XKCD did a comic about this phenomenon a few years ago. The story is set in the far future when the Med has dried up again, and the next flood that refills it is imminent.
http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/
> Special frames are selected by popular vote. The vote calculation is done automaticly, but new special frames won't show up right away (about a 10 minute delay). For a frame to attain special status it must receive a certain number of votes, and it must have a higher number of votes for it than against it. The exact numbers for this are still being determined.
> Debated Frames are frames that have recieved a number of both yes and no votes.
The special frames are ones where people have voted that it demands extra attention (e.g. text to read) that wouldn't be possible at multiple FPS. Debated just appears to be that there are significant yes votes, but insufficient to make it special.
WildwoodClaire's video on the Messinian Salinity Crisis gives an excellent backround on the paleogeology of the Mediterranean basin, particularly as expressed through salt deposits up to 3500 meters thick, but also with considerable evidence of ancient channels both in the regions surrounding the Mediterranean (as at the Aswan High Dam) and underneath the existing sea.
There is a similar theory about the Black Sea: the Black Sea deluge hypothesis [1].
From Wikipedia:
The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the Black Sea circa 5600 BC from waters from the Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the Bosphorus strait.
(This one, if true, is pretty interesting because it occurred within fairly recent human history.)
Nothing the size of the Med, of course. There are several major below-sealevel basins in Northern Africa. The most significant is probably the Qattara Depression[1], which probably won't ever naturally flood, but is the target of many plans to flood it intentionally for power production and improvements in local climate.
Vaguely related is the Salton Sea in southern California. It's been a large lake in the geological past, but it most recently filled in due to some bad irrigation planning in 1905. It filled up in about 2 years.
Death Valley could flood if there was some way for sea water to get to it. If the climate changed and it started to rain there often, it could also make a massive inland freshwater lake.
New Orleans, many areas of China (see 1931 China Floods), areas along the Ganges Delta, also look at the Special Flood Hazard Areas assigned in the US.
>"We do not envisage a waterfall, as is often represented: instead the geophysical data suggests a huge ramp, several kilometres wide, descending from the Atlantic to the dry Mediterranean...," the scientists said.
The Zanclean flood seems to have occured 5.3 million years ago, while the genus Homo has emerged 2.5 million years ago.
Another way to look at it is that the first human was closer to witnessing Lee Sedol's win against AlphaGo than it was to seeing that flood.
Humans started developing their first language around 1.8 million years ago.
Unless apes were able to somehow express the idea of a flood before having a language, it seems unlikely.
No, this happened about 5.6 million years ago, according to the study. That's well before the advent of the homo sapien or any prehistoric ancestors developing a language complex enough to tell such a story.
Fwiw, there are more recent large floods that serve as possible inspiration for the flood stories you can find in any major religion.
A lot of the older books of the bible were collected from Mesopotamian mythology. Based on the stories it's likely something big really did happen, but no one is quite sure what.
I've always been fascinated by the Scottish Tsunami/Storegga Slide of ~6000BC, which was about 70ft high at the coast and ran some 50 miles inland.
Not sure why you are being down-voted, as it is a fair question. But it was too long ago to be a part of human memory. Perhaps the Black Sea deluge though...
Maybe, however we have recent flooding events that are almost biblical. There are the recent in my lifetime floods in the Mississippi valley 1993 and 2011. Not to mention the 1927 flood. Ohio River flood of 1937 which I think is mythologized in the Johnny Cash song 5ft high and rising.
In the Great Flood of 1862 the California Central Valley flooded, 6000 square miles, some of which was still under water 6 months later.
While I suspect such floods don't occur in the Euphrates and Tigris basins now, 5000 years ago when the climate was wetter, perhaps such floods similar to the Great Flood of 1862 did occur every few hundred years.
A common myth. The bible doesn't say the world was created in 6 days, but in 6 'yoms'. A yom in Hebrew means 'a defined period of time'. Like an epoch, or a year, a day or a minute etc.
The bible was translated into English in the middle ages.
Wikipedia has a definition as 'A long, but finite span of time', among others.
It's interesting that the similar "stretch of lifetime" is seen in Japanese ancient document (Kojiki), and probably in other cultures, too. Those ancient tales were inherited orally before recorded. Could it be that the storytellers tend to exaggerate? Or maybe counting the number of years wasn't that objective but had more subjective significance?
There is a theory that the age of Biblical patriarchs were originally recorded in months (969 months = 80 years and 9 months, which is quite reasonable) and somehow got mistranslated into years sometime later. This, however, doesn't quite work with Enoch who is said to have had a son at age 65.
So, maybe he had been married very young to an older female and had a, for him at the age of 5 a half years surprising, pregnancy attributed to him. His age of 365 days is still rather symbolic. His father's 81 years at that time are rather a lot. I'm not even sure that kind of arranged marriage was common. He was said to be living amongst sinners, anyhow, while his father was said to have had many children. The Grandfather of the family would have reached fatherhood at the same 65 (yoms, then), so, whatever.
I don't know, if yoms has a different meaning, maybe father has, too.
I propose, children would be given responsibilities early on, they had to start soon. So, maybe being a father at figure 65 months means teaching a brother or cousin or other newborn and leaving the adults care for the food. They would form trust for one another while the resentment from biological parents towards their children, as shown with gods fury over adam and eve, would be mutual. "Alter" (older) in german can mean big brother, or father, but generally any subjectively old one.
Of course I mainly agree to the story aspect, but I don't know any other mysticism about the mentioned figures.
