A Lost Civilization Beneath the Persian Gulf? 277
Phoghat sends news of a new theory that a once-fertile landmass beneath the Persian Gulf may have supported some of the earliest humans outside of Africa. "Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago... These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."
Re:A book? (Score:3, Informative)
It was a work of fiction by HP Lovecraft called "The Nameless City"
Cool story - a lot of his stuff can be found fulltext on the internet, but here's the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nameless_City [wikipedia.org]
Re:Attempt at justifying religion again? (Score:4, Informative)
There was not a single female ("Eve") alive at that time, there were at least thousands of females, and those females were all reproducing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve [wikipedia.org]
This image explains it pretty well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MatrilinealAncestor.PNG [wikipedia.org]
BEWARE link leads to popups (Score:0, Informative)
and spam and spam
Knock it off with the pseudoscience (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to the abstract just to nip all this 3rd and 4th hand speculation about flood myths and Atlantis: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/657397 [uchicago.edu]
It's great for bringing public attention but not so great for highlighting the actual science behind the pop sci article.
ONE != ONLY ancestor (Score:5, Informative)
No matter how you try to spin it, the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans trace back to "ONE" female.
To say we all descend from ONE woman does not mean she was the ONLY woman on earth at the time.
Look at it this way: all my brothers, sisters, and cousins descend from my grandmother. But we have TWO grandmothers. Capisce?
Re:Attempt at justifying religion again? (Score:4, Informative)
Except that it's hard to reconcile the story with the fact that Noah and the "Eve" figure lived over a hundred thousand years apart.
The Noah story is a myth. The Flood story is a myth. The Adam and Eve story is a myth. It's pointless to try to force fit science to myth, or myth to science.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
The oldest languages around the Persian Gulf are not Semitic. The oldest language that can be attested are Sumerian and Elamite, which are both isolates, with know perceivable connection to any other spoken language. The Akkadians and other Semitic tribes were later invaders that seized Sumer, though they largely retained the Sumerian religion and the language as a sort of liturgical language (much like Latin was to become after the fall of Rome). No one can be quite certain where the Semitic languages arose, though the parent Afro-Asiatic family appears to come East Africa, and the Semitic languages may have arisen in the Arabian Peninsula.
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
The oldest languages around the Persian Gulf are Semitic, so it's unlikely the forerunners of the Indo-Europeans lived in the hypothetical valley now sitting under the waves.
The Sumerians, the Hurrians and the Elamites want to have a word with you. (None of their languages were remotely Indo-European, but they weren't Semitic, either.)
Re:Unscientific to dismiss legends and myth ... (Score:5, Informative)
Citation please. Seriously. This would be very useful these days.
"Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lemaitre.ogg (helpinfo) July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Louvain. He sometimes used the title Abbé or Monseigneur. Lemaître was the first scientist to propose what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre [wikipedia.org]
"The Big Bang is a scientific theory, and as such is dependent on its agreement with observations. But as a theory which addresses the origins of reality, it has always carried theological and philosophical implications. In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state Universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang [wikipedia.org]
Re:Noah, etc (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, over 200 civilizations have the same flood myth with similar details: one man (couple, family, etc.) is told by God that he will flood the entire earth. He builds a wooden vessel and survives (with or without animals) and everyone else dies. Even the man's name is Nue in Hawaii and Nuah in China.
This kind of correlation between people speaking different languages living in all continents is hard to ignore. Occam's razor says there was a global flood and the man (probably named Noah) saw everyone around him die and believed that God's forewarning saved him, at the very least.
Before we apply Ockham's Razor we have to filter out the made-up evidence. Yes, there are lots of flood myths and some have interesting elements in common. But no, there's not the kind of consistency biblical literalists like to believe there is.
Then, for whatever similar myths remain, Ockham's Razor would probably recommend cultural dissemination. That might be problematic in some cases, but then any claim that the myths represent the same event require an equal degree of dissemination.
Occam's razor says there was a global flood and the man (probably named Noah) saw everyone around him die and believed that God's forewarning saved him, at the very least.
Both geology and genetics tell us that there has never been a global flood. Every living species would have a genetic bottleneck from the time of the flood, and that isn't what we find.
More importantly, the biblical flood story portrays YHWH as an evil fuck-up. Why bother with a flood when he could just wish the evildoers out of existence? Why drown all the world's babies and kittens? Why didn't this solution to the problem of evil actually work???
If apologists for divinity had any sense they would distance themselves from the flood story even faster than the more secular minded do.
Re:Noah, etc (Score:5, Informative)
It refers to a goddess named Nuwa [wikipedia.org]: It sounds like just cherry-picking of selected elements that are convenient. The Chinese myth of Nuwa seems superficially similar in pronunciation to Noah, but the myth is nothing like Noah. For one thing, Nuwa is a woman, not a man, and is a creator-deity, which is expressly counter to Christian theology.
Chinese mythology does have some myths about floods, but they involve the Yellow Emperor [wikipedia.org] teaching the commoners irrigation and flood control (of the Yellow River, not the sea) in order to bring about the creation of civilization.
Christian creationists like to mix and match selected similar elements from myths, ignoring the rest, and use that as reason to support the "fact" of the Great Flood. At best this is ignorant, and at worse sheer dishonesty.
Re:this land is a fertile land... (Score:4, Informative)
You said it all wrong! What Wash said next was [youtube.com]:
"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal"