Are there any remains/fossils after Noah's flood?

Upvote:0

Okay, I feel like I need to take a second for a PSA.

This is a controversial topic for which multiple perspectives and ardent disagreements exist. Anyone presenting a perspective as if it is irrefutable fact is being dishonest. Doubly so if they refuse to disclose their perspective.

This answer is according to a YEC interpretation of available evidence. For the sake of readability, I'm not going to fill it with weasel words. See the above paragraph, and keep in mind that Naturalists (whose religion is based on denying that God exists and denying that miracles can occur) have a different perspective.

If you consider yourself "Christian", you might want to seriously consider which perspective you prefer; one which prefers the Word of God and is forthright about their dogmas, or one which refuses to acknowledge their dogmas or problems with their interpretations, prefers to attack straw men rather than addressing their actual opponents, and necessarily denies Christ (the Resurrection was a miracle, after all). Even if you aren't Christian, how much do you trust a group that willfully engages in the Holmesian Fallacy?

Christians are also encouraged to consider Romans 1:18-24 and 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12.

End PSA.


You asked:

Are there any human (considerable account) & animal fossils/remains that proves/suggests the occurrence of a worldwide flood. (Flood which occurred at Noah's time should have created fossils, because such catastrophic events lead to creation/preservation of fossils.)

Well... yes and no.

Most fossils are the result of the flood. There are, in fact, various evidences that most fossils were laid down in a single, cataclysmic event, and not over great time periods as alleged by Uniformitarians. Some of these evidences include vast fields of fossils showing consistent orientation (which would be implausible if fossilization was a local occurrence), fossils in unlikely places, fossils that span "geological strata", unlikely mixtures of species, and even the distribution of species within the fossil record (in particular, less motile species, which would have been unable to flee from rising floodwaters, "at the bottom"). These evidences point toward a global cataclysm that significantly changed the shape of the Earth's crust (i.e. mountains, canyons), deposited many rock strata (that is, many distinct layers up to depths of several meters or more) during a short time period, and in at least some cases arose from large areas (i.e. significant fractions of continents) being concurrently underwater.

At the same time, there are far, far fewer fossils of motile animals, particularly birds and mammals (including humans), than there are of plants and invertebrates.

Fossilization requires rather unusual circumstances, as under normal conditions, scavengers and other activities tend to destroy corpses (even the bones), preventing fossilization. Even without this action, dead animals tend to float, making it difficult for their corpses to become fossilized. There seems to be disagreement whether what animal (and human) fossils we do have were deposited in the Flood, or during a subsequent ice age.

We should also keep in mind that the point of the Flood was to destroy the wicked people of the time. God Himself tells us he will (would) "blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land" (Genesis 6:7). While we should keep in mind this isn't unequivocally saying God did destroy all evidence of former humans (both their bodies and their artifacts), it may be that He did indeed do so.

In any case, there is a significant amount of material available on the subject; more than can reasonably be condensed into this answer. Even limiting ourselves to fossils (and not general evidence for the Flood), here are just a few articles to start digging deeper:

Upvote:2

Are there any remains/fossils after Noah's flood?

Many believe that such discoveries exist.

But the big question here is how to interpret the physical and biological finds. That is the biggest obstacle!

One example is how to explain why there are fish fossils near the top of Mt. Everest. Was it a caused by some sort of universal flood or simply by the creation of two continents forming the Himalayan mountains.

The mighty Himalayas, also known as ‘The Roof of the World’, rise up to an incredible height, disappearing into the clouds on some days. Some of the world’s highest peaks are in the Himalayas, including Mount Everest, which at 29,029 feet is the highest mountain in the world. At these altitudes, the air is thin, and the temperatures are extreme. The land is arid and brown, and it looks like it’s been this way since the beginning of time. These mighty mountains are hundreds of miles away from the closest sea. So how is it possible that marine fossils have been found in multiple locations in the Himalayas? -Why Are There Fish Fossils High Up In The Himalayas?

There are a few marine archaeologists that believe they have found the first evidence of a people who perished in a great flood of the Black Sea that has been linked with the story of Noah's ark.

Marine archaeologists have found the first evidence of a people who perished in a great flood of the Black Sea that has been linked with the story of Noah's ark.

Using robot underwater vehicles more than 300ft below the sea's surface, they have begun to map a rolling landscape, fed by meandering streams and marked with wattle and daub houses, that was flooded more than 7,000 years ago.

The discovery was announced yesterday by Robert Ballard, the scientist who discovered the wrecked Titanic.

The Black Sea was once a freshwater lake, well below sea level. About 7,000 years ago, according to geological evidence, the rising Mediterranean sea pushed a channel through what is now the Bosphorus, and then seawater poured in at about 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. The Black Sea would have widened at the rate of a mile a day, submerging the original shoreline under hundreds of feet of salty water.

