February 7, 2026 • 44 mins
If look into the mythology of just about any culture in the world, you will find a myth about a great flood that destroyed humanity and submerged the Earth in the distant past. Does this mean that a great flood actually happened? Listen to this classic episode to explore the possibilities with Josh and Chuck.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and I have one word to
describe this week's select from twenty twenty one on why
there are so many myths about a great flood founding
cultures around the world. That word is fascinating, but I'll
had a few more words. I guess this is one
of those good old fashioned Stuff you Should Know episodes
(00:22):
where we find out that a thing that everyone just
kind of takes for granted actually has a lot more
to it than it seems.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
And I love those.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Episodes, and I love this episode, which is why I
picked it.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I hope you love it too.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Ahoy, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck,
and we're the captains of this here ship called Stuff
you Should Know. And that's all there is to it,
although I do think we need to allow for the
fact that Jerry is Rear Admirable and by that, of course,
I mean Rear Admiral, and by that, of course, I
(01:11):
mean it's gonna be a long episode.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Has there ever been a cut c TV show called
The Admirable Admiral?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Uh No?
Speaker 1 (01:20):
That sounds great. I think there was one the Simpsons
did one called Admiral Baby.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Oh all right, well that counts.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though,
it could have been like a terrible person.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
So I have a cold, So I just want to
apologize up front. Just a head cold. But I'm a
little stuffy, So I'm sorry if if it's coming across
as untoward.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I'm very proud of you for pushing through, chuck, because
a lesser podcasters would not. They might they might just
be like, I can I have a cold. People don't
want to hear that, and you say, the heck with that.
I'm going forward with it.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Remember back in the day, you had like a three
month cold that one year.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Every year here for a little while, I used to
get so sick. Yeah, no, it's terrible. But we've gotten
much better, haven't we.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah. I think I don't know, maybe quitting smoking and
something to do with.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
That, maybe just a touch.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
You don't get colds like that anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
No for you, I really don't. So yet another reason
to quit smoking. Everybody who's out there on the fence,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So we're talking today.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
The reason I said that we're captains is because I
was making a play on a story that it seems
like every single person Chuck knows about. At the very least,
I can say with almost one hundred percent confidence that
everyone that you and I have ever met, seen in passing,
talked to, or been in the same country with, probably
(02:41):
has heard of the story of Noah and the Flood,
where Noah was told to go ahead and build a
boat because the earth was going to flood and everybody
was going to be killed. And by the way, grab
some animals put them on board so that you and
your wife and then the animals can all repopulate your
respective species once the flood's sides. Right, it's a classic story.
(03:02):
Everybody loves it. We we read it out loud just
about every Saturday at dinner time, and it's just a
great story. Right, everybody knows this story. But it turns out, Chuck,
that there's this idea that that actually happened. That there,
and it's long been an idea that the what the
(03:23):
Noah's story is talking about happened in actuality, that there
was a point in time where the entire world flooded.
And there's been a lot of scholarly research into this
into how that's even possible.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, And you know, I guess if we're talking about
this particular, because you know, we've we've found, after digging
around and getting ed to help us with this research,
that there are flood myths in not every culture but
a lot of cultures over the years. And we'll get
into that, you know, in lots of detail, but as
far as actual Noah's actual flood from the Old Testament,
(04:00):
there was a gentleman in eighteen seventy two named George
Smith who is a hobbyist of all things Assyrian and
an amateur sort of historical sleuth, but a well educated
when nonetheless, because he could do things like read quneiform tablets,
and he was doing that one day on I don't
(04:21):
know if it was an actual lunch break or if
that's just apocryphal, but supposedly on a lunch break, went
to a museum, was reading quneiform and came across a
story the Epic of Gilgamesh and read this quote, build
a boat, abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn poverty, save life.
Take on board all living things, seed animals. The boat
(04:44):
you will build. Her dimension shall be equal her length
and breadths shall be the same. It doesn't sing any
about cubits, but it's inferred. Cover her with cover her
with a roof like the ocean below, and he will
send you a reign of plenty. And George Smith said, hey,
this is strikingly familiar as the Christian slash Jewish Old
(05:05):
Testament Noah's flood story. But this is several hundred years previous.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, and instead of God telling Noah or an angel
telling Noah, it's the God in Lel who's telling a
guy named utnapished him to build this boat.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Noah's nowhere to be heard.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
And for what reason?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Well, I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where
like Earth is being punished? Basically?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Oh yeah, So the reason that U and Lel gave
to Udina pished him was because the humans were too
noisy and the gods were sick of humans, so they
were going to flood the earth and kill off all humans,
whereas in the Bible it was because humans had become
too wicked to live.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
I think noisy and wicked are the same thing back then.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I guess so.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
And it makes you wonder, like, did somebody misread the
word and they're like noisy, okay, and just barreled on.
They're like, my lunch break is almost over. So George
Smith's was like noisy, it's they said noisy.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
But there was also the idea of saving animals, and
there was also the idea that afterward birds were sent
out to find dry land, just as a no.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Story, right, And so you just kind of say, whoops.
Because the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Old Testament by
at least several hundred years, depending on what part you're
talking about, And so you might say, okay, so the
Noahs story is adapted from this, but that doesn't mean
(06:32):
that it undermines the veracity. They don't undermine the veracity
of one another. In fact, if you stop and think
about it, the fact that one of the first things
that was ever written down after the invention of writing,
qn aiform, was the first written system humans ever devised,
(06:52):
and that the first literary work ever created, the Epic
of Gilgamesh, contained this flood story. It kind of suggests
that something actually may have happened, like it was a
really important story that has stuck around for thousands and
thousands of years. The Epic of gilgrimesh was written thirty
(07:13):
four hundred years ago, that it suggests that there might
be some some kernel of truth to it.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yeah, and over the years, a lot of people have
tried to prove, whether scientifically or otherwise, that the the
Noah's Flood really did take place. Bible literalists, is that
is that what we call them? I think so, okay,
Bible literalists Bible historians, because that would, uh, that would
(07:43):
go a long way in Christianity if you could say, hey,
the Bible is an actual historical document, this stuff is
really true. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there
was something called deluvialism, deluvial meaning like relating to a
great flood. But that was a big shape of actual geology.
Was basically saying, hey, this physical literally the physical world
(08:05):
that we're living in came about after this flood. What
kind of reset things? And then the real geological record
came along once science got serious and they proved that
was not the case, and that kind of went the
way of the Dodo around you know, the mid eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah, they kind of did it backwards. They said the
Noah Flood shaped the world as we see it. Go
find proof, and when they found proof, they were like,
it's not really adding up. Yeah, So there's no evidence
that there was a global flood that inundated the world.
And in fact, the geological record that these geologists, the
early Ones and you know, up to modern day ones
(08:43):
have been putting together supports the exact opposite of that
that Earth wasn't created in a deluge. It was created
over incredibly long distances of time, very very slowly, layer
by layer.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
But people still say, okay, welly number one, why have
we been telling this flood story for so long? And
then also, why is it, like you said, the idea
of flood myths seems almost universal. Doesn't that like still
strongly suggest that there was, even if the Bible doesn't
quite have it right. And by the way, Noah's story
(09:18):
also shows up in the Quran too, so it's in
the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the Quran. And
then there's the epic of Gilgemach story, Like, why is
this important story still around? Doesn't that still support the
idea that something happened? Why would there be universal flood
myths from cultures that had never even heard of Christianity before,
and there have been some attempts to explain that that
(09:40):
I think are much more satisfying than the idea that
we're just missing all of the evidence for a great
worldwide deluge that happened back in antiquity.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, and there were you know that it's more than
just those There were Chinese flood myths. There were flood
myths in southern Canada and the British Isles. So there
was one study picked out fifty cultures and they all
had their own flood myth and that it was related
to some kind of punishment. So they started looking, like
you said, of like why why is this happening? And
(10:12):
there's a bunch of reasons and they all kind of
make sense to me if I'm being honest. One of
them is that there was a flood in these cultures,
but it wasn't a global flood. But if you're you know,
if all you know is a certain area and you
never get to leave that area and it wipes out
everything you know, then the story that you pass along
(10:34):
orally through the years would sound like one that wiped
out everything.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, and like the whole idea is that this flood
actually did happen way far back to one group, and
then that group eventually kind of spread out and carried
that flood myth with them, And so to those of
us today historians anthropologists, looking at like all of these
(11:01):
groups that are spread out all over the world, all
sharing basically the same story, it would make it seem
like a flood had impacted all of these groups that
were that far spread.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Out, so it must have been a really big flood.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
But this explanation says no, the flood was actually really localized.
