Not really - although it had been known for a long time the Black Sea levels had changed (There is a flooded river bed in the Dardanelles) The timing and speed of the event did not come to light until 1995 when serious exploration of the Black Sea started searching for oil. It was this information that Ryan and Pitman exploited in their theory.
That's funny...neither AGW nor Evolution is a religion...but is strawmanned that way by people to ignorant of the facts. Why is that?
What is your 'not really"? Nothing I said is inaccurate. Look at it this way. There have been what, 8 glacial advances in the past 800,000 years or so. Each time the sea level dropped, cutting off the black sea. Each time it rose, the black sea would reflood. This would have been obvious to anyone aware of this simple fact. The shallowest part of the Dardanelles is 43 feet, so it didnt require the sea level drop much to cut it off. Sea level was down about 300 ft at the height of the ice age. Now, picture this: the sea level starts rising, world wide. At some point, the high high tide will overtop the highest point in the channel. and let some water thru. Down goes the tide, the trickle stops. I dont know how fast the water is believed to have risen in the worlds oceans, but lets just say, in ten years it rose a foot. It was nowhere near that fast, of course. But lets say it did. So now we have one foot of water going over the top, into a huge lake. The shoreline would rise, but no drama. A land snail would get bored, fleeing that. The claims made that there would have been a titanic waterfall dont really make sense. The "timing and speed" did not "come to light", it was expressed as a theory. Quite a profitable one, too. "Exploited" is the correct word. And, you will note if you read a bit, the theory about the speed of the recharge is not at all widely accepted. Regardless, it has been well known for many years that both the Mediterranean dried up and or were cut off from eachother as well as from the Atlantic not once but several times. Anyone with a historical geology book or a few minutes to spend googling can see that for themselves. Took me maybe two minutes to find a book from 1923 talking about the recharge of the Black Sea. Ryan and Pitman made no revolutionary discovery, and the only reason anyone took any particular note was that they linked their research to Noahs Ark.
Nothing is obvious until it is proven. For hundreds of years everyone knew that the Americas and Africa must have been joined at some time. It took till the 1950s for someone to show how they could have been joined and how they'd been torn apart. The same is true for the Black Sea. Intuitively it is obvious what you described was true, but the when how and why remained a mystery. As I mentioned in my previous posts, getting core data from all over the Black Sea put the timing of the various floods and re-floods of the region into context. If you study anthropology for any reasonable time, you discover that many myths have kernels of truth in them, especially when dealing with oral transmissions of stories. All Ryan and Pitman did was establish a time line for an event that may have ultimately morphed into the story of Noah. And please remember the flood narrative was an old story long before the Bible came along.
With evolution, they're pretty explicit. Half of all Americans believe people were created in their current form, poof, within the last 10,000 years, because the bible says so and because the notion of humans as a temporary, contingent and accidental byproduct of a purposeless, directionless process offends the delicate human ego. But I don't see AGW conflicting with any particular reading of any scripture, nor offensive to the ego. So why the close association?
I suppose this is plausible. The most severe glaciation occurred about 650,000 years ago. There were probably humans around then, but that's a long time even for myths to propagate. However, the most recent glaciation peaked about 20,000 years ago, and the most recent mass-meltings were about 14,000 and again at 11,500 years ago, which is just before the age of agriculture and recorded history. So it's entirely conceivable that this last melting period flooded human civilizations (which tend to be on shores or rivers) and was woven into myths, which were then recast into the format implied by local religions. But I'm no anthropologist.
Yes also Gilgimish, and Deucalion. Just about every culture around the back sea has a flood myth. The sudden spread of technology around the black sea at the time of the flood makes it plainly obvious why, people evacuated.
Its not just conceivable. The remains of of an ancient civilization that have been discovered at the bottom of the black sea predate Mesopotamia. At this stage of knowledge it is very likely that civilization began in what is now the black sea.
Like a theory? . They didnt "know' that. As a kid I saw that they looked like puzzle pieces, more so with African and Madagascar. That is not the same as knowing. . A very large body of data from many sources finally culminated in the tectonic explanation, previously it has been noted that rock formations etc match, but no mechanism was known. No, it was not a mystery, nor has the exact when and how been solved. It was not only obvious, but it was known that it had happened. More details have emerged, that is all. More will emerge as time goes on. There is no revolutionary discovery as with the plate tectonics discovery. Historical geology from everywhere is like that. The more work that is done, the more is known. The only reason for people to be getting excited is the "noahs ark" connection, tenuous as it is. I've studied more than enough anthro to know that. As for the recharge of the Black Sea, you do surely know that this was old news before those buys were born. More details no doubt were added by R n' P, but they didnt discover when it happened. If they are the first to suggest that the event may have been the source of the the "flood" story, good for them, it made them famous. I kind of doubt they were the first, but maybe they were. All this is, is that some basic geology got out into the pop culture press, something like "the god particle" and everyone with half a notion of what its about jumped in to say it proves their point, whatever that point is styled to be.
