And god said to Noah:

"For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the Earth, to destroy from under Heaven all flesh in which there is a breath of life. Everything that is on the Earth shall die."

One hundred and twenty five years ago, George Smith, a young assistant at the British Museum, was at work deciphering fragments of the ancient story of the epic of Gilgamesh. Late one night it suddenly dawned on him that in Tablet 11 of Gilgamesh he was reading the story of Noah in the Bible. This was an historic moment: he had discovered an earlier version of the story of the Great Flood. Legend has it that in a state of delirium George Smith tore off his clothes and danced round the museum. Could the accounts of Noah and Gilgamesh have been inspired by a real Great Flood?

Over 100 years later two geologists, Walter Pitman and Bill Ryan, are asking the same question.

WALTER PITMAN:

I think this story of the flood is fascinating. Because in its Biblical version and the flood myths of the Middle East it's a dividing line, a catastrophe in their history. And the question we ask as geologists is: could it have been an historical event?

PROF. JOHN DEWEY: (UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD):

Walter and Bill are world-class scientists, in the very best sense. And science is to a large extent, imagination:

what is possible; umm, having ideas and then trying to build models to test those ideas. And both are quite brilliant at it and have done it in quite different ways: Walter was in on the very early days of plate tectonics and developing magnetic profiles of the oceans. Bill is a much more eclectic man: he's interested in sea level, in sediments. He is a true dedicated scholar, but exceedingly absent-minded.

WALTER PITMAN:

John Dewey and Bill had been working together on the tectonic history of the Alpine belt--the area north of the Mediterranean, extending eastward. At the same time, Bill and his colleagues had discovered that - discovered what we call a Mycenaean crisis: they had discovered that the Mediterranean had become isolated and drawn down. Draw-..

BILL RYAN:

Dried out, Walter! Completely dried out.

WALTER PITMAN:

Dried out! Completely dried out. Except for some salty puddles--is that okay?

PROF. JOHN DEWEY: (UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD):

Bill had just discovered this quite brilliant idea of the great waterfall over Gibraltar refilling the Mediterranean geologically and virtually instantaneously, and it was a phenomenal shock to the system for many geologists.

And also, of course, we're also faintly cross, in the friendliest kind of way, with Bill for being-- yeah, I have to say it-- a space cadet! I mean, he'd wander off and do all kinds of scholarly things. Anyway, here we were sitting down, and - and.. And I remember - I remember quite distinctly saying: "Well, perhaps this - this er great waterfall in Gibraltar explains the Biblical flood." And I instantly realised that was a stupid remark--it was six million years too old! [laughs]

BILL RYAN:

I think it all started in sort of - in jest or.. I thought it was a joke! Er, that you would begin a scientific inquiry based on something that you'd read in the Bible or a term paper you'd written in prep school!

PROF. JOHN DEWEY: (UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD):

Yeah, okay, Bill! You've got that wonderful mechanism: use it - use it in some way.. Use it in some way to - to explain the Biblical flood legend.

WALTER PITMAN:

Very dangerous thing to do. We - it is..

BILL RYAN:

It is completely backwards!

WALTER PITMAN:

Yeah, it - it - it - er.. Normally in science you - you have data, a hypothesis which leads you to go to get more data, which leads you to - to revise the hypothesis. This, we're starting with a myth as a hypothesis, which is - would be considered outrageous procedure by many, many scientists.

Both Bill and I knew of the Gilgamesh epic. Er, we had learned of this in college. And so this triggered us to think that possibly there might have been a real flooding event.

NARRATION:

Bill and Walter felt confident going in search of the Great Flood, for a simple reason: Bill had found one before. The evidence of it is stored here, in the core repository of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

BILL RYAN:

Cores are the prime evidence. They are the minerals, the sand layers, the meat of the Earth's history.

When we were on the Globar Challenger in the Mediterranean in 1970, we had an enormous, serendipitous discovery. Drilling one night east of the island of Minorca...

BILL RYAN:

...the drill string began to bounce and chatter on the formation that was more than a mile beneath the ship. Eventually we got impatient. We pulled up a core, and when it arrived at the surface and was opened, it was composed of sodium chloride --salt. And this salt was from the deepest basins of the Mediterranean. It was evidence that the water had drawn down, had evaporated away out of the Mediterranean, laying bare the floor of the sea.

