From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1774
Date: 2000-03-06
John Croft
> Whilst I tend to agree with the oceanography and geology, I am having
> trouble with the linguistics and archaeology of their proposed
> hypothesis. What do you others think?Gerry Reinhart-Waller:
Hypothesis sounds doable especially since a dried up sea produces lots
of salt -- a huge salt lick that both animals and humans could "sniff"
out. What would be the objections to this hypothesis since the geology
seems to be in place?
"Hypothesis" is the wrong word. The transgression of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea ca 5500 BCE is a proven fact of Earth history, as proven as the drying up of the Med itself, and the breaking through of the Atlantic at Gibralter some 6,000,000 years ago. One of Ryan and Pitman were on the team that proved the Gibralter event.There are, however, lots of details that still need to be worked out, including further refinement of the exact date (5550 BCE is the closest I've seen, with the usual hems and haws about radiocarbon dating); I gather there have already been some dendochronological studies. Marine archaeology has come of age recently, and its techniques are going to be applied to the old, now-indundated shoreline of the Euxine Lake. Nearly everything I have read is preliminary; much of the data awaits the full writeup in the peer-reviewed journals. One fascinating rumor I've heard is the existance of a neolithic seaport off of present-day Sinope, exactly where we would expect to find it just before the flood. The implications for neolithic archaeology in this part of the world are staggering; it's more than likely agriculture was practiced at the lakeshore, and relating this to the archaeological horizon in immediate post-5500 Eastern Europe and Anatolia will be part and parcel of the current and upcoming generation's crop of Ph.D. dissertations.And, as I've said before, the implications for Indo-European studies are profound. We have a catastrophic event which may in some way be directly related to the emergence of PIE. Piotr places the proto-Indo-Europeans further west, apparently in SE Germany-SW Poland, and as such would not have been directly party to the catastrophe, but undoubtedly, would have fully experience the cultural shakeup this event generated (refugees, migrations, new trade relationships, etc). Taking the standard kurgan-model, the PIEs would have been right there: the former lakeshore is approximately co-extensive with the southern extent of the 1000-year-later Sredny Stog Culture.Mark.