Most people have heard of the great flood from the Bible when Noah saved two of every animal by building a giant ark to protect them from the rising ocean engulfing the entire earth. What many people do not know is that the bible flood myth is simply the latest story about a global flood that has been told in over 70 cultures, thousands of years before the bible was written.
In Plato’s dialogues called the Timaeus and Critias he describes “the great deluge of all” that occurred 9,000 years before his time (around 11,500 B.C.). We now know, during that time, we were in an ice age and the sea levels were 400 feet lower than they are today. Something caused a rapid melt, ending the ice age and eventually creating modern day sea levels. We have also discovered ancient sites hundreds of feet below sea level off the shore of Japan.
Ice Age Sea Levels
Modern Day Sea Levels
Why this fascinates me:
1. There are too many stories, from all across the world that date back thousands of years to only be a myth (the flood, not the Noah story).
2. A natural catastrophe, such as a meteor landing in the Indian Ocean, could easily wipe out most of mankind at the time, as tsunamis would destroy the coasts.
3. Something caused the mile high glaciers to melt relatively quickly. All that coastline during the last ice age is now underwater.
4. An “advanced” civilization that existed before the ice age makes for great fiction stories!
Was there really an event, such as a meteor crash or epic earthquake, that caused global tidal waves leading to a rapid end to the ice age?
Yonaguni – underwater monument off the coast of Japan