At the time of the flood, almost all the people around were farming and making pottery. Anatolia and the Black Sea area were more advanced than other areas. The peoples in Anatolia may have been experimenting with diversion of water from streams. Ryan and Pitman (in Noah's Flood) say they'd have had tradesmen (bricklayers, carpenters, painters, sculptors, basketweavers, leatherworkers, jewelers, potters and morticians), that society had divided into laborers, administrators, and shamans.

They had problems with malaria and arthritis. The Anatolians seem to have had simple brain surgery (trepanation, in which a flap of the skull is opened to relieve swelling). Average lifespan was about 30, with some living till 60.

Then came the flood. As the sea-level grew in the Aegean (actually, as it grew in the Sea of Marmara) and began trickling over, the soil was becoming much heavier by soaking up water. It only took a few days to go from a trickle to a wild, tumultuous flume, shooting through at 50 miles per hour and carrying the force of 200 Niagara Falls. Sometime within those first few days, a mudslide occurred from the Bosporus to a point well to the north. Mud from this slide spread under the water, across several hundred miles of the lake.

The flood continued at its peak for a year, each day raising the level of the lake by six inches, at which rate another mile of land in the northwest part of the lake was inundated. Steeper parts of the shoreline were flooded at a slower rate. During this peak flow rate, the thunderous sound and vibration were heard throughout the basin, as water, land, and boulders slid in. During this first year, the lake rose by 180 feet. It slowed some for the next year, only raising the lake another 100 feet.

It wasn't till about the third year that immigrant saltwater species such as the cockle (Can..... edulis) began to survive. Sometime in the third year, when the flood had totaled 330 feet of new water, it entered the Kerch Strait, and soon thereafter reached the Azov Plain, which had been abandoned by humans for quite a while. This became the Sea of Azov near Sevastopol at the northern tip of the Black Sea.

After the flood, neither the Bosporus nor the snow-capped Caucasus could be crossed, except for the few with boats. Along the northern and western coasts, fleeing populations probably followed the major rivers.

Though knowledge of this flood seems to be new to us, Pliny the Elder spoke of the Black Sea as though he was a witness to its flooding several millennia earlier. In his Natural History (J. F. Healy translation), he refers to the Black Sea as, Having swallowed up a large area of land which retreated before it.