Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

The Sumerian King List begins with eight rulers who reigned before a great flood, with reigns lasting 28,800, 36,000, and 43,200 years. These durations are multiples of 600 and 3,600, totaling 241,200 years. The text is a variant tradition, used here as a textual input rather than literal history. Some interpret the reigns as encoded climate data, with boundaries matching real-world climate shifts.

A proposed anchor date of 11.6 ka BP is near the Younger Dryas termination. The list's boundaries need to match dated geological events for the interpretation to hold. The analysis uses a Gaussian kernel proximity score to compare the Sumerian reigns with other ancient chronologies and a catalog of climate events. The primary test fixes the anchor at 11.6 ka BP, while a secondary test optimizes the anchor within a 10 to 13 ka window.

Despite the flexibility in anchor placement and bandwidth, the primary analysis finds no statistically significant alignment between the Sumerian reigns and the paleoclimate catalog.