It was the group that it happened to that eventually
spread out. That's one explanation. It makes a lot of sense.
And one of the groups that are usually kind of
pinpointed as this flood happening to or the proto Indo
Europeans who were known to have been around the I
(11:33):
think the Caucasus Mountains to start, and then just spread
out as far as the British Isles, basically all over
Europe northwest, east, south, and that all of our languages
like English, Germanic, just a whole slew of languages developed
out of this group.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, and some more support for this is the fact
that there aren't flood myths in Sub Saharan African cultures,
and these were groups that when they left Africa they
didn't come back, so they would not have taken back
with them a flood myth from proto Indo Europeans. So
it all kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of related one too, that
that says that there were floods, just not a flood.
That flooding is actually really common, so it happened to
a lot of different groups, So it would make sense
that all these different cultures would have flood myths.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Sure. And again, if you live in your riverside village
and you don't get to travel very far from there
and everything you know of gets destroyed again, it could be,
you know, lend support to the idea that it gets
translated as a worldwide flood. And if everyone's having these
localized floods which happened, you know, there's always been floods then,
(12:54):
not necessarily of the forty days and forty nights variety.
But when things are passed around orally and then they
get rewritten, things get kind of mixed up.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, and it's our bad, those of us alive today
who are mistaking or laying our interpretation of the word
world onto like these culture's use of the word world.
They're saying their world, which is much smaller than it
is to those of us today. When we think the world,
we think the whole globe, you know.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, And speaking of laying your things on other cultures,
the third one is Christian missionaries, and there's evidence of
this happening. They would go and tell the story of
Noah's Great flood, especially you know, when colonization was happening too,
and between missionaries and colonization, all these other cultures picked
(13:41):
up on that original Biblical flood tale or I don't
know if we should call it a flood myth or
flood tale at this point, what should we call it?
Speaker 1 (13:51):
I think most people call it flood myths or Deluvian myths.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Okay, Delivian myth that sounds a little more academic. So yeah,
So Christian myth stiononaries did this, and I think this
is also evidence in the fact that the South Pacific
didn't really have one until eighteen fourteen when they came
into contact with Christian missionaries, and then all of a
sudden they had the Maori flood myths.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, so they actually had a flood myth before, but
apparently it was more tsunami based, and then after contact
with Christianity, it became much more of like a deluge,
and it just bore some striking resemblances to the Noah
flood myth of Christianity, And apparently that happened all over
the South Pacific as well, where these cultures will have
their own kind of flood myth, but it's always based
(14:38):
on tsunamis. But then the Christians come and go, and
all of a sudden, it's a day luge where the
water rose after like forty days and forty nights of
rain and stuff. So that creates a lot of headaches
for anthropologists, but it also at the same time explains
why a universal flood myth or a flood myth would
seem universal of those of us around today, and why
they seem to bear such a striking resemblance still one another.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Indeed, I think we should take a break and I'm
gonna go blow my nose, okay, and then we'll come
back and talk about geo mythology right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So, Chuck, that was a nice view to blow your
nose at the break rather than during recording, even though
I still had to hear it.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
You know what's funny, I was listening to I don't
know why I just thought of this, but I was
listening to Paula Tompkins Stay at Homepkins podcast he does
with his wife Janey the other day, and he was
talking about sneezing on stage and that that had happened
to him once in his career. And Paula someone who
spent lots and lots and lots of time on stages,
And I wonder if there's something to that of the
(16:09):
body withholding things like sneezes, because I've never seen anyone
sneeze on stage. I've never sneezed on stage. Yeah, isn't
that weird?
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, I'm sure it's related to adrenaline in fight or flight.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
That's what I was thinking. I mean, there's got to
be something to that.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yeah, like your body's like I have time to waste
all that energy on sneezing. We got to get out
of here, We got to put on a great show.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
It would be really weird to think about it if, Like,
I don't know, Barry Manilow in Vegas was talking about
setting up Mandy before he sings it and just lets
out a big sneeze.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, well, thank you for setting me up to reminisce
yet again about the time that you, me and I
saw Barry manilo front Row Center in Vegas.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
You would have been sneezed on with that big snoze.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yes, we actually would have been covered in his sneeze.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
All right, So we promised talk of geo mythology. Here's
the idea. Since science really got attacked together, there have
been a couple of different ways to look at things
like flood myths as either this is a story about
our cultural values and there is a lot of religious
metaphor involved, or this was an actual historical event and
(17:18):
geomethology came along to kind of say, hey, man, it
can kind of be both, like there could have been
a real flood and it also took on metaphor and
took on cultural values and was used as a story
of I can't think of the word I'm trying to
think of to teach you a lesson.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
What's it called fable?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, like a fable.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
So this kind of this field has emerged since I
believe the sixties, and actually I was reading about this
field of geomethology is like still really trying to establish
itself in the field of geology. And most geo mythologists
are trained geologists. That's where you start out, probably, but
(18:04):
they they also are like, you know, they have to
really defend what they're doing against their fellow geologists because
they're they're basically saying, all of these myths, all of
these legends, all of this historical, these these folk traditions,
they actually contain eyewitness accounts of natural disasters, of weird
events and earth of early finds of fossils, and yeah,
(18:28):
they've they've cloaked them in the language of mythology and
the terminology of mythology and monsters and weirdness and all
this stuff that makes it just seem completely legendary to
us today. But that's how these pre scientific and often
preliterate cultures passed along really valuable information, and like we've
(18:51):
been kind of foolish to just discount them as all
nothing but legend, as if there's no fact whatsoever in there.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Water exactly. And so that's what geomithology is doing.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
They're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, if you
just look at this the right way, we are covered
up in historical accounts, just waiting for us to unravel
if we learn how to read these correctly and then
also correlate with actual, like known geological events that we've
discovered through science.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, like, hey, you see that story that seems completely
crazy about a demon god who lives in a mountain
and gets angry and spouts fire from its top. Like
that's a volcano, bros. And like, just because it sounds
crazy doesn't mean we shouldn't look at the fact that
an actual volcano eruption might have happened then, and let's
(19:45):
kind of marry these two things and let's just all
get along.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Right, And so like that legend about the volcano with
the angry god that sometimes spews like scary stuff forth,
and if you ever hear the mountains starting to make rumbles,
it means the god is way up and you should run.
Like that's that is a way for a culture that
is aware that this mountain's actually a volcano, and that
(20:08):
volcano can sit dormant for generations at a stretch, so
those there will be people born in the future who
aren't aware that that's a volcano. And this is the
way that the culture passes down over deep time. This
really important information. If the volcano ever makes a sound
run because you don't want the fiery breath of that
god that's trapped inside it makes it.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
I've heard. I love this stuff. Like, Yeah, before science
came along, all humans did from the moment they could
sort of form thoughts was try and explain what was
going on around them, from rain and thunder to volcanoes
and floods. And I don't know, I think it's super interesting.
It's almost like these proto early warning systems, right, like
(20:51):
nuclears didn't really know how to explain the science of it.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Exactly like nuclear semiox Remember we did an episode on
that on how to tell people ten thousand years in
the future about steering clear of nuclear waste. Right, it's
the same exact principle. It's just chuck. Somewhere along the way,
we later generations became arrogant and just completely discounted any
of that those pre scientific traditions because they didn't appear scientific.
(21:17):
But it is exactly like what you were saying. It
was the way that they made sense of actual stuff.
And so there's plenty of stuff to learn from those
those accounts and those tales and those myths and legends.
We just have to basically kind of eat a little
bit of crow and go back and be like, well.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
We've been ignoring this to our own detriment.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, And it's like you said earlier, it's a tough
road to ho though for scientists these days if they
take this on, because you know, you have mixed results
when you go back and you look at these tales.
