The Popol Vuh flood and the colonial-transmission problem in New World myth
The Popol Vuh is the fullest surviving Mesoamerican creation narrative, including a destruction-of-humankind episode: the gods make people of wood, find them defective (without hearts or minds, not honouring their makers), and destroy them in a flood of black resinous rain while animals and even their own tools turn against them. It is the single best New World test case for the convergence hypothesis (Q27) — a flood-destruction-of-humanity motif from a culture with no documented contact route to Mesopotamia — and the textbook illustration of why such cases are hard to use cleanly: the only surviving text passed through a Dominican friar's hands a century after conquest. Evidence class 4 (ethnographic/textual recording), with a colonial filter that must be stated, not waved away.
The wood-people flood is structurally a different myth from the Near Eastern deluge: the cause is defective worship/ingratitude, not divine annoyance at human noise; there is no warned righteous survivor, no ark, no bird reconnaissance, no mountain landing, no post-flood covenant. The survivors become monkeys. The diagnostic Near Eastern sub-elements (great-flood) are absent — which is exactly what a convergent, independently-generated flood story should look like.
Transmission caveat (Quiroa 2011): the text exists only because Francisco Ximénez transcribed and translated a now-lost mid-16th-century K'iche' alphabetic manuscript c. 1701–03. The alphabetic original was itself written by Christianised K'iche' nobles after the conquest. So the chain has two points where biblical Genesis could have coloured the telling — the 1550s K'iche' authors and the 1700s friar.
The counter to over-applying that caveat: the Popol Vuh flood's structure is conspicuously un-biblical (no Noah-analogue, punishment for bad ritual rather than wickedness, animals as agents of destruction). If Christian contamination drove the episode, it imported the idea of a destroying flood at most, not the Genesis plot — whereas genuine borrowing (per the vault's own contact tests) shows up as shared sequence, which is absent here.
This is the heart of Q5 and Q27: post-contact recording means missionary contamination is a live confound for every New World flood story, and the apparent global ubiquity of flood myths is inflated by an unknown amount. The discipline's standard mitigations: prefer episodes whose structure diverges from Genesis (negative evidence of borrowing), cross-check against pre-conquest material culture (Maya codices, monumental iconography) where it survives, and weight independently-attested motifs (the Mesoamerican world-ages/destructions cycle is also in the Aztec sources and in stone, lending it pre-contact depth). The Dresden Codex flood imagery (a pre-conquest screenfold) is the kind of non-textual corroboration that can partly bypass the colonial filter and is the gathering target Q27 names next.
new-world-flood-convergence-test, great-flood, distinguishing-descent-contact-convergence-methods