Geologists have found the first
evidence for China's Great Flood, a 4,000-year-old disaster on the Yellow River
that led to birth of the Xia dynasty and modern Chinese civilization,
researchers said Thursday.
The findings in the journal Science
may help rewrite history because they not only show that a massive flood
did occur, but that it was in 1920 BC, several centuries later than
traditionally thought.
This would mean the Xia dynasty, led by
Emperor Yu, may also have started later than Chinese historians have thought.
Yu gained fame as the man who was able
to gain control over the flood by orchestrating the dredging work needed to
guide the waters back into their channels.
Restoring order after chaos earned
"him the divine mandate to establish the Xia dynasty, the first in Chinese
history," said the study, led by Wu Qinglong, professor in the department
of geography at Nanjing Normal University.
Stories about Emperor Yu laid the
ideological foundation for the Confucian rulership system, but in recent
generations, some scholars have questioned whether it ever happened at all.
Perhaps, they say, it was all a myth designed to justify imperial rule.
So geologists investigated along the
Yellow River in Qinghai Province, examining the remains of a landslide dam and
sediments from a dammed lake and outburst flood.
Catastrophic flood
What they found suggests a catastrophic
flood that is one of the largest known floods on Earth in the last
10,000 years, said co-author Darryl Granger, professor in the department of
Earth atmospheric planetary sciences at Purdue University.
The floodwaters surged to 38 meters
(yards) above the modern river level, making the disaster "roughly
equivalent to the largest Amazon flood ever measured," he told reporters
on a conference call to discuss the findings.
The flood would have been "more
than 500 times larger than a flood on the Yellow River from a rainfall
event," he added.
"This cataclysmic flood would have
been a truly devastating event for anyone living on the Yellow River
downstream."Since such floods toss debris and sediment all over, mixing old soil with new, the scientific team used human remains to pin down the timing of the disaster.
Three children's skeletons were found
in the rubble of an earthquake, which is believed to have triggered a
landslide, researchers said.
That landslide created a dam. Water
built up around the dam and eventually burst through, unleashing the flood.
Radiocarbon dating on the children's
bones showed that they died in 1920 BC, coinciding with a major cultural
transition in China.
"This is the first time a flood of
this scale—large enough to account for it—has been found," said David
Cohen, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at National Taiwan
University.
"The outburst flood... provides us
with a tantalizing hint that the Xia dynasty might really have existed,"
he told reporters.
"If the Great Flood really
happened, perhaps it is also likely that the Xia dynasty really existed, too.
The two are directly tied to each other."
Now that researchers have evidence to
back up the tales in ancient texts, the Xia dynasty could be considered as
starting around 1900 BC, instead of 2200 BC as previously thought, they argue.
"Great floods occupy a central
place in some of the world's oldest stories," wrote David Thompson of the
University of Washington, Seattle in an accompanying commentary in Science.
"And Emperor Yu's flood now stands
as another such story potentially rooted in geological events."
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