Stop 3. The last 14,500 years

Follow the last wedge to strip 4. Here the scale is years BC and AD, and you can finally see history.

On the left is a cold snap called the Younger Dryas. Ice cores from Greenland date it from about 10,900 to 9,700 BC. The world warmed quickly after it. Farming starts in the Fertile Crescent between about 10,000 and 8,000 BC. Göbekli Tepe, the great stone circles in Turkey, was built in the middle of the 10th millennium BC.

Copper smelting appears about 5000 BC. Writing appears in Sumer and Egypt about 3350 to 3200 BC. Then comes the gold band. That is all of written history: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and the machine age from about 1760.

Now find the green marks. They show one reading of this stretch, from the Michlaude book Before the Flood. The book places Noah's Flood at the start of the Younger Dryas, about 10,800 BC. The book itself labels that PROPOSED, not proven.

Record check (judgment). The record puts the start of the Younger Dryas at about 10,900 BC, close to the book's date and within the dating error. The book also says the chemical markers at that layer are "not seriously disputed." That claim does not hold. A large 2023 review disputes the markers themselves, not just what caused them. You can read the book at michlaude.com/discipleship/before-the-flood.

Three brown marks show where the Bible's story sits on this strip: Abraham, Moses and the exodus, and Christ. They sit well inside the gold band.

Picture: Chart 1, strip 4.