Before this, seven and a half millennia ago, the Black Sea was a fresh-water lake.
Speculation exists regarding the Indo-European diaspora and another ancient event -- the great flooding of the Black Sea in 5,600 B.C. The Indo-Europeans certainly lived on or near the shores of the Black Sea at this time. Is it possible that this enormous catastrophe hit the Indo-Europeans and had some part in scattering them all over Eurasia? Here are the recent discoveries regarding the flood:
Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard has found conclusive proof that a flood of Biblical proportions inundated an area north of Turkey about 7,600 years ago - a timetable and location that virtually match the Old Testament account of Noah.
While on a National Geographic expedition in search of ancient merchant vessels in the Black Sea last summer, Ballard also took time to investigate a theory proposed by Columbia University experts William Ryan and Walter Pitman.
Studying sediment cores and the geography of the Black Sea, the pair theorized that an enormous flood resulted from the collapse of a natural dam at the northeastern extreme of the Mediterranean Sea. Water rushing into the Black Sea basin through the narrow channel now known as the Bosporus would fill the basin like a bathtub, destroying towns and villages along its shores. For as long as two years, water rushed through the narrow Bosporus with the flow of 200 Niagara Falls, eventually inundating an area the size of Florida.
Before this, seven and a half millennia ago, the Black Sea was a fresh-water
lake.
"In some places," said Ballard, "the surface of the Black Sea might have been widened by as much as a mile a day. Along cliffs, the waters probably rose about six inches a day. If you were living on a flat area near the lake, you'd have to try and outrun the rising waters."
For their original research, Ryan and Pitman focused on the northern shore of the Black Sea - a region which was in a direct line with the incredible forces created by the Bosporus waterfall. The original ancient shoreline probably did not survive.
Ballard searched in a different direction.
"We did much of our research in what is really one of the few good natural harbors in the Black Sea, At Sinop," said Ballard. The area would have been protected from rough flood waters by a point of land that juts out into the Black Sea to the west. "There, the flood waters would have simply risen, preserving the contours of the original beach," he said.
Ballard and his team dropped a side-scan sonar sensor overboard from their boat . . . and found exactly what they were looking for.
"There was the classic beach profile: The flat shore area, the beach berm leading down to the old water level, and a sand bar just offshore," Ballard said. "It looked like any beach, anywhere on Earth - except it was under 550 feet of water!"
Using a plain dredge box, Ballard scooped up a bucket of shells from the ancient shoreline. He sent them to Gary Rosenberg of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, for analysis, and the findings were astounding: Two were shells of extinct fresh-water mollusks, presumably from the pre-flood, fresh-water Black Sea. Seven were salt water mollusks, from the post-flood era.
And when Ballard had the shells radiocarbon-dated at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the results were even more amazing: The youngest date for the fresh-water shells was about 7,500 years ago.
"That was right on the money," said Ballard. "Exactly what we would be looking for in a flood scenario."
Later, U.S. archeologists found the remains of a 7,500-year-old building, probably a house, more than 300 feet below the surface of the Black Sea, the strongest evidence yet of the flood.
The newly found house had been on the beach discovered by Ballard. "Now we know that people were living on that surface when [the flood] took place, because we are finding evidence of human habitation," Ballard said.
"This is amazing. It's going to rewrite the history of ancient civilizations because it shows unequivocally that the Black Sea flood took place and that the ancient shores of the Black Sea were occupied by humans," said Ryan.
He and Pittman believe that residents who fled the area carried stories that were eventually incorporated into the flood stories that seem to permeate cultures worldwide.
The rectangular structure is 311 feet below the sea's surface about 12 miles east of the Turkish city of Sinope. The construction material of the 39-by-13-foot structure was identified as traditional Black Sea "wattle and daub" architecture: wood branches and sticks embedded in a clay matrix (exactly the kind built by the Indo-Europeans)
"This struck a bell because it was familiar to me from [ancient buildings on] land," said archeologist Fredrik Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania, part of Ballard's team. "Literally, my jaw dropped."
The expedition also found old tree branches, pieces of wood and a trash heap with polished stones and other debris indicating human habitation.
The artifacts were extremely well preserved for their age because the depths of the Black Sea have a very low oxygen level--too low to support the marine worms and bacteria that normally would destroy wood, sails and other materials. Ballard long has argued that this anoxic environment should make the floor of the Black Sea a literal museum containing the preserved hulks of hundreds or even thousands of ancient structures. He plans to begin exploring the sea floor after he examines the immediate area of the newly discovered house to see if more dwellings lie nearby.
"Now we are looking for neighbors," he said
Biblical scholars believe that the Book of Genesis and the story of Noah's flood were written about 2,500 to 2,900 years ago, nearly five millenniums after the Black Sea flood. Many have questioned whether the biblical events could be tied to a single ancient event
But Ryan and Pittman argued that the exodus from the shores of the ancient sea was so traumatic to its populace that it was recorded in the collective human memory as the story of Noah, in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, and in a variety of other flood stories (and possibly resulted in the dispersal of the Indo-Europeans).