Noah's decendants and the origins of people groups

This one actually does jibe with the bible version you gave:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionia

Nice one as always, IL fricking X.

Anyway, I think any theory about something as old as origins of people groups has to be based on a lot of speculation because of what little source material there is. Because of the Jewish scribal tradition, writings like the Biblical books by Moses or Josephus's Jewish Antiquities probably contain some fairly well preserved information.

Something like the Shu Jing (Book of Ancient History compiled by Confucius) is another good one to look at.

What other old writings are useful in learning about ancient history?

Graves' Greek Myths, although his migrationist interpretations of everything are horribly old-fashioned.

How ancient do you mean? Something like Thucydides' Peloponnesian War is older that or similar in age to a lot of the Bible, but is "modern history" in a way that the Bible isn't - or in a way that Herodotus isn't, too.

Carry on folks! I'm interested to read this kind of thing (Im afraid I cant contribute, I know little about the subject).

Along with this topic, other than just early writings about history, what are the oldest found writings or oral traditions (preferably with translations into English) I would think many of them are mythologies and hard to use for history.

This topic is interesting to me because it's kind of like a superstring theory but for history, yet like Trayce I know little about it.

No archeological evidence supports the claim that peoples would originate from one family. Besides, if humans decended from one family, the gene pool of the human population would be so narrow that the whole species would be dead of hereditary diseases quite soon. There is a minimum amount of individuals a species must have in order for the gene pool to be wide enough to stop this from happening and to allow the species to survive into the future. But I guess facts like this mean nothing to a Creationist.

Please read:
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/johanson.html

one neat thought experiment: trying to do some naval architecture analysis to figure out how such a huge boat would react to the stress & strain of both the cargo(animals, humans, and supplies needed for 375+ days in the the J-C version) and its own construction. Wood can only handle so much.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v13/i4/bones.asp

oh drop it. your article is "biased" fer a "literal" interp, the one I listed is agin'.

Actually, Finns suffer from several hereditary diseases because of our inbredness. Anyway, I can't see how I was wrong claiming that the gene pool of two human beings iss too narrow to allow them to be the forefather and foremother of the whole human race. I didn't claim that the gene pool needed for a species to survive needs to be super big, but it certainly has to be wider than that of two individuals.

There are very few cultures that don’t have a Flood motif. That’s a basic idea: the dissolution of the world which takes place every night when we go into the flood of our own unconscious. It’s the analogue of the mythological Flood: at the end of the cycle, there’s a flood. The American Indians have lots of Flood stories.

It was thought when the diggings in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley were proceeding that evidence of the Biblical flood could be located – at least a flood universal to that area. And there were flood levels found in several cities. But they were not the same flood level; they were local floods. There’s no cosmic flood; the Flood motif is a mythological idea. The whole notion that all originates from water, and all is going back to water, gives you a cycle: out of water, back to water, out of water, back to water; and each new cosmic aeon, each new world-age, is, as it were, a creation out of water and a dissolution into water. So it’s a mythological motif. This is exactly the point that Thomas Mann makes very well in the first part of Joseph and His Brothers: the archetypal Flood is a mythological, a psychological flood, and when local floods occur they become identified with it. Do you understand? We have experienced The Flood. The Flood is a mythological principle, and when a flood occurred, we understood the sense of the image.

http://www.worldwideflood.com/

Also, are we not all descended from Charlemagne? (Where did I read that?)

Post - that story was inserted to explain why we don't all speak the same language, if we're descended from a single family.

As well as being, for what it's worth, exactly how it does work in reality.

- Proportions are optimal

- Size is ideal

- Roof Vents are viable

- Construction time is sufficient

...even the ceiling height is about right!

So if this is an embellished story of a reed barge on a flooded river, why would the numbers make sense in a hydrodynamic study?

(NB: some people do seriously believe that, and a lot more believed it before the 1930s - it was, like a lot of the stuff upthread, a case of finding words in one language that sound vaguely like unrelated words in another, and going "aha! a link!")

ha ha - he said "theory"

well, us slavs probably are anyway.