Some of them may just be folk tales and legends,
and some may have kernels of truth, some may have
a little more truth. So there's a lot to sort
(21:56):
of parse through as a geologist these days, if you're
if you're working as or with the geo mythologist.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Right, and so when you are laying this out and
trying to figure out, okay, what is this myth describing.
You know, again you're a trained geologist if you're a geomthologist,
but you're also working with people from other scientific fields
as far as trying to uncover the fact the kernel
(22:26):
of truth behind these flood myths. You would be working
with paleohydrology or paleo bathymetry, which is the study of
ancient sea levels like where they were at in the past,
and so you're going to take like the findings from
these fields and then say, okay, let me see if
I can correlate it with a myth. Or you find
(22:48):
a myth and you say, okay, let me see if
I can correlate it with paleobathymetry or paleohydrology findings. And
they've actually turned up some really interesting stuff so far.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yeah, there was in twenty sixteen, there was a study
that tied together one of the Chinese flood myths from
about four thousand years ago, basically that there was a
great flood wiped out China. It lasted for a couple
of decades, and then this great man came along who
had become emperor, Emperor U, and tamed the water. So
(23:20):
geologists went back and they said, all right, there's an
ancient landslide around that same time that damned up a
river and a lake filled up behind it in about
six months or so, and then that flooded. That river
got flooded, broke through the dam, and there was this
huge flood, and they have found sediment that sort of
tracks along these lines. Then they found the Emperor U.
(23:43):
Actually it turns out he may not have been you know,
magically tamed the water. He just had a knack for
early engineering, and that he dredged the waters and it
cleared up the river's flow. Things returned to normal, and
he became emperor. But back then it gets you know,
told as it take of this, you know, great soon
to be emperor that tames the waters when he was
(24:04):
just good at what he was doing, right.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
But they, I mean, they found like evidence, geological evidence
that backs all of this up, that this whole series
of events, the earthquake that tragdered, the landslide, the landslide,
the damn, the lake filling up in six months, the
lake breaking and flooding, that all this happened within a
single year. That is definitely the kind of thing that
your culture is going to make note of and pass
down over the years, that this kind of thing can happen.
(24:27):
And then not only that this great person came along
in freed us from the burden of these floodwaters that
apparently stuck around for twenty years. That's right, It's pretty cool.
There's another one that is just beyond thrilling. If you
ask me that a lot of people say this is probably,
this is possibly and I think That's a big reasons
(24:47):
a lot of mainstream geologists have problems with geo mythology
is we can't really see a course to getting to
the point where we're saying this is the one. This
is this flood that we have evidence of is what
gave rise to the epic of Gilgamesh and Noah's story.
But you can say there's a really good chance that
(25:09):
this is the one, this fits the bill, and this
one does kind of stick out like that.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
That's right, this one. In the nineties, it became fairly
popular that basically said there was an oceanographer named William
Ryan and another guy named Walter Pittman. They were i
think in the early two thousands, and they said that
rising sea levels at one point caused a Mediterranean to
burst through the Bosporus Strait about seven thousand years ago.
(25:35):
And this was a like a legit serious flood that
I'm sure seemed like a flood, like a global type
of thing. It created a waterfall a volume two hundred
times that of Niagara Falls, and I think enough water
in one day that could have flooded Manhattan by three
thousand feet. Yeah, that's well, that's a flood.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
It's quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
They also determined that the mediterrane and see moved inland.
The coast moved inland by about a mile a day.
Can you imagine seeing that happen before your eyes, like
you're just you'd almost lose your mind again. That would
make a really great story that you would pass along
and explain it in whatever terms you could. But there
(26:19):
would have been coastal settlements along the Bosporus Strait on
either side, on the Mediterranean side and also on the
Black Sea side that all this water poured into, and
it would have just completely wiped those settlements out. So
the people who did survive would have been like, something
really bad happened here, and this is how we're going
to make sense of it. And the timing of it
(26:40):
was just right. It happened probably about seven thousand years ago.
And as we'll see, there's a lot of stuff that
happened around seven seventy five hundred years ago around the
world because the end of that last glacial period started
in the sea levels rose, and all sorts of crazy
stuff happened as result. But that's one that people point to,
(27:02):
is like that maybe the flood that gave rise to
the Gilgamesh and Noah stories. No pun intended gave rise,
I think, so it really was unintended. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Another one about seventy five hundred years ago was the
creation of the Persian Gulf. Kind of a similar kind
of thing during the last Ice Age that what is
now the Persian Gulf used to not be. It used
to be a very nice river valley near the Fertile
Crescent where people lived. And the thing here though, that
I don't quite get is that they haven't they haven't
(27:37):
found any evidence of things underwater there, right.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
No, they haven't.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
They The reason why they think this happened, Chuck, is
because all of a sudden, on the shores of the
Gulf as we know it today, some like really well
established settlements with decorative pottery and well built stone houses
and all sorts of other things. Domesticated animals just sprang
up basically overnight.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
So they were relocated essentially.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, that's really the only explanation. I went from hunting settlements,
hunting camps to all of a sudden, these people are
like an advanced society, so that the best explanation is
that their original settlement is down there beneath the Persian Gulf,
we just haven't found it yet.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
What about Doggerland.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
So Doggerland is another similar story. They both share what's
called aquaterra, by the way, which is a coin or
a term that was coined in the nineties to describe
these lands that were exposed for one hundred and fifty
thousand years that humans were kind of developing and forming societies,
and then were lost just seven seventy five hundred years
(28:45):
ago when the sea levels rose again. So Doggerland and
the idea of the Gulf being an underwater now submerged settlement,
Doggerlands like that, but instead of in the Persian Gulf,
it's been in the north. It was a patch of
land that connected the British Isles to Scandinavia before until
about eighty five hundred years ago.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Right, And here they have actually found submerged traces of
settlements under the sea, unlike the one in the Persian Gulf.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Right, And they actually think that it's possible. Some people
are saying no, it's probably just you know, slow, steady
sea level rise that flooded Doggerland. But there was a
massive landslide in I think Norway called the Storiga event
that happened eighty five hundred years ago, and it probably
(29:37):
generated a massive tsunami, and it could have been big
enough to have submerged dogger Land permanently after that. Apparently
that's how big that underwater landslide was.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Yeah, I was about to say underwater. Can you get
to point that out out?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, But there's a flood story from Brittany around that
area that says that a king's daughter was possessed by
a demon and opened like their country's floodgates and that
was flooded, you know, catastrophically. So it's like, you know,
are they talking about this event that happened eighty five
(30:13):
hundred years ago that this has survived as this legend
until today.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
That's right. And yet another right here in the well
and now the US of A. But in the nineteen
eighties and nineties they investigated flood miss of the indigenous
peoples in the Pacific Northwest and they found out that
their flood miss this was a little more recent. This
was around seventeen hundred a d. But the idea is
that there was a like magnitude nine earthquake that caused
(30:41):
the tsunami, unleashing these big waves from basically sort of
Vancouver Island all the way down to northern California.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, it was the hoe and the Quilliute people who
had this legend of thunderbird and whale getting in a fight.
And it interesting is I mean, there's all sorts of
geological evidence. Apparently there's still trees that are just not where,
they're just not growing back they were wipe clean from
the tsunami. But there's a Japanese temple, a Buddhist temple
(31:15):
that marked the date January sixth, seventeen hundred because the
tsunami wave made it all the way to Japan and
they noted it. So by basically cross correlating that Japanese
noting of the date with the hoe and the quil
Yuk's story about thunderbird and whale, they've said, this story
is about this particular event, which is pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
And then sometimes it's just a culture like prescience again
making sense out of finding weird things like the Zuni
people in the southwest of the United States obviously not
back then, they saw these you know, ancient marine animals
and seashells in the fossils that they were finding and
they said, well, this is part of our creation story.
