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> periods in which the intensity of the magnetic field wanes and the dipole (or two magnetic poles) that we're familiar with can disappear, replaced with multiple magnetic poles
If this was a basis of a movie plot I would think how stupid the movie is. Apparently it was normal for earth to have more than two magnetic poles before earth core started to solidify [0]. Was earth core composed of multiple elements where each had two magnetic poles?
Also somewhat relevant wiki articles: Geomagnetic excursion [1], Laschamp event [2] and Geomagnetic reversal [3].
[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a21528/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_excursion [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laschamp_event [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
In the 60s I read a (crackpot?) theory that the Old Testament was not kidding when it says people lived hundreds of years, and that a sudden influx of cosmic rays could explain a nexus of Biblical events - the dispersion of a persistent global cloud cover that had existed until then, the rain & flooding event that Noah rode out, and the subsequent reduction (thanks for nothin', cosmic rays) in human lifetimes.
The OT is 1000s of years of pre-Christian history that was mostly told by word of mouth, all captured on parchment 1000s of years after it happened. Then it was all selectively collected and copy edited into a single volume another 1300 years after the period of the old testament ended.
Sure, some events in the OT probably happened, but if I go by how much I exaggerate sometimes when telling a story, the Great Flood probably was just a dam that broke it's banks or something. Also doesn't help that every major culture that's old enough has a Great Flood in their history somewhere. It's almost like it's a TV trope of the ancient times.
Nothing in the OT can be ascribed to christianity alone. Things were much more... "fluid" then, and the concept of organised religion did not exist. Things happened, and people blamed the gods/demons/monsters/spirits/forefathers. Only after the fact were these stories appropriated by organised religion for whatever purpose or reason.
Folks living 100s of years: maybe they lived 100s of full moons, or seasons? Maybe the number was rounded up with every retelling to make the subject of the story appear more heroic? There is just no way that we can ever filter out the fact from the fiction in these old books I think.
> Also doesn't help that every major culture that's old enough has a Great Flood in their history somewhere. It's almost like it's a TV trope of the ancient times.
I know you're trying to argue that this is evidence that humans are prone to pass on exaggerated stories about floods, but if there really was an ancient worldwide flood then we would expect most cultures to have a story about it. That is, without further details, the prevalence of such stories worldwide is evidence for an actual worldwide flood, not evidence against it.
Or evidence for it working as a mechanism in storytelling, ie a trope.
It's only one of the many patterns that recur in prehistoric religion, and those aren't indicative of a physical constant either. Well, maybe the constant is our brains.
Rivers are prone to flooding.
When you’re a farmer at the dawn of civilization and the river valley your entire village has lived in for centuries floods, it’s like the whole world has flooded. It’s a basic matter of perspective, it doesn’t require world-wide acts of magic to explain.
I'm not claiming it requires worldwide acts of magic to explain. I'm saying that worldwide stories are evidence for a worldwide floor, not evidence against it.
Consider: if there were few other stories of great flood around the world, we would take this as evidence against a worldwide floor. So if there are such stories, it's evidence for.
I am guessing “flood” got autocorrected in each place…. Well I’m arguing the opposite: that the multiple flood myths across civilizations simply means that floods happened a lot.
The ages of the patriarchs are almost certainly some sort of Hebraic numerology that has been lost to history and may have been influenced by different traditions (the ages in the Septuagint differ, for example). After all, the fact the majority of them are divisible by 5 is an interesting data point (compared to the lengths of rulership of kings, much later, which appear randomly distributed).
Lloyd Bailey wrote an interesting (non-peer reviewed) paper on the subject, "Biblical Math as Heilsgeschichte?"[1] and Ben Stanhope in "(Mis)Interpreting Genesis"[2] covers it as well.
[1] https://drmsh.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Bailey-Biblical...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Mis-interpreting-Genesis-Creation-Mis...
Isn't the most likely candidate for the Great Flood the Black Sea being flooded? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
Basically: yes.
Also: Even today people cannot hear of a major catastropic event without immediately inventing stories with dark forces or sinnful people involved etc.
Why would it have been different back in the day? Many people suck at accepting that bad things happen without cosmic reason.
I like the theory that The Great Flood(s) were related to the Ice Age glaciers melting away.
Look up a graph of rising sea levels after the last glacial age. Writing starts precisely where the graph levels of to current levels.
After reading accounts of floods on the Mississippi before it was embanked and straightened. I'd totally believe that sort of stuff happened on the Tigris and Euphrates's rivers back 5000 years ago when it was wetter.
