Re: [tied] The Black Sea Flood

I finally received my copy of Stephen Oppenheimer's book, Eden in the East. This is the one interested in the inundation of Sundaland (the dry-land extension of SE Asia during the Ice Age, when Borneo, Sumatra and Java were connected to the Malay Peninsula). He goes a great deal into the situation at the end of the last Ice Age. The big melt was in three segments, 14k, 11.5k and 8k years ago. The last of these three is the one he's most interested in. The precipitating event was the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet in N.America, with rapid sea-level raising. 7.5 k years ago, of course, was when the Med had risen sufficiently for its weight to push thru the Bosphorus and cause the filling of the Black Sea. Sea Level reached modern heights at 5200 BCE (7.2 kya), then went on rising up to 5 meters above present, not retreating down to modern level until ca. 3200 BCE.

Piotr here and elsewhere speaks of events in Central Asia at this time. Certainly, mountain top ice sheets were also collapsing. I don't know what is being spoken of, though, when he mentions Tungas Lake.

At 3200, the Europe was cooling somewhat. The Alpine glaciers started advancing. I posted a quote earlier on how Greece and Thrace would seem to have been virtually depopulated before 3200, mostly because of raised sea level.

The implications of all this have not yet really been addressed. For IE studies, it certainly has something to do with the falling-together of PIE about the time of the Black Sea event. The situation in 3200 also says something about when Anatolic broke away from the remainder of PIE.

Mark.

----- Original Message -----

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

I've learnt of the findings of the Toshkent/Warsaw project (launched in 1994) indirectly, from sketchy releases in the Polish press. They claim to have found solid evidence of extensive flooding in the deserts of W Uzbekistan at a rather recent date, roughly about the time of the Black Sea event.

I know no details and can only speculate that such huge amounts of H2O circulating in Central Asia in the sixth millennium BC had to do with the early Holocene climatic optimum and the accelerated melting of the surviving fragments of the Pleistocene ice sheet in the highlands of N Asia after ca. 8000 BP (with a smaller-scale reenactment of the Tungus Lake scenario). Like the Laurentide ice sheet in Canada, the remnants of continental ice in Siberia and Tibet took a long time to retreat, much longer that the Scandinavian glaciers.

Global warming is also held responsible for the sea-level rise that presumably caused the Ryan-Pitman flood. The apparent "flood conspiracy" of the mid-sixth millennium may mean a number of independent hydrological events triggered more or less simultaneously by the same climatic factors. The Steppe region is a former sea-bed (the eastern end of the ancient Tethys basin), still well below sea level in some parts (about -28 m for the Caspian Sea itself) and easy to inundate if there is enough water available.

Piotr

Mark:

The extent and drainage patterns of the lakes formed at the southern front the northern glaciers during the last ice age have been demonstrated. I am more familiar with the North American situation. The overflow of glacial Lake Aggasiz (with the then-tributary Lake Superior), dug new river valleys so that the Upper Mississippi and upper Missouri now flow south to the Gulf of Mexico. This was a humongous amount of water. Where I live, in Northeast Iowa, the Mississippi is a deep gorge with high cliffs on either side.

http://www.pca.state.mn.us/water/basins/redriver/agassiz.html

The situation in Europe was similar. At the height of the Ice Age, all access to the Arctic Ocean and North Sea was blocked by ice. Huge freshwater lakes formed at the front of the glacier. All of Central and Eastern European waters, and the waters of Western Siberia flowed to the then-freshwater Euxine Lake, and thence to the Med. By 8,000 BCE, the glaciers had sufficiently retreated to allow European rivers access to the North Sea and the Ob and Yenisey Rivers access to the Arctic Ocean.

From: Michal Milewski <milewski@...>

> Mark Odegard wrote:
>
> > These lakes took their path to the sea via a much
> > increased Aral and Caspian, the Euxine and then to the
> > Med. Some maps I've seen suggest Aral-Caspian-Euxine were
> > united as one huge fresh-water lake.
>
> Are there any geological data supporting this? What would be
> the timeline for those events?