing but gnats compared to natural disasters. So it took
Speaker 1: quite a while for modern scientific understanding of her to
Speaker 1: geological and biological history, to fully disengage from Western Christian
Speaker 1: religious traditions, and to fully remove the sacred time frame
Speaker 1: from the profane time frame. Uh. So we see the
Speaker 1: earliest approaches to understanding Earth's history. We see those shackled
Speaker 1: to this idea of an antediluvian world, a pre flood world,
Speaker 1: uh within the periods of of a pre adamic and
Speaker 1: edemic time. So it's all about like you know, Eden
Speaker 1: and Adam and then the Great flood and Noah surviving it.
Speaker 1: Like that is just interwoven with our early scientific understanding
Speaker 1: of the world. And there's this kind of fascinating weave
Speaker 1: of religion and science that happens in the Roman Catholic Church,
Speaker 1: but in the other clergy as well, but primarily through
Speaker 1: a guy named Nicholas Steno, And he's the seventeenth century
Speaker 1: Roman Catholic priest who is one of the earliest known geologists.
Speaker 1: He actually achieved three of the four steps to being
Speaker 1: declared a saint, So this guy is very highly regarded
Speaker 1: within the Catholic Church. Steno was one of the first
Speaker 1: people to show that rocks tell their own stories, and
Speaker 1: sometimes these stories either guide religious doctrine or they can
Speaker 1: refute it, right, And in this instance he was referring
Speaker 1: to the flood myth right. And so by the time
Speaker 1: of Darwin, Uh, the clergy basically came to the understanding
Speaker 1: with the field of geology and abandoned the idea that
Speaker 1: a literal global flood had happened. Now, we were just
Speaker 1: talking to our co host Joe McCormick about this before
Speaker 1: we came in. Now, Joe said that there are like
Speaker 1: some I guess creationist geologists who have said, you know, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we we disregard that. We do think that
Speaker 1: there was a global flood, and you can see it's
Speaker 1: markers here, here, here, and here, and like one of
Speaker 1: the examples he gave us was the Grand Canyon. But
Speaker 1: for the most part, the discipline of geology and even
Speaker 1: many clergy members disregard that and think of it as
Speaker 1: more of a metaphor or as being something that was localized.
Speaker 1: Right that Uh, science, with what we have with science today,
Speaker 1: it seems like it would be impossible for the world
Speaker 1: to actually have experienced a global flood exactly. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: are a number of reasons why this is is just
Speaker 1: not the case. So for for starters. There is no
Speaker 1: global culture in early human history, so there's no there's
Speaker 1: no there's no internet in ancient Battlodian times. So if
Speaker 1: there was a global flood, we have no way of
Speaker 1: reporting it, you know, we would have to depend on
Speaker 1: a divine being I guess to report it to us.
Speaker 1: That would be the loophole to explain it. Also, um
Speaker 1: if you of course, this is a big one here,
Speaker 1: there's just not enough water in the earth system to
Speaker 1: account for water levels to rise above the highest mountain
Speaker 1: um uniformly rising level would not allow the water to
Speaker 1: have the erosive capabilities that are often attributed to a
Speaker 1: global flood. Particularly and you know in the Abrahamic tradition
Speaker 1: and some rock formations millions of years old, they show
Speaker 1: no evidence of large scale water erosion. The rocks are
Speaker 1: not telling us that this is taking place. And then
Speaker 1: of course there are a number of other cultural things
Speaker 1: to think back on here, again coming back to the
Speaker 1: idea that there's no global culture in early human history.
Speaker 1: You look back to the earliest human empires and they're
Speaker 1: all very regional. The Akkadian Empire and from three fifty
Speaker 1: to b C. And modern Iraq and the following that,
Speaker 1: the Hittite Empire, the Assyrians, they're all fairly localized, but
Speaker 1: to them that was the world. The world was what
Speaker 1: they knew, so it would make sense that, of course
Speaker 1: this would be a world myth, even though they're unaware
Speaker 1: that Japan exists. Right. And then the other big one,
Speaker 1: of course, is that human society's early human co stures
Speaker 1: they built up around waterways and waterways, flood, rivers, flood
Speaker 1: uh ponds, flood lakes, flood the waves come crashing in.
