Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined today by staff writer Josh Clark.
Speaker 1: How's it going. Oh, well, it's been raining today, It
Speaker 1: has been. It has been. Luckily, it's not raining so
Speaker 1: much that anything's gonna flood as the Midwest has been
Speaker 1: seeing this whole summer. Huh. Indeed, there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of flooding out there, although um, nothing that that comes
Speaker 1: even close to uh, the stories of the Great Flood, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and great it was. Um. Scientists today have surmised
Speaker 1: that in order for the world to flood as much
Speaker 1: as it reputedly did during the Great Flood, there would
Speaker 1: have to be five times the amount of water in
Speaker 1: the oceans and the atmosphere to fill up the world
Speaker 1: to the tops of mountains. I know you're talking about. Also,
Speaker 1: that much water present the atmosphere would change the pressure
Speaker 1: so much that people's lungs would be totally crushed before
Speaker 1: you even drowned. Right, So it'd just be a bad
Speaker 1: day all around for everybody, right, unless you were right
Speaker 1: and and Noah, of course, is known to fans of
Speaker 1: the Bible as the guy who built an arc and
Speaker 1: UH basically saved a pair of every animal he could
Speaker 1: get his hands on and breeding pair ostensibly. Um, the
Speaker 1: thing is is no, Uh, Well, the Biblical version of
Speaker 1: this great flood isn't the only account. Did you know that?
Speaker 1: There are cultures throughout the world that have stories of
Speaker 1: a great flood that took place? Yes? I did know that. Actually,
Speaker 1: and the great flood story throughout Christianity and Islam and
Speaker 1: Judaism all share some pretty similar elements, namely a man,
Speaker 1: his wife, a boat, and pairs of animals. Well, there's
Speaker 1: also other variations around it. Um. You know, there's people
Speaker 1: as disparate as the Ottawa tribe in North America. There's
Speaker 1: Juang people in China, The Massai, and East Africa all
Speaker 1: have tales of flood stories, and there are some commonalities
Speaker 1: among those two. Most of the time, there's usually at
Speaker 1: least one human who has either angered the gods or
Speaker 1: has been worn by the gods. That are big floods coming,
Speaker 1: and usually either in concert with animals or in rescue
Speaker 1: of animals. UH grabs a bunch of different species and
Speaker 1: UH basically either rediscovers or recreates the world or rides
Speaker 1: out the flood and lands you know somewhere like on
Speaker 1: a mountain or that kind of thing, and the world's repopulated, right,
Speaker 1: So don't you find it kind of odd that there's
Speaker 1: all these different stories from all these cultures around the
Speaker 1: world of a great flood? Um, do you do I
Speaker 1: find it on? Yeah? Do you find it on? I mean,
Speaker 1: think about it, like that's really weird? Uh? There there?
Speaker 1: We We just entered the age of artificially technical, technologically
Speaker 1: enabled communication, what within the last hundred or so years?
Speaker 1: So how would these stories have spread with people living
Speaker 1: so far flowing around the globe. I don't really think
Speaker 1: it's not at all. I think that any sort of
Speaker 1: history like that has been passed down for millions of years,
Speaker 1: sometimes through oral storytelling, and so these stories just, you know,
Speaker 1: they continue to gain traction and import as they go
Speaker 1: throughout different generations. And I think that in different parts
Speaker 1: of the world, perhaps it's more of an um environmental phenomenon.
Speaker 1: In another part to the world, it's more of a
Speaker 1: spiritual phenomenon, and people assign you know, spiritual or environmental
Speaker 1: values to what these stories mean to them. I think
Speaker 1: that maybe um, the Ottawa tribe, for instance, I was
Speaker 1: reading that story earlier today myself, I think that that
Speaker 1: would speak more highly to the fact that this is why,
Speaker 1: you know, the population sprang up here and this part
Speaker 1: of the world, whereas I think that in Christian or
Speaker 1: Jewish or Islamic traditions it would be more about, you know,
Speaker 1: this is how we came to be descendant from this
Speaker 1: group of people. These are our leaders. Well, it's funny
Speaker 1: that the that you bring up the Ottawa believing in
Speaker 1: um migration or for or flood forced migration, because there's
Speaker 1: actually um scientists who theorized that there was a flood
Speaker 1: and that it did force migration. That um there was
Speaker 1: a an ice cap that melted in Greenland, causing massive
Speaker 1: flooding and basically taking a humanity and spreading it out
Speaker 1: from the centralized area to you know, Europe and elsewhere,
Speaker 1: which would also account for why there would be oral
Speaker 1: traditions of of floods and different cultures around the world.
Speaker 1: You know, it could have taken place at a time
Speaker 1: when people were living in a relatively small area. The
Speaker 1: flood happens, everybody's kind of scattered throughout the world and
Speaker 1: and formed their own cultures, but that one tradition remains.