We can make it to the road in a homemade boat
That's the only thing we got left that'll float
It's already over all the wheat and the oats
Fun thing about the Noah 'story' is that the exact same story is present in Hinduism.
It goes something like, God selected a righteous person to help humanity survive the flood. He has this individual built a big ship in which humanity and animals can survive. The only difference in the story is that God took a form of small fish which grew larger as the flood date came close. In the end it became so big that it was able to steer the big ship during flood waves.
The story in the Vedas probably has the same origin as the Mesopotamian flood myths. The oldest surviving Akkadian and Sumerian references to the flood precede and are pretty close in time to the Aryan expansion to the Indian subcontinent, and the Mesopotamian cities had long-lasting trade, cultural and military links to the peoples living in the Iranian plateau.
I love speculating on the origin of the flood myths. My personal favorites are long-lasting oral traditions about the Black Sea flood and the Persian Gulf flood, both of which were rapid, catastrophic large-scale floods of large areas that were previously settled by humans. Sadly, the true origin is probably a lot more banal -- the oldest surviving fragmentary literary evidence refers to the specific city that flooded, Shuruppak, or modern Tell Fara. There is indeed a significant flood layer there (60cm of alluvial sand!) at about the right time (2900BC), but this was left by a normal river avulsion that created a violent but local flood.
Have you ever read John Walton's "The Lost World of the Flood?" Admittedly he coauthored it with Tremper Longman, so different views are presented in the text, but I'm currently working through it. It's quite interesting and makes a good companion to his book "Lost World of Genesis One."
Some things just off the top of my head: Much of the story is probably a polemic (or has polemical qualities), it ties into the Genesis 6:4 Watcher theology (and much of the Second Temple period literature on the subject), and... the description of the ark has some translational issues that we rarely touch on. In particular, we have no idea what "gopherwood" is. Or if it's even a wood. Most probably it was thatching.
>The oldest surviving Akkadian and Sumerian references to the flood precede and are pretty close in time to the Aryan expansion to the Indian subcontinent, and the Mesopotamian cities had long-lasting trade, cultural and military links to the peoples living in the Iranian plateau.
Note that the oldest attested Indic people lived to the west of the Iranian plateau. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni
It could have been the asteroid hit to the Michigan ice sheet that set off the Younger Dryas period. That hit sent enormous ice boulders flying which hit all over the U.S. creating the "Carolina bays", and which may also have hit the Atlantic and send huge waves over northeastern Africa.
The flood story is everywhere.
I forget count, but it was hundreds, every culture around the world has a flood myth.
Something happened, people speculate on melting ice, tidal waves, or something.
Stories are passed down for a long time, maybe this magnetic field switch had something to do with the stories..
There's also the omnipresent story of the thunder-god that defeats the huge snake/dragon. Here's a summary of all the variations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon#European_stories/record...
Guess what's a central thesis that's not immediately obvious in the biblical account? Leviathan. In Isaiah 27:1, Leviathan is destroyed, and the adjectives used to describe this creature are the same cognates from the Ugaritic that describe Litanu/Tiamat.
There's no accident in my mind that in Revelation, the beast that rises up from the sea has 7 heads, because that's how Leviathan/Litanu was traditionally pictured in the Semitic cultures of the day (7 heads). Psalm 74 uses the plural for "heads" when speaking on Yahweh crushing them, though it never numbers them. Likely the imagery was a common cultural motif, so the numbering wasn't necessary for the readers to understand.
Leviathan likely represents a northwest Semitic chaos deity in opposition to Yahweh and is more or less the embodiment of evil that is destroyed in the eschaton, but this is probably speculative. I think there are strong arguments in favor of it, however.
At the time any of those myths would have originated, nobody really had any concept of a "global" anything. If the local river flooded, that was your _entire world_. Lots of local flood stories, then once the bronze age got going and trade routes and cities and writing, they started getting coalesced into more regional myths.
'Flood myths' possibly seen in China (Yellow river), Africa (Nile river) or Native Americas are quite different than the story of Noah and Manu.
Noah and Manu have the same characters and exact 'screenplay' in quite detail (only difference being the fish). Those who wrote the characters of Noah and Manu probably had same ancestors or the story travelled between Levant and Indus region.
It is the only the story from vedic writings that matches from the Hebrew bible. Other than this story as far as I know all Hindu texts differ.
> Those who wrote the characters of Noah and Manu probably had same ancestors or the story travelled between Levant and Indus region.
They can't have the same ancestors because one is of aryan lineage and the other is of semitic lineage.
It's more likely these cultures and peoples borrowed from the same story.
