Did fossils inspire ancient flood legends?

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="4">Did fossils inspire ancient flood legends?</font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Posted Sept. 6, 2004<br> World Science Staff</font> <font size="2" face="Arial"><b><br> <br> Many ancient and modern cultures have creation myths involving flood legends similar to the the Bible's story of Noah's Ark. Thinkers over the centuries, including Leonardo da Vinci, have debated whether the stories were true. </b></font> </p> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="200" style="float: right; padding-left: 10; padding-bottom: 10"> <tr> <td><img border="0" src="http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sistine/8d-Flood.jpg" width="200" height="272" style="border: 2 ridge #FFFFFF"></td> </tr> <tr> <td><font face="Arial" size="1">Detail of "The Flood" from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel paintings, Rome, depicting the Bible's flood story. In the story, God sent a flood to cleanse Earth of man and his wickedness the Overcome by the wickedness. God spared only Noah and his family, instructing Noah to  build an ark and to take on board a male and a female of every species of bird and beast. Ancient civilizations such as China, India, Russia, Babylonia, Wales, India, America, Peru, Hawaii, Scandinavia, Sumatra, and Polynesia all have their own versions of a giant flood tale.</font></td> </tr> </table> <p class="MsoNormal"> <font size="2" face="Arial"><b>In the past few years it has become popular to believe they were – that a primordial flood really happened. Recent studies claim to back up the notion scientifically; for instance, there are findings that a that a titanic flood created the Black Sea in the Middle East 7,500 years ago. <br> <br> But a better explanation may exist, a physicist says.<br> <br> Fossils of ancient fish and marine organisms are often found high in mountains, due to the movement of rocks through geologic processes. The physicist, Richard K. Jeck, says these fossils could have inspired people to believe the areas were once flooded.<br> <br> "Fossils of marine organisms, especially shellfish like clams and other molluscs, and sometimes fish, can be found in relatively high elevations in many places around the world," wrote Jeck, who is also a research meteorologist at the Federal Aviation Administration Technical Center near Atlantic City, New Jersey. Jeck published this hypothesis in the June issue of the journal Antiquity. <br> <br> The sea life fossils "are found throughout the Near East and countries bordering the Mediterranean," the area from which the Bible stories came, he wrote. <br> <br> This "can explain why stories of a great flood are found in the folklore or legends of ancient peoples in diverse places around the globe," he wrote. "It is understandable that primitive peoples had no other conclusion to draw than that a deep flood, one like no other in their experience, must have put those seashells way up there. They did not know about mountain building and the geological processes that can raise fossil-bearing, sedimentary rock strata to great heights."<br> <br> Jeck's ideas aren't likely to end the debate. The findings about the ancient Black Sea flood are widely accepted, for instance. Backing them up, archaeologists have found signs of human habitation hundreds of feet below the sea.<br> <br> But there are problems with the claim that the Black Sea flood is the source of the Noah's ark flood story, Jeck wrote. For instance, the evidence for this flood says nothing about a rainstorm, which figures prominently in the Noah story. <br> <br> The hypothesis that the Black Sea flood is the source of the Noah's Ark story was proposed in the late 1990s by the Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman. Pitman and Ryan wrote that the flood was caused by a massive overflow of water from the Mediterranean Sea due to rising water levels at the end of the last Ice Age. </b></font> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <font size="2" face="Arial"><b>* * * * *</b></font> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> <font size="2" face="Arial"><b>Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> about this story</b></font> </p> <b> <hr> <p style="margin-top: -3; margin-bottom: -3; padding: 13" align="center"> </b> </body>