December 7, 2021 • 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?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good luck. Hey everybody. We are super excited to return
to the sketch Fest stage and do a live show again.
We missed it so so much last year and we
can't wait to get back to San Francisco. Yeah, it's
our first live show in two years, chuck, and we're
going to be there at the Sydney Goldstein Theater and
beautiful San Francisco, California at seven thirty on Friday, January one.
(00:26):
Is a straight up stuff you should know live show,
and it's going to be off the chain, that's right.
You should show up to see if we've forgotten how
to do this, to see a skate around on stage,
nervously sure, doubting ourselves and eventually bringing the funnies. Yeah, hopefully.
Where do they go? They go to s f AS
in San Francisco, SF sketch Beest dot com. Click on
(00:48):
the schedule and tickets link. There are tons and tons
and tons of great shows, so best comedy UH festival
in the country in my opinion over the whole month
of January. So go check us out and go check
out every body else as well. Yep, it's also a
full vaccination show, so you've got to show proof of
vaccination and wear some masks. Don't be naughty. Don't be naughty,
(01:08):
be nice. So we'll see you guys on Friday, January
one in San Francisco, California. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radio. Ahoy, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're the
(01:31):
captains of this here ship called Stuff you Should Know.
And uh, 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 mean
it's going to be a long episode. Has there ever
(01:52):
been a cute c TV show called the Admirable Admiral? Uh? No,
that sounds great. I think there was one. The Simpsons
did one called Admirable Baby. All right, well that counts. Yeah.
I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though
it could have been, like a terrible person. So I
have a cold, so I just want to apologize up front.
(02:14):
Just a head cold, but I'm a little stuffy, so
I'm sorry if if it's coming across is untoward. I'm
very proud of you for pushing through, Chuck, because lesser
podcasters would not. They might they might just be like,
I can I have a cold and people don't want
to hear that. You say, the heck with that. I'm
going forward with it. Remember back in the day, you
(02:34):
had like a three month cold that one year every year,
every year for a little while, I used to get
so sick. Yeah, no, it's terrible. But we've gotten much better,
haven't we. Yeah, I think, Uh, I don't know. Maybe
quitting smoking has something to do with that, Maybe just
a touch. You don't get colds like that anymore for you.
I really don't so, And yet another reason to quit smoking.
(02:55):
Everybody who's out there on the fence. Uh So we're
talking today. The reason I said that we're sin 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 a hund percent
confidence that everyone that you and I have ever met,
seen in passing, talked to um, or been in the
(03:16):
same like country with probably 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, grabs 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 subsides. Right,
(03:38):
it's a classic story. Everybody loves it. We 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 um, there's this idea
that that actually happened, that that there and it's long
(03:59):
been and I the that the that what the 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. Yeah, and you know, I guess
if we're talking about this particular, because you know, we've
(04:21):
we've found after digging around and getting d to help
us with this research, that there are flood myths and
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. Um, there was a gentleman in eighteen seventy
two named George Smith who was a hobbyist of all
(04:44):
things Assyrian and an amateur sort of historical sleuth. But
um a well educated one, nonetheless, because he could do
things like read cuneaform tablets. And he was doing that
one day on I don't 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
(05:06):
Cunea form and came across the story the Epic of
Gilgamish and read this quote, build a boat abandoned wealth
and seek survival. Spurn poverty, save life. Take on board
all living things, seed animals. The boat you will build.
Her dimensions shall be equal, her length and breadths shall
be the same. Doesn't seeing about cubits, but it's inferred.
(05:30):
Cover her with a root, 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 Testament Noah's
flood story. But this is several years previous. Yeah, and
instead of um, God telling Noah or an angel telling Noah,
(05:52):
it's the god in Leal who's telling a guy named
Uta pished him to build this boat. Noah's nowhere to
be heard and for what reason? What do you mean? Well,
I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where like
Earth is being punished? Basically? Oh yeah, so um the
reason that that Uh and Leo gave to Udna pitched
(06:15):
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. I think noisy and wicked are the same
thing back then, I guess so. And it makes you
wonder like did somebody misread the word and they're like
noisy okay, and just barreled on there like my lunch
(06:37):
break is almost over. So George Smith just was like noisy,
it's they said noisy. 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 story, right, and so Uh, you just
kind of say whoops, because, um, the Epic of Gilgamesh
predates the Old Testament by at least several dred years,
(07:00):
depending on what part you're talking about. And UM, so
you might say, Okay, so the Noahs story is adapted
from this, but that doesn't mean that it undermines the veracity.
They don't undermine the veracity of another. In fact, if
you stop and think about it, the fact that one
of the first things that was ever written down after
(07:23):
the invention of writing Q form was the first written
system humans ever devised, and that the first literary work
ever created, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contained this flood story. Um,
it kind of suggests that something actually may have happened,
Like it was a really important story that has stuck
(07:45):
around for thousands and thousands of years. The Epic of
Gilgamesh was written thirty four hundred years ago. Um that
that it suggests that there might be some some kernel
of truth to it. Yeah. And over the years, a
lot of people have tried to um prove, whether scientifically
(08:06):
or otherwise, that the the Noah's flood really did take place.
Bible literalists, is that what is that? What we call them,
I think, so okay, Bible literalists, um, Bible historians, because
that would uh, that would go a long way uh
in Christianity if you could say, hey, the Bible is
an actual historical document. This stuff is really true. And
(08:29):
in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there was something called
uh deluvialism, deluvial meaning like relating to a great flood.
But that was a big shaper of actual geology. Was
basically saying, hey, this physical literally the physical world that
we're living in came about after this flood. What kind
of reset things? And then the real geological record came
(08:50):
along when 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. Yeah,
they kind did it backwards. They said, the Noah flood
shaped the world as we see it. Go find proof,
and when they found proof, they're like, it's not really
adding up. So there's no evidence that there was a
(09:12):
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 have been putting together
supports the exact opposite. Of that that Earth wasn't created
in a day luge. It was created over incredibly long
distances of time, very very slowly, layer by layer, right,
(09:36):
But people still say, okay, well, why 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 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 also shows up in the Koran too, So
(09:58):
it's in the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the Koran.
And then there's the epic of Gilgamas story, Like, why
is this important story still around? Doesn't it 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 like some attempts to
explain that that I think are much more satisfying than
(10:19):
the idea that we're just missing all of the evidence
for great worldwide deluge that happened back in antiquity. Yeah,
and there were you know that It's more than just
those there were Chinese flood myths. There were uh flood
myths in southern Canada and the British Isles. Uh. So
there was one study that picked out fifty cultures and
they all had their own flood myths and that it
(10:42):
was related to some kind of punishment. So they started looking,
like you said, of like, why why is this happening?
