Not just that. The Persian Gulf, in the heart of the cradle of civilization, is an average of 50m deep, never more than 90m. That's 250,000 square km of prime real estate (a river valley fed by the same rivers that would eventually produce Sumeria) that would have been well above the water line when civilization was just getting started. No wonder every culture has a flood myth.

How quickly did coastal areas get reclaimed by the seas? If it happened over centuries then it’s a slow creep and hardly a flood, though given geography, it’s likely some areas got reclaimed at accelerated rates. In any event we’d need some evidence before accepting that this was the genesis of the myths.

It seems like somewhere between 1m-5m per century depending on time and place[1]. At 5m that would be noticeable in a lifetime in a coastal estuary, you would see dwellings from your childhood swallowed by the sea by middle age. Interestingly, Sumerian myths said that the Akkadians arrived from the sea and brought with them the knowledge of city building. Certainly begs some interesting questions.

[1]https://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-level-rise-end-last-ice-ag...

We need to know how people settled. Was it permanent dwellings, limited-lifespan dwellings (wattle/reed), seasonal dwellings, or nomadic dwellings. If people kind of moved from season to season, or as local resources get depleted, then water creeping up is kind of just accepted as "they way things happen." If it was settled for hundreds of years and then water crept up, sure, I can see that being considered a flood if it happened quickly enough.

I guess we may have to live with guesswork as I doubt we'll have convincing answers.

You need to adjust your timescales. "Settled for hundreds of years"? No. Settled for tens of thousands of years. In many places the shoreline moved three feet per year, when water was rising fastest; the beach one played at as a child was wholly gone by adulthood. The grandparents' ancestral shoreside village was underwater.

People could not just move inland; other people already lived there. Australians still keep careful oral records of negotiated resolutions of conflicts over living space when Sahel, between Australia and New Guinea, was inundated.

Between where Indonesian islands are now, and for hundreds of miles off the coast of Viet Nam all the way to Korea, were millions of square miles of prime habitat ("Sundaland"), also for tens of thousands of years. Every tribe there had to find somewhere else to live.

We don't exactly know the carrying capacity/density of those populations and their territorial needs. We don't know if they were nomadic or not, if they seasonally moved. did they live in permanent places or did they move as resources depleted... did they rely of marine life, wildlife, proto-agriculture, foraging, hunting, etc.

We can't presume people lived "there" if we don't know much of the above.

Which is more likely: millions of square miles of river valley forest and savanna, inhabited? Or meticulously avoided?

Nomadic people have very rarely ranged over more than a few hundred miles. We have here thousands of miles. There is room for every variation you can imagine, and even more you can't.

Rather, there was.

That’s hardly a flood though. A flood is the village disappearing in day or two. Disappearing in a decade or two? I’m not sure what I would call that, but definitely not a flood.

It's not necessarily a binary thing. You can have gradual sea level rise punctuated with rapid inundation events.

This is exactly what happened in the British Isles when low lying Doggerland (between modern England and Denmark) was wiped out by a wave which was likely caused by an underwater landslide; that wave was in turn caused by the melting ice at the end of the ice age, which was otherwise causing gradual sea level increase.

True, but if you invented writing today and decided to record a 500 year old story, in that scenario are you really likely to be able to discern what the term flood meant back then, or if the word flood was even in the original story? Hundreds of years later people who weren't there are going to get lazy with the details.

I will be sure to relay your misgivings to the people displaced, once my time machine is ready. I will need to teach them English when I get there/then, so I can explain your careful distinction between a flood and ... what, an inundation? You didn't say.

I harbor doubts about their receptivity to the correction.

There are zillions of flood myths. More of them are cataclysmic like Noah and his ark, than gradual over a generation like The Pretenders' My City Was Gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths

Having an ocean on top of an archaeological site does make it tricky to investigate.

I think it’s interesting that there could be amazingly preserved human settlements, and maybe even human remains, in the depth of the Black Sea. It’s an oxygen deprived environment below a certain depth, meaning things could be fairly well preserved. For example:

https://news.mit.edu/2000/blacksea-0920

> If it happened over centuries then it’s a slow creep and hardly a flood

They probably flooded increasingly regularly before being abandoned and eventually subsumed, no unlike Venice today. Some could have been much quicker though, there are fault lines through the region though, so it's entirely possible a small tsunamis could have knocked out villages that sea level rise made vulnerable.

It depends. It was not something that happened at a fixed rate. There were periods steady rise between 1 and 2.5m per century... but then you had events like the sudden flooding of the Black Sea area from the Med, or the Tsunami which finished off Doggerland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland#Disappearance - both of these events would have had human victims, and survivors, and must have been absolutely terrifying.

There wasn't exactly a lot of news that went around back then I imagine.

That claim struck me as extraordinary, but sure enough: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_sea_level

Not sure there were that many coastal settlements in the first place. Ultimately you need access to drinking water and being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea.

Thats why those settlements are usually all located on a river that goes into the the sea.

(but for actual drinking water, smaller springs are preferrerd and can be found almost everywhere, except the dessert, too)

So you have drinking water - and can do extensive fishing, in the river as well in the sea - and in the very fish rich area in between.

Also with a river you can more easily connect inland.

(have you never played civilisation?)

> being next to a river is much better than being next to the sea.

You can be next to both.

Coastal settlements provide excellent food sources, and greatly limits various health issues (lack of salt, iodine, …). Consuming fish blood would also help, it’s going to be much closer to isotonic than seawater.

Depending on land structures, coastal settlements would also often benefit from much higher precipitation rates, providing freshwater. That’s essentially the story of Polynesian settlements, islands would be settled if they either had natural springs or enough precipitations.

A story about similar, for those who haven't seen it: https://xkcd.com/1190/

The North Sea was Doggerland 8500 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland

You could walk from the Netherlands to Britain.

Before that, the Mediterranean Sea was a dry depression. When the Atlantic barrier collapsed, you can imagine the wall of water filling the basin and chasing early humans uphill.

The Mediterranean has been full throughout human prehistory.

Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive.

We know there was a cataclysmic meteor strike toward the west end of the Persian Gulf, well after it had filled in.

> Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive.

Evidence of catastrophic flooding is debated and inconclusive.

That the black sea’s level used to be much lower is not, all water levels were much lower at the glacial maximum, and gradually rose as the ice age ended, nearing stable historical sea levels around 7.5kya (5500 bce).

I am corrected: Yes,the Black Sea level was much lower, and rose. But how quickly? E.g., if the Bosporus was blocked, and later broke, the water could rise very quickly, over weeks, not years. It could fall, instead, if the sea had filled in, and then suddenly drained by a similar process.

But the subject is complicated by the unknown inflow from rivers, and from meltwater of retreating glacier.

Hydrology is complicated.

The Zanclean Flood (refilling of the Mediterranean) happened about 5 million years ago. That predates not only Homo sapiens sapiens, nor the Homo genus itself, but even Australopithecus itself.