Artanthos t1_ixozyoa wrote
Reply to comment by nybbleth in Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible, new evidence on the evolution of the coastline of west Wales has revealed by marketrent
>Various cultures (by no means 'all') having flood myths is hardly evidence of a singular worldwide flood as though
We know there was massive global flooding at the end of the Ice Age.
We also know various oral histories regarding flooding have all pointed to geographic and archaeological evidence that verified those stories were all related to end of Ice Age flooding.
Inuit oral history recorded villages (among a people that did not have permanent villages). Those villages have been found underwater.
Australian aboriginals passing down the names, locations of descriptions of islands that don't exist. But we found them underwater by following those stories, and they would have been above water at the end of the Ice Age.
Why would we doubt that the Sumerians, who were 6,000 years closer in time to the Ice Age, would not have remembered the post Ice Age flooding in their oral histories?
nybbleth t1_ixqffu1 wrote
> We know there was massive global flooding at the end of the Ice Age.
There was no singular "global" flood at the end of the ice age. There were floods, yes. But these were regional and weren't singlularly cataclysmic events but rather a series of floods that happened over centuries and thousands of years. This doesn't correspond to abrahamic mythology at all. They're much more comparable to the increase in flooding and extreme weather events we're seeing today as a result of climate change. We are experiencing more hurricanes for example which over time adds up to a lot of damage. Now one could imagine hypothetically that such a statistical increase might lead to a culture falling apart as they can not cope with the increase. Which would likely lead to stories being told about it yes. But if ten thousand years from now, that story would be that a single great storm wiped out that civilization (or to make it more akin to the abrahamic tales, wiped out 99.9999% of humanity) in an instant, that would be wildly incorrect.
> Inuit oral history recorded villages (among a people that did not have permanent villages). Those villages have been found underwater.
Color me skeptical at best.
> Australian aboriginals passing down the names, locations of descriptions of islands that don't exist. But we found them underwater by following those stories, and they would have been above water at the end of the Ice Age.
Yes. Again. Color me skeptical at best. I am aware of these claims by some scholars; but this is by no means accepted consensus science. The notion that a society that has no writing or mapmaking could maintain an accurate oral tradition that somehow records exact locations and details of geographical features that were lost 15-10000 years ago is frankly so absurd that I'm inclined to dismiss such claims out of hand. At the very least it's going to require a hell of a lot more evidence than one or two papers when the far more likely explanation is that these kinds of claims are a case of researcher bias where they're essentially pigeonholing the facts into unclear stories, or these islands were in fact dry land much more recently.
> Why would we doubt that the Sumerians, who were 6,000 years closer in time to the Ice Age, would not have remembered the post Ice Age flooding in their oral histories?
Because the ability of humans to accurately re-tell a story is notoriously unreliable even where it concerns very recent events. The idea that we could accurately pass information down this way over a period of many thousands of years is simply not very plausible.
And as I pointed out earlier, it really doesn't take much for a culture to come up with flood stories without having to have some sort of cultural memory of a particularly bad one ten thousand years ago. Floods are common. Islands and other stretches of land disasappearing due to flood erosion are common.
Arguing that they're memories of late ice-age floods is almost like a reverse prophecy fallacy: If I predict that at some undefined point in the future, there will be war, does that mean I'm a prophet, or did I simply make the obvious observation that an event that has happened countless times before is probably going to happen again? Similarly, in reverse, if a culture has some sort of grand destructive flood story in its tradition, do you really think it's more likely that they've accurately kept the memory alive of a flood 10000 years ago as opposed to just mixed and matched observations of more recent floods together, finding seashells on mountains (which isn't caused by floods) and tried to fill in some blanks here and there? People make shit up all the time.
Also because the Sumerian creation myth incorporating the flood is generally believed to have been inspired by a local river flood at Shuruppak (which is where the story begins) around 2900BCE, causing the settlement to be abandoned for a time. The Sumerian flood myth is only written down after that, despite us having older sumerican creation myths that do not mention the flood story.
Plus, Mesopotamia is literally located on a vast riverplain. Floods would've happened there regularly. It isn't hard to imagine they might seem to have inundated most of the world to their limited geographical knowledge.
Again, it's a matter of plausibility.
Artanthos t1_ixry9gn wrote
You can be as skeptical as you want, it doesn’t change well documented facts.
nybbleth t1_ixs8uyd wrote
Right, so now we're elevating unverified claims and conjecture made on the basis of interpreting vague stories by a handful of people to not just facts, but "well documented" facts.
Meanwhile, you simply ignore those empirical facts that show that even if you could somehow prove that the stories you're calling upon draw upon some sort of cultural memory dating back to the ice age, the actual flooding that happened at that period was gradual and took place over centuries or even thousands of years, thereby invalidating the conclusions you're drawing since flood mythology talks about a single cataclysmic flood, and not a slow process of much smaller floods.
Not to mention all the other arguments I've brought forth. You brought up the Sumerian Flood Creation Myth. Are you going to address the fact that said myth can only be traced back to 1600BC and that it doesn't seem to appear in other of their creation myths that we can date to much earlier? How does that documented fact not factor into your reasoning?
Artanthos t1_ixsxrdn wrote
The whole point, there has been verification.
The no longer existing islands have been found. The Inuit villages have been found.
And there was absolutely no way either people could have guessed. They remembered mostly accurate information through thousands of years of oral history.
nybbleth t1_ixv0nsh wrote
> The whole point, there has been verification.
So you say. I have yet to see you post a scientific paper on this matter, much less independent verification of the claims in it.
> And there was absolutely no way either people could have guessed
Says you. Again, I am not seeing any 'verification' that this claim is at all true.
Artanthos t1_ixv175l wrote
Go look it up yourself, you certainly won't believe anything I link.
nybbleth t1_ixvcbry wrote
I've tried. I've found exactly zero sources claiming inuit oral traditions have accurately pointed out villages lost by floods 10000 years ago.
Which face it, would be quite impressive since they weren't even around back then. The Inuit only formed a thousand years ago, which is when they came to occupy the area they now live in. Their ancestors lived in Alaska and Russia before that, so there's literally no way for them to have an oral tradition about villages lost 10,000 years ago in the area they now inhabit. Neither could they have adapted stories from the people that lived there before (the Dorset culture), since there appears to have been no contact between these groups. Nor would that matter if they had, because none of the paleo-eskimo seemed to have existed that far back. Humans only started living in the areas the Inuit now live 5000 years ago at the earliest. So obviously they can't have oral traditions about the area that date back twice as far.
This is clearly something you either made up entirely, something someone else made up, or a case of you misremembering something you read.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments