The myth of a Flood that kills off almost the entire human race is present in various cultures around the world...

The myth of a Flood that kills off almost the entire human race is present in various cultures around the world, from Mesoamerica, to Greece, to Mesopotamia, to India, to Australia.
What could be the origin of this legend?

There are 165 major rivers in the world and thousands of minor rivers.

According to wiki pages, roughly 20-30 floods hit each year, atleast recorded ones on wiki. I suspect the number of actual floods happening per year is in hundreds.

If we assume 30 minimum each year, over, the past 2000 years, thats roughly 60,000 years. Over the span of 10,000 years, that's around 200,000 major floods.

A myth coming from few of those is not out of ordinary.

The first agricultural civilizations formed on the banks of rivers which flooded every year. Some floods were bigger than others. A story about a REALLY big flood is basically inevitable.

Ancient aliens, like everything that links civilizations

300,000*

The planet Nibiru passing by Earth caused a great deluge to rise and sweep the world clean, sinking the great land of Atlantis beneath the waves in the process. It also removed whatever few traces were left of the great Finnish and Korean civilizations.

Archetypal event

Its not Nibiru, but Planet Nine.

Sea levels were once far lower and rapidly rose at the end of the Ice Age. It stands to reason that almost every major city in the world was submerged at about the same time, displacing/killing millions of people in the process.

Meltwater pulse 1A-D where sea levels rose 50-100 meters in 300 years. For early cultures who see this unbelievably rapid change in sea level and their limited knowledge of small floods it makes sense they would reach a conclusion of a global flood event

floods

plus the inevitable subsequent systemic colapse made them feel like the world ended and they survived in some postapocaliptic reality where even the knowledge of the event or what happened in the before times was lost or turned into legend

The pan-Semitic myth of a worldwide flood comes from the Sumerian* flood myth. This myth itself derives from the historical flooding of what is now the Persian Gulf, an action which drove the Sumerians out of their traditional marshland homes and onto land, leading them to form agriculture and civilization. Semites, being immeasurably influenced by the Sumerians, adopted this myth. Indo-Europeans then adopted it from Semites.

*Sumerians share no genetic or cultural lineage with Semites or Indo-Europeans, being a linguistic, cultural, and genetic isolate. They are entirely unrelated to the Semitic populations that they would come into contact with.

A theory of the origin of such stories that I find interesting, although I feel is often overlooked, is that they arose to explain the presence of sealife fossils that could be found in areas high above any water.

>
*Sumerians share no genetic or cultural lineage with Semites or Indo-Europeans, being a linguistic, cultural, and genetic isolate. They are entirely unrelated to the Semitic populations that they would come into contact with.

They're only a linguistic isolate, there's no indication that they are genetically and culturally isolate. Considering you have populations like the Basques who are descended from the same "indigenous" hunter-gatherer stock that permeates a lot of European populations (albeit usually as a minority) while remaining linguistically isolated, assuming that linguistic isolation means genetic isolation is unwarranted.

That only explains its presence in Mediterranean and Mesopotamian myths

It must be aliens. After all, its not like every starting civilization settled around big rivers and those rivers would flood area around them from time to time, right?

If there was a global melting of ice it would drive ocean levels up around the globe at around the same time. As another user also mentioned, there are hundreds of rivers across the globe and civilizations tend to rise up around bodies of fresh water, so it's hardly a surprise that a flood myth would arise when floods would be a relatively common occurrence anyway

i do believe in this shit to some extent but thats the first time i heard of an ancient finnish and korean civ
could u enlighten me more

>What could be the origin of this legend?

It's of a psychological origin, therefore it does not have to be explained through cultural contamination. Its a mythological story about humanity being destroyed through mass degeneracy and hedonism.

It's not a myth, there was a huge flood in the Tigris Euphrates river valley that devastated many cities. They attributed it to the work of Enlil, it exists in every discovered Mesopotamian archaeological source.

Why do you think everyone says shit will hit the fan if the Mosul dam collapses?

major flooding brought on by the end of the last ice age.

Human archetypes and symbolism.
Water is a universal symbol of cleansing and rebirth. Like another user said, flooding happens a lot around the world.

It makes sense that different cultures would independantly have similar creation stories, add to that the factor that the more contact with the outside world a culture gets (which has increased more and more) the more similar the stories become.

By the point of you googling this shit in 2017, of course all stories seem the same. Thats because the """ORIGINALS"" are long distorted, despite what sources may say.

The Black Sea flood would have left a cultural impression.As would many of the mega-tsunamis that have been proven to have occured.And when you factor in that most human habitation has historically been at or near coastlines and riverbanks then the universal flood myths suddenly make more sense,to me, anyway.

>SE asia

holy shit, that must have been one hell of a population shift

Literally wat?

They were the peak of human advancement and existed around ten thousand years ago, but ended up destroying each other in a terrible Hyperwar that lasted for thousands of years, something humanity has never recovered from.

The Black Sea Flood explains Greece/Mesopotamia/Anatolia, mega-tsunamis explain India/Australia/Mesoamerica, as do floods of rivers like the Ganges. Also, pretty much every early civilization formed on the banks of major rivers, so floods were common. It's pretty straightforward.