Is the latest Noah’s Ark discovery a fake?

Kurdish workers carted wood up Mt. Ararat in order to fake the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an archeologist who worked on the dig says.

On Tuesday, a group of Asian Christian evangelicals held a press conference in Turkey to announce they were “99.9 per cent” sure they’d found the biblical boat.

The claim was greeted with immediate skepticism, which seems increasingly well founded.

The bible suggests that the ark came to rest after 40 days of flooding in the “mountains of Ararat.” The mountain, located in Turkey near the border with Armenia, is an inhospitable place for both geographic and political reasons. And even the translation is suspect.

The bible specifies that the landing spot is “Urartu.” Over time Urartu became Ararat, a name that was given to the mountain long after the bible was written. So it’s not exactly clear where the bible’s authors meant. Thus, it’s slightly suspect that the ark should show up exactly where we want it to be.

Nonetheless, Ararat has drawn a steady stream of explorers for decades. Many of them have “discovered” the ark.

“I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it,” said archeologist Paul Zimansky recently told National Geographic.

Ditto Noah’s Ark Ministries International. The evangelical-archeological group claims to have found the remains of the ark in a series of caverns near the peak of Ararat in 2008. Video footage provided by the group shows incongruous wooden beams jutting through the ice in a cavern. They also claim that carbon dating puts the age of the wooden beams discovered at 4,800 years old.

The scientific-creationist movement (yes, such a thing exists) has suggested that the entire radio-carbon dating process must be recalibrated. This is their way of explaining how objects can be shown to be tens of thousands of years old on a planet they believe was created out of the void 6,000 years ago.

So even they doubt Noah’s Ark Ministries, since in their time-compressed radio-carbon world, 4,800 years is far too young for the ark.

Now, someone within the Noah’s Ark Ministries camp is rubbishing the discovery.

Randall Price, an evangelical Christian, was apparently one of the original archeologists hired by the group. He has been circulating an email, alleging that the wooden beams were taken from a site near the Black Sea and then planted on Ararat. Price has stopped talking about the incident, and is involved in some sort of financial dispute with Noah’s Ark Ministries. But he did acknowledge the email to the Christian Science Monitor.

For now, the doubters have no way of directly confronting the evidence. The Noah’s Ark Ministries team intends to keep the ark’s purported location secret until they get it designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.