The world's greatest sailor / navigator / biologist

As it's a Sunday, let us pay tribute to a biblical character whose achievements have been so overlooked. One could mention his longevity - he lived to over 900, or the fact that he invented wine. Today however, we shall focus on the most famous achievement of Noah, the man without whom we would have no land animals alive today. The first great achievment is the obvious one. Building a boat large enough to house between two and seven of every land animal in existence as well as enough food to keep them alive for many months. Now, many thousands of years later, the human race, all six billion of it, still hasn't been able to discover and catalogue all of these animals - and it is quite a straightforward process, in places such as the Amazon rainforest, to discover a new species. But Noah, he got the lot and presumably a few others that have since died out. But the often overlooked skill of Noah and his family is their prodigious ship building ability. After all, they would have to have sent vessels to all parts of the Earth to collect the native species and return them to Noah. Then, after the waters had subsided, take them back to the appropriate part of the world. Given the limited time available, his family must have been amongst the most efficient workers ever to have lived, just to build the sea going vessels capable of such a task. And, of course, the history books must be re-written in terms of seamanship and exploration. It now beomes clear that a member of the Noah family must, by definition, have discovered most of the places on Earth, since they rescued and then returned the native species to them. The planning operation must have required great foresight as Noah's family would have to devise a method of exploring pretty much the whole of the Earth's surface, so as not to miss anything. This is made all the more impressive since, by definition, he must therefore also have been the one to discover that the Earth is round. The insight was amazing, imagine as he instructed his sons to head for the polar regions, as yet undiscovered on the off chance there might be some land there and to bring back what he found. One imagines that the penguins were met with rather more enthusiasm than the polar bears. Indeed, the animal handling skills of his family must have been magnificent to be able to contain lions, tigers, poisonous snakes and spiders, wild horses and all manner of other beasts well equipped with tooth and claw. And when they finished, did they sit back on their laurels and relax in the knowledge of a job well done? No, they re-populated the entire world through in-breeding. An achievement indeed. But you try and teach all this to the kids of today and they won't even believe you.