Meh. "The flood myth" seems to have a single, local origin, somewhere in Mesopotamia, possibly literally just the city of Shuruppak. There are plenty of other flood myths, but that just makes sense because floods in river valleys are pretty common as far as disasters go and that's where most of the early civilizations were started.
And it really boggles my mind that with all these evidences, people still think that supernatural stories based on the OT myths are real...
If anything, cosmic rays would (stochastically) seed clouds. Constant cloudiness would suggest that Earth was under bombardment at that time.
Fake news is not a modern concept.
It goes back a little earlier, but if you pardon the pun, Young Earth Creationism is itself a fairly young theology. The predominant idea behind YEC stems from the 1920s and Seventh Day Adventism, particularly Ellen G. White who claims she had a vision of man and dinosaurs walking the Earth together. Her claims would have disappeared into history as the ramblings of a cultish leader until they were more or less popularized by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb—and yes, in the 1960s.
There's a lot of bonkers theology that rose to popular culture during that time period. Incidentally, it's also when Gog/Magog were ascribed to Russia (because of the Cold War), and if you read the papers by Dr. Paul Tanner on the subject, it becomes quite clear that the extent of exegesis performed basically amounts to cross-linguistic homophones—that is, that one of the regions (princes?) listed in Ezekiel, Rosh, happens to sound like the Indo-european root "Rus." Therefore, obviously, it's Russia... Facepalm.
I'm a Christian, and I lean more toward Dr. John Walton's view of Genesis 1, that it was intended as a functional description of the created order. We forget that the culture that produced the Bible was vastly different from our own, and the Israelites saw things as "uncreated" if they served no purpose. That is, the idea of nihility (or creation ex nihilo) are modern ideas that we have imposed on the text in order to satisfy a narrow reading of scripture. Even if you're not a believer, as one of my sibling comments suggests, the oral tradition itself seems to capture events from the end of the last period of glaciation.
But to assume people lived for 100s of years despite the fact we know almost nothing about the period during which the primordial history (Genesis 1-11) was authored (and we know little about how/when it was redacted, though most probably during the Exile) is naive. The ages most likely conveyed some meaning themselves, because the early Israelites were much less interested in exacting chronology than we are.
Here's an example: Sarah is said to have lived 127 years. Interestingly, 7 being the number of completeness/perfection in Israelite culture and 120 (or 110) representing the same in early Egyptian culture seems to convey the idea that she lived the "perfect" (or "complete") life as both an Egyptian and Israelite woman. This may be stretching the numerology somewhat, but if you step outside YEC material, there is some scholarship that makes a pretty strong case for this reading.
Variations in cosmogenic radionuclides like beryllium-10 provide an independent proxy of how Earth's paleomagnetic intensity changed.
Indeed, Panovska found that the average production rate of beryllium-10 during the Laschamps excursion was two times higher than present-day production, implying very low magnetic field intensity and lots of cosmic rays reaching Earth's atmosphere.
The location hedging is due to:
magnetic field excursions, brief periods in which the intensity of the magnetic field wanes and the dipole (or two magnetic poles) that we're familiar with can disappear, replaced with multiple magnetic poles. The Laschamps excursion that occurred around 41,000 years ago is among the best studied. It features a low magnetic field intensity that implies less protection for Earth's surface from harmful space rays.
The Earth still had a denser lower atmosphere, though, which also provides protection from cosmic rays - geophysical air surveys for ground radiometrics have to calibrate for cosmic rays by running "stacks" .. survey lines high up in the air and prgressivel closer to the ground in order to estimate the cosmic falloff with atmospheric density for the duration of the ground survey.
* "twice as many* is also a hand wave, cosmic ray energy has a spectrum and the changed geomag field would bend the pass through spectrum and likely allowed more high energy gamma's through .. the end result was the doubling of the creation of a proxy indicator.
> cosmic ray energy has a spectrum and the changed geomag field would bend the pass through spectrum and likely allowed more high energy gamma's through
The earth magnetic field has no shielding effect on gamma rays at all (which are photons), only on charged particles (protons, electrons and their heavier variants: muons and hypothetically tau leptons but IDK if there are any of them in cosmic rays)
The earths magnetic field traps charged particles (mostly protons and electrons) from the solar winds into large donut-shaped belts around the Earth, well outside of the extent of the atmosphere.
It's these particle belts which filter cosmic rays (gamma radiation) and as the magnetic field fluctuates so too does the spectrum of high energy gamma radiation that makes it through the charged particle shielding, which is further filtered by the atmosphere.
You're correct that there's no direct magnetic transformation of the incoming gamma spectrum, I was casually referencing the very real indirect effect.
