Noah's Flood. The New Scientific Discoveries about the Event that Changed History

by William B.F. Ryan, Walter C. Pitman

Stories of major floods are preserved in the Bible and in the epic of Gilgamesh. But did they actually occur? This book details archaeological, genetic, linguistic and scientific evidence in attempting to answer this question. Archaeologists and oceanographers provide evidence that the sea once broke through the Strait of Gibraltar and flooded what was a fresh water Mediterranean basin. The repercussions of such an event are discussed.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Religion, Geology, Ancient History, Archaeology

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I so enjoyed this exploration of the Flood. Many disciplines of science are brought to bear-geology, oceanography, archeology, phonology, paleo-everything. 5 Stars A real trip down traditional scientific realms without the poisoned political scientism of our current time. Theories are proposed, “semi-proven”, questioned, debunked-usually quite politely, new theories arise, exploration, conjecture, argument, new techniques and technology are used, a messy and fun exercise trying to find the “truth”. No one is “cancelled”, exiled, silenced, banned, put down, fired, threatened, So unlike today.

The book begins with various accounts from archeology with the discovery of flood accounts that predate the one in the Old Testament. Here is an account of George Smith discovering a flood reference: (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...)

On looking down the third column, my eye caught the statement that the ship rested on the mountains of Nizir, followed by the account of sending forth the dove, and its finding no resting place and returning.

As Smith’s astonishment mounted, he shouted for Rawlinson to hurry in and share the excitement. Deciphering the tiny cuneiform signs no bigger than the letters on this page, Smith knew that he had stumbled on a tablet engraved with the familiar tale of the Great Flood. One version of the day’s events recounted that in a state of hallucination, Smith dashed into the hallway and in front of the other startled workers on the museum staff began to tear off his clothes.

Apparently what had so deeply moved Smith was the realization that the fragments he had assembled contained an independent version of the biblical deluge. The heathen words told almost exactly the same story as the Hebrew narrative, right down to the selection of a survivor of the deluge through the intervention of a god, the forewarning that gave time to build a wooden ark, the refuge in it of every kind of animal, bird, and reptile, the grounding of the boat on the side of a mountain, the details of dispatching a swallow, raven, and dove to find land, the offering of a sacrifice, and the pledge that the gods would never again return the world to its primeval watery chaos.

In the weeks ahead Smith added a few more pieces of the tablet, all the while pondering how the flood story in the Bible, a work of supposed divine authorship, could be so similar to another one, even older in its redaction and recorded in an alien myth. Might this mean that the Israelites borrowed a narrative they may have heard when held in captivity in Babylon? Or can it be that the real flood had been such a momentous event in prehistory…

We now switch to oceanography as scientists explore the bed of the Bosporus. Apparently it has been known since antiquity that there is a river at the bottom that flows north while the upper current flows south. The scientists are on a ship, the “Chain” with a new underwater mapping technology:
When the Chain entered the serpentine narrows between the steep bluffs of Kandilli and Kanlica, where King Darius had led his Persian army across a floating bridge to subjugate the Scythians in 534 B.C., the depth profile unveiled an underwater gorge more than 350 feet deep. Here the echoes stretched into a pronounced reverberation. Hersey told his attentive guests that the ringing of the echoes meant that the channel cut through bedrock, whereas before the channel floor was covered with loose sediment rippled by underwater currents.

The signs of currents were not surprising. The Black Sea is a huge basin more than six thousand feet deep and fed by numerous large rivers. It receives considerably more freshwater from rain and river discharge than it loses by surface evaporation. Consequently, its excess freshwater is expelled to the Mediterranean. The Bosporus Strait and its downstream counterpart, the Dardanelles, at the western end of the Sea of Marmara, provide the only outlet from the Black Sea. In some parts of these straits the velocity of the outflowing water exceeds five knots (six statute miles per hour).

In heading northward toward the Black Sea the Chain bucked this swift flow through the narrow gorge. The Turkish chief hydrographer began to tell the Americans that as far back as the Persian invasions of Byzantium in the early seventh century, there had been knowledge of another current flowing in the opposite direction to the surface current and lying below it. He then went on to recount that when the Byzantine emperor Heraclius crushed the invaders from Asia Minor, he flung the torso and head of his foe separately into the Bosporus. The bloated torso floated and drifted south in the surface current. The head sank directly to the bottom. Months later teeth washed ashore in gravel bars to the north.

