Dryas octopetala CREDIT Jörg Hempel
Sometimes, we need to recalibrate our sense of time in antiquity. I’ll take the liberty to say that we sometimes conflate the dates of milestones in the advance of humanity, such as the construction of Gobekli Tepe with other events in truly ancient history and prehistory, such as the end of the Ubaid Period . Ho hum. Except, let’s examine the timeline looking back from now to Gobekli Tepe:
| Years Before Present | Event |
| 4,000 | Abraham leaves Ur during collapse of the last Sumerian culture: the Ur III dynasty. Father of monotheistic religions whose adherents comprise 54% of earth’s population Judaism, Christianity and Islam. |
| 8,000 | Beginning of Ubaid Period (8,500 to 5,800 BP) which ended coincident with the 5.9 Kiloyear Event. |
| 12,000 | Earliest monumental construction at Gobekli Tepe (12,000 to 10,000 BP) and the End of the Younger Dryas Stadial, (12,900 to 11,700 years BP) |
It is very easy to overlook the vastness of antiquity without some sense of relative sequence and fixed gaps between them. By the above table you should get a feel about how very long ago and the range of time differences between events we are discussing in this blog.
Another useful tool for getting a sense of sequence and immensity of time can be found in a timeline like, for example, the Timeline of human prehistory. There are many other timelines available on the web. All of them will help you get a more realistic sense of proportion when you try to grasp the enormity of what we discuss on this blog.
Thanks for visiting,
R. E. J. Burke
I just posted a comment Number 39 on the TALK page of the Younger Dryas Wikipedia Page
where I expressed a concept where after three attempts the Dry Mediterranian was sucessfully
filled completely with water in the 400 year, 200 year, and 1200 year events of the Oldest,
Older, and Younger Dryas Events. I also speculated that using the Sun to pump water inland to
fill salty Basins could lower global Ocean levels several feet, and thus effectively raise continents
at all elevations. The results should be a small cooling of continents.
Thanks for this comment. The Straits of Gibraltar Wiki Geology tab (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Gibraltar#Geology) addresses the depth of the Straits in its last paragraph, saying the Mediterranean has been open to the Atlantic since the Zanclean Flood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood) 5.33 million years ago. The second paragraph of the “Consequences” section of the Zanclean Flood site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood#Consequences) supports your latter conclusion about global cooling as likely consequent to the Mediterranean basin flooding, comparing it to the global cooling event following the much smaller flooding from Lake Agassiz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz) which precipitated the 8.3 Kiloyear Event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2_kiloyear_event). Thanks, again, for leading us to closely examine the filling of the Mediterranean.