(I’m sure it will shock none of you who aren’t already familiar with him that he conned himself onto Rogan.)
Not to rain on Jimmy’s parade, because I’m sure he’s “done his research,” but the Bible says that the Ark landed on the Mountains of Ararat, which is not the same thing as Mount Ararat. The connection with the mountain in Turkey didn’t start until the middle ages.
Or, the end of the mini-ice-age resulted in flooding that equated to a rise of something like 20 stories (as in building levels) of water in lower regions including the Fertile Crescent. It would make sense that the first (known) civilizations would have great flood myths because their lands were wiped out during their lifetimes. Did the entire world flood? From their perspective yes. From that of geologists, no.
Edit: Oh, and I want to cancel all religions. Christianity isn’t special.
The sea level rise at the end of the Younger Dryas would have been virtually imperceptible to the people living through it.
Flood myths are because people generally settle near large bodies of water and large bodies of water can flood, sometimes catastrophically.
The Fall of Civilizations podcast indicated that there was a period of rapid rise in sea levels around Mesopotamia, but if you have reason to disagree with the host I’ll defer. I don’t know their background beyond being a good storyteller.
As you can see here, the rise sounds dramatic, but year-over-year, it would not be very noticeable-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Holocene_sea_level_rise
In geology, rapid is still a very long time, even up to a few million years.
That podcast episode (which is great) said the rise was about a 2.5cm per year (or 0.3m/day horizontally). Not that rapid.
Minutes 23-30 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/8-the-sumerians-fall-of-the-first-cities/id1449884495?i=1000454904678
As I understood that one, it was localized to the Black Sea or Mediterranean and based on blockages to their connecting channels to larger bodies of water. But last I heard of that was a long time ago.
I wanted to say Black Sea but wasn’t confident enough that I’d remembered correctly.
Okay yeah.
For everyone else, what we’re talking about is a theory that the Black Sea has a few points in history where the regions monumental earthquakes caused landslides that blocked(and maybe later cleared, or it cleared naturally) the Bosporus. When it was blocked, the sea swelled and flooded.
However, the Black Sea deluge hypothesis, which is far from a consensus view, would have happened a couple of thousand years before civilization began in Mesopotamia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
The believers in “this created the Ark story” will tell you that it was 2000 years of oral history. Occam’s razor tells me that a civilization built between two rivers tends to experience flooding.
I choose to believe it caused twenty stories about water, not 20 stories of raised water.