From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1811
Date: 2000-03-09
Gerry: Who was responsible for proving the transgression of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea?
Ryan and Pitman. Their's is the glory, together with their well-credited team. The original writeup was in one of the peer-reviewed journals, the US's Science, as I recall. Their book, Noah's Flood ..., is a dumbed-down, popular account of their findings.The objection is not to speaking of the biblical flood, but in associating it with the Black Sea event -- even Ryan and Pitman admit the possibility is remote. As someone else on this forum noted, the biblical flood (if historic status is to be accorded to it) is most likely related to a world-wide rise in sea-level and most definitely NOT to the Black Sea flood. I have not the least doubt that it's their publisher, Simon & Schuster, who are to blame for the addition of this rubbish: they were looking for a best-seller; for the money Ryan and Pitman are probably making off this book, I'd have gone along with the idea too.
If you read of the rivers in Eden, and squint your linguistic perceptions a little, the rivers that flowed 'out' of it were actually flowing 'in' to it, specifically, the Tigris, Euphrates, a wadi in Saudi Arabia and a seasonal river in Iran (the names of the last two escape me). The Garden of Eden was inundated by a rise in sea level -- a slow rise; the refugees waded to safety, much as most of the refugees of the Black Sea event waded to high ground. Sea level at this time was about 50 feet below the present level.
As I have said before, I've heard scholarly whispers about a substantial rise in sea level in the 3200-2700 BCE period, and for a brief phase higher than the present level; the idea is that ca. 3200 BCE, mean sea level was below, and had been for some time had been below the present level, and only then did it get to where it is today (and it seems, for brief period as much as 1.5 to 10 meters above present levels -- I'm waiting for responsible sources on this last, however). This would be the biblical flood.
Here is one responsible quote from the web (it was posted in early 1999, and events have somewhat overtaken what is reported here). This is the Cornell University dendrochronology site (the added emphases are mine):
ht tp://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/98news/98adplet.html
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. Prof. Mehmet Ãzdogan at Istanbul University has had a theory for many years that the Black Sea was once a freshwater lake, connected to both the Caspian and Aral Seas, with an outlet south through what is now the delta of the Sakarya River and then west through Sapanca Lake and the Gulf of Izmit. Cores drilled from the Black Sea floor show saltwater mollusks on top and freshwater mollusks below, also plant roots from plants which once grew on dry land.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. Mehmet's argument is that since the shores of the Bosphorus are so steep, it is a relatively new cut. Some time around the Early Bronze Age rising sea levels world-wide, possibly combined with an earthquake, caused the Sea of Marmara to break through the Bosphorus and to turn the Black Sea into the brackish sea that it now is rather than a freshwater lake.
Work done recently by Profs. Bill Ryan and Walter Pitman at the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia seems to bear at least part of this out. They note a steep slip-strike fault below the present Bosphorus channel, deepening as it goes northward (as one would expect if vast volumes of water (~50 cubic kms. a day) were rushing through the gorge into what is now the Black Sea). Their radiocarbon dating of the death of the freshwater molluscs and therefore the ingression of the saltwater from the Marmara is around 5600 B.C. The Ryan-Pitman scenario does not explain why there are no EBA settlements along the Bosphorus, nor does it explain in full why it took so long for Kiten to be submerged. Our wiggle-matched Kiten date, however, suggests that the Black Sea did not assume its present form immediately after their proposed 5600 B.C. breakthrough. 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.
The Kiten/Sozopol findings could be explained at least in part by subsidence; it can take the Earth a very long time to adjust to the added weight of water. Earthquakes and subsidence are known to occur consequent to the filling of large reservoirs behind new, large dams. The Black Sea event added more water to the basin than the contents of all the world's reservoirs put together many many times over. This part of the world is also an active earthquake zone.All of these questions will undoubtedly sorted out in the next few years. This is now one of the hottest, sexiest topics in oceanography, hydrology and ane/IE archaeology, the sort of thing that gets superb funding.
Mark.