The Sumerian King List records eight pre-flood kings with reign lengths totaling 241,200 years. These numbers, often multiples of 3,600, have sparked speculation about distorted memories of real climate events. Researchers tested whether these reign boundaries align with paleoclimate data from the Quaternary period.

By rescaling the chronology to a fixed span and anchoring to the Younger Dryas termination 11,600 years ago, they compared the sequence against geological event catalogs. The analysis found no statistically significant alignment in the primary dataset. Even when expanding to 103 catalog entries, the results remained inconclusive.

The smallest raw p-value of 0.021 appeared in a catastrophic exploratory catalog, but failed to remain significant after adjustment for multiple comparisons. The study concludes that while apparent matches are easy to find with flexible parameters, no robust evidence supports the hypothesis that the King List encodes real climate shifts. Comparisons with Biblical and other ancient chronologies demonstrate how readily unrelated sequences can produce chance alignments under similar analytical procedures.