Many cultures end between 3000 BCE and 2700 BCE, including the Yangshao and Majiayao cultures of China's Yellow River Valley, the Daxi culture of the Three Gorges region, the Majiabang of the Yangtze delta, the Chengtoushan culture of Hunan, and the Hongshan culture of the Northeast.

So, too, do the Eastern European Neman culture, the Southeastern European Cucuteni-Trypillian and Ezero cultures, the Central European Funnelbeaker culture, and the Novotitorovka culture of the North Caucasus.

Sumer's Early Dynastic Period begins after a cultural break with the preceding Jemdet Nasr (JN) Period that has been radiocarbon dated to about 2900 BCE at the beginning of the Early Dynastic (ED) I Period.

Archaeologists have confirmed the presence of a widespread layer of riverine silt deposits, shortly after the Priora oscillation, a sudden climatic change that occurred approximately 3300 to 3200 BCE and seemingly associated with a period of colder drier air over the Western and Eastern Mediterranean.

The inundation, twenty-five feet deep and covering an area one hundred miles wide and three hundred miles long, interrupts the sequence of settlement, leaving a few feet of yellow sediment in the cities of Shuruppak, Uruk, and Kish.

The possibility of a tsunami cannot be ruled out.

The polychrome pottery characteristic of the JN period is replaced with a different pottery design in the ED period.

The Sumerian king list portrays the passage of power from Eridu in the south, the mother city of Sumer, to Kish in the north, near the future site of Babylon.