2715 BCE: the SECOND Black Sea Flood.

The information below is snipped/edited from what seems to be an impeccably reputable site; this is the Cornell University dendrochronology project. This does not necessarily imply a world-wide sea-level rise but may represent the result of subsidence, caused by an earthquake, or as a delayed response to the immense weight of the additional water brought in by the transgression of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea ca. (radiocarbon attested date) 5500 BCE. The quote below mentions the work of Ryan and Pittman (but not their book), and is more than a year out of date.

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/98news/98adplet.html

--start quote--
There is an interesting angle to the wiggle-matched oak chronology from Kiten near Sozopol near Bourgas in Bulgaria mentioned in the 1994 newsletter, in Acta Archaeologica (1996), and now formally here in print: namely something catastrophic which happened some time after 2715 +/-10 B.C., the date of the last pilings at the site. [...]

There is also a conspicuous lack of Bronze Age settlements anywhere near the Bosphorus--indeed not even a single EBA potsherd. There are, however, submerged Early Bronze Age settlements extending north on the western shelf of the Black Sea, and now we have dated one of them, i.e., Kiten, to within ten years of 2715 B.C. [...]

As late as the end of the third millennium B.C. people were able to live in settlements such as Kiten and Sozopol and Ropotamo along the western Black Sea coast, all of which are now about 8-10 meters under water.

--end quote--

I think it's reasonable to take this at face value. It's a preliminary report, but a responsible one. The data will show up soon enough in the learned journals.

The implications for archaeology, linguistics and the interpretation of certain ancient Near-Eastern texts are obvious.

This is an event that probably *directly* applies to the breakup of proto-Indo-European (a reasonable scenario is to have proto-Anatolic (Hittite etc) somewhere south of the Danube, involved somehow in the Ezero culture, which is 3200 BCE down and thence moving into NW Anatolia/the Troad).

Mark Odegard. <