Shea,
This is interesting you bring this up. Within my discipline there is a theory that the people of the America's happened relatively recently in terms of time depth of humans on the planet as a whole.
I sometimes come across First Nations individuals who try and argue with me about how they have been in North America since forever. I get that. If you were to consider that for each of us, our entire life allows reasonable familiarity with our own generation and that of our parents/children, grandparents/grandchildren and that generations come along roughly every twenty-five years, so that the human history of North America encompasses some five to six hundred generations. This is a quantum of time that truly can be conceived as immemorial, akin to forever, in ordinary terms.
Now a lot of First Nations groups in my part of the world share an oral tradition that can be referred to as an "earth-diver" story, very similar to a giant flood. Where a creator figure instructs the animals floating on a raft to dive to find land. All fail until one returns with a bit of mud on his paw. From this earth, the land is fashioned. Then people move in.
The scientific approach will also point to a post-glacial world where massive ice sheets flowed towards each other, coalesced, and then melted forming immense unstable lakes and there was water for as far as the eye could see. Plant and animals populations re-established themselves first, after which people settled the landscape.
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, if there was a post-glacial world here in North America due to the melting of the glaciers (at one point Canada was under 1 km thick ice sheets) it would not be inconceivable that the same thing happened in Europe and explanations/stories grew from that ie. noah and the great flood.
This is interesting you bring this up. Within my discipline there is a theory that the people of the America's happened relatively recently in terms of time depth of humans on the planet as a whole.
I sometimes come across First Nations individuals who try and argue with me about how they have been in North America since forever. I get that. If you were to consider that for each of us, our entire life allows reasonable familiarity with our own generation and that of our parents/children, grandparents/grandchildren and that generations come along roughly every twenty-five years, so that the human history of North America encompasses some five to six hundred generations. This is a quantum of time that truly can be conceived as immemorial, akin to forever, in ordinary terms.
Now a lot of First Nations groups in my part of the world share an oral tradition that can be referred to as an "earth-diver" story, very similar to a giant flood. Where a creator figure instructs the animals floating on a raft to dive to find land. All fail until one returns with a bit of mud on his paw. From this earth, the land is fashioned. Then people move in.
The scientific approach will also point to a post-glacial world where massive ice sheets flowed towards each other, coalesced, and then melted forming immense unstable lakes and there was water for as far as the eye could see. Plant and animals populations re-established themselves first, after which people settled the landscape.
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, if there was a post-glacial world here in North America due to the melting of the glaciers (at one point Canada was under 1 km thick ice sheets) it would not be inconceivable that the same thing happened in Europe and explanations/stories grew from that ie. noah and the great flood.