The scientists drill all around the Mediterranean and uncover evidence it was first a sea, then a desert and then a sea once more. The desert was as harsh as anything in Arabia and the sea reclaimed the Med in the space of a lifetime—but millions of years ago. No humans around to record that flood but the idea of a rapid return of the sea sends the scientists looking for something similar but more recent. The theory of the Med becoming a desert:

The three scientists decided to tackle anew the issue of building mountains with colliding continents and disappearing oceans, by using the relative motions of the drifting plates. File cabinets overflowed as they gathered manuscripts, treatises, field notes, structural maps, computer output, satellite photographs and stratigraphic columns. They met often in Dewey’s lab for three or four-day binges to pore over the data. Their goal was to document the closing up, in steps of twenty million years, of the formerly wide ancient sea known by earth historians as Tethys, the mythical wife of Oceanus, which had once stretched from the Caribbean to the Himalayas. Their reconstruction highlighted the collision of the African promontory of Morocco with the European promontory of Spain seven million years ago, the event that sealed the Atlantic from the Mediterranean and led to the transformation of the latter from a sea to a desert.

I had no knowledge of phonology, the science of tracing languages through pronunciation. There are efforts to find the proto-language, called Anatolian, that gave rise to many branches. The proposed scene of Noah’s Flood is the Black Sea with the Med breaking through to flood the low-lying Black Sea Lake. A couple of Soviets come up with a theory that many of the similarities in various languages come from a common group and language dispersed in many directions when the flood occurs. Many dismiss this theory but some explore it. One American sceptic uses computer programs to try to find an answer. He winds up proving the theory he didn’t credit at first:

“It might be fair to say that I was biased against it [the age reversal].” Almost not believing the results himself, he ran the computer program again and again, removing some daughter languages inserting others. In every trial run, no matter how he tweaked the input, the same general picture emerged. “So you can imagine how startled I was when the algorithm kept turning up Anatolian as one first-order branch of the family, and everything else as the other first-order branch,” Ringle remarked.

What Gamkrelidze had deduced and what the computer had confirmed was an initial bifurcation into two trunks—one for southerners, the speakers of Anatolian, and the other for northerners, who then divided into groups migrating into the interior of Europe, the speakers of Celtic; groups traveling to the Mediterranean coast of Europe, the speakers of Italic; and groups adventuring eastward into the heart of central Asia, speaking the ancestral form of Tocharian. Gamkrelidze placed the divide in early fifth millennium B.C., about six hundred years after the Black Sea flood.

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov could not have been aware that, because of the climate crises brought about by the Younger Dryas and the second mini Ice Age starting 6200 B.C., the Black Sea had become a giant freshwater lake bordered by the Caucasus and the Anatolian Plateau. As an oasis in the midst of an arid landscape, it apparently attracted people of diverse cultures and language families to flourish along its fertile shores, exchanging goods and ideas and bits and pieces of their languages. Words borrowed by the IndoEuropeans from other languages such as Semitic, Kartvelian, Sumerian, and even Egyptian attest to the proximity of these people. The famous Russian plant geneticist Nicolae Vavilov found impressive examples of IndoEuropean contributions to those other languages such as vinograd in Russian, vino in Italic, wein in Germanic, wino in Kartvelian, wijana in Anatolian, wajnu in proto-Semitic, and woi-no in the parent Indo-European. The residue of retsina wine found in the bottom of a pottery jar from sixth millennium B.C. villages near Lake Urmia on the Iranian Plateau indicates that experienced vintners were thoroughly enjoying the grape at that time.

The Flood:

By 5600 B.C. the ocean had risen to a height where it stood poised to invade the Bosporus valley, and plunge to the Black Sea lake five hundred feet below. Driven by the wind and tide, the waters must have repeatedly washed up onto the top of the divide to fall back, leaving damp patches on the soil, until a final surge began to flow continuously across and down the slope toward the lake, finding old gullies and dried streambeds in the rough ground between the trees and around the litter of boulders.

