Noah's Ark found? Not so fast
Posted: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 4:00 PM by Alan Boyle

Web sites are buzzing over claims that remains from Noah’s Ark may have been found on Turkey’s Mount Ararat. The finders, led by an evangelical group, say they are "99.9 percent" that a wooden structure found on the mountainside was part of a ship that housed the Biblical Noah, his family and a menagerie of creatures during a giant flood 4,800 years ago.

But researchers who have spent decades studying the region – and fending off past claims of ark discoveries – caution that a boatload of skepticism is in order.

"You have to take everything out of context except the Bible to get something tolerable, and they're not even working much with the Bible," said Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist and historian at Stony Brook University who specializes in the Near East - and especially the region around Ararat, known as Urartu.

Cornell archaeologist Peter Ian Kuniholm, who has focused on Turkey for decades, was even more direct - saying that the reported find is a "crock".