Off Turkey's coast, the man who found the Titanic has found what some say could be a link to the story of Noah.

Explorers said yesterday that they had discovered signs of human habitation hundreds of feet below the Black Sea, providing new evidence of a 7,000-year-old catastrophic flood that some scientists say could be link to the biblical story of Noah.

Robert Ballard, famous for discovering the wreck of the Titanic, said his expedition had found rectangular foundations for two Sone Age structures along an ancient riverbed that once had been rolling countryside.

"To go into a large region and find where people had been living and had to abandon it, leave rapidly or drowned... and no one has been there since is very rare in the archaeological word," Ballard said by satellite phone from his research ship.

The team's chief archaeologist, Fredrik Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, described the find, about 12 miles off the coast of Turkey in 311 feet of water, as the "Pompeii of landscapes."

"This is a major discovery that will befin to rewrite the history of cultures in this key area between Europe, Asia and the ancient Middle East," he said.

Many ancient Middle Eastern cultures have legends of a great flood, including the Bible story of Noah. Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman speculated in their 1997 book, Noah's Flood, that when the European glaciers melted 7,00 year ago, the Mediterranean Sea overflowed into what was then a smaler freshwater lake to create the Black Sea.

The two geologists believe Noah's flood took place not in the Middle East, as might be assumed from reading the Bible, but in the area around the Black Sea. Their theory was based on their discovery of a drowned landscape as seen in seismic profiles and sediment cores.

Pitman said he had never been so excited in his life as he was wih the finding announced yesterday. Ballard, a National Geographic Society sexplorer-in-residence, was more cautous about linking in discoveries with the Bible. "That is not my expertise," he said. "We are gathering facts."

Ballard earlier had found indications of an ancient coastline miles out from the current Black Sea coast. He also had found two types of shells along the ancient coastline - saltwater shells dating back 6,500 years and freshwater species dating to 7,000 years or more. His new discovery provides evidence that people once lived in that now inundated region.

"So," he said yesterday, "we know that there was a suden and dramatic change from a freshwater lake to a saltwater sea 7,000 years ago. And we know that as a result of that flood a vast amount of land went underwater. And we now know that that land was inhabited. What we don't know is who these people are. We don't know how broad their settlements were... but we're expanding our studies to try to determine that," he said.

Ballard said his team, using remote-controled underwater vessels with cameras, located a former river valley beneath the sea and in that valley were two collapsed structures, including some preserved wooden beams that had been worked by hand.

Hiebert said they possibly were houses, and were "absolutely" man-made. The archaeologyist said his "jaw dropped" when he saw the first images of one of the structures. "It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life," he said. "To be almost out of sight of lan, and... se something familiar to a land archaeologist. To see fragments of wood is remarkable."

The artifacts were captured three days ago by sonar and on pictures taken by a roving vehicle called Argus that is about the size of a washing machine and attached by fiber-optic cable to the research ship.

One of the structure measures about 12 feet in width and is 45 feet long, with carved wooden beams, wooden branches and tools -- collapsed among the mud matrix. Ballard said nothing had been removed. The group is mapping the site and looking for the other structures.

"This is a work in progress," Ballard said. "It is critical to know the exact era of the people who lived there, and to that end we hope to recover artifacts and wood for carbon dating so we can figure out what sort of people lived there and the nature of their tools."

"It belongs to a separate Black Sea world," added Hiebert. "The quest is to discover who the people were."

The discovery occured within Turkey's coastal waters, and that country's Directorate of Monuments and Museums has a representative on the research vessel.

The expedition is sponsored by the National Geographic Society, which is planning a book and TV programs on Ballard's Black Sea research.



This article is from The Philadelphia Inquirer Wed, September 13,2000

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