The Great Flood of 9,700 BC

Every culture around the world has a Great Deluge or Great Flood tale.

For the Europeans, it was Noah’s Flood and for the Hindus, it was the manvantara-sandhya. The Mesopotamians have their own flood stories that are very similar to the Native Americans in North America’s recounting of a Great Flood. There is also the Gilgamesh flood myth recounted in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek mythology. In short, every single culture around the world has a Great Flood myth, and for good reason.

IT’S NOT A MYTH.

There actually was a Great Deluge that happened long long ago–11,700 years ago, to be precise. We know this date because this was the time when the last glacial period (ice age) ended around 9,700 BC, that is, 11,700 years ago.

With the warming of the Earth, a huge sheet of ice called the Laurentide Ice Sheet that covered a large portion of North America melted and released all its water into the ocean, causing a sudden and catastrophic rise in global sea level of water in the oceans.

Laurentide Ice Sheet

You have to understand, this was not just a paltry bit of ice. The Laurentide ice sheet was almost three kilometers (two miles) thick and covered North America from the Canadian Arctic all the way to the modern U.S. state of Missouri. For scale, and to put this into perspective, the Empire State Building is barely 1,454 feet (443 meters)! Where the Empire State Building now stands, the ice would have towered over it. (Fig. 1)

That Great Flood affected everyone alive on Earth at that time, not just Noah and his cohorts. It wiped out a huge number of humans. I wrote about it in one of my posts Ancient Viet 02: Sunken Paradise where I talked specifically about how it affected the ancient Viets and the drowning of Sundaland.

Professor Chris Turney of the University of Exeter stated that: “Entire coastal communities must have been displaced, forcing people to migrate in their thousands. As these agricultural communities moved west, they would have taken farming with them…It was a revolutionary time.” (2)

He was commenting on the flooding that happened in Europe, but remember, this ice sheet was located in North America, and it affected everyone across the globe. Sea levels rose 1.4 meters.

I use a different measuring system so didn’t exactly know how much of a rise that was. It could have been ankle deep or over my head. I didn’t have a grasp of exactly how high that was, so I used my go-to handy dandy Google conversion app.

As it turns out, 1.4 meters is around 4.6 feet. Since I’m 5’2″ and not a dwarf, my head would still be above water if I’m standing on terra firma. Of course, this assumes that all the turmoil of rushing waves would have subsided and I would simply be standing in still water. In a tsunami-like situation, I would also be fish food.

This does not mean that I could remain on land that has been inundated with sea water. Nothing could grow there but seaweed, and although I truly love nori (Koreans call it gim) we can’t survive on laver alone.

Life must have been harrowing and desperate for the survivors who would have lost everything and needed to scramble towards higher ground to find subsistence. Something this traumatic would reverberate for a very long time within the psyche and genetics of the people who managed to survive.

Genetic Memory

This is called, appropriately, Genetic Memory, as explained by Dr. Darold Treffert in one of his papers published in Scientific American. He stated that: “To explain the savant, who has innate access to the vast syntax and rules of art, mathematics, music and even language, in the absence of any formal training and in the presence of major disability, “genetic memory,”…must exist along with the more commonly recognized cognitive/semantic and procedural/habit memory circuits.”

Yet another researcher, Dr. Wilder Penfield, also referred to three types of memory. In his book Mystery of the Mind, he stated that: “Animals, particularly show evidence of what might be called racial memory” (aka genetic memory).

I touched upon this idea in one of my previous posts, Human CCC Part 1: On the Confluence of Crows and Monkeys, where I zeroed in on genetic memories of a couple of very intelligent animals who coexist with us on this planet.

Dr. Penfield also listed the second type of memory as a “conditioned reflexes” and a third type as “experiential”. These types are more inline with what I would consider to be “habit or procedural” memory and “cognitive or semantic” memory, as opposed to something that an ancestor has gifted to one or more of its descendants.

Even Dr. Carl Jung used the term “collective unconscious” to define his even broader concept of inherited traits, intuitions and collective wisdom of the past. He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world. This brings me to the next point regarding genetic memory and the Great Flood of 9,700 BC.

We were all there when it happened.

(To Be Continued)

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