And there's a bunch of reasons and they all kind
of make sense to me if I'm being honest. Um,
one of them is that there there was a flood
in these cultures, but it wasn't a globe flood. But
if you're you know, if if all you know is
(11:04):
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 orally um through the years
would sound like one that wiped out everything. Yeah, And
like the whole idea is that this flood actually did
happen way far back to one group, and then that
(11:28):
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 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
(11:48):
far spread out, so it must have been a really
big flood. 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 them, the groups
that are usually UM kind of pinpointed as that this
flood happening to or the Proto Indo Europeans who were
(12:09):
known to have been around the the I think the
Caucusus Mountains to start and then just spread out as
far as the British Isles, um, basically all over Europe northwest, east,
south UM. And that all of our languages like English, Germanic, um,
just a whole slew of languages developed out of this group. Yeah.
(12:30):
And some more support for this is the fact that
there aren't fled 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,
uh flood myth from proto Indo Europeans. So it all
kind of makes sense. Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of
(12:53):
related one to that um 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. Sure. And again, if you're if you
live in your riverside village and you don't get to
(13:15):
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 which happened,
you know, there's always been floods then uh, not necessarily
of the forty days and forty nights variety. But when
things are passed around orally and then they get rewritten,
(13:38):
things get kind of mixed up. Yeah, and it's are
bad those of us alive today who are mistaking or
laying our interpretation of the world word world onto like
these cultures use of the word world. They're saying their world,
which was much smaller than it is to those of
us today. When we think the world, we think the
whole globe. You know. Yeah, And speaking of laying your
(14:01):
things on other cultures, the third one is Christian missionaries. Uh,
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 up on that original biblical
flood tail or. I don't know if we should call
(14:24):
it a flood myth or or flood tail at this point,
what should we call it? I think most people call
it flood myths or Deluvian myths. Okay, Delivian myth that
sounds a little more academic. Uh so. Yeah, So Christian
missionaries did this, and I think this is um also
evidence in the fact that the South Pacific didn't really
(14:45):
have one until eighteen fourteen when they came into contact
with with Christian missionaries, and then all of a sudden
they had the Maori flood myths. Yeah. So they actually
had a floyd myth before, but apparently it was more
tsunami based, and then after contact with Christianity, it became
much more of like a day lose and it just
bore some striking resemblances to the Noah flood myth of Christianity,
(15:09):
and apparently that happened all over the South Pacific as well,
where um, these cultures will have their own kind of
flood myth, but it's always based on tsunamis. But then
the Christians come and go, and all of a sudden,
it's a day lose where the water rose after like
you know, forty days and forty knights of rain and stuff.
So that creates a lot of headaches for anthropologists, but
it also at the same time explains why universal flood
(15:31):
myth or a flood myth would seem universal of those
of us around today, and why they seem to bear
such a striking resemblance to one another. You know. Indeed,
I think we should take a break and I'm gonna
go blow my nose and then we'll come back and
talk about geo mythology right after this. So, Chuck, that
(16:17):
was nice of you to blow your nose at the
break rather than during recording, even though I still had
to hear it. It was you know, what's funny, I
was listening to Uh. I don't know why I just
thought of this, but I was listening to Paula Thompkins
Stay at Hopkins podcast he does with his wife Janey
the otherday, and he was talking about sneezing on stage
and that that had happened to him once in his career.
(16:40):
And Paul is someone who spent lots and lots and
lots of time on stages, and I wonder if there's
something to that of the body withholding things like sneezes,
because I've never seen anyone's sneeze on stage. I've never
sneezed on stage. Isn't that weird? Yeah, I'm sure it's
related to adrenaline fight or flight. That's what I was thinking.
(17:02):
I mean, there's got to be something to that. Yeah,
like your body's like I have time to waste all
that energy and sneezing. We gotta get out of here.
We're gonna put on a great show. 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. Yeah, well,
thank you for setting me up to reminisce yet again
(17:22):
about the time that you me and I saw Barry
Manilow front Road Center in Vegas. You would have been
sneezed on with that big snoze. Yes, we actually would
have been covered in his his sneeze. 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
(17:44):
as either um, this is a story about our cultural
values and there's a lot of religious metaphor involved, or
this was an actual historical event and geo mythology 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
(18:09):
values and was used as a as a story of
I can't think of the word I'm trying to think
of to teach you a lesson. What's that called fable? Yeah,
like a fable. So this kind of this field has
emerged since, um, I believe the sixties and actually it
was I was reading about. This field of geomethology is
like still really trying to establish itself in the field
(18:32):
of geology, and most most geomethologists are trained geologists. That's
where you start out D and D probably, but 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 history, these these folk traditions, they actually
(18:56):
contain eyewitness accounts of natural disas, sters, of weird events,
and earth of early finds of fossils. And yeah, they've
they've been 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 um legendary
(19:18):
to us today. But um, that's how these pre scientific
and often preliterate cultures um passed along really valuable information.
And like we've been kind of foolish to just discount
these as all nothing but legend, as if there's no
fact whatsoever in there. And so the bathwater exactly, and
so that's what geo mythology is doing. They're saying, wait
(19:40):
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 to read these correctly and then also correlate
with actual, like known geological events that we've discovered through science. Yeah, like, hey,
(20:01):
you see that story that uh seems completely crazy about
a demon god who lives in a mountain and gets
angry and spouts uh 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 kind
(20:23):
of marry these two things and let's just all get along, right,
and so like that that 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 that God is waking up and you should run, like, um,
that's that is a way for a culture that is
aware that this mountains actually a volcano, and that volcano
(20:47):
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 and information If the volcanover makes it sound run
because you don't want the fiery breath of that god
that's trapped inside it makes it I love this stuff.
(21:08):
Like before science came along, all humans did from the
moment they could sort of form thoughts was trying to
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 like nuclear didn't really know how to explain
(21:30):
the science of it, exactly like nuclear semiatics. 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
(21:53):
because they didn't appear scientific. 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, we've been ignoring this to
our own detriment. Yeah, And it's like you said earlier,
(22:15):
it's it's it's a tough roadeho 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,
so may have a little more truth. So there's a
lot to sort of parse through as a geologist these days,
(22:37):
if you're as you're if you're working as or with
a geo mythologist, right, um, and so when when you
are laying this out and trying to figure out, okay,
what what is this myth describing? You know, again you're
a trained geologist if you're a geo mythologist, but you're
also working with people from other scientific fields, um as
(22:59):
far as trying to uncover, um this the fact the
kernel of truth behind these flood myths. You would be
working with paleo hydrology or paleo bath immetry, which is
the study of ancient sea levels like where they were
at in the past, and um so you're going to
take like the findings from these fields and then say, okay,
(23:23):
let me see if I can correlate it with a myth.
