Off the coasts of Cuba, Japan, and India, what appear to be some kind of megalithic remains have been found. Some of them may simply be columnar rock formations, but many of them show signs of human, not geological, stonework. Oceanographer Robert Ballard has also found some very ancient stuff in the Black Sea, including fossilized wood. Most of these findings are 8 kA (thousands of years) old or more. At that time, the sea level was much lower; 25 kA ago, it was lower by some 150-300 feet, and the Black Sea was little more than a brackish pond. That water was locked up in huge ice sheets covering the Northern Hemisphere and extending Antarctica, some of them several miles thick and as dense as rock.
Of course, all new archeological findings have to be verified (one Japanese researcher was involved in a major fraud on the prehistoric Jomon people a few years ago, and shortly after that, a major expert on
Neanderthalensis was found to have been systematically faking artifact dates), but they fit in with speculations about Ice Age era human cultures that may have been more advanced than we're used to thinking have existed. Stories about Atlantis, Hyperborea, etc., may have come from this ancient history. They would naturally have been elaborated over the years, and there is no shortage of modern net wits who make remarks about "mystic lasers", although what we're seeing simply appears to be old, submerged, large-scale stonework.
Here is a
précis of some work being done by Massimo Rapisarda, as more and more educated guesses are yielding some amazing finds:
The first traces of obsidian trade in the western Mediterranean are dated 8 thousand years ago, 4 thousand years later than their equivalent in Mesopotamia. Although the trade is chronologically associated to the diffusion of the first farming societies, obsidian was used by homo sapiens almost since his appearance. The presence of an obsidian source at Pantelleria, in a period when Northern Africa was a climatically hospitable region and the Straits of Sicily much narrower and easily navigable, suggest that a settlement in the Straits region during the Ice Age could be a likely hypothesis. Seafaring was born much earlier than agriculture and the trafficking between Tunisia and Sicily could have enriched the settlers, even generating the surplus necessary for the birth of a primordial civilization. At present the conjecture lacks archaeological evidence, however several hints as the distribution of the earliest populations in Sicily, the timing of the Lampedusa colonization and the absence of a Palaeolithic settlement in Pantelleria push towards its soundness. Moreover, since 12 thousand years ago the sea level was about 60 meters lower, finding underwater the missing obsidian source of Pantelleria or whatever settlement remains in the Straits could demonstrate the hypothesis. Intriguingly, the geographical characteristics of the region are the same of Plato’s Atlantis.
Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology 2005
There were three other presentations on the technical accomplishments of prehistoric Europeans in just the Maritime section alone. Better archeological techniques and technology have pushed the veil of prehistory back very rapidly.
But we know very little about our human ancestors before written history; gene mapping has given us a good idea about who migrated where since the big genetic "bottleneck" when the Toba supervolcano exploded around 76 kA ago, but only stone and fossilized bone artifacts can survive that long. (The artifacts of glassmaking and metallurgy are usually too fragile to survive more than a few millenia, let alone 76 of them!) If there were early stoneworking human cultures, the now-flooded coastal plains would be the first place to look.
The discovery of
Homo floresiensis artifacts in Indonesia a few years ago -- the "Hobbits" from about 15 kA ago -- shows that we may have overlooked a lot more of the human record than we can even imagine. I wonder how many other species of
Homo were completely wiped out by the Toba event, and whether our own kind made migrations out of Africa before then, only to be killed off by that short, brutal climate change.
The changes that came at the end of the last ice age -- mainly flooding -- might have led to some flood myths, but there are so many flood myths around the world that it's probable more than one flood was involved. And there was a large, long-lived seagoing culture, the Northern Atlantic Maritime culture (
click here for an illustrative syllabus from the University of Indiana), that would have been sensitive to such changes in the oceans and seacoasts. The Answer, if it is ever to be found, is likely to be much richer and stranger than our present collection of myths and hypotheses.
Hopefully, we will survive long enough to find it.
--p!
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