Interesting summary of some interesting studies a bit over a decade old now… Recent Cosmic Impacts on Earth – Do Global Myths Reflect an Ancient Disaster?
The main researcher cited, W Masse, has reconstructed the event(s) behind the hundreds of Flood legends/myths as being from an ocean impact by a comet/asteroid. Multiple fragments could mean a quasi-global range for the disasters recorded in those myths. Masse wasn;t the first.
Several decades ago Isaac Asimov speculated that Noah’s Flood was best explained by an impact in the ocean. Noah’s drift around the ‘flooded Earth’ could well have lasted a year (as per the text) if the Ark had been washed down into the Persian Gulf by a retreating impact tsunami. Now there’s a possible candidate for the impact, though the dates are still speculative.
One piece of ‘evidence’ for the deep sea impact crater near Madagascar as the causative agent, aside from a possible crater, are large chevron ‘dunes’ that look for all the world like a huge ‘splash’ of sand from the ocean floor. The carbonate they’re composed of has recently been carbon dated to c.11,000 years bp, which is long before Masse’s impact, so the exact nature of the chevrons is yet to be worked out. A mix of organic carbon mixed with old ‘fossil’ carbon could make a more recent deposit ‘date’ much older than its actual origin.
With my recent dating of Moses’ Exodus to exactly 1250 BC, how does the Bibical Flood fit in? While the long ages of the Post-Diluvian Patriarchs seem excessively old, the age sequence data they provide might be accurate. Using the Patriarchal times from Flavius Josephus we can compute a total of 1053 years from Shem’s 2 years after the Flood to the birth of Abram. From Abram to the Exodus is 505 years. This gives a Flood Date of 2,808 BC, which is surprisingly close considering the uncertainties involved.
Citation: King, Thomas F. “Recent Cosmic Impacts on Earth.” ThoughtCo, Jan. 19, 2018, thoughtco.com/recent-cosmic-impacts-on-earth-170379.
While very interesting, this timeline is also near the beginnings of the Mycenaean civilization and may Bronze Age civilizations. Wouldn’t a major disaster like the one being described have delayed the start of these civilizations, or at least be more clearly recorded?
If anything, I would think that the legends of the flood long predate the rise of the Bronze age, and would have been recorded as legends (as they are). If they were contemporious, then they would likely have been recorded as “current events” by the people involved.
Didn’t the Greeks place the Flood of Deucalion fairly close to their time?