Or you find a myth and you say, okay, let
me see if I can correlate it with paleo bath
immetry or paleo hydrology findings. Um, And they've actually turned
up some really interesting stuff so far. Yeah, there was
in two thousand sixteen, there was a study that tied
together one of the Chinese flood myths from about four
(23:44):
thousand years ago. Basically that there was a great flood
whited out China, lasted for a couple of decades, and
then this great man came along who had become Emperor,
Emperor You, and tamed the water. So geologists went back
and they said, all right, there's an ancient landside around
that same time that damned up a river and a
(24:05):
lake filled up behind it. And about six months or
so and then that flooded. Uh, that river got flooded,
broke through the dam, and there was this huge flood,
and they have found uh sediment that sort of tracks
along these lines. Then they found the Emperor You. Actually,
it turns out he may not have been you know,
magically tamed the water. He just had a knack for
(24:27):
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 a tale of this you know, great soon
to be emperor that tames the waters when he was
just good at what he was doing. Right. But they,
I mean, they found like evidence, geological evidence that backs
(24:47):
all of this up, that this whole series of events,
the earthquake that triggered 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. And
then not only that this great person came along and
freed us from the burden of these floodwaters that apparently
(25:10):
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 that's a
big reasons A lot of like mainstream geologists have problems
with geo mythology as we we can't really see a
(25:33):
course to getting to the point we were 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 this this is the one, this
fits the bill, and this one does kind of stick
out like that, that's right, this one. Uh. In the
(25:53):
nineties that became fairly popular that basically said there was
oceanographer named William Ryan and another guy named Walter Pittman. Uh.
They were I think in the early two thousand's, and
they said that rising sea levels at one point caused
a Mediterranean to burst through the Bosporus straight about seven
thousand years ago. And this was a like a legit
(26:16):
serious flood that I'm sure seemed like a flood, like
a global type of thing. Uh. It created a waterfall
a volume two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, and
I think enough water in one day they could have
flooded Manhattan by three thousand feet. Yeah, that's that's a flood.
It's quite a bit. They also determined that the um
(26:36):
the Mediterranean Sea moved inland. The coast moved inland by
about a mile a day. Can you imagine seeing that
happened before your eyes, like you're just you 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 would have been coastal settlements
(26:59):
along the bospor Us uh straight on either side, on
the Mediterranean side and also on the Black seaside, 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 was just right. Um, it
(27:20):
happened probably about seven thousand years ago. And as we'll see,
there's a lot of stuff that happened around seven thousand,
seventy undred years ago around the world because the end
of that last glacial period started in the sea levels,
rows and and all sorts of crazy stuff happened as
a result. But that's a that's one that people point to,
is like that maybe the flood that gave rise to
(27:43):
the Gilgamesh and Noah stories, no pun intended gave rise.
It really was unintended. Yeah. Another one about years ago
was the creation of the Persian Gulf. Kind of a
similar kind of thing during the last Ice Age, it
what is now the Persian Gulf used to not be.
(28:04):
It used to be a very nice river valley, uh,
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 found any evidence of of things underwater there, right, No,
they haven't. They they The reason why they think this happened, Chuck,
is because all of a sudden, on the shores of
(28:27):
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. So they were relocated essentially. Yeah,
that's really the only explanation. I went from hunting settlements,
hunting camps to all of a sudden, these people are
(28:49):
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. What about dogger Land,
So dogger Land is another similar story. They both share
what's called aqua terra um, by the way, which is
a coin or a term that was coined in the
nineties to describe these lands that were exposed for a
(29:14):
hundred and fifty thousand years that humans were kind of
developing and forming societies. And then we're lost just seven thousand,
seventy five years ago when the sea levels rose again.
So dogger Land and the idea of the Gulf being
um an underwater now submerged settlement dogger Lands like that,
but instead of in the Persian Gulf, it's been in
(29:37):
the North Sea. It was a patch of land that
connected the British Isles to Scandinavia before until about eighty
five hundred years ago. Right. And here they have actually
found submerged traces of settlements under the sea, unlike the
one in the Persian Gulf, right um. And they actually
think that it's possible. Some some people are saying no,
(29:57):
it's probably just you know, slow steady sea level rise
that that flooded dogger Land. Um. But they there was
a massive landslide in I think Norway called the Storaga
event UM. That happened eighty five hundred years ago, and
it probably generated a massive tsunami UM and it could
(30:18):
have been big enough to have submerged dogger Land permanently
after that. Apparently that's how big that underwater landslide was.
I was about to say underwater. You gotta point that
out out. But there's a flood story UM from Brittany
around that area that says that a king's daughter um
was possessed by a demon and opened like the their
(30:41):
their country's floodgates and that that was flooded, you know, catastrophically.
So it's like, you know, are they talking about this
event that happened eighty five hundred years ago that this
is survived as this legend until today. And yet another
right here in the well and now the U s
(31:01):
of A. But in the nineteen eighties and nineties they
investigated flood miss of the indigenous people's in the Pacific
Northwest and they found out that their flood miss uh
this was a little more recent, this was around sev D.
But the idea is that there was a like magnitude
nine earthquake that caused the tsunami, unleashing these big waves
(31:21):
from basically sort of Vancouver Island all the way down
to northern California. Yeah, it was the hoe and the
quill you people, um who had this legend of thunderbird
and whale getting in a fight. And UM. What's what's
interesting is, I mean, there's all sorts of geological evidence.
Apparently there's still trees that are just not where they're
(31:44):
they're just not growing back. They were wiped clean from
the tsunami. UM. But the they there's a Japanese temple
of Buddhist temple that mark the date January six hundred
because the tsunami wave made it all the way to
Japan and they noted it. So by basically cross correlating
that Japanese um noting of the date with the hoe
(32:06):
and the quill yus um story about thunder ward thunderbird
and whale, they've said, this is this story is about
this particular event, which is pretty awesome. And then sometimes
it's just uh a culture like pre science again making
sense out of finding weird things like the Zuni people
in the southwest of the United States obviously not back
(32:28):
then they saw these you know, ancient marine animals and
seashells and the fossils that they were finding, and they said, well,
this is part of our creation story. There there was
a great flood, and that's how this stuff got here, Yeah,
here in the desert, which is I mean, that's how
a pre scientific commuce culture would make sense of that
(32:48):
kind of thing. Pretty cool. So, UM, I say we
take one more break and we're gonna talk about the
other aspect of these myths, the mythology part of it,
right right after this. Okay. So if you take um
(33:28):
a myth and you strip the mythology off and you
just look at the kernel of historicity and try to
figure out, you know, what event it's actually describing. UM,
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, uh
and who we are and how how we think spread
(33:50):
out even across cultures throughout the world. UM. And there's
a lot of similarities that pop up from UM from
examining geo mythology, especially with flood myths. Even when you
set aside the idea or I should say, even when
you um account for the idea of missionaries spreading the
Noah flood too. So yeah, you know, one of the
(34:12):
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 uh.
