Timeline

c. 448,000 BCE:  A glacier-fed ice lake catastrophically breaks through the chalk hills connecting what are today England and France.  In possibly less than a month this flood carves a canyon that will eventually become the English Channel.  The ice dam-ice lake-flood repeats through several ice ages with the canyon at times funneling a joint Thames-Rhine river system to the Atlantic.

c. 100,000 BCE:  At least three major river systems appear to have flowed north across the Sahara in this period.  The resulting corridors would have provided ways for early humans to cross the Sahara from sub-Saharan Africa to the North African coast.

c. 8500 BCE:  Cattle domesticated in the Near East.

c. 8000 BCE:  Cattle management is taking place in northern China.

c. 7500 BCE to 6400 BCE:  Hasan Dağ volcano had a minor eruption.  An artist appears to have recorded the eruption on a wall mural at Çatalhöyük, the earliest city/proto-city known.

c. 5500 BCE:  James Ballard finds human-made structures, fresh water shells, and drowned beaches under the Black Sea at a depth of 100m.  Carbon dating finds the shells are approximately 7500 years old.  Whether in a catastrophic flood or through gradual intrusion of Aegean salt waters into this former fresh water lake, the Black Sea floods.  Some argue this drove survivors into Europe as the first Neolithic farmers, but farming already had spread to modern Hungary.  The flooded area, however, represents a possible origin area for Indo-European speakers who may have begun their moves after flooding of their homeland.

1250 BCE to 1100 BCE:  300 year drought began in eastern Mediterranean.  Researchers believe this drought led to the collapse and/or decline of Bronze Age civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean and created the diaspora of Sea Peoples from Greece and other areas into the Levant and Egypt.