Even more exciting was how it refilled. This was a desert, and it became an ocean. And here is the flood horizon: more than a mile of salt water, pouring in in perhaps a century or two. Initially this idea was so preposterous that many of us could hardly believe it ourselves. But this is more than twenty-five years ago, and there've been a number of subsequent expeditions back to the Mediterranean. And today this is accepted as a real but rare event in the Earth's history.

NARRATION:

Huge field catastrophes have constantly gone in and out of fashion with geologists.

WALTER PITMAN:

Up until the 19th century there was a part of the geologic community who felt that their job was to go into the field and find evidence that would support the history as related in the Old Testament. order to explain what they saw, they invoked catastrophes.

JOHN DEWEY:

Then we got into, if you like, modern geology in the broadest sense, and people developed notions of a rather continuous, slow process: The sea comes in, the sea goes out very slowly, the mountains go up very slowly, the mountains erode very slowly. And we now know that to be really fairly incorrect on - on - on a variety of time-scales.

WALTER PITMAN:

Geologic thinking was very much anti-catastrophes--catastrophes didn't occur. And er yet here we are! Two scientists to actually use er a legend of a catastrophe, to go out and find a catastrophe. We decided we would accept the challenge. An ideal candidate would be one of these small, bottle-shaped basins with a narrow neck at the point where it - it empties into the ocean. And that we suppose that what had happened is that during the height of the last glaciation, when the sea level was down, this basin was isolated: that its barrier was above sea level, and that the basin dried out. As the ice melted and the sea level rose, it eventually got to the point where it flooded over the barrier and flooded out the basin.

BILL RYAN:

And we have three really good examples! We have a Persian Gulf, with a narrow neck, here, to the Arabian Sea. The problem was that it had an open channel, and so the water would simply have receded and then gradually returned. We looked then at the Red Sea, but its bottle-neck was too big! So we were finally left with the Black Sea. The Black Sea had the perfect bottle-neck: very narrow and very shallow. And there was no question but the Black Sea had been isolated from the Mediterranean during the last Ice Age.

NARRATION:

So Bill and Walter began to focus on the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, which is the bottle-neck through which any possible thrust would have pulled. Does the present day Bosphorus, with its strange system of currents, suggest any clues of a catastrophic past?

BILL RYAN:

Well, the principal current here in the Bosphorus flows from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean-- south. But there's a counter-current flowing in the opposite direction, into the Black Sea. This is the remnant of the flood. And we're going to go out and see if we can find it! Okay?

NARRATION:

If a counter-current can be found flowing into the Black Sea, could this be the first clue that Bill and Walter are on the right track? Might there still exist a trace of the flood?

BILL RYAN:

We have a basket here, in which we have placed stones. And we are going to lower this basket into the waters 'til it enters the counter-current that we believe exists beneath us. And notice: as the float goes in, it pulls away from us, heading magically up the Bosphorus to the Black Sea at probably a good mile or two an hour.

So what do you think?

WALTER PITMAN:

Ha! Fantastic! I couldn't believe it! I - I took a guess that you would have made it up to the end in less than a day.

BILL RYAN:

So no Doubting Thomases?

WALTER PITMAN:

No Doubting Thomas here! I'm going to buy you a beer tonight, then, Bill. Maybe several!

BILL RYAN:

Maybe several! Well, I'll drink any ones you buy me!

NARRATION:

The Black Sea is fed by fresh water from rivers, as well as salt water from the Mediterranean. This helps explain the Bosphorus currents and some of the other puzzling properties that began to fascinate Bill and Walter.

BILL RYAN:

The Black Sea is very deep, well over a mile deep. It's unique in all the world: for its huge layer of poison in its water.

WALTER PITMAN:

This layer of poison is caused by the fact that salt water flows on the bottom through the Bosphorus. And because the salt water is heavier than the fresh water, it settles in the bottom of the Black Sea. And it doesn't allow the Black Sea to breathe, which makes it literally poisonous.

WALTER PITMAN:

Perhaps this is the reason why the ancients called this the Sea of Death. The problem we now faced was obtaining the kind of data that would tell us whether the Black Sea was drawn down, and then how rapidly it was refilled, if it was refilled. And in fact the problem we had was trying to get any data about the Black Sea at all. It was obviously an area er of great military importance to the Russians, and so it was simply closed to the er - to the West!

DR. DAVID ROSS: (WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION):

The Black Sea! Er..! [LAUGHS] It's - it's - it's not dissimilar from what we have over my shoulder right now. I mean, it - it looks like it has this darkish quality to it. The Black Sea! It had - it - it - it's not the Caribbean, let's put it that way!