Speaker 1: There are tsunamis, there are hurricanes. So rising water levels
Speaker 1: would be a pretty much a universal experience of any
Speaker 1: early humans. So everyone would have the chance to experience
Speaker 1: this and form their own myths about it, or certainly
Speaker 1: to uh intercept another myth and make it their own. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, absolutely, as we have seen just today with
Speaker 1: the Gilgamesh epic sort of morphing into the Noah's Ark
Speaker 1: story that we know today. Yeah. Uh and this is
Speaker 1: what uh this there's this term I U I threw
Speaker 1: it out earlier, but I really like it. It came
Speaker 1: up in the research. It's called geo mythology, and it
Speaker 1: was coined by a woman named Dorothy Bataliano in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, and she was essentially trying to describe oral
Speaker 1: storytelling that explains landforms that have been created by earthquakes, fires, floods, volcanoes,
Speaker 1: diverting waterways, or even like the sudden emergence or disappearance
Speaker 1: of islands. Right, these huge natural events. There is some
Speaker 1: evidence that these are grounded in real events, but they're
Speaker 1: connected to myth as well, so geo mythology. In the
Speaker 1: case of the Great flood myth though, as we're saying now,
Speaker 1: most people think that it differs from region to region. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: so the the the immediate take home here is that
Speaker 1: while nobody is seriously considering the idea of a global
Speaker 1: catastrophic flood, there's plenty of really cool science and really
Speaker 1: cool research um that that applies to regional floods in history. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so this leads us to this book called The
Speaker 1: Rocks Don't Lie by geologist David Montgomery, and he wrote
Speaker 1: really a long interesting piece in Nautilus magazine that we
Speaker 1: read for this episode that dives pretty deep into looking
Speaker 1: at in particular, he was what was the part of
Speaker 1: the world that he was in that he was describing
Speaker 1: I believe to bet he was looking at at at
Speaker 1: some Tibetan floodplaints and he was there, but then he
Speaker 1: was extrapolating it outward to all these other regions that
Speaker 1: had flood myths, and he's sort of our go to
Speaker 1: on this. Yeah. He has a great quote from the
Speaker 1: from that book. He said, if your world is small enough,
Speaker 1: all floods are global. I keep coming back to that
Speaker 1: again again. Uh. There's also another quote I want to read,
Speaker 1: real quit from a man by the name of Irving Finkel,
Speaker 1: curator at the British Museum and author of the book
Speaker 1: The Ark Before Noah, Decoding the Story of the Flood
Speaker 1: and another very interesting author. Stealing seriously with the subject matter.
Speaker 1: He says, quote, there must have been a heritage memory
Speaker 1: of the destructive power of floodwater based on various terrible floods,
Speaker 1: and the people who survived would have been people in boats.
Speaker 1: You can imagine someone sunbathing in a canoe, half asleep
Speaker 1: and waking up however long later, and they're in the
Speaker 1: middle of the Persian Gulf, and that's the beginning of
Speaker 1: the flood story. Yeah, I'm thinking of there's there's an
Speaker 1: episode of that Andy Daly Show review with Forest McNeil.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen that? I don't think it's really funny,
Speaker 1: but that that happens in it. He goes to sleep
Speaker 1: in a canoe and wakes up and he's actually in
Speaker 1: the um what's the great Pacific garbage? He wakes up
Speaker 1: there anyways, So yeah, David Montgomery really kind of pulls
Speaker 1: it all together. But there's been a lot of geologists
Speaker 1: who have looked at this over the years, right, So yeah,
Speaker 1: David Montgomery is really like the guy who's been pulling
Speaker 1: a lot of this together. And in particular, in two
Speaker 1: thousand two, he did this analysis of the Spango again
Speaker 1: sang Po River in the Tibetan Plateau, uh, and he
Speaker 1: found evidence in sediment layers that there was a great
Speaker 1: valley that had formed in this you know, uh, or
Speaker 1: there was a lake that had formed in this valley
Speaker 1: centuries ago at once but number of times, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it apparently flooded several several times. Uh. Downstream, he found
Speaker 1: evidence that a glacier on several different occasions advanced far
Speaker 1: enough to block the river, creating a huge lake. But
Speaker 1: since ice makes ununstable dam over time, the ice thins,
Speaker 1: and then it finally gives way and antalicius this tremendous
Speaker 1: torrent of water that just surges down to the deepest gorge. Now,
Speaker 1: in Montgomery's book The Rocks Don't Lie, he makes arguments
Speaker 1: that there's two centuries of evidence that the global flood
Speaker 1: did not happen. Uh. First, as we said, there's not
Speaker 1: enough water on Earth to account for water levels that
Speaker 1: could even rise above our highest mountains. And secondly, any
Speaker 1: uniformly rising level would have left erosive evidence rock formations
Speaker 1: that are millions of years old. They don't show large
Speaker 1: scale water erosion, so it's more likely that these were regional.