And we've already seen a little bit and what we've
talked about is oftentimes it's a man and a woman. Uh,
usually a man and a wife who are charged with um,
gathering up the animals, with repopulating the earth afterward, uh,
(34:35):
saving the species essentially. Um. There's usually a warning, um,
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 upon you. Right. Yeah, Um,
(35:00):
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, um. And
one of the warnings that that came through was to
this brother and sister who freed a thunder god, um
from their father's I guess Chicken Cooper or whatever. Their
(35:22):
their father had captured him, and so the 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
that's a bill of boat. Um. 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
(35:44):
to repopulate and um, that was a taboo incest is
a basically the universal taboo one of them. Um. And
that was the same in ancient China as well. So
in different versions of the story, either the brother and
sister basically got a pass this time. Another version is that, um,
(36:04):
the brother had to go through a huge series of
physical challenges and couldn't and that 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, Um.
But the the if you start really kind of looking
at floods, there's like especially the purpose of the flood.
(36:26):
That's the thing, Like it's very rare that the flood
happens in a flood myth just for fun. Like there's
almost always a reason, like humans want there to be
a reason. So we've come up with different reasons over
them over the years, and one of them is basically
the apocalypse, that that humanity is being wiped out, usually
(36:47):
as as punishment, uh, and that we deserve to survive,
and we would have to survive or else we wouldn't
be around to be passing the story along. So somebody
had to survive, so that's where those people who repopulate
the earth come from. But the rest of us, we
got wiped out because we displease the gods, that's right.
(37:08):
Another one is that we started out as an ocean, uh,
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 Japan as well,
(37:29):
and basically you know, it's either returns us to a
state of water or an island above an ocean. Yeah,
and that's I mean, that's so closely related to the
apocalyptic one. Too. It's just that's we just happened to
be returning to how things were before, which is also
related to another kind of theme as a reason for
(37:51):
the flood, which is purification. Like, yes you're being punished
and yes you're returning to this primordial state, but the
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
(38:12):
up together. Yeah, then there's just angry gods, and it
might have anything to do with you, um doing any
wrong is 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 t s for you guys. It just happens.
(38:34):
But that's still interesting that people the 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. I think so.
So the there's another one to um that Emperor you
myth is a good example of um industriousness, people working together,
people controlling things. UM, where the earth has done something crazy,
(38:56):
maybe the gods were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it,
either in the the the form of like a savior,
like emperor you. Um. There's one in Bhutan. I believe
there's a legend about Guru reproach Um and the Zangpo Valley. Um.
He shows up and basically drains a lake, exposing all
(39:17):
this fertile farm land where a village was then settled
or the um. And I apologize for this. I genuinely
could not find a pronunciation for it, Chuck, I really tried.
But the goon ganny g Aboriginal people g U and
g g a n y j I Um, they have
one where Um, the tsunami keeps coming and coming and
(39:41):
the sea levels are rising and rising. So the people
are organized and 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. It's good stuff.
And then people have gotten a little weird over the
years with trying to explain these away. Uh. There was
(40:02):
a Hungarian psychoanalyst named Giza Roe I'm uh in the
nineteen thirties that said, no, the reason why we have
all these flood myths is because they're just from people's dreams.
And people in ancient times drank a lot of water
and peede a lot at night, and so they dreamt
about floods and told stories about floods. Or maybe it
(40:25):
is um the God's urinate on urinating on people like literally,
which and there are myths that literally talk about that
that floods the result of God's being on earth. Um,
But I don't know about expanding that to like all
the cultural flood miss all over the world for all time, right,
And there's others that explain it is like men's jealousy
(40:47):
of not being able to give birth and then it's
a reference to the bursting of the amniotic sack or
something like that. Um. I feel like when when psychoanalysis
gets involved, especially in this day and age, kind of
like that was a nice try, everybody. Let's just move
on to geo mythology instead, you know what I think?
So That's where I'm putting my money, Chuck, Geo mythology.
(41:09):
It's fantastic stuff. Uh, 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 geo
mythology without even realizing it, that's right. Uh. If you
want to know more about geo mythology and flood myths,
then just start searching the internet because there's a lot
of interesting stuff out there about it. And since I
(41:30):
said that it's time for a listener mail, this is
a shout out to the one of the winners of
the Stuff you Should Know five K. This is something
that the Stuff you Should Know Army puts together every
year now in a in a virtual way right now.
But our buddy Aaron Mozelle is one of the people
(41:50):
who works on this um. They're looking to do this
again next year. Because here's the deal. As they sent
me this stuff afterward, and I was like, well, we
need to get this before, so I'm gonna 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. Uh, so is when it's
(42:11):
hopefully going to happen again. No official registration, no entry fee.
There's an event page. I guess that the Stuff you
Should Know Army Facebook site and um, I think people
had two weekends to participate this year and they had
bike riders this year. So regarding you know, regardless of
what your status is an athlete does, they're finding wlace
(42:34):
for you to get involved, which is really cool. So
this is from Amanda though, riding in to say that
I'm a winner. Baby. Uh, you guys have 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
(42:55):
there and I did the dang thing, and that's what counts.
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 achieve 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
(43:15):
came across the package addressed Stuff you Should Know five
K champ Amanda Thompson and just about cried and got
a hand crafted by Stuff you Should Know Army member
metal racked uh for her efforts and it's really great.
That's pretty great. She has to buy her her own
metal though, I don't think so. That's fantastic Van. Congratulations Amanda,
(43:39):
that's wonderful news. And congratulations to everybody who participated and
finished or even just started or even thought about doing it.
Maybe you'll do it next year, who knows, that's right.
Congratulations to everyone. Yeah. Uh, and again that is a
very cool thing. That Stuff you should Know fans too,
and it makes us love you guys even more. Uh.
You got anything else, No, just be on the lookout
(44:01):
next late summer fall for news on the Army facebook page. Yeah.
Somebody please remind us ahead of time so we can
tell everybody else. Uh. 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 iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
(44:25):
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Good luck. Hey everybody. We are super excited to return
to the sketch Fest stage and do a live show again.
