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Black Sea '01 Expedition
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Overview Intro to the Black Sea The Flood Theory The Shipwreck Museum Past Expeditions The 2001 Expedition
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Unfortunately, Ryan & Pitman's theory of the Black Sea flood has been abducted from its sleeping bed and brought to the masses entirely out of context. As an example, one newspaper reported that archaeologists on a 2000 expedition had discovered "Noah's House" in the Black Sea. I can assure you, they didn't. A THEORY OUT OF CONTEXT It is very important to understand that archaeologists in the Black Sea are not searching for Noah's ark, and why Ryan & Pitman's Flood Theory is not a player in the debate over the truth of the Bible. Reason #1: Geological Context The Flood Theory is a geological model proposed by two of the most respected senior investigators in the field. It was developed from decades of seafloor cores, bathymetry analysis, interpreting slip-strike faults in the Bosphorus Channel, and so on, with its development continuing by geologists and geophysicists today. So if you are going to extend the Flood Theory into other disciplines of scholarship (which is a fun and acceptable thing to do in science), you at least have to know how to read it, and that means understanding the language it was written in: geology. And then in the final analysis, none of the geologic data in the Noah myth (such as the date, duration, speed, and global scope) fall inside the specifications of Ryan & Pitman's flood. Actually, creationists usually computate the age of the Earth (based on geneaologies) to be only about 6000 years old. Recall that Ryan & Pitman's Bosphorus flooding date is 7600 years ago. Reason #2: Speed When a geologist like Bill Ryan or Walter Pitman says "rapid flooding", he means something vastly different than when the Bible uses similar words. The Flood Theory doesn't entail the Black Lake whimsically turning into nearly a thousand miles of rapids and tidal waves which chased people and swept civilizations clear away. In fact, the geological picture is quite different. The Bosphorus flooding wouldn't have just been a "really bad month": it was part of a geological process that took the better part of 10,000 years to get started (in order for enough ice to melt to get the Mediterranean high enough to punch through the Bosphorus). Even during the flood, Ryan & Pitman calculate that the shores of the Black Sea would've risen about 6-12 inches a day (which is still incredible when you think about it). Furthermore, it is thought that hundreds of years passed before water levels stopped rising. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, so a millenium is literally a geological nanosecond. (To wit: modern Homo sapiens, who emerged 200,000 years ago, have walked the Earth for 0.004 % of the planet's history.) In most cases, the geologic record doesn't have the kind of resolution to distinguish much between a year and a century when you're looking back 7600 years. So these numbers are always very approximate. This discussion is not to imply it was a happy time on the shores of the drowning Black Lake. Freshwater fish were dying from the salt, crops were being wrecked, water was getting contaminated and people were getting the heck out of dodge. Pitman calculated that, even if you lived at the far north end of the Black Lake, when the Bosphorus broke in the south you would have had to flee the rising shores by a quarter-mile per day -- up to a mile per day if you lived in a river valley where the land is flatter. Villages would've been washed through in weeks (quick enough that we may still find remains today, but not fast enough to be literally swept away in a flash). So we are still not talking about people across the Black Sea running away from tidal waves. The scene at the Bosphorus itself would've been, indeed, quite dramatic, but hardly global or sudden. The build-up of water took generations (actually millenia). Given that timeframe, even the Hollywood bursting of the dam would've been preceded by seismic rumblings long before the dreadful moment, which we'd like to think would've compelled prehistoric man to high-tail his prehistoric behind to higher ground. Reason #3: No Flood Myth is an Island There are literally hundreds of ancient cultures in the world with flood theories. (Here is a list of these myths, in html or pdf.) This wet cornucopia of myths is not at all surprising when you remember that water levels were rising all over the world at the end of the last Ice Age, and so we would expect humans across the planet to bear witness to large floodings, and accordingly attribute them to deities. And let us not forget that destructive floods occur almost weekly somewhere in the world. So just because Ryan & Pitman's flood is the most cataclysmic one we can imagine, it doesn't mean civilizations haven't been greatly harmed or even destroyed by "smaller" floods over the millenia. The Mesopotamian flood myth in Gilgamesh (see the review below) is thought to be over a thousand years older than the Noah story in the Old Testament. So it does not make much sense to attach the Ryan and Pitman Flood Theory to a specific faith, when the geologic evidence very equally supports older and extinct Mesopotamian religions as well as extant ones. (As we will see below, there is a deeper reason for this ambiguity in endorsement.) Reason #4: The Diaspora Misread Given this confusion, you might think the last name Ryan & Pitman should've given their book would be "Noah's Flood". Well that's what they called it, and though this may be a bad name for the geological theory (one avoided in these pages), the title wasn't chosen to promote the divine influence of acts described in Genesis. In fact, "Noah's Flood" relates to the geologists' explanation for the very human development of the Noah myth.
The diaspora is certainly intriguing, and it sounds logical to the casual observer -- if not extremely attractive to anti-religion folks seeking a more cogent refutation of the Biblical ties knotted to "Noah's Flood". But as it turns out, the proposed diaspora conflicts with the cultural record of the area: people could not have spread out across the continent (carrying the haunting memory of the flood) as Ryan & Pitman suggest, because the cultural trajectory would not make any sense given the established history of stone age cultures around the Black Sea. "It's a silly idea," Black Sea expert Dr. Fred Hiebert says of the diaspora. Ryan & Pitman are geologists, not anthropologists. They extended their Flood Theory to the diaspora not because of direct evidence relating the two, but because (as they explain it), after developing the geologic idea there was an irresistable tempatation to connect this catastrophe to the cultural history of the human race. Nevertheless, the field of anthropology rejects the diaspora aspect of "Noah's Flood". The cultural annex to their geologic theory -- seeming to combat a literal interpretation of the Noah myth -- does not stand up to known secular evidence. So wait a minute -- if the diaspora doesn't hold up in court, then what exactly is the Flood Theory saying about the Noah myth? Nothing. The scientifically accepted version of "Noah's Flood" has nothing at all to do with Biblical authenticity, neither for or against. SUMMARY Peer review (and the standards of proof) in the scientific community have very cleanly excised some bonus cultural arguments that Ryan and Pitman added to their Flood Theory. The only idea left supported by evidence is their main one: that an abrupt flooding of the Bosphorus transformed the Black Lake into the sea we see today. And though we are left with even less contact with the Bible, we seem to be stuck with the name "Noah's Flood".
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