30 ft under a hillside in eastern Turkey, a team hunting for Noah’s Ark says it [music] has pulled up wood that was burned.
And 30 ft underground, nothing burns.
There’s no air down there.
So, that fire happened somewhere else at some other time.
And then the earth swallowed what was left.
The team has a theory that sounds backwards.
Someone may have tried to destroy this thing with fire and that fire may be the only reason it survived.
They’ve named four possible culprits.
A shepherd, a bolt of lightning, a volcano, [music] and someone who wanted it gone.
There’s a fifth that nobody on the team has said out loud, and it’s written in the book of Genesis.
[music] By the end of this video, you’ll know exactly which result from the lab points to which one.
Here’s what happened.
On the 27th [music] of October, at a symposium in eastern Turkey, the people working on the Durupanar formation laid out what they had.
[music] Durupanar is that boatshaped mound about 18 mi south of Mount Ararat, more than 500 ft long.
The first announcement was about radar.
Professor Sankaratala of Sivas Kumhurat University, the lead archaeologist said he had reviewed the preliminary scans from Dr.
[music] Hosro Baktar and that they showed a structure with three levels.
Genesis describes an ark with three levels.
Bakar went further.
He says [music] he filtered out the geology and was left with organized corridors and chambers and he called it the most [music] significant finding of 45 years of my career.
Then came the wood, several damaged pieces [music] recovered from almost 30 ft down and some of them charred.
They’ve gone to laboratories in [music] Turkey and France to find out what species of tree they came from and how old they are.
Now, [music] before we go any further, you need to know how thin the ice is here.
No lab result exists yet.
The photographs of the wood haven’t been released.
One Turkish news agency’s report doesn’t confirm the depth.
Some accounts [music] say charred and another says it may be petrified and those are very different things.
Geologists, [music] including a young earth creationist, have said for decades that this formation is natural.
[music] And Attilla himself has said it might turn out to be just a geological hole.
Even the man who runs the project, Andrew Jones, volunteered the least exciting explanation himself.
It could be the remains of a shepherd’s campfire.
So, nobody is telling you this is the ark.
But the team did make one claim you can actually check today.
Without a lab and without taking anybody’s word for it, they said fire may have preserved this wood.
Most people hear that and laugh.
Fire is what destroys wood.
So, we checked it.
Wood rots because it’s food.
[music] Fungi and bacteria digest the cellulose and given enough time and enough damp, [music] a giant oak beam turns into dirt.
That’s why so few wooden ships survive from the ancient world.
Burn that wood with too little air, though, and something strange happens.
The water and the volatile compounds leave.
What stays behind is carbon locked into tight, stable rings, and almost nothing alive can eat it.
Charcoal is one of the most decay resistant forms of carbon on Earth.
Researchers have found it virtually unaltered in soils after many thousands of years.
History is full of fires that did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do.
Ebler in Syria around 2250 BC, roughly the age people give Noah’s flood.
The royal palace burned to the [music] ground.
The wooden shelves of its archive went up in flames and the clay tablets fell exactly where they stood.
More than a thousand complete tablets were found right there in the 1970s.
[music] The people who burned that city erased it and they also saved its library.
Herculanium 79 AD.
Vuvius engulfed a Roman villa and carbonized more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls into black lumps.
They’re the only library from antiquity that survives in its entirety.
And this year, for the first time, researchers recovered all the surviving text from a single scroll.
Then the one that should give you chills.
Enghetted on the Dead Sea.
Around the year 600, a synagogue burned and a scroll inside its ark was turned into a lump of charcoal.
It sat in storage for decades because nobody could open it without destroying it.
[music] In 2015, a team led by Brent Seals at the University of Kentucky unwrapped it inside a computer.
It was the book of Leviticus, and the words matched the Hebrew Bible we have today.
A fire had kept that text safe for,400 years.
People learned this trick on purpose.
The Roman architect Vituvius told builders working on soft marshy ground to drive charred piles of alder, olive, or oak under their foundations.
In Japan, carpenters still scorch cedar planks in a method called yakisugi because the burned surface sheds water and resists insects and [music] fungi.
So, the team’s idea isn’t crazy.
Fire really can save wood.
But there’s a number in their announcement that you should run for yourself because when we did, the theory got a lot harder.
The project [music] says charring slows decomposition often to well under 1% a year.
