I doubt whether there were even any animals.
Well if you doubt the existence of animals in antiquity I guess it's not surprising you also doubt the Holy Bible.
The Flood has to be the silliest story in the Bible.
According to fundamentalist atheism, more than 80-90% of the world population in recorded history is silly.
"O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. ... in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Paethon [Venus], the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving in the heavens around the earth, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth, which recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore. And from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing saviour, delivers and preserves us. When, on the other hand, the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water, the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. Whereas in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the water come down from above on the fields, having always a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the traditions preserved here are the most ancient. The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed-if there were any actions noble or great or in any other way remarkable, they have all been written down by us of old, and are preserved in our temples. Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven. " -- Sonchis of Sais, priest, 6th century B.C.
"Many great deluges have taken place during the nine thousand years, for that is the number of years which have elapsed since the time of which I am speaking...." --Plato, philosopher, Critias, 360 B.C.
"...the time must come when this place will be flooded again." -- Aristotle, philosopher, Meteorology, 350 B.C.
"And so even to the Athenians themselves, though they built the city of Sais in Egypt, yet by reason of the flood, were led into the same error of forgetting what was before." -- Diodorus Siculus, historian, ~1st century B.C.
"Afterwards, when most of the inhabitants of Greece were destroyed by flood, and all records and ancient monuments perished with them, the Egyptians took this occasion to appropriate the study of astrology solely to themselves; and whereas the Grecians (through ignorance) as yet valued not learning, it became a general opinion that the Egyptians were the first that found out the knowledge of the stars." -- Diodorus Siculus, historian, ~1st century B.C.
"And in the time of Crotopus occurred the burning of Phaethon, and the deluges of Deucalion." -- Clement of Alexandria, priest, Stromata, 2nd century
"One and seventy Ages are styled here a Patriarchate (manvantara); at it's end is said to be a twilight which has the number of years of a Golden Age, and which is a deluge." -- Brahmarishi Mayan, demon, The Surya Siddhanta, 490
"In the life of Manco Capac, who was the first Inca, and from whom they began to boast themselves children of the Sun and from whom they derived their idolatrous worship of the Sun, they had an ample account of the deluge. They say that in it perished all races of men and created things insomuch that the waters rose above the highest mountain peaks in the world. No living thing survived except a man and a woman who remained in a box and, when the waters subsided, the wind carried them ... to Tiahuanaco [where] the creator began to raise up the people and the nations that are in that region." -- Cristóbal de Molina, priest, 1572
"They make great mention of a deluge, which happened in their country ... The Indians say that all men were drowned in the deluge, and they report that out of Lake Titicaca came one Viracocha, who stayed in Tiahuanaco, where at this day there are to be seen ruins of ancient and very strange buildings, and from thence came to Cuzco, and so began to multiply." -- José de Acosta, priest, 1590
"In the lifetime of [Emperor] Yao the sun did not set for ten full days and the entire land was flooded." -- Johannes Hübner, evangelist, 1729
"Living organisms without number have been the victims of the catastrophes. Some were destroyed by deluges, others were left dry when the seabed was suddenly raised; their races are even finished forever, and all they leave in the world is some debris that is hardly recognizable to the naturalist." -- Georges Cuvier, naturalist, 1819
"Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers." -- Hermann Melville, author, 1851
"The belief in a great deluge is not confined to one nation singly, the Tamanacs; it makes part of a system of historical tradition, of which we find scattered notions among the Maypures of the great cataracts; among the Indians of the Rio Erevato, which runs into the Caura; and among almost all the tribes of the upper Orinoco. When the Tamanacs are asked how the human race survived this great deluge, the 'age of water' of the Mexicans, they say, 'a man and a woman saved themselves on a high mountain, called Tamanacu, situated on the banks of the Asiveru....'" -- Alexander Von Humboldt, Personal Narrative, naturalist, 1852
"I saw at once that I had here discovered a portion at least of the Chaldean account of the Deluge." -- George Smith, archaeologist, 1876
"The fragments of the Chaldean historian, Berosus, preserved in the works of various later writers, have shown that the Babylonians were acquainted with traditions referring to the Creation, the period before the Flood, the Deluge, and other matters forming parts of Genesis." -- George Smith, archaeologist, 1876
"There is, however, one special tradition which seems to be more deeply impressed and more widely spread than any of the others. The destruction of well-nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world's history, by a great deluge, appears to have impressed the minds of the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness that their remote descendants of the present day have not even yet forgotten it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries and among the most barbarous tribes." -- Hugh Miller, geologist, The Testimony of the Rocks, 1892
"The Babylonian account of the deluge is older than the Biblical story. It does not take away from it but rather corroborates its truth." -- Drusilla D. Houston, historian, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cu[wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth][wash my mouth]e Empire, Chapter XIII: The Civilization of Babylonia, 1926
"In the reign of Osorkon II of the Libyan Dynasty [22nd Dynasty] in Egypt, in the third year, the first month of the second season, on the twelfth day, according to a damaged inscription, 'the flood came on, in this whole land ... this land was in its power like the sea; there was no dyke of the people to withstand its fury. All the people were like birds upon it ... the tempest ... suspended ... like heavens. All the temples of Thebes were like marshes.'" -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, 1950
"For many centuries, indeed until only a few generations ago, the story of Noah was accepted as a historical fact...." -- Leonard Woolley, archaeologist, March 12th 1953
"Geologists from earliest days, but especially from the eighteenth century (Baron Cuvier and others) recognized that a 'flood' had spread a blanket of 'drift' over Europe. Thus, it comes as no surprise that an 'event' 11,000 years ago had the energy and fluid medium to broadcast erratics and other debris in a thick blanket over southern Canada, the Great Lakes region, New England, the prairies of western Canada and the American midwest. Anyone who has pondered the well-established sudden disappearance from the region of whole species of the larger ungulates (elephants, camel, horse, sloth, etc.) and their predators, while the same families of creatures continued, apparently unaffected, elsewhere in the world, will find the 'flood' interpretation of prehistory convenient for explaining the facts." -- C. Warren Hunt, geologist, 1989
"The extent of the Sumerian flood was very substantial: a deposit 8-feet thick covering an area some 400 miles long by 100 miles wide -- a total of many billions of tons of material. And it was this discovery that sent a buzz through the corridors of uniformitarian geology. For here, at last, was evidence of a real Homo diluvii testis -- man a witness to the flood. Because this catastrophic event had occured in recorded history then -- uniquely in the geological record -- here was direct evidence of a substantial sediment that must have been laid down rapidly and all at once, rather than slowly over millions of years. And if this stratum then why not others?" -- Richard Milton, writer, 1992
"Flood legends appear in the mythology of so many cultures that a universal flood has often been invoked to explain their prevalence." -- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, geomythologist, 2007
"Noah's flood is a story so compelling that for centuries it has demanded a scientific explanation. The story clearly refers to an inundation so large that its survivors assumed that the whole world had been affected. People have long sought to tie the Flood to a specific event and location, but only recently has a plausible explanation, based on sound scientific research, been proposed. Ryan & Pitman (1999) hypothesize that postglacial melting elevated sea levels to the extent that the Mediterranean broke through into the Black Sea depression, drowing out so many settlements that a universal flood legend resulted. I am not only convinced that this is the true explanation of the Flood, but I am also impressed with how quickly and effectively these two scientists have brought this long-elusive story into the realm of science-based geomythology." -- Dorothy B. Vitaliano, geomythologist, 2007
