Researchers have found the first evidence for the legendary Great Flood on the Yellow River, a massive, catastrophic event that occurred about 4,000 years ago and ultimately produced the first dynasty of China.

Folk traditions and written records recount how the hero Yu dredged and tamed the destructive floodwaters about 4,000 years ago.

Yu's decades-long feat earned him "the divine mandate to establish the Xia dynasty, the first in Chinese history, and marked the beginning of Chinese civilization," Qinglong Wu, a researcher at Peking University and Nanjing Normal University, China, and colleagues wrote in Science.

Until now no direct evidence of the cataclysm had been discovered.

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"In the absence of geological evidence for such a flood, some scholars have argued that the story is either a historicized version of an older myth or propaganda to justify the centralized power of imperial rule," David Montgomery, professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, wrote in a related Science paper.

Mapping distinctive sediments that are widely distributed along the Yellow River valley, Wu and colleagues were able to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to the flood. The sediments included deposits sourced from the gorge upstream.

"They are the direct and solid evidence of a great flood. Only a large flood can deposits such sediments," Wu told Discovery News.

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