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

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