Is there any chance that what modern science refers to as an extinction event in the past could be the same event referred to in the almost ubiquitous ancient flood stories?
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The Extinction Event
- Thread starter Chesterton
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Polycarp1
Born-again Liberal Episcopalian
Good answer.
For those interested, "snowball Earth" is slanguage for the infra-Cambrian glaciation of about 700 million years ago, the most severe of three known Ice Age epochs in geological history.
Virtually all known multicellular fossils (the only real exceptions being growths of cysnophyte algae called stromatolites) date from the three Eras of the Phanerozoic Eon: the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic [in glib terms, the Ages of Invertebrates, Fishes, and Amphinbians, of Dinosaurs, and of Mammals respectively). The famous Burgess Shale fauna is the premiere example of the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of multicellular life during the Cambrian period, at the beginning of the Paleozoic (and of the Phanerozoic Eon). Pre-Cambrian time, the Crytozoic Eon, mostly has no clear evidence of multicellular life except the Ediacara fauna of Vendian time at the very end of it. Just prior to the Vendian, there seems to have been a glaciation that was worldwide in scope, approaching or reaching the equator of the time. While the Pleistocene glaciation ("the Ice Age" in popular parlance) covered much of the northern areas of the Northern Hemisphere, and the Permian glaciation near the end of the Paleozoic did the same in the Southern Hemisphere, the one near the end of the Cryptozoic, which I think is called the Varangian glaciation, appears to have been far more severe than either of the two since, covering all or almost all the Earth.
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There have been 5 major extinction events in the past. Which do you want to associate with the Flood?
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I was just listening to Niles Eldredge on this last night.
He points out that there are different levels of extinction events. A minor local environmental change might lead to the extinction of a local population.
The 5 major extinctions each wiped out many hundreds of species (Over 90% of the Permian species in the Permian extinction.)
In between there can be medium-sized regional events which lead to significant extinctions in a region. An example would be the formation of the Panama land bridge between North and South America which led to the extinction of most of South America's then largely marsupial fauna. Similarly the land bridge that connected Asia and North America during the last Ice Age brought humans into North America for the first time--an event that was followed quite swiftly by the extinction of most mega-fauna in North America.
So it seems to me a regional flood of significant impact could cause many extinctions in the affected region--not only immediately, through drowning, but also through habitat destruction and reduced food supply which would continue for a while after a prolonged flood.
There is no indication in the biblical story that any species became extinct. In fact the very idea that species could become extinct shocked Europeans when it was first proposed by Georges Cuvier. It didn't fit with prevailing ideas about creation that anything God had caused to be could cease to be. That is probably why the flood story speaks of saving a sample of every form of life, not of any species being destroyed.
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Are you saying that each separate flood story could be based on a separate actual flooding event?
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No, because the first human fossils don't occur until long after the last mass extinction event (K-T).
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But the fact that human fossils don't occur until a certain time doesn't necessarily mean that there were no humans before that time, does it?
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Because God repented that He had made man (but that idea is not shared with all other flood stories).
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I'm just trying to make sure we're on the same page.We both know the story. Go ahead and say what you intend to say.
The Bible claims that all of humanity was wiped out, except for Noah, his wife, the kids and their respective wives. That means that almost 100% of humans was wiped out in the (supposed) global flood event.
So if we're going to try to account for Noah's Flood by one of the mass extinction event horizons we see in the fossil record, then there had better be some human fossils in the mix. But there aren't. The first humans are found way up at the top of the rock record, as I said, long after the last mass extinction is recorded at the K-T boundary (between the Cretaceous and Tertiary in the image below):
The other four mass extinction horizons are at the end of the Ordovician, Late Devonian, end of the Permian, and end of the Triassic. We don't find any human fossils anywhere within those extinction horizons or in between them. Thus, it makes no sense to conclude that Noah's Flood is recorded anywhere in those event horizons.
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Sphinx777
Well-Known Member
In biology and ecology, extinction is the death of every member of a species or group of taxa. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species (although the capacity to breed and recover may have been lost before this point). Because a species' potential range may be very large, determining this moment is difficult, and is usually done retrospectively. This difficulty leads to phenomena such as Lazarus taxa, where a species presumed extinct abruptly "re-appears" (typically in the fossil record) after a period of apparent absence.
Through evolution, new species arise through the process of speciationwhere new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological nicheand species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Extinction, though, is usually a natural phenomenon; it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct.
Prior to the dispersion of humans across the earth, extinction generally occurred at a continuous low rate, mass extinctions being relatively rare events. Starting approximately 100,000 years ago, and coinciding with an increase in the numbers and range of humans, species extinctions have increased to a rate unprecedented since the CretaceousTertiary extinction event. This is known as the Holocene extinction event and is at least the sixth such extinction event. Some experts have estimated that up to half of presently existing species may become extinct by 2100.
Through evolution, new species arise through the process of speciationwhere new varieties of organisms arise and thrive when they are able to find and exploit an ecological nicheand species become extinct when they are no longer able to survive in changing conditions or against superior competition. A typical species becomes extinct within 10 million years of its first appearance, although some species, called living fossils, survive virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Extinction, though, is usually a natural phenomenon; it is estimated that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct.
Prior to the dispersion of humans across the earth, extinction generally occurred at a continuous low rate, mass extinctions being relatively rare events. Starting approximately 100,000 years ago, and coinciding with an increase in the numbers and range of humans, species extinctions have increased to a rate unprecedented since the CretaceousTertiary extinction event. This is known as the Holocene extinction event and is at least the sixth such extinction event. Some experts have estimated that up to half of presently existing species may become extinct by 2100.
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Certainly any time humans experienced a significant flood, some sort of oral history about it would emerge.
However, refugees travel taking stories of their experiences with them, and stories are retold and retold in various guises. So some proportion of flood stories would be repetitions of stories about floods that happened elsewhere.
It would be very difficult to pin down what that proportion is.
In addition some flood stories could be just stories and not have any historical basis at all.
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So what do we make of the multiple coincidences? Details vary, but Wiki lists more than 20 flood stories (that we know of) from every continent.
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I don't think there is any great mystery. There are multiple possibilities of actual floods, all of which could give rise to flood stories.
In addition there are multiple possibilities of flood stories being told and re-told in various ways.
If there were as few as five actual floods per continent (on average), there could easily be hundreds of flood stories.
It would be an interesting exercise to try and draw up a family tree of flood stories to see how many different types of flood stories there are and which ones were derived from earlier versions. One might also uncover hybrid versions in which a flood story from one family borrows elements of a flood story from a different family.
(Have you looked into memes?)
I don't expect there is much likelihood of connecting any particular family of flood stories with any historical flood.
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Who says they are coincidences? Most human settlements are located on water of some type. Riverbanks swell and tidal waves break, so it's hardly surprising that there should be so many flood accounts.
(There are also many accounts of earthquakes around the world throughout history. This doesn't mean that at one point, there was a global earthquake.)
Also, could you please provide the wiki article you referred to?
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