Past Climates-The Great Flood

Today as I sit here bored with the news and watching the ice build up outside I thought I would start a series of posts on the world climate over the last 100,000 years. There will be no order to these posts, what ever little piece of it I feel like posting on that day. That is my nature. Today we will start with the "The Great Flood". There is some good news and some bad news here for the flat earthers. The good news is there actually was a great flood. The bad news, it was not the result of 40 days and 40 nights of rain but the result of global warming.

The Black Sea Basin is Flooded

As glaciers and icecaps melted at the end of the last Ice Age, sea levels rose and dramatically changed the world, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in what is now the Black Sea, where, according to some researchers, a flood 7600 years ago filled the basin.

Evidence for the flood was confirmed in 1996 when Columbia University marine geologists William B.F. Ryan and Walter C. Pitman proposed a solution to the mystery that archeologists and paleoclimatologists have wrestled with since the early 1800s with the story of the deluge that appears in the Book of Genesis was found to exist in other cultures not associated with the Judeo-Christian Bible such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.

As sea levels rose, the waters of the Mediterranean began to flow into the basin that is now the Black Sea. According to the National Geographic, "funneled through the narrow Bosporus, the water hit the Black Sea with 200 times the force of Niagara Falls. Each day the Black Sea rose about six inches (15 centimeters), and coastal farms were flooded."

Dr. Robert Ballard while exploring the Black Sea for ship wrecks in 1999 discovered the remains of an ancient building some 95 feet below the current level of the black sea.

Today Ballard, famous for finding Titanic, confirmed that his research team, sponsored in part by the National Geographic Society, has identified a wooden structure on a gently sloping shelf near the convergence of two submerged ancient river beds.

“This is an incredible find,” Ballard said in a telephone call to the National Geographic Society from the expedition ship Northern Horizon. “It consists of [the remains of] a single building with a hewn beam and wooden branches that formed the walls and roof of a structure—most likely a house. We have also found and photographed stone tools, possibly a chisel or an axe, and ceramic storage vessels, all untouched since the flooding of the Black Sea.”

The find represents "the first concrete evidence for the occupation of the Black Sea coast prior to its flooding," says expedition archaeologist Fredrik Hiebert, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. "This is a major discovery that will rewrite the history of civilizations in this key area between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East."

Abundant wooden beams andbranches were located in the vicinity of the archaeological site. This beam showssigns of being worked by implementsor tools.

So what does it all mean?

If a massive flood did occur, it may have played a role in the migration of people away from the region, possibly helping to spread the Indo-European languages-- from which Sanskrit and many European languages including English evolved-- to India and Europe. Linguists who study the origin of languages note that migrations of people from the eastern part of the Black Sea around 6,000 years ago include three eastern branches-- going toward Iran, India and Central Asia respectively-- and two western migrations-- the first going directly towards Greece while the second went around the Caspian Sea towards Europe where many Western languages emerged from.

There was indeed a great flood and it is responsible in part for the spread of what we know as "Western Civilization". This is only one of many examples of how climate has impacted the movement of man and civilization. In the future we will discuss how climate change forced the human race to migrate out of Africa.