In the shadow of Mount Ararat-before Abraham, before Gilgamesh-5,600 years ago, the Mediterranean surged north. A freshwater lake that had sat quietly for millennia suddenly became the Black Sea, rising seven feet a day. Villages vanished. Cattle drowned. Farmers fled with their seeds. The Ryan-Pitman hypothesis isn't fringe: it's pollen cores, drowned shorelines, freshwater snails locked under salt crust. This book follows that diaspora-how the flood didn't just wipe out a valley, it seeded the world's oldest myths. Sumer's ark. Noah's wine. The drowned gods of Anatolia. Step by step, we trace the escape routes: up the Danube, along the Dnieper, into the steppes. We see Göbekli Tepe's last hunters abandon their stones, maybe even build them as warnings. And when the waters settled? A genetic bottleneck-exactly where we find it. A linguistic echo-heaven-high floods in Proto-Indo-European. Even the Bible's cubits line up, once you convert. 106,000 words of sediment, satellite imagery, and stubborn hope. No sermons. Just maps, dates, and the quiet terror of realizing the flood wasn't myth-it was Monday morning for someone. If you ever wondered why so many cultures draw the same drowning dream, start here.