Reaching the ancient shelf below, the water meandered across its flat surface, trickling into old channels long dry, formed small lagoons, and gradually cut its own course, at last flowing over the edge and down the gentle slope to the lake below. The rivulet became a gentle brook, flowing ever more swiftly, scouring and tugging more forcefully at the bottom and walls of its channel. Within days its gentle murmur would have grown to a roar as the stream became a wildly turbulent river, cutting into its banks, pulling trees and large chunks of earth into the maelstrom.

The soil and debris that had once dammed the valley were quickly swept away, and the water, now several tens of feet deep, was a thundering flume twisting and churning with rubble as it clawed at the soft rock walls that now and then collapsed. The debris-laden water ground into the bottom like a rasp, cutting deeply into the bedrock itself. The deeper it cut, the faster it flowed, and the faster it flowed, the faster it cut until it had gouged a flume at least 280 feet and up to 475 feet deep. Ten cubic miles of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls, enough to cover Manhattan Island each day to a depth of over half a mile.

The people of the Flood and the prehistoric Diaspora begins:

The level of the lake began to rise six Inches a day, immediately inundating the deltas and invading the flat river valleys—moving upstream at as much as a mile each day, without pause hour after hour, day after day, drowning the less agile, forcing all else upriver or up onto the desertlike plateau through which the valley had been cut.

It is hard to imagine the terror of those farmers, forced from their fields by an event they could not understand, a force of such incredible violence that it was as if the collected fury of all the gods was being hurled at therm. They fled with family, the old and the young, carrying what they could, along with fragments of the other languages, new ideas, and new technologies gathered from around the lake.

Farmers, called Vinca, makers of lovely wattle-and-daub houses and fine incised pottery, appeared abruptly on the plains of Bulgaria and up along the valley of the Danube. Other refugees crossed from the Black Sea to the Aegean to settle on some of the islands such as Samothrace, crossing over as far as the Dalmatian coast. Some Linearbandkeramik fled up the Dniester River and then rapidly to the west across northern Europe as far as the Paris basin, displacing peaceably or by force the indigent hunter-gatherers. They brought with them their longhouse building style, their ceramic pottery decorated with linear bands of incised grooves, and their agrarian ways. They may have been Indo-European speakers, but others who certainly were moved out to the north, up through the river valleys of the Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga, spreading in an arc from southeast Europe to the Caspian Sea and beyond. it was around the northern Caspian Sea that they first domesticated the horse, on the backs of which they stormed into eastern Europe sixteen hundred years later.

The speakers of the Semitic tongues climbed through the hills to the South, up creeks and streams and over the Anatolian plateau, scattered wide Inlry pf deep valleys and mountains.

From the tale of Gilgamesh, we hear the Black Sea is dangerous:

Finally he comes to the sea, the Black Sea according to Ryan and Pitman, and to the abode of the “alewife,” a tavern keeper; Gilgamesh asks how to cross the waters to see Utnapishtim. The sea is inhospitable, he is told, “Gilgamesh, there has never been a crossing. ... Everywhere the waters of death stream across its face.” Not from the beginning of time has anyone been able to go across this sea of death. “Far out in the waters, forbidding the way, there slide the other waters, the waters of death.”

Here is the real-life explanation of the danger to Gilgamesh if he tries to cross the Black Sea:

The Black Sea is indeed a sea of death. In its surface waters there is sufficient oxygen to support a varied and plentiful fish life, but since the flood, its depths, devoid of oxygen, have been enriched in poisonous hydrogen sulfide. A lungful of this gas will kill a human. Today the interface between the life-supporting surface layer and the life-denying anoxic layer lies 450 feet below the surface. Its level is not constant. In the last few decades it has risen by more than eighty feet. The black mud on the floor of the sea contains purple pigments formed by a special bacterium, Thiocapsa roseopersicina, which lives by “anoxygenic photosynthesis” (in the absence of oxygen and yet requiring sunlight). The changing concentrations of this pigment in sediment cores indicate periods of substantial movement both up and down of the top of the poisonous water mass in the past. Major storms or tsunami generated by earthquakes would have been capable of momentarily sliding away the protecting surface layer to release a lethal cloud of destruction across the basin and its rim.

