Black Sea deluge theory & the Indo-European homeland

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Following the warming up of the climate after the end of the last Ice Age, the enormous ice caps covering northern Europe and Siberia started to melt. The land bridge between Britain and continental Europe was flooded by the English Channel around 6500 BCE.

In northern Europe the excess of fresh water was evacuated through the Baltic Sea and North Sea into the Atlantic Ocean. However, water had nowhere to go in North America and Russia, and great lakes were formed. Those of interest to us are the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea.

It was hypothesised that the Caspian Sea eventually overflew and spilled its content into the Black Sea through the depression north of the Caucasus, causing the Black Sea level to rise dramatically, until it finally spilled over the Bosphorus and the Aegean Sea.

According to the initiator of the Black Sea deluge theory, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, the deluge occurred circa 5600 BCE, i.e. during the Neolithic period for the peoples living in that region.

Giosan et al. disagree, saying that the deluge would have taken place around 7400 BCE.

What if they were both wrong and the water level rose around 4000 BCE, at the time the Indo-Europeans started leaving the Black Sea shores and invade Europe ? Have a look at my migration maps and try to imagine what it would have been like. Big-scale migrations are often caused by disasters. Imagine your are a nomadic herder from the Pontic steppe, and rising sea levels start flooding your homeland. To the north is the cold forest-steppe, but to the west are the rich, fertile lands of the Danube basin and steppes similar to those of your homeland. Where would you go ?
 
It might have been a different story. From what I heard 5000 years ago the climate was warmer and the steppes were more moist. This and beginning of agriculture might have produced abundance of people around Caspian and Black Sea steppes. This rise of population created vibrant and strong economically cultures that overpopulated the land and encourage mass migration and conquests in all directions, also towards Europe.

Similar events most likely caused other migration and invasions. Aryan push south 4000 years ago when the warm and most period in central Asia was over, and semi desert conditions settled in. Or Tatars in medieval warm period overpopulated and started conquering neighbours in great numbers. Or mas migration of nations in 500s that coincided with cooling and drying steppes and pushed many tribes from central Asia to Europe.

Generally speaking, more or less water in Caspian or Black Seas shouldn't be a factor of great migrations. But climatic change covering areas of continents should be taken under greater consideration.
 
in those times there were massive agriculture culture only in mezopotimia. in steppes, stockbreeding was the main output which prvide them considerably wild insticts compared to peaceful agriculture cultures.
 
I had always thought that the rising sea level in the Mediterranean Sea broke through the Bosporus and flooded back into the Black Sea. Before 5500 B.C. the Black Sea was a fresh water lake. They have been able to date the age of the "Great Flood" by dating the age of fresh water mussels found on timbers embedded in the sea floor many kilometers in from the current shoreline.
 
That's right, I heard this theory couple of times already. It makes sense and archeology proves this true too.
 
barbarian said:
in those times there were massive agriculture culture only in mezopotimia. in steppes, stockbreeding was the main output which prvide them considerably wild insticts compared to peaceful agriculture cultures.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's true, they probably enjoyed only very little of agriculture. Couple of lousy and half wild cereals probably. Regardless, moist climate made vast quantities to grass for extensive herding.
 
I have also read that the Black sea was a fresh water lake until around the sixth century BCE. The belief was that the Bosporus held back rising seas levels like a dam until maybe the wall gave in, possibly as a result of an earthquake. Estimates ranged up to a mile per day difference along the shoreline as the sea level rose. That is a lot of water. It may very well have provided impetus for those who lived in that area to move and move quickly.
 
Are you sure it was 600 BCE and not 6 000 BCE?
 
aaaahhhh! Correction, six thousand years ago BCE! That's what I get for logging on while at work!

Sorry all and thanks for the heads-up. Let us go with sixth MILLENIUM BCE.
I had in mind that the six thousand years ago or so may have fit in with at least some of the movements of those peoples. Six hundred would not work at all.
 
