PIE and the Black Sea Flood.

[Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>]

This link has some junk I wrote after re-reading Ryan and Pitman. I
also started comparisons to Mallory.This are rough, personal use
notes and personal speculations. Take them just for that. These pages
are unicode compliant, tho they work fine with extended latin (they
just load funny).

http://homepages.msn.com/LibraryLawn/mark_odegard/Indo-European.html

Besides links to 'religious' sites that make use of Ryan and Pitman,
the only web pages that refer to their findings seem to be the
original press reports of their book as well as a reference
someplace to the _Science_ article that reported their work
originally. Ryan and Pitman are impeccably-credentialed Earth
Scientists. They are not archaeologists, linguists or ethnographers.
This book was meant to be popular, but the hard science is obscured
by the speculative stuff. And they are the only person I've ever
read that's referred to Kathleen Kenyon as Kay Kenyon (which
suggests they are way out of their field).

Anyway. The Med indeed burst thru the Bosporus ca 5500 BCE, in a huge
event that raised the Black Sea 350 feet in two years.

The implications for the coalescence of PIE are unavoidable. It's in
the right part of the world at something like the right time. It
also lets you put agriculture in the Pontine region well before
archaeology proves it. And domestic animals too, I think. It lets
you think of the larger grouping PIE belonged to, and of it's
breakup (not Nostratic, but something under that).
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net