5 stars
First Sentence: Paddling desperately toward land with his whole torso bent in effort, the voyager is astonished to see a forest rising beneath his raft.
Thoughts: Time for a good book! Noah’s Flood covers one of my enduring interests: geology. I live in the mountains for a reason and that reason is lots of neat rocks around. In a parallel universe where I’m not a complete mathematical dunce, I would be a geologist.
So what geological conundrum are we reading about today? How two oceanographers, specifically the authors, tracked down the origin of the flood stories that all cultures share.
Since all cultures have a flood story, it makes sense that there was a Great Flood at some point in the last hundred thousand years, but where and when? The most famous stories are Gilgamesh and Noah From the Bible, but those both came from desert people. Sure the Euphrates and Tigris flood, but river floods are nowhere near as destructive as what the legends describe. Also, after a river flood, you can move back home after everything dries out. One of the common threads in the flood stories is that the survivors don’t go back.
I’ve read and heard the story of Noah I don’t know how many times since I was born and it wasn’t until I read this book that I noticed that detail. Noah & Co. didn’t go back home, did they? They settled down where the Ark landed. How did this escape me for so long?
The search for the Actual Great Flood began with seafloor-mapping expeditions. (Actually the book begins with the origins of modern geology but we’ll skip over all that.) In 1961 scientists aboard The Chain were mapping the floor of the Bosporus when they noticed an underground river. The surface currents flowed from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean, but there was a strong current under that flowing the other way. Sailors on the Bosporus knew about this for ages, turns out. In the days before motors, ships wanting to go into the Black Sea would throw something heavy overboard tied with a rope or chain and let it carry them into the sea. They would ride the surface currents back out. Hey, it saves a lot of rowing.
In 1970 Glomar Explorer mapped the sea floor of the Mediterranean. They found something very interesting in the core samples they drilled from the floor. There was a distinct difference in the samples below 5 million years ago and above then. It looked for all the world like the Mediterranean had dried up and then refilled. Some more research and poking around in the samples revealed that was exactly what happened. Why?
The explanation presented in the book was that the Straits of Gibraltar had been sealed off due to plate tectonics. With no water coming in from the Atlantic, the water left in the Mediterranean dried up. Then the dam burst and the sea filled back up. This would have been a great candidate for the Great Flood because that would have been a heckuva deluge except for one problem: there were no homo sapiens five million years ago. All the ancestors of genus homo were still living further south in Africa.
Ryan and Pitman joined forces to find the origin of the Flood stories. They wondered if, during the Ice Age, other large bodies of water had dried up when sea levels dropped. The glaciers definitely reshaped the landscape after melting (see the northern part of North America) but what happened while they were forming? On an expedition in the Black Sea, they noticed something else Very Interesting in the core samples they drilled up. At one point the Black Sea was a freshwater lake. What happened to turn it into a salty sea? Whatever it was, it happened around 7600 years ago when the fossils suddenly changed from freshwater to saltwater species. And there were humans in the area at that time. Hmmmm….
Call the anthropologists! Turns out that during the Ice Age a lot of places in the modern Middle East and Eastern Europe were abandoned, only to be resettled about a thousand or two years later. The resettlers brought agriculture with them. Fully developed agriculture, not the tentative steps towards from the original inhabitants. Going back along the migration routes, it turned out that a lot of them radiated from a common center: the Black Sea. Another Interesting Fact: all of the groups moving away from the Black Sea, save one, settled far away from large bodies of water and usually in the mountains.
My favorite chapter was the one where Pitman and Ryan imagine what the Black Sea Flood must have been like. The Mediterranean slowly rose as the glaciers melted until one day it reached the top of the dam separating it from the Black Sea. It was only a trickle at first, then it got stronger and stronger until HOLY SCHNEIKIES WATER EVERYWHERE! It didn’t happen all at once. Evidence shows people had time to go look at this new waterfall, realize what it meant, and run back home to pack up their families and whatever they could carry up to higher land.
Granted, as with most pre-literacy ancient societies, this isn’t 100% accepted by all of The Scientific Community. There is no archaeological evidence of the Black Sea freshwater societies for one thing, mainly because the places where they lived is under several hundred meters of water now. Still this makes sense to me. I remember running from the floods in eastern North Carolina after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and the scenarios the authors posit track with my experience. That’s another reason why I live in the mountains now.
The Eclectic Reviewer 