Biblical deluge actually happened and created Persian Gulf: Study

TORONTO - The mythical deluge in the biblical story of Noah’s Ark could have be an actual event caused by unprecedented worldwide floods triggered in Canada in 6000 BC, says a new theory.

The present-day Persian Gulf was also the creation of that deluge, says the theory by University of Birmingham archeologist Jeffrey Rose.

According to the theory, Canada’s ancient super-sized Lake Agassiz - a remnant of which is today’s Lake Winnipeg - suddenly burst its banks 8,000 years ago, triggering worldwide deluge. The resulting rise of the Indian Ocean flooded a Great Britain-sized expanse of the Arabian peninsula that had previously been above water and was certainly inhabited by peoples for as long as 100 millennia, Rose told Canada’s Postmedia News.

The worldwide deluge created the present-day Persian Gulf and drowned shorelines around the Arabian peninsula, along the northeast coast of Africa and elsewhere around the world, the news agency quoted him as saying.

The deluge would have submerged key archeological evidence of the early evolution of human race, including its migration out of Africa and the cultural developments that led to the early civilizations of the Middle East, he said.

Rose said his theory has been boosted by recent archeological discoveries along the Persian Gulf coast which show advanced cultures with no apparent previous settlements to explain how they attained their level of cultural sophistication, according to the news agency. “These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world,” said Rose.

“Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well-developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago.

“These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean.”

Studies by Canadian geologist James Teller at the University of Manitoba, who has done reconstructions of the colossal drainage of Agassiz 8,000 years ago, show that this ancient supersized lake once covered most of central Canada and held a volume equivalent to 15 Lake Superiors.

Quoting Teller’s studies, Rose said, “There is now a critical mass of evidence to indicate that some significant flooding event greatly impacted an indigenous group that had been living within the (Persian Gulf) basin.

“Whether this was a gradual process over a few thousand years, or, as Teller suggested, happened relatively quickly due to a (meltwater outburst) in the North Atlantic at 8,200 years before present, is one of the questions to be addressed going forward.”

Rose’ study has been published in the current issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

(Gurmukh Singh can be contacted at gurmukh.s@ians.in)