Selects: Why Do Great Flood Myths Seem To Be Universal?

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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:02Josh Clark?

  Hey, everybody, it's Josh, and I have one word to describe this week's select from 2021 on why there are so many myths about a great flood found in cultures around the world. That word is fascinating. But I'll add a few more words, I guess. This is one of those good old fashioned Stuff You Should Know episodes 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. And I love those episodes. And I love this episode, which is why I picked it. I hope you love it, too.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:50Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  And by that, of course, I mean rear admiral. And by that, of course, I mean it's gonna be a long episode. Has there ever been a

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Cutesy TV show called The Admirable Admiral?

• 2:21Josh Clark?

  Uh, no, that sounds great. I think there was one, The Simpsons did one called Admiral Baby.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  Oh, all right. Well, that counts.

• 2:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I don't know if the baby was particularly admirable, though. Could have been like a terrible person.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Uh, so I have a cold, so I just want to apologize upfront. Uh, just a head cold. But I'm a little stuffy, so I'm sorry if, uh, if it's coming across as untoward.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  I'm very proud of you for pushing through, Chuck, because lesser podcasters would not. They, they, they might, they might just be like, I can't, I have a cold. People don't want to hear that. And you say, to heck with that, I'm going forward with it.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Remember back in the day, you had like a three-month cold, that one year?

• 3:01Josh Clark?

  Every year.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Every year for a little while.

• 3:03Josh Clark?

  I used to get so sick. Yeah, I know, it was terrible, but we've gotten much better, haven't we?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, uh, I don't know, maybe quitting smoking had something to do with that.

• 3:11Josh Clark?

  Maybe. Just a touch.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  You don't get colds like that anymore.

• 3:14Josh Clark?

  No.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Good for you.

• 3:15Josh Clark?

  I really don't. So, uh, yet another reason to quit smoking, everybody who's out there on the fence.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:21Josh Clark?

  Uh, so we're talking today, the reason I said that we're captains, 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 100% confidence that everyone that you and I have ever met, seen in passing, talked to, um, or been in the 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, 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 subsides, right?

• 4:03Josh Clark?

  It's a classic story. Everybody loves it. We, we, we read it out loud just about every Saturday at dinnertime. 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, and it's long been an idea, that the, that what the Noah 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.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  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- 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, there was a gentleman in 1872 named George Smith, who was a hobbyist of all things Assyrian and an amateur sort of historical sleuth, but a well-educated one nonetheless, because he could do things like read cuneiform tablets. And he was doing that one day on, I don't know if it was an actual lunch break,

• 5:25Speaker 02

  or if that's just apocryphal, but supposedly on a lunch break, went to a museum, was reading cuneiform and came across a story of 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 you will build, her dimensions shall be equal, her length and breadth shall be the same." Doesn't say anything about cubits, but it's inferred. "Cover her with a roof, like the ocean below, and he will send you a rain of plenty." And George Smith said, hey, this is strikingly familiar as the Christian slash Jewish Old Testament Noah's flood story,

• 6:09Speaker 02

  but this is several hundred years previous.

• 6:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And instead of God telling Noah, or an angel telling Noah, it's the god Enlil, who's telling a guy named Utunapistim to build this boat. Noah's nowhere to be heard.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  And for what reason?

• 6:27Josh Clark?

  What do you mean?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, wasn't this one of the ones where like, earth is being punished, basically?

• 6:33Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah. So the reason that that Enlil gave to Utunapistim 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.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  I think noisy and wicked are the same thing back then.

• 6:53Josh Clark?

  I guess so. 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 just was like, noisy. They said noisy.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  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 in Noah's story.

• 7:14Josh Clark?

  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 Noah's story is adapted from this. But that doesn't mean 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

• 7:47Josh Clark?

  after the invention of writing, cuneiform was the first written system humans ever devised.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:54Josh Clark?

  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 Gilgamesh was written 3,400 years ago. That suggests that there might be some kernel of truth to it.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And over the years, a lot of people have tried to

• 8:29Speaker 02

  prove, whether scientifically or otherwise, that the Noah's flood really did take place. Bible literalists, is that what we call them?

• 8:38Josh Clark?

  I think so.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Okay. Bible literalists, Bible historians, because that would...

• 8:44Speaker 02

  That would 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 18th and 19th century, there was something called diluvialism, diluvial 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 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 1800s.

• 9:23Josh Clark?

  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're like, it's not really adding up.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:33Josh Clark?

  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 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, right?

• 9:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 10:00Josh Clark?

