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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 archaeologist 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 archaeological 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 archaeological
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)
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