14 DAY TRIAL // The Biblical flood seems to have turned Europeans from Stone Age hunter-gatherers into farmers. 'Noah's Flood' originated in a real event that took place millennia ago: the flooding of the Black Sea, an inland sea wedged between Europe and Asia, caused by the rising of the ocean levels (and of the Mediterranean) 8,000 years ago due to the melting of the huge ice sheet covering most of North America.
In 1997 geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in Palisades, New York, revealed with the help of sonar maps that the Black Sea passed from being an isolated freshwater lake into an inner sea at the end of the Ice Age, when the Mediterranean Sea surged over a strip of land called the Bosporus sill, which kept apart the two seas.
Sonar maps revealed the ancient shorelines covered by mud at 295 to 328 ft (90 to 100 m) under the surface of modern Black Sea. Perfectly preserved dunes pointed to a rapid submergence and preserved freshwater and marine shells tell the same story.
The new research, published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, focused on the age of the youngest freshwater shells and the oldest marine shells come from mud samples, pointing that the transition from fresh water to sea water occurred 8,300 years ago.
"That's the same time [that] there was a big catastrophic release of fresh water from North America," said co-author Chris Turney of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.
12,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age, the huge Laurentide ice sheet covering most of North America started to melt forming an enormous lake, which burst into the North Atlantic Ocean in a rapid event, rising the world's sea level by about 4.92 ft (1.5 m) about 8,100 to 8,500 years ago.
"It looks like it was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was enough to get the Mediterranean over into the Black Sea. Our age [for the Black Sea flood] fits in very nicely, bang in the middle." said Turney.
But the ancient Black Sea was already 90 m below the sea level and the flood was enormous.
"The flood seems to have kick-started agriculture in Europe," said Turney.
Farming developed in Europe from the Near East 9,000 years ago, but evolved slowly here.
"As soon as the flooding happened, what we see in the dates is a massive acceleration [in farming]," Turney said.
The new research pointed that the number of agricultural sites on the shores of the Black Sea boomed 8,200 - 7,300 years ago.
Ryan comes also with another explanation: rivers' estuaries were constantly flooded at the end of the Ice Age, due to continuous ice melting. When this stopped, for the first time, rivers began meandering across the flood plains, offering fertile soils for farming.
"That's a possibility, and it's linked to sea level," Ryan said.
"Regardless of what brought on sea level rise, the flooding of the Black Sea would have disrupted the lives of people living on its coast, a historical event that serves as a warning for the future. There are 145 million people worldwide living within a meter [3.2 feet] of the sea level today, mainly in the developing world. It shows that we have an obligation to sort [out] this mess that we are creating at the moment with climate change." said Turney.