(32:01):
There there was a great flood, and that's how this
stuff got here.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah, here in the desert, which is I mean, that's
how a pre scientific culture would make sense of that
kind of thing. Pretty cool, absolutely, So I say we
take one more break, and we're going to talk about
the other aspect of these myths, the mythology part of it,
right right after this. Okay, So if you take a
(32:51):
myth and you strip the mythology off and you just
look at the kernel of historicity and try to figure out,
you know, what it's actually describing. You don't want to
just forget the myth part. You want to go back
and also look at the myth part too, because that
reveals a lot about humans and who we are and
how we think spread out even across cultures throughout the world.
(33:16):
And there's a lot of similarities that pop up from
examining geomithology, especially with flood myths, even when you set
aside the idea or I should say, even when you
account for the idea of missionaries spreading the Noah flood too.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
So, yeah, you know, one of the things that's interesting
to look at is how these things are, how these
myths are similar. And one way that a lot of
these flood myths are similar is that and we've already
seen a little bit, and what we've talked about is
oftentimes it's a man and a woman, usually a man
and a wife, who are charged with gathering up the animals,
(33:54):
with repopulating the earth afterward saving the species essentially, usually
a warning, whether it's Noah's flood myth or all the others,
where you know, someone comes along and says, you know,
you better get your act together earth, or tell everybody
on earth you know you were the messenger to get
their act together, or else I will rain down rain
(34:17):
upon you.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, there's also sometimes a warning, I guess one of
the warnings, Chuck, that came through. I think we said
earlier that the Chinese have like at least four flood myths,
And one of the warnings that came through was to
this brother and sister who freed a thunder god from
their father's I guess Chicken Cooper or whatever. Their father
(34:45):
had captured him. And so the thunder god said, hey,
thanks a lot of kids. By the way, the things
are about to get serious around here. You might want
to build a boat. Actually, yeah, I think they build
a boat. But they're one of those interesting stories where
you said, usually it's a man and wife who end
up having to repopulate the earth. That put these two
kids in the position of having to repopulate, and that
(35:08):
was a taboo. Incests is a basically the universal taboo
one of them, and that was the same in ancient
China as well. So in different versions of the story,
either the brother and sister basically got to pass this time.
Another version is that the brother had to go through
a huge series of physical challenges and couldn't and that
(35:32):
somehow the earth became populated anyway. And the third version
is that they just made everybody out of clay, that
they made themselves, right, Okay, But if you start really
kind of looking at floods, there's like especially the purpose
of the flood. That's the thing, Like it's very rare
that the flood happens in a flood myth just for fun,
(35:55):
Like there's almost always a reason, Like humans want there
to be a reason. So we've come up with different
reasons over the years, and one of them is basically
the apocalypse, that humanity is being wiped out, usually as
punishment and that we deserve to survive, and we would
(36:15):
have to survive or else we wouldn't be around to
be passing the story along.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
So somebody had to survive.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So that's where those people who repopulate the earth come from.
But the rest of us we got wiped out because
we displeased the gods.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
That's right. Another one is that we started out as
an ocean and nothing but ocean, So this is just
a reset to that, return to our original state here
on planet Earth. And there are a lot of cultures
around the world that basically thought that we started out
as an ocean from ancient Egypt north I think in
(36:50):
Japan as well, and basically, you know, it's either returns
us to a state of water or an island above an.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, and that's I mean, that's so closely related to
the apocalyptic one too. It's just that's we just happen
to be returning to how things were before, which is
also related to another kind of theme as a reason
for the flood, which is purification. Like, yes, you're being punished,
and yes you're returning to this primordial state, but the
(37:21):
ultimate reason that say like God or the gods have
is to purify things, to get to rid the world
of evil and just keep the good and start over
with just the good. Basically, that's another big one too,
and they're all kind of, you know, pretty tightly wound
up together.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Yeah, then there's just angry gods. And it might not
have anything to do with you doing anything wrong as
a culture or getting your act together. It's just that
the gods were angry, so they they kicked open the
top of that mountain and it became a volcano. And
sorry ts for you guys.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, it just happens.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
But that's still interesting that people this rationalization even in
itself though, isn't it. It's just kind of like sometimes
that happens even if you didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
So there's another one too, that Emperor U myth is
a good example of industriousness, people working together, people controlling things.
Where the Earth has done something crazy, maybe the gods
were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it, either in
the form of a savior like Emperor U. There's one
(38:29):
in Bhutan. I believe there's a legend about Guru Reproach
and the Zangpo Valley. He shows up and basically drains
a lake exposing all this fertile farm land where a
village was then settled or the and I apologize for this,
I genuinely could not find a pronunciation for it, Chuck,
I really tried. But the gung ganny g Aboriginal people
(38:55):
g u n g g a n y j I,
they have one where the tsunami keeps coming and coming
and the sea levels are rising and rising. So the
people are organizing, get together and start rolling boulders down
into the sea, and it actually prevents the sea levels
from rising any further. So I think that's probably my
favorite one. The industriousness and control ones.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
It's good stuff. And then people have gotten a little
weird over the years with trying to explain these away.
There was a Hungarian psychoanalyst named Giza Roim in the
nineteen thirties. It said, no, the reason why we have
with these flood myths is because they're just from people's dreams.
And people in ancient times drank a lot of water
(39:40):
and peed a lot at night, and so they dreamt
about floods and told stories about floods. Or maybe it
is the gods urinate, urinating on people like literally which
and there are myths that literally talk about that that
floods a result of God's peeing on earth, But I
(40:00):
don't know about expanding that to like all the cultural
flood myths all over the world for all time.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Right, And there's others that explain it as like men's
jealousy of not being able to give birth and that
it's a reference to the bursting of the amniotic sack
or something like that. I feel like when psychoanalysis gets involved,
especially in this day and age, it's kind of like,
that was a nice try, everybody. Let's just move on
to geomethology instead, you know, I think, so That's where
(40:29):
I'm putting my money. Chuck geomethology. It's fantastic stuff. And
also I should say I want to give a shout
out to one of our past episodes, Was there real Atlantis?
We were doing geomethology without even realizing it.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
If you want to know more about geomethology and flood myths,
then just start searching the internet because there's a lot
of interesting stuff out there about it. And since I
said that, it's time for a listener, may.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
This is a shout out to the one of the
winners of this Stuff you Should Know five k. This
is something that the Stuff You Should Know Army puts
together every year now in a virtual way right now.
But our buddy Aaron Mazel is one of the people
who works on this. They're looking to do this again
next year. Because here's the deal is they sent me
(41:18):
this stuff afterward and I was like, well, we need
to get this before, so I'm going to go ahead
and say it now and then we'll see if you
can remind people. But people voted to have this happen
in late September early October, so twenty twenty two is
when it's hopefully going to happen again. No official registration,
no entry fee. There's an event page, I guess at
(41:40):
the Stuff you Should Know Army facebook site, and I
think people had two weekends to participate this year and
they had bike riders this year. So regarding regardless of
what your status is an athlete is, they're finding ways
for you to get involved, which is really cool.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
So this is from Amanda though, writing in to say
that I'm a winner baby. You guys had the best
been listening for years and I was happy to participate
in the virtual stuff you should Know five K this year.
It's a cool event that brought some really nice people
together at our little corner of the internet. I'm not
a particularly good or fast runner, but I get out
there and I did the dang thing, and that's what counts.
(42:21):
The other participants in the five k radiate that spirit
and are so encouraging of each other. Don't ask me how,
but somehow I achieved fastest five K for a woman
in this event. What a cool feeling. So today I
listened to Venus fly Traps on the way home and
came across a package addressed Stuff you Should Know five
K champ Amanda Thompson and just about cried and got
(42:44):
a hand crafted by Stuff you should Know Army member
metal racked for her efforts. And it's really great.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
That's pretty great. She has to buy her own metal though.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
That's fantastic, man. Congratulations Amanda, that's wonderful news. And congratulations
to everybody who participated and finished or even just started
or even thought.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
About doing it. Maybe you'll do it next year, who knows,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Congratulations to everyone.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Yeah, and again, that is a very cool thing. That
Stuff you should Know fans to and it makes us
love you guys even more.
