Sodom found?

[Anomalocaris]

Its not a reputable theory for the origin of the story in the ot.  That's where these analysis always fall flat.  To say...hey, here's a big flood, maybe big floods like this are the reason people tell flood stories?  They happen all over the world.  Why not?  This, acknowledging that none of the details of any flood story fit any known flood anywhere at any time, the black sea fill in being no exception.

Maybe so..but that's not the reason they told the flood story in the ot.  There's a ton of good research on this both from the literary angle and supporting archaeology.  This, in contrast, to the fruitless search for the real events™ that inspired the bible.  There were real events, sure - just not the ones in the establishment myth that contextualized them.

Of course it is.  it makes no effort to explain each steps in its subsequent evolution, hybridization, inbreeding, out breeding and mutation along the line of decent to the OT fable.   It attempt to detect genetic markers in the OT fable, so to speak, that may point to some discernible factual occurrences during that long path of descent, such as association with very broadly similar flood myths shared with several earlier cultures in the near East, and a yet earlier actual geological event which would have left at least impressions style memories of a dooms day flood across much of that region. 

As to the reason why people tell the story in OT, it should be pointed out that until modern times, people across the world mostly did not share the modern concept of telling storie about things outside their daily lives for the purposes of broadening horizon oh factual knowledge.     Stories are told mainly as malleable props to support a rethorical agenda.

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Fire and brimstone is something more likely associated with a volcanic event, than a meteorite strike.

A meteorite strike or airburst large enough to cause serious destruction is rare - probably at most 1 per 100 years somewhere on the Earth.  In a particular area, it would be unknown for millennia.  The suggestion that it is happened here is speculation based on multiple lines of evidence.

This paper may have been completely wrong, but, the geological evidence is interesting.  I think that destruction myths are often fashioned around a societal memory of something real (and the stories can be borrowed by different cultures).  You don't get a flood myth without some societal memory of large floods, even if a true deluge never happened.  Likewise you wouldn't get a fire and brimstone myth unless either volcanic or meteoric destruction was something known to happen, at to at least some degree.  It doesn't mean that there ever was a city of Sodom, two angels, or a man named Lot.

i think before any city has been smitten by a bolide air burst, a hundred would have been smitten by the fire and brimstone of volcanos.

For each city that volcanos smote, a hundred more would have smitten by the artificial fire and brimstone manufactured by invading armies or violent social upheavals.

So the origin of sodom story is primarily a man made event should seem to me to be the default assumption.