this is google ad spam, and i had to click on it. had researchers found noah's ark?

https://mydailymagazine.com/could-these-be-the-remains-of/

well, they found some wood in the mountains that was treated by humans, but there's lots of wood in those mountains (and all over the world) that's been treated by humans, and you'd really need a pretty high bar of evidence to demonstrate that the ark belonged to the actual character noah (and i guess you'd by proxy prove the historicity of noah. who lived to be how old? i can't remember. it was measured in centuries though, right?). i don't even know what that high bar of evidence would even be. maybe noah might have carved "noah was here" on the deck; maybe the ark had a nice paint job noah's ark. maybe they could find fossilized remains of all of the animals, lined up by twos.

that would mean that if they were to finally find a fossilized unicorn, it would falsify the theory. it is falsifiable, at least.

i'm being facetious, to dance around the point that this isn't science. maybe the wood they found is actually interesting, but there's no way to prove or disprove it has anything to do with the flood myth; like, you can't even reasonably articulate the claim.

but, the persistent existence of these flood myths does suggest that something happened deep in our history, and there is actual science that backs up the point. we should be talking about something like the great anthropocene-induced flood, because the factors that created the flooding are related to our colonization of the planet. we have enough archaeology and enough of a climate record to back this up - there were floods to close the neolithic period, as a consequence of the neolithic period, itself.

see, we built our settlements on the beaches. we still do, and we did it back then, and we did it everywhere. we cut down the inland forests to clear space for agriculture and to build structures just around the beaches that we built our settlements around. and, then we bred heavily, as we had more than enough to eat. these three changes - forest clearing, the growth of agriculture, a spike in human population - led to increased concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, which led to ice cap melting.

and, there were floods, as the oceans rose - which wiped out our idyllic beach settlements. the stories remember this catastrophic event that we created, via anthropogenic climate change, as a consequence of the neolithic revolution.

in the the judaic version of the myth, god promises never to send another flood, and gives us a rainbow as a covenant for it. i have this sneaking suspicion that this is the actual real reason that americans are so skeptical about climate change; god promised he wouldn't do that again. but, of course, this is just a story, and the myth is just a hope - although one wonders how badly damaged judaism may have been in the long run had there, indeed, been another flood in the region.

in time, the atmosphere stabilized, but then we discovered oil. and coal. and here we go again - although this time it may be too much.

so, i wouldn't expect to find substantive evidence of noah's ark out there any time soon. but, seeking it out is really missing the point of the story, which is a memory of a time where we flooded ourselves due to the consequences of technological advancement - and then lacked the understanding to put it in the proper context. this story is actually a vital part of our history, and it is important that we reclaim it from the peddlers of myth and prophesy and understand it and it's lessons correctly.

but, note that google gave me the link through an ad. that's as scary as anything else.