From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1690
Date: 2000-02-26
I've heard it rumoured recently that a Kazakh-Polish archaeological expedition has discovered strong evidence for another Great Flood (supplementing the Black Sea event) in the mid 6th millennium BC in what is now Kazakhstan and southern Russia -- apparently caused by the catastrophic emptying of a vast post-glacial lake in western Siberia into the Aral and Caspian seas. I'll believe it if I see the report published in Nature and corroborated by further research, but one has to get accustomed to archaeological and geological surprises which may render a lot of speculation invalid overnight.
These "archeological and geological surprises" really can change the intellectual landscape. The timing of Black Sea event (ca. 5500 BCE) compels you to think about what effect this had on the falling-together of PIE. The level of Old Euxine Lake was raised 300 feet in two years, drowning large areas east and west of the Crimea.
It has occurred to me that the glacial lakes in Siberia, and the route they took to the Aral and Caspian acted as a natural barrier between the western and eastern steppe, with the result of little to no linguistic interaction on an east-west axis until essentially PIE times.
Another fact that has become more well-known is that Central Asia, to include Xinjiang, was considerably wetter 3000-4000 years ago than it is today, and has become progressively more arid as the ice has receded. The Tarim Basin (where the Tocharians were) had a large lake fed by mountain rivers. As Central Asia got dryer, serious drought years put pressures on the west as eastern tribes migrated westward in search of better pasture (the grass is always greener in Ukraine, and greenest of all in Hungary).
The biggest suprise of all, I think, will come from the current research in paleoclimatology and associated disciplines. The dendrochronologists (tree ring dating) are close to having a coordinated world-wide sequence; already, this has forced reanalysis of the generally accepted dates for ancient sites in some locales. Combined with such things as Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, cores taken from lakes and bogs as well as local tree-ring analyses, we are close to having an extraordinarily detailed year-by-year analysis of the weather for specific locations. The scientists also seem to be getting ready to give us an equally detailed year-by-year analysis of worldwide sea-level for the last 10,000 years. Compared to what we have now, we will have extraordinarily detailed information for giving dates and estimating local weather conditions, all of which will clearly force a serious re-analysis of just about every set-in-stone conclusion we have about deep antiquity.
One whisper I've heard among scholarly circles on the net is that there are some major surprises in store regarding sea level ca. 3200-2700 BCE (1.5 to 10 meters higher than present, depending on what you read).
Mark.