Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - How Dynamic Geology Influenced Early Civilisation

Tuesday, 28 October 2025

Refuting Creationism - How Dynamic Geology Influenced Early Civilisation

Geography of Mesopotamian Plain (dashed black line) and its joint watershed (black line)

Giosan L, Goodman R (2025)

Urban civilization rose in Southern Mesopotamia on the back of tides – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have shown, in a paper just published in PLOS ONE, that the rise of Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia was strongly influenced by the dynamic interplay of tides, rivers, and sedimentation at the head of the Arabian Gulf. In doing so, they remind us just how parochial and derivative the culture that produced the origin myths in Genesis really was.

According to Genesis — which places the Middle East, and the Hebrews in particular, at the centre of everything — humans were created fully formed, without ancestry, in a ready-made Bronze Age civilisation.

Within just five generations of a supposed genocidal global flood that allegedly reset life on Earth, eight survivors are said to have produced a population large and skilled enough to embark on a massive civil engineering project: building a tower up to Heaven. In this worldview, Heaven lay just above the clouds over the Middle East, on a flat Earth watched over by a creator god who could apparently be taken by surprise.

Meanwhile, several other ancient civilisations were continuing uninterrupted, apparently unknown to the author of Genesis — despite the fact that some of the stories in Genesis are clearly derived from older Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths. Both the genocidal flood myth and the Tower of Babel narrative draw directly on Mesopotamian sources: the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the tower itself from the Great Ziggurat at Ur.

What the Genesis myths fail to acknowledge is the fundamental role of geological and environmental change in shaping human civilisation. The authors of these myths believed they lived in an unchanging world, created especially for them by a perfect god. There is no hint of plate tectonics shifting continents, no awareness that volcanic gases can alter climates, or that major rivers can change course or silt up. Yet such processes could and did disrupt the regular flooding on which early agriculture depended. Silting and delta formation could leave once-coastal communities stranded inland, while blocking the twice-daily tidal ebb and flow that once reached deep upriver.

The Sumerian Civilization.

Map of Sumer.

World History Encyclopedia.

Sumerian civilization was one of the earliest complex societies in human history and played a foundational role in the development of urban culture, writing, law, and statecraft. Its legacy profoundly influenced later Mesopotamian societies — including the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians — and, indirectly, Western civilisation through its impact on biblical traditions.

Here is a structured overview of what is known:

Chronology and Geography

Timeframe: Roughly 4500–1900 BCE, though Sumerian cultural influence persisted long after their political decline.

Ubaid period (c. 4500–4000 BCE) – pre-urban, formative era.
Uruk period (c. 4000–3100 BCE) – emergence of the first true cities.
Early Dynastic period (c. 2900–2334 BCE) – independent city-states flourish.
Akkadian conquest (c. 2334–2154 BCE) – Sumer absorbed into Akkadian Empire.
Ur III period (c. 2112–2004 BCE) – brief Sumerian political resurgence.

Location: Southern Mesopotamia (modern-day southern Iraq), particularly the fertile plain between the Tigris River and Euphrates River near the head of the Arabian Gulf.

City-States and Political Structure

Sumer consisted of independent city-states, each with its own ruler (often called ensi or lugal) and patron deity.
Major cities included Ur, Uruk, Lagash, Eridu, Kish, and Nippur.
These cities were often in competition, sometimes forming alliances but frequently engaging in warfare.
Sumer is credited with the first known urban civilisation: dense populations, monumental architecture, administrative institutions, and economic specialisation.

Economy and Technology

Based on irrigated agriculture, especially wheat, barley, dates, and legumes.
Sophisticated canal networks allowed them to control the annual floods and irrigate fields.
Used the wheel, plough, and advanced metallurgy for their time (notably copper and bronze tools and weapons).
Trade networks reached as far as the Indus Valley, Persian Plateau, and Levant.

Culture, Religion, and Society

Sumerian religion was polytheistic, with a pantheon led by gods such as An (sky), Enlil (air), Enki (water and wisdom), and Inanna (love and war).
Each city had a ziggurat, a stepped temple complex that functioned as both a religious centre and administrative hub.
Society was hierarchical, with kings and priests at the top, followed by merchants, artisans, farmers, and enslaved labourers.
Their religious beliefs influenced later traditions: the Great Flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh closely parallels the story of Noah in Genesis.

Writing and Knowledge

The Sumerians invented Cuneiform writing (originally for record-keeping), one of the earliest known writing systems (c. 3200 BCE).
Initially pictographic, it evolved into wedge-shaped signs pressed into clay tablets.
They recorded laws, hymns, administrative documents, astronomical observations, myths, and epic poetry.
Sumerian scholars developed early forms of:

Mathematics: base-60 (sexagesimal) system, influencing how we measure time and angles today.
Astronomy: early celestial records.
Law: codes that predate Code of Hammurabi.

Decline and Legacy

Sumer declined due to a combination of factors:

Environmental degradation (salinisation of irrigated soils).
Shifting river courses and deltaic changes.
Political fragmentation.
Conquest by the Akkadian Empire under Sargon of Akkad.