The bursting through of the sea into the Black Sea, if that's what happened, like the bursting through of the sea into the Mediterranean itself (at the neck of Gibraltar), can only be envisioned as happening suddenly rather than as over time surely. This means that any forewarning permitting the movement by men and animals out of the area soon to be inundated would have been unlikely.
If we are looking for lost 'seed civilizations' in a particular area that no longer exists as it did and therefore cannot be easily investigated archaeologically, and on unevidenced assumption, we are willfully disregarding all the other potential sites of early civilization that ARE still accessible to investigation. The 'Lost Homeland' is an enticing concept though.
Regarding the sunken lands of the Persian Gulf - this redrawing of coastline looks like having been a much more gradual change, and the lost land a potentially more likely area of early human habitation anyway - perhaps the earlier homeland of the Sumerians, maybe even the mysterious inhabitants of Catal Huyuk (since pathological evidence in some of the human remains found suggest a former habitation in a low lying marshy area very different from Catal Huyuk).
 
crudshoveller said:
The bursting through of the sea into the Black Sea, if that's what happened, like the bursting through of the sea into the Mediterranean itself (at the neck of Gibraltar), can only be envisioned as happening suddenly rather than as over time surely. This means that any forewarning permitting the movement by men and animals out of the area soon to be inundated would have been unlikely.
If we are looking for lost 'seed civilizations' in a particular area that no longer exists as it did and therefore cannot be easily investigated archaeologically, and on unevidenced assumption, we are willfully disregarding all the other potential sites of early civilization that ARE still accessible to investigation. The 'Lost Homeland' is an enticing concept though.
Regarding the sunken lands of the Persian Gulf - this redrawing of coastline looks like having been a much more gradual change, and the lost land a potentially more likely area of early human habitation anyway - perhaps the earlier homeland of the Sumerians, maybe even the mysterious inhabitants of Catal Huyuk (since pathological evidence in some of the human remains found suggest a former habitation in a low lying marshy area very different from Catal Huyuk).
Click to expand...

If there are places worth investigating for a possible "lost Indo-European homeland", I would search in the coastal areas under the Black Sea, especially in the Sea of Azov, as well as the region north of the Caucasus, between the North Caspian and the Sea of Azov.

If there really was a deluge around the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, it would have been caused by the glaciers in the southern Urals region melting, resulting in the Caspian Sea overflowing into the Black Sea via the Kuma–Manych Depression or through the Volga-Don basin (assuming that the overflowing Volga would be diverted into the Don near Volgograd, or even that the two rivers flew differently at the time).

It would consequently be plausible that early settlements or even towns/cities along the Volga and/or Don rivers were submerged by the deluge and now lie under a layer of sediments (or at the bottom of one of the numerous artificial reservoirs in the region).
 
I've just seen a program on discovery chanel about the black sea deluge and they said that the first farmers in Europe were like Turkish refugees.
 
Aristander said:
I had always thought that the rising sea level in the Mediterranean Sea broke through the Bosporus and flooded back into the Black Sea. Before 5500 B.C. the Black Sea was a fresh water lake. They have been able to date the age of the "Great Flood" by dating the age of fresh water mussels found on timbers embedded in the sea floor many kilometers in from the current shoreline.
Click to expand...


yes I heard that also, and from there people moved to messopotamia cause minor asia was Arid that time.

in fact many theories are based upon that,

the cataclysm is considered the break down of propontis


I know that in the bottom of the Euxeinos after a matter of slat mud exist a sweat water mud from Volga, that is natural the mud being from north since most of rivers are from there exept Danube but the lack of salt proves that, also the luck from Alpen minerals proves that Danube is a later river than Volga,
 
I read that migration events are usually due to shift in climate.
 
Ramses II said:
I read that migration events are usually due to shift in climate.
Click to expand...

Climatic changes affect food production, so your statement has logic in it.
In times of plenty, in certain regions, we see population growth, therefore strength with bigger armies and growth of dominant empire in this region.
In times of cold and dry weather, the poverty pushed tribes to migrate in search of better lands. It also might cause empires to collapse.

If we can extrapolate recent mini ice age and today's and medieval warm periods farther back. If we assume that they come in about 1000 years cycles, then around year 0, we can expect that, warm period helped Roman Empire to flourish.
500 years later in colder part of the cycle, we have collapse of Roman Empire and a big migration period.
At year 1000, the warm period, we have Europe coming out of dark ages, consolidation of strong countries, and new nations in eastern europe too. And if not for Black Death we would have Renaissance in Europe by 13 hundreds not 15.
Last Ice age was between 16 and 19 hundreds, at this time we don't see great changes. Except French revolution caused by cold and draughts, the rest of Europe is in hands of established empires with lack of appetite for big wars, so they survived. There collapse is caused by devastation of WWI then anything else. On other hand, european economy was quite stagnant in little ice age, and it started really booming in 19 hundreds in phase with new warm period.
 
