الصفحة 1
الصفحة 1
The Black Sea Flood question : Changes in coastline, climate and human settlement
Each of the 35 papers marshals its own evidence for or against the flood hypothesis. No summary or overall resolution to the flood question is presented, but instead access is provided to a broad range of interdisciplinary information that crosses previously impenetrable language barriers so that new work in the region can proceed with the benefit of a wider frame of reference. The three fundamental scenarios describing the late glacial to Holocene rise in the level of the Black Sea—catastrophic, gradual, and oscillating—are presented in the early pages, with the succeeding papers organized by geographic sector: northern (Ukraine), western (Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria), southern (Turkey), and eastern (Georgia and Russia), as well as three papers on the Mediterranean. The volume thus brings together eastern and western scholarship to share research findings and perspectives on a controversial subject. In addition, appendices are included containing some 600 radiocarbon dates from the Pontic region obtained by USSR and western laboratories.
Recent Advances in Palaeodemography : Data, Techniques, Patterns
The written data used by demographers essentially cover the last five centuries. Since Homo Ergaster moved out of Africa around 1.8 million years ago and until the sub-contemporary periods, there is no data allowing us to reconstruct a demographic history that can be interpreted with the traditional tools of demography. If we want to be able to tackle demographic issues over a long evolutionary duration, trying to reconstitute our human demographic history and thinking out and testing macro-demographic theories, we need to draw on sources other than written data and on techniques other than those commonly used by demographers. This necessarily means using information of every kind, from archaeology, physical anthropology, paleontology, primatology or genetics, along with relevant models of interpretation.
