A member of the ark-hunting team who made the purported discovery has expressed doubts about the veracity of the find. Not just about its being the Ark itself, mind you, but about whether the whole thing is a deliberate hoax.

Dr. Randall Price, an evangelic Christian professor at the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, was the sole archaeologist on the team in 2008 when they first discovered the wooden structures on Mount Ararat. He wouldn’t get into specifics with the Christian Science Monitor, but he did tell them that he had “difficulties with a number of issues related to the evidence at hand.” He also confirmed that he had sent a certain email which has now leaked in which he claimed the wood was planted.

From the email:

I was the archaeologist with the Chinese expedition in the summer of 2008 and was given photos of what they now are reporting to be the inside of the Ark. I and my partners invested $100,000 in this expedition (described below) which they have retained, despite their promise and our requests to return it, since it was not used for the expedition. The information given below is my opinion based on what I have seen and heard (from others who claim to have been eyewitnesses or know the exact details).

To make a long story short: this is all reported to be a fake. The photos were reputed to have been taken off site near the Black Sea, but the film footage the Chinese now have was shot on location on Mt. Ararat. In the late summer of 2008 ten Kurdish workers hired by Parasut, the guide used by the Chinese, are said to have planted large wood beams taken from an old structure in the Black Sea area (where the photos were originally taken) at the Mt. Ararat site. In the winter of 2008 a Chinese climber taken by Parasut’s men to the site saw the wood, but couldn’t get inside because of the severe weather conditions. During the summer of 2009 more wood was planted inside a cave at the site. The Chinese team went in the late summer of 2009 (I was there at the time and knew about the hoax) and was shown the cave with the wood and made their film. As I said, I have the photos of the inside of the so-called Ark (that show cobwebs in the corners of rafters – something just not possible in these conditions) and our Kurdish partner in Dogubabyazit (the village at the foot of Mt. Ararat) has all of the facts about the location, the men who planted the wood, and even the truck that transported it.

Damn, yo. If true, I have to give the expedition credit for commitment to their con. Dr. John D. Morris, a consultant to the Chinese team and president of the Institute for Creation Research, declined to join the press conference and is withholding judgment until he sees some real evidence, but he points out to the CSM that hauling all that wood up 12,000 feet of snow-covered mountain then cramming it into the ice would be a dramatic feat. You’d need major heavy machinery to accomplish it.

It seems to me the con could be a lot more simple than that: pocket money from avowed Ark-hunters, take pictures and video from other sites, make a big splashy announcement with zero confirmable information and enjoy the publicity and further riches that inevitably ensue. If they disappear from this point onwards, the story will just fade away, one of a million media microfurors that get zero follow-up.

A team of Chinese and Turkish explorers from an evangelical Christian group called Noah’s Ark Ministries International announced earlier this week that they’ve found the remains of Noah’s Ark on top of Mount Ararat in Turkey. The news instantly spread around the world via wire service (AFP seems to have been the primary source) and a remarkable number of mainstream media outlets reported the claims virtually uncritically; see this absurdly definite headline from ABC, for example.

The basics are as follows: at an undisclosed location on Mount Ararat, the team claims to have found seven large wooden compartments, plus some fragments of wood nearby, in 2007 and 2008. In October of 2009 they returned with a film crew. They say they’ve carbon dated the wood and the results indicate the wood about 4,800 years old, which is kinda sorta when Noah would have been awaiting the rainbow sign, give or take 500 years going by Bishop Ussher’s chronology.

Filmmaker Yeung Wing-cheung from the 15-person team went so far as to say “It’s not 100 per cent that it is Noah’s Ark, but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it.”

In support of their claims, they offer the remote location which precludes human habitation as a source of the structures, some unauthenticated footage and a couple of pictures. Oh, and also the presence of tenons in the wood, which of course only existed before nails were invented. (Any mortise and tenon joints you might have encountered on your post-Noah furniture secretly include invisible nails.) The group refuse to disclose the location, for its protection, of course. They also say Turkish officials present at the press conference will ask the government to submit the site to UNESCO for World Heritage status.

The Turkish government doesn’t seem to be quite on board with the plan, however, because they’re actually initiating an investigation into the regional officials involved and into whether the team actually had permission to do any research on Mount Ararat and remove artifacts from the country.

Also displeased are Creationist scholars who point out that if radiocarbon dating is accepted in this case, then it would have to be accepted in all the other cases where the results are older than the 6,000 years of the earth according to Biblical literalists. If you recalibrate all carbon dating results so the maximum is 6,000 years, then of course the 4,800 years of this find make it way too young to be Noah’s wood. Also, it’s cedar wood, not gopher, so yeah, literalists not happy.

Meanwhile, actual archaeologists point out that even if this find is real and the dating is accurate — two huge ifs — that proves exactly nothing. The wood could be on Mount Ararat and a) not be from a ship, b) not have been used in construction right when it was harvested.

“I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn’t find it,” Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York state, told National Geographic.

The evangelical group says it found wood structures on Ararat, and carbon dating placed it at 4,800 years old. But even this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Noah’s Ark – or that the “structure” they found is that old.

“All that we know at the moment is that the expedition members are showing us pictures and samples of a structure made out of wood,” Cline told The Christian Post.

“It could be ancient, it could be medieval, it could even have been constructed last week,” he said. “Even carbon-14 dating will only tell us how old the wood is; it will not tell us when the structure was constructed.”

“If the finds are published in a full and comprehensive manner, one will truly be able to assess it,” Dr. Aren M. Maeir, a professor at Israel’s Bar Ilan University, told The Christian Post. “Meanwhile, it joins many other such discoveries – and sound quite hard to believe.”

There’s also zero geological evidence of a flood in Turkey 4,000 years ago, and Biblical scholars point out that the Bible says the ark landed in Urartu, a kingdom in eastern Turkey. The Mount Ararat location only became the prevalent theory in the Middle Ages.

So, in other words, the “find” is pretty much meaningless at this point. The articles quoting the team unchallenged are succumbing to the allure of Bible-related discoveries. We’ll see if there’s any fire to all this smoke should the discoveries ever be published.

Meanwhile, here’s an entertaining YouTube of the Noah’s Ark Ministries International team doing their version of archaeology on the Ararat site. I particularly like the stumbling around in thick boots part.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/LjpeQU7GIZc&w=430]