Did it really happen in the Black Sea? So much circumstantial evidence but nothing concrete—any evidence of a large population living around a smaller freshwater lake is now under deep water. If not there, where?

[Bill Chaisson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book because the story crosses so many disciplines: history, prehistory, archaeology, linguistics, and many different parts of geology. The authors, both geoscientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, are most at home writing about their own fields. The clearest passages of Noah's Flood are those that describe the procedures of shipboard science that are used to collect data that Pitman and Ryan use to reconstruct the history of the Black Sea. The expositional passages that reconstruct the work of various historians, linguists, et al. are less consistently successful. And the parts of the book that describe the authors' own endeavors are the least readable because they solve the problem of being co-authors by describing each other in the third person, and they have a weakness for the Whig theory of history. That is, we are told about research that supports their story, but not about anything that refutes it.

Noah's Flood is a series of vignettes that amass circumstantial evidence for the claim that the global deluge found in the mythologies of so many Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples is actually a cultural memory of an early Holocene event. The basic premise that Ryan and Pitman set out to defend is that the legendary global flood is a historical event that took place 7,600 years ago north of Anatolia. The authors describe the basin of the Black Sea as a cradle of civilization, a place where agriculture may have originated, where some very sophisticated pottery was made, and human society was settled and somewhat complex. Basically, the flood ended a period of stable affluence and precipitated a long period of nomadic life, filled with warfare and hardship. Because it divided history in half this way, it was preserved as myth.

After the end of the last ice age, 20,000 year ago, the Black Sea basin began to fill with meltwater from the retreating ice sheets of northern Eurasia. The basin had been empty because of arid conditions during the ice age. The world's oceans, including the Mediterranean were much lower than at present, because so much of the world's water was frozen in the ice sheets. Post glacial warming was interrupted by two cooling events, the Younger Dryas from 12,900 to 11,700 BP and another event near 8,200 BP. The associated aridity in Europe, Asia and the Middle East drove early Modern human tribes into the Black Sea basin because it was a source of fresh water and food.

As the world's oceans, and therefore the Mediterranean, continue to rise in the post-glacial period, the salt water eventually overtopped debris that had collected in the Bosporus channel during the ice age and the ocean poured back into the Black Sea, displacing the fresh water lake that was there and the peoples who lived around it.

In a review in the New York Times shortly after the book's publication, Richard Ellis was more convinced by Pitman and Ryan's argument that the flood changed human history by displacing the Black Sea basin peoples, who then dispersed throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East, carrying their advanced cultural practices with them. He was less convinced that this event had any link to the deluge myth. Furthermore, a decade ago research in the Black Sea delta of the Danube suggested that the level at 7,600 BP was only about 20 meters lower than the modern level, not 60 or 80 meters as Pitman and Ryan suggested. This would make for a much less catastrophic event, much less worthy of enshrining in folklore.

Regardless of the truth or falsity of the hypothesis, the book is just difficult to read because the prose has so many rough patches and the discursive storytelling requires trust that isn't earned. The Simon & Schuster editor is partly to blame. When authors use words incorrectly (e.g. "indigent" when they mean "indigenous") or tangle their syntax, the editor should sort it out. Also, some elements of the story are mentioned too often, like the baskets of rocks on ropes hung over the side of boats that allowed them to move northward in the Bosporus against the south-flowing surface current.

A synoptic history is related in Section IV in a chapter called "On a Golden Pond." The reader has been given the story a piece at time in the preceding 225 pages, which have included many, many tangential passages. So, it frustrating not to have been given this road map at the beginning of the book. If the authors wanted to structure this like a detective story, they should have copied the formula of Columbo and showed you the crime first and then let you watch a couple of scientists in rumpled raincoats figure it out.

