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