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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

You need to adjust your timescales. "Settled for hundreds of years"? No. Settled for tens of thousands of years. In many places the shoreline moved three feet per year, when water was rising fastest; the beach one played at as a child was wholly gone by adulthood. The grandparents' ancestral shoreside village was underwater.

People could not just move inland; other people already lived there. Australians still keep careful oral records of negotiated resolutions of conflicts over living space when Sahel, between Australia and New Guinea, was inundated.

Between where Indonesian islands are now, and for hundreds of miles off the coast of Viet Nam all the way to Korea, were millions of square miles of prime habitat ("Sundaland"), also for tens of thousands of years. Every tribe there had to find somewhere else to live.

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We don't exactly know the carrying capacity/density of those populations and their territorial needs. We don't know if they were nomadic or not, if they seasonally moved. did they live in permanent places or did they move as resources depleted... did they rely of marine life, wildlife, proto-agriculture, foraging, hunting, etc.

We can't presume people lived "there" if we don't know much of the above.

Which is more likely: millions of square miles of river valley forest and savanna, inhabited? Or meticulously avoided?

Nomadic people have very rarely ranged over more than a few hundred miles. We have here thousands of miles. There is room for every variation you can imagine, and even more you can't.

Rather, there was.

That’s hardly a flood though. A flood is the village disappearing in day or two. Disappearing in a decade or two? I’m not sure what I would call that, but definitely not a flood.

It's not necessarily a binary thing. You can have gradual sea level rise punctuated with rapid inundation events.

This is exactly what happened in the British Isles when low lying Doggerland (between modern England and Denmark) was wiped out by a wave which was likely caused by an underwater landslide; that wave was in turn caused by the melting ice at the end of the ice age, which was otherwise causing gradual sea level increase.

True, but if you invented writing today and decided to record a 500 year old story, in that scenario are you really likely to be able to discern what the term flood meant back then, or if the word flood was even in the original story? Hundreds of years later people who weren't there are going to get lazy with the details.

I will be sure to relay your misgivings to the people displaced, once my time machine is ready. I will need to teach them English when I get there/then, so I can explain your careful distinction between a flood and ... what, an inundation? You didn't say.

I harbor doubts about their receptivity to the correction.

There are zillions of flood myths. More of them are cataclysmic like Noah and his ark, than gradual over a generation like The Pretenders' My City Was Gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths

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