Again I cant tell if you are trolling or just so young and ignorant that 1996 seems like ancient history to you.
Something about the intuitive rather than logical thinking that leads people to accept the bible stories in the first place. It just doesnt seem like people could affect the atmosphere enough to change the climate, so, it cant be true. In earlier times, it was felt that the ocean is just too big to pollute, or overfish. There is also the mentality we see so universally among fundies, which is that they simply cannot be wrong.
Taikoos youthful take of 1996 as being long long ago reminds me of this southpark The Man From 1996 [video=youtube;oVTmH6Ayw78]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVTmH6Ayw78[/video]
But what she SAID was that the draining and refilling of the Black Sea and Mediterranean has been known for much loonger. What happened in 1996 was the proposal that at least one of these cycles was the inspiration for at least one of the flood myths.
I think these are related - that intuitive thinking naturally leads to certainty, while logical thinking necessarily admits shifting levels of probability. But the "argument from incredulity" is a common factor, I agree with you there.
Except perhaps for Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian civilizations. But what we're speculating about is not the refilling of the Black Sea, which has happened several times, but whether this event gave rise to any of the oral traditions of the area, which eventually got written down by various cultures each grinding their own axe.
Such "civilization" (vague word!) as existed around the shores of the Black Sea before it began to recharge is not anything remarkable or more advanced than found in many other localities. IF the recharge prompted the "flood" story in the bible, they sure fluffed it up! It has less resemblance to actual events than Obama has to the Metro Goldwin lion. In any case, if that one event led to that flood myth, it leaves unexplained the many other flood myths. For my take on it, I think the flood story is like stories of god-kings, little people, dragons, mermaids, etc, that occur around the world. Its something in the human psyche that generates these, not actual mermaid sightings. Or real dragons.
My speculation is that the advent of agriculture led directly to immobile communities, rather than the nomadic hunting and gathering. And immobile communities tend to mean more permanent buildings, and finer division of labor. The building blocks of civilization. But of course these myths had a more important purpose than just keeping children amused. In the case of the Genesis version, it was heavily modified as part of the overall campaign of establishing the primacy of their local god. First, you create a god. Then you have to show that your god is powerful and willful. Then you have to show that, being so powerful and willful, your god is the boss god. Finally, if you've been persuasive and convincing so far, you can dispense with the other gods as being false or even imaginary. The Genesis flood story was shaped to show both the power and the purpose of the local boss god. No, I don't agree. In a general sense, people who build civilizations (buildings in one place) tend to live on the banks of rivers and shores of lakes or seas. These things, you know, facilitate trade, irrigation, and such good stuff. BUT they also tend to flood. The Nile flooded every year. Everywhere people settled tended to flood, so you'd expect flood stories to be the norm. And if we're considering the possibility that at least some of these stories came from large-scale melting at the start of the Holocene (the most recent Great Melting, about 11,000 years ago), this event may have caused widespread instances of flooding. But that's a lot more speculative. Oh no. Floods are very real, and were very frequent, quite variable, and the worst ones were surely memorable. Nothing imaginary about them. Now, all of the fantabulous embellishments probably derive from the psyche, but nearly always these stories are moral in nature.
I think that is very generally accepted. Thats how I see it. Of course you agree. THE flood ala bible came from either no event at all, or a different event than what led to other flood stories, if there was any event at all. There was no tower of babel, no 6 day poof, no adam and eve, so no special reason to think one myth must have a basis when others do not. Sure they are real, but then we are not really disagreeing. There is always some sort of grain of truth in the wild stories of old. Lizard-> dragon.
I'm not sure I follow. Flood myths are ubiquitous, because floods are. I have read (I'm not an expert) that the Genesis flood story is a reworked version of a previous local flood story,which is probably a reworking of a yet previous story. But flood stories are compelling, because floods were something in everyone's experience. And that IS a basis for putting flood myths in a different category from myths not clearly resting on normal experience. But I think their origins differ qualitatively. I'm not sure how to express this. I know tales grow in the retelling. I also know that tales get borrowed and repositioned to bolster some different cultural structure. Most or all cultures have creation tales, but these aren't exaggerated or embellished versions of some "real" creation event like flood stories. Instead, they are ways to satisfy normal curiosity (where did people come from?) in forms compatible with the cultures that produced them. More than compatible, foundational. So maybe the best way to put it is that I draw a distinction between grains of historical/physical truth and grains of psychological truth (the commonalities that we call "human nature").
If we look at Aboriginal Dreaming, we can see how a story can be carried for at least (In one case) At least 11,000 years. They have a dreaming story of the reflooding of Bass Strait, which we know happened 11,000 years ago. In the case of the Black Sea, I dont see anything in the geography, geology or the myths that suggest it could not happen. And lets face it, we have very little chance of ever really knowing anyway.
I can recall the huge debates that used to spark up over who came first, the Egyptians or Mesopotamian culture. Both appeared almost at the same time, and trouble has been that there does not seem to be a link between the two. A dribble of refugees spreading out after the inundation of the Black Sea becomes a very elegant answer to that very question.
