20,000 years ago the ocean levels were 130 meters lower.
Imagine all the coastal settlements that are lost
Imagine all the coastal settlements that are lost
[1]https://noc.ac.uk/news/global-sea-level-rise-end-last-ice-ag...
I guess we may have to live with guesswork as I doubt we'll have convincing answers.
People could not just move inland; other people already lived there. Australians still keep careful oral records of negotiated resolutions of conflicts over living space when Sahel, between Australia and New Guinea, was inundated.
Between where Indonesian islands are now, and for hundreds of miles off the coast of Viet Nam all the way to Korea, were millions of square miles of prime habitat ("Sundaland"), also for tens of thousands of years. Every tribe there had to find somewhere else to live.
We can't presume people lived "there" if we don't know much of the above.
Nomadic people have very rarely ranged over more than a few hundred miles. We have here thousands of miles. There is room for every variation you can imagine, and even more you can't.
Rather, there was.
I harbor doubts about their receptivity to the correction.
This is exactly what happened in the British Isles when low lying Doggerland (between modern England and Denmark) was wiped out by a wave which was likely caused by an underwater landslide; that wave was in turn caused by the melting ice at the end of the ice age, which was otherwise causing gradual sea level increase.
They probably flooded increasingly regularly before being abandoned and eventually subsumed, no unlike Venice today. Some could have been much quicker though, there are fault lines through the region though, so it's entirely possible a small tsunamis could have knocked out villages that sea level rise made vulnerable.
You can be next to both.
Coastal settlements provide excellent food sources, and greatly limits various health issues (lack of salt, iodine, …). Consuming fish blood would also help, it’s going to be much closer to isotonic than seawater.
Depending on land structures, coastal settlements would also often benefit from much higher precipitation rates, providing freshwater. That’s essentially the story of Polynesian settlements, islands would be settled if they either had natural springs or enough precipitations.
(but for actual drinking water, smaller springs are preferrerd and can be found almost everywhere, except the dessert, too)
So you have drinking water - and can do extensive fishing, in the river as well in the sea - and in the very fish rich area in between.
Also with a river you can more easily connect inland.
(have you never played civilisation?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
You could walk from the Netherlands to Britain.
Before that, the Mediterranean Sea was a dry depression. When the Atlantic barrier collapsed, you can imagine the wall of water filling the basin and chasing early humans uphill.
Some think the Black Sea was much smaller, and filled up, during the period in question. But evidence there is inconclusive.
We know there was a cataclysmic meteor strike toward the west end of the Persian Gulf, well after it had filled in.
Evidence of catastrophic flooding is debated and inconclusive.
That the black sea’s level used to be much lower is not, all water levels were much lower at the glacial maximum, and gradually rose as the ice age ended, nearing stable historical sea levels around 7.5kya (5500 bce).
But the subject is complicated by the unknown inflow from rivers, and from meltwater of retreating glacier.
Hydrology is complicated.