Speaker 1: So his that's sort of his general thesis that he
Speaker 1: keeps coming back to over and over again. So Montgomery
Speaker 1: has actually written about that Pacific Northwest region as well
Speaker 1: that I was talking about earlier. But this is different
Speaker 1: from the thunderbird whale myth that I was talking about.
Speaker 1: This is from ten thousand years ago, probably again caused
Speaker 1: by melting glaciers. There's now evidence from geological research that
Speaker 1: show displaced boulders and deep scores in the earth and
Speaker 1: deep ripple marks on the prairies, all of which are
Speaker 1: signs of what we refer to today as the Missoula Flood. Now,
Speaker 1: these same floods likely eroded away Land that also created
Speaker 1: the English Channel all the way on the other side,
Speaker 1: you know, a continent away. Uh, they made England into
Speaker 1: an island. The myth connected to this, though, is different. Uh.
Speaker 1: The Ojibwa Indians. They have a legend that a great
Speaker 1: snow fell down and a bag containing the sun's heat
Speaker 1: was breached when a mouse nibbled into it. The warmth
Speaker 1: from the bag spilled over, melted all the snow and
Speaker 1: produced the flood, and everyone drowned except for one old
Speaker 1: man who was drifting around in a canoe rescuing animals.
Speaker 1: Interesting again, we see that a particular geography of a region,
Speaker 1: the particular weather of a region, playing into their own
Speaker 1: particular flood myths. Yeah, I would imagine, Uh, if this
Speaker 1: was Carl Young was in the room with us, he'd
Speaker 1: be screaming about collective unconscious right now. Indeed, so all right,
Speaker 1: we've got two, maybe three pretty big geological discipline studies
Speaker 1: that have come out in the last i'd say thirty
Speaker 1: years that have really gone deep, and literally by by
Speaker 1: saying gone deep, they've literally drilled the deep into the
Speaker 1: earth to find out what's going on with these flood myths. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so the first of these are William Ryan and
Speaker 1: Walter Pittman. That's right. These are these are geologists from
Speaker 1: Columbia University, and in the nine they proposed that a
Speaker 1: great flood in the Middle East resulted from rising water
Speaker 1: levels at the end of the last Ice Age, that
Speaker 1: would been about seven thousand years ago. At that time,
Speaker 1: the Black Sea was a freshwater lake and the lands
Speaker 1: around it were farmlands. When the European glaciers melted, the
Speaker 1: Mediterranean Sea overflowed with a force of two times greater
Speaker 1: than that of Niagara Falls, converting the Black Sea from
Speaker 1: a fresh to saltwater body and flooding the entire area.
Speaker 1: So the way these guys came to this conclusion was
Speaker 1: they analyzed sediment cores from the bed of the Black Sea,
Speaker 1: making them think that the sea used to be a
Speaker 1: freshwater lake. The glacial ice melted at our poles, raising
Speaker 1: the world sea levels, and this caused the huge inflow. Now,
Speaker 1: this is where the world's earliest farming communities lived, as
Speaker 1: Robert just mentioned, So maybe they're the ones who brought
Speaker 1: this story to Mesopotamia. It then turns into the Gilgamesh legend,
Speaker 1: which then turns into the Noah legend, which maybe then
Speaker 1: travels to India. Who knows. Yeah, I mean that this
Speaker 1: would have rapidly inundated odd plane occupied by some of
Speaker 1: the world's earliest farming communities. They're traumat traumatized by the flood. Uh.
Speaker 1: They bring these tales with them to new lands and
Speaker 1: new culture. So perhaps the tail of the Great Flood
Speaker 1: was essentially hard coded into the secret of agriculture. You
Speaker 1: get one, you get the other, Okay. So other researchers
Speaker 1: have since looked at sediment cores from the delta of
Speaker 1: the Danube River, which empties into the Black Sea. Yeah. Indeed,
Speaker 1: one of these studies was actually National Geographic Society explorer
Speaker 1: Robert Bower, and he was inspired by Ryan and Pippen's hypothesis,
Speaker 1: and he's discovered supporting physical evidence, including an underwater river
Speaker 1: valley and ancient shorelines, as well as stone age structures
Speaker 1: and tools beneath the Black Sea. His team was also
Speaker 1: able to unearthed fossils that show now extinct freshwater species
Speaker 1: dating back some seventy four thousand, sixty to fifteen thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred years. Wow. Uh, I'm wondering now, like looking
Speaker 1: looking at this because it seems like he's connected maybe
Speaker 1: to the Laurentide Eye a sheet hypothesis. Maybe he was
Speaker 1: part of that team in two thousand seven as well.
