CompuServe Messages

>> The commonness of flood myths is intriguing, but before any theory claims them as evidence, there must be something that links them to rule out obvious contenders. Any given location will have a "normal" major disaster sooner or later – perhaps the myths come from multiple "normal" disasters not all at the same time. The stories may be signposts leading to real evidence, but seem not to be evidence themselves. << I think you are right. Floods are very common, it is not surprising that they occur in many myths. Also, since 10,000 years age, many many (the majority?) of people have moved (as cultural lineages, if you will) from one place to another. So a flood myth found in one region may have been generated in another by the ancestors, more or less, of the same people. The key here is to demonstrate that all of these impacts have the same date, which is highly doubtful. Also, linguistic evidence should be able to tell something about when some of these myths started and how they spread. For example, all known language families probably diverged into their current diversity less than 10,000 years ago (there are probably exceptions). If the flood is "primordial" to these languages, then the word for flood should be similar in all languages. On the other hand, if flooding is primordial (and we can guess that it is) then one might get similar results! GTL Greg Laden Dept. of Anthropology Harvard University Cambridge MA 02138