Speaker 3 (43:20):
You got anything else, No, just be able to look
out next late summer fall for news on the Army
Facebook page.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Yeah, somebody please remind us ahead of time so we
can tell everybody else. And if you want to remind
us of something, we would love to be reminded because
that probably means we forgot. And you can put that
reminder in the form of an email, which you can
send to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and I have one word to
describe this week's select from twenty twenty one on why
there are so many myths about a great flood founding
cultures around the world. That word is fascinating, but I'll
had a few more words. I guess this is one
of those good old fashioned Stuff you Should Know episodes
(00:22):
where we find out that a thing that everyone just
kind of takes for granted actually has a lot more
to it than it seems.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
And I love those.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Episodes, and I love this episode, which is why I
picked it.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I hope you love it too.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Ahoy, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck,
and we're the captains of this here ship called Stuff
you Should Know. And that's all there is to it,
although I do think we need to allow for the
fact that Jerry is Rear Admirable and by that, of course,
I mean Rear Admiral, and by that, of course, I
(01:11):
mean it's gonna be a long episode.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
Has there ever been a cut c TV show called
The Admirable Admiral?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Uh No?
Speaker 1 (01:20):
That sounds great. I think there was one the Simpsons
did one called Admiral Baby.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Oh all right, well that counts.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though,
it could have been like a terrible person.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
So I have a cold, So I just want to
apologize up front. Just a head cold. But I'm a
little stuffy, So I'm sorry if if it's coming across
as untoward.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I'm very proud of you for pushing through, chuck, because
a lesser podcasters would not. They might they might just
be like, I can I have a cold. People don't
want to hear that, and you say, the heck with that.
I'm going forward with it.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Remember back in the day, you had like a three
month cold that one year.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Every year here for a little while, I used to
get so sick. Yeah, no, it's terrible. But we've gotten
much better, haven't we.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Yeah. I think I don't know, maybe quitting smoking and
something to do with.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
That, maybe just a touch.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
You don't get colds like that anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
No for you, I really don't. So yet another reason
to quit smoking. Everybody who's out there on the fence,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
So we're talking today.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
The reason I said that we're captains is because I
was making a play on a story that it seems
like every single person Chuck knows about. At the very least,
I can say with almost one hundred percent confidence that
everyone that you and I have ever met, seen in passing,
talked to, or been in the same country with, probably
(02:41):
has heard of the story of Noah and the Flood,
where Noah was told to go ahead and build a
boat because the earth was going to flood and everybody
was going to be killed. And by the way, grab
some animals put them on board so that you and
your wife and then the animals can all repopulate your
respective species once the flood's sides. Right, it's a classic story.
(03:02):
Everybody loves it. We we read it out loud just
about every Saturday at dinner time, and it's just a
great story. Right, everybody knows this story. But it turns out, Chuck,
that there's this idea that that actually happened. That there,
and it's long been an idea that the what the
(03:23):
Noah's story is talking about happened in actuality, that there
was a point in time where the entire world flooded.
And there's been a lot of scholarly research into this
into how that's even possible.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, And you know, I guess if we're talking about
this particular, because you know, we've we've found, after digging
around and getting ed to help us with this research,
that there are flood myths in not every culture but
a lot of cultures over the years. And we'll get
into that, you know, in lots of detail, but as
far as actual Noah's actual flood from the Old Testament,
(04:00):
there was a gentleman in eighteen seventy two named George
Smith who is a hobbyist of all things Assyrian and
an amateur sort of historical sleuth, but a well educated
when nonetheless, because he could do things like read quneiform tablets,
and he was doing that one day on I don't
(04:21):
know if it was an actual lunch break or if
that's just apocryphal, but supposedly on a lunch break, went
to a museum, was reading quneiform and came across a
story the Epic of Gilgamesh and read this quote, build
a boat, abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn poverty, save life.
Take on board all living things, seed animals. The boat
(04:44):
you will build. Her dimension shall be equal her length
and breadths shall be the same. It doesn't sing any
about cubits, but it's inferred. Cover her with cover her
with a roof like the ocean below, and he will
send you a reign of plenty. And George Smith said, hey,
this is strikingly familiar as the Christian slash Jewish Old
(05:05):
Testament Noah's flood story. But this is several hundred years previous.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
Yeah, and instead of God telling Noah or an angel
telling Noah, it's the God in Lel who's telling a
guy named utnapished him to build this boat.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Noah's nowhere to be heard.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
And for what reason?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Well, I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where
like Earth is being punished? Basically?
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Oh yeah, So the reason that U and Lel gave
to Udina pished him was because the humans were too
noisy and the gods were sick of humans, so they
were going to flood the earth and kill off all humans,
whereas in the Bible it was because humans had become
too wicked to live.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
I think noisy and wicked are the same thing back then.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
I guess so.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
And it makes you wonder, like, did somebody misread the
word and they're like noisy, okay, and just barreled on.
They're like, my lunch break is almost over. So George
Smith's was like noisy, it's they said noisy.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
But there was also the idea of saving animals, and
there was also the idea that afterward birds were sent
out to find dry land, just as a no.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Story, right, And so you just kind of say, whoops.
Because the Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Old Testament by
at least several hundred years, depending on what part you're
talking about, And so you might say, okay, so the
Noahs story is adapted from this, but that doesn't mean
(06:32):
that it undermines the veracity. They don't undermine the veracity
of one another. In fact, if you stop and think
about it, the fact that one of the first things
that was ever written down after the invention of writing,
qn aiform, was the first written system humans ever devised,
(06:52):
and that the first literary work ever created, the Epic
of Gilgamesh, contained this flood story. It kind of suggests
that something actually may have happened, like it was a
really important story that has stuck around for thousands and
thousands of years. The Epic of gilgrimesh was written thirty
(07:13):
four hundred years ago, that it suggests that there might
be some some kernel of truth to it.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Yeah, and over the years, a lot of people have
tried to prove, whether scientifically or otherwise, that the the
Noah's Flood really did take place. Bible literalists, is that
is that what we call them? I think so, okay,
Bible literalists Bible historians, because that would, uh, that would
(07:43):
go a long way in Christianity if you could say, hey,
the Bible is an actual historical document, this stuff is
really true. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there
was something called deluvialism, deluvial meaning like relating to a
great flood. But that was a big shape of actual geology.
Was basically saying, hey, this physical literally the physical world
(08:05):
that we're living in came about after this flood. What
kind of reset things? And then the real geological record
came along once science got serious and they proved that
was not the case, and that kind of went the
way of the Dodo around you know, the mid eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah, they kind of did it backwards. They said the
Noah Flood shaped the world as we see it. Go
find proof, and when they found proof, they were like,
it's not really adding up. Yeah, So there's no evidence
that there was a global flood that inundated the world.
And in fact, the geological record that these geologists, the
early Ones and you know, up to modern day ones
(08:43):
have been putting together supports the exact opposite of that
that Earth wasn't created in a deluge. It was created
over incredibly long distances of time, very very slowly, layer
by layer.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
But people still say, okay, welly number one, why have
we been telling this flood story for so long? And
then also, why is it, like you said, the idea
of flood myths seems almost universal. Doesn't that like still
strongly suggest that there was, even if the Bible doesn't
quite have it right. And by the way, Noah's story
(09:18):
also shows up in the Quran too, so it's in
the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the Quran. And
then there's the epic of Gilgemach story, Like, why is
this important story still around? Doesn't that still support the
idea that something happened? Why would there be universal flood
myths from cultures that had never even heard of Christianity before,
and there have been some attempts to explain that that
(09:40):
I think are much more satisfying than the idea that
we're just missing all of the evidence for a great
worldwide deluge that happened back in antiquity.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Yeah, and there were you know that it's more than
just those There were Chinese flood myths. There were flood
myths in southern Canada and the British Isles. So there
was one study picked out fifty cultures and they all
had their own flood myth and that it was related
to some kind of punishment. So they started looking, like
you said, of like why why is this happening? And
(10:12):
there's a bunch of reasons and they all kind of
make sense to me if I'm being honest. One of
them is that there was a flood in these cultures,
but it wasn't a global flood. But if you're you know,
if all you know is a certain area and you
never get to leave that area and it wipes out
everything you know, then the story that you pass along
(10:34):
orally through the years would sound like one that wiped
out everything.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, and like the whole idea is that this flood
actually did happen way far back to one group, and
then that group eventually kind of spread out and carried
that flood myth with them, And so to those of
us today historians anthropologists, looking at like all of these
(11:01):
groups that are spread out all over the world, all
sharing basically the same story, it would make it seem
like a flood had impacted all of these groups that
were that far spread.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Out, so it must have been a really big flood.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
But this explanation says no, the flood was actually really localized.
