Possible Influences of the Black Sea Flood on the Formation of the Vinča Culture

Bogdan Brukner (Serbia)

Abstract

In their 1998 volume Noah’s Flood, Ryan and Pitman presented their hypothesis of a catastrophic flooding of the Black Sea at c. 5600 BC that may have influenced the development of the Vinča culture. Their revised date of approximately 6700 BC, more than a millennium before the earliest appearance of Vinča settlements, makes a contemporary cause and effect relationship impossible. Nevertheless, this paper discusses the possible influence of climate change on Neolithic cultural development in Southeast Europe, Anatolia, and the region of the Black Sea. Oscillations in environmental temperatures and the relative rising and falling of the Black Sea level appear to have had an affect on the development and extinction of cultures in the region.