WALTER PITMAN:

Our colleague, Dave Ross from Woods Hole, was able to take a ship into the Black Sea and in effect open it up to the West. He obtained the first real data that we cold get our hands on that we could make use of.

DR. DAVID ROSS:

When we entered the Black Sea we had one of the four-engine bombers fly over us. It was immediate - just literally waiting for us. And the plane was a - it was a spectacular scene and - and I... as an American of the United States it was not the natural thing to see a foreign bomber fly over my head!

BILL RYAN:

Ross spent two months in the Black Sea and accomplished a survey, a remarkable survey, which allowed him to map the entire basin of the Black Sea.

DAVID ROSS:

We want to cover everything we can. We want to cover the sediments, we want to cover the structure, we want to cover the biology; get as much data as we can until we know - we start to find out what was interesting. As it turns out, looking at the cores and the sediments, it was quite easy to see that 25-30,000 years ago the Black Sea was a fresh water lake. And it wasn't until, oh, maybe about 9,000 years ago that we - we hypothesised then that with the rise in sea level, that the waters of the Mediterranean eventually started getting into the Black Sea.

NARRATION:

What interested Bill and Walter was how the Mediterranean came in. From all the data Dave Ross brought back, one clue caught their eye.

BILL RYAN:

Within a year of the return of his cruise he published his highlights in the journal Science, and with pictures of his cores and a remarkable graph that showed a very abrupt transition from fresh water to salt water. This was exactly what would be expected in the scenario of an ocean flooding an inland basin. The problem was that he in fact saw no flood.

NARRATION:

As the world sea level dropped, what he saw was a constant outflow of fresh water. With all the rivers feeding the Black Sea, how could it have drawn down enough to ensure a flood? When the two reconnected 9,000 years ago, Ross imagined not a catastrophe but a more gentle affair.

DR. DAVID ROSS:

What happened at that blue area there that was broached? Well, it was a narrow area of the Bosphorus. It was probably isolated--you might have been able to walk across it. That'd be my guess. And then eventually it became a trickle, and then it became a running river, then it became... a salt water river coming in.

BILL RYAN:

And so for a while we weren't really as thrilled as we should have been. And suddenly one day, on a gloomy March afternoon, a letter, a fax, is brought to my desk out of the blue from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences from a Dr. Petko Dimitrov:

"Dear Mr. Ryan and Mr. Pitman, I received a letter that informs about your intentions for proceeding in the Black Sea. I'd like to assure you...."

PROF. PETKO DIMITROV: (INSTITUTE OF OCEANOLOGY, VARNA): SUBTITLES (TRANSLATION OF LETTER):

I was doing some research in the Black Sea in the late Seventies. I found an old shoreline about 110 metres under the surface. Then I found evidence of ancient beaches. The old dune formations were extremely well-preserved. This proved that they had been covered suddenly by a huge volume of water. In other words, there had been a flood.

BILL RYAN:

Here is somebody I've never met, who has arrived at what looks to me an identical interpretation of a catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea. I rush the letter into Walter, we read it over and over again, and we're thrilled.

NARRATION:

It wasn't until six years later that Petko got the chance to visit his underwater beaches.

PETKO DIMITROV: SUBTITLES:

It was extraordinary. I was able to look at the seabed through the eyes of a geologist, and I saw the shoreline in a new light. It began to dawn on me that there was a good chance that people once walked along these old beaches. My colleagues looked at me in disbelief. They put it down to my excessive imagination. [LAUGHS]

WALTER PITMAN:

Er, he sent us a lot of data. Picked shells from his beaches, er did radio carbon-dating on these shells. And he was able to show that sea level had risen from something in the order of 100 metres below present up to about 45 metres, all in one whoosh! at about 9,750 years ago. And he had a lot of data. And so we had a flood. And er it was really very, very, very exciting.

PROF. PETKO DIMITROV: SUBTITLES:

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there are dreamers like me in other parts of the world.

NARRATION:

With evidence now building to support Bill and Walter's hypothesis, the question remained: if there was a flood in the Black Sea, could the account in Gilgamesh possibly be a memory of this catastrophe? In the story, the legendary King Gilgamesh sets out on a long and arduous journey to find everlasting life. He goes in search of Upnapishtim, the only human immortal and the sole survivor of the Great Flood.

STEPHANIE DALLEY (UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD):

The epic of Gilgamesh does inspire people. They become very emotionally involved when they're reading it. And I can quite believe that Ryan and Pitman, having found an inspiring myth which uses the flood, would have felt impelled towards an explanation that connected the two.

