Le Déluge, les savants et la mer Noire : une nouvelle mythologie scientifique ?
The Flood, the scientists and the Black Sea: a new scientific mythology?

Summary/Abstract: Noah’s Flood is a narrative structure that has cross ages and civilizations. It is above all a deterministic posture in our perception of the relationship between societies and their environment. We attempt in this paper to examine the universal character of the Flood myth, and how some scientists call upon this mythological structure to justify or dress up their studies. Consequently, we try to observe the causal links established by some researchers between the history of climate and societies, to explain the origin of the Noah’s Flood. We seek to understand how scientific discourse was built around the research dedicated to the incarnation of the place, and how today the use of Earth Sciences to unravel the true of the fake is carried out. Furthermore, it is particularly interesting to pore over the links between archaeologists - historians of materiality - and environmental scientists. In this article, we will briefly present our investigations conducted on the populating of the Black Sea coastline during recent Prehistory, and the way we evidenced a landscape (more than 7000 years old), nowadays largely submerged by the floodplain of the Danube delta. Those works have led us to many questions about the existence of a flood in the Black Sea.

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