Steve Long writes:
> > Mallory and even Renfrew (who should know better) both
> > treat the Black Sea as if it were a wall instead of the
> > best possible highway.
> > In fact, might not the Black Sea have been the shortest
> > distance between Anatolia, the Ukraine and the Danube?
This is a question Black Sea marine archaology may answer, yea,
will likely answer.
> > Jeremy Rutters, the Dartmouth archaeologist, made the
> > comment at the Anatolian Conf at Richmond last year,
> > that the Black Sea and new (underwater) digs that will
> > follow the Flood theory may change everything.
Not 'may change everyhing': 'will change everything'. Because of the
anoxia of the lower depths of the Black Sea, organic material decays
very very slowly, if at all. As I've said before, marine archaeology
is entering a golden age, and the Black Sea will be the mother lode.
As an example, there's that Roman-era shipwreck, where the ship's
timbers are as intact as they were almost the day it sank.
> > Because one thing about all theories is that they fall,
> > perhaps 50 years from now, people will be talking about
> > a *PIE homeland not in Anatolia or the Steppes, but
> > instead in a ring around the Black Sea.
I have my doubts. The date of the Euxine Event curiously coincides
with the emergence of certain archaeological horizons, e.g., the LBK.
There is also the fact IE seems to preserve no memory whatsoever of a
flood/disaster event (tho' it borrows, as with Ducalion). I concede,
however, that this really was a very long time ago, and they may have
simply forgotten about the Euxine Event, even if they knew about it
from personal experience. My own speculation is that this cataclysm
lead to a abrupt northward spread of agriculture etc, brought by
refugees; the few kilometers a year of 'demic spread of agriculture'
pulsed several hundred klicks, I think, within a matter of a few years
(the old mouth of the Dnister is about 100 miles down, under the Black
Sea, from the present one).