Nearly 100,000 square miles were inundated. Sea shells on the beaches of the modern Black Sea are of marine origin, but deep below the surface there are layers of shells of freshwater molluscs, mute witnesses to the shoreline of the ancient lake.

There are many myths concerning a great flood in the region. There was a first mention in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian work. The Romans and Greeks had the legend of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who saved their children and animals by floating away in a giant box. The Hebrew book of Genesis most famously tells the story of Noah, who found grace in the eyes of the Lord, when all around him were wicked. Noah was warned of a forthcoming flood, and built a huge "ark" to hold his family and all the animals in pairs. Noah survived when all perished. Tradition has it that his ark came to rest on the slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey.

Dr Ballard began exploring the Black Sea in the Hull registered ship Northern Horizon, and used side-scanning sonar to look for interesting shapes on the seabed over a 200-sq-mile area, 12 miles off the Turkish coast, near Sinop.

The instruments detected "targets" worth a closer look, so video cameras mounted on underwater robot submarines were put to use. "We found two ancient ships last night," said Dr Ballard speaking by phone from his research vessel yesterday. "What we were trying to do in our wildest dreams - which is exactly what happened - was find a structure that was evidence, not a sunken ship, not trash and not geology, but characteristic of human habitation."

They found it. Above an area submerged too deeply for human divers, the sonar instruments revealed details of the landscape. On September 9 they sent robot scouts down to objects which looked like beams and branches, debris that might have been the stiffening for wattle and daub homes.

They found a rectangular area up to 12ft by 25 ft, over which an ancient mud and wooden house had collapsed, and they found tools of highly polished stone, together with fragments of ceramics.

"What we are looking at is a culture that is definitely thousands of years old," said Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was also on the ship. "The flood is an event that is geologically known, and for us to find a structure in 150 metres of water means that these people were definitely living there before it flooded, so it is pre-Greek. It is a different world and it deserves a great deal of attention and years of study to help us truly identify who these people were." - Evidence found of Noah's ark flood victims

As for myself, I find it amazing that that every culture on earth has some sort of deluge myth, including the Eskimos of the great north.

Does every culture have some sort of deluge myth? Possibly, but it is impossible to say for sure. Major culture systems are a different matter. For example, if we combine all North American Indian cultures together, there are definitely some deluge myths, where as it would be hard to say for sure if exactly every single Native Tribe believed this specific myth or not.

Flood stories pervade hundreds of cultures and there are striking similarities to many of the accounts. It seems that at least some of these stories could be based upon actual events. Geologists have proposed the possibility of a great flood in the Middle East at the end of the last Ice Age, which was about 7,000 years ago. At that time, the Black Sea was a freshwater lake surrounded by farmlands.

The story of a universal flood can be found in cultures on every continent including the Pacific Islands. Surely that proves nothing, but I find it very relevant to this subject matter.

A particular interesting point I find is that modern humans coexisted with woolly mammoths during the Upper Palaeolithic period when the humans entered Europe from Africa between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. Yet this beast was well suited for cold and yet is now extinct.

The woolly mammoth is the third-most depicted animal in ice-age art, after horses and bison, and these images were produced between 35,000 and 11,500 years ago. Today, more than 500 depictions of woolly mammoths are known, in media ranging from cave paintings and engravings on the walls of 46 caves in Russia, France, and Spain to engravings and sculptures (termed "portable art") made from ivory, antler, stone and bone. Cave paintings of woolly mammoths exist in several styles and sizes. The French Rouffignac Cave has the most depictions, 159, and some of the drawings are more than 2 metres (6.6 ft) in length. Other notable caves with mammoth depictions are the Chauvet Cave, Les Combarelles Cave, and Font-de-Gaume. A depiction in the Cave of El Castillo may instead show Palaeoloxodon, the "straight-tusked elephant". - Woolly Mammoth

I can find no favourable reasons for their extinction other than some sort of global flood. Like I said it is in how we interpret the the physical findings.

The following may be of interest also:

Upvote:2

No.

  • A flood covering the land to a height higher than the Mt. Ararat is not possible. The amount of water on earth is by far not sufficient to have such phenomenon, even if all ice melted (and it is scientifically proven that it didn't) and all water in the atmosphere was on the land (which would contradict the telling of the Bible, saying that it rained heavily) (⇗Total amount of water on earth).
  • A flood at that time need not necessarily leave fossils but for sure sediments. No uniform trace of sediments around the world,going back to the time in question has been found.
  • It would not have been possible to have all animals and plants of the world in a large ship (compare weight of DNA). A worldwide catastrophy of the described extent would have led to the extinction of most land animals and plants. This has not been the case since men exist.

It is quite likely and possible that a great flood came over the flat land of Sumer, which is today's Iraq. This could have happened with an extraordinary long and intense monsoon coming until there (it would usually not go much further north than to Oman).

The flood is also described in the Atrahasis Epos, around 2000 years before Moses, as a myth or saga placed in the polytheistic context of the religion of that time and region*.

