this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Yeah, pretty much this. People like living near water - you can drink it (if it's fresh), you can use it for rudimentary sanitation, you can water animals and crops much easier than building complex irrigation, and you can use it as a food source (fish/shellfish).
And that's exactly why, despite certain Christian biblical literalist beliefs, you can find flood myths all over the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
If there were volcanoes everywhere humans settled, there would be global volcano myths.
But as you can see from that list, it's pretty global. You can't really say that about volcanoes. On the other hand, Chinese flood myths can be explained a lot more easily by the fact that a massive Yangtze flood in the 1930s killed something like 4 million people wasn't even close to a one-off occurrence than the Black Sea flooding neolithic settlements.
On top of that, the Tigris floods pretty regularly even today and the Tigris was also home to the Sumerian civilization that the Gilgamesh story came from.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/16072/floods-in-northern-iraq