WALTER PITMAN:

Traditionally it's been thought that when Gilgamesh made his journey in search of Upnapishtim he went to the Persian Gulf. But the actual description of his trip says otherwise.

WALTER PITMAN:

Er, it is said that he set out in the direction of the setting sun, which means he went westerly, north- west; and eventually he came to the Sea of Death--

WALTER PITMAN:

--a perfect description of the anoxic condition of the Black Sea.

STEPHANIE DALLEY:

We can't say which direction he's travelling in. We are beyond the regions of the known world. He goes through a tunnel of darkness, he comes to a garden full of jewels, he is in magic land.

NARRATION:

However, there was another parallel that struck Bill and Walter.

BILL RYAN:

No sooner is Gilgamesh told that no one has ever crossed the Sea of Death than he's introduced to a ferryman. And then he discovers that the ferryman has this unique means of propulsion: stone things...

BILL RYAN:

...in urnunu snakes! And the scholars have been puzzled: what does this mean? But to - to an oceanographer it's nothing but a basket of stones --the rope, the hemp, the urnunu--that's been lowered into the undercurrent of the Bosphorus for millennia...

BILL RYAN:

...to navigate this unique sea-way in the world! And it can be no other strait in the world but the Bosphorus.

STEPHANIE DALLEY:

I think that the stone things are a case of special pleading: there is nothing to tell us what the things of stone are. We don't know if they're little amulets, for instance: perhaps it's some way of warding off the danger of the water--we don't know! We don't know if they're enormous, we don't know if they're tiny, we don't know if they're medium-sized.

INTERVIEWER:

But umm isn't this at least a suggestion or an interpretation that's worth considering?

STEPHANIE DALLEY:

Well, I don't think it is, no! [LAUGHS]

NARRATION:

Perhaps Bill and Walter have jumped the gun. Their take on Gilgamesh is one thing; but from other quarters there is doubt as to whether their flood could ever have happened.

In the Crimea, Russian scientists have discovered similar sunken beaches to Petko's, but they have a very different interpretation of what happened in the Black Sea.

DR. PAVEL DOLUKHANOV: (UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE):

According to the Russian model, the Black Sea level was at its lowest at around 20,000 years before present. At that time the Black Sea turned into a fresh water lake. And the level of this lake started to rise gradually, due to the influx of melted water from the North, until between 9-8,000 years the linkage was established and the salt water from the Mediterranean started to penetrate into the Black Sea. Then the two seas together started to rise at around 6,000 years before present. I am not convinced that it was a flood.

WALTER PITMAN:

The Russian model really bothered both Bill and I for quite a long time: one reason, obviously, being that they had access to such a large amount of data.

INTERVIEWER:

Still worries you?

WALTER PITMAN:

Every once in a while - not that often! [LAUGHS]

JOHN DEWEY:

Walter is a uni-directional man: he will - he will go down a line of reasoning until he's absolutely certain he's got that line of reasoning. He won't be distracted--Walter is undistractable. Whereas Bill umm will try to pull in lots and lots of things simultaneously--he's a tremendous lateral thinker, he'll ooze back and forth. And those two working together is brilliant, because Walter basically keeps Bill on track.

DR. CELAL SENGOR ISTANBUL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY):

"Well, this is the entrance to the Bosphorus. And you see the Golden Horn there and the Bosphorus here. And behind the three is my city!"

WALTER PITMAN:

"You call this a city?!"

CELAL SENGOR:

"Well, it really is a megapolis. It's an independent country in a country."

NARRATION:

Walter made a number of trips to Istanbul on other plate tectonics projects, and began to lean on friends and colleagues, like Celal Sengor, to get a better picture of the Bosphorus which might hold the key.

CELAL SENGOR:

"I mean, this is a youthful river valley! (Yeah!): Perhaps attenuated by the flood!"

WALTER PITMAN:

"I think probably. I'm quite sure! (Yeah!):

I was able to get a brief look at data obtained by the Turkish Navy all along the Bosphorus. And what I was able to see was that the depth to the hard rock below the sediment was 80 metres at a minimum and in many places over 100 metres. And what it indicated to me was that this groove, this channel, had to have been cut by a rush of fast-moving water.

DR. CELAL SENGOR:

We were sitting on the terrace of my house, and Walter had taken his traditional resting position, which is almost fully reclined, propped up by pillows. And he says: "Where can I get a piece of paper?"--which means: "Get me a piece of paper." And I rushed up to my study, got a piece of paper to Walter, and he sat down--he was having a beer, I was sitting next to him, and he was looking around, making comments about the current of the Bosphorus, the flow, and the ships passing by.

