“Noah’s flood” spread farming, researchers say

I find the issue interesting how scientists can link the flood and agriculture.
I should say this link may also be there, why do we have a lot of
biodiversity in the tropical areas where they fall into the belt of this
flood as well. Is the Noah's issue also not connected with conservation
of biodiversity when they keep all animals male and female into
the craft??

Read On and do not shoot the messenger, but thought provoking ehh.

Hastings
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Nov. 19, 2007World Science staff

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/071119_flood.htm

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.

Al­though some re­search­ers dis­pute the the­o­ry, the new stu­dy’s au­thors take it fur­ther and say the dis­as­ter 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 ex­p­lained. “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 thus can­not ex­plain the del­uge 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 ori­gi­nal 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.”* * *