Speaker 1: Then we've got Bruce Massey, I think is how you
Speaker 1: say his last name? Uh? And he has a comment theory. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: he's an environmental archaeologist at the Lost Alamos National Laboratory
Speaker 1: and he has his own theory. He thinks that more
Speaker 1: comets and meteors have struck Earth than we're aware of,
Speaker 1: which sounds reasonable. Uh, And that the great flood stories
Speaker 1: all sprung out of a comet hitting the planet five
Speaker 1: thousand years ago. This is rather perfect, right, especially when
Speaker 1: you start looking at these models where the flooding is
Speaker 1: a divine action. So here we see a cosmic body
Speaker 1: actually plummeting to the Earth and causing the flooding. It
Speaker 1: could it could be, although I wonder if guys like
Speaker 1: Montgomery would argue with him and say, well, that's sort
Speaker 1: of going back to a more global catastrophe rather than
Speaker 1: a regional one. But basically his argument is that there
Speaker 1: is a three mile or four point eight kilometer wide
Speaker 1: commet that crashed into the ocean just off of the
Speaker 1: coast of what we now call Madagascar, and this caused violent,
Speaker 1: huge tsunamis and hurricanes that just basically wrecked the whole
Speaker 1: planet because the superheated water vapor from the comet goes
Speaker 1: up into the air along with aerosol particles. They're shot up,
Speaker 1: they go into the jet streams and they just you know,
Speaker 1: wreck havoc on the weather patterns. Now, he says he's
Speaker 1: found evidence for this theory in ancient petroglyphs, drawings and
Speaker 1: historical records. But then in two thousand four he gets
Speaker 1: really excited because he thinks he's found physical evidence. He says,
Speaker 1: a tsunami that's six hundred feet tall would of course
Speaker 1: leave evidence on our geology. Well, he thinks that he
Speaker 1: found evidence or another team found evidence, and he, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, glommed onto this that in Africa and Asia
Speaker 1: there are what we call chevron. So you think of
Speaker 1: chevron like the gas station, it's kind of like they're symbol.
Speaker 1: They're these wedge shaped configurations that come up out of
Speaker 1: the sand. Now, the Holocene Impact Working Group found a
Speaker 1: lot of these in that area with satellite imagery, and
Speaker 1: he's connected onto that and said, well, this is evidence
Speaker 1: of this comment theory that I have. The next step
Speaker 1: for them is basically to go into these chevrons and
Speaker 1: carbon date all the fossils that are within them to
Speaker 1: determine if they were formed five thousand years ago. Right
Speaker 1: around the time he's pitching that this comment landed. Well,
Speaker 1: however it ends up playing out, I think it's a
Speaker 1: fascinating theory. Yeah, it is. It's interesting it um. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I guess like in the face of all
Speaker 1: these other geologists that we've we've read today that say
Speaker 1: well it's probably localized because of this, this and this,
Speaker 1: then to have a guy come along and say like, actually, no,
Speaker 1: there's a super big comment man, Like, it sounds cool.
Speaker 1: It sounds like an epic like movie. But I don't know,
Speaker 1: it sounds a little too epic, that's the thing. It
Speaker 1: sounds like in a and I don't I'm not saying
Speaker 1: this as a criticism of his research, No, I mean
Speaker 1: it sounds like an epic idea to support a a
Speaker 1: large scale flooding that has already been dismissed. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and to his credit. I don't want to make him
Speaker 1: sound like a crackpot or anything, but to his credit,
Speaker 1: he's actually coming up with evidence, and he's looking for
Speaker 1: scientific evidence as well as cultural evidence. So I think
Speaker 1: that's important. So wow, So we've got all these myths,
Speaker 1: and then we've just looked through all of these geologists
Speaker 1: and the science that they're working on. They're still drilling,
Speaker 1: pulling sediment cores, analyzing what's in them, trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what actually happened with water in our land masses
Speaker 1: and the history of the planet. What if we've got
Speaker 1: another flood coming. What if my prediction from earlier, what
Speaker 1: if Noah's Noah's ark is actually like a prophecy. Well you,
Speaker 1: depending on where you live in the world, that certainly
Speaker 1: could play out. Uh. In two thousand fourteen, the inter
Speaker 1: Governmental Panel and Climate Change released its fifth Assessment report,
Speaker 1: predicting that the oceans would rise by more than three
Speaker 1: feet by the year that's enough to swamp many of
Speaker 1: these cities along the US East Coast, for example. And
Speaker 1: they're they're even more extreme estimates out there, and certainly
Speaker 1: they have been made over the years, including a complete
Speaker 1: meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet and that would push
Speaker 1: sea levels to rise twenty three feet or seven meters,
Speaker 1: and that's not to actually submerge London. Wow, okay, so yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about like the end of Spielberg and Kubrick's AI. Yes,
Speaker 1: like the cities or underwater. Yeah, yeah, that would be unpleasant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, based on most of the predictions we see
Speaker 1: out there, rising water levels and the inevitable flooding of
Speaker 1: coastal regions, that can be mitigated. Uh, you know, if
Speaker 1: we get our craft together in time. Well, I love
Speaker 1: coastal cities. I grew up in around a closet coastal
Speaker 1: city at love to live near one again. Right now,
Speaker 1: we live four hours away from the coast, so I
Speaker 1: would imagine Atlanta's probably maybe Atlanta will become beachfront property.
