Underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard says he can’t claim to have found Noah’s old neighborhood, but he does know now that around 7,000 years ago, the region was hit by a very big flood.
Renowned underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard is used to big discoveries. He tracked down the wreckage of the Titanic, the German battleship Bismarck, and a number of other famous lost ships around the world.
Now, Ballard claims he’s found something even bigger.
He’s been hunting for “mother of all floods — the flood that the Bible says carried Noah’s ark. And he says he’s beginning to find evidence that it really did happen.
Ballard and his team have uncovered an ancient shoreline 400 feet below the surface of the Black Sea. Underwater robot scouts have been mapping this landscape and have discovered remnants of houses made of mud and wood.
“What we were trying to do in our wildest dreams — which is exactly what happened — was find a structure that was evidence, not a sunken ship, not trash and not geology, but characteristic of human habitation,” Ballard told the Guardian.
They found ancient houses underwater, but the surprises didn’t end there. They also found tools made of polished stone and fragments of ceramic.
The shells you’ll find scattered around the Black Sea today are from animals who live in seawater. But Ballard and his team have discovered the shells of ancient freshwater mollusks along the underwater shoreline, the Guardian reports. Carbon dating tests place them at about 5,000 B.C. — the same time as the biblical flood.
Ballard says he can’t claim to have found Noah’s old neighborhood. But he does know now that around 7,000 years ago, the region was hit by a very big flood.
“Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level,” he told ABC News, “But a really big flood that then stayed … The land that went under stayed under.”
Here’s how he explains it. Around 12,000 years ago, much of the world was covered with glaciers. When they began to melt, excess water rushed into the earth’s oceans and caused disastrous floods.
So in 5,000 B.C., the Black Sea was just a freshwater lake. As the Mediterranean Sea rose, seawater flooded into the Black Sea with a force 200 times that of Niagara Falls, the Guardian reports.
“It probably was a bad day,” Ballard told ABC News. “At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometers of land (or 58,000 square miles, about the size of Illinois), went under.”
He guesses that the flood must have been a catastrophic event for the ancient civilization that lived along the shores of the Black Sea. The theory is that the survivors of this flood passed the story from mouth to mouth, over generations.
Some believe that this may have inspired the story of Noah’s ark. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God rescues Noah from the perils of a disastrous flood by instructing him to build an ark. The story tells us that Noah and his family entered the ark, along with two of every species of animals in the world, and emerged 40 days later.
Other ancient civilizations also tell the tale of a catastrophic flood in the Black Sea region. The Sumerians had the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” while the Romans and Greeks spoke of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escaped the flood waters in a box.
The houses that Ballard and his team have discovered appear to be pre-Greek. This opens up the door to an ancient seaside culture that might never have been studied before.
“All we can say is that there has been a major flood, that people were living here when it happened,” he told the Guardian. “We prefer to stick with the facts — and who know where those facts will lead us.”
Culled from NyDailyNews
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