The Indo-Europeans are sub-group of a larger group, the Nostratics. It is the Nostratics that lived on the shores of the Black Sea. I don't know if I can post links, but here is a map of the various Nostratic language families today:
images
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t86925-69/
 
Holger Pedersen invented the term Nostratic from Lingua Nostra (Our Language). This was the original language of white people which divided into Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Sumerian, Elamo-Dravidian, and Hameto-Semitic branches. Bomhard wrote an excellent comparative dictionary of Nostratic. Take the word for "fort." There are simliar words from Ancient Egypt to Ancient Sumer to India to Central Asia to Finland.


[TABLE="width: 100%"]
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[TD="class: msgtxt"]Widespread Ancient Word for FortThere is a word which has spread all over Europe, Africa, and Asia which dates to very ancient times. It originally meant pen or fenced in place, and gradually came to mean village, fort, town and city.Here are a few modern versions of the word. Belgrade
means White City. "Grad" means city. The Russian word "gorod" also means city. The Hebrew word "qiryat" means village.The ancient city of Carthage was Qart Hadasht or New city. Qart meant city. In India, the names of many towns end in -garh. In Scandinavian, "gard" means fenced in area or garden. For example Kierkegaard means church yard. Our words yard and garden also are cognates.Let's look at 199 of ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INDO-EUROPEAN CULTURE. The original Indo-European word is said to be *ghordhos, meaning 'fence, hedge; enclosure, pen, fold.
Welsh "garth" means 'pen, fold'.
Latin hortus = garden. This is the origin of the English word "court."
Greek khortos = 'enclosed place, feeding place'
Old Norse garðar = 'fence, hedge, court'
Gothic gards = house, household, court
Lithuanian gardas = fence, hold, pen
Old Church Slavonic gradu = town, city
Phrygian gordum = city
Hittite gurtas = citadel
Luvian gurta = citadel
Avestan garada = cave housing demons
Sanskirt grha = house, habitation, home
Tocharian B kerciyi = palacesIt was borrowed by Finno-Ugric languages.
Udmurt gurt = village, settlement
Komi gort = houseNow, let us look at THE NOSTRATIC MACROFAMILY, A STUDY IN DISTANT LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIP, edited by Allan R. Bomhard and John C. Kerns. New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1994.
Proto-Nostratic *gur-/*gor- 'to stand out, to jut, to
project'
Welsh garth = promotory, hillProto-Nostratic *gyir-/*gyer- 'to enclose, to gird'
Egyptian d-ri to constrain, to enclose, to fortify,
enclosing wall
Dravidian--Telugu cera = prison, imprisonment
Sumerian gir = girdleFinally, let us look at HAMITO-SEMITIC ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY, MATERIALS FOR A RECONSTRUCTION, by Vladimir E. Orel and Olga V. Stolbova. New York, E.J. Brill, 1995.*ga'ur = wall, yard
Akkadian 'igaru. Aramaic 'gr. Arabic 'iggar-
West Chadic *gar-gar = low wall or mount*gur- "house, place"
Berber *gVrur- = enclosure, wall, place, yard
Central Chadic *gur- = enclosure
West Chadic gur = place
Hausa gure*ger- = town
Semitic *gir- = town
Hebrew 'ir
East Chadic *gyar - house, villg*kil = fence
East Chadic *kul = hut, town*kor- = house, place
Semitic *kur-an- = villages
Arabic qur-an
West Chadic *kwar- = hut
Central Chadic *kwa-kwar = town
East Chadic *kwaru = placeLANGENSCHEIDT'S HEBREW DICTIONARY
qirya = town, city
qereth = city, town
qarta = a town in Zebulon
qartan = a town in Naphtali
qarqar = a town beyond the Jordan
kerem = garden, orchard, vineyard, plantation
karmel = garden fruit, garden grainI should mention the Mongolian word for tent or house, yurt. There are also some Mongolian and Turkish words for town which I don't recall exactly.THE BROWN-DRIVER-BRIGGS HEBREW AND ENGLISH LEXICON
qir = wall
qir = name of Moabite cities
qaryaten = a townCOPTIC ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY, by J. Cerny
kro = shore, further side, limit
ghalak = ring
ghir = road, street, quarter. Egyptian hrw = street
joe, joi, jo = wall. Egyptian d_rit = wall of wood
joljl = surround with hedge
choeile = dwell, visitAN EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHIC DICTIONARY, by E.A. Wallis Budge
khar = village, a quarter of a town or city, street.
Coptic ghir, gheir, chir
(in Egyptian, R is often replaced by the N sound)
khent = a place of seclusion, harim, prison-house, the part
of the temple not generally accesible to the public
khenti = office, court
khenti = the hall of a temple
khent, khenti = shrine, sanctuary
khent = garrisons, forts
khenta = sepulchres
kher= grave, tomb, necropolis, cemetery
khenu = the Court, the capital, the town in which the
king lives
khen = walled enclosure
(neter means gods in Egyptian)
Khert-neter = the cemetery, necropolis
kat = place, district
kar, kara = shrine, sanctuary
kari = gardener
karat = place of restraint, prison
karit = shrine, sanctuary
tchet = place, house, abode (r is left out)
tchai = wall. Coptic cho, choi
tchaiua = an inner chamber of a temple
tchaut = chamber or hall of a temple
tchera-t = wall, palisade, wooden palings for defence
tchera-t = domicile
tchet-t = grave, tomb, sepulchre
tcheteb-t = a kind of building, storeFinally, let's look at place names in an atlas.
Cartagena, Spain. Zagreb, Croatia. Novgorod, Russia. Qiryat Shemona, Israel. Qiryat Atta, Israel. Susangerd, Iran. Chandigarh, India. Hanumangarh, India. Stepanakert, Armenia.http://forums.delphiforums.com/paleolinguistic
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You have it backwards

