[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Myran_*]

Sometimes I wonder if certain people really got the qualifications for their job, this is one such.
Mr John Barentine who works at the Apache Point Observatory have come up with a theory that a native american petroglyph depicts the supernova of the year 1006, yes 1000 years ago.
One of the reasons he think this is a depiction of a supernova is that it got something that looks like a star, well native american often used that shape.
What worries me is that Mr Barentine think that the image of a scorpion in the pertroglyph are some kind of proof.
The supernova appeared in the constellation Lupus (the wolf) which are located quite near Scorpius (The scorpion) but.....
The constellation we see are derived from cultures in the eastern Mediterranean (while the star names we use often are arabic). But the native americans are rather unlikely to see the same constellations as those from the old world. In short a small fact that make the theory derail completely.

More here

[Jyril]

That hypothesis sounds intriguing, but I've read that it has some very serious flaws. Can't remember any example, though.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

That hypothesis sounds intriguing, but I've read that it has some very serious flaws. Can't remember any example, though.

This hypothesis (that the flooding back of the Black Sea at the end of the ice age produced the dilluvium story) is plausible, but not proven. A similar explanation was proposed for the story of Atlantide (it would have be flooded by the rise of sea level at the end of the ice age). The main flaw I see in both is that it makes more than 6000 years of oral transmission for a remembering of such events.

Anyway, even if the story of the black sea is true, it will be difficult to prove. Likely we shall find on its bottom only peasants homes, raw stones walls and the like. Even if something like Noah's Arch really existed, it is very probable that this ship could not be distinguished from other ships existing at this epoch (or rather rafts) and anyway that it ended into fire wood. and that it never went above the today sea level. No chance to find its remnats ant top of Mount Ararat! If the background event is true, Noa'h biblical account would be the story of many peasants, at best tribal chiefs, who had to build rafts to escape the flooding, putting aboard their livestock. We know how a whole people can be symbolized by only one person into ancient tales, especially biblical reports. A hint of how the social hierarchy was considered: the god-like patriarch, and all the others, wife and peoples, were just his slaves, his belonging, like for us our shoes.


There are more traceable events telling us how an ancient fact can become a seemingly incredible or magical legent. I recently stumbled on a story which happened in France, in the 12th century, near Perpignan (at that epoch it was everything but french, but this is not the point). It is the story of the "babaos", a gigantic snake monster which invaded the Agly river, eating lot of people, to end up killed by the local land lord, an historical character. There are many variants of the story, but when the "babaos" was killed, his gigantic bones were placed into the churches of Rivesaltes and Arles sur tech. What makes this story interesting, is that these bones are still visible today. Of course, they were examined by scientists, which, what did you expected, found that they were whale bones. It is very clear here that there was a real fact (a whale engaging into a river, and unable to find her way back) and exagerations (the whale eating peoples, or, in a variant, killed on top of Mount Canigou, a near 3000m mountain).

We can still see such exageration or parasitic elements added to a true story today. Recently there was in Toulouse, France, a huge explosion in a factory called AZF, which erased the factory, killed about 30 persons and shattered the windows in half of the town. To this simple raw account, there was many stories added (many people seeming unable to accept that an well known and established factory could just explode by the fault of a trite human error and slack into security rules). The most incredible was a story of an electric discharge coming from a transformer into another neighbouring factory and zapping hundred of metres toward the faulty dock. But the most interesting is the story of an Arab worker, found among the deads, who had several underwears, a feature which was sometimes encountered into suicide bombings. Of course enquireers checked this hypothesis and found that the guy and his family were peaceful people, at the exact opposite of terrorists. And enquireers simply dumped this explanation. But from this time, the "terrorist explanation" is regularly "discovered" into the extreme right press, which regularly denounce the "terrorist plot" and the "censorship of this explanation by authorities"! Would such a thing happened into Middle age, we would have a nice legend of a monstruous plot, a pretext for a crusade!