Rocks and bones reveal China’s great flood

Legends have long claimed that China’s first dynasty, the Xia, arose after Emperor Yu tamed a large-scale flood that threatened the country’s civilization. Researchers never found any evidence to corroborate the tale – until now.

By analyzing sediments and the bones of three young children, Dr. Wu Qinglong, a professor of geography at Nanjing Normal University, and his colleagues have discovered evidence that such a flood probably happened sometime around 1900 BC.

According to BBC News and the Washington Post,  Dr. Wu was conducting research around the Yellow River in 2007 when he found rock deposits resembling “outburst flood sediments” in the form of green schist and mudstone. The sediment layers were far thicker than was normal for the area, suggesting that they were originally deposited there by a tremendous flood.

He recruited a team of archaeologists, geologists, and historians to further investigate the site, and they concluded a nearby earthquake triggered an avalanche which formed a natural dam in the river. That dam lasted for six to nine months before bursting, and once it did, as much as 16 cubic km worth of water flooded the lowlands downstream.

As Wu told reporters during a teleconference, the investigation “showed that the sediments from this outburst flood are up to 20m thick, and up to 50m higher than the Yellow River – indicating an unprecedented, devastating flood.” His team published their findings in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Findings provide possible link between Xia dynasty, Erlitou culture

During the course of their investigation, Wu’s team carbon-dated organic matter found along with the flood deposits, as well as bones belonging to three young children believed to be victims of the cataclysmic event. The results indicated that the flood occurred sometime around 1922 BC – “plus or minus about 28 years,” study co-author Dr. Darryl Granger told BBC News.

Granger, a geologist at Purdue University, noted that the flood waters would have extended as far as 2,000 km (more than 1,200 miles) downstream while traveling 300-500,000 cubic meters per second. That’s “roughly equivalent to the largest flood ever measured on the Amazon river” and “among the largest known floods to have happened on Earth during the past 10,000 years.”

It’s also 500 times the size of a typical flood on the Yellow River caused by rainfall, the study authors explained. While the dating of the event is earlier than some earlier estimates, it would coincide with a transition from Stone Age culture to Bronze Age culture – specifically, the rise of the Erlitou culture, an early Chinese Bronze Age society previously identified by researchers. The study suggests that the Xia dynasty and the Erlitou culture could be linked.

“This is the first time a flood of this scale – large enough to account for it – has been found,” co-author David Cohen, an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at National Taiwan University, told the AFP.  The discovery “provides us with a tantalizing hint that the Xia dynasty might really have existed,” he noted. “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.”

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Image credit: Qu Qinglon

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