It was the group that it happened to that eventually
spread out. That's one explanation. It makes a lot of sense.
And one of the groups that are usually kind of
pinpointed as this flood happening to or the proto Indo
Europeans who were known to have been around the I
(11:33):
think the Caucasus Mountains to start, and then just spread
out as far as the British Isles, basically all over
Europe northwest, east, south, and that all of our languages
like English, Germanic, just a whole slew of languages developed
out of this group.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, and some more support for this is the fact
that there aren't flood myths in Sub Saharan African cultures,
and these were groups that when they left Africa they
didn't come back, so they would not have taken back
with them a flood myth from proto Indo Europeans. So
it all kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of related one too, that
that says that there were floods, just not a flood.
That flooding is actually really common, so it happened to
a lot of different groups, So it would make sense
that all these different cultures would have flood myths.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Sure. And again, if you live in your riverside village
and you don't get to travel very far from there
and everything you know of gets destroyed again, it could be,
you know, lend support to the idea that it gets
translated as a worldwide flood. And if everyone's having these
localized floods which happened, you know, there's always been floods then,
(12:54):
not necessarily of the forty days and forty nights variety.
But when things are passed around orally and then they
get rewritten, things get kind of mixed up.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, and it's our bad, those of us alive today
who are mistaking or laying our interpretation of the word
world onto like these culture's use of the word world.
They're saying their world, which is much smaller than it
is to those of us today. When we think the world,
we think the whole globe, you know.
Speaker 3 (13:21):
Yeah, And speaking of laying your things on other cultures,
the third one is Christian missionaries, and there's evidence of
this happening. They would go and tell the story of
Noah's Great flood, especially you know, when colonization was happening too,
and between missionaries and colonization, all these other cultures picked
(13:41):
up on that original Biblical flood tale or I don't
know if we should call it a flood myth or
flood tale at this point, what should we call it?
Speaker 1 (13:51):
I think most people call it flood myths or Deluvian myths.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Okay, Delivian myth that sounds a little more academic. So yeah,
So Christian myth stiononaries did this, and I think this
is also evidence in the fact that the South Pacific
didn't really have one until eighteen fourteen when they came
into contact with Christian missionaries, and then all of a
sudden they had the Maori flood myths.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Yeah, so they actually had a flood myth before, but
apparently it was more tsunami based, and then after contact
with Christianity, it became much more of like a deluge,
and it just bore some striking resemblances to the Noah
flood myth of Christianity, And apparently that happened all over
the South Pacific as well, where these cultures will have
their own kind of flood myth, but it's always based
(14:38):
on tsunamis. But then the Christians come and go, and
all of a sudden, it's a day luge where the
water rose after like forty days and forty nights of
rain and stuff. So that creates a lot of headaches
for anthropologists, but it also at the same time explains
why a universal flood myth or a flood myth would
seem universal of those of us around today, and why
they seem to bear such a striking resemblance still one another.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Indeed, I think we should take a break and I'm
gonna go blow my nose, okay, and then we'll come
back and talk about geo mythology right after this.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
So, Chuck, that was a nice view to blow your
nose at the break rather than during recording, even though
I still had to hear it.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
You know what's funny, I was listening to I don't
know why I just thought of this, but I was
listening to Paula Tompkins Stay at Homepkins podcast he does
with his wife Janey the other day, and he was
talking about sneezing on stage and that that had happened
to him once in his career. And Paula someone who
spent lots and lots and lots of time on stages,
And I wonder if there's something to that of the
(16:09):
body withholding things like sneezes, because I've never seen anyone
sneeze on stage. I've never sneezed on stage. Yeah, isn't
that weird?
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah, I'm sure it's related to adrenaline in fight or flight.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
That's what I was thinking. I mean, there's got to
be something to that.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yeah, like your body's like I have time to waste
all that energy on sneezing. We got to get out
of here, We got to put on a great show.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
It would be really weird to think about it if, Like,
I don't know, Barry Manilow in Vegas was talking about
setting up Mandy before he sings it and just lets
out a big sneeze.
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, well, thank you for setting me up to reminisce
yet again about the time that you, me and I
saw Barry manilo front Row Center in Vegas.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
You would have been sneezed on with that big snoze.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yes, we actually would have been covered in his sneeze.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
All right, So we promised talk of geo mythology. Here's
the idea. Since science really got attacked together, there have
been a couple of different ways to look at things
like flood myths as either this is a story about
our cultural values and there is a lot of religious
metaphor involved, or this was an actual historical event and
(17:18):
geomethology came along to kind of say, hey, man, it
can kind of be both, like there could have been
a real flood and it also took on metaphor and
took on cultural values and was used as a story
of I can't think of the word I'm trying to
think of to teach you a lesson.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
What's it called fable?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Yeah, like a fable.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
So this kind of this field has emerged since I
believe the sixties, and actually I was reading about this
field of geomethology is like still really trying to establish
itself in the field of geology. And most geo mythologists
are trained geologists. That's where you start out, probably, but
(18:04):
they they also are like, you know, they have to
really defend what they're doing against their fellow geologists because
they're they're basically saying, all of these myths, all of
these legends, all of this historical, these these folk traditions,
they actually contain eyewitness accounts of natural disasters, of weird
events and earth of early finds of fossils, and yeah,
(18:28):
they've they've cloaked them in the language of mythology and
the terminology of mythology and monsters and weirdness and all
this stuff that makes it just seem completely legendary to
us today. But that's how these pre scientific and often
preliterate cultures passed along really valuable information, and like we've
(18:51):
been kind of foolish to just discount them as all
nothing but legend, as if there's no fact whatsoever in there.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Water exactly. And so that's what geomithology is doing.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
They're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, if you
just look at this the right way, we are covered
up in historical accounts, just waiting for us to unravel
if we learn how to read these correctly and then
also correlate with actual, like known geological events that we've
discovered through science.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Yeah, like, hey, you see that story that seems completely
crazy about a demon god who lives in a mountain
and gets angry and spouts fire from its top. Like
that's a volcano, bros. And like, just because it sounds
crazy doesn't mean we shouldn't look at the fact that
an actual volcano eruption might have happened then, and let's
(19:45):
kind of marry these two things and let's just all
get along.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Right, And so like that legend about the volcano with
the angry god that sometimes spews like scary stuff forth,
and if you ever hear the mountains starting to make rumbles,
it means the god is way up and you should run.
Like that's that is a way for a culture that
is aware that this mountain's actually a volcano, and that
(20:08):
volcano can sit dormant for generations at a stretch, so
those there will be people born in the future who
aren't aware that that's a volcano. And this is the
way that the culture passes down over deep time. This
really important information. If the volcano ever makes a sound
run because you don't want the fiery breath of that
god that's trapped inside it makes it.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
I've heard. I love this stuff. Like, Yeah, before science
came along, all humans did from the moment they could
sort of form thoughts was try and explain what was
going on around them, from rain and thunder to volcanoes
and floods. And I don't know, I think it's super interesting.
It's almost like these proto early warning systems, right, like
(20:51):
nuclears didn't really know how to explain the science of it.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Exactly like nuclear semiox Remember we did an episode on
that on how to tell people ten thousand years in
the future about steering clear of nuclear waste. Right, it's
the same exact principle. It's just chuck. Somewhere along the way,
we later generations became arrogant and just completely discounted any
of that those pre scientific traditions because they didn't appear scientific.
(21:17):
But it is exactly like what you were saying. It
was the way that they made sense of actual stuff.
And so there's plenty of stuff to learn from those
those accounts and those tales and those myths and legends.
We just have to basically kind of eat a little
bit of crow and go back and be like, well.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
We've been ignoring this to our own detriment.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yeah, And it's like you said earlier, it's a tough
road to ho though for scientists these days if they
take this on, because you know, you have mixed results
when you go back and you look at these tales.
