I love how some cultures have recordkeeping that goes back hundreds of years that can be tied to explain some unusual sediment deposits found halfway around the world.
Nearby this in Oregon is Crater Lake, which is the stunning remnant of a catastrophic volcanic eruption 7,700 years ago. The volcanic explosivity index classifies it as a 7, "super-colossal", i.e. an order of magnitude larger than Krakatoa. And indeed there are Native American tribes who have passed down the story of the eruption over the millennia, believing it to be the site of a battle between gods. Super cool to see folklore and geology intersect.
> According to the myth of the Klamath Indians, Llao, the chief of the Below World, standing on Mt Mazama, was battling Skell, the chief of the Above World, who stood on Mt Shasta in California, about a hundred miles away (Clark 1953). They hurled rocks and flames at each other, and darkness covered the land. The fight ended when Mt Mazama collapsed under Llao and hurled him back into his underworld domain. The large hole that was created then filled up to form Crater Lake.
> This sounds like an eye-witness account of such an eruption, and it undoubtedly is, for Indian artifacts have been found buried in the Mazama ash. The eruption has been radiocarbon-dated to about 6500 years ago on the basis of Indian sandals found in the ash, but had no datable materials been found, this myth alone would have served to date the eruption as post-Pleistocene, because this part of the world was first inhabited by people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge and migrated down through Alaska and Canada into the northwestern United States.
The impressive thing about the Crater Lake/Mount Mazama eruption is that you can still find the ash layer from it in locations hundreds or even thousands of miles away. There's an 8 inch layer visible in many locations in the Okanagan Valley of Northern Washington, which is about 500 miles away by car.
I'm pretty sure these intersections are often coincidence. There are enough myths across enough cultures that you're bound to find some with similarities to real events. For example: if the story of Sodom and Gomorrah had been a Klamath myth instead of a Hebrew myth, people would claim that it was from the eruption of Crater Lake. The same goes for pretty much any prehistoric flood.[1]
There really was a worldwide flood. It did not recede; all the water is still there. Instead, people had to abandon where they lived and move uphill.
It didn't happen all in one day, or year. But there were many places where the water moved inland by three feet per year; any beach one knew as a child was gone by adulthood.
Millions of square miles of what was lowland is now underwater -- the region between Indonesian islands; for hundreds of miles out to sea from Viet Nam all the way up to Korea; all the space between Australia and New Guinea; thousands of square miles off India; the whole Persian Gulf; England and Ireland were not islands; from Florida to Louisiana; from Argentina out to the Falklands.
These places were prime habitat (possibly excepting near the Falklands, and northern England), so not unpopulated.
It seems significant that the oldest known civilizations, in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley, arose immediately uphill from especially major inundations. Australian oral records have precise accounts of conflict resolutions over people moving uphill into land already occupied for 40,000+ years.
