I appreciate the effort. Blum does appear to be fixated on 8500 BCE.
Given the sources used range from 1978 to 1993, 26 years old at least, I would expect that current sources will give a different take. In particular the temperature reconstructions for the Holocene are different. Also there has been much work on sea level changes and even the history of tropical cyclones.
It appears Tell Abu Hureyra was occupied from 9500 BCE to 7500 BCE which makes it hard to say a flood wiped out the population in 8500 BCE.
Dear Bill,
So, when do you place the flood, or are you just being argumentative? Do newer sources more accurately place the flood at 7,500 BCE, is this what you are saying? Nothing that Bloom wrote conflicts with what I see written today, it only his interpretation of the research that you might not agree with - that it was local flooding that chased away the hunters and gave the farmers a chance to thrive.
Have you come across any research in an event that also wiped out the same area at the time of Sodom? Whatever happened scourched the earth for hundreds of square miles east of the dead sea. Some Akkadian records seem to indicate the area of Iraq between the river valley area and the Dead Sea was once so heavily forrested that it was hard to maneuver armies through that area without a lot of work first. How would we even prove today, the area was once a huge forest?
If the area between present day Turkey and India, and the whole of the Arabian peninsula was heavily forrested, would that not take some time to switch between livestock farming and a wider variety of plant farming? Obviously there was even more drastic climate change after that, and we are just left with a barren desert. The last form left would be nomadic shepherds. We know Forest can last thousands of years without human interaction. Has the possibility of massive forest ever been looked into?
I donât. Once you reduce to flood to a regional flood does it really matter which of the many local floods was the original source for the story?
What I have seen is Tell Abu Hureyra was initially occupied from 11,500 BP to 10,000 BP. There is evidence the site continued to be used and around 9,700 BP the population expanded and spread over the Middle East carrying cultivated cereal grains. This second occupation lasted until 7,000 BP. None of this agrees with Blum. If you want to pick a date and say âthat is when the flood happenedâ be my guest as you are defining what is considered to be âthe floodâ.
Since this appears to be a topic that is near and dear to your heart you might want to check out Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra by A. M. T. Moore as he appears to be the expert on this topic and it is less than 30 years old. Or do a Google Scholar search for AMT Moore to see what real research looks like.
Thank you Bill,
This topic is not ânear and dear to my heartâ. @pevaquark accused me of being unscientific and that there was no basis behind my posts. Many fields of science agree that flooding coinciding with the change from hunter gather to farming most likely dates Noahâs appearance. What is more interesting, is that the change from a hunter gather society was the advent of rich language and culture.
The appearance of farming occurred in many places around the globe at roughly the same time. Which would point to climate change IMHO. This is a pet peeve of mine. Agriculture did not appear exclusively in the ANE. Despite what many were taught in Sunday School. It was probably the source that spread to Europe but it is our Eurocentric view that makes it seem to be the only source.
They teach archeology in Sunday school? I guess I have missed the advent of culture being taught in church. I am getting too old. Maybe it is a denominational difference?
I did not go to Sunday school. I started studying history and philosophy after my second masters degree. The flood that came with climate change and the melting of the glacial ice gave the farming culture a chance, but that does not mean that the hunting culture completely died out. I call these two separate cultures makers vs takers in my paper A return to the high ethic of the Ionian Ideal. This is not Eurocentric, but a global view of the invading, slave keeping cultures versus the caring cultures of farming and animal husbandry. The flood gave the latter a chance to flourish, for a time.
What I said was the idea that agriculture only originated in the ANE and ignoring the rest of the globe was Eurocentric. In your paper did you address the rise of farming in China for instance?
The sea level rise in the Holocene was not âsuddenly 100mâ but was dramatic over longer periods of time. Your graph doesnât show anything about sea level change but most will look something like this:
This was a change of 100 meters over a period of 5-10 thousand years.
Your graph does not show a 2 degree increase in temperature between 10.5-8.5 kya. Hereâs another graph as well showing the same thing in no reconstruction of the temperature is there such a change in that timeframe:
I did, though perhaps the parts of your post that I was questioning was not clear. The timing of things and the specific numbers is my problem- not that there were no climate changes or sea level rises in recent history.
For example, grabbing a quote from Blum in his Figure 1:
Such a dramatic climate change also occurred around 9000 BC. when, within about 50 years, a global warming of about seven degrees Celsius took place, which led to the Flood around 8500 BCE.
I couldnât figure out what his source is for such a remarkable claim. But thankfully I was able to find something kind of like it, along with a review paper of Greenlandâs recent climate history from Richard Alley who is mentioned by Blum in his sources, though it was a good 4,000 years before Blumâs date:
There was an abrupt change over several decades for a change in the temperature of Greenland of about 7-8 degrees Celsius and occurred about 12,800 years ago. But none of the dates and many of the numbers are matching up which is a problem to me.
