by Peter Watson
The starting point for this synthesis comes from the fact that this area has the highest concentration of flood myths in the world.19 Does this prove that the flood had the most devastating impact here? No, but the inference is tantalising and it fits exactly with what William Meacham, a Hong Kong-based prehistorian, noted in 1985, what was referred to earlier, that the most important gap in the Neolithic record now ‘is the total absence of open sites in lowland areas [in South East Asia] dating from 10,000 BC to 5000 BC’. Moreover, after sea levels started to fall again, from 6,000 years ago, pot-making maritime settlements began to occupy sites all the way down from Taiwan to central Vietnam. Charles Higham, a New Zealand archaeologist based mainly in Thailand, argues that these settlements were actually relocations of maritime people who had always lived in these areas but had been flooded out much earlier on.20 His argument is based on two factors: one, the complete lack of evidence of people moving into these areas from anywhere else; and two, certain cultural resemblances between these coastal peoples and a much older pre-Neolithic culture in inland Vietnam known as ‘Hoabinhian’. Since Higham made his inferences, more direct evidence has been found. At several sites (near Hong Kong, for example) two cultural phases have been unearthed, separated by a layer of silt up to six feet thick. Inland sites, on the other hand, were continuously inhabited from more or less the end of the Ice Age.
More extraordinary and tantalising still, many of the artefacts found on the south China coast, at Middle Neolithic levels below the silt, have counterparts to those found at Ur under Woolley’s silt. These artefacts include perforated clay discs (tied into nets, to help them sink), painted bowls, shell beads and polished stone adzes and stone hoes.21 It is also the case that tattooed female figurines were found in both places – slim naked women, often with exaggerated genitalia and sometimes carrying children.22 The heads of these figurines are distinctive – they have black bitumen hair or wigs and slanted eyes, with heavy folds under the eyelids. Paint marks and embedded clay pellets on the shoulders of the figurines hint at tattooing and/or skin scarification. A few men with similar features were also excavated in Eridu in Mesopotamia. What accounts for this similarity? Coincidence, or early contact?
These links have in fact been dismissed as ‘stretching credulity beyond the limits’, and it is certainly true that, between these two extremes – Mesopotamia and the south China coasts – there are several intermediate communities, in Oman and the Persian Gulf for example, which are known from their shell middens and do not share these burial practices. But the hair, wigs and tattooing features are not their only similarities. There is, for instance, the added fact that Woolley observed that the graves in which these figurines were found were of a rectangular shape, their bottoms covered in pottery that had been deliberately broken up. The cadavers had been stretched and the remains powdered in red haematite, iron ore. There is a similar practice of painting extended bodies with haematite, in wooden box burials, in the Niah Cave in Borneo. They are dated to 3800 BC.23
Then there is the matter of skin scarification. Tattooing is widespread in Austronesia but skin scarification is limited to Oceania, notably the north coast of New Guinea. Scarification is performed on the shoulders and torso as part of an initiation rite and is intended to imitate the teeth marks of crocodiles. (Note the reference to crocodiles.) The patterned scars so produced, according to Stephen Oppenheimer, ‘resemble those of the Ubaid figurines’. Ubaid is west of Ur in southern Iraq, the Ubaid period dating to ~5300–4000 BC.
Geoffrey Bailey makes the point that while the continental shelves close to many of the Old World centres of human evolution and early civilisation are relatively narrow, the major exceptions are ‘in the extensive shelf that skirts mainland China and the peninsulas and archipelagos of South East Asia, and more localised pockets around the Arabian Penisula, part of the Indian coastline and northern Australia’. Is early contact between these areas unthinkable? The remains of the early technology of sailing – boats, fishhooks, harpoons – are only found in post-glacial times but when they are found, their chronological spread is as shown on map 4: seafaring developed along what will be identified in just a moment as ‘the East-West Corridor’, linking Mesopotamia with South East Asia, at least 4,000 years ago (map 1). And of course it is well known that the South East Asians colonised Madagascar, thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean, albeit only in the first millennium AD.24
If these practices are more than coincidence, then the Indian Ocean – and Pacific rim – cultures carried on a long-term trading network and were in very early contact with Mesopotamia. Intuitively, this seems exceptionally early but we shall see shortly that it is reflected in mythology.
