In the school I was told that the biblical story of Deluge is directly based on the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, which includes a version of the Sumerian myth of Atra-Hasis a.k.a Ziusudra. Jewish priests had access to Babylonian archives in the time of Babylonian captivity and during the Persian rule. The flood of Ziusudra was a local flood in the Sumerian city Shuruppak radio carbon dated to 2,900 BC. Naturally, young as I was, I believed this (no wonder, it is correct in a way) and then I concluded that as this was a local flood and as the Sumerian culture did not disappear in 2,900 BC (it disappeared 2200 BC when the Gutians came from the north and destroyed the cities), the Bible must be mistaken in describing this as the end of one of the times (the 2000 year era before the law in the Jewish era model).
Well, that is wrong. The old world did end to the flood, or let us say to a drought (the 8.2 ky event in 6,200 BC) and to a series of floods between 6,000 BC and 3,000 BC. These floods occurred in the time the sea level was in the maximum, 1-3 meter above the present level in the Persian Gulf basis. The alluvial fans of Tigris and Euphrates were much smaller at that time and consequently the land was lower. Additionally, the pinch effect created by the growing Karun-Karkeh delta was still to come. Because of these reasons, the Gulf coastline looked very different in that time from what it is now and the local flood was quite serious. See:
http://www.archatlas.dept.shef.ac.uk/EnvironmentalChange/EnvironmentalChange.php
Figure 25 in this site shows how the coastline may have looked in the 4th millennium. Explained also in:
http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/171.pdf
Floods, even local ones, could isolate cities and in may well have been necessary to build a raft to take domestic animals to the main land. In later versions the raft become the Noah’s ark. The biblical stories describe history of Mesopotamia and Levant rather well, but what about the end of an era? It is because the Deluge is not only this one flood.
The biblical story retells elements of Ziusidra’s flood, but it also mentions heavy rains. These heavy monsoon rains stopped in the fifth millennium. There many floods. One large flood was in the city of Ur in the Ubaid period (before 3800 BC) before the Sumerian era. Yet the world that disappeared to the flood was not Sumer or Ubaid. It was the previous culture, Pre Pottery Neolithic of the Levant and Mesopotamia area (8500-5500 BC). It was a continuation of the Natufian culture and as Natufian remains have yielded Y-DNA haplogroup E1b1 derivants (+ CT) and mtDNA haplogroup N1b and J2a2 we can associate these people with North Africans. Sumerians were not the same people. They were a mixture of three populations, one from the north with grains and animals, the second group was herders, and the third was littoral fishers. Ubaid was a predecessor of Sumer, probably with a similar population. The Pre Pottery Neolithic was different, it was originally Levantine.
There is a hint to this in the Sumerian flood myths. In one version of Ziusudra’s flood story it is told that the reason for the flood was overpopulation and after the flood the people of Levant started sacrificing their own children. People of Levant, that is, not people of Sumer. The culture that faced this overpopulation problem was Levantine. That can only be Pre Pottery Neolithic (PPN). Probably PPN disappeared mainly because of the 8.2 ky event, that is several centuries long drought, but before the culture disappeared there were the monsoon rains, rising sea level and some of the floods.
So, some world ended, but we get the length of a biblical era as 6,000 years easily. (2000 y before the law, 2000 y of law, 2000 y of messianic time)
The traditional date for the Deluge is about 3,200 BC, which more or less agrees with Ziusudra’s flood in Shuruppak, but is a bit earlier. This is important, since it allows us to calculate the length of an era. According to the very plausible theory proposed by Jeffery Rose, the Paradise was lost 9,500 BC when the Gulf was filled by the sea. The time of the era, the length of one world, becomes roughly 6,000 years (9,500-3,200). Jews thought that the world exists for 6,000 years but they added one 1000 years for God, so their cycle had 7,000 years, but Sumerians always calculated in multiples of 6, so their era had to be 6,000 years.
How could Sumerians know when the Paradise was lost? The event is described with star constellations in the myth of the original sin in the Bible. It is probably described in a similar way in other myths. By 2,500 BC Sumerian astrologers may have been able calculate the times of these events, but it is almost certain that Assyrian astrologers could do it around 1,500 BC. They could calculate one other important time: the time when Deneb was the Polar star, i.e., 16,000 BC. Deneb is the head of the Swan and it is between the legs of the Milky Way. In Finnish mythology the Milky Way is the sky woman, who is swimming in the sea and a bird (the Swan) lands on the hip of the sky woman, who gives birth to the universe. In the Bible the corresponding myth is Adam and Eve around the Tree of Life. Assuming that the time when Deneb was the Polar star is taken as the time when the creator god started his work, we again get about 6,000 years as the era when the world was created, that is, from 16,000 BC to 10,000 BC. The Paradise is lost soon after that time in 9,500 BC and men have to start agriculture. The old agricultural world was lost in the flood around 3,500 BC.
Assyrian astrologers could calculate these times around 1,500 BC, maybe Sumerians could do it a thousand years earlier. The times imply that the creation took six god’s days, that is, 6,000 years, and one world lasts for 6,000 years. One world was destroyed by the flood. The Bible refers also to another earlier world that was destroyed by fire. It could (if we want to be kind to the old wise men) mean the Ice age world from 16,000 BC to 10,000 BC, which was destroyed by global warming (well, fire destroys ice, how could they know it was not fire? Zoroastrans tell of Ice instead of a flood).
