> George Fisher wrote:
>
> >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.
>
As you know, flood traditions are endemic in many primitive culltures,
and to my mind are too common to have be revealed to once faith tradition
only (bit I'm no expert...)
> 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.
> (several lines deleted)
An excellent point, Glenn -- I would agree that some skills were
certainly transmitted for long periods of time, but would argue that it's
a lot easier to transmit a flint knapping technique consistently (esp
with example axes at hand) than something as absract as the flood
tradition. And even if the core of the tradition was transmitted in this
way, I think we'd have to admit that the fossil hominid record contains
no evidence of technology capable of bulding an ark 5.5 my ago, so that
many details of the OT version must have been added later.
George Fisher