Re: [tied] Re: Euxine Event.

Piotr:
There's a lot there to think over. It's very important (and
difficult at times) to establish a consistent chronology.

Me (Mark):
Yes, it is important. It rules-out certain scenerios. Northern
Europe was essentially uninhabitable until sometime after 6000
BCE, and east-west connections between Ukraine and Central
Asia would have been extremely difficult to establish and
maintain.


Piotr:
Holocene climatologists routinely use radiocarbon years BP
without saying so explicitly -- this may confuse a
chronologically naive web surfer who visits their sites. The
dates you give below match the calibrated dates I find in my
home-library sources, and although there is some uncertainty
about dating the onset of some fluctuation phases, the
sequence seems to be rather securely established. I suspect we
may still expect some little surprises concerning the detailed
scenario of the 7500 BP floodings (wasn't the Ryan-Pitman
event itself a bolt from the blue -- an unsuspected vast-scale
catastrophe in such an apparently well-studied area?).

Me (Mark):
I have difficulty with 'negative dates', forever having to
think twice about what the 7th or 6th millennium BCE stands
for. Dates in BP are also confusing, as 'Before Present' means
'years before 1950'. And radiocarbon dates -- uncalibrated or
calibrated -- present their own difficulties.

The Med-to-Euxine flood was indeed a bolt from the blue. It
makes catastrophism fashionable again. Considering that
Ballard has retrieved potsherds from the old lakeshore off
Sinope -- and that other artifacts will soon enough also be
recovered -- it's clear we are in a new archaeological age.
I'm certain they will prove agriculture was practiced at the
lakeshore.

As I mentioned earlier, IE seems to have not a whisper of
evidence to suggest a native flood myth. What we do have was
borrowed. This silence reinforces the notion that the IE
homeland was in North Central Europe.

I won't reproduce John's valuable post here, but he brings up
some interesting points. The genetics of the dog is very
interesting. Unless we are to say the IEs came from Central
Asia (unlikely), they had to come from Anatolia, via the
Bosphorus Land Bridge, or had to enter via Iran east of the
Caucusus at a rather late date. Whatever the case, the split
from Uralic was likely someplace like Mesopotamia, or even
further south.

Glen should chew on this path of entry for a while. It makes
Tyrrhenian a stay-at-home language in Anatolia, whereas IE
pushed itself north before returning southward millennia
later. I suspect the IE's moved around the lake shore, then
followed the Danube up into Central Europe, following a
hunter-gatherer lifestyle, modified by contacts with
agriculturalists. The language[s] spoken along the lakeshore
are a mystery, but Kartvalian must have been one of them, and
something related to Urartian must have been there too.

The founders of Central Danube agriculture, ca 5300, would
seem to have been descended from refugees from the Black Sea
flood. I imagine the archaeological record from this time
needs to be thoroughly re-assessed. These people are usually
not considered to be IE-speakers.

This is fascinating stuff. Changes in sea level, the climate,
and hydrological features all need to be thoroughly
documented.

Mark.