Re: [tied] Euxine Event.

There are some problems with this. Worldwide sea level at the time of the Black Sea event was about 50 feet below present. The former outflow of the Caspian to the Euxine Lake, presumably the route of the present Don-Volga Canal, is above present sea level. I don't know what elevation this part of Russia is. Volgograd (former Stalingrad), of course, is practically at sea level, with the course of the Volga being below sea level after Volgograd. The Caspian would have had to have been much higher than present, to overtop the present barriers and flow to the Euxine.

I might add that this part of the world is quite geologically active, experiencing uplift. The weight of the additional waters flowing into the Black Sea would have caused some depression of the seabed.

The remnant of the Laurentide ice sheet, esssentially a gargantuan ice cube filling Hudson Bay, rapidly collapsed ca. 8000 years ago; imagine of the mother of all icebergs. This at once raised sea level, but also sent the world into a mini-ice age. It was the effect of all that cold, fresh water flooding into the Atlantic from the collapsed ice sheet.

The whole of Central Asia was formerly much wetter, even in historical times. The Tarim Basin lake did not completely dry up until the present millennium. From 6000 BCE on down, remnant continental glaciers, mostly in mountains, were melting. It would seem that once the cold-phase caused by the collapse of the Laurentide ice sheet was over, this process must have accellerated.

Whatever the situation, the 6th Millennium BCE Pontic-Caspian Steppe was indeed a disaster area.

Mark.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

It seems a priori likely that the Ryan-Pitman flood overflowed into the Caspian depression through the natural spillway of the Don-Volga interfluve. The modern Caspian is a body of salt water (brackish in the northern part) with partly marine fauna -- in apparent contradiction to what is known about its Pleistocene past. Its present-day level is ca. -28 m, that is more than 100 m higher than the level of the old freshwater Euxine. These facts can be accounted for if we envisage a pre-5500 BC Caspian in the form of a deep freshwater lake (or rather two large lakes forming an 800 km long figure "8") located within the southern and central parts of the modern Sea. The influx of salt water from the Black Sea event filled the depression almost to the brim.

The Aral Sea situation is less clear: the Aral is smaller, very shallow (as compared to the Euxine and Caspian) and extremely unstable (it has shrunk catastrophically by 50% over the past 40 years as a result of Soviet hydroengineering experiments). Its salinity varies in reverse proportion to its dimensions. During the Holocene both transgression and regeression have occurred, with the maximum known level some 50 m higher and the minimum level even a few meters lower than today, according to my sources. If after the Black Sea event the level of the Caspian rose to about the contemporaneous sea level, one could expect the flooding of the flat plains of western Kazakhstan and perhaps the formation of an ephemeral Caspian-Aral system. John seems to know a lot about ancient sea levels; perhaps he can offer some some references to information on the hydrogeography of Central Asia during that period.

One thing seems likely: the North Euxine-Caspian steppe was a natural disaster area in the mid and late sixth millennium BC.

Piotr

This is a recent, respectable link on the Black Sea flood.

http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/0799toc/7focus1-calamity.shtml

It gibes with everything I've read so far.

The more I get into this, the more I think all bets are off. The history of the European Neolithic has to be completely re-thought and re-written.

From what we can reconstruct of IE mythology, it seems they did NOT have a flood-myth. The lack of oceanic/seafaring terms has long been pointed to as making them an inland people. If they had experienced the Black Sea flood, and had been refugees from it, or even if they had been somewhat to the north of it, some whisper should have survived, but there is nothing.

Linearbandkeramik keeps looking better to me. I wonder what Gimbutas would have thought.

Mark.