Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis - Evidence From Archaeology

Evidence From Archaeology

Although neolithic agriculture had by that time already reached the Pannonian plain, Ryan and Pitman link its spread with people displaced by the postulated flood. More recent examinations by oceanographers such as Teofilo A. "Jun" Abrajano Jr. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his Canadian colleague Ali Aksu of the Memorial University of Newfoundland have cast some doubt on this linkage. Abrajano's team, finding sapropel mud deposits in the Sea of Marmara which are today associated with freshwater outflow over top of salt-water inflow, have concluded that there has been sustained fresh water outflow from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean for at least 10,000 years. In 2003, Michael Sperling concluded that the Black Sea was not a major freshwater source contributing to formation of the Marmara Sapropel S1. Aksu found an underwater delta south of the Bosporus; evidence for a strong flow of fresh water out of the Black Sea in the 8th millennium BC. Nevertheless, Erkan Gökaşan and later Kadir Eris demonstrated that the development of the delta is clearly associated with the Kurbağalı Stream on the east coast, and not with the Black Sea outflow through the strait.

In a series of expeditions, a team of marine archaeologists led by Robert Ballard identified what appeared to be ancient shorelines, freshwater snail shells, drowned river valleys, tool-worked timbers, and man-made structures in roughly 100 metres (330 ft) of water off the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Although radiocarbon dating of freshwater mollusk remains indicated an age of about 7,500 years, radiocarbon dating in freshwater mollusks in particular can be inaccurate. Such inaccuracies, however, are always in the direction of objects appearing older than they actually are (containing less 14C than expected), so the time given is a maximum age of a freshwater shoreline at that location.