Some of them may just be folk tales and legends,
and some may have kernels of truth, some may have
a little more truth. So there's a lot to sort
(21:56):
of parse through as a geologist these days, if you're
if you're working as or with the geo mythologist.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Right, and so when you are laying this out and
trying to figure out, okay, what is this myth describing.
You know, again you're a trained geologist if you're a geomthologist,
but you're also working with people from other scientific fields
as far as trying to uncover the fact the kernel
(22:26):
of truth behind these flood myths. You would be working
with paleohydrology or paleo bathymetry, which is the study of
ancient sea levels like where they were at in the past,
and so you're going to take like the findings from
these fields and then say, okay, let me see if
I can correlate it with a myth. Or you find
(22:48):
a myth and you say, okay, let me see if
I can correlate it with paleobathymetry or paleohydrology findings. And
they've actually turned up some really interesting stuff so far.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yeah, there was in twenty sixteen, there was a study
that tied together one of the Chinese flood myths from
about four thousand years ago, basically that there was a
great flood wiped out China. It lasted for a couple
of decades, and then this great man came along who
had become emperor, Emperor U, and tamed the water. So
(23:20):
geologists went back and they said, all right, there's an
ancient landslide around that same time that damned up a
river and a lake filled up behind it in about
six months or so, and then that flooded. That river
got flooded, broke through the dam, and there was this
huge flood, and they have found sediment that sort of
tracks along these lines. Then they found the Emperor U.
(23:43):
Actually it turns out he may not have been you know,
magically tamed the water. He just had a knack for
early engineering, and that he dredged the waters and it
cleared up the river's flow. Things returned to normal, and
he became emperor. But back then it gets you know,
told as it take of this, you know, great soon
to be emperor that tames the waters when he was
(24:04):
just good at what he was doing, right.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
But they, I mean, they found like evidence, geological evidence
that backs all of this up, that this whole series
of events, the earthquake that tragdered, the landslide, the landslide,
the damn, the lake filling up in six months, the
lake breaking and flooding, that all this happened within a
single year. That is definitely the kind of thing that
your culture is going to make note of and pass
down over the years, that this kind of thing can happen.
(24:27):
And then not only that this great person came along
in freed us from the burden of these floodwaters that
apparently stuck around for twenty years. That's right, It's pretty cool.
There's another one that is just beyond thrilling. If you
ask me that a lot of people say this is probably,
this is possibly and I think That's a big reasons
(24:47):
a lot of mainstream geologists have problems with geo mythology
is we can't really see a course to getting to
the point where we're saying this is the one. This
is this flood that we have evidence of is what
gave rise to the epic of Gilgamesh and Noah's story.
But you can say there's a really good chance that
(25:09):
this is the one, this fits the bill, and this
one does kind of stick out like that.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
That's right, this one. In the nineties, it became fairly
popular that basically said there was an oceanographer named William
Ryan and another guy named Walter Pittman. They were i
think in the early two thousands, and they said that
rising sea levels at one point caused a Mediterranean to
burst through the Bosporus Strait about seven thousand years ago.
(25:35):
And this was a like a legit serious flood that
I'm sure seemed like a flood, like a global type
of thing. It created a waterfall a volume two hundred
times that of Niagara Falls, and I think enough water
in one day that could have flooded Manhattan by three
thousand feet. Yeah, that's well, that's a flood.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
It's quite a bit.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
They also determined that the mediterrane and see moved inland.
The coast moved inland by about a mile a day.
Can you imagine seeing that happen before your eyes, like
you're just you'd almost lose your mind again. That would
make a really great story that you would pass along
and explain it in whatever terms you could. But there
(26:19):
would have been coastal settlements along the Bosporus Strait on
either side, on the Mediterranean side and also on the
Black Sea side that all this water poured into, and
it would have just completely wiped those settlements out. So
the people who did survive would have been like, something
really bad happened here, and this is how we're going
to make sense of it. And the timing of it
(26:40):
was just right. It happened probably about seven thousand years ago.
And as we'll see, there's a lot of stuff that
happened around seven seventy five hundred years ago around the
world because the end of that last glacial period started
in the sea levels rose, and all sorts of crazy
stuff happened as result. But that's one that people point to,
(27:02):
is like that maybe the flood that gave rise to
the Gilgamesh and Noah stories. No pun intended gave rise,
I think, so it really was unintended. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Another one about seventy five hundred years ago was the
creation of the Persian Gulf. Kind of a similar kind
of thing during the last Ice Age that what is
now the Persian Gulf used to not be. It used
to be a very nice river valley near the Fertile
Crescent where people lived. And the thing here though, that
I don't quite get is that they haven't they haven't
(27:37):
found any evidence of things underwater there, right.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
No, they haven't.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
They The reason why they think this happened, Chuck, is
because all of a sudden, on the shores of the
Gulf as we know it today, some like really well
established settlements with decorative pottery and well built stone houses
and all sorts of other things. Domesticated animals just sprang
up basically overnight.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
So they were relocated essentially.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, that's really the only explanation. I went from hunting settlements,
hunting camps to all of a sudden, these people are
like an advanced society, so that the best explanation is
that their original settlement is down there beneath the Persian Gulf,
we just haven't found it yet.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
What about Doggerland.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
So Doggerland is another similar story. They both share what's
called aquaterra, by the way, which is a coin or
a term that was coined in the nineties to describe
these lands that were exposed for one hundred and fifty
thousand years that humans were kind of developing and forming societies,
and then were lost just seven seventy five hundred years
(28:45):
ago when the sea levels rose again. So Doggerland and
the idea of the Gulf being an underwater now submerged settlement,
Doggerlands like that, but instead of in the Persian Gulf,
it's been in the north. It was a patch of
land that connected the British Isles to Scandinavia before until
about eighty five hundred years ago.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Right, And here they have actually found submerged traces of
settlements under the sea, unlike the one in the Persian Gulf.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Right, And they actually think that it's possible. Some people
are saying no, it's probably just you know, slow, steady
sea level rise that flooded Doggerland. But there was a
massive landslide in I think Norway called the Storiga event
that happened eighty five hundred years ago, and it probably
(29:37):
generated a massive tsunami, and it could have been big
enough to have submerged dogger Land permanently after that. Apparently
that's how big that underwater landslide was.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Yeah, I was about to say underwater. Can you get
to point that out out?
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, But there's a flood story from Brittany around that
area that says that a king's daughter was possessed by
a demon and opened like their country's floodgates and that
was flooded, you know, catastrophically. So it's like, you know,
are they talking about this event that happened eighty five
(30:13):
hundred years ago that this has survived as this legend
until today.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
That's right. And yet another right here in the well
and now the US of A. But in the nineteen
eighties and nineties they investigated flood miss of the indigenous
peoples in the Pacific Northwest and they found out that
their flood miss this was a little more recent. This
was around seventeen hundred a d. But the idea is
that there was a like magnitude nine earthquake that caused
(30:41):
the tsunami, unleashing these big waves from basically sort of
Vancouver Island all the way down to northern California.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
Yeah, it was the hoe and the Quilliute people who
had this legend of thunderbird and whale getting in a fight.
And it interesting is I mean, there's all sorts of
geological evidence. Apparently there's still trees that are just not where,
they're just not growing back they were wipe clean from
the tsunami. But there's a Japanese temple, a Buddhist temple
(31:15):
that marked the date January sixth, seventeen hundred because the
tsunami wave made it all the way to Japan and
they noted it. So by basically cross correlating that Japanese
noting of the date with the hoe and the quil
Yuk's story about thunderbird and whale, they've said, this story
is about this particular event, which is pretty awesome.
Speaker 3 (31:39):
And then sometimes it's just a culture like prescience again
making sense out of finding weird things like the Zuni
people in the southwest of the United States obviously not
back then, they saw these you know, ancient marine animals
and seashells in the fossils that they were finding and
they said, well, this is part of our creation story.
(32:01):
There there was a great flood, and that's how this
stuff got here.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah, here in the desert, which is I mean, that's
how a pre scientific culture would make sense of that
kind of thing. Pretty cool, absolutely, So I say we
take one more break, and we're going to talk about
the other aspect of these myths, the mythology part of it,
right right after this. Okay, So if you take a
(32:51):
myth and you strip the mythology off and you just
look at the kernel of historicity and try to figure out,
you know, what it's actually describing. You don't want to
just forget the myth part. You want to go back
and also look at the myth part too, because that
reveals a lot about humans and who we are and
how we think spread out even across cultures throughout the world.
