Benutzer:Wutzofant/Baustellen/Schwarzmeerfluthypothese

Die Schwarzmeerfluthypothese postuliert ein abruptes und schnelles (schätzungsweise 1 Jahr langes) "Überschwappen" des Mittelmeers in das Becken des heutigen Schwarzen Meeres vor ungefähr 7600 Jahren. Obwohl der Theorie wissenschaftlich ein gewisses Wohlwollen entgegengebracht wird, kann sie noch nicht als allgemein akzeptiert gelten.

The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized prehistoric flood that occurred when the Black Sea rapidly filled, possibly forming the basis for some Great Flood myths. The theory made headlines when it surfaced in The New York Times December 1996.

In 1998, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geologists from Columbia University, published evidence that a massive flood through the Bosporus occurred about 5600 BCE. Glacial meltwater had turned the Black and Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes, while sea levels remained lower worldwide. The fresh water lakes were emptying their waters into the Aegean. As the glaciers retreated, rivers emptying into the Black Sea reduced their volume and found new outlets in the North Sea, and the water levels lowered through evaporation. Then, about 5600 BC, as sea levels rose, Ryan and Pitman suggest, the rising Mediterranean finally spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosphorus. The event flooded 60,000 mile² (155,000 km²) of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and east. Ryan and Pitman wrote:

Black Sea today and in 5600 BCE according to Ryan's and Pitman's theories

   "Ten cubic miles [42 km³] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls. …The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days."

Although neolithic agriculture had by that time already reached the Pannonian plain, the authors link its spread with people displaced by the postulated flood. It has been suggested that the survivors' memory of this event was the source of the legend for Noah's Flood. Initial resistance came from those who looked for more detailed correlation with the Book of Genesis (see Noah's Ark and Mount Ararat) or preferred as prototype the similar marine ingression that formed the Persian Gulf in the lower Tigris and Euphrates valley.

In a series of expeditions, a team of marine archeologists 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 300 feet (100 m) of water off the Black Sea coast of modern Turkey. Radiocarbon dating of freshwater mollusk remains indicated an age of about 7,000 years.

Scholars of the Proto-Indo-Europeans have also pointed out that the Black Sea deluge would have flooded what was probably the right place, at roughly the right time, to set into motion the massive diaspora of the Proto-Indo-European people throughout Europe and Asia. The region just north of the Black Sea is the favorite candidate for the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as put forth for example by J. P. Mallory, and there is strong evidence that their scattering was underway by 4000 BCE. The Black Sea deluge occurred well in advance of that date, but is entirely consistent with it. This is also consistent with great flood legends in many Indo-European cultures, including Celtic legend as well as the more familiar Greek. The Babylonian and Semitic cultures also had widespread contact with Indo-European peoples prior to the earliest evidence for their flood legends; whether or not they had an independent origin in the Persian Gulf for their great flood myths, they would also have had ample opportunity to absorb the story from Indo-European sources. The Black Sea deluge theory therefore provides a candidate cause for the longstanding Indo-European mystery—what prompted so many people, possessing the toolkit to become so successful elsewhere to have scattered in so many directions, with a fairly advanced technology for the time, without leaving any clear archaeological evidence of a homeland anywhere that has yet been searched.

Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review, replied to the claims, "All modern critical Bible scholars regard the tale of Noah as legendary. There are other flood stories, but if you want to see the Black Sea flood in Noah's flood, who's to say no?" Fundamentalist Christians claimed that "Noah's Flood was not a local flood in the Black Sea area, but a world-wide flood that has left its mark on every continent on this planet," [1] and that the timing was wrong, although this claim is not compatible with science, since it would require the sudden production and then disappearance of three times more water than is contained in the Earth's oceans, and for millions of locally endemic land-dwelling species to have been collected from and then returned to their endemic habitats.

Earth scientists also disputed the conclusions. More recent examinations by oceanographers such as Teofilo A. "Jun" Abrajano Jr at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his Canadian colleague Ali Aksu of Memorial University of Newfoundland have cast some doubt on this catastrophic flood theory. Abrajano's team, finding sapropel mud deposits in the Sea of Marmara, have concluded that there has been sustained interaction between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea for at least 10,000 years:

   "For the Noah's Ark Hypothesis to be correct, one has to speculate that there was no flowing of water between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea before the speculated great deluge. We have found this to be incorrect."

According to a report in New Scientist magazine (May 4, 2002, p. 13), the researchers found an underwater delta south of the Bosporus. There was evidence for a strong flow of fresh water out of the Black Sea in the 8th millennium BCE.

The hypothesis remains an active subject of debate among archaeologists. [edit]

References

   * John Noble Wilford, "Geologists Link Black Sea Deluge to Farming's Rise," The New York Times, December 17, 1996, pp. B5 and B13.
   * W.B. Ryan and W.C. Pitman, Noah's Flood: The new scientific discoveries about the event that changed history 1998

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External links

   * Why the Black Sea is not the Site of Noah's Flood by G. R. Morton
   * Press release June 14, 2002, concerning Abrajano's report in Marine Geology, 2002