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For thousands of years, the legend of a great flood has endured in the biblical story of Noah and in such Middle Eastern myths as the epic of Gilgamesh. Few believed that such a catastrophic deluge had actually occurred. But now geophysicists have discovered an event that changed history, a sensational flood 7,600 years ago in what is today the Black Sea. Using sound waves and coring devices to probe the sea floor, they discovered clear evidence that this inland body of water had once been a vast freshwater lake lying hundreds of feet below the level of the world's rising oceans. The authors explore the archaeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence suggesting that the flood rapidly created a human diaspora that spread as far as Western Europe, Central Asia, China, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf. They suggest that the Black Sea People could well have been the mysterious proto-Sumerians, who developed the first great civilization in Mesopotamia, the source of our own.… (more)
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With this quote, the authors set the tone for the story of their exploration of the Black Sea basin. 7,500 years
Because of the impact these flood stories have had on various cultures for so long, this is a fascinating topic for me. For the most part, the research of Ryan and Pitman has been well-received, and the general theory (if not all the details) deserves to be treated seriously. More recent research validates that a sudden flood event may indeed have occurred as suggested, though perhaps not at the magnitude described in Ryan and Pitman’s hypothesis.
The writing is interesting, and it reads like a scientific detective story. This isn’t a new book; it’s now thirteen years old, and you can pick it up used at Amazon for pennies.
That's the concept that William Ryan and Walter Pitman came up with some years ago, and through dedicated research, oceonographic mapping and discovery, and some luck, along with scientists unwittingly on similar
Definitely a good read, if a little dry at points, but worth it if you, like me, are on the search for the potential truth behind the fiction of our ancestors. I read this as part of my World History foray into my Read Your Library project, and I highly recommend it.