<story><title>Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/relics-washed-beaches-reveal-lost-world-beneath-north-sea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncmncm</author><text>This is fascinating. But I find it extremely odd that they talk only about Doggerland and, in passing, Beringia (connecting Alaska with Siberia) and &amp;quot;archipelagos of Oceania&amp;quot;. Meanwhile, they leave unmentioned literally &lt;i&gt;millions&lt;/i&gt; of square miles of prime habitat occupied by modern humans for at least 50,000 years before it was inundated, now called Sundaland and Sahul.&lt;p&gt;Sundaland is now sea between Indonesian islands, reaching up along Vietnam and out to Taiwan (thus not an island), all the way up to Korea (thus not a peninsula). Sahul filled the gap between Australia and New Guinea.&lt;p&gt;They also leave unmentioned the Persian Gulf and the sea southeast of Pakistan, more thousands of square miles of recent land. The first cities (that we know of) were built immediately upstream from those parcels. Buildings were exposed in the latter parcel before the big recent tsunami, where fishermen&amp;#x27;s nets have long got snagged.&lt;p&gt;Knowing that so much of what we think of as prehistory happened in places that are now flooded makes what we call &amp;quot;Atlantis&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Noah&amp;#x27;s flood&amp;quot; legends into legitimate oral history. The old question of where the water came from, and went afterward, is answered: from the glaciers, and it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;all still there&lt;/i&gt;. Australian oral histories record negotiated resolution of conflicts from people obliged to move uphill and crowd into where other people had lived for tens of thousands of years.&lt;p&gt;There were places the shore moved inland another meter each year, for centuries. Your grandparents&amp;#x27; seaside village was always just offshore. It is easy to imagine how stories would have turned that into a dramatic deluge, over subsequent millennia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simonh</author><text>This is an article about finds from Doggerland, not an article about your favourite flood mono-myth theory, hence a comprehensive discussion of global floods and associated myths is really out of scope and that&amp;#x27;s why it&amp;#x27;s not in the article. No confusion required.&lt;p&gt;We have no reason whatever to link the Atlantis story and the Noah&amp;#x27;s Flood story the way you do. Not all stories about floods have to be about the same flood. Individual flood myths may well be legitimate oral history, but therefore Atlantis is a non sequitur.&lt;p&gt;As it happens we do have evidence that oral history can persist stories about events across tens of thousands of years. However we also know that floods are a very common phenomenon for unrelated reasons all over the world even now.</text></comment>
<story><title>Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/relics-washed-beaches-reveal-lost-world-beneath-north-sea</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ncmncm</author><text>This is fascinating. But I find it extremely odd that they talk only about Doggerland and, in passing, Beringia (connecting Alaska with Siberia) and &amp;quot;archipelagos of Oceania&amp;quot;. Meanwhile, they leave unmentioned literally &lt;i&gt;millions&lt;/i&gt; of square miles of prime habitat occupied by modern humans for at least 50,000 years before it was inundated, now called Sundaland and Sahul.&lt;p&gt;Sundaland is now sea between Indonesian islands, reaching up along Vietnam and out to Taiwan (thus not an island), all the way up to Korea (thus not a peninsula). Sahul filled the gap between Australia and New Guinea.&lt;p&gt;They also leave unmentioned the Persian Gulf and the sea southeast of Pakistan, more thousands of square miles of recent land. The first cities (that we know of) were built immediately upstream from those parcels. Buildings were exposed in the latter parcel before the big recent tsunami, where fishermen&amp;#x27;s nets have long got snagged.&lt;p&gt;Knowing that so much of what we think of as prehistory happened in places that are now flooded makes what we call &amp;quot;Atlantis&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Noah&amp;#x27;s flood&amp;quot; legends into legitimate oral history. The old question of where the water came from, and went afterward, is answered: from the glaciers, and it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;all still there&lt;/i&gt;. Australian oral histories record negotiated resolution of conflicts from people obliged to move uphill and crowd into where other people had lived for tens of thousands of years.&lt;p&gt;There were places the shore moved inland another meter each year, for centuries. Your grandparents&amp;#x27; seaside village was always just offshore. It is easy to imagine how stories would have turned that into a dramatic deluge, over subsequent millennia.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slongfield</author><text>My impression of the history of the &amp;quot;Noah&amp;#x27;s flood&amp;quot; story is that mythologists tend to trace it back to the origin of civilization in the fertile crescent, a historic flood plain.&lt;p&gt;Specifically, there are very strong parallels between it and the Gilgamesh flood myth: 
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gilgamesh_flood_myth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gilgamesh_flood_myth&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>