Since we’re going through the story of Noah’s Ark in our Bible study, I have revisited the post-flood re-population problem.
Summary: I did come up with a model that doesn’t require completely suspending disbelief to have the world repopulate to a reasonable (namely, enough people to build the pyramids) post-flood.
For the sake of convenience, I will hand-wave the issue with eight people (or two of each “kind” of animal, whatever a kind is) having enough genetic diversity for the entire human population away. God can perform a miracle where He just randomly mutates genes the right way, post-flood, so we get all the genetic diversity of modern humans. Mind you, this genetic diversity just happens to look just like the genetic diversity from about 100 people in central Africa about 100,000 years ago, but this is an ah-hoc explanation,
not a scientific theory.
The only problem I will concern myself with is the problem of getting enough people to build the pyramids in ancient times, while having today’s population.
So, let’s allow God to perform some miracles with humans right after Noah leaves the Ark:
- The women on the ark, being born before Genesis 6:3, can have children regardless of how old they get.
- Every person born before the flood lives to be 1,000 years old (a little high, but this is an approximate calculation)
- Every person born after the flood lives to be 120 years old (as capped with Genesis 6:3)
- God commanded the people coming off of the ark to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 9:7) so they do in my model. Starting on every girl’s 12th birthday (it was a long time ago, and yes ancient Jewish law does allow a 12-year-old to get married), each girl becomes pregnant and successfully gives birth to a child 36 weeks later. There is a 5% chance of having twins and a small chance of having triplets. Upon giving birth, every single girl becomes pregnant again within a week. This process continues until the female is 50 years old, so each and every woman has over 50 children. Yes, this requires an extreme level of obedience to Genesis 9:7, a level of suppression of women’s rights which would be unthinkable today, but we’ll let it pass saying “it’s a miracle” and “things were different back then”
- Every man, woman, and child post-ark lives to be 120 years old. There is no death and no failed pregnancies in this model.
- 52% of births are women. This is higher than real world figures, but if God is performing other miracles to maximize human fertility post-ark, he can perform this one.
What are the results? Over 20,000,000 people (20 million) from the eight on the ark in only 100 years. In more detail:
Years after leaving ark: 100
Year: 2270 BCE
Population: 21,507,526
Living: 21,507,526
Females: 11,180,800
Adult men: 1,885,216
Adult women: 2,041,023
Adults total: 3,926,239
Pregnant women: 2,031,797
Avg. weeks pregnant: 15.598720246166
Children: 17,581,287
Adults here are 12 and older; children are under 12. As one can see, in order to accomplish this hyperfertile growth, each and every teenager and adult has to care for over four preteen children. Death has to be eliminated, every women has to be able to become pregnant within a week of giving birth until they are 50. Also, every pregnancy results in a child being born, and God, in yet another miracle, has decreased gestation time down to 36 weeks (from 38-42 weeks) to maximize population growth.
If God does all of these miracles post-ark, then, yes, one could have enough people to build the pyramids 100 years after Noah and his family gets off of the ark. Mind you, the first pyramid in Egypt (the Pyramid of Djoser, sometimes called the Step Pyramid) was built about 300 years
before Noah left the ark, so we’ll either have to move the flood timeline back a few hundred years or move the Step Pyramid ahead a few hundred years, but assuming we can do that we
could have people breed like rabbits for 100 years, then spend about 50 years building up enough civilization so we can have the Djoser Pyramid, and have something which kinda sorta works with the young Earth model for the Ark story.
It’s still a stretch and requires a number of extra-Biblical miracles from God.
I ran another hyper-fertile model which has women get married at the age of 14, where a woman has only an 8% chance of getting pregnant any given week, where there’s a small but significant chance of a miscarriage or of someone dying, and where women no longer get pregnant when they turn 40. This somewhat more reasonable, albeit still hyperfertile, model requires 200 years to get around 750,000 people. That’s probably enough people to have a society that can build the Step Pyramid, but we’re now having to move the date of the flood and/or Step Pyramid by about 500 years.
Source code and additional discussion is here:
GitHub - samboy/PopulationGrowth: Models of population growth in a world where the Noah story is a global cataclysm