Mitch, My view has been out there for about 20 years in print. My view is too complicated for here, it gets into too many topics. But Mitch, my desire not to debate it here doesn’t change the facts that Mesopotamia dips south, all the water flows south, and there are no widespread flood deposits that covered much more than the flood basins of those rivers (a geologic term). If all we want is cheap and simple for apologetics that sound good on the surface but that make no sense (regardless of whether my view satisifes or not) ,then Mesopotamia or the Black Sea will work just fine.
I really don’t have the energy to debate the details of this. Suffice it to say floods leave geologic evidence of themselves. Any flood that could last a year has to be a very unusual event. My view requires one thing, that Mankind is very very old. By mankind I mean having the image of God. Most people won’t like the time frame, but I said earlier to Jay, modern genetics has ruled out a single pair of humans for the time period people are looking to find Adam and Eve. But what if they were older? Art: earliest hominid manufactured art was found by Mary Leakey dated 1.6 myr ago and appears to be a baboons face. the earliest art recognized by a hominid, goes back 3.2 million years, the Makapansgat pebble, which was carried a km or so away to a cave and it is an australopithecine face on that pebble, and evidence of speech and evidence of religion goes back at least 750,000 years ago but probably go back further because of the use of perishable material. Language is a prerequisite for religion because one must have religious concepts first.
Hominids were making stone tools that required days of planning (traveling to quarries, making the tools and then going back where they came) as long ago as 1.5 million years.
“Only slightly later (1.5mya) we find Acheulian assemblages with sharp and retouched flakes and a greater proportion of bifaced (>40%) shaped into tools of distinct form, almond shaped hand axes or transverse edged cleavers. These tend to be larger, better balanced and more symmetrical than pebble tools, and are more regularly flaked over a greater proportion of the surface. They are often made by retouching large flakes, or struck from large boulders, so that one side is flatter than the other. Materials are carefully chosen for specific tools and transported to a factory: at Gadeb in Ethiopia obsidian used for hand axes has been transported from 100km away."Dr. D. R. Johnson, "Lower and Middle Pleistocene - Homo erectus and Homo sapiens”
http://saturnus.tvi.is/skolanet/Kennsluefni/LIF/Itarefni/Throun/Homo%20erectus%20og%20Homo%20sapiens(e).htm
Earliest ocean crossing requiring a boat 700,000 years ago: Crossing the ocean has apparently been accomplished by man and his ancient, archaic ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years. Ancient man was on Flores, an island in the Indonesian archipelago, at least 700,000 years ago. see P.Y. Sondaar, et al., "Middle Pleistocene faunal turnover and Colonization of Flores (Indonesia) by Homo erectus," Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences. Paris 319:1255-1262.
To get to Flores, mankind must have been able to build a boat because even at the lowest sealevels of the glacial ages, Flores required an ocean voyage. Flores also was never connected to the Asian mainland during low sealevel stands. Indeed it required the crossing of at least 2 straits. Plus cross currents going through those straits take everything straight out to sea away from land. They had to be able to steer.
Flores is the island where the ‘hobbits’ were found and many say they were descended from Homo erectus and were short because of island dwarfism, a well known evolutionary process.
No apologetical account of human history takes the above facts into consideration. Someone engaging in religion simply has to be human in the sense of having the image of God, but mespotamian floods and late Adam and Eve stories ignore these important details. You want my flood story, here it is published in 1997 but also in a book that is now out there in the public domain. No one likes the view because of the antiquity of the events. But I will guarantee you my flood view matches what Scripture says in detail. The events described in my paper happened JUST AFTER the first appearance of hominids on planet earth. But Mitch, you will have to go to a link, something you refused to do earlier. The Mediterranean FloodŸ Glenn R