Did Noah Bring in All those Billions of Life Forms into his Ark?

Following my blog write up here:

                                     

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/?zx=6002ef2770615bb7

 

someone in “My Friend” WhatsApp group then was asking how did Noah preserve and store all those foods, probably in their tens of hundreds of tons for the animals he brought into his ark without refrigerators or any form of refrigeration? I have not even thought of this problem before.

 

Yes, that was a very relevant and interesting question as it rained for 40 days, and 40 nights, and this was a very long time for food to be preserved. But the Bible didn’t tell how that was done. I suppose the Bible is not a science book or a book on food science, food technology or on food quality control to describe all those logistics.

 

But I believe even without refrigeration, food can be preserved and kept for a very long time especially plant-based foods like hay, straws, grasses, fodders and dry feeds.

 

All these foods for animals can be dried in the sun before the rains come for Noah and his family as the adage says “make hay while the sun shines”.

 

I also suspect most of the animals Noah brought into his ark were grass-eating animals and plant feeders and were not meat-eaters like lions, tigers and crocodiles.

 

But what bewilders me was how it was possible for Noah to bring in so many species of animals into his ark. 

 

Exceeding 99% of the estimated four or five billion species that have evolved on Earth have now gone extinct. At least nearly 1,000 species are now gone over the last five hundred years.

 

The Cambrian Period was part of the Paleozoic Era. This period extended from 541 million to 485.4 million years ago when it saw the most prolific explosion of life on this planet, Earth has ever known.

 

This period produced the most intense burst of evolution ever known. We call this the Cambrian Radiation. It witnessed an incredible diversity of life that emerged, including many major animal groups in existence till today.

 

Most of them were the lower life forms like chordates to which animals with backbones (vertebrates) like humans belong.

 

However, there were at least four major extinctions that befell during the Cambrian Radiation. The first extinction occurred at the Early Cambrian epoch boundary. During that event, the oldest group of trilobites, the olnellids, perished as well as the primary reef-building organisms, the archaeocyathids.

 

 

The remaining three disappearances were irregularly distributed around the Late Cambrian epoch boundary. On the whole, it severely affected the trilobites, brachiopods, and conodonts.

 

 

It was believed that Noah was born in 2448 B.C. in Shulon, East Eden. He died 1848 B.C. in Salem, Cannan. Noah was then five hundred years old; and Noah begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth. ' (Genesis 5:32). This means the Great Flood occurred between those two periods. That period was 485 million years after the Cambrian Period when most life, at least the lower forms of life had already evolved.

 

 

It was mostly the phyla that originated then, but there's been so much turnover that the families and orders got replaced and became non-existent over the past 500 million years, most critically during the Ordovician Radiation, the Permian mass extinction, the Mesozoic marine revolution and the KT extinction.

 

 

Cambrian Period, earliest time division of the Paleozoic Era, extending from 541 million to 485.4 million years ago. But we are not clear how many species of life were evolved then. But we are sure there were no mammals then.

 

More than 17,000 species are known to have survived until the mega-extinction that ended the Permian period 251 million years ago.

 

But I think it was about 3.6 million years ago that human-like Australopithecus afarensis footprints were seen as well as the emergence of more advanced animals. These animals were seen in the Galapagos Islands by Naturalist Charles Darwin. It was then also a rise of other mammals in the Panama Isthmus and advanced animals probably Noah brought into his ark millions of years later.

 

True humans like Adam and Eve emerged after all animals including apes, chimpanzees and other hominids were created or evolved. 

Before them it was clear the plants were created first as described in Genesis 11 to provide oxygen through phtosynthesis before all other air-breathing creatures became possible.

It is also clear that life evolved from the oceans and seas first, then the birds of the air as given in Genesis 20 - 27.

Later other land creatures came into existence before humans were created.

Then out of the oceans and seas, the fishes and all other aquatic creatures came into being before they became reptiles to creep into dry land where they further evolved into "glorifed reptiles" as birds of the air

This tallies beautifully from what we know in the time scale on the evolution of life on earth.

See 4 Billion Years of Life Creation here:

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2021/02/4-billion-years-of-life-creation.html

It was around 2.5 million years ago then tools were used by humans 

 

Noah came much later after Adam and Eve. As mentioned, Noah was born in 2,448 B.C. which was approximately 4,448 years ago. By then a good number of warm-blooded animals and mammals besides humans were already in existence, but how many species of animals or even hominids as described in Genesis 6 before the Flood became possible we are uncertain. 

 

Conservatively, we may put them at least 100,000 versus 5,500 mammals currently. Some half the species have since gone extinct since Noah’s time, whether destroyed by the Great Flood or through Natural Selection we are unclear.

 

Even at these very conservative numbers on mammals alone, not counting reptiles and other cold-blooded animals, that was an awful lot of animals even if just one each in a pair Noah needed to accommodate into his ark?

 

Our question and a very pertinent one is, would it totally be impossible for Noah to collect all those few billion types of life, in pairs too, to accommodate them into his ark, and also supply all of them with food for 40 days and 40 nights during rains and the Great Flood?

 

 

Then what about all those aquatic animals like various types of fishes, different kinds of whales, sharks, manta ray, seals, dolphins, etc. Were they left alone into the seas and waters or were they also brought into the ark? Were all these sea creatures also destroyed by the Great Inundation.

 

In the insect world, scientists specializing in taxonomy documented there are currently more than 1 million species of insects alone.  Among the insects, ants are the most abundant. These colonial hymenopterans may number to the tune of 10-100,000 trillion individuals globally among the more than 10,000 species.

 

In the Order of Coleoptera, beetles are known to have some 350,000 documented species. For instance, in the United States alone, there are nearly 30,000 types of beetles known. These figures are constantly rising from new species being found.

 

Insects evolved at the same time as the earliest land plants around 480 million years ago, an international study revealed. The earliest fossil evidence for insects is dated at around 400 million years old, but the new study uses genetic techniques to corroborate estimates that they evolved much earlier.

 

Hence, we can safely conclude insects alone have long existed even before Noah. Our question would be, did Noah included all those insects, ants and beetles in pair as into his ark? After all, insects zoologically-speaking are also animals? 

 

What about the bacteria, microbes, worms and parasites? Were these 

also brought into the ark? Worms, insects too are zoologically classified as animals.   

 

Another controversy much discussed by the church, debated by scientists and asked by the ordinary man-in-the-street is, was the great flood just localized or regional event, and where did the rains get all those waters?  I shall write on this later. 

 

 

But as far as the number of species of life existed during Noah's time,

and how many types and species he put inside his ark; I am afraid my current knowledge does not allow me to answer some of these issues.  

 

 

Maybe someone else more enlightened may be able to answer 

 

I am willing to learn from them. 

 

jb