“This story also raises other questions for scientists. For instance, Noah was 600 years old when the deluge occurred. We know humans don’t live that long.
Furthermore, it’s unclear how every animal could have reached the ark—imagine penguins staggering from Antarctica to the Middle East,” the researchers explained.
According to historical documents, Noah’s flood retells older stories and is likely an allegory rather than a literal account of an event.
Ira Spar, a professor of ancient studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, suggests that the Old Testament stories, written between 800 BCE and 500 BCE, likely originated from older oral traditions and various sources.
There are slightly different accounts of the Noah’s flood story in other religions, such as the Qur’an, while the earliest versions of flood disasters come from ancient Mesopotamian texts.
Spar notes that there is a recorded Sumerian flood story in fragments dating back to the late third millennium BCE.
“Who knows how far back the story goes?” Spar said.
If we consider the sources of Noah’s flood as a regional flood rather than a global one, it becomes more plausible. Montgomery explains that some geologically plausible floods could have occurred, inspiring the narrative.
For example, in the late 1990s, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, marine scientists William Ryan and Walter Pitman hypothesized that around 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea began flowing into the isolated Black Sea, causing a massive flood in the vicinity.
This event could have resulted in a significant flood around the Black Sea region, which might be the origin of the Noah’s flood.
“It would have been a disruptive event that flooded the entire known world to the people living there, and it could have evolved into the story of Noah’s flood with a few survivors escaping to Mesopotamia,” Montgomery said.
A 2009 study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews argued that if it did indeed occur, the flood would have been much smaller than what Ryan and Pitman estimated.