Speaker 1: But uh yeah, I certainly hope that, you know, our
Speaker 1: coastal cities don't get totally wiped out. But it it
Speaker 1: does come back to just why these myths were so pervasive,
Speaker 1: because humans have always lived in coastal regions. Humans have
Speaker 1: always lived along rivers, They've made their life along rivers.
Speaker 1: We've we've lived in many resources to yeah, we've lived
Speaker 1: in this tenuous balance with the water that the in
Speaker 1: some of these myths, the water and flooding itself kind
Speaker 1: of takes on a divine um energy and it is
Speaker 1: personified even in the the idea of river and flood gods.
Speaker 1: And that makes sense that this this wrathful entity that
Speaker 1: we depend on uh is also a great danger and
Speaker 1: we see that no matter you know which age we
Speaker 1: live in. Well, best case scenario, it ends up like
Speaker 1: water World, right, and we're Kevin Costner swimming around and
Speaker 1: riding on our catamaran. I can't believe I didn't think
Speaker 1: about water World. Is there any land in water World?
Speaker 1: There is that Well spoilers for water World from the end,
Speaker 1: but that's the whole like mcguffin of the movie, is
Speaker 1: that they're searching for the last bit of land that
Speaker 1: supposedly exists and they find like a I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it's an island at the end, but yeah, like
Speaker 1: the little kid has like the tattoo of the map
Speaker 1: on his back that shows how to get to the
Speaker 1: I barely remember that movie, but yeah, the whole mission
Speaker 1: is for them to figure out if this myth is
Speaker 1: true and do they invoke Noah and the Great flood
Speaker 1: at all, and I don't think they ever mentioned Noah
Speaker 1: now that I think about it, although, like I said,
Speaker 1: it's been a long time. I mean, I just remember
Speaker 1: Dennis Hopper on the like oil ship commanding a gang
Speaker 1: of like mad Max esque pirates. Um. Yeah, that's weird movie.
Speaker 1: A lot of people bash that movie because of how
Speaker 1: expensive it was, and it was kind of a flop.
Speaker 1: But I loved it when it came out, and now
Speaker 1: I want to see it. I've never seen it, in
Speaker 1: large part because I remember when it came out the
Speaker 1: media was at the time. I'm just completely said, oh
Speaker 1: it's it's a disasters to gratulate. You don't see it,
Speaker 1: And now it sounds rather attractive. It's not the worst
Speaker 1: movie in the world. You you could do far worse
Speaker 1: things with two hours of your time. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna go ahead and head for land.
Speaker 1: On this one, we're gonna go ahead and um and
Speaker 1: cling to the mountain side and let these the floodwaters
Speaker 1: of knowledge recede. But hopefully we were able to provide
Speaker 1: you know, in instance, you've got got to get your
Speaker 1: feet wet and uh. In global flood myths in the
Speaker 1: underlying science of large scale regional flooding in our past,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, who knows, Maybe we'll discuss some
Speaker 1: of the fringe your stuff in the future. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: would be interesting. And if you know, I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear from people out in the audience who maybe you
Speaker 1: are you know, aware of some kind of cultural myth
Speaker 1: that we missed that's that's really interesting related to floods,
Speaker 1: or you live in an area that's been experiencing a
Speaker 1: lot of flooding, uh, and you've got something to say
Speaker 1: about that connected to this, we'd love to hear from you. Uh.
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Speaker 1: contact us is our landing page, our Mother's ship, stuff
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Speaker 1: I just shoot us an email at blow the Mind
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