However, Sumerian culture persisted: their language was used as a liturgical and scholarly language for centuries after their political power faded, much like Latin in medieval Europe.
Many elements of later Mesopotamian religion, myth, administration, and law were inherited directly from Sumer.

In short, Sumer was not just an early civilisation — it was the template for many that followed. Its myths, technologies, and urban model echo through subsequent cultures, including the Hebrew tradition that produced Genesis, making the biblical narratives seem provincial in comparison to the much older Mesopotamian worldview from which they drew.

The Woods Hole research provides a striking example of this geological dynamism. Their findings are explained in a press release.

Urban civilization rose in Southern Mesopotamia on the back of tides
A newly published study challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of urban civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, suggesting that the rise of Sumer was driven by the dynamic interplay of rivers, tides, and sediments at the head of the Persian Gulf.
A newly published study challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of urban civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, suggesting that the rise of Sumer was driven by the dynamic interplay of rivers, tides, and sediments at the head of the Persian Gulf.

Published today in PLOS ONE, the study, Morphodynamic Foundations of Sumer, is led by Liviu Giosan, Senior Scientist Emeritus in Geology & Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and Reed Goodman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Science at Baruch Institute of Social Ecology and Forest Science (BICEFS), Clemson University.

The research introduces a novel paleoenvironmental model in which tidal dynamics influenced the earliest development of agriculture and sociopolitical complexity in Sumer. Results are a contribution to the long-running Lagash Archaeological Project, a collaboration led by Iraqi archaeologists and Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.

Our results show that Sumer was literally and culturally built on the rhythms of water. The cyclical patterns of tides together with delta morphodynamics -how the form or shape of a landscape changes over time due to dynamic processes - were deeply woven into the myths, innovations, and daily lives of the Sumerians.

Liviu Giosan, first author.
Geology and Geophysics
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA.

Sumer was an ancient civilization located in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq. It is often considered the cradle of civilization due to its numerous innovations, including the invention of writing, the wheel, and organized intensive agriculture. Sumerian society was structured into city-states like Ur, Uruk, or Lagash, each with its own ruler and religious institutions. The study shows that from about 7000 to 5000 years ago, the Persian Gulf extended farther inland, and tides pushed freshwater twice daily far into the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates. The scholars propose that the early communities must have harnessed this dependable hydrology using short canals to irrigate crops and date groves, enabling high-yield agriculture without the need for large-scale infrastructure. As rivers built deltas at the head of the Gulf, tidal access to the interior was cut off. The resulting loss of tides likely triggered an ecological and economic crisis—one that required an ambitious societal response. The extensive works for irrigation and flood protection that followed ultimately came to define the golden age of Sumer.

Iraqi Marsh Arabs poling mashoofs, traditional canoes, loaded with freshly cut reeds.

Photo credits: Reed Goodman, Clemson University.

We often picture ancient landscapes as static, but the Mesopotamian delta was anything but. Its restless, shifting land demanded ingenuity and cooperation, sparking some of history’s first intensive farming and pioneering bold social experiments.

Reed Goodman, co-author
Baruch Institute of Coastal Ecology and Forest Science (BICEFS)
Clemson University
Clemson, South Carolina, USA.

Beyond the environmental drivers, the study also explores the cultural impacts of this watery foundation, connecting the flood myths of Mesopotamia and the water-centered Sumerian pantheon.

The radical conclusions of this study are clear in what we’re finding at Lagash. Rapid environmental change fostered inequality, political consolidation, and the ideologies of the world’s first urban society.

Holly Pitman, (not an author of the paper). Director of the Penn Museum’s Lagash Archaeological Project.

Using ancient environmental and landscape data, new samples from the archaeological site of ancient Lagash, and detailed satellite maps, the authors were able to recreate what the coast of Sumer looked like long ago and imagine how its inhabitants responded to its shape-shifting nature.

Our work highlights both the opportunities and perils of social reinvention in the face of severe environmental crisis. Beyond this modern lesson, it is always surprising to find real history hidden in myth — and truly interdisciplinary research like ours can help uncover it.

Liviu Giosan

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility (NOSAMS), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Penn Museum. Additional support for Giosan was provided by STAR-UBB and ICUB in Romania. Goodman finalized his contribution to this study as a part of his postdoctoral studies at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University.

Publication:
Giosan L, Goodman R (2025)
Morphodynamic Foundations of Sumer.
PLoS One 20(8): e0329084. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329084

Abstract
Economic mechanisms behind the emergence of ancient Sumer remain unavoidably speculative and should benefit from a better understanding of their environmental context. Abundance sustaining increased social complexity during the Uruk period (c. 6,000–5,200 y BP) has been traditionally ascribed to pastoralism, trade, and/or resource diversity. However, contemporary agricultural surpluses are hard to explain before adoption of large-scale irrigation systems. Here we use high-resolution satellite-based topography and paleoenvironmental proxies from a new drill core at Lagash/Tell Al Hiba, together with previous geological and archaeological data, to reconstruct the morphodynamic evolution of coastal Sumer. We propose that tidal irrigation offers a plausible jumpstarting mechanism for high-yield, diversified agriculture providing an impetus for urbanization. As access to sea was restricted by delta build-up and tides shifted with the advancing deltaic coast, intensified reliance on mercurial river regimes eventually led to the expansive fluvial irrigation network of Early Dynastic city-states. By positioning coastal morphodynamics as a pivotal factor in urbanization and political ecology, we underscore the intricate interconnections between naturally evolving systems and collective human agency.