Added to all this, rice grains associated with pottery have been found in the Malay peninsula apparently dated to 9250 BC, while in India it is now known that two different forms of agriculture were begun: sixrow barley with cattle, sheep and goats was introduced in west India in the seventh millennium BC; and rice agriculture in the Vindha Hills in the sixth-fifth millennium, where the practice overlaps heavily with the distribution of the Mundaic tribes in the north-central and northeastern areas.25 The Mundaic tribes speak Austro-Asiatic languages, as found predominantly in South East Asia.
The new chronology – insofar as it concerns us, and if confirmed – is therefore as follows. Rice-growing, with pottery and the exploitation of seafoods, went hand-in-hand in South East Asia between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago. Sea levels rose, thanks to massive glacier melts, covering many early sites with silt when they receded, but stimulating changes in lifestyle, including an improvement in sailing and navigational skills, causing the people of the Sunda Shelf to spread out in all directions, perhaps as far as the Middle East. (The effects of flooding in the Middle East are considered in more detail in chapter fifteen, but for now it is enough to say that, at one stage, between 15,000 and 8,500 years ago, vast areas of the Persian Gulf, 900 kilometres between the Strait of Hormuz and what is now Basra, were dry land.) But the largest amount of low-lying land in the world, which would have been most affected by any rise in sea levels, where a flood would have been most catastrophic, was the Sunda Shelf, on the south-east ‘corner’ of South East Asia, and stretching 5,400 kilometres east to west and 2,700 kilometres north to south. This may well account for why flood myths are more prevalent in that region than anywhere else. Such a flood would have provoked large-scale migration – east, west and north.
Is this the ‘great split’ that Johanna Nichols identified in the linguistic record between Old World peoples and Pacific rim peoples? Though the hard evidence is meagre and by no means universally accepted, the picture it paints fits in every way but for the chronology; and dating, we know, is the weakest point in chronolinguistics.
COLLECTIVE WARNINGS
We now need to consider, briefly, one other relatively new finding about ancient Asian history before moving on to compare Old World and New World myths. This too is not the detour it might at first appear. It concerns a whole constellation of stories known as the Vedas. The Vedas, the sacred writings of the Hindus, envisage a ‘Yuga’ theory of historical and cosmic development – great cycles of humanity and of nature, disrupted by enormous natural cataclysms. One of these cycles is said to last 24,000 years, not so very different from the 23,000-year ‘wobble’, as Stephen Oppenheimer calls it, but more relevant, perhaps, is the newly discovered fact of three great floods in recent geological history, at ~14,000,~11,500 and ~8,000 years ago. Is this not in effect cyclical history, broken by great catastrophes? Is that why Hinduism lays such store by cyclical history?
More specifically for our purposes, however, the Vedantic literature refers to a land of seven rivers – identified as the Indus, Ravi, Sutlej, Sarasvati, Yamuna, Ganga and Saryu – in which the Sarasvati was the most important for Vedic people, both spiritually and culturally, irrigating their central land and place of origin and supporting a large population.26 One verse of the Vedas describes the Sarasvati
as ‘the best of mothers, the best river, the best goddess’ and another places it between the Sutlej and the Yamuna.27
The problem is – or was – that today there is no major river flowing between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, and the area is well known as the Punjab (panca-ap in Sanskrit), or the Land of Five Rivers or Waters. This discrepancy led some scholars for many years to dismiss the Sarasvati as a ‘celestial’ river, or an imaginary construct, or in fact to be a small river in Afghanistan, whose name, Haraquti or Harahvaiti, is cognate with Sarasvati.