And suddenly his comments ceased and the - you can hear the scratch of the pen on the paper - and he says, "My god!" I said, "What's happened, Walter?"

And I - I thought something serious had happened. "I just calculated the flow velocity," he said. And I said, "What is it?"

"It's 80 kilometres per hour--more like 100." And he suddenly gets up from his propped-up, you know, the propped-up chair, chaise longue, and he points his finger and says, "Celal," he said, "Imagine this bloody thing flowing at 100 kilometres per hour and shooting out the other end of the Bosphorus!"

And I said: "Jesus, that's tremendous!" And Walter said, "Yeah! The people in the Crimea would have thought that too, because they heard it!"

NARRATION:

Armed with Walter's rough calculation, they started wondering how big the flood was. The answer lay among the coral reefs of Barbados.

BILL RYAN:

A colleague of ours here at Columbia, Rick Fairbanks, has drilled the corals of Barbados. And he has subjected dozens of samples to precision radio carbon-dating. And from that he has reconstructed a curve showing the rise of global sea level from 20,000 years ago to the present. So if we take the beach sample of Petko's at 100 metres--and here is the level of the world ocean at the same time, at about 40 metres: that gives a magnitude of a flood of 60 metres. And therefore we have a phenomenal waterfall.

NARRATION:

The hypothesis was now complete. All they had to do was prove it. And for this they needed an expedition. In 1993 an opportunity came out of the blue, when Bill and Walter were invited to join a Russian vessel tracking radiation levels in the Black Sea, following Chernobyl.

BILL RYAN:

I had made arrangements prior to the invitation to supervise an undergraduate student to spend six weeks here at the lab doing research. And so I presented to her the possibility of this marvellous trip to Russia.

CANDACE MAJOR: (LAMONT DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY):

I didn't know too much about the flood idea before I got here. I had spoken to Bill on the phone once or twice: he had described the basic idea. But I had never met either one of them before I arrived at Lamont, which was only five days before we left for Russia.

BILL RYAN:

She didn't hesitate one nano-second, whereas Walter had to be literally dragged on the ship [WALTER LAUGHS] screaming! And it wasn't until the last four days that he bothered to get a ticket!

WALTER PITMAN:

I knew that Russia was a very depressed place. I just thought that - that their equipment and er their ships would be in such terrible shape that we might not get anything out of this at all-- we'd spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time, er, and that nothing useful could - would come out of it. And I was absolutely, totally wrong! I was 180o [LAUGHS] in error! [LAUGHS] From the very beginning!

We were very fortunate in being given a loan of some of the most sophisticated seismic profiling equipment that could - we could possibly bring to bear on the problem, capable of obtaining profiles of the sedimentary structure in very shallow water. And this is exactly what we needed if we were going to look for this buried flood surface. We had a bit of a job getting it down to Galenjik, and our truck was shot at three times by - presumably by Russian pirates! And then er once we'd got it on the ship, there was a bit of a problem in rigging this equipment.

In fact, at one point I was standing out on deck looking at the equipment I had: 'How am I going to get this equipment over the side?' And all of a sudden up on the deck came this very stocky, steel-eyed, grey-haired man who was the chief mechanic of this ship, and I explained to him what I wanted to do, and he just looked at me with his clear blue eyes and said, "No problem." And that was it! [LAUGHS]

NARRATION:

The seismic profiler bounces soundwaves down to the sea-bed and beyond, to give millimetre- accurate cross-sections of the layers and deposits built up over time.

WALTER PITMAN:

Well, from the moment we put the equipment over the side, it operated beautifully. The Russians were absolutely amazed. They sort of tried to push me away, to be able to sit in front of the equipment and watch it! They - they would stay up all night watching this data come in. I must say, I was astonished too: I hadn't really seen any equipment this sophisticated, either.

NARRATION:

Once the seismic profiling was under way, coring of the ocean's sea-bed began. When the cores were hauled back on board and analysed, the results were promising.

CANDACE MAJOR:

We saw several different kinds of sediments. But overall, you could separate them into a very organic kind of slimy mud that was the holocene or the recent mud, the post-flood mud. And the pre- flood mud--which was dry, umm very - well, I have some of it here! [LAUGHS] It's big, chunky stuff.

So what we could tell was that there were some marine muds and fresh water muds--with a very abrupt transition between the two.