Speaker 1: The thing about the ice cap melting, uh is somewhat
Speaker 1: poignant today, what with climate change in our own ice
Speaker 1: caps undergoing a a nice quick melt, And you find
Speaker 1: that a little titillating, you better keep on the straight narrow,
Speaker 1: Mr Clark. Yes, I'm melting the ice caps with my
Speaker 1: pure evil right. Well, if you're looking at some of
Speaker 1: the stories that have more of a religious residence to them,
Speaker 1: we know from the Koran and from the Bible that
Speaker 1: the earth was made to flood on purpose. Apparently this
Speaker 1: was something that the hand of God constructed in order
Speaker 1: to wash away the sons of the world, and he
Speaker 1: chose only the most righteous to survive it. And I
Speaker 1: think that anytime, especially in our modern era, where or
Speaker 1: in which empirical evidence speaks volumes louder sometimes than faith
Speaker 1: and spiritual elements, people are going to doubt that something
Speaker 1: like that happened. And that certainly is the case with
Speaker 1: a great flood. Well, there does seem to be some
Speaker 1: evidence of it. At the very least. The theories are
Speaker 1: pretty sticky, they seem reasonable. But if you start to
Speaker 1: look into the fact that Noah pops up in different
Speaker 1: religious texts, and even further back than that with the
Speaker 1: Sumerian and the Babylonians. Um, that kind of lends a
Speaker 1: little credence to the existence of some guy with a
Speaker 1: boat when you get down to the brass text. Apparently,
Speaker 1: the the boat that Noah built was, you know, an
Speaker 1: acre in size. According to the Book of Genesis, it
Speaker 1: was three d cubits long, fifty wide, and thirty tall,
Speaker 1: which is enormous. It's like, that's an acre and I mean,
Speaker 1: in this day and age, it's it's tough to imagine. Well, actually,
Speaker 1: to tell you the truth, in this day and age,
Speaker 1: it's kind of easy to imagine a boat that size.
Speaker 1: But we're talking that this would have been built with wood, right,
Speaker 1: and some people argue that there wasn't even shipbuilding technology
Speaker 1: at that time that would have existed to help Noah
Speaker 1: guide his efforts. Well, let me ask you this then,
Speaker 1: I mean, is is Noah and is you know three
Speaker 1: cubit boat fact or fiction? Is there evidence to support
Speaker 1: it one way or the other? Well, that's a tough
Speaker 1: question to answer, So I'm gonna say it's a little
Speaker 1: bit fact, it's a little bit fiction. That does know
Speaker 1: a character existence that has arc did too um. Even
Speaker 1: in the Sumerians and the Epic of Gilgamesh, we we
Speaker 1: read about a Noah type character who builds a boat
Speaker 1: to survive a great flood, and then a Kuran we
Speaker 1: read about a similar neotype character who builds this boat,
Speaker 1: and the Bible will read about a nootype character in
Speaker 1: his boat. But where's the boat? Well, some people say
Speaker 1: that would being in organic compound would have decomposed by
Speaker 1: these But people ask, if the waters of the world
Speaker 1: rose to the tops of the highest mountains, the arc
Speaker 1: would have settled somewhere. So where is this boat? Well,
Speaker 1: scholars have proposed, based on the answers given in the Bible,
Speaker 1: it would have been either Mountain Judai or Mount error At.
Speaker 1: And when they investigated these sites, they found a rock
Speaker 1: formation that looked like perhaps it could have been the
Speaker 1: petrified wood of a boat, but then people dismissed that theory.
Speaker 1: On another mountaintop, they found a very dark spot within
Speaker 1: what appeared to be some sort of glacial formation, and
Speaker 1: the CIA actually had photos of this that they kept
Speaker 1: under wrapped for a while. They they had a satellite
Speaker 1: photo and they circled it and labeled it the air
Speaker 1: at anomaly and just filed it away secretly. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then there was a bit of legislation came out that
Speaker 1: caused it to be released to the public and people
Speaker 1: looked at it and some people said, well, yeah, that
Speaker 1: could very well be out an arc, and then others
Speaker 1: said no, because with glacial formations I would have pushed
Speaker 1: the arc down instead of freezing it in place mountain. Also,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned the the it's just impossible, um, atmospherically,
Speaker 1: meteorologically for the the water to have risen to the
Speaker 1: point where it would have been deposited at the top
Speaker 1: of a mountain, right. Didn't the guy who raised the
Speaker 1: Titanic have another theory that he investigated? He did, um,
Speaker 1: This was Robert Ballard. He found the Titanic, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: so he went diving at the bottom of the Black
Speaker 1: Sea to see if he could find any remained and
Speaker 1: he didn't. But that's not to say that the arc
Speaker 1: didn't exist and then it was never built. It could
Speaker 1: be simply that it wouldn't have sunk near the Black Sea.
Speaker 1: Perhaps there was a differ front locale And so really
Speaker 1: it comes down to your question of you know, how
Speaker 1: much evidence do people really need it. Sounds like it
Speaker 1: comes down to a question of fake. There you go.
Speaker 1: So if you want some empirical, uh answer to whether
Speaker 1: or not the ark existed, you could simply say the
Speaker 1: wood disintegrated, or skeptics could say it never really did happen.
Speaker 1: But we know for sure that there was the possibility
Speaker 1: that the world could have flooded based on the annual
Speaker 1: rise and fall of the Tigers and Euphrates river, or
Speaker 1: it could have been an ice cap. Whether or not
Speaker 1: anyone built up an art to withstand the flood is
Speaker 1: a question that I think people have to answer on
Speaker 1: their own. If you want more facts about it, you
Speaker 1: can read Didn't Know Is arc Really Happen? On how
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