As can be see, the theory of world times was quite scientific, the creation of the best minds of that time working with the best empirical evidence, that is, looking at history, gazing stars and calculating. As usually is the case, also this time science was wrong.
There is an old mystery of lizard men from the Ubaid period:
They are terracotta statues of human-looking creatures which have the head of a snake.
Nobody seems to know why the woman and the child have a head of a snake. I do not know it either, but let us remember that many myths describe stars. Sumerians were the first astrologers who developed the Zodiac and noticed the planets. Before that time most myths of stars relate to the Polar star. Thuban in the constellation Draco was closest to the heavenly North Pole in 2,700 BC meaning that it could be used as the Polar star from 3,700 BC to 1,700 BC. The earlier date is just a bit after the Ubaid period ended. Draco was the closest star constellation to the North Pole a long time before Thuban become the Pole star. It is possible that the Ubaid people worshiped Draco as the ruler of the sky.
Let us return to the end of the Pre Pottery Neolithic world. It reminded me of the similar collapses of early agricultural societies in Europe as told by the article:
I found it very mysterious that the diversity of male-only Y-DNA reduced sharply, but the diversity of female inherited mtDNA was not reduced, indeed, it grew. In the end of the following article there are figures, one shows the diversities of Y-DNA and mtDNA and a drastic drop in Y-DNA after agriculture already has started. It is not the bottleneck of hunter-gatherers caused by the last maximum of the Ice age.
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.full.pdf
I could not solve this mystery for some time, but then I read an article by Lance Welton from The Unz Review which I have recently followed:
http://www.unz.com/article/are-atheists-genetic-mutants-a-product-of-recent-evolution/
The article explained a paper by Edward Dutton et al. That paper was so race realist political (as too much of that site is) that I do not want to refer to it, but in that paper there was a link to an article on mice, the collapse of a mice utopia by John B. Calhoun. This paper, an old favorite of Neo-Malthuseans, may be interesting in the present context
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/procrsmed00338-0007.pdf
Though Dutton, Calhoun and Welton imply that the mouse experiment is relevant for our time, I think it is much more relevant to the collapse of the early Neolithic.
Calhoun does not explain the collapse of the mice utopia with mutant genes, his explanation is that the mice lacked social roles. Dutton et al suggest the reason is mutational load and they apply it to our time. I think Calhoun may be correct in what happened to the mice, but a mutational load might explain the Neolithic time collapse. There are always deleterious mutations but usually they are purged out of the population. The mutational load stabilizes on some value, but if the effective size of the male or the female population decreases below a certain threshold, then the purging mechanism does not suffice to remove bad genes. They start to accumulate and finally the population collapses.
If the fertility between lineages varies a lot it can lead to a situation where the effective size of the male population is very small: a small number of males have sired most of the population. This may have been the situation with the mice, but there is no data to support this assumption. It may also have been the situation in early Neolithic societies and now we have data to support it: the diversity of the Y-DNA decreased dramatically.
(Notice that in the Bible many people have problems getting children, in the time of the Patriarchs fertility was a problem, it suggests high mutational load.)
Data suggests the situation where very few men had access to all women. Now we come to the Sumerian myth: as a response to the flood, which was caused by overpopulation, the people of Levant started sacrificing their children. From the Bible we know that they sacrificed the firstborn son. Killing sons is a very poor way of combating overpopulation as one man can fertilize a large number of women. Killing daughters was what Eskimo did in the environment where food was scarce, but Levantine people sacrificed firstborn sons. The emphasis must be in firstborn. The firstborn son inherits the father in a patriarchal society. Removing the firstborn son creates a competition between younger brothers and even other males. This competition selects a capable male and removes the risk of mutational load.
I conclude that these early Neolithic societies practiced polygamy and accumulated possessions allowing some males to get access to all or most females. If the strong man was allowed to give his inheritance to the firstborn son, there was no competition and in some hundred years deleterious genes accumulated in the population and it collapsed. In order to prevent that from happening, the Levantine people introduced the sacrifice rule. European people adopted monogamy. (You could just change the inheritance law, but there was no law. Killing the firstborn was the surest way.)
That may explain the strange practice of sacrificing firstborn sons. The crucifixion of Jesus was a direct result of this practice, as prophesies were based on a religion which had this command. We can also conclude that the worship of El by Levantine people was a consequence of the collapse of the Pre Pottery Neolithic culture: El is a Semitic god corresponding to the Greek god Kronos, who was eating his children in order to prevent that he be thrown out of the throne. Zeus finally killed his father. For Greeks Kronos was a Titan, but also the ruler of the cosmos and the god of time.
Time was divided in eras, as we remember. Kronos ate his children in order to prevent the end of the era. The flood was the end of the era. Levantine people sacrificed their firstborn sons in order to prevent the end of the era, which meant the death of their population. It can very well be argued that the religion, which later developed Judaism, Christianity and Islam (all believing in the end of the times) was a result of the collapse of the Pre Pottery Neolithic.