We missed it so so much last year and we
can't wait to get back to San Francisco. Yeah, it's
our first live show in two years, chuck, and we're
going to be there at the Sydney Goldstein Theater and
beautiful San Francisco, California at seven thirty on Friday, January one.
(00:26):
Is a straight up stuff you should know live show,
and it's going to be off the chain, that's right.
You should show up to see if we've forgotten how
to do this, to see a skate around on stage,
nervously sure, doubting ourselves and eventually bringing the funnies. Yeah, hopefully.
Where do they go? They go to s f AS
in San Francisco, SF sketch Beest dot com. Click on
(00:48):
the schedule and tickets link. There are tons and tons
and tons of great shows, so best comedy UH festival
in the country in my opinion over the whole month
of January. So go check us out and go check
out every body else as well. Yep, it's also a
full vaccination show, so you've got to show proof of
vaccination and wear some masks. Don't be naughty. Don't be naughty,
(01:08):
be nice. So we'll see you guys on Friday, January
one in San Francisco, California. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
a production of I Heart Radio. Ahoy, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and we're the
(01:31):
captains of this here ship called Stuff you Should Know.
And uh, 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 mean
it's going to be a long episode. Has there ever
(01:52):
been a cute c TV show called the Admirable Admiral? Uh? No,
that sounds great. I think there was one. The Simpsons
did one called Admirable Baby. All right, well that counts. Yeah.
I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though
it could have been, like a terrible person. So I
have a cold, so I just want to apologize up front.
(02:14):
Just a head cold, but I'm a little stuffy, so
I'm sorry if if it's coming across is untoward. I'm
very proud of you for pushing through, Chuck, because lesser
podcasters would not. They might they might just be like,
I can I have a cold and people don't want
to hear that. You say, the heck with that. I'm
going forward with it. Remember back in the day, you
(02:34):
had like a three month cold that one year every year,
every year for a little while, I used to get
so sick. Yeah, no, it's terrible. But we've gotten much better,
haven't we. Yeah, I think, Uh, I don't know. Maybe
quitting smoking has something to do with that, Maybe just
a touch. You don't get colds like that anymore for you.
I really don't so, And yet another reason to quit smoking.
(02:55):
Everybody who's out there on the fence. Uh So we're
talking today. The reason I said that we're sin 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 a hund percent
confidence that everyone that you and I have ever met,
seen in passing, talked to um, or been in the
(03:16):
same like country with probably 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, grabs 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 subsides. Right,
(03:38):
it's a classic story. Everybody loves it. We 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 um, there's this idea
that that actually happened, that that there and it's long
(03:59):
been and I the that the that what the 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. Yeah, and you know, I guess
if we're talking about this particular, because you know, we've
(04:21):
we've found after digging around and getting d to help
us with this research, that there are flood myths and
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. Um, there was a gentleman in eighteen seventy
two named George Smith who was a hobbyist of all
(04:44):
things Assyrian and an amateur sort of historical sleuth. But
um a well educated one, nonetheless, because he could do
things like read cuneaform tablets. And he was doing that
one day on I don't 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
(05:06):
Cunea form and came across the story the Epic of
Gilgamish and read this quote, build a boat abandoned wealth
and seek survival. Spurn poverty, save life. Take on board
all living things, seed animals. The boat you will build.
Her dimensions shall be equal, her length and breadths shall
be the same. Doesn't seeing about cubits, but it's inferred.
(05:30):
Cover her with a root, 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 Testament Noah's
flood story. But this is several years previous. Yeah, and
instead of um, God telling Noah or an angel telling Noah,
(05:52):
it's the god in Leal who's telling a guy named
Uta pished him to build this boat. Noah's nowhere to
be heard and for what reason? What do you mean? Well,
I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where like
Earth is being punished? Basically? Oh yeah, so um the
reason that that Uh and Leo gave to Udna pitched
(06:15):
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. I think noisy and wicked are the same
thing back then, I guess so. And it makes you
wonder like did somebody misread the word and they're like
noisy okay, and just barreled on there like my lunch
(06:37):
break is almost over. So George Smith just was like noisy,
it's they said noisy. 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 story, right, and so Uh, you just
kind of say whoops, because, um, the Epic of Gilgamesh
predates the Old Testament by at least several dred years,
(07:00):
depending on what part you're talking about. And UM, so
you might say, Okay, so the Noahs story is adapted
from this, but that doesn't mean that it undermines the veracity.
They don't undermine the veracity of another. In fact, if
you stop and think about it, the fact that one
of the first things that was ever written down after
(07:23):
the invention of writing Q form was the first written
system humans ever devised, and that the first literary work
ever created, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contained this flood story. Um,
it kind of suggests that something actually may have happened,
Like it was a really important story that has stuck
(07:45):
around for thousands and thousands of years. The Epic of
Gilgamesh was written thirty four hundred years ago. Um that
that it suggests that there might be some some kernel
of truth to it. Yeah. And over the years, a
lot of people have tried to um prove, whether scientifically
(08:06):
or otherwise, that the the Noah's flood really did take place.
Bible literalists, is that what is that? What we call them,
I think, so okay, Bible literalists, um, Bible historians, because
that would uh, that would go a long way uh
in Christianity if you could say, hey, the Bible is
an actual historical document. This stuff is really true. And
(08:29):
in the eighteenth and nineteenth century there was something called
uh deluvialism, deluvial meaning like relating to a great flood.
But that was a big shaper of actual geology. Was
basically saying, hey, this physical literally the physical world that
we're living in came about after this flood. What kind
of reset things? And then the real geological record came
(08:50):
along when 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. Yeah,
they kind did it backwards. They said, the Noah flood
shaped the world as we see it. Go find proof,
and when they found proof, they're like, it's not really
adding up. So there's no evidence that there was a
(09:12):
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 have been putting together
supports the exact opposite. Of that that Earth wasn't created
in a day luge. It was created over incredibly long
distances of time, very very slowly, layer by layer, right,
(09:36):
But people still say, okay, well, why 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 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 also shows up in the Koran too, So
(09:58):
it's in the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the Koran.
And then there's the epic of Gilgamas story, Like, why
is this important story still around? Doesn't it 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 like some attempts to
explain that that I think are much more satisfying than
(10:19):
the idea that we're just missing all of the evidence
for great worldwide deluge that happened back in antiquity. Yeah,
and there were you know that It's more than just
those there were Chinese flood myths. There were uh flood
myths in southern Canada and the British Isles. Uh. So
there was one study that picked out fifty cultures and
they all had their own flood myths and that it
(10:42):
was related to some kind of punishment. So they started looking,
like you said, of like, why why is this happening?
