Irving Finkel: belief

Transcript context

…So there’s a guy named Graham Hancock who talks about the Younger Dryas hypothesis, 10,000 BC, that there was an asteroid that hit Earth and melted the ice sheets, and that created a flood in North America. So that means an actual cataclysmic global event, that then as all the different civilizations sprung up, they all carried that knowledge, that memory. That’s his idea. What probability would you assign to that? I would say negligible, because I regard it as a literary matter— …which is not predicated on the existence of flood in people’s minds. But I do believe that the story in Mesopotamia owes its inception to a disastrous flood, but nothing global. Nothing that touched America or China or Birmingham. So I, I, I don’t have any sympathy with that. But people have made drilled cores and then they, and then they… I do that all the… I’m not interested in all that stuff. It’s, to my mind— It’s a literary device.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.