Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44.2 (2001) 307-309

Book Review

Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event that Changed History

The title of this volume does sound like something out of the National Enquirer. One might expect a book that was all noise, no content; all argument, no evidence. Instead, one has a much more heady mixture--including geological and cultural history, considerable real scientific evidence, and, also, some wonderful flights of speculation. [End Page 307]

The story is simple and compelling. About 7,550 years ago, give or take a few decades, the Black Sea came to the end of its life as an isolated freshwater lake. It was then comparable in size to one of our Great Lakes. The water supported a large-scale oasis, set in the midst of an arid basin. The lakefront was occupied by primitive but effective agriculturalists, who used the fresh water to prosper. During those days, the Black Sea surface stood considerably lower than the salt water of the Aegean and Mediterranean. These waters were rising with the oceans, as they all shared water freed by glacial melts during a warming period. The waters were held in place, away from the Black Sea, by a land mass including the present area of Istanbul.

Then the Bosporus sprung a leak. Salt water trickled into the Black Sea, dug a channel, and became a torrent equivalent to a thousand Niagaras. The water level in the Black Sea rose steadily, 20 or so centimeters a day. After a year or two, the waters had risen by 100 meters, and the freshwater lake had become a much larger saltwater sea. Freshwater species were killed by salt and replaced by saltwater dwellers. The people who had been nourished by the fresh water died or fled over many hundreds, indeed thousands, of kilometers. Some of them reappeared as new settlers through large areas of Europe and Asia. They founded agricultural civilizations in places as disparate as France and Mesopotamia. Remains of their trek are to be found in the spread of Indo-European languages, of advanced agriculture, of tall fair-skinned people, and--most especially--in a widespread middle eastern myth about a major flood.

Naturally, different parts of the story have different plausibilities. The descriptions of geological history and some of the qualities of the actual flooding apparently have a solid factual base, a base which was developed in large part by the authors in expeditions into the waters of the area. These sea tales describe a fascinating kind of scientific investigation. Since the studies were carried out in waters between Russia and Turkey, the voyages have an atmosphere of cold war distrust alleviated by cross-national scientific cooperation. Moreover, we get some solidly interesting descriptions of the conduct and logic of science.

Another major portion of the book is devoted to the archaeological, linguistic, and cultural investigations of the geographical areas presumed to have gained the post-flood migrants. The investigators and their stories are wonderfully romantic and gave me happy hours of reading. The discoveries are quite exciting. But the authors have to work very hard to bring these discoveries to bear upon their own flood story. There is hardly any direct evidence that their flood triggered any post-deluge population migration. While the book's argument is not implausible, I believe the authors do protest too much.

As for Noah. The book tells us how the biblical story--written perhaps 3,000 years ago--might have come to the Hebrew Bible, via Sumerian and other early sources first written perhaps 3,000 years earlier. There is a then a gap of perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 years, in which the story presumably would have been preserved by an oral tradition. But again there is no evidence. There is no more reason to [End Page...