[David Olmsted · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book proposes a fascinating thesis that the world's flood stories all originated with breaking open of the Bosporus and the sudden flooding of the Black sea. While possible the odds are very much against this being true. The actual number of people displaced was small, Egypt does not have a flood story (the claims for such depend on one late, nearly destroyed "book of the Dead" papyrus dating to between 1500 and 1350 BC which can only be paraphrased and thus open to wide interpretation), the flood stories in Asia all deal with river flooding, much different from the upwelling flooding context of the near eastern stories. Still this book is a great read just for the view of ancient times and the discovery of catastrophic flooding in both the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

[Colleen Lynch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just not my kind of book. The subject matter didn't interest me, had to read it for a college course. It reads pretty easily, jumps around characters because the journey the book follows takes such a long time, and things might get a little confusing but by the end it is pretty clear: there is a lot of evidence that a flood actually happened. What is less clear is that the flood that happened sparked the story of Noah's Flood. The book pretty much glosses over that part with much less evidence and didn't convince me. Read it if you are very interested in geoscience and proving the Bible right through scientific discovery.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Places a new found respect for the Bible as a historical literary device and helps explain the influence that stories, such as the story of Noah's ark really had on the world. The book also helps to fold the pages of time so as to speculate with grounded information what actually did happen that would birth such a fantastic and morally profound story. While the writing tends to simplify itself down to scientific method in many parts, there is still enough philosophical substance to keep my mind turning with these ideas for much time to come.

[Kelly Palakshappa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books. It is written by a respectable geologist and geophysicist at Columbia University, giving great credibility to the book. The book gives a scientific description of “The Great Flood” and what ancient people could have been depicting when they told stories of a great flood, as seen in the Bible. I really enjoyed the book because it discusses, scientifically geological events that have happened in the past and tries to place it with accounts of stories that have been past down through generations.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

It has become something of a running joke among those who know me best that I have a standard refrain about books I haven't enjoyed: The book felt like a good magazine article's worth of content stretched into an underwhelming book. I catch myself thinking that. I catch myself saying that. And for the final 100 pages of Noah's Flood I tried badly to come up with something else to offer by way of comment.

No luck.

In their attempt to turn a magazine article into a full length book, the authors managed to bury their main story under a dozen tangents and several metric tons of scientific community "inside baseball." Was this a presentation of evidence for a transformative event in earth's history? Sort of. Was this an awkwardly phrased third person narrative about the author's research careers? Plenty of that too. Were there attempts at fancy prose to create vivid imagery? Done and done.

So, yet again, I find myself saying that I would have much rather gotten this story from The New Yorker. Sigh.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

OK, so I love this type of stuff, speculative history. But this is really well documented, The Black Sea did flood in a rather cataclysmic way @ 10,000years ago. It is likely that this would have had psycological impact on anyone that witnessed it, and the stories would be passed down...

[Tom Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed it. There were several fantastic appearances of computer code in the text, suggesting that nobody actually proof read this edition. However the underlying story was very interesting.

[Lee Harmon · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We need not try to make history out of legend, but we ought to assume that beneath much that is artificial or incredible there lurks something of fact.” –C. Leonard Wooley, 1934

With this quote, the authors set the tone for the story of their exploration of the Black Sea basin. 7,500 years ago, their research determined, rising sea levels on the Mediterranean broke through a barricade and plunged into the Black Sea with a force 400 times greater than that of Niagara Falls, its thundering sound carrying at least 60 miles. Could this event have spawned the flood legends we read of in so many cultures, including the Hebrew story of Noah and the Ark? “The details given in the inscriptions describing the Flood leave no doubt that both the Bible and the Babylonian story describe the same event, and the Flood becomes the starting point for the modern world in both histories.” Could it be that people driven from their villages spread advances in agriculture and irrigation throughout Mesopotamia?

Because of the impact these flood stories have had on various cultures for so long, this is a fascinating topic for me. For the most part, the research of Ryan and Pitman has been well-received, and the general theory (if not all the details) deserves to be treated seriously. More recent research validates that a sudden flood event may indeed have occurred as suggested, though perhaps not at the magnitude described in Ryan and Pitman’s hypothesis.

The writing is interesting, and it reads like a scientific detective story. This isn’t a new book; it’s now thirteen years old, and you can pick it up used at Amazon for pennies.

[karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Becky and I had a short trip to Turkey, and a friend said "read Noah's Flood". It was the perfect book for the flight over and back, because it essentially is centered on the Bosporus. It was not until we were in Istanbul and Ephesus that we finally got a sense of such vague names as Sea of Marma, Black Sea, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Fertile Crescent, Euphrates and Tigris, Danube, and so forth. This book helped make the connection. The essence is 7500 years ago the Mediterranean broke through something like a mother nature dam on the Bosporus and tumbled 500 feet down on the fresh water Black Sea. The Black Sea had been down (after several thousand years) and probably was the center of modern civilization. As the salt water poured in and shorelines moved like a mile/day, the folks fled and a lot didn't make it. Oral retelling of this massive flood over thousands of years .... and you can guess the rest.

The text can be very scientific and dense at times (hence the 4 stars), but the linkage to literature, religion, archeology, anthropology reflects a book that resembles (footnotes and citations) intellectual work.

[Janet Zehr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be very well researched and full of interesting detail about the historical geology of the Black Sea, along with sections that attempted to trace the migration of the original inhabitants who fled when the Flood catastrophe occurred. The connection to global climate change during the time when there was a human culture in Europe and the Middle East was very intriguing.
The authors also included a section that told how various cultures preserved the memory of the disaster through oral traditions that continued into modern times.
I would recommend a later book “ Before the Flood”, by Ian Wilson, which is an account of how archeologists subsequently recovered artifacts from towns which were occupied during the millennia before the Black Sea Flood. A submersible was used to explore the floor of the Black Sea, and dwellings and other objects were recovered. These communities existed long before what we all learned were the “cradles of civilization” in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating topic, but written by scientists who, well, write like scientists. I found it particularly annoying when the authors referred to themselves in the third person and jumped forward in the chronological story with phrases like "what he didn't know yet was...". Although both a geologist and a biologist, i had to reread several passages to try to follow their evidence, and locate the places and historical figures they were referencing. I was surprised and grateful to find one of the final chapters, (On a Golden Pond), where the authors summarize their whole theory, including the chronological sequence of the events that they believe occurred. The chapter was very easy to read and understand, leaving with me the feeling that the chapter had once been their scientific journal article placed here to sum things up. It would have more useful as a thesis to start the book.

[Stacy · Rating 1 out of 5]

There's a lot of great info in this book, but it reads like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The majority is dramatic narrative fluff that feels like it's only in there to pad the length of the book. I actually discovered only after trudging through this schlock that the entirety of the actual scientific evidence discussed in the book is summed up succinctly in a single easy-to-read article on PBS.org. Unless you *want* to read an epic by a James Cameron wannabe, I'd recommend starting there before losing a month to the book.

[Patrick McFarland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although well written, "Noah's Flood" is targeted more for the academic student of archaeology or geology than the casual reader. Personally, this book suffers from too much technical information that would have been better placed in footnotes or an appendix than within the text itself. That said, the theory itself is fascinating and the implications it could have on biblical history are astounding. Not a riveting book, but an interesting one nonetheless.

[Elfie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the book when it was first published and was enthusiastic - finally a scientific explanation of Noah's Flood and its consequences (the migration of the survivors) that made sense. Unfortunately the theory has been contested in the meantime, but it is not over yet - more research is required to completely refute it.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tried twice to read this. Very detailed account of the excavations and sedimentary evidence for Noah's flood. Connects Noah's flood to a flood of the Black Sea and the Gilgamesh story. Interesting, but I like the video on the search for Noah's ark better as far as evidence of where Noah's ark landed. But this is verifying the flood, not the ship.

[Annelisa Burns · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you’re not a geologist, you could literally just read chapter twenty and get a very helpful summary of the argument. This book is supposedly written for a popular audience but it’s just a lot of science. And the mixture of narrative and science was just v strange. And the authors write about themselves in third person which is… unsettling.

[Britt Daniel]

An awesome, world view changing book. The polar ice caps melted and overflowed into the Black Sea through the Bosphorus like a flume or 200X Niagras. Global warming wonks should look at the true Earth's history of warming and cooling occurring thousands of years before man could have any impact.

[Jrobertus · Rating 4 out of 5]

i loved this book. a fascinating hypothesis, gaining some strength, that the flood was the breakthrough of the mediterranean into a huge depression to create the black sea. lots of science.