The black sea history is a whole lot more complex than just a single even in which it suddenly or slowly flooded. The thing has dried, flooded, and had water flowing out rather than in, back and forth. The basin is tens of millions of years old. Nobody is likely to ever know if the biblical flood is some fantastically overplayed version of the black sea flooding, but there is no question about whether people lived at one time where it is now salt water. Of course, any continental shelf area is also like that, including the entire bering Land bridge, wider than the whole state of alaska is now. - - - Updated - - - Seriously?
This is my initial posting here. I have been posting on the general subject of this thread on other forum sites for about four years. Over that time I have read about the subject almost daily and own many books on the subject. Several posts in this thread have piqued my interest.There are several quite intelligent posters on both sides of the AGW issue and I value their contributions. The quotes I reply to are in italics. Actually it requires emperical evidence to support the theory and manmade global warming has emperical evidence to support the theory. Computer models, which provide emprical evidence, support the theory that the destruction of nature and the increase in manmade atmospheric CO2 emissions support the theory that mankind is responsible for tipping the scales which has resulted in increased global temperatures. Virtually 100% of the scientists actually involved in researching climate change agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. I'm afraid that the statement that computer models provide empirical evidence is simply incorrect. Computer simulation models of global climate (General Circulation Models - GCMs), like all computer simulations, take the data and data values that the modeler selects and subjects them to the algorithms the modeler selects. The data types and the algorithms selected to manipulate them number into the hundreds. Thus selection must be subjective. Computer simulations cannot create empirical evidence because emperical evidence is that evidence gained by direct or indirect observation. I cannot imagine any scientist, including those who are climate modelers, making such a statement. [Google Freeman Dyson, perhaps the planet's preeminent physicist, and climate models.] The last statement quoted is also incorrect. In the first place, there has never been a scientific poll taken that asks that specific question. In the second place, there are hundreds of scientists who do not agree with that specific statement. For that last statment to be true, there must be at least one peer reviewed study that links mankind's production of atmospheric CO2 (due primarily to burning fossil fuels) to rising global temperatures. And that study must have been endorsed by "viturally 100%" of the world's climate scientists. There is no such study. But a computer program can be verified for accuracy based upon historical data. Does a computer projection match when compared to a know natural event? Computer simulation verification does not require the matching of historical data. Matching historical data could simply be the result of using data and algorithms that cause a match. Simulator output must be consistent with (match) future observations of the phenomenon being simulated. (More about that later with regard to GCMs.) In fact the computer models have already been demonstrated to be overly conservative as the predictions of climate change based upon AGW are less than what we're actually experiencing. For example the models predicted polar melting but it is occurring faster than the model projected because of the conservative calculations related to CO2 increases and deforestation. Computer simulations of future global temperatures have shown no skill at doing so. As a graph displayed above shows, almost none of the dozens of GCMs or their hundreds of model runs have come close to accurately predicting global temperatures. This is a dismal record given that $billions have been spent on them over the past 30 years or so. If GCMs cannot accurately predict global temperatures - their primary function - then it is difficult to accept their predictions on collateral issues like polar ice cap melting that are supposed to be caused by rising global temperatures. This is the problem in a nutshell. We observe that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We observe that high CO2 concentrations in the past correlated with warmer temperatures. We observe that CO2 levels are rising fairly rapidly. We observe that essentially all the additional CO2 is being generated by human activities. We observe a gradual global warming trend. The second observation assumes that CO2 concentrations caused warmer temperatures in the past. But there are many studies (and books) that suggest (with data) that warmer temperatures cause higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations. This is also just a hypothesis, but one which has the benefit of having supporting data. The fourth observation requires supporting data. The fifth observation requires selection of relevant dates. For example, the IPCC (and proponents of AGW) have stated many times that mankind's contribution to atmospheric CO2 did not affect global temperatures until at least the 1950s. Yet, global tempereatures have been rising at a fairly consistent rate since about 1860 - the end of the Little Ice Age. Any global temperature rise prior to the 1950s must have a natural cause(s). If manmade CO2 is causing global temperatures to rise since the 1950s, then the previous natural cause(s) must have mysteriously quit operating. More amazingly, the amount of temperature change before and after the 1950s is almost the same! That is an incredible coincidence. Man and nature causing the same amount of global temperature changes and one quits at the same time the other goes into effect. In addition, one must be prepared to explain historical global temperature increases (the Medieval Warming Period for example) without reference to manmade CO2. Annual climate changes fluxuate but global warming is a long term event measured in hundreds and thousands of years. I think it would be more accurate to state that weather changes fluxuate over time scales up to a few years, but that climate changes over periods from decades to millennia. In the AGW context this means that no single weather event can be tied to a change in climate.
Yes its called archeology. You seem to be stuck up on some bogus computer models that try and argue that the deluge wasn't that big. The archeology from the surrounding regions show that those claims are bull(*)(*)(*)(*)! There was a major sudden and wide population exodus. There is a thing with computer models. They will almost always reflect the bias of the modeler.
