The consequences of global warming were mind-boggling. In two or three centuries around 17,000 BCE the sea level rose forty feet as the glaciers that had blanketed northern America, Europe, and Asia melted. The area between Turkey and Crimea, where the waves of the Black Sea now roll (Figure 2.1), had been a low-lying basin during the Ice Age, but glacial runoff now turned it into the world’s biggest freshwater lake.
