AI Summary
5 min readIn 1872, a London banknote engraver named George Smith taught himself to read ancient Babylonian tablets, then made a discovery that shook the foundations of biblical scholarship. He found a flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh—a great flood, a ship resting on a mountain, a dove sent to search for dry land—written down roughly 4,000 years ago, long before the Bible. Smith reportedly stripped off his clothes and ran around yelling, "I am the first man to read that after more than 2,000 years of oblivion." The discovery raised an unsettling question: if Noah's Ark was just one version of a much older story, how far back can you trace a tale? One astrophysicist thinks he has found a story that may be 100,000 years old.
The Pleiades puzzle
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What you'll learn
- 1 What's the Oldest Story Ever Told? — Unexplainable
- 2 Timestamped Outline
- 3 (01:11) **George Smith's Shocking Discovery** - A London banknote engraver finds a flood story on ancient Babylonian tablets that predates the Bible
- 4 (02:39) **The Hundred-Thousand-Year-Old Story Hypothesis** - An astrophysicist believes he's found a story that survived since humans were in Africa
- 5 (03:48) **The Orion and Pleiades Connection** - Examining a constellation story shared across completely isolated cultures
- 6 (06:10) **Astrophysicist Ray Norris's Theory** - Why a shared story between Greeks and Aboriginal Australians might be 65,000 years old
- 7 (08:31) **The Astronomical Evidence** - How star movements over 100,000 years could explain the "missing sister"
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has questions.
Guests: Ray Norris, astrophysicist; Manvir Singh, cognitive anthropologist at the University of California, Davis
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