And there's a bunch of reasons and they all kind
of make sense to me if I'm being honest. Um,
one of them is that there there was a flood
in these cultures, but it wasn't a globe flood. But
if you're you know, if if all you know is
(11:04):
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 orally um through the years
would sound like one that wiped out everything. Yeah, And
like the whole idea is that this flood actually did
happen way far back to one group, and then that
(11:28):
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 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
(11:48):
far spread out, so it must have been a really
big flood. 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 them, the groups
that are usually UM kind of pinpointed as that this
flood happening to or the Proto Indo Europeans who were
(12:09):
known to have been around the the I think the
Caucusus Mountains to start and then just spread out as
far as the British Isles, um, basically all over Europe northwest, east,
south UM. And that all of our languages like English, Germanic, um,
just a whole slew of languages developed out of this group. Yeah.
(12:30):
And some more support for this is the fact that
there aren't fled 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,
uh flood myth from proto Indo Europeans. So it all
kind of makes sense. Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of
(12:53):
related one to that um 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. Sure. And again, if you're if you
live in your riverside village and you don't get to
(13:15):
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 which happened,
you know, there's always been floods then uh, not necessarily
of the forty days and forty nights variety. But when
things are passed around orally and then they get rewritten,
(13:38):
things get kind of mixed up. Yeah, and it's are
bad those of us alive today who are mistaking or
laying our interpretation of the world word world onto like
these cultures use of the word world. They're saying their world,
which was much smaller than it is to those of
us today. When we think the world, we think the
whole globe. You know. Yeah, And speaking of laying your
(14:01):
things on other cultures, the third one is Christian missionaries. Uh,
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 up on that original biblical
flood tail or. I don't know if we should call
(14:24):
it a flood myth or or flood tail at this point,
what should we call it? I think most people call
it flood myths or Deluvian myths. Okay, Delivian myth that
sounds a little more academic. Uh so. Yeah, So Christian
missionaries did this, and I think this is um also
evidence in the fact that the South Pacific didn't really
(14:45):
have one until eighteen fourteen when they came into contact
with with Christian missionaries, and then all of a sudden
they had the Maori flood myths. Yeah. So they actually
had a floyd myth before, but apparently it was more
tsunami based, and then after contact with Christianity, it became
much more of like a day lose and it just
bore some striking resemblances to the Noah flood myth of Christianity,
(15:09):
and apparently that happened all over the South Pacific as well,
where um, these cultures will have their own kind of
flood myth, but it's always based on tsunamis. But then
the Christians come and go, and all of a sudden,
it's a day lose where the water rose after like
you know, forty days and forty knights of rain and stuff.
So that creates a lot of headaches for anthropologists, but
it also at the same time explains why universal flood
(15:31):
myth or a flood myth would seem universal of those
of us around today, and why they seem to bear
such a striking resemblance to one another. You know. Indeed,
I think we should take a break and I'm gonna
go blow my nose and then we'll come back and
talk about geo mythology right after this. So, Chuck, that
(16:17):
was nice of you to blow your nose at the
break rather than during recording, even though I still had
to hear it. It was you know, what's funny, I
was listening to Uh. I don't know why I just
thought of this, but I was listening to Paula Thompkins
Stay at Hopkins podcast he does with his wife Janey
the otherday, and he was talking about sneezing on stage
and that that had happened to him once in his career.
(16:40):
And Paul is someone who spent lots and lots and
lots of time on stages, and I wonder if there's
something to that of the body withholding things like sneezes,
because I've never seen anyone's sneeze on stage. I've never
sneezed on stage. Isn't that weird? Yeah, I'm sure it's
related to adrenaline fight or flight. That's what I was thinking.
(17:02):
I mean, there's got to be something to that. Yeah,
like your body's like I have time to waste all
that energy and sneezing. We gotta get out of here.
We're gonna put on a great show. 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. Yeah, well,
thank you for setting me up to reminisce yet again
(17:22):
about the time that you me and I saw Barry
Manilow front Road Center in Vegas. You would have been
sneezed on with that big snoze. Yes, we actually would
have been covered in his his sneeze. 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
(17:44):
as either um, this is a story about our cultural
values and there's a lot of religious metaphor involved, or
this was an actual historical event and geo mythology 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
(18:09):
values and was used as a as a story of
I can't think of the word I'm trying to think
of to teach you a lesson. What's that called fable? Yeah,
like a fable. So this kind of this field has
emerged since, um, I believe the sixties and actually it
was I was reading about. This field of geomethology is
like still really trying to establish itself in the field
(18:32):
of geology, and most most geomethologists are trained geologists. That's
where you start out D and D probably, but 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 history, these these folk traditions, they actually
(18:56):
contain eyewitness accounts of natural disas, sters, of weird events,
and earth of early finds of fossils. And yeah, they've
they've been 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 um legendary
(19:18):
to us today. But um, that's how these pre scientific
and often preliterate cultures um passed along really valuable information.
And like we've been kind of foolish to just discount
these as all nothing but legend, as if there's no
fact whatsoever in there. And so the bathwater exactly, and
so that's what geo mythology is doing. They're saying, wait
(19:40):
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 to read these correctly and then also correlate
with actual, like known geological events that we've discovered through science. Yeah, like, hey,
(20:01):
you see that story that uh seems completely crazy about
a demon god who lives in a mountain and gets
angry and spouts uh 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 kind
(20:23):
of marry these two things and let's just all get along, right,
and so like that that 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 that God is waking up and you should run, like, um,
that's that is a way for a culture that is
aware that this mountains actually a volcano, and that volcano
(20:47):
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 and information If the volcanover makes it sound run
because you don't want the fiery breath of that god
that's trapped inside it makes it I love this stuff.
(21:08):
Like before science came along, all humans did from the
moment they could sort of form thoughts was trying to
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 like nuclear didn't really know how to explain
(21:30):
the science of it, exactly like nuclear semiatics. 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
(21:53):
because they didn't appear scientific. 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, we've been ignoring this to
our own detriment. Yeah, And it's like you said earlier,
(22:15):
it's it's it's a tough roadeho 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,
so may have a little more truth. So there's a
lot to sort of parse through as a geologist these days,
(22:37):
if you're as you're if you're working as or with
a geo mythologist, right, um, and so when when you
are laying this out and trying to figure out, okay,
what what is this myth describing? You know, again you're
a trained geologist if you're a geo mythologist, but you're
also working with people from other scientific fields, um as
(22:59):
far as trying to uncover, um this the fact the
kernel of truth behind these flood myths. You would be
working with paleo hydrology or paleo bath immetry, which is
the study of ancient sea levels like where they were
at in the past, and um so you're going to
take like the findings from these fields and then say, okay,
(23:23):
let me see if I can correlate it with a myth.
