In the shadow of Mount Ararat-before Abraham, before Gilgamesh-5,600 years ago, the Mediterranean surged north. A freshwater lake that had sat quietly for millennia suddenly became the Black Sea, rising seven feet a day. Villages vanished. Cattle drowned. Farmers fled with their seeds. The Ryan-Pitman hypothesis isn't fringe: it's pollen cores, drowned shorelines, freshwater snails locked under salt crust. This book follows that diaspora-how the flood didn't just wipe out a valley, it seeded the world's oldest myths. Sumer's ark. Noah's wine. The drowned gods of Anatolia. Step by step, we trace the escape routes: up the Danube, along the Dnieper, into the steppes. We see Gobekli Tepe's last hunters abandon their stones, maybe even build them as warnings. And when the waters settled? A genetic bottleneck-exactly where we find it. A linguistic echo-heaven-high floods in Proto-Indo-European. Even the Bible's cubits line up, once you convert. A cyclopean accumulation of sediment, satellite imagery, and stubborn hope. No sermons. Just maps, dates, and the quiet terror of realizing the flood wasn't myth-it was Monday morning for someone. If you ever wondered why so many cultures draw the same drowning dream, start here.
