The Most Traumatic Event in Human History

Image Credit: Unsplash/Storm Seeker

The most agonizing events a person experiences can fundamentally change their psyche. Arguably, the most traumatic event in human history created a sense of divine judgment that has carried into the modern era. It reshaped the meaning of being human.

Roughly fifteen thousand years ago humans were scarred by a tragedy that was etched into the collective mind and ruminations of the subconscious: the sea level dramatically rose following the end of the last Ice Age. Over generations tribes witnessed the slow and agonizing death of their land. Modern science has gifted us the power to understand the limits of sea level rise, but to these early hunter gatherers it might have spelled a form of doom. They were unable to understand that eventually the ocean’s hunger would be satiated. 

As a prerequisite to understanding the sheer scale of this trauma one must first understand that we are fundamentally tied to our land. We are described by our nationality. Our citizenship is not just of a country, or a group of people, it is associated with the land. For ancient hunter gatherers, limited long distance mobility ensured they would typically never leave the region oftheir parents. Even exceptions such as migrations bore more resemblance to a piecemeal movement than the grand exoduses of the animal kingdom.

Simultaneously, in a sharp and direct contrast to the slow and agonizing advance of the oceans, glacial lakes around the world exploded in scale. Enormous ice sheets that towered miles over the ground melted creating catastrophic floods. To ancient people this must have been ominous. To lose their land was to lose their humanity. 

It is unsurprising that around the world this apocalypse triggered oral traditions that survived thousands of years. What is surprising is the accuracy of some of these stories. Aboriginal Australians, for example, have an uncomfortably accurate understanding of events that happened hundreds of generations ago. One possible explanation is that tribes cross referenced each other's mythologies creating a form of error correction. But it is incredibly revealing that out of the multitudinous ancient catastrophes–from volcanic eruptions that dimmed the sun, to droughts where entire civilizations starved to the point of collapse–the tale that has a surviving global oral memory was the loss of land.

If this sounds familiar it is possibly because flood stories are intrinsically tied with religious narratives. Noah’s ark, an integral part of Abrahamic religions from Christianity to Judaism and Islam, is a textbook example. But billions of devout followers could understandably question the compatibility of these two doctrines. So could Noah have coexisted with the Ice Age floods?

And despite the Genesis flood’s explicit destruction of the entire world, ancient Hebrew had a limited vocabulary forcing oral and written stories to be creative with word usage. This was probably closer to a modern metaphor than an exaggeration, not the exact truth but parseable to the truth. In essence it appears to be reasonable to believe in both religious floods and modern geology. 

As waters annex yet more land,  sea level rise is often ignored. We are facing the same ocean and we know with a lucid precision the cultural significance because of residual trauma. If we are to remember Noah’s odyssey and the echo of the ancient stories, we must consider climate change and what will be left when the waters recede.