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Summary: Adds Vital Understandings To Indo-European Cultures
Review: For a long time now, linguistics has recognized that languages throughout a broad region of the world, from India through Western Europe, all shared a common root language. What was missing was a decent explanation for how this commonality came about.Ryan & Pitman begin decades ago with a friend's suggestion that there might be an actual cataclysmic event behind the story of Noah's flood. No event known at that time seemed to fit the known facts. The first two-thirds of this book relates their story of how decades of seabed research by numerous scientists from several nations leads to the inescapable conclusion of just the right sort of cataclysmic flood of the Black Sea occurring about 7,500 years ago. In the final third of this book, Ryan & Pitman collect the work of a diverse group of scientists far outside of their own areas of specialization. Taken together, the body of work summarized by Ryan & Pitman provides a convincing first theory of how the population dispersal caused by this flood could have led to the broad distribution of various common cultural elements, like the Indo-European language group, styles of pottery, methods of farming, and so forth. Ryan & Pitman clearly indicate that this last third of their book is collected from the works of other scientists. Accordingly, it is totally unfair to criticize this part of their book as either "outside of their areas of expertise" or even "totally lacking in any scientific foundation." The scientists whose work is presented in this last third of this book are all well-respected experts in their own specialties. If further support is required for the theories presented in this part, an inquiring mind should look to the works of those clearly-identified scientists whose works are summarized by Ryan & Pitman. In future times, anybody wondering just how we got to be who we are today will be forced to take into account the Great Black Sea Flood. It clearly had an incalculable effect on the development of nankind. Ryan & Pitman are to be commended for their discovery and their overview of its probable impact. I'm sure future scientists will find Black Sea flood-related research to be a fertile ground for seeking even more insights as to exactly who we are and how we got to be here.
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Summary: Authors Veered off Course
Review: If only the authors of Noah's Flood had stuck to science, their area of expertise, and not veered off course into a quagmire of vague and unconvincing theories on population movements, the roots of modern agriculture, etymology and oral history, this might have been a superb book. Instead, the real promise of the first half of Noah's Flood is undermined by a string of weak arguments and infuriating and unnecessary repetition later on. The chapters that build the case for a sudden flooding of the Black Sea in 5,600 B.C. are fascinating. Ryan and Pitman excel at synthesizing the history of biblical archaelogy with geology in gripping paragraphs that recreate the excitement of the early digs in Mesopotamia as well as their own experiences drilling the Mediterranean and Black Sea floors in search of flood records. Their attempt to link the solid base of geological evidence they build early on with passages from the Bible and other ancient texts is poorly executed and vain. Just proving the existence of a Black Sea flood and exploring the potential consequences of such as catastrophe would have been enough. Unfortunately, the authors go the extra mile and craft a total history of the event predicated on the shaky hypothesis that it formed the basis for the creation tales in Genesis and the Gilgamesh epic. A further disappointment is the editing in the latter chapters. Here the reader gets bogged down by the repetition of earlier references to glacial history and mind-numbing facts like how fast the Black Sea rose during the flood. Noah's Flood also could have benefitted from a fuller explanation of the complicated geology it delves into, complete with better charts and drawings, as well as footnotes at the bottom of the page. With the notes at the back, one is often left wondering how on earth Ryan and Pitman came to some of their bizarre conclusions.
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Summary: Excellent evidence for Noah's Flood
Review: Despite all of the flood stories in various cultures, many have denied the reality of Noah's flood. Here's the evidence. And contrary to popular belief, the Bible does NOT teach a global flood. This odd belief didn't become popular until the 1960s and doesn't fit with complete biblical study (i.e. the Bible says where the water came from and went, not enough for global flood; geography remained unchanged; "earth" can be translated as local area and "high mountains" as hills...). For more on the complete biblical agreement with a local flood, see "The Genesis Question" by Hugh Ross. Share these books with young-earth radicals.
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Summary: Misleading Notions About the Great Flood
Review: The authors would have you believe that the Great Flood was actually a rapid infilling of the Black Sea. Unfortunately, that will not wash (pardon the pun). The Bible unmistakeably teaches that the Flood was a global event. It covered all the mountains and drowned all humans and all land vertebrates except those on Noah's Ark. If you want to know how Noah's Ark REALLY worked, see Woodmorappe, John. 1996. Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study.
