Here's a shot of a ruin that was associated with pictographs I posted.
The more I learn the more this kind of history fascinates me and makes me wonder what it was really like to live back then...
And... Yesterday on a random YouTube video I watched I learned of yet ANOTHER flood myth belonging to the natives not too far from where I live associated with a great flood and sounding VERY VERY similar to the Christian Noah's Ark version.
"The Pima have a myth called “The Flood on Superstition Mountain”, or variations on that name.
In that story, Earth-Maker (sometimes called Great Butterfly / Cherwit Make) warns the people multiple times about their wrongdoing through the winds: North wind, East wind, etc.
The people ignore the warnings.
There is a shaman (named Suha in many versions) who does listen. He is told (by one of the winds, often the South Wind) that he and his wife are the only ones worth saving, and instructed to build a large hollow ball of spruce gum (or similar material), stock it with supplies, etc.
Then a great flood comes, the valley is destroyed. The shaman and his wife float in this “arksphere” until waters recede.
So... The Pima above and also the Yavapai, Havasupai, Hualapai, Hopi, and the Apache are all tribes sorta near here and they all have flood myths and are often similar in some ways to the biblical story.
I still don't know for sure if these stories came before or after European contact, however... I found a video on YouTube where a respected medicine man elder claims that his people had these legends before the colonizers showed up.
I do tend to lean in the direction that these legends were already here and that the natives are the descendants of survivors from a "great flood".
And, more than ever I do kind of think this may be on a cycle and it may be every 10 or 20 thousand years or something like that? Who knows... The legends pretty much universally all tie the floods to human corruption becoming "too much"...
Maybe we never learn our lesson and we just keep extincting ourselves? Or... Nearly extincting ourselves and reducing our great civilizations to a small amount of survivors living in caves?
Definitely something to ponder and think about...