Noah’s Flood: What About Australia?
- stephenstrent7
- 2 minutes ago
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This post is from Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, Noah’s Flood and the Philosophies of Men.
From which of the sons of Noah did the Aboriginal Australians descend? The Bible is silent regarding any of Noah’s descendants in Australia, primarily because the continent had not as yet been discovered by the authors of the biblical text. Throughout most of human history, the question of Australia was irrelevant to the West because no one—except the Australian Aborigines themselves—even knew it existed. For centuries, some Europeans hypothesized that a large landmass existed in the Southern Hemisphere, a place called Terra Australia Incognita, the “Unknown Southern Land.”
The entire, gigantic continent of Australia, all 2,968,464 square miles of it, lay hidden from the rest of the world until the seventeenth century. Ptolemy’s world map from approximately 150 AD, his “2nd projection,” depicted a large body of land labeled “terra incognita” along southern Africa and south of the Indian Ocean, stretching across the entire bottom edge of the map. Nicolaus Germanus’ 1467 world map, which was based on Ptolemy’s earlier work, showed these same unknown land masses, labeled “Terra Incognita Secundum Ptholomeum” (Unknown land according to Ptolemy).1 Germanus played a pivotal role in modernizing and popularizing Ptolemy’s Geographia; at least fifteen copies or revised versions were authored by him or immediately copied from his work. Between 150 and 1467 AD, there were no other accurate maps of the world. Consequently, the general understanding of global geography essentially stood still, or even regressed, for over 1,300 years. This historical gap illustrates why the “Table of Nations” in Genesis remains geographically confined to the regions known to the ancient Near East.
By the sixteenth century, the name “Terra Incognita” was sometimes written on maps as “Terra Australia Incognita” (Unknown Southern Land). In the fourth century BC, Aristotle had proposed that the landmass of the Northern Hemisphere must be counter-balanced by an, as-yet-unknown landmass in the Southern Hemisphere. Later cartographers followed his lead, adding this hypothesized landmass. It turns out that Aristotle’s hypothesis of a “balance” necessary for a motionless, universe-centered Earth failed to recognize that the amount of land not covered by water is insignificant compared to the massive volume of sub-crustal material forming the Earth’s mantal and core.
There were also other, more fanciful world maps produced between the time of Ptolemy and Germanus. At least 1,100 such maps still exist, depicting Jerusalem at the center of the world. One such example is “The Psalter Map,” found in a book of psalms likely produced by unnamed monks in Salisbury or Westminster between 1262 and 1280. The bulk of the remaining maps, known as “Mappae Mundi” (maps of the world), range from the Albi or Merovingian map (c. 730 AD) to the Fra Mauro map (1459–1460 AD). Of those 1,100 maps, approximately 900 appear as book illustrations and about 200, exist as separate, stand-alone maps.2
On December 18, 1603, Willem Janszoon, captain of the Duyfken (“Little Dove”)—a fast, lightly armed, shallow-draft, three-masted Dutch yacht—sailed from the Netherlands on his third voyage to the East Indies. His ship was one of twelve belonging to the fleet of Steven van der Hagen, the first admiral of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Formed in 1602, the VOC was becoming the world’s first multinational corporation. After visiting Java, Janszoon was sent to search for trade in “the great land of New Guinea and other East and Southlands.” In 1606, the Duyfken landed on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in northeast Australia. This made Janszoon and his crew the first documented Europeans to land on Terra Australia Incognita. The encounter with Aboriginal Australians was violent, resulting in casualties on both sides.3
For the next century, various expeditions probed the coasts of New Guinea, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Australia. These voyages were driven by profit, not pure exploration; the Dutch were only interested in treasure. Because the region yielded no immediate wealth, it remained a vast, dangerous mystery. Ships frequently ran aground on shallow reefs with no land in sight. In The Discovery of Australia, Arnold Wood stated, “Again and again people had tried to find in the South Seas something that was worth finding; and again and again they had failed. The golden continent of the imagination had changed into the Nova Hollandia [New Holland: Australia] of fact, eight thousand miles of sheer uselessness. By the middle of the seventeenth century all hope was abandoned by those who entered Australia.” The only thing of note was a strange species of “cat” with short forepaws and large hindlegs upon which it “walked.”4
By 1699, William Dampier—an English explorer, navigator, pirate, and the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world three times—had “‘spent about five weeks in ranging off and on the coast of New Holland, a length of about three hundred leagues.’ He had landed at three several places to see what there might be thereabouts worth discovery, and especially to recruit his stock of fresh water and provisions. He had found nothing worth discovering, nothing to eat, nothing to drink…The Dutch had discovered the continent, but they had made no use of it, and never would make use of it.”5
Dampier described the land as having “a dry and dusty soil,” that was “destitute of water except you make wells,” claiming it was entirely devoid of food. In his 1922 analysis, Wood stated, “And the people were worthy of their land. They are, writes Dampier, ‘the miserablest people in the world…[they] have no houses and skin garments, sheep, poultry and fruits of the earth, ostrich eggs, etc.…Their costume consisted of a piece of the rind of a tree, and a handful of grass or bough.’ They refused friendship and ran away.”6 In reality, the Aboriginal Australians are highly intelligent people who did not seek to be “discovered” and simply wished to be left alone.