[Colette · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get into this book at all. It was very dry, and I just wasn't in the mood. I'm sure it was very informative.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book about the possibility of a real flood that may have occurred .There is evidence that the Mediterranean may have burst into the Black Sea , thereby creating the original flood.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up from the library, thinking I was going to be reading about sea shells and whale bones found on mountain tops. Instead, I found myself reading about the discovery of ancient clay tablets and their translation process; about how scientists drill for and examine core samples; about how the Ice Ages created deserts in Asia and freshwater lakes that become salty seas; about how tracing language, artifacts, and the construction of walls can track the movement of people thousands of years ago; and, towards the end, that there is a branch of scientists who study myths and the methods of oral storytellers.

The biblical theme is actually pretty light considering it's the end goal of the scientists. It's like the treasures of Indiana Jones (what were they again?) it's more about the processes and the discovering and the collaboration and the hunting, than about the treasure in the end.

Easy to read, it's actually a pretty informative text about how scientists "see" into the past. I'm probably weird, but this is something I would consider a "beach read". I'm glad I picked it up.

[Patricia Woodruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This looks at history from a geological point of view. What makes it really cool from my perspective is that it lines up completely with the research I've been doing on ancient religions, their commonalities and how they dispersed. It makes everything really fall into place! The Black Sea was the center of a really advanced culture that forced to break apart and caused what at first glance looks like simultaneous development of metal working, writing, etc. above and below the Black Sea. I'd love to see some sort of video that would illustrate the geological changes that happened in Central Europe around 15,000 to 5,000 years ago. But until then, this is a well written book with scientific proof and yet easy enough for the layman to understand. Of course anything that is going to re-write history is going to be extremely controversial, but once this knowledge becomes common it will help researchers figure out some long standing puzzles as to why a whole lot of cultures were moving around and into other territories.

[Erik Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent work of scientific value that takes us through evidence of a flooding of the Black Sea that likely cause devastation and refugees as the last paleolithic ice age ended and ocean levels cause a pouring in through the Bosporus. The story provides an accountable portrayal of what might have happened during this flood based on archaeological evidence. What is also very good about this author is that he addresses the event as seen through science and the various cultural stories using the event to purpose as separate. He makes a clear point in the beginning saying (I paraphrase) that behind mythical stories there are generally some actual events that storytellers are using. The authors maintained both a rigorous investigation method and a clear headedness that kept them from getting caught up in cultural fairy tales. By doing both of these things, they offer a tome of high value to humanity.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thorough account of the archaeological, geological, and anthropological evidence for the occurrence of a Black Sea flood that the authors contend could be the source of the flood myths of ancient cultures and the account of Noah's flood in the Bible. For the most part, it is a lot of meaty, interesting material, but I struggled with the science part of the narrative. I struggled to understand the significance of the findings and how they related to the hypothesis of the author's titles. Maybe it is lack of base knowledge on my part, but I was hoping for a greater comprehension of the geology and archaeology and was somewhat frustrated. Not sure if this is a layperson's science book.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Often a strange mix between dense scientific explanation and an adventurous travelogue which can be jarring. However, the science is comprehensive and the authors walk you through it well so that even the layman can get something out of it. Authors Ryan and Pitman explain the evidence and likelihood of a localised flood event in the black sea which may have given rise to the flood myths of many ancient cultures. Very interesting stuff.

[Joe Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the book with my Tuesday morning study group. I got started a couple of weeks late, and I never caught up with the schedule. To put it one way, the group felt flooded with unnecessary personal details of the story, but I kept thinking that assessment was carping a bit. In the end--I was glad to get to chapter 20, where I was happy to see a good 8-9 page summary of the story the authors had to tell.

See also the review by Lee Harmon. He says it well.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, plenty of food for thought. A challenging read, needed to be taken in small doses, blending scientific, archaeological and linguistic research, along with sections of story telling. Is it valid? Hard to be certain, but credible authors and using validated research it's a strong contender.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a narrative of the archeological and oceanographic work done that supports the flooding of the Black Sea as the source of Noah’s flood. Super interesting discussion of cultures that existed in the Bosporus and Anatolian regions of history. I highly recommend the read to learn more about the development agriculture, linguistics and the peoples in the historical mid-east.