The Great Flood was caused by the Mediterranean pouring over a giant falls in the Bosporus.
Here are a few quotations from NOAH'S FLOOD, THE NEW SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE EVENT THAT CHANGED HISTORY, by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. N.Y., Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Page 188: "The ocean bursting through Bosporus in 5600 B.C. so violently cleaved Europe from Anatolia that it would have been several years before anyone dared make passage across."
Page 189 Map "Inferred human migrations west and northwest into Europe in the wake of the Black Sea flood"
The map shows five migrations.
1. Danilo-Hvar from Bosporus, around Greece, and north into Serbia
2. Hamangians from Rumanian coast southwards into Bulgaria and Thrace
3. Vincas along Danube through Belgrade and up to Budapest. Origin of famous Vinca culture with primitive writing.
4. Linear Pottery Farmers (LBK) through Moldavia across central Europe to Paris
5. Proto-Indoeuropeans up the Dnieper River into Russia
"It seemed clear to Vasic that the Vinca had built on the deserted ruins of an older culture. Makers of lovely wattle and daub houses and fine incised pottery, the Vinca appeared abruptly on the plains of Bulgaria within a century and a half after the flood, settling also on river terraces of the southern Hungarian plain and in mountain valleys as far south as the Vardar River in Macedonia. They constructed well-planned permanent villages on leveled ground with parallel rows of houses separated by streets."
Page 190: (Vinca) "They plastered their floors with white clay. But instead of constructing their walls of mud-brick, they built them from split timber planks or hewn posts interwoven with twigs and covered with a thick layer of mud plaster. Archaeologists have uncovered shrines decorated by bucrania, attached to a wall beam as in the shrines of Anatolia.
"Vasic saw no continuity between the Vinca culture and the underlying strata of their predecessors but rather thought the Vinca were outsiders who settled on a previously abandoned site. Their art and pottery were so exceptional and in such contrast to the prior occupants that Vasic mistakenly identified this 'as a center of Aegean civilization in the second millennium B.C.'" It was actually over 3,000 years older than he thought.
"LBK culture....their longhouse building style, never before seen in Europe, these huge timber-framed houses, up to 150 feet in length, were organized into villages founded exclusively on the fertile loess soil blown across Eurasia during the sky-darkening sandstorms of the last Ice Age. THESE DWELLINGS WERE THE LARGEST FREESTANDING BUILDINGS IN THE WORLD FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS (emphasis added)"
Page 191: "A very striking feature of the LBK is the homogeneity in pottery design, stone tools, village plan, house shape, burial practices, and economy over the vast territory into which these people appeared, suggesting that their dispersal was almost instantaneous. Experts specializing in pottery from Belgium can readily recognize shards from Moldavia as if they had been crafted nearby in France. The domesticated plants and animals show practically no variation from village to village across a span of a thousand miles or more. But there is a dramatic cultural gap between the preexisting sparse hunter-gatherer population and the
LBK homesteaders." This is another blow to the theory of Renfrew and Cavalli-Sforza that Indo-European languages spread with neolithic farmers from Turkey. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong direction.
Danilo-Hvar "They crafted a now-famous pot decorated with a sailing ship, depicting masts and rigging dated at about 4000 BC." They imported obsidian from Italy.
Page 194 Map "Inferred human migrations northeast into Asia and southeast into the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia" Going clockwise, the following migrations are shown:
1. Proto-Indoeuropeans up the Dnieper into Russia
2. Proto-Indo-Europeans up the Don into Russia and eastwards to the Urals and south of the Urals and from there to Kazakhstan and western China
3. Ubaids from Georgia eastwards and then southwards to Sumer in Iraq
4. "Semites" from southeastern Black Sea to Halaf and Abu Hureyra in Iraq and Syria. This one is doubtful.
5. From just east of Istanbul we have a migration which branches into
....a. migration to Hacilar, in western Turkey
...b. migration of "Predynastic Egyptians" to Çatal Hüyük and Mersin in Turkey, along the Mediterranean coast past Jericho into Egypt.
