Durupinar "Wood Found!!!!!"

 

Back on the Durupinar project fundraiser, a wide-eyed Kezia McGarvie  ( Oct 28) excitedly but somewhat prematurely reveals after the end of the fieldwork: ' BREAKING: WOOD RECOVERED FROM THE NOAH'S ARK DURUPINAR SITE'.

In a major development in the search for Noah's Ark, project lead Dr. Cenker Atila has confirmed that multiple pieces of wood have been recovered from the Durupınar formation in eastern Turkey. The fragments are damaged and charred, raising fascinating questions about what happened at this site thousands of years ago. The samples are now in the laboratory for carbon-14 dating [...] While laboratory testing is still needed to establish their age and significance, this is an exciting new chapter in the investigation.

According to the internal biblical chronology, Noah's Flood occurred in the year 1656 AM (Anno Mundi), so by the most popular rendering to 2348 BC (equivalent to 4298 Cal BP). That is Early Bronze Age, just after the disappearance of The Kura-Araxes Culture in the general region of the Durupinar site (no need to mention the absence of evidence of flooding as the cause of that collapse about a century earlier).

Typically, for such an amateurish project, more details are available, not from an official press release by the excavation's director, but in the form of video shorts, some made by the project's PR team, and many (several dozen already) derivative ones made by other content creators. In one of them, Noah's Ark Researcher Reveals BLACKENED WOOD Found Underground! (@proofinthedirt 30/10/2026) isan interview with Ndrew Brown, the head of "Noah's Ark Scans"

"The wood that was found earlier this summer, the professor [Atila] kept it quiet just to make sure that the site was secure and people would not dig up more, you know, so that he made that decision, ah, but we now decided to announce it now, because we're about to send.. we actually have... some of it has already been sent off to a lab, but another lab in the US is about to test it, and so the professor said, yeah, go ahead, tell everyone we found wood. And so, there's charred blackened wood, and also uncharred wood that has been found inside the site, and when you are looking at the site, it's about 8-9metres down and at least a metre or so in, and we're looking at the west side.

The way he refers to this does NOT sound like it came from the boreholes, but the rather inexplicable coring method employed on the side of the site where (what seem likely to be) soil samples were taken by pounding a steel tube into a cliff from a ladder (in the screenshot it seems the guy relegated to this role could not always keep the hole level...)...

Bozo hammering away, no measuring equipment or recording media in sight

It is difficult to see how ANY stratigraphical observations can be made of the stratigraphical context of any samples retrieved by such crude methodologies, which just represent destruction of context without producing information.

Elsewhere, the manky stuff represented as wood in the official team's film certainly does not look like charred wood (charcoal) in the photo, nor really is there any way of identifying the black stuff as "wood" (looks more like a coprolite to me - Noah's Ark Poo). In any case, and wood found loose in a core is useless without a context, does it come from a lake silt layer and its wood that fell into the lake, is the wood in fact nothing more than the roots of a socking-big Holocene or recent tree? Is it earlier material that became incorporated into the mass by means of mixing when the Telçeker mudslide occurred? Once again, the excavators (I use the term loosely) failure to establish the underlying geology BEFORE they began doing the archaeology (and interpreting the bits and bobs they find) is methodologically utterly unsound. Shame on you Professor Atila.