BILL RYAN:

We knew there was a story, but it still remained to us to decipher, well, what was the story? And with a pair of tweezers we poked in around the mud and there were these beautifully intact molluscs. And the first one pulled out with the tweezers, both valves were still in place, just the way it had been the day it died. And it was this immigrant from the Mediterranean.

NARRATION:

Once he could get a look in, Walter started making sense of all the seismic data.

WALTER PITMAN:

We can see a truncated set of layers - layers that have been chopped off. And we can see that they've been eroded right off along this surface, right out over the shelf edge. That could only have been done if it were exposed to the rain, wind and so forth. And then what we see over this surface is a drape of a couple of metres of very fine marine muds. And the - the thickness of this drape is uniform all the way up along this surface: that proves that this surface was exposed and that the sea came up extremely rapidly and covered this entire surface. 'Cos that's the only way you would get this little drape of very fine mud uniform over the entire surface.

CANDACE MAJOR:

I said, "Bill, I found some - these little sand layers and cracks in the core. And he said, "Oh, great!", came down and he looked at them. He says, "Great!" You know? And you could tell that that was it! Desiccation cracks!

BILL RYAN:

And it was a stiff, hard clay! Baked in the sun, desiccated. Clearly a land surface. Breaking it open with our hands, we could see immediately the roots still in place of shrubs and plants, and we knew we were on a - on a flood plain or the margins of a - in a very arid, semi-desert region.

WALTER PITMAN:

This wasn't one of these breakthroughs in which you all of a sudden realise that you're right; it was a slow realisation, er day after day, that you er - you're feeling better and better and better and better about the idea, and doing a lot of smiling and not a lot of sleeping, you know! [LAUGHS]

BILL RYAN:

It was as if your most perfect production has appeared in front of your eyes! And - and - and this never - this never quite ever happens so perfectly and then reinforced day after day!

CANDACE MAJOR:

You could just see the expressions on their face, like this - this moment of epiphany! Like it all fit together.

WALTER PITMAN:

Eventually we were able to ship off a number of samples for carbon 14 dating. And we fully expected no difficulties at all, things had been going so smoothly. Er, but the data had some surprises for us still.

NARRATION:

They sent their samples off for precise dating to the lab at Wood's Hole set up by Glenn Jones. They expected confirmation of Petko's flood date at just over 9,000 years ago.

BILL RYAN:

Glenn was eager to do the dates, because he was a Black Sea expert. But the results didn't come and didn't come and didn't come. And I had agreed with Glenn to give a lecture at Wood's Hole and explain what we had been - had been up to. Finally came down to the week before the lecture, and I called Glenn: he assured me that the numbers would be in, he'd give them to me the morning of the lecture. And I arrive, and no numbers--the samples are still being prepared there.

DR. GLENN JONES: (TEXAS INSTITUTE OF OCEANOGRAPHY):

And he sort of jumped the gun and actually planned to give a talk at Wood's Hole--which he did. Er, we did not have the results ready at the time. So that what he had to do during his presentation was make a prediction as to what he thought the results would be.

BILL RYAN:

And then in front of this distinguished audience at Wood's Hole of Black Sea experts I make a prediction: that if there was a flood, then all the ages of the first mud to appear on the shelf at all the depths--from the deepest depths, up to the shallowest depths--should be exactly the same age.

GLENN JONES:

His prediction was that the ages would be in the mid 9,000--about 9,000 or 9,200. The major surprise was that the results did not come out what anyone would have expected.

BILL RYAN:

The phone rings. Pick up the phone and it's Glenn Jones on the other end, and he's chuckling. I say, "Glenn, what's the problem?" And he says, "Have you tricked me?" I say, "What do you mean, have I tricked you?" He said, "Have you sent me er shells all from the same sample?" I said, "Course not! What - what - what's the problem?" He said, "Well, the date's are exactly all the same, just as you predicted in your lecture." So I'm thrilled. Then he gives me the age: 7,540 years ago. It's not what I was expecting.

DR. GLENN JONES:

Both of us were very confused, and sent several letters and e-mails back and forth as to what was going on. And we went back and forth, redated things, and they all came out the same.

BILL RYAN:

This date, 7,550 years ago, was exactly the date that he had got from all his cores of the onset of the - beginning of a poisonous layer in the Black Sea. And this meant that when the salt water rushed in through the Bosphorus and flooded the shelves, it stopped the breathing of the Black Sea.

GLENN JONES:

It's pretty amazing to think of raising an entire ocean basin 140 metres in certainly under thirty years. Er, what that means globally, if you actually calculate how much water went into the Black Sea from the rest of the world's oceans, it lowered the world's oceans by about one foot.

