Persian Gulf created by Biblical deluge?
Fireworks explode during the illumination of a giant Christmas tree at the launch of Christmas festivities in Beirut on Thursday
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 B.C., 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 said. 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 civilisations of West Asia, 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.”
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