It might be more accurate to call the second branch "Proto-Afroasiatic Speakers" . Hacilar and Çatal Hüyük might come from a different branch originating farther west than the Afroasiatic branch.
"The craftsmen who reoccupied Hacilar after its desertion created sophisticated painted pottery, more technologically advanced in style and fabrication than any contemporary pottery found elsewhere in the entire Near East."
Page 196: Caption "The elaborately decorated pottery that appeared in Syria and Mesopotamia in the centuries bracketing the Black Sea flood."
"Others have assigned a northern or Anatolian origin to the [beautiful colored pottery of] Halaf."
"As Moore has pointed out, there was a sizable influx of farming peoples along the coast of Lebanon and in its valleys in the mid sixth millennium B.C. Were these refugees from the flood?
"Egypt had experienced a rapid cultural and economic change during the same period, at the time of the flood. A new flint industry was introduced, epitomized by two-sided flaked tools, which was much more in common with the industry of Çatal Hüyük, Hacilar, and Jericho than with the preceding African designs. In addition, the art of pottery making appeared for the first time in the Nile Valley. Domesticated cereals and animals with direct genetic affinity to Asia were also suddenly adopted, along with the first systematic practice of planting and harvesting in fields watered from the Nile." The similarity of the Egyptian language with the Semitic languages of southwest origin also indicates a common origin.
Page 197: Advanced farmers with a culture similar to the Halafian of Iraq settled along the Rioni River between the Black and Caspian Seas right after the flood.
"Carbon 14 dating places the settling of the Transcaucasus contemporaneously with the beginning of the LBK dispersal, the defense and fall of Hacilar, the arrival of newcomers in the Levant--particularly in the valleys and along the coast of Lebanon and at Tell Ard Tlaili in Palestine--the introduction of Asian domesticates in Egypt, and the flooding of the Black Sea." We are probably dealing with the related Kartvelian, Sumerian, and Elamo-Dravidian language families, which form a cluster within Nostratic and were first spoken in the Caucasus, Turkey, Iraq, and western Iran.
"Except for a few isolated settlements where its margin meets with the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, the land between the great rivers south of Baghdad was unoccupied at the time of the flood." Many Sumerians were represented with blue eyes and Armenoid features, and book The Races of Europe described the Sumerians as largely of the Old Mediterranean Race and identical to ancient Egyptians and skulls in London plague pits. The Old Mediterranean Race is largely extinct today.
Page 200: "Sir Arthur Keith describes the skeletal remains in Woolley's expedition report:
'The southern Mesopotamians...had big, long and narrow heads....Their affinities [were] with the peoples of the Caucasian or European type....We may regard southwestern Asia as their cradleland until evidence leading to a different conclusion comes to light. They were akin to the pre-dynastic people of Egypt.'"
The 1993 YEARBOOK OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY compared the anthropological measurements of ancient Egyptians with many modern and ancient peoples. Surprisingly, the closest match of all was to people of Neolithic France! This same Old Mediterranean Race built the earliest megaliths of Europe and the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, Indus Valley, and Crete.
"In the Sumerian language most of the root words are monosyllabic. However, those having to do with agriculture and crafts are polysyllabic, such as the words for farmer, herdsman, fisherman, plow, furrow, metalworker, blacksmith, carpenter, basketmaker, weaver, leatherworker, potter, mason, and even merchant. These may have indeed been brought to Mesopotamia from the Black Sea melting pot on the journey south and later passed from the Ubaids to their Sumerian successors."
PBS - Scientific American Frontiers | Beneath the Sea | Noah's Flood
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http://www.pbs.org/saf/1207/features/noah.htm Changed:6:40 PM on Sunday, May 4, 2003
Black Sea Flood Cultures - Dnieper Donets Boian Baltic
Address:
http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi142.htm Changed:10:15 AM on Friday, June 21, 2002
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http://glen-gordon.tripod.com/LANGUAGE/NOSTRATIC/STEPPE/BlackCas6000_v3.gif Changed:9:08 AM on Monday, March 5, 2001
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