Or you find a myth and you say, okay, let
me see if I can correlate it with paleo bath
immetry or paleo hydrology findings. Um, And they've actually turned
up some really interesting stuff so far. Yeah, there was
in two thousand sixteen, there was a study that tied
together one of the Chinese flood myths from about four
(23:44):
thousand years ago. Basically that there was a great flood
whited out China, lasted for a couple of decades, and
then this great man came along who had become Emperor,
Emperor You, and tamed the water. So geologists went back
and they said, all right, there's an ancient landside around
that same time that damned up a river and a
(24:05):
lake filled up behind it. And about six months or
so and then that flooded. Uh, that river got flooded,
broke through the dam, and there was this huge flood,
and they have found uh sediment that sort of tracks
along these lines. Then they found the Emperor You. Actually,
it turns out he may not have been you know,
magically tamed the water. He just had a knack for
(24:27):
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 a tale of this you know, great soon
to be emperor that tames the waters when he was
just good at what he was doing. Right. But they,
I mean, they found like evidence, geological evidence that backs
(24:47):
all of this up, that this whole series of events,
the earthquake that triggered 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. And
then not only that this great person came along and
freed us from the burden of these floodwaters that apparently
(25:10):
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 that's a
big reasons A lot of like mainstream geologists have problems
with geo mythology as we we can't really see a
(25:33):
course to getting to the point we were 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 this this is the one, this
fits the bill, and this one does kind of stick
out like that, that's right, this one. Uh. In the
(25:53):
nineties that became fairly popular that basically said there was
oceanographer named William Ryan and another guy named Walter Pittman. Uh.
They were I think in the early two thousand's, and
they said that rising sea levels at one point caused
a Mediterranean to burst through the Bosporus straight about seven
thousand years ago. And this was a like a legit
(26:16):
serious flood that I'm sure seemed like a flood, like
a global type of thing. Uh. It created a waterfall
a volume two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, and
I think enough water in one day they could have
flooded Manhattan by three thousand feet. Yeah, that's that's a flood.
It's quite a bit. They also determined that the um
(26:36):
the Mediterranean Sea moved inland. The coast moved inland by
about a mile a day. Can you imagine seeing that
happened before your eyes, like you're just you 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 would have been coastal settlements
(26:59):
along the bospor Us uh straight on either side, on
the Mediterranean side and also on the Black seaside, 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 was just right. Um, it
(27:20):
happened probably about seven thousand years ago. And as we'll see,
there's a lot of stuff that happened around seven thousand,
seventy undred years ago around the world because the end
of that last glacial period started in the sea levels,
rows and and all sorts of crazy stuff happened as
a result. But that's a that's one that people point to,
is like that maybe the flood that gave rise to
(27:43):
the Gilgamesh and Noah stories, no pun intended gave rise.
It really was unintended. Yeah. Another one about years ago
was the creation of the Persian Gulf. Kind of a
similar kind of thing during the last Ice Age, it
what is now the Persian Gulf used to not be.
(28:04):
It used to be a very nice river valley, uh,
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 found any evidence of of things underwater there, right, No,
they haven't. They they The reason why they think this happened, Chuck,
is because all of a sudden, on the shores of
(28:27):
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. So they were relocated essentially. Yeah,
that's really the only explanation. I went from hunting settlements,
hunting camps to all of a sudden, these people are
(28:49):
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. What about dogger Land,
So dogger Land is another similar story. They both share
what's called aqua terra um, by the way, which is
a coin or a term that was coined in the
nineties to describe these lands that were exposed for a
(29:14):
hundred and fifty thousand years that humans were kind of
developing and forming societies. And then we're lost just seven thousand,
seventy five years ago when the sea levels rose again.
So dogger Land and the idea of the Gulf being
um an underwater now submerged settlement dogger Lands like that,
but instead of in the Persian Gulf, it's been in
(29:37):
the North Sea. It was a patch of land that
connected the British Isles to Scandinavia before until about eighty
five hundred years ago. Right. And here they have actually
found submerged traces of settlements under the sea, unlike the
one in the Persian Gulf, right um. And they actually
think that it's possible. Some some people are saying no,
(29:57):
it's probably just you know, slow steady sea level rise
that that flooded dogger Land. Um. But they there was
a massive landslide in I think Norway called the Storaga
event UM. That happened eighty five hundred years ago, and
it probably generated a massive tsunami UM and it could
(30:18):
have been big enough to have submerged dogger Land permanently
after that. Apparently that's how big that underwater landslide was.
I was about to say underwater. You gotta point that
out out. But there's a flood story UM from Brittany
around that area that says that a king's daughter um
was possessed by a demon and opened like the their
(30:41):
their country's floodgates and that that was flooded, you know, catastrophically.
So it's like, you know, are they talking about this
event that happened eighty five hundred years ago that this
is survived as this legend until today. And yet another
right here in the well and now the U s
(31:01):
of A. But in the nineteen eighties and nineties they
investigated flood miss of the indigenous people's in the Pacific
Northwest and they found out that their flood miss uh
this was a little more recent, this was around sev D.
But the idea is that there was a like magnitude
nine earthquake that caused the tsunami, unleashing these big waves
(31:21):
from basically sort of Vancouver Island all the way down
to northern California. Yeah, it was the hoe and the
quill you people, um who had this legend of thunderbird
and whale getting in a fight. And UM. What's what's
interesting is, I mean, there's all sorts of geological evidence.
Apparently there's still trees that are just not where they're
(31:44):
they're just not growing back. They were wiped clean from
the tsunami. UM. But the they there's a Japanese temple
of Buddhist temple that mark the date January six hundred
because the tsunami wave made it all the way to
Japan and they noted it. So by basically cross correlating
that Japanese um noting of the date with the hoe
(32:06):
and the quill yus um story about thunder ward thunderbird
and whale, they've said, this is this story is about
this particular event, which is pretty awesome. And then sometimes
it's just uh a culture like pre science again making
sense out of finding weird things like the Zuni people
in the southwest of the United States obviously not back
(32:28):
then they saw these you know, ancient marine animals and
seashells and the fossils that they were finding, and they said, well,
this is part of our creation story. There there was
a great flood, and that's how this stuff got here, Yeah,
here in the desert, which is I mean, that's how
a pre scientific commuce culture would make sense of that
(32:48):
kind of thing. Pretty cool. So, UM, I say we
take one more break and we're gonna talk about the
other aspect of these myths, the mythology part of it,
right right after this. Okay. So if you take um
(33:28):
a myth and you strip the mythology off and you
just look at the kernel of historicity and try to
figure out, you know, what event it's actually describing. UM,
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, uh
and who we are and how how we think spread
(33:50):
out even across cultures throughout the world. UM. And there's
a lot of similarities that pop up from UM from
examining geo mythology, especially with flood myths. Even when you
set aside the idea or I should say, even when
you um account for the idea of missionaries spreading the
Noah flood too. So yeah, you know, one of the
(34:12):
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 uh.