It sounds reassuring.
So, let’s do the math.
Start with a charred beam and take away 1% every year.
After 100 years, you have about 37% left.
After 500 years, less than 1%.
After 4,300 years, you have a fraction with 18 zeros after the decimal point.
[music] In other words, nothing.
Slow it down 10 times to 1/10enth of 1% a year, and you still lose nearly 99% of it.
And real field studies in biologically active soil have measured charred material [music] breaking down at anywhere from under 1% to 7% a year.
So a fire by itself doesn’t get you 4,000 years.
For charred wood to last that long, the decay has to drop to almost nothing.
And that takes one more thing.
[music] It has to be sealed away from air and from life, buried deep, fast, and left alone.
There’s another problem, and it’s easy to miss.
Jones says they found wood with signs of burning and wood without them.
If unburned wood is sitting down there too, then fire can’t be the only reason wood survived in that ground.
Either something else is protecting it or none of it is as old as anyone hopes.
Which brings you to the detail that changes how you should read this whole story.
Go back to that depth.
30 ft.
Fire needs oxygen.
30 ft under packed earth.
There’s nothing to burn with.
So unless something very hot came down with it, and we’ll get to that.
Whatever burned this wood did not do it where the drill found it.
That wood was once up in the open air.
It stood in daylight.
It caught fire and afterward something put 30 ft of earth on top of it.
That means there are two events to explain.
A fire and a burial.
And whoever or whatever lit that fire has to fit both.
Think about what we know of this ground.
According to local reports, on the 19th of May 1948, heavy rains and three earthquakes shook the mud of this valley and exposed the boat shape for the first time.
A Kurdish shepherd named Rashid Sarihan found it.
This hillside moves.
Geologists say that’s the whole explanation for the shape.
The project says this wood is [music] neither surface debris nor material carried in by a mud flow.
But so far, you’re being asked to take their word for that.
So, now you have a real investigation.
Burned in open air, buried 30 ft deep.
Let’s put the suspects up against it.
Suspect one, the shepherd.
This is Jones’s own alternative.
Centuries ago, someone took shelter in the ruins, lit a fire to stay warm, and moved on.
It’s plausible.
Herders have been working these hills for a very long time.
[music] It would also be the most deflating answer possible, and you have to respect a man who says it about his own project.
But now run it against the depth.
A campfire burns on the surface.
For its remains to be 30 ft down, the ground had to rise or slide 30 ft [music] in the few hundred years since.
On a calm hill, that’s nearly impossible.
[music] On this one, with its history of slides, it’s possible, but it takes a landslide.
So, the shepherd isn’t cleared.
He just needs an accomplice.
Suspect two, lightning.
Durupanar sits at around 6,500 ft on open slopes.
Lightning is a real hazard up there.
There’s even an old tradition about this.
A famous Christian monastery on Mount Judy, the other mountain people have long called the resting place of the ark, was said to have been destroyed by lightning in the year 776.
That’s a different mountain, and it comes to us through an 18th century source, so don’t lean on it too hard.
Here’s what makes lightning interesting, though.
Genesis 6:14 says, “Noah coated the ship with pitch.
Inside and out, pitch burns.
One strike on a dry tar-covered hull could do what a strike on a green tree never would.
But notice what that requires, a hull.
If this wood was never part of a hull, then lightning [music] simply burned a tree.
And that’s a very ordinary thing.”
Suspect three, the volcano.
This is the one the ark believers talk [music] about the least and it may be the strongest.
Look at the map.
The Durupanar formation isn’t just near a volcano.
It’s on one.
Mount Tendurek, a huge shield volcano whose lava flows cover about 250 square miles of this region.
Now run the test.
Remember the exception we promised?
This is it.
A hot flow of volcanic ash doesn’t need open air.
It buries wood and chars it at the same moment deep underground.
That’s exactly what happened to those scrolls in Herculanium.
It’s one event instead of two with no ship and no people.
If the lab comes back with a date far older than any human story, this is your culprit and the mystery ends quietly.
Suspect four, someone who wanted it gone.
This is the idea in the headlines.
It’s also the suspect with the least evidence.
We looked and we couldn’t find a single ancient text saying anyone tried to burn the ark.
Not one.
But there’s a reason people keep coming back to it.
[music] The old writers do say people went to the wreck and took pieces.
