Noah and the Marsupials

One of my more amiable co-workers, bless her heart, believes in the literal truth of the Biblical flood story. I don't argue the point with her because it really doesn't matter in our interaction what either of us believes about Noah and the Ark.

I have never been able to buy the idea that the whole entire earth was covered with water and that every person and terrestrial animal not on the Ark perished. I cannot believe that all the people and animals today are traceable to a severe population bottleneck only a few thousand years ago. Human diversity seems too great to have developed in such a short time.

The flood legend has troubled me since I was a child, and my first questions about it concerned kangaroos. Kangaroos, and all marsupials except opossums, are limited to Australia, and there does not appear to be any evidence that kangaroos flourished in the Middle East in Biblical times. There are no literary or artistic references to kangaroos from the Middle East of that period, even though such an odd creature would surely have been remarkable. There is no evidence of contact between the Middle East and Australia, and Noah would have had to travel far through unknown country to retrieve the Australian fauna. Then, following the flood, he would have had to schlep back to Australia with all those creatures to make sure that none were left on any other continent. The same would have gone for African and American fauna and for penguins.

In order to reconcile what we know about kangaroos with the legend of the flood as a global event, we must believe that there was a conspiracy to expunge all references to marsupials from human memory until they were encountered again by the Aborigines. There is no verse in Deuterononomy to the effect that "Thou shalt not eat of the pouched hopping beast". And the platypus would certainly have caught the attention of the diet regulators. Maybe these animals were considered so unclean that they were exiled to Australia? If so, why no mention of it in the Bible? The journey of Noah to the land down under would be a great story in and of itself.

This leads me to believe that the flood, if it happened, was a more localized event.