Just a silly question here: Is the geographic location of a population the only factor involved? Especially in modern societies?
True, human populations are no longer isolated and there is a lot of mixing in modern societies. So this is assuming that the population in Australia is not substantially infused with new arrivals from colder climates.
leoleia - why don't you think the Black sea "hypothesis" holds any water? After having read the book, it stands out 100 % clear that there WAS a flood in that area and a resulting diaspora of the peoples of the region. So why do you use the word "hypothesis"? Because you do not believe in the Black sea flooding, or because you do not believe that fllod was the basis for the Noachian flood story?
No, I don't mean I dispute the geological event but rather that it is the catalyst of the Mesopotamian Flood legend. It could have had an influence in starting or sustaining deluge traditions in the millenia preceding the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations. But since the Sumerian Flood legend was first written around 2600 BC (corresponding to the time when writing began to include literature instead of mere record-keeping) and the Black Sea flood occurred around 5600 BC, there would have been an intervening period of 3,000 years of oral transmission of the flood story -- and that is a time depth too great for historical reminiscences to survive beyond mythological archetypes. It is the equivalent of someone today recalling a historical event from 1000 BC that was not recorded in any literary source. The phenomenon is well attested in cultural anthropology. For instance, the Eskimos of Greenland have a few genuine reminiscences of the Vikings who lived on their land at the time the Eskimos settled Greenland in the 1300s. That is a time depth of 700 years. But if you examine the actual stories the Eskimos tell about the Vikings -- these are not based on any real historical events but are based on general Eskimo legends and folktales that are common to Eskimo culture all throughout North America and even Siberia. Thus, after the passage of only 700 years, memories of the historical Vikings have already started to pass into the realm of myth and legend. The Jews living in Judea around 600 BC already thought of the ancestral population of Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest (e.g. 1200 BC) as primeval legendary giants. That is at a time depth of 600 years, but still there are historical memories embedded within the legends. But a time depth of 3,000 years? It is like a Bible writer from that time reproducing a historical memory from 3600 BC from oral tradition. That was a time of pure legend and myth from the standpoint of the late First Temple period. My point is that whatever historical reminiscence of the Black Sea flood would have dissolved by 2600 BC into the general universal Flood archetypes that likely preceded the historical event and are found throughout the mythologies of the world. I don't think Pitnam and Ryan really take into account the existence of mythological archetypes and their independence from history. So that is one reason to be skeptical.
Another is the fact that the Mesopotamian Flood story in its details bears little resemblance with the specifics of the Black Sea flood. This is to be expected, if memory of the latter had faded away by the third millenium BC. The biggest difference is that the Black Flood was an inundation of a plain with terrestial water, whereas the Mesopotamian flood stories concern a deluge from water from a storm. This is an important difference because these are the two basic categories of the universal Flood myth, and there are many Flood myths throughout the world that concern an inundation of a terrestial body of water -- such as a nearby sea or waves from the ocean and so forth (the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the implied flooding of the Vale of Siddim by the Dead Sea combines the two genres). The Mesopotamian myth has no concept of an inundation by terrestial water; the Flood is entirely caused by a storm. This is telling evidence against the view that the story derives ultimately from the Black Sea flood; instead it better recalls the local floods caused by rain that caused the rivers to overflow to such an extent that the entire region was inundated with rainwater. If there was any myth containing reminiscences of the Black Sea event that survived to the third millenium BC, it was effectively replaced by more recent events in Sumeria. And when we look at the Ziusudra and Utnapishtim stories themselves, they do fit very well with the catastrophic floods known to have occurred in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC at the end of the Ubaid period and 2900 BC, at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period. This fits very well with the placement of the Flood in the Sumerian King List in between the dynasties representing the Ubaid, Uruk, and Jemdet Nasr periods and the dynasties pertaining to the "postdiluvian" Early Dynastic period.
I'm not saying that I know for a fact that there was no influence from the Black Sea flood, but I am quite skeptical of this and the evidence much better fits the floods that clearly did occur much closer to the time when the flood myths were written down in Mesopotamia.