BILL RYAN:

So if we take our radio carbon date and we put it in the context of human history, it's essentially consequence to their culture.

BILL RYAN:

This is how it all began! Imagine: back then, people wandering along the shore of the Black Sea lake, and stumbling upon a brand new waterfall. And in the course of visiting the waterfall, they go up to it and refresh themselves with a sip of nice cold water, and to their surprise it's salty. And when they return, they discover that the waterfall's gotten a little bit bigger..and next season bigger still, and next year even bigger still. They go fishing up there, so they know beyond the rocks there's a sea. And it doesn't take long to know that something is happening, and this is the warning.

WALTER PITMAN: This is a lot of water. But the water flowed through the Bosphorus at the time of the flood was a thousand times greater than what you're seeing flow over Niagara.

INTERVIEWER: How do you know?

WALTER PITMAN: I calculated it! [LAUGHS] How - how do I know! [LAUGHS] What do you mean, how do I know?! [LAUGHS] I calculated how much water is flowing over Niagara and flowed through the Bosphorus.

GILGAMESH READING (WOMAN'S VOICE): Like a battle force, the destructive flood weapon passed over the people. No man could see his fellow, nor could people be distinguished from the sky. Even the gods were afraid of the flood weapon.

BILL RYAN: The type of flood that we've found in the Black Sea has remarkable parallels in the Gilgamesh epic. In fact, the very word they use for `flood' --`abubu'--when seen in different contexts, talks to an orifice or a waterfall... a projectile... a roar that comes out of an orifice, out of the throat of a monster.

WALTER PITMAN: When the Bosphorus broke through, the level of the Black Sea began to rise anywhere from 15 to 30 centimetres a day. This water would have rushed up the rivers, and people would have had to flee upstream at least a kilometre a day. Just imagine having to move your family, your entire village, your possessions, one kilometre every day, day after day, for 100 to 200 days, and in the meantime you have to find enough food to feed them and take care of them. It would have been terrifying.

NARRATION: Thinking about the human effects of the flood has taken Bill and Walter for the first time into the murky waters of archaeology, where they were in for a few surprises.

DR. DOUGLASS BAILEY: (UNIVERSITY OF WALES, CARDIFF): I would not want to look for an immediate change for some sort of ecological event like a flood. It's not as if you've got Charlton Heston grabbing a potful of grain, jumping on his chariot, and cruising across the plane with the waves lapping at his wheels. It just didn't happen that way.

PROF. DAVID HARRIS: (INST. OF ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIV. COLLEGE LONDON): And even though it were an enormous flood, I think the impact might have been relatively slight. The point I would emphasise is that these hunter-gatherer people were accustomed to moving around in the landscape. And it might have been certainly a very unusual, almost a catastrophic event; but not, I think, one that would change their lifestyle.

WALTER PITMAN: We have presented the flood to a number of archaeologists, and we've had a - I would call it a lukewarm [LAUGHS] response! Er, but the geologic data in support of the flood is now so overwhelming that we could say that the occurrence of a flood is an ugly fact. And it - it's something that the archaeologists are - are going to have to deal with er in one way or another!

Location: Piermont Marsh, New York State

BILL RYAN: Here in the Piermont Marsh is where I come when I want to imagine what it'd be like to live on a shore of the Black Sea lake as it draws down under the powerful evaporation of the sun. And I put myself in a framework of our ancestors, hunters and gatherers, coming to this oasis at a time when the climate is very arid. In my mind, it's a natural laboratory, because the receding shoreline of the Black Sea would give you a new virgin field for planting, year after year, a field a year. The falling of the lake would also divert the course of the channel, and the different migrations of the channels would be an observed natural irrigation. And right after the flood, irrigation appears for the first time in Mesopotamia! We wonder if the people from the Black Sea took it with them. Because the flood plain in Mesopotamia could only be established with irrigation technology. And with irrigation, civilisation follows.

DAVID HARRIS: Well, I have to say that I think we are really moving into fantasy land now. The key thing about irrigation is that you take water from somewhere, you bring it by some means--canals, it may be, or small little ditches--and you put it on land that is dry. Now, that is the kind of irrigation that developed in Mesopotamia. And I see no connection, functionally or [LAUGHS] archaeologically, between what may have happened around the shrinking fresh water lake in the Black Sea basin and what was happening on the alluvium of Mesopotamia.