  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 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 Quran too. So it's in the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament and the Quran. And then there's the Epic of Gilgamesh 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've been like some attempts to explain that, that I think are much more satisfying than the idea

• 10:44Josh Clark?

  that we're just missing all of the evidence for a great worldwide deluge that happened back in antiquity.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there were, you know, it's more than just those. There were Chinese flood myths. There were flood myths in southern Canada, in the British Isles. So there was one study that picked out 50 cultures and they all had their own flood myths. 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 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, there was a flood in these cultures, but it wasn't a global flood. But if you're, you know, if, if all you know is a certain area and you never get to leave that area

• 11:32Speaker 02

  and it wipes out everything you know, then the story that you pass along orally through the years would sound like one that wiped out everything.

• 11:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and like, the, the whole idea is, 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 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 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.

• 12:24Josh Clark?

  And one of the, the groups that are usually kind of pinpointed as this flood happening to are the Proto Indo Europeans, who were known to have been around the, I think the Caucasus Mountains to start, and then just spread out as far as the British Isles.

• 12:42Josh Clark?

  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.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:12Josh Clark?

  So it all kind of makes sense. Yeah, exactly. There's another kind of related one, too, 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.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Sure. And again, if you're, 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.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  And if everyone's having these localized floods.

• 13:51Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Which, which happened, you know, there's always been floods.

• 13:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Then, not necessarily of the 40 days and 40 nights variety, but when things are passed around orally and then they get rewritten, things get kind of mixed up.

• 14:03Josh Clark?

  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 cultures' 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?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  What should we call it?

• 14:53Josh Clark?

  I think most people call it flood myths or diluvian myths.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Okay, diluvian myth. That sounds a little more academic.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  So yeah, so Christian missionaries did this, and I think this is also evidenced in the fact that the South Pacific didn't really have one until 1814, when they came into contact with Christian missionaries, and then all of a sudden, they had the Maori flood myths.

• 15:18Josh Clark?

  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 on tsunamis. But then the Christians come and go, and all of a sudden, it's a deluge where the water rose after like, you know, 40 days and 40 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 to those of us around today, and why they seem to bear such a striking resemblance to one another, you know?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  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 geom mythology, right after this.

• 16:32Josh Clark?

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• 17:35Josh Clark?

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• 19:41Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, that 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 thick.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny, I was listening to, I don't know why I just thought of this, but I was listening to Paul Up Tompkins, Stay of Homekins podcast he does with his wife, Janie, the other day, and he was talking about sneezing on stage. And that that had happened to him once in his career. And Paul was 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 sneeze on stage. I've never sneezed on stage.

• 20:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Isn't that weird?

• 20:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I'm sure it's related to adrenaline and fight or flight.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  That's what I was thinking. I mean, there's got to be something to that.

• 20:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like your body's like, I don't have time to waste all that energy on sneezing. We got to get out of here. We got to put on a great show.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 20:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Well, thank you for setting me up to reminisce yet again about the time that you and I saw Barry Manilow front row center in Vegas.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  You would have been sneezed on with that big snobs.

• 20:53Josh Clark?

  Yes, we actually would have been covered in his sneeze.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  All right. So we promised talk of geom mythology. Here's the idea, since science really got its act together, there have been a couple of different ways to look at things like flood myths. As either

• 21:12Speaker 02

  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 geom 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 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?

• 21:41Josh Clark?

  Fable?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a fable.

• 21:43Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm. So, this kind of, this field has emerged since, I believe, the 60s. And actually, it was, I was reading about this field of geom mythology is like, still really trying to establish itself in the field of geology. And most, most geom mythologists are trained geologists. That's where you start out.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Who play D and D?

• 22:05Josh Clark?

  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 histor- these, these folk traditions, they actually contain eyewitness accounts of natural disasters, of weird events in earth, of early finds of fossils. And yeah, they've, they've encloaked 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

• 22:47Josh Clark?

  and often pre-literate cultures pass along really valuable information. And like, we've been kind of foolish to just discount them as, as all, nothing but legend, as if there's no fact whatsoever in there.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

• 23:02Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And so that's what geom mythology is doing. They're saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you just look at this the right way, we're 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.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  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 kind of marry these two things and let's just all get along.

• 23:50Josh Clark?

  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 mountain starting to make rumbles, it means the god is waking up and you should run. Like, that is a way for a culture that is aware that this mountain's actually a volcano and that volcano can sit dormant for generations at a stretch. So 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.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love this stuff. Like, 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.

• 24:53Josh Clark?

  Right, like nuclear semiotics.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  They just didn't really know how to explain the science of it.

• 24:56Josh Clark?

  Exactly, like nuclear semiotics. Remember, we did an episode on that, on how to tell people 10,000 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 those pre-scientific traditions, 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 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.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's like you said earlier, it's a tough road to hoe 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 of parse through as a geologist these days if you're working as or with a geomythologist.

• 26:06Josh Clark?