Beginning just after World War Two, however, archaeological excavations began to uncover more and more settlements which seemed related to the well-known Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa Indus civil-isations but paradoxically were up to 140 kilometres distant from the Indus River itself, at sites where there is today no obvious source of water. It was only in 1978 that a number of satellite images from the spacecraft launched by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation began to identify traces of ancient river courses that lay along where the Vedas said the Sarasvati had been. Gradually, these images revealed more details about the channel including the fact that it had been six to eight kilometres wide for much of its course, and no fewer than fourteen kilometres wide at one point. It also had a major tributary and between them the channel and its tributary converted the Land of Five Rivers (of today) into the Land of Seven Rivers (saptasaindhava) in the Vedas. Moreover, the Rig Veda describes the Sarasvati as flowing from the ‘mountains to the sea’, which geology shows it would have done only between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, as the Himalayan glaciers were melting. Over the years, the rivers feeding the Sarasvati changed their course four times as a result of earthquakes, feeding the Ganges instead, and the Sarasvati dried up.28
So the Veda myths were right all along – there was a Sarasvati River and it was just as mighty as the scriptures said.* But it also throws into context the fact that the sacred texts show that the Vedic culture at that time was a maritime culture (there are 150 references in the Vedas to the ocean, rivers flowing into the sea, and travel by sea).
The rediscovery of the Sarasvati therefore underlines two things that concern us. One, the basic skills of civilisation – notably domestication, pottery, long-distance trade, sailing – were in place in South Asia (India) and island South East Asia by 5000 BC; and second, the great myths which we find spread right across the world are almost certainly based on real catastrophic events that actually devastated early human-kind and form a genuine collective memory to warn us that such terrible events may one day recur.
MYTHS AS MEMORIES
Now that we have done our groundwork and have a strong suspicion that myths – the important ones, the original ones – are founded on fact, on real historical events, then the ways in which myths vary across the world takes on a new and tantalising significance. What, we may ask, do they tell us about the early experiences of humans in different parts of the globe? In particular, how do myths in the New World differ from those in the Old and, where they do, what does this mean? Do they help us to reconstruct the experiences of early peoples?
The genetic evidence shows that the Chukchi in Siberia and the first human groups to enter the Americas reached Beringia by central Eurasia and had arrived some time between 20,000 and 16,500 years ago at the latest. The linguistic evidence in particular suggests that a second, later group of ancient peoples travelled up the western coast of the Pacific Ocean – Malaysia, China, Russia. If the earliest peoples reached the New World at any time between 43,000 and 29,500 years ago, as some of the genetic evidence suggests, they may well have had a memory of the Toba earthquake, but none of the great floods had yet occurred. On the other hand, the second group – the Na-Dene speakers with the M130 genetic marker, whose bearers migrated up the Pacific rim and into the Americas at about 8,000– 6,000 years ago – should have had fairly recent experience of flood. What do we find?
In the first place, and by way of generalisation, we may say that there is an extensive constellation of myths that occur in both the Old World and the New, far too many for them to have all been jointly conceived by coincidence. Allied to this, there are some important myths that occur only in the Old World and in Oceania but do not appear in the New World. At the same time, there are a few myths – of origin, creation – that appear in the New World and not in the Old. This is all what you would expect if early humankind originated in the Old World and migrated to the New.
A second thing to assimilate is that a number of myths have a very wide spread indeed, right across the world. For example, there is a creation myth among the Diegueno Indians of south-west California that is closely paralleled in the creation myth of the Mundaic aboriginal tribe of Bengal. In the Californian myth, two brothers who were under the sea at the beginning of time go out looking for land. After some fruitless searching, the elder brother creates land from tightly packed red ants. However, the birds which he made later could not find this land because it was still dark. He therefore made the sun and the moon. In the Bengal myth, after a watery start to the world, two birds were created in mistake for men. They then flew around the world looking for land but after twelve years hadn’t found any. The creator then sent various animals to dive for earth and after several abortive attempts, the turtle brought up land, in the form of an island, which became the source of all life on Earth. In both these cases there is a watery start to the world, two brothers, or birds, go looking for land but are unsuccessful.
The wide geographic distribution of this myth is not so odd if we accept that its origin was the flooding of the Sunda Shelf in South East Asia, a flood which generations later receded, to reveal (create) more land. Then the idea migrated out from there, both to the west and to the north. We have seen that the Mundaic peoples were rice growers, who speak Austro-Asiatic, both of which traits originated in South East Asia. The Diegueno Indians of California are Na-Dene speakers which, as we saw in a previous chapter, is a language that overlaps with Dene-Caucasian in South East Asia. The Diegueno have the M130 haplogroup so most likely left island South East Asia at around 8,000 years ago. Whatever accretions have been made in, say, Bengal and California (or on the way there), the similarities of these myths suggest their common origins. The Mundaic tribes and the Diegueno originated in island South East Asia and, following the flood, one tribe went west, the other north.29
Next we may consider the myths found on both sides of the Bering Strait, where we can examine the detailed – and systematic – ways in which they vary.
As has been said, many myths describe a ‘watery chaos’ flood, out of which land gradually emerges. In the sub-arctic regions of North America, however, the most common myth is that of the ‘land diver’. In these myths, following the flood, land doesn’t emerge gradually but is created by raising it up from the floor of the ocean bed. A common procedure to ensure this happens is the use of what have become known as ‘land divers’. These are animals, often diving birds, who are sent down to the bottom of the ocean (by either the creator or Earth’s first inhabitants) to pick up a scrap of earth on the ocean bed. Typically, after a few unsuccessful attempts, one diver returns with earth or clay in its claws or beak, and this small amount is transformed into the growing Earth. In one form or another, this myth can be found from Romania to central Asia, to Siberia.
But the land diver and land raiser myths are most typical in sub-arctic North America and among the Algonquin tribes of the eastern woodlands. The Huron, of Ontario, for example, have a myth in which a turtle sends various animals diving for earth, all of whom drown except the toad, who returns with a few scraps of land in its mouth. These are placed on the back of the turtle by the female creatrix, who has descended from heaven for this purpose, and the scraps of earth grow into the land. The Iroquois (on the north-western Pacific coast of what is now the United States) and the Athabaskan tribes also have this myth, which is in fact confined to two linguistic groups, Amerind speakers and Na-Dene speakers. The motif is not found
in Eskimo flood myths or in Central or South America.30
Two other aspects of this set of myths claim our attention. First, the distribution of the land diver stories overlaps with a characteristic genetic marker in sub-arctic North America. Certain population groups (not Eskimos, Aleuts or Athabaskans) have what is known as the ‘Asian 9-base-pair deletion’ – nine pairs of proteins are missing from their DNA. This marker, this characteristic pattern of absence, is shared with certain clans in New Guinea, and also with peoples in Vietnam and Taiwan. Not only does this further confirm the South East Asian origin of at least some Americans (and underlines the distinction between Eskimos and Na-Dene speakers), but the sheer size and diversity of the 9-bp deletion on both sides of the Pacific suggests a very old origin. One suggestion is that they represent an expansion of circum-polar Asian populations around the time of the Younger Dryas event over 11,000 years ago (i.e., at the time of the second flood). The Younger Dryas was a bitter cold snap that preceded the flooding at 11,000 years ago and this event might explain the period of extreme cold and famine preceding the flood, that is also described in the Algonquin myths.31
Second, these land raiser myths, which after all are fairly spectacular, lend themselves to one or more of three phenomena recognised by geographers and oceanographers. The first is ‘coastline emergence’. This is something which happened on a grand scale, especially in North America. It is a phenomenon which occurs because, after the Ice Age, as the glaciers melted, they grew lighter and, with less weight on it, the continental crust lifted up. Moreover, the change in weight brought about a rise in the land that was more than the rise in sea level. Since the land had hitherto been crushed below sea level, it would at that time have risen out of the sea. Photographs of Bear Lake in Canada show several shore lines that have risen hundreds if not a few thousand feet above sea level.32 People alive at the time would, over the generations, have noticed that the shore line had moved and, we may assume, incorporated this strange phenomenon into their myths, explaining it as best they could.