In 1756, Charles de Brosses published a book, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, contenant ce que l'on sait des moeurs et des productions des contrées découvertes jusqu'à ce jour, which gave a comprehensive description of all known voyages to the southern seas. According to Wood, “…Brosses said that the contents of this huge region are partly known, partly unknown…The unknown Southern land is the vast continent, that [according to Aristotle’s incorrect hypothesis] must exist further South, though only ‘Capes’ have hitherto been seen. It must exist because it has to balance the land in the North. The laws of physics show that, but for this unknown Southern continent, the earth would rotate by the Poles, instead of rotating by the Equator. It centres in the South Pole, and its promontories project far northwards in various places, and especially between New Zealand and America…how inconceivably great must be the interest of these Southern lands…which occupy one-third of the Globe! How can one doubt that they will furnish objects of curiosity, and opportunities of profit, equal to all that has been furnished by America? How many peoples [are there], differing amongst themselves, and greatly differing from ourselves, in figure, in manners, in usages, in ideas, in religion! How many animals, insects, fishes, plants, trees, fruits, drugs, precious stones, fossils, and metals! And, no doubt, in all these genera there are millions of species of which we have not even a notion, since this world has never had communication with ours, and is to us, so to say, almost as strange as would be another planet.”7
It turns out that Brosses was remarkably correct about the uniqueness of the region. Australia is home to over 21,000 species of vascular plants and 14,000 species in non-vascular plants, along with 250,000 species of fungi and over 3,000 species of lichens. A staggering 85-92 % of these are unique to the continent and found nowhere else in the world.8 Furthermore, Australia has an estimated 250,000+ species of fauna, with over 120,000 described to date. Around 96% of the total Australian species are invertebrates, including nearly all yet-unidentified species. A large portion of Australia’s species are endemic—found nowhere else on Earth.9 Australia has one of the highest endemicity rates in the world: 45% of bird species, 87% of mammal species, 93% of reptile species, and 94% of frog species are found nowhere else on the planet.10
This biological isolation raises a difficult question for the global flood paradigm: Why are most of the world’s marsupials confined to Australia? Did Noah sail the ark to Australia specifically to deposit them there, perhaps with opossums escaping into the Ozarks along the way? Did he drop off Tasmanian devils in Australia and Tasmania, only for them to die out on the mainland later? One wonders why he didn’t drop them off earlier—perhaps in America—or if it simply took him that long to corner the “little devils” without being bitten. By the time the ark reached New Zealand, Noah apparently had no normal mammals and no snakes left, leaving behind only three species of bats and some very weird birds. Most importantly, no people from the “Table of Nations” lineages got off the ark in Australia.
And then there are the humans. In 2016, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas and a large team of collaborators published a genomic history of Aboriginal Australians in the journal Nature. They generated “…high-coverage genomes for 83 Aboriginal Australians (speakers of Pama-Nyungan languages) and 25 Papuans from the New Guinea Highlands,” and found that “Papuan and Aboriginal Australian ancestors diversified 25-40 thousand years ago (kya), suggesting pre-Holocene population structure in the ancient continent of Sahul (Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania). However, all of the studied Aboriginal Australians descend from a single founding population that differentiated ~10-32 kya…We estimate that Aboriginal Australians and Papuans diverged from Eurasians 51-72 kya, following a single out-of-Africa dispersal, and subsequently admixed with archaic populations.”11
Of course, Aboriginal Australians are “us,” part of the human family. However, what is far more important than trying to force their origin into a specific branch of Noah’s sons is understanding that they were “…also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth…[were] not created or made, neither indeed can be.”12 The origin of our physical bodies matters very little. As John the Baptist told the Pharisees and Sadducees, “God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.”13 What truly matters is the recognition that we are all sons and daughters of God, every one of us, regardless of which continent we live on.
Trent Dee Stephens, PhD
References
1. Cartography in the German Lands, 1450–1650 Peter H. Meurer, In, History of Cartography vol. 3, Chapter 42, press.uchicago.edu/books/hoc/HOC_V3_Pt2/HOC_VOLUME3_Part2_chapter42.pdf
2. The World Through Their Eyes; Medieval World Maps, 2017; amdigital.co.uk/insights/blog/medieval-world-maps
3. Sigmond, JP, and LH Zuiderbaan, Dutch Discoveries of Australia. Rigby Ltd, Australia, 1979, pp. 19–30
4. Wood, G. Arnold, The Discovery of Australia, Macmillan, London 1922; A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. The Flora of Australia series in a planned 60+ volumes; Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS); ABRS Publications; dcceew.gov.au/science-research/abrs/publications/flora-of-australia#:~:text=About%20this%20series,lichens%20to%20the%20species%20level
9. The Fauna of Australia series is a 5-volume set; Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS); ABRS Publications; dcceew.gov.au/science-research/abrs/publications/fauna-of-australia
11. Malaspinas Anna-Sapfo et al., A genomic history of Aboriginal Australia, Nature 538:207-214, 2016
12. Doctrine and Covenants 93:29
13. Matthew 3:9