>I agree, except that the dates for the flooding of the
> Med seem clearly to be _way_ too for any human
>traditions to have been preserved (5.5 my, after
>all).
What about revelation. There are two ways that the info
could be preserved. 1. oral tradition and 2. revelation.
I agree that there is a difficulty with preserving oral
tradition. But are we ruling out the possibility that God
could reveal this to Moses? After all it is usually
believed that God revealed lots of things to the writer of
Genesis. While I doubt he revealed a lot to the Greeks,
this would work for the Hebrews.
But in favor of the oral transmission option, let me point
out that the information for the construction of the
Acheulian hand ax was transmitted successfully for over 1
million years. Johanson (_Lucy's Child_,(New York: William
Morrow, 1989), p. 148,149) points out that the Acheulean
hand ax was made all over Europe and Africa. This object
was made nearly identically over this region for over a
million years.
He writes:
"The 'biface' hand ax typifies a period called the
Acheulean, which endures in the Archeological record for a
stunning length of time. Tools very much like the one I
now held had been found in European sites as young as
500,000 years, as well as in Olduvai deposits dated at a
million and a half.
"Whatever they were used for, clearly the hand axes
and other Acheulean tools were doing it efficeintly.
Compared to the longevity of the hand ax, the invention of
the automobile -or for that matter the wheel
itself--strikes me as a sort of cultural whimsy, a fleeting
bit of gadgetry."
If this information can be transmitted for a million years,
it is not too far out of possibility for other information
to be transmitted over similar time periods.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm