"Eden in the East" - Southeast Asia as the epicenter of prehistory

I suppose everyone is startled when they first encounter these passges in the Epic of Gilgamesh:

"What I had loaded thereon, the whole harvest of life I caused to embark upon the vessel; all my family and all my relations, The beasts of the field, the cattle of the field, the craftsmen, I made them all embark.  I entered the vessel and closed the door...

For six days and nights Wind and flood marched on, the hurricane subdued the land.  When the seventh day dawned, the hurricane was abated, the flood which had waged war like an army; the sea was stilled, the ill wind was calmed, the flood ceased. I beheld the sea, its voice was silent, And all mankind was turned into mud! As high as the roofs reached the swamp;...

I beheld the world, the horizon of sea; Twelve measures away an island emerged; Unto Mount Nitsir came the vessel, Mount Nitsir held the vessel and let it not budge... When the seventh day came, I sent forth a dove...

These words [more at the link] were inscribed onto clay tables in Ninevah centuries before the Bible was assembled.

What I didn't realize until reading Eden in the East is that there are some 500 flood myths from around the world - not just from the Middle East, but also in northern Europe, North America, China and the far East.  This book undertakes the immense task of collating the flood myths in search of a unifying hypothesis.   

I'll offer just a bare-bones thumbnail sketch.  Everyone agrees that the world has experienced marked changes in sea level since the appearance of Homo Sapiens, the most dramatic of them occurring when changes in the global climate resulted in melting of the glaciers:

The time scale in Figure 1 above goes back to 18,000 years before the present - about the time that early humans were traversing Beringia (on land or via near-shore vessels) from Asia to the Americas.  Note that early in human prehistory (10-15,000 years ago), sea levels around the world were 50-100 meters lower than their present levels.

Figure 3 above "zooms in" on the third world-wide flood about 8,000 years ago, and shows geologic evidence of that rise in regions as far apart as the Arabian Gulf, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.

Those glacial melts flooded continental shelves around the world - as for example Doggerland:

That land between GB and Europe was above water and inhabited by modern humans, and if you dredge the bottom of the North Sea, you can haul up artifacts from that era.

I bookmarked Doggerland years ago as blogworthy material, but for now I'm going to shift back to Eden in the East.  Oppenheimer notes that there was an immense low-lying coastal landmass between what is now Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam and what is now Borneo/Mayasia - the undersea area now referred to as "Sundaland."

Oppenheimer uses this area as the focus of his book, and postulates that cultural diffusion from this Sundaland may have spread to Austronesia, the Indian subcontinent, Mesopotamia, and then worldwide.

That's the big picture.  Here's a smattering of excerpted tidbits - starting with the science of the megafloods:

"Around 12,500 years ago, not long after the first flood, pottery appeared for the first time in southern Japan.  Some 1500 years later there is evidence of pots being made in China and Indo-China.  These examples of pottery making antedate any from Mesopotamia, India or the Mediterranean region by 2500-3500 years.  Stones for grinding wild cereal grains appeared in the Solomon Islands... as early as 26,000 years ago, whereas they were not apparently used in Upper Egypt and Nubia until about 14,000 years ago..." [p. 18-19]

"The third dry cold period was interrupted suddenly around 8000 years ago by an event which, although only discovered in the last decade, has been described as 'possibly the single largest flood of the [past two million years]'.  The melting Laurentide ice cap had dammed up vast volumes of fresh water in glacial lakes occupying a third of the land area of eastern Canada...  Geologists have calculated that the combined surface area of these glacial lakes... exceeded 700,000 square kilometres... Calculations of the total unfrozen water volume discharged instantly vary between 75,000 and 150,000 cubic kilometres - enough to raise the global sea-level by 20-40 centimetres instantaneously...  The centre of the ice cap that was also flushed out through the Hudson Strait, however, would have rapidly added another 5-10 metres to the sea-level..." [33-35]

"This last rapid rise in global sea-levels was presumably also responsible for breaching the Hellespont and flooding the partially desiccated Black Sea... Bill Ryan and Walt Pitman... who discovered this flood, suggest that this may  have given rise to the legend of Noah's flood.  This is possible for the Middle East, but it does not explain all the other 500 flood stories from around the rest of the world." [38]

"Southeast Asia has the highest concentration of flood myths in the world.  It is an area with few large river deltas and no recent reputation for flooding, but it lost more than 50 per cent of its landmass after the Ice Age." [62]

"... the strong likelihood of superwaves arising from the crustal strains when the Laurentide ice sheet of Canada collapsed and melted around 8000 years ago... The release of energy from the Earth's crust would have produced waves rolling across the Pacific and inundating all shores and flat hinterlands in direct line..." [107]

The excerpts above are from Part I of the book, which details the geologic events that would have produced widespread flooding. Part II shifts the focus to how the displacement of large coastal populations by the floods could have led to the diffusion of knowledge/customs/technologies from southeast Asia to other parts of the world, using new information from linguistics, anthropology, and genetics.

"I believe that Southeast Asia was the centre of innovations after the Ice Age and long-distance seeding of ideas from the region led to technological breakthroughs elsewhere.  The Austronesians may have contributed sailing technology, magic, religion, astronomy, hierarchy and concepts of kingship.  The Austro-Asiatic speaking people may have contributed the more down-to-earth skills of cereal farming, and even bronze.   A combination of all these traits was necessary for the first city-builders of Mesopotamia..." [221]

"If there were so many bad riverine floods in Mesopotamia, as the sedimentary record shows, one very bad one would not be remembered so long.  Instead the recurrent aspects would be recalled.  The myths from around the world do not usually refer to periodic river floods.  In any case most flood myths come from island Southeast Asia, which, unlike Mesopotamia, lost most of its alluvial flood-plains after the great melt when the Ice Age ended." [227]

"After 200 pages of concentrated flood myths he [Sir James Frazer] concluded that such ancient myths were widespread on every continent except Africa...  A large proportion of the Earth's surface was permanently lost to settlement and agriculture somewhere between 18,000 and 5000 years ago as a result of the sea-level rising...  Africa, with narrow continental shelves, would have been relatively spared... " [230-232]

"There is now general agreement that the stories of Noah's Flood and the floods of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians are related, although there is no agreement on the original source... There are now at least eleven related Ancient Near Eastern versions, including the two in Genesis and Berossus's account of Xisuthros.  The three Assyrian versions were committed to tablet in the seventh century BC.  This was perhaps a hundred years before the writing of the Priestly account in Genesis, but probably well after the Jehovistic account, for which a date is still under discussion.  The two surviving Babylonian accounts were written thousands of years earlier, somewhere between 1850 and 1500 BC..." [242-8]

"Frazer lists fifteen Greek flood stories in his Folklore in the Old Testament, twelve of which record a mountain landing." [258]

"A number of the Moon stories I have sketched contain the number seven.  I have suggested the lunar week as a possible origin for the use of this numeral... After one, two, and three, the number seven appears more frequently in Old World sacred texts than any other number.  This applies particularly for the Bible, the Koran, Babylonian texts and the Egyptian Book of the Dead...  Although five is a prime... the number of fingers on a hand and a half unit in the decimal system it is not more common in sacred texts than expected... [345-6]

"And did God first mould a model from blood and clay and blow into it to give it life?  Did he take the bone, Ivi, from man's side among the dark rainforest trees of Southeast Asia?.. Stories of the creation of humanity are universal.  They can be divided into two main varieties, people evolving from a totem, such as a tree or animal, and the creator fashioning man from clay.  These two archetypes have distinct distributions which overlap most dramatically in eastern Indonesia.  The merging of these two themes in that location eventually resulted in the beautiful and mysterious story of the Garden of Eden... In this chapter we trace the origin of the Genesis version of the clay-man myth from Southeast Asia... Polynesian informants insisted on the antiquity of stories stating that the first woman, who came from a bone in the man's side, was called Eevee/Ivi (the word for a bone in many eastern Polynesian languages).  Yet most of the Christian ethnographers assumed a missionary source for these stories rather than the disturbing possibility of a more ancient origin... It is likely that they were unaware of the widespread ancient distribution of the story elsewhere and thus could simply not believe their informants.  This selective bias is discussed at length by Sir James Frazer." [355-9]