BILL RYAN: It's been our experience, talking to the archaeologists, that they're intrigued by the flood: they're intrigued by its possibility of affecting humans, and yet they'd like to see it happen in someone else's patch - out of their patch.

DOUGLASS BAILEY: My initial reaction to the flood hypothesis was of real, extreme wariness. But the more I thought about it, it started to become clear to me they might have stumbled on something extremely important, but perhaps not for the reasons they thought.

NARRATION: Douglass Bailey is the first archaeologist to think seriously about the possible effects of Bill and Walter's flood.

DOUGLASS BAILEY: What they have discovered is a very exciting starting point for a dramatic period of change in south-eastern Europe that culminated in the copper age. And the importance of the copper age in a context of European prehistory is great. Because this is the first real emergence of elites, of people controlling other people, exploiting them for their labour, for their time, for their resources. It's a period of symbolism.

They made models of important people in this society: portraits which would have related the identity, the prestige of that individual. Symbols of power, power over other individuals. Social politics in prehistory--this is where is starts.

NARRATION: So after the flood where did the refugees go?

DOUGLASS BAILEY: People who came from the Black Sea coast after the inundation probably would have come to a place like this: a small river flood plain with forests around it. Now, this resource zone is extremely different from the Black Sea coast. So you couldn't use the same knowledge, the same technology to live here as you could have used on the coast--it wouldn't have worked. So what would have happened is that probably over many years--perhaps 400, 500 years-- they would have come to rely on wheat agriculture. Wheat agriculture locks them into this place for permanent settlement. What you have, then, is the accumulation of successive building horizons one on top of the other. And this forms a tell.

DOUGLASS BAILEY: After about 5,000 BC, from 15-100 kilometres and further inland from the new Black Sea coast, these sights are popping up everywhere. That's incredible! That's 10 metres of people living here: that must be hundreds and hundreds of years of people settled in this place. It just defines the period so exactly.

Previously there's been no satisfactory explanation for why these developments, why this explosion of symbolism, why the settled life. And what Ryan and Pitman might have stumbled upon is actually the original cause of these events.

GILGAMESH READING (WOMAN'S VOICE): Let the igigi listen to this song, and let them record your greatness. I shall sing of the flood to all people. Listen.

BILL RYAN: At the end of our search for the flood, we find that our detective work is still incomplete. The people who remembered this event and immortalised it in myth settled in the south, on the flood plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. And yet the strongest evidence for a human migration out of the Black Sea at the time of the flood is for people who went north into Europe.

DR. STEPHANIE DALLEY: If the flood in the Black Sea were a little closer to Mesopotamia--both geographically and in time--if we didn't have a gap of 2,500 years or so to deal with, I think it would be well worth looking for traces of it. If it was a contemporary event with the putative time of Gilgamesh, okay, go and look for it. But the difficulties are too great with this connection that we have here.

PROF. JOHN DEWEY: I can see no flaws in the basic logical reasoning of what they say. The geology is very clear. The flooding of the Black Sea, the rise, in the lateral flood over the Danube delta, that seems to me irrevocable. The real question is: does it explain the Biblical flood, or is it some other phenomenon?

BILL RYAN: This is beautiful! But I wish this was a research ship and we could go there right now and start looking for those ancient civilisations.

WALTER PITMAN: But we can get a Turkish navy ship - and that - I mean, that's quite certain, they promised us that.

BILL RYAN: Well, there's a NATO ship scheduled to come in next year. (Really?): Beautifully equipped new ship.

WALTER PITMAN: Yeah. They have the right kind of sonic equipment?

BILL RYAN: A beautiful (swarf?): mapping, sonar energy, pools...

WALTER PITMAN: If we prove it, we can say it's game, set, match, right?! [LAUGHS]

Narrator RAY BROOKS Reader JILL BALCON Horizon wishes to thank LAMONT DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY US OCEAN DRILLING PROJECT SIMRAD LTD HYDROBOND ENGINEERING LTD. Photography JOHN GOODYER Sound ANTHONY WORNUM RON KEIGHTLEY Dubbing Mixer DAVID WOOLLEY Graphics ALAN JEAPES Videotape Editor MARK TUFFNELL Horizon Unit Manager SHIRLEY ESCOTT Production Manager GORDON BASKERVILLE Executive Producer DAVID COLLISON Film Editor AMANDA BAXTER Associate Producer ANTONIA BENEDEK

Directed & Produced by RICHARD CURSON SMITH

A THIRD EYE PRODUCTION for BBC TV / A&E Network

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