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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 04 Dec 2023

Taken: 04 Dec 2023

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After the Ice •
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Steven Mithen •

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Black Sea

Black Sea
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Another catastrophe happened on the other side of Europe, 3500 kilometers away. The victims were those who lived upon the lowlands around the freshwater lake that was the Black Sea. These provided flat, fertile soils covered with Oak woodland in which people had hunted and gathered for many thousand of years. By the date of this event, however, a new people had arrived: Neolithic farmers. They had travelled from communities in Turkey, settling upon rich alluvial souls; felling trees to make way for fields for their cattle and goats. . . . . .

The Black Sea had become a freshwater laie during the ice age. The level of the Mediterranean had falled to below the base of the Bosphorus channel, its link to the Black sea through which seawater had once flowed. The challenge became blocked with silt. Then, when global warming began to meld the ice, the Mediterranean Sea began to rise again. As it did so, the level of the Black Sea was doing the precise opposite – it was falling, due to evaporation and reduced run-off from rivers. As the sea level rose above the base of the channel, the plug of silt held firm. It held, and it held, as a gigantic wall of marine water built upon its western face. And then it began to seep. Then it burst.

So, one fateful day about 6400 BC., a cascade of salty water crashed with the force of two hundred Niagara Falls into the placid waters of the lake – and continued to do so for many months. The roar would have been heard 100 kilometres away – echoing in the ears of those hunting within the hills of Turkey and those who fished around Mediterranean shores. Fifty cubic kilometres of water thundered into the lake each day until the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were one again. Within a matter of months, a staggering 100,000 square kilometres of lakeside woodland, marshland and arable fields had been submerged – an area equivalent to the whole of Austria. `~ page 153

AFTER THE ICE
15 months ago. Edited 15 months ago.

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