From: Piotr Gąsiorowski
Message: 38
Date: 1999-09-24
----- Original Message -----From: Piotr GąsiorowskiSent: Sunday, September 19, 1999 10:37 PMSubject: Odp: Caraculiambro----- Original Message -----From: Alexander StolbovSent: Sunday, September 19, 1999 7:10 PMSubject: Re: CaraculiambroDear Piotr,Thank you very much for your reply and for the warm words about my page design. Though to tell the truth, the design itself is a merit of my son Sergey. For myself I wish to receive well argued and benevolent criticism.I'm grateful for such a detailed answer with an extensive citation. This subject is very important for me, but unfortunately I'm not acquainted with L.Campbell's book. Is it possibly to find in the Internet an abstract of the book or something like this? I think, in a while I'll give my opinion concerning mentioned matters (Xincan languages and farming in America).I have another request. You mentioned disastrous flooding about 5600 BC. Highly interesting topic! Could you advise where I could get a reliable information or say me in a few words what do you know about?Thank you in advance. Best regards,AlexanderDear Alexander,The quotation is not from a book by Campbell but from a collection of articles devoted to discussing Dolgopolsky's book on Nostratic linguistic palaeontology. The collection has just been published and I don't know if there are any reviews on the nets.Here's a summary of the Black Sea event of 5600 BC. The interpretation of the geological record is still a little controversial, but what seems certain is that up to that date the Black Sea was a freshwater lake occupying what used to be a branch of the Thetys Ocean. Its level was about 100 m below where it is now, and instead of the Bosphorus there was a landbridge connecting Asia Minor with Europe. If you want to find out more, feed words like Ryan, Pitman, Black Sea, Flood etc. to any search engine. Many Americans tend to identify the Ryan-Pitman flood with Noah's Flood, but that won't work, chronologically. Still, the impact of their discovery on theories of IE origin will certainly be dramatic. Wherever the PIEs lived, it wasn't far away from the Black Sea, wasn't it?Yours, PiotrFrom The New York Times, 5 January 1999
Plumbing Black Sea for Proof of the Deluge
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Two Columbia University marine geologists, inviting incredulity, came
forward in 1996 with astonishing evidence suggesting that a
catastrophic flood of the Black Sea 7,600 years ago could have played a
pivotal role in the spread of early farming into Europe and much of
Asia. The deluge also may have cast such a long shadow over succeeding
cultures that it inspired the flood account in the Babylonian epic of
Gilgamesh and, in turn, the story of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
Now the geologists, Dr. William B. F. Ryan and Dr. Walter C. Pitman III
of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N. Y.,
say they have even more archeological, geological and climate data to
support their provocative thesis. They argue their case in "Noah's Flood:
The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History,"
a book being published next week by Simon & Schuster.
While the authors have yet to win over skeptics of the Black Sea
flood's possibly sweeping influence on history, other scientists have
weighed in with new findings that seem to confirm the fact of the flood
itself. In about 5600 B.C., with rising global sea levels, salt water
from the Mediterranean and Aegean seas apparently burst into the Black
Sea, then a landlocked freshwater lake. The Black Sea rose with
terrifying swiftness, inundating more than 60,000 square miles of
coastal plains and giving the body of water its current size and
configuration.
The thesis, however it is ultimately judged, has already inspired a wave of
archeological and other scientific research in the previously neglected
Black Sea region.
"It has captured the archeological community's attention and enthusiasm,"
Ryan said in a recent interview. "The atmosphere has changed in just two
years. People from many countries are keen to take part in exploring the
idea in many ways."
Working on Turkey's Black Sea coast at Sinop, Dr. Fredrik T. Hiebert, a
University of Pennsylvania archeologist, has detected possible ruins of
a Stone Age village that was submerged in the flood. He is planning an
expedition this summer to expand the search for preflood settlements.
One objective is to determine if the people were farmers and so, as
refugees from the deluge, might have spread the practice of agriculture
into Europe for the first time.
Dr. Robert D. Ballard, the oceanographer who used modern underwater
technologies to find and explore the Titanic wreck, is preparing an
ambitious survey of submerged Black Sea archeological sites this
summer. Ballard, formerly with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
on Cape Cod, is president of the Institute for Exploration in
Mystic, Conn.
Until Ryan and Pitman advanced their hypothesis, archeologists had little
reason to believe the preflood Black Sea shore was particularly
hospitable.
In the last two years, moreover, new cores from the Greenland ice cap
have revealed that the world underwent a cold, arid period, beginning in
6200 B.C. and ending about two centuries before the flood.
Archeological digs in the Middle East appear to show many Neolithic
settlements' being abandoned during this drought.
"We speculate that this cold and arid period may have driven people to
the Black Sea as an oasis," Pitman said. "They would have brought
farming with them to this water hole, so to speak, and also exchanged
ideas and languages."
The timing of the flood, Pitman said, happened to coincide with
archeological evidence of newcomers in the Balkans and in northeastern
Europe and with some of the earlier signs of agriculture in these regions.
Some pottery at these sites is similar to that found near the Sea of
Marmara in Turkey from around the time of the flood.
Making connections between people displaced by the flood and the rise
of agriculture in Europe -- even in Egypt and Central Asia -- is the most
controversial aspect of the Ryan-Pitman thesis. In a review of the book in
the current issue of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, the managing
editor, said the farming connection "is predicated on a huge archeological
assumption" that there was a drought and it did force Middle Eastern
farmers to find refuge on the preflood Black Sea coast. He also noted
that some farming had already begun to appear in parts of Europe 500
years before the putative flood.
Rose concluded: "If Ryan and Pitman are right about the inundation of
the Black Sea, they have made a real advance in our understanding of
the region's past. But making it Noah's flood and claiming it was the
'event that changed history' was a mistake."
In other recent research, Dr. Gilles Lericolais, a French
oceanographer, led an expedition last spring that conducted more
seismic and echo-sounding probes of the submerged shelf off the Black
Sea coast. He discovered deep underwater canyons where the Danube and
Dnieper rivers had once cut deep to reach the declining waters of the
preflood Black Sea.
Turkish geologists recently reported evidence that, contrary to most
assumptions, the Bosporus Strait was cut at the time of the flood and
not before. At the end of the last ice age, more than 12,000 years ago,
the outlet connecting the freshwater Black Sea to the Mediterranean was
probably a channel through the Sakarya River to the Gulf of Izmit, an
eastern arm of the Sea of Marmara. But this passageway had closed well
before the flood, leaving no outlet for Black Sea's steadily evaporating
and diminishing waters.
"We have no way of knowing what caused the change," Ryan said. The
Sakarya outlet "is on the Anatolian fault, so a slip of the fault may have
choked it up."
In any event, where the Bosporus flows today by Istanbul, separating
Europe and Asia, there was a low valley just before the flood. Ryan and
Pitman propose in their book that a natural dam across the valley kept
the ocean waters, rising since the melting of ice-age glaciers, from
entering the Black Sea basin. This, they said, would explain why the
world ocean did not make contact sooner with the lowered Black Sea and
why, when it did break through, the event was so catastrophic and left
such a deep scar as the Bosporus Strait.