4 ms·

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 s

• mc32 5y ago
  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.
  • treeman79 5y ago
    Having an ocean on top of an archaeological site does make it tricky to investigate.
    • devoutsalsa 5y ago
      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 https://news.mit.edu/2000/blacksea-0920
  • ncmncm 5y ago
    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.
    • mc32 5y ago
      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.
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        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.
    • irrational 5y ago
      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.
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        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.
        • MockObject 5y ago
          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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
      • 5y ago