Great flood myths are found in many religions. Is there any geological evidence something like this happened in the scope of human memory?
The Black Sea flood is one candidate.
Yes. The Black Sea Flood of about 7000 years ago. However, there’s to evidence to suggest that it inspired any of the “Great Flood” stories, intriguing as that might be.
Yep. Here’s one. There was a PBS documentary on this a while back. Of course it wasn’t an actual worldwide flood–that would be impossible. I read someplace that if all the water in the atmosphere condensed out at once, it would only cover the Earth to a depth of one inch.
More on the Black sea Flood theory:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/blacksea/ax/frame.html
The problem: the last dispatches reported a lack of man-made structures so far, not to mention that the location is far from what the bible and Gilgamesh told the heroes came.
I still think a huge extraordinary flood occurred around the Tigris and Euphrates and the tale got better as time went by, and it was carried later to the rest of the world as humans emigrated.
Yeah, I agree. Sorta the same way that the older your parents or grand-parents get, the longer they had to walk to school, and the deeper the snow got.
Let me re-emphasize what Earl said earlier.
There are lots of floods in earth history. There are many huge floods in earth history.
There is not the slightest shred of evidence that any particular flood is the progenitor for any particular myth.
All this talk about the Black Sea flood - and other candidates - being the source of the myth is total backwards-think. A) There’s a myth about a flood. B) Working backwards in time, we can find evidence of a great flood. Therefore B caused A.
Not only is there no direct evidence for any such connection, but the time lapses are so great that we have to posit an oral tradition lasting thousands of years and covering thousands of miles.
Not to mention that there is no good way to connect such an event to any mythologies outside their Mediterranean basin.
None of this is science in the usual sense of the word. It’s closer to modern day mythmaking.
There is also evidence of a massive flood in the city of Ur. Wooley (sp?), who excavated the city in the 50s got through a couple of layers of cities then came to around 20+ feet of sediment, then more evidence of people. His wife suggested that it was the “great flood”. This sounds better then the Black Sea flooding, as doesn’t Abraham come from Ur?
Sorry, it’s been years since I’ve read the book, I mostly remember this part as we talked about it in one of my classes.
The river Euphrates being one of the traditional sites of the Garden of Eden? If you’re not a Biblical literalist, I think you need to brush up on your ancient population movements.
There are other candidates for floods, e.g. that following the eruption of the volcano Thera in the Aegean Sea, which is connected with the Greek flood myth (cite,cite). And many regions, e.g. the Nile valley, parts of Eastern China, modern-day Bangladesh, are prone to regular flooding; it’s far from impossible that travellers tales from these regions had an influence. If you weren’t used to the Nile flooding, it might have seemed like an apocalypse.
Early settlements of people were often in river flood plains. To these people that plain, and maybe 50 miles in each direction, was the entire world.
It is therefore not at all surprising that many society’s religions, myths and legends contain stories of the world being flooded.
I’m agreeing with Futile, but also want to ask – we know of the Genesis Noah story and the Babylonian Gilgamesh story. That’s two. That doesn’t seem to me to be “many.”
I mean, OK, the Genesis Noah story finds its way into “many” religions, but they all tie to the same story. I think the Qu’ran echoes that story, too, as it does other Old Testament stories, but we’re still talking about the same origin story. Where do you get “many”, astro?
Seashells and Fishbones are found at the summits of mountains.
Obviously this land was once underwater.
A world-wide flood is the “obvious” explanation. We’ve all seen floods. Who among us has actually seen a mountain rise?
I agree with Futile and GIGObuster as well.
Just think of how much back breaking work went into farming with hand tools and how the survival of you and your family hinged on the weather. Certainly, floods were bad news to all early agrarian societies and the story of a horrific, world-wide flood would be better than any car accident. Acient people we just as imaginative as we are today, we just have cooler toys.
Add in the Moses spin for those in Europe and you get an explination as to why there are still people on the earth and the warm-fuzzy feeling from knowing that you are descendent from God’s chosen.
More on Moses and inbreeding later.
Much appologies for the poor spelling. It’s very early here.
Check this page out for a summary of world-wide flood legends. This is a ‘Creation Science’ site which naturally goes on to use the frequency of the tale as proof that everyone knows Noah, so the bible must be true.
But it does show that flood tales are uniform throughout the world. It’s a testiment to the uniformity of human development across the globe and the similarity of human needs and aspirations. When you are in an early agri-culture society floods are very big deals with very similar results and very similar human responses.
Yeah, spelling “Noah” as M-O-S-E-S is pushing it. 
Mountains are formed by Tectonic plates moving together and being forced up into the air. It therefore stands to reason that these fossils found at the top of mountains started off under the sea once. The Himalayas for example where formed when India crashed into asia. The bit in the middle was under water and was raised.
Where? cite? what specific circumstances?
Not “obviously”. There are many ways for seashells and fishbones to end up at a mountaintop. They could be carried there by swallows.
Maybe obvious if you are ignorant enough.
And who among us has read anything about geology?
See Flood Myths – Part One for Sumerian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Australian, Chaldean, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Greco-Roman, Jicarilla (Apache), Mayan, Aztec, Squamish, Skagit, Mandingo, Yakima, Caddo, Chippewa, Navajo, and Hopi “great flood” references.
Ummm, anyone hear a whooooosh around here?