Also quite amusing in the context of contemporary Australia's philosophy where alien plants and animals are concerned! :)
> “It suggests that Aboriginal oral traditions may have endured for up to 30,000 years, and lends further weight to the idea that some Aboriginal myths pertaining to gigantic animals may be authentic records of extinct megafauna”
Wow ^ 2
Hundreds of Aboriginal tribes had hundreds of contradictory myths on hundreds of subjects. Most of them are verifiably false (e.g. those rocks over there are not, in fact, the remains of three young women who got turned into stone for disobeying their father). Some of them are probably correct by complete accident.
As for gigantic animals... well, they're a pretty common motif in myths and stories all around the world. Maybe it's some distant memory our cultures all have of the larger animals that used to live around here... or maybe it's just because giant animals are cool. In Aboriginal myths, giant animals are often really really giant, because they're used as explanations for geographic features -- e.g. rivers are caused by the meanderings of a giant snake.
We can look at story drift even in non primitive societies where they have writing and it's huge within generations.
Most of middle east cultures draw the myth from Mesopotamian cultures, whose flood myth most likely refers to the flooding of the Persian gulf (which Eufrat and Tigris drain to currently, but used to be a fertile lowland with multiple rivers) cca 8kya.
https://www.livescience.com/10340-lost-civilization-existed-...
Considering the map in this article, with abundance of rivers across the whole Persian gulf plain, I would suggest that the myth of exile from Eden is also related to it - after the flooding and subsequent move of people upriver between the Eufrat and Tigris there was a need to create irrigation channels to keep the agricultural production up at necessary levels. Creating and maintaining these channels is hard, back-breaking work, and it might have inspired the famous 'By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food' line.
I thought the GP was actually referring to this event. Do we have a time frame for that which negates that possibility, because otherwise I'm not sure how your evidence refutes rather than corroborates.
The article I linked clearly states that it was a fertile land basin until 8kya. I decided to ignore kbenson's lack of reading comprehension hiding behind an attempt to insert himself as an arbiter through nitpicking about a thing he obviously knows nothing about, but I see he's not the only one refusing to read the article, so I'll restate my point:
My point of contention is the 15kya date. By 15kya the receding of ice age ice caps has barely started, so 15kya the ocean levels were not affected in any major way. The major geography-changing ocean level rise came a few thousand years later.
The linked article clearly states the following: "Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said." and "The Gulf Oasis would have been a shallow inland basin exposed from about 75,000 years ago until 8,000 years ago, forming the southern tip of the Fertile Crescent, according to historical sea-level records."
While I see how it's possible you could interpret me as trying to insert myself as and arbiter instead of expressing my own lack of knowledge and asking for clarification, it was fully your own choice to not only decide that was the interpretation you believed as fact, but to then broadcast that negative interpretation as fact to others. A little assumption of good faith goes a long way, and I don't think it's too much to ask for.
But like I said, that's ok.