I understand the background of your question as to decide whether the report in Genesis may be revealed and true or rather related in humanity and retold as a myth, parting from the Jewish monotheistic religion.

From all we know from science, the latter is true. The thesis that the Torah is entirely revealed to Moishe cannot be upheld. It is a multi-source writing, containing prophetic and non-prophetic traditions.

*Side remark: also the Atrahasis Epos describes Atrahasis=Noah as a monotheist, prophet and warner.

Upvote:5

This is such a big subject, you really need to read a book about it. All I can do in a short answer is to point you to one which deals with that question, and many more, all related to a global flood catastrophe. This particular book is a revised edition of 1994 and I will stick to chapter 3, headed, The Effects of the Flood are Visible Today, sticking also to the sub-heading, 'The Formation of Fossil Beds'.

First, he points out that large-scale fossilization is not occurring anywhere in the world today. Very few creatures die in circumstances conducive to fossilization. Fish don't sink to the bottom and fossilize. They either decompose or get eaten. Then the author quotes this geologist:

"The buffalo carcasses strewn over the plains in uncounted millions two generations ago have left hardly a present trace. The flesh was devoured by wolves or vultures within hours or days after death, and even the skeletons have now largely disappeared, the bones dissolving and crumbling into dust under the attack of the weather." (Carl O. Dunbar, Historical Geology, New York:Wiley & Sons, 1949, p.36)

The book then states:

"In contrast to the lack of fossilization going on in the world today, consider the almost unbelievable amount of fossilization that has occurred in the past ...Nothing could be more obvious than the fact that billions of fossils of crustaceans, fishes, land animals, and plants, many of them almost perfectly preserved in huge sedimentary deposits, could not have been buried by processes observable in the world today." (John C. Whitcomb, The World That Perished, p.76)

With regard to mammoths, it has been estimated that there may be remains of 5 million of them along the coastline of northern Siberia and Alaska, and that they were suddenly frozen and buried not many thousands of years ago. They began to be discovered during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Tsarist governments exhumed a few and brought them to St. Petersburg, providing sensational evidence of Siberia having had a temperate or subtropical climate. Amazingly, the further north a person goes, the more numerous become the mammoth bones and tusks. Note, too, that mammoths lacked the oil-producing glands in their skin that would have enabled them to live in cold climates.

It is stated that only a catastrophe of the proportions described in Genesis 6-9 could have suddenly destroyed these vast numbers of large animals, then freezing them. The contents of their stomachs were still intact, you see. The picture then becomes one of animals peacefully grazing in summer when suddenly, within half an hour of ingestion, the temperature plunged to about minus 150 degrees F., causing freezing death in summer. The Beresovka mammoth was found in that state, never to completely thaw until he fell out of a river bank in 1901. A prominent field zoologist who spent many years studying these phenomena, had attempted at first to explain the mass destruction of Arctic mammoths in non-catastrophic terms. But a special study of the Beresovka mammoth cause his position to be almost completely reversed. (Ivan T. Sanderson, 'Riddle of the Frozen Giants', Saturday Evening Post Jan. 16th 1960, p 82.)

Whitcomb's book (which includes that quote above) also says:

"In Lincoln County, Wyoming, almost perfect speciments of fish, turtles, insects, and mammals have been found together with hugwe palm leaves, from six to eight feet in length and from three to four feet wide. Even more significantly, trillions of tons of vegetation, much of it perfectly preserved, even to leaves and flowers, have been buried in all parts of the world, including Antarctica, in the form of coal. Each foot of coal represents many feet of compressed plant remains, and some coal seams are as much as thirty or forty feet in thickness. Obviously, no such process of coal formation is going on toady, and the so-called 'peat-bog theory' is a poor attempt to cope with this problem."

Then comes an example, which is yet another one undermining the 'uniformity principle' explanation designed to counteract the biblical catastrophism explanation. The book shows time and again how the non-biblical interpretation of fossils and geology simply does not deal with the issues that biblical catastrophism explains. Another example is given on p.82 of Whitcomb's book. of a photo of

"...a large tree trunk turned into coal, penetrating vertically through several layers of sedimentary strata (N.A. Rupke, 'Prolegomena to a Study of Cataclysmal Sedimentation' in Why Not Creation? p.153) Surely this constitutes a serious blow to the uniformist theory of coal formation, for no tree could have remained in an upright position for thousands of years while sediments built up around it!" [There is now a web-site showing the actual photograph of that tree, with people standing at the side, to show the scale of it, and the layers of sedimentation. Go to https://answersingenesis.org/geology/catastrophism/petrified-forest-national-park-painting-a-different-picture/ https://answersingenesis.org/the-flood/flood-cataclysm-deposit-uniform-rock-layers/ ]

The debate really rages around interpretation of fossils and other remains. That is what needs to be thrashed out. I've only given a few snippets from that chapter, to whet your appetite, hopefully. Do get Whitcomb's book, The World That Perished, and give it a fair read.

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