Formosan caption tells of a great flood , and how Emperor Yu drive back the floodwaters , base the Xia dynasty and giving upgrade to Taiwanese civilization . Now an international scientific collaboration has discovered the first geologic grounds that such a inundation may actually have hap — and the introduction of the Xia dynasty may have happened one C of class later than historians previously think . They depict their finding ina young paperin Science .
“ Great overflow occupy a primal place in some of the humanity ’s old narration , ” theUniversity of Washington geologistDavid Montgomerywrote in an accompanying commentaryon the new finding . “ Emperor Yu ’s floodlight now stands as another such story potentially rooted in geological events … . How many other ancient narration of challenging cataclysm might just have more than a food grain of trueness to them ? ”
There aredifferent versionsof theGreat Floodmyth , handed down through oral tradition for C of twelvemonth before finally being write down around 1000 BC . But all feature the heroic Yu , who figured out how to dredge and channel all the flooded rivers and tributaries to control the floodwaters — a task that supposedly took 10 to fulfil , even with the help of a dragon to grasp channel and a giant turtle to haul mud . ( myth have their fanciful elements . ) This led to him becoming emperor and establishing the Xia dynasty in China .
Whether or not the Great Flood actually happened has been a longstanding bone of contention among student . After all , the historic record may have included the chronicle of the flowage and Emperor Yu ’s theatrical role in driving back the waters as propaganda to justify majestic rule . History is written by the victors . This raw geological discoveryis the first real grounds for such a flood taking place .
In apress conference yesterday , lead generator Wu Qinglong of Peking University in Beijing described the inadvertent discovery of unusual deposit in the Jishi Gorge of the Yellow River . He hypothesized that it might be tie in with the big inundation and the found the Xi dynasty . It was Wu who brought together the extremity of the collaboration , hailing from different disciplines , to find evidence to bolster that supposition .
harmonize to cobalt - authorDarryl Granger , a geologist at Purdue University , they found that evidence by map and go out the classifiable sediment deposited downriver from Jishi Gorge . They also see bones from skeletons of children who died in an temblor , found at the archaeological site of Lajia . carbon 14 analysis of the skeletons gave a date of around 1922 BC .
From this , the collaborators were able to redo a succession of likely events hap around this meter along the Yellow River . First , there was a devastating seism that caused a massive landslide . This dam the Yellow River in the Jishi Gorge , settle right at the border of the Tibetan tableland . consort to Granger , quake - caused landslide are quite common to this area . The resulting lake eventually spilled over the top of the dekametre of dust , weakening it until it collapsed catastrophically , send a deluge of piss downriver and flooding the lowlands .
The houses of that period would have been more like caves dug into windblown deposit , concord to co - writer David Cohen , an archaeologist atNational Taiwan University , which collapsed when the earthquake hit , killing the masses inside .
“ We know [ the earthquake ] happened the same year [ as the flood ] because fissure in the undercoat because of the temblor are satisfy with flood deposit , as are pottery jars [ at the land site , ” said Granger . “ So the people killed in the quake and the flood lamp are intimately related . ” Had it been more than a year , the annual pelting would have kicked in , take those fissures and jarful with finer sediment .
The implosion therapy would have significant enough to devastate the region . In theBook of Documents , Yu describe the implosion therapy :
“ The inundating amnionic fluid seemed to assail the heavens , and in their extent embrace the hills and overtopped the peachy mounds , so that the people were confounded and overwhelmed .
That ’s in line with the Chinese coaction ’s estimates based on their mapping and analysis of deposit the site . Granger forecast that the flood waters may have risen 38 metre ( around 124 invertebrate foot ) abovethe usual river grade — about one - third the height of the Empire State Building , per Cohen — with flow charge per unit between 300,000 to 500,000 cubic meters ( 79 million to 132 million Imperial gallon ) of pee per second . “ That ’s tantamount to the largest alluvion registered on the Amazon River , and the tumid known flood on Earth in the last 10,000 years , ” he said . The pile of debris that dam up the river would have been somewhere between the height of theThree Gorges Damthat spans the Yangtze River and the Hoover Dam in the US .
This timeline also coincides with a major ethnical transition , as the late Neolithic Era give direction to the Early Bronze Age , although Cohen describes this as more of an interesting latitude , with no grounds as yet for direct causation . There is evidence that the organisation of smaller chiefdoms in topographic point before that metre suddenly collapsed , and after a transitional period of time , larger cities , with more complex administrative structures , a piece of writing organization , and bronze manufacturing emerge around 1900 BC .
In that signified , “ The news report of Yu tame the floodlight is the story of a new political order emerging out of the chaos of the deluge , ” said Cohen .
[ Science ]
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