Evidence found of Noah's ark flood victims

Ship probes land below Black Sea submerged 7,000 years ago and linked to biblical disaster

Tim Radford, science editor
Guardian

Thursday September 14, 2000

Marine archaeologists have found the first evidence of a people who perished in a great flood of the Black Sea that has been linked with the story of Noah's ark.

Using robot underwater vehicles more than 300ft below the sea's surface, they have begun to map a rolling landscape, fed by meandering streams and marked with wattle and daub houses, that was flooded more than 7,000 years ago.

The discovery was announced yesterday by Robert Ballard, the scientist who discovered the wrecked Titanic.

The Black Sea was once a freshwater lake, well below sea level. About 7,000 years ago, according to geological evidence, the rising Mediterranean sea pushed a channel through what is now the Bosphorus, and then seawater poured in at about 200 times the volume of Niagara Falls. The Black Sea would have widened at the rate of a mile a day, submerging the original shoreline under hundreds of feet of salty water.

Nearly 100,000 square miles were inundated. Sea shells on the beaches of the modern Black Sea are of marine origin, but deep below the surface there are layers of shells of freshwater molluscs, mute witnesses to the shoreline of the ancient lake.

There are many myths concerning a great flood in the region. There was a first mention in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian work. The Romans and Greeks had the legend of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who saved their children and animals by floating away in a giant box. The Hebrew book of Genesis most famously tells the story of Noah, who found grace in the eyes of the Lord, when all around him were wicked. Noah was warned of a forthcoming flood, and built a huge "ark" to hold his family and all the animals in pairs. Noah survived when all perished. Tradition has it that his ark came to rest on the slopes of Mount Ararat in Turkey.

Dr Ballard began exploring the Black Sea in the Hull registered ship Northern Horizon, and used side-scanning sonar to look for interesting shapes on the seabed over a 200-sq-mile area, 12 miles off the Turkish coast, near Sinop.

The instruments detected "targets" worth a closer look, so video cameras mounted on underwater robot submarines were put to use. "We found two ancient ships last night," said Dr Ballard speaking by phone from his research vessel yesterday. "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."

They found it. Above an area submerged too deeply for human divers, the sonar instruments revealed details of the landscape. On September 9 they sent robot scouts down to objects which looked like beams and branches, debris that might have been the stiffening for wattle and daub homes.

They found a rectangular area up to 12ft by 25 ft, over which an ancient mud and wooden house had collapsed, and they found tools of highly polished stone, together with fragments of ceramics.

"What we are looking at is a culture that is definitely thousands of years old," said Fred Hiebert, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was also on the ship. "The flood is an event that is geologically known, and for us to find a structure in 150 metres of water means that these people were definitely living there before it flooded, so it is pre-Greek. It is a different world and it deserves a great deal of attention and years of study to help us truly identify who these people were."

Dr Ballard is perhaps oceanography's answer to Indiana Jones. As a marine scientist in the US, two decades ago, he took part in the dramatic discovery of communities of strange creatures living in submarine volcanic vents two miles below the ocean surface. He also found the submerged liner Titanic, and tracked the wreck of the German battleship, Bismarck, and the fleet which the US navy lost off Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

He formed his own exploration institute in Mystic, Connecticut, before going on to lead National Geographic expeditions to probe the mud of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea for lost treasures - and now a lost world.

But he does not claim to have found the landscape of Noah. " We really cannot say in any way, shape or form that this is the biblical flood. All we can say is that there has been a major flood, that people were living here when it happened. We prefer to stick with the facts -and who knows where those facts will lead us."