Sumerian culture was many thousands of years after the end of the ice age. Even the last big cooling event was a couple thousand years before Mesopotamian cities, and that was just a cooling event, not something with big ice sheets that turn into floods when it warms up. What they had is the Tigris and Euphrates that did flood on a regular basis, sometimes catastrophically - the floods of the Nile brought fertilization from the upper terrains they covered and it was predictable like clockwork, but the floods of Mesopotamia were destructive and unpredictable. One thing it absolutely didn’t do is cover the whole Mesopotamian plain, it just flooded the land surrounding the river. Unfortunately, people make cities near those rivers - but the mountains were WAY too far to run to them. Mesopotamia is just basically one gigantic flat plain, it doesn’t have random mountains in the middle.

We have geological records of one big flood dated around 2900 BCE that destroyed most notably Shuruppak (it got better), which held a big cultural position at the time, and a few other cities in the area. What’s funny is that by the time the Flood story was integrated into Akkadian / Babylonian culture, sometimes between 2000 and 1800 BCE, there were still people living in Shuruppak, which is named in those myths as having been destroyed.

The “gospels were dictated by first hand witness” idea is a massive problem because that’s not first hand account at all, that’s actually someone claiming that someone else told him “dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you” (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that’s just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says “I saw that myself” or “my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself”, and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.

I don’t know about the timeline of the temple; I’ve heard it brought up before, but I haven’t heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don’t know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.

None of those are first hand. The gospels were written by other people more than a generation (60 years) after, not by people who were alive in that period of 30 years.

Notice how it says people agree but doesn’t say there is any evidence.

The best we have is letters from a whole generation after his death, and it’s only people saying “these guys say there was a dude a while back” , second hand comments, no living first hand account.

The way I see it, it doesn’t matter what she said, it was only happening to make her creepy. If Ruby’s guess near the end is right, the whole point of her being there, haunting her, making people run away, was to make specifically this one man run away in terror, and there’s no way whatever that was had anything to do with anyone else abandoning Ruby. She simply says something so terrifying that people run away, that’s it, it doesn’t matter what exactly, and it doesn’t even have to be the same thing for everyone. Same with the teleport: she did it the same way she time travelled back into her past. How? We don’t know either, and it doesn’t matter, it’s just here to make her creepy.

The Doctor told her about this terrible Welsh minister, and she made it her life’s mission to get rid of him, and then went back to her young self. Why did the Doctor vanish? Why 73 yards? Why did her mom and Kate turn on her? We don’t know, it’s magic. Or it’ll be revealed later, maybe, or maybe it won’t. The creepiness, the distance, is to make her afraid, to make others afraid, and to make her realize she has an easy way to make the guy run away. It doesn’t make sense, it just has to work for her to think “I can weaponize that” and connect the dots. I’m fine with the details not making sense personally, it’s not that kind of episode, I thought it was well executed.

Only thing I would have hoped to see at the end is the Doctor again realizing that his memory changed between telling Ruby about Robert and then Robert disappearing from History in the future. Just to tie with the previous one.

beings from other planets,

Not that one, no.

On m’a toujours dit qu’il ne pleuvait que 3 fois dans l’année en Normandie.

Une fois pendant 6 mois, une fois pendant 2 semaines, une fois pendant 5 mois.

I found that Tony’s slide to fascism following his PTSD and thinking he knew better than everyone else was a good character development in a show where he’s not the hero. What we’re missing is a 4th solo movie where he faces his fuck-ups and his selfishness, but no, he went out like a hero through sacrifice after causing it and blaming the rift on Cap (when returning from Titan).

I also found that early Steve really needed to get a better angry face, but that evolved well between Infinity War and Endgame.

The Galapagos weren’t known to Christians until the mid 16th c. so there’s a bit of a timing problem of over a couple thousand years.

There’s a field that was called Gu-edin (meaning “open fields”) in the mid third millennium BCE that was the subject of a border war that lasted a couple centuries, between the cities of Lagash and Umma (which is right where you said), because the founder of Lagash bought an unassuming piece of land from Umma and a bunch of surrounding terrains, and then did mad irrigation work and it became crazy fertile. According to Lagash’s records, Umma got mad that it was swindled out of such great land and kept attacking Lagash over it, and kept getting its ass kicked and its kings killed. People from Umma were “allowed” to till the field for Lagash for a time, but most of the grain would still go to Lagash, causing more revolts from Umma (and more punishment).

It’s fairly agreed that this place probably gave some degree of inspiration for “Eden”, along with some rare green gardens in the region created with irrigation work. The apple bit, the woman rib bit, and the knowledge bit came from other Sumerian myths.

I’m not sure if it’s the Galapagos, maybe in the Canaries instead?, but some island famous for its apples, weather, and safety did play a part in inspiring the myth of Avalon, the island of apples.

The page itself is just a map with a legend that says that the red lines on the map are roman roads.

Except if you look at the legend, and click on the image for the red line, that white rectangle with a red line links to a file that is named “thin red line for nurses flag.”

It’s just a coincidence / lack of attention / someone picked a random image that looked good enough for a map legend.