INSIGHTS on September 6, 2016 http://science.sciencemag.org/ PERSPECTIVES Downloaded from ANTHROPOLOGY Emperor Yu’s Great Flood Geological data provide support for a legendary flood in China ~4000 years ago By David R. Montgomery with the major cultural transition from the older myth or propaganda to justify the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in centralized power of imperial rule (1, 3). e know of the legendary Emperor China and that also helps explain curious In contrast to the hero of another well- Yu through the story of China’s details of Yu’s story. known flood story, Yu is not heralded for Great Flood, a tale already an- According to folk tradition, the story of surviving a great deluge sent by an angry cient when first recorded around Yu’s Great Flood is an oral history of real god. Rather, the story tells of how he di- 1000 BCE (1). On page 579 of this disaster, handed down for a millennium be- rected efforts to dredge and channel rivers issue, Wu et al. offer a provocative fore entering written records. However, in to drain the floodwaters (3). It casts this Wnew explanation for this story. They pre- the absence of geological evidence for such sent evidence for an enormous landslide a flood, some scholars have argued that the Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, dam break 1922 ± 28 BCE (2) that coincided story is either a historicized version of an WA 98195, USA. Email: [email protected] COLLECTION BIGELOW WILLIAM STURGIS IMAGE: 538 5 AUGUST 2016 • VOL 353 ISSUE 6299 sciencemag.org SCIENCE Published by AAAS Battling the Great Flood. Emperor Yu’s fantastical Northern California to British Columbia, PHYSICS achievements include defeating the dragon that stirred also describe floods coming from the sea up the Great Flood and ridding the floodwaters of ser- (6). They tell of ancient fights between pents and dragons that drove off settlers. Thunderbird and Whale so violent that Bringing they caused the ground to shake and trig- triumph of human ingenuity as bringing gered huge waves, killing scores and lodg- order to the land so that fields could be ing canoes in treetops. Indeed, stories from order to the planted, thereby setting the stage for the across the tsunami-prone Pacific—from lowland agriculture that fueled the blos- Indonesia to Chile—tell of surprise floods soming of Chinese civilization. A telling from the sea. expanding aspect of the story—that it took Yu and his In contrast, stories from regions with followers decades to control the floodwa- formerly more extensive glaciers, such as fermion zoo ters—makes sense in light of the geological Scandinavia, Tibet, and North America, evidence that Wu et al. present. evoke failure of glacial dams as the cause of Crystallographic Wu et al. report that an ancient land- great floods (4). Another recurring theme slide dammed the Yellow River in the Jishi is lowland flooding. For example, Ryan classification provides an Gorge on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. and Pitman have argued that the story of inventory of the electron- Through mapping and dating lake sedi- Noah’s Flood describes how a rising Medi- ments impounded behind the dam and terranean Sea spilled into a low-lying fresh- like particles that emerge also distinctive sediments water valley to create the in a lattice world deposited downstream, the Black Sea (7). Another po- authors show that an enor- tential explanation for No- mous flood surged down “Great floods ah’s Flood updates the idea By Carlo Beenakker the river when the dam occupy a central of levee failures inundating broke. They find that this low-lying terrain along the e observe space as a continuum, flood coincided with the place in some of Tigris and Euphrates rivers but we might entertain the on September 6, 2016 social disruption of a ma- the world’s oldest (4), in light of catastrophic thought that there is an underly- jor cultural transition and flooding during Cyclone ing lattice and that space is ac- suggest that it breached the stories.” Nargis in 2008, when more tually a crystal. Which particles river’s natural levees. The than 130,000 people were would inhabit such a lattice timing of the flood, Wu et al. report, coin- killed in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta (8). It Wworld? This question was first raised by cides with an avulsion that redirected the increasingly seems that fundamental ele- Werner Heisenberg in 1930 in an attempt Yellow River to carve a new course across ments of the global tapestry of great flood to remove the infinities that plagued the the North China Plain about 2000 BCE (2). stories mirror the geography of tsunamis, continuum quantum mechanics. His Git- It would have taken considerable time for a glacial outburst floods, and catastrophic terwelt (lattice world) hosted electrons large river to