>From "The Rational Optimist - How Prosperity Evolves", by Matt Ridley, Harper; >p. 128. ... "...at 7,600 years ago, farmers who were happily cultivating the fertile plains around the "Euxine Lake" suffered a rude shock, when rising sea levels burst over the hellespont and flooded into the lake's basin, filling it at a rate of six inches a day till it became the modern Black Sea. Baffled refugees presumably fled up the Danube into the heart of Europe."
" By 5,000 years ago, farmers had reached Ireland, Spain, Ethiopia and India". "Other descendants of the Black Sea refugees took to the plains of what is now Ukraine where they domesticated the horse and developed a new language, Indo-European, that would come to dominate the western half of the Eurasian continent, and of which Sanskrit and Gaelic are both descendants." " It was also somehwere near the Baltic or the Black Sea between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago that a genetic mutation, substituting G for A in a control sequence upstream of a pigment gene called OCA2, gave adults blue eyes for the first time. It was a mutation that would eventually be inherited by nearly 40 percent of Europeans."
