Black Sea anomalies?

[Beagle]

A bit off topic I suppose, (about as far as the Serbian vincan settlement from the Black Sea,) I am a bit intrigued by the discussion of 6000+ year old metallugy using what seems to a be fairly sophisticated furnace. Very interesting stuff for me.

IMO the use study of the evolution of metallurgy can tell much about the migration and trading habits of ancients. Furnace and smelting technology is fairly high tech and yet seems to have developed almost simultaneously at different locations around the world. I have yet to find a study which attempts to explain this.

We've danced around this issue before and I've yet to be convinced that someone could accidentally drop a piece of copper ore into a camp fire and smelt copper. So I fully agree that the technology is fairly high tech affair and not something that is likely to be developed by accident.

So....HTH did they do it?

Min, I can see it happening by chance. Especially on Cyprus. That island is not much more than an upthrusted dome of copper. It gets it's name from the Latin word Cupros, meaning copper.

Men could once pick up rocks laden with copper, although now it has to be mined. But if some ancient fellow lined his campfire with these rocks, he might get it so hot that he noticed "liquid" flowing from the rock.

And the rest is history.

[Minimalist]

Except everything I've read ssays that a camp fire is several hundred degrees too cool to smelt copper. A copper bearing rock in a camp fire would yeild a hot rock....not smelted copper. So how did they know that they had to make a hotter fire in order to smelt ore the first time?

I think we had this discussion with Charlie and his metal furnace. As Monk says, someone knew something AND it seems unlikely that it could have been discovered by accident.

[daybrown]

Fool's gold is chalcocite, a major copper ore. It was no doubt collected for the pleasure of the ladies living in the agrarian communities around the Tranasylvanians. There, the chalcocite is found also contaminated with arsenic, so the result of smelting the ore is not copper, but arsenic bronze.

A vastly more useful metal for work wood working tools.

As for the flood. Look at the valleys of the Don and Danube that flow into the Black sea. They are *wide*. Many of the torrential floods we all agree that came south eroded the sides of the river channels. Now, look at the channel of the Bosporus. Its like a narrow and rather straight deeply cut trench.

Had it been there for all these other floods we know about, it too would have had the sides of the channel gouged out like the rivers that now together drain out of it. Ergo, it was not there for the previous great floods.

Look at the Sakarya as it drains into the Black Sea. That piddly ass little river has a humongous valley like we'd expect if the total flow of the Danube, Dneister, & Don were coming thru it. And then, about 40 miles south of the the Black Sea coast, near Adapazan, there's a broad open valley that runs west to the Sea of Marmara. But- there's no river at all in that.

From Adapazan to the West end of the Sea of Marmara is a rift valley that gets progressively deeper going west. The West end has been going down, the East end has been coming up. It kept coming up after the glacial melt water ran out, so the evaporation of the Euxine stopped all outflow.

Indeed, were we to shut off the Bosporus today, the lake level would again fall as we see the Caspian has, altho not as fast as irrigation in Ukraine is not so necessary. I would wish for better maps of the channels, but if you maintain a contrary opinion, I dont have a problem with it.

What I find relevant about all this are the cultural, linguistic, and technological effects that came out of it. If you do not care about Aryan pre-history, there's no reason to consider it.

[Beagle]

http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/garden_e_danu.htm

Here's one for you DB. This author is obviously a proponent of M. Gimbutas. This web site is very interesting and well written.

It can be read one link at a time for convenience.

[daybrown]

http://www.geocities.com/gardenofdanu/garden_e_danu.htm

Here's one for you DB. This author is obviously a proponent of M. Gimbutas. This web site is very interesting and well written.

It can be read one link at a time for convenience. 8)

Thanx Beagle. well worth looking at. I didnt know about the defensive works at Jericho this far back. He implies defensive works at Chatal Hoyuk, but not only do I not see any, I dont see any reason.

Jericho in this era was, at most, a few hundred, whereas the Anatolian cities were at least, a few thousand. In an era when there were just roaming small hunting bands, that's not enuf warriors to present a problem.

He has different dates for Chatal Hoyuk; Hodder says 9000-6000 BC. with most of the population gone by 6200. Hodder shows a chart with it as but one of a dozen Neolithic Anatolian cities that were all abondoned in this era, altho there were a few others founded.

It looks to me like 2/3 of the population was gone by the end of the 7th mil. Not that its likely to ever be very well delineated.

I agree that there was script, but I think too much has been made of too little in trying to figure out what it meant.

[Cognito]

The article contains an interesting projection of Eurasia circa 12,500bc and for the most part, accurate. Very rarely is Lake Mansi properly noted in any maps of that period along with downstream drainage.