It's the first time I ever hear about such an effect and I admit I have a hard time believing it since the particle density is very low in the Van Allen belt.
Do you have any source for that? (Google couldn't help)
The inner Van Allen donut is some 8,000 km thick (from ~1,000km above ground surface stretching out to ~8,500 km or so) and denser than the much much larger outer donut that (IIRC) stretches from 3 earth radii to 10 earth radii.
Low density but a lot of particles, many with high energy, sourced mostly from solar ejection, with cosmic particle and cosmic gamma strikes on the upper atmosphere sourcing a significant chunk of additional charged particles for the inner belt, and both receiving decay particles from cosmic high energy gamma and cosmic charged particles strikes on particles already within the belts (at a proportionatly lower rate than those from upper atmosphere interaction).
It's a Pachinko game, the density is low but the strikes do happen.
The effect I refer to is studied on again | off again (eg: iirc, Robert Forward looked at "draining the Van Allen belts" to remove charged particles and there were papers looking at the sheilding factor for cosmic that would be lost) but largely tossed in as an "and also" .. eg:
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/eart...
our magnetosphere shields us from erosion of our atmosphere by the solar wind (charged particles our Sun continually spews at us), erosion and particle radiation from coronal mass ejections (massive clouds of energetic and magnetized solar plasma and radiation), and cosmic rays from deep space.
I admit I've largely only concerned myself with the fall off of the gamma spectrum through the atmosphere, but I've had past discussions with some on the fall off of the (cosmic) gamma spectrum as it approaches Earth and figure there must be papers on this about.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory calibration procedure papers would likely be our best bet for a good source, the satellite has an eccentric obit ( Perigee altitude 14,307.9 km, Apogee altitude 134,527.6 km ) which puts it fully outside the denser high energy inner belt but half in | half out the less dense outer belt.
There would have to be a procedure to factor out the variation in "local" X-Ray events as it moves about the planet in order to sharpen the data from the two Grating Spectrometers
Thanks for mentioning Chandra (RIP), it shook me out of this weird hypnotic fog that had me almost believe the Van Allen belts are important absorbers of gamma rays.
However, Chandra I know something about: it needs densities over three orders of magnitude larger than what is found in the Van Allen belt to even detect absorption lines, so that the belt would do anything important at all to the gamma ray continuum is just impossible.
I didn't say important at all, check the qualifiers, they absorb some gamma events .. how much would ideally show up in Chandra calibration procedures (if at all) .. it's the thinner outer belt that it rose and fell through after all, not the denser inner belt.
Hitomi did exquisite X-ray spectra from LEO before its accident, so you're writing a lot of speculation about an effect that is truly unimportant.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Daughters_of_Eve a few of the seven mothers of Eve seem to have lived around the same time. Just an observation.
Interesting book, very hard to tell whether you're a serious twue believer or just engaged in some wry leg pulling:
Howy Jacobs in Nature labelled the book as semi-fictional with the majority of the information "the accounts of the imagined lives" of human ancestors. He commented: "All this made me feel that I was reading someone's school project, with influences from The Flintstones cartoon series, rather than a treatise by a leading academic."
It seems a little near in time for a literal bottleneck of seven women's genetics, I feel even Bryan Sykes would have pushed back his dating of the seven clan mothers further than a mere 42 kyears.
"It seems a little near in time for a literal bottleneck of seven women's genetics ..."
The bottleneck was figurative. No actual bottle was involved.
(I have five figures of karma with which to fight this battle).
A lot of people misunderstand figurative bottlenecks too.
The "7 women" does not mean anything like "only 7 women existed at the time". Particularly:
* other women existed who only had sons, or whose daughters only had sons, etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton%E2%80%93Watson_process (about surname extinction, which is basically the same thing other than sex-specific polygamy effects)
* other tribes existed (or split off) who later faced extinction due to being outcompeted by these 7 tribes.
> used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.
The word got misused so many times that Oxford modified the definition, and the wrong way is now right, by consensus.
Ah, the joys of a living language.
I want a browser filter that just removes the word. It almost never adds to the content, it's just a styrofoam filler word.
Approximately when the Neanderthals disappeared, cave art starts appearing, and Homo Sapiens arrive in Europe
I feel like the first two clauses are explained neatly by the third clause.
Unpicking causality at a distance of 40ky is certainly problematic
Cosmic rays: interfering with Mario 64 speedruns since 38,976 BC
I misread the title as "Comic rays..."
It's how that font came to Earth
Ah, the old 'Pankernia' theory.
I'll see myself out.
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