And we've already seen a little bit and what we've
talked about is oftentimes it's a man and a woman. Uh,
usually a man and a wife who are charged with um,
gathering up the animals, with repopulating the earth afterward, uh,
(34:35):
saving the species essentially. Um. There's usually a warning, um,
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 upon you. Right. Yeah, Um,
(35:00):
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, um. And
one of the warnings that that came through was to
this brother and sister who freed a thunder god, um
from their father's I guess Chicken Cooper or whatever. Their
(35:22):
their father had captured him, and so the 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
that's a bill of boat. Um. 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
(35:44):
to repopulate and um, that was a taboo incest is
a basically the universal taboo one of them. Um. And
that was the same in ancient China as well. So
in different versions of the story, either the brother and
sister basically got a pass this time. Another version is that, um,
(36:04):
the brother had to go through a huge series of
physical challenges and couldn't and that 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, Um.
But the the if you start really kind of looking
at floods, there's like especially the purpose of the flood.
(36:26):
That's the thing, Like it's very rare that the flood
happens in a flood myth just for fun. Like there's
almost always a reason, like humans want there to be
a reason. So we've come up with different reasons over
them over the years, and one of them is basically
the apocalypse, that that humanity is being wiped out, usually
(36:47):
as as punishment, uh, and that we deserve to survive,
and we would have to survive or else we wouldn't
be around to be passing the story along. So somebody
had to survive, so that's where those people who repopulate
the earth come from. But the rest of us, we
got wiped out because we displease the gods, that's right.
(37:08):
Another one is that we started out as an ocean, uh,
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 Japan as well,
(37:29):
and basically you know, it's either returns us to a
state of water or an island above an ocean. Yeah,
and that's I mean, that's so closely related to the
apocalyptic one. Too. It's just that's we just happened to
be returning to how things were before, which is also
related to another kind of theme as a reason for
(37:51):
the flood, which is purification. Like, yes you're being punished
and yes you're returning to this primordial state, but the
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
(38:12):
up together. Yeah, then there's just angry gods, and it
might have anything to do with you, um doing any
wrong is 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 t s for you guys. It just happens.
(38:34):
But that's still interesting that people the 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. I think so.
So the there's another one to um that Emperor you
myth is a good example of um industriousness, people working together,
people controlling things. UM, where the earth has done something crazy,
(38:56):
maybe the gods were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it,
either in the the the form of like a savior,
like emperor you. Um. There's one in Bhutan. I believe
there's a legend about Guru reproach Um and the Zangpo Valley. Um.
He shows up and basically drains a lake, exposing all
(39:17):
this fertile farm land where a village was then settled
or the um. And I apologize for this. I genuinely
could not find a pronunciation for it, Chuck, I really tried.
But the goon ganny g Aboriginal people g U and
g g a n y j I Um, they have
one where Um, the tsunami keeps coming and coming and
(39:41):
the sea levels are rising and rising. So the people
are organized and 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. It's good stuff.
And then people have gotten a little weird over the
years with trying to explain these away. Uh. There was
(40:02):
a Hungarian psychoanalyst named Giza Roe I'm uh in the
nineteen thirties that said, no, the reason why we have
all these flood myths is because they're just from people's dreams.
And people in ancient times drank a lot of water
and peede a lot at night, and so they dreamt
about floods and told stories about floods. Or maybe it
(40:25):
is um the God's urinate on urinating on people like literally,
which and there are myths that literally talk about that
that floods the result of God's being on earth. Um,
But I don't know about expanding that to like all
the cultural flood miss all over the world for all time, right,
And there's others that explain it is like men's jealousy
(40:47):
of not being able to give birth and then it's
a reference to the bursting of the amniotic sack or
something like that. Um. I feel like when when psychoanalysis
gets involved, especially in this day and age, kind of
like that was a nice try, everybody. Let's just move
on to geo mythology instead, you know what I think?
So That's where I'm putting my money, Chuck, Geo mythology.
(41:09):
It's fantastic stuff. Uh, 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 geo
mythology without even realizing it, that's right. Uh. If you
want to know more about geo mythology and flood myths,
then just start searching the internet because there's a lot
of interesting stuff out there about it. And since I
(41:30):
said that it's time for a listener mail, this is
a shout out to the one of the winners of
the Stuff you Should Know five K. This is something
that the Stuff you Should Know Army puts together every
year now in a in a virtual way right now.
But our buddy Aaron Mozelle is one of the people
(41:50):
who works on this um. They're looking to do this
again next year. Because here's the deal. As they sent
me this stuff afterward, and I was like, well, we
need to get this before, so I'm gonna 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. Uh, so is when it's
(42:11):
hopefully going to happen again. No official registration, no entry fee.
There's an event page. I guess that the Stuff you
Should Know Army Facebook site and um, I think people
had two weekends to participate this year and they had
bike riders this year. So regarding you know, regardless of
what your status is an athlete does, they're finding wlace
(42:34):
for you to get involved, which is really cool. So
this is from Amanda though, riding in to say that
I'm a winner. Baby. Uh, you guys have 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
(42:55):
there and I did the dang thing, and that's what counts.
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 achieve 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
(43:15):
came across the package addressed Stuff you Should Know five
K champ Amanda Thompson and just about cried and got
a hand crafted by Stuff you Should Know Army member
metal racked uh for her efforts and it's really great.
That's pretty great. She has to buy her her own
metal though, I don't think so. That's fantastic Van. Congratulations Amanda,
(43:39):
that's wonderful news. And congratulations to everybody who participated and
finished or even just started or even thought about doing it.
Maybe you'll do it next year, who knows, that's right.
Congratulations to everyone. Yeah. Uh, and again that is a
very cool thing. That Stuff you should Know fans too,
and it makes us love you guys even more. Uh.
You got anything else, No, just be on the lookout
(44:01):
next late summer fall for news on the Army facebook page. Yeah.
Somebody please remind us ahead of time so we can
tell everybody else. Uh. 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 iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
(44:25):
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