(33:16):
And there's a lot of similarities that pop up from
examining geomithology, especially with flood myths, even when you set
aside the idea or I should say, even when you
account for the idea of missionaries spreading the Noah flood too.
Speaker 3 (33:33):
So, yeah, you know, one of the things that's interesting
to look at is how these things are, how these
myths are similar. And one way that a lot of
these flood myths are similar is that and we've already
seen a little bit, and what we've talked about is
oftentimes it's a man and a woman, usually a man
and a wife, who are charged with gathering up the animals,
(33:54):
with repopulating the earth afterward saving the species essentially, usually
a warning, whether it's Noah's flood myth or all the others,
where you know, someone comes along and says, you know,
you better get your act together earth, or tell everybody
on earth you know you were the messenger to get
their act together, or else I will rain down rain
(34:17):
upon you.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, there's also sometimes a warning, I guess one of
the warnings, Chuck, that came through. I think we said
earlier that the Chinese have like at least four flood myths,
And one of the warnings that came through was to
this brother and sister who freed a thunder god from
their father's I guess Chicken Cooper or whatever. Their father
(34:45):
had captured him. And so the thunder god said, hey,
thanks a lot of kids. By the way, the things
are about to get serious around here. You might want
to build a boat. Actually, yeah, I think they build
a boat. But they're one of those interesting stories where
you said, usually it's a man and wife who end
up having to repopulate the earth. That put these two
kids in the position of having to repopulate, and that
(35:08):
was a taboo. Incests is a basically the universal taboo
one of them, and that was the same in ancient
China as well. So in different versions of the story,
either the brother and sister basically got to pass this time.
Another version is that the brother had to go through
a huge series of physical challenges and couldn't and that
(35:32):
somehow the earth became populated anyway. And the third version
is that they just made everybody out of clay, that
they made themselves, right, Okay, But if you start really
kind of looking at floods, there's like especially the purpose
of the flood. That's the thing, Like it's very rare
that the flood happens in a flood myth just for fun,
(35:55):
Like there's almost always a reason, Like humans want there
to be a reason. So we've come up with different
reasons over the years, and one of them is basically
the apocalypse, that humanity is being wiped out, usually as
punishment and that we deserve to survive, and we would
(36:15):
have to survive or else we wouldn't be around to
be passing the story along.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
So somebody had to survive.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So that's where those people who repopulate the earth come from.
But the rest of us we got wiped out because
we displeased the gods.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
That's right. Another one is that we started out as
an ocean and nothing but ocean, So this is just
a reset to that, return to our original state here
on planet Earth. And there are a lot of cultures
around the world that basically thought that we started out
as an ocean from ancient Egypt north I think in
(36:50):
Japan as well, and basically, you know, it's either returns
us to a state of water or an island above an.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, and that's I mean, that's so closely related to
the apocalyptic one too. It's just that's we just happen
to be returning to how things were before, which is
also related to another kind of theme as a reason
for the flood, which is purification. Like, yes, you're being punished,
and yes you're returning to this primordial state, but the
(37:21):
ultimate reason that say like God or the gods have
is to purify things, to get to rid the world
of evil and just keep the good and start over
with just the good. Basically, that's another big one too,
and they're all kind of, you know, pretty tightly wound
up together.
Speaker 3 (37:36):
Yeah, then there's just angry gods. And it might not
have anything to do with you doing anything wrong as
a culture or getting your act together. It's just that
the gods were angry, so they they kicked open the
top of that mountain and it became a volcano. And
sorry ts for you guys.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, it just happens.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
But that's still interesting that people this rationalization even in
itself though, isn't it. It's just kind of like sometimes
that happens even if you didn't do anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
So there's another one too, that Emperor U myth is
a good example of industriousness, people working together, people controlling things.
Where the Earth has done something crazy, maybe the gods
were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it, either in
the form of a savior like Emperor U. There's one
(38:29):
in Bhutan. I believe there's a legend about Guru Reproach
and the Zangpo Valley. He shows up and basically drains
a lake exposing all this fertile farm land where a
village was then settled or the and I apologize for this,
I genuinely could not find a pronunciation for it, Chuck,
I really tried. But the gung ganny g Aboriginal people
(38:55):
g u n g g a n y j I,
they have one where the tsunami keeps coming and coming
and the sea levels are rising and rising. So the
people are organizing, get together and start rolling boulders down
into the sea, and it actually prevents the sea levels
from rising any further. So I think that's probably my
favorite one. The industriousness and control ones.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
It's good stuff. And then people have gotten a little
weird over the years with trying to explain these away.
There was a Hungarian psychoanalyst named Giza Roim in the
nineteen thirties. It said, no, the reason why we have
with these flood myths is because they're just from people's dreams.
And people in ancient times drank a lot of water
(39:40):
and peed a lot at night, and so they dreamt
about floods and told stories about floods. Or maybe it
is the gods urinate, urinating on people like literally which
and there are myths that literally talk about that that
floods a result of God's peeing on earth, But I
(40:00):
don't know about expanding that to like all the cultural
flood myths all over the world for all time.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Right, And there's others that explain it as like men's
jealousy of not being able to give birth and that
it's a reference to the bursting of the amniotic sack
or something like that. I feel like when psychoanalysis gets involved,
especially in this day and age, it's kind of like,
that was a nice try, everybody. Let's just move on
to geomethology instead, you know, I think, so That's where
(40:29):
I'm putting my money. Chuck geomethology. It's fantastic stuff. And
also I should say I want to give a shout
out to one of our past episodes, Was there real Atlantis?
We were doing geomethology without even realizing it.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
If you want to know more about geomethology and flood myths,
then just start searching the internet because there's a lot
of interesting stuff out there about it. And since I
said that, it's time for a listener, may.
Speaker 3 (40:57):
This is a shout out to the one of the
winners of this Stuff you Should Know five k. This
is something that the Stuff You Should Know Army puts
together every year now in a virtual way right now.
But our buddy Aaron Mazel is one of the people
who works on this. They're looking to do this again
next year. Because here's the deal is they sent me
(41:18):
this stuff afterward and I was like, well, we need
to get this before, so I'm going to go ahead
and say it now and then we'll see if you
can remind people. But people voted to have this happen
in late September early October, so twenty twenty two is
when it's hopefully going to happen again. No official registration,
no entry fee. There's an event page, I guess at
(41:40):
the Stuff you Should Know Army facebook site, and I
think people had two weekends to participate this year and
they had bike riders this year. So regarding regardless of
what your status is an athlete is, they're finding ways
for you to get involved, which is really cool.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
So this is from Amanda though, writing in to say
that I'm a winner baby. You guys had the best
been listening for years and I was happy to participate
in the virtual stuff you should Know five K this year.
It's a cool event that brought some really nice people
together at our little corner of the internet. I'm not
a particularly good or fast runner, but I get out
there and I did the dang thing, and that's what counts.
(42:21):
The other participants in the five k radiate that spirit
and are so encouraging of each other. Don't ask me how,
but somehow I achieved fastest five K for a woman
in this event. What a cool feeling. So today I
listened to Venus fly Traps on the way home and
came across a package addressed Stuff you Should Know five
K champ Amanda Thompson and just about cried and got
(42:44):
a hand crafted by Stuff you should Know Army member
metal racked for her efforts. And it's really great.
Speaker 1 (42:52):
That's pretty great. She has to buy her own metal though.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
That's fantastic, man. Congratulations Amanda, that's wonderful news. And congratulations
to everybody who participated and finished or even just started
or even thought.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
About doing it. Maybe you'll do it next year, who knows,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
Congratulations to everyone.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Yeah, and again, that is a very cool thing. That
Stuff you should Know fans to and it makes us
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You got anything else, No, just be able to look
out next late summer fall for news on the Army
Facebook page.
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can tell everybody else. And if you want to remind
us of something, we would love to be reminded because
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Josh Clark
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Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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