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“Noah’s flood” spread farming, researchers say

Nov. 19, 2007
World Science staff

A giant pre­his­tor­ic flood—which a con­tro­ver­sial the­o­ry has linked to the Bib­li­cal sto­ry of Noah’s Ark—kick-started Eu­ro­pe­an ag­ri­cul­ture, ac­cord­ing to a new stu­dy.

A decade-old the­o­ry holds that about 7,500 years ago, a del­uge filled the Black Sea in the Mid­dle East, in­spir­ing the Noah’s Ark flood tale and pos­sibly some of the oth­er flood sto­ries that mys­te­ri­ously re­cur in many myth­o­lo­gies.

A sa­tellite map of Eu­rope; the Black Sea is the bo­dy of wa­ter at the right, near the bot­tom of the im­age. (Cour­te­sy NOAA)

A great prehistoric flood—which a controversial theory has linked to the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark—kick-started European agriculture, according to a new study. A decade-old theory holds that about 7,500 years ago, a deluge filled the Black Sea in the Middle East, inspiring the Noah’s Ark flood tale and possibly some of the other similar stories that mysteriously recur in mythologies. Although some researchers dispute the theory, the new study’s authors take it further and say the catastrophe also triggered a boom in agriculture. “A catastrophic rise in global sea level led to the flooding of the Black Sea and drove dramatic social change across Europe,” the scientists said in an announcement of their findings. The deluge “could have led to the displacement of 145,000 people,” they argued. “Archaeological evidence shows that communities in southeast Europe were already practising early farming techniques and pottery production before the Flood. With the catastrophic rise in water levels it appears they moved west, taking their culture into areas inhabited by hunter-gatherer communities” across Europe. The research, by the Universities of Exeter, U.K. and Wollongong, Australia, appears in the September issue of the research journal Quaternary Science Reviews. The trigger for the hypothesized flood would have been the collapse of the North American Ice Sheet some 8,000 years ago, according to the scientists. This would have raised sea levels—causing water to violently breach the Bosporus Strait, which previously dammed the Mediterranean and kept the Black Sea as a freshwater lake. The Australian and U.K. researchers created reconstructions of the Mediterranean and Black Sea shoreline before and after the hypothesized sea level rise. They estimated that nearly 73,000 square km of land, an area about the size of Ireland, was lost to the sea in one 34-year period. Controversy has dogged the flood hypothesis from the start, although it has support from evidence including signs of human habitation found well beneath the sea. One team has proposed that although there was a flood, it happened too gradually to threaten anyone, and so cannot explain the flood myths. Another scientist has claimed that the true source of these tales is the presence of marine fossils in mountains: the fossils get there by geologic process, but ancient people might have seen them as proof of past floods. The authors of the Quaternary Science Reviews paper are sticking close to the deluge hypothesis, proposed by marine geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman in 1996. “People living in what is now southeast Europe must have felt as though the whole world had flooded. This could well have been the origin of the Noah’s Ark story,” said the University of Exeter’s Chris Turney, lead author of the new paper. “Entire coastal communities must have been displaced, forcing people to migrate in their thousands. As these agricultural communities moved west, they would have taken farming with them across Europe. It was a revolutionary time.”