"The Garden of Eden story holds a cherished place in Western literature... Yet the Genesis writers assembled this story less than three thousand years ago from a selection of fertility and immortality myths that were in common circulation at the time.  The separate elements of these myths are still to be found today in Southeast Asia and Melanesia."  [382]

"The tree of knowledge played centre stage throughout the snake's temptation of Eve.  The tree of life, however, remained in the wings unnoticed until it was nearly too late and Jehovah realised that Adam and Eve could eat from that too, and become immortal like Him.  He therefore shooed them out of the garden before they could gain immortality as well as knowledge... Frazer's view was that there were originally two trees, but that the tree of knowledge of good and evil had really been the tree of death contrasting with the tree of life.  This hypothesis may explain the verses:

'But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely  die.' (Genesis 2:16-17)

Clearly, humankind did not die on that day of the Fall, but instead became mortal." [384]

"In certain Aboriginal cultures, the Moon was regarded as a deity with the secret of immortality because it 'died' for three days every month, subsequently renewing itself during the first half of the next month." [386]

"The location of paradise has always worried Bible scholars, particularly since the lush forest description given in Genesis fits so poorly with anything we know about the environment of ancient Mesopotamia.  Rainfall may have been better 6000-7000 years ago, but nothing fits the picture of paradise as well as tropical jungles such as in Southeast Asia.  Both ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians described their respective sites as far across the water towards the rising Sun, that is in the East." [405]

This is an impressive book, extensively annotated with relevant references from the literature.  I first encountered it shortly after its publication about 20 years ago, and after being duly impressed by the scholarly writing I set it aside for a re-read "sometime in the future" (that future having arrived this year).  I think it is sometimes erroneously grouped with the fantasy books about Atlantis or ancient aliens, but the existence of the "drowned continent" of Southeast Asia is factual, and the hypotheses presented here are eminently logical.

The book has probably "too much information" for the casual reader, so for the TL;DR crowd I can recommend the final ten-page "Epilogue" as a reasonably concise summary.  I've already created a mega-post here and I'm tired of typing, but I'll close by adding several excerpts from the Epilogue:

"In their partial rejection of diffusion as the reason for these links [between diverse cultures], folklorists of the twentieth century have had to propose the only two other possible causes of similarity: chance and the inner workings of the human mind.  While chance may operate for single obvious motifs, such as the worship of the Sun, I have shown that it is statistically extremely unlikely that complex story-types, sharing from three to ten distinct motifs, could have occurred more than once.  Yet this is what would have to happen for the distribution of myths in a diagonal band across Eurasia - with Polynesia at one end and Finland at the other - to have all occurred independently.  That these were the core myths that were preserved so carefully by the Mesopotamian, Middle Eastern and Egyptian civilisations can also be no coincidence.  All the main stories in the first ten chapters of Genesis are found in this cultural band and all occur in the Far East: the watery creation, the separation of skies and earth, the creation of man from red earth, and Eve from his side, the Fall, Cain and Abel, and, of course, the flood.  With the exception of the flood, the relative paucity of evidence for these complex story-types elsewhere in the Americas and Africa not only supports diffusion as a reason for the distribution, but also argues against both chance and the 'inner workings of man's brain' for their similarities."

"If we can accept the statistical evidence of trans-continental relationships in myths, then the dating of the first written versions of the Eurasian myths becomes crucial.  We are lucky here, since the Sumerians and Babylonians were so assiduous in recording the motifs on tablets and cylinder seals.  The date bracket that comes out of such an enquiry reveals that the myths, with their religious connotations, were among the first of all written records in the third millennium BC.  Since in the majority of cases the structure and content of the Mesopotamian myths show them to be derived from earlier Eastern versions, we may suppose that the direction of diffusion was East-to-West, and that the date of diffusion may be been earlier than the beginning of the third millennium.  This means that East-West cultural links may be older than 5000 years.  Such cultural links could only have occurred if there were people in Southeast Asia to hold the stories, and that they were capable of traveling to India and Mesopotamia to transmit them... The Sumerians and Egyptians themselves wrote about the skilled wise men from the East, a fact often dismissed as the embellishment of a fertile imagination."