adjust to such a change, and lowland flooding. that could morph into protons, photons the associated sustained flooding would Great floods occupy a central place in that were not massless, and more pecu- fall in the right time and place to account some of the world’s oldest stories. And Em- liarities that compelled him to abandon http://science.sciencemag.org/ for Yu’s story—including the long time it peror Yu’s flood now stands as another such “this completely crazy idea” (1, 2). Heisen- took to control the floodwaters. story potentially rooted in geological events. berg’s motivation to put electrons on a lat- This support for the historicity of Yu’s Time and again, natural disasters like great tice came from solid-state physics, which flood is part of a broader pattern, another floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions in the 1930s was just developing as a field piece in long-standing debates over stories inspired tales passed down through genera- of research and which has now become a of epic deluges. These stories have been tions and civilizations to become legends playground for “crazy ideas” from particle particularly contentious in the Western (4, 9). How many other ancient stories of physics. In this spirit, on page 558 of this Downloaded from world. After all, attempts to explain the intriguing disasters might just have more issue Bradlyn et al. (3) use concepts bor- biblical story of Noah’s Flood not only than a grain of truth to them? j rowed from crystallography to classify shaped the early development of geology the electronic excitations of the lattice but later fueled discoveries refuting the REFERENCES world, and then use that to identify pos- biblically inspired idea that a global flood 1. S. Allan, The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in sible candidates of materials where they Early China (State Univ. of New York Press, Albany, 1991). laid down the world’s sedimentary rocks in 2. Q. Wu et al., Science 353, 579 (2016). become a reality as (nonfundamental) the first place (4). But how many of these 3. M. E. Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (State Univ. of quasiparticles. ancient stories might actually record re- New York Press, Albany, 2006). The idea that electrons on a lattice might gional flood disasters? 4. D. R. Montgomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist turn into altogether different quasiparticles Investigates Noah’s Flood (Norton, New York, 2012). A century ago, the Scottish anthropolo- 5. J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (Macmillan, was forcefully demonstrated in graphene: gist James Frazer detected a pattern in London, 1918). An electron moving on the two-dimen- flood stories from around the world (5). 6. R. S. Ludwin et al., Seismol. Res. Lett. 76, 140 (2005). sional honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms In case after case across cultures, stories 7. W. Ryan, W. Pitman, Noah’s Flood: The New Scientific loses its mass. In the language of particle Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (Simon of great floods evoked descriptions of local & Schuster, New York, 1998). physics, the electron is said to have been natural events. A rising sea was the cause 8. H. M. Fritz et al., Nat. Geosci. 2, 448 (2009). transformed from a massive Dirac fermion of floods in stories from Pacific islands 9. D. B. Vitaliano, Legends of the Earth: Their Geological into a massless Weyl fermion. If the lattice prone to huge earthquake-generated waves Origins (Indiana Univ. Press, Bloomington, 1973). (tsunamis). Many Native American stories Instituut-Lorentz, Leiden University, 2300 RA Leiden, along the Cascadia subduction zone, from 10.1126/science.aah4040 Netherlands. Email: [email protected] SCIENCE sciencemag.org 5 AUGUST 2016 • VOL 353 ISSUE 6299 539 Published by AAAS Emperor Yu's Great Flood David R. Montgomery (August 4, 2016) Science 353 (6299), 538-539. [doi: 10.1126/science.aah4040] Editor's Summary This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Article Tools Visit the online version of this article to access the personalization and article tools: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6299/538 on September 6, 2016 Permissions Obtain information about reproducing this article: http://www.sciencemag.org/about/permissions.dtl http://science.sciencemag.org/ Downloaded from Science (print ISSN 0036-8075; online ISSN 1095-9203) is published weekly, except the last week in December, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1200 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005. Copyright 2016 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved. The title Science is a registered trademark of AAAS. RESEARCH | REPORTS The projected states are composed of two sub- phene, also allows one to selectively inject carriers 24.