  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 geomythologist, but you're also working with people from other scientific fields. As far as trying to uncover the fact, the kernel of truth behind these flood myths, you would be working with paleohydrology or paleobathimetry, 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 a myth and you

• 26:51Josh Clark?

  say, okay, let me see if I can correlate it with paleobathimetry or paleohydrology findings. And they've actually turned up some really interesting stuff so far.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was, in 2016, there was a study that tied together one of the Chinese flood myths from about 4,000 years ago. Basically, 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 Yu and tamed the water. So geologists went back and they said, all right, there's an ancient landslide around that same time that dammed 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 that Emperor Yu actually

• 27:47Speaker 02

  It turns out he may not have been magically tamed the water. He just had a knack for early engineering in 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 told as a tale of this great soon to be emperor that tames the waters when he was just good at what he was doing.

• 28:08Josh Clark?

  Right, 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 triggered the landslide, the landslide, the dam, 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 stuck around for 20 years.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 28:38Josh Clark?

  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 reason a lot of mainstream geologists have problems with geom mythology, is we can't really see a course to getting to the point where we're saying, this is the one. 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 is the one, this fits the bill. And this one does kind of stick out like that.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  That's right. This one, in the 90s, 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 2000s, and they said that rising sea levels at one point caused the Mediterranean to burst through the Bosphorus Strait about 7,000 years ago. And this was a legit, serious flood that I'm sure seemed like a flood, like a global type of thing. It created a waterfall of volume 200 times that of Niagara Falls, and I think enough water in one day that could have flooded Manhattan by 3,000 feet.

• 29:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Like, that's a flood.

• 29:58Josh Clark?

  Quite a bit. They also determined that the Mediterranean Sea 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 would have been coastal settlements along the Bosphorus 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 gonna make sense of it.

• 30:42Josh Clark?

  And the timing of it was just right. It happened probably about 7,000 years ago. And as we'll see, there's a lot of stuff that happened around 7,750 years ago around the world because the end of that last glacial period started and the sea levels rose and all sorts of crazy stuff happened as a result. But that's one that people point to is like, that may be the flood that gave rise to the Gilgamesh and Noah stories.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  No pun intended.

• 31:13Josh Clark?

  Gave rise?

• 31:14Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 31:15Josh Clark?

  It really was unintended, yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Another one about 7,500 years ago was the creation of the Persian Gulf. Kind of a similar kind of thing during the last Ice Age. 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 found any evidence of things underwater there, right?

• 31:44Josh Clark?

  No, they haven't. 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.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  So they were relocated essentially?

• 32:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's really the only explanation. It went from hunting settlements, hunting camps, to all of a sudden these people are like an advanced society.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 32:17Josh Clark?

  The best explanation is that their original settlement is down there beneath the Persian Gulf. We just haven't found it yet.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  What about Doggerland?

• 32:25Josh Clark?

  So Doggerland is another similar story. They both share what's called aqua terra, by the way, which is a coin or a term that was coined in the 90s to describe these lands that were exposed for 150,000 years, that humans were kind of developing and forming societies. And then were lost just 7,000, 7,500 years ago when the sea levels rose again. So Doggerland and the idea of the Gulf being an underwater, now submerged settlement. Doggerland's like that, but instead of in the Persian Gulf, it's been in the North Sea. It was a patch of land that connected the British Isles to Scandinavia before, until about 8,500 years ago.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Right, and here they have actually found submerged traces of settlements under the sea, unlike the one in the Persian Gulf.

• 33:18Josh Clark?

  Right, and they actually think that it's possible. Some people are saying, no, it was 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 8,500 years ago. And it probably generated a massive tsunami. And it could have been big enough to have submerged Doggerland permanently after that. Apparently that's how big that underwater landslide was.

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was about to say underwater, you got to point that out.

• 33:54Josh Clark?

  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 8,500 years ago? That this survived as this legend until today?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  That's right, and yet another, right here in the...

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Well, and now the US of A, but in the 1980s and 90s, they investigated flood myths of the indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest. And they found out that their flood myths, uh, this was a little more recent. This was around 1700 AD, but the idea is that there was a like magnitude nine earthquake that caused a tsunami unleashing these big waves from basically sort of Vancouver Island all the way down to Northern California.

• 34:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was the Ho and the Quilluke people who had this legend of Thunderbird and Whale getting in a fight. And 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, they're just not growing back. They were wiped clean from the tsunami. But the, they, there's a Japanese temple, a Buddhist temple that marked the date, January 6th, 1700, because a 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 Ho and the Quillukes

• 35:34Josh Clark?

  story about Thunderbird and Whale, they've said this is, this story is about this particular event, which is pretty awesome.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  And then sometimes it's just 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 then, they, 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. There, there was a great flood and that's how this stuff got here.

• 36:07Josh Clark?

  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.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 36:16Josh Clark?

  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?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Right after this.

