Chuck

There were Chinese flood myths.

There were flood myths in southern Canada, in the British Isles.

So there was one study that picked out 50 cultures and they all had their own flood myths.

And that it was related to some kind of punishment.

So they started looking, like you said, of like, why is this happening?

And there's a bunch of reasons, and they all kind of make sense to me, if I'm being honest.

One of them is that there was a flood in these cultures, but it wasn't a global flood.

But if you're...

You know, if all you know is a certain area and you never get to leave that area and it wipes out everything you know, then the story that you pass along orally through the years would sound like one that wiped out everything.

Yeah, and some more support for this is the fact that there aren't flood myths in sub-Saharan African cultures.

And these were groups that when they left Africa, they didn't come back.

So they would not have taken back with them a flood myth from Proto-Indo-Europeans.

So it all kind of makes sense.

Sure.

And again, if you live in your riverside village and you don't get to travel very far from there and everything you know of gets destroyed, again, it could be, you know, lend support to the idea that it gets translated as a worldwide flood.

And if everyone's having these localized floods, which happened, you know, there's always been floods, then not necessarily of the 40 days and 40 nights variety, but

But when things are passed around orally and then they get rewritten, things get kind of mixed up.

Yeah, and speaking of laying your things on other cultures, the third one is Christian missionaries.

And there's evidence of this happening.

They would go and tell the story of Noah's great flood, especially when colonization was happening too.