Re: Nostratic (was Re: Schwebeablaut (was Re: tolkien?))

Rhiemeier wrote:
> The Black Sea Flood happened around 5500 BC; within the next
> 500 years, the neolithic farming tribes had reached the Rhine.
>The flood must have displaced a large number of people.
I comment:
Hardly anybody living in that basin could have survived that flood.

Remember, the flood was a secondary event.  The first event --
the breaching of the land dam that had held back the waters of
the Mediterranean Sea near Istanbul -- only let the water rush down
to the lake that was at the bottom of the basin. That makeshift
"river" was probably only several miles wide at its worst moments.

The real disaster began when that "river" reached the lake at the
basin's bottom and began raising that lake's water level.  The basin
is fairly shallow, so, as the lake's water level rose, its surface area
expanded exponentially.  I've read that the lake expanded outward
(in various directions) at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour.

So people couldn't outrun it.  And they couldn't know that it was
coming until it nearly reached them (so they had no time to build
arks or even rafts to survive it on). And this was about 1000 years
before they had horses (and even those Kurgan horses probably
couldn't have travelled fast enough to save them from that flood).

Reply