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• 37:45Josh Clark?

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• 39:17Josh Clark?

  Okay, so if you take a myth and you strip the mythology off, and you just look at the kernel of historicity, and try to figure out what event 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. And there's a lot of similarities that pop up from examining geom mythology, 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.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  So yeah, 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 in 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, with repopulating the earth afterward, saving the species essentially. There's usually a warning, whether it's Noah's flood myth or all the others, where someone comes along and says, "You better get your act together, Earth, or tell everybody on Earth, you are the messenger, to get their act together, or else I will rain down, rain upon you."

• 40:49Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:51Josh Clark?

  Um, there's also sometimes a, um, 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, uh, came through was to this brother and sister who freed a thunder god, um, from their father's, I guess, chicken coop or whatever. He, their, their father had captured him. And so the, the thunder god said, hey, thanks a lot 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 built a 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 to repopulate.

• 41:35Josh Clark?

  And, um, that was a taboo incest is a, 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, 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.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  All right.

• 42:09Josh Clark?

  Okay. Um, but the, the, 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. 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, um, over the years. And one of them is, um, basically the apocalypse, that, that humanity is being wiped out, usually 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.

• 42:52Josh Clark?

  But the rest of us, we got wiped out because we displeased the gods.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  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, Norse, I think in Japan as well. And basically, you know, it's either returns us to a state of water or an island above an ocean.

• 43:29Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah, just happens. But that's still interesting that people, that's a 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.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 44:35Josh Clark?

  So the, there's another one, too, that Emperor Yu myth is a good example of industriousness, people working together, people controlling things, where the, the earth has done something crazy, maybe the gods were responsible, but humans managed to overcome it, either in the, the, the form of like a savior like Emperor Yu. There's one in Bhutan, I believe there's a legend about Guru Repoche in the Zhangpo Valley. He shows up and basically drains a lake, exposing all this fertile farmland 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.

• 45:18Josh Clark?

  But the Gunganyi G, Aboriginal people, 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 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.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  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 Roaim in the 1930s 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 peed a lot at night, and so they dreamt about floods and told stories about floods." Or maybe it is the gods urinating on people, like literally, which, and there are myths that literally talk about that, that floods are a result of gods peeing on earth. But I don't know

• 46:29Speaker 02

  about expanding that to like all the cultural flood myths all over the world for all time.

• 46:35Josh Clark?

  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 sac 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 geom mythology instead," you know?

• 46:57Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 46:58Josh Clark?

  That's where I'm putting my money, Chuck, geom mythology. It's fantastic stuff. And also, I should say, I want to give a shout out to one of our past episodes, Was There a Real Atlantis? We were doing geom mythology without even realizing it.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 47:13Josh Clark?

  If you want to know more about geom 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 said that, it's time for listener mail.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  This is a shout out to the, uh, one of the winners of the Stuff You Should Know 5K. Uh, this is something that the Stuff You Should Know Army puts together, uh, every year now in a, in a virtual way right now. Uh, but our buddy Aaron Mazel is one of the people who works on this. They're looking to do this again next year, cause here's the deal is they sent me this stuff afterward. And I was like, oh, we need to get this before. So I'm going to go ahead and say it now and then we'll see if we can remind people, but people voted to have this happen in late September, early October. Uh, so 2022 is when it's hopefully going to happen again. Uh, no official registration, no entry fee.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Uh, there's an event page, I guess, at 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 as an athlete is, they're finding ways for you to get involved, which is really cool.

• 48:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  So this is from Amanda though, writing in to say that I'm a winner, baby. Uh, you guys are the best. Been listening for years and I was happy to participate in the virtual Stuff You Should Know 5K this year. It was a cool event that brought some really nice people, uh, 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. Uh, the other participants in the 5K radiate that spirit and are so encouraging of each other. Don't ask me how, but somehow I achieved fastest 5K for a woman in this event. What a cool feeling. Uh, so today I listened to Venus Flytraps on the way home and came across a package addressed Stuff You Should Know 5K champ Amanda Thompson and

• 49:11Speaker 02

  just about cried and got a handcrafted, uh, by Stuff You Should Know Army member medal rack, uh, for her efforts and it's really great.

• 49:20Josh Clark?

  That's pretty great. She has to buy the, her, her own medal though.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 49:26Josh Clark?

  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 about doing it. Maybe you'll do it next year. Who knows?

• 49:40Speaker 02

  That's right. Congratulations to everyone.

• 49:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And again, that is a very cool thing that Stuff You Should Know fans do, and it makes us love you guys even more. You got anything else?

• 49:50Speaker 02

  No, just be on the lookout next late summer, fall for news on the Army Facebook page.

• 49:56Josh Clark?

  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 [email protected].

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 50:32Josh Clark?

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• 51:58Josh Clark?

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