According to Glenn Scott, a striking example of how new developments can require us to scrap old assumptions regarding dates was the excavation of the ancient city Ur (home of the biblical patriarch Abraham) by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1929.
After six years of digging down through many layers of Ur (each representing hundreds of years of occupation), Woolley found under the lowest level of that city, a deep bed of silt which he assumed represented the earliest occupation at that site. However, curiosity impelled him to dig into that mysterious deposit, which proved to be more than ten feet deep. Such a thick layer of silt could only have been deposited by a stupendous flood! To his astonishment, he found under the silt not the virgin soil he had expected, but rubble with thousands of sherds of handmade pottery and implements of flint from the (preflood) stone age. Clearly this deep bed of silt separated two distinctly different epochs of human culture and represented "a sudden and drastic break in the continuity of history."
To confirm that this flood was no local phenomenon, Woolley sank a series of shafts at intervals approximately 1,000 feet apart with the same results, (a) city pavement, (b) silt bed, and (c) Stone Age rubble.
Other archaeologists found similar beds of silt under the ancient cities of Kish, Erech, Shuruppak, Lagash, and Nineveh far to the north in Assyria. The layer of silt was thinner as it approached the mountains around Nineveh, being eight-feet-deep there.
Halley's Bible Handbook tells us that the Armenian mountain region is like an island, with the Black Sea and Caspian Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the south. Therefore, a cataclysmic subsidence (sinking) of this region would have caused the waters of the surrounding seas to pour in at the same time that the forty-day rain poured down from above. This may be what Genesis (8:36 IV; 7:11 KJV) means, "the same day were all the fountains of the deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." Subsidence is the only logical answer to how the forty-day Flood could have covered those 5,640-foot mountaintops.
Werner Keller summarized it, "a vast, catastrophic inundation (assumed by skeptics to be a fairy tale or legend), an event within the compass of history . . . it happened about 4000 B.C."
We know that toward the end of the fourth millennium B.C. several bona fide civilizations arose in widely scattered areas of the world: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Crete, India, China and two separate areas of the New World. In the first two of these have been found continuous lists of kings--dating to c. 3100 B.C.
Thus, it is the opinion of Scott Glenn that we now have not only solid physical evidence in support of the biblical narrative of the Flood, but a date which enables us to establish a more realistic chronology of biblical events, and discard the naive guesstimates of Archbishop Ussher. [Glenn A. Scott, Voices from the Dust: New Light on an Ancient American Record, p. 11]
Ether 1:3 The first part of this record, which speaks concerning the creation of the world . . . even to the great tower (Chronology) [[Illustration]]: Projected Schedule of Dates from the Flood to the News World [Glenn A. Scott, Voices from the Dust: New Light on an Ancient American Record, p. 10]