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Summary: Sensationalism instead of science
Review: William Ryan and Walter Pitman are senior scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. "Pitman is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and both authors have received the Shepard Medal for exemplary research in marine biology." However, this book is not about marine biology, but history and mythology. The main problem with this book is that the authors are clearly in over their heads. The title makes it clear that these geologists--who are otherwise quite reasonable scientists--are seeking to "prove" their pet theory. This, together with the fact that these earth scientists are attempting to address questions of history, mythology, and archaeology that are well beyond their areas of particular expertise, makes their science especially suspect. My principal problem with the book is that , but they never address the fundamental issue of how any useful information about a specific historical event can be transmitted orally across twenty five centuries in the context of small, politically decentralized Neolithic societies. If the Black Sea flood is the one recalled in Genesis, this means that the memory of this event was preserved for 2500 years before the appearance of any writing system and then another 2000 years before it was written down in Genesis. The probability that any story could last this long among human populations seems to me extremely small. Think about the oral transmission of information about the Trojan War, which probably occurred (in some form) in the 13th century BC and evolved into the story as recounted by Homer over a period of four centuries. Or the story of the Exodus, which mostly likely occurred (in some form) in the late 13th century BC but wasn't recorded in the Biblical account until the 10th century BC. Both of these stories were conserved in the context of semi-literate cultures that are likely to have had formal specialists in "remembering" and the composition of epic poems and sagas. Any story of a "flood" that occurred 7500 years ago would have had to be conserved for SIX TIMES as long as the Iliad or TEN TIMES as long as Exodus in the context of much simpler societies that had NO written records at all! For how many generations can an oral tradition be conserved among non-literate peoples? The author's failure to address this key problem makes Ryan, Pitman, and now explorer Robert Ballard's identification of "Noah's Flood" a major interpretive leap that smacks of pseudoscience. As an archaeologist, I've learned to be extremely skeptical about the claims of non-archaeologists about the human aspects of the ancient world. Another distinguished marine biologist who went off the deep end was Barry Fell, an expert on invertebrates at Harvard who abandoned all reason in his pursuit of "epigraphic" evidence for the presence of Celts, Phoenicians, Iberians, and other Old World explorers in the Americas. He treated as authentic dozens of objects that were widely recognized as fakes and hoaxes and promoted the worst kind of pseudoscience and pseudohistory. However, his popular book Saga America was identified as one of the best history books of 1976 and his writings have spun off a wide circle of disciples who continue to identify spurious runestones in Oklahoma and ancient naval academies in Arizona! Serious archaeologists consider Fell and his followers' claims as nonsensical as those of Creationists. I suspect the Genesis Flood theory will not hold up well to criticism. The story of the Black Sea's dramatic rising and the possibility of well-preserved, submerged Neolithic settlements is exciting enough without the investigators resorting to sensationalistic interpretations.
Rating: 
Summary: a good read
Review: Engaging account of an interesting scientific discovery.
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Summary: Noah, Move Over!
Review: What has fascinated me since childhood about the story of Noah's Ark is how similar it is to other (older) flood myths from the near east. A popular trend among Old Testament scholars has been to highlight the differences between the biblical account and earlier near eastern flood stories. (Yet, I would argue that while there are differences in the number of gods involved, the results for the human race were pretty much the same, regardless of the provocation). Ryan and Pitman do an outstanding job of gathering and presenting evidence from a number of scientific disciplines that bolsters the case for a major and memorable cataclysmic event in our distant past giving rise to the flood mythology in that part of the world. What I found particularly fascinating was their discussion of the origins of agriculture and its spread outward from the Black Sea region some 7,000 years ago. That the catastrophic Black Sea flood happened is now beyond question, and the fact that it happened at the dawn of human civilization would make it a ripe candidate for the origins mythology of any people. A fascinating and scholarly, yet very accessible, synthesis of science and cultural history. Highly recommended.
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Summary: A most meaningful explanation of the flood myth!
Review: Ryan and Pitman have, in my view, produced a truly stunning scientific understanding of the Black Sea flood that occurred around 5500 BCE, which became the basis of various flood myths such as Noah and his Ark. Truly worthwhile reading. Raja
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Summary: References to Anatolia
Review: Since I have lived in Turkey for the past 39 years, I found this book particularly interesting. I learned that there had been an ancient village at the foot of Hasan Dag which I have passed many times on my way to Ankara. Its destruction by a volcanic eruption as shown by a mural in the 9000 year old village of Çatal Höyük was new to me. The only thing that I noticed in the book that could be disgreed with was the spelling of Höyük (mound) as Hüyük. All in all there is so much interesting information in this book. It draws together so many scientific branches related to the study of ancient man--archaeology, genetics, languages, textiles, agriculture. Of course, we can't forget geology. It is a beautiful and fascinating book. I thank the authors for writing it.
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Summary: Good story; very weak illustrations.
Review: Naoh's Flood offers a well written personal account of how a group of oceanographers stumbled upon 'that kernal of truth' that underlies the biblical flood myth. The book's strength is its readability. For those readers who desire more critical presentations, you would do better to go to the scientific literature. I found the book very disappointing in several respects: 1) the quoted remarks, thirty years after the fact, seems a bit of a stretch; 2) the illustrations carry almost no information. The crude sketches could easily been replaced by cross section maps of the inlets to the Mediterranean and Black Seas.Bathymetry maps of the Black Sea would have also been nice; 3) There should have been much more discussion of the event leading to the desertification of the Mediterranean during the Miocene. Although published elsewhere (most of this story is), this is a story that is even more compelling. 4) There is absolutely no reason why this book should cost 25 dollars in hardback. The lack of color photographs should have made this book no more than 15 dollars.
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