1. Introduction
The earliest network of city-states [1], closely knit by shared cultural traditions and economic interests, emerged c. 5,000 years ago in southern Mesopotamia (Fig 1a). Collectively referred to as Sumer, this urban florescence was agrarian in nature, sustained by large-scale irrigation systems [2–4]. The urbanization of Sumer consolidated a process that started at least a millennium earlier, during the Uruk period (c. 6,000 BP–5,200 BP), following the long-lasting rural Ubaid culture. Synergistic increases in population, innovation, and occupational specialization at that time led to the appearance of state structures with complex economies, integrating an urban core with its rural periphery [5]. This “Sumerian takeoff” could not have happened in the harsh arid tropical zone between the Arabian and Iranian deserts without access to the perennial freshwater sources of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. However, it remains uncertain when labor-intensive large-scale irrigation was widely adopted in the region and, prior to that, if and how this water abundance advantage translated into societal affluence.

Fig 1. (a) Geography of Mesopotamian Plain (dashed black line) and its joint watershed (black line).
Modern localities mentioned in text (black-filled circles respectively). Drill core location at Lagash in shown as red-filled circle; (b) Natural vegetation [7]; (c) Precipitation [8]; (d) Soils [9].
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329084.g001>

Unlike ancient Egypt or the Indus Valley, flood recession irrigation was hindered in Mesopotamia by the long temporal lag between agricultural and fluvial cycles. Solving this “perplexing mismatch” [6] required complex engineering solutions to allow for irrigation during low river flow and flood protection during high flow. Cuneiform texts and radiocarbon-dated canals attest to such large-scale hydraulic works from c. 4,500 BP, but during the preceding proto-literate Uruk period, irrigation is only indirectly inferred [2,4]. Although pastoralism, trade, and resource diversity played important roles in the rise of Uruk, the origin of any agricultural surpluses that may have contributed to its unprecedented prosperity is uncertain. In this context, the agroecology of Sumer, which, in addition to river dynamics, was conditioned by the inland extent of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf waters and the configuration of its coastal zone, needs to be better resolved.

Here we provide a synoptic-scale reconstruction of coastal Sumer by combining existing geological and archaeological data with state-of-the-art satellite-acquired topography and paleo-environmental proxy records on a new drill core that we recovered on the lower Mesopotamian Plain at modern Tell al-Hiba/ancient Lagash (Fig 1a). The history of infilling at the head of the Persian Gulf started with a tidally-influenced Sumer delta lobe built with contributions from both Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Alongside a transversal fan-delta built by Karun and Karkeh rivers progressively blocked the head of the Gulf and ultimately merged with the Euphrates lobe into the emergent Shatt al-Arab delta. The remnant Mesopotamian Bay continued to be infilled by the Tigris with successive river-dominated lobes before joining the Shatt al-Arab. Based on morphodynamic considerations we argue that the mutual adjustment of river tides and coastal landforms at the head of the Gulf controlled the inception and evolution of Sumerian agriculture and represents an important key to understanding the cultural ecology of early urbanization and development of state institutions in Sumer.

Giosan L, Goodman R (2025)
Morphodynamic Foundations of Sumer.
PLoS One 20(8): e0329084. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329084

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by PLoS. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

The Sumerians were not simply an early civilisation; they were the foundation on which much of the ancient Near East was built. Centuries before the Hebrew origin myths were written down, Sumerian city-states had mastered irrigation, developed complex social and religious structures, constructed monumental temples, and created one of the world’s first writing systems. Their myths and cosmologies were sophisticated attempts to make sense of a changing and often capricious environment — not revelations from an unchanging deity, but stories rooted in the landscape itself.

What the research from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution underlines is that the rise and fall of these early societies were shaped not by divine intervention but by natural forces — tides, sedimentation, shifting river channels, and the ever-changing coastlines of the Arabian Gulf. Civilisations adapted to these forces or succumbed to them; they did not command them.

By contrast, the authors of Genesis, writing millennia later, seem unaware of this long history and the environmental realities that shaped it. Their narrow, localised worldview reduces a rich and complex human past to a parochial myth of divine favour, catastrophe, and punishment. The Sumerians left behind temples, texts, and cities that can still be studied. Genesis left a story — a story whose echoes can be traced directly back to Sumer, but stripped of its historical and environmental context.

Understanding the real forces that gave rise to the earliest civilisations reminds us that human history is written not in the heavens, but in the shifting earth beneath our feet and the waters that flow across it.

Advertisement

Amazon