A Babylonian priest named Barasus [music] writing about 2,300 years ago said visitors scraped pitch off the vessel and carried it away as charms against evil.
So if those sources are right, people knew where something was and they were tearing it apart.
And on a high plane with very few trees, a mountain of seasoned timber is more than a legend.
[music] It’s firewood.
There’s a clue that might fit this.
Soil samples from inside the formation reportedly came back with three times the organic matter of the [music] soil outside and 38% more potassium.
Wood ash is rich in potassium.
That’s where the word potachsh comes from.
A very large fire could leave exactly that signature.
But remember, suspect three, volcanic [music] ground can be rich in potassium, too.
So, that clue points in two directions, and [music] nobody has separated them yet.
Four suspects, and there’s one more that’s been [music] sitting in plain sight the whole time.
Open your Bible to Genesis 8:20.
The waters are gone.
The animals are out.
And here’s the very first thing Noah does on dry land.
He builds an altar, and he makes burnt [music] offerings on it.
Read that again and think about where he’s standing.
He’s just walked out of an enormous wooden ship coated in pitch from end to end on a bare mountain side.
And the first thing he does is light a fire.
It isn’t only the Bible either.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets, [music] tells a flood story of its own.
Its hero seals his boat [music] with bumen poured from a kiln.
And when he reaches the mountain, he makes an [music] offering on the peak and the gods smell the smoke.
Now, let’s be completely clear.
Nobody on the Dupinar team has proposed this.
It’s our own thought.
There’s no evidence for it.
And no verse says the ark caught fire.
Maybe there’s nothing to it at all.
But if you’re looking for the one person in that story who we know lit a fire beside that ship, you don’t need a lab to find him.
And it would mean the fire wasn’t meant to destroy anything.
It was an act of worship.
And it ended up becoming the record.
If this is the kind of story you like following, subscribe now because the next part is going to happen in the real world.
The lab is working on this as you watch.
So, how does this end?
It ends with a number.
And the beautiful thing about this case is that the number points at suspects.
[music] If the wood comes back at a few hundred years old, that’s your shepherd or your medieval firewood thief.
The story’s over and the ground simply slid.
If it comes back at tens of thousands of years or so old that radiocarbon can’t read it at all, that’s the volcano, natural fire, natural burial, and a boat shape that was only ever a coincidence of mud.
And if it comes back somewhere around 4 to 5,000 years, [music] then every headline you’ve seen will look small next to the ones that come after it.
Don’t get ahead of it, though, because even that wouldn’t prove the ark.
Radioarbon tells you when a tree died.
It doesn’t tell you who cut it or whether it was ever part of anything built by human hands.
The project’s own leaders have said that old trees also give old dates, however [music] late they were actually burned.
And a date alone can’t turn a piece of wood into a ship.
That’s why the second test may matter just as much.
Species.
The team asked the lab to identify the tree.
Nobody knows for sure what gopher wood was.
But if that charcoal turns out to be a tree that doesn’t belong on this high bare plane, then you’ve got a much harder question.
How did it get here?
As for when, one report says the lab in France could answer in about 15 days and the labs in Turkey in about 3 months.
And now the part that nobody has really put in the headlines and the one that made us want to tell you this story.
Remember the confusion about whether this wood is charred or petrified?
That isn’t [music] a small detail.
Petrified wood has been turned into stone.
Its original carbon is gone.
So in [music] general, you can’t radioarbonate it.
You could dig up a fully mineralized ship [music] with the name of Noah carved on its side.
And that test could not tell you how old it is.
Charred wood is different.
Charred wood can keep its original organic carbon.
It’s what archaeologists have been dating for decades.
It’s exactly what you’d want to hand to a lab.
So think about what that means.
Unburned wood has to fight rot for every one of those years.
Wood that turned to stone has lost its clock.
Char is the form most likely to survive the ages and still tell you its age and you only get it from fire.
That’s the real meaning of this title.
It may not be that fire saved the ark.
There may be no ark to save.
[music] It’s that whatever is down there, if the burned pieces are what they appear to be, the fire is the reason it can answer the question at all.
A shepherd warming his hands, a strike from a storm, a mountain tearing itself open, a man with a torch, or an old man on a bare hillside thanking God that he was still alive.
One of them lit this fire and they never knew what they were doing.
A piece of what they burned is sitting in a laboratory right now, and it’s about to tell us who it was.
