e Black Sea from a fresh to salt water, with human-habitation consequences:
Some fled westward into Europe; others made their way southward into Mesopotamia, later the site of Babylonia and modern-day Iraq, where their tales of a watery catastrophe eventually passed into legend (McInnis 48).
McInnis explains that earlier geologic investigations of core samples in the Mediterranean area had found evidence that the Mediterranean basin itself had been inundated and so formed by a great Atlantic flood through the narrow, "bottleneck" Gibraltar Strait some six million years ago--too long ago to be relevant to human history or myth. The Bosporus "bottleneck" overflow positioned a similar cataclysmic event within the record of human habitation, and for that reason, according to the scientific team in the Black Sea, would be consistent with the Gilgamesh and Noah stories. This was confirmed by analysis of sedimentary layers, not only layers of rock, dirt, salt, etc., but also layers showing evidence of life forms; at its deepest
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