Diving Into Noah's Flood

A new National Geographic documentary featuring Jeffrey Rose and the Gulf Oasis hypothesis. I wish that Noah would be left out of it -he was also featured in a recent talk about the flooding of the Black Sea- but I understand how invoking a well-known biblical figure is not bad for publicity, and if it's the hook that will get people to watch a program about cutting-edge archaeology, why should we complain?

I wasn't able to find a full page on the documentary, but here's a description from NatGeo:

Diving into Noah's Flood
Archaeologist Jeff Rose embarks on a journey to understand how the destructive forces of water might have inspired the biblical story of Noahs Ark and the great flood. Dr. Rose believes that a massive flood once swallowed a landmass as big as Great Britain, created the Persian Gulf and sent tribes of Neolithic people into constant retreat from the ever-rising waters.

You can probably find the program online if you missed its broadcast, or you can check National Geographic channel for airdates. I'll update this entry with any noteworthy information from the documentary.

Trailer:



UPDATE: In a sense, this is the antithesis of the Black Sea Flood theory as inspiration of the Gilgamesh Flood and later Biblical Flood story, in that it has people moving south-to-north, staying close to freshwater sources created by the river that once flowed in the Gulf, as the Indian Ocean rose and saltwater claimed land after land of the Gulf Oasis.

Another interesting lesson from the documentary is just how hard underwater archaeology actually is. In the earlier Black Sea talk (linked above), it was shown that thousands of years of sediments have covered most traces of any human habitation that may have existed along the pre-Flood coastline, dead organisms dropping to the sea floor like snow.

In the new NatGeo documentary it was shown how many false positives archaeologists have to contend with: things that look anomalous on the bottom of the sea often tend to be man-made, but not necessarily from the period in question; people have been dumping stuff on the sea for quite a long time.

The documentary also shows the precarious manner in which archaeologists have to work in Iraq, as the documentary host and his local contact visit various Ubaid and Sumerian sites, as well as pay a visit to the Marsh Arabs.

So, what's my opinion of the overall theory? The ideas of the Gulf Oasis theory seem plausible, and the idea that the earliest flood myth in Mesopotamia may have been related to the flooding of the Gulf seems much more plausible than the idea that it may have been related to the inundation of the Black Sea.

I am not so willing to believe, however, that people from the north played no role in the formation of the Ubaid and then the early Sumerian civilization. As I explain in the Womb of Nations, there are good arguments why most West Eurasians share relatively recent common ancestry from the northern tip of the Fertile Crescent. That does not preclude the absorption of Gulf Oasis denizens, indeed of a great number of them, depending on how close genetically they were with the proto-agriculturalists to begin with, but some substantial role must be maintained for the latter: the emergence of Ubaid/Sumerian culture cannot simply have been a local development.

Perhaps a case can be made that some of the languages of the Gulf were the descendants of the languages spoken in the Gulf Oasis. Sumerian and Elamite are the obvious candidates, although the two are not related to each other.

The advancement of the sea may have pushed Gulf Oasis denizens northward, eastward, and westward, into Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Iran, but the later gradual expansion of the land by fluvial depositions of sediments by the Tigris and Euphrates provided the added land and irrigation to motivate people to move southward. So, it is perhaps through a blending of cultures that the Proto-Sumerian civilization was born: a marsh-adapted southern element, and an agriculture-bearing northern element joining to exploit the harsh but profitable environment that was formed as a result of these two processes.

Y-chromosomes of Marsh Arabs

What do the Marsh Arabs have to do with ancient Sumer? Nothing that can be determined on the basis of this data. There are plenty of ancient Sumerian skulls, so how about we study them directly?

As far as I can see, the only link between Marsh Arabs and Sumerians presented in this paper comes from dating Y-STR variation of their major J1-Page08 group using the evolutionary mutation rate, with a divergence time of 4.5 +/- 2.6 ky. Even if that mutation rate was correct (it is not) and the assumptions on which the confidence interval are based were exhaustive (they are not), we still have +/- 2.6 ky leeway to deal with, which spans not only the Sumerians but plenty more besides.

Not to mention that the evolutionary mutation rate is wrongly applied to every case under the sun, and that Y-STR based age estimation in general has been conclusively shown to be a rather futile exercise.

Nonetheless, the paper does have value in demonstrating the paucity of J2 and R1 in the Marsh Arabs compared to the more cosmopolitan general Iraqi population:

Different from the Iraqi control sample, the Marsh Arab gene pool displays a very scarce input from the northern Middle East (Hgs J2-M172 and derivatives, G-M201 and E-M123), virtually lacks western Eurasian (Hgs R1-M17, R1-M412 and R1-L23) and sub-Saharan African (Hg E-M2) contributions.

Rather than "Sumerian", it seems that the Marsh Arabs have rather preserved a more pristine Semitic patrilineal gene pool compared to the cosmopolitan Iraqi samples that have absorbed pre-Arab and pre-Semitic population elements.

BMC Evolutionary Biology 2011, 11:288doi:10.1186/1471-2148-11-288

In search of the genetic footprints of Sumerians: a survey of Y-chromosome and mtDNA variation in the Marsh Arabs of Iraq.

Nadia Al-Zahery et al.

Abstract (provisional)

Background
For millennia, the southern part of the Mesopotamia has been a wetland region generated by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers before flowing into the Gulf. This area has been occupied by human communities since ancient times and the present-day inhabitants, the Marsh Arabs, are considered the population with the strongest link to ancient Sumerians. Popular tradition, however, considers the Marsh Arabs as a foreign group, of unknown origin, which arrived in the marshlands when the rearing of water buffalo was introduced to the region.

Results
To shed some light on the paternal and maternal origin of this population, Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation was surveyed in 143 Marsh Arabs and in a large sample of Iraqi controls. Analyses of the haplogroups and sub-haplogroups observed in the Marsh Arabs revealed a prevalent autochthonous Middle Eastern component for both male and female gene pools, with weak South-West Asian and African contributions, more evident in mtDNA. A higher male than female homogeneity is characteristic of the Marsh Arab gene pool, likely due to a strong male genetic drift determined by socio-cultural factors (patrilocality, polygamy, unequal male and female migration rates).

Conclusions
Evidence of genetic stratification ascribable to the Sumerian development was provided by the Y-chromosome data where the J1-Page08 branch reveals a local expansion, almost contemporary with the Sumerian City State period that characterized Southern Mesopotamia. On the other hand, a more ancient background shared with to Northern Mesopotamia is revealed by the less represented Y-chromosome lineage J1-M267*. Overall our results indicate that the introduction of water buffalo breeding and rice farming, most likely from the Indian sub-continent, only marginally affected the gene pool of autochthonous people of the region. Furthermore, a prevalent Middle Eastern ancestry of the modern population of the marshes of southern Iraq implies that if the Marsh Arabs are descendants of the ancient Sumerians, also the Sumerians were most likely autochthonous and not of Indian or South Asian ancestry.

Link