The flood widely believed to be behind the Noah's Ark story is what kick-started European agriculture, according to British and Australian researchers.
The collapse of the North American Laurentide ice sheet 8,000 years ago caused global sea levels to rise by a dramatic 1.4 metres, the largest freshwater pulse of the past 100,000 years, the researchers said.
Researchers from the universities of Exeter and Wollongong reconstructed shorelines of the Mediterranean and Black seas and estimated that nearly 73,000 square kilometres of land were lost over a period of 34 years.
That forced the displacement of about 145,000 people, with migrants from southeast Europe — who had developed some farming techniques — forced to move west and spread their knowledge into hunter-gatherer communities.
"People living in what is now southeast Europe must have felt as though the whole world had flooded. This could well have been the origin of the Noah's Ark story," Chris Turney, a professor in the geology department of the University of Exeter, said in a release issued Sunday.
"Entire coastal communities must have been displaced, forcing people to migrate in their thousands. As these agricultural communities moved west, they would have taken farming with them across Europe. It was a revolutionary time."
The research, which was published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, said a ridge across the Bosporus Strait dammed the Mediterranean and kept the Black Sea as a freshwater lake.
The rising sea levels breached the ridge and caused the Black Sea to flood, which is the event widely believed to be behind the various folk myths that gave rise to the Noah's Ark story.
Archeological records also show that farming and pottery began to spread at about the same time, the researchers said.
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