An ancient legend confirmed?Around 2,000 BCE the bronze age was opening, and (as the story has it) a

An ancient legend confirmed?Around 2,000 BCE the bronze age was opening, and (as the story has it) a large long lasting flood gushed down the Yellow River in what is now China prompting a local chieftain named Yu to tame it, becoming in the process the founder of the first Xia dynasty and launching the civilisation that would long call itself the Middle Kingdom (between Heaven and Earth). No concrete evidence had turned up before now to substantiate the story, though ever since Schliemann discovered Troy partly by using a geological eye to reconstruct how the Turkish coast had changed since those long gone days it is obvious that many of them contain kernels of truth, invariably embellished and embroidered by later retellings.A team exploring the Jishi Gorge found the first physical evidence for the purported flood in the shape of distinctive sedimentary deposits (remembering that subsequent floods will remove evidence of previous ones, the same as with cycles of glaciation and thaw removing previous moraines), and that it was preceded by no more than a year by a large earthquake. Their excavation also revealed a poignant human story of a family of 14 slain in the quake, and then buried in the flood deposits in their erstwhile home, which helped establish the dates (around 1920 BCE) and sequence of events. The same site also revealed the world’s oldest noodles, preserved in the fine grained river silt.The quake caused a landslide that dammed the river for some time, situated some 25km upstream from where the team excavated, creating a lake 200 metres deep. When it broke through as a huge flood after several months of building up in volume a devastating wave of water and sediment flowed some 2,000 km downriver, whose volume was estimated at somewhere between 12 and 17 cubic km. The house with the dead children in was buried in mud, evidenced by the fact that cracks from the quake were filled in with flood deposits and not the normal fine silt left by normal runoff.The legend states that Yu took a quarter century to tame the land again and that large scale dredging operations were involved. The organisational experience (and divine mandate) gained by facing this challenge sparked Yu to found a dynasty and start expanding, a process which culminated much later when the entire country became unified. The event may have also influenced the philosophy that crystallised as Confucianism, with its emphasis on creating and preserving order and stability out of chaos.Since written records only date from 450BCE any tales that have come down will have been distorted by ‘Chinese whispers’, and some had believed the Xia dynasty a later myth meant to show the longevity of imperial rule, but the latest discovery at least shows plausibility lying in the old legends, since they estimate that this flood was the worst in many millennia and it occurred in roughly the right place at the right time.LozImage credit: Jishi Gorge, Reuters, Excavation: Cai Linhaihttp://bit.ly/2aOpxqnhttp://bit.ly/2aC70CKhttp://bit.ly/2aOuobnOriginal paper, paywall access: http://bit.ly/2aXmyjB -- source link

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