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A Lost Civilization Beneath the Persian Gulf?
Phoghat sends news of a new theory that a once-fertile landmass beneath the Persian Gulf may have supported some of the earliest humans outside of Africa. "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."
Here's a link to the abstract just to nip all this 3rd and 4th hand speculation about flood myths and Atlantis: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/657397
It's great for bringing public attention but not so great for highlighting the actual science behind the pop sci article.
No matter how you try to spin it, the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans trace back to "ONE" female.
To say we all descend from ONE woman does not mean she was the ONLY woman on earth at the time.
Look at it this way: all my brothers, sisters, and cousins descend from my grandmother. But we have TWO grandmothers. Capisce?
The oldest languages around the Persian Gulf are not Semitic. The oldest language that can be attested are Sumerian and Elamite, which are both isolates, with know perceivable connection to any other spoken language. The Akkadians and other Semitic tribes were later invaders that seized Sumer, though they largely retained the Sumerian religion and the language as a sort of liturgical language (much like Latin was to become after the fall of Rome). No one can be quite certain where the Semitic languages arose, though the parent Afro-Asiatic family appears to come East Africa, and the Semitic languages may have arisen in the Arabian Peninsula.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The oldest languages around the Persian Gulf are Semitic, so it's unlikely the forerunners of the Indo-Europeans lived in the hypothetical valley now sitting under the waves.
The Sumerians, the Hurrians and the Elamites want to have a word with you. (None of their languages were remotely Indo-European, but they weren't Semitic, either.)
Citation please. Seriously. This would be very useful these days.
"Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lemaitre.ogg (helpinfo) July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, honorary prelate, professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic University of Louvain. He sometimes used the title Abbé or Monseigneur. Lemaître was the first scientist to propose what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaitre
"The Big Bang is a scientific theory, and as such is dependent on its agreement with observations. But as a theory which addresses the origins of reality, it has always carried theological and philosophical implications. In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state Universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang
It refers to a goddess named Nuwa: It sounds like just cherry-picking of selected elements that are convenient. The Chinese myth of Nuwa seems superficially similar in pronunciation to Noah, but the myth is nothing like Noah. For one thing, Nuwa is a woman, not a man, and is a creator-deity, which is expressly counter to Christian theology.
Chinese mythology does have some myths about floods, but they involve the Yellow Emperor teaching the commoners irrigation and flood control (of the Yellow River, not the sea) in order to bring about the creation of civilization.
Christian creationists like to mix and match selected similar elements from myths, ignoring the rest, and use that as